Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  That fall, director Herbert Machiz persuaded Tallulah to play Eugenia, Baroness Munster, in Henry James’s early masterpiece The Europeans, which playwright Randolph Carter had adapted for the stage. Machiz had just directed a tryout of Carter’s dramatization at Machiz’s summer theater in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey. James’s character is superlative, as fascinating as Regina Giddens or Blanche DuBois. A cosmopolitan adventuress, she is the daughter of an expatriate American woman and an Italian father, who leaves a morganatic marriage in Germany that has gone sour. Crossing the Atlantic, she seeks her fortune on the estate of her mother’s half brother, a New England Puritan named Wentworth. Traveling with her is her younger brother, Felix, an easygoing bohemian who dabbles in painting. They enchant, repel, and utterly transform Wentworth and his three children. Eugenia also attracts William Acton, a wealthy businessman, who is a friend of the Wentworths but several notches more tolerant than they.

  Having traveled the world, Acton is now settling back in his native New England, where he would like to add Eugenia to his luxurious home, teeming with curios. Ultimately she is a specimen too exotic even for him.

  Carter credits Machiz’s ability “to talk great theater. I’ve never seen anyone who expressed himself better.” But Carter’s script had problems that even Machiz’s salesmanship could not disguise. He had transposed too much of James’s dialogue wholesale, and James’s complex rhetoric sounded stilted when spoken. Moreover, Carter chose not to dramatize a crucial denouement between Eugenia and Acton, a decision that could be justified on literary grounds, for James liked leaving the fireworks out of view, tilting the mirror away from the peephole. Yet theatrically, Carter had made a major mistake. Audiences were likely to feel shortchanged, waiting for a confrontation that never came.

  Machiz and his lover, John Bernard Myers, gave a young writer friend, Waldemar Hansen, Carter’s script to read. “It’s neither fish, flesh nor fowl,” said Hansen. Machiz defended the script, claiming that Tallulah would be able to paper over deficiencies in her material.

  Casting the play at Lake Hopatcong from his colony of devoted young performers, Machiz had chosen Irma Hurley to play the juicy role of Gertrude, the younger Wentworth daughter, simmering with rebellious thoughts that disturb her as much as they do her family. Gertrude is pursued by the painfully earnest young reverend, Alfred Brandt; it is with Eugenia’s brother, Felix, however, that she eventually pairs off. For Broadway, Machiz selected the slightly more experienced Anne Meacham for Gertrude, casting Hurley as Gertrude’s prim but loving sister Charlotte. (At first only Eugenia realizes which sister is the reverend’s proper companion, but by the end of the story Charlotte is betrothed to him.) Like Tallulah, Hurley had been raised in Catholic schools, and was evidently well-bred. Throughout the production, it amused Tallulah to call Hurley by her decorous character’s name, confusing role and interpreter.

  Weeks later in New York, as the cast was trailing out the stage door, Tallulah saw Hurley hop on the back of cast member Jay Barney’s motorcycle.

  “Oh, my God!” Tallulah squealed, grabbing hold of her escort and swooning to the ground in feigned shock. “That’s Charlotte”—she giggled—“that’s Charlotte on that motorcycle!”

  Meacham believed that casting Barney as Eugenia’s suitor Acton was a mistake. Though Barney was a very good actor, there was no chemistry between them; Tallulah needed another Donald Cook. Machiz’s Streetcar casting of Gerald O’Loughlin, not the powerhouse presence to strike sparks from Tallulah, had struck her the same way.

  With Tallulah starring, it was only natural to enlist Jack Wilson to produce. Unfortunately, the years had treated Wilson no more kindly than they had treated Tallulah. He was no longer only a steady social drinker; before long the cast realized that he was a full-blown alcoholic. At their first reading, Hurley watched him, wondering if he could last the length of the show. Carnation in buttonhole, body held rigid, a flaming face “that just sort of hung there”—it was all too easy for her to picture him embalmed.

  To Hurley’s surprise, the rehearsals were “absolutely marvelous,” with Tallulah “making a great effort to be the character and not do a star turn,”

  Hurley recalled in 1993. Asking Hurley and Meacham not to articulate quite so crisply, she had the idea that as the foreigner, the precision of her speech should mark her as alien. She was working on making sure that the baroness, despite her past indiscretions, would always remain cloaked in comme il faut. She had a way of reminding the cast that the breeding of the baroness was in Tallulah’s own bloodlines as well. It almost seemed that by staying within the limits of propriety in her characterization, she would be reclaiming something that in the public’s eye—perhaps also in her own—she had lost.

  James’s humor in the The Europeans is dry and delicate, and the laughs Tallulah was honing were going to be more subtle than the raucous ones the public had come to expect. “It wasn’t camp for a second,” Meacham said; rather, Tallulah’s approach was high comedy, “of the same calibre” as the kind Meacham had witnessed onstage with Ina Claire and Jane Cowl, or when she watched Lynn Fontanne from the audience.

  Wilson gave Eugenia, as the adaptation was called, a deluxe production, with two supremely gifted designers, Oliver Smith and Miles White, designing sets and costumes. For Tallulah’s first-act entrance, White planned a black traveling costume. Pleased with the sketch, Tallulah corrected the color: her own Victorian grandmother told her always to travel in brown to hide any dust. To conform to James’s evocation of Eugenia’s raven-haired mystery, Tallulah donned a black wig—bangs, chignon, and spit curls. She hated sweating under hot wigs but, White recalled, “she cared about being perfect” in the part.

  In the third week of December 1956, Eugenia opened its six-week tryout tour in New Haven. Robert Leahy in the New Haven Register described it as “a wry little comedy, with appropriately poignant undertones,” in which Tallulah was “given a delightful chance to glitter, to glower, and to pass amusing commentary upon the deadliness of propriety.” The beauty of her gowns was extolled by most critics. “Once she got everything pinned,” Carter recalled, “she was absolutely glorious: quite as glamorous as Garbo.” The cast was briefly puzzled by the buckets of ice Rose Riley was seen bringing into Tallulah’s dressing room before every performance.

  Eventually they realized that Tallulah must be using them as a restorative, dunking her face and neck, which explained how onstage her neckline magically tightened. Critics and cast alike found her ravishing onstage.

  “The woman had magnificence,” Carter declared, and an emanation, strange and hypnotic.

  On her first Saturday matinee in New Haven, Tallulah marshaled her confidence and commitment to give “the most beautiful performance I’ve ever seen in my life,” recalled Carter. The stage was spinning with seduction and intrigue, and the cast was galvanized.

  Soon after they arrived in Boston the following week, she invited the cast to her suite at the Ritz-Carlton, serving drinks and sandwiches. Warm and engaged, Tallulah told everyone to order anything else they wanted from room service. When Tallulah “was relaxed, she listened,” said Meacham. The star was anything but relaxed the next night when they opened, however. Elliot Norton in the Post described an edgy Tallulah who“threw her lines like so many harpoons, sometimes before her opposite number on the stage had finished speaking his or her final words.” While Tallulah’s Eugenia was “a genuinely glamorous and sophisticated creature; cool and controlled, haughty and contemptuous, capable of savage irony,”she needed to make the character “a good deal more sympathetic.” None too complimentary about the rest of the cast, Norton saved his harshest comments for Carter’s script and its “air of clumsy contrivance.” It followed the novel’s narrative “closely, without penetrating to the heart of the matter. In adhering to the line and even the lines of Henry James, Mr. Carter has missed the light and the life.”

  While the four other dailies were kinder to the play, Norton was the dean of Boston
critics, one of the most reputed in the nation. Waldemar Hansen found himself summoned to Boston for a rewrite. Then in his early thirties, Hansen was a published poet who had been Cecil Beaton’s amanuensis since 1950, finessing several books Beaton wrote during the fifties.

  After watching a performance in Boston, Hansen was escorted to a rather intimidating meeting. There sat Wilson, Tallulah (calm as Hansen would rarely see her again), Carter, Machiz, Myers, and none other than Thornton Wilder, a writer Hansen revered. Wilder had been visiting Tallulah in Boston and been recruited for this confabulation.

  Hansen shared his views that the play was diffuse, beleaguered by problems of structure and focus. “There’s no drama here, you’ve got to keep some of the Jamesian elegance, but tool it to give it a dramatic shape,”even one James might not have approved of. Ruth and Augustus Goetz had done this in The Heiress, violating the ending of James’s Washington Square for a more effective third-act resolution, and achieving a great success on Broadway.

  As Hansen spent his first night on the job rewriting vigorously in his room at the Ritz-Carlton, the still morning air and rat-a-tat of his typewriter were broken by a ringing phone. “Darling,” a voice fogged over with intoxicants announced, “it’s Tallulah. You’ve got to make this play a hit for me and for Jack.” Semicoherent babble followed until Hansen was able to ease her off the phone and go back to the typewriter, where he hammered away until dawn.

  After a few hours’ sleep, Hansen reported to the theater with his new pages. A few minutes into the rehearsal, however, Tallulah fell victim to a classic addicts’ mistake, growing flummoxed by a line, then a detail, until soon the entire session ground to a halt. “I’m afraid we’re going to have a disaster on our hands,” Wilson told Hansen, “but I owe this to Tallulah.”

  “She was frantic; she was desperate,” remembered Meacham. Tallulah knew better than anyone that this could very well be her last chance on Broadway. Turning on Machiz at a technical dress rehearsal, she hissed with cold, dry, what-have-you-got-me-into fury, “Look, you’re wearing the skirts in this play, anyway.” The cast cringed.

  As the weeks passed, Tallulah’s performance echoed the show’s emotion-fraught climate. “When Tallulah felt she was going to have to carry the show,” Hurley recalled, the star who had wanted so much to preserve decorum started going into burlesque, doing things she wouldn’t have dreamed of before. Poking another character with her umbrella to provoke a laugh, she manipulated line readings for maximum humorous dividends. “Such a delicious garden!” Eugenia nightly exclaimed to her hosts at their first meeting. “One can see that you have done nothing whatever to improve it. C’est tout au naturel.” In her early performances she made the slight so subtle it could go completely over the heads of her hosts. Now her voice slammed down on “nothing,” the woofers on Tallulah’s basso profundo turned all the way up.

  As the delicacy seeped away to gales of laughter, Irma Hurley wondered how many members of the audience had ever read The Europeans, or cared in the least about Henry James. Crowds loved the outrageous, boisterous Tallulah, even if the critics remained lukewarm.

  Miles White, the show’s costume designer, remembered a rather unsavory younger man attending Tallulah in New Haven. It may have been actor Don Torillo, Tallulah’s live-in secretary/companion at the time.

  White suspected some drunken fisticuffs when mysterious bruises started appearing on the star. As the tour went on, there were further injuries.

  Tallulah fractured her finger in Philadelphia banging her hand against the set for emphasis. Doctors recommended a cast, but Tallulah refused because she had to change gloves four times in the play. After her hand was operated on, she fell in her hotel, breaking several ribs and forcing the show to cancel more performances. Cue hailed her as “a valiant figure . . .

  triumphant over broken ribs and fractured bones,” claiming “her heroic behavior in the face of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” proved her “an indestructible woman.” Alas, Tallulah was all too mortal, leaving the hospital taped together and loaded up on painkillers and her standard diet of amphetamines, barbiturates, and liquor. When Hansen learned she was using carbon tetrachloride to quickly remove heavy stage makeup, he told her in horror that she’d die from the fumes. She only laughed: “Oh, really?”

  As her confidence in her material waned, Tallulah’s enunciation once again began to suffer. Backstage Machiz and Hansen spoke to her one night, telling that “the first law in the theater is audibility.” When Hansen stood at the back of the orchestra to watch, “I couldn’t hear what you were saying.” Tallulah seemed genuinely concerned. At the next day’s matinee she somehow pulled all the unraveling strands back together to give an

  “extraordinary” performance of elegance and style, Hansen noted. “It was audible, it was everything.” The Tallulah Bankhead he knew by reputation was back.

  The hopes of the cast revived, but Tallulah’s performances soon started to veer erratically once more. Still, “she could be great at any unexpected moment,” remembered Carter, and Meacham would see her “pull herself together again and fight to give a straight legitimate performance.”

  One moment that did stay consistently focused was a silent passage in the first act. Eugenia wanders into the guest cottage to which she and Felix have been assigned while the rest of the family visits outside. Are the Wentworths keeping her at arm’s length, in surroundings less palatial than she desires? Tallulah’s eyes panned across the cottage and its furnishings, surveying, assessing what it was all worth and what it augured for her chances. Tallulah’s take was a forty-second tour de force.

  For Waldemar Hansen, Baltimore was “Custer’s Last Stand.” After she cut short another rehearsal, Hansen exclaimed, “Miss Bankhead, you’re defeating me. I can’t go on writing pages if you’re constantly going to reject everything. I told you what I wanted to do with this play and you agreed.

  You’ve got an opening in New York in one week. If you don’t do what I ask you’re going to have a flop on your hands!” For the next few days in Baltimore, Tallulah gave him the silent treatment.

  On the train to New York from Baltmore, Machiz was forced to run relays, taking new dialogue from Hansen up to Tallulah, sprinting back and reporting which lines had passed muster, which were no go. One line she would accept—“I’m tired of being an influence; I wish somebody would influence me”—particularly pleased Hansen. It seemed to confirm the belief shared by so many in Tallulah’s life that beneath her combativeness, she was looking to be controlled. As the train rolled toward New York, Tallulah bellowed at Machiz, “You can tell that GODDAMN SON OF A BITCH AND BASTARD”—her voice dipped respectfully—“that he has improved this play.”

  On January 30, 1957, Eugenia opened at New York’s Ambassador Theatre. The next day, Tallulah spent her fifty-fifth birthday reading the reviewers’ consensus that she had blown what was left of the play right out of the water. “James’s meticulous study of manners cannot cope with performing on this tumultuous scale,” wrote Atkinson in the Times. “Hobe.” in Variety compared Tallulah’s performance to the “self-parodying, tragic, final days of John Barrymore,” calling her “wanton abandonment of once-fine gifts” a “sad spectacle.”

  The play itself was also panned. Charles McHarry in the Daily News claimed that Eugenia burdened Tallulah with “a ream of the flattest lines in recent theatrical history.” Variety called for a boycott of Henry James dramatizations. After failed attempts to stage The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove, Eugenia was “perhaps the worst yet.”

  Chastened by her reviews, Tallulah tried playing it straight a few days into the New York run. But once more, her devoted cult appeared and “did to her what they did in Streetcar,” Meacham recalled. “They didn’t accept the fact it was legitimate.” For the sold-out first Saturday matinee, Tallulah was nowhere to be found as curtain time approached. A search party was sent to her home, where they found Tallulah in her bathtub, having taken another
fall and scraped her head. The matinee was canceled.

  That night, the cast realized that the house of cards had finally collapsed. Tallulah played the evening performance, but she seemed somewhere beyond reach. Rose Riley was furious at her employer, hissing to Meacham that Tallulah should pay every member of the cast the money the company had lost. The week’s houses had been not bad, but Jack Wilson now had to cut his losses, and the closing notice went up that night.

  The next week, Eugenia was put out of its misery.

  In the weeks following the closing the phone often rang in Hurley’s tiny Greenwich Village apartment, and she was greeted by a smoky, “Hello, darling . . . I thought maybe you’d like to come up for dinner.” The invitations were spur-of-the-moment, always for that very same night; Tallulah seemed to live day to day. Even on such brief notice, Hurley felt compelled to accept. She was sure that Tallulah was genuinely fond of her. Several years later, when she moved to California, Tallulah insisted on writing letters of introduction to power brokers in the film community. But the young actress felt her friendship with the legend sprang from Tallulah’s need to keep empty time at bay, to keep herself from dwelling on how she had been stranded.

  In New York they’d sit in the library of Tallulah’s town house, eating dinner served on trays by a discreetly retiring cook. The fare was classic American and the amusement was television, which occupied a great deal of Tallulah’s time. A year earlier, asked if television should be abolished, Tallulah had said, “No, but I wish it had never been invented. Thanks to it there are fifty unread books in my living room, to say nothing of ten unread plays.” Her favorite shows were Dr. Baxter’s Sunday afternoon discussions of the classics; Meet the Press; Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now; Kukla, Fran and Ollie; as well as the Giants games. She also had a predilection for soap operas and game shows. Together Tallulah and Hurley tuned in to “To Tell the Truth,” Tallulah bringing the full weight of her mental concentration to winnow out impostors from the real McCoy. Suddenly she’d sit bolt upright, jabbing her finger at the set. “He’s the one! That one—remember that! Now that’s the one I picked.”