Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Determined to maintain her pledge publicly, Tallulah nevertheless hit upon substitute stimulants. She developed a regular habit of dosing her liquid refreshment with spirits of ammonia—“grain alcohol,” as it’s called in the South, where it has traditionally been a way for women to surreptitiously spike their drinks. Cole said that she never stopped drinking entirely; sometimes she hid liquor by disguising it in spirits-of-ammonia bottles. Yet she certainly cut down considerably during the war years.

  On June 10, Will wrote Tallulah at the Ambassador East in Chicago.

  He evidently felt neglected. “It has been a very long time since I have heard anything from you, in fact since you were here in February when I was so sick has been about the last direct word I have heard from you. I know that you are extremely busy, and so long as I felt that things were going well with you it was all right.” (She had, however, responded to his letter in March concerning National Sharecroppers’ Week.)

  I have had a terrible time with the attack of intestinal influenza that I had when you here, and have had a terrible time in throwing it off and getting rid of its effects upon me. I had to go to Florida for a month to try to recuperate, but the truth is, I have not as yet gotten back to my normal health and weight, and have to be extremely careful about any exerting matters. I do not want you, however, to be worried about my condition, as I am thankful that I am so much better and able to attend to my duties here at the Capitol.

  Will gingerly asked if he could delete $325 from a $900 payment that he was holding for Tallulah after handling the sale of a portion of the Sledge estate in Mississippi that had been willed to Eugenia and Tallulah by Adelaide’s father. He explained that in addition to heavy state and federal income tax, his medical bills had been onerous. He had purchased for $1,500 a sixty-acre tract adjacent to a farm near Jasper that he had acquired earlier with an eye to his retirement. He needed $325 for the second payment on the land. He further offered to sell her half of the property for exactly what he’d paid. “I assure you that it will be a good investment for you, as the value of this land will never be less than what I agreed to pay for it.” He simply did not have the $325, he confessed. “Please be perfectly frank about this matter. And if you had rather reserve the $900.00 which I hold for you as Trustee for some other purpose, it will be all right with me.” He was hoping that Congress would soon adjourn, for he remained“pretty tired and worn out.”

  Losses

  “I just hate her! She reminds me of myself.”

  Will had asked if there was a way for Tallulah to extend the Chicago run of The Little Foxes until mid-July, when he and Florence would arrive for the 1940 Democratic Convention, at which he was to deliver the keynote speech leading to FDR’s renomination. But the play closed in Chicago on May 31 after a healthy run of five weeks. Tallulah chose not to take the summer off before beginning the national tour of Little Foxes in September, but instead to embark on an eight-week tour of The Second Mrs.Tanqueray, her second appearance in a play by Arthur Wing Pinero.

  Tallulah was undoubtedly attracted by the opportunities for emotional and erotic display the play had offered since its 1893 premiere. A young woman who’s already been the mistress of several men, Paula Tanqueray becomes the second wife of a gentle and tolerant man. But she is tortured by her stepdaughter’s indifference, as well as by her husband’s distaste at her social gaffes and her uncouth retaliations against those who shun her.

  The coup de grâce comes when her stepdaughter becomes engaged to a man she had once been involved with. She persuades her husband to break up the engagement, her stepdaughter turns on her viciously, and the second Mrs. Tanqueray shoots herself.

  Pinero’s reputation as a masterful theatrical technician aside, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is in many ways clunky and laborious, yet the play drives Paula convincingly to suicide by an impressively inexorable tide of persecution. Its spasms of late-Victorian angst over a fallen women’s attempt at redemption would certainly not have had the relevance to audiences of 1940 that they had in 1893. “You can make it hold up,” claimed Cole, who was stage manager, “but you’ve got to be an awfully strong actress. Very arresting. God knows she was.” Tallulah was not averse to pulling out all the stops: “The more you got the audience involved, the better off the play was. Tallulah didn’t really camp; she just made it bigger than it was.”

  Tallulah brought Rawls along with her, to play her unsympathetic stepdaughter. The diary that Rawls kept on the tour is included in her book, Tallulah, a Memory. She records that in Marblehead, Massachusetts, Sinclair Lewis came to visit Tallulah in the old house where she was staying. Cole was impressed at how many academic and literary figures visited her backstage. Perhaps it was the desire to make up for her dismal record in formal education that compelled her to be as driven and competitive in her reading as she was in every aspect of her life. Cole claimed that Tallulah had read every volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past despite finding it all a bit needlessly excessive. “She felt that it was there; it had to be done.”

  While they were playing in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Tallulah spent several mornings watching Serge Koussevitzky rehearse at Tanglewood.

  She also made the acquaintance of the young Leonard Bernstein, then the great conductor’s assistant, and he visited her at the house where she was staying. In later years he liked to suggest that they had been romantically involved.

  In Dennis on Cape Cod, an unfledged Tennessee Williams came to see her about a play he’d sent for her consideration. It was the genesis of what became Battle of Angels, which subsequently closed before reaching Broadway with Miriam Hopkins starring. Tallulah complimented him on his writing but said that she didn’t want to do the play because religion and sex were a fatal mixture onstage. (An odd opinion given how well they’d ignited in Rain.) Williams was bedraggled after biking down from Provincetown. By the time he was ready to go back, it had started to rain.

  Tallulah asked Cole to drive Williams and his bicycle back home.

  Tallulah had been faithful to Emery while they were living together in New York, but she had now been on the road since the beginning of the year and both she and he were quickly moving apart. She was having an affair with Colin Keith-Johnston, a distinguished British actor who played her husband in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. Keith-Johnston was married and Tallulah had no intention of breaking up either his or her own marriage; indeed, her avoidance of intense emotional bonds was well served by her many affairs with married men. But Emery was more seriously involved with the Russian dancer and actress Tamara Geva, who had enjoyed many successes on Broadway since emigrating to the United States in 1927. Tallulah herself had known Geva casually for a number of years.

  Their mutual friend Clifton Webb had introduced them backstage at the Broadway revue Three’s a Crowd in 1931, in which Geva and Webb starred.

  In 1993, Geva claimed that Webb had reported Tallulah saying, “I just hate her! She reminds me of myself.” Whether or not Tallulah really said this, her words were all too true: Geva was talented, beautiful, intelligent, and just as determined as Tallulah to be on top.

  In Rawls’s Tallulah, a Memory, Keith-Johnston recalled his summer with Tallulah. “However extrovert—ebullient and irrepressible she was outside the theater—the moment she was in her work-shop she was the most complete, conscientious and professional of all the players I have worked with.” Actor Romney Brent was credited with Tanqueray’s direction, but that had as much to do with the need to put down a name than anything else. Tallulah was certainly the dominant influence over the production. Keith-Johnston called her “an uncompromising and creative critic of even the smallest part and the most insignificant performer.”

  While Tallulah toured the summer resorts, Will insisted on attending the Democratic Convention in broiling Chicago despite the urgings of his friends, family, and doctors. One reason he insisted on going was the possibility that he would be nominated to run for vice president. According to the Washington
Post, “a great drive” was made to secure the slot for him by his fellow politicians. Despite Will’s long service to Roosevelt, the president insisted instead on Henry A. Wallace.

  Tallulah listened to the nomination returns by radio in Maine, where The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was performing, and called Will to commiserate. Soon after, his sister Marie wrote him, “Everybody I have seen in Montgomery is seething with indignation because the President let you down at the Convention.” But Will refrained from assigning blame. “Except for the President’s intervention,” he wrote back to Marie, “I might have been nominated, but, frankly, I had no assurance of it.” Will nevertheless worked tirelessly for Roosevelt’s reelection, once again ignoring the warnings of friends and family that he conserve his health.

  The Second Mrs. Tanqueray closed in Massachusetts on August 31, and Tallulah returned to New York to rehearse for the national tour of Little Foxes. It was going to be a much more grueling tour than any she’d ever undertaken, including weeklong engagements in major cities, but also scores of one-night stands. On September 10, 1940, she and her sister were in New York sitting by the radio waiting for a live broadcast by their father from Baltimore. Over the air came news that his speech had been canceled due to a sudden illness. His chauffeur called to tell them that they should come immediately to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Will had been found unconscious in his hotel room shortly before he was scheduled to speak. An artery in his abdomen had burst, probably weakened by his influenza earlier in the year. That night the sisters sat outside his room until morning for fear that if he found them by his bed in the middle of the night he would realize how ill he was. By morning he had regained consciousness and wanted to return to Washington and the naval hospital there. His doctor asked him where his pain was. “I don’t play favorites; I scatter my pain.” Will was similarly playful when Tallulah asked him before leaving: “Daddy? Do you still love me?” “Why talk about cir-cumferences?” he asked with a smile.

  Tallulah returned quickly to New York, and then to Princeton, New Jersey, where The Little Foxes was going to open on September 15. On the day of the first performance, Keith-Johnston was in Princeton for a final good-bye before she left for the tour and he went back to his wife. In the afternoon, he and Cole scoured the town, increasingly worried when they couldn’t locate her. Finally they found her at the theater, staring into the empty auditorium. She told them that Uncle John had called to tell her that Will was failing rapidly in Washington. Tallulah was convinced that she must fulfill her professional obligation, that it was what her father, who put work before nearly everything, would have wanted from her. It was not until after the performance that she and Cole boarded a train to Washington. She drank a little and steeled herself for what was to come. Steeling herself was also a way to gain leverage over Eugenia, who had gone ahead to Washington alone. Eugenia’s public deportment now became a subject for Tallulah’s concern. She was prone to public displays of emotion. Despite her own exhibitionism, Tallulah considered such things unseemly breaches of dignity and decorum. She said little to Cole on the way down, except to share her concern that Eugenia would be unable to exercise self-control. Tallulah’s own emotions were perhaps a Pandora’s box she dared not explore.

  She had been told that Will was in a coma but thought she might be able to arrive in time to see him alive. When her train pulled in to Washington at 2:30 A.M., however, she was met at the station by family members who told her that he had died an hour earlier. Florence, Eugenia, and his brother John were at his bedside. The cause of death was given as “abdominal hemorrhage.”

  “He was a strong partisan, but he could appreciate the viewpoint of the opposition,” House Minority Leader Joseph W. Martin Jr. said the next day. The Washington Post’s editorial page opined that Will had died, “a victim of his profound sense of loyalty and devotion to the party which, in honoring him, had honored itself.”

  At noon the next day, the House convened to elect Sam Rayburn House speaker. At twelve-thirty the chamber reopened for Will’s memorial service, which was attended by FDR. At four-thirty a funeral train left Union Station for Alabama, with the president and many other dignitaries on board, including a sixty-strong delegation of representatives. Will’s funeral was held on the following day at the First Methodist Church in Jasper. He had honored Florence by requesting that he be buried in Jasper with his parents rather than in Huntsville with Adelaide, who everyone around him knew had been the great love of his life. Twelve years later, Florence was also buried with the Bankheads.

  Tallulah, as always, sought solace in work. Rather than proceed on to Jasper, she rejoined The Little Foxes the very evening of Will’s House chamber memorial service. A police escort took her to Philadelphia for the September 16 performance. Tallulah always found pity unbearable and even expressions of sympathy left her feeling uncomfortably exposed. Tallulah’s theater maid Rose Riley told Rawls that those around Tallulah needed to “be strong and not let Miss Bankhead see our sympathy.” Yet Rawls could see how difficult it was for Tallulah to pronounce the lines in the script referring to Horace Giddens’s illness and death. “I looked at her and held her hand, as Alexandra, and made myself not cry when I saw her eyes.”

  “I am just gradually coming around to normal,” she wrote a friend a month after Will’s death, but Tallulah was, as Cole recalled, “filled with sorrow” in the aftermath. Some of her grief must have been for the relationship that she and her father had never had, and she must have experienced some guilt. During his last months, she seems to have been largely out of touch with him. Since his influenza in February, it had been evident to Will’s family and friends that his health was precarious. Tallulah found the prospect of his dying so upsetting that once again it would have been easier for her to remain distant.

  Much remained unresolved between them. She had never “lived under the same roof with my father for two uninterrupted years in my whole life,” she wrote in a 1951 recollection for Coronet magazine. During her earliest years he had been intermittently depressed, drunk, and suicidal.

  She had suspected that he preferred Eugenia—“that always worried her,” said her friend, actor William Roerick. Nor could she escape her childhood fear that he held her responsible for Adelaide’s death.

  He had exhibited fatherly concern over the course of her adult life, and they had certainly spent warm and festive times together, but during her eight years in England, she had seen him only twice. She seems to have been wary about establishing any sustained relationship with him after she returned from England. The mutual trust that would have enabled her to share her emotions with him was never established. “We haven’t enough confidence in our parents when we are young,” she told an interviewer in 1944. “We’re so convinced that they won’t understand. We forget that they have been through whatever it is we are going through, or its equivalent, and probably understand far better than we do.”

  Her career provided a way both to vicariously fulfill her father’s thwarted dream of being an actor and to go him one better. In 1938 Tallulah was in Washington to watch Emery in the tryout of Save Me the Waltz.

  One night she and Will drove John to his theater. After John had gone in, Will sat looking at the stage door, then turned to her and said, “Tallulah, if I had only had one whack at it!”

  “Too bad I can’t go with you,” she recalled his saying as she left for New York in 1917. He had seen her onstage only a half-dozen times. His congressional demands precluded many visits to New York, and money was tight. “I suspect, too, that seeing me in the theater would have stirred and revived his old regrets.” Perhaps Tallulah had felt somewhat burdened by the need to live out Will’s dream.

  “He never, to my knowledge, exulted over any success I achieved. His was an inner satisfaction, the knowledge that his daughter had fulfilled his hopes—and in a degree his own ambition.”

  “I don’t know a word, and I don’t believe there should be any, for consolations,” Hellman wrote Ta
llulah. “I only wanted to say how sorry I was to hear about your father, and to tell you that I send all good wishes for you.” Despite this letter, Tallulah’s relations with Hellman and Shumlin only worsened as the tour continued. Cole, who was traveling with Tallulah throughout much of that tour, said that Shumlin and she would speak, but only professionally. “He’d have to knock at her door, be announced, say hello, get the amenities over, and say, ‘Don’t you think you’re doing a little this, or doing that a little bit too long?’ Sure she’d accept it.”

  Shumlin later wrote Florence Williams that, “I would on a number of occasions go out to watch the play, and re-rehearse it, principally because of Bankhead’s changing performances. Her ugliness towards me was so distressing, so undignifying, that I gave up checking on the play. I would have preferred to close the play, but it had to go on.”

  In 1975, Hellman told Jan Allen that Tallulah had “turned out at first . . . perfectly splendid. . . . And later on in the run of the play, not very good.” Cole said that she became “more Tallulah” as the tour went on.

  She took off the corset that had been pinching her back for months, substituting a waist cinch that gave the same line to the costume but didn’t force her to stand as straight as she had had to do in the corset. Nevertheless, in his opinion she still accurately represented the character of Regina Giddens.