Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  John Levy was also Holiday’s lover as well as her manager at the time, and although he was one of the abusive strong men to whom Holiday gravitated, Levy was intimidated by Tallulah and her connections. When Tallulah came around, all he could do was get out of the way. Once at a nightclub he sat at a nearby table watching Tallulah express her affection to Holiday.

  “Look at that bitch, Carl, look at that!” he exclaimed to musician Carl Drinkard. “That bitch is going out of her fucking mind, she’s all over her.”

  In a letter to J. Edgar Hoover written on February 9, 1949, from the Élysée, Tallulah issued an appeal on Holiday’s behalf that remains slightly mysterious, since Holiday was at liberty at that time, although she may have been under surveillance. Until now the letter has been buried in Tallulah’s FBI files. Tallulah cagily both protects herself from guilt by association and enhances her leverage on Holiday’s behalf by denying any personal involvement with the singer.

  I am ashamed of my unpardonable delay in writing to thank you a thousand times for the kindness, consideration and courtesy, in fact all the nicest adjectives in the book, for the trouble you took re our telephone conversation in connection with Billie Holiday.

  I have met Billie Holiday but twice in my life but admire her immensely as an artist and feel the most profound compassion for her knowing as I do the unfortunate circumstances of her background. Although my intention is not to condone her weaknesses I certainly understand the eccentricities of her behavior because she is essentially a child at heart whose troubles have made her psychologically unable to cope with the world in which she finds herself. Her vital need is more medical than the confinement of four walls.

  Private Lives closed in New York on May 7, 1949, its 256 performances a substantial tally for a Broadway revival. Soon after, the show began a tour of the summer theaters in the Northeast. At the end of June the company was in Princeton.

  Herbert Kenwith, then artistic director of the McCarter Theater in Princeton, was impressed that Tallulah diligently rehearsed a play she had already done for two years. Her behavior outside the theater was another matter. One night the front desk of the Princeton Inn called him at 4:00A.M. and asked him to please get his star inside the inn. Tallulah was rolling across their lawn naked. On a hot night after another performance, she was being driven back to Manhattan along US 1 when she told her driver to let her out. He was to putter along while she ambled behind on foot. Soon she had stripped down to stockings and shoes, strolling with her arms swinging casually. A truck driver spotted her in his headlights and began tailing her. Another truck pulled abreast of him and they inched along, creating a traffic jam. Eventually a member of the local police precinct pulled up, intending to arrest her for indecent exposure. After the officer called Kenwith, who offered a season pass for him and his family, the matter was dropped.

  Two weeks later, they opened in Marblehead, Massachusetts, where they enjoyed a fantastically successful week’s run, which was climaxed, however, with more havoc by Tallulah. The company had rented rooms in an eighteen-room summer mansion owned by Harry Blaisdell, a Boston manufacturer of elevator parts. After the closing performance Saturday night, Tallulah threw a party that became so rambunctious Blaisdell called the police. In the course of their discussion, Tallulah struck one of the officers. She was arrested, remanded into the care of her theater maid, Evelyn Cronin, and told to leave town immediately.

  In August came a chance to put herself back on track. She was asked to test for the role of Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, which Warner Brothers was planning to transfer to the screen.

  Laurette Taylor had given an already-legendary performance in the original Broadway production, but died soon after the play closed in 1946. Tallulah was now forty-seven; Taylor had been sixty-two when she played Amanda.

  Tallulah might have been diffident about playing a dowdy woman in late middle age, but the role was one of the greatest women’s parts of the day, and any path trodden by Taylor, an idol since Tallulah’s early days in New York, was hallowed for Tallulah. She loved Taylor’s luminous transparency as much as she did the spine-tingling aplomb of Ethel Barrymore. “You could never catch her acting,” Cole said about Taylor.

  Both Barrymore and Taylor also played bridge with Tallulah. Their lives suffered from long periods of alcohol-soaked disarray, but in front of Tallulah they were careful to maintain their dignity. “Laurette was like an Irish grandmother,” Cole recalled, while Barrymore appeared to be impersonating a firm, wealthy aunt.

  During Antony and Cleopatra in 1937, Charles Bowden had told Tallulah about encountering Taylor while he was on the staff of the Sutton Theatre on Fifty-seventh Street. Taylor was living in a residential hotel nearby.

  He was punching tickets when a disheveled drunk staggered into the theater’s lobby, propelling herself along the mirrors that lined a long hallway.

  He alerted the manager, who told him that there was nothing to worry about: it was Taylor, who showed up plastered every week or so, snoozing in the last row.

  “It’s just horrifying,” Bowden had told Tallulah. “I can’t believe a woman with any talent could get that low.” “She’s a great talent,” Tallulah replied, “and you’re a smart-ass, and one day I’m going to jam those words down your throat.”

  One day in December 1938, Tallulah called Bowden, asking if he was free that night and whether he had enough cash to lay out the money for a set of rented evening clothes. Emery was sick and Tallulah wanted Bowden to escort her to a Broadway opening, but she was evasive about what they were going to see.

  When they pulled up at the Playhouse Theater, the entrance was crowded with first-nighters. By the time Tallulah had signed autographs and they’d settled into aisle seats, the houselights were dimming, and Bowden still hadn’t had a chance to pick up a program. When he saw the actors onstage, he realized that they were seeing Sutton Vanes’s Outward Bound, which was being revived fourteen years after its Broadway premiere. The house quickened as Laurette Taylor made a humble yet electrifying entrance, pushing herself backward through swinging doors at the center of the stage.

  During the first intermission, Tallulah and Bowden stayed in their seats.

  Many people came over to talk to her and request autographs. As the houselights again went down, she reached over and gave Bowden a playful cuff on his cheek. At the final curtain, he and the rest of the audience went into mad bravos over Taylor’s comeback. “Are you sorry?” Tallulah asked him about his earlier criticism of Taylor. “With all my heart,” Bowden assured her. “Then I’ll take you back to meet her,” Tallulah said. Six years after that, in 1944, Taylor had scored an even greater success in The Glass Menagerie.

  Irving Rapper, who was going to direct the film adaptation, had spent most of his twenty years in Hollywood as a dialogue director. During the 1940s Rapper had directed several Bette Davis vehicles, including the classic Now Voyager. He went to Windows to discuss with Tallulah her upcoming film test for Taylor’s role. Tallulah wanted the part desperately. “I never saw an actress so cooperative and intelligent,” Rapper later told Denis Brian. Tallulah spent several days getting ready for the test, then two days on the actual filming. The heat was oppressive but she performed at the summit of her artistry. “You just had to give her a suggestion and she always built on it,” Rapper said to Lee Israel.

  On Friday, the second and final day of shooting, Tallulah worked well in the morning, but when she came back from a lunch break in her dressing room, the crew suspected that she had had something to drink. After lunch she filmed one scene with Pamela Rivers, who was testing for the role of her daughter, Laura, but Tallulah refused to continue on to the scheduled scenes with Ralph Meeker. He was being tested for the role of Tom, her son. Tallulah claimed that she hadn’t had enough time to prepare her scenes with him, but after the studio enlisted Dola Cavendish to intervene, Tallulah agreed to simply feed the lines to Meeker while sitting out of camera range. Tallulah we
nt back to her dressing room, only to reappear reeling drunk and cursing a blue steak. Bellowing that Meeker was the next Barrymore, she demanded to be allowed to direct his scenes herself. “You have absolutely no idea of the disgraceful state Miss Bankhead was in late Friday afternoon,” Harry Mayer, in Jack Warner’s New York office, wrote on August 22 to Warner’s executive assistant, S. B. Trilling, in Hollywood. “Incidentally, it was this that caused us to go into two full hours of overtime at the studio.”

  The tests were sent ahead to California. As impressed as the West Coast office was, Tallulah’s behavior was cause for concern, and Gertrude Lawrence was hired instead. Jack Warner’s son-in-law, William Orr, who worked for Warner at the time, was among those at the studio who saw the test. He considers what happened one of the “three or four things that upset me during the course of my career at Warner Brothers. Tallulah was perfect for the part, and Gertrude Lawrence was not,” Orr insisted in 1993.“To me she wasn’t believable; Tallulah was fantastic.”

  About a month later Rapper called William Morris executive John Hyde, and asked how Tallulah had handled the rejection. “There was the longest pause,” Hyde told Rapper. “You could hear a pin drop.” Tallulah reacted to her disappointment by embarking on one more tour of Private Lives. Back in May, a brief tour had been announced for the fall.

  Tallulah all but apologizes in her memoirs for spending three years of her life dedicated to “so feathery a trifle” as Coward’s play, claiming that she needed the money and a better play was hard to find. Despite her many manifestos asserting the sacredness of comedy, it seems she fell prey to the common critical perception that it was a lesser genre.

  It is true that great women’s roles were becoming harder to snare for all the major leading ladies of the prewar era. Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and Cobb in Death of a Salesman were the iconic performances of the late 1940s, and the 1950s were to see a generally more misogynistic temperament take hold.

  Tallulah wasn’t the only one forced to compromise. “It’s all right for you,” Gertrude Lawrence told Anton Dolin soon after the end of the war.“You can keep dancing these wonderful old ballets over and over.”

  Lawrence herself was forced to take refuge in revivals of Shaw’s Pygmalion and Coward’s Tonight at 8:30.

  Tallulah’s last Private Lives tour was blighted for all concerned by her dissipation. Baxley later told Buff Cobb that Tallulah had become an outrage, drinking, sniffing cocaine, and smoking pot on a regular and indiscriminate basis. With Donald Cook’s own sobriety shaky—his alcoholism was such that it was now impossible for him to work and drink—his Italian wife, Gioia, was worried. “I don’t care how many times they sleep together each night,” Gioia had told Manulis before the first tour in 1947,“just don’t let her get him to drink again.”

  But the show again did sensational business. “A box office riot,” Variety reported from Charlotte, North Carolina. “Town has gone off its rocker.” Tallulah was scheduled for a one-night stand there December 6, and the performance had been sold out weeks in advance. Tallulah had said she wouldn’t do two performances on a one-day stop, but after the mayor appealed to her, she agreed to add a matinee. During stops in Alabama, Tallulah reportedly pandered to her local fans by waving a Confederate flag during curtain calls.

  While her own self-control was fast degenerating, Tallulah discovered that Evelyn Cronin, who had worked as her theater maid on tour and lived at Windows as general factotum, had bilked her out of $35,000 over the past several years. Tallulah paid all her bills by check and Cronin had been routinely kiting them. In Manhattan, Tallulah’s accountant, Benjamin Nadel, showed her a pile of checks Cronin had kited. Tallulah asked Donald Seawell, her attorney, to go to Windows and confront Cronin. Cronin immediately confessed, adding defiantly that Tallulah wouldn’t dare do anything about it, because if she did Cronin would say that she raised the checks in order to get money for “cocaine, marijuana and sex.” Her accusations would be enough to ruin Tallulah.

  Tallulah had always suspected that Cronin was not an entirely savory character. More than once she had been picked up for shoplifting during the tour of Private Lives; each time Tallulah had gotten her off, and taken particular pride in keeping the matter quiet. Cole, who’d learned from Cronin what had happened, had to resist blurting out, “And I know about Evelyn!” during his parting feuds with Tallulah.

  Tallulah requested that the New York District Attorney’s Office put together a case against Cronin. Nadel advised her against it; the amount she’d lost was minor in the context of her income, and Tallulah had to have known that a trial would put her under great stress. There was a lot about her life that Tallulah would have preferred the public not to know. Yet she maintained that blackmail was “the worst crime in the world,” according to Seawell, and Tallulah felt that if she let Cronin get away with it, she would try the same tactic on another victim. Cronin “misjudged her victim,” Seawell said. Had she “simply admitted her guilt and asked forgiveness . . .Tallulah would have told her to forget about it. . . .”

  But Tallulah herself may have had some resistance to prosecuting Cronin. The district attorney’s office would not have been able to proceed without Tallulah’s cooperation, and the Times had reported that District Attorney Frank S. Hogan had “censured Miss Bankhead for not reporting the alleged offense promptly.” In January 1951, Hogan facetiously told guests at a testimonial dinner that he had made peace with “that Alabama darling”—Tallulah had promised to appear on his program and he had promised to appear on hers. By his “program,” Hogan referred to the general sessions court in Manhattan. Additional delays meant, however, that the case was not going to come to trial until December 1951.

  As the Private Lives tour reached its conclusion, Tallulah made a rare appearance on New York’s hallowed “subway circuit”: she was at the Flatbush Theater in Brooklyn at the end of April, before moving to Washington, where she played the Gaiety, because the more prestigious National remained segregated. Passaic, New Jersey, was next. Finally, the tour concluded with more subway-circuit engagements in the Bronx. The strain of this last tour had been too much even for Tallulah. On June 3, from her dressing room in Passaic, she made an announcement that her final performance of Private Lives would be the last she’d ever give onstage.

  Part IV

  1950–1968

  <<

  Mixed Highs and Lows

  “I have nightmares in which I drop every page of the script and can’t think of a thing to say into the microphone.”

  Following her announcement, NBC approached Tallulah with an offer to star on radio in The Big Show, a weekly ninety-minute variety spectacular. With CBS having recently raided NBC’s stable of talent, the network needed to stage a comeback. So did the medium of radio, which was rapidly being outflanked by television. The Big Show promised to be easy work for Tallulah—rehearsals Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, then a broadcast Sunday evening—as well as fabulous money. Yet it was a daring, risky, and uncharted move.

  Tallulah had made many radio appearances in the 1940s, acting in sketches or trading patter with Hildegarde, Fred Allen, Kate Smith, and others. The Big Show would continue that pattern, except that Tallulah would be the host and fulcrum of a lavish extravaganza, impersonating no other role but her own public persona.

  Tallulah agreed to try it for four weeks, hedging her bets. “I’m going to do some broadcasts. . . .” she mentioned vaguely to Ward Morehouse at the end of September 1950. Despite her vow to leave the stage, she was also considering another play, this one by Edward Justus Mayer, who’d written A Royal Scandal. In the weeks leading up to the November 5 premiere of The Big Show, she grew nearly paralyzed with anxiety. NBC had lined up a heavyweight assemblage of celebrities for the first show and was billing it “All This—and Tallulah, Too.” Tallulah felt that her segues, introductions, and patter didn’t justify such a buildup.

  To her astonishment, however, the broadcast was a triumph, Tallulah’s efforts ear
ned glowing reviews, and she let the Mayer play go. For the moment, The Big Show had solved the problem of how to find an alternative to a theatrical career she had diminishing inclination or energy to sustain.

  As the weeks went on, her broadcasting persona was crystallized by a team of first-class writers: Mort Green, Goodman Ace, Selma Diamond, and George Foster. Their task was made easier by the fact that Tallulah had a whole dossier of verbal tics and quirks that she had eagerly flaunted for public delectation. While other stars were sanitizing themselves for public view, with Tallulah, there was always the possibility that too much revelation would end her career. But her eagerness to flaunt her foibles was refreshing; her characteristic self-deprecation coupled with an air of bravado bordering megalomania won the public’s affection.

  Her role on The Big Show presented an altogether original antiheroine.

  In place of the usual fawning over guest stars, she traded acid barbs.

  “Thank you, Ethel, and better luck next time,” she told Merman on the first show after the studio audience had greeted her song with a rousing reception. The guests, in turn, were expected to parade a comparable litany of their vanities and affectations. When Dietrich appeared, Tallulah chided her for shaving years off her age. Dietrich defended herself by explaining that she had recently discovered that her daughter was two years older than she.

  In January 1951, Collier’s editorialized:

  We’d like to congratulate the person who had the inspiration to think of Miss Bankhead . . . for the richly talented and combustively temperamental Tallulah is scarcely the master- (or mistress-) of ceremonies type.

  In a field noted for the folksy exuberance of its practitioners, Miss Bankhead specializes in the deadpan and often deadly squelch. Her general air of graciousness is never completely reassuring. For there is always the possibility that that marvelous voice of hers is about to pass from a purr of honeyed hospitality to an outraged bellow of professional rage. She is, in a word, terrific.