Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  But whisper it not around Longacre Square, but Tallulah goes a little bit ham on her customers.”

  Mildred Dunnock played Sophie’s rival Lily Spring. One night Dunnock and Shepard were sitting in the wings when Dunnock told her, “You think Miss Bankhead is great. But she really isn’t. She is not a real actress.She is just a personality, and you would be very unwise to copy her.”

  Dunnock got up for her scene, and Shepard noticed that Rose Riley was sitting behind her. Riley must have gone straight to Tallulah, because while Tallulah usually “gave the stage to Millie,” during their scene, at the following day’s matinee, she “walked all over her,” Shepard recalled. “She let Millie say her lines, but just said, ‘I’ll show you who’s an actress!’ ”

  Things returned to normal at the following performance, and Dunnock and Tallulah subsequently became quite good friends.

  In Donald Cook, who played her lover Gordon, Tallulah had found one of her most simpatico leading men. He had starred in Barry’s first big success, Paris Bound, in 1927, and his comic timing was as masterly as Tallulah’s.

  “You’d think, ‘Oh, my God, he’s waiting too long to say this line,’ ” Dick Van Patten recalled, “and then he would just lay it into the audience and get the laugh.”

  Estelle Winwood’s husband, Robert Henderson, recalled that “Tallulah always said that with leading men it should be from the bed to the stage,”and Cook felt the same way about his leading ladies. Glenn Anders, who lived at Windows during several dry spells in his career during the 1940s, recalled deciding one day to thaw out Tallulah’s industrial-size refrigerator.

  “It had gotten bad,” he said, in part because of the frequent pandemonium of Tallulah’s lifestyle. Friends might arrive unexpectedly, prompting Tallulah to yell to the cook to chill a bottle of Burgundy or champagne, which might freeze and then be put back in the refrigerator, or crack when left untended if the new arrivals didn’t stay for dinner. Amid all the thawed and frozen potables and victuals, Anders thought with a laugh that “I’m sure I’m going to find Donald Cook down here somewhere.”

  Shepard had already worked with many leading ladies and found they had very sharp elbows when it came to children and the audience responding to them. But Tallulah used her eyes, her movement, her face, her hands to make Shepard feel mothered. “She gave you from herself,” she recalled, in a way that she said very few actors, including some very fine ones, were able to do. Offstage as well, Tallulah was solicitous and involved. Her dressing room was always open to Shepard, and she attended the girl’s graduation from the Professional Children’s School, held at City Center.

  Tallulah received a share of Foolish Notion’s profits and she realized that the better the show was the more successful she was. “She wanted everybody to get all their laughs,” said Shepard. “She was a fiend about it.If you missed a laugh, she wanted to know why,” she recalled. “She’d call you into her dressing room and say, ‘Look, what’s happening here?’ ”

  Despite Tallulah’s vigilance, grosses slipped by the beginning of June, but Foolish Notion was still turning a profit when it closed that month after thirteen weeks in New York. Rather than prolonging the play through the hot weather, in those days when not all theaters were air conditioned, Tallulah preferred to sit out the summer at Windows. She would return to the play in September, when they would embark on an extensive tour, and in the meantime, Barry would have time to do some rewriting. When the cast convened to rehearse at the Guild’s town house on West Fifty-third Street, Barry had not only produced a new and improved third act, but had made quite a few line changes throughout the play.

  During the New York run, Tallulah had announced that she was staying on the wagon for the duration of the war, and as far as Shepard could see, that was true. But no sooner was peace declared than Tallulah picked up right where she’d left off. “There was a little personality change there,”Shepard recalled. “She wasn’t quite as attentive and loving.” One evening, Tallulah, Cook, and company manager Peter Davies returned from a dinner break in rehearsals happily bombed. Drinking during working hours struck Shepard as “a great sin,” and she was very disapproving at seeing Tallulah falling giddily over Davies.

  For the tour, John Emery replaced Henry Hull as Sophie’s husband, Jim. He and Tallulah seemed to Shepard to be on excellent terms. There were lots of all-day trips from city to city. The company commandeered its own railroad car, with Tallulah occupying the drawing room at one end.

  Eugenia also joined up with Tallulah from time to time. They seemed to be getting along famously, and the fact that Eugenia brought her son was perhaps a factor in their comity. Tallulah told Shepard to call Eugenia “sister,”and Eugenia and Tallulah were happy that Shepard got along with Billy.

  Tamara Geva—now Mrs. Emery—also joined the tour at some points, drinking and playing cards with Tallulah, Emery, and Cook.

  Foolish Notion opened in Wilmington on September 14, 1945, beginning a cross-country tour that lasted five months. The tour was phenome-nally successful, perhaps in part because the script was better, but it scored land-office business even in cities that disliked the play. In Philadelphia, the second of a two-week run grossed “an amazing $29,000,” Variety reported, “the kind of figure generally associated with musicals” [for which prices are higher and theaters bigger] despite many tickets already sold at discount because the play had been included in a Guild subscription series.

  Russell McLaughlin in the Detroit News wrote on October 16 that“Miss Bankhead is popularly believed to be playing ‘herself’ as the actress.”

  That was “nonsense,” for he considered her “a woman of the greatest and most polished professional skill who could play the Mona Lisa as convincingly as she could a tempestuous, temperamental star.”

  Over the length of the tour, Tallulah continued to maintain her own performance and everyone else’s, too. “She cared for the production,”Shepard said. “She was determined.” She warned Shepard in the middle of the tour about garbling her lines, a common pitfall during a long run. On Tallulah’s forty-fourth birthday, January 31, 1946, Shepard presented her with a poem incorporating remarks Tallulah had said to various members of the cast and crew. One stanza read: “Joan your talk is so garbled now /We cannot hear a word you say / The audience complains and how / Do better at the matinee.” They played more than twenty cities, including four weeks in Chicago and two weeks each in San Francisco and Los Angeles, before closing in San Diego on February 24, 1946.

  A year after World War II ended, musical-comedy star Dorothy Dickson, a friend of Tallulah’s from her Algonquin days, visited the U.S. from London and was Tallulah’s guest at Windows. “Miss Dickson hasn’t eaten any good food in years,” Tallulah told her cook. “Which was true,” Dickson laughed, in 1982. “ ‘She must have lobster; she must have this and this and that.’

  Oh, I was the guest,” Dickson recalled. “I was the one.”

  One night, Tallulah started to ask Dickson about London during the war. “Now living here, and going through what one went, you couldn’t be a bomb bore. No one could tell a bomb story, because it was happening to everyone.” But Tallulah not only wanted to hear every one of Dickson’s own experiences, but those of many other people Tallulah had known in London. “All night long Tallulah was asking me. ‘Ohhh, God . . . Go on, yes. And how about this?’ and then be quiet. She really cared, and I never got over how moved I was.”

  Dickson was disconcerted on that visit by Tallulah’s dogged attention to televised baseball (which was probably no more intense than the average American male’s, although unusual in women of the time). “I’d look at it a bit and I admire anyone who’s successful at anything—big chaps doing something marvelous—but she would sit for hours and hours. I thought,‘How odd.’ ”

  As Tallulah reached middle age, she was more than ever frightened of solitude. Cole felt that depression beset her whenever she was alone. At Windows, she built a sixty-by-twenty-foot pool and plied it
as a lure to attract visitors. Yet she used her staff to buffer her in a cocoonlike environment in which she was sustained by her passionate interests, baseball among them. Cole believed that Tallulah had inherited from her father an enormous curiosity about the world. But he saw, too, a corresponding las-situde that he chalked up to good old Southern sloth. He told the story of Tallulah once coming home alone to her hotel apartment with a new dress from Hattie Carnegie’s. She proceeded to try it on but found herself unable to undo the complicated fastenings. She wound up going to sleep in the gown and ruining it.

  If Tallulah wasn’t working, Cole recalled, she preferred not to make the rounds of chic nightspots. She was in her soul so competitive and insecure that public life was difficult for her, despite her impeccable deportment on many occasions, her salty bluster on many others, and the disruptive social dysfunction that set in especially when she was drunk.

  Weeks after The Skin of Our Teeth opened on Broadway in 1942, Cole had shipped out to Europe as part of the American Field Service. After returning in 1945, he spent a lot of time at Windows with her. Together they hiked, picked flowers, and spent hours reading by the pool. She hired a young black man, Robert Williams, to drive for her and to cook, but she continued to drive herself around Westchester. Cole was predictably dismissive. “Everybody claimed, ‘Oh, she’s a wonderful driver.’ It frightened the hell out of me.” She was somewhere around five-three and her height placed her too far below the wheel for his comfort. Her driving wasn’t reckless, but she kept turning to look at him as they talked, something she would never permit her drivers to do.

  Once, while Cole was driving Tallulah and Estelle in a rented car, Tallulah persisted in criticizing his driving until finally he pulled over, got out, and hitchhiked home. “I have no idea what they did,” he said. “It was never discussed again, and I never called,” he insisted. “She called me. ‘Aren’t we going to play bridge tonight?’ ”

  At times, their relationship took on a graphically parent-child dynamic. He recalled an occasion when she was at her dressing table in Windows and “said something I didn’t like.”

  “I’ve told you not to talk to me like that, Tallulah.”

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  “I took her by the hair of her head, put her over my knee, and gave her a good spanking.” Cole employed the smooth back of Tallulah’s gold Cartier hairbrush while she cried, “You son of a bitch! I’ll never speak to you again!”

  “She was so taken by surprise she didn’t know what to do,” he said.

  She fell on her bed and “tried to cry; when that didn’t work, she locked herself in the bathroom.” But “it was all over in two minutes. Her feelings were hurt; she didn’t really mind the spanking.”

  Tallulah ran her household along the lines established in the South, where house slaves and later domestic servants enjoyed the luxury of being treated if not as equals, then as companions rather than factotums, with the right to define their roles and even talk back to their white employers.

  Behind closed doors, Tallulah returned to the symbols and patterns of her upbringing. One night at Windows, Cole noted her absence and thought she had gone to bed. Suddenly there was a knock at the door . . . “I opened it and there was a colored mammy outside: ‘Aahs heah to see Mistuh Cole. He says he’s white, but he’s half colored.’ ” It was Tallulah, made up with shoe polish and a great big puffed out stomach. “Oh, she was funny! And she went on and on and I was red all over.”

  Tallulah “was just like a friend of ours,” said Sylvester Oglesby, who began working at Windows with his wife Lillian in 1949. “She was a nice lady; she was just hot-tempered. You know I used to get a vacation practically every month or so. Miss Bankhead and I would have a fallin’ out, something I did or something she did or something she said. And I’d be talkin’ about quittin’. Then she’d give us a week off and her car. And we’d wait awhile, and then back there again, we started up again.”

  Tallulah indeed was prone to asking her servants to join the festivities.

  One weekend, Anton Dolin had driven to Windows with a sixteen-year-old nephew. William Skipper, the Denishawn dancer who had met Tallulah in 1939 when he delivered her photo proofs, was driving Beatrice Lillie up after her show let out. Skipper and Lillie arrived at 2:00 A.M. to find Windows lit up like a Christmas tree and the phonograph going full blast.

  Skipper was astounded when a friend of his opened the door: Lou, an actress in between engagements, had begun working as a cook at Windows just a week earlier. Tallulah, Dolin, and his nephew came to the door and found them in a tight embrace. Lou was told to instruct Robert Williams, to finish cooking dinner himself. Williams “had been trained for years to expect almost anything,” and was unflustered. Tallulah insisted that Lou sit down with the guests and a cocktail and explain exactly how she and Skipper knew each other.

  As often happens with celebrities, sometimes Tallulah also blurred the boundaries between friends and retainers. She paid Glenn Anders’s expenses during the many months he lived at Windows. Yet in his telling, the relationship was quid pro quo. “I did an awful lot of talking for her. I remember she made me do a lot of talking for her.”

  Once Tallulah was expecting three representatives from a major agency, which was trying to woo her away from William Morris. She told Anders she wanted him to be there, and when they arrived for lunch, it was he who went out to their car to greet them. Eventually Tallulah came downstairs and they settled down to lunch on her porch while Anders went back to his own affairs. He was walking downstairs just as Tallulah was entering the kitchen to tell her cook something. Apparently she wasn’t pleased with the agents’ pitch, and Anders found himself in the firing line of her irritation. Tallulah “came at me like a tigress,” Anders recalled,“bouncing at me and grabbed me and smashed me against the wall. ‘Goddammit! You have more integrity than anybody I know! Goddammit!’ ”

  Bested by Brando

  “If I have my history right, it is the heretics, the nonconformists, the iconoclasts who have enriched our lives, added both to our knowledge, our progress, and our happiness.”

  Tallulah met Marlon Brando on the opening night of I Remember Mama in October 1944. She had gone backstage to congratulate Mady Christians, who played the title role and was a friend of hers.

  Brando, then twenty, had played Christians’s fifteen-year-old son. Tallulah invited him to visit Windows. “Don’t go,” warned Christians. “She will just chase you through every room in that house.” “Don’t worry; I can take care of myself,” Brando replied, and he did spend an amorous weekend at Windows.

  Two years later, Edie Van Cleve, who was Brando’s agent at MCA and an informal adviser to Tallulah as well, recommended he play opposite her in Jean Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads, which Tallulah had selected for the 1946–47 season. Despite her expostulations against the Group Theatre during Clash by Night, Tallulah did want to be au courant. She must have realized that Brando was not only a fantastic presence in his own right but an avatar of the coming epoch of acting. Tallulah agreed to hire him despite the fact that he auditioned badly, which had cost him the opportunity to play the Lunts’ son in O Mistress Mine in 1945. The Lunts wanted very much to act with him, and Lunt even coached him for his audition, but Brando’s reading was so desultory that they couldn’t bring themselves to hire him. Tallulah told Cole, who was to be Eagle’s stage manager, that she would be able to “fix” Brando, but he steered clear of her. Not only was she his mother’s age, but his mother also had a drinking problem. There would be no resumption of their fling.

  The Eagle Has Two Heads is set in a quasi-mythical kingdom at the end of the nineteenth century, something of a sister to the haunted castle Cocteau had just conjured up in his film, Beauty and the Beast. As the play opens, a queen is carrying on a conversation with her late husband’s specter over tea. It is the tenth anniversary of both their wedding and of his assas-sination. She has not shown herself to her subjects since the murder, and is inva
riably veiled whenever in company. She is at odds with Baron Foehn, her kingdom’s chief of police, who is plotting to dethrone her.

  That night, the queen is surprised in her chamber by a would-be as-sassin, Stanislas, but he turns out also to be the pseudo-anonymous poet“Azareal,” who had earlier written a poem denouncing her. She so enjoyed his verses that she circulated them to the court. She sees him now as the fated instrument of her death, and decides to shelter him only so that he can accomplish his objective. But his wrath is merely a defense against his long-suppressed love for her, which she soon reciprocates.

  Cocteau’s valorization of the poet was a theme of the play. “He is poor, he has no title,” the queen explains to her majordomo. “No, I am wrong, he has the most beautiful title of all; he is a poet.” Stanislas has brought the queen back to life, and she resolves to face her populace once more and even divests herself of the dose of poison she has carried on her person for years.

  But the queen’s redemption is dashed to bits when Stanislas is cornered by Baron Foehn, who shows him a warrant for his arrest that he intends to enforce. The hysterical young poet flees to the queen’s room and swallows her poison. The queen is enraged, taunting him until he stabs her. She confesses that she had provoked him so that he would take her with him to a Liebestod-like eternity. “Death is love,” she tells him as they expire together.

  Static and macabre, the play was in some ways an odd choice for Tallulah, the setting dangerously close to the Ruritania she had flopped with in A Royal Scandal. But she was doubtless impressed by the cachet of Cocteau and the play’s recent success in Paris starring Edwige Feuillère, and in London starring Eileen Herlie. Tallulah surely envisioned covering herself in prestigious new laurels, for the play had the earmarks of the avant-garde. The first act featured a monologue by the queen that is perhaps the longest in contemporary drama, while the second act is dominated by Stanislas’s long address to her. Several times the queen and he speak to each other in verse, and in the final act they engage in almost an operatic dialogue in recitative. Cocteau’s text embodies the reflexive self-regard employed by Wilder in The Skin of Our Teeth. The queen rings down the first-act curtain by instructing Stanislas to “rest well and renew your courage for tomorrow you must help me to finish to write my tragedy, but we have done enough for tonight. This scene will do as a curtain.”