Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Shumlin “was a great director,” she told Denis Brian in 1966. “He made me slow up.” Tallulah modified what had been her characteristic diction: Regina’s words issued with a measured gravity that suited the character’s deliberation and didn’t conform to Tallulah’s own fizzy staccato—the repartee of drawing room comedy. But the difficulties that the role posed for Tallulah were not what Williams took away from those rehearsals. “I just felt it was so natural a thing for Tallulah. She knew the part so thoroughly; she knew exactly what she was doing.”

  Williams cites Shumlin’s “structural sense of a play” as his great strength as director. “He was marvelous at putting it together: how to position people—where to put them. He did that beautifully, and oftentimes got a relationship between people because of the positioning.” Nevertheless, there were definite limitations to Shumlin’s vision, Williams believed.

  He worked the stage like a magnified chessboard, manipulating the pieces brilliantly, but to him the pieces were hollow. “He just did not know how actors worked, how most actors worked,” she says. “He felt they were puppets. Norma Chambers understudied Birdie; she worked for Herman as understudy quite a bit. One time Norma was explaining to him how one acts from within. He listened and said, ‘If I believed that about actors, I’d never direct one again.’ ”

  Shumlin would recall something charmed about the way the play coa-lesced: “We read it through the first day, then sat around and discussed the characters. The second day we read it again with interpolations and then began setting up the characters and scenes of the first act. . . . The whole play was set up in nine days. . . . I’ve never had a play come along like that.”

  The remaining weeks of rehearsals could therefore be dedicated to the process of perfecting, on which Shumlin concentrated mercilessly. Tallulah spoke admiringly of Shumlin’s ability to rehearse the same scene twenty times in a row until the actors were able to produce the exact result he wanted. The director objected to any acting that did more than the text required. But it was just not possible for Tallulah to underplay as much as he wanted. “I did a couple of scenes the way I wanted to do them,” she recalled ten years later. “I wanted to be Ethel Barrymore! And they said”—

  Tallulah shaking her finger primly—“No, no, that’s overdoing it. You have to be the way a gracious Southern lady would.’ ”

  “Well, I’m acting,” Tallulah retorted, “do I have to always be gracious and a Southern lady?” Nevertheless, she followed to the best of her ability, and her performance was undoubtedly enhanced by Shumlin and Hellman’s reprimands. Even when Regina was raging at floodtide, there was“never lack of control,” says Williams. The plumb line of the characterization was self-possession. “She gave such stature to it, the way she played it.

  She was not a bit hysterical, ever,” even when telling Horace, “I hope you die. I hope you die soon. I’ll be waiting for you to die.”

  “I can still hear her saying it,” Williams recalled. “Meaning every word.Cold as ice and just waiting.”

  “Here is a woman with whom everything is seething under the surface,” Tallulah told a reporter. “I’m the kind of actress for whom it’s always easy to let go, emotionally. This time, though, I must hold back, repress, especially in the early part of the play. The force behind the acting has to be mental.”

  Under Regina’s subdued exterior prowled tensions and calculations that the audience felt as much as glimpsed. “I wouldn’t say she was quiet in that she just sat placidly, because she wouldn’t be still in the mind—things were going on all the time,” Williams said, thinking of the first-act party scene, when the Giddenses are entertaining Mr. Marshall of Chicago and the audience watched Regina begin to weave her web. “You saw her brain working; you got the whole thing, the wheels turning. But that always came across.”

  Without diluting Regina’s virulence, Tallulah looked for and readily found in Hellman’s text airs and graces in the character that would have been just as essential to Regina’s success in the world as her single-minded determination. Tallulah’s Regina was by no means an unalloyed fire-breather or stock villainess. Tallulah as Regina “was beautifully charming, when she wanted to be,” Williams recalled. “But she let you know that it was turned on, Tallulah let you see just enough through her.”

  She “managed to get comedy out of Foxes nobody else would have,”recalled Williams. She transformed ordinary exposition into merriment, not at the expense of the script, but often, it seems, without cueing from the lines as printed.

  Early in the second act, after dispatching her daughter Alexandra to Baltimore, Regina is fielding a third degree from her brothers about why she and Horace have not arrived on schedule:

  REGINA: Didn’t I have a letter from Alexandra? What is so strange about people arriving late? He has that cousin in Savannah he’s so fond of. He may have stopped to see him. They’ll be along today some time, very flattered that you and Oscar are so worried about them. . . .

  BEN:Regina, that cousin of Horace’s has been dead for years, and in any case the train does not go through Savannah.

  REGINA: Did he die? You’re always remembering about people dying.

  “Did he daaaah?” Tallulah asked, her voice swooping high on did he, then descending into how-dare-that-skunk-kick-the-bucket baritone ef-frontery on daaaah?

  “It was priceless,” remembered Williams, who enjoyed it just as much as the audience did. Shumlin would not have been Shumlin if he had not cast a wary eye on some of Tallulah’s intonations; the director himself had“no sense of humor, poor man,” said Williams. “If he did, it was so slight you couldn’t notice it.” But Williams felt that Tallulah’s was a wise, tactical move. Fleeting interjections of humor gave the audience a breathing spell from the foreboding, the strife that was always either being played out or just about to detonate. Tallulah made a very heavy play a bit easier for the audience, a strategy good actors have universally employed: “I always thought you must try to find the comedy even in parts like Lear and Hamlet,” John Gielgud once said.

  Tallulah’s humor also established self-knowledge as a part of Regina’s makeup, the impression that Regina knew herself well enough to laugh at her own machinations. “Did he daaah?” was poking fun at being cornered in her own deflective strategy. The relative on whom Hellman had patterned Regina “would speak with outrage of her betrayal by a man she had never liked,” Hellman informs the reader of Pentimento, “and then would burst out laughing at what she said.”

  Tallulah’s own hunger resonated with Regina’s sexual frustration.

  Regina is a very desirable forty-year-old woman married to a man who has never excited her. They have not had relations in ten years—undoubtedly one reason why Regina keeps stating her determination to move to Chicago with the proceeds from the mills. Like every other character she played, Tallulah’s Regina was a vessel of life force. Regina’s story gained a regenerative potency beyond the confines of one woman’s selfish struggle.

  Considerations of good woman and bad fall away when an audience encounters this type of mythic reverberation. Tallulah made the audience breathe along with her own rhythms—and with Regina’s. She was “going to get what she wanted, some way,” Williams said. “You felt that from the beginning, and it grew and grew, and swept you along with it.”

  Regina “was made for Tallulah, because of the insecurity and the ruthlessness she was able to bring into it.” In Williams’s recollection, Tallulah’s performance had a rounding of character such that a strange kind of sympathy drifted in over the footlights. In her autobiography, Tallulah brands Regina “an unmitigated murderess.” But perhaps this was an attempt to distance herself from the part, from qualities in herself that were reprehensible. “I was very close to that character,” she would say to a friend in 1958. It’s unclear whether she meant she knew the character intimately, or that she saw their common ground.

  Hellman had wanted the audience to see themselves, at least some part of themsel
ves, in the Hubbards; “I had not meant people to think of them as villains to whom they had no connection.” She was disappointed, and felt she had failed, when the public stigmatized them as monsters.

  Hellman biographer Carl Rollyson is not sure that the playwright didn’t imagine Regina as a heroine. Hellman “saw the world as a tough place that called for a hardness of character which often was not pretty to behold.” One can see Regina’s trajectory as that of an exceptional woman claiming her due, a woman thwarted by society of the opportunities she deserved. She is a paradigm of energy and intelligence in one of the most repressive societies in the world.

  What she had endured explains, if not excuses, Regina’s malevolence.

  “The fact is,” William Wright declares in Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman, “we root for her, and if Hellman didn’t want us to, she would be a clumsy playwright indeed.” Where the audience is likely to retract its sympathy is in the fatal passage at arms between Regina and Horace. Hellman weighs the scale so that both antagonists are equivalent.

  “For once in your life I am tying your hands,” Horace tells her. “There is nothing you can do.”

  Her dream is gone. She will never get to Chicago. She will watch as her brothers grow rich with her money. Coolly she details the contempt she feels for Horace, has felt for most of their marriage. A cobra has been provoked. Horace crumbles under her brutality, and his heart failing, he clutches frantically at his medicine. When it shatters, he begs her to go for another bottle. As if instinctively, Regina rises to find it, then changes her mind. She looks straight out at the audience, not seeing, not hearing, determined not to know, as Horace stumbles toward the stairs.

  Gasps went up in the audience, and yet they were still, perhaps unknowingly, willing Tallulah’s Regina to victory.

  The Little Foxes received its world premiere at the Ford’s Theater in Baltimore on January 30, 1939. Tallulah had not acted in that city since leaving for London. A hairdresser was scheduled to come down from Elizabeth Arden in New York but fell ill at the last moment. Tallulah herself had to create the soufflé of waves and ringlets she wore in the first act. Two hours before the curtain, she sat in her dressing room, putting up her hair and taking it down again, until by the time she had it pinned to her satisfaction, her arms ached. Shumlin walked by and asked her how she was feeling.

  “Oh, God, just awful,” she said.

  “Then you’re all right,” he told her, voicing a theatrical truism.

  Hellman had given Regina an unforgettable entrance. Obliquely visible to the audience, she lingers in the dining room with Marshall, Alexandra, and Ben, while center stage in the living room, Oscar takes his tortured wife to task for chattering with their guest from Chicago. Decades later Hellman spoke of the “deep, thrilling” laugh that emanated from Tallulah at the dinner table. Hellman looked forward to it at every performance she watched, sharing in the prickles of anticipation that it sent through the audience. It was eerie, like the call of a hyena, feral ambition flaring up behind a decorous facade. And then Tallulah would glide through the dining-room archway with her guests, wearing a sinuous black velvet evening gown that defied the sweet-pea shades worn by Alexandra and Birdie.

  A frothy lace border embroidered with paillettes snaked across her bare chest and arms. “She came out and all eyes turned to her,” Glenn Anders recalled. “Who was going to look at anybody but Tallulah?”

  Tallulah had asked Anders to come down to Baltimore and critique her performance. “I didn’t have time to do more than tell her the good things,”

  Anders said. But he advised her by letter that rather than batting coquet-tishly the black fan she held, she should do so languorously: “A queen has all the time in the world.” Tallulah told Shumlin about it, and when the director next ran into Anders, he thanked him, saying if he had given her one more correction at that point, “she’d have jumped on me.”

  For all was not well in Baltimore, where Howard Bay, who had designed the sets, recalled to Carl Rollyson an intermittent cross fire between“Herman and Tallulah, Lillian and Herman, Tallulah and Lillian, and a little all around.” They wondered if the play was too bleak for a world poised on the brink of real convulsion. Was it going to be the hit that Hellman and Tallulah needed so badly? There was a consensus that the third act was too long. Donald Kirkley in the Sun had complained that “the pace fal-tered, some threads of the plot came unraveled, and there were traces of uncertainty and confusion.” Gilbert Kanour in the Evening Sun concluded that Hellman “let her fondness for phrases impede the rush of her drama to its crisis, and while talk, even for talk’s sake, often has its advantages on the stage, there is far too much of it here.”

  Hellman undoubtedly did cut, for the complaints were not echoed in New York. Hellman had been doing some tinkering all along; Florence Williams had retained her original “sides,” sheets of her own lines printed with a preceding cue line. Many new lines were penciled in over the printed dialogue. Williams explained that the major change—the substitution of a new ending—occurred before reaching New York. In Baltimore, the play had concluded with a tender exchange between Alexandra and Addie, one of the Giddenses’ black servants, following a rather innocuous exit by Regina.

  Richard Moody was the single Hellman biographer to mention the revised ending. He attributed it to advice given Hellman by Sara and Gerald Murphy.

  But Williams was sure that Tallulah was the catalyst. Lobbying for what she believed was required, Tallulah made the men’s room of a Baltimore–Pittsburgh train into an impromptu forum, calling a cast meeting en route to the troupe’s engagement at Pittsburgh’s Nixon Theater. Tallulah flounced in and hopped onto Carl Benton Reid’s lap, sat there looking at him, and let out a gamy, “Verah strange that I don’t feel your personali-teh.” Benton Reid was not amused and she got down to business. “The play just isn’t right,”

  Tallulah argued. “It has to end differently. Regina should be on stage at the end. It’s all wrong and we’ve got to convince Herman that it is.”

  “I think she rather thought that she had convinced everyone,”Williams recalled. “I don’t think they capitulated, really. She wanted confirmation from them and she hoped she would get it. She went to Herman and Lillian and told them what she wanted and I think she threatened to leave the show.” That would have been professionally suicidal on Tallulah’s part. She had, however, accepted the part before the third act was finished and so technically could have claimed veto power.

  Williams recited the original scene, approximating the missing lines of Addie’s dialogue that preceeded the cues included on the “sides.” She loved it and was unhappy about the change, as, she claimed, was Hellman. “I think Lillian was terribly upset,” she said, “because she wanted the curtain to come down ready for the next play.” Hellman envisioned Little Foxes as the opening of a trilogy tracing the rise and fall of the Hubbards. In 1946came Another Part of the Forest, which showed the Hubbard siblings as young adults, twenty years before Little Foxes. Williams believed that the final play would chronicle Alexandra escaping her mother’s domination.

  However Hellman envisioned her future writing projects, they were of course of no interest to Tallulah. Hellman may have agreed with Tallulah’s complaint, or it may have been echoed by the judgments of the Murphys or other friends. The revision strengthened Tallulah’s dominance in the play. It also sharpened the focus of the work and gave it a more satisfying closure, “a wonderful plunk of the old log curtain,” Williams said, laughing. (In melodrama’s heyday, provincial theater curtains were built with a log on the bottom edge, and so the curtain fell with a thud.) The new ending also made both Regina and Alexandra’s characters richer. Carl Rollyson writes that Regina’s realization “that her plans have cost her daughter’s affection,” which the revision established, is one of the things that “clearly mark her as a complex and vulnerable personality.”

  Hellman and Tallulah were also shrewd enough to realize that audiences would be g
lad to see Regina receive some measure of retribution. Alexandra’s revolt introduced a note of hope, however tenuous, that the little foxes of the world could be combated.

  For Williams the insecurity that shadowed Tallulah’s Regina throughout the play had become the fear that was the price of her victory. “She had to face the world alone, and she wasn’t so sure after all if she could do it.

  She would have liked to have had Zan come along with her so she could play Big Mama and look after her dear little daughter and make all her conquests along the way.” Now Alexandra was privy to the insecurity that the audience had sensed all through the three acts.

  Alexandra delivered the final line in the play: “Are you afraid, Mama?”

  “I read that line as if, You are afraid of something? You? It was the first time that Zan ever saw that, and she was delighted.” Regina does not reply, but goes silently up the stairs. The look on Tallulah’s face was chilling, her dawning realization of the isolation she might have to face.

  On February 15, 1939, in New York the cast of The Little Foxes faced an opening-night audience that would not let them leave the stage before taking twenty curtain calls. Early the next morning, when Tallulah read the reviews at the party given by Clare and Henry Luce, she knew that her moment had arrived.

  Part III

  1939–1950

  <<

  Triumph

  “We are the talk of the town.”

  When they began calling for the author on opening night—not just our friends but the real public in the balcony—I felt like getting right down on that stage and praying,” Tallulah told Mabel Greene of the New York Sun. Will had come to the Baltimore opening and sent her a long wire on the New York opening night. “He seems to be taking more interest than he usually does in my reviews,” Tallulah confided to Greene. “Usually I have to send the notices to him, but this time he’s getting them for himself. He says he thinks I look like my mother with my hair up in the play.