“The play is unimportant,” wrote the Bergen Daily Record. “The fact is that Tallulah was there. For all the theater buffs cared, she could have been Goldilocks or Mrs. Wiggs of the cabbage patch.”
Amiable and well-meaning, Winston was too awestruck to be fully effective with Tallulah. She turned to Hook for advice as to whether she was speaking clearly enough. Most of Kelly’s dialogue in Craig’s Wife is beautifully honed and paced, but he included gobs of small talk to establish the rhythm of his particular realism. Hook told Tallulah that yes, she was indeed garbling some of the dialogue. “Well, darling, a lot of those lines are just throwaways,” Tallulah said, “you’re not meant to hear them anyway.
“Well, then why did George Kelly write them?” Hook demanded. “Touché, you’re right,” she admitted. But it became clear that the play had not been the best choice for summer stock: too long, not a lighthearted trifle at all.
Tallulah’s love for Kelly and his excitement about her performing the play had clouded her judgment.
They spent a week in Chicago at the Edgeware Beach Playhouse, then went to Kennebunkport, Maine. Tallulah “overwhelmed ‘Craig’s Wife,’ ”Boston’s Elliot Norton commented after seeing the play in Kennebunkport, “she being a far more consequential person than Mrs. Craig ever was.”
Bette Davis came to see the play in Kennebunkport and went backstage, where she and Tallulah had a friendly visit, absent of any of the professional jealousy Tallulah had fanned publicly. Craig’s Wife went on to On-tario for its final engagement, where it closed August 6. Rehearsals for Midgie Purvis were scheduled to start ten days later. Just as they were about to start work, however, 20th Century-Fox exercised an option over Ferrer, recalling him to Hollywood to direct State Fair. Fryer and Carr bowed out.
They were succeeded by the equally distinguished producing team of Robert Whitehead and Roger Stevens.
“I loved Tallulah’s ruthless honesty, her sensitivity, her intelligence,” Whitehead said in 1993. When Whitehead went over to talk to her about the play, she was a good deal more agitated than she had been in her early talks with Fryer, Carr, and Chase. She talked and coughed and carried on so that Whitehead didn’t feel that she was listening to what he said. Only weeks later did he realize that she’d heard everything—when she would “suddenly nail me to the wall” with a statement he’d made on that first visit.
Having dealt with many great stars, Whitehead understood both their abilities and their limitations. “I think great actors read a script and they say, ‘I can play that; I can play that . . . that and that. That’s what I’ll play.’
And all the things in between that you’d love to see them do, they won’t do.
But what they do, nobody else in the world would be able to do. And then you’ll get an actor who’ll get all of it, but he’ll be about half as good.”
Distraught that Ferrer was leaving, Tallulah suggested various directors, but with the season about to begin, the ones she chose were already committed elsewhere. Whitehead took a gamble on another celebrated actor, Burgess Meredith, who had considerably less directing experience than Ferrer but had known Tallulah since their fling back in 1935.
For set designer, Whitehead installed Ben Edwards, who had designed most of Whitehead’s shows dating back to Judith Anderson’s Medea in 1947. Edwards felt that while Chase “had one of one of the most original comedy minds and wits,” her work was customarily “disorganized and needed to be put together.” Director Antoinette Perry had spent much time with Chase rewriting Harvey before they went into production. Earlier, Fryer had already asked Chase for some revisions of Midgie Purvis, which she had executed to his satisfaction. Now it was Meredith who was demanding far more substantial reworking, which Hook blamed on Meredith’s anxiety caused by inexperience.
Meredith’s own account in his 1994 autobiography contradicts Hook’s, and includes Meredith’s questionable assertion that Whitehead cast Tallulah despite Meredith’s reluctance, whereas Tallulah had, of course, been part of the play from the beginning. The problem with the rewrites, Meredith claims, is that Chase was supplying too much new material.
Tallulah had told Ferrer that among the crutches she didn’t want to rely on in Midgie Purvis was waving a silk handkerchief, a trademark of many of the leading actresses of her day that had now acquired an arch overtone that wasn’t conducive to Tallulah working against type. But by the time Midgie reached Broadway, however, Tallulah’s first entrance came complete with handkerchief. “She realized that that was the path of least resistance,”said Hook, “and so she went along with it. With all the rewrites, and the fact that the direction was so sketchy, this was all that really was left: she had to pull out the old bag of tricks. But she still didn’t pull out that many.”
During the opening scene, Tallulah slid down a banister in full evening dress, the first of an evening of stunts she managed to perform despite her declining health. In the hideaway that Midgie rents behind a local candy store, she frolicked on a swing and slid down a firemen’s pole. But Tallulah typically fretted, fumed, and lamented onstage at the dress rehearsal in Philadelphia, refusing to swing out over the apron of the stage until Mary Chase got up and tried the stunt herself. Once Tallulah had mastered her fear, however, she was eager to exploit the device, asking the designer and stage crew to devise a way for her to swing out even farther.
Midgie Purvis opened in Philadelphia on December 26, 1960, as a work in progress, and it became more so after the play received bad reviews. “ ‘Midge Purvis’ hardly ever delivers,” Ernie Schier complained in Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin, “because, chiefly, the playwright is almost totally lacking in a sense of direction.” After each night’s performance, Whitehead, Stevens, and Edwards would go back to Tallulah’s suite to mull over what could be done to fix the play. Meanwhile Chase was sending Tallulah reams of new material; Tallulah was sometimes given pages after a matinee and expected to perform new scenes that same night.
Hook believed that Meredith’s relative inexperience made him insecure, and that he was drinking during Midgie Purvis; Hook and Tallulah discovered bottles Meredith had hidden on the set. Edwards was taken aback when Meredith told him that the sets, which he’d requested be designed to resemble illustrations from children’s books, might now have to be entirely reconceived because of the rewrites.
Edwards recalled a “funny perversity” in Meredith, “kind of an Irish leprechaun mischievous character.” Meredith “did some rather naughty things,” such as the time he called a rehearsal for what turned out to be only one member of the cast: Tallulah. “You just don’t do that with a star,” Edwards said. Even if all the work is done with her, “you’ve got to have at least four or five of the other people there to set the scene”; you can’t bla-tantly pick on the star. Tallulah was livid, and Whitehead—“quite rightly”—canceled the rehearsal.
Necessary or not, the rewrites did not help. After the play opened at the National on January 10, 1961, Richard L. Coe of the Washington Post called it “too good not to be good enough,” and Tallulah “one of our great natural resources.” Despite noting that Chase had “a lot to say about cliché-thinking and rut-behavior,” Coe termed the condition of the script “almost incredibly sloppy and undisciplined.”
“Tallulah. . . . strives mightily to lose her own celebrated personality in the character of Midgie Purvis,” Tom Donnelly wrote in the Washington Daily News, concluding that she would have been better advised to be herself, since Tallulah was a much more sharply defined character than Chase’s Midgie. Indeed, Tallulah spent most of Midgie Purvis in disguise; the matron beneath the old lady did not seem to be sufficiently defined.
Until the opening night in New York, Tallulah continued to accept new material, but in her dressing room on tour she heatedly told Meredith that the rewrites were making this the most grueling pre-Broadway experience of her career. As far as Tallulah was concerned, Midgie was now no longer the play she had originally agreed to do. Chase, too, compl
ained to Tallulah about Meredith’s demands for rewrites. Tallulah said, “Well, Mary darling, I can’t get in the middle of this with you, because you’re the writer and I’m the actress, but I think the director is the captain of the ship. You either have to get rid of him or go along with him.”
John F. Kennedy’s inauguration was taking place while Tallulah was in Washington. Having campaigned for Kennedy, she was invited, but decided to forgo political activity to concentrate on the play. “I think Kennedy is going to make a great president,” she had told the New York Times in August. “I do what I can to sell the Democratic ticket to train porters and cab drivers—but they’re all Democrats, anyway. All artists, intellectuals and minorities are Democrats.” Of course she hastened to hope “the Republicans won’t hold this against me. Some of my best friends are Republicans . . . they’re the ones who can afford to buy tickets to my play.”
On the train back to New York, Whitehead and Tallulah shared a compartment. In the midst of arguing about the play, Whitehead suddenly “blew my top,” and proceeded to give her a stinging dressing down, calling her “selfish, indulgent, drunk, and an outrage.
“You’ve spoiled yourself and you’ve been spoiled,” he hectored.
“You’ve destroyed something which was really a superior thing and you’ve made it into a goddamn joke.” When he’d settled down, she fixed him with a Borgia look. “You can’t touch me!” Tallulah spat out at him. But Whitehead saw that she’d understood him—and didn’t disagree.
At the time, Tallulah’s drinking was not a problem. She would drink after a performance, but not to the extent she had done during previous plays. This explained why despite everything she was able to give her best performance since A Streetcar Named Desire.
After a week of previews, Midgie opened on Broadway on February 1, 1961. Tallulah and her colleagues mustered everything and gave what Meredith recalled as “a miraculous first night performance.” Even while deep banks of snow were being shoveled in front of the Martin Beck, Tallulah’s fans were out in force, greeting her appearance with an ovation so intense that she had to wait several minutes before she could speak. The Christian Science Monitor reported that the entire evening was punctuated by “hysterical outbursts from the star’s volunteer claque,” yet the poignancy Tallulah wanted to impart was able to survive. The Saturday Review reported that, “Two or three times during the evening she allows her special and overwhelming ability for expressing a reluctant wisdom to grip both her and us.”
Indeed, most of Tallulah’s reviews were glowing, although all the critics, even those who liked the play, found it deeply flawed and amorphous. In the Herald Tribune Walter Kerr called Tallulah’s Midgie her “best performance in years.” Theatre Arts described her as “a wonderfully accomplished actress” who had “enlarged her usual range.” Yet, as ever, some critics felt her personality upstaged her acting potential. In the Wall Street Journal, Richard P.Cook recognized her “restraint,” but found her “still too strong an individual to be merged into Midgie Purvis. We constantly feel that her old woman’s disguise is not really that but a cloak for the redoubtable Miss Bankhead. . . .”
Hook recalled that much of the show’s charm was lost on the way to Broadway. Tallulah may have been attracted to the whimsy of Chase’s original, but farce and roughhousing had intruded. Howard Taubman of the New York Times blamed Meredith, whose direction had “an air of noisy desperation,” but Tallulah most of all. “Instead of a fey, childlike creature, Midgie Purvis has become a vulgar clown. . . . The public personality of Miss Bankhead, as it has manifested itself on radio, television, and the gossip columns, has been catered to.”
During Midgie Purvis’s first week, the weather was so bad that no private cars could go in or out of Manhattan. This on top of its reviews doomed the play after twenty-one performances. Hook was reduced to tears every time he watched the play, “for what it was and for what it could have been,” until he became unable to see it in its entirety. “I’d just watch certain scenes and then wait in the dressing room.”
Midgie Purvis’s closing sank Tallulah into another deep depression. For the next month, she hardly bothered to get out of bed at all. The part nevertheless garnered her a Tony nomination for best actress of 1960–61, losing to Joan Plowright’s performance in A Taste of Honey.
“When I read Midgie, I knew there was magic there,” Hook insisted in 1983, “and I still say that if Buzz Meredith hadn’t made poor Mary Chase change it so much and if José Ferrer had directed it, it probably would have been her swan song classic.” But the revision that Chase submitted for publication in 1963 is structurally even weaker than the one played by Tallulah in New York, as the 1961 script is evoked by contemporary reviews.
In 1978, Hook tried to pass Chase’s latest revision on to Elaine Stritch.
Chase had reinserted puppets that had shared the stage with the actors in a preliminary draft. Hook never heard from Stritch. Chase’s Midgie Purvis remained a delightful premise doomed never to reach fruition.
Last Train
“My God, what kind of party is this? I stop by to pay my respects to the hostess, and I wind up in bed with her!”
For the rest of 1961, the only work Tallulah did was to appear a few times on The Jack Paar Show. In many ways an exceptionally resilient woman, she was nevertheless prepared to keep trying. While Midgie Purvis failed to provide her career’s crowning triumph, she considered Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, a surrealistic caper in which she would play a grotesque dominatrix, something of an aburdist spin on Crazy October’s Daisy. Although Ted Hook hated Oh Dad and told her to turn it down, Tallulah, who kept abreast of new movements in the theater, was fascinated. Yet its language and transgressions of propriety proved too big a stumbling block. “She said her daddy would turn over in his grave,” recalled Hook; though Tallulah was convinced that it would succeed, “it’s not for me,” she decided. “I can’t say things like that onstage.”
Oh Dad, Poor Dad opened off-Broadway early in 1962 with Jo Van Fleet, running for a year. Producer Roger Stevens offered Tallulah a production in San Francisco or London. Again she turned him down, though she did accept his invitation to see the play in New York, which she pronounced “beautifully staged” by Jerome Robbins, who was an occasional bridge partner of hers.
Not long after that, Hook left to accept a job in theater production, with Tallulah’s encouragement. “There’s less fun and more nursemaid in your job every day,” she had told him, although the two remained in touch until her death.
With Hook’s departure, Tallulah decided that the responsibilities of a town house were too onerous. Selling her house, she bought a two-bedroom apartment at 447 East Fifty-seventh Street, near Sutton Place and the East River. The decor remained the neutrals and pastels she had preferred since her Farm Street home in London. Augustus John’s 1930 portrait of Tallulah at the peak of her beauty dominated the living room, the only image of herself on display. The distinguished and eclectic small collection of art she’d accumulated over the years covered the walls.
While Tallulah had no permanent housemate in the apartment until 1966, she was more or less looked after by a circle of younger men, called “caddies,” by Tallulah’s publicist Richard Maney. Also in daily attendance was a cook, Maria Brown, and Emma Anthony, who cleaned and waited on her. Anthony was an elderly black woman whose presence Tallulah found comforting, perhaps a nostalgic reminder of her childhood in Alabama.
“ ‘Mamma,’ I call her,” Tallulah explained to a friend, “and she calls me ‘daughter.’ ”
In the spring of 1962, Tallulah appeared on television in a dramatic special, A Man for Oona, that brought Nancy Carroll out of retirement to costar with her. Soon after, Tallulah elected to return to the stage in a summer theater tour of George Oppenheimer’s Here Today, a madcap drawing-room comedy that Ruth Gordon had starred in on Broadway in 1932. The genre was far more familiar to Tallulah
than Oh Dad, Poor Dad, and the play had become a staple of summer theater.
Tallulah would be Mary Hilliard, a prototypical screwball heroine dancing circles around propriety. A successful playwright, she arrives in the Bahamas with her sidekick Stanley Dale to frolic with her ex-husband and current good friend Philip Graves. Philip is trying to woo Claire Windrew, daughter of a starchy Boston family, whose stuffy fiancé is also on his way to the Bahamas. Mary and Stanley come to Philip’s aid, constructing a fantasy pedigree for him, but of course Mary soon decides she wants Philip back.
For the role of Mrs. Windrew, Claire’s mother and Mary’s crusty adversary, Tallulah recruited Estelle Winwood, marking the third and final time they acted together. Both Tallulah and Winwood were decades older than their roles, yet no one seemed to mind, and the twenty-year gap between them was perfect for their onstage relationship. James Kirkwood Jr., a good friend of Tallulah’s from Welcome, Darlings in 1956, recommended director Jack Sydow. “We had a wonderful time,” Sydow recalled in 1993.
Directing her was simply a matter of “guiding her and giving her opportunities. Her sense of the character was extraordinary.”
“She had confidence in me,” he said, and once called him “Daddy,” as she had years before referred to Herman Shumlin as “Teach” during the rehearsals of The Little Foxes. The honorific was freighted with the full ambivalence of her lifelong response to authority. But with Sydow her ambivalence was good-natured.
Tallulah and Winwood each separately warned Sydow about her costar: Winwood accused Tallulah of speaking too quickly and Tallulah cautioned him against Winwood speaking too softly. Winwood was now seventy-nine, but at sixty, Tallulah’s hearing was beginning to fail. “It’s very important that she be able to hear you,” actor Bill Story was told before he successfully auditioned for the juvenile lead of Claire’s younger brother.
Tallulah! Page 59