Deciding that Alington was a lost cause, Tallulah returned to New York, and to the fact that her runner-up choice, Jock Whitney, was also unavailable. Whitney was by now principally involved with British film star Madeleine Carroll. Whitney’s kiss-off to Tallulah was a home he rented for the summer of 1937 on Langdon Island, located in the Long Island Sound off the Connecticut shore. It seems that Tallulah was perfectly willing to be just a bit of a kept woman. Had she not, she would not have been able to enjoy such a cushy vacation in a rambling home on this private island. Despite full employment over the past year, she had been able to do no more than pay her expenses and address her arrears.
On Langdon Island, Tallulah could prepare for her next major undertaking: at the end of May, she had accepted the offer of producer Rowland Stebbins to star that fall on Broadway in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. She had presumably heard good things about Stebbins from George Kelly, as Stebbins had produced two of his plays.
Tallulah told Whitney that on Langdon Island she had to have a little car with which to go shopping or to send the servants into Norwalk. Whitney sent along nothing more than a Ford, and “ohhh, that made her angry!” Cole remembered. At the end of the summer she presented it to the servants.
She loved the country and was genuinely proud of her rural roots, even as she sometimes exploited them for publicity purposes. Her curtain speech at the Temple Theater in Birmingham the previous May had been an effusion of populist sentiment. She claimed that “No matter where I’ve been—in New York, London or Hollywood, in every letter [my father]writes he tells me to remember that I am just an Alabama hillbilly—just one of the Bankheads who owe a debt to the State we can never repay.”
Will, however, never in any surviving letter to Tallulah said anything remotely like that. Although they enjoyed rustic retreats, the Bankheads cherished their professional status as lawyers and doctors. Years later, Tallulah made a reference in print to her “country cousins.” “That did not go over well,” Kay Crow, the wife of Tallulah’s cousin, recalled. “It was not appreciated.”
On Langdon Island, in a controlled and loving environment consisting primarily of Smith and Cole, Tallulah blossomed “into the healthiest thing you’ve ever seen,” Cole recalled. She swam regularly, played badminton well and table tennis very well. “In spite of all the terrible things she could do, there were weeks and months when Tallulah was nothing but fun,”
Cole said. “She was more fun than anyone I’ve ever known.” She was good company and a good sport. But Cole recalled that if too many guests were present, she would slip easily into her reflexive habit of making a group of people into an audience.
On July 6, she wired George Cukor in Hollywood:DARLING DARLING GEORGE I HAVE BEEN WANTING TO WIRE YOU MANY TIMES AND TELL YOU ABOUT MY VERY WISE AND LOVELY SUMMER I HAVE A DELIGHTFUL HOUSE ON THE SOUND COMPLETELY ISOLATED BY TREES AND A DIVINE SWIMMING POOL AND AM HAVING THE ONLY SENSIBLE HOLIDAY OF MY LIFE I KNOW THIS WILL PLEASE MY VARY [sic] VARY GOOD FRAND [sic] GEORGE I WISH YOU WERE HERE. . . .
Tallulah included her address, as well as her phone number, “in case you should have an overwhelming urge to hear my voice.” Whitney showed no such urge. He was supposed to appear on Langdon Island but he never did. Toward the end of July, however, Tallulah found a man she could believe was the mate for whom she’d been searching. She went to see a play based on Dorothy Sayers’s comic whodunit Busman’s Honeymoon at the Westport Country Playhouse. Actor John Emery walked onstage as detective hero Lord Peter Wimsey, and Tallulah declared herself infatuated.
Two years younger than Tallulah, Emery was very handsome in a somewhat cardboard, profile-dominated style. He was descended from a distinguished theatrical family. Tallulah had met him backstage in Los Angeles a year earlier, when she was trying out Reflected Glory and he was acting in Katharine Cornell’s revival of Saint Joan.
After the Westport performance, Tallulah invited him to come visit her on Langdon Island, and after the week’s run of his play he continued to stay. “I found him intelligent, amusing and exceptionally good-looking,”she writes in Tallulah. He was also destined to be a lifelong pawn in the designs of dominating and glamorous women. It was not long before Tallulah told Stephan Cole and Edie Smith that she and Emery would soon be traveling to Jasper to be married.
Cole imagined that Tallulah told herself that she and Emery could somehow make the marriage become what she wanted it to be. But he thought that at least some part of her knew that it was all a mistake even before they married—a mistake born of expediency and fury at the rejections she’d experienced.
Originally she planned to marry in Washington at Christmas, then Tallulah decided that she didn’t like “long engagements.” Long at this point meant anything more than the month that she and Emery had been lovers.
They decided instead to marry at the end of August. After her rejections by Alington and Whitney, Tallulah was determined that there would be no re-calcitrance on the part of her intended. Even a brief separation seemed to make her anxious. One day Cole and Emery were planning to drive into Norwalk to buy outdoor things, badminton nets and the like, with which to surprise her. She came running out of the house, crying, “Take me! Take me!” They were not going to take her to buy her own surprise gifts, however. In the car, Emery asked Cole, “I wonder if she’ll be mad when we get back?” “She won’t be speaking to us,” Cole predicted, “and she’ll be in bed,” which is where Tallulah retreated when she felt completely defeated.
“And there she was, pouting,” Cole recalled. “But we spread everything we bought around the bed and that got her right up again.”
“John felt he was in love with Tallulah,” said Cole. “She was certainly the most novel thing he’d ever seen.” On another occasion, Cole clarified that Emery “felt he ought to be” in love with her, by virtue of the wag-the-dog reasoning that he had, after all, married her. During yet another discussion, Cole hinted that a dash of professional opportunism had motivated Emery, who had been dating Rosalind Russell. If so, however, his plans surely backfired, since after he married Tallulah, Russell reportedly tried to put the kibosh on any Hollywood interest in him.
Tallulah’s frequent attraction to men who served as father figures accommodated her need to test the boundaries of authority. Emery was physically overpowering, a foot taller than she and, although reticent and seemingly mild-mannered, perfectly capable of rising to her bait. According to Ann Andrews, one night an argument arose between them, Tallulah getting the better of it until Emery bounced her to the ground. Edie Smith told Andrews, “The minute I heard he’d knocked her down, I knew it was all over; she was going to marry him.” He later slapped her at the Stork Club, which Cole said she was furious about only because it was a public arena. Orson Welles recalled to author Denis Brian that “Emery kept belting Tallulah and she loved it. He could be pretty rough.” For his part, Emery told Time magazine a decade later that Tallulah had once struck him in the eye in a rage.
For Tallulah, one of the most attractive prospects of the marriage was that she and Emery could replicate the success of husband-and-wife stars Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. She determined that Emery would join her in Antony and Cleopatra. At thirty-two, he was on the young side for Cleopatra’s love interest Antony, and so would instead play Cleopatra’s“love-menace,” Octavius Caesar.
A tenet of nineteenth-century middle-class American culture was that the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare represented the world’s peak of literature. Will Bankhead shared that commonplace belief and passed it along to Tallulah as she was growing up. During the late 1920s, a rumor had circulated in London that Tallulah was thinking of playing Ophelia.
She confirmed the rumor to a reporter and solicited his advice with a quip:
“And who would you suggest for the role of the First Gold Digger?” But Ophelia, Tallulah later insisted, was “a lousy part”—in her eyes, a pawn manipulated by Polonius, Laertes, Hamlet, and Gertrude in turn.
; While Shakespeare had been in something of an eclipse during the 1920s, he was fast becoming fashionable all over again during the 1930s.
On Broadway, Katharine Cornell had played Juliet in 1935 to acclaim. In 1936, Leslie Howard and John Gielgud had challenged each other as Hamlet, playing the role concurrently in two different Broadway productions.
Tallulah with her husband John Emery on their honeymoon
On August 30, Tallulah played Viola in an all-star radio broadcast of Twelfth Night. In the surviving air check, we hear her apply a Noël Cowardgloss to her readings, as she brilliantly overlays one stylization on top of another: contemporary drawing room repartee over the elaborately meta-phoric rhetoric of Elizabethan verse. It is hard to imagine any actress answering Olivia’s “I prithee tell me what thou think’st of me” with a “That you do think you are not what you are” of equal brio and insinuation. Viola’s response to Olivia’s asking “Why, what would you?,” which begins with “Make me a willow cabin” and concludes eight lines later, is tossed off with impeccable breath control that allows her a comfortable pause before the final “and cry out Olivia!” There is a swelling gallantry to the way she reads “It gives a very echo to the seat/where Love is throned” in response to Orsini’s “How does thou like this tune?” And in the private reflections, such as “A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man,”she exhibits a disarming earnestness. The entire cast is superb: Cedric Hardwicke as Malvolio, Helen Menken as Olivia, Winwood as Maria, and Orson Welles as Orsini. They each approach Shakespeare somewhat differently, which does not make for incoherence but for richness.
The next day, Tallulah, Emery, Cole, and Smith took off for Alabama.
Louisa Carpenter, a du Pont heiress and crack aviatrix, loaned Tallulah her private plane and her champion Danish pilot. The plane experienced some trouble and they were forced to touch down en route for repairs. Tallulah and Emery got their hands on champagne and brandy and proceeded to get drunk, Tallulah rather more so than Emery. Forty-five years later, Cole retrieved a blurry snapshot he’d taken that captured Tallulah rolling around the airstrip in a pair of silk lounging pajamas. Tallulah could have been experiencing some panic. Committing that much of herself to any man would have been terrifying, and she would have been a far less intelligent woman not to have realized that after her many affairs with prominent and powerful men, Emery was definitely a comedown.
Her hands ranged freely over Emery as they resumed their flight south. Cole and Smith were squeamish and fretted about how Tallulah could possibly sober up in time for their arrival in Birmingham. Yet Tallulah somehow managed to pull herself together before they descended into a sea of reporters. They changed clothes at Birmingham’s Tutweiler Hotel and then drove on to Jasper forty-five miles away. Tallulah’s arrival had been trumpeted on radio and the local papers, and several thousand Alabamians had motored to Jasper to greet her.
The wedding took place at Sunset, the Bankheads’ home in Jasper.
During a talk with the family, a question came up about Emery’s blood test, which was at that time mandatory to secure the wedding license. “Oh, there’s nothing to worry about,” Will let out heartily, “John’s been examined on the way down!” Will was joking, but nevertheless “Daddy knew he had been,” as it were, examined, already, by Tallulah, Cole said. He did not believe that Will was at all shocked by it. “He was a pretty racy guy himself.” Indeed, Jean Dalrymple said that Will had pursued her throughout the opening-night party following the Washington premiere of Forsaking All Others in 1933. In the face of Dalrymple’s apathy, Tallulah had urged her, “Oh, Jean, why don’t you give him a little feel?”
And this paradox in Will between gentlemanly decorum and raunchiness made it difficult for him to condemn Tallulah or her sister’s adult behavior, even though it seemed a direct refutation of the ideal of feminine behavior in which he had consciously tried to school them. According to Tallulah, Will never swore, and yet she did constantly. “His notion of an epithet was jackass,” she writes in Tallulah. “ ‘Never take the name of the Lord in vain,’ he would say when I would rip out a goddam. I might reply, ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, but goddam it’—Then he’d laugh.”
Perhaps he was able to see the role he had played in molding his daughters, and perhaps he enjoyed Tallulah’s irreverence. Tallulah herself knew that however much Will believed in his tenets of propriety, behind his facade there were other less refined strains. She had known it on some level as early as the age of five, when he had applauded her risqué impersonations. Perhaps it was the desire to appease or please these covert facets of his personality out of which Tallulah’s outrageous bawdiness was born.
She had found a way to connect with this secret side of him, to establish an emotional lifeline. His sometime disapproval was nonetheless an active response, and it was leavened by his own amusement at her antics.
Others among the Bankheads may have been less forgiving. “I think the family was always sort of embarrassed by Tallulah,” said a neighbor who had moved to Jasper during the Depression. “She turned a lot of people off,” said Barbara Bankhead Oliver, the daughter of Will’s brother John’s son Walter Will. “They just didn’t approve of her too much.” John Bankhead and his wife, Musa, “were very good” to both Eugenia and Tallulah, but their son, Barbara’s father, “didn’t much like her. He was pretty strait-laced about most things,” recalled Charlotte Taggart, a Jasper resident who worked for a time as his secretary.
Will and Tallulah together were “formidable,” recalled Dr. Charles Crow, the son of Tallulah’s cousin Marion, John Bankhead’s daughter.
“They were both gorgeous to look at and very effusive in their language and talked beautifully. It was fascinating to listen to them.” Oliver and Crow had once watched Tallulah and her father enliven the twilight with Shakespearean duets on the porch at Sunset. This younger generation accepted the eccentricities that may have disturbed Tallulah’s contemporaries and elders. “Of course she didn’t do all these wild and crazy things here,” said Oliver; nonetheless, Tallulah’s habits remained her own. During one of Tallulah’s visits to Jasper, Oliver wandered into Sunset to hear her relatives asking where Tallulah was. “She’s out there in the sunken garden taking a sunbath.” Oliver walked outside and found Tallulah lounging nude, and although she was quite shy, she stayed to talk to her and was glad she did; Tallulah was very friendly. Dr. Crow found her “absolutely delightful.” He was in his late teens at the time; Tallulah’s responses to his questions about the theater “exuded the attitude that everybody was full of bull and trying to compete and win and beat the hell out of everybody else.”
Smith was bridesmaid; Cole was best man at the wedding ceremony.
Will’s brother John and his wife were present along with Will and Florence; Eugenia was still living in Europe. A judge conducted the ceremony after a local minister begged off because Emery’s first marriage had ended in divorce. Will asked if he himself could then read through the traditional wedding service “as my mother would have liked it,” Tallulah recalls in Tallulah. Marie could not leave Montgomery, promising instead to drive to Birmingham the next day to meet them. Marie had given Tallulah permission to present Emery with the wedding ring that Tallulah’s grandmother had given Captain John.
After the ceremony, Will asked Tallulah to address a few words to the crowds clamoring outside their gates. Tallulah went upstairs to change, and when she came downstairs, she saw that on the front lawn Will and Emery had launched impromptu into a scene from Julius Caesar. Then Tallulah convened open house for the entire Bankhead clan. Cole said that she found these family gatherings overwhelming: “all the Bankheads in a room together talking at the top of their lungs at the same time.”
Tallulah and her party spent the next day with Marie in Birmingham.
At ten-thirty on the morning of September 2, with Louisa Carpenter’s pilot at her side, Tallulah herself piloted the plane out of the Birmingham Municipal Airport. She claimed in a
n interview conducted in flight that she was sharing the flying duties. “You know he’s a bit mad,” Tallulah told the radio listeners about Emery, “as mad as I am—or he’d never have married me.” Tallulah and Emery were going to honeymoon for two weeks on Langdon Island before starting rehearsals. They wanted to bring Antony and Cleopatra south before they were “worn out by a long run,” and then take it to London.
On September 7, Marie addressed her letter to “My Darling Children”and targeted her words of connubial advice to John:
I want you to guide that tempest of energy and exuberance you have for a wife, with a steady hand. She is one of the great women of her day—you know this, and our pride in her is boundless. But don’t mind spanking her when she needs it, and you take your own spanking when you need it, and that’s the way to weather the storm we call life.
“Believe me please,” Emery wrote Marie, “that I shall do all in my power to live up to what the ring and that moment must have meant to you, and does mean to me.” He and Tallulah could not enjoy their swims anymore “as we constantly worry when the rings are not on our fingers.
Tallulah has decided that she prefers the ring on my little finger where you placed it, so that settles that.” He felt that “things are going very well except for the few odd moments which occur now and then when I am made the recipient of that Imperious Bankhead Glare. But I am learning not to flinch TOO much.”
Cleopatra Pissed
“Well, there’s one note of reality in your fucking play: Cleopatra pissed!”
By now, Variety was reporting that Tallulah had been chosen for Scarlett O’Hara, but Tallulah herself knew better. “I’m NOT going to play Scarlett,” she told the New York Post’s Michael Mok by phone from the Tutweiler in Birmingham, “and I’m tired of hearing about it. I’m thinking only of Cleopatra. Of course, Scarlett is divine, but Cleopatra is much diviner, don’t you think?” Tallulah did not take her rejection as lightly as her prattle would indicate: losing Scarlett O’Hara “broke her heart,” Gladys Henson said.
Tallulah! Page 31