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If I had my life to live over again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner...
Not many people remember Tallulah Bankhead's stage or screen performances. But Tallulah was more than an actress, she was a star and though she died in 1968 she refuses to go away.
With a voice that actor-writer Emlyn Williams said 'was steeped as deep in sex as the human voice can go without drowning' and looks that led Daphne du Maurier to exclaim that she was 'the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life', her signature 'dah-lings' and her notorious private life, it's doubtful we will ever forget Tallulah or see her like again.
Born in Huntsville, Alabama to William Brockman Bankhead and Adelaide Eugenia Bankhead, Tallulah was named after her paternal grandmother but tragedy was to strike her early.
Her mother, who was just twenty-one, died when Talluah was just three weeks old as a result of blood poisoning. Her father was grief stricken and struggled to cope. He bacame an alcoholic and Tallulah was raised by her aunts and grandparents though he would later overcome his problems to become a respected politician.
As a child, Tallulah was chubby and fair whilst her older sister Eugenia was slimmer and prettier. Tallulah did everything she could think of for attention. She ran around the house doing cartwheels or singing and reciting literature that she had memorized. She was rarely still and her boisterous behaviour irritated everyone, especially her grandmother. Tallulah was prone to throwing tantrums, rolling around on the floor and holding her breath until she was blue in the face. Her frustrated grandmother would threaten to throw a bucket of water on her to calm her down, and frequently did.
Above: Tallulah aged four
Bankhead's family weren't rich but they were aristocracy, a politically important and powerful Democratic family. Her father overcame his problems to become the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936-1940 immediately preceding Sam Rayburn. Bankhead herself was later to beome a lifelong and passionate Democrat, albeit one of a more liberal stripe than the rest of her family.
At 15, Bankhead won a movie-magazine beauty contest and convinced her family to let her move to New York. She quickly won bit parts, first appearing in a non-speaking role in The Squab Farm. During these early New York years, she became a peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table and known as a hard-partying girl-about-town. It was during this time she began to use cocaine and marijuana, going as far as saying "Cocaine isn't habit forming. I should know, I've been using it for years."
She became known for her sharp wit, although as screenwriter Anita Loos, a minor fellow Roundtable member, said: "She was so pretty that we thought she must be stupid."
Once, while at a party, a guest made a comment about rape, and Bankhead replied "I was raped in our driveway when I was eleven. You know darling, it was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel." She also professed to having a ravenous appetite for sex, but not for a particular type. "I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic. And the others give me either stiff neck or lockjaw," she said.
Apparently though, Tallulah's first affair was with an actress Eve Le Gallienne and she took to introducing herself at parties by saying 'I'm a lesbian, what do you do?' Later though she told friends 'I could never become a lesbian, they have no sense of humour' Her bisexuality was never in question though.
Bankhead once met Chico Marx at a party before her reputation had overturned the presumption that William B. Bankhead's daughter would be disgusted by Marx's typically crude (yet generally effective) approach to picking up women. Although Marx had been cautioned to be on his best behavior with Bankhead, the two first spoke at the punch bowl. "Miss Bankhead." "Mr. Marx." And, as everyone breathed a sigh of relief, Chico told her, "You know, I really want to fuck you" "And so you shall, you old-fashioned boy" she replied without missing a beat.
In 1923, she made her debut on the London stage, where she was to appear in over a dozen plays in the next eight years, most famously, The Dancers. Her fame as an actress was ensured in 1924 when she played the waitress Amy in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted. The show won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize. She was famous not only as an actress but also for her many affairs, infectious personality and witticisms like "There is less to this than meets the eye" and "I'm as pure as the driven slush."
Infamous for her promiscuous behavior and with the reputation of being sexually available to anyone she found attractive, famous or not, Tallulah's longest known affair during this period in her life was with an Italian businessman named Anthony de Bosdari, which lasted just over one year. By the end of the decade, she was one of the West End's, and England's best-known and most notorious celebrities.
Bankhead returned to the US in 1931 to be Paramount Pictures' "next Marlene Dietrich", but Hollywood success eluded her. Instead her passions lay in a lifestyle full of wild parties that would regularly take place in her home on Stanley Street in Hollywood that we re said to 'have no boundaries'
Bankhead's first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor, and the pair became fast friends. Bankhead behaved herself on the set and filming went smoothly, but she found film-making to be very boring and didn't have the patience for it. She didn't like Hollywood either. When she met producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him, "How do you get laid in this dreadful place?"
Bankhead was not very interested in making films. The opportunity to make $50,000 per film, however, was too good to pass up. She later said, "The only reason I went to Hollywood was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper."
An interview that she gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932, gave an insight into her life as she ranted wildly about needing an affair:
"I'm serious about love. I'm damned serious about it now.... I haven't had an affair for six months. Six months! Too long.... If there's anything the matter with me now, it's not Hollywood or Hollywood's state of mind.... The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! ... Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!"
The early 30s saw Hollywood becoming increasingly conservative, partly as a result of past scandals, and partly because Will H. Hays and others had formed the infamous Production Code.The code dictated not only what the studios could show in their films, but how actors had to conduct themselves off-screen. As predicted, the interview Tallulah gace to Motion Picture magazine created quite a scandal. Will Hays was furious. Time ran a story about it, and back home, Bankhead's father and family were mortified. Bankhead immediately telegraphed her father, vowing never to speak with a magazine reporter again.
The vow didn't last long though. She was once again found talking to reporters about her attitude to affairs of the heart.
"...I've had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself."
Although she never made excuses for being blunt and outspoken, she did successfully avoided scandal related to her affairs, regardless of the gender of her lovers. Tallulah was known to embrace her bisexulaity with enthusiasm and was known to have stripped off her clothes on several occasions while attending parties, shocking most people present. Tallulah though always got away with her outrageous actions. Her personality made her almost irresistible as a friend, or a lover.
Rumors about her sex life have lingered for years, and she was linked romantically with many notable female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne, Laurette Taylor, and Alla Nazimova, as well as writer Mercedes de Acosta, the wealthy Betty Carstairs, and singer Billie Holiday.
She was reportedly extremely excited when she was first able to meet the elusive Garbo, but whether they were sexually involved has never been determined beyond a doubt. The two women played tennis together often, and were said to have enjoyed one another's company, but Garbo was extremely protective of her private life and secretive about her lovers.
It was in 1933 that Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy for an advanced case of gonorrhea, which she claimed she contracted from Gary Cooper.
The reason she had given as her sole motive to move to Hollywood.. 'to fuck Gary Cooper'
had nearly killed her. Weighing a fragile seventy pounds when she left the hospital, she wryly said to her doctor, "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!"
In 1934, after recuperating in Alabama, she returned to England. After only a short stay, she was called back to New York to play in Dark Victory. Although Bette Davis played the leading character in the film version, she openly admitted in later years that she had emulated Bankhead in the role.
1937 saw Bankhead marry actor John Emery.
Tallulah had vowed not to marry anyone less well hung than actor John Barrymore and presumably Emery fitted the bill. She would often take guests to the master bedroom where he was sleeping, whip back the duvet and ask them triumphantly if they had 'ever seen a prick as big as that?' It wasn't to last though. She was later to say ' the weapon may be of admirable proportions but the shot is indescribably weak'. They divorced on June 13 1941 in Reno, Nevada and rumours of further lesbian affairs surfaced including one of a long term relationship with actress Patsy Kelly.
It was during this period that David O. Selznick, producer of Gone With the Wind called her the "first choice among established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara. Although her screen test for the role in black-and-white was superb, she photographed poorly in Technicolor. Selznick also believed that at age 36, she was too old to play Scarlett, who is 16 at the beginning of the film; the role eventually went to Vivien Leigh. Selznick sent a representative to Bankhead to "sound her out" about playing prostitute Belle Watling in the film however she turned the role down. Unable to recapture Hollywood, Bankhead returned to her most-loved acting medium, the stage.
Returning to Broadway, Bankhead's career stalled in unmemorable plays. When she appeared in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with her husband, John Emery, The Times' Brooks Atkinson wrote "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile, last night, and promptly sank!"
All the laughing stopped, though, when she played the cold and ruthless Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. Her portrayal won her the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Performance, but Bankhead and Hellman feuded over the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland. Bankhead, a staunch anti-Communist, was said to want a portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief, while Hellman, an equally staunch Stalinist, objected strenuously, and the two women didn't speak for the next quarter of a century.
More success and the same award followed her 1942 performance in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.
During the run of the play, some media accused Bankhead of an ongoing feud with the play's director, Elia Kazan. Kazan confirmed the story in his autobiography when he stated that Bankhead was one of the few people in his life that he ever actually detested.
Of the play, she later said
'For all the comedy's spectacular success, for all the hubbub it raised, there were people who found it as baffling as the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone. Typical was the reaction of a Park Avenue debutante reported to me by a friend who overheard the conversation in the lobby. During the intermission, the Park Avenue birdbrain said to her escort, 'I don't understand a word of the play. I haven't any notion of what it's about. Have you?'. Her companion stammered slightly, then said, 'Yes, I think so...in general terms it's about the human race.' 'Oh', jeered the belle, 'is that all?'"
In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as the cynical journalist, Constance Porter, in Lifeboat. The performance is widely acknowledged as her best on film, and won her the New York Film Critics Circle Award. Almost childlike in her immodesty, a beaming Tallulah accepted her New York trophy and exclaimed, "Dahlings, I was wonderful!"
Below: Tallulah with Hitchcock
After World War II, Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star, and Bankhead's "best friend" from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968.
Bankhead circulated widely in the celebrity crowd of her day, and was a party favorite for outlandish stunts such as underwearless cartwheels in a skirt or entering a soirée stark naked. She is also said to have been so engrossed in conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt that she dropped her drawers and used the toilet while the first lady was still talking.
Always extravagant, upon leaving the theater one evening she encountered a Salvation Army band passing around the tambourine. Reaching into her purse, Bankhead withdrew a twenty dollar bill, tossed it into the tambourine and exited into a taxi with the remark, "there dahlings, I know it's been a rough winter for you Spanish dancers."
Though Tallulah Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye. Although she had become a heavy drinker and consumer of sleeping pills, Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, in the occasional film, as a highly-popular radio show host, and in the new medium of television.
In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy Show which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies but also performed monologues and songs, many of which can be heard on the album Give My Regards To Broadway!. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood and radio including Marlene Dietrich, Groucho Marx, Ethel Merman, Gracie Fields, Vera Lynn, Peggy Lee, Judy Garland, Ethel Barrymore and Gloria Swanson, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny's and Edgar Bergen's ratings.
Bankhead had proved to be a masterful comedienne and intriguing personality though she wasn't blamed for the failure of The Big Show. Television's growth was hurting all radio ratings at the time so the next season NBC installed her as one of a half dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights. Although critics loved her, and Tallulah's monologues became classics, she was not among the hosts renewed for the following season.
Bankhead's most popular television appearance was her December 3, 1957 appearance on The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. Bankhead played herself in the episode titled "The Celebrity Next Door." The part was originally slated for Bette Davis, but she had to bow out after cracking her vertebra. Lucille Ball was a fan of Bankhead's and did a good impression of her. By the time the episode was filmed, however, both Ball and Desi Arnaz were at their wit's end over Bankhead's behavior during rehearsal: she refused to listen to the director and she did not like to rehearse. It took her three hours to "wake up" once she arrived on the set and everyone thought she was drunk most of the time. Ball and Arnaz apparently didn't know about Tallulah's antipathy toward rehearsing or her incredible ability to memorize a script.
The actual filming of the episode went off without a hitch, and Bankhead impressed everyone with her line readings and professionalism". Lucille Ball later said that she was conned by Bankhead who purposely made her think she would screw up to throw her off kilter. Desi Arnaz said that Bankhead walked all over him and Ball, they hadn't known this was typical behavior.
Below: Tallulah as a guest star on the Lucy and Desi Comedy Hour
Bankhead had no children but was the godmother of Brook and Brockman Seawell, children of her lifelong friend and actress Eugenia Rawls and Rawls's husband, Donald Seawell. She was known for her kindness to animals and children although she is said to have inspired much of the "personality" of the character Cruella De Vil in Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians.
Tallulah's last motion picture was a British horror film, Fanatic, in 1965 co-starring Stefanie Powers. Her last appearance on screen came in March 1967 as the villainous Black Widow in the Batman TV series. By now she was haunted by her demons, drinking a bottle of boubon a day and regularly taking Tuinal, Benzedrine, Dexydrine, Dexamyl and Morphine. She was still full on in every area of her life though. She couldn't bear to be alone so young men were ordered in to sit at her bed, she called then her 'caddies'. She couldn't stop talking. According to one friend she racked up 70,000 words in one day, the length of a novel. Her maid would tape her wrists together to stop her taking more pills and there were some serious accidents and psychotic episodes.
When people approached her on the street to ask if she was Tallulah Bankhead, she would reply 'I'm what's left of her darling'
Below: on stage with Tab Hunter in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore - 1964
According to author Brendan Gill, when Bankhead entered the hospital for an illness, an article was headed "Tallulah Hospitalized, Hospital Tallulahized." A testament to Bankhead's large, charismatic personality.
Tallulah Bankhead died in St. Luke's Hospital in New York City of pneumonia complicated by emphysema, at the age of 66 on December 12, 1968. She is buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, Chestertown, Maryland. Her last coherent words were "Codeine... bourbon."
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