During her appearance with Andy Williams, Tallulah still had sufficient stamina to do a razzmatazz song-and-dance number. “She loved being surrounded by these beautiful boy dancers,” Hyland recalled. “Picked the best looking one to be her partner.” Sex no longer was a salve, but she continued to find ways to indulge her hedonism.
For Red Skeleton’s show, the two friends stayed at a motel in the San Fernando Valley only a few minutes’ drive from CBS’s studios. A quarter dropped into a slot next to the beds caused the mattress to vibrate. Tallulah loved availing herself of that stimulation. One night Hyland told her he was going to go out and asked if there was anything he could get her.
“Bring quarters!” she replied.
While she was in Hollywood, producer Paul Gregory, who had married ex–movie star Janet Gaynor, a long-standing acquaintance of Tallulah’s, called and asked if they could visit. Tallulah invited them to dinner.
Ordering in from the motel restaurant, they ate sitting on the floor around the cocktail table. Gregory said that he wanted to put Tallulah, Gaynor, and Agnes Moorehead into a horror movie together, but Tallulah had had her fill with Fanatic.
In October 1965, Tallulah spent a week in Philadelphia cohosting Mike Douglas’s afternoon talk show. Douglas “did everything right with her,” Hyland recalled. The night that they arrived, he arranged for dinner to be served in her suite, bringing his wife and daughters. For each day’s dress, she was brought a selection of clothes from a chic dress shop. Tallulah, who no longer indulged in clothes-buying blitzes, was delighted to learn that she could keep the dresses she wore. Her on-air questions to her guests were uninhibited. “She’d ask them anything she wanted,” Hyland recalled. “Mike would roar laughing.”
“I never even go to the theater anymore,” Tallulah told the New York World-Telegram and Sun in March 1966. “I hate the crowds and the traffic.It takes so long to get crosstown, and I feel too much respect for the theater to come late. So I get there an hour early and then I’m exhausted.” As so often, however, Tallulah exaggerated. She did go infrequently; she had seen Luv and The Odd Couple during the same week the previous December.
Tallulah had not always demonstrated respect for the theater any more than for herself. But this was an issue on which she was now at pains to show contrition. In the personal papers that her attorney, Donald Seawell, collected from her apartment and gave to the Players’ Club library is what looks like an introduction to a reprint of her autobiography. (But this introduction does not seem ever to have been printed.) “In the past my admittedly flippant approach has protected me from ever being unduly over-awed by anybody or anything,” she wrote. “But the great thing about mellowness is that it allows you to pay that respect without embarrassment—with, in fact, the delicious relief that comes with declaring a love too long hidden.”
She now insisted that “I do have respect, and I have admiration, and I have love” for artists in general and the members of her own profession in particular.
For a while, Tallulah still considered that she might have one more chance at a Broadway hit. She told actor Emory Bass that she had a play she wanted to do and asked him to read it. It turned out to be a period piece that had something to do with suffragettes; Bass was amazed that she wanted to go through the rigor of wearing bustles again. Tallulah had called Agnes Moorehead, who had played her agent in Main Street to Broadway, and Moorehead had agreed to costar. The play never got off the ground, however. Bass doubted that anybody she showed it to liked it,” he said, “or they couldn’t get up the money. Or she decided she wasn’t up to it after all.”
In 1966, Tallulah was approached to star in a revival of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s Dinner at Eight, directed by the great British director Tyrone Guthrie. While she’d seen both the original Broadway production in 1932 and George Cukor’s 1933 film adaptation, she wasn’t sure which of the matron-age roles she was being offered. She told Bass she was interested in joining the production but that she would have to have solo star billing, which she had not had in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. “Tallulah, it’s an all-star revival,” Bass attempted to reason with her.
“How can you possibly have sole star billing when everybody in the cast is a star?” Tallulah didn’t quite agree, telling Schumann, “They’re ten so-called stars of which four I’ve never heard of!”
She also demanded, incredibly, that whichever role she played was to be given the final line of the play, spoken, as written by the dinner’s host, Mr. Oliver. “They’re not going to rewrite the play for you,” Bass told her, “in spite of how wonderful you are.” He suspected that she was deliberately setting up conditions that could not be met; she both wanted to work and suffered terrible doubts about being able to get through the run of a play. “I think she was frightened. I just think she was nervous about doing anything.”
Dinner at Eight opened without Tallulah on September 27, 1966, and Tallulah went to see it. Backstage she embraced the great character actress Blanche Yurka, who had played the Swedish cook in the apartment where dinner is to be served. After Tallulah left, Yurka was led to contemplate the way that Tallulah had squandered her talent, beauty, and physical stamina.
Many other performers shared this view, which has been absorbed into legend but remains an unfair simplification of her life’s work.
Tallulah herself certainly did have regrets. When Ted Hook visited her close to the end of her life, she spoke of her complicity in creating the garish caricature by which the public had come to recognize her. “The boys didn’t do it to me,” she said, referring to her gay claque, “they did it for me.” Sometimes she and Christopher Hewett, who’d directed her in the Zieg feld Follies and Glad Tidings, would talk about a play that was currently running, and Tallulah would say, “I could have done that.” If it was a classic script that was being bruited, she’d add, “Perhaps.”
Tallulah’s career had spanned from the heyday of vaudeville to the dawn of the rock festival. She made an effort to appreciate the changing cultural landscape. Hook recalled watching a performance on TV by a leading hard-rock group. Their raucous noise bewildered Tallulah, but she was interested in what the phenomenon was all about. When Richard Lamparski interviewed her in the fall of 1966 for his Pacifica Radio talk show, she told him that she had recently gone to see the “mod” films Darling and Morgan and loved them.
One evening, Richard Burton’s ex-wife Sibyl called to invite Tallulah to Arthur, the new discotheque she had just opened. Tallulah asked the Seawells’ daughter Brook (eventually Brook Ashley) to accompany her. Tallulah had a great time and was perfectly at home: “Tallulah was so adaptable,” Ashley said in 1994. Also present at Arthur that night was a celebrity of Tallulah’s own generation, chanteuse Mabel Mercer, whose singing Tallulah adored. Tallulah could no longer dance, but she and Mercer talked.
Silvio Narizzano came to New York and asked to visit; Tallulah told him not to come during the hour when her two soap operas were shown.
“That’s my family now, and I’ve got to see my soaps.” She stayed in contact with her biological family as well, and had never stopped making short visits to Alabama. In 1963, Dr. Wernher von Braun, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, invited her to witness the launching of a space satellite named for her. She was excited at the conferring of a different kind of immortality than her fame as an actress, gleefully repeating to friends that she’d been told her satellite would remain in orbit “a thoouusand years!” as she repeated with glee to friends.
At last she allowed herself to visit the Huntsville grave of her mother. She had never been able to shake her sense of complicity in her mother’s death.
Tallulah took her family responsibilities seriously. “Sister’s not at all well,” she told Schumann in 1966, several months after she’d last seen Eugenia. “She’s got so thin, and she’s got a boyfriend who’s a drunk and a liar. . . .” Eugenia’s primary residence was now heiress Louisa Carpenter’s esta
te in Chestertown on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where Eugenia lived in a comfortable two-bedroom house, next to an adjoining guest cottage; Tamara Geva lived in a larger house called “the castle.” Louisa allowed Eugenia some freedom in pursuing her extracurricular romances with men.
The Bankhead sisters were not overly fond of Geva, and the feeling was mutual, but all were properly cordial when they socialized. Carpenter had also bought a farm for Eugenia’s son, Billy, who had graduated from the Cornell Agricultural College. Tallulah and Eugenia were both conscious that neither had finished high school, while their father’s sisters and other women in their family had graduated from college. Eugenia evinced a snobbism about the rural roots of the family, mildly lamenting to Schumann that she wished she’d been able to bring her son up “to be an educated gentleman instead of a farmer.”
Tallulah was planning to go to Maryland at any moment, because Billy’s wife, Cindy, was expecting their second child, and Tallulah thought that Eugenia wasn’t going to be able to be present. “I should be there; Sister can’t.” Their firstborn daughter had been christened Mary Eugenia; Billy asked Tallulah’s permission to name the newborn Tallulah Brockman.
Tallulah gave her consent enthusiastically.
Schumann, a playboy with a private income, began to tape the calls he made to Tallulah and Eugenia from his Baltimore apartment. During one conversation, Tallulah seemed to allude to the censorious superego her upbringing had instilled. “We’ve got in our heavens that awful Saturn,” the Aquarian Tallulah said, that “schoolteacher who’s always shaking his finger at you!” She also touched on a belief in her own invincibility that she’d felt had enabled her to live on the razor’s edge: “But we are always saved by the eleventh hour.”
A long visit with Dola Cavendish in British Columbia brought mortality close to Tallulah’s thoughts. As she and Hyland sat waiting for the flight back to New York, Tallulah started to cry. “I don’t think I’ll ever see Dola again.” Cavendish died of a stroke soon after, and Tallulah herself seemed ready for death. “All my friends are dead,” she told Emory Bass. “I can’t do the things that I want to do anymore. I’ve done everything there is to do.”
Having talked about her “death wish” for forty years, Tallulah could not have been unaware of how the destructive forces massed within her had often worked to thwart her own well-being.
Her interest in keeping on going waxed and waned according to how she felt. Her physical plight naturally increased her irascibility. One day she had been so unpleasant to one of her “caddies” that she told Schumann that “if he killed me I’d be grateful. He has every right to.” Growing more hermitlike with every passing day, she didn’t leave her apartment for weeks at a time, hardly even stirring from her living room sofa, where she sat “cross legged in her almost yogi position,” as her friend William Skipper, the Denishawn dancer she’d met in 1939, recalled. Yet she was not exactly a recluse. She entertained at home, dressed in satin caftans of different colors. She communicated with friends by telephone and telegram, speaking regularly to Estelle Winwood in Hollywood. Winwood visited, as did Tallulah’s Fanatic costar Stefanie Powers, who one night brought her mother. Singing was heard in the hallway: Eddie Fisher was dating Powers at the time.
For most of her adult life, insomnia had dogged Tallulah. She had never made a serious effort at defeating it, choosing the palliative of barbiturates rather than trying to confront the possible psychological causes.
“I haven’t slept all night,” she told Schumann one day. “I read two books, and Life and a few things I’d piled up.” She was increasingly prone to accidents as she got older; she never looked down, Bass recalled, and never looked where she was going—perhaps a capsule description of the way she lived her entire life.
One time Bass took Tallulah to a party thrown for writer Anita Loos.
“Whatever you do, don’t let me speak to Lillian Hellman if she’s here,” Tallulah told him. Although she was still angry at the playwright, she didn’t want to get into a public brawl. Before Bass knew it, Hellman was at Tallulah’s table greeting her. Tallulah turned around, saying “Hello, darling” reflexively. “Oh, my God,” Tallulah blurted out, when she realized whom she’d addressed.
In the fall of 1966, Hellman again approached her at Truman Capote’s masked ball at the Plaza Hotel; this time Tallulah responded happily. Her breach with Hellman had been a mistake, she had decided, even if their dominating personalities made clashes inevitable. When The Little Foxes was revived by the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center a year later, with Anne Bancroft starring as Regina Giddens, Hellman wrote a piece for the New York Times recalling incidents from the original out-of-town tryout in Baltimore. Tallulah wrote a letter to the Times amiably refuting her. Outliving Tallulah by fifteen years, Hellman was able to have the last laugh, writing in Pentimento that she found an amicable Tallulah as exhausting as an adversarial Tallulah.
At the Capote party, Tallulah was reunited with Jesse Levy, an acquaintance in his midforties who lived on a pension for service in World War II and the proceeds of friendships with the globe-trotting rich. Tallulah asked him to move in with her not long after as her secretary/companion, the first full-time live-in companion she’d had in four years. Distinguished-looking, and affecting a somewhat self-mocking lockjaw, Levy could be both quite campy or act butch enough that women were attracted to him.
Tallulah, whom he called “La Belle,” was amused by how he referred to his plans to go out cruising: “I think I’ll go out scampering.” Levy played piano well, sometimes playing for her; ultimately she willed him her Baldwin grand piano.
For Tallulah, Levy was her own Christopher Flanders, although unlike Milk Train’s angel of death, he was more amusing than spiritual. Shrewd and mercenary, he nevertheless became genuinely attached to Tallulah. He was not a caretaker, however, never trying to curb her regimen of drugs and alcohol, or alter her almost complete disdain for food.
When she wasn’t working, Tallulah began her day with an Old Grand-Dad and ginger ale. Her drinking was sporadic, sometimes heavy, sometimes not. Possibly her quasi-domestic arrangement with Levy provided an element of stability. On social occasions she insisted that drinks prepared for her be weak, and in her current condition, she found drunkenness around her particularly unnerving.
By 1967, Tallulah was accepting that her illness now made stage work impossible. “I could never do a play again,” she admitted to Schumann. “I couldn’t make a quick change.” She had done almost no work in 1966 beyond supplying the voice of the “Sea Witch” in The Daydreamer, an animated adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen tale narrated by many noted performers. Invited to appear on the television show Batman, she declined at first, although the series was the sensation of the 1965–66 television season. “I didn’t understand it,” she told Schumann, “and I think they made me a grandmother, and I said, no, please, not after this last picture I did,” referring to Fanatic.
Batman was predicated on the same wickedly knowing tone of subversive irony that Tallulah had championed all her life. After Estelle Winwood told Tallulah what fun her own guest appearances on Batman had been, executive producer William Dozier received a late-night call: “Darling, oh, I must do it!” Robert Mintz, a member of the postproduction team, created a character for her: the Black Widow, who has turned to a life of crime after the death of her husband, Max Black. Living in a grottolike hideaway—“The Web”—she sallies forth to rob banks, disarming attendants with a brain-wave short-circuiter.
The Batman production staff awaited Tallulah’s arrival with some apprehension. They had heard stories of her behavior on Lifeboat, recalled Dozier’s wife, actress Ann Rutherford, yet Tallulah took to the show with “almost a childish glee.” Her difficulty breathing, though it relegated her to sitting between takes and setups, didn’t stop her from smoking. Yet Tallulah “didn’t want you to think she was frail, not in a million years!” Dozier’s assistant Charles Fitzsimmons noted. “She was just
a consummate professional in every sense of the word.”
As in Fanatic, Tallulah marshaled everything she had for a performance she must have known would be one of her last. Even in her ravaged state, she still manages to ring some new variations on her characteristic reprobate swagger. She bounces around the set so blithely that once again she is able to disguise her infirmity. Photographed in soft focus, she looks very attractive. Her voice gives away her condition, however, rendered a hollowed-out husk by age, illness, cigarettes, and liquor. Unable to take deep breaths, she speaks laboriously, yet produces some new vocal effects suitable for the snarling creature she plays.
If Tallulah had sometimes violated her own understanding of stylistic distinctions in comedy, here her discernment is fully evident. Deadpan, her cartoonish exaggeration provides a different stripe of broadness than her past exercises in farce. Mintz’s script was good, and as he said in 1993, Tallulah’s delivery adds “a level and a half” to his dialogue. One of the Black Widow’s henchmen asks, “But didn’t your husband Max always say that money can’t buy happiness?” Tallulah corrects him: “Happiness can’t buy money.”
While she was shooting the show in Hollywood, George Cukor hosted a dinner party for her. Among the guests was Katharine Hepburn, who several months later received a wire of condolence from Tallulah after Spencer Tracy died in June. Hepburn responded on July 22, 1967, thanking Tallulah for her “dear sweet wire.”
That October, Tallulah visited the Broadway theater for perhaps the last time when she went to the opening night of Marlene Dietrich’s one-woman show, and also attended the after-theater party at the Rainbow Room. On November 24, 1967, she signed her will. After the windfall generated by Private Lives and The Big Show, she had started to save money seriously, and in the subsequent two decades her estate had grown to nearly $2 million.
Tallulah had mothered many young people during her life, but one of the her most enduring bonds was with her two godchildren, the Seawells’ daughter, Brook, and son, Brockman, who had been given Tallulah’s middle name. Each received one quarter of her estate. Eugenia’s two grandchildren were also well taken care of; together they received another quarter of her residual estate. Tallulah’s namesake great-niece also received her gold Cartier dressing table set, including the brush with which Stephan Cole had administered his spanking twenty-five years earlier. The last quarter of Tallulah’s estate she bequeathed to Levy, who eventually moved in with Will Rogers’s daughter Mary in San Francisco.
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