“Why, of course, darlings!”
“She was very easy, very amenable, always ready to rehearse,” Narizzano recalled in 1982. “It’s better I play full out,” she said of her rehearsal process, “and you tell me what you don’t like.” After the first take, she would respond to his comments and would always ask if he wanted another take before the end of any shot.
Sometimes she would pull Narizzano aside and suggest some business she wanted to supply to another actor. Her ideas were usually very good. “I would say, ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ and she would ask, ‘Can I tell her?’ ” Narizzano would call the cast together. “Tallulah has an idea. Tallulah, you explain it.”
Once he got angry with her for asking too many questions. “I don’t know, Tallulah. I’m just the director,” he burst out. “You’re the actor.” “I am not an actor,” she replied, “I am a star.” Her rejoinder was equal parts self-mockery and conviction. Despite a decade of trying to break out of typecasting, she considered herself above all a personality. He asked her why she thought she had been such a star. Comparing herself to Garbo and Dietrich, she told him, “It’s all bone structure.”
“But you were such a great actress!” he cried, remembering The Little Foxes, which he had seen in Toronto when he was a teenager. “Yes, I was good in that,” she said, “but that was almost the only decent role I ever had.” She referred to their film as “this piece of shit we’re doing,” telling her stock myth about needing to work for the money. She did prefer earning to living on her capital; nothing else was being offered her and she did want to work. “What else am I going to do?”
In her view, the great theatrical stars had all magnetized their audiences by harnessing outsize personalities. Recalling her youthful ambitions to be a “serious” actress, she noted the hegemony of the star system, which had dominated theater when she started working. Actresses whose names went in klieg lights on the marquee of a theater built loyal followings no matter the intrinsic worth of their play. Indeed the entertainment world today remains dominated by the star system, even as the culture of stage stars that existed in Tallulah’s youth has completely disappeared.
Tallulah admired those who did transform themselves to accommodate a role. “She thought Olivier was fantastic,” Narizzano recalled, but she thought he was more popular with the public now that he had started to use less makeup and other radical disguises. Narizzano later worked with Olivier and found that “he in a way had come to the same sort of conclusion. He hated makeup and wigs or anything like that. He said, ‘When I was young, I thought, “I can’t get on the stage unless I’m something different.” ’ ”
By the 1970s, he doubted whether this meant anything to the audience.
In Fanatic, however, Tallulah had no choice but to function as a character actress. Decades before, she had told Stephan Cole that, offered the choice of playing an ugly woman or a beautiful one, she would play the ugly woman if hers were the better part. Yet with her looks crumbling, she was appalled at the degree of verisimilitude Narizzano insisted upon: makeup A. H. Weiler in the New York Times would describe as “darling only to a mummy.” Off went Tallulah’s lipstick for almost the first time in her professional life; to Mrs. Trefoile, red was “the devil’s color.” Ironically, the first day’s shooting was delayed when the makeup man could not get the red off Tallulah’s lips. Ultimately he had to apply a lightener to disguise the red tone.
Tallulah had been asked to bring theatrical stills of herself that would be plastered around the walls of Mrs. Trefoile’s basement refuge, where she stockpiles paraphernalia of her life prior to conversion. Yet while Mrs. Trefoile has renounced mirrors altogether, Tallulah had not. Leafing through a scrapbook of photos, Tallulah clucked, “Oh, my, wasn’t I beautiful? And look at me now!” Turning to a mirror, she let a theatrical moan escape.
“Oh, my God!” But she was resigned. “It all goes, doesn’t it? You can’t hold on to it.”
Nostalgic about her years in London, Tallulah still didn’t want to dwell on them too much: “Everybody’s dead. It’s a very sad place for me now.”
Riffling through her phone book, she found the numbers still listed but many of the names were now gone. She and Kenneth Carten had had a tearful reunion at the airport when she arrived in London. “Thank God you’re still alive!” she’d said to him, although he was only fifty-five. However, his sister Audry, Tallulah’s contemporary and colleague in The Dancers in 1923, had slowly lost her mind; she was now completely homebound in her brother’s apartment.
On-screen, Tallulah’s vitality seems undimmed, save for an occasional difficulty in having enough breath to finish a line as suavely as she might have liked. Doubtless this reflects her determination to husband her energies for the set. Yet, visiting Tallulah for the last time after forty years of friendship, Gladys Henson found her in bed at the Ritz “so ill I couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t breathe. I don’t know how she got out of that bed.”
Tallulah appeared hardy enough to be approached by a British producer who wanted to bring her to London in Glad Tidings. She told him she didn’t want to return to the British stage in a play that wasn’t first-rate.
All her life Tallulah had depended on those who escorted her and waited upon her. Now the programmed dependence of the Southern belle was not only emotional but physical. “Laura did everything for her,” Narizzano said. “If she had to go to the bathroom, she’d ask Laura to help her unzip the back of her trousers.” Once Tallulah asked Narizzano to perform the same function. “I’m not your dresser; I’m your director, Tallulah.I’m not going to do that for you.” “Oh, darling,” Tallulah scolded, “you’re a devil!”
When the shoot ended, Tallulah presented the cast and crew with keepsakes in engraved silver from Tiffany’s. Narizzano received a cigarette box and a medallion engraved with a devil’s head on it, and on the other side: “From one devil to another. Love, Tallulah.”
Although his time and energy were fully consumed by the process of directing his first film, Narizzano indulged her loneliness. Evenings, Tallulah would routinely phone to invite him and his wife to play poker with her, asking them about their lives, freely sharing her own trove of anecdotes. “Oh, you’ve probably heard these stories,” she said, unsure “what I’ve told anybody anymore” and which stories were true. She shared one notorious incident that wasn’t true, but was so funny that she adopted it: how one Christmas season, she had slipped a Salvation Army solicitor a twenty-dollar bill with the injunction, “Don’t thank me. I know it’s been a rotten season for you flamenco dancers.”
Narizzano saw her shocking and outrageous behavior as preemptive compensation against a certain shyness. “Why don’t we have new people in for our ‘pokey’ tonight?” Tallulah would ask him, but when he brought friends, they would have to endure a long thaw while Tallulah stayed silent, her head buried in her cards. One evening, Narizzano brought over a young actress named Kathy Beck. Tallulah wouldn’t talk to her for a long time. Suddenly she leaned over and touched Beck’s face. “You could have a very good career, darling. I don’t know whether you’re a good actress, but you have beautiful bone structure.” She then very pleasantly gave Beck extensive advice about how she should make up her exemplary bones. Many a night they’d play until 11:00 P.M, when Narizzano would force her to break off, reminding her that they had to work the next day.
Most difficult was getting Tallulah back to the set after she’d returned to her dressing room. Narizzano’s first assistant director was in a tizzy over his proximity to the legend. “I’d say, ‘Claude, go up and get Miss Bankhead.We’re ready for her now.’ He’d never come back. I’d go up and say, ‘Claude, come on,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, she’s doing this, doing that.’ She’d be talking to people: endless, endless jabber.”
When asked if he could handle Tallulah, Narizzano’s second assistant director, Peter Deal, a man barely out of his teens, asked him what he needed. “I want you to get her down here.” Deal took the direct ap
proach, barging into her dressing room, insisting, “Miss Bankhead, Silvio wants you now,” taking her by the hand and leading her back to the set.
“Oh, my baby, my baby assistant is taking me onto the floor,” Tallulah cooed. “You won’t let me trip on any wires, will you, darling?”
Narizzano watched as every day at four o’clock, Laura Mitchell brought Tallulah a cup of tea. Increasingly suspicious about its actual contents, he intercepted the cup one day, tipping it to his lips only to discover that it had been dosed with a slug of bourbon. Distressed that she’d been found out, Tallulah was reassured when Narizzano agreed the late drink wasn’t affecting her work. “If you started drinking at lunchtime—” “Oh, no, no, darling, I won’t do that, I won’t do that. . . . You don’t mind?” “On the contrary, would Laura bring me a cup of tea, too?” From then on they shared “tea” together every afternoon.
Tallulah insisted that the film was really more Patricia’s story than Mrs. Trefoile’s, and she seemed very jealous of Stefanie Powers. The two actresses never chatted, never sat next to each other on the set. “Is the girl going to do this?” Tallulah would ask Narizzano. “Is this the scene where I do this with the girl?”
During a struggle that occurs toward the end of the film, Tallulah was required to slap Powers fiercely across the face. Powers didn’t want to fight back too violently: “She’s an old woman now,” she told Narizzano. Though Powers was intimidated by Tallulah, she liked her and was learning a great deal about acting by working with her. Tallulah, however, insisted. “Just fight me!” she commanded as they rehearsed. “Fight me! . . . No, hit me.You’ve got to hit me like that!” She reassured Powers that, “On stage we’d have to be a little more careful, but if you hurt me, the director will just call ‘Cut,’ and they’ll wait twenty minutes until I’m all right.” Tallulah wal-loped her, and was quite prepared to be hit with equal ferocity. “She didn’t feel you should hold back,” Narizzano said.
During a long sequence Tallulah’s character had to drag Powers’s unconscious body down to her basement hideaway; Narizzano needed about eight shots for coverage, intending to use a stand-in to lug Powers, tall and an ex–swimming champion. He told Tallulah that she didn’t have to come until late because he would film the long shots with the stand-in. In the close-ups she would be pulling only a pillow. But Tallulah would not hear of it. Going to her stand-in, she said, “I’m sure you do it very well, darling, better than me, but I’m going to do it.” She insisted on doing all the rehearsals herself as well.
Eventually Powers was able to break down Tallulah’s defenses, and the two became friends. Later, long after the film was completed, Narizzano visited Tallulah in New York and she asked after the actors, using the names of the characters they’d played—with one notable exception. “Stefanie always comes to see me when she’s in New York,” she mentioned, the first time he ever heard Tallulah use her name.
Tallulah found the dubbing process very difficult. Just how annoying it had become to her by the time the film was finished is revealed in an au-diotape someone made of one session. Tallulah is required to repeat over and over again three phrases that were judged not sufficiently distinct in the sound track. She complains, laments, bellows, and insults. (It is impossible to imagine that a woman with this much lung power was actually in the advanced stages of emphysema.) She complains that she’s in pain, that the pills she’s been given “are nothing but talcum powder,” while Narizzano humors her, finally letting out a few vitriolic zingers.
Interestingly, what Tallulah—so often portrayed since her death as an emotionally detached and clinical performer—is most incensed about is having to re-create an emotional state needed to deliver lines out of context. “Oh, I can do this from the very beginning, but you’re going to take all the emotional content out of the whole thing! . . . I can’t pick up the middle of a sentence in the middle of eighteen verses and get any feeling in it.”
Over Tallulah’s objections, Fanatic was retitled Die! Die! My Darling! for American release in the spring of 1965. Tallulah by now bristled at anything to do with her “darling” shtick. As mechanically as she could repeat her trademark phrases, she was loath to do so. She had been asked to go to England to promote the movie’s opening, but told her friend Cal Schumann, “I’d rather be dead than get out there and say, ‘Hello, darlings.’ ”
A month before she died, Tallulah entertained Cal Schumann in her 57th Street apartment
Tallulah “thought the picture was dreadful,” Narizzano says, “and she was happy that I thought it was pretty awful, too.” But in 1982, seventeen years after its release, he said, “I think it’s quite not a bad film except for about the last ten minutes” of flagging pace. “Quite not bad” is perhaps the fairest description of Fanatic. There is a terminal cheesiness to it, and at ninety-seven minutes it seems oppressively longer, one sadistic episode following another. Tallulah’s performance is an almost heroic marshaling of talent and experience, however. Not only is she deglamorized as far as possible from a “Tallulah” performance, but the character is different from any other that she had tried. When discovered by Powers perusing her long-ago theatrical portraits, Tallulah is chilling as she insists with the desperate righteousness of the convert, “God was good. He led me from that evil. . . . Yes, a pit of evil. A place for the lost and the damned. The devil’s entertainment. God’s anathema . . .”
Her Mrs. Trefoile is complex and ambiguous: sometimes malicious, sometimes pitiful, capable of both deranged duplicity and rational cunning. At times her movements are slow and rather dreamlike, demonstrating her absorption in her own imaginary universe. Sometimes she is brisk and jaunty as she demonstrates her complete dominance over her household of freaks. She also is able to create an extraordinary effect standing stock-still.
At times her stentorian crescendos evoke the bravura actresses of her youth. Tallulah has never been more magnificent than when she turns around to find Harry, a sinister employee with his own designs on Patricia, stalking her and shoots him dead, then washes blood from her hands, crumpled in a paroxysm of guilt that sends her to her secret trove of lipstick and booze. “Stephen . . . Don’t look at me!” she cries out to her dead son in a lather of shame. Had she been able to bring to Milk Train the variety and strength of her performance here, her final appearance on Broadway might have been remembered as one of her best.
Fanatic was greeted by most critics with, at best, indulgence. Few recognized the tour de force Tallulah had achieved, although Dora Jane Hamblin wrote in Life that, “Her superb acting is the saving grace of the film.”
But Fanatic was released in May 1965 directly into second-tier theaters to little business, and sank quickly.
Winding Down
“I think we all ought to be put out in the garden. It would be wonderful to think that someday a flowering tree would grow around me.”
Tallulah had four years left to live, during which time her work dwindled to a trail of a crumbs and her mobility diminished as her emphysema progressed. “If you knew how this tires me,” she told George Hyland one day as she stood in her bathroom brushing her teeth. Dr. A. L.Loomis Jr., who practiced at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan, began treating her in 1965 for this painful and debilitating disease. Phoning him frequently “to ask for medication and ask if anything further could be done,” Tallulah “wanted to do what she could to help,” Loomis remembered, “except to stop drinking or smoking.” Actually, during her final years, she tried desperately not to smoke, resorting to the novel strategy of asking people who were smoking in her vicinity to blow their exhaled smoke at her.
Not long after Tallulah returned from London, in November 1964, John Emery died of cancer at fifty-nine. Their lives had stayed entwined, since his ex-wife, Tamara Geva, had become a prime mare in du Pont heiress Louisa Carpenter’s stable of mistresses. Carpenter was most attracted to women who were more heterosexual than homosexual. For twenty years, her harem had also included none other than Eugenia Bank
head, although Tallulah insisted that her sister was “not a lesbian! She just does it for the money.”
Although she’d told Silvio Narizzano that she wasn’t quite sure why she had ever married Emery, Tallulah was certainly fond of him, sending flowers to his funeral and venturing out to attend the service.
During the 1960s, Tallulah ended her long-term association with agent Phil Weltman, moving to New York–based agent Milton Goldman. Goldman and Arnold Weissberger were one of Manhattan’s foremost homosexual power couples. Goldman loved Tallulah and wanted her to be seen. He talked her into venturing more often to Hollywood for television appearances, assuring her that the work would be easy. But learning new material, even in the small doses required for TV sketches, continued to be a problem for Tallulah.
In 1965, Hyland accompanied her to Hollywood for appearances on The Andy Williams Show in May and The Red Skelton Show in December.
During their trips the two would commandeer the card table installed in the front of passenger cabins to play “Russian Bank” together. On one return flight, during a layover in Las Vegas, two gaming-table veterans boarded the plane. “Hi, Tallulah!” they said. “Hi, fellas. You want a game?”
The four of them played poker. Hyland said that Tallulah was “awfully good” at the game. “She could keep that poker face.” But when they played bridge at home, her “card playing was brilliant, but I didn’t like her bidding.” Bidding in bridge is “legitimately giving your partner information about your hand,” and for Hyland’s taste, her bidding was too instinctive, too impulsive, not informative enough.
Tallulah! Page 62