Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  But her clinical objectivity is thrown to the winds once her path crosses Emery’s Alex Thoerson, a reckless young playboy. His lover, a leading actress, has shot and wounded him in a fit of jealous pique over his desire to meet none other than Judith Held. Thoerson sweeps Judith off her feet and almost immediately she discovers firsthand just how slippery the long slope of amorous jealousy can become.

  Tallulah’s old friend and London colleague Glenn Anders played her husband; and Thomas Mitchell was again directing her. But “that awful play,”as Anders recalled I Am Different fifty years later, was a colossal waste of time and energy for all concerned. The leads started rehearsing in New York before they traveled to the West Coast where some of the smaller roles were cast. On August 10, Tallulah and her father displayed professional and personal soli-darity across the thousands of miles separating Alabama from Hollywood.

  On a national radio broadcast, he exercised his dramatic ambitions by reading a monologue, for which Tallulah supplied an introduction.

  Tryouts were to begin in San Diego on August 18. A New York opening was planned for November. Yet Tallulah realized the play’s shortcomings and signed a contract allowing her the option of not taking I Am Different into New York. Judith Held was a long and difficult role. Cole, who stage-managed, described Tallulah’s performance as “all technique and personality”—not feeling that the two were necessarily mutually exclusive. Tallulah was able to illustrate Judith’s identity as author and newspaper columnist with sufficient accuracy to make the character credible. But during an interview in San Francisco, she issued a spirited assertion of the legitimacy of“personality” acting.

  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. Unless it’s a character part (and I’ve only played two in my life—Amy in They Knew What They Wanted and Sadie Thompson in Rain) I try to adapt the role to my own personality and act it as naturally as possible. If I’ve got a jealousy scene to do, I simply try to remember how I’ve behaved when I’m jealous.

  At the Los Angeles opening on August 22, “celebrities were everywhere to be seen and a street crowd of surpassing size came to pay court,”noted the Los Angeles Times. Backstage, a Herald Express reporter watched Tallulah nervously “pacing up and down, worrying about lighting, constantly calling for water to soothe her throat after arduous last minute rehearsals all the night before.” But Tallulah told Cole that she didn’t mind being seen in Los Angeles even in as flimsy a vehicle as I Am Different, since she felt she could act better than most movie stars anyway. (“What passes for acting in Hollywood, with some few exceptions . . . puzzles and embarrasses me,” Tallulah would write in 1949.)

  Hollywood accorded the play a polite but hardly vociferous reception, nothing like the success she’d had there two years earlier in Reflected Glory.

  More enjoyable for Tallulah was the chance to go horseback riding with Cole through the then largely unsettled San Fernando Valley. Tallulah had ridden since she was a girl and enjoyed it. (Her riding skills had been captured on film in Thunder Below.)

  Tallulah put the brightest face on her seemingly hopeless struggle to find a durable play, telling the Los Angeles Examiner: “What I like best about playing in the United States is that I can’t rest on my laurels. Abroad they go to see the stars in any play, old or new. Over here you have to establish a reputation all over again with every role. I like it. It’s stimulating. It keeps you on your toes.”

  Tallulah, as always, felt the obligation to entertain her audience by whatever means necessary. Featured in a small role in I Am Different was Fritzi Scheff, a star of opera and operetta at the turn of the century. Concerned that I Am Different wasn’t enough to send an audience home satisfied, Tallulah after some performances would take Scheff in front of the curtain and prompt the audience, “Now if you all ask very nicely, maybe we can get Fritzi to sing a chorus of ‘Kiss Me, Again.’ ” Scheff had introduced the song on Broadway in Victor Herbert’s Mlle. Modiste thirty-three years earlier.

  From Los Angeles the play moved to San Francisco, where it was running when the the New York Times reported on September 17 that Tallulah didn’t want to bring it to Broadway because she thought that major revisions were necessary, but “Miss Akins does not want any lines changed.”

  Akins cabled a response that was published in the Times on September 25.

  May I say that there are no lines in the play which have not already been changed or juggled about as it suited them by either Mr. Thomas Mitchell the director or Miss Bankhead herself. . . . May I also add that the climactic scene of the play was never rehearsed as written and that a letter prepared by my lawyer forbidding a second performance if the scene was not played as written was sent to Mr. Joseph Gaites the manager in San Diego before the opening there but because the first performance was a little closer to my intentions than the preceding rehearsals I let that opportunity of closing the play pass however I have [done]nothing since that time but urge the management to have important revisions properly rehearsed and incorporated or close the play.

  But Cole says that Tallulah wasn’t behaving badly, “it was just one of the worst plays that ever happened.” In any case, some accord with Akins was reached, since after a week’s hiatus, I Am Different continued on to Chicago, where it did quite well, remaining for three weeks before spending the week of October 24 in St. Louis and the following week in Cincinnati. That was followed by two weeks of one-night stands throughout the South, a territory where Tallulah could do no wrong. She played two performances, a matinee and evening, at the Temple Theater in Birmingham, and after both, the audience “brought her out again and again with heavy applause,” Vincent Townsend reported in the Birmingham News. “Birmingham likes to see Miss Bankhead stomp, rant and toss her head and when she does one of her famous frowns of perplexity, that makes the picture just about perfect.”

  Townsend conceded affectionately that she “can do a lot for the timing of a line and the shading of a stage situation with one of her mannerisms,” but he spoke as a conventional Southern gentleman as well as a critic when he added that “we would like to divorce her from so many of those deep throaty laughs that work their way into her presentations.”

  I Am Different reached Washington on November 22, which was as close to Broadway as it got. Producer/director Herman Shumlin had just sent Tallulah the script of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. Hellman hadn’t yet finished the third act, but Tallulah wired back her acceptance immediately. She was to play Regina Giddens, a cunning and restless Southern matron living at the turn of the century. “Regina fascinated me, as did Lillian Hellman’s searing prose,” she writes in Tallulah. “Regina had depth and stature and eloquence.” Anders watched her drop to her knees and address a divinity with a plea that “I must have that part!”

  The play was “a God-send,” she told Shumlin, in that it allowed Tallulah to stop the tour of I Am Different to come back to New York to start rehearsals for her new show early in January. The following summer, Shubert announced that Constance Bennett would star in I Am Different on Broadway, but nothing came of this. “New York has had its share of indignities,”Tallulah writes in her autobiography. “It could well be spared that one.”

  The Little Foxes

  “Well I’m acting, do I have to always be gracious and a Southern lady?”

  It has been claimed that in The Little Foxes, Tallulah finally—as never before and perhaps never again—really delivered; she “acted,” created a character, and no longer “played herself.” There is an unmistakable subtext here: that Tallulah was deserving of approval because she behaved, her ferocious, subversive energy was contained and harnessed. When society celebrates the taming of a lioness, a male ringmaster must also be crowned. In this instance the ringmaster was Herman Shumlin, who produced and directed Hellman’s play. He has been represented as a paragon of rectitude, imposing integrity on his wayward star in a way that his predecessors could not do.r />
  Certainly there is an amount of truth to the myth. In The Little Foxes, Tallulah did give an unforgettable performance that revealed new dimension to her talent. And by her own account, she received invaluable guidance from Shumlin, who was a great director and a stern taskmaster.

  Shumlin was not, however, what the Medusa-slaying mythology claims. He was not a paragon of virtue but a fallible man who warrants more than the cursory depiction he has so far received.

  “He had tremendous drive, more drive than anyone I’ve ever met,”says his cousin, screenwriter George Slavin. “Whatever he did he would have been successful—and he would have made a lot of enemies. I never got personal with Herman,” said Slavin, and few people did. “He was self-taught and he knew more than anyone I knew about what was going on politically and theatrically. That was his problem; he had no time for people who indulged in small talk. The human element was missing.”

  Shumlin subjected everyone around him to the relentless drive that had propelled his own rise. Eager to break into the theater, Shumlin had dropped out of high school, working for a time in his uncle Charlie Slavin’s chain of moderate-priced women’s clothing shops. Slavin sent him to producer/director Jed Harris, Broadway’s crown prince during the twenties and thirties. Shumlin rose to become Harris’s business manager and then struck out on his own. He had four flops before hitting the jackpot with The Last Mile, a prison melodrama written by an ex-con. George Slavin recalled a late-night call to his father from Shumlin. “Charlie, if I don’t get twelve thousand dollars by tomorrow I’m going to commit suicide.” Charlie Slavin not only contributed what he could but that night went hat in hand to friends to raise the balance. A huge hit, later sold to Hollywood, The Last Mile started Shumlin on three decades of prosperity and acclaim.

  Shumlin hired Lillian Hellman as a play reader in his office and then accepted her first play, The Children’s Hour, in 1934. The Children’s Hour set the precedent for Hellman’s work. It was an unflinching look at human malevolence and psychological brutality. It ran eighteen months and made Hellman a name to be reckoned with on Broadway and in Hollywood. But in 1936 Hellman’s second effort, Days to Come, had lasted only five performances on Broadway. Flush from a Hollywood contract, she was able to nurse her wounds until summoning the courage to begin The Little Foxes. It“was the most difficult play I ever wrote,” she recalls in her memoir Pentimento. Draft upon draft, nine in all, eventually produced a tightly—too tightly, some would complain—woven melodrama of social conscience.

  The Hubbards are a family of capitalist spoilers in a small Southern town at the turn of the century. Brothers Ben and Oscar and their sister Regina are planning to spread their wings by building a cotton mill to adjoin the cotton fields outlying their town. They have joined forces with William Marshall, a Chicago industrialist who is attracted by their promise of cheap labor and strike-free conditions. Regina sends her seventeen-year-old daughter Alexandra to retrieve her estranged husband, Horace Giddens, from a Baltimore hospital, where he has learned that he does not have long to live. But when he returns he refuses to become part of the family scheme. With death approaching, he wants no more gambits to exploit and enrich, and Regina is left with no funds to get in on the deal.

  Oscar’s son Leo is employed at the local bank owned by Horace Giddens. Oscar and Ben prevail on Leo to lift a sheaf of bearer bonds in Giddens’s safe-deposit box, which they will use as collateral in lieu of Horace’s stake. Only too ready to cut their sister out of the deal, Ben and Oscar plan to replace the bonds when construction begins and outside investors can be recruited at favorable terms. Horace finds out, but tells Regina he will play along with her brothers’ deceit, letting them use the bonds as the stopgap surety they need. He has made a new will, and these bonds, the instrument of her brothers’ victory, are all she will get. The rest will go to their daughter, Alexandra. Defeated, Regina will not aid him when his heart gives way. She walks away from her husband’s deathbed to confront her brothers, promising them silence about Leo’s theft if they will cede her a three-quarters return for the one-third stake that her late husband’s bonds supplied. She has gained the upper hand, the independence she craves, but Alexandra, appalled by what she has seen, leaves her for good.

  Hellman brought Shumlin the play late in 1938; Dorothy Parker had suggested the title, a verse from the Song of Solomon: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines; for our vines have tender grapes.”

  Shumlin was committed to producing Life with Father, but Hellman demanded that he extricate himself or she would go elsewhere. Shumlin did and was not sorry. Although Life with Father ran ten years and would have set him up financially for life, The Little Foxes’ success brought Hellman and him even closer; they became lovers during the run of the play. In an anthology of her work published in 1942, Hellman wrote, “He has done more than interpret these plays: he has wrung from them more than was in them, and hidden things in them which should not be seen.”

  Shumlin had originally talked to Hellman about Tallulah’s playing Regina, but “we were both very nervous about her—Lillian in particular,”Shumlin claimed. “Her reputation by that time was rather scarlet.” And so before The Little Foxes found its way to Tallulah, Judith Anderson and Ina Claire had passed on it. “Each had a pleasant reason for refusing,” Hellman said, “each meant that the part was unsympathetic, a popular fear for actresses before that concept became outmoded.” Anderson, Shumlin recalled, had been less than pleasant, saying that The Little Foxes was“disgusting.”

  Shumlin again sounded out Hellman about Tallulah, but Hellman thought she might be too young. Tallulah was only thirty-six when she began rehearsals, but Shumlin had seen her frequently onstage, and “knew her power, her style, her authority . . . her wonderful vitality and a marvelous freedom . . . a daring and a boldness that I liked very much.”

  Shumlin’s casting sense was remarkably acute and each role received as perfect a personification as could be imagined. Ben, point man in the family’s operations until Regina trounces him, was Charles Dingle (whom Hellman could apparently forgive for his appearance in the ill-fated Days to Come). Carl Benton Reid was his hapless brother, Oscar, given the thin end of the wedge by both Regina and Ben. Lee Baker was William Marshall, and Horace Giddens was played by Frank Conroy. Dan Duryea played Oscar’s wastrel son, Leo, before beginning a long career in Hollywood.

  Patricia Collinge was Tallulah’s virtual costar, this being the first play in which Tallulah had been so equally paired with a woman since Fallen Angels in 1925. Collinge played Oscar Giddens’s wife, Birdie, the daughter of old Southern aristocracy, a pitiful figure of ravaged gentility. Birdie was just as great a part as Regina, and Tallulah knew it. Kenneth Carten said Tallulah told him she had even originally told Shumlin she would play either Birdie or Regina.

  Collinge had been a leading Broadway actress for almost thirty years, but had been away from Broadway for four years, devoting herself to writing. Her play Dame Nature had recently been produced by the Theatre Guild.

  To play Regina’s daughter Alexandra, Shumlin hired Florence Williams, a twenty-eight-year-old native of St. Louis who had trained to be a concert pianist before falling in love with the theater in her teens. She had acted on Broadway with Lillian Gish, Judith Anderson, Helen Menken, Gladys Cooper, and Glenn Anders. “It was my very great pleasure,” Shumlin wrote soon after her Broadway debut in 1933, “last night to see you in Girls in Uniform, and I wish to take this opportunity to tell you how beautiful a performance you gave and thank you for it.” Earlier he had courted her unsuccessfully for a lead in The Children’s Hour.

  Shumlin’s intensity was reflected in the preparations for the play. “Herman conducted as though he knew that he had a classic,” Williams recalled. “We had banquets on the stage,” laid out for breaks in rehearsal.

  “Ham, roast beef, every kind of bread you can think of.”

  Gathering material for her play, Hellman had raided the skeletons in h
er own family’s closets. The painstaking efforts of Shumlin and his team nearly caught her red-handed. During the second-act breakfast scene, a newspaper is casually perused by the Hubbards. Shumlin instructed stage manager Ben Krantz to find and reprint an authentic vintage issue. Hellman gave an approximate population, location, and year. But when Hellman saw the facsimiles Krantz had printed, she went through the roof: “Get all those destroyed immediately. I’ll be sued! I’ll be sued for libel. Get them out!” Krantz had found exactly the Alabama town from which her mother’s relatives hailed. The lot of prop newspapers was destroyed and the gazette of an adjoining town substituted.

  Tallulah brought to the rehearsals an intensity that matched Shumlin’s.

  After Tallulah’s death, Shumlin told Hellman’s biographer Richard Moody that “no actress ever attacked a role with such fervor and such total commitment.” Shumlin saw that the freedom he had admired in Tallulah was built on an armature of precision. “Her mind is tremendously alert and retentive,” he averred. Tallulah wanted to know exactly what he was looking for at all times and would sometimes ask Shumlin to demonstrate things for her as Gerald du Maurier and George Kelly had once done.

  “Regina was a challenge that I welcomed,” Tallulah writes in Tallulah.

  For a woman who could not stand constriction, the most noxious of the role’s requirements were period clothes laced in by corsets, which required a different movement protocol. Tallulah told Stephan Cole she had resolved to move only in period character from the first day of blocking, but she still missed being able to cross her legs or light a cigarette onstage. Her trademark red nail polish had to come off and clear lacquer was substituted: nail painting was hardly acceptable for the Alabama matron of 1900.