Tallulah always spoke admiringly of Hellman’s writing and Shumlin’s direction, but she now considered them both seditious Communists.
Alienating them was, however, a terrible professional mistake. She had wanted all along to take Foxes to London, and was so excited about exhibiting her performance to old friends and fans that she was willing to brave the Blitz. Emlyn Williams, who was producing the play in England, cabled her asking if she was interested. “YES! YES! YES!” she cabled back. But Shumlin and Hellman told Williams that as far as Tallulah was concerned, the answer was No, No, No. Instead, it would be Fay Compton who played Regina Giddens in London. The movie rights were sold to Samuel Goldwyn, who had earlier filmed Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, and Bette Davis, not Tallulah, was going to play Regina Giddens. Emery later said that when Tallulah discovered she’d been passed over, she threw everything detachable against the walls of their suite. In October 1940, Davis came to watch Tallulah’s performance in Cleveland, but didn’t dare go backstage.
When The Little Foxes returned to Washington, D.C., on March 17, 1941, for a weeklong engagement, Hellman was in the audience with William Wyler, who was going to direct the film, and her ex-husband, Arthur Kober, with whom she was collaborating on the screenplay. Tallulah must have wanted to remind them what a mistake they’d made. Nelson B. Bell in the Washington Post wrote that, “Seldom, if ever, has the return engagement of a major play so completely matched the excellence of its initial local performance. . . .”
The tour concluded with a return visit to Philadelphia early in April 1941. Emery now asked Tallulah for a divorce so that he could marry Geva. Tallulah agreed, having come to the realization that the marriage had always been pointless, although probably she would not have chosen to initiate a divorce, at least not yet. She had no intention of repeating her mistake, and was somewhat repelled, as were all the Bankheads, by her sister’s multiple marriages. Etiquette of the time dictated that in an amicable divorce the woman would initiate an action, usually on the grounds of mental cruelty. Tallulah arranged to spend the requisite six-week residency in Reno, Nevada.
Tallulah now began to feel that if Emery remarried immediately, public perception would paint her as the injured party and she would be humiliated—and the public’s perception of Tallulah was something that weighed on her a great deal. On her way to Reno, she arranged to stop in Los Angeles, where Emery and Geva were living together and both making movies. A meeting was arranged at George Cukor’s. She and Emery went in a corner and talked quietly. Emery agreed to her request that he wait a year before marrying Geva.
In Reno, Tallulah and Cole rode horses and gambled. Called to testify, Tallulah produced the standard recital of vague accusations, fact, and conveniently manipulated fact that plaintiffs were compelled to compile in the days before no-fault divorce. Tallulah alleged that Emery was moody and morose, a defeatist with a violent temper, that he had hit her in public, and had once before her eyes tried to leap out of a window, with the result that she suffered insomnia and great mental strain. Through his attorney, Emery denied Tallulah’s accusations, but naturally did not contest her action.
Out of court, Tallulah was conciliatory. After her decree was granted on June 13, she issued a statement that Emery was “a fine fellow” who had written her “a beautiful letter two days ago.” She blamed a conflict of careers for the failure of their marriage. Tallulah and Emery did fulfill the cliché of friendly ex-spouses, acting together again in 1945. According to Geva, Tallulah didn’t stop there. “When I married John, Tallulah was just dying to be a friend of mine, like crazy. She just didn’t want anyone to know that anybody could leave her for somebody else. I played along always. I said, ‘Why hurt her?’ ” Like Tallulah, Geva massaged and manipulated her own image relentlessly.
Before returning to New York, Tallulah also augmented her menagerie of birds, dogs, and monkeys with a lion cub. She and Cole attended a circus performance staged for blind children by the Reno Lions Club. When it was announced that a star lioness was not performing because she was in the throes of childbirth, Tallulah requested an audience with the new mother. She was now very much involved in the campaign to bring the U.S. into the war on the Allied cause, and she named the cub “Winston Churchill” and brought him, heavily sedated, to New York. Stashed in a laundry basket, he was smuggled in and out of the hotel via the freight elevator for daily walks in Central Park.
Tallulah’s sister loved animals as much as Tallulah did and also shared her penchant for exotic specimens. Eugenia was in New York that summer and had booked a suite at the Lombardy adjoining Tallulah’s. It accommodated herself, a monkey, a red fox terrier, and a Pekingese, as well as perhaps her husband. She was now married to William Sprouse, a sergeant in the Marine Corps, “not educated but . . . a man of sterling quality,” Aunt Marie described him.
Thirty years later, Eugenia described the way the lion stoked the resentment toward her younger sister that was so much a part of Eugenia’s recollections of their relationship. One morning there was a knock at Eugenia’s door and a sprucely attired hotel manager informed her regretfully that he would have to ask her to leave. “The health authorities will not allow us to turn this hotel into a zoo.”
“My sister’s got a lion next door,” Eugenia protested. “Why I can’t have three harmless little animals I don’t know!
“Well, we’ve let Miss Bankhead have the lion under great protest. But she’s been living at the hotel for a long time, and—”
“Yes, and she’s famous and rich, that makes a little difference,” Eugenia retorted, and slammed the door in his face.
Although lions are harmless when they are newborns, they grow rapidly. Part of Tallulah’s enchantment with her new pet was undoubtedly the way it could frighten and surprise unsuspecting visitors, but Tallulah herself was terrified when Winston Churchill took an inopportune swipe at her. By the end of the summer, she had taken him to live at the Bronx Zoo.
Cole also became attached to the lion, and claimed that it was he and not Tallulah who continued to visit Winston there. In November 1942, however, Tallulah would tell Robert Francis of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that Winston had “grown so big you wouldn’t know him. . . . I go up to see him every now and then. He always knows me. Gentle as a kitten.”
During the summer of 1941, Tallulah again toured in summer stock, reviving Her Cardboard Lover, with Harry Ellerbe in the part Leslie Howard had played opposite her in London in 1928. Like Tallulah, Ellerbe’s experience with author/director George Kelly had been a high point in his career, when Ellerbe starred in Kelly’s Philip Goes Forth in 1931. More recently, he had toured with Ethel Barrymore and Alla Nazimova, two of Tallulah’s favorite theatrical matriarchs. In an unpublished memoir, Ellerbe writes that he had played André, the lover who proves much more enduring than cardboard, once before in summer stock, and he loved the part.
The revival’s titular director was John C. Wilson, an American who had broken into the theater as a result of his long affair with Noël Coward in the 1920s and ’30s. He was considered a man of great taste and his production banner guaranteed a high standard. But as a director he was less than a tyro.
Ellerbe writes that that Wilson treated the first rehearsal as “a social gathering where everything and anything was discussed except the play itself.” Both Ellerbe and Tallulah were annoyed when Wilson continued to display “an appalling lack of preparation.” On the third day, he told them he was taking several days off to attend the Lunts’ “graduation.” The University of Wisconsin was bestowing honorary degrees on them. “I’m sure you’ll carry on beautifully without me,” he told the company assembled onstage.
“But of course we will, darling.” Tallulah assured him. “When are you leaving?”
“Right away, sweetie.”
“Well, have fun, darling, and give Lynn and Alfred my love.” Wilson threw kisses at Tallulah as he walked up the aisle of the Henry Miller Theatre. Once he was out of sight, Tallulah turned to
the company and said,
“Now, darlings, let’s forget everything the sonofabitch said, and start from scratch. . . . !”
Wilson was not heard from again until the revival’s opening night at the Westport Country Playhouse on June 30. According to Ellerbe, it was Tallulah herself who “did a remarkable job in getting it on without director or figurehead.” She certainly knew the play inside out, having performed it for an entire season in London and on tour.
For the first act, set in a French casino, Tallulah selected a Hattie Carnegie ice blue evening gown. She was very tan from her time in Reno and looked so striking in the gown that Cole, who was stage-managing, regretted decades later that he had not taken a color photo.
Ben Edwards, who became one of Broadway’s leading set designers, had graduated from Dartmouth three years earlier and was a summer apprentice in the resort town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, when Tallulah and her company came through. Edwards saw her at her best: “She used to hang around all of us working on the scenery,” he recalled in 1992, “and go out and eat with us at little dives, and we’d go to her hotel. She sort of became one of the gang.”
Each of the local theaters provided its own scenery and bit players for Tallulah’s Cardboard Lover. At the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, the management wanted to show Tallulah the sets prior to the dress rehearsal. “Great God!” Tallulah shrieked when she saw what had been designed for her bedroom in acts 2 and 3. “It’s the color of horse shit. I cannot play farce comedy in front of that, darling. You’ll have to redo it.”
Ellerbe agreed that the color was all wrong. Tallulah stomped off and the young designer responsible pursued her, protesting in tears that it would be impossible to change the shade before the next night’s opening.
Tallulah replied that in that case she would not open. The crew worked through the night to remedy the set. Tallulah proclaimed it “utterly beautiful” and sent the designer an expensive gift and a bottle of champagne.
Tallulah’s “expertise as a farceur made Her Cardboard Lover a joy,” Ellerbe recalled. “There was a ‘hand-in-glove; give-and-take’ between us that was exciting.” Cole recalled that with Ellerbe, Tallulah enjoyed one of the most snugly fitting comedic partnerships of her career. One day during a break in rehearsals, Ellerbe found her in a reflective mood. “To be a success in the theatre, Harry, you must set a high standard for yourself and stick with—raise it but never lower it. Respect your own talent or nobody else will.” If Tallulah regretted not fighting for better roles in the past, she was now determined to maintain the standard set by The Little Foxes.
When she returned to New York, she let it be known that she was looking for a dramatic part to equal Regina Giddens, and before long accepted one of the most challenging of her career.
Drama by the Kitchen Sink
“The lady was too much of a lady for the part.”
—Clifford Odets
Tallulah had asked Clifford Odets for a play back in 1935, when he had just burst into fame on Broadway. His Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! brandished a populist banner, an affirmation of the possibilities of theater to arouse political will and social consciousness. Odets was the leading dramatist of the Group Theatre, a conclave of young idealists who had met while playing small parts for the Theatre Guild. They admired the ensemble cohesion possible in the state-subsidized theaters of Europe and the Soviet Union, and the agitprop exhortations of activist playwrights like Bertolt Brecht. The child of Romanian Jewish émigrés, Odets said in 1938 that he was not a member of the Communist Party but was “highly sympathetic to its aims.” This was not Tallulah’s customary milieu, which may have been what attracted her to Odets, and why they had been lovers in 1935.
But it was not until 1941 that he had a part and play for her: Clash by Night, in which Tallulah was to play Mae Wilenski, a housewife married to a WPA construction worker. Like all of Odets’s work, it was flawed, untidy, undeniably powerful, and possessed of a singular rhetorical eloquence, both flowery and brutish.
After ten years of existence, the Group Theatre was beginning to fracture as a result of the conflicting aims and ambitions of key members. Its egalitarian premise made it hard to enforce the disciplined hierarchy necessary to function. Odets’s decision not to let the Group produce Clash by Night marked its virtual demise. Instead, Odets sold it to impresario Billy Rose, who had some experience in the theater by virtue of his now-dissolved marriage to Fanny Brice, but whose customary venues tended to be the World’s Fair Aquacade and the Diamond Horseshoe nightclub in Times Square. Odets took with him two pillars of the Group: Clash by Night was directed by Lee Strasberg, and Lee J. Cobb played Mae’s husband Jerry.
Clash by Night is a violent, seamy story unfolding over the torpor of a Staten Island summer. Mae Wilenski is a thirty-four-year-old Staten Island housewife tending to a newborn daughter. Over Mae’s objections, her husband of six years insists that his best friend Earl, a movie projectionist subbing as a construction worker, rent their extra bedroom. Earl is after Mae right away, but she resists him for several weeks before they become lovers.
Jerry discovers the truth, and Earl and Mae decide to run away together with her infant. Jerry tracks Earl down to the projection room of the movie theater where he is working and strangles him.
Life declared that Tallulah “alone among top-flight actresses of the U.S.stage would dare to face a role so brash and grubby.” It was indeed a courageous choice, far removed from Regina Giddens: she had this time not fallen into the trap of her London years by trying to repeat a formula that had once proved successful.
Tallulah would have heard a lot about Billy Rose from Brice, with whom she was very friendly. She and the producer began to spar almost immediately. During rehearsals, Rose sent his sister Polly, with whom Tallulah was also friendly, to buy some cheap housedresses for Tallulah to wear as Mae. Polly did the best she could with the minuscule budget her brother allotted her, but when Tallulah tried on the dresses they didn’t fit.
She then proceeded to phone Hattie Carnegie’s atelier and order three silk dresses that were so simple that seen from the audience they could pass for down-market. “They fit her,” Cole said, “they fit the character, and she looked well in them.” Tallulah charged them to Rose and gave him a lecture about not treating a star that way.
Relations reached a flash point because of Rose’s refusal to install footlights on the stage of the theater. Footlights provided added illumination to the front edge of the stage, which is where stars often tend to be positioned. But they did not accord with the aesthetic ideals of the new wave, which dictated that stage hierarchies be dissolved. Rose was very close to a nickel and was probably just trying to cut costs. But Tallulah had spent her entire career in front of footlights, believed that they were flattering, and liked the way they blinded her, making it easier for her to immerse herself in the stage action. After Clash by Night she had her contracts stipulate that they would be provided.
Odets limned a secondary romantic couple to counterpoint the triangle of Jerry–Mae–Earl. Peggy Coffee, a younger friend and neighbor of Mae’s, has just lost her mother and looks to Mae for guidance; Peggy is in love with her neighbor Joe Doyle. Peggy and Joe are trying to decide what they really want from each other.
Joe was played by Robert Ryan, who had yet to make his movie debut.
Katherine Locke played Peggy. “I should never have been in that play,”Locke said in 1993 of the supporting role she played. For she had already scored a big hit starring opposite John Garfield in Having Wonderful Time in 1937 and had played Ophelia to Maurice Evans’s Hamlet in 1938. In 1940, Strasberg had directed her and Lee J. Cobb in Fifth Column, the first and only play to which Ernest Hemingway signed his name. It was Strasberg’s wife, Paula Miller, who convinced her to take the touching if undeveloped role of Peggy in Clash by Night. “Paula had a way of manipulating people,” Locke recalled.
Locke liked almost no one connected with Clash by Night. She felt that Od
ets was “a miserable human being” whose affair with actress Frances Farmer had nearly destroyed her. Locke’s feelings toward Tallulah were a mixture of condescension and compassion. “I think she was fond of me in her own crazy way,” Locke said. Tallulah once invited her over to her suite and they were talking casually when Tallulah said, “By the way, darling, I was asked, ‘What’s the difference between beauty and charm?’ and I said,
‘Darling, I have beauty, Miss Locke has charm.’ ” Locke sensed Tallulah’s engulfing loneliness and her fear of solitude. Once Locke came early to a rehearsal. Tallulah had arrived even earlier and was sitting alone, in a state of near panic. “Oh, I’m so glad, darling, you’re here!” she said.
Locke didn’t like Strasberg’s direction, finding his approach “Talmu-dic” and “very confusing.” She thought he was cruel to defenseless actors playing small roles. Along with the Group’s Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler, Strasberg became a celebrated acting teacher preaching the“Method,” a convenient umbrella for a constellation of systemizations of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s teachings. Locke recalled telling Strasberg, “Listen, there’s more than one way to truth. There isn’t just one road. Some of your actors—in spite of your work—will come out all right!”
Tallulah, however, followed Strasberg’s direction closely, despite having no interest in becoming an adherent. Strasberg tried a Method conversion to which Tallulah listened politely but paid no attention. Yet the Method codified techniques used by virtually all actors, Tallulah included.
It is inevitable that actors cull “sense memories” and emotional responses from their own experiences, whether consciously or not, whether or not they try to summon up these memories before or during each performance, as the Method teachers encouraged their pupils to do.
Tallulah! Page 39