Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  “She could not have played Scarlett,” insisted Marcella Rabwin, perhaps echoing the sentiments of her boss, David O. Selznick. “Can you imagine Tallulah Bankhead being that young and innocent?” Selznick instead offered Tallulah the small but significant role of Belle Watling. Tallulah refused to “consider the part she was right for,” Rabwin claimed.

  An entire year elapsed before Vivien Leigh began her successful campaign to win the role of Scarlett. Whether Scarlett is ever innocent is open to debate, but Leigh in her midtwenties was exactly the right age: it is always easier to age forward rather than back. Rabwin believed that choosing an Englishwoman salved the South’s fury that a native daughter was not chosen. A Northerner might have alienated that constituency altogether.

  Tallulah threw herself into interpreting Cleopatra, intending to take the same approach she had tried with Twelfth Night. “There’s never been a modern Antony and Cleopatra,” she told Cole, for whom she found a job in the production as assistant stage manager. “I’m going to do it.”

  Modern to Tallulah meant a more conversational delivery than the melodic cadences of an actor like Maurice Evans, with whom actors used to hum backstage under their breath. Modern was Orson Welles’s rethinking of Shakespeare at the tiny Mercury Theatre on West Forty-first Street.

  Tallulah advised her friends to see anything Welles did. When he revised the world’s classics, there’d always be some staging concept, some novel interpretation that was superior to any other version you’d seen.

  Modern meant a “natural” response to the booming declamatory style of much nineteenth-century acting (which nevertheless saw itself as the avatar of unprecedented realism). During their lives, both Winwood and Tallulah issued manifestos in favor of naturalness. “My forte has always been natural,” Winwood said in 1982. “That’s why, when I did Shakespeare, I played it like a human being, and not as Shakespeare.” Excessive stylization, Tallulah implied, came at the cost of the emotional truth. “Personally, I believe you must be natural even when playing the classics,” Tallulah would write in 1940. “I don’t mean that you should neglect the rhythm and the beauty and certain technical points that are peculiar to them, but when you read the lines you should give the impression of believing what you say.”

  But one generation’s natural is another’s stylized, and there is also no reason that stylized and truthful must be mutually exclusive. Seen on film today, the acting of both Tallulah and the somewhat more understated Winwood seems stylized as well as convincing. It was really only after World War II that many such false dichotomies became orthodox. Tallulah’s delivery in Twelfth Night comes as a stylish and stylized contrast to the dogged conversational vernacular to which so many contemporary American interpreters of Shakespeare subscribe.

  “Tallulah was always on the ball,” Cole said. “If she was playing a part that was historical, or thinking of playing one, she would go into it. God knows she did go into Cleopatra to the nth degree.” Tallulah’s research would have clarified the many ways in which the historical queen was a different woman from Shakespeare’s heroine, and probably much less of a coquette. Tallulah may have found the essential unreality of Shakespeare’s portrayal jarring—a daughter of politics, she knew exactly what the pa-rameters of power brokering were. But it’s not until the fifth act of Antony and Cleopatra that the queen begins to behave with the the full and expected majesty of a monarch.

  Cole also saw her reading some volume of Shakespeare interpretation.

  It wouldn’t have been extraordinary for a Broadway star like Tallulah to also retain the services of a coach as she contemplated her first onstage foray into Shakespeare. Constance Collier had indeed offered to coach her as Cleopatra, but Tallulah declined. A quarter of a century past her Edwardian heyday, Collier was now a successful coach in addition to a supporting actress in films. In 1912, Collier had played Cleopatra opposite Herbert Tree at His Majesty’s Theatre in London. Her stentorian oratorical deliveries were marvelously apt for the grandes dames she played in Hollywood, but it is hard to see anything in Collier’s work that would have resonated with Tallulah’s approach.

  Ethel Barrymore also offered to coach her, and unlike Collier, Barrymore would not have charged. Tallulah must have seen her play Juliet on Broadway in 1922. Ethel’s forays into Shakespeare had been much less successful than her brother John’s, but nonetheless, as Cole said, “Ethel knew her Shakespeare.” Tallulah turned Barrymore down, too, telling her as she told Cole that “I’m going to play it quite differently than anybody else has ever played it.”

  Doing Shakespeare her own way, Tallulah envisioned capitalizing on her strengths in comedy. Cleopatra “must have had a lively sense of humor,” Tallulah told a reporter, “for she played pranks . . . in other days it was the noted tragediennes who played the role, and the humor in the play didn’t get much of a chance usually. We hope to give it a full effect.”

  Producer Rowland Stebbins had hired Professor William Strunk of Cornell University to prepare the adaptation. Strunk had adapted Romeo and Juliet for Cukor’s film the previous year, and he is perhaps best known as the coauthor with E. B. White of The Elements of Style, the perennially popular writing handbook. At the first rehearsal Tallulah listened intently to Professor Strunk as he explained the play scene by scene, sharing his professorial insights into the play’s meanings. But in his attempts to re-vamp Shakespeare’s sprawling epic, the professor seemed to have gone astray. When Stebbins approached Margaret Webster, perhaps the most celebrated director of Shakespeare on Broadway during the thirties and forties, about directing this Cleopatra, she had no trouble refusing. Webster considered Strunk’s adaptation to be of “blood-curdling ineptitude.” Cole related with irony that Professor Strunk had adapted Cleopatra “so well”that he decided to cut the renowned passages in act 2, scene 2, in which Antony’s equerry Enobarbus describes Cleopatra riding a barge “like a burnished throne” on her first visit to Antony. “And that is the one scene the public wants to see,” Cole said. “If you have nothing else but the barge and the snake, that’s it, they’re happy.”

  Tallulah apparently approved of one editing decision by Strunk. Fabia Drake, Tallulah’s colleague in the The Creaking Chair thirteen years earlier, was visiting from London. At the Gotham, Tallulah told Drake they were cutting Iras’s and Charmian’s deaths from Cleopatra’s magnificent farewell scene, “Because, of course, darling, we only want one death in that scene!”

  “Strunk was a nice man,” said Cole, “but I think he got a little mixed up.” In addition to being assistant stage manager, Cole had also been assigned a bit part numbering only a few lines, “and I was saying them in the wrong country,” he recalled. “I shouldn’t have been in Rome. I was very shy about it, originally, because here was this great professor from Cornell, but I didn’t want to do it, because it made no sense.” Tallulah had also recognized the disparity. Cole posed a disingenuous query about how she thought he should read that particular line and she fobbed him off with, “Don’t get me mixed up with that!” Finally Cole pointed it out to the professor, who to Cole’s immense relief decided to simply cut the lines out altogether.

  Cole believed that Orson Welles would have been the perfect director for Tallulah. “She would have taken it from him, no matter what he wanted her to do,” said Cole. “It would have been absolutely unique and it would have worked.” Instead, Stebbins hired Reginald Bach, a Welshman in his late forties who had acted for years in the West End. On Broadway a year earlier he had gotten good notices for directing and acting in Love on the Dole with Wendy Hiller. He was mild and gentle, with just the right theatrical flair to incite speculation about which part of Cockneyland he might originally have hailed from.

  Charles Bowden said that there was “never any communication” between Tallulah and Bach. Bowden was among the bit players who did not come in at the beginning of rehearsals, so he didn’t know how the relationship began between the star and the director. But by the time Bowden arrived th
e second or third week, there was an impasse. “He couldn’t cope with her at all. Tallulah was pretty stubborn by that time. I think she knew it wasn’t going to work.” Bach had better communication with the younger people, with a college background, who were spear carriers and played bit parts, and with the older, mature character actors playing roles like Enobarbus.

  Had Tallulah solicited Emery’s help with her interpretation? “Noooo,”Cole replied, in line with his feeling that Emery was a lightweight. Nevertheless, on Broadway Emery had played Laertes in Hamlet with Gielgud, and Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet with Cornell. But in the onstage action of Antony and Cleopatra, Tallulah and Emery had little to do with each other: Octavius Caesar and Cleopatra are kept apart for most of the play.

  Tallulah’s Antony was Conway Tearle, a good leading man on stage and screen with a Barrymore-ish flourish; indeed in Dinner at Eight on Broadway his role was a parody of Barrymore. At sixty, however, Tearle was a rather desiccated leading man for thirty-five-year-old Tallulah. Charmian was played by veteran actress Fania Marinoff, wife of Carl Van Vechten, whom Tallulah had known for almost twenty years. “Tallulah adored Fania, that’s why Fania was in the play,” but Bowden was perplexed when Marinoff arrived for her first day of rehearsals sheathed in bracelets. “Tallulah was trying to speak and all you could hear was clatter-clatter-clatter-clatter.”

  “Take off those fucking bracelets,” Tallulah finally enjoined. “I can’t hear myself think!”

  The production opened October 13, 1937, in Rochester, New York.

  The day before the opening, George L. David, drama critic of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, interviewed her. She told him that George Cukor was there; he had directed a distinguished summer stock company in Rochester during the twenties. “George told me Rochester was a very lucky town in which to open, and I certainly hope he’s right.” Perhaps that was why she had decided to begin there, for otherwise it would have been an odd choice, not having hosted the launching of a pre-Broadway tour in ten years. Cukor had just directed Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard in MGM’s film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in which Tearle had given a blustery performance as the Prince of Verona. British impresario Charles Cochran, who had helped Tallulah snare her role in The Dancers, was also in Rochester for the opening. Perhaps he was considering the production for London, as Tallulah and Emery had hoped.

  The next day, George W. White in the Rochester Times-Union wrote that“Miss Bankhead grew in the role. From an uncertain beginning her portrayal swelled, scene by scene,” but he found the ambivalence in the script defeating her. “Shakespeare’s own inability quite to make up his mind just what he did think of Cleopatra was reflected in a wavering characterization. . . . The depth of Cleopatra’s character, the sincerity of her love for Antony were not conclusively stated in Miss Bankhead’s portrayal.” Shakespeare’s text as emended by Strunk remained “a pretty sketchy and sprawling thing,” and White voiced his preference that Maxwell Anderson or Robert Sherwood fashion an entirely new drama or comedy in which Tallulah would star as Cleopatra. Both playwrights had frequently treated historical subjects.

  George L. David was more enthusiastic. He wrote that “no living actress whom the writer has seen in many years of theater-going” was more qualified than Tallulah to embody Cleopatra. “She was a wily seductive woman, languorous of mind and sinuous of movement on occasion. But this was only one side as Miss Bankhead portrayed her.” It was with“marked fluency and delicacy in shading” that Tallulah had been able to limn all the varied facets of the queen.

  Variety reported that Stebbins had reputedly invested “a golden mint in the production.” But according to Bowden, Stebbins’s office flew by the seat of its pants, for all the largesse they dispensed. “It was an amateur production,” Bowden said. Engagements were still being booked as they began the tour, so that stage dimensions weren’t known in advance. And it seems that Jo Mielziner, at thirty-six already one of the most esteemed Broadway designers, had gotten a little out of control in his designs. The production was so cluttered that they could never fit all the scenery into any theater on the itinerary. In Rochester they performed in the Masonic Auditorium, a gargantuan space that offered only a shallow stage, which wouldn’t accommodate more than two thirds of the scenery they’d brought. Reporting from their next stop in Buffalo, Variety’s “Burton.” noted that Mielziner had been forced to improvise a stripped-down mise-en-scène that was nonetheless “highly credible chiefly because of its vivid costuming and brilliant lighting.”

  “Burton.” had complained that he couldn’t understand all Tallulah was saying and reported that it was Emery who “easily walks off with acting honors,” He was of “regal appearance and reading with clarity and understanding.” This put him, the reviewer speculated, “in a tough spot personally and professionally.”

  The tour was originally announced as ten weeks, with the Broadway opening scheduled for December 27. In Buffalo it was clarified that “if business warranted,” the show was going to swing through the South before coming to New York. However, business was not very good. After receiving more bad reviews in Pittsburgh, Cleopatra’s weeklong engagement there had reaped only $9,000 despite playing in the 2,100-seat Nixon.

  Producer Stebbins decided to cut his losses by pushing up the Broadway opening to November 10 from December 27. Engagements in no less than nine Southern cities were now postponed until a prospective post-Broadway tour, which never did materialize.

  The trouble with Tallulah’s Cleopatra, Cole claimed, was that she was“so modern nobody recognized it. Tallulah could have gotten the rhythm of the lines and still given her own interpretation. She never absorbed the rhythms.”

  On tour she “was just doing her best to get in and out,” Cole said.

  “Sometimes she’d rush through a scene so you couldn’t understand a word.”

  It was their first professional work together and he did not have enough influence to confront her. Cole did venture to suggest that, “There must be something wrong with the acoustics of the theater because so many people are complaining that they can’t understand the actors; the words are all run together.” She knew what he meant. The next night she tried harder but the improvement didn’t last. “This will never work,” she said to Cole.

  But Tallulah believed she was carrying on for the sake of her marriage.

  “It’s disaster for me,” she told Bowden. “But it’s so good for Ted [as Emery was called by intimates] that I’m going to stick with it.” After the production’s demise, Tallulah gave announcements to individual members of the press at the Stork Club, “Well, you know the only reason I brought it into town was because John got such good notices.” Actually she was obligated by the terms of her contract to go the distance. Of course, as Stephan Cole said, “She could have gotten sick: ‘Due to Miss Bankhead’s illness . . . ’ But that would have been cheating,” he said.

  What Cole never disclosed and what it was left to Bowden to relate was that medical as well as emotional and artistic problems had in fact assailed her throughout the production.

  One night, Emery and Tallulah were coming from their dressing rooms to the stage. Emery was busy with something and lagged behind Tallulah, who was left to struggle with Cleopatra’s jewel case. “Miss Bankhead, may I carry that for you?” Bowden asked, and then nearly fell on his sword at the tale of woe that came out of her mouth. “Oh, darling, would you? You know I really don’t want to lift much. They’ve gotten in my cunt and taken everything out. Everything. But—there is some hope.

  They’ve left a little bit of something in there so that I can have a reaction.

  Anyway it makes Ted happy, now that something’s happening to me.”

  Bowden and Tallulah became friends. “I don’t feel anything when I’m being fucked,” she said to him during the tour, attributing to her hysterectomy a lifelong feeling of frustration during intercourse that she mentioned on any number of occasions. Tallulah seems to have been alluding to a
second operation intended to remedy some unfortunate aftereffect from her hysterectomy.

  What Bowden also understood to be a result of one of the operations was incontinence, which could have been caused by the slightest nick on her bladder. Tallulah was frequently in a frantic haste to relieve herself. Assisting Tallulah with a costume change, her theater maid Rose Riley was forced to grab any nearby vessel. Bowden was horrified at the sight of Tallulah squatting over an urn held in the wings for the next scene while she pulled off one wig and one suite of cumbersome jewelry, slapping at Rose in rage, discomfort, and frustration. The meager sets turned the stage into an echo chamber. Bach came back one night in the middle of one of her tragicomic costume changes.

  “Darling, you have to be very careful. The audience can hear you urinate.”

  “Well,” Tallulah snapped, “there’s one note of reality in your fucking play: Cleopatra pissed!” Bach scurried away. By the time they got to New York they were hardly speaking.

  Terribly nervous as he was about his own performance, enduring his bride’s humiliation, Emery’s drinking got worse, as did Tallulah’s. Bowden felt that “he became a real alcoholic. Some nights he’d go quite mad after the performance.”

  “Jesus, I’m so tired,” he confessed to Bowden. “The show is important to me. But we do it and then she’s always dragging me out afterward to some party.”

  “Do you want this marriage to work?” Bowden asked.

  “Well, yeah, it’d be good for both of us.”

  “Then give her a good kick in the ass.” Bowden was among those who believed a relationship with Tallulah could only survive when the man established undoubted authority. “She’s looking for a father. I swear, all she wants you to do is say, ‘We’re not going anywhere; you’re going home. We’re going home tonight quietly.’ If she fights, tell her, ‘Then I’m going home.’ ”