She wasn’t going out a lot and was on the wagon during the ten months that she was involved with Reflected Glory. Perhaps Gone with the Wind was her motivation, but perhaps she was alarmed at the steady increase in her own drinking. As so often was the case with Tallulah, concern about her appearance may have been paramount. She told a reporter that she’d run into an old friend whose looks had so radically improved since he’d gone on the wagon that she was inspired. Perhaps sobriety brought the self-reflection that alcohol dampened. “I had everything I wanted in London for years,” she told a reporter. “All the parties, all the smartness.
Maybe too much. But I wanted it so much when I was a little girl.” She took up the quiet pleasures of needlepoint, which she later told Will by mail that she found “fascinating and restful.”
Reflected Glory was looking as though it would have a good run, but Tallulah’s financial situation was anything but secure. The money she’d saved from Hollywood was almost gone. She was being dunned by the IRSfor over $3,000 in arrears on the tax bill she had begun to pay off in 1932.
She wrote Will that she had “many excellent movie offers, but as you have probably heard I may do ‘Gone With The Wind.’ . . . When I start filming again I want to take all Sister’s responsibility over again. But I am not ready yet darling. However I will send her something from time to time.”
Where Gone with the Wind was concerned, Tallulah was jumping the gun because it wasn’t until a month later, over the Christmas holiday, that she flew to Los Angeles for two days to make tests for the film. The morning of her arrival, Louella Parsons in her nationally syndicated column issued an irate thumbs-down on Tallulah, but predicted that, because her friends Cukor and Whitney were involved, a fix was in and Tallulah would bag the coveted role.
Parsons’s sourness may have had something to do with an interview Tallulah had given her the previous August in her suite at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. Dorothy Manners worked for Parsons for thirty years, beginning in 1935. Manners went along to the interview, where Tallulah greeted them cordially, but seemed preoccupied with a pet bird the size of a large canary. Parsons would ask Tallulah questions and Tallulah’s response was to consult the bird in its cage. “Did you hear that? She wants me to tell her about my love life?” After waiting for the bird—“it seemed like a lifetime companion”—to chirp a response, Tallulah would turn back to Parsons and reply.
“Louella was amused by the bird,” Manners recalled in 1994, “but she thought Tallulah was a little wispy-poo.” Manners herself wasn’t always sure whether Tallulah was talking to the bird or to Parsons, and asked herself whether Tallulah was slightly disturbed or slightly drunk. Once again, Tallulah’s uncontrollable need to shock came at the cost of her relations to the world. “Louella did admire her as an actress,” Manners said,“but I think that interview sort of got Louella off Tallulah for almost any role!”
Tallulah looks ravishing in the surviving test footage for Gone with the Wind, but the camera’s cold scrutiny revealed what Selznick wouldn’t have seen from his seat at the Belasco the previous August. “The tests are very promising indeed,” Selznick wrote Tallulah. “Am still worried about the first part of the story, and frankly if I had to give you an answer now it would be no, but if we can leave it open I can say to you very honestly that I think there is a strong possibility.”
As Tallulah waited for more news of the role, attendance for Reflected Glory began to flag, and a tour was arranged. They opened in mid-January in Boston, where Mordaunt Hall in the Boston Transcript saluted the precision of her performance. “There is never a line that comes too soon or too late, or a pause that does not suit the situation. Her silence is eloquent in some passages and rapidly as she at times delivers her lines, her every word is distinct.”
Will had become Speaker of the House in June 1936, after the death of Speaker Joseph S. Byrns. On the night of Reflected Glory’s Washington opening, February 9, 1937, he left a late House session to get to the theater in time. Before the performance he visited Tallulah and gave her a rabbit’s-foot good-luck charm. She cherished it all her life, and it was eventually buried with her. Will signed a $950 million relief-deficiency bill in his theater box before the curtain rose.
“I hate to step out of character,” Tallulah said as she began her curtain speech. “It’s disillusioning, I know. But you have been so very gracious. I imagine you all understand”—she gestured to her father’s box—“that I’ve been terribly nervous. . . .” She tossed a kiss to Will, who removed his spectacles and brushed away a tear. “Parental restraint prevents my gushing,” he said later, “but I think she did it very artistically.”
Will must have wished Adelaide could have been present that night, and Tallulah must have thought of her as well. Ann Andrews recalled the billfold with pictures of her mother that Tallulah kept on her dressing-room table. “Tallulah had this funny feeling that she had to protect her mother, that her mother was younger than she—that that was a young beautiful child over there.”
In Washington, a former druggist from Huntsville found his way backstage and cried as he told Tallulah, “I’ll never forget the night you were born. I kept open all night for your mother, but it didn’t help.” Another former neighbor of Will and Adelaide’s scrutinized Tallulah carefully, then concluded, “Well, you’re beautiful all right. But you’re not a patch on your mother.” Tallulah kissed him.
On February 10, the Washington Post’s editorial page contained a tribute that must have greatly pleased both Tallulah and Will, highlighting as it did the most satisfying part of their relationship:
Those who witnessed Speaker Bankhead’s very legitimate pride in his daughter’s acting . . . must have derived from that little drama of human nature as much pure enjoyment as from the play itself. Probably there is no relationship more ideal, and therefore more pleasurable, than that which exists between a father and daughter whose respective talents, while widely different, each is able to appreciate and respect. And in the case of Representative Bankhead and Tallulah there is no need for any reservation in the honors due and reciprocally accorded.
Reflected Glory was scheduled to tour the South, and its scheduled appearance in Alabama had left the Bankheads aquiver with excitement. On February 27, however, Tallulah wrote Will from the Netherland-Plaza in Cincinnati to tell him that her plans had changed. After a week in Detroit, then a split week in Indianapolis and Columbus, they were headed not for the South but to Chicago, which was the one city outside New York where Broadway shows might settle into an indefinite run. There were only two major legitimate theaters in Chicago and it was the only time that one would be available.
Tallulah let Will know that what was best for her career was at least as important to her as what would please the Bankheads. “In a way I’m disappointed about the southern tour being postponed but after all Chicago is the most important theatre town in the country next to New York and it’s wise to get in there before the hot weather sets in.” Nevertheless, she assumed that there would be a visit to the South in due time. Will, however, was anxious, writing to Marie on March 4: “I somehow very deeply fear that this will mean that she will not be able to make the southern tour at all and if it develops that way it will be a most grievous disappointment personally and I know to you and all of our relatives and warm friends in Alabama.”
On April 1, Eugenia wrote from Italy, where she was slowly recuperating from an almost fatal bout of pneumonia. She thanked Tallulah for a shipment of books that included Gone with the Wind. “There is only one person to play Scarlett in America. Who but you were born and bred in that briar patch? Is it to be done in the films. Make them let you do it. I shall pray you get the part, cable me the minute it is settled.” Ten days later, Will wrote Tallulah that a few nights earlier he had tuned in to a radio interview with Cukor. “Just as he was asked about Tallulah Bankhead the radio failed on me. I was so disappointed I wanted to shoot a hole through it.”
Very Scarlett-lik
e was a letter she wrote to Will from Detroit on March 6, 1937, concerning her acquaintance with a Mrs. Pinckney Bankhead, matriarch of a black Bankhead clan that had migrated from the South.
Mrs. Bankhead had visited Tallulah backstage and invited her to her home, where she was served a Southern tea with fried chicken, biscuits, cakes, and ice cream. Present as well were a Barbara Bankhead and her son John Quincy Bankhead, who was several years older than Tallulah and remembered piloting her in a wheelbarrow back in Jasper. “The whole thing was very touching, simple and real,” Tallulah wrote to Will, making an explicit link to Margaret Mitchell’s steadfast restoration of Southern mythology. It was like “something out of Gone With The Wind . . . it didn’t seem like the Civil War had been fought at all. . . .”
Tallulah also broached the subject of a widespread though officially taboo phenomenon of the Old South: miscegenation between white masters and black slaves or servants. Both Barbara Bankhead and her son John looked “more like Indians than colored,” Tallulah appraised, and one of the Detroit relatives had told Tallulah, “All of the Bankhead men, both colored and white, were always tall.”
Perhaps Tallulah was giving Will a little nudge, reminding him that she was privy to family skeletons; miscegenation and illegitimacy were not going to be overlooked by her. She also reminded him that it was this same Barbara Bankhead who had tended the infant Eugenia and Tallulah when another nurse was hitting the bottle. Yet at the same time she was reassuring: the black branch of the family tree professed undying loyalty to their white relatives. “They said the Bankheads were always good to their people and they told many humorous stories about how the Bankheads were always getting them out of trouble.” Mrs. Pinckney Bankhead treasured a letter that Will had sent her. Nor did the Detroit Bankheads display any desire to rise above their station. Tallulah wrote that “I thought you’d like to hear about it because they were really old fashioned respectful Negroes, religious, proud and dignified.”
On April 12, Will’s sixty-third birthday, he wrote thanking Tallulah for the birthday telegram she had sent. “You know of course how it touched me. . . . I thank God that I have been spared this long, and that my health is still excellent and that I am able to carry on.” His health was not excellent, but he had had no heart incident in two years. He was enclosing a
“gracious and interesting” letter sent him by a Mrs. Miles Abercrombie, a Huntsville native who had been one of Adelaide’s bridesmaids thirty-seven years earlier. She now lived in Greensboro, North Carolina. He had told Mrs. Ambercrombie that Tallulah would be performing in North Carolina despite not being sure whether this would happen. “I want you without fail to have Edie acknowledge this letter at once, and tell Mrs. Abercrombie what she may expect from you.”
The ever-vigilant George Kelly was along on the tour. After many of the performances, he, Cole, and Tallulah went back to Tallulah’s suite and talked. Tallulah gladly ceded him the floor. Kelly was a man of great intellectual curiosity—a riveting raconteur whose vaudeville training enabled him to reenact any situation with élan. Despite her professional and personal infatuation, however, their intimacy stopped short of anything romantic: Kelly was gay. But his brother John was not. Tallulah happened to meet John Kelly in the elevator of her hotel, which led to an assignation in her suite. Only later did Tallulah learn who he really was, and once she did, she turned the situation to her humorous advantage. The tryst with John Kelly, she told Ann Andrews, was done “to spite George!”
Chicago had its fill of Reflected Glory after several weeks, which was nonetheless a perfectly respectable run in that city. Reflected Glory reached Birmingham, Alabama, at the beginning of May. From the Hotel Mayfair in St. Louis, Edie had written Marie on April 13 conveying Tallulah’s message of welcome and wariness. “She is looking forward to seeing you all and would like you to wire immediately the number of seats you will require for the opening night. If possible, they should be restricted to members of the family only, as she is on a percentage and has to pay for each ticket.
Naturally she doesn’t want anyone left out, so she is leaving the tickets to your discretion.” Edie added a little catnip for Marie: “If she gets the part of Scarlett O’Hara she is going to take you to California to help her with her Southern accent.”
In Birmingham, an after-theater party was thrown for Tallulah by social doyenne Mrs. Melville Davis. The next day in Montgomery, two hundred of the city’s social cream of the crop met Tallulah at a garden party given by a friend of Will’s, Mrs. William Calvert Oates. The next day Will drove Tallulah to Wetumpka to see the small church where his parents had been married seventy years earlier. Soon after, Tallulah returned to New York with one thought uppermost in her mind: it was now time that she, too, finally marry.
Getting Married
“I’ve found that the longer you take a man seriously the more your independence is threatened.”
One evening during the early 1940s, Tallulah, Ann Andrews, and Guthrie McClintic were sitting around her suite at the Élysée Hotel.
They began talking about Tallulah’s love life, and she started counting up her affairs, retrieving name after name, numbering among her partners some as unlikely as Cecil Beaton. Most of these relations were, in Andrews’s telling, “quickies,” and by her count, Tallulah’s scorecard ultimately reached 185, before her doorbell rang, more guests arrived, and the tally came to a halt.
It is hardly wise to try to neatly parse anyone’s sexuality, but libido may have been among the least pressing urges behind Tallulah’s constant pursuit of sex. Sex satisfied her raging need for attention and reassurance.
It was an attempt to solace an overwhelming loneliness that never left Tallulah and sometimes threatened to engulf her. When she felt lonely, Cole knew her to walk up and down for hours, chewing the inside of her mouth, not talking.
Yet Tallulah felt that emotional passion was dangerous. “I’ve found that the longer you take a man seriously the more your independence is threatened,” she told a reporter in the fall of 1936. “It would be hard to give up something I have regulated.” But Tallulah’s obsessive sexual adventures could prove as debilitating as the most fatal passion, as she had found out in 1933.
Tallulah had toyed with marriage most of her adult life, alternatively seeking it out with a certain ferocity and shunning it in favor of an active career and sex life. Marriage would have pleased her family and particularly her father. By 1937, marriage would also have given her public reputation some needed scouring. Although as a young woman, Tallulah had done everything she could to broadcast her bisexuality, she knew by now that if it became too widely known and accepted as fact, her career could be jeopardized. Acceptance among the sophisticates who condoned unconventional behavior did not mean any degree of public ratification, and performers were slaves to their public’s favor. During the late 1920s, Ethel Barrymore and her two children had stayed for a week with Tallulah at 1Farm Street. In 1930, when Estelle Winwood and Barrymore shared the stage in Scarlet Sister Mary on Broadway, Winwood told Barrymore that Tallulah would soon be returning to the U.S. “I don’t know her,” Barrymore told Winwood. “I nearly dropped dead,” Winwood recalled. “She was so frightened that if people thought that she was a friend of Tallulah they’d call her a lesbian.”
Richard Schanke’s biography of Eva Le Gallienne claims that Le Gallienne’s career suffered considerably because she did not make any attempt to hide her homosexuality. As far as their acceptance of sexual mores went, most producers, directors, and critics were conventional men of their time.
Columnist Walter Winchell, for one, was a rabid homophobe. “Less-bian said about them, the better” he once referred to Tallulah and another star in his column. “She never said a word, never answered him,” Cole remembered, “because you could have a fight and he could get very vicious. But the next time we were in the Stork Club, she flirted with him, took him home and put him to bed.” Winchell, married and publicly sanctimonious, never dared cross her aga
in after their one-night affair.
Tallulah’s willingness to use her own sexuality to quash rumors about that very sexuality somehow seems of a piece with her ability as an actress to objectify and utilize every aspect of her allure. Onstage, there was no part of Tallulah that she would not expose if she felt the audience would react positively, even if it meant censure for “playing herself.” Offstage, nothing about Tallulah’s physical intimacies was sacred. What she would share only fitfully was emotional honesty.
Immediately after the Reflected Glory tour finished, Tallulah went to London for a short holiday, seemingly determined to make one last attempt to persuade Alington to marry her. His young wife had died suddenly of pneumonia a year earlier, and although the marriage had produced a daughter, now eight, according to David Herbert, Alington and his wife were estranged when she died.
In his Diaries, Cecil Beaton described a Tallulah “Walpurgisnacht” during this visit in May 1937. At a small private party, “Tallulah danced frenziedly, throwing herself about in a mad apache dance with Napier Alington. After he left, she wept and bemoaned the fact that he had never married her,” but then changed course and in front of the guests “threw off all her clothes, performing what she called ‘Chinese classical dances.’ ”
In London, Joan Matheson, Tallulah’s former West End colleague, received a call from Tallulah’s ex-employee Mrs. Locke. “Come and see Tallu; she’s miserable.” Tallulah was staying at the Green Park Hotel. “I went and she was,” Matheson recalled, something of a note of disbelief in her voice, because she had never seen this side of Tallulah before. Nevertheless, Tallulah received her very cordially. Now that Matheson was a big girl of twenty-seven, Tallulah even offered her a drink, which she had declared taboo when they had acted together seven years earlier. Tallulah herself was by now no longer on the wagon.
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