Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Lubitsch wanted to film in Technicolor, but said that color cameras were unavailable because so many had been loaned to the War Department. Not long before work was due to begin, Lubitsch suffered a heart attack. He decided to cede the direction to Otto Preminger, whose Laura was filling theaters across the country. Lubitsch remained the film’s producer and took a codirecting credit. Tallulah and Preminger had known each other since 1938, when he was directing on Broadway. Tallulah had heard that his family, who were Austrian Jews, were not going to be allowed to resettle in the U.S. because of emigration quotas. She asked her father to intervene and he did, successfully, earning Tallulah Preminger’s eternal loyalty.

  Work was scheduled to begin in late July. Charles Coburn was cast as the chancellor, but was suddenly recalled to an earlier studio commitment.

  They debated replacing him, but “there was only one answer,” said Tallulah, “because there is only one Coburn. And of course, you know, he’ll steal every scene from me,” she said, sighing ironically to Elizabeth Wilson of Silver Screen.

  This occasioned more delay, now a six-week hiatus. Tallulah visited wounded serviceman in local hospitals and took tennis lessons in the morning from ex-champion Bill Tilden, whom she’d known since London.

  In the afternoon she took driving lessons, and earned the first license she’d had since moving back to the U.S.

  Onstage Tallulah was still being called more beautiful than ever, yet on-screen the years of abuse were beginning to become visible on her face. She had always felt the presence of a movie camera intrusive, confessing to Preminger that it terrified her. She was convinced that her right profile was far inferior to her left. Preminger, in his 1977 autobiography, agrees: “One profile looked like Tallulah but the other like a completely different person.”

  Arthur C. Miller, one of 20th Century-Fox’s leading cameramen, was“a humorous little man who had once been a jockey,” Preminger writes. He installed a hoax light on his camera right over the lens. “I have invented this light especially for you,” he told Tallulah. “In fact, we will call it the‘Bankhead.’ It will make you look marvelous. You have nothing to worry about—just relax.”

  “If it’s possible to be happy with a movie camera in one’s face,” Tallulah told Wilson, “I’m happy.”

  Not long after A Royal Scandal began shooting with Tallulah, Lubitsch came to Preminger with news that Garbo had told him that she wanted to play Catherine. He insisted that Tallulah would have to be bought off so that Garbo could take her place. Preminger would have been thrilled to direct the film that lured Garbo out of retirement. But betraying Tallulah was out of the question.

  It is puzzling why Lubitsch was so insistent, since Garbo was not the obvious choice for a comic role. But Lubitsch had directed her in Ninotchka and was probably the single director who could have coaxed another great comedic performance out of her.

  But the front offices turned thumbs down on Lubitsch’s impulse. Tallulah, who had never been a movie star, had just appeared in a success, while Garbo, one of the screen’s greatest stars, had followed the flop of Two-Faced Woman in 1941 with three years’ inactivity. Preminger writes that Lubitsch was so bitter over the studio’s rejection of Garbo that he began to find Tallulah’s presence noxious and to treat her cavalierly.

  Alexei was played by William Eythe, who was then a juvenile on the rise, a good-looking and slightly kooky cub. His friend Lon McCallister recalled in 1993 that “Bill said she was a wonderful, giving, brilliant actress to play opposite. He loved the whole experience of working with her.”

  Anne Baxter was in a less enviable position, playing Tallulah’s lady-in-waiting and love rival. One day Preminger returned from lunch to find Tallulah stretched out on the floor in her tent sobbing with rage. Her costume was in a heap in a corner. She told him that Lubitsch had visited her after seeing the “rushes” that day and accused her of stealing a scene from Baxter, deliberately distracting the viewer’s attention by closing her eyes while Baxter was speaking. Preminger hadn’t seen any evidence of undercutting on Tallulah’s part during the shoot; in fact, he had directed her to close her eyes at that particular moment.

  Tallulah repeated to Preminger the vitriolic response she’d given Lubitsch and insisted that she was going right to Darryl Zanuck, returning her salary and walking off the film. Preminger persuaded her to calm down and blamed Lubitsch’s behavior on his illness. He asked Tallulah to apologize for her outburst and she did exactly that, humbly proffering to Lubitsch an olive branch, which he accepted without, however, apologizing for his accusation.

  Baxter’s uncle was the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. One day Wright decided to visit the set. “Get that monster out of here” were Tallulah’s first words to Preminger when she saw him that day. She impugned Wright’s right-wing politics in the ripest language and said she would not work while he was on the set. Preminger cleverly worked out a compromise.

  Rather than actually film a scene, Tallulah and Baxter would rehearse it, which they did some twenty-five times, until Wright got bored and left, and Preminger could finally go ahead and shoot the scene.

  A Royal Scandal opened in March 1945. Crowther in the New York Times said that despite Tallulah’s “valiant efforts to fan the comic spirit,” it was “oddly dull and witless.” Indeed the film’s reviews were unfairly derisive. There is wit and humor in the story and the dialogue, but the problem with A Royal Scandal is that it attempted to revive an outdated genre. An ornately stylized Ruritania—there are only a few fleeting exterior shots—had now become too airless for the World War II American audience.

  In Tallulah, she says that the now penitential Lubitsch had told her that her Catherine was “the greatest comedy performance he had ever seen on the screen. Otto Preminger . . . can so testify under oath.” If Lubitsch did indeed say this, he was certainly exaggerating, but Tallulah does give as glittering a display of comic virtuosity as could be imagined, ranging from knockabout farce to rarefied high comedy. She integrates all the different technical and stylistic engines at her command into a purring consistency.

  Much as she liked Preminger, Tallulah realized that the nimbleness of the famed “Lubitsch touch” was not in Preminger’s arsenal. Years later, she told John Kobal that if Lubitsch had directed the film it could have confirmed her viability as a movie star, which Tallulah knew was tenuous.

  She was willing in both Hitchcock’s and Preminger’s films to share above-the-title billing, something she was no longer doing on Broadway. It’s true that A Royal Scandal suffered from Lubitsch’s absence. But Tallulah was now forty-three, and as good as she looks in A Royal Scandal, she does not look any younger than her years. Leading screen roles for women of forty-plus were just as scarce then as they are now.

  When the picture was finished, Miller gathered the crew together and they ceremoniously presented Tallulah with the “Bankhead,” so she could use it in all her films. They wondered how she would react the next time she faced the cameras, when their ruse would surely have become clear to her.

  But Tallulah’s rude awakening never came, because as it turned out, A Royal Scandal was the last time she appeared before the cameras as leading lady.

  Flights of Fancy

  “You don’t know what I’ll do for a laugh.”

  For twenty-five years, Tallulah had vowed never to work for the Theatre Guild after she had been tricked into rehearsing for Heartbreak House until the Guild’s first choice became available. Soon after she got back to New York, however, she renounced her vow when the Guild offered her a play tailor-made by Philip Barry. Foolish Notion blended Barry’s long expertise with drawing-room comedy and his intermittent flirtations with mysticism and the furtive workings of the human psyche. It provided Tallulah bravura displays of versatility, yet in some ways the play was almost biographical. She played a glamorous theatrical star, Sophie Wing, whose entire world is theatrical. Her father, Horatio, is a professor emeritus of dramatic literature. Her adopted twelve-year-old d
aughter, Happy, is studying at drama school.

  After shipping out to Europe to support the Allied cause five years earlier, Sophie’s husband, Jim, is listed missing and presumed dead by all but his daughter. Sophie is about to leave with Gordon Roark, her lover and leading man, for a tour of South America, where they are to be married.

  Sophie’s maid brings in a cryptic phone message: Jim will finally be arriving home that evening with a certain “Flora.” Four dream sequences follow over the following two acts as Gordon, Horatio, Happy, and Sophie each imagine how Jim’s return might play out. Flora is a cipher, and each one shapes her according to his or her own hopes and fears. Barry had named his play after a line from Robert Burns’s “To a Louse on Seeing One Upon a Lady’s Bonnet in Church”: “O wad some power the Giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us. It wad frae monie a blunde free us an foolish notion.”

  The cast had already been rehearsing for ten days—and the Theatre Guild would have to negotiate with Equity to allow a firing this late into rehearsals—when Tallulah decided conclusively that she could not warm to the girl playing her daughter. Twelve-year-old Joan Shepard was brought in to replace her.

  Philip Barry was then forty-nine, five years from his death, but already wearing the earmarks of heavy drinking and high blood pressure.

  He looked to Shepard like he was about to burst at all times and particularly when he was upset about anything—which he was frequently during the preparation of Foolish Notion. Shepard saw how much Tallulah wanted the play to be a success and to be clear to the audience; amid the flashbacks and the multiple personae of the characters, there was a danger of confusion. Jack Wilson was directing. Wilson’s entrée into the theater had been his affair with Noël Coward, but he had by now begun to direct as well as produce successfully. He certainly was more experienced than he’d been as titular director for Tallulah’s summer 1941revival of Her Cardboard Lover. Nevertheless, Wilson directed Foolish Notion “in a mild sort of way,” recalled Shepard, who appreciated his suggestions to her about comedy timing and about maintaining stage reality. But what did this in the script mean? Tallulah would ask Wilson.

  What was the motivation? And if he couldn’t answer her she’d ricochet her question back to Barry, with whom she was “constantly at loggerheads,” Shepard said. “But it was kind of friendly loggerheads. They plainly liked each other but they were always dueling.” But there were frequent “lovey-dovey moments, typically theater-people-hugging-each-other moments.”

  Foolish Notion received its world premiere on February 2, 1945, in New Haven. The Shubert was packed for the three-performance run, but notices were lukewarm. “Bone.” in Variety complained that “Barry has gone off the deep end in expressing himself via fact and fancy. That the plunge has taken him into hot water was evidenced by the mixed reception accorded the play’s premiere. With proper revision, he can extricate himself to the extent of delivering a worthwhile box office and literary contribution.”

  From there they went to Boston. A few minutes before their second performance there, Shepard and Tallulah were talking onstage. “Did you see ’em?” Tallulah asked. “Did you see the reviews?”

  “Of course,” Shepard said proudly.

  “Well, how do you feel?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Did you see that one that said ‘Little Miss Shepard does some scene-stealing that Miss Bankhead wouldn’t take from an actress just a few years older’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, they’re goddamn right!”

  During another performance, Shepard was sitting onstage next to Tallulah when she suddenly felt her leg tingling and then felt the tingling turn to a strange pain. She looked down at her lap and saw a tiny circle of flame: Tallulah had accidentally set her dress on fire with a lit cigarette.

  Tallulah saw it the same moment and began patting out the flame as they continued with their stage dialogue, Tallulah whispering between lines, that it was “all right, baby, I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about it. It’s okay, it’s all right.” When they went off stage, Tallulah was contrite and next day gave Shepard a lavish present.

  A portrait of Jim hung on the imaginary “fourth wall.” Before each fantasy, the controlling character sat facing his portrait, thereby facing the audience. The audience could see the actual picture, however, because it was reflected in a mirror over the fireplace center stage. The entrance of characters walking backward reminded the audience that another fantasy was in place. In the first, Gordon sees himself as the outsider, watching Sophie and Jim in the first flush of connubial happiness. Jim comes home tipsy, Sophie takes him to bed, and there’s nothing Gordon can do about it.

  Then, in Horatio’s dream, Jim comes back to set Sophie free to marry Gordon as Horatio would like her to. Happy’s dream reveals her anxiety about her father’s being usurped. Sophie and Gordon appear as cartoon malefactors, plotting to rub out Jim. In Sophie’s dream she confronts her conscience, in the form of rival actress Lily Spring, a grande dame who reproaches her for not being a better wife and a better actress. “We never seriously competed,” Lily tells Sophie. “I am an actress, while you are—what do they call it?—a personality.”

  Sophie fires back:

  Writers, sculptors, painters, actors—we’re all the same—interpreters—and of the same of thing—of life! And if, while you’re actually being Lady Macbeth—Phèdre—Roxane—what you will—I’m still just Sophie Wing, the personality again. Maybe I’m a spot or two closer to life than you are.

  In Sophie’s fantasy, Jim has been killed, and his “return” means only that his ashes are presented to Sophie in an urn. She grieves over it in a parody of the tragic grand manner that Lily Spring might be famous for. She shreds rose petals before it, loosens her hair, and lets it fall over the urn.

  Finally Jim returns for real. He tells them that he’d enlisted because he knew Sophie and Gordon were in love even before they did. And he is in love with Happy’s governess, Florence, who had been only seventeen when he shipped out. Having now to some extent each confronted his or her fears, Sophie and her family are able to resume their lives on the most satisfactory of notes.

  Throughout rehearsals, the cast was aware that the last scene of Jim’s homecoming was flawed. It was murky; it was—after all those speculations and projections—somehow anticlimactic. The Boston Globe’s Elliot Norton, who admired the play, nonetheless warned audiences they would find the final scene “thoroughly bewildering.”

  “Barry is working continually on that last scene, which is quite a problem,” Tallulah told a Boston reporter. In Baltimore, Barry gave up his sleep to put it right, as did Tallulah and her party of guests. “We’d had a great evening with Tallulah,” recalled her cousin Charles Crow, who was then doing a residency at Johns Hopkins. “We’d been up all night, drinking and having a wonderful time,” and everyone present debated possible last-act revisions.

  The next day Barry handed the cast a new version. Tallulah read through a few of the new lines and immediately flung the pages to the floor. “I will not say that!” she bellowed. One line that provoked her: something was described “as queer as Dick’s hatband,” which was a British archaism. Nobody would know what the hell she was talking about, Tallulah growled. Barry’s play was already adorned with esoteric literary references.

  In his autobiography, the Guild’s Lawrence Langner writes that Barry“could match Tallulah with his own brand of temperament.” This was certainly not the first time Barry had worked under such pressure—his greatest popular success, The Philadelphia Story, had been radically revised during out-of-town tryouts. When Barry got agitated his face flushed, and on the afternoon that he presented the new pages to Tallulah, it went all the way to crimson. A blood vessel in his nose burst and he was taken to Johns Hopkins.

  Foolish Notion moved to Washington, where Tallulah creatively explained away Barry’s absence. “Poor darling, he’s in the hospital with his sinus,” she told a reporter, and of
fered soothing words to hasten his return.

  “It’s a rare, extraordinary play,” she said. “It recognizes the war, of course, but it’s still not a war play. It’s escapist, but it faces facts. I just adore the author, adore his mind, his work. Everything he does is so civilized.”

  In Washington, Tallulah came down with a virus, but told Langner not to worry because “the curious thing about me, darling, is that I give my best performances when I am slightly ill, because then my diaphragm is not quite so powerful.” Presumably, in her weakened state, Tallulah was less prone to overstatement. She was traveling with Dola Cavendish, who called Langner and said that Tallulah had awakened feeling fine but was craving chicken for her midafternoon breakfast. Locating a fowl in wartime Washington was not as easy as it sounds, but one was produced. “Tallulah ate it for breakfast,” writes Langner, “and thereupon behaved like an angel, accepting her new lines without comment, and played out the Washington engagement in the most beautiful manner.”

  Foolish Notion opened March 13 at the Martin Beck Theater in New York. A $200,000 advance sale allowed the play to survive critical notices that were again disparaging. In the New York Times, Lewis Nichols wrote that only Tallulah could have made many of Barry’s “rag-tag, bob-tail notions about life, love, truth and beauty stand up in a dramatic structure. . . . The scenes forsake her, as they shuttle back and forth between fancy and fact.She never forsakes a scene. Her performance is a veritable triumph of the season.”

  Richard P. Cooke wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Tallulah “looks and is magnificent,” likening the dazzle she emitted in her clinging, be-plumed, be-trained Mainbocher gowns to the aurora borealis. Barnes in the Herald Tribune wrote that, “She brings such radiance and feeling to the part of the tortured woman who has made a compact with destiny, and has to make it all over again, that the piece has genuine fascination.” A dissenting note was sounded by Robert Garland, who wrote in the New York Journal American: “She is my favorite actress. To me, she can do no wrong. . . .