Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Other times, other evenings, they were joined by Tom Ellis, a mischievous young actor who had played Clifford Wentworth in Eugenia. On those nights, with Ellis escorting Hurley home, she would stay later. After Tallulah would send the cook home, she would plead with her guests to stay until she got into bed. Evenings dwindled into early morning, Tallulah becoming drunker and sadder, crying bitterly about growing old, invoking the memory of Will Bankhead as Hurley and Ellis helped her unsteadily to bed. “Look at me, Daddy!” she cried, just as she had fifty years earlier, cartwheeling to cajole her father out of his grief. Now the old cry for attention was a plea for commiseration. “Look at me, Daddy: I’m fifty-four years old. . . . Look at me!”

  Tallulah grew less and less inclined to leave her home. When Miles White, who had designed the costumes for the film Around the World in 80 Days, arranged for Tallulah to see it, she found watching the epic not only a pleasure but a relief. Unable to imagine any better film, she said felt she never had to go to see another movie.

  White spent a lot of time with her that spring; Tallulah asked him to design several gowns for an upcoming appearance at the Café de Paris in London, where she had been invited to bring her nightclub act for a five-week run. One of London’s toniest nightspots for years, the café had been the site of a 1927 charity benefit, an evening of cabaret, which Tallulah had organized. In 1955, she’d turned down an offer to return to share a bill with Dietrich, saying she couldn’t bear her beloved Maltese Dolores being quarantined for six months. (Perhaps Tallulah knew enough not to risk her friendship with Dietrich by sharing a nightclub stage.) Now, to return to London in the highest style, Tallulah commissioned White to forge a new diamond necklace from some of her old pieces. Together they went to Tallulah’s vault. There were “nice 1920s bracelets,” White recalled, “a brooch, a few big-sized diamonds,” tributes from past admirers whose generosity Tallulah credited as she prepared to melt them down into a parure she hoped would dazzle the city she had once captivated.

  She opened in London on May 27 before an audience that included Adlai Stevenson. A recording of her opening performance survives. She shares a song, “I’ve Heard a Lot About You,” with the gentlemen of the chorus, delivers a funny and raffish monologue, performs Parker’s “The Waltz,” and does some more crooning.

  It was the custom for nightclub entertainers to disappear up the café’s great stairway at the end of their act, then descend again to take more bows if the applause warranted. But with emphysema dogging Tallulah, she told the audience, “Well, darlings, you can give me a big hand now, ’cause I’m not going all the way up there and down again.”

  During her last week’s run, Ward Morehouse came from New York to review Tallulah. At midnight, she appeared at the head of the café stairs in a royal blue gown, long white kid gloves, and her new necklace. Her physical plight became grist for repartee. “God, that everlasting stairway!” she quipped once she had managed to descend.

  “I was once quite the rage in England,” she mentioned during her patter, “and had dukes and earls and princes running after me.” As “a delighted roar” rose from a corner, she paused, looked toward it, and said: “Maybe you, dahling, were one of them.” Shortly after Tallulah returned to the U.S., the Café de Paris closed for good. “The Germans blitzed it twice during the war,” Tallulah said to her friend David Herbert, “but it took me to close it.”

  Tallulah may have been incapable of sustained effort on Broadway, but she could still deliver brilliant performances of short duration. Her agent Phil Weltman found many bookings for her on television, although communicating with his client was increasingly a challenge. “It got to the point where I told the maid, ‘Look, don’t have her call me in the afternoon because I don’t understand what she’s saying.’ ”

  Dubs survive of several of her television appearances that year. The May 12, 1957, Steve Allen Show can be viewed at the Library of Congress.

  In the first of two skits she performs, Tallulah and a man keep trying to postpone getting out of an elevator so that they can pick each other up. In the second skit, she ventures for the first time into an automat. “Well, I don’t care what the rules of this establishment are, I will not put my mouth under that spigot!” she rants when directed to a coffee spout by an invisible waiter. She is hilarious, yet there is something almost forlorn about her characterization, someone so bewildered and nonplussed by the most pedestrian demands of mechanized existence. In both sketches, Tallulah maps out an intricate infrastructure of facial reactions and vocal transitions known only to great comic virtuosos. Unlike her work in Eugenia, her diction here is impeccable.

  Tallulah found television just as trying as Broadway, however. “I’d rather go over Niagara in a barrel. The chaos that precedes a single TV appearance—if you’re lucky you may have three days of rehearsals—the clutter and confusion with which the star must contend leaves her numb.”

  In December, she was the guest star on “The Celebrity Next Door,” the second Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz show, an episode now available on commercial video. The story line has Tallulah renting a house next to the Ricardos in Westport. For a dramatic presentation by the local PTA, Tallulah agrees to sound the jeremiads of a storm-tossed Renaissance queen. After a falling-out between the two madcap women, Lucy sabotages Tallulah’s histrionics mercilessly. But Tallulah forgives her, and suggests that they incorporate all of Lucy’s scene-stealing antics and turn the playlet into a satire. “You don’t know what I’ll do for a laugh!” Tallulah explains.

  Because of the show’s monthly broadcast, Tallulah actually had an extra day to rehearse, but she was unable to avail herself of the luxury, for according to various biographies of Ball, Tallulah was fully conscious only one hour out of their rehearsal days. Nonetheless, she mustered herself for the live filming, performing with so much assurance that Ball wondered if Tallulah had spent the week lulling her into a false sense of complacency.

  No one could ever steal a scene from either comic talent, and the two play off each other superbly.

  On December 28, Tallulah made her second of two appearances that year on The Arthur Murray Party, dancing a waltz with Rod Alexander, who with his wife, Bambi Linn, formed one of the most popular ballroom teams of the day. (The episode is preserved in a kinescope at the Library of Performing Arts in New York.) Tallulah plunges into their ballroom adagio with an abandon that precludes any thought of the physical infirmities she was experiencing, bringing an ardor to the various falls and swoons that makes this pas de deux as affecting as any dramatic performance by her that can still be seen today.

  Halloween Madness

  “I went home to Alabama not long ago and found some of my relatives to still be racist Dixiecrats, and I loathe them, too.”

  Tallulah continued her fraught existence on Sixty-second Street. In February 1958, she developed a high fever that alarmed Dr. Rodgers, who remained her personal physician, so much that he had her checked into Lenox Hill hospital. In July, she cut her arm on a lamp, necessitating five stitches. She was about to begin a tour of a mystery play by George Batson entitled House on the Rocks, in which she was to play Alexandra, the reclusive chatelaine of a mansion on the upper Hudson River. It was a revision of Batson’s earlier play Celia, which Jessie Royce Landis had tried out at the Bucks County Playhouse in the summer of 1953, to reviews insufficiently encouraging to warrant a Broadway production. Tallulah was returning to the comedy-mystery genre for the first time since 1924’s The Creaking Chair, and again the possibility was entertained that the play would go on to Broadway.

  Both Batson and the director, Arthur Sircom, were experienced but not first rank. Sircom had been resident director at Cape Playhouse in Dennis, where he directed many stars, undoubtedly perfecting the tactics of accommodation. “He concentrated on making her look good,” cast member Joseph Campanella recalled in 1994. “He would give her all kinds of leeway.” Campanella played the red-herring villain. Under thirty, Campanella was thrilled at the p
rospect of working with Tallulah. Warren Kemmerling played the detective, a former lover of Tallulah’s Alexandra, who turns out to be the real killer. Kemmerling was in his thirties, with extensive experience in Broadway musical comedy, and he, too, had eagerly anticipated working with Tallulah. Unlike Campanella, however, he found her behavior appalling and told her so. In his recollection, Tallulah was sober “off and on” during rehearsals, and after about a week, Sircom realized that directing her “was a lost cause. She took a little blocking and that was about it.”

  They opened an eight-week tour at the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack, where Helen Hayes invited several members of the cast over to her home. Kemmerling, who’d started to clash with Tallulah during rehearsals, saw her prepare to wash down four pills with a slug of liquor. “What are you doing?” he said. “You don’t need the goddamn things.” After she told him this was none of his business, he tried again, but she refused to answer him. Kemmerling knew firsthand how potent her narcotics were: once when they’d had two days off between performances and he was suffering with flu, Tallulah had given him a sleeping pill that knocked him out cold for eighteen hours.

  She asked him whether he would have appeared on The Big Show had he been asked. “I doubt it.” The conversation came around to “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You,” with which Tallulah and her guest stars signed off each episode. He told her, “Nobody could do it as badly as you did and still have come off as well as you did. You were fucking awful!”

  Campanella was much less critical; he found himself bewitched by a moment in House on the Rocks in which Alexandra, who had been a nightclub singer, listened nostalgically to a recording she had once made. The performance used was Tallulah singing a torch song that sounded as though it had been recorded privately at a party. Melancholy, yet resilient and erotic, it suited her exactly. “I’m sure she was touched by it, too,” Campanella recalled. “There was something about it that reached her. It was perfect in the play.”

  “She was marvelous, as an actress,” said Kemmerling, even if their animosity carried over onstage. During one scene he was across the stage from her, recollecting their mutual past. She was supposed to be sitting stage left listening. At one performance, however, she got up and started arranging flowers. He went over to her, throwing in an “Oh, my dear” as he steered her back to the couch, then directed the rest of their dialogue sitting next to her. Sotto voce he told Tallulah, “You don’t arrange fucking flowers for me, honey!”

  “Those eyes of hers would look right into you,” Campanella said. “It was Tallulah but it was the character, too.” Her behavior in the wings belied the shibboleth that Tallulah did no preparation before going onstage.

  She watched the action onstage so that a couple of seconds before she walked on she was already in the scene. “In every way, shape, or form she was a professional,” Kemmerling noted, “up to the point where her ego got in the way.” They had a climactic struggle at the end of the play, scrambling up the set’s grand staircase, where Tallulah was supposed to push Kemmerling out a window. Immersed in the scene’s Sturm und Drang, knowing exactly how to engineer the fight so that it would be most effective, Tallulah was nonetheless too frail to protect herself from her own exertions. She struggled so vehemently Kemmerling thought he was going to hurt her; he was forced to devise a way to go out the window on his own.

  After a week in Detroit, they spent half a day traveling by bus to Warren, Ohio, where they were booked at a well-known summer theater managed by John Kenley, whom Tallulah had known when he was working for the Shuberts during the 1930s. Tallulah drank throughout the trip. When they pulled up to the theater, stage manager Ed Strum saw Kenley standing with a clutch of journalists and television cameras. Running to the door of the bus, he pulled Kenley inside and showed him Tallulah. Kenley ordered the driver to pull away, and they fled the parking lot to return only after the press had dispersed.

  A technical rehearsal was in progress that night at eleven when Tallulah arrived at the theater and weaved up to the stage. “Where are the footlights?” she demanded. It turned out they had not yet been installed.

  Turning to the head carpenter, Tallulah said, “You fucking stagehands know how to make an old cunt look good. Get me the footlights!” The theater’s summer apprentices “almost went flying into the night,” Kenley’s production associate Leslie Cutler remembered. “Miss Bankhead,” Kenley intoned from the back of the theater, “we do not use that language in my theater.”

  Tallulah spun around. “Shut up, you big faggot!”

  “I am not a faggot!” Kenley insisted. “Well, I am,” Tallulah camped. As their hostilities escalated, “a terrible scene” ensued, recalled stage manager Ed Strum. The horrors were only beginning.

  Shortly before noon on the first matinee day of the week, Tallulah’s companion Don Torillo came running to Strum’s room after having tried unsuccessfully to wake Tallulah. Strum went to her rooms, then called Kemmerling, as someone went out for ice. Filling the bathtub, they dumped Tallulah into it. After an hour, she was still unconscious. They walked her around her rooms.

  The parking lot was packed with buses conveying theater parties from all over the region. Kenley could not afford to refund the audience’s tickets; he was not about to cancel the performance. Calling his doctor, he had coffee poured into Tallulah until they got her to the theater. Kenley’s doctor administered vitamin B.

  After the curtain had been held an hour, Tallulah finally made it to the stage on her hands and knees. Strum warned the stagehands to be ready to bring the curtain down should some disaster occur. Tallulah got to her feet.

  “Are you okay, Madam?” Strum asked.

  “Yeees,” rumbled out of Tallulah.

  “We’re going to do this fuckin’ play.” Strum impressed upon her that she was playing to a sold-out house of several thousand. “Yeees,” Tallulah croaked in assent. For the first two-and-a-half acts, until she went to the top of the stairs for her climactic struggle with Kemmerling, Tallulah moved minimally. Although she spoke the lines with complete accuracy, she read them in a disembodied, exhausted voice, and she read at such a snail’s pace that the performance ran about a half hour overtime. The audience watched in disbelieving silence.

  The more Tallulah drank, the less she ate, and at this point in her life she was seriously malnourished. When Kenley went to visit her later in the week, he threatened to leave if she didn’t eat something. As she swallowed a little of the consommé that he ordered in, Kenley scolded her. “God once gave a woman all the beauty in the world and all the brains. He’ll never do it again, because of you, Tallulah.”

  Along with director Sircom, Batson, who was thrilled that Tallulah was starring in his play, joined up with the show intermittently. Yet the playwright didn’t seem interested in rewrites or any of the usual pre-Broadway attention. House on the Rocks was a dead end, and Tallulah knew it. “Oh, Joseph, this is not going to Broadway, you know that,” she told Campanella.

  At the end of the summer, Gertrude Macy, Katharine Cornell’s long-term producing associate, sent Tallulah a new black comedy by a young writer, James Leo Herlihy. Crazy October was based on Herlihy’s short story >“The Sleep of Baby Filbertson.” He was also going to direct his play. Earlier in 1958, Blue Denim, a comedy/drama of adolescent angst Herlihy had written with William Noble, had been well received on Broadway.

  Tallulah said she wouldn’t do Crazy October without Ed Strum. The stage manager had grown attached to Tallulah despite his harrowing summer with her, and he agreed immediately. A brave departure from her customary realm of sophistication and glamour, the role was absolutely right for her. Once more she was playing a woman of ingot-bending tenacity from down south, but this time she was going to flout that cardinal taboo of a Southern belle and turn “common.” Her character was Daisy Filbertson, the blowsy proprietress of a roadside dive in West Virginia who scraped out a living with the same ferocity with which her neighbors gouged coal from the earth. Like T
allulah, Daisy wouldn’t scruple to use any manipulative wile at her disposal, running the gamut from terror to seduction. Paid by Miz Cotton, the grieving widow of a miner, to bury her husband, Daisy interred him in a parking lot, then dug up his skeleton when an interstate was run through it. Gulling the bereaved woman into believing that she owed her money for the interment, she forced the widow’s daughter, Dorrie, to work off the extorted debt. So had she also manipulated her adult son until he was almost infantilized. The play was as dependent on mood as on action, and what plot there was centered on a last-gasp Halloween party that Daisy throws to drum up business at the inn, and the worm-turning rebellion of her son, who helps finagle an elopement between Dorrie and a drifter named Boyd.

  At Tallulah’s urging, Estelle Winwood returned to the U.S. to play the widow, although she was too old for the part. Winwood had been working in England, where she had just completed the film Alive and Kicking, acting with fellow septuagenarian Sybil Thorndike. Strum suspected Tallulah wanted Winwood there as a companion.

  Meanwhile, Eugenia Bankhead’s wanderlust was now taking her to Morocco, where she would spend a great deal of the next few years. Tallulah’s old friend David Herbert had been living in Tangier for a decade. Tallulah wrote to him asking him to look after her sister, warning him that she would “take a lot of looking after and wear you to death.” Before leaving for Morocco, Eugenia tried to effect a reconciliation between Tallulah and Stephan Cole, bringing him unannounced to the town house. Opening her door, Tallulah said, “You are not welcome in this house.” The next day she called him to apologize, asking if he’d please come back to visit.