Myerberg came to Tallulah and asked her for money to bring the show into New York. She told him she’d lost every penny she put into Forsaking All Others and wouldn’t make the same mistake again. March, however, did buy an interest in the show.
Wilder was somehow granted permission to leave California. The following week, Skin opened in Philadelphia for a two-week run. A notice was posted backstage that “Captain Wilder” would be visiting and that the entire cast should stay onstage after the curtain calls. Wilder sat with Isabel and addressed the cast. “I know that my play has been receiving bad reviews, but that does not bother me, because I know it will be a tremendous hit in New York. But the thing that’s disheartening to me is that you, the cast, have given up on the play. You’re all acting depressed and wish you could get out of the show, and that’s what hurts me. Maybe the trouble was you don’t understand my play.” He proceeded to deliver a thirty-minute explication of the text, to which they listened intently.
William Roerick was a young actor posted in Philadelphia on his way to perform overseas in the State Department’s production of This Is the Army.
In Philadelphia he watched a matinee of The Skin of Our Teeth. At the end of the first act, as the Ice Age descended on the Antrobus household, the theater auditorium itself became a playing field: actors dressed as ushers pretended to rip up chairs for firewood and race them up to the stage.
“Pass up your chairs, everybody,” Tallulah appealed to the audience. “Save the human race.”
“When Tallulah said that,” Roerick recalled in 1982, “your breath caught, and you were moved and you shuddered.” That night he attended a theatrical party in the basement restaurant of a hotel. Walking downstairs, natty in his uniform, he bumped into Tallulah coming away from the same party, an elderly man at her side. Tallulah looked up at him and smiled and he smiled back. He told her that he knew Emery, and how moved he’d been by her performance at the matinee. “Moved! Moved!” Tallulah expostulated to her companion. “Why don’t the critics say that! Darling,” she said, turning back to Roerick, “how terribly smart of you.”
The result was an affair between them lasting for the duration of the Philadelphia engagement. One day Tallulah elected to tell Roerick’s fortune by reading cards. “Darling, you’re going abroad. I don’t think anybody’s going to be shooting at you in anger. . . . But you may be killed.” He gasped. “Don’t interrupt me!” she commanded. “I know you’re not afraid of dying. Neither am I. In fact 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. So before you go, sit down, write letters to your friends, and give them to someone to mail in case anything happens to you. And then you won’t have that on your mind and it’ll be perfectly simple.”
Roerick complied, giving the letters to his sister, then tearing them up when he returned from the war. A decade later, he was acting with Tallulah in Dear Charles; watching the way her tantrums could insult friends for whom she actually cared, he thought to himself that it was Tallulah herself who needed to write letters like this.
Her manic volatility was undoubtedly exacerbated by chemicals. During Skin, Tallulah was not imbibing that anyone could see, but she was downing a great deal of coffee as well as umpteen bottles of Coca-Cola: “She had one in her hand constantly,” Van Patten recalled. Perhaps she was spiking them, too. Kazan wrote his wife that Tallulah was sending the company manager to the drugstore to buy spirits of ammonia for her. “She looks loaded up with something, her eyes staring wildly at me when I talk to her.” Isabel Wilder knew that Tallulah had a weight problem and “we knew she was taking something.” But amphetamines were about the last possible prescription she should have received.
Montgomery Clift played the Antrobuses’ bad-seed son Henry, a.k.a Cain, who we learn early in the play has slain the Antrobuses’ second son.
Tallulah was fond of him and appreciated his talent. Clift had played with the Lunts in There Shall Be No Night in 1940 and his admiration for Lunt was reflected in unconscious mimicry. “If you didn’t watch him, he’d fall right into it,” Cole recalled. Tallulah called Clift into her dressing room and gently warned him about it.
She had advice, too, for fourteen-year-old Dick Van Patten. She summoned him into her dressing room one night to tell him that he should wait longer before saying one line, that he was killing a laugh in the scene he played with her, Eldridge, a dinosaur, and a mammoth. “Dickie, darling,” Tallulah said, “you’re getting automatic. When I give you your cue, take a second to think about what I just said to you and then say your line.”
“Isabel and I are Ruth and Naomi,” Tallulah wrote Wilder from Washington. “I don’t know what I would have done without [her]. She has saved my life and her reward is being kept up until four of a morning. But she’s holding her own better than any one else. God bless her—”
As deeply as Tallulah enlisted Isabel to her cause, Isabel was more than a sounding board for her. They talked about their childhoods; there was warmth and reciprocity between them. “She was very fond of me,” Isabel recalled, “and often very generous,” willing to change plans to suit her friend. She sometimes went out with Tallulah after the theater, when Tallulah was lonely, and Tallulah was grateful for that.
“Tallulah used to say outrageous things in front of Isabel,” Roerick remembered. “She used more than the usual number of four-letter words.She thought Isabel both was astonished and secretly pleased.”
“You know I don’t have to go around talking like this,” Tallulah told Roerick, “but I think it’s good for Isabel.”
Tallulah “knew in her heart she misbehaved,” Isabel recalled, “but she did it on purpose—to be on top always. She knew she hurt people by being rude, and I think she often was sorry for it. At times she would really be ashamed of herself. Sometimes she even apologized to me. And I didn’t like that—that she was so vulnerable. I’d rather she stayed her cussed self.”
On November 9, The Skin of Our Teeth began a week’s engagement at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. A program note had been added, encouraging the audience to focus on the Everyman aspect of the allegory.
“George Antrobus is John Doe or George Spelvin or you—the average American at grips with a destiny, sometimes sour, sometimes sweet. . . .”
The next day Tallulah mailed a letter to Wilder written from the Carlton Hotel. “Anything you want me to do I would do; but every day something arises that torments me so that I am almost ready to give up the ghost. . . . I really do enjoy myself once I am before the audience, but due to said Myerberg’s conflicting and confusing ‘orders,’ I have a feeling of dreadful suspense up until the play begins; one is never told if something that directly concerns me is going to be changed. . . .” She was enclosing a carbon copy of a three-page, single-spaced letter she had sent Myerberg on October 28 “because he refused to contact me.” In a handwritten post-script to Wilder she added, “I love you and treasure every word you have written me. Your letters are always close at hand and in my heart.”
She apologized to Wilder for how “vitriolic” her letter sounded. She had told Myerberg that his “idea of authority is sadly dated; authority is not snapping your fingers at waiters, or in this case, actors . . . it is something innate . . . something that springs from inner dignity; true knowledge, tolerance and simplicity. In your obviously frustrated desire to be at long last respected, your utter disregard for human relationships have [sic]succeeded only in making of yourself a figure of ridicule; for this sad state of affairs I am deeply sorry for you.”
But most of her letter was a catalog of professional grievances rather than a personal attack. She chastised Myerberg for administrative lapses: no list of hotels was posted backstage in the out-of-town theaters, despite the shortages of rooms that Baltimore and Washington were suffering. In Baltimore, supporting members of the cast had to spend so much time looking for accommodations that they missed a
rehearsal. The company manager was inadequate; the company traveled without a flyman to signal scenery changes; the slide shows that preceded each act were not being projected correctly.
But these things paled before staging blunders that she felt were making parts of the play incoherent. “The mechanical device used in the first act for the so-called effect of wind is infantile and in complete contradiction of the author’s avowed intention of leaving those things to the imagination of the audience and it completely dissipates the audience’s chance of understanding the refugees.” (These “refugees” were dispossessed custo-dians of civilization, Homer and the Muses—“a singing troupe!” Mrs.Antrobus complains—who sought sanctuary from the cold in Antrobus’s household.) Tallulah castigatedthe absurd effect at the end of the second act when the storm before the flood drowns out all the important lines of the play. The audience haven’t the faintest idea that Mr. Antrobus is referring to the animals when he says, “Jump up on my back, here, take the turtles in your pouch, etc.” They can’t hear him; they can’t see him; and the impression is given that he is asking the audience to come with him.
Throughout the second act, a fortune-teller tolls chilling warnings to humanity, imploring them to recognize their folly and the imminent flood threatening their survival. These were intoned by Florence Reed, a great Broadway star now playing character roles. Tallulah complained to Wilder that Reed’s “vitally important” lines at the end of the act were obscured,“and the whole end of the second act is complete chaos; a dreadful let-down for the audience; making it an up-hill fight in the third act.”
“I’m so glad to be playing comedy,” Tallulah told the Herald Tribune a few days before Skin’s November 18 opening in New York, “for comedy seems to me to be the fresh creation of the actors at every performance. . . .To me it’s a beautiful play and full of truth.”
Wilder’s script stipulated a ramp leading into the audience for the ark-like exodus from Atlantic City at the end of the second act. Myerberg had“fought like a demon” against it, Heflin recalled, because he didn’t want to lose the seats; he couldn’t bear the loss of revenue.
He proposed instead a short ramp into the center aisle. Facing the opposition of everyone else, including Isabel Wilder, Myerberg capitulated.
But when The Skin of Our Teeth moved into New York’s Plymouth Theatre for the first of two previews, the cast discovered that the ramp had been built the wrong way and had to be completely turned around. The curtain rose forty-five minutes late. The performance had been bought out by a benefit theater party, for which tickets were steeply hiked from the customary top of $3.85. The audience was angry by the time the curtain rose and even angrier when it fell. “When we took our curtain calls they shook their fists at us,” Heflin recalled. But that was of no consequence, because at the November 18 opening night, Cole recalled, the play “went like a house afire!” And when the curtain calls came raining down, the naysayers among the cast were baffled.
“Miss Bankhead is magnificent,” Lewis Nichols wrote in the New York Times. “She can strut and posture in broad comedy, she can be calmly serene.” “Her portrayal of Sabina has comedy and passion,” Freedley wrote in the New York Sun. “How she contrives both, almost at the same time, is a mystery to mere man. It is a great part and she rises to it magnificently.”
Chatelaine
“Do you know why I’ve been telling you how good I am in this part?Because I don’t think I am.”
Indications are that freak comedy is real click,” Variety reported on December 2, 1942. The Skin of Our Teeth’s box-office take was only enhanced by the outrage it continued to inspire in some quarters. Broadway reviewers had on the whole acclaimed it as a major event, but some considered it a pretentious bore. Frances Heflin recalled “a small fleet of cabs that belonged to us” pulling up to the Plymouth after the first act and after the second to accommodate disgruntled spectators.
Tallulah was feeling in the chips and could afford the generous tips she liked to bestow. “She takes good care of me,” a stage doorman told Van Patten. For Christmas she sent presents to the cast, giving Kazan a gold bill clip bearing a Saint Christopher’s medal. In Tallulah, she writes that she was later incensed to read in a newspaper profile of Kazan that he and she had not exchanged a single word after the show opened. Tallulah’s rebuttal was to reproduce in her book Kazan’s thank-you response for the gold clip.
Assuming the letter actually existed—and it is doubtful that Tallulah would have dared fabricate such a document—the letter adds another wrinkle to the contradictory accounts of their relationship.
I was very touched by your gift. I carry it around with me, like praise from someone I respect. I want to thank you for it, and while doing so, thank you for a number of things. Things that took place a number of weeks ago. Thanks for being right those times when I was completely wrong.
Thanks for having the courage, being right yourself, to battle for what you believed in—battle against inertia, and unconcern, and sometimes just plain stubbornness. And thanks above all for a thing no one can thank you for—for your gifts akin to genius. What you have added to Wilder’s play and to my production can only be reckoned one way—by sitting down and imagining what it would all have been without you.
Tallulah was onstage almost the entire play and the pace of the first two acts was punctuated by the hectic exits and entrances of farce. During the first months of the run, she was forced to fortify herself by spending as much time as possible resting in bed because she had been diagnosed with a gastric ulcer—an ailment she disdained as the property of “Hollywood agents and similar trash.” It had started to bother her in Philadelphia. She blamed Myerberg, as she had earlier blamed Billy Rose for her pneumonia during Clash by Night.
The mutual dislike between Tallulah and Florence Eldridge also flared in New York. There was “a real jealousy” between the two actresses, Van Patten recalled, “more from Eldridge.” “Florence always felt she’d been cheated onstage,” said Stephan Cole, who stage-managed the Marches in another play on Broadway in 1950.
At the conclusion of act 2, the Antrobus family flees the floods overtaking Atlantic City. To escape the deluge, the Antrobuses and Sabina ran down the ramp reaching into the center aisle of the theater and fled to the back of the auditorium. As they went into the dark at the back of the theater one night, Heflin heard words being exchanged between Tallulah and Eldridge. She caught up to them to hear Tallulah saying, “Oh, why don’t you stop being such a tight, neurotic bitch.”
From that point a competition began between the Marches and Tallulah for the affection of the two junior leads, Clift and Heflin. The Marches“were a very family-oriented group,” Heflin recalled, and she and Clift spent time with them away from the theater. “But we hung out a lot with Tallulah at the theater, so it was a little awkward. We always felt when we were sitting in the wings talking to Tallulah that Florence was eyeing us.”
Tallulah’s agent, Phil Weltman, was due to go into the service on a Monday. He had arranged for Tallulah to have dinner with him on the Saturday before, in between her matinee and evening performances. Weltman came to her shortly before act 3 was to begin. She told him as she walked to the stage that he should go into her dressing room and talk to her guest.
Weltman thought he was an out-of-work actor who’d come to ask Tallulah for a loan; his shirt was a little dingy.
“Talk to Max,” Tallulah told Weltman as she was changing after the performance. Outside the theater, Weltman expected she would say good-bye to Max. Instead she pushed both men into a waiting limousine. Weltman protested to Tallulah, “We’ve got a lot to talk about” as she took a seat between the two men.
“You two guys met, didn’t you? This is Philip Weltman; this is Lord Max Beaverbrook.” Beaverbrook had known exactly what Weltman was thinking. “I was having a little fun with you,” the magnate admitted. He had come from Washington early in the afternoon and gone straight to the Plymouth without bothering to cha
nge, because he had to fly back to England that night.
After her ulcer abated, while The Skin of Our Teeth was continuing to reward her handsomely, Tallulah began shopping for a country home that would enable her to commute to Manhattan. She settled on a low-lying white-brick Tudor Revival on the border of Bedford Village and Pound Ridge in Westchester, New York. The house was not all that distinguished, but the $25,000 price tag was modest and the setting out of a Grant Wood canvas. Bedford at that time was composed largely of estates and both recreational and working farms. Tallulah’s eighteen-acre estate was small by comparison, but bordering other estates, it provided an untrammeled view. When Vogue featured her home in July 1943, the magazine described Bedford as “the deep, almost wild country.” Today the farms are gone, but many of the estates remain. Despite waves of subdivisions, it remains one of the most spacious and idyllic pockets of Westchester.
Tallulah subsequently told Adele Whiteley Fletcher of Photoplay: Five years ago if anyone had offered me this place as a gift—and now I jolly well have to sweat for it—I would have asked, horrified, “But what can I do with it? I couldn’t possibly live in it! My friends wouldn’t travel over those icy hills in winter! I would be stranded. Oh, no! Besides, I must be close to the theater. I can’t commute for an hour and more six midnights a week.”
However, about the time her marriage to Emery was ending, she began to envision some other kind of domestic bulwark. “Growing older—I don’t mean I’m Mrs. Methusaleh—I felt the same need to walk on my own land that all the farmers I spring from always have known.” She didn’t think of it as a vacation house but as her real home, the first she’d had since leaving London in 1931. The house was blanketed with no fewer than seventy windows, but that was not, Tallulah explains in her autobiography, why she named it Windows. She intended the name as a comment on the transparency of a life lived in the public eye, perhaps ironically so, since it was this relentless exposure that the house was meant to deflect.
Tallulah! Page 42