Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Main Street to Broadway, the film in which she starred as “Tallulah Bankhead,” opened July 22 to derogatory reviews. Though the Saturday Review called Tallulah’s performance “foolish [and] strident,” as with all of Tallulah’s film work, her performance deserves another look today. The edge of hysteria she cultivated beginning with The Big Show is there, but she delivers a nuanced as well as garish self-portrait, performed alongside actual figures from her own life. Estelle Winwood is seen talking to friends in the lobby on Tallulah’s opening night. “Tallulah’s got a wonderful heart,” she says. “Only sometimes it pumps the wrong way.” In her dressing room Tallulah cringes and cowers as she hears the Giants take a beating at Ebbets Field. She phones Leo Durocher midgame to challenge his dugout tactics.

  Early in the film, aspiring playwright Tony Monaco, played by Tom Morton, visits his agent, played by Agnes Moorehead. “He has a lot of talent,” Moorehead tells her assistant, “but we might make him into a money-maker yet.” Tallulah bursts in, threatening to fire Moorehead unless she can find her a wholesome role instead of the harridans that she’s being offered.

  In the mind of the young playwright, Tallulah acts out his different dramaturgical ideas. He envisions her as a sugar-cured Southern housewife, but Tallulah can’t help but be “herself.” Laughing her own raucous laugh, she then corrects herself, neatly demonstrating the central issue of her career: her sometime struggle against, sometime acquiescence to an overwhelming personality that both made and undid her.

  “Let’s try an entirely different approach,” suggests Tallulah in the guise of his superego. The limits of credibility can be strained only so far. Now he sees her as a comic tabloid murderess, ultimately poisoned by her husband and partner in crime. Presenting the script to Tallulah, she rejects it as playing the same song she is tired of singing. Then John van Druten tells her he will direct and Tallulah changes her mind. Alas, the play strikes out on opening night. Attended by Rose Riley in her dressing room, Tallulah consoles Morton after the audience’s disappointing response. “I doubt if anyone will have as many flops as I’ve had.” This flop, she tells him, is only the beginning of his life in the theater.

  Pearls Before Swine

  “After all, darling, we can’t go around showing people what we’re really like. I mean, pearls before swine, darling, pearls before swine.”

  Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler was a role that many felt Tallulah was destined to play. As early as 1930, she was rumored to be considering the role in London, and during the 1940s Robert Henderson all but begged her to do it, although he hadn’t put together a production. In fall of 1950, she found a translation that she liked, and Robert Lewis, artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse, wanted her to try it out there. Her friend Charles Bowden pleaded with Tallulah to accept, saying she’d be superb, and Lewis would communicate exactly the best way to play the role. Tallulah declined, however, and “I think that’s when I really became disenchanted with her,” Bowden said.

  No doubt Tallulah recognized Hedda as a problematic, not to say virtually unstageable, play. It takes the compression of melodrama to such extremes that it becomes symbolist drama, while still simulating adherence to naturalism. Tallulah was by now two decades older than Hedda as Ibsen describes her. Plus, she had already failed in Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads, playing the queen, a woman as morbid as Hedda, but more sympathetic.

  Tallulah’s real mistake was insisting on starring in a television adaptation of Hedda that compressed its four acts into an hour, less time out for commercials. The sponsor, U.S. Steel, had suggested a comedy, but Tallulah insisted that January of 1954 would be the ideal time to take a stab at playing Hedda.

  Tallulah had talked about the role at length with Lewis, who overlooked her having turned down his production and gave his blessing to her doing the play on television. Disappointed by her performance, he wasn’t looking forward to her inevitable call the morning after the live telecast. “All I can say, Tallulah,” Lewis told her diplomatically over the phone, “is that when Ibsen wrote the play he had you in mind. I can’t say anything other than that.” Bowden found her dreadful, “especially because you knew how superb she could have been,” and John Crosby in the New York Herald Tribune commented that in even “the most intense and tragic” scenes “there were faint mocking overtones of the All Star Revue.” Columnist Larry Wolters suggested in the Chicago Tribune giving her “back to Milton Berle and Jimmy Durante . . . where she belongs.”

  Yet Harriet Van Horne in the New York World-Telegram and Sun saw “a fine actress,” who showed “dignity, beauty and passionate conviction.” And Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild was sufficiently impressed that he told a reporter he was pursuing her for a stage production. Nothing came of this. Years later, Tallulah would admit that although she hadn’t watched a kinescope of her performance, “frankly, it was very bad.”

  Four years after her last performance in Private Lives, Tallulah agreed to step onto the “legitimate” stage again, finally consenting to star in Dear Charles, a script that had traveled one of the most circuitous paths imaginable. Based on a play by Roland Bottomly that had never reached Broadway, it had been adapted for Broadway in 1944 by Frederick Jackson and renamed Slightly Scandalous. It failed in New York, but the script was translated into French by Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon and became a success in Paris.

  It was then successfully adapted by Alan Melville for British audiences, and Tallulah had considered doing it in America in late 1952, but ultimately turned it down. In the fall of 1953, it was tried out on the road with Lili Darvas, but found wanting. The producers returned to Tallulah, who committed to a tour of summer theaters in 1954.

  Dear Charles is a frequently amusing, sometimes coy and strained drawing-room comedy. Tallulah played a popular Parisian novelist, Dolores Darvel, who leads an avant-garde existence. She quaffs fresh veg-etable juice on a daily basis. Working in her study, she indicates to her three children that she is not to be disturbed when she pastes literary quotations on her drawing room wall. Having had three children by three different men, Dolores forgoes marrying any of her children’s fathers, choosing to stay independent. One man isn’t enough. “If I did choose one of you,” she says, “I’d spend the rest of my life regretting the other two.” The play surely appealed to Tallulah as a testament to her own lifestyle.

  Arthur Penn, who later did outstanding work on Broadway and in Hollywood, directed the piece. A strange candidate to direct Tallulah, Penn was then twenty years her junior, product of the alien technique and aesthetic of the Actors Studio. He was then working primarily in television, and Dear Charles would have marked his Broadway debut. Penn found directing Tallulah “a nightmare,” the star “willful and out of it. I didn’t expect her to be so drugged out,” he said in 1995.

  By contrast, Werner Klemperer, cast in the role of a temperamental Polish piano virtuoso who is the father of Tallulah’s only daughter, considered her work ethic impressive. Tallulah was “the first one in the theater, the last one out of rehearsal,” he recalled in 1992. Although Klemperer had played on Broadway in Twentieth Century, this would be his first lead comedy role. Klemperer learned a great deal about the genre from Penn, who he felt was totally in charge during rehearsals. The director, however, felt toyed with by Tallulah, if subtly so. “It was not a dead-on confrontation from day one,” Penn recalled. “It was ‘Oh, baby, oh, daddy, oh sweetheart.’

  A lot of that bullshit went on.” Penn found her shrewd in her manipulations, “as are all deeply disturbed people,” but mainly “just plain panicked” over her return to the stage.

  Hugh Reilly played Jeffrey, the father of Dolores’s younger son, a man she found waiting in her hotel suite to madly profess his love. Dolores discovers that he’d intended to rob an adjoining suite, but her fascination with him lasts the two decades since their one night together. Tallulah, who called Reilly “the black Irish,” respected his gumption. “When you don’t like something that’s going on in the
play, when you don’t like something I do, you come right up and talk to me about it. You’re not afraid to argue for what you think. You don’t know how much I admire that.”

  Her conflicts with Penn, however, could not be resolved. “Tallulah knew what she wanted and so she was going to kind of take over,” said Mary Webster, who played Lucienne, Dolores’s prospective daughter-in-law. Penn ultimately asked that his name be removed from the production, and Tallulah’s old friend Edmund Baylis, the show’s stage manager, was the nominal substitution. Dear Charles played around Cape Cod and other resort spots on the Eastern Seaboard, proving a much more robust success than anyone had suspected.

  Grace Raynor, who played Dolores’s daughter, Martine, was roommates with Mary Webster. Once Tallulah asked if the two were having an affair. They told her that they were not. “You should try everything once,” she advised them.

  The cast was struck by how frail Tallulah was. “A couple of times she was really out of it, even onstage,” Webster remembered. When a hurricane blew out the power during a performance in Ogunquit, Maine, they resumed the performance by candlelight. The experience was magical, but Tallulah’s colleagues worried that she would fall or hurt herself.

  Patsy Kelly, the marvelous Hollywood comedienne of the 1930s, had fallen on hard times and was traveling with Tallulah in that typically ambiguous space between employee, friend, and lover. One Sunday summer morning over a cast brunch, two cast members brought out some pot and smoked it in a corner. Tallulah put some in a little pipe and smoked it, growing mellow rather than giddy. As the others were offered some, Kelly, hardly one to abstain herself, nevertheless thought that Tallulah had crossed the line and was corrupting her younger colleagues: “Oh, no, you’re not giving these kids anything!”

  Right up until the tour’s end, it was unclear whether Tallulah would agree to bring the play to New York. Webster and her friends in the cast sensed Tallulah’s apprehension over how it would be received on Broadway, since her performance could only be praised at the expense of the play. Yet the play’s fluffiness was no doubt comforting: they suspected Tallulah was not ready to take on the challenge of something less safe.

  On September 15, 1954, Dear Charles did open on Broadway at the Morosco. In the New York Times, Atkinson noted that the star who could“give the average author a tussle for command of the stage” was here “an easy winner.” Louis Schaeffer wrote in the Brooklyn Eagle that she was “relatively subdued,” at times “taking the easiest way to a laugh with one of her familiar vocal mannerisms,” but for the most part using her “full, artful technique to fatten a skinny play.”

  Others found her performance disturbing. John Mason Brown wrote in the Saturday Review that she had dominated the evening, “not by stealing the show, but by turning what little show there is into a sizable sideshow.

  With Tallulah the divine spark is a fire at once flaming and dangerous.

  The extraordinary endowments which distinguish her also imperil her.

  She is as much the victim of her talents as she is the product. Her gifts outdistance her taste. Most players have to learn to act. Her problem is to keep from overacting. This she seems to find harder and harder to do.

  For the bulk of the run, Tallulah’s behavior was good, although not ir-reproachable. One afternoon before a matinee, she arrived at the Morosco somewhat under the influence. Stage manager Baylis ripped her clothes off, put her into a shower, and kept her screaming under the spout until she had sobered up.

  At another performance, Herbert Kenwith, for whom Tallulah had worked in Princeton in 1949, watched from the second row as Tallulah sat on a very low pouf, fluffing her skirt so that it billowed up to reveal that she had no underclothes on. The priest and three nuns seated in Kenwith’s row soon got up and walked out of the theater.

  Despite such incidents, “when it was time to work she worked harder than any actress I ever saw,” recalled co-star Hugh Reilly. Reilly appreciated her almost avid willingness to work or rework a scene that was not playing as well as she or someone else thought it could.

  Regular rituals that she observed unnerved her when broken. In one scene, Tallulah exited up a staircase; backstage she walked down a corresponding flight. During a dress rehearsal, Klemperer happened to be backstage when she came off. He walked up the steps behind the set, took her hand, and helped her down. “I have the habit when I do certain things in the theater once, I do them every time,” Klemperer said. Every performance he would leave his dressing room, go down to the stage, and wait, holding her hand as she descended into the backstage murk.

  One night, however, his habitual practice slipped Klemperer’s mind.

  He was sitting in his dressing room when he heard a clumping up the stairway. Huffing and puffing and curses echoed down his hall. The stomps got louder, nearer, and a tempest crashed into his dressing room.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” Tallulah shrieked.

  If her life was ordered to satisfy expectations that verged on the compulsive, her need for companionship was just as pressing. “At night,”Klemperer said, “after the play, she was always hoping somebody would say, ‘Come with us, Let’s do this.’ ” She often had cast members back to the Élysée after the performance, and Reilly noticed her on the phone quite a bit with Willie Mays, a titan of her favorite team, the Giants, as well as a fellow Alabamian. She could be counted on to be up most of the night, even when she wasn’t entertaining. More than once, Klemperer called her when he couldn’t sleep or was troubled by something. She was in a cab and at his apartment almost instantly. “She was interested in everything. She tended to froth at the mouth a little bit more than other people, but she was a good listener, too.”

  After five months of good business, Tallulah was ready to take Dear Charles on the road. With Reilly leaving the show, William Roerick was considered for the role of the American father. “Oh, darling you don’t have to introduce us!” Tallulah said gaily, when Roerick was presented for her vetting. It was twelve years since they had been lovers during The Skin of Our Teeth. “Now just a minute,” he finally told her, “before you decide that you want me to go with you, three things: I will not stay up all night and drink, I don’t play bridge, and I don’t know anything about baseball. And I don’t want to be taught!”

  He was happy to spend time with her on tour so long as his boundaries were honored. “She loved being educated,” Roerick said, “and she remembered everything you told her.” She listened for three hours as Roerick lectured her on Egyptology on a train ride between tour engagements. One night after a show, Roerick found her working in her suite on a wire urging the passage of an arts appropriation bill being debated in Congress. Also in her suite were several actors from the company and some people she’d met in the elevator. As she worded the wire, Tallulah struggled over whether Hamlet had said “is a consummation devoutly to be wished” or “ ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.” Turning to Roerick, she beseeched him, “Now, you’re a Shakespearean, you tell me, which is it?” He didn’t know. “You’ll just have to rattle over it.”

  “Oh, I can’t do that,” she told him, insisting that her father “would never forgive me if I misquoted Shakespeare.” She had Roerick call down to the desk for a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare. After midnight, no such anthology could be procured. Around two o’clock, Roerick finally proposed that she compromise and just make her wire read, “and it is—quote—a consummation devoutly to be wished—quote closed.

  “She thought that was cowardly,” Roerick said, “but finally she bought it.”

  When Dear Charles opened in Washington in mid-February, Mamie Eisenhower came to see the show. Hearing that she was in the audience, Tallulah overlooked her loyalty to Stevenson and invited her backstage.

  Things went less smoothly in St. Louis, where intestinal flu forced Tallulah to cancel the opening night performance after the first act. The next night, Tallulah called the company onstage. “I’ve been throwing up and runni
ng to the bathroom all day, so I’m going to have to cut out all the clowning and just sit still. Please bear with me. I don’t know what I’ll be able to do, but I’ll be doing as little as possible.” For the next two nights, she omitted everything raucous or slapstick, sitting still and reaping laughs with her verbal delivery, a delivery Roerick felt only Ina Claire could have matched.

  He found it one of the most delicious high-comedy performances he had ever seen. When he asked her why she didn’t perform Dear Charles that way all the time, Tallulah said, “Oh, no, that’s not what people want. No, no, no.” Once she was cured, she summoned the company back onstage.

  “All right, darlings, back to the clown act.”

  Brooks Atkinson had noted that audiences would have been “confused and disappointed” if Tallulah had been anything except her own theatrical persona. Indeed, Roerick saw that the audience wanted to believe Tallulah’s performance onstage was an accidental extension of her own life.

  “Now, you can’t tell me she wasn’t drunk tonight,” visitors backstage would insist to him. “She fell over the sofa. And that huge laugh.” All of these moments were of course “rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed” before being performed with such apparent spontaneity.

  In one city where Dear Charles played, John Barrymore’s troubled daughter Diana was appearing in another play. Having known her since she was a teenager, Roerick went to see her, but that night the curtain never rose. Roerick later learned that Barrymore had been so terrified at the thought that Tallulah might be in the audience that she had started to drink. He went again to see Barrymore perform, reporting back to Tallulah about her amateurish makeup. Tallulah invited Barrymore over one night after their performances. She told her that she’d heard Barrymore’s makeup “didn’t read well.” She offered to give her a tutorial and took her into her bedroom to show her what she should do. Seeing the difference Tallulah’s techniques made, Barrymore walked out of the bedroom nearly in tears. After their shows diverged to other cities, Tallulah encouraged Roerick to write Barrymore on tour. “Tell her we’re thinking of her. I think she’s terribly lonely.”