Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Private Lives had taught her a treacherous lesson: the harder she worked her comic persona, the more she spoofed herself, the more vociferously her audience responded. Air checks of The Big Show reveal that she often delivered lines with masterly subtlety, but her more raucous comic frequencies were more frequently tapped. Stephan Cole recalled that during a theatrical rehearsal some years before, Tallulah read a scene using her deepest voice. The director thought it was good, but Tallulah feared it might provoke unwarranted laughter. But in Private Lives she showed no similar circumspection about her comic tricks, and on The Big Show she exaggerated them all the more, suddenly letting the bottom register drop out of her voice so that she descended to subbaritone depth.

  A recurring comic theme on The Big Show exploited Tallulah’s purported disorientation at being forced to cope with the varied indignities of prosaic reality. In one monologue, she told of a night her driver was off and she found herself having to show up for an appointment in upper Manhattan. Calling the airports, she discovered that her destination was off the flight route. A friend told her to descend into “a dark hole in the ground,”and when she ventured into the subway, she was shocked when the clerk at the booth refused her check. A series of rude awakenings followed as Tallulah encountered the rough-and-tumble world of subterranean mass transit.

  The Big Show was the biggest radio hit of the year, pulling in a fantastic lineup of guest stars. George Baxt, whose agency was always trying to book clients on The Big Show, found that Tallulah was “having constant battles about the blacklisting.” The House Un-American Activities Committee was at the height of its influence. Tallulah fought for the likes of Judy Holliday and Edward G. Robinson. Even Tallulah was considered suspect by some for having appeared in plays by Hellman and Odets.

  Holiday became a semiregular, performing a running dialogue with Tallulah in which the younger woman and the older woman tried to give each other advice that neither wanted to hear. Another semiregular was Fred Allen, who had performed a classic “Mr. and Mrs. Broadcasting”sketch with Tallulah on his own show, prefiguring her vinegary Big Show humor. Its satire on husband-and-wife talk shows had a married duo making sugary patter over breakfast, complete with endless sponsor plugs.

  Then the veil was drawn back: the audience eavesdropped on the surly squabbling and sponsor bashing that might take place when the microphones weren’t plugged in.

  Tallulah’s new radio success made her position in the theater world, always somewhat equivocal, even more controversial. Tallulah was only doing what many of the biggest stars in show business had done, deploying a persona and a recurring series of tropes delivered in the person of her own self.

  Having achieved the status of one of the theater’s great ladies in the 1940s, she hit a different nerve than Jack Benny or Martha Raye did. She reawakened a long-standing cultural anxiety over the breaching of boundaries between democratic and aristocratic genres. (Tallulah’s entire career did just that, in fact; she had always freely interwoven the highest and driest comic modes with the earthiest.)

  Tallulah met the same disapproval that greeted Helen Traubel and Ezio Pinza when they descended from the even “higher” art of grand opera to appear in Broadway musicals. It is hard to imagine this today, when the most popular, accessible genres are the ones that dominate the field. Also, the Broadway of today barely resembles the one that existed in 1950, having slowly contracted since the advent of talking pictures.

  Tallulah herself was perhaps never totally comfortable with her role or her new medium. “I have nightmares in which I drop every page of the script and can’t think of a thing to say into the microphone.” Tallulah told Murray Schumach of the New York Times. Rather than be called “mistress of ceremonies,” she wanted to be billed as conférencier, as the Russian impresario Nikita Balief called himself when he hosted the renowned Chauve-souris revue in Europe and America during the late 1920s. Not surprisingly, this was too esoteric for NBC.

  A couple of months after The Big Show premiered, Bert Cowlan joined the show as a commercial announcer for Reynolds Metals. He was present for Sunday rehearsals only. Starting in the late morning, they would perform a run-through, a dress rehearsal, and then the live broadcast before a studio audience. Cowlan recalled these rehearsals as “sheer fun. They were wild. It was Tallulah’s playground.” She kept a glass close at hand, but while he was sure it contained only tea, Tallulah would pretend it was liquor, constantly calling attention to it or sipping from it ostentatiously.

  Many of the guests were entertainers she’d known for years. “If you put Tallulah and Groucho Marx together, things could get outrageous fast.”

  One Sunday during The Big Show’s second season, Peter Lorre was among the guests rehearsing when a woman Tallulah knew showed up with her baby. Oohing and aahing, Tallulah was so enchanted that she made a spontaneous gift of a wad of cash. She kept running offstage to play with the baby, until Lorre walked over to the microphone. He said,“Please take that out of here before I eat it.” Tallulah laughed and the mother finally left and the rehearsal went on. “You never knew what Tallulah was going to do,” Cowlan recalled in 1993, “except that underneath all of the posing that was one thorough-going professional.”

  Dee Engelbach, a boy-genius type in his early thirties, who produced and directed the show, had alleviated Tallulah’s panic during the weeks before the first broadcast. In her autobiography, she calls him “one of the ablest and most understanding men ever to weave coherence out of chaos.”

  Cowlan thought that Engelbach was clever to give much of his direction over the intercom. His disembodied voice was perhaps able to exert more authority over Tallulah than his boyish presence; this way, she could not try to break him up with some of her own shtick, or climb all over him with hugs and kisses.

  Tallulah maintained a suite at the Élysée and lived there during the days she was working, but the rest of the time she stirred from Windows as little as possible. “It was very quiet,” said Fran Bushkin, who had married Tallulah’s good friend, musician Joe Bushkin, in 1947. The Bushkins visited frequently during these years. “If the Giants were playing, that was probably the most exciting thing that went on in her life at the time,”

  Bushkin recalled in 1993. If the team was winning, Lillian and Sylvester Oglesby would jump up and perform a soft shoe, and Tallulah would join them in a Charleston.

  Some of her reclusiveness was due to the fact that she was losing faith in her appearance. One reason Tallulah liked the radio show was that she didn’t have to worry about her looks. “It’s just a relief,” she told Bushkin.

  She had always disliked her breasts because she felt they were too big for her height; now she underwent breast reduction surgery because she worried that they were sagging. The operation resulted in severe scarring, and afterward she felt it was “a sort of minor tragedy,” Bushkin recalled.

  Windows was quiet, too, because people were becoming wary of visiting Tallulah. After many years in England, Cathleen Nesbitt was acting again on Broadway in T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. She went to the Élysée to visit Tallulah, who seemed lonely and needy, less giving than the woman she’d acted with in 1924. Reluctant to let Nesbitt leave, Tallulah followed her downstairs in a nightgown to see her into a cab, talking all the while.

  When Nesbitt spent several weekends at Windows, Tallulah’s insomnia and loneliness were again an issue. “Lock your door at night,” Nesbitt was warned by friends, “because Tallulah likes to wander.” One weekend, expecting Nesbitt, Tallulah planned a formal dinner, including entertainment by magician Fred Keating, who’d acted with her in Forsaking All Others. “The servants had gotten out the best of everything,” recalled Glenn Anders, who was also invited. To calm her excitement or anxiety, however, Tallulah started drinking before her guests arrived. By the time champagne was served at the dining-room table, Tallulah’s head had dropped into the soup as she passed out. Carried off to bed, she did not wake up until late the next afternoon,
long after her guests had cut apple blossoms and beat a retreat.

  One night Tallulah had dinner served earlier than usual. “The sunset’s so beautiful,” she told Bowden, Anders, Winwood, and Edward Baylis, an old friend who’d stage-managed Private Lives after Bowden left the show.

  “We’ll have dinner here and enjoy it.” They sat by a bay window, all on one side of the table, to catch the sun’s retreat behind Tallulah’s rolling hills.

  Hostess and guests sipped white wine. After dinner, some watched television, still a novelty in those days, while others played bridge. Tallulah repaired to her bedroom on the ground floor. The others retired to guest quarters upstairs, where several bedrooms lined a hallway. As Bowden got into bed, taking out a book and thinking how charming a hostess Tallulah was when sober, an unmistakable sound filled the house. Bowden recognized the snort Tallulah bleated out when she was smashed. Telling himself it was his imagination, he heard another fearsome guffaw. Bowden opened his door, and watched as each door down the hallway opened and horrified faces peered out.

  Last to come out was Robert Williams, Tallulah’s manservant, whose room was at the far end of the hallway. “It’s all right,” he told the bathrobe-clad assemblage, “the bird’s cover must have slipped.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s the only thing the bird can do: laugh just like her.” As Williams went downstairs to cover the unruly member of Tallulah’s menagerie, the guests all sank, relieved, back into bed.

  Fran Bushkin herself was at something of a disadvantage with Tallulah, being the much younger wife of a man whom Tallulah had some history with. An heiress, Bushkin undoubtedly brought her own sense of entitlement to the relationship. Even so, an alliance of convenience and even a genuine friendship developed. “We both were mad for dogs—animals in general,” Bushkin recalled.

  Bushkin gave Tallulah a Maltese that she named Dolores. To a reporter, Tallulah extolled the breed, saying “Queens loved them,” and among their regal owners, Cleopatra had called hers “my little comforters.” At night Do-

  lores slept on Tallulah’s head, a privilege extended to all her favorite pets.

  Dolores was never spayed, and Bushkin knew exactly when Dolores was in heat. Tinges of blood would daub Tallulah’s graying ash-blond hair. Dola Cavendish told Bushkin that she had become partial to Pekingese because of the one called Napolean that Tallulah had had back in London when they first met. Dola now went everywhere with an elderly Pekingese and his oxygen tank. Guests in Cavendish’s company were frequently alerted that the dog couldn’t survive one more night. Tallulah endured many false alarms until “after a whole night of hysteria and oxygen” at Windows, the dog finally died.

  “We will find Dola the greatest Pekingese puppy on earth,” Tallulah announced, sending Bushkin to make the rounds of breeders. Finally Bushkin located the perfect puppy, and Tallulah presented it to Cavendish to great rejoicing.

  Poolside at Tallulah’s, Pimm’s cups were served and glasses were continuously replenished. Tallulah was drunk one day when she handed Bushkin’s toddler daughter a Pimm’s cup. “I exploded at her,” Bushkin said. “She felt awful. If you reprimanded her about anything that she felt she deserved, she was just so apologetic. She’d just crumple up.”

  Joe Bushkin had talked to Mitch Miller at Columbia about the idea of Tallulah’s cutting some novelty records, for she was singing frequently on The Big Show. In the first month, Meredith Willson’s “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You” was introduced, and each week the show closed with Tallulah and her guests singing a stanza in turn. Inviting Mr. and Mrs.

  Miller to join her and the Bushkins one Saturday night for dinner, Tallulah ordered a long, elaborate continental meal to be catered. Cocktails were to be served at seven, dinner at eight. When eight o’clock rolled around and the Millers still had not arrived, however, Tallulah grew furious. “People should always be prompt, or at least the first time they meet you.” At eight-fifteen Tallulah said they would go ahead and eat the dinner, which was getting cold. At eight forty-five, they heard a car drive up.

  “I don’t know who you think you are,” Tallulah told Miller, “but you are the rudest man I’ve ever known.” Mitch’s wife, Frances, was apologetic, but Miller was not. “I am standing,” Tallulah said, “and that means that you and Mrs. Miller must leave.” Joe Bushkin told Tallulah to forget about the record date. After another miserable hour picking over their meal, they went to bed at ten-thirty.

  Later that night the Bushkins heard a timid knock at their bedroom door. A small voice said, “May I come in?” It was Tallulah; she couldn’t sleep.

  “I was so awful tonight. I just humiliated you, didn’t I, Joe? Acting the way I did, and it was insufferable.” Lighting a fire, she told them how reassuring she found a blazing fireplace if she was upset about something.

  She’d written several drafts of an apology note to the Millers, which she showed them.

  The next day, Tallulah wanted Sylvester Oglesby to drive the note into Manhattan to Miller’s office immediately. Fran Bushkin reminded her that Miller wouldn’t be in the office on a Sunday. Tallulah finally agreed to wait.

  “But she was like a child about it,” Bushkin recalled. “A child who’d behaved terribly and wanted to do anything to make up for it.”

  The note healed relations and Tallulah went on to record with Bushkin and Miller. As she relaxed between takes, someone left a tape recorder running. Her unguarded words make for fascinating listening today. “I hate my voice,” Tallulah confesses. “It’s supposed to be my greatest asset but I’m always shocked. I am not supposed to be a musician.” Sometimes she issues pleas to be controlled—“I’m going to be telling you how to play it in a minute, if you don’t—for God’s sake, don’t let me!”—as well as wild statements of bravado: “I’m going to sing at Café Society tonight. I’m going to get those gangsters there to pay your week’s salary. I’m going to hold ’em up, brother! I’m going to say, ‘Listen, I get five thousand per performance, and if you riddle me, dear, you’ve got Truman to answer to, and [musicians’union head James] Petrillo for that matter’—I’ll find you in the morning sun and when the night is new, I’ll be looking at the moon but I’ll be seeing you.”

  At one point she cries, “Let me get barefoot. I’m an Alabama hillbilly, for Christ’s sake, why I have all these modern contraptions I don’t know.

  Plus I’ve got the prettiest foot in civilization, too.”

  “I’m a foot man myself,” says Miller.

  “So was Cleopatra,” Tallulah replies.

  “Did you ever catch athlete’s beard?” Bushkin asks Miller. “Athlete’s tongue.”

  “Did you hear that, Bill?” Tallulah calls to her boyfriend William Langford. “It doesn’t make babies, but it’s fun.”

  Tallulah’s androgyny, her capacity for double entendre, and her graphic talk about sex made her a favorite with an urbane male homosexual audience, and her Big Show appearances fanned their approval into wildfire popularity. Invariably intrigued by fringe cultures, Tallulah had always cultivated every audience she could.

  In the recording studio, Joe Bushkin tells Tallulah that her records will be “something every fag in America must have in their home—and there are twenty million of them.”

  “Me and the ballet, dear,” Tallulah says tartly. “If it weren’t for them, I’d be dead.”

  Yet she also felt some ambivalence about her following. Perhaps she realized she was getting in over her head. Gay culture of the 1940s and ’50s encompassed the hostility of an ostracized and persecuted minority, and there was a decided strain of misogyny among the ranks of Tallulah’s ador-ers. If she validated gay male territory, she also intruded upon it.

  Early in 1951, The Big Show was transmitted from Hollywood. Tallulah and Dola Cavendish were flying back to New York following the broadcast.

  After an early dinner at George Cukor’s, Tallulah’s agent, Phil Weltman, was going to drive them to the airport. Several o
f the young men in Cukor’s retinue plied Tallulah with liquor throughout dinner, deriving a good deal of pleasure out of seeing her decline into sloppiness. As Weltman pulled his convertible up to the house, he saw Tallulah walking out when “one of these bastards” approached Tallulah with a full glass and put it in her hands. This last slug was enough to make Tallulah seriously disorderly, so much so that the airline pilot refused to let her board. He had flown a previous flight on which Tallulah had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette in her hand. It was an audience of men like those at Cukor’s who would foreclose Tallulah’s theatrical career and reputation over the course of the 1950s.

  Stateless

  “After twenty years I return to the scene of my triumphs. Of course, most of them are married now.”

  For the opening broadcasts of its second season, The Big Show went to Europe, taping at London’s Palladium on September 16 and from the Empire Theatre in Paris on September 24, 1951. Tallulah returned to London for the first time since 1937 overcome with excitement and trepidation. Particularly concerned with how her looks would compare to the woman she had been, she went on the wagon all during the summer of 1951, if her autobiography can be believed. Her return received enormous attention in the British press, which toasted her in a reception at the Ritz.

  “After twenty years I return to the scene of my triumphs,” she announced on air. “Of course, most of them are married now.” The broadcast featured an all-star lineup including Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, who acted a scene from Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. What Tallulah hoped would be received as a token of her love for Britain turned out to be a disaster, however, as she recited Gene Fowler’s poem “Jervis Bay,” saluting the heroism of a World War II freighter that chose to slip out of a convoy so that other ships might escape attack. The British were appalled by her reminder of their wartime losses. “Oh, it was dreadful,” said Una Venning, Tallulah’s colleague in The Dancers twenty-eight years earlier. “The more it went on, the more you said ‘How can she do this?’ ” Venning had been looking forward to seeing Tallulah again, but she debated with herself over what she could say. Finally she went to visit Tallulah at the Ritz, where she was received warmly. “Well did you hear it?” Tallulah brought up the subject herself. “Yes.” “Well, it was a mistake, wasn’t it?” Venning agreed: “But I thought you’d heard it so much that it was better not to mention it. Well, you’ve had an awful press, haven’t you?”