One-Woman Show

Even when it was new, 17 years ago, Noel Coward's Private Lives was no great shakes as a play. When it was revived this fall on Broadway, it had plainly not improved with the years. But last week, as it has for the past six weeks, Private Lives was packing the Plymouth Theater with as many standees as the New York Fire Department will allow. What the customers were crowding to see was not so much a play as a remarkable personality with a remarkable name: Tallulah Bankhead.

On stage, as well as off, Tallulah Bankhead mugs, flings, shouts and croaks her boisterous way through an outrageously florid, outrageously amusing imitation of Tallulah Bankhead. Many a mediocre play has been dragged beyond its deserved life span by Tallulah's gaudy brilliance, but this time she has turned one into a smash hit singlehanded.

Tallulah * is not the first lady of the theater. She is the theater's first personality. The theater's current first lady is a kind of composite of Helen Hayes, Katharine Cornell, Judith Anderson, Lynn Fontanne--and Tallulah. But Tallulah does not fit neatly into a category, and other ladies of the stage, whatever their virtues as actresses, pale beside her as stars pale when a bonfire is lighted.

Gaudy Legend. At 47, after three decades in the dazzled public eye, Actress Bankhead is one of the few people in the English-speaking world instantly and unmistakably identifiable by her first name. Her lounging, lionesslike vitality, her insatiable lust for life and her contempt for all forms of humbug have inspired a large body of legend. Her egomania is about as extreme as "the artistic temperament" can produce. She is exhibitionistic, extravagant, self-indulgent, unpredictable--and full of whims, radiant good humor and terrible rages. She is all these things in a very fulltime, wholehearted way.

The legend of Tallulah, which can no longer be completely separated from fact, pictures her as a combination of great lady and rowdy hoyden moving in an aura of sex and alcohol. She has been perfectly at ease in a San Francisco waterfront dive, in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, or playing poker with stagehands. She can quote readily, and at impressive length, from the Bible, Shakespeare, and a lavatory wall. Onstage she is gowned by famous designers (she was once called the "world's only volcano dressed by Mainbocher"). Offstage, she prefers slacks and a mink coat. Hollywood didn't know what to make of her, but London adored her for eight wild years.

Tallulah has always moved casually among the great and the near-great.* When she was a child in a Washington suburb, a kindly gentleman named Cordell Hull let her ride his ponies. She has swapped cabled pleasantries with her friend Winston Churchill. An admirer, Lord Beaverbrook, once gave her a party attended by such eager guests as the Aga Khan and Rudolph Valentino. Jock Whitney, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Kent, Ronald Colman--they have all flitted through the spotlight that trails Tallulah wherever she goes. In London, Lawrence of Arabia used to run out to get her fresh cigarettes when her supply ran low.

15% & Footlights. As the theater's first personality, Tallulah currently commands its stiffest terms: 15% of the gross receipts, plus 25% of the net profits. During the 53-week cross-country tour that preceded the New York opening, the current revival of Private Lives took in about $1,000,000. Tallulah's average estimated weekly income, not including an occasional $2,500 to $3,000 for a radio stint: $5,500.

Yet, says Tallulah, "I'm always broke." Her extravagance is so well known that her retinue tries not to let her carry money; when she has it, she often hands out bills to cabdrivers and rest-room attendants without even looking at the denomination. But she has invested heavily in bonds, and is building an annuity that will some day pay $500 a month--maybe enough to keep her in perfume and pet food (her menagerie has included a lion cub, a marmoset, several dogs and a parakeet).

Tallulah's contract gives her more than money: there are special riders to make sure that she runs the show. She gets the right to pass on the hiring of the play's directors, players, company manager, stage manager, pressagent and costumer. One clause commits the management to give her footlights, which have been going out of fashion on the New York stage. Tallulah insists on them because they offset overhead lights that throw unflattering shadows.

Despite her tremendous drawing power (she once broke attendance records in Boston during a blizzard that stopped traffic and closed the schools), some of Broadway's top producers and directors swear they will never again have any truck with her. (Says one: "The woman is constitutionally unable to fit harmoniously into a group effort.") Mostly, these people are merely unwilling to follow the one tested formula for getting along with Tallulah: give in to her. The formula seems to work for Producer John C. Wilson; he also put on her last show, Jean Cocteau's The Eagle Has Two Heads, a bad play that tempted Tallulah because it gave her a 17-minute monologue and a chance to do a queenly death scene tumbling down a flight of red-carpeted stairs.

She has quarreled with almost every producer, director and playwright who has crossed her path in recent years. Oddly, the bitterest feuds have involved her best plays. She does not speak to The Little Foxes' Producer-Director Herman Shumlin and Playwright Lillian Hellman (both leftists whose rows with Tallulah were political as well as professional). She does not speak to The Skin of Our Teeth's Producer Michael Myerberg and Director Elia Kazan. Shumlin will not even discuss her. Billy Rose, who starred her in Clifford Odets' Clash By Night, is more reticent about Tallulah than he is on most topics. During that play, in which Tallulah carried on several concurrent vendettas, she referred to Rose as "a loathsome little bully," and stopped talking to him. (His defense: "How can you bully Niagara Falls?")

Problem Child. To Tallulah, all the world's a stage and all the men & women merely supporting players. Much of her showing off is as natural as her dark honey hair. Some of it is a conscious offering on the altar of her own lurid legend. None of it is publicity-seeking in the strict box-office sense; it fills more personal needs that began forming on Jan. 31, 1901, when Tallulah was born in Huntsville, Ala.

Tallulah was christened beside the casket of her mother, Eugenia Sledge Bankhead, a Virginia belle whose great beauty inspired a published valentine by Critic Stark Young as late as 1943. Her mother died three weeks after Tallulah's birth, leaving the Bankheads without-the male heir they had hoped for. As she grew up, politics kept her father busy, and Tallulah and her older sister Eugenia * got along like "fiends." Tallulah spent her childhood shuttling between her Aunt Marie Bankhead Owen in Montgomery, her grandmother in Jasper, her father in Washington, and schools and convents in Virginia, Washington and New York. She had everything but the kind of attention that children ordinarily get from their parents. As a child ("I was a fat, pimple-faced kid"), she had tantrums that lasted for hours; as an adolescent, she was a rebellious problem pupil. At 16, she "placed" in a movie magazine beauty contest and implored her father, who was a frustrated would-be actor himself, to let her try the theater. By then, she was a girl with a ravenous hunger for attention; the hunger has still not been fully satisfied.

Anything But Dull. Tallulah has rarely been able to see someone else in the spotlight without writhing. During her early days in New York, she felt so painfully anonymous in theater audiences that she once lit up a cigar. (Said Critic Percy Hammond: "It is doubtless her way of being inconspicuous.") In London, piqued at the attention her composer-pianist was getting at a party, she set up shop in an adjacent room, leaving the door open. In the face of such competition, the soloist was soon playing only for the hostess. In Hollywood, sulking unnoticed at a party celebrating the premiere of a Norma Shearer movie, Tallulah finally cornered Miss Shearer's husband, the late Irving Thalberg, and spent 20 minutes hooting at his wife's abilities as an actress.

At the suggestion that all the stories told about Tallulah are a little too lurid to be believed literally, one old friend says solemnly: "I don't think there's anything you can say about Tallulah that isn't true." Another friend, asking Tallulah's permission before talking to a TIME reporter, was instructed: "Tell him everything, dahling, only don't make me dull."

Tallulah herself is responsible for circulating many of the spiciest tales. When Elsa Maxwell noted that her leading man in The Dancers did not seem very convincing in his love scenes, Tallulah lowered her sultry lids and purred: "Perhaps not on the stage . . ." When it seemed that a certain man was trying to snub her at London's Savoy, legend has it that she called: "Hello, dahling, I'm sorry you don't recognize me with my clothes on." Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, the expert on sex statistics, recently tried to get an interview with her, but the matter was dropped when Tallulah agreed "on condition that I can ask you the same questions." Visiting the White House on the heels of a group of reformed women prisoners, she made Franklin Roosevelt roar with laughter at her first words to him: "We'll get along swell. You like delinquent girls."

Young Jezebel. She likes to run around her Manhattan hotel suite or "Windows," her twelve-room house in Bedford Village, N.Y., with no clothes on, and has to be prompted by friends when callers arrive. She also enjoys the bug-eyed shock on the faces of strangers when she pretends to be a dope fiend. (She sprays her temperamental throat with a doctor's prescription that includes cocaine.) Once, for the benefit of a visiting innocent, she took a Benzedrine pill (a drug she uses regularly), mashed it on wax paper with a rolling pin and asked for a nail file. Then, sprinkling the powder on the file and sniffing it, she said: "This is really the only way it's effective, dahling."

During her Broadway apprenticeship, back in 1918, Tallulah was regarded as a "most beautiful girl." Her hair came down to her knees, thick as a cloak. She had not begun to drink or smoke. ("I was a completely good girl in those days.") "But she was never simple," says Actress Estelle Winwood, one of her oldest friends. "She was as sophisticated then as she is now."

After her first year in New York, Tallulah persuaded her father that she could get along without her chaperon, Aunt Louise. "I couldn't stand Aunt Louise's snoring," she says. "I told Daddy: 'If you believe the things people say about me, I'll believe the things your political enemies say about you.' "

Socially, young Tallulah went like a house afire, but her stage career languished in flop after flop. She dreamed of London. Every year she and Estelle Winwood would call on an old Scottish woman named Mrs. Bunce, who told fortunes in a Manhattan brownstone. Mrs. Bunce's routine was to open a Bible and poke a needle into it for an omen. One year, probing for Tallulah's future, the needle stuck on the name Jezebel. "Oh, that's terrible," said Estelle. "Jezebel was thrown to the dogs." "Yes," throbbed Tallulah, "but first she rode with kings and princes."

Flappers & Cartwheels. The next year, Tallulah got to England, and became an immediate sensation. As a cigarette-smoking, short-skirted vamp, she was a hit in her first play. The part she played set the style for a series of underdressed, sexy roles, including a drunk flapper, a chorus girl, an artist's model, a trollop, and a few unfaithful wives. (She also found time to play Camille.)

Summing up her impact on London (1923-31), Socialite Columnist Charles Graves says: "She popularized smoking in the days when few nice girls smoked. She killed the stage-door Johnny--he couldn't get through the hundreds of girls outside the stage door . . . She popularized the words 'divine' and 'darling' and bacchanalian parties."

The frenzied girl fans hit their emotional peak in 1930 at her last London play, Let Us Be Gay. They waited in line for 36 hours to get in. When the doors opened, police cordons crumbled under a wild stampede, and some who had been first in line picked themselves up to find the theater full. Halfway through the show they stormed, 100 strong, into the lobby, yelling and screaming, until the bobbies rallied to throw them back.

Throughout her London success, few critics considered Tallulah very seriously as an actress. But her looks were really something. Cecil Beaton called her "... A wicked archangel with . . . carven features . . . Her eyelashes, like a spreading peacock's tail, weigh down the lids over her enormous snake-like eyes . . . She is cadaverously thin ... the most easily recognizable face I know and ... the most luscious . . . cheeks like huge acid pink peonies . . . eyelashes built out with hot liquid paint to look like burnt matches . . . Her sullen, discontented, rather evil rosebud of a mouth is painted the brightest scarlet . . . shiny as ... strawberry jam

Augustus John painted her portrait. It stole the show one year at the Royal Academy and now hangs opposite her bed in Windows, where it is the first thing she sees when she wakes up. In 1932, she turned down $100,000 for it.

Tallulah's gay parties at her house off Berkeley Square became notorious. She allegedly got Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson tipsy and took pictures. But she generally behaved like a duchess at society functions. An exception was one big masked ball, given for charity at Devonshire House, and attended by every socialite from the Duke of Kent down; some time during the evening Tallulah was seen turning perfect cartwheels around the room.

Bad Girls. Her career has held few disappointments. One of the biggest was Somerset Maugham's refusal to let her play Sadie Thompson in Rain in 1925. * She was so depressed by losing the part that she cast herself in the role of a would-be suicide and swallowed a handful of aspirins ; but she woke up next morning feeling better than she had for a long time. Another big disappointment, years later, was not getting the lead in Gone With the Wind.

In 1931 the movies had begun to talk, and Tallulah returned to the U.S. to get a word in. Under a $100,000 Paramount contract, she played bad girls redeemed by the love of a good man in a series of pictures with titles that now sound like perfumes ( Tarnished Lady, My Sin, Faithless). The pictures gave off a bad scent, and Paramount dropped her option. Her movie career was a failure until Alfred Hitchcock cast her in Lifeboat (1944), which won the New York film critics' award for the best actress' performance of the year. Her only movie since, A Royal Scandal (1945), was an indifferent picture that won her good reviews as Catherine the Great.

Chain-Talker. In grease paint or out, Tallulah is always on stage and the curtain is always up. No longer a great beauty, and overweight for her 5 ft. 3, she is still magnetic. She is almost never silent or still. Says Actor John Emery, her ex-husband: "She is the only woman I ever knew who could carry on a conversation, listen to the radio, read a book and do her hair at the same time."

She is a chain-talker, and the only thing that stops her momentarily is the need for oxygen; she gasps, and the unpunctuated torrent of words gushes on until she must breathe again. When someone looks as if he may try to interrupt, she may shut her dark blue eyes or stare him down, but she keeps going. Her accent has been described by her ex-husband as "half British and half pickaninny." She does not even stop talking to smear on fresh lipstick; the words sound like a gurgle, but out they come.

What helps make a Tallulah filibuster spellbinding is the famed voice that can bounce a whisper off the balcony walls. Husky and vibrant (partly the product of childhood croupiness), it can shift without notice from a sigh in a rain barrel to a hoot in a hollow ("Are you ever taken for a man on the phone?" Columnist Earl Wilson once asked her. "No," she snapped. "Are you?").

Tallulah's physical stamina is rather frightening to her friends. Playwright Moss Hart once got away from one of her Hollywood parties at 6 a.m., passed her house late the next afternoon and claims the party was still going strong. On election night, rooting for President Truman and convinced that he would win, Tallulah did not go to sleep at all. Then she played a matinee and an evening show and went right on celebrating.

Her ability to keep going at high speed, despite a long record of maladies, also mystifies her doctors. She has suffered, loudly, from neuritis, bursitis, ulcers, double pneumonia, smoker's cough and acute gangrenous appendicitis. She also has psychosomatic laryngitis, generally brought on by stormy dealings with a producer. But through it all, the doctors are stumped for any medical rebuttal when she announces flatly: "I'm not built like other people." On the road, she uses three suitcases just for aspirins, Benzedrine, sleeping tablets, vitamins and other pharmaceutical odds & ends.

The Domestic Life. For all her highly publicized love life, Tallulah has had just one engagement and one marriage. The engagement, in London in 1928, was brief. It was virtually all over when her fiance, Count Anthony de Bosdari, told a reporter: "I am the master. I will do the talking."

The story goes that Tallulah fell for Actor John Emery because he reminded her of John Barrymore, o-n whom she had had a girlish crush. In any case, she knew, immediately on seeing him at a summer playhouse in 1937, that she wanted him. She rushed backstage afterward, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. As Emery recalls it: "She damn near knocked my tonsils down my throat."

A few days later they were married. What was it like to be married to Tallulah? "In a way," muses Emery, "it was like the rise, decline and fall of the Roman Empire." It was not just that Tallulah had such odd cravings as a planter's punch for breakfast ("It's full of fruit and things, awfully good for you"), or that she liked to stay up three nights running, or that she once left $20,000 worth of jewelry in the keeping of a strange cabdriver. It was also not quite safe. Once Emery was telling her about a fight he had got into. "As usual," he recalls, "she got excited: 'Oh, if I'd only been there! Why didn't you kill the son-of-a-bitch?' And with that, she hauled off and hit me in the eye with all her might."

In 1941, Tallulah charged "mental cruelty" and they got a friendly Reno divorce. Says Emery, who is now married to Actress-Dancer Tamara Geva: "I'm still recuperating."

Trouper. A great trouper in the show-must-go-on tradition, Tallulah attended her father's state funeral in Washington, but gave up going to the burial in Alabama to keep her Little Foxes tour on schedule. In a Minnesota blizzard on the same tour, when railroad men said it was impossible to get her train to St. Paul for a matinee, she goaded them into hitching up a snow-plow that got her through on time. She is one of the few topflight actresses who will play one-night stands and Chicago summers--not that she pretends to like it. For weeks in Chicago last summer, she lived on watermelon, Vichysoisse and Daiquiris, and slept surrounded by ice cubes whipped by electric fans. When she played one-nighters in Peoria and Rockford, Ill, she described her reaction in one-word postcards to a Chicago friend: "God!" In Sacramento she insisted that the stage liquor be real.

Her friends say that Tallulah does not like the taste of liquor. But her distaste is catholic: she has tried almost every alcoholic drink known. She goes on the wagon for long periods. Her longest dry spell began with the fall of Dunkirk, when she vowed not to take a drink until the port was retaken. Meanwhile she drank Cokes, spiked with a dash of aromatic spirits of ammonia. She is a chain-smoker (British Craven As).

During her tour of Private Lives, the play sometimes ran shorter, because of Tallulah's rabid enthusiasm for the New York Giants. During afternoon ball games, Tallulah would race through her matinees in Chicago like Ty Cobb running the bases. During night games, the curtain went up late and intermissions were stretched out. As players came on stage they hissed bulletins to Tallulah ("The Giants are a run ahead") and Tallulah would hiss back: "What inning?"

Sound & Fury. For all her garish conduct, Tallulah is capable of great charm, dignity and kindness. During the filming of A Royal Scandal, an older actor blew his lines in one scene 85 times, but Tallulah never made the slightest show of impatience. Her genuine respect for age is linked to her reverence for her parents, whose pictures are always on her dressing-room table. Last year she spent 20 minutes getting a long-distance call through to her gardener so that she could wish him a merry Christmas. Preposterously openhanded with money and gifts, she is also generous with her stage experience in helping other players.

The cyclone called Tallulah, full of sound & fury, pulls wildly at everything around it, but it has a vacuum core of insecurity and loneliness. Behind its protective bluster and bombast, Tallulah's loneliness makes curious demands. She cannot sleep without a radio blaring near by; turn it off and she wakes up. When a power failure stilled her radio in the country, she insisted on keeping a guest up all night, talking, until the electricity came on again. She hates to be alone; she almost never is.

John Emery recalls that she would start drinking after "someone would say the wrong thing at a party and she would take offense." A onetime secretary-companion notes: "She's like a child . . . She broods all night. She'd keep me up hour after hour going over everything that'd been said, worrying about what she'd said and done." Herman Shumlin once said: "Like all important people, she is always filled with fear--the gnawing, consuming fear that she may not be quite good enough."

Like the woman herself, Tallulah's theatrical style is a little more brightly colored than life, in the grand manner that makes modern naturalism seem flat and bloodless. "The boldness of her ease upon the stage," Critic John Mason Brown once wrote, "is on occasion as uncomfortable to watch as it is to see a guest making himself too much at home in another person's house."

As an actress, Tallulah is a hard worker and a "quick study." Her portrayal of the down-South Borgia in The Little Foxes was a fine piece of serious acting, and, without letting herself go completely in

The Skin of Our Teeth, she brought off a brilliant piece of comedy as Sabina, the eternal wanton. But she lacks the stability and discipline to keep her gift under control over a long period. Her performances fluctuate more than most after the opening night. Says a friend: "The longer she plays in something, the less you see of the play, the more you see of Tallulah." She has turned Private Lives into a one-woman show--at once the triumph of a personality and the surrender of an actress. Says she: "I'm Tallulah in this play, and I'm not a bit ashamed of it."

* Tallul'ah, an Indian word of unknown origin (it may mean "terrible"), came to her by way of her maternal grandmother from Tallulah Falls in northeastern Georgia. The falls are now dammed, but, appropriately, there is a Tallulah Power Plant.

* Grandfather John and Uncle John were U.S. Senators; Father William Brockman Bankhead was Speaker of the House (1936-1940).

* Eugenia, now living in Chestertown, Md., has been married seven times, three times to the same man.

* She got around to playing it on Broadway in 1935-

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