Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Before executing her will, Tallulah had summoned Louisa Carpenter to Fifty-seventh Street. Carpenter piloted her plane to Manhattan, where Tallulah asked how well Louisa was prepared to provide for her sister. Eugenia was a spendthrift, and was almost recklessly generous to men she was interested in; as Cole recalled, she “would spend her last dime to get laid.”

  Tallulah accused Eugenia of being “cock crazy.” Louisa assured Tallulah that Eugenia would be well taken care of, but according to Cole, together they made sure “she didn’t get enough to waste.”

  Tallulah left Eugenia $5,000 cash, canceled a debt Eugenia owed her, and set up an annuity that would pay her sister $250 a month. After Tallulah’s death, Eugenia was angry that she hadn’t been left more. She heeded Cole’s suggestion that she should never have taken Tony Wilson away from Tallulah in London in 1928. “I suppose that’s the inexcusable thing I did,”she told Schumann, but the vindictive tone in which she added, “I bet she’d never tell anybody I’d managed to get a man away from her!” suggested a complex and torturous rivalry that neither sister had been able to defuse.

  To Winwood and a number of other friends, Tallulah left cash bequests or jewelry and artwork. Perhaps as a posthumous tribute to Dola Cavendish, she chose to will the nineteen-carat star-sapphire ring that Jock Whitney had given her in the 1930s to Judy Joy, a niece of Cavendish’s; the ring, along with other valuable pieces of Tallulah’s, was auctioned at Parke-Bernet in 1969. What jewelry was not bequeathed was sold at auction at Sotheby’s in 1969. Friends and retainers from the distant past, such as John and Mary Underdown, Tallulah’s live-in servants on Farm Street, were remembered with small cash bequests. Her former secretary and companion Edie Smith received $10,000 as well as several pieces of jewelry.

  Some were hurt that Tallulah had not left them more; Ted Hook, who was left $1,000, believed that the will had been tampered with. Surprisingly, Tallulah neglected to specify the fate of her portrait by Augustus John, and it, too, was eventually put up for auction. Jock Whitney purchased it secretly and donated it to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

  During the last two years of her life, Tallulah would call Merv Griffin, whom she met while appearing in Las Vegas in 1953, whenever she had something she wanted to publicly hold forth about. Despite her protests to the contrary, her need to perform was clearly a drive she couldn’t completely curtail. Griffin would book her on his show, appearances she seemed to take as seriously as Broadway openings.

  In December 1967, Tallulah made her last trip to Hollywood to appear on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Her final professional appearance was on The Tonight Show on May 14, 1968. That night guest host Joe Gara-giola presided. In the past, Tallulah had been received by Johnny Carson, but she didn’t like Carson as much as Griffin or Mike Douglas, finding him too intent on outpacing her.

  She had said all her life that she believed in God. Her phobia about communism, which had abated considerably by the 1960s, was due in part to its atheism. Christopher Hewett, a devout Catholic, gave Tallulah a statue of the Madonna that she kept by her bed. “You know I was raised by the nuns,” she reminded him. But her religious beliefs were extremely syncretic. “I get nervous when I hear Billy Graham saying ‘Jesus,’ ” she told biographer Denis Brian, “when I think of all the Jews in the world and all the other religions.”

  She expected to have to confront her transgressions in some realm. “None of us can go through life swindling, lying and outraging our fellows and escape retribution,” she declared in her autobiography. She leaned to Eastern philosophy as well: “I have a suspicion we go through dozens of reincarnations.”

  On December 31, 1967, Tallulah called Tamara Geva, inviting her over for a drink. Planning to see some friends in Connecticut, Geva said she’d stop on the way. She found Tallulah sitting alone in a red caftan, very sad, obviously having sampled from an open magnum of champagne. As they were talking, Tallulah suddenly burst into tears. Geva was at a loss: “It was like seeing a mountain fall apart.” The tears Geva had seen after the opening night of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1956 were an exhalation of relief. What Geva now saw looked to her like an existential despair. She held Tallulah’s hand before leaving for her party.

  That summer, Richard Maney, Tallulah’s longtime friend and publicist, died. She attended his memorial service in Connecticut and contributed an obituary to the New York Times. She’d been grateful for his support; he understood her, and that was good, “because I don’t understand myself.”

  In July, Jesse Levy drove Tallulah to Maryland for a long visit with Eugenia and her family. It was the last time the two sisters would spend time with each other. Instead of discussing the traumas they had endured together as girls, they distracted themselves with competing grievances. Tallulah regularly confronted Eugenia with the fact that in childhood Eugenia had been their father’s favorite, a charge that Eugenia never tried to deny.

  “I was Daddy’s favorite because I needed him more,” Eugenia told Cal Schumann.

  That October back in New York, Tallulah attended the premiere of the film The Subject Was Roses and then the party at Sardi’s. Later that month Otto Preminger escorted her to a Democratic luncheon, which tired her so much that she was leaning on him by the time he took her home. On Election Day she phoned Hewett and asked him to go with her to vote. The polling place was close to Tallulah’s apartment; even so, she walked very slowly. Tallulah “would vote if she had to crawl,” noted George Hyland.

  For president she was voting, naturally, for Democrat Hubert Humphrey.

  Tallulah abhorred the U.S. involvement in Vietnam; at one point, she’d vowed to stop smoking until America’s boys came home. Even so, after Lyndon Johnson had declared his intention not to seek reelection earlier that year, Tallulah sent him a note of support.

  In December, Tallulah came down with a flu that turned so alarming, Levy called Dr. Loomis, who prescribed an ambulance to St. Luke’s. On Friday, December 6, Levy checked in Tallulah and called Hyland in tears: she was not doing well. Her flu turned into double pneumonia and on Sunday night she was moved to intensive care. “I think she knew it was fatal,” Dr. Loomis told Denis Brian, noting Tallulah’s request that they inform her sister. “I think she knew the end was coming and she accepted it, with some dramatization.” During the week she spent in St. Luke’s, she was put on a respirator, her heart gave out and was restarted, and she was given a tracheotomy. “She demanded a lot of sedation,” Dr. Loomis recalled, suspecting Tallulah “could have got several from different physicians.”

  Tallulah was losing consciousness by the time Eugenia arrived with her son. Her last words were “codeine—bourbon,” presumably a garbled request. She sank into a coma, and died at 7:45 A.M. on December 12, 1968. Levy called Hyland sobbing loudly, “She’s left us.’ ”

  Tallulah died of the “dread pneumonia” that Mrs. Bankhead had cautioned her against fifty years earlier. She might have survived, as she had her previous bouts decades earlier, had the illness not been exacerbated by emphysema. An autopsy reportedly revealed that she had died of malnutrition in addition to pneumonia and emphysema. Eugenia withheld this from public announcements, perhaps feeling it reflected badly on her own sisterly attentions.

  Tallulah died at sixty-six, the same age as her father. As she had not left any instructions for the disposal of her remains, Eugenia chose not to bury her sister in Jasper with their father, but instead in the ancient cemetery attached to St. Paul’s Church near Louisa Carpenter’s estate in Maryland.

  Tallulah had not allowed Eugenia to express her grief at their father’s funeral, but the older sister was now able to mourn openly. Weeping, she threw herself on Tallulah’s casket.

  During her life Tallulah had rebelled against the pieties of her Southern roots as much as she has honored them in the breach. Her hunger for information forced her to never stop entertaining alternatives to the certitudes of her youth. “I think this modern embalming and burial is ridiculous,”
she had written in 1962. She was willing to donate her eyes “or any other part of me that someone might need.” But she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes scattered. “I think we all ought to be put out in the garden. . . . It would be wonderful to think that some day a flowering tree would grow around me.”

  Notes

  <<

  Author’s note: In these notes I’ve tried to be as economical as possible, supplying only those attributions not given in the text. That is to say, if a letter is identified with a date in the text, I do not repeat it in the Notes. Similarly, I only provide an author’s interview citation, the first time I quote from a subject’s recollections.

  I have not tried to correct Tallulah’s idiosyncratic punctuation, nor changed reviews to make them consistent with text formatting. I have not included explicit dates for the voluminous citations of theatrical reviews from daily and Sunday newspapers. In Tallulah’s time, the daily reviews invariably came out the next day after the opening, followed by the weekend reviewers. Sometimes I have consulted articles included in clippings files and scrapbooks without any identifying information, in which case I have not made any citation.

  All correspondence by Tallulah and the Bankhead family, except as otherwise noted, is at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. All quotes from Eugenia Bankhead are from a taped conversation in March 1971 with Cal Schumann. All Thorton Wilder correspondence is at Beneicke Library at Yale University.

  Numbers printing below refer to the page number where quotation appears.

  Abbreviations:

  LPA = Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center

  BL = Manuscript Division, British Library

  SE = Bankhead, Tallulah “My Confessions,” Sunday Express [London], March 11, March 18, March 25, 1928

  TB = Bankhead, Tallulah, Tallulah

  Lace Curtains

  3 “All the Bankhead women were outspoken,” author’s interview with Kay Crow, January 1995.

  4 “an old Elizabethean word,” radio interview by Richard Lamparski, “High Tea with Tallulah,” October 1966.

  4 “Will Bankhead’s diary,” Alabama Department of Archives and History.

  5 “a class in elocution,” Alumni Affairs Office, Salem College.

  5 “how she loved to doll up,” included in Eugenia Rawls, Tallulah, a Memory.Birmingham, AL: UAB Press, 1979.

  6 “prospect of twins,” Tex and Jinx syndicated column, September 28, 1952.

  6 “never lack for friends,” letter from Marie to Tallulah, May 16, 1925.

  8 “disconsolate for years,” Adele Whiteley Fletcher, “Banking on Bankhead,”Photoplay, April 1944.

  8 “laughing raucously,” Marie West Cromer, “Old friend recalls Tallulah as‘showoff,’ showstealer,” Birmingham News, January 8, 1990.

  9 “low timbre of her voice,” author’s interview with Dr. Milton Reder, September 1983.

  10 “fish pride” author’s interview with Stephan Cole, November 1982.

  10 “I never went through any of that,” Lamparski, op. cit.

  10 “that’s all we talked about,” idem.

  11 “the duck,” author’s interview with David Herbert, February 1993.

  12 “policemen, burglars, and ghosts,” SE.

  12 “astonished at Tallulah’s ability,” author’s interview with Stefanie Powers, October 1992.

  12 “We were always,” Lamparski, op. cit.

  13 “They could not fit in,” letter from Marion Bankhead to Lee Israel, LPA.

  13 “place for people to give impersonations,”New York Tribune, October 1, 1922.

  14 “I received your lovely letter,” letter from Tallulah to Mrs. Bankhead, November 12, 1915.

  15 “Grandmother was very old fashioned,” Helen Ormsbee, “Miss Bankhead Leaves Art Out of It,” New York Herald Tribune, April 17, 1938.

  16 “She had promised to wait,” “A Bantam from Alabama,” Photoplay, March 1919.

  16 “the best cure,” Billboard, September 10, 1921.

  16 “my father’s godchild,” William M. Drew, Speaking of Silents. New York: Vestal Press Ltd., 1989.

  16 “a force in her,” letter from Marie to Ernest V. Heyn, editor of Modern Screen, January 25, 1932.

  Debutante

  20 “what sort of film this is,” Variety, February 15, 1918.

  20 “like you meant business,” letter from Will to Tallulah, February 19, 1918.

  20 “I thought it a terrible thing,” SE.

  20 “Bankhead characteristic,” letter from Marie to Edie Smith, March 28, 1932.

  20 “enjoyed the floor show,” Lamparski, op. cit.

  21 “so intelligent and so amusing,” author’s interview with Ann Andrews, November 1982.

  22 “I have made my debut,” letter from Tallulah to Mrs. Bankhead, March 16, 1918.

  22 “selfishness, vanity and rapacity,” Theatre magazine, May 1918.

  22 “the privileged Hattons,” “A Bantam from Alabama,” op. cit.

  22 “with sincerity and feeling,” Motion Picture News, June 15, 1918.

  22 “brains are better than experience,” quoted in TB.

  22 “excellent acting,” Motion Picture World, November 23, 1918.

  22 “the great beau of Washington,” Lamparski, op. cit.

  23 “And there was this Tallulah,” author’s interview with Estelle Winwood, August 1982.

  23 “as though I was the most important person,” unpublished interview with Estelle Winwood, transcript supplied by Robert Henderson.

  24 “I was such an idiot,” Lamparski, op. cit.

  24 “She didn’t look right,” author’s interview with Dorothy Dickson, February 1982.

  25 “I am nearly dead now,” February 8, 1919.

  25 “in time to have supper with Jobena,” letter from Mrs. Cauble to Louise, quoted in a letter from Louise to Captain John, April 23, 1919.

  27 “It is a fine thing,” letter from Will to Tallulah, February 19, 1918.

  27 “I am giving up pictures,” letter from Tallulah to Will, 1919.

  28 “I am going to make good,” letter from Tallulah to Captain John, May 26, 1919.

  29 “Why are you an Equity member?” Billboard, op. cit.

  29 “charged with the conviction,” TB.

  29 “to tour was to quote oblivion,” TB.

  30 “she felt uneasy,” unpublished transcript, read at the Player’s Club library.

  Making Her Way

  33 “I wanted to spare you any anxiety,” letter from Tallulah to Captain John, January 6, 1920.

  33 “I will keep my eye on the girls,” letter from Henry Bankhead to Captain John, January 8, 1920.

  33 “to save some expense,” letter from Will to Florence, January 21, 1920.

  33 “If you can’t get what you want,” letter from Will to Tallulah, February 19, 1920.

  34 “Tallulah needs new clothes,” letter from Will to Marie, February 26, 1920.

  34 “your heart and your purse need a rest,” letter from Tallulah to Captain John, January 24, 1920.

  34 “a peculiar child,” letter from Captain John to Darwin James, Jr., December 2, 1919.

  34 “a dear little apartment,” letter from Tallulah to Mrs. Bankhead, May 1920.

  35 “had talked up Tallulah,” Zoë Akins, “Happy Birthday, Dear Tallulah,” Town and Country, January 1951.

  36 “the teaching of acting was still in its infancy,” Steve Vineberg, Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style. New York: Schirmer Books, 1991.

  37 “the stage itself was the best place,” Zit’s Weekly Newspaper, April 9, 1921.

  I’m a Lesbian, What Do You Do?

  40 “If you have any shoes or stockings,” letter from Tallulah to Mrs. Bankhead, fall 1920.

  40 “I have missed you so much,” letter from Tallulah to Mrs. Bankhead, October 9, 1920.

  41 “much too charming,” letter from Tallulah to Mrs. Bankhead, October 19, 1920.

  41 “No wonder Scotty wants you,�
� Rachel Crothers, Nice People. New York: Brentano’s, 1921.

  42 “I have been busy every minute,” letter from Tallulah to Mrs. Bankhead, February 28, 1921.

  42 “might have daunted Shakespeare,” The Weekly Review, April 13, 1921.

  42 “a pleasant and mythical world,” The Bookman, May 1921.

  42 “All the assisting parts,” Theatre magazine, May 1921.

  42 “the despair of her elders,” Vanity Fair, July 1921.

  42 “in the way of a career,” Zit’s Weekly Newspaper, op. cit.

  42 “I want emotional roles,” “On Stage Two Years, Miss Bankhead’s Career Promising,” New York Telegraph, April 10, 1921.

  43 “I’m a lesbian. What do you do?,” author’s interview with Fiona Hale, June 1993.

  43 “I have been a nervous wreck,” letter from Tallulah to Mrs. Bankhead, May 8, 1921.

  44 “quite a few of the boys,” December 1963 radio interview with Paul Berman, WBAL, Baltimore.

  45 “I feel that they are all my daughters,” Rachel Crothers interview by Colgate Baker, unidentified clipping, LPA.

  45 “to displace the eternal triangle,” Baltimore News, November 1, 1921.

  46 “the stupidity of life itself,” ibid.

  46 “an ideal choice,” Christian Science Monitor, December 6, 1921.

  46 “kings and queens are really kind of a joke,” Rachel Crothers, Everyday, typescript in Museum of the City of New York Theatre Collection.

  47 “There’s someone!,” author’s interview with Ruth Hammond, February, 1979.