Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  In June 1939, she went to Washington to lobby for continuation of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project. The Senate Appropriations Committee was opening hearings on a $1,735 billion relief bill passed by the House. An amendment to restore funding denied in the House bill had been attached to the Senate relief bill by Claude Pepper, a liberal Democrat from Florida.

  Escorted by Emery, she took an early morning flight to Washington together with Shumlin and several other theatrical notables. Probably it was Shumlin who enlisted her; he was a lifelong supporter of left-wing causes.

  (Shumlin wrote in an official biography that, when working as a teenager in the office of a Newark manufacturing plant, he had been “dismissed as a ‘Socialist’ ” for asking aloud why safety devices weren’t installed on machines.) In her new role as activist, Tallulah conducted herself with the flair that audiences on two continents had come to expect.

  She went first to Senator Pepper’s office; Will and Uncle John were there to greet her. Will was noncommittal on the issue, but to the press, “His daughter seemed sure of his support.” In any case his opinion as speaker of the House was much less important than John’s, since the latter sat on the Senate committee. John was not disposed to support her, complaining that,

  “Those city fellows in Congress never vote to do anything for farmers. Sol Bloom [a Democrat representing New York in the House] and the whole crowd always vote against the farm bills.” Tallulah insisted that Bloom“would do exactly as Daddy tells him to do,” and told the reporters that John on her behalf would “filibuster for two years reading the life of Robert E.Lee.” She asked him to confirm her assurance that he would filibuster, but he remained silent and she countered with a humorous threat to disown him. However, she quickly decided that the hilarity had gone far enough and told the reporters present that “this is no time to be flippant or joking.”

  Instead, her testimony to the committee contained a dash of coquetry, as she tossed off her blue slouch hat and sat not on a chair, but on the felt-covered committee table to read her prepared statement. She defended the project on philosophical as well as economic grounds, insisting that the theater was invaluable to the cultural life of the nation and that the Federal Theatre Project had played an unparalleled function in disseminating that culture, exposing the youth of America to great classics of drama. She claimed that its nationwide cultivation of new audiences for live theater had enhanced the viability of cross-country touring by Broadway shows.

  She noted the relatively small amount of money allotted to the project and pointed out that many of its initiatives had proved self-sustaining.

  To sum up, we ask that the theater project be continued because those now employed on it—95 per cent from the relief rolls—will be utterly destitute without it, or condemned to a form of work for which they are not fitted and in which the skills which they have spent their lives in attaining will deteriorate; because those skills are social assets which will be lost to the community; because the project’s activities have contributed enormously to the cultural life of the nation, bringing education, cheer and a wholesome love of the stage as a civilized nation to millions of the least well-to-do of the nation; because the people of the stage by their generosity to others in distress deserve better than to be singled out for this discrimination.

  “I beg you from the bottom of my heart,” Tallulah concluded, “not to deprive these people of the chance to hold up their heads with the dignity and self-respect which is the badge of every American.” With that she burst into tears that were probably sincere as well as histrionic. Tallulah had always replaced actors whose contribution she didn’t think was adequate. But she was at the same time sentimental about the plight of unemployed actors and freely dispensed relief from her own pocketbook.

  Tallulah stayed to hear several of the other witnesses, representatives of ten national arts and artists’ organizations. She was still red-eyed when she left to fly back to New York for that evening’s Little Foxes. Her Washington appearance was front-page news in the next day’s New York dailies.

  The New York Times reported that she “mingled serious appeals for restoration of theatre projects with comic interludes involving the Bankhead family.” Uncle John eventually voted in favor of the amendment, but it nevertheless failed to pass in the Senate, and the Federal Theatre Project was dissolved ten days later.

  It was Tallulah’s burgeoning political consciousness that precipitated the most contentious of her disputes during the embattled run of The Little Foxes. On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland after weeks of fruitless negotiations about a territory swap that the Soviets insisted they needed in order to protect themselves against a possible Nazi invasion.

  The Soviet aggression was condemned by most of the global community. In the U.S., a Finnish relief fund was established with former president Herbert Hoover as national chairman and Mayor La Guardia as New York chairman.

  Most Broadway shows performed benefits to aid Finnish refugees. Tallulah announced that The Little Foxes would perform such a benefit. Hellman and Shumlin announced unequivocally that it would not.

  Hellman enraged Tallulah by claiming that the Finland benefit was being vetoed because Tallulah had refused Hellman’s earlier request that the company perform a benefit for Republican Spain. Hellman repeats the claim in her 1969 memoir, Pentimento. But while Florence Williams remembered Hellman asking the cast to wire their elected representatives concerning the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Americans who had gone to Spain to support the fight against Franco, “nobody ever asked me” about a benefit. (Had one been proposed, it would have been necessary to present the decision before the entire company.) In her autobiography, Tallulah says that Hellman’s excuse was “a brazen invention,” and recalls that on the day Barcelona fell to the Nationalists, she took the anguished Hellman into her dressing room and gave her a restorative shot of brandy.

  Spain was a problematic issue for liberals because both sides of the civil war were funded by totalitarian regimes, the Spanish Fascist cause supported by Germany and Italy, the pro-democracy Republicans by the Soviet Union. “I wasn’t too familiar with the politics of the civil war in Spain,” Tallulah writes in Tallulah. “But I was concerned about the plight of the widows and orphans, innocent victims of the bloody business.”

  Hellman insisted that Finland was harboring pro-Nazi elements. But rather than being anti-Finland, Hellman may have simply been speaking as an apologist for the Soviet Union. She was among the American liberals who continued to defend the Soviet regime even after knowledge of Stalin’s persecutions became undeniable. She had visited the Soviet Union during the 1930s and continued to visit it during World War II.

  Hellman’s propensity for near-pathological dissembling equaled Tallulah’s, as was demonstrated by the scandal over the veracity of the “Julia”chapter in her Pentimento forty years later. In that same book, Hellman also claimed to have visited Finland in 1937 and been appalled at the Nazi sympathies she discovered there. However, her biographer William Wright doubts that any such visit took place.

  Tallulah traded salvos in the press with Hellman and Shumlin. She told the New York Times: “I’ve adopted Spanish Loyalist orphans and sent money to China, both causes for which both Mr. Shumlin and Miss Hellman were strenuous proponents. . . . Why should [they] suddenly become so insular?” (Tallulah had not actually adopted the children but defrayed the expenses of their resettlement in the U.S.)

  The Little Foxes remained profitable all the way to the end of its Broadway run, closing February 3, 1940 after 410 performances. Immediately after, it was to begin a tour of northeastern regions that would conclude with an open-ended run in Chicago. Tallulah continued her fervor of political-minded action, forwarding to her father a letter from a Jewish actor she knew whose son had been denied admission to the University of Alabama Medical School. Tallulah believed that he was being discriminated against and hoped that Will could somehow intercede with his alma mater.
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  She was “thrilled beyond words at being with you and Florence for a full week in Washington. Rest up well, because I want to monopolize you!”

  The Little Foxes opened in Washington on February 5, and Tallulah contributed her salary from the play’s weeklong engagement at the National Theater to the Finnish relief fund. But her time with Will was again shadowed by illness and anxiety: while she was in Washington, he fell ill with what he later described as an attack of intestinal influenza. He continued, however, to exult in her success as Regina Giddens. “I was delighted with the very fine newspaper notices which you have received on your Boston appearance, and feel sure that your good success on the road will continue.”

  Anger—whether personal or political—undoubtedly energized Tallulah and distracted her from a more debilitating emotional malaise. Her determination to find enemies in her midst perhaps explains her adoption of a vehement anticommunism. She may have confused, as most Americans have done since, the abuses of the Soviet regime with the theoretical content of Marx and Engels’s own writings. Or she may have felt, as of course many did, that Communist theory offered a real and dangerous threat of totalitarianism. In her autobiography she describes communism as a system of “state feudalism.” “She was a little crazy about that,” Estelle Winwood recalled. Nevertheless, she had the sense and the courage to condemn Joseph McCarthy in her autobiography, dictated in 1951, when he was the height of his influence.

  Before it was shut down, the Federal Theatre Project had been denounced by opponents in the House as a hotbed of Communist sentiment.

  Tallulah apparently came to believe that its survival had been compromised by the insidious presence of a fifth column of Communists. Such an attitude may have been dictated to her by Will, who had grown increasingly liberal throughout his years in Congress, but was also adamantly anti-Communist. In March, he wrote Tallulah, gently advising her against allowing her name to be used by the organizers of a “so called National Sharecroppers Week,” convened in Manhattan to benefit the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, of which Tallulah was listed as a sponsor. “I dislike to make this suggestion to you, but it is my opinion that this organization is composed largely of Reds and Communists, and while it purports to be organized in the interest of white and colored tenant farmers, its leaders are subject to very grave suspicions.” He was enclosing corroborative literature for her perusal. “I hope this is a matter upon which you will take my judgment and act accordingly.” She did just as he asked, writing the National Sharecroppers’ Week organizers to ask that her name be deleted from their publicity materials:

  I feel very deeply for the plight of the sharecroppers and it was my sincere desire to help them in any way I could, just as I tried to aid the actors in the WPA theatre project. Because of these same un-American tendencies at the head of that WPA endeavor and the vicious propaganda, the innocent actors were deprived of their livelihood. I feel that the sharecroppers will suffer likewise if this set-up is not weeded out.

  I know that there are many distinguished people sponsoring your organization and my accusation naturally does not refer to all of them.

  I am sure, if they knew the truth, many of them would also withdraw.

  It is not clear whether the “vicious propaganda” Tallulah mentions refers to the smears against the Federal Theatre Project or instead to any alleged indoctrination attempts by its members. In any case, she enclosed a copy of the letter to Will, along with a note to him stating, “Here is a copy of the letter I sent. I hope it meets with your approval. All my love, Tallulah. Will write long letter soon, in such a hurry—”

  In Boston, still furious with Hellman and Shumlin over the Finland incident, Tallulah behaved unprofessionally, refusing to participate when the director called the entire company for a rehearsal. After he had worked with the rest of the cast, she agreed to come onstage, Rawls recounted, and go through her part in front of him. Although the entire cast seems to have sided against Hellman and Shumlin on the issue of the Finnish benefit, no one except Tallulah had responded so vitriolically. Patricia Collinge felt in-debted to Shumlin for bringing her back into acting, and was therefore his staunchest ally in the cast. “When he first talked to me about playing Birdie,” Collinge later recalled to Gary Blake, “I hadn’t acted for some time and I said to him that I thought I was a little afraid. And he said, ‘Will you let that be my problem?’ So I had no more fear.”

  She and Tallulah were on good terms. “Tallulah respected Pat so much,” Florence Williams said, “and Pat was very gentle with her, very tactful and very good,” without being at all deferential. “Pat had a wonderful, naughty sense of humor,” Williams recalled. “She said she was like a rattlesnake, she couldn’t keep from striking.”

  “Tallulah is the sort of person,” Collinge observed to Williams, “who would chop your head off one minute and wonder why on earth it wouldn’t stick back on the next.”

  On March 19, 1940, Collinge wrote Williams from Boston. “We had a bit of a scene, Tallulah being pretty rude to him. It all just makes me sick . . . to my heart and stomach, dear. All is peaceful at the theater for the moment. Tallulah is saving Finland and that keeps her busy. She and Herman not speaking. You know she attacked him terribly over the Finland benefit. We were all terribly upset. I finally explained that we were sorry he didn’t agree with us about Finland but we still felt he had a right to his own opinion and that we all loved and respected him and were prepared to say so. She took it very well and has stopped raging against him, at least around the theater. Peace—it’s wonderful!”

  Tallulah’s impassioned, sincere, but frequently graceless crusades continued when she decided that spring to run for a five-year position on the governing council of Actors’ Equity. Her husband was also running for a five-year term on the regular Equity ticket. Tallulah was forced to run as an independent, an unusual if not unprecedented event in Equity elections.

  Equity recorded in its monthly newsletter that Tallulah’s nomination was submitted at “almost the last possible moment” by sixty “Senior Resident Members in good standing.” She wanted specifically to challenge the can-didacy of actor Sam Jaffe (not to be confused with Paramount’s production manager of the same name), but Equity rules did not permit a direct opposition. Instead, it was up to any Equity member who wanted to elect Tallulah to specify which candidate on the regular ticket she would replace. Her determination to challenge Jaffe, who became in the 1950s a victim of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) blacklist, clearly meant that she was taking aim at the far left flank of Equity’s membership. Tallulah must have believed that Equity, no less than Finland, was under siege by the totalitarian far left.

  Equity was clearly thrown on the defensive. An editorial in its newsletter said that the nominating committee, six of whose nine members were elected in a special meeting, had “devoted considerable time and effort” to choosing a ticket that was “representative of all shades of thought and opinion in the membership.” Tallulah had earlier been “seriously considered” by the nominating committee and passed over “with reluctance” because it had already been announced that she would be on the road for most of the upcoming 1940–41 theatrical season. In addition, seating both Tallulah and her husband at the same time would have violated Equity custom.

  Equity’s stated opinion was that Tallulah “would be a valuable member of the Council in more than one sense, even though her election would be at the expense of one of the nominees on the Regular Ticket.” The editorial, however, urged the “preservation of harmony and unity,” which Tallulah’s election would surely have breached.

  A year earlier, actor Philip Loeb had accompanied Tallulah to Washington to defend the Federal Theatre Project. He was at one point a member of the American Communist Party and became during the fifties one of the most tragic victims of the blacklist. At the Equity council’s annual meeting on May 24, 1940, in New York, Loeb stood up to say that he was“greatly perturbed” not only by Tallulah’s
nomination, but by “the conduct of the campaign on behalf of Miss Bankhead which had preceded this meeting.” He defended Jaffe as “one of the finest, noblest creatures in the theatrical profession. . . .”

  With Stephan Cole

  When the election was convened later in the meeting, the entire Equity ticket was voted in. Tallulah lost narrowly, receiving 246 votes, which si-phoned off more from Jaffe than from any other candidate. He received 256votes, while, for example, Walter Abel received 405 votes and Emery 376.

  Tallulah’s move was in some ways characteristically impetuous and confrontational, but it was so divisive that it would be interesting to learn how she made the decision to run, and at whose urging. Obviously there was sufficient opposition to Jaffe among Equity’s membership to put her name on the ballot. But how easily it was to become the dupe of red-baiters well to the right of Tallulah was demonstrated almost immediately after her defeat. Republican Congressman William Lambertson of Kansas used the Equity election to buttress his accusations that Equity had now been infiltrated by Communists, as, he claimed, the Federal Theatre Project had been, thus justifying its demise. He cited as proof the victory of Jaffe, “an avowed Communist,” over Tallulah, “an outstanding American actress.” He circulated one of the little lists that were so effective in stirring anti-Communist hysteria, naming Jaffe, Loeb, and several others, including Tallulah’s friend and adviser, agent Edith Van Cleve, despite Van Cleve’s being a lifelong Republican. Van Cleve later told Lee Israel that Tallulah had furiously composed a denial on her friend’s behalf and phoned it to the press.

  Tallulah’s continued success in The Little Foxes unfolded against an increasingly grim world stage. In Chicago she learned about the British catastrophe at Dunkirk, and soon after announced that she was going on the wagon until the British turned the tide of the combat. She was aware of the absurdity of her pledge, telling Rawls “it sounded as if she were bribing God, and nobody would believe her anyway, but she meant it.” Cole insisted that Tallulah had instead done it “for herself” because her drinking was again reaching a danger point. In Toronto a month earlier, after a night of drinking, she had gone to board the train that was taking Little Foxes to Detroit. “Pat,” she told Collinge, “if your mother came in now, I would be perfectly able to meet her graciously.” She then proceeded to pass out.