Tallulah!
Page 57
“Tallulah,” he said, “I really don’t want to.”
“Let’s be friendly like the old days,” she pleaded through tears. After reminding her that those days were gone, Cole agreed to return for a visit.
The next day, he came back with a friend, who talked with Estelle, Eugenia, and Louisa Carpenter in Tallulah’s drawing room while Cole took his place at the foot of Tallulah’s bed. She asked him all about his life, then read him the entire script of Crazy October, playing all the parts. She was looking forward to the first proletariat role she had created since they had done Clash by Night together seventeen years earlier. The visit stretched on until six in the morning. Now forty-four, running a flower shop at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, Cole was unable to be what Tallulah wanted: “a fixture in her life.”
Fast becoming a fixture in Tallulah’s life was author Herlihy. Herlihy “was charismatic, and knew it,” Strum recalled. Thirty-one, tall, handsome, playful, he was very much “on.” Yet beneath his high-key persona, Strum sensed a real vulnerability and love for the theater. Another William Inge, Strum wondered, a new Tennessee Williams?
Tallulah trusted and loved the writer, and her dedication to his play was a far cry from her approach to House on the Rocks. Before rehearsals began, Strum, Herlihy, and Tallulah met frequently at her house to discuss the play. Tallulah “really wanted to be and convey the character Jamie had written,” Strum recalled, she wanted to get under the skin of this battered but indomitable woman. She was all ears and all eagerness, listening with an intensity Strum had seen only a few times before, when Tallulah had asked Strum about his childhood. At times her head would crane forward as she lapsed into a responsive silence as powerful as her usual battery of words. Other times she plied Herlihy with questions about her character’s motivation and history.
Alvin Colt, a leading costume designer since On the Town in 1945, was hired to design Crazy October. One day finding himself in Tallulah’s drawing room—a sea of beige and ecru at twilight—he listened as she told him there would be no Mainbocher gowns in this. “I’m not going to look like Tallulah at all,” the woman said of the institution. “No one’s ever going to have seen Tallulah looking like this.” That meant a pair of honky-tonk wedgie shoes she’d found, and “skins,” the word she invented for panty hose, which had just come on the market.
Colt talked about wraparound Hoover aprons for Daisy to wear at work, with perhaps a long-sleeved sweater underneath to protect against drafts in her dilapidated roadhouse. Perhaps a red Hoover apron, he suggested. “Oh, put me in red, darling,” Tallulah cried, “no one will look at anybody else on the stage!” There would be two aprons, one wine, one green.
The second-act Halloween party gave Colt the most latitude. What masquerade to put her in . . . what character to make her? He decided upon the most unlikely: she would be dressed as an angel. As all costumes were ostensibly homemade, Daisy’s robes were improvised from a long-sleeved nightgown, “not a Tallulah nightgown,” but a negligee bought at Sears, and adorned with jewelry fashioned from leftover Christmas tree tinsel. To top it all off, there would be wings made out of wire coat hangers, with the hooks left on them. Tallulah burst into laughter when saw his sketch. “She liked it so much that she put a line in the play: ‘I made these wings myself; I made them out of wire coat hangers.’ ”
Macy was producing Crazy October in association with Walter Starcke, a protégé of John van Druten. Macy and Starcke had already coproduced two plays written by van Druten. They were having trouble casting the role of Thelma, a middle-aged belle perpetually nursing her wounded pride after episodes of loving well but not wisely. Strum had recommended his friend Joan Blondell.
During their first day’s rehearsal at the Belasco in New York, Tallulah pulled Blondell into her dressing room. “Joan, I’m going to wear my hair this way. What are you going to do with yours?” She grabbed a hank of Blondell’s hair for emphasis.
At the end of the day, Blondell took Strum aside and told him he was going out for a drink with her. Was she going to become dead meat, the latest target for Tallulah’s free-floating hostilities? Could she get out of this contract? Strum assured her that this was just Tallulah’s normal behavior, her way of showing Blondell that she loved her.
The two stars did quickly become good friends. Tallulah respected Blondell’s theater experience, and she was easy to like. “Mother Earth” Strum called her. “If you met her, in two minutes you’d be telling her your life story.” Both actresses cherished their experiences with playwright/director George Kelly, for whom Blondell had starred as a Broadway ingenue in 1929’s Maggie the Magnificent.
Blondell was very close to her two children, Norman and Ellen Powell, as well as her stepson Mike Todd Jr. and her grandchildren. Her luck with her husbands was less than stellar; June Allyson had walked off with Dick Powell, her second husband. Her third, Mike Todd, used Blondell’s money for his exploits, leaving her penniless. Still, Blondell was a strong woman who liked herself, and considered herself very attractive at age fifty-two.
And indeed she was.
During the weeks of preproduction, an overriding anxiety had preoccupied Starcke and Macy: Tallulah’s ability to keep her drinking under control. Yet rehearsals, however, were propitious, with Tallulah embodying“truly the ideal of what theater could and should be.” Tallulah’s chores onstage were plentiful: there were pots of coffee to be made, Coke bottles to be pried open, ice cream sodas to be blended. Strum knew that mechanical props could unnerve her. He told Macy and Starcke they would all save themselves a lot of tribulation by hiring the propman a couple of weeks earlier than usual. Plunk went Tallulah’s little finger on the keys of Daisy’s cash register, out shot the big bad drawer, and Tallulah recoiled as if from an electric shock. But she persevered. “She was very worried about rehearsing with the props and getting them right,” assistant stage manager Joe Ponazecki recalled, but she finally grew comfortable with each appliance.
Coming as it did on the heels of those rehearsals, it was that much more disheartening that the premiere in New Haven was “one of the most horrific openings” that Strum had ever experienced. The process is a rocky one, whether it’s a musical with thirty sets or a kitchen-bound domestic drama, as the actors find their stage legs. “They’re holding a teapot in their hand and they think they’ve got a baby without its head,” or they don’t seem to realize there is going to be a door where before, in rehearsal, there had only been a chalk outline.
When Tallulah’s stairs materialized at the dress rehearsal, they proved an insuperable obstacle. She couldn’t walk up them, let alone be carried up them as she was supposed to be at the end of the second act. Designer Ben Edwards, who had been her apprentice in Marblehead, Massachusetts, for Her Cardboard Lover in 1941, kept reassuring Tallulah that she could do it.
“After all, they were just stairs, they weren’t nine-inch risers.” An hour or so was wasted. “Everybody was involved, stagehands standing in the wings, time going by, overtime.”
But actor J. Frank Lucas said that the stairs were indeed too steep, and it was he who had to carry Tallulah up them. Moreover, from the top of the stairs, where they performed one scene, they were out of view of patrons at the back of the balcony. Yet another reason Tallulah couldn’t navigate the stairs, according to Strum, was that her insecurities had led her to hit the bottle. He had seen it many times: actors assuming that one little glass of bourbon would give them the courage to face down their nerves, when it was exactly the kind of stimulation they didn’t need. Strum suspected that Rose Riley had brought a bottle to Tallulah as she waited in an “escape” perch behind the set. His suspicions were corroborated as Tallulah began slurring Herlihy’s words, until Herlihy erupted, “Get the fuck out of here!”and Tallulah stormed off. “We never, ever finished dress rehearsal,” Strum sighed. After an effusive reconciliation between Tallulah and Herlihy, the cast opened cold the following night, October 8, 1958.
They played the
first act to bewildered silence. The audience was not laughing; they were not sure they were supposed to be laughing. The act ended with Tallulah preparing for the Halloween festivities by lowering a skeleton from the balcony of the Blue Note, which is later revealed to be the remains of widow Miz Cotton’s husband. It was meant to be a big “boffo” laugh, a crescendo to bring the act to a rousing close. But the gag elicited silence, and the curtain came down to barely polite applause. Tallulah stole back to her dressing room; the rest of the cast milled around onstage, dazed. Blondell looked around at the cast and said, “Well, kids, don’t send your laundry out.”
The audience seemed to be expecting an evening closer to Tallulah’s more habitual arena of drawing room hilarity, another Dear Charles or Private Lives. But Crazy October was something else altogether, and Tallulah was giving a different performance than her audience had come to expect. “Tallulah had worked so hard to discipline herself so that she could carry out the intentions and purpose of the play,” Strum recalled. “Everyone in the cast was working toward that aim.” Perhaps an explanatory note like the one Richard Maney had provided with The Skin of Our Teeth would have helped, or the more venturesome public of the next decade; it was in 1969 that Herlihy achieved his greatest success, with the film of his novel Midnight Cowboy.
Designer Edwards had used myriad shades of umber and tan for Daisy’s Blue Note Inn, to convey walls and surfaces soiled by years of smoke and grease. After the notices, the producers decided that the set was too somber to serve as a backdrop for comedy. Edwards threw up his hands and walked out, and a crew of scene painters sloshed on a washed-out blue. “Terrible,” Strum called the blanket of sludge that “took the character out of the play, the performers, and the performances.” But the cast’s J. Frank Lucas, however, felt that the overhaul was justified. What Strum found marvelously atmospheric he found simply depressing, with “no particular character for Southern gothic.”
Crazy October was also Herlihy’s first stab at directing, and Lucas felt that he was not the right director for his own play. “It was his baby. He couldn’t see what was wrong with it. He would go out and watch the show with the audience and not get a clue why this thing wasn’t working.”
From New Haven they went to Washington. Herlihy was in Tallulah’sdressing room when Cal Schuman, a friend of Tallulah’s from Baltimore, came back after a performance.
Joan Blondell, Estelle Winwood, and Tallulah rehearsing Crazy October, 1958
“Well?” Tallulah demanded.
“I think it’s an avant-garde camp,” Schuman told her.
“Did you hear that, darling?” Tallulah asked Herlihy. “He thinks it’s an avant-garde camp, and everybody doesn’t quite get it!”
Strum had noticed in Tallulah’s suite drugstore bills for rolls and rolls of three-inch adhesive tape. It turned out Rose was taping Tallulah’s wrists together at night to prevent her from taking more pills during her frequent intervals of wakefulness. In Washington Tallulah, Blondell, and Starcke were staying at a small, chic hotel, while Strum’s digs were less expensive.
After leaving a small party Blondell had given in her suite, Strum found himself waiting and waiting for an elevator. Finally, the doors swung open: standing before him was a Tallulah even he had never quite seen before—“a wild woman, like a caged chimp.” Straggle-haired, barely wrapped in a thin robe, she flailed at the walls, sputtering “Where am I?”
“Madam! What are you doing?” Strum asked. “Why are you in this elevator without any clothes on? It’s two o’clock in the morning.”
Tallulah seemed to be searching for Herlihy or Starcke. “I’ve got the most wonderful idea for a rewrite.” She had managed to claw the tape off her wrists and stagger out, while Rose slept soundly. Jabbing at all the elevator buttons, Tallulah kept the car opening on one unfamiliar floor after another.
When Strum took Tallulah back to her suite, they discovered Dolores, her Maltese, yapping furiously. She had fallen behind the headboard of Tallulah’s bed and trapped herself. Strum woke up Rose and liberated Dolores. Tallulah was taped back into bed, Strum went on his way, and that evening belatedly came to a close.
In Washington, a considerably more composed Tallulah also spoke at several Democratic luncheons, one of which was attended by the Trumans and Eleanor Roosevelt. Tallulah did a lot of Republican bashing, calling Vice President Nixon “a dangerous man” and saying she loathed Dixiecrat Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas as well. She didn’t hesitate to point the finger closer to home: “I went down to Alabama not long ago and found some of my relatives to still be racist Dixiecrats, and I loathe them, too.”
After the first week of the two-week Washington run, the producers announced that they were not going to bring Crazy October to Broadway.
By telephone, Tallulah expressed her regret to the New York Post. “It ratherbaffles the audience. . . . I think in Europe it would be a success. They dig that kind of thing.
“Everyone put a lot of heart into it,” she said. “And heart is about the only thing we have, isn’t it, darling? Not brain. If that’s all we had I’d have cut my throat long ago.” Putting the show on two-week hiatus while Herlihy did some rewriting, the producers decided to try again in Detroit on November 10.
From Detroit, they boarded a train to Los Angeles. After they’d gotten under way, Strum came around to alert the cast that Tallulah was still smashed from the prior evening’s revelries. In fact, she intended to stay smashed the entire train ride to the West Coast. Twice Strum brought Lucas down to sit with her. For the first time Lucas saw how Tallulah drunk meant an uninterrupted monologue that brooked no response. After an hour, Lucas’s arm was sore from her grip on his wrist and his soul chilled by her frenzied, fearful chatter.
Crazy October opened a three-and-a-half-week run in Los Angeles with the biggest advance sale since Helen Hayes’s revival of James Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows in 1954. The stars flocked to Tallulah’s first Los Angeles stage appearance in three years. Yet Lucas felt a resistance, a “show me” chill from the house, although Joan Crawford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Lucille Ball trooped backstage to see the play’s stars and then gathered for a champagne reception in the lobby.
Tallulah and Don Torillo had just broken up, and her relationship with Rose Riley was finally beginning to unravel. In Los Angeles she invited Ted Hook, a dancer who had been in the chorus at the Sands Hotel with her, to become her secretary/companion. Now Hook stood guard outside her dressing room door, announcing visitors. John Emery identified himself.
“John, darling!” Tallulah bleated from inside.
Emery marched over to her: “I was married to that old bag! How are ya?” he said, sweeping her into his arms, up the twelve inches it took to bring them eye to eye.
Onstage, Tallulah’s anxiety over the play had led her to seek refuge in the safety of her tried-and-true theatrical trademarks. But they did not overpower her performance as they had Eugenia. Lucas thought Tallulah was doing to a great extent what the part and the play required. “She played it, shall we say—common. She was not a congressman’s daughter here.” Nothing she did onstage matched her rehearsals, as far as Strum was concerned. Yes, she maintained her characterization, but it wasn’t as focused; nothing equaled what she had done in rehearsal.
When Strum arrived at the theater at 7:00 P.M the stage was still dark, lit only by a single work light. Tallulah, Rose, and the doorman were the only people present, and Tallulah was already fully made up. She sometimes asked him about the performance, and there was enough concern in her voice that he felt he could gently criticize. “I think the intention here was not what you were doing. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get a laugh there. It’s okay to sacrifice.”
“Oh, yes, I see what you mean.” Tallulah nodded.
“There’s a subtext here that has been discussed that you’re not paying attention to,” he told her about a fine point which had gotten lost. Tallulah was responsive.
But the constant att
ention that Tallulah and the play needed were beyond Herlihy’s staying power. “I think I just gave up,” he recalled to Strum when they talked shortly before Herlihy’s death in 1993.
Strum was impressed by Tallulah’s emotional commitment onstage: “She gave you eyeball to eyeball: contact, emotion, feeling. She would really dredge it up.” Ponazecki remembered the pocket-size notebook Daisy kept by the cash register in which she could take down orders, scribble inventory. He looked it over and discovered that Tallulah was actually making the appropriate jottings that Daisy would have made.
Strum retained a copy of the script originally distributed by Starcke’s office, but it was Ted Hook who for some reason wound up with Strum’s own script. Hook let me read this script but not photocopy it. It was a patchwork of line changes and larger revisions in Strum’s often illegible handwriting, so that it is difficult to say how the script evolved. The reviews of Crazy October did not improve, however. In the San Francisco Examiner, Charles Einstein wrote that the play had been “chased by saddened reviewers and not saddened audiences wherever it went. Along the line, Bankhead became more Bankhead, Blondell more and more Blondell, Winwood more and more Winwood,” to the enhancement of its entertainment value. “They are completely wonderful on stage, to the point where the audience laughs not only at unfunny lines but, from time to time, even before the lines are delivered.”
In San Francisco, Strum escorted Tallulah to a famous transvestite nightclub, Finocchio’s, much to the vociferous delight of the performers, who dedicated their show to her. The next day they turned out in force for a matinee of her show. After the Christmas Eve performance, the cast peered through the curtains as Tallulah made an appeal for the Actors’Fund. In diamonds and a voluminous pink gown, she evoked The Gold Diggers and 1926, hiking up her skirt and dancing a mad Charleston. After insisting that she wasn’t giving any presents this year, Tallulah sent Ted Hook at the last minute to buy a dressing gown and a bottle of liquor for all the men in the cast and crew, and two cashmere sweaters for each woman.