After a week in Westport, they opened in Chicago on July 22, 1947, where Claudia Cassidy wrote in the Chicago Tribune that Private Lives now seemed “a fairly repetitious exercise in trivia,” but described Tallulah acting with a “gleeful exaggeration under control” that elicited from the audience roars so vociferous they might have stopped a passerby in his tracks. Despite feeling that the two stars overplayed the second act, Cassidy admired their slapstick: “Miss Bankhead is a stageful even when she loses control of her Mainbocher pajamas, perhaps even more so.” At the final curtain, their reception was frenzied. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Cobb recalled.
The audience stamped their feet, whooped, and screamed, reminding her of an audience at a prizefight.
Cobb stood in the wings at every performance, watching Tallulah and Cook wrangle, coo, sulk, and rapproche through the second act. “A great learning experience,” Cobb called it. “You couldn’t watch anything more brilliant than those two at work.” She was fascinated by the way Tallulah’s stage business utilized personal trademarks to speak for the character: furious at Cook’s Elyot, she slashed on her lipstick with savage intensity.
At the end of act 2, Amanda and Elyot’s attempts to suppress their violent tempers collapse altogether, and slapstick fisticuffs ensue. Both Tallulah and Cook were in their midforties and not in the best of physical shape.
Cook’s drinking during the trip to Canada had gotten so alarming that Tallulah went to Equity and gained permission to fire him if he went too far.
Their initial attempts to stage the fight were cautious, until Manulis told them he would have to bring in a stuntman to work with them. Rising to the challenge, they devised an appropriately rambunctious brawl. Tallulah toppled over a sofa with a dexterity to rival her acrobatics onstage during the twenties, but not without redoubled effort. She would come offstage soaking, often asking for rub-downs during the intermission.
Tallulah always felt that Coward had never written a good third act, and the final act of Private Lives is indeed something of an anticlimax. The second act curtain falls on Sibyl and Victor arriving in time to see Amanda and Elyot in the throes of their distemper. All four spend the night propped alone on various couches and beds. In act 3, they are forced by their unresolved affections to regroup at the breakfast table.
Cobb loved her interaction with Tallulah in this act. Amid the sullen quartet of present and former spouses, Amanda fills in the awkward lapses with desperately nonchalant chatter. To Cobb, Tallulah added some behind-her-hand mirth, slowly lowering her eyelashes in a wink into her upstage coffee cup. “She was so naughty, she tried to break me up every night.”
The age difference between them was much greater than it had been between Gertrude Lawrence and Adrienne Allen in the original production, something Tallulah now made a virtue of. “Seeing the depths of degradation to which age and experience have brought you I’m glad I am as I am,” Sibyl tells Amanda. She replies: “That was exceedingly rude. I think you’d better go away somewhere.” And with that Tallulah dismissed Cobb with a vague wave of the wrist, not even giving Sibyl the importance of a command.
At eighteen, Cobb was a worldly young woman who had already been divorced after a brief first marriage. But she was not quite worldly enough at that time to solve the riddle of her marriage to Eythe. She is not quite sure to this day whether she was simply a cover for his homosexuality.
Eythe had already begun a long relationship with a leading juvenile in Hollywood. Cobb kept wanting to leave the show and return to Eythe to figure out what was going on between them. Tallulah tried to discourage Cobb’s hopes without actually telling her that her husband was homosexual. During the run, Cobb met newscaster Mike Wallace, and by the time she left the show, she was engaged to him.
Cole said that Tallulah “got Private Lives by the ears, made it sit up and play. I don’t know how she saw the things in it she did—even Noël didn’t know they were there.” Nor, perhaps, did Noël want to know. “Tallulah? In Private Lives? In New York? Are you out of your mind?” Coward had exclaimed. Always picky about casting, he was refusing to let Lillian Gish come to New York in a revival of his play The Marquise. Wilson tried to convey Coward’s reluctance diplomatically, but Tallulah was nonplussed.
With Coward arriving in Chicago at the end of August to vet the production, Tallulah was eager for him to see exactly how much business they had been doing. (Wartime restrictions still in effect meant that Coward, perpetually in need of money, hadn’t started getting his statements. Coward’s royalty was 10 percent of the gross, already a hefty amount by then.) In the week before Coward’s arrival, Cobb noticed Tallulah’s performance getting smaller and smaller. “Nearly all the shtick was gone,” and Cobb was perplexed. “By Thursday or Friday night I heard a rumor that Coward was showing up.” She asked Stephan Cole, who was stage-managing, when Coward was expected. Cole was surprised she knew because Tallulah had been trying to keep everything quiet so as not to get everyone’s nerves racing.
Coward arrived with a delegation of British colleagues, including his lover, actor Graham Payne, all-powerful producer Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont, musical comedy star Ivor Novello, as well as playwright Terence Rattigan, in whose O Mistress Mine the Lunts were starring next door to Tallulah. At dinner before Tallulah’s performance, Coward scoured the ledger sheet, looked up, and quipped: “I think Tallulah’s absolutely fine and should go to New York!” But Cole felt that Coward truly enjoyed the performance, seeing “a different play,” performed in a style more suited to contemporary American audiences. Coward even told Phil Arthur, cast as Amanda’s second husband, Victor, that Tallulah’s was the best way to perform his play in that time and place.
“I went to the performance with some misgivings,” Coward wrote in his diary. “Much to my relief, and a certain amount of surprise, Tallulah was extraordinarily good; she is a bit coarse in texture, but her personality is formidable and she played some of it quite beautifully and all of it effectively.”
After the performance, when they went for drinks, Tallulah was“touchingly thrilled that I liked her performance and ecstatic when I said she could play it in New York,” Coward noted in his diary. She told him she was presenting him with an Augustus John portrait of Gerald du Maurier that she had purchased in London.
Later in the week, Tallulah celebrated their camaraderie by hosting a supper party in her suite for Coward, the Lunts, and other members of the British contingent. Tallulah sometimes went to the Lunts’ theater to chat with them, but tonight she was discomfited by Fontanne’s cool regality. Tallulah was a little high when she announced, “I’ve fucked every man in this room, except Alfred, and I’ve had my eye on him for a long time.” “Lynn thought that was rather unnecessary,” said Charles Bowden, who was a close associate of the Lunts. The evening wore on until Tallulah, by now
“quite pissed,” decided the time was right to reopen a long-standing debate along Broadway. “People discuss so constantly who’s the better actor, Alfred or Lynn, or what would have happened to Lynn if she hadn’t married, or what would have happened to Alfred, if he hadn’t. . . . What do you think you’d be doing, Lynn, if you hadn’t married Alfred, right now?”
“Probably playing Private Lives,” Fontanne retorted. “Now it’s late,” she continued, “and we’re all very tired. Did you know in a way you’re working for me? Every Jack Wilson production has four partners: Jack, Noël, Alfred, and myself. So I’m sort of your boss, and I think you should go to bed, and be fresh for the matinee tomorrow.” She stood up and Lunt followed suit. As they moved toward the door, the balance of Tallulah’s guests rose to leave. In the elevator they all caroled in unison that Tallulah was just too much.
Tallulah was hardly pleased when the next night, after the evening’s performance, the Lunts took their guests for a weekend at their home in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin. Still, when Coward and Payne went to check out, they discovered that Tallulah had already taken care of the bill for their weekl
ong stay.
“Darling Tallu,” Coward wrote upon his return, accentuating the positive. “You were so gay and sweet and generous and your god damned vitality lights up all the world around you and I only hope they kept you away from the coast during the war on account of your magnetism triggering up any black out.”
During her months in Chicago, Tallulah spent a lot of time with disc jockey Dave Garroway. They went out alone much more frequently than Tallulah did with most of her boyfriends, and she enjoyed his tutorials about jazz. “Dave was a brilliant man,” said Cobb. “MIT graduate and all kinds of things, and he really knew his music. He was very good for Tallulah.” Unfazed by anything she might do or say, Garroway had a lively sense of humor. He called her “Tiger,” frequently tossing out greetings to her over the air, which particularly pleased her.
Over the summer, Tallulah asked Cobb how she was surviving the Chicago heat; Cobb said she was subsisting on cold seafood and white wine.
Tallulah took Cobb more literally than she needed to, deriving all her suste-nance for the next month on lobster and white wine. That may have brought on an attack of neuritis that she suffered in October, forcing the show to close for two weeks while she went into traction. Later in the Chicago run, a superbly talented and very strong-willed twenty-four-year-old actress named Barbara Baxley was hired as Cobb’s understudy. By that point, Tallulah and Cook had ended their relationship, but she was none too pleased to watch him begin an affair with Baxley. Cook was living with Cole in a district of small houses that had been populated in the 1890s by the city’s kept women. Cook’s dresser kept house and prepared dinner. On one occasion, Tallulah showed up without warning, ostensibly curious about how they were living but really, Cole suspected, trying to catch Baxley in flagrante delicto. It wasn’t that Tallulah would have punished Baxley, Cole believed,“Tallulah just would have had something on her.”
After a performance, Tallulah could not tolerate being by herself. Nobody could match her ability to sit up drinking for hours night after night after night. The company used to take turns going back to the Ambassador East and babysitting her into the wee hours. It became something of a joke among the company, Cobb recalled. “It’s your turn,” Cole would say to her.
“No, it isn’t; I did it last night!”
The Harris Theatre was packed every night, bursting at its seams with hilarity. Each laugh encouraged Tallulah to try to embellish a gag for bigger responses, and she could get carried away. “I’m going to try to get her over that,”
Wilson confided to Manulis during a performance, watching a bit of Tallulah’s stage business. “Fat chance,” Wilson corrected himself with a chuckle.
If Wilson preferred to stage these plays in the manner that Coward and Lawrence had created them, he was not displeased at the enormous grosses generated by Tallulah’s own approach. From time to time, various notables of the theater world would catch the show on their way through Chicago, calling Wilson to sniff, “You ought to see what she’s doing now!”
Then Wilson would order Manulis, who was receiving a modest percentage of the box-office take, to “go and earn your money.”
Manulis never felt, as others did, that Tallulah’s highjinks were more appropriate to vaudeville than the high-comedy stage, but she “was certainly rough-and-ready compared to what Gertie had done.” The director said that he could “talk to her about particular points.” If he told Tallulah something was “as close to dropping your drawers as you can get, and you mustn’t do that,” she would laugh, but she was “smart enough to think over what was said,” and ultimately “she would calm down.”
Some parts of the performance were in a different mood altogether. Tallulah’s delivery of the lines in which Coward allows Amanda to establish the poetry of her soul were done without any irony or bravado. They were “all sweetness, beautiful and lovely, not tough, not funny.” Manulis found himself bewitched by her moment on the balcony when she hears the hotel orchestra play “Someday I’ll Find You,” as it had been played in St. Moritz on her honeymoon with Elyot. As Manulis watched her, he felt that Tallulah, too, was calling on something in her past to make Amanda’s moment of recollection extraordinarily real. Whatever Tallulah herself called up, the scene“was youthful, it was fresh, it was very poignant. You cared very much.”
Offstage, Tallulah spent her afternoons in bed reading, doing needlepoint, listening to the radio, with only the occasional outside excursion, a walk around the city. A scarf and sunglasses swallowing most of her face, she trotted unrecognized around the Loop, sometimes winding up at a movie.
On her Sunday night off, Tallulah liked going with Cole to the Chicago Symphony. One Sunday they argued about whether a certain instrument was a viola or a violin, and he accused her of pretending to know more about music than she did. That was about as much insult as Tallulah could bear from him, and they didn’t speak for two days.
In fact, Tallulah had played violin and piano as a child, and she could still read music; Cole would sometimes see her perusing a score if she happened upon one, and she had played a few measures on the piano in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. In Chicago, Tallulah also went to see Kirsten Flagstad sing Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in her return to American opera.
The Liebestod, “that was her music,” Cole said with a chuckle; for her it was a rapturous experience that affected her almost like a drug. During her early days in New York, Tallulah had been invited several times by muralist Paul Draper to musicales given by Robert Chandler, a wealthy music buff who was married to soprano Lina Cavalieri. At Chandler’s home, Jascha Heifetz and Artur Rubinstein performed the Leibestod as an instrumental duet. “If my breast was savage, those boys charmed it.”
For Tallulah, the onstage workings of comic byplay could be as thrilling and mysterious. During one exchange in Private Lives, Cobb spoke a feed line to Cook that aroused a snicker from the audience before he said his punch line and reaped an enormous laugh. One night, however, it was Cobb’s line that provoked the bigger laugh. “That put him into a state,”
Cobb recalled. “That had been a surefire laugh.” Cook said something to Tallulah, who watched the scene from the wings for the next couple of performances. Then Tallulah called a rehearsal, suggesting different adjustments. That night the big laugh remained on Cobb’s line. Eventually Cook got used to it. But some weeks later, Cobb said her line, and the audience snickered, but when Cook said his line the house fell down around their ears. The laugh was back where it had been originally. The same thing happened the next night. However, Cook was disconcerted all over again, because by now he was accustomed to Cobb getting the laugh. He returned to Tallulah, and back they all went to another rehearsal.
“What are you doing that’s different?” Tallulah wanted to know, but Cobb couldn’t tell her. After another session working over it, Tallulah declared, “Well, that ought to fix it.” But Cobb’s laugh never came back, while Cook’s stayed right where it should have remained all along. “Nobody could explain it,” Cobb said.
Also in Chicago that fall was British comedienne Florence Desmond, who’d known Tallulah since the 1920s, when Tallulah had approved Desmond’s impersonation of her. Desmond was performing in a London revue. While Desmond was appearing at Chicago’s Palmer House hotel, she saw a lot of Tallulah. On Christmas Day, missing her family desperately, Desmond decided to drop in on Tallulah midafternoon. She found her alone in her suite with Dola Cavendish, her room in its “usual state of disorder,” books and magazines strewn on chairs, tables, and across Tallulah’s bed.
“Merry Christmas, darling,” Tallulah said.
“This is a hell of a Merry Christmas,” Desmond said, and burst into tears. Tallulah asked her many questions about her husband and child, “as if she too craved a little family life on that day, even if it were only talking about it,” Desmond recalls in her 1953 memoirs. Tallulah wouldn’t let her leave, even asking her to keep her company while Tallulah bathed before the evening’s performance; finally th
ey ate and went on to their work. “It was certainly an odd Christmas,” Desmond writes, “and I honestly believe that Tallulah was every bit as lonely as I was.”
Skidding
“Well, I’m the star of this play, and I can do whatever I want to.”
At the beginning of February 1948, Tallulah and Private Lives folded up their tents and left Chicago for a five-month cross-country tour that was as smashing a success as the Chicago run. But it would prove a fateful turning point in Tallulah’s life. In Cincinnati, Baxley told Tallulah that she was going to have an abortion, saying she had become pregnant when a boyfriend visited her in Pittsburgh. Convinced that Cook was actually the father, Tallulah confronted her costar, who stonewalled, saying that he knew nothing about it. “Tallulah was having a great time,” Cole recalled, as she tried to trick Baxley into confessing that it was actually Cook. Baxley was determined to thwart Tallulah’s enjoyment in taking charge and administering care, making all the medical arrangements herself. Not being in charge frustrated Tallulah completely.
As the tour went on, Tallulah began veering toward self-parody all the way through the second and third acts: exploiting her vocal acrobatics, ostentatiously blinking her eyes, her upstage wink to Cobb growing increasingly lewd. Her antics emboldened Therese Quadri, cast as the maid in their Paris love nest.
Quadri, who had played the same role in the original Coward–Lawrence production, and had her own one-woman show, felt that her talents were being stymied in the inconsequential role of Louise. As she brought in the breakfast in act 3, she improvised a long gibbering monologue to herself. With every performance, Quadri continued to pad her part. One night, while serving the couple, Quadri missed the table entirely, sending the tray and its contents spilling all over the floor. Tallulah and then Cook dissolved in laughter. “That is perfectly disgusting,” Cobb interjected, in character as the fusty Sibyl. “Go away and bring us some more coffee.” That sent Tallulah and Cook into further hysterics, along with the audience. As the crew raced around backstage to set up another tray, Quadri walked off, returning to try again.
Tallulah! Page 47