Entertaining some of the cast in her hotel room, she sang two of her favorite songs a cappella: “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Silent Night,” which she intermingled with tears welling up in her eyes. “Pack up all my cares and woe, Here I go, swinging low—Siiilent night, hooolly night . . .”
On New Year’s Eve, the company played a special matinee. Tallulah had been running a fever the night before, which had worsened by showtime. Lucas carried her up the stairs, depositing her in the offstage escape area. Tallulah was sweating profusely. Lucas ran to Strum, who came up and asked if they should put on her understudy for the next act. “No, no, no, Ed, you cannot do that,” Tallulah insisted. “I’ve got to finish this performance. If you go out there and tell them I’m sick, everybody’s going to hoot and howl. Sick? She just got drunk last night. She’s hungover, that’s all that’s wrong with her.”
In Los Angeles, Starcke had put out feelers to Preston Sturges about taking over as director. Sturges’s film career was in eclipse, but he’d been trained on the stage, and his absurdist genius might have provided the ideal diagnostic tools to fix Crazy October. Unfortunately, Herlihy resisted being dismissed from his own project.
Business wasn’t as good in San Francisco as it had been in Los Angeles.
Macy and Starcke were feuding and, along with Herlihy, they went back to the East Coast. It wasn’t long before they sent word that the plug was to be pulled for good this time.
In Retreat
“No curtain has ever been rung down on me!”
By the time Crazy October gave its final performance in San Francisco on January 3, 1959, Tallulah seemed to have conceded defeat to her personal and professional demons. Returning with Ted Hook to Los Angeles, she taped an appearance on Milton Berle’s TV show before heading back to her Manhattan town house. Rose Riley, who had worked in Tallulah’s home and her dressing room on and off for twenty-five years, had determined to end her increasingly grim tour of duty. Since Tallulah couldn’t bear to part with her entirely, she invented a job for Rose processing her expenses. Every month she sent checks up to Riley’s apartment in the Bronx for her to sign, including one made out to Riley herself.
Later that January, Jean Dalrymple dedicated a gala evening to Tallulah at the City Center. The New York City Ballet danced, and the City Opera performed, while, in addition, Lotte Lenya sang excerpts from The Three-penny Opera. Mike Nichols and Elaine May performed a skit. Tallulah and Sandy Campbell reprised the young collector scene from A Streetcar Named Desire.
In April, an addled Tallulah testified before Congress to advocate a bill providing unemployment insurance for actors. The political appearance compared sadly with some of her earlier ones. “I haven’t heard a bloody word you’ve said,” she told the committee, “so I don’t know whether you’re for us or agin’ us.”
Not long after that appearance, Jackie Gleason cited Tallulah as an example of performers with whom he wouldn’t share a stage because they’d had curtains rung down on them when drunk. With her habits common knowledge throughout the profession, she had sunk to new lows in her most recent productions, yet she had always been able to perform, as she had in Ohio in House on the Rocks the preceding summer. “No curtain has ever been rung down on me!” she insisted to Ted Hook. “I’m not Jeanne Eagels,” whose behavior at the end of her career had sometimes made such misfortune obligatory. Gleason’s remark—hypocritical above all—so upset Tallulah that she remained in bed in for a week in a near-catatonic depression.
One night she once again fell, breaking several ribs. After she was checked into Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital, it was reported that she had entered for “a general checkup.” Hook told reporters that Tallulah was simply getting herself a clean bill of health before her next venture in summer theater. It was true that she was thinking of working that summer, and had called up Ed Strum asking him to stage-manage. She was not well enough, however, to go on the road again in the summer.
The death of Billie Holiday that July affected Tallulah deeply, although they had been estranged for some years. Tallulah and Holiday had fallen out over Holiday’s autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. Holiday had tried repeatedly to reach Tallulah on the phone to tell her that she was mentioning her in her book. Unable to get through, she finally gave up. After a trip out of town, she returned to New York to discover that Tallulah had informed Doubleday that she wanted Holiday’s mentions of their friendship omitted from the book. “I thought I was a friend of yours,” Holiday wrote Tallulah in January 1956, shortly before the book went to print. “That’s why there was nothing in my book that was unfriendly to you, unkind or libelous.”
Friendship with Holiday had become too risky for some of her celebrated admirers. During the 1950s, for instance, Tallulah had attended a party thrown by Fran and Joe Bushkin, but when Holiday arrived she was in no condition to be guest of honor. But on the matter of Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday was as outraged by Tallulah’s hypocrisy as Tallulah had been at Jackie Gleason’s, for Tallulah’s own behavior with Holiday had been anything but discreet. Holiday reminded Tallulah that if she wanted to embarrass her, she certainly could. Plenty of people could testify to Tallulah’s flagrantly amorous activities with Holiday’s dressing room propped open, the times she “carried on so you almost got me fired” from the Strand Theatre in 1949. “And if you want to get shitty,” Holiday taunted Tallulah, “we can make it a big shitty party. We can all get funky together.”
Three years later, Holiday’s tribulations had finally come to an end.
During Holiday’s last hospital stay, William Dufty, who had ghosted Holiday’s autobiography, planted a news item about floral tributes from Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra, and Tallulah in order to shame the rich and famous who now avoided her. But Tallulah could not dismiss their relationship as cavalierly as she had the singer, however. Going to the Campbell’s funeral home to pay her last respects, she was seen speaking to Holiday’s remains by a friend to whom Tallulah later alluded to her relationship with the singer. She sent twelve dozen long-stemmed roses to the funeral.
The gregarious woman who feasted on the world’s audience was now largely her own audience; the symbol of glamour spent most of her day in a dressing gown. Tallulah’s routine remained unchanged during the almost four years she lived with Hook. She talked to friends on the phone and occasionally entertained. She didn’t wake until late afternoon, after 3:00 P.M.
After a bath, she’d watch two soap operas that she followed religiously, The Edge of Night and The Secret Storm. She sat down to dinner with Hook, not eating “enough to keep a bird alive.” Then she’d watch the six- and seven-o’clock news shows. As an actress, she realized how much information was biased by the newscasters’ delivery; if she didn’t trust the reports, she liked the visuals. Usually she and Hook would talk until the ten- and eleven-o’clock news, followed by Jack Paar’s talk show. At 1:00 A.M. she got back into bed and read until dawn or later. She told Hook that she always included passages from the Bible and her autobiography, “the two greatest books ever written!” When she slept, the radio was turned on for white noise, her personal sleep machine. But her sleep was always fitful, alternating with patches of wakefulness. Her loneliness flared in the watches of the night; sometimes she would summon Hook to her room, needing reassurance that she was loved.
Hook was gay, a fact that didn’t necessarily deter Tallulah, but there was nothing sexual between them; he was more a conduit to the outside world that she increasingly shunned but remained acutely curious about.
She lived vicariously through him. If he came home late, she’d call him into her room: “Well, darling, tell!”
“She’d want a full report of everything I had done, both in and out of bedrooms, and bars, and you name it.” She also wanted a scene-by-scene breakdown of every Broadway show he saw, although from time to time she accompanied him to movies at the local theater. On their cook’s night out, Hook sometimes pleaded with her to go out to eat; eventually she would relent,
groaning, “Oh, all right, darling, if we must.”
Much of her reclusiveness had to do with her insecurity about her appearance. If someone on the street asked, “Aren’t you Tallulah Bankhead?”her reply was, “I’m what’s left of her, darling.”
Often the strangers were actors, with whom Tallulah chatted graciously, but she was more interested when her admirers were from different professions altogether; in that case, she might very well extend an invitation to visit her home. As always, she was hungry for information.
Similarly, on the occasions when Tallulah agreed to attend a party, Hook saw her deliberately eschew center stage. It seemed both a defense against having to make small talk and a sign of her exhaustion with her own compulsive need to be “on.” She would buttonhole the most interesting guest and say, “Come over here, darling, let’s talk.”
One day she asked Hook to name the two people he’d most like to dine with; he told her Dorothy Parker and Truman Capote. It was arranged, and the four enjoyed dinner together at the town house. “The whole evening was totally outrageous,” Hook recalled. Tallulah and her guests continued a round robin of quip and counterquip as if enacting a rerun of the Algonquin Round Table. “I would have given my soul to have had a tape.”
While she continued to have assignations with some men at the town house, sex was not the consuming pastime it had been. “No one wants to be Mr. Bankhead,” Tallulah said to Hook. “I’m just too much for a man.”
Harvey Shain, an actor then in his early twenties, recalled taking her out occasionally during these years. He had met Tallulah a decade earlier when he was a child actor at a summer theater where she was appearing.
There was no part for a child in Private Lives, and so instead he was assigned to be her valet. She took him under her wing: “She just thought I was like the kid she wanted to have.” One day he barged into her dressing room with her mail and found her on the couch in a romantic clinch with a female stage manager. Tallulah threw something and yelled, “Get the fuck out of here!” “You’re going to grow up very fast,” she subsequently told him, and proceeded to explain some of the facts of life.
She would call him and his parents once every several years, until he found himself as a young adult tapped to be an escort. She took him to a gallery opening of an exhibit of Cubist painters. They went to a couple of small parties. But mostly they went out to dinner, and sometimes danced.
By Tallulah’s choice they never went to high-profile places, but instead neighborhood restaurants in the theater district or, since Shain owned a car, in the suburbs. Invariably he’d have to fight to pay the check. She trudged to his walk-up apartment once because he wanted to show her his new espresso machine. She suggested scenes for him to study and he read for her. She reminded him of all the reasons that rejection in the theater might have nothing to do with lack of talent.
“Is David Merrick gay?” he asked her.
“Yes!”
“He wants me to go to Philadelphia with him.”
“You have to make up your own mind about those kinds of things.”
Sometimes when he picked her up she looked as if she had been crying. Sometimes he thought she was drugged: her eyes were glassy and she was melancholy, but she hadn’t had a drink. But over dinner Tallulah invariably became a little tipsy. After several dates, “she started to turn me on: the sensuality that she had,” he recalled in 1995. Driving back from a restaurant on Route 4 in New Jersey, Tallulah was a little high when she asked, “Do I attract you? Would you make love to me?” “Sure, yes,” he said, and giggled. On later occasions they sometimes kissed, but according to him, that was as far as it went.
Tallulah wasn’t looking to act again on Broadway unless offered something too good to pass up. She told Hook that she hated reading scripts because she didn’t think she could tell from the printed page what the theatrical possibilities might be. “I usually make the wrong choices,”she would tell John Kobal in 1964. “Now, I won’t say I know a very great play when I see one, although I read avidly, and I think I read good books.”
Tallulah delegated Hook as her gatekeeper. Early in 1960, she received a new script by Mary Chase, author of the immortal comic fantasy Harvey.
Chase’s Midgie Purvis chronicled the escapades of a middle-aged matron who has spent her life as a free spirit. Her soon-to-be-married son chastens her for her high jinks and tells her to act her age. She takes a flier, disguising herself as an elderly babysitter, and discovers simulated old age more fun than the transitions of middle age. “I just flipped over it,” Hook recalled. “I ran downstairs in the middle of the night to tell her about it.”
“I think it’s the only part I’ve ever had to characterize,” Tallulah later told the New York Herald Tribune. While that was an exaggeration, she was certainly aware of the acclaim that could accrue from a dual role requiring her to spend most of her performance radically disguised.
If Tallulah found the depredations of age torturous to watch, she may have been attracted to the script’s tacit embrace of the freedoms of maturity over a compulsion to retain one’s youth. Her character’s escapades with the three siblings for whom she babysits surely appealed to Tallulah’s frustration at not being able to bear children after her hysterectomy. She told Hook that she would have gone ahead and had children out of wedlock, would the stigma not have harmed her career as well as hurt her family. “I wouldn’t have minded having illegitimate children,” she had told a reporter in 1957, “but, you see, I had relatives in politics.”
With Midgie Purvis, Tallulah once again saw the possibilities of a great performance. She told producers Robert Fryer and Lawrence Carr, who were then riding high, that Midgie’s gentle whimsy would show another facet of her that the public didn’t know. Concerned that her trademark mannerisms had hampered her ability to act, she sought “a strong director with a discerning eye, someone who won’t let me fall into tricks.”
José Ferrer met with Tallulah’s approval; not only was he one of the leading actors of the day, he had directed several major hits on Broadway over the past decade. She told Ferrer that she understood the character, and knew she could portray her accurately without resorting to reprising trademark Tallulahisms. “Don’t let me be strong,” she told him. “You be strong, I don’t want a director who’s going to say yes to everything I decide to do.”
Tallulah had a history with Mary Chase, who had originally wanted her as the lead in her comedy Harvey, about a woman with an imaginary friend.
Tallulah wasn’t available at the time, and the premise changed en route to Broadway in 1944: the woman became a man, and the friend an invisible rabbit. During The Big Show, Chase had offered Tallulah the lead in another comic fantasy, Mrs. McThing, but Tallulah couldn’t see herself in a role that Helen Hayes went on to play, a matron who learns to appreciate her unruly son after a witch turns him into an impeccably behaved automaton.
The germination of Midgie came one day when Chase noticed her college-student son’s unguarded face reflected in a store window as they walked together and realized that he wanted to be away from her and with his friends. “The boy was a man,” she had thought. “His mother was out of a job.” She sat down to write Midgie Purvis as yet another vehicle for Tallulah, putting into Midgie’s mouth her own feelings about how parents should enter their children’s own world and cherish their children’s all-too-fleeting youth.
Tallulah signed for Midgie Purvis in March, committing herself to the play for two years following its Broadway opening. There is no question that she saw this as a valedictory vehicle. Time was running out; she was not yet being treated for emphysema, but she was already experiencing symptoms. With an eye toward Midgie Purvis, she retained nurse Anne Sargeant to travel with her on tour. Tallulah had been an intermittent patient of Sargeant’s for two years, since she’d been hospitalized after falling in her bedroom and breaking several ribs. Sargeant tried valiantly to reduce Tallulah’s drug addiction. “Tallulah you don’t need this,”
she would say. “Anne, I do!” “But no you don’t.”
Chase became a frequent visitor to the house on Sixty-second Street before the play began rehearsals. She had much to say about the script and character, having based Midgie’s experiences on her own. “Mary really was Midgie,” Hook said. Rehearsals were scheduled to begin at the end of May, after which they would embark on a long tryout tour to the West Coast, dropping anchor at the Lyceum in October.
When booking difficulties and the possibility of a strike by Actors’ Equity delayed rehearsals until August, Tallulah returned to the “straw hat” circuit of summer theaters, starring in a revival of George Kelly’s Craig’s Wife, which had received the Pulitzer Prize in 1925. A supremely assured demonstration of the well-carpentered play of the 1920s, Craig’s Wife was a better play than Kelly’s Reflected Glory, in which Tallulah had starred in 1936. The tale of a woman who drives everyone around her away from the sterile retreat she makes of her home in a small city remains a fascinating study in compulsive behavior bordering on the pathological—only slightly exaggerated from the societal ideal of woman’s proper forum, as it existed at the time.
Kelly visited on Sixty-second Street, thrilled by Tallulah doing his play.
He read the entire script aloud to her and gave her some tips on the role.
The director was going to be Ron Winston, a young man whose experience had been in television and who later went on to films. They began the run in Nyack during the first week of July, opening the Tappan Zee Playhouse season. Nancy Kelly, Sylvia Sidney, and Helen Hayes were in the audience.
Tallulah! Page 58