Tallulah’s only requests of her director were “loud” or “soft,” according to Richardson, but Seldes recalled Tallulah requesting more fine-tuned pedal work. “How shall I say this?” she asked about a speech. “Any way you want,” he replied. “You’re the director,” she said. “Well, invent,” Richardson insisted; “you are the actress.” “I signed the wrong contract,” she retorted. “I’m sending you back to Oxford.”
“She was begging for direction,” said George Hyland, one of Tallulah’s closest friends from her circle of younger men, whom she had installed as assistant stage manager. “Begging for direction and not getting it.”
“Now, Tony,” she implored him at one rehearsal, “I can do this next scene on my head or on my back or doing a cartwheel, but I want you to tell me how to do it!”
“You’re the actress,” he repeated.
Richardson’s behavior baffled cast member Konrad Matthaei. “Another director who had had a star forced on him would have found a way to try to make it work,” he said. Matthaei called rehearsals “a train wreck to hell,”
wondering if Richardson got “some strange amusement” from baiting and mocking Tallulah. “It was suicidal for the play.” Thirty years after the fact, he wondered if Richardson had any interest in the job other than to supply Hunter with his Broadway debut. Richardson’s plate was more than full at the moment. Not only was he involved in preproduction on the film The Loved One, and trying to barter a reprieve from Merrick for the Broadway closing of his production of Brecht’s Arturo Ui, but his marriage to Vanessa Redgrave, waiting in England with their newborn daughter, Natasha was troubled, requiring further attention.
Williams explores mercilessly the carnality and rapacity of Milk Train’s Flora Goforth. Everything has been projected outward: to solve her spiritual bewilderment, she looks to sensual and material gratification. “She’s more afraid of being robbed of her jewelry than her life,” her secretary Blackie says. As the play progresses and death fixes her in its sights, Flora becomes more and more bedizened. Finally, in the fifth of the play’s sixth scenes, she suffers an attack, climbing out of her sickbed to cover herself defiantly in mink and a blaze of jewelry.
Because of the burn on her hand, Tallulah dreaded having to put on the rings, as much as she knew that the jewelry was essential to Williams’s portrait of a grasping woman. Sara Neece, a drama major who’d taken a leave from college to work as Tallulah’s dresser, applied the rings at every performance. The task required each of them to steel herself. “Okay, Miss Bankhead, here we go. We’ve just got to do it.”
Preoccupied with Hello, Dolly!, which was also headed for Broadway, the show’s producer had essentially given up on the play before it finished rehearsals. Merrick was rarely at Milk Train rehearsals. Tryouts were minimal; a few days in Wilmington, followed by a week in Baltimore.
By the time it reached the stage, Tallulah had come to like the part of Flora Goforth, but not the play itself. Before she had agreed to star, she had shown the script to Hyland, who thought it read beautifully, seconding Tallulah’s interest. “That’s where I was wrong,” he said in 1992. “It was beautifully written, but it didn’t play. I always had a tinge of guilt about that.”
Meandering, diffuse, and very wordy, Milk Train simply didn’t hold the stage as well as it read on paper.
Tallulah and Tab Hunter had grown to develop a mutual respect; as a result, she protected his inexperience as he did her physical depletion. As Neece stood in the wings, marveling that Hunter was speaking his whole part in a monotone, she watched Tallulah “find some tiny variance in his rhythm and bring it back. She’d make him look a lot better than he was, by verifying or compounding the way he was reading those lines.”
The Baltimore Sun’s R. H. Gardner praised Tallulah but found the play lacking “the poetry, magic and emotional peaks characteristic” of Williams’s best work, finding Richardson’s “usually dexterous” directorial hand “somewhat unsure here.” Expecting Tallulah to be an ideal match with Flora Goforth, Richard L. Coe in the Washington Post was disappointed: “As if aware that she has trapped herself in something beyond our ken, if not her own, Miss Bankhead races through her words as though imitating some kind of congealed vocal scales and I got about one word in 20.”
The Merrick office canceled the play’s New York booking at the end of the week in Baltimore, only to reinstate it an hour later. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore did open on Broadway on January 1, 1964, at the Brooks Atkinson. Critics again turned thumbs down on the play. Tallulah’s notices were again mixed, although most were frank about her debilitation.
“She strides about her stage with her garish clothes and mannerisms streaming behind her,” Martin Gottfried wrote in Women’s Wear Daily,“barely intelligible and mostly a clown. If the character she plays could be played (and this is dubious), Miss Bankhead has not even bothered to try. Her performance is dreadful.” While, as Richard P. Cooke in the Wall Street Journal noted, “it was hard to understand a good deal that she was saying” at first, “her performance sharpened up considerably” in the second act. Her predecessor Hermione Baddeley’s performance was declared superior.
No doubt Tallulah did most justice to those elements in the role that she identified with at this moment in her life. For Cooke the highlight of the play was her final dialogue with Flanders, in which she attempts to seduce him but winds up instead capitulating to his gentle coaxing that she surrender to death. Playwright George Oppenheimer, who had become Newsday’s drama critic, found “moments when Miss Bankhead brings depth to the shallows of the play, especially when she is finally forced to face the reality that she is dying.” In the Newark Evening News, Edward Sothern Hipp described the way she “changed mood magnificently to reflect the heartbreak of a woman who has known many men but still gropes for love or the fright of a doomed human who has no more hiding places.”
John Chapman in the Daily News called the opening-night audience “one of the queerest . . . since the early days of the Ballet Russe [sic] de Monte Carlo.” Years later, Seldes told the New York Times how Tallulah’s cult followers “shrieked with laughter at the most inappropriate moments. . . .” Knowing full well by now the ambivalence of their adoration, Tallulah must have offered herself to her claque with a certain amount of cynicism and despair. It was her customary default strategy, an acknowledgment that the production had defeated her. Yet it also perhaps fulfilled her on some of her darkest levels, these fans a fun-house mirror reflecting her own distorted picture of herself.
Even so, Neece found working with Tallulah an unforgettable education; the aspiring actress peppered Tallulah with questions about acting at every possible opportunity. “You can only tell the truth and you can only tell the truth about what you know,” Tallulah told Neece. “Use what you know, what you’ve lived.” She encouraged her student not to shy away from drawing upon painful experiences that could inform her work, something Tallulah had done “to the hilt,” Neece recalled in 1983. “She sucked herself dry.” Neece cited the final scene of act 1, when Mrs. Goforth shakes off the fumes of a nightmare she’s had recalling the death of her first husband: “You were there with her; it was real: her breathing pattern, the way she focused, the way she tried to come back to reality.” Neece watched from the wings as Tallulah’s sense recollection “flashed through her.”
The Brooks Atkinson was a particularly unlucky theater for Tallulah.
Milk Train did not close after two performances, as Richardson says in his book, but instead managed to eke out five. It was the same theater where she had endured the other briefest run of her career. In 1937, when it was called the Mansfield, Antony and Cleopatra had run for only five performances as well.
Yet Milk Train, undeniably pungent and vigorous, has survived. The play is occasionally revived: in 1994, Rupert Everett played Flora Goforth in drag in a production in the United Kingdom.
After the closing notice was posted before the second performance, Tallulah’
s friend and colleague William Roerick decided to catch the show while he still could. He noticed her difficulty projecting her voice, and backstage after the show he saw how weak she was. Yet despite the posted notice, that night she gave “a marvelous, courageous performance,” her professionalism admirable, with her “not looking back, that the thing was a failure.”
From his home in Key West, where he fled after Milk Train closed, Williams wrote Tallulah, “We all did all we could. It is pointless to consider the curious behavior of the director. He probably thought he was doing the right thing. . . . What is there to say?”
Home to London
“Daddy always said that gentleman was two words.”
While The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore was Tallulah’s final appearance on Broadway, it was not her last performance onstage.
By the summer of 1964, she was in good enough shape to return with a tour of Edward Mabley’s Glad Tidings, starting in Miami and then moving on to summer theaters in New England. Originally performed on Broadway in 1951, with Signe Hasso and Melvyn Douglas, Glad Tidings is an amiable comedy, thematically similar to Here Today in its restoring of a long-sundered romance. Its heroine, star actress Maude Abbott, takes a de-tour on her way to perform on Cape Cod through a New England resort town, visiting her long-ago flame Steve Whitney—a maverick editor about to be married to the conservative doyenne for whom he now works. Her two teenage children in tow, Maude reveals to Whitney that he is the father of her daughter. With both children experiencing a crisis about their paternity, Whitney rises to the occasion, eventually ditching his too-starchy fiancée and choosing Maude.
Eight years after the Zieg feld Follies, Christopher Hewett was again directing Tallulah. Disoriented at losing a lifelong mastery of her material, she seemed to him to be deliberately avoiding having to knuckle down.
“We’ll stay here and rehearse until you know your lines,” he told her during one rehearsal. When Tallulah protested about the heat, he told her, “It’s hot for us all. The sooner you know your lines the sooner we can all go out for a cool drink.”
Actors were still eager to share the stage with Tallulah, as traumatic as working alongside her could be. Emory Bass, who played Gus, Maude’s tagalong manager, whose scrutiny she is perpetually trying to elude, left another show to work with her. Bass was also Southern, and Tallulah told him that he was exactly the type of dignified representative that she herself would be pleased to have: “Daddy always said that gentleman was two words.” She thanked Hewett for her supporting cast. “The cast is wonderful. I particularly like that Emory Bass. I love our two-handed scene, except I never know which one of us is talking!” Not only was his Southern accent pronounced, Bass had a tendency to fall into Tallulah’s own rhythms during their dialogue.
Still, her audiences could foil her. One matinee in Coconut Grove, peeping out at the crowd before they went onstage, Tallulah told Bass, “You’re not going to get anything today, dear. This is one of my houses.
They’re going to go after everything I say.” Her entrance was greeted with rapture; from that point on, no attention was paid to any other actor on stage. Bass thought she was both resigned to and embarrassed by this.
“There was nothing she could do about it,” he recalled in 1993. “It threw the performance, threw the show for everybody.”
No record has been found of Glad Tidings, but Bass remembered one performance being filmed in Miami, and a bonus in his paycheck. The film, which has never surfaced, would be an invaluable record of Tallulah, aged sixty-two, in her final stage production.
During the mid-1950s, Tallulah’s friend and volunteer amanuensis Dola Cavendish had moved back to British Columbia. Tallulah had begun a series of long visits to her, often accompanied by George Hyland. In the past Tallulah had both exploited Cavendish’s adoration and been mightily irritated by it. (“Make way for Miss Bankhead; make way for Miss Bankhead!” Cavendish once boomed officiously at the airport, when Tallulah arrived in Canada with Hyland. Tallulah had turned to her in the car:“Dola, don’t ever meet me at the airport again.”) Their relations were much calmer and more loving now, however. Cavendish turned over her own bedroom to Tallulah in her magnificent house that looked out on equally sumptuous grounds. Tallulah was delighted to avail herself of two long hallways entirely lined with books. Cavendish’s alcoholism had not abated: she began drinking gin with rock sugar at ten in the morning. At least, she never smoked or drank in bed. “I wish she’d stay in bed all day,” Tallulah told Hyland.
Tallulah was visiting Cavendish after Glad Tidings finished its run in August 1964 when she received the script of Fanatic, a movie Columbia was coproducing with Britain’s Hammer Films. Hammer ran one of the most durable cinematic franchises devoted to horror and gore. After the 1962 success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hammer decided to explore a new avenue of horror stories starring great leading ladies of the past. Purchasing rights to a gothic thriller called Nightmare by British author Anne Blaisdell, they asked American Richard Matheson to write the script. Matheson, whose classic horror novel The Shrinking Man was famously filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man, had written many screenplays as well.
Nightmare was the story of an actress whose Welsh sea captain husband brings her to a remote farm, converting her to evangelical Christianity, and unleashing in her the zeal of the newly indoctrinated. After his death, Mrs. Trefoile’s fanaticism leads her son to flee her grasp, ultimately committing suicide. His ex-fiancée, Patricia, comes to visit the widow for a brief and dutiful condolence call—except Mrs. Trefoile imprisons and ter-rorizes the “lapsed sinner” in an attempt to purify her, assuring her son’s redemption. When Patricia reveals that he had actually committed suicide, Mrs. Trefoile is driven over the edge, and prepares a ritual sacrifice to send Patricia to join her son.
Hammer had approached Columbia, hoping that a joint production would give them entrée to the type of leading lady they were seeking. Joyce Selznick, the niece of David O. Selznick, was then a casting executive at Columbia. It was she who sent the script to Tallulah. Several years earlier, Tallulah had turned down the role that Joan Crawford went on to play in Baby Jane. By now, however, she was more inured to the thought of playing gargoyles, and Selznick’s was a reputable recommendation. Even more attractive was the opportunity to return to England, the country that Tallulah customarily referred to as “my home.” She’d told Ted Hook how much she wanted “to go back to my home once more before I die.” Dola Cavendish’s niece Laura Mitchell agreed to accompany Tallulah, who was eager to see London and its many personal landmarks. Among them would be her old house on Farm Street and the Ritz Hotel, where she was going to stay as she had on first arriving in London in 1923.
The Hammer executives were apprehensive about assigning one of their directors to work with Tallulah, recognizing that, as a grande dame from a bygone era, she was an altogether different animal from their own familiar pool of horror stars. Silvio Narizzano, a director active in Canadian television who had worked with a number of high-powered stars, was asked to make his film debut with Fanatic. Anthony Hinds produced. The son of the cofounder of Hammer Films, Hinds had taken over his father’s share of the business. After Tallulah was signed, Hinds rewrote the script to accommodate her theatrical persona, developing the idea of a basement refuge to which Mrs. Trefoile retreats. Papered with old stills and theatrical mementos, it is an archive of the life she had allegedly renounced. Most specifically tailored to Tallulah was a scene in which Mrs. Trefoile back-slides to avail herself of a secret stash of liquor and makeup.
Several months before production was to start, Narizzano went with his wife on a holiday in Spain. Apprehensive about his upcoming work with this “monster lady,” he was reluctant to do too much preparation, fearing that being too set in his ideas would lead to confrontations.
“Could Miss Bankhead be intending to play it for comedy?” the New York Times had asked before she left for England. “No, God, no,” she insisted
. “If anyone laughs, it will be because of my bad acting. . . . I do hope this will be more serious, a bit better than the usual.”
With a very tight shooting schedule, Fanatic had all the cost-cutting hallmarks of a B movie. The cast was very good, however. A new ingenue, Stefanie Powers, was cast as Patricia. Maurice Kaufman, a fashionable leading man of the day, played Alan, Patricia’s current boyfriend and ultimate rescuer. In one of his first major film parts, Donald Sutherland played a half-wit servant in Mrs. Trefoile’s house.
Contrary to Narizzano’s expectations, Tallulah was willing to depend on him almost unquestioningly. Her chief concern was with what was going to be filmed the next day. Laura Mitchell made sure to get her next day’s lines from Narizzano, running over them with Tallulah at the Ritz that night and in their car on the way to the studio in the morning.
In one of the first scenes they shot, Tallulah brings Powers food in the attic to which she is confined. “I feed her the porridge?” Tallulah asked Narizzano. “Oh, yes, that’s right, Laura told me something about the porridge.”
“You have a gun in your hand,” Narizzano told her.
“I have to carry the porridge and the gun? How am I going to do that?”
“No, the maid comes up with the porridge and you’ll have the gun.”
“Well, what hand should I have the gun in?”
“Tallulah, I don’t know. What hand do you normally carry a gun around in?”
“I’m ambidextrous, darling.”
Tallulah asked him to demonstrate, a common practice in her youth that had come to be derided as the epitome of monkey-see mechanical repetition. Tallulah had profited from the practice at times, especially when working with directors who had been accomplished actors, like George Kelly and Gerald du Maurier. She would watch Narizzano intently, remembering every detail of what he’d done, then using his blueprint to develop her own interpretation. “Oh, that’s good, dear. Marvelous!” she’d chirp, serenading Narizzano with praise. “Better than you are, Tallulah!” the crew hooted at her.
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