Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

Heflin heard Tallulah muttering offstage. Finally Heflin said, “Try a window, honey.” Tallulah found an opening to climb through, entering im-probably through a stage closet. Trying very hard not to laugh, Heflin ad-libbed, “I’m so glad you came in through the window.” “Yeah, I never saw a window in a closet before,” Tallulah replied.

  The stairs to the Kowalski apartment hadn’t been built very securely.

  As they wiggled and wobbled, Tallulah would clutch Heflin and hiss under her breath, “Frances, don’t get me killed! We’re both going to get killed!”

  Tallulah muttered warnings about broken necks, broken backs, unaware that Heflin was six months pregnant at the time.

  Williams had left for a short vacation in Key West. Machiz also went back to New York for a week, though Heflin suspected he was asked to leave. Afterward, “he wrote these ridiculous letters. He said he felt Stella should be the kind of woman who perhaps used too much makeup and had lipstick smeared all over her face.”

  After three weeks at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, the production left for a week in Palm Beach; there, Tallulah was taken seriously by the audience. At the first-night party thrown by Mrs. Jane O’Malley-Keyes, she sank exhausted into a chair, remaining uncharacteristically quiet.

  During her most agonizing days in Florida, Tallulah had asked Estelle Winwood not to come see her play Blanche in New York. Now she called Winwood and asked her to come. “I have been working on this thing every performance. I don’t know whether it’s any good or not, but I’ve tried as hard as I can and I think maybe some things are pretty good.”

  On February 15, 1956, however, when Streetcar opened at City Center after one preview, the contours of her Blanche were obliterated by the response of her audience. The laughter at City Center was oceanic, drastically more vociferous than in Florida. “Each passing reference to anything stronger than Coke brought forth gales of uproarious, pseudo-sophisticated laughter,” Cue reported a week later. “These gay lads had come to see a travesty, and despite Miss Bankhead’s sturdy refusal to commit one, they applauded, as though by their actions they could call it into being.”

  Patience Cleveland, a young actress, was in the audience that opening night. At the beginning of scene six, Blanche stands outside the Kowalski apartment and looks at the sky, making conversation as Mitch stands nervously behind her. “I’m looking for the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, but these girls are not out tonight. Oh, yes they are, there they are! God bless them! All in a bunch home from their little bridge party.” Tallulah spoke those lines with wistful coquetry, but no sooner had they come out of her mouth than the auditorium was upended by hilarity. “When that got a laugh, I wanted to stand up and scream,” Cleveland recalled. “They turned it into their private Hallelujah Chorus,” said Anne Meacham, who was understudying Stella.

  Backstage, Tallulah was furious, barking at Rose Riley, roaring that the audience was a bunch of horses’ asses. As the evening wore on and the audience refused to back off, Tallulah grew shakier and shakier. “She hung on to me a lot that night,” Heflin recalled, “even though I was as scared as could be.”

  “I have seen many actresses play Blanche DuBois,” Dalrymple writes in From the Last Row, “but by comparison they were sparrows. Tallulah was an eagle. At the end of the play, pinioned to the floor, she was like that great bird brought down. . . .” Heflin found Tallulah’s descent into an abyss of near insanity in the final scenes “truly brilliant . . . so totally truthful.

  She tapped an extraordinary emotional reserve. It was the best I’d ever seen it played. I was wiped out by her every night.”

  The newspaper reviews were decidedly mixed, however. “They only listened to the audience,” said Meacham. Robert Coleman in the Daily Mirror asserted that Tallulah “took the first act of ‘Streetcar,’ and kidded the pants off it. She satirized it unmercifully. . . .” Other critics felt she was simply wrong for the part. The Times’s Brooks Atkinson said that “Miss Blanche and Miss Bankhead do not have much in common,” complaining that Tallulah was “playing an introspective tragedy in the style of melodrama.” Walter Kerr wrote in the Herald Tribune that Tallulah was patently miscast, because she was . . . as a person and as a performer, notoriously indestructible. Blanche DuBois is a girl who deceives herself. There is no self-deceit anywhere in Miss Bankhead. She is a woman patently wise in the ways of the world, obviously without illusions of the sort called for throughout the play; she is shrewd and sharp and no one to tangle with. Try as she will she cannot disguise the fact that she is candid. And the attempt to disguise it—by letting her sentences float off into the breeze, by never striking a period by babbling hastily through the more affected passages—simply end in monotony.

  As always, Tallulah provoked wildly divergent opinions. Hawkins in the New York World-Telegram and Sun found that she used “a superhuman degree of taste, restraint and control. . . . One can only be amazed at the way the star edits her own experience for her performance.” Thomas R. Dash in Women’s Wear Daily called Tallulah’s “a performance that evokes all the subtle facets of Blanche’s character,” distilling “the anguish, the heartbreak and the pathos of a woman of tender sensibilities. . . .”

  The second night, with no cult present, there was not one unwanted laugh in the audience. The second-night critics—those who didn’t have to file for a newspaper deadline—passed Dalrymple with tears streaming down their faces, unable to speak. Saul Colin, the New York correspondent for the British monthly Plays and Players found Blanche the best thing Tallulah had done since The Little Foxes. Tallulah was “deep and tender, violent and sufficiently insane to appear normal, moving and coy, suffering yet concealing pain . . . a new dimension never encountered during the magnificent performances of Jessica Tandy, Uta Hagen or Vivien Leigh.”

  Tallulah’s Streetcar was a bonanza for City Center. The enormous theater was sold out for the two-week run and the possibility was discussed of bringing the show to Broadway. Apparently, Tallulah could not extricate herself from the Follies commitment because the show did not transfer.

  The constitution of the audience varied from performance to performance.

  Director Herbert Kenwith, who was in the audience at a later performance, claims that Tallulah did resort to the direct appeal she had resisted on opening night. Responding to gales of laughter, she came to the front of the stage at one point and said, “Will you please, please give me a chance!”

  According to Heflin, the audience’s sabotage “broke her heart. She never did get over it.” At the party given for the New York opening, Tamara Geva, who had attended together with Emery, walked by a room and saw Tallulah trying to hide the fact that she was crying. Yet Tallulah had done everything to cultivate this fringe, and she was perfectly willing to exploit her talent to satisfy them, always looking for the “hot” spots in an audience to pitch her performance to, knowing that they would trip a contagious response throughout an auditorium. Ted Hook, a dancer on the bill at the Sands Hotel, remembered Tallulah asking him, “Are there any gays out there? Where are they sitting?” She should have detected the hostility beneath her cult’s adoration long before. Yet only now were the consequences to her reputation and her possibilities as an actress becoming unmistakably clear.

  The Nadir

  “The Germans blitzed it twice during the war, but it took me to close it.”

  [referring to the Café de Paris in London]

  Three weeks after Streetcar closed, Tallulah was working on the Zieg feld Follies, which was complex enough to require five weeks of rehearsals. The Follies gave Tallulah the chance to do more singing, which she loved but struggled with. Challenged by her sense of pitch, she had spent hours practicing the few lines of “Paper Moon” Blanche DuBois riffs on throughout Streetcar. (Ultimately she’d substituted “Bye Bye Blackbird,”which she had been singing for decades.) “She couldn’t really carry a tune,”said Peter Howard, Follies pianist for the often “troublesome” rehearsals. “I had to plot things out for her constan
tly.”

  The revue’s sketches were directed by Christopher Hewett, who, like Howard, became a good friend of Tallulah’s. Hewett had begun directing while an actor in a British repertory company. After coming to New York in 1954, he had directed the Shoestring Revue with Beatrice Arthur, who was also featured in the Follies. Tallulah’s frequent vituperations against the theater notwithstanding, Hewett sensed that she “loved her profession” but“felt somehow that it hadn’t come out right.” “My fans really didn’t help me, did they?” she said, shaken by her experience with Streetcar.

  Tallulah loved revues, which she had been watching avidly for more than thirty years. “Somerset Maugham once said that a play should have a beginning, a middle and an end. A revue doesn’t. A revue is the queen of non-sequiturs—which is what I am anyway.” The Follies followed that tradition without bearing the stylistic imprint of the best examples of the genre. “It actually wasn’t a bad show, in retrospect,” Howard said. “Of course, it wasn’t a good show, either.”

  One day, Tallulah showed up for a rehearsal very much the worse for wear. “I apologize for Miss Bankhead,” Hewett announced to the assembled actors. “She’s not prepared to rehearse today and you’re all standing around doing nothing.” He dismissed the cast, saying, “I’m sorry I called you in. It’s my fault.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Tallulah said angrily when they were alone. “I’ve done it,” he said. “You can rectify it very easily tomorrow by saying that you are awfully sorry.” “I certainly will not,” she insisted, yet the next day she did exactly that.

  Choreographer Jack Cole, of wide renown both on Broadway and in Hollywood, directed the dance and musical numbers. “She adored him,”Hewett said. “She would try anything for him and did,” particularly in the first-act finale. Cole devised a three-ring circus of acts, whirlpools of activity in which Tallulah would stumble or be engulfed, to her simulated surprise and shock. She’d tell the audience she was just crossing the stage to get a drink of water, then get caught up in a dance act and be thrown from man to man.

  After the show, when Hewett and Tallulah would go out, she invariably asked how certain things had gone. “I think this is a bit over-the-top,”he would say if he felt she was overplaying. “All right, let’s pull it back.” If he told her a scene wasn’t working, invariably Tallulah had ideas about how it could be improved. “She was wonderfully inventive,” Hewett said.

  “She’d have been a wonderful coach,” if only to a select few, because “I think her patience would run out with a lot of people.”

  Unfortunately, Tallulah’s sketch material was not really first-rate; some of it was shopworn. Nonetheless she could still be “remarkably funny,” as in a sketch where she played a maladroit stewardess, or when her Big Show subway monologue was fleshed out and imaginary characters from the radio monologue visualized.

  At one point, she drew a mustache on a subway car poster of Bette Davis. A purported feud between them, justified by Davis’s assuming Tallulah’s roles in Jezebel, Dark Victory, and The Little Foxes, had become a part of Tallulah’s public shtick since All About Eve, where costume designer Edith Head had explicitly styled Davis’s appearance to resemble Tallulah’s.

  Privately, Tallulah spoke admiringly of Davis’s talent, but insisted on the superiority of her own Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes.

  Hewett complained of “various and sundry problems” he had with the Follies producers. They had commissioned lavish sets for the musical numbers, but designer Raoul Pène du Bois had not bothered, or hadn’t been asked, to design sets for many of the revue’s sketches. At the eleventh hour before the Boston opening, Pène du Bois whipped up some velvet draperies with “plugs” into which a door or window could be inserted.

  At the April 16 opening, the “anxious-to-enthuse first-night tryout audience” was so unimpressed that many of them left early, according to Variety’s “Guy.” The paper did note Tallulah’s “rousing reception” for “a slick and compelling performance in this new medium for her.”

  “As far as I was concerned, she was perfectly nice to work with,” Jay Harnick, who sang in the Follies chorus, recalled in 1994. “She was never critical of her fellow performers.” On the other hand, she was totally preoccupied with her frustrations in the show. On the few occasions that Harnick had a chance to speak to her, “it was always what was happening to her, why the gods were against her? Or why this device was not centered around her? Don’t they know that I can or can’t—’ Life lived at such an intense level that it was a little terrifying.”

  Philadelphia brought more bad reviews. Traveling with fifty-two stagehands, the show’s overhead was enormous. At New York’s Winter Garden Theater, a sold-out house would reap a gross of $70,000 weekly, but it was going to take an “unprecedented” $55,000 a week just to break even.

  Further troubles plagued the show. Star dancer Carol Haney left because of a kneecap injury, while the show’s leading vocal attraction, Joan Diener, quit. Their scheduled third week in Philadelphia had to be canceled after they were forced to refund $26,000 in advance orders. As a result, the producers could not raise the money to bring the show to New York, and the Follies closed.

  Tallulah invited Hewett to ride back to New York with her. Harnick and some friends were also driving back; while eating at a roadside Howard Johnson, Tallulah and Hewett popped in. To Harnick, Tallulah seemed relieved that the fate of the show had been decided. She “could not have been more gracious and generous and charming,” he recalled. As they were leaving, she swooped up all the toy animals in the souvenir shop, distributing them among Harnick and his friends.

  That summer, the revue Welcome, Darlings was put together for Tallulah by some of the displaced Follies performers. Harnick, in therapy at the time, recognized his own “problem with dominating women,” and figured,

  “Hey, I’ll make a job that forces me to deal with one of the most dominating women in Western civilization—but for two days a week.” As advance director, every Sunday he would conduct a dress rehearsal in whichever new town they were playing. The show would open on Monday; Harnick would leave the next day, then catch up with the show on the following weekend.

  Tallulah was busier than in the Follies, performing in fourteen of the twenty-five numbers, including the finales of both acts. The show opened with the song “I’ve Heard a Lot About You,” in which a male chorus saluted Tallulah, who performed some “startling high kicks,” William Peper reported in the New York World-Telegram and Sun. She gave a hilariously pointed reading to Dorothy Parker’s “The Waltz,” an acerbic monologue in which a woman wryly complains about her dance partner, even though she can’t bear to part from him.

  There were new sketches, including one devised by Neil Simon, then writing for television, and his brother Danny, together with Joseph Stein.

  Playwright and screenwriter Patricia Coleman devised a Peter Pan satire that was called “Love and Thimbles.” Mary Martin’s Peter Pan had just finished its successful Broadway run, which made it ripe for ribbing. Coleman had been introduced to Broadway after graduating from Vassar in 1933, thanks to purported love affairs with both Charles MacArthur and Tallulah. At one point in the late 1940s, Tallulah had seriously considered producing another play of Coleman’s.

  A poignant note was introduced into Welcome, Darlings when Tallulah sang “I Don’t Want to Be Hurt Again” after reading a farewell note from a lover. She again returned to her subway monologue, as well as a similar scene pitting her against the perils of an unstaffed kitchen. A passel of writers contributed to the musical score, including Harnick’s brother Sheldon, who later wrote the lyrics for Fiddler on the Roof. “Regardless what the material was,” Jay Harnick said, “she could illuminate it in the way that few others could.”

  Welcome, Darlings opened in Westport on July 16, 1956, then began weeklong engagements at summer theaters around New England. Tallulah had instructed Harnick to make an appointment for her at the local beauty par
lor on the day of each opening. Manicurists were to have four different shades of red nail polish for her to choose from. Although the scenery was minimal, supplied by the local theaters, Tallulah insisted on footlights in every theater, as well as a neutral-colored “traveler” curtain behind her for her songs. Tallulah told Harnick it was as the best possible backdrop to disguise the ravages of age.

  In Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the local designer provided the footlights, but the theater could not afford to rent a special curtain. He offered Harnick use of a white organdy curtain, which would absorb whatever color light was trained on it, or they could use the gray burlap backing, if Tallulah preferred.

  When Tallulah arrived, it was obvious that she and her traveling companion had been drinking all the way from their previous stop. Harnick met her limousine, explained about the curtain, and she gurgled a hazy acknowledgment. That night at the dress rehearsal, Tallulah was still a little shaky. Harnick thought the white organdy looked fine and he hoped that they could get through the dress rehearsal without a scene from Tallulah.

  Unfortunately, halfway through the first act, he had to call a time out for some reason. Tallulah looked around and focused on the organdy for the first time. “Where’s Jay Harnick?” she growled, blinking ferociously. Then came an explosion. She was fifty-three years old. She couldn’t allow the public to see her as she really was. She had specified the traveler in her contract. Harnick had betrayed her.

  Standing in the back of the theater, Harnick started to approach the stage, signaling to the local designer so that as he reached it, the curtain had started to come down from the batten. Tallulah looked around and saw the gray burlap. “All right,” she said, “I’m fifty-five,” exaggerating her age for greater comic effect. The air was cleared so stylishly that Harnick forgave her everything.

  Variety reported that Tallulah’s salary was a flat $5,000 per week, which tipped ticket prices to a high of $4.20. Although several dollars less than a prime Broadway seat, this was steep for summer theaters. Nevertheless, Welcome, Darlings did well wherever it played. Variety reported that the show was “cautiously eying Broadway,” but felt the material was “just not good enough for the Main Stem.” At the last stop, Ivorytown, Connecticut, the show reaped a “smash” gross and closed on September 1.