“Yes.”
In Tallulah the actress apologizes “for this unwitting blunder,” committed against “a people for whom I have nothing but respect and affection.”
Yet London had acclaimed her as a still-handsome woman, which to Tallulah was probably as important a yardstick of her success as anything.
The previous May, Tallulah and her attorney, Donald Seawell, had reported to general sessions court in downtown Manhattan to begin the trial against her former maid Evelyn Cronin, only to be told that Cronin was in the hospital and the trial would have to be postponed. When it finally commenced, Fred Morritt, Cronin’s defense attorney, warned prospective jurors that “with the greatest reluctance and regret” he would be forced to support his defense with details of “foul language, profanity, perversion and criminality.”
On December 11, Tallulah’s eyes teared and she shook her head as Morritt made his opening statement. Cronin’s defense rested on claims that she had been forced to reimburse herself for innumerable and sometimes clandestine purchases, including drugs. “The next thing they’ll have me doing is vivisecting my dog without an anesthetic,” Tallulah snorted from her seat in the courtroom.
“I expect to prove all this in the trial,” Morritt said.
“And I expect to disprove it,” Tallulah announced.
Morritt complained to Judge Harold Stevens that Tallulah was “making facial gestures and sounds.” “I coughed, Your Honor,” Tallulah explained. “I have a bronchial condition.” Time reported: “Theatergoers who watched fully expected her to pull a small, pearl-handled revolver from her handbag and with a triumphant and scornful baritone cry, shoot both counsel and defendant.”
Judge Stevens denied Morritt’s request for a mistrial and refused to reprimand her. But by the third day of the trial, all reporters were barred, as well as all witnesses, of whom there was no one except Tallulah.
Before the trial began, Cronin had contacted Phil Arthur, asking him to testify about how and why Tallulah had fired him from Private Lives.
Arthur refused. Cross-examining Tallulah’s accountant, Benjamin Nadel, Morritt asked him to supply the names of people in whose bank accounts he had deposited money on Tallulah’s instructions. Morritt volunteered the name of William Langford.
By the very nature of the transactions for which Cronin claimed she deserved to be reimbursed, she could produce no supporting paper trail.
Tallulah’s checkbooks recorded minutely itemized expenses. Cronin claimed that she had paid for shoes Tallulah bought when she didn’t have her checkbook. Tallulah’s checkbook, however, recorded approximately $1,500 paid for shoes bought over an eighteen-month period.
Cronin claimed that during the run of Private Lives, nightclub owner Dickie Welles had brought Tallulah some cocaine backstage at the Plymouth. Since Tallulah didn’t have any cash, Cronin said she had paid him fifty dollars. But when he went back with Tallulah to the Élysée, Tallulah gave him a check for fifty dollars. Cronin insisted that the check wasn’t payment, but was written only because Tallulah knew he was broke.
Although never asked to testify, Eugenia Bankhead later asserted to Cal Schumann, mutual friend of the Bankhead sisters, that Cronin had stolen from Tallulah on a grand scale. One day in Buffalo, where Eugenia was visiting Tallulah, she and Cronin were going to go out shopping. Cronin told Tallulah that they needed cash. Tallulah told her to go down to the front desk of the hotel and ask them to charge $100 to her account. At the front desk, Cronin asked for $600; at the time, Eugenia assumed Tallulah had authorized Cronin to ask for this amount when Eugenia had been out of the room.
Tallulah and her legal team countered Morritt’s vilification with some of their own. She claimed to reporters that Cronin had “been in burlesque before I was born.” That was an exaggeration, since Cronin was fifty-nine, but she had done some low-grade stripping decades earlier. When Assistant District Attorney Jerome Kidder cross-examined Cronin, he got her to acknowledge the full scope of her performing experiences. Asked about her shoplifting record, she also conceded that she had been questioned in a San Francisco store about a brooch that she said she had “found on the floor.”
After a thirteen-day trial, Cronin was convicted by an all-male jury.
Tallulah, however, asked the court to show leniency toward her former employee, and Cronin’s sentence was suspended. It turned out, she was indeed ill with heart trouble, and died a year later.
As late as 1994, Morritt continued to insist that Cronin had, in fact, kited checks on Tallulah’s orders. “She ordered her. She authorized her. It was more than that. I recall that she beat the hell out of her.” Morritt had made the same argument in court in 1951. Perhaps this was what Cronin told him. Tallulah could slap or strike out at people on occasion, and she could throw or break things in a fit of fury, but there has been no indication that she ever administered beatings to her staff or anyone else. As terrifying as Tallulah’s violent temper could be, she was slightly built and Cronin would have been able to take care of herself in a physical confrontation.
Calling herself “old and tired,” in the court corridors Tallulah told reporters, “I lose everything if I lose the goodwill of the public.” Yet surprisingly, Tallulah’s reputation suffered not at all. The public, which had spent the previous year laughing at her vagaries, declined to censure her for them even when documented in the frankest terms from a witness stand. The gratuitous cruelty of Morritt’s attacks also helped her cause. Edie Smith, who had returned to work for Tallulah, told a reporter that they had received stacks of supporting mail. Even so, the trial was as much of a trauma as Tallulah had been warned it would be, “perhaps more so because she kept so much inside herself,” Seawell wrote to Lee Israel in 1971.
After its glorious debut year, The Big Show began to sputter, along with the medium of radio. Robert Lewis Shayon in the Christian Science Monitor wrote that Tallulah’s “vain, rude, and temperamental role has worn very thin. She would be well advised to try something fresh.” Tallulah agreed. In a long letter to director Engelbach, she pleaded for more challenging material. “I’m sincere when I say I’m grateful and lucky that I don’t have to play eight times a week,” she wrote. “But I’m not yet so old, fat and tired that integrity doesn’t rear its ugly head.”
The Big Show concluded its second season on April 20, 1952, and was not renewed by NBC. Tallulah’s plans for the fall included her television debut, as well as the publication of her memoirs, which she had planned to begin in the fall of 1949. It wasn’t until the summer of 1951 that she began dictating them at Windows, the book ghosted by Richard Maney, her personal publicist since 1939. It wasn’t the first time Maney had spoken for Tallulah. Broadway’s foremost publicity agent, he handled most of the leading shows, and on more than one occasion he had drafted articles bearing Tallulah’s byline.
Maney’s style was ornately embellished, dripping with erudite allusions, a rather different timbre of flamboyance than Tallulah employed when speaking firsthand to the press. Yet his words give Tallulah a voice in which her sensibility echoes as reverberantly as his. She dedicated the book to Will, but Maney received a citation page of his own.
Published at the end of September 1952, Tallulah went straight to the top of the best-seller lists. Much of what she disclosed was racy for the time. An entire chapter covers her dalliances with drugs and alcohol, though she omits and denies as much as she discloses. Indeed the book could be seen as a way of countering the kind of scrutiny she had received in a number of long profiles published during the previous decade.
At this point in her life, Tallulah seemed to care about decorous press coverage at least as much, if not more, than she had when her father was alive. Almost any major profile of her was now guaranteed to contain things that could infuriate her. Time magazine’s 1948 cover article on her, for instance, mentioned her use of sedatives and stimulants as well as her drinking. Armchair analysis was ladled out heavily in middlebrow and highbrow celebrity profiles of the
day. Concurrent with Tallulah’s publication, the American Weekly commissioned Maurice Zolotow to revise a profile of her that he’d done for the Saturday Evening Post in 1947. Reviewing her extensive history of physical ailments, he wrote that it was “no coincidence that all of these diseases are the kind known as ‘psychosomatic’—the kind that are physical expressions of repressed emotional frustrations, hostilities and resentments.”
Reverting to Southern-belle type, she seems in Tallulah to be afraid of being perceived as a bluestocking intellectual. But the country’s anti-intellectualism bothered her. She had written that whereas intellectual was “once a flattering term, the rabble-rousers and reactionaries now use the word as an epithet. Too many of our countrymen rejoice in stupidity, look upon ignorance as a badge of honor.”
“Her writing about her stage career is a pallid recital of parts played and notices received,” Lee Rogow complained in the Saturday Review. It is true that above all Tallulah wanted to be perceived as someone who spent her career winging it. As she had throughout her life on so many different issues, she simplified herself for public consumption. Yet her autobiography shows her to be more insightful about herself than one would have expected.
About communism, she confessed a phobia so great that “more than once I’ve lashed out at innocent people, liberals and rationalists who have no more sympathy for the Reds than I, but who point out to me that capitalism is not lily white.” She found McCarthy “a disgrace to the nation. He has held us up to more ridicule, more contempt at home and abroad, than the reddest Red in the land.”
On October 11, 1952, Tallulah made her television debut as hostess of NBC’s All-Star Revue. Scheduled to feature a revolving roster of hosts, the program was slotted to have Tallulah host one show per month. She had retained key people from her Big Show team: writers Mort Green and George Foster, music director Meredith Willson, director Dee Englebach. A prestigious selection of guest stars participated.
One the debut show, Ethel Barrymore joined Tallulah in a sketch Tallulah had earlier performed on The Big Show, a pointed satire on the vanities of the star performer. Tallulah played an actress who appeals to Barrymore for honest response to her latest performance, and then proceeds to belittle every candid thing her friend says. Finally her friend gives up, serves up unalloyed praise, and the actress thanks her for supplying exactly the objective critique she needed.
After the taping, entertainment celebrities, joined by executives from NBC and Harper & Brothers, celebrated the publication of Tallulah at the Pen and Pencil restaurant. Two days later, Tallulah left for Hollywood to film the supporting but pivotal role of “Tallulah Bankhead” in the film Main Street to Broadway. A coming-of-age fable of a young writer trying to get a play staged on the Great White Way, Main Street to Broadway’s young hero is a fledgling writer who produces a script tailored to Tallulah’s demand for a role that would not stereotype her. The film was produced by MGM, directed by Tay Garnett, and written by Samson Raphaelson, one of the foremost playwrights and scenarists of the time. In addition to Tallulah, numerous theater greats, ranging from Ethel and Lionel Barrymore to Rodgers and Hammerstein, made supporting appearances.
That fall Tallulah campaigned vigorously for Adlai Stevenson’s presidential bid, telling William Hawkins of the Herald Tribune, “I hope the book doesn’t hurt the Democratic party. They might say, ‘That Monster. If she likes it, it must be wrong.’ ”
After Stevenson lost to Eisenhower, Tallulah wrote in the New York Times that, “As distinguished from the bilge, the double-talk, the gibberish, the cliché-cluttered balderdash that politicians spout in an election year, the addresses of the Illinois Governor were models of clarity, sanity and good taste. In heretic fashion Governor Stevenson spoke to the American people with humility, with respect for their intelligence.”
Tallulah ends her autobiography by saying that, “Earlier in this odyssey I beat my breast and swore I’d never act on a stage again unless so crushed by professional disasters I had no alternative did I hope to survive.Don’t bet on that.” Her appetite for performing in the theater turned out to be unquenchable. Soon after, she was considering starring in Dear Charles, a drawing-room comedy she found “very charming.” She was to play the mother of three grown illegitimate children who invites each child’s fathers for a reunion, with an eye toward marrying the one she most fancies in order to please her children’s prospective in-laws.
A production of the play had just opened in London, starring Yvonne Arnaud. Tallulah had been interested in starring in the London production, but was committed to The All-Star Revue. She was thinking of trying out the play in California over the summer of 1953, and she wanted Englebach to direct her.
At the end of the season, Tallulah pulled out of All-Star Review, which lasted one more year without her. Soon afterward, she accepted an offer to perform a nightclub act at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. It was an unprecedented move for Tallulah, yet a logical outcome of the popular venues she had been involved with since 1950, garnering her highest salary ever: $20,000 per week for a three-week run. She told Dean Fuller, who accompanied her on piano, that she needed the money to cover her income-tax arrears.
A young composer and Yale graduate, Fuller impressed Tallulah, who never forgot that she had not finished high school. Fuller had also done some work for producer/director Gus Schirmer Jr., a friend of Tallulah’s who was overseeing the engagement. Two days after their arrival in Las Vegas, Tallulah confessed to “a terrible night”: she had lost a huge wad of money at the casino tables, then slept with “a perfectly strange woman from Hartford.” Developing a case of shingles, which she attributed to nerves, she feared having to delay her opening.
When she went on as scheduled on May 20, 1953, Sands manager Jack Entratter found his audience filled with counterparts from rival hotels, come to gloat over the folly of bringing a theatrical star to Las Vegas.
Their derision melted away with her success. “Contrary to some pes-simistic feeling,” wrote Variety’s “Soho.” “Bankhead . . . proves to be socko as an entertainer in a medium which has heretofore been completely strange to her. . . .”
Her opening monologue was pure stand-up comedy, including her baffled reaction to hitting the casino tables for the first time. Though Tallulah had actually been gambling for decades, the monologue reprised the winning formula from her Big Show monologues, making comic fodder out of a Tallulah so spoiled and insulated that she was almost pathologically unable to face mundane existence. Like her maiden voyage on the subway, her “first” visit to a casino bewildered and outraged her. “I’m faded!” Tallulah bellowed.
“What do you mean I’m faded?” The audience loved every minute of it.
Her act also included a slightly condensed version of Dorothy Parker’s“Telephone Call,” a dramatic monologue in which a woman waits for a phone call from an ex-lover that never comes. “This material would ordinarily seem most dubious for nightclubs,” Variety stated, “particularly in the far west, but the artistry of her delivery carried it unfailingly, and brought her a near ovation from the capacity crowd.”
What made the segue into the dramatics of that monologue was Tallulah’s ability “to go from yellow to dark green immediately,” Fuller recalled.
At first speaking quickly and glibly, she began taking long pauses as the reality sank in. Her voice trailed off. Her eyes filled with tears. She prolonged pauses to the point where the audience seemed to be holding its breath, almost afraid that she might break down.
Tallulah also sang “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “Bye Bye Blackbird,” which was the one part of the act that Variety’s correspondent called “questionable.” Ray Sinatra led an eleven-piece orchestra, with Fuller on piano.
Despite her reception, Tallulah wasn’t satisfied. “You’re kind,” she told well-wishers who trooped backstage, “but to tell the truth, I was lousy.”
“I’ve never seen anyone quite so nervous,” wrote “My New York” columnist Mel Heimer,
who went backstage to find her shaking. (Entratter had sponsored a junket of journalists from both coasts to cover Tallulah’s debut.) Each night at 11:00 P.M. and 1:00 A.M., she performed her thirty-two-minute turn. A half hour before the first show, Fuller would arrive at the Sands and drop into her dressing room, where Tallulah would pick at dinner and drink a split of champagne. Fuller’s presence didn’t inhibit her from studying herself in the mirror as she went over the performance in her mind. Invariably she was concerned with the Parker monologue. She would mention what they had done the night before and how they might slightly change it that night.
As always, after the show Tallulah needed somebody to talk to. She and Fuller would go back to her room and drink champagne and cognac.
Sometimes, if he wandered off, she would have him paged. She also spent time with Marlene Dietrich, who was working in Las Vegas at the time.
Fuller was with them one night as they sat on Tallulah’s bed, drinking champagne and lightheartedly discussing the respective merits of homosexuality and heterosexuality.
Tallulah’s stint in Vegas contributed to her uniquely medium- and genre-spanning career. For purists, however, it was the nadir of her spiral into popular vulgarity. Watching her perform the Parker monologue, Heimer had “scratched my head and wondered again—-why here?” He stopped wondering when he remembered “that all of us . . . have sold our souls at one time or another.”
Tallulah! Page 51