Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  The refusal of Tallulah and most stars of her vintage to fall into Method line did not render their technique archaic, despite the popularity that Method acting would achieve. Rather, it could be argued that the Group and its disciples were guilty of claiming to reinvent the wheel, and it must be said that they did so with a moralistic fervor that was self-serving. Their determination to sweep away most of what they found before them was certainly an affront and threat to the established acting order, which frequently retaliated with withering scorn. Tallulah was dismissive on grounds that were perhaps more than simply defensive. To her, the Method may have seemed amateurish, a throwback to a primitive phase in her artistic development. “If you act on emotion you do it beautifully one night and the next night, it just doesn’t come. . . . I did that once, but now I know I can reproduce the effect every night and it will be right.You must be conscious of yourself,” she told the New York Times during Clash by Night’s Broadway run.

  It is the eventual dominance of the Method doctrine—as well as Tallulah’s own public shows of nonchalance about her work—that probably explains why, when Tallulah isn’t being described as lacking in technique, she is reported to have been so coldly technical that she did not do any emotional preparation at all and simply walked from her dressing room and picked up her onstage cue. But Cole, who stage-managed Clash by Night, said that in this as in all her plays, Tallulah constructed an imaginary “closet for the character” that she could go into and retrieve the character whenever she wanted to. She also kept her dressing-room door open after the curtain went up so that she could hear how the performance was going when she wasn’t onstage. She was able to insert herself into the play by standing in the wings and listening for a couple of minutes to the dialogue onstage. Tallulah’s personal method certainly succeeded in establishing every actor’s goal of stage reality. In 1938, the New York Herald Tribune’s Helen Orsmbee had written in her book Backstage with Actors that Tallulah was:

  . . . particularly gifted at using imagination so that she extends the reality of a scene beyond the limits of the stage setting. Every time she comes in or goes out at a door, that next room, that hallway, that sidewalk which cannot be seen, all become existent in the story. She makes you believe that they are there just out of view. From the first moment she steps into a play she brings with her a conviction of the reality of events that have been happening offstage.

  In tune with the egalitarian and ruminative tendencies of the Group, Clash by Night’s rehearsals witnessed exhaustive analyses of Mae’s character by Tallulah, Strasberg, and other members of the cast. Cole and Tallulah also talked about her between themselves. While Mae’s socioeconomic profile was alien, the role played to many of Tallulah’s acting strengths: Mae is salty and outspoken and simmering with discontent. She is a woman trapped by circumstances and dogged by the knowledge of her own shortcomings. She can’t stop snapping irritably at her husband and she can’t help being angry at herself for being so short-tempered. She is not entirely coherent or consistent; Odets crowds into her character too many credos and dissatisfactions, from cosmic angst to pettiness. She has too many different chips on her shoulder and we’re not told by him what their interconnectedness is and which we should pay most attention to. Mae is a typically diffuse yet fascinating Odets statement.

  Her speeches are leavened by dry quips that might have been written especially for Tallulah. Perhaps they were. In the opening scene, Jerry tells Mae, “Earl knows some of those movie stars in person.” “They’re not happy,” Earl says, “those movie people, none of them.” “Yeah,” Jerry replies in what Odets describes as a customary tone of childlike bewilderment,“all that money an’ cars an’ chauffeurs, an’ what have they got?”

  “They’ve got money, cars and chauffeurs. . . .” Mae replies.

  Dominated by the Method, the production of Clash by Night became one of the most heterogeneous mixes of acting styles and temperaments imaginable. Cobb was a magnificent actor who embodied the best and the worst traits of the new school of actors. His intensity and immediacy were harrowing, but he was all but incapable of a light touch. His insistence on living in the moment made him so improvisatory as to be maddening to Tallulah. “He was so Method,” Cole complained, “that he would take forever for his next idea to come to him and go all the way through the head.”

  Cole claimed that Cobb exasperated everyone in the play, including Odets, who was a great friend of his but “had it out with him almost every night.

  “Even Strasberg said to him: ‘If you’re going to make a sandwich, put it together. You put the bread here, and then you put all the ingredients over here and then you put another piece of bread down, but you never put it together. If you’re going to do that, do it, don’t wait forever. The audience has seen what you’re going to eat.’ ”

  Between the glower of Tallulah and the lumbering of Cobb was positioned the stylish swagger of Joseph Schildkraut’s Earl. Schildkraut was returning to the stage after six years in Hollywood. It is often proposed that the exhibitionism of a theatrical “ham” precludes true acting greatness.

  Schildkraut may have been, as Cole claimed, “the whole hog,” but at least on the evidence of his films, his propensity for displaying his chiseled profile doesn’t detract from his consummate skill. He would have been perfectly at home in the role of Earl, who bluffs and preens and at first gets nowhere with Mae.

  Locke found Schildkraut’s “embroidered” acting interesting, but didn’t think much of him offstage. “He was shallow. He was on the make before we’d been introduced, when I got in the elevator.” Her sentiments were echoed by Cole, who called him “a terrible man,” and expressed compassion for “his poor wife. He just ordered her around like a slave.” Schildkraut asked Cole to come to his hotel and feed him cues while he worked on his lines. When Cole refused, Schildkraut asked why not and Cole told him, “The only person I’ve ever cued in my life is Miss Bankhead.”

  For three days before the October 27, 1941, premiere at the Wilson Theatre in Detroit all concerned with Clash by Night hardly left the theater.

  Amphetamines were passed out like Life Savers, in the customary last-minute crunch to get a new production on the stage. From Detroit they went to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. Tallulah was becoming more and more exasperated at Cobb as he followed the dictates of his emotional experience so blindly that he never adhered to the same blocking in any two performances. “She never knew what he was going to do,” Cole said. Tallulah herself never gave exactly the same rendition performance to performance, but she followed a consensual outline. With Cobb “she always played it absolutely the same, because then he couldn’t come back and say, ‘I didn’t know what she was going to do.’ ” When she felt Cobb drifting out of her orbit, Tallulah took to perching upstage center, the most powerful and visible station on the stage, until Cobb’s survival instincts drew him back to a closer connection with her.

  They opened in Philadelphia at the Locust Street Theatre on November 17. But after the performance, Tallulah collapsed backstage. She had had pneumonia for at least twenty-four hours, but was too preoccupied with the play to realize how dangerously ill she was. She was rushed to the hospital and put into an oxygen tank, and for several days her life was in danger. By November 29 she was past the crisis. “It is remarkable to me that she pulled through,” said her physician in Philadelphia, Dr. A. I.Rubenstone. In her autobiography, Tallulah blames her illness on Rose’s harassment.

  After being discharged from the Philadelphia hospital, Tallulah went with Cole to recuperate in Atlantic City. She was relieved at the prospect of a rest, but felt guilty about leaving the show. “There’s no such thing as the show must go on,” Cole assured her. “The show can go on with another actress. If you died, and they felt this was an important play, somebody else would do it.”

  Katherine Locke’s response to Tallulah’s Mae Wilenski was colored all along by her conviction that “Tallulah was wrong for the part. I was
right for the part.” Locke offered to play Mae while Tallulah was ill. “That was my mistake; of course I was turned down.” She had refused an earlier play of Odets and believed that he was punishing her, but actually, the part would have been off-limits anyway. Like most of the biggest stars of the day, Tallulah did not have an understudy: if she was indisposed, the show closed.

  Clash by Night finally opened on Broadway on December 27, 1941.

  Women’s Wear Daily reported that one of the year’s “largest and most fashionable audiences” flocked to the Belasco to see Tallulah try her hand at pro-letarianism. Pollock in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described it Odets’s “most intense play,” and said it had “kept the audience holding on tight.” The cast had performed “with the seriousness of actors in the grimmest of Eugene O’Neill’s plays, for Odets has made his play taut and built it as carefully as a watchmaker.” George Freedley in the New York Morning Telegraph wrote: There isn’t a person writing for our stage today who can speak more pungently, with a hard brilliance which conceals tenderness, honest rage and a cold loathing of the poverty of the world and the maladjustment of wealth which causes it. This is exciting theater, if somewhat overwritten and, as acted by Miss Bankhead, Mr. Schildkraut and Mr.Cobb, is unquestionably the most interesting play in town, bar none.

  Tallulah’s reviews were nearly all excellent, although as might have been expected, some of the most enthusiastic included the proviso that it was difficult to accept her as a blue-collar housewife. Odets himself told Polly Rose, when she wrote a biography of her brother, that “the lady was too much of a lady for the part.” But what is interesting is that several critics felt she was entirely convincing. Lockridge in the New York Sun wrote that, “Miss Bankhead has never, even in The Little Foxes, played better, with more sense of character or with more feeling and intensity.”

  Pollock wrote that Tallulah had acted “with great honesty, wanting very much to obliterate all characteristics that would make her Tallulah rather than drab Mae Wilenski of Staten Island, formerly of Scranton, Pa., ex-waitress. . . . it is probably the most difficult job she has ever undertaken and her greatest achievement.”

  Despite the auspicious opening, Clash by Night’s business flattened after the opening week. Pearl Harbor had been attacked while Tallulah was in Atlantic City. Cole thought that the country’s instantly transformed mood was what ultimately doomed the play; the domestic triangle took on“a great unimportance.”

  Nevertheless, Tallulah’s Mae Wilenski awakened considerable interest among her fellow actresses. Garbo came to see Clash by Night; Judith Anderson and Ruth Gordon each came several times. After one performance attended by both Anderson and Gordon, Tallulah and Cole went with them to Club 1-2-3 on East Fifty-fourth Street, where the three women talked shop and discussed the footlight issue: Anderson and Gordon both agreed with Tallulah.

  Tallulah had begun Clash by Night extending civil pleasantries to Schildkraut that he mistook for sincere interest. Soon she began to find him dreadfully boring and then he began to grate mightily on her, and to feel the lash of her disgruntlement.

  Clash by Night opens with Mae, Jerry, Peggy and Joe all sitting on the Wilenskis’ porch. Tallulah was to sing some verses of “The Sheik of Araby.”

  Her singing was flat. “She had a tin ear,” said Locke, who had trained to be a pianist. “It drove me crazy.” Tallulah discovered Locke’s musical background and asked for her help. Locke told her not to sing full voice because of her pitch problems, not to “try to be an opera singer. It drives me crazy just to hear you.”

  She took Locke’s suggestion and her singing improved, but “she fell in love with the sound of her own voice” and kept singing past one of Cobb’s cues. Finally, at one performance Cobb yelled, “Shut up, Mae!” Later in the scene they exited together, and “you could hear her out front, attacking him,” Locke insisted. “I thought, ‘Why don’t they bring the curtain down?’ ”

  Standing in the wings later in the performance, Tallulah was fuming at Locke about Cobb and “those Group Theatre actors!” “Listen, Tallulah, you did something very unprofessional,” Locke told her. “I’m sorry that I even gave you the advice. You went on and on and on. I thought you’d never stop. Lee had to say his lines. You know what it’s like to come to a cue if you’re distracted by something.”

  “Well, I should have known better! You Group actress!”

  “I’ve never been a Group actress to begin with, and I’ll thank you not to talk to me in that tone.” More words were exchanged and Locke bowed out by saying, “There is nothing in my contract that says I have to say any lines to you except those written by Clifford Odets, and I will thank you not to address me anymore.”

  Later during the performance, Locke noticed that Tallulah was coming much closer to her than she was supposed to, and with a smile on her face was soon covertly yanking at Locke’s hair. “If you continue this,” Locke told Tallulah out of the side of her mouth, “I’m going to hit you right in the mouth.”

  Tallulah seemed to be distressed by Locke’s refusal to engage with her.

  Tallulah’s usual “Hi,” as they gathered on stage before the curtain became“Hi, darling.” Locke turned her back. Tallulah sent Rose Riley to plead her case with Locke. Locke was unmoved.

  “Darling, I have a compliment for you,” Tallulah announced as they waited to begin another performance. “Ruth Gordon was out front with Thornton Wilder, and they came backstage and said, ‘Tallulah, you sing so beautifully! What happened?’ I said, ‘Katherine Locke taught me.’ ”

  “Tallulah, stop,” Locke replied. “Don’t give me that stuff. I’ll talk to you. Not too often, but I’ll talk to you.”

  “She sounded so pathetic,” Locke recalled, “like a little girl. I wanted to say, ‘Oh, you poor little thing.’ ” But Locke was willing to give as good as she got from Tallulah and almost enjoyed doing so. When Tallulah learned that Locke had filmed a screen test with actor Lloyd Goff, and that he was also a friend of Locke’s husband, she asked the younger actress to introduce them. “Not on your life,” Locke replied. “I wouldn’t waste that on him, Tallulah. I’m sorry. He’s a friend. I wouldn’t do that to him.”

  With Florence Eldridge and Dick Van Patten in The Skin of Our Teeth

  Ticket sales rallied and Clash by Night was generating a small profit when Rose decided to close it after seven weeks on Broadway. It had beena traumatic experience for all concerned. “Never did a final curtain fall on a more relieved actress,” Tallulah later recalled. Both she and Katherine Locke immediately checked into private hospitals for a week of rest.

  Radio was Tallulah’s only medium for the next six months. She had signed with the William Morris Agency to handle all the work she did away from live theater. Although she negotiated her own stage contracts, she reasoned that networks dealt exclusively with agencies and would not hire an actress who was not represented. She was handled by agent Phil Weltman, who had recently joined the Morris office in New York.

  Few of Tallulah’s colleagues were indifferent to her: she alternately inspired the most belligerent derision or the most ardent devotion. Weltman was destined to have a long and warm association with her. One week in March 1942, Tallulah was a guest on The Kate Smith Show. Smith’s manager Ted Collins came over to Weltman while Tallulah was rehearsing: “Are you representing Tallulah Bankhead? . . . Well, she can’t do the show that way. . . . She isn’t wearing a dress.” Tallulah had become addicted to slacks while she was in Hollywood.

  Weltman knew that the only people who would see Tallulah were a small studio audience, and he knew that it was too late for a substitute guest to be found for that night’s broadcast. He told Collins that he wasn’t even going to mention it to her. Later, however, Weltman and Tallulah were talking in her dressing room. She asked if he was having a problem with Collins. Reluctantly Weltman told her about their conversation. Ten minutes later, she told him that she had to run an errand and would be back in thirty minutes. When she re
turned she was wearing a dress. “She did this just so as not to cause me a problem,” Weltman recalled in 1995.

  “This is the kind of a lady she was. I’ll never forget her for that.”

  Multiple Personalities

  “I have a death wish. But there’s one thing about dying that has always troubled me: that you would not have told the people you love how much they mean to you.”

  During the summer of 1942, Tallulah rented a house in New Canaan, Connecticut, and enjoyed an idyllic vacation with Cole and Winwood. Every night after dinner they strolled into town, drank an ice cream soda at the local drugstore, then sauntered back. It was there that she received the script of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. “It’s an extraordinary thing to find yourself with a script that means a lot to you,” she later told the New York Herald Tribune’s Helen Ormsbee. Wilder’s play is a comic parable of humankind’s endurance, written as an absurdist free-form carnival. In each of the three acts, Tallulah played Lily Sabina, an embodiment of the Bible’s Lilith in the guises of chambermaid, bathing beauty, and camp follower. But, in addition, she played the actress ostensibly impersonating these roles, a “Miss Somerset,” who would deliver a running commentary directly to the audience about her various dissatisfactions, voicing, as it were, the audience’s own possible bewilderment.

  “I hate this play and every word in it,” Miss Somerset confides shortly after the curtain goes up. “I don’t understand a single word of it, anyway. . . .” In the second act, she interrupts an adulterous seduction scene on the Atlantic City boardwalk, protesting to “Mr. Fitzpatrick,” the stage manager, that she just cannot go through with it; she is too sensitive to the feelings of a girlfriend of hers who lost her husband just this way. In the third act, she joins her fellow actors in explaining to the audience that several cast members have come down with food poisoning and her maid Ivy and other backstage support staff will have to read their lines.