Tallulah liked to play exceptional women, and the majestic complexities, not to say perversities, of this queen offered ripe theatrical fodder. Undoubtedly, she was also attracted by how she would look in the period costumes, which were designed by Aline Bernstein, who had designed her costumes for The Little Foxes. In act 3, Tallulah wore a riding ensemble, brandishing a whip, which carried a fillip of fin de siècle sadomasochism when she used it to vent her fury on Stanislas.
Eleanor Wilson, an actress in her late thirties, read before Tallulah and producer Jack Wilson for the role of Edith de Berg, the queen’s duplicitous lady-in-waiting. After Wilson had read, Tallulah walked down to the stage and said, “Her face is too much like mine.” “Well, I’ll break my nose,” Wilson said facetiously. She got the job; Tallulah later told her she was impressed by her spirit. Tallulah likewise found Brando’s irreverence initially attractive. “If I have read my history right,” she writes in Tallulah, “it is the heretics, the noncomformists, the iconoclasts who have enriched our lives, added both to our knowledge, our progress, and our happiness.”
Brando already had established a pattern of erratic, insubordinate behavior in the few shows he’d been in. Like Tallulah, he was assailed by conflicts about himself and his vocation. “He hated acting,” said Herbert Kenwith, who was Brando’s roommate when they acted together in I Remember Mama. “He hated audiences. He just thought they were fools to pay money to see people on a stage playing.”
Brando muttered and mumbled and stumbled and fumbled from the first day’s reading of Eagle at the New Amsterdam Roof theater, but he had so much going for him that Tallulah and everyone else was willing to give him the benefit of every doubt. He and Tallulah were to some degree mirror incarnations in their heretical behavior, their ambivalent approach to their work, right down to their elocutionary idiosyncrasies. “If I were not a Queen, I should be a revolutionary myself,” Cocteau’s heroine confesses.
The maverick temperament shared by the established actress and her young leading man could have given exactly the right dynamic to their stage relationship.
Winter was approaching, yet Brando kept appearing in threadbare coverings. Finally Tallulah said, “Marlon, it’s cold outside. Why aren’t you wearing a coat?” “Haven’t got a coat.” So that day at lunchtime, Wilson’s assistant, Martin Manulis, was assigned to go to nearby Brooks Brothers with Brando and buy him a coat. At the store, Brando delivered a performance far surpassing what he was doing in rehearsal. The very first coat they looked at was beautiful and fit him. Brando proceeded to look at a vast array of overcoats, before deciding that what he really wanted was none other than the very first coat they had seen.
In her autobiography, Tallulah describes Jack Wilson as her favorite producer—“charming, tactful, alert”—but says nothing about his directing. Wilson had brought her the play and perhaps his direction was part of the package. He certainly was by now much more experienced than he had been during her summer 1941 tour in Her Cardboard Lover. During The Little Foxes she had written that good direction was the most essential element in an actor’s performance apart from good casting. “The more talent you have the more discipline you need.” However, Tallulah’s mental awareness of what she needed contended with her reflex instinct to rebel against authority. Perhaps by now more assertive directors did not want to subject themselves to inevitable wrangles with her. One should not, however, overestimate how much sway any director actually exercised over Broadway superstars.
Eleanor Wilson said that Tallulah “couldn’t have been sweeter or nicer or kinder” to the cast, but “managing her would be quite a different problem, I think. She had to have her way—she had to have her way.” Yet Jack Wilson had developed his own skills as a conciliator. “Once she rebelled against something. There was an argument and he sent her a present and so got his way in the end. She understood that, too, I think, that technique.”
Cocteau’s queen is so eccentric that one explanation for her behavior could be insanity. According to Cole, Jack Wilson advised Tallulah that this was how the queen had been interpreted by Herlie in London and Feuillère in Paris, although Feuillère’s performance in the film is rather more ambiguous than that. Tallulah, however, was reluctant to portray the queen as fully demented because she was afraid she would look foolish. Manulis thought her decision may have been wise. Tallulah “playing a loony could be nervous-making; it could have been taken as funny.” In any case, Cole said that while Wilson couldn’t quite get her to play Eagle as he wanted her to, “he got her to play it so he thought she was doing it his way.”
Tallulah’s publicist Richard Maney writes in his 1957 memoirs that Jack Wilson “had interpreted Marlon’s trancelike conduct as a manifestation of genius. He hesitated to correct him lest he upset his mood.” But Wilson’s flash point was struck as Brando was mumbling his way through a dress rehearsal shortly before they went to Wilmington for the November 28, 1946, opening. “I don’t care what your grandmother did,” Wilson exclaimed, “and that Method stuff, I want to know what you’re going to do!”
Brando in turn raised his voice, and acted with great power and temperament. “It was marvelous,” Eleanor Wilson recalled. “Everybody hugged him and kissed him. He came ambling offstage and said to me, ‘They don’t think you can act unless you can yell.’ ”
Variety’s “Klep.” turned in a report from the premiere in Wilmington.
“Tallulah Bankhead triumphs over musty, outmoded material to turn in a superb performance. . . . Regal in bearing, she is always believable. Some of those speeches would floor a less able performer.” There was some real poetry and magic to the play but also much tedium, said the reviewer. “A moderate run at best is all this one can expect.”
Dipping into Method-ese, the reviewer assessed that Brando was “still building his character, but at present fails to impress.” He received better reviews at subsequent tour stops, but what his colleagues recalled was only occasional indications of the brilliance he could have demonstrated.
“There were a few times when he was really magnificent,” Tallulah admitted in 1962. “He was a great young actor when he wanted to be, but most of the time I couldn’t even hear him on the stage.” Brando displayed his apathy by demonstrating some shocking onstage manners. He “tried everything in the world to ruin it for her,” Cole claimed. “He nearly drove her crazy: scratching his crotch, picking his nose, doing anything.”
The scratching got worse and worse. After several weeks on the road they reached Boston, by which time Tallulah was ready to dismiss him.
Brando’s third-act death roll down the stairs was balletically graceful and even somewhat effeminate. It was appropriate for the esoteric play, but was not to the tastes of the Harvard undergrads in the audience, who greeted his tumble with laughter. For Tallulah, this was the last straw.
Manulis was dispatched to New York to audition potential replacements and he decided on Helmut Dantine, the young Austrian actor who was familiar to film audiences from roles in Mrs. Miniver and a number of other popular films. On the final Friday of Eagle’s two weeks in Boston, Brando was given his notice. Rather than subject him to two more weeks as a lame duck, he was paid the equivalent salary.
At the Saturday matinee, Manulis took a seat in the last row of the orchestra to watch Dantine’s debut. Just before the theater darkened, down the aisle came Brando. He wore the sloppiest clothes, carried a little makeup kit, and dangled a jockstrap over his wrist. He had bought a seat in the front row. His feet perched on the orchestra rail, he spent the performance staring down his replacement and Tallulah. Less than a year later, his career would skyrocket with A Streetcar Named Desire.
Tallulah was glad that, offstage as well as on, she was getting more response from Dantine than she had from Brando. But she had to have realized that, handsome and competent as he was, “Helmut didn’t have in his whole body what Marlon had in his thumbnail,” as Manulis said. Charles Bowden, who saw the play in New York, found Tal
lulah exhibiting a searing Phèdre-like intensity, while “everything was so mingy around her.” In act 2, Tallulah generated real menace when the queen engages in her pastime of target practice. But this was dissipated by Dantine’s responses; it turned into “girls’ games in a finishing school: What should we play next?”
Early in January 1947, Tallulah sent for Guthrie McClintic to come to Philadelphia and offer his diagnosis. McClintic was just the type of proac-tive director that Wilson was not. But “Guthrie was full of shit,” Cole complained. “ ‘It’s a Gothic thing,’ Guthrie said, ‘and it’s all there; it just needs a little pulling together.’ ” Cole was sure that McClintic realized the play’s ills were terminal and just didn’t want to get mixed up in it.
Manulis felt that the play was deadly for American audiences. He saw Tallulah fighting to retain her belief in it, knowing the unlikelihood of its success should she admit to herself that she had made a mistake. Tallulah was terrified she wouldn’t be able to hold the audience’s attention for the entire span of her act 1 monologue, but she did. However, perhaps sensing some restlessness in the audience, she began giving the speech less value as the weeks went on. It had clocked in at thirty minutes in Wilmington, but Tallulah was reading it in 17 minutes by the time the show reached Broadway, where it remained a record-breaking stem-winder. Not every word was any longer distinct, Cole recalled, but he felt that the monologue should have been cut by half anyway. Cocteau, however, refused to allow any cuts.
Eagle stayed on the road for the next two months, a longer tryout than most Broadway shows enjoy. With all her lapses and vagaries, Tallulah was routinely able to call upon the sterling training in etiquette in which her grandmother had instructed her. At civic and social receptions on tour she was invariably “the best-behaved woman in the group,” Eleanor Wilson recalled.
Business was good, and Tallulah must have wanted to squeeze out as much of a run as she could before braving New York, where Eagle finally opened at the Plymouth on March 13, 1947. Stabbed in the back by Stanislas, Tallulah’s queen climbed a baronial staircase center stage, stepped out upon a balcony to greet her subjects, grabbed a curtain for support and pulled it over her head in her dying agony, and fell halfway down the stairs.
“The audience very nearly burst with enthusiasm,” Pollock reported in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “But up to that moment it had small occasion for elation.”
The Eagle Has Two Heads earned almost unrelieved scorn from New York critics, who condemned its melodrama while hardly acknowledging—even to condemn—that this was melodrama filtered by Cocteau’s symbolism and cerebral detachment. In the New York Post, Richard Watts Jr. wrote that, “It is so good to see Miss Bankhead again that I hate to be ungrateful to the play that brings her back, but ‘The Eagle Has Two Heads’ is a preposterous bore.” Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune opined that the play is worth witnessing merely for Miss Bankhead’s consummate acting. Even when she is asked to carry on a long conversation with a ghost she gives the offering eloquence and dynamic power. The final scene, in which she taunts her lover into shooting her, finds her at the peak of her artistry. Performing such as hers is rarely seen on the stage.
William Hawkins in the New York World Telegram found unwise her attempt to sound funereal by limiting her usually agile vocal handsprings.
“The result is that she sounds as if she did not in the least care what she was talking about.” Freedley in the Morning Telegraph said that “no more serious piece of miscasting has taken place in a long time . . . she never convinces you of the character.”
In her curtain speech, Tallulah confessed her anxiety that the play would never come off. “It’ll come off, all right,” Robert Garland assured his readers in the New York Journal American. “And sooner than expected.”
The first four nights sold out, and then the play coasted for two weeks on the strength of what advance money was not subject to refund. Most of the $80,000 advance sale disappeared very quickly, however. Tallulah, nursing bruises on the right side from the impact of her topple down the staircase, was glad that it was finally over.
Public and Private Lives
“I’ve fucked every man in this room except for Alfred, and I’ve had my eye on him for a long time.”
Tallulah told David Herbert that Eagle’s failure had been entirely her fault: she felt that she was just wrong for it. When it closed she was eager to go back to work, eager to reaffirm her viability, to herself above all. A revival of Coward’s Private Lives started as a stopgap. She had taken the play on short tours of summer theaters in 1944 and again in 1946.
Jack Wilson was keeping the Empire Theater dark all summer so that he could open a fall production there. To fill it, he suggested that Tallulah perform Private Lives on Broadway during the summer of 1947. First they would open in Westport, followed by a short season in Chicago, and then Broadway. But Private Lives turned instead into the longest run of Tallulah’s career.
Private Lives tracks the amorous shenanigans of Amanda Pryne and Elyot Chase, who reconnect five years after their divorce while sharing adjoining honeymoon suites on the Riviera. They run away from their current spouses and live together in Paris. Their current legal mates track them down and they run away together one more time. Dismissed by most critics as a bagatelle, it proved to be one of the century’s most enduring comedies.
To direct, Wilson assigned his assistant Martin Manulis, who was convinced that the script should be rethought in terms of the time and the country in which they were performing. For example, throughout act 1, a running commentary is made upon the splendid yacht parked in the harbor beneath the couple’s terrace. “Who’s yacht is that?” Amanda asks Elyot.
“The Duke of Westminster’s, I expect,” Elyot tells her. “It always is.” When Private Lives had first been performed, the audience laughed, because the fabulously wealthy duke was a well-known yachtsman. Seventeen years later and a continent removed, the line seemed flat. “We thought it was so boring,” said Manulis. “ ‘Whose yacht is that?’ Who cares?” Cutting the two lines crossed their minds, but Coward refused to allow any cuts or changes.
Tallulah’s solution was to tweak the line instead, asking “Whose yaacht is that?” in a tone of such high irritation that it became nearly a Dixie war cry. The source of her exasperation seemed not just the annoyance of the moment but a lingering, cumulative anxiety about exactly who was on that yacht, someone she might have had an affair with, and might or might not want to run into at that moment. At the first performance, Manulis was stunned by the way Tallulah’s delivery turned on a dime. “She did it cleanly, so boldly, coming out of nothing.” He admired her ability to find an emotional logic for a transition without needing to take a pause. It was a valuable facility shared by the experienced actresses of the older school. By contrast, he believed that the Method-influenced comers found it much more difficult to negotiate hairpin turns in mood.
As Elyot, there was no question that Tallulah would again retain Donald Cook, after starring opposite him in the play in Canada the previous summer. Charles Bowden, who stage-managed Tallulah’s Private Lives during its Broadway run, said that Cook was “perfection” because “what Tallulah deeply wanted was the most ballsy, sexy guy in town who wasn’t afraid of coming across as a sissy.” Cook was partial to striking poses, hand across chest, and luxuriated in a succession of dressing gowns, yet he managed to seem unimpeachably virile in a way that Coward, who had played the lead in his own play, never could achieve. Cook “knew how to play with her and against her,” said actor J. Frank Lucas, who caught the play in New York and acted with Tallulah in Crazy October ten years later.
Tallulah used Cook’s sexual duality to enable her to assert her own.
Bowden found Tallulah’s “whole attack” on Private Lives fascinating—the way she “played every possible masculine aspect of that woman. It was a wonderful reversal.” Much of their coupling “had this kind of strange off-beat thing, where he was rather pliant and s
he rather aggressive. It wasn’t necessarily physical, but in the interpretation of the lines and the color.”
For her rival, Sibyl, Tallulah picked eighteen-year-old Buff Cobb. She was the granddaughter of humorist Irvin S. Cobb and her mother was an acquaintance of Tallulah’s. Cobb had already appeared in the film Anna and the King of Siam, and was married to William Eythe, who had acted with Tallulah in A Royal Scandal.
A year earlier, Cobb and Eythe were driving near Windows one Sunday. Apparently thinking of Anne Baxter, he warned Cobb that Tallulah could be extremely rude to young actresses and so he’d better go in first and ask Tallulah if she wanted to meet his wife. He returned to say that Tallulah was very anxious to meet Cobb. In the spring of 1947, Cobb and Eythe ran into Tallulah walking on Fifty-seventh Street, and within an hour of their arrival back home, Tallulah was calling to ask Cobb to read for Sibyl the next day.
In Westport, a very rocky dress rehearsal began at 8:00 P.M. and lasted till dawn because of tantrums from Tallulah. “It was absolutely outrageous,” Cobb recalled. “She just went bananas. Screaming and yelling: she wouldn’t work in that set, and she couldn’t do this and she couldn’t do that.” It was terrifying for Cobb. “Until then I had never seen anything except a hardworking lady who was very pleasant.” According to someone else watching from the audience, Tallulah was slightly under the influence.
Tallulah! Page 46