LIKE Sir Andrew Aguecheek Tallulah Bankhead was adored once. It seems bizarre now, but in 1923 she sailed from New York to London, appeared in The Dancers, a first play by the actor Gerald du Maurier, performed a kind of Red Indian Charleston and took the town by storm. She was nineteen and had hitherto been an unremarkable actress and a kind of mascot of the Algonquin Hotel set, the 47th Street equivalent of a Bright Young Thing.
Her father, Will Bankhead, a native of Alabama, would one day become Speaker of the House of Representatives and, as such, be the third most powerful man in the United States. The name "Tallulah" was said to be Choctaw for "delightful sound", and it could not have been more inappropriate. In an autobiography, the lady herself claimed Irish roots and declared that her name was the "Irish for `colleen'".
Pause for rolling in the aisle.
In London, she was, if not the darling of the gods, then the high priestess of the Gallery Girls. Arnold Bennett wrote: "They are a mysterious lot, these stalwarts of the cult. They seem to belong to the clerk class, but they cannot be clerks, typists, shop assistants, trottins: for such people don't - and can't - take a day and a half off whenever their `Tallulah' opens." Already spoiled rotten by an indulgent upbringing, Tallulah played up to her galleryites, addressing them in raucous asides and turning the occasional cartwheel as a kind of trademark. During the longueurs when she was not on stage, her fans chatted among themselves or enjoyed an impromptu sing song.
We must take the word of her biographer, David Bret, for this and for much else. Understandably, there are no source notes and we must accept the author on trust for his facts. He misspells the name of the archetypal groupie of her time, the Countess di Frasso. He says that Alexander Woollcott appeared on Broadway in The Man Who Came to Dinner (he was the original of the "man", Sheridan Whiteside), whereas he never did - he starred in the play on tour, yes. He says that Tallulah had seen and admired her future husband John Emery when he played Willie O'Shea in the disastrous MGM film, Parnell. In fact, Alan Marshal played the role; Emery was not even in the film. Mr Bret says that Tallulah had created the role of Margo Channing in All About Eve on the stage. The film was based on a short story, The Wisdom of Eve, about an incident in the career of Elizabeth Bergner; it was never a stage play.
With these gaffes and an inadequate index, one is inclined to read Bret's book for its entertainment value alone, and there is not much of that when one encounters such syntactical plums as "Working with Davis, of course, would have been one trauma willing to have been endured by few." Nonetheless, allow me reluctantly to continue the book to review.
At this remove, it is extraordinary that Bankhead thrilled her audiences instead of boring them to extinction - but then, after all, Madonna is doing much the same thing today. Tallulah used the word fuck" and its variants whenever she opened her mouth, which orifice, as was boasted of the Windmill Theatre during the London Blitz, never closed. She debased "darling" so relentlessly as to reduce it to low camp, conjuring up a vision of those women who, Noel Coward said, should be struck regularly, like gongs.
She was an exhibitionist who used the toilet in full view of anyone who was in the next room. She delighted in going about naked. "Darling, haven't you ever seen a blonde before?" she said to Donald Sutherland when he came upon her wearing her favourite costume. That is not included here. nor is an anecdote about the film Lifeboat, in which it was reported to Alfred Hitchcock that she was all too obviously knickerless. The director expressed himself uncertain as to whether to call for the assistance of "wardrobe" or "coiffure".
She flaunted her promiscuity and freely discussed her lovers' skill or lack of it, salting the discourse with descriptions of the relevant male organs, erect or/and flaccid. She openly declared herself bisexual. In short, she was, she must have been, a thundering, unstoppable, infantile bore.
Whatever else, she had star quality. Plays that were utter rubbish survived because she was in them, addressing the Gallery Girls in asides as her "darlings" and doing her considerable best to honour Baudelaire's axiom that il friut epater les bourgeois. She appeared in only a few plays that were of the front rank one of these was Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. Another was Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, which she loathed.
In her off stage life, "caddies" - gay or bisexual - were paid to tidy up after her, preparing her bath, switching radio and television sets on and off, honing her lipsticks to a point, keeping them on ice and then dipping them in bourbon before use. She used cocaine freely, smoked a hundred cigarettes a day and drank a quart sometimes two, of hard liquor. And yet one wonders if there was not within her a core of self preservation. In her will, she left more than $2 million, which seems hardly indicative of a death wish.
She married once. The actor John Emery looked like a remaindered version of John Barrymore and, according to the author, had been married to the British actress Phyllis Calvert - it is news to this reviewer, but even Mr Bret must - be right some of the time. His face, was foxy, and he played weaklings and dishonest secretaries, as in the film Here Comes Mr Jordan. Tallulah was not above, or beneath, discussing his sexual shortcomings in public, and the marriage ended in divorce.
She later appeared with much success on television. When emphysema had already set in, she appeared in one of her last films, Fanatic (called Die! Die! My Darling in the US). The director, Silvio Narizzano, told this reviewer that Bankhead had made a shocking confession to him one day in her dressing room. Because of a vaginal obstruction, so she said, she had never had a full sexual experience with a man. Narizzano asked if she had ever contemplated corrective surgery. "Darling," she laughed, "the daughter of the Speaker of the House and a member of an upstanding Southern family simply didn't do that sort of thing!"
The story has at least the ring of truth, and of course it is a cliche that those who are most sexually successful are those who speak least about it. Suddenly one feels an outburst of affection for Tallulah. It would be the richest and ripest of all showbiz jokes if the most outrageous sexual athlete of her time turned out to be that dreary, old fashioned thing: a virgin. It is like, after all, discovering that Attila was a pacifist.