Always before it was my sister who looked like mother and I who was supposed to take after the Bankheads.”
The Little Foxes was an immediate sellout and was indeed Tallulah’s first smash box-office hit in America. She won Variety’s citation as best actress of 1938–39 and received nearly unanimous critical acclaim. Grenville Vernon in the Commonweal extolled “the extraordinary variety” of her characterization; “in its combination of charm, common-sense, courage, avarice and utter unscrupulousness her Regina is a figure who might have stepped out of the pages of Balzac.” George Ross in the New York World Telegram called it “one of the best roles of Miss Bankhead’s career”; while Pollock in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described her as acting with “a simplicity which is not customary with her. . . . She has done nothing better.”
Almost unanimously as well, the critics found The Little Foxes scorching and riveting. But many had reservations about its melodramatic emphaticness. Melodrama was at that point a discredited genre. Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times wrote:
As compared with “The Children’s Hour,” which was [Hellman’s] first notable play, “The Little Foxes” will have to take second rank. For it is a deliberate exercise in malice—melodramatic rather than tragic, none too fastidious in its manipulation of the stage and presided over by a Pinero frown of fustian morality.
John Anderson in the New York Journal American termed it “a drama so taut and absorbing that I couldn’t take my eyes off the stage, not even to look at the First Nighters.” But he responded more enthusiastically to Hellman’s schematic illustration of pre– and post–Civil War Southern avatars than he did to the way she moved these symbols around. He wrote that Hellman “manipulates the values of the play so adroitly that the symbols are never obtrusive and never overshadow the powerful, if lurid, and occasionally over-plotted, events of the narrative. . . .”
Yet today The Little Foxes is generally considered one of the classics of twentieth-century American drama. Its flirtation with melodrama registers as a masterly acknowledgment of a hallowed tradition in the theater.
“Darling, how I wish you were here to see Little Foxes,” Tallulah wrote George Cukor in Hollywood. “It has all been worth it. It’s not only a good part in a good play but really the best play, and we are the talk of the town.”
Despite the play’s success, Tallulah’s triumph seems to have done nothing to mitigate her growing malaise. If anything, she now became more aggressive, erratic, and destructive. Cole felt her vindication had come too late, that she was “like a hen that’s been pecked too many times and turns on the whole coop.” Tallulah’s ego swung very high and very low. Hungry for approval as she was all the time, success could make her giddy, and after her many frustrations and disappointments, she certainly needed to mine The Little Foxes for all she could. But success also awakened additional anxiety. Kenneth Carten, who visited from London during the run, said she was afraid she’d never act as well again.
There was trouble in Tallulah’s household as well. Emery and Tallulah were still trying to maintain a united front. He frequently dropped her off or picked her up at the theater. But the marriage had, at best, settled into a routine of convenience. “John didn’t know what he was doing being Tallulah’s husband,” recalled Gladys Henson. “He was like an audience. She was a stranger to him, in a way. He was in awe of her.”
“Why’d you marry John?” Henson once asked her. “He’s the only one who ever asked me,” she replied. This just may be true. Although Tallulah in her autobiography claims that Alington had sprung the question soon after meeting her, she herself seems skeptical about his sincerity. Certainly she had married Emery at a moment when her marital prospects looked very bleak indeed.
The weaknesses in the marriage were compounded by the fact that while Tallulah was enjoying her greatest triumph to date, Emery was having trouble finding a job. Early in 1939, Orson Welles had cast him in his Shakespearean amalgamation, Five Kings. But after the Philadelphia tryout, the Theatre Guild withdrew its financing. In the Emerys’ suite at the Élysée, they discussed with Welles and a number of others how the production could be rescued. Tallulah got on the phone and began calling likely contributors, including playwright Marc Connelly, her neighbor at the Élysée and a friend from her Algonquin days. Connelly duly got out of bed and came over, but Welles didn’t find the financing he needed. Five Kings never made it to New York.
Emery was next tapped to play Heathcliff in a dramatization of Wuthering Heights that was headed for Broadway. Edith Barrett, a former lover of his, was playing Cathy. Once Barrett knew that Emery was available, “she never stopped,” recalled Robert Henderson, who was directing. She had the actor playing Heathcliff dismissed and replaced him with Emery.
Emery was generally considered more effective in costume parts than in contemporary ones, and Cole believed that Tallulah was coaching him throughout The Circle and I Am Different, “but on the QT.” She was not on Quiet Time, however, when, at Emery’s request, she arrived in Philadelphia to watch a dress rehearsal, accompanied by several friends and under the influence of alcohol. Without mincing words she told Emery what was wrong with his performance. Around ten-thirty the next morning, Henderson arrived to check on some details for the opening that night. He discovered the apparently demoralized Emery sleeping on one of the stage sofas.
Wuthering Heights came into New York early in May and closed after fourteen performances. Soon after, Tallulah’s friend David Herbert docked in New York with a regiment of His Majesty’s Merchant Navy. He bought a ticket for The Little Foxes and went around to see Tallulah after the performance. “Oh, darling, this is wonderful; we’ll have a night out. We’ll pick up my husband.” The three went dancing at the Casino, a posh nightclub of that time in Central Park. “Now then, Tallulah,” Emery urged, “we are going home,” perhaps attempting to exert the authority that Charles Bowden had advised him to assert during Antony and Cleopatra. If so, it was by now too late in the marriage for Emery to be able to shift footing. “We are certainly not going home,” she told him. “David’s been fighting the war for us and it’s his night out. We are going up to Harlem.” They dropped Emery off at the Élysée and he slammed out of the car. Tallulah rolled down the window and shouted, “Darling, if I’m not home by five, start without me.” “It’s hopeless,” Tallulah told Herbert about her marriage. “I don’t know why I ever did it.”
The Shuberts had a play they wanted Tallulah to consider, and John Kenley had been dispatched to deliver it to her. Edie greeted him at the door of their Élysée suite, to which they had moved from the furnished apartment they’d been driven to renting during their financial crunch of late 1937. “Come right in, come right in,” Tallulah called from the bedroom, where Kenley found her and Emery in bed in medias res. She chattered on, praising his sexual prowess, while Emery ignored Kenley and continued apace. This was not the only time such a thing happened: in Pentimento, Hellman recalls that when Shumlin first went to talk to Tallulah about The Little Foxes, she conducted the parley while sitting next to Emery in bed. After hours of discussion, she pulled off the covers to display Emery’s nudity and asked Shumlin what he thought. Perhaps she had ceased to see her husband as anything more than a display piece, a necessary escort and accessory.
For well over a decade, Edie Smith had not simply been Tallulah’s secretary but her closest confidante, her anchor-to-windward, her bedrock.
Now a parting of the ways seemed imminent. (Perhaps Tallulah’s marriage had strained relations: “You lost respect for me when I married John because you knew I didn’t love him,” Tallulah told Smith repeatedly when she returned to work for her for a time during the 1950s.) In a letter, Tallulah tried to heal the tensions existing between them:
I realize that you have your life to live and the best part of it should be yet to come, with all my heart I hope so. Where you live or whom you live it with is something for you to decide for yourself and I hope your decision will be the wise and
right one for all concerned—I hope you will find a good job that you will enjoy and feel free in and know that is worthy of you . . . but great friendship like ours is not to be ignored—so what I want you to know is that no matter how high you soar if you would like to come back to the Cuckoo’s Nest I would be very happy.
On my eyes I want your happiness and welfare as much as you do mine and I would not want you with me if it incurred any sacrifice on your part either physically, spiritually or mentally.
Well that’s that.
Love,
Die Donner.
Die Donner was Smith’s nickname for Tallulah, German for “thunder.”
Smith retreated to a significantly less thunderous job in the children’s book department of Marshall Field in Chicago.
Waiting in the wings as Edie’s replacement was a wealthy Canadian woman named Dola Cavendish. She took over some of Edie’s functions, but Cavendish was neither a paid employee nor as intimate a friend of Tallulah’s. Cavendish had known Tallulah in London; she was slavishly devoted, and believed to be in love with her, which Edie had never been. But Cavendish’s encroachment may have been another factor in Edie’s decision to leave Tallulah. Cavendish is recalled as charming, low-key, and lovable. She was also an alcoholic who was slightly tipsy many of her waking hours.
When Tallulah wasn’t drunk she found drunkenness repulsive. Cole recalled late-night calls from her when they were on tour, asking if he would “get this goddamned woman out of my room.” Cavendish would be sitting “with a cigarette sewn to her lip,” Cole recalled, “trying to talk with a drink in her hand, drunk as a skunk.”
But Tallulah’s own drinking was heavy and steady all through the eleven-month Broadway run of The Little Foxes. Florence Williams recalled her coming in some Monday nights looking as if she’d had a sodden weekend. Tallulah was not under the influence during working hours, but she was perhaps cutting things a little close. Alabama native William Skipper, a young dancer in the Denishawn company, was working as a messenger for theater photographer Marcus Blechman. One day he went around to the Élysée to deliver some proofs to Tallulah, who was eating before going to the theater. She gave him a drink and then another and another. “I don’t know how many” Tallulah and Cavendish, who was in attendance, had already imbibed, he later recounted. She asked him all about himself and his experiences: Tallulah was a great admirer of Shawn and St. Denis. Twice a week Skipper posed nude at the Art Students League. “Oh!” Tallulah screamed. “I’m going to start art classes there next week.”
In December 1939, Tallulah revisited two of her most traumatic rejections when she attended the Manhattan premiere of Gone with the Wind and the party given by Jock Whitney that followed. Whitney hosted the party at the Fifth Avenue mansion in which he’d been raised.
Glenn Anders escorted Tallulah. In the lobby banked with poinsettias, a footman took Tallulah’s fur and she and Anders negotiated a marble stairway jammed with celebrities. They decided to battle the crowd no farther and sat at the nearest table overlooking the staircase they had just mounted. Every now and then Tallulah would wave a miniature Confederate flag she’d brought, but she was outflanked because the film’s stars were all there in person. A footman walked up the stairs hauling a huge tin vat filled with bottles of champagne on ice. It looked very much like a bathtub, and Tallulah poked fun at its inelegance. “My God,” she snorted, “is that the way the Whitneys live?”
It wasn’t too long before they decided to leave. After jostling their way to the street, they faced a crowd that seemed to stretch for blocks. Held back by a squadron of police, eager faces leaned up close enough to coo greetings at Tallulah. Usually cordial with her fans, that night she was oblivious. The head of a long line of idling taxis drove up. Tallulah got in and Anders stepped in behind her in time to hear Tallulah’s final deflationary gesture of the evening, directing the driver to proceed forthwith to“Childs, please!”
Tallulah’s continued hunger for affirmation and approval, unsatisfied even by The Little Foxes, was demonstrated by her evolving relationship with Florence Williams. Williams had found herself the object of “much attentiveness” from Tallulah during the early rehearsals. They were talking during a break when Williams mentioned her husband. Tallulah looked at her and gasped, “My God! Are you married?”
“Yes,” she said, “and very happily so.”
“Oh,” Tallulah replied with distaste.
Reflecting on the incident much later, Williams thought that Tallulah had been attracted to her. Williams did have the slightly angular handsomeness that Tallulah’s female lovers seemed to share. In Baltimore, shortly before The Little Foxes opened, Tallulah had been presented with the key to the city. She, in turn, gave the key to Williams, but the younger actress was bewildered more than flattered. Williams thought that Tallulah was “a little crazy and not my kind of person in the least.”
At her opening-night party in Baltimore, Tallulah introduced Williams to her father. “This is my baby, Daddy,” Tallulah had said with a suitable flourish, but Williams believed that it rankled Tallulah to be playing a woman with a grown child. Tallulah had last played a mother in Tarnished Lady eight years earlier, and in that film she was rearing a toddler. Perhaps Williams represented something particularly sobering: the advent of middle age. But if Williams had reciprocated Tallulah’s interest, she would probably have stayed on good terms with her. Tallulah needed to be surrounded by colleagues who appreciated and responded to her offstage as well as on, even if her behavior sometimes made that difficult. “She never acted like, ‘Don’t come near me, I’m the star,’ ” Cole said. “Nothing pleased her more than another actor coming to her with a problem. That was one of the great things in the world.”
Williams’s indifference seemed to unnerve and enrage Tallulah. Onstage in New York she began to harass Williams with pigtail pulling, behind swatting, and pinching “upstage so nobody could see except the stagehands and the wardrobe woman.” A tenet of Shumlin’s direction was that the estrangement between Regina and Alexandra be signified by Tallulah never touching Williams. “And she violated it constantly!” Williams claimed. Shumlin knew that Tallulah was defying his staging decision, but watching from the audience, he couldn’t see exactly what was going on.
He regularly conducted brushup rehearsals of the play and took the opportunity to restage the offending passages, “but she didn’t last more than one or two performances,” Williams alleged. “She’d go back to doing what she felt like.”
Earlier in her career, Williams had been the victim of an older actress’s antagonism and was able not only to sail past it but to use it to fuel her own determination. But she was nonplussed by Tallulah’s blend of venom and quasi-sexual provocation. “It was hell on wheels to concentrate and play that part,” she said. “Now I’d handle it completely differently. I would say, “Tallulah, what the Samuel Thunder goes on?!’ But I didn’t know what to do then. I think back and I must have infuriated her—that I didn’t respond. That was probably the worst insult that I could have given that poor woman.”
Williams wanted to leave when her six-month contact expired in August. Her agent told her that Shumlin wanted her to stay. Williams’s understudy had been a very young actress, Joan Tetzel, who later made a career for herself in Hollywood. But when Tetzel left the show, Shumlin hired Eugenia Rawls as Williams’s understudy. Rawls had played a small part in The Children’s Hour five years earlier. She had admired Tallulah in Rain and Reflected Glory, and they shared significant experiences: Rawls had also been raised in Alabama by her grandmother.
When Hellman and Shumlin began to think about sending The Little Foxes on a tour to begin early in 1940, Tallulah apparently insisted that Williams be replaced by Rawls. “The interests of Lillian and the interests of the many involved in the production, and of my own were at stake,”
Shumlin wrote Williams thirty-five years later. “You were the victim.”
The night after Williams was given her two
weeks’ notice, she walked past Tallulah’s dressing room on her way to the stage. Tallulah dragged her into her dressing room, locked her in a mad embrace, and made the bizarre profession, “Oh, my darling, you’re the bravest woman I’ve ever known since Robert E. Lee!” Williams pushed her away in disgust.
Rawls stepped into The Little Foxes at the end of October 1939. She was to become a very significant person in Tallulah’s life. Perhaps her adoration was able to take the sting out of Tallulah’s considerable resentment that she could not have children. Whether she would have decided to or not, Tallulah of course had wanted to be the one to choose. If Tallulah had to face middle age, she could do so with a loving daughter manqué. On December 2, she wrote Eugenia’s grandmother:
I can’t wait for you to see her in this part. She has a scene where she is so touching that it almost breaks your heart; in fact, it is hard for me to keep in character when I watch her. (As you know, I am playing a very unsympathetic and cruel mother.) . . . My mother died when I was born and I was raised by my grandmother, so Eugenia and I have a great bond in common.
In April 1941, eighteen months after Rawls joined the cast, Tallulah was matron of honor when Rawls married Donald Seawell, a young lawyer who became Tallulah’s attorney. The Seawells had two children, a girl, Brook, and a boy, Brockman, who was given Tallulah’s middle name, which was also the maiden name of her father’s mother. Tallulah eventually bequeathed each of the two children one quarter of her estate.
Tilting her Lance
“This is no time to be flippant or joking.”
It was during The Little Foxes that Tallulah became for the first time active politically. Tallulah was well informed about world affairs, reading every one of the nine daily newspapers published in Manhattan during the 1930s. But now the increasingly dire European situation took on extra relevance because of her still-strong attachment to Britain. Domestically, her father had become one of FDR’s most trusted lieutenants, and she could see how his efforts had helped remake America with the New Deal.
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