Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Emery, however, brushed off Bowden’s advice. “When he didn’t do it, but kept tagging along behind her, I said the marriage is finished.”

  Stress turned Tallulah into a diva from hell who seemed to be most concerned with what she was going to wear to her opening night execution in New York. “The slave girls used to be terrified of her,” Bowden recalled.

  “She’d suddenly look at one of them, and they’d know, Oh, God, she wants this costume!”

  “Take it off, darling,” Cleopatra commanded her hapless attendants after they’d all exited offstage. “I’m going to try that on for the next scene.”

  And in the wings the chosen girl stripped down and Tallulah swept out onstage for a shakedown cruise in her pirated finery. After a while, the girls used to carry their dressing gowns down to the stage with them.

  Finally Tallulah called in Cecil Beaton to administer a last-minute overhaul. Beaton’s new costumes arrived shortly before the New York opening. The night before Tallulah faced Broadway she was onstage trying on her new ensembles. There was a capelet in an avant-garde fabric at the time, woven with plastic. “Christ, he’s laughing at me,” Tallulah grumbled.

  “I look like a shower curtain!” Part of her midriff was bared: “Look at my stomach: every secret,” she said with a pat, “I’ve ever had is exposed!” Then came a pair of coiling snake armlets that didn’t quite fit. “I can’t move my fucking arm, darling!”

  From the start, she detested the helmets of tightly coiled plaits that she’d been given to wear on her head. In her research, Tallulah had discovered, or claimed to have discovered, that Cleopatra had a fondness for wigs of all shapes and colors. Why, then, Tallulah argued, couldn’t she be a blonde? (In her autobiography, Tallulah asserts that in London she won a five-pound bet with Lord Birkenhead when he wagered that Cleopatra was brunette.) The wigs were banished. In New York, Tallulah wore a quasi-pageboy with bangs, which conveyed something of an Elizabethan flavor.

  On November 10, 1937, they opened at the Mansfield Theatre (today the Brooks Atkinson) in New York. “In the clutter and noise and mumbled speeches of the production it sounds pretty much like a collision in the property room,” John Anderson wrote in the Journal American the next day. “You can scarcely tell what’s going on. Scenes scamper past, with the insisted alarums of Virgil Thomson’s brassiest brass, in a chaos of sound. . . .” In the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson wrote that Strunk’s adaptation “has managed to rob the play of a large part of its motivation, dispelled ‘the golden haze of sensuous splendor’ which is the source of the tragedy, and reduced the size of the characters.” Preparing the text for Tallulah, Strunk would have been expected to put Cleopatra’s scenes in higher relief by minimizing some of the subsidiary plot strands; yet Variety reported to the contrary that she was offstage more than she was on. A near consensus from the critics was that her acting in the remaining scenes did not make them want to see more.

  Atkinson complained that, “There is no suggestion of majesty in this Cleopatra, and, curiously enough, not much sensuousness or passion. Miss Bankhead’s restless modernism gives it more of the garishness of a nightclub scene. Her voice has none of the music that blank verse requires; she misses the rhythm of poetic speaking, and a large part of what she says cannot be understood.” Richard Watts Jr. in the New York Herald Tribune called her “more a serpent of the Swanee than of the Nile”; John Mason Brown in the Post recorded that “Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra—and sank.”

  But as always, Tallulah’s reviews were not homogeneous. Even though the majority of critics considered her Cleopatra a disaster, it is worth quoting the minority opinion. Burns Mantle of the Daily News, who was not a particular fan of Tallulah’s, nevertheless declared himself thoroughly impressed and commended her restraint. “The death scene is modestly played, and with a becoming dignity.”

  Robert Francis of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was the only reviewer to acknowledge the limits of the character as she is presented by Shakespeare: I took my seat with some misgivings, but Miss Bankhead can always be counted on for the unexpected and she proceeded to do a Cleopatra that not only at all times was warm, moving and human, but frequently brilliant. She lifts a rather doll-like character out of a well of sentiment and makes her a vital, passionate woman. She is intriguing and interesting every minute she is on stage.

  In the Sun, Richard Lockridge accused Tearle of erring on the colloquial side more than Tallulah had. Emery received some good notices, but his performance did not generate enough enthusiasm to justify Tallulah’s decision to come into New York on his behalf. Watts, however, called him“the one member of the cast to play with both authority and a knowledge of the beauty of the lines. And then they have deprived him of his great speech when he hears of the death of Antony. It is all very discouraging.”

  Antony and Cleopatra closed after five performances. Producer Stebbins took his prodigious losses gallantly: “I could have had a yacht or the play. I picked the play.”

  Serving Time in Drawing Rooms

  “You know I can’t be happy in a part if I don’t feel that I could be—to a certain extent—that sort of person.”

  It has been suggested that the failure of Antony and Cleopatra proved conclusively that Tallulah was not capable of acting Shakespeare. Her Twelfth Night broadcast refutes this, however. It has also been speciously argued that Tallulah’s failure as Cleopatra resulted from the limitations of a second-rate actress. Estelle Winwood was on tour and sent Tallulah a very supportive wire after the disastrous reviews appeared. But her own ambivalence about Tallulah surfaced when she told Cole soon after that Cleopatra had failed “because she’s never learned her job.” Nevertheless, Winwood’s withering comments in 1982 were startling. “Tallulah couldn’t play Shakespeare,” she insisted flatly. Why not? “Well, my dear, now there’s a question,” she said with a caustic little laugh. “Why not? It isn’t easy to play Shakespeare. I’ve played a lot of it. And to put somebody like Tallulah, who is just a little Miss Nobody, really, into a part in Shakespeare is ridiculous. She was noted as a beauty—beautiful hair, things like that. Not as an actress. Ever.”

  It’s unfortunate that Tallulah never excelled in a classic part in a way that allowed her to prove the real scope of her talent. Toward the end of her life she seemed to realize that she had needlessly foreclosed her artistic options. “I am a purely naturalistic actor,” she told radio interviewer Michael Perlman in 1963. “I’m not a classical actress. I could have been, but I never had that kind of training.”

  Marie Bankhead, as always, was entirely uncritical of Tallulah’s acting.

  Undoubtedly feeling the need of a reassuring presence, Tallulah and Emery had invited her to come up for the New York opening. Back home after seeing the play, Marie wrote Tallulah on November 18, 1937: What a glorious treat you gave me! I shall never forget the thrills I had when the play unrolled before my eyes. I don’t care what the critics say I know it was great. And how fine it was to be with you and John and see you so happy together. John certainly made a hit with the family both male and female. I got the repercussion of opinion after you left and it was all favorable. They just loved him. And of course they worship you.

  If Tallulah’s health problems were as serious as Bowden has suggested, she may indeed have been in no position to think or act rationally. Her marriage and her Cleopatra seem to reflect the long-standing pattern of self-sabotage seen in her impulsive career decisions, her often disastrous behavior with men, and her reckless abuse of her health. It is impossible to disagree with the assessment of Tallulah’s friend David Herbert that she was “her own worst enemy.” She herself must have on some level realized this. “She was a wise woman about her own life and what she’d done with it,” Cole commented. Some of the aggression she vented on the world was undoubtedly born of frustration at how much harder she tended to make things for herself.

  Antony and Cleopatra’s critical reception in New York could not
have come as a surprise to Tallulah, but perhaps the full ramifications of the calamity were more than she had imagined. ‘No use denying I was desolated,” she writes in Tallulah. Nevertheless, she took Emery to Washington days after the closing to watch Will preside over the opening of Congress.

  On December 12, Edie Smith wrote Marie that Tallulah and Emery—“the children”—had been on the wagon for ten days “and are really so much better,” but were nevertheless having great difficulty falling asleep. But Tallulah could not decide what role would afford the best recovery from Cleopatra. Edie wrote Marie that:

  Plays keep coming in but it doesn’t seem that there is anything worth while for Miss Tallulah—the plays that look like anything at all are usually full of sex and its perversions—which might be alright for some coming star—and as Miss Tallulah has set up a certain standard she feels it would be dangerous to attempt anything that is in the least risky.

  Soon after, Tallulah and Emery moved with Edie out of the Gotham and into a furnished apartment on East Seventy-seventh Street. Tallulah’s culinary skills were modest and Edie cooked for them. Tallulah was desperate for money and trying to borrow from whomever she could. She told Bowden about a likely prospect, “a strange Moroccan” man who was keeping Stephan Cole. “Oh, darling, he can take care of me!” Tallulah snorted.

  “There’s nothing to worry about there.” Cole’s protector—“well, he’s practically a prince!”

  Early in the new year, the Emerys were given a brief respite when John began rehearsals for Save Me the Waltz, a romantic comedy in which he was the ruler of a mythical kingdom. It boasted a superb cast including Mady Christians, Leo G. Carroll, Laura Hope Crews, and none other than Reginald Bach. Save Me the Waltz opened on Broadway on February 28, 1938, and lasted only eight performances. But immediately after, work came for both Tallulah and Emery in a revival of Somerset Maugham’s 1921 play The Circle, one of his finest comedies. Tallulah was to play Elizabeth Champion-Cheney, a role originated by two great actresses: Fay Compton in London and Estelle Winwood in New York. Emery would play her rakish love interest, Teddy Luton, a rubber-plantation executive. Teddy persuades Elizabeth to throw off status and security in exchange for the passion and impetuosity missing in Arnold, her somewhat priggish, if well-meaning, husband, a local politician with eyes on bigger prizes.

  The recurring pattern suggested by the title is established by Lady Kitty, Elizabeth’s mother-in-law. Thirty years earlier, she left five-year-old Arnold and her husband to run off with Lord Porteus, her husband’s best friend and employer. Elizabeth has invited Kitty and Porteus to visit and meet Arnold for the first time since they bolted. The plot is thickened by the unexpected appearance of Arnold’s father, who, together with Kitty and Porteus, exhume and dispute their mutual past.

  The Circle came Tallulah’s way at the instigation of playwright Edward Sheldon. After enjoying a smashing success as a young man early in the century, Sheldon had fallen victim to a slowly advancing paralysis as the result of a mysterious, perhaps psychosomatic, illness. His Gramercy Park apartment was consecrated ground for many great actresses in the theater, who sought the bedridden playwright’s counsel and advice. One of them was actress Grace George, who, at sixty, was one of Broadway’s great ladies.

  In part to distract George from her son’s recent death, Sheldon proposed that she undertake the role of Lady Kitty, and proposed that Tallulah, who had complained to him of the dearth of viable plays, star opposite her.

  After the debacle of her Cleopatra, Tallulah was determined in The Circle to show a completely different side. When forced by circumstances, she was capable of this kind of sensible damage control. Back in 1933, for example, when Tallulah was staying at the Garden of Allah in Hollywood, she had dived into the hotel’s pool in a sequined dress that took on water so alarmingly that she climbed out of it and hoisted herself out of the pool naked. The next day the incident was making the rounds of Hollywood gossip when Tallulah showed up at a party with Alan Vincent. Wearing a middy blouse, she looked all of sixteen, Hedda Hopper recalled in her syndicated column ten years later. The image was so unexpected and so incongruous that no one ribbed her about the night before.

  So did Tallulah in The Circle pull off a stunning reversal. Elizabeth is described as being in her early twenties, and Tallulah gave the part its full value as a young romantic lead. “It was an ingenue part and she played it as ingenue,” Cole recalled. “It was unlike anything I’d ever seen from her, she looked so young and so innocent.” It was not a comment on innocence that Tallulah delivered but a convincing simulation of the genuine article.

  “It takes a woman of my experience to play a virgin,” Sarah Bernhardt once said. “I know just what to leave out.” By the same token, Tallulah never attempted, as a younger actress might have done, to milk the role of Elizabeth for sentiment.

  Tallulah told a reporter that “at first I thought it wasn’t my sort of thing. Of course I have done a very wide range of parts—almost every kind of emotion—and yet it’s as a comedienne that I fancy myself. Here I am, though, in a play [ . . . ] other people have all the laughs.” Nonetheless she realized that, “It will be good for me to learn to lean back, relax, and let the other characters carry the scenes. I have been so used to sailing in and doing the work myself.”

  Grace George was known to be an perfectionist whose demands were always met since she was invariably produced by her husband, William Brady. “He gave her the best productions that anybody could want,” said Cole. George’s stepdaughter Alice Brady was also a great actress. George’s range easily encompassed the full spectrum from tragedy to comedy that the role demands. Vain, absurdly painted, affected, and capricious, Lady Kitty is nevertheless wise enough to present herself as a cautionary figure to deter Elizabeth from making the same escape that she had thirty years earlier.

  Tallulah was grateful to Brady for rescuing her and Emery. She also got along well with director Bretaigne Windust, one of the busiest young directors of the time. Before the opening, Tallulah told a reporter that George was going to be “magnificent” in the play. A mistress of understatement, George’s work could have been studied profitably by Tallulah, and undoubtedly was. For in Cole’s words she “always had her eyes open. Anyone who was supposed to be good, Tallulah wanted to see what they were all about.” He didn’t consider her a “shopper,” sifting through other performers’ work, “but if there was something unusual, some little thing worth looking into, she’d keep it in mind.” She was singularly interested in visiting the work of experienced senior actresses, other women of George’s generation: Alla Nazimova, Laurette Taylor, and Jane Cowl among them.

  Shortly before the The Circle opened on Broadway, an agitated Tallulah came to visit the senior actress to whom she was closest. Elizabeth had been “one of my favorite parts,” Winwood recalled in 1982. She quelled Tallulah’s anxiety by advising her to “just lie back on the author.”

  Maugham’s elegant dialogue needed no embellishing, a somewhat novel situation after the many occasions on which Tallulah felt compelled to do anything she could to rescue a bad script.

  The Circle’s April 18, 1938, opening at the Playhouse was termed “the social high spot of the week,” by Radie Harris in her nationwide radio broadcast. “One of the most glamorous actresses on the stage today, Tallulah always attracts a glittering first night audience, culled from the social, literary and theatrical worlds.”

  The ovation that greeted her entrance stopped the performance cold.

  The audience seemed to want to assure her that she had been forgiven for Cleopatra, and so did the critics. Grenville Vernon wrote in Commonweal that, “First honors go to Tallulah Bankhead for her Elizabeth, in which she gives the performance of her career. She has charm, simplicity, pathos, feeling; both emotionally and technically her performance is a masterpiece.”

  “After the nightmare of being an ebony night club enchantress in Antony and Cleopatra Miss Bankhead finds her true self in Maugham�
��s work,” wrote Thomas R. Dash in Women’s Wear Daily. “Eschewing tawdry and meretricious languishements [sic] and febrile, overwrought acting, this actress is matchless as the sensitive and well-bred young English matron of finer sensibilities.”

  She looked, Arthur Pollock wrote in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “like something you dreamed.” Cole recalled her entrance with George at the beginning of act 3. Having strolled in the garden, they entered the drawing room of the Champion-Cheney home together, George first as befitted her seniority. Each woman dressed exquisitely, they presented a breathtaking portrait of the beauty of age and the beauty of youth, and the audience was moved to applause.

  Tallulah did not, of course, receive unanimous praise. In The Nation, Joseph Wood Krutch wrote that: “Miss Bankhead does not even try to act except intermittently. Between her occasional big scenes she either does nothing at all or, what is perhaps worse from the standpoint of a performance, relies for attention upon the casual exploitation of her voice or gestures or general personality.”

  Although notices for The Circle were on the whole highly favorable, it lasted only seventy-eight performances. Business took a dive with the advent of summer weather. Grace George decided to tour the play in the fall, but Tallulah and Emery resolved instead to star together in I Am Different, a comedy of marital misadventure, adapted by Zoë Akins from a play by Hungarian playwright Lily Hatvany. Several years earlier, Akins had successfully adapted Hatvany’s The Love Duel as a vehicle for Ethel Barrymore.

  I Am Different took place in Akins’s preferred milieu of the high-toned European drawing room, amid the same sort of brandy snifters and humidors that had surrounded Tallulah in Akins’s Footloose eighteen years earlier.

  Tallulah would play Dr. Judith Held, a noted European author of volumes of popular psychiatry as well as advice-dispensing newspaper columns. In her writings she frequently takes aim at the foolishness of female jealousy.