Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  The character of Victor is a hopelessly hearty prig. Like Sibyl, Victor is a fairly thankless straight man to two scintillating leads; Laurence Olivier had hated playing the part during the original production in 1930. But Phil Arthur had been so eager to work with Tallulah that he’d extricated himself from a commitment to Lucille Ball, who was furious. A true company man, he had no problem with his supporting role. “Anything I do that you don’t like just tell me,” he told Cook.

  Tallulah lived up to his expectations—and then some. He found her“very kind and generous and a lot of fun—but very demanding.” As the tour progressed, Tallulah’s romantic interest in him became clear. While Arthur found her attractive, he wanted to be taken seriously as a good actor, not as “the star’s stud. I was married, too.” A writer as well, he was also finishing a play that would later be performed by the Chicago Stage Guild.

  Tallulah was persistent. She would invite him to watch the circus with her, or include him in a festive evening with the ballet’s Anton Dolin and Alicia Markova. At one point during that evening, Dolin looked over and asked Tallulah, “Have you had this marvelous boy?” Tallulah paused.

  “No. I’ve had everybody else in the company but him,” Tallulah replied, “and his wife’s in town.” Indeed, Arthur’s wife appeared without warning more than once during the tour. Tallulah was on her best behavior with him. “Some people talk all the time,” he said, “but she’d listen to you.” She revealed the shy side of herself, confiding to Arthur that “The reason I talk so much is that I hate to have dead air, the silence.” Over a quiet dinner in her suite in Minneapolis, she told him she didn’t like going to the theater “because people stare at me instead of the play.”

  “Phil,” she said, “if anybody behaved like I do, I’d dislike them intensely.”

  They were in the Midwest that winter when Cobb came down with a severe virus. After Baxley stood in for her, Cobb decided not to return to the show. Tallulah was happy to have Baxley onstage with her, because of her talent and because she wasn’t the competition in the looks department that Cobb had been.

  Tallulah was beginning to question how long her own looks and stamina would hold up. “How long can I keep this up?” she asked Cole, who had begun to notice her energy dwindling. Tallulah’s anxiety about the future was partly what was keeping her on the road with Private Lives, since she was now determined to make enough money for her retirement. As the tour approached the West Coast, she found some reassurance with Arthur’s understudy, William Langford, a Canadian actor in his late twenties, with whom she began an affair that lasted five years.

  Midway through the first act of Private Lives, Amanda goes into her suite to change for dinner. While she is offstage, ex-husband Elyot appears, sauntering around his end of their adjoining terraces. To make this quick costume change, Tallulah repaired to a special booth in the wings, where she shed the printed dressing gown she wore for her first entrance and donned designer Mainbocher’s floor-length “Bankhead blue” crepe dinner dress. Her maid zipped her in, fastening a new pair of shoes while Tallulah fixed her hair. In a minute, she was back onstage and bumping into her ex-husband.

  In San Francisco, Tallulah began taking longer to make the change.

  Forced to cool his heels, Cook improvised some stage business while he and the audience waited. The intermissions got longer, the curtain coming down later and later. The delay was atypical for Tallulah. “She’d keep us waiting,” Cole recalled grimly, “having a drink.” These were slugs from a flask of brandy. Cole blamed her affair with Langford—for Tallulah, sex and liquor went hand in hand—as well as a general loosening of restraint tied to her anxiety over the future.

  Before, Tallulah had always prided herself on not drinking before or during a performance—though her standards were perhaps not as strin-gent as some. Glenn Anders said that during the 1926 run of They Knew What They Wanted, she engaged in the widely practiced British custom of imbibing a split of champagne during intermission. She was still doing it during Forsaking All Others in New York in 1933. But Jean Dalrymple, the show’s publicist, didn’t find it detrimental to her performance. “I never noticed that it did anything except maybe liven her up a little bit.”

  In Private Lives, however, the effects were more deleterious. As the waits got longer, her speech slightly thickened, to the point where her comic timing was slowed. Instead of confronting her directly, Cole showed her the running tally he made of each performance, asking her to help solve the riddle of why the performance could be getting progressively longer.

  In Los Angeles, the final stop on the tour, Tallulah had Phil Arthur fired in order for Langford to take his place. Jack Wilson sent his deputy Eddie Knill all the way out from New York to tell Arthur he would not be going to Broadway with the show. Arthur recalled Knill’s discomfort: “He said, ‘This is so unfair.’ They all knew the score.” Cole discussed with Arthur Tallulah’s unbearable loneliness. “It was the first indecent thing I’d ever seen her do in the theater,” Cole recalled in 1982.

  The two had heated exchanges in Tallulah’s dressing room. He reminded her that she’d always said she would never stoop to what she accused Gertrude Lawrence of doing: “firing somebody so some boy could take his place.”

  “Well, I’m the star of this play, and I can do whatever I want to,” Tallulah retorted.“You are and you can, but it’s not very nice, and it’s not very honorable.”

  One night before a performance, Tallulah called Arthur into her dressing room. Spread on a tray was an array of gold bibelots from a local jeweler. “Take your pick, darling.”

  “Tallulah, under any other circumstances I’d just be thrilled to have something,” he told her, but as matters now stood it was no thank you.

  Tallulah later complained to Charles Bowden that Arthur had been impossible to act with. “It’s like playing with a brick wall. There’s no impression; there’s no give. And so you decide what’s the use?” Whether or not she really felt that, Arthur was certainly a better actor than Langford.

  Although Langford received decent notices for his performance in Private Lives, Tallulah later admitted to Bowden that onstage he “just can’t get it up.”

  The whole incident brought to an end one of Tallulah’s longest and most significant relationships with a man. After the play closed in Los Angeles on July 26, 1948, Stephan Cole handed in his notice. While Tallulah and the cast booked passage for New York, Cole left Los Angeles on a later train. He would speak to Tallulah on only a few occasions until her death twenty years later.

  Not really a love affair, Tallulah’s friendship with Cole was virtually as intimate as a marriage; he was probably closer to her in many ways than Emery had been. Although she and Cole had squabbled frequently in the past, this time, neither would relent. Given how obstinate each of them was, an irrevocable breach was perhaps inevitable, but she considered his departure a cruel desertion. Cole learned later that she had told friends that during his overseas tour in World War II, he had kept prisoners tied to a mast in the broiling North African sun.

  In September, Tallulah returned to Private Lives with short engagements in Boston and Philadelphia before Broadway. She cut her hair, which she’d worn longish for the past decade, because she felt it more appropriate to her forty-six years, and kept it short for the rest of her life. The New York reception to her performance as well as her looks was worrying her. “I just don’t want a kick in the ass,” she told Charles Bowden, who replaced Cole as stage manager.

  After a performance in Philadelphia, Bowden and Baxley were in Tallulah’s suite when at around two in the morning, Tallulah capped a night of drinking by downing five Seconals with a brandy chaser. Bowden picked her up, seemingly unconscious, and carried her into her bedroom.

  Baxley watched in horror, venting her disgust that someone so talented would behave this way.

  At the theater the next night, Tallulah revealed that she had overheard the ingenue’s criticism. “That Baxley broad isn’
t happy, is she? If she thinks I’m abusing myself, maybe she ought to go elsewhere.” Tallulah’s insomnia and addictions had gotten to the point where short of a lethal overdose, nothing could shut down her senses altogether.

  By this point Tallulah was so reckless that one part of her must not have cared whether she woke in the morning. She provoked concern from people less prone to put her on the defensive than Baxley, the much-younger actress not only playing Tallulah’s love rival but carrying on with Tallulah’s ex-lover and leading man.

  “Take care of yourself,” Coward himself had written, “and for Christ’s sake don’t be a silly bitch and ruin your health by ramming ‘reefers’ up your jacksie. . . .” Kindly admonitions were tossed aside by assurances from Tallulah that she knew what she was doing. Cole believed she did know, and that she was playing as recklessly as she could, convinced there was nothing left for her in her life. “When she died I felt, this is what she’s been trying to do for twenty years.”

  Private Lives opened on Broadway at the Plymouth on October 4, 1948. Martin Manulis thought her opening-night performance in New York was tidier than it had been on tour. Tallulah delegated rising star Carol Channing, with whom she had struck up a friendship, to come back at both intermissions and tell her how she thought it was going. Channing assured her she had the audience eating out of her hands. “But is it Amanda?” Tallulah kept asking Channing about the performance she was giving.

  In the Daily Mirror, Robert Coleman toasted her virtuosity: “She takes Coward’s taut situations and scintillating wit, and makes them sparkle like perfect diamonds instead of the paste jewels they really are.”

  “Gracious, what a voice that woman has!” John Chapman exclaimed in the Daily News. “It’s a baritone, mostly—but with it she can wheedle and simper and entice, as well as bellow. . . . As I watched her I wondered how it was that she missed in the role of Cleopatra.”

  There was controversy about how much of the alluring Tallulah of old had survived her farcical shenanigans. The New Leader compared her performance to “the antics of a lively and lickerish mountain goat.” But William Hawkins of the Journal American declared that, “For all her abandon and athleticism in this role of the overly married Amanda, there are moments when Miss Bankhead moves in an aura of inexplicable glamour which is beyond comparison with the allure of any other figure in the theatre.”

  The play itself was dismissed. Almost alone among New York reviewers, Watts of the Post had a longer perspective, saying that Coward’s plays of two decades earlier were in truth “valuable social comedies, which have important comment to make on the vital between-wars period in British annals. Eventually, done in the costumes of their day, they are likely to occupy a place in dramatic writing not infinitely inferior to the words of Wilde and Congreve.”

  Shortly before Private Lives opened on Broadway, David Dubinsky, the president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, invited Tallulah to introduce President Truman in a radio address sponsored by the union that was to air on October 21, immediately prior to the presidential election. She accepted eagerly, toiling over many drafts of her speech, doubtless with the help of her publicist, Richard Maney. The curtain went up ten minutes early so that Tallulah could be on the air at ten o’clock rather than wrangling with Cook in the second-act finale. Truman’s seven-minute speech was preceded by three minutes from Tallulah.

  She began by invoking her family’s long record of public office (which had ended two years earlier with the death of Uncle John). Delivering an ad hominem attack against Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate, she used tones of high comedic irony. “Mr. Dewey is neat,” she conceded. “Oh so neat. And Mr. Dewey is tidy. Oh, so tidy . . . It seems a great pity to risk exposing Mr. Dewey to the smells and noises and ills of humanity.” Praising Truman’s policy and personality, she mentioned his“passionate pleas for veteran housing, for curbs on inflation, for legislation to aid and comfort the great mass of our population.”

  Political concerns were never far from Tallulah’s mind. In December, she sent the great Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad a charming letter containing an appeal from the Honorable Nathan D. Perlman, chairman of the fund-raising committee for the Foster Parents’ Division of the Labor Zionists’ Commission. When Flagstad sent a donation, having also given in Europe to the same organization, Tallulah asked if she could send Flagstad’s letter on to columnist Walter Winchell, self-appointed judge and jury of celebrities’ moral and political shortcomings.

  Flagstad’s husband, a Norwegian businessman who had died in prison, had been accused of being a collaborator with the Nazis. Flagstad claimed to have known nothing of her husband’s activities, and her ac-companist and biographer, Edwin McArthur, wrote that he believed her in his 1965 biography of the singer. Nonetheless, her performances were picketed, and although she sang at the Chicago Opera—where Tallulah had just heard her Isolde—and across Europe, New York’s Metropolitan Opera still refused to rehire her.

  Learning that Flagstad was expected at a performance of Private Lives on Broadway, Tallulah wrote a note begging her to ignore her own fleeting attempts at singing in the play. After the show, Tallulah went back to Flagstad’s apartment with McArthur and his wife, where they talked until six-thirty the following morning. Each diva wanted the other to tell her about her very different career. “Kirsten was much taken by Miss Bankhead’s rough magnetism,” McArthur writes, “and her warmhearted anger at the antagonists Kirsten was still facing.”

  Dancer William Weslow was introduced to Tallulah in Ethel Merman’s dressing room at the Imperial Theater, where Annie Get Your Gun was playing to packed houses. “Oh, darling, I just wanted to tear that jockstrap off you!” she confided. The jockstrap that had aroused Tallulah was actually a buckskin loincloth, in which Weslow scampered through the show’s “I’m an Indian” ballet.

  He took her out many times. She never, he recalled gratefully, tried to press him to drink. But there was no doubt that the drinking, like everything else about Tallulah, was reaching critical mass. “She’s one of my dearest friends,” Beatrice Lillie told Weslow. “I love her and she loves me,”the elfin star of musical comedy and revue confided, “but I cannot put up with her lewd, lewd vulgarity. But she only does that when she gets about eight or ten drinks.

  “I’m going to leave with the car if she gets too outrageous,” Lillie warned Weslow. “I can’t stand when she lifts up the dress.” Keeping Tallulah’s dress down had become a major problem for anyone who signed on for the duration of an evening. Tallulah’s need to exhibit could erupt, of course, when she was cold sober, but after she’d had enough to drink, it became an imperative.

  Like a unicycle, Tallulah’s conversation changed direction on a dime, moods and responses segueing and doubling back on one another. Staggering assaults were often followed by retreats to the polite manners her grandmother had so diligently instilled. Flying her skirts at half mast brought maître d’s running. “Oh, Miss Bankhead, you can put the dress down now. We’ve seen that so many times.”

  “It’s boring you?”

  “Oh, yes. And your table is ready now.”

  “Oh, thank you, darling. Bill,” she apologized, “I have to put down my dress now. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Really, Miss Bankhead, we’ll have to pull a screen around you,” waiters would chide, when her language went from blue to aquamarine. Tallulah accepted that they, too, had a job to do; she was, Weslow noted, too versed in noblesse oblige to castigate service people. She was sensitive to the vulnerabilities of people who had not been given license, as she had, to talk any way they wanted to anyone they pleased.

  The young, beautiful, and unlettered are indispensable decoration at the tables of the celebrated, but there they enjoy only yeoman’s status.

  There was a night when Noël Coward mouthed a snippy dismissal to Weslow, then showed him a summarily turned back. Tallulah laced into the playwright. “I know you wear your skirts to th
e ground, darling . . . When you’re nasty to people I hate that!”

  Floating in her banter was Tallulah’s awareness that something was very wrong. Weslow remembered a paean by her to Frances Farmer—Farmer’s beauty, her talent, her desirability—that Tallulah capped with,

  “Of course she had an alcohol problem, a mental problem. So do I. Who doesn’t?”

  The fog of alcohol relieved her social anxieties, but distorted her ability to accurately gauge her environment. “When she was drunk everyone looked like they were enjoying themselves and liked her,” Weslow said.

  Those who were genuinely fond of Tallulah much preferred her sober.

  “My heart goes out to people of talent and brains who never achieve their professional due because of flaws of conduct,” she writes in Tallulah.

  Undoubtedly she was able on some level to recognize herself in their vagaries. Since the early 1930s, Billie Holiday had attracted Tallulah’s deepest personal and professional affection. “Tallu and Lady were like sisters,”musician Harold “Stump” Cromer recalled to Linda Kuehl, whose research forms the basis of several biographies of Holiday.

  Tallulah’s relationships, of course, seldom observed clear-cut boundaries, and it appears that during the late 1940s she and Holiday were also lovers. Perhaps they had been all along. Holiday later told William Dufty, who ghostwrote her autobiography, that when Tallulah visited backstage at the Strand Theatre, the thrill she took in exhibitionistic sex made her insist on keeping Holiday’s dressing room door open. Holiday later claimed that Tallulah’s brazen show of affection almost cost her her job at the Strand.