Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Something Gay opened in Boston on April 19. “Libbey.” in Variety said that Tallulah had delivered “a splendid performance ranging from cutting satire to downright mugging in a desperate effort to save the show.” Two weeks later the show opened on Broadway at the Morosco. Given Tallulah’s frame of mind, it is not surprising that John Mason Brown in the New York Evening Post described her as “unusually fretful at the start” of the opening-night performance. “But she soon stopped her needless pacings, controlled her energies and settled down to a performance that was commanding and varied and skillful.” George Jean Nathan in Life wrote that the play had brought her “back to the plate for the third time in the season, but once again failed to provide her with a bat.”

  Something Gay limped along for two months before succumbing to the summer doldrums. Cole remembered how beautifully Tallulah and the languid Sinclair played opposite each other. But he said that comic business that had been in the production on opening night began to fall by the wayside. This may have been in response to the criticism that she had done too much: Arthur Pollock in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle had complained, “Not content ever with getting her effect once, she bores ahead and underlines it heavily three or four times.” But according to Cole, what expanded in direct proportion to the stage business that fell away were covert gags between her and Sinclair, both doubtless bored to distraction by the script itself

  When Michael Mok of the Post proposed that Tallulah discuss why “you appear in one poor play after another,” she responded testily, “Do you think I pick poor plays for fun?” She ranted at him about her need to make a living, complaining that “I’ve been on the stage fifteen years and I’ve been in only one good play, Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted. . . .”

  With restored composure she lobbed a challenge back to him. “I’ll make you a proposition. . . . You write a brilliant comedy and I’ll buy it.”

  Jock

  “Parental restraint prevents me from gushing, but I think she did it very artistically.”

  — Will Bankhead

  In her autobiography, Tallulah writes, “In my time I’ve scrambled many a commandment, upended many a statute, but I’ve never been a kept woman!” It’s not clear whether she is looking down her nose at all women supported by men or simply observing the conventional prejudice against women who did so without benefit of wedlock. Perhaps she is simply jesting. Although she prided herself on her self-sufficiency, Tallulah had been raised with the assumption that there would be a man footing her bills. Part of her may have longed for what her intellect would have condemned; one of Whitney’s allures was the financial security he could provide.

  But however seriously Tallulah took her affair with Whitney, and hoped that he would, neither she nor he was monogamous during their three- or four-year affair. In the spring of 1935 playwright Clifford Odets was making a big splash on Broadway. She saw in Odets not only a lover but a potential dramaturge. In June 1935, Odets had gone to Cuba with a delegation organized by the League of American Writers to investigate conditions under the Mendieta-Batista regime. The entire delegation was briefly imprisoned and then sent back to New York. Tallulah cabled him at the naval prison in Havana as soon as word reached her in New York:

  DARLING I REGRET HAVING TO QUOTE THE SCRIPTURES BUTCHARLES MACARTHUR TOLD YOU SO STOP GOODY GOODY I HOPEYOU STAY IN THE DAINTY PLACE UNTIL YOU HAVE WRITTEN MYPLAY OR SHALL I BE BIG AND SAY OUR PLAY STOP NO BUT REALLYITS TOO FANTASTIC AND RIDICULOUS BUT YOU CAN’T BE A GENIUS AND HAVE EVERYTHING STOP DON’T FORGET MY POSTCARDAND BE HAPPY. LOVE, TALLULAH.

  Odets himself slept with hundreds of women and, says his son, some men as well. He was a misogynist, and for a man like him, Tallulah violated the last taboo by behaving with the same casualness as he did. He wrote about her without sympathy but with great insight when, in September 1935, as their affair was cooling, he confided to his diary: I can’t quite make out what is wrong with her. To say she is in flight from something is to say an obvious thing. She suffers from an awful and big sense of “insufficiency.” She feels all people are aware of that lack and she compensates for it by giving you her sex instruments for your use and possible pleasure. That is her way of binding you to her.

  That year Tallulah was also involved with another quirky, intense-looking young darling of Broadway, actor Burgess Meredith, who at twenty-four was starring in Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset. In his autobiography, he recounts that Tallulah wired him to invite him to a party in her suite. She answered the door stark naked, cocktail glass in hand, threw her arms around Meredith, and thrust her tongue into his mouth. She insisted on introducing him to every one of her guests, who were talking, drinking, and playing cards, but all seemingly oblivious to Tallulah’s nudity. Not long after, she pulled Meredith into her bedroom and demonstrated the way she honored her commitment to Whitney by demanding, at the height of their lovemaking, “For God’s sake, don’t come inside me. I’m engaged to Jock Whitney!” A formal engagement, however, was only a matter of wish-ful thinking on her part.

  She must have known, too, that Whitney had his own stable of mistresses. But Tallulah did not like being superseded by any other woman in her professional or personal sphere. She was miffed to find herself at a party hosted by a former mistress of Whitney’s in an apartment that he had purchased for her. After downing a toast, Tallulah smashed one of the woman’s Baccarat glasses into her fireplace. When Tallulah was drunk she did often start smashing glasses, but she hadn’t been drunk, and Stephan Cole, who had gone with her, was convinced that she had done it not out of exhilaration but hostility. He told her that such a show of jealous pique was beneath her. “You’re not Russian and you don’t throw your own glasses into the fireplace, so I don’t see any reason for you to throw hers.” Edie Smith issued a similar admonishment. “We shamed her into sending the woman some more glasses,” Cole recalled.

  Cole could laugh at his own foibles, but looking back on his relationship with Tallulah, he never conceded that he might have been wrong in any dispute with her. This rigidity may have attracted her to him. One of Cole’s appointed functions was to apply what would today be called tough love, to answer her demands for attention with firmness and, if necessary, ridicule.

  In his telling, Tallulah had been maternal with him during the early years of their relationship—he was twelve years younger—and then he had settled into a role that encompassed companion, lover, and quasi-parent. Nominating him to the caretaker role that Tallulah felt she’d been most crucially shortchanged of, she acceded to his authority and fought it at the same time.

  No matter how aggressively Tallulah behaved, she had been born and bred a belle for whom sexual coquetry was de rigueur but sexual aggression just as strictly forbidden. Despite her brazen behavior, she also wanted to be seen as a hapless victim of sexual aggression. To Cole she made a bizarre simulation of passivity, telling him that Napier Alington had “raped me.” It was and is not uncommon for Southern women to use the term loosely and colloquially to indicate intent or desire, as in “he raped me with his eyes.” But Tallulah clung to the literal meaning and repeated it about other important men in her life, so much so that Cole later said facetiously, “As far as I can make out, the first time a man ever set eyes on her, he raped her.”

  “Tallulah, how many times can a woman be raped?” Cole asked her.

  “Why, any number of times!” was Tallulah’s perfectly accurate but nevertheless disingenuous response.

  Tallulah did not work for an entire year after Something Gay closed at the end of June 1935. She had resolved to wait for a good play no matter how long she had to cool her heels. After finally accepting Reflected Glory, by Pulitzer Prize–winner George Kelly, she continued to wait while Kelly fenced with the Shuberts about whether he would receive 60 or 50 percent of the motion picture rights. Eventually he prevailed.

  Tallulah called the months-long wait “interminable.” Cole recalled a night at the Gotham when Tallulah was drinking, depressed,
melodramatic, and full of self-pity. “I’m going to jump out of the window!” she declared. “I’m going to kill myself.” “Well here, let me open the window for you,” he said. It was snowing outside. “Now be careful you don’t slip,” he cautioned. She whipped around and hissed, “You son of a bitch!” before walking away and quieting down.

  Kelly’s earlier plays had satirized the foibles and pretensions of middle- and lowbrow bourgeois America. Now, in Reflected Glory, he portrayed an actress, Muriel Flood, who dreams she wants home and children.

  She turns down one man because he insists that she give up the theater if they marry, but then succumbs to the blandishments of a con man who is already married. By the end of the play she has wised up to the fact that her real satisfaction will always come from the stage.

  Although Tallulah symbolized to the public the flamboyance of the theater star, this was the first time she had actually impersonated a dramatic actress. Reflected Glory was an excellent vehicle, filled with cynical expert and sparkling observation. Kelly was an expert director and “a consummate comedian,” recalled Anne Meacham, who supported Ina Claire in his play The Fatal Weakness in the late 1940s. Kelly had been born into a Main Line Philadelphia family but made a career as an actor in vaudeville.(His niece Grace later became a star, and then royalty, in her own right.) His first compositions were vaudeville sketches he acted himself. “He knew exactly what would work,” said Meacham. “Every instruction he gave—‘you pick up the cigarette case in this hand, you open it on this word, you take out the cigarette on this, you close the case on this word, you put it down on this, you strike the match on this—seemingly fanatical, but not at all. If you did it any other way the laughs would not come accurately.”

  Tallulah, too, trusted him implicitly. “No one had the same influence over Tallulah,” said Cole. “It was the way he went about it, his attitude. He never raised his voice, never lost his temper. He was more like a priest in the theater.”

  Estelle Winwood was cast as Muriel Flood’s colleague and confidante, Stella Sloane, whose acerbity is perhaps a mouthpiece for Kelly’s own sentiments. She dismisses Muriel Flood’s evocations of idyllic domesticity as a theatrical pose less truthful than her onstage acting: “As soon as you begin drawing that armchair up to the fire—the sequins come out.”

  Winwood was a delicious comedienne and she undoubtedly played Miss Sloane brilliantly. But Tallulah wanted Winwood in Reflected Glory above all because she found her a calming influence and she was agitated about her return to the stage. Playing second fiddle to Tallulah was an onus that Winwood took great pains to avoid. It cannot have entirely pleased her that the unfledged Southern girl she’d befriended was now the more famous star.

  “Winwood was a fine actress,” Ann Andrews said, “but she missed hers because she was oversexed. She was always living with somebody or marrying somebody instead of keeping her vitality for the theater.” During the 1920s, Winwood had renounced her Broadway stardom to marry and retire to New Zealand, where she lived happily on a remote ranch. When her husband died suddenly after several years, she immediately booked passage back to the U.S. His family had opposed the marriage and so Winwood did not wait to press any claims against his estate. But on her return, she was seen by Broadway producers as a character actress. Only on tour or with regional theaters did she again play star roles.

  Winwood’s last husband, Robert Henderson, who knew her from the mid-1930s, described her attitude toward Tallulah as “always from the teacher to the student.” Winwood was nineteen years older, for one, and her relations with Tallulah hinged on the unquestioned assumption that Winwood was a better and more versatile actress. Stephan Cole was very deferential toward Winwood, who was thirty years his senior. Though she could be caustic, he described her as unfailingly polite and soft-spoken—in his words “a gentlewoman.”

  Asked about Winwood’s range in character parts, Cole said, “She played a Gullah Negress!” as if the issue were settled by Winwood’s casting as a resident of the sea islands off the South Carolina coast in 1930’s Scarlet Sister Mary. Tallulah, on the other hand, was more skeptical about the limits of Winwood’s versatility—as evidenced by exactly that Gullah impersonation. In her 1966 interview with Richard Lamparski, she brought up that very play, in which Winwood had supported Ethel Barrymore on Broadway. “They couldn’t have been more miscast,” Tallulah said about Barrymore and Winwood. Gullahs speak a unique patois, “almost like a foreign language,” Tallulah noted, and Winwood “playing with a Southern accent” seemed to her preposterous. “I didn’t see it, but George Cukor said it was the biggest camp he’d ever seen.” Yet Tallulah trusted Winwood’s professional judgment and would accept criticism from her. “Tell me the truth, Estelle,” Tallulah would implore, “how was I?”

  Tallulah decided that Reflected Glory’s out-of-town tryouts would be as far out of town as San Francisco, her favorite city in America. Much of the production was put together on the West Coast. Howard Greer, who had been Paramount’s principal costume designer, designed Tallulah’s costumes; the screen’s Phillip Reed played the would-be bigamist who almost ensnares Muriel Flood.

  The San Francisco opening on July 20, 1936, turned out to be one of the great nights of Tallulah’s career, earning her sixteen curtain calls. From there they moved to Los Angeles, where Tallulah’s August 10 opening was again triumphant, a vindication of the frustrating time she’d had in Hollywood four years earlier. “Reflected Glory made Hollywood take another look at her,” Cole recalled. Edwin Schallert wrote in the Los Angeles Times that“She is the most interesting actress seen here in the footlight world in ages.”

  Among the motion picture elite present at her Los Angeles opening was David O. Selznick. The day after the opening, George Cukor called Tallulah. Cukor was then slated to direct Gone with the Wind, although he was later replaced by Victor Fleming. “I’ve got our Scarlett,” Selznick had told Cukor. As it turned out, Tallulah had read the book while in San Francisco and had already decided that she would make the perfect Scarlett.

  She believed that her age was her only drawback, since Scarlett is a teenager in the opening scenes and Tallulah was now thirty-four. “But through dieting, self-denial and discipline, I was sure I could come up to the pictorial mark,” she writes in Tallulah.

  Jock Whitney was Selznick’s principal backer, but despite the fact that he and Tallulah were still involved, he did not interfere in Selznick’s artistic decisions. Aunt Marie, however, went to work organizing a letter-writing campaign to ensure that Tallulah was given the role. “Most of the letters that came in were for Tallulah,” Selznick’s assistant Marcella Rabwin recalled in 1994.

  On Reflected Glory’s opening night in Los Angeles, Tallulah had gone with a great flourish to the wings and brought Winwood out to take a special call together with her. The audience cheered. Henderson later said to Winwood, “Wasn’t that nice of Tallulah to bring you out for a call?” Estelle said, “I could have walked out myself.”

  Winwood grew increasingly resentful. She felt Tallulah encroaching on their tacit agreement about who was mentor and who was apprentice.

  Winwood found Tallulah’s acting suggestions—“Don’t come in so quickly there”—offensive, and felt that only Kelly had the right to direct her. She let all concerned know that she was handing in her notice, and stayed firm about her departure although Tallulah tried everything she could to persuade her to stay. Winwood told Cole that she “would rather remain friends with Tallulah than work with her.”

  Replacing Winwood was another friend of Tallulah’s, Ann Andrews.

  Andrews played the role all through the New York run and during a subsequent tour. But Tallulah was affronted on Kelly’s behalf when Andrews arrived at her first rehearsal and announced that she’d done some pruning of excess verbiage in her part.

  Reflected Glory played for several days in New Haven before opening on Broadway at the Morosco on September 21. The critics found the play trite, although as Tallu
lah says, “Had it been written by a lesser playwright, I think they would have cheered it.” It suffered comparison with Kelly’s best work. Her reviews were generally very good, although as usual some critics carped that she was again playing a role too close to her persona to be challenging. Arthur Pollock of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noticed a vast improvement since her last Broadway appearance in Something Gay. “Miss Bankhead has converted all her recklessness, all her careless, scattered talents, all her undeveloped aptitudes into something that appears very simple, something that has an uncommon naturalness and a high polish. This is the play she needed.”

  Reflected Glory was “a hurdle race,” she told Michael Mok of the New York Post. “Can’t get my breath except for eight minutes, when I lie down, panting like a little old lady.” She was onstage almost continuously during all three acts. The role ran the gamut of emotion, containing vignettes of every description, including extended pantomime alone, in which Tallulah put on airs as she contemplated her own greatness, or reenacted an encounter, reprising it into a theatrical exercise.

  But it was not so much the physical exertion that made Cole describe Muriel Flood as the most exacting role he saw Tallulah play. Rather it was Kelly’s insistence that she give the same performance every night. He stood in the wings at each performance. If she changed any movement or timing, he would speak to her and she would accept his corrections. According to Cole, Tallulah “learned more about consistency from him than from anyone else.”