There were five bedrooms. Hers was on the main floor next to a small bedroom where lovers were installed. Tallulah’s was decorated in tones of rose and blue to match her Augustus John portrait, the centerpiece of the room, which she placed above her fireplace. Glenn Anders recalled a chorus of warnings from him and others that the rising smoke would destroy the painting, but “you couldn’t change her mind.” The fireplace was close to her bed and she loved being able to see the portrait the moment she woke up.
Decorator Alban Conway filled the house with sensuous upholstery and draperies: French blue damask in Tallulah’s bedroom; painted white satin in the yellow-and-white dining room; tweed, velvet, and raw silk in the living room, which was furnished with walnut furniture from her Farm Street house in London.
She also began a massive landscaping effort. “Oh, she loved flowers,”said Sylvester Oglesby, who tended the house with his wife, Lillian, from 1949 until Tallulah sold the house in 1955. “We had a grape arbor; we had gorgeous flowers.” Soon after moving in, she contracted a gardener, Louis Venturi, who planted copses of dogwood and rhododendron, 150 rose-bushes, and lavish stands of peonies, daffodils, tuberoses, lilies of the val-ley, gladiolus, tulips, hyacinths, hollyhocks, and other hardy perennials.
She hoped that life in the country would lead her in new directions.
“I’d like to do something in private,” Tallulah told columnist Emily Cheney.
“I’d like to write. But let alone the talent, I haven’t got the patience to sit down and work by myself.” She did, however, take up painting and achieve some proficiency, and she also devoted time and effort to the meticulous art of flower arranging.
After moving into the house at the beginning of April 1943, she commuted daily to Manhattan for The Skin of Our Teeth. She had invited Estelle Winwood to stay with her. Winwood was appearing on Broadway in S. N.Behrman’s The Pirate, and she and Tallulah used to go back and forth to Manhattan together.
Late one night, after they’d returned from work, Tallulah built a fire and began to talk about her performance in Skin of Our Teeth. “She said, ‘It really is marvelous what I can do with this part,’ ” Winwood recalled days after Tallulah’s death in 1968. “She talked about the way she played this part for an hour.” Winwood responded by telling her, “Tallulah, the time has come when you do not have to sit down and talk for one hour about how good you are. It’s time you stopped and let other people tell you.”
Tallulah looked at Winwood quizzically, “as much to say, ‘Well you’re not very sympathetic.’ ” She lay down on the sofa. Neither spoke for a number of minutes. “Estelle,” Tallulah finally said. “Do you know why I’ve been telling you how good I am in this part?” “No, I haven’t the faintest idea.” “Because I don’t think I am.”
Winwood’s advice was good, and Tallulah’s response was insightful about the inverse relation of her bravado to her internal doubts. But Tallulah didn’t seem to want to probe further. She never sought psychiatric consultation, even though by the 1940s any stigma that attached to psycho-therapy was fast disappearing. But the prospect of abandoning her many defenses and deflections and exploring her core motivations was undoubtedly too frightening. Perhaps she shared the belief of many in her profession at that time that sorting out her personal demons would make her a less compelling figure theatrically.
Tallulah’s Sabina earned her best-actress honors from Variety and the newly formed New York Drama Critics Award. In May, The Skin of Our Teeth was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The standard Equity run-of-the-play contract expired on June 1. Tallulah wanted to take Skin on tour, but both she and Myerberg gave each other one ultimatum too many. “I’ll submit to wheedling, but never to bulldozing,” Tallulah writes in her autobiography.
She claimed the breaking point was reached when he demanded that she appear at a rehearsal between a matinee and an evening performance, which is forbidden by Equity except when special permission is granted.
The result was that she left the show when her contract expired. She was replaced first by Miriam Hopkins and then by Gladys George before Skin closed on Broadway in September.
Almost immediately after she left the play, Alfred Hitchcock contacted her with an offer to star in his latest film, Lifeboat. She jumped at the chance. She had never met the director, but she believed that his film Blackmail had vastly improved the stage production she had starred in. In Lifeboat she would play Constance Porter, a foreign correspondent adrift in a lifeboat on the Atlantic with a cross section of Allied citizenry. They’re joined by a Nazi who becomes their virtual commandant. He exploits the conflicts between them, lulling them into submission until the scales fall from their eyes and they mutiny, beating him savagely and throwing him overboard.
Tallulah’s Constance Porter “has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything,” she explained to a reporter. “She has forgotten how to be afraid of life or of death. But life in a lifeboat changes her.” Connie loses her worldly trappings as well as her arrogance and amour propre. We first see her swathed in mink and diamonds when first sitting alone in the lifeboat that she has, we might imagine, all but deigned to enter. By the time the boat is about to be rescued, she is soiled, tattered, parched, and stripped of much of her hardness and frivolity. Tallulah’s nemesis aboard is a Marxist boiler stoker played by John Hodiak. Behind their antagonism smolders a mutual attraction that ignites during their voyage.
Constance Porter is the only passenger who can converse with the Nazi in his native tongue. Tallulah was so rabidly anti-Nazi that she refused to learn her German dialogue any other way but phonetically. She went to California with Lee Strasberg’s wife, Paula, as her secretary/companion. Strasberg drilled her in her lines and she speaks them with nuanced inflection and accurate pronunciation.
Tallulah got along famously with Hitchcock. “He understood me, and understood everybody,” she told John Kobal in 1964. They both enjoyed modern art and together they toured Los Angeles’s galleries. Tallulah had a good record gauging the talent of young artists, probably in part because of her friendship with Betty Parsons, who owned one of Manhattan’s leading galleries.
As a director, Hitchcock was “wonderful,” Tallulah told a reporter. “Always calm and good-natured—not like some of them who have to bellow to let you know who the director is. When Hitch has something to say about the action, he sits down next to you and talks it over very quietly—almost in a whisper. It’s very effective. You’re never on edge when you’re working with Hitch.”
Only forty pages of the screenplay had been completed when Tallulah agreed to do the film. Jo Swerling and John Steinbeck were still working to finish the script as the production went ahead. The Detroit News visited a rehearsal late in August. “I haven’t got a shirt on,” Hodiak’s character was to rebuke Tallulah, “or a mink coat, either.” Hitchcock stopped the rehearsal. “Wouldn’t John say ‘fur coat,’ instead of mink?” he asked. Tallulah thought that the line had more punch with “mink coat.” Hitchcock asked skeptically whether “an oiler on a freighter [would] know a mink coat when he saw one?” “Of course, he would,” Tallulah replied. “He goes to the movies, doesn’t he?” Hitchcock conceded.
By this time, Tallulah’s need to expose herself had begun to result in breaches of professional etiquette. On Broadway in The Skin of our Teeth earlier that year, “she never wore underpants, she hated them,” Frances Heflin recalled. The management received letters from disgruntled patrons who had seen more of Tallulah than they wanted. Finally Equity sent down a mandate that she had to wear her underpants. Tallulah complied, but she used to take them off between scenes. “She got it into her head that they were uncomfortable, that no underpants were comfortable, so that was that.” Similar exhibitions by Tallulah on the confined set of Hitchcock’s film led to complaints that the director fielded with his much-quoted deliberation about whether the matter needed to be referred to the makeup or the hairdressing department.
In November, with a month of fi
lming still to go, Tallulah again contracted pneumonia. This time she had no one to blame except smoking and the rigors of filmmaking. When the climactic storm scene was filmed, she was dunked for eight days with thousands of gallons of water—“I’ve never seen any big-name star take such punishment,” Lifeboat’s cinematographer Glen MacWilliams told the press. She was treated with sulfa drugs and, jelly-legged, returned to the set too soon; after three days of filming her temperature was again stratospheric. But she was determined at all costs to get back to Windows. She had already made a reservation on the Super Chief train back to New York and was unwilling to face the inevitable wartime delay in booking another. After wobbling through the final days of shooting, Tallulah managed to make it home to New York safely.
In January 1944, Lifeboat opened nationwide to excellent reviews and business. It was an ensemble piece rather than a starring vehicle, but Tallulah’s performance came in for its fair share of acclaim. The New York Post said that she “comes into her own on the screen in this picture . . . is supremely assured and appealing.” Later that year, Tallulah received the New York Film Critics Circle Award for her performance.
“I did love Lifeboat,” Tallulah told Kobal, “and I liked my performance, thanks to Hitchcock.” Tallulah’s diction in the film is quite different than in her films of a decade earlier, displaying more of a slow gravitas that was perhaps born in The Little Foxes. She took pains to capture the character, and convincingly mans a newsreel camera and a typewriter, but on-screen the role seems closer to Tallulah’s public persona than she wished it to be.
“I told him, ‘Don’t make me say Darling, they’ll say I’m playing myself,’ ”
Tallulah recalled to Kobal. Hitchcock wanted as much Tallulah in her impersonation as possible, perhaps to capitalize on the incongruity of so glamorous a creature stranded in a storm-tossed dinghy. “I figured that trying to anticipate what Tallulah might do next would keep audiences in suspense for an hour and a half,” he told actor Joseph Cotten.
The film also aroused controversy: it was accused of abetting the enemy cause by exposing the foibles and pettiness of the Allied representatives peopling the boat. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times wrote that“we have a sneaking suspicion that the Nazis, with some cutting here and there, could turn ‘Lifeboat’ into a whiplash against the ‘decadent democracies.’ And it is questionable whether such a picture, with such a theme, is judicious at this time.” The Writers’ War Board awarded it “four duds,” and branded it “a credo of German super-intelligence and of the degeneracy of the democratic peoples.”
To be sure, the criticism of Lifeboat as subversive was jingoistic hysteria. For it is a sham hegemony that the German musters. Yes, he is exceptionally competent, disguising that he is fluent in English until his prey are too enervated to care that he’s understood every word they’ve spoken about him. But he is able to subdue the boat’s inhabitants not because he belongs to a master race, but because he has secreted vitamin tablets and water that let him keep rowing as those around him grow weak with thirst and hunger.
What may have rankled many was the critique of capitalism throughout the film. Henry Hull plays Charles D. Rittenhouse, a captain of industry who embodies the greed and provincialism, as well as the plucky amiability, of a self-made American titan. Tallulah’s Connie Porter is an emblem of the best and worst of capitalism. She also is a self-made woman, but she rose from the South Side of Chicago with the aid of a rich paramour.
Otis L. Guernsey Jr. of the New York Herald Tribune took Tallulah to lunch to discuss the controversy early in February. Was the German too suave, too attractive? “For heaven’s sake, anyone would be distrustful of one of those whip-cracking, snarling von Stroheim types!” she retorted.
And the bickering between the lifeboat inhabitants, she declared, was deliberately intended to criticize the behavior of the Allies. “That’s just what happened in Europe. . . . Of course if we can’t face the truth about ourselves it’s just too bad, that’s all!”
In the final scene of the film, the lifeboat survivors witness the sinking of the U-boat to which their teapot fuhrer was rowing them. A young survivor of the downed ship hauls himself into the boat and pulls out a gun, which Connie swiftly seizes. At the film’s conclusion the audience is unsure whether this one will be thrown back to the sharks. Guernsey asked, was the scene meant to imply that the Allies would be hoodwinked all over again? No, Tallulah said. It “just shows that there’s no satisfactory answer to, ‘What will we do with them after the war?’ Do you want to match their brutality with brutality? Is America fighting for that—to kill them all when they’re finally defenseless?”
By the mid-1940s, however, Tallulah’s increasingly garrulous and dom-ineering sessions with the press rarely produced coherence of the kind she had supplied Guernsey. Furthermore, her credibility about political affairs was compromised by her impulsive and indiscriminate epithet spewing.
Among the smears that dropped too glibly from her mouth the dreaded Communist figured prominently. At a large press conference that winter to discuss Lifeboat, Tallulah turned nasty after being introduced to a reporter from PM, branding the daily paper a “vicious” and “dangerous” rag.
“For God’s sake, Tallulah, what kind of talk is that?” shot back a Collier’s staffer. “I thought you were a liberal. That’s what PM is. . . .” No, Tallulah insisted, PM was “a dirty Communist sheet.” But Tallulah’s real beef with the daily was apparently much more personal. “And if I ever get my hands on that Bob Rice . . .” Tallulah vowed to all present. In 1942, Rice had written a profile of Tallulah for PM that hadn’t pleased her. She eventually quieted down, telling the PM reporter that she reminded her of a close friend, but insisting, as always, on the last word: “She committed suicide.”
Work and Play
“If it’s possible to be happy with a movie camera in one’s face, I’m happy.”
Eugenia Bankhead and her then husband William Sprouse had adopted a son in 1942. During the war, Eugenia moved to Aunt Marie’s farm in Alabama, which she converted into a boardinghouse for servicemen and their wives. At one point thirteen children and their parents were living with her. Her husband at the time was overseas. One day in the spring of 1944, Tallulah phoned Eugenia in Alabama, “a little on the high side,” Eugenia claimed, although Tallulah was still officially on her wartime wagon. Tallulah asked Eugenia what she was doing. “I’m drinking a mint julep,” Eugenia told her. “Oh, you’re drinking one, too,” said Tallulah. “Who makes your mint juleps? I bet I make better ones than you do.”
She invited Eugenia to visit Windows and said she wanted to see Eugenia’s adopted son, Billy, “I thought this was a little late to want to see him,” Eugenia recalled, because he was now two and a half, but she decided to accept Tallulah’s offer. When Eugenia and son disembarked at the Bedford Hills train station, Tallulah came on strong. “I ran to her,” Eugenia recalled, “and started to speak and she said, ‘Ssssh!’ ” as if there were eavesdropping hordes surrounding them. But Eugenia claimed that nobody was near. Tallulah’s deep voice prompted the title “sir” from her nephew. “He called her that until he could say ‘sister.’ ”
She steered them to a black Cadillac limousine and, as they drove the few miles to Tallulah’s, stopped at a store in Bedford Village and bought a great stash of toys for Billy. One of them was a miniature croquet set, with which he subsequently discharged an errant pitch toward Tallulah, who was reading on a sofa in her living room.
Eugenia heard a crash and a scream and came running. Billy was in tears and Tallulah clutching her nose. “It’s all right, darling!” Tallulah called to the boy. “The bastard broke my nose!” she muttered to Eugenia while urging her nephew to “Go out and play, Billy, darling. Sister’s all right, run out and play.”
Eugenia took her to the hospital, where it was confirmed that Tallulah’s nose had been broken slightly, not enough to change its appearance. “Well, I heard about that for a long time, to
o,” Eugenia said. “But she was awfully sweet with him when he was a baby.” Tallulah remained a devoted aunt to Billy for the rest of her life. David Herbert recalled her “talking along about Billy all the time. One felt in a way that she wished Billy was hers.”
Tallulah was back in Hollywood in the summer of 1944, portraying Catherine the Great in the film A Royal Scandal, based on the 1922 Broadway hit The Czarina. Edward Sheldon had adapted it from the Hungarian original of Melchior Lengyel and Lajos Biro. Ernst Lubitsch was going to produce and direct. One of the screen’s greatest stylists and auteurs, Lubitsch had filmed a silent version of the play with Pola Negri in 1924. Although this boudoir farce was set in a specific Russian time and place, it might as well have been the fictional Middle European kingdom of Ruritania, a staple of operetta and drama to which Lubitsch was returning for the first time since The Merry Widow in 1934. Since then he had been concentrating on urban and contemporary settings.
The screenplay followed Sheldon’s play quite closely. Chancellor Nikolai Ivanovich dances attendance on Catherine while pulling lots of strings behind her back, not without her peripheral awareness and even tacit approval. Catherine’s young lady-in-waiting Countess Anna is engaged to a subaltern, Alexei. He deserts his regiment and breaks into the Winter Palace to warn Catherine of seditious plans being hatched in the military and in the palace. In gratitude and in lust, she makes him captain of the palace guard, and he quickly forgets about Anna. Alexei is in a swivet of reform fever, but he becomes disillusioned when he realizes that Catherine is far more interested in him as a bedroom firebrand than a political one. Now he resorts to his own insurrection against her, but he is foiled by the chancellor. Catherine pardons Alexei, who is reconciled with Anna, because she has moved on to a dashing ambassador from France whom the chancellor has been trying to introduce her to all through the picture.
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