Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Oppenheimer was present for some rehearsals of his play. He kept flagging what he said had been the play’s biggest laughs in earlier productions, but by accident or design they never turned out that way as Tallulah acted the part. Other laughs that she got, nobody had ever dreamed of getting.

  During the summer of 1962, Here Today played to great success at summer theaters all over the East Coast. After seeing a performance in Ogunquit, Maine, the Boston Record’s Elliot Norton called Tallulah “an unchallenged mistress of comic technique. . . . Watching her dazzle her way through three acts is like watching a great fencer demonstrate his entire repertory. . . .” Her scenes with Winwood were “as funny as any on view on any stage today. . . . The pair of them, both brilliant craftsmen, stand toe to toe exchanging thrusts and counterthrusts, uttering insults,” Winwood “grandly as through a lorgnette,” while Tallulah did so “bluntly with lowered head and jutting jaw.”

  Tallulah’s entrance in Here Today was not until the middle of the first act, which meant that as Sydow gave notes to the company after a run-through, Tallulah often got restless, bringing up scenes later in the play with Winwood. The afternoon of one opening night, Sydow was giving notes to the cast while Tallulah continued to talk privately with Winwood.

  “Tallulah?” Sydow called. “I promised you that we would be out of here by five”—Tallulah wanted to be go home, nap, eat and be at the theater no later than ninety minutes before the eight-thirty curtain—“but if you don’t keep your big fucking mouth shut, we’re going to be here until curtain time.” Sydow believed she appreciated his discipline. “She never said another word.”

  She also enjoyed jokes played at her expense by people she liked. One day in her house in the woods of Ogunquit, she entertained a group including Jimmy Kirkwood and cast member Bill Story. Going upstairs to use the loo, Tallulah kept talking, as was her habit. Meanwhile, Kirkwood and Story prompted all the guests to walk out of the house so that when she came back downstairs she realized she had been chattering to an empty house. “She died laughing,” Story said, once they all came traipsing back.

  Tallulah’s sister also visited her on tour. The two sisters had fought over Eugenia’s living in Tangier, the men she was involved with, the money she spent, and the fact that for at least part of the time Eugenia’s teenage son remained in America, albeit in the capable hands of du Pont heiress Louisa Carpenter. Eugenia and Carpenter had been sharing a household since the mid-1940s. Now, with relations between the Bankhead sisters restored, Tallulah was eager to impress Eugenia. “Now everybody be good,” Tallulah went around telling the cast, “because Sister’s out front, so we’ve got to be good for Sister!”

  Once again, Tallulah insisted that she was working only to pay her bills. “I don’t care whether you’re doing this only for the money or not, Tallulah,” director Sydow would sometimes say after a particularly good performance, “you are a superb artist.” Work continued to be her lifeline, saving her from the depression and inertia that set in when she was idle.

  The production’s success raised the possibility of bringing Here Today to New York. Tallulah asked Elliot Norton for his critical opinion; he advised her to wait to return to Broadway in an original play. And that fall, Tallulah decided that she very much wanted to play Flora Goforth in Tennesse Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. She had previously been reluctant to embody the most extreme of Williams’s heroines, and none is more gaudy and grotesque than Flora Goforth.

  Tallulah had been in Miami in 1956 for A Streetcar Named Desire when Williams had tried to interest her in a dramatization of his novella “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone,” whose heroine’s addiction to sex takes precedence even over her own self-preservation. Tallulah was skeptical, and it was eventually filmed with Vivien Leigh.

  Tallulah claimed to have been offered the role of Alexandra Del Lago in Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, although it is not clear what actually transpired with the role. Williams did admit in a 1963 article that he wrote it with her in mind. Sweet Bird of Youth opened in New York on January 10, 1959, a few days after Tallulah’s long and trying tour with the abortive Crazy October closed in San Francisco. When John Kobal interviewed Tallulah in 1964, she said that she turned down Williams’s play “because I’d promised my friend [Herlihy] to do his play and he said, ‘I’ll release you from your contract,’ but I didn’t think that was right.”

  But Tallulah may well have made a big mistake in not accepting Sweet Bird of Youth. To the role of the dissipated, debauched ex-movie queen, Tallulah might have lent a humanity that Geraldine Page doesn’t manage to do, and a far more sensual glamour. The character may have been repellent to her, though; Alexandra is parasitical in a way that Blanche DuBois is not.

  Both women are promiscuous, but Alexandra’s stances are brassier and more masculine. She coldly objectifies men in a way that Tallulah might have felt uncomfortable revealing herself doing before an audience.

  Milk Train’s Flora Goforth is Alexandra Del Lago circling the drain. Tallulah’s avid interest in the role was surely in part due to her inevitable awareness of how few leading roles were being written for women of her age. The potential of this role is considerable, moreover; Mrs. Goforth is an ex-Follies girl grown fabulously wealthy on the inheritances from her many, mostly unloved husbands. Living on a private island in the Mediterranean, she is in frantic denial of her imminent death until visited by an angel of death in the guise of a handsome young poet.

  Tallulah went “virtually on hands and knees” to request the role, according to the Washington Post, “a most uncharacteristic posture for that tigress who walks alone.” Although Williams claimed again to have written his latest role for Tallulah, earthy British comedienne Hermione Baddeley starred in the world premiere in the summer of 1962 at Italy’s Spoleto Festival. When it was decided to bring the play to Broadway, Williams approved Baddeley enthusiastically. Tallulah saw the production and found Baddeley’s performance in it “superb.”

  That winter, Tallulah went back out on the road in Here Today. Although she brought Sydow at her own expense twice to check the show and her performance, she compromised her professionalism by going onstage one night in La Jolla, California, “drunk as a skunk,” according to actor John Carlyle, who was in the audience. “All she could really do was get every line wrong and toss her head and make sure we all knew it was real hair.” Afterward, Winwood read Tallulah the riot act. Tallulah promised to never let it happen again: “But I was funny, wasn’t I?” In her protests there is an echo of her behavior on social occasions, when drunkenness let her mistakenly believe she was more appreciated than she really was, simply because she herself was more relaxed.

  Shockingly and uncontrollably rude as Tallulah frequently was, she still considered rudeness a cardinal violation of civilized mores. Patience Cleveland was now playing Tallulah’s rival Claire Windrew, and Peter Hobbs was their mutual vis-à-vis, Philip. Cleveland and Hobbs became involved and later married. During the tour, Tallulah was party to a disagreement between the two of them, in which Cleveland told Hobbs, “You bore me.” Tallulah reproached her angrily, saying, “It was the worst thing you could say to anybody, darling!”

  Cleveland had written a children’s book, and her publisher asked her to request a blurb from Tallulah. Tallulah responded with a quote that was as much confessional as endorsement: she recommended it as “the most enchanting book I’ve read since ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and E. B. White is my favorite author. If I could have lived my life as gracefully as he writes, I would have nothing to regret.” But Cleveland’s publishers had never heard of E. B. White and sent the sheepish Cleveland for a second blurb. Tallulah salved Cleveland’s embarrassment by saying that she’d probably gone overboard and delivered a second, more straightforward endorsement.

  As she would for the rest of her life, Tallulah struggled with trying to cut down on smoking, if not quit. On one occasion Story took a puff of the British brand Tallulah smoked, a pote
nt mix of Turkish and Virginia tobac-cos, and was shocked at how strong it was. Sometimes Tallulah could go nearly the entire day without a cigarette. Her hunger for palliatives was fierce, however. Anytime someone took out a bottle of medicine for any reason, she wanted to know what it was for, insisting that, whatever the ailment being treated, she was suffering similarly. “I’ve got a weak heart, darling, give me some . . . Oh, I know I’ve got gout, darling, the way I live.”

  Richard Kendrick, John Granger, and Tallulah in Here Today

  At one point, Tallulah was feted by a wealthy Tucson businessman, a prominent Republican booster whose invalid wife spent her days sitting or prone in an enormous Mediterranean-style bed. During the party, Tallulah went into the woman’s ground-floor bedroom to sit at the edge of the bed and chat. The top drawer of one of the bedside tables was open, crammed with a battery of medications. Tallulah promptly sampled some of everything and passed out on the floor. When the nurse in attendance quicklydetermined how much she had taken of what, she predicted that Tallulah would be unconscious for several hours, unaware that she had overlooked Tallulah’s robust nervous system and high tolerance. Cast members were summoned to lift Tallulah into the invalid’s bed. Thirty minutes later, they were in the living room whispering about how to explain her prolonged absence to the rest of the assembled guests when the great oak doors swung open. There stood a miraculously restored Tallulah, resplendent in a red chiffon pantsuit. Closing the doors behind her, she leaned up against them dramatically. “My God, what kind of a party is this?” she cried. “I stop to pay my respects to the hostess, and I wind up in bed with her!”

  The second tour of Here Today was not well publicized or managed, the cast recalled, and business suffered. Isabel Sanford, who would later win fame in television’s The Jeffersons, had been chosen in Los Angeles to play the role of a native Nassau maid, but the management was leaning toward local actresses to cut expenses. Ultimately, Sanford was summoned to Phoenix and asked to join the tour. Trying to keep the play running, Tallulah plowed her own salary back into the production on weeks when the grosses were low.

  At that point, Tallulah was traveling with Robert Williams, who had been her manservant and driver on and off for twenty years. Before the show traveled to Alabama, she called Sanford and Williams into her dressing room and told them that if they experienced any racial incidents there to let her know immediately. Before the show could reach the South, however, the producers cut short the tour.

  The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore had been hurt on Broadway by a newspaper strike that precluded coverage and advertisements. The critics who were able to publish reviews considered the play a distinctly minor addition to the Williams canon, and it closed after sixty-nine performances. Later that year, Williams produced a revision at the Barter Theater in Virginia, starring Fred Astaire’s onetime Broadway dance partner Claire Luce. Williams’s revision framed his script in the conceits of Kabuki theater: two of the characters in the play are stage assistants who change scenery before the eyes of the audience, but are visible to the other characters only when they assume a spectrum of bit roles. In October 1963, Williams asked Tallulah to star in it on Broadway. David Merrick was willing to produce it, an unprecedented move a scant year after its initial failure. To direct, Merrick selected Tony Richardson, then a top star of stage and film; his film Tom Jones was one of that year’s biggest successes.

  Tallulah was thrilled at the prospect of working with Richardson. She taped a radio show in her apartment with interviewer Paul Berman, host of a radio show in Baltimore, where the play was going to try out. She seemed to be sending propitiatory tributes Richardson’s way, listing his credits and even declaring herself capable of accepting direction. “If I get a director I respect I’m grateful for his advice and I will certainly follow it,” Tallulah said. “There may be certain little arguments back and forth; I don’t mean fights or rows or things one usually hears about, but I mean just saying,‘Well, darling, I don’t understand it this way,’ or ‘Help me,’ I might say, ‘I don’t know what to do here.’ ”

  The part of Mrs. Goforth is immensely long, longer in the revision than in Williams’s first script, thanks to a number of digressive monologues he added in which she recounts her past, dictating her memoirs into a tape recorder. “I thought I was a quick study,” she told Berman, but for the first time, learning her part was difficult. Age and alcohol had already taken a toll on her memory, concentration, and energy; after exploding matches burned her right hand, she was also physically disabled. It was going to heal better if left unbandaged; onstage, however, Tallulah used her customary chiffon handkerchief to hide the eyesore.

  “Part of my job as an actress was to protect that awful, helpless hand,” writes Marian Seldes, who played Blackie, Mrs. Goforth’s much-abused secretary, in her 1978 memoir, The Bright Lights. Tallulah asked Seldes to come over and work with her on lines before rehearsals began. Seldes visited twice, finding Tallulah so apprehensive and distracted that she “never did learn the lines as they were written,” Seldes writes. “She knew most of them and some of her cues. . . .”

  “She tried, she really did, I have to give it to her,” recalled Milk Train’s lighting designer Martin Aronstein, “but I don’t think at that point she was capable of performing.” Tallulah was “favoring every bone in her body.”

  Her voice was weak, her hands trembled. Konrad Matthaei, who played one of the stage assistants, agreed that they were basically working with a cripple. The painkillers Tallulah was taking dried out her mouth, making it difficult for her to project her voice intelligibly. Given her condition, the production should have been postponed if not canceled, especially once it became apparent that her new director did not want her in the part.

  Richardson’s memoirs claim that he’d barely heard of Tallulah before being told by Merrick that Williams wanted her for Mrs. Gorforth. After meeting Tallulah at her apartment and seeing her hand, Richardson decided that she wasn’t up to performing the play. On a short trip to California to discuss several film projects, he determined to find a substitute for Tallulah there, preferably Katharine Hepburn, who’d had great success in another Williams property, the film adaptation of Suddenly Last Summer.

  Yet Mrs. Goforth is entirely different from Mrs. Venable in Suddenly Last Summer, and Hepburn an odd choice to play an aging hedonist. Not yet ready to leave her life in retirement with Spencer Tracy, Hepburn turned down the role, making the question moot.

  For the role of Christopher Flanders, the enigmatic young poet, Richardson wanted Anthony Perkins. Perkins wasn’t interested, but through him, Richardson met Tab Hunter, who was Perkins’s lover at the time. In the introduction to her father’s book Long Distance Runner, Natasha Richardson recalls finding the manuscript written out in long-hand on legal pads the day Richardson died in 1991. Although the manuscript was probably not intended for publication, Richardson is nevertheless circumspect in it about his bisexuality, giving only coded hints throughout.

  “Cocksure” that he could get a performance out of Hunter, making his Broadway debut after a long career as a screen juvenile, Richardson claimed he’d “surprise the world by the way I could make Tab act.”

  Richardson had screened Lifeboat and, after watching it, had the extraordinary response that Tallulah was “no livelier in that than when we had met.” What he doesn’t say is that she must have represented everything he and his generation found frivolous in British theater. The era of Noël Coward was anathema to Richardson, whose success was inextricably tied to the rise of Britain’s Angry Young Men playwrights. Still, he agreed to accept Tallulah, provided that Williams agree to Hunter, to whom he told Williams he had “a moral obligation.” “Tony was out to make Tab, in every sense of the word,” recalled a member of the production, one of several company members to note the “private tutoring sessions” Richardson gave Hunter. Hunter’s stage inexperience was readily visible to everyone, as was a trepidation equal to Tallulah’s. One day
they were rehearsing a scene together when he neglected to deliver one of her cues. Tallulah politely reminded him that he had one more line to say. Hunter flailed his arms, yelling, “What the fuck difference does it make?”

  “This would be a moment to be Tallulah,” his costar announced, “but I’m going to go to my dressing room.” To clear the air, Tallulah invited him over for dinner. Touched by his account of a beloved brother who had been killed fighting in Korea, she invited him back several times for dinner during rehearsals.

  Relations between Tallulah and Richardson, however, quickly grew fruitless, a fact that doomed the play as much as Tallulah’s physical condition. Richardson had “no respect” for Tallulah, Aronstein recalled, and Richardson himself admits as much in his memoirs. He describes her “a spectre from the past. . . . The most unpleasant person I’ve ever worked with—or let’s blame her senility and decay.”

  Richardson instructed Aronstein “not to give her anything she wants.”

  At one point, Tallulah sidled up to Aronstein and confided that this was the first time in twenty years her contract had not stipulated that she would be given footlights. Nevertheless she wanted to know if he could provide them. He told her he would speak to Richardson. “Absolutely not,” the director replied. When Aronstein suggested they use balcony lights, which would blind her just as effectively, the director vetoed them as well.

  One day, Tallulah stepped out into the orchestra to watch Ruth Ford, who was playing the Witch of Capri, a catty socialite who is all too happy to inform Mrs. Goforth about Christopher Flanders’s reputation for “helping” the elderly rich over the final threshold. “Oh, she looks gorgeous,” Tallulah said as she watched Ford, “I must look okay.” Though she never brought it up again, Aronstein was distressed because he felt that Tallulah looked “the worst she had ever looked in her life.” “That’s exactly what I want her to look like,” Richardson said to him; Flora Goforth is meant to be as ravaged as Tallulah actually was.