When they arrived in Los Angeles, Roerick had dinner before a performance with a cousin who kept insisting over Roerick’s protests that he linger over coffee. As a result, he didn’t get to the theater until a few minutes after the half-hour check before curtain time. As they drove up to the theater, he saw Tallulah waiting in her dressing gown outside the stage door. “Darling, where have you been? I’ve been almost frantic! I wanted to be the first to tell you. Diana’s killed herself.” He groaned in pain. “No, she hasn’t actually,” Tallulah said, “but she tried to.”
“She was punishing me for being late,” Roerick recalled wryly. Hus-tling him into the theater, Tallulah explained that Barrymore had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Tallulah had found out which hospital Barrymore was in, and she told Roerick, “The last thing the poor child needs is a wire from me with the press watching, so you send her a wire, and say,‘Please learn to count to two. The madam sends her love, as do I. Bill.’ ”
The tour concluded with four weeks in San Francisco. After their final performance, as Tallulah and Roerick were saying good-bye, he told her, “I won’t be seeing you anymore.”
“You have your farm and I have Windows,” Tallulah said, “but we’ll be seeing each other.”
“No, we will not be seeing each other.” While he was devoted to her, and would always be there if she needed him, he confessed that “I cannot stand your public personality.”
“Darling, isn’t it awful? I make vows I’m going to stop all that nonsense,” Tallulah said, “but it’s what people expect of me, and when they come ’round it takes over, it takes over.” Just as they were sitting, that very persona emerged as if it were a doppelgänger.
“After all, darling, we can’t go around showing people what we’re really like.” Tallulah drew herself up. “I mean, pearls before swine, darling, pearls before swine.”
The Hallelujah Chorus
“I’ve always wanted to die onstage.”
Now more than ever, Tallulah dreaded being alone at night and was unable to sleep. At Windows she would run alongside the car of departing guests, hanging on to delay their leave-taking. On the Dear Charles tour she had spent a lot of time with the Raynor siblings, Grace and Tom, who played her daughter and younger son. Once she asked Tom to give her twenty-five minutes’ notice before he planned to leave her hotel suite so that she could take her pills and already be halfway to sleep by the time he left. Her dependence on barbiturates made her existence in Bedford perilous; routinely falling asleep with a cigarette in her hand, she’d burned so many holes in the carpet that a parquetlike pattern was imprinted.
Ray Foster, a young man whose mother cleaned for Tallulah when she was in Manhattan, spent time at Windows, gladly using her pool and, with Tallulah’s permission, often inviting guests. The house was not as pristine as it should have been. Sitting all day with a glass, Tallulah was in no condition to oversee her staff. Guests usually made her boisterous and dominating, although with stimulating company she could elude her own need to be “on.”
One afternoon she and Gladys Cooper, who was now starring on Broadway in The Chalk Garden, had a quiet lunch by the pool. Another time Foster brought W. H. Auden to see her. She treated the poet with reverence, though other times she seemed disgusted with everything to do with herself, her life, her myth. “I have to go to a fucking ball game!” she complained once to Foster. “How do I get myself into these fucking things?”
Working was the only thing that propelled Tallulah to exert control over her addictions, her personal demons. In late 1955, she made the decision to move back into Manhattan, purchasing a town house at 230 East Sixty-second Street, between Second and Third Avenues. At the same time, she accepted an offer to star at the New York City Center, playing Blanche DuBois in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Jean Dalrymple, who had handled Tallulah’s press for Forsaking All Others in 1933, had directed the City Center drama and opera program since its in-ception in 1943, producing limited runs of proven repertory starring Broadway names at popular prices. Tallulah’s Streetcar would rehearse and try out in Florida, before coming into New York for a two-week run in February 1956.
Tallulah had also signed a contract a month before to be mistress of ceremonies in a new attempt to resuscitate the Zieg feld Follies, which had not been produced since the mid-1940s. Shortly after signing, Tallulah joked to the press that she had been “brainwashed” for six months by Richard Kollmar, who was producing the show with Richard Gardiner. “I said, ‘Darling, I CAHN’T do anything.’ He bullied me. He has a darling sense of humor. I’ll have 3 or 4 sketches and I’ll come down in a beautiful dress and probably trip right over my feet.” She would begin work on it immediately after Streetcar closed.
Rumor has it Tallulah had been offered the role of Blanche in the original production of Streetcar, which opened on Broadway in December 1947. Tennessee Williams said that he had suggested Tallulah to producer Irene Selznick, who felt that she was too strong for the part. Had Tallulah been offered the part then, at age forty-five, she might well have found that the role of a Southern woman who drinks too much, is concerned about aging, and is promiscuous would have left her too personally exposed.
Most likely she would have been reluctant to abandon the torrential success she was having in Chicago in Private Lives, as well.
Before Dalrymple approached her with Streetcar, Tallulah had been considering starring in a revival of Déclassée, Zoë Akins’s romantic melodrama about the downward spiral of a British noblewoman. Ethel Barrymore’s performance in the original 1919 Déclassée had so enthralled Tallulah that she sneaked into the Empire Theatre during intermissions to watch her again and again. But Streetcar meant more to her. Reading the play in 1955, she was in tears by the time she finished.
Dalrymple felt that the play was Williams’s greatest, and Tallulah shared her enthusiasm. She may still have had apprehensions about the parallels that could be drawn to her own life, but she’d learned from The Big Show to take preemptive comic strikes on just such delicate matters.
Williams had agreed to supervise the production, choosing thirty-three-year-old Herbert Machiz to direct in his Broadway debut. Twenty years later, when Machiz died, he still had not become a major Broadway director, something his many detractors blame on a shortfall of talent.
Many first-rate actors admired him, however, working season after season at his summer theater in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, and off-Broadway at his Artists’ Theatre, where he presented experimental plays funded by his lover, prominent Manhattan art-gallery owner John Bernard Myers.
Williams continued to believe in him, clearly, later choosing Machiz to direct the premieres of Suddenly Last Summer and The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.
Streetcar’s City Center cast included several members of the original production. Edna Thomas again played the Mexican Woman. Rudy Bond, who in 1947 had played Stanley’s poker partner, Steve, was now Blanche’s suitor Mitch. Gerald O’Loughlin, an up-and-coming actor in his early thirties, was making his Broadway debut as Stanley. Frances Heflin, who had been Gladys Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth thirteen years earlier, would again be acting with Tallulah, this time as Stella.
As they were scheduled to rehearse only two weeks in Florida, Tallulah asked Heflin to come to the Élysée to work on their scenes together. For Heflin, Tallulah would have made a perfect Blanche had she been ten years younger; Tallulah seemed a little old for the first two scenes, in which Blanche arrives and immediately sends up Stanley’s guard. Blanche is meant to be five years older than Stella, but Tallulah had twenty years on Heflin. Tallulah tried to get Heflin, whom she felt looked like she “just fell out of the nest,” to wear her hair so that she looked older. After Heflin resisted, Tallulah dropped the matter. She needn’t have worried; her age never became a factor in critical notices. Onstage, Tallulah “never looked old to me,” said Dalrymple. Tallulah’s more mature Blanche strengthened the impression of a woman
who has exhausted her opportunities.
During the original Broadway run of Streetcar, Sandy Campbell had taken over the role of the Young Collector. Blanche, waiting for her date with Mitch, opens the door to a young man selling subscriptions to a local newspaper. She gently flirts with him before sending him on his way. Despite Tallulah’s suggestions that he hire one of the young men in her retinue, Williams still wanted Campbell.
On the flight to Florida, Tallulah and Campbell became friendly. Together with Rose Riley and Robert Williams, Tallulah was being put up in a gloomy Spanish-style mansion that Campbell recalled as something out of Sunset Boulevard. The lawn extended three hundred feet to the bay. Tallulah invited Campbell to live with her. After a few days, kept awake by her coughing and the radio she had on at all times, he decamped to an out-building on the estate. Edna Thomas moved into the house, but Campbell remained part of the household, driving Tallulah to the theater and dining with her frequently at the house. During their five weeks in Florida, Campbell sent bulletins about the production to author Donald Wyndham, and they were eventually published privately.
Williams told Campbell that he thought Tallulah was on her last legs; it was for that reason that he had had approved this revival only reluctantly.
Although she was on the wagon when she arrived in Florida, she took pills throughout the day; at night she downed a powerful barbiturate that rendered her incoherent within ten minutes. When Tallulah stepped out onto the lawn to walk her dogs, she said she was tired after ten yards. Yet her mind was startlingly retentive. Campbell remembered her quoting something he said on the plane “when I didn’t think she had heard me.”
By Tallulah’s own admission, she didn’t care whether she lived or died.
One night she, Williams, and Campbell played the 1920s game of Truth, in which one was obligated to respond “truthfully” to any question posed by a fellow player. “I wish always, always, for death,” Tallulah said. “I’ve always wanted death. . . . That’s why I take sleeping pills. They’re very close to death.” Later on in Florida, she told Williams that Streetcar was the story of her own life.
Both the Coconut Grove Playhouse and the mansion where Tallulah stayed were owned by a Texas oilman. He told the cast not to use the theater’s back entrance because it was being paved, but blacks working in the production were told that they could not use any other entrance. This sent Tallulah into a rage. She announced that she would only use the back entrance, insisting that everyone else in the cast follow suit. Soon after, the theater management saw fit to relax its rules.
In his letters to Wyndham, Campbell recorded Tallulah’s whims, quirks, mood swings, and conflicted emotions, many of which perplexed him. He didn’t understand why Tallulah and Williams were so often at each other’s throats. He knew that she was furious that Williams had brought his friend Maria Britneva, a young actress of Russian descent, to Florida with him. Britneva had auditioned for Stella, but Tallulah felt she was a brown nose and rejected her.
Williams loved the wry humor that marked Tallulah’s interpretation of Blanche. Neither Jessica Tandy nor Elia Kazan, star and director of the original Streetcar, had recognized Blanche’s humor, he felt. Yet during rehearsals Williams told Campbell that Tallulah’s performance was “disgraceful.” Over the years, Williams would give conflicting accounts of Tallulah’s Streetcar in articles, interviews, and his memoirs. Anything he said about Tallulah in Florida cannot be trusted, according to Heflin: “He was smashed the entire time,” she recalled. “He’d be drunk by one, go for a swim in an icy pool, and then stay sober for a couple of hours. He was sweet, he was nice, but I don’t think he knew or remembered anything about that production.”
Williams rarely attended rehearsals, and when he did, he was not much help. Once Tallulah was in a state of hysteria over where she should move on one line. “Move there,” Williams told her.
“But that’s where the wall and door are.”
“This is not a realistic play, completely,” Williams said. “We can take that license.”
“But there’s a real door there. I know it’s not a realistic play, but the door is real and the wall is real.”
“Oooh, I didn’t know the door was real.” Williams had nothing more to say about the matter.
“What an insensitive ass he is,” Campbell complained to Wyndham about Machiz. “His directing so far comes out of the printed acting edition of the play, which he reads to the cast.” Heflin agreed that the director “had no concept of what the play was about, of what actors were like. He was a dreadfully destructive influence and he made Tallulah very unhappy.” Yet Tallulah “didn’t dislike him as much as I did,” Heflin said. “She allowed herself to be directed by him up to a point.”
“We were all in agony,” Heflin recalled. “None of us felt we were any good, that we were getting anywhere with our performances. ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!’ Tallulah said. ‘I don’t think any of us do.’ ” One day before rehearsal Tallulah walked past Heflin without even a greeting. “I thought, ‘Uh, oh, we’re in for it today, kids.’ ”
In rehearsal, Tallulah moved Campbell to tears with Blanche’s monologue about her husband’s suicide. Yet he felt that she was playing his scene with her “at surface value,” afraid that it would be taken as personal confession: “There’s Tallulah trying to make a young boy.”
Campbell watched her suffer a sudden setback in rehearsals. “She forgets her lines, her pace is bad, there’s no energy, and she can’t remember a single prop. Perhaps this is how she works,” thought Campbell, when, mysteriously, Tallulah pulled herself together. A couple of days later, at dress rehearsal, she was “marvelous.”
Williams had told Tallulah that the young bill collector’s scene was his favorite, urging them not to rush it needlessly. “I love my scene now,”Campbell wrote Wyndham. “She plays it beautifully, and I can take as much time as I want. In fact, in one spot she wants me to take more than I want to.”
One friend of Williams, author Gilbert Maxwell, had known Tallulah casually since 1934, when Stephan Cole showed her Maxwell’s first book of poems. A day before the Miami opening, Maxwell sat with Williams to watch a run-through. Tallulah came on with her suitcase, “looking fragile and lovely,” as Maxwell recalls in his book Tennessee Williams and Friends.
“Her first lines, plaintively spoken, sent a chill down my spine.” As the scene progressed, Williams “was as moved” as he was. Unhappily, at the opening, the presence of a new element, the most strident members of Tallulah’s gay following, made themselves felt with a vengeance. They laughed at Tallulah’s humor in the part, but they also insisted on laughing at any line that could be construed as a double entendre. “I sat grinding my teeth,” Maxwell writes, “marveling that any star could carry on in the face of such ribald bad manners.”
In Tallulah’s dressing room after the performance, Williams put his head in her lap. “Tallulah,” he told her, “this is the way I imagined the part when I wrote the play.” Yet only hours later, he contradicted himself during a party in a nouveau riche mansion replete with an enormous indoor pool.
Williams announced fortissimo to Dalrymple that if Tallulah “continued to give such an appalling performance he would not allow the play to open in New York.” He claimed that she was “playing it for vaudeville and ruining my play.” Campbell felt he’d been influenced by Britneva, who had sat with Williams offering a running stream of invective against Tallulah’s work throughout the performance.
The next day, when Williams visited Tallulah, they talked alone about how she could deflect the laughter. “I want to do what Tennessee wants,” she told Campbell, “but he is so vague and changeable and doesn’t watch enough, so that I’m confused and don’t know what to do.”
When William Hawkins of the New York World-Telegram and Sun came to Coconut Grove to interview her, Tallulah told him that the role of Blanche was “harder than 18 King Lears, with a Hamlet thrown in.” As usual, when Tallulah spoke
about the difficulty of a part, she did so in terms of physical rigor. She had a costume change for each of Streetcar’s eleven scenes—particularly difficult since she was beginning to experience the first symptoms of emphysema. “If I had played it in the original run, I’d have died. But then I’ve always wanted to die onstage.” Whatever the cost, Tallulah was determined “to prove I’m a dramatic actress before I do the revue.”
The suggestion of some Miami reviewers that her personality had sub-jugated Blanche upset her. “What can I do?” she asked Campbell. “Other personalities had the same problem: Jack Barrymore, Irving, Bernhardt.”
Campbell told her that when he was onstage she was Blanche and not Tallulah. She continued to experiment night after night; at one performance, she played the role “in a lower key—very different.”
During the tryouts of Streetcar, Jean Dalrymple visited Florida several times. Together she and Tallulah reviewed every sound and movement Tallulah made, excising anything that was distracting or inappropriate. Tallulah “carefully weeded out every Tallulahism—the change of voice, the head tossing, the quick hand motions. . . .”
“We were all very nervous,” Heflin recalled, “but her stage fright was extraordinary.” Tallulah’s nerves even caused her to lock herself out of the set at one matinee. (A local propman had installed a real lock on the door of the set, an invitation to mishap that would not have been tolerated by a New York stage manager.) “Goddamn, I can’t get this fuckin’ thing open,”
Tallulah! Page 53