Tallulah!

by Lobenthal, Joel

• ISBN13: 9780060394356
• ISBN10: 0060394358
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-01-01
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Outrageous, outspoken, and uninhibited, Tallulah Bankhead was an actress known as much for her vices -- cocaine, alcohol, hysterical tirades, and scandalous affairs with both men and women -- as she was for her winning performances on stage. In 1917, a fifteen-year-old Bankhead boldly left her established Alabama political family and fled to New York City to sate her relentless need for attention and become a star. Five years later, she crossed the Atlantic, immediately taking her place as a fixture in British society and the most popular actress in London's West End. By the time she returned to America in the 1930s, she was infamous for throwing marathon parties, bedding her favorite costars, and neglecting to keep her escapades a secret from the press. At times, her notoriety distracted her audience from her formidable talent and achievements on stage and dampened the critical re-sponse to her work. As Bankhead herself put it, "they like me to 'Tallulah,' you know -- dance and sing and romp and fluff my hair and play reckless parts." Still, her reputation as a wild, witty, over-the-top leading lady persisted until the end of her life at the age of sixty-six.From her friendships with such entertainment luminaries as Tennessee Williams, Estelle Winwood, Billie Holiday, Noël Coward, and Marlene Dietrich, to the intimate details of her family relationships and her string of doomed romances, Joel Lobenthal has captured the private essence of the most public star during theater's golden age. Larger-than-life as she was, friends saw through Bankhead's veneer of humor and high times to the heart of a woman who often felt second-best in her father's eyes, who longed for the children she was unable to bear, and who forced herself into the spotlight to hide her deep-seated insecurities.Drawn from scores of exclusive interviews, as well as previously untapped information from Scotland Yard and the FBI, this is the essential biography of Tallulah Bankhead. Having spent twenty-five years researching Bankhead's life, Joel Lobenthal tells her unadulterated story, as told to him by her closest friends, enemies, lovers, and employees. Several have broken decadelong silences; many have given Lobenthal their final interviews. The result is the story of a woman more complex, more shocking, and yet more nuanced than her notorious legend suggests.

Table of Contents

Introduction	xi
PART I: 1902--1930
Lace Curtains	3	(14)
Debutante	17	(15)
Making Her Way	32	(8)
``I'm a Lesbian. What Do You Do?''	40	(13)
Madcaps in London	53	(11)
Naps	64	(12)
Risky Behavior	76	(11)
Modern Wives	87	(9)
Femme Fatale	96	(9)
Something Different	105	(11)
Skylarking	116	(10)
Sex Plays	126	(11)
Surveillance	137	(9)
Betrayals	146	(11)
Constrained by Crinolines	157	(9)
London Farewell	166	(13)
PART II: 1931--1939
Paramount	179	(11)
Hollywood	190	(7)
Gary Cooper and Others	197	(6)
``I Want a Man!''	203	(10)
Back on Broadway	213	(7)
Disaster	220	(10)
Recovery	230	(10)
Jock	240	(13)
Getting Married	253	(11)
Cleopatra Pissed	264	(10)
Serving Time in Drawing Rooms	274	(9)
The Little Foxes	283	(16)
PART III: 1939--1950
Triumph	299	(10)
Tilting Her Lance	309	(10)
Losses	319	(12)
Drama by the Kitchen Sink	331	(11)
Multiple Personalities	342	(13)
Chatelaine	355	(11)
Work and Play	366	(6)
Flights of Fancy	372	(11)
Bested by Brando	383	(7)
Public and Private Lives	390	(10)
Skidding	400	(19)
PART IV: 1950--1968
Mixed Highs and Lows	419	(9)
Stateless	428	(10)
Pearls Before Swine	438	(8)
The Hallelujah Chorus	446	(10)
The Nadir	456	(15)
Halloween Madness	471	(14)
In Retreat	485	(12)
Last Train	497	(14)
Home to London	511	(11)
Winding Down	522	(15)
Notes	537	(22)
Bibliography	559	(6)
Index	565

Excerpts

Tallulah!
The Life and Times of a Leading Lady

Lace Curtains

"When I was twelve years old I used to think it was the best sport in theworld to give impressions of my step-mother. At that time dad said severely:'The place for people to give impersonations is on the stage!' andso the seed was planted."

The opening years of the twentieth century were a time of intense reactionin the American South, the inauguration of the Jim Crow doctrineof "separate but equal." Amid an attempted restoration of the prewarcivil order, whites who possessed any degree of power could live as if theywere antebellum plantation owners. Statues of Confederate heroes appearedin courthouse squares. There was a new sense of identification withthe settlers of the Old South, a nostalgic, recidivist affinity with the lostcause. Integral to this mood was a renewed investment in the prewar visionof the elite white Southern woman and her consecrated purity, passivity,and dependency. Yet bright women chained into the rigid and puritanicalsociety of the upper-class South found ways to express themselves and tomake waves. The words that came out of Tallulah Bankhead's mouthwould register shock to new extremes, but her dialogue had been primedby women talking out long before she was born in 1902. "All the Bankheadwomen were outspoken," said Kay Crow, who married Charles Crow, sonof Tallulah's cousin Marion Bankhead. But it was the men who stepped up to public platforms. Tallulah was the first woman in her family to bestowher performances not just on friends and family, but to exhibit herself forpay -- to seize a public pulpit.

She was named for her grandmother, Tallulah Brockman Bankhead,whose parents believed they had conceived her during a stopover at TallulahFalls in northern Georgia. Tallulah Brockman married John HollisBankhead in 1866. He had served as captain in the Confederate Army, andto the end of his days he was called "Captain John" by the family. After thesurrender he ran a cotton mill and was warden of a prison in Wetumpka,Alabama. Mrs. Bankhead had given birth to Marie, John Jr., and Louise beforeTallulah's father, William Brockman Bankhead, was born in 1874. In1887, Captain John was elected to the House of Representatives, beginninga thirty-three-year career in Congress.

Both John and Tallulah Bankhead were formidable, but their styleswere different. Mrs. Bankhead was driven around Washington by a liveriedchauffeur. Captain John, however, devoutly took the streetcar every day tothe Capitol. "Grandaddy would say 'Ain't,' " Tallulah recalled to authorRichard Lamparski in 1966. "And my grandmother used to be furious.She'd say, 'Honey, Captain John, you know better than to say 'ain't'!' He said,'Tallulah -- first of all, it's an old Elizabethan word, perfectly legitimate; second,if I didn't say "Ain't" I wouldn't get a farmer's vote in the whole state!' "

Their son Will Bankhead was moody, high-strung, and nurtured theatricalambitions that could not be achieved. Will followed his olderbrother, John, to the University of Alabama, where he was president of theclass of 1892 and won a Phi Beta Kappa key, and then followed John to thelaw school at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

In 1897, he went to New York with two friends to set up a brokerageoffice, which limped along perilously. "My life in New York has been moreof a struggle than I have heretofore known," he wrote in his diary in January1898. But he managed to attend the theater frequently, filling his diarywith jottings on what he had seen, and he brewed with the desire to takehis love of oratory to the theatrical stage. He happened upon an advertisementin a trade paper announcing openings in a Boston theatrical stockcompany, and coining a fictitious resume, he was hired. He sent word tohis mother and left for Boston.

As a teenager, Mrs. Bankhead herself had enjoyed performing in privatetheatricals to raise money for the Confederacy, and as a young man, CaptainJohn loved to recite Shakespeare with his neighbors on his farmhouse porch in west Alabama. But a career in the theater was not what they envisionedfor Will. Sitting on the Boston Commons, buffeted by the winterchill, he read his mother's letter demanding that he return. "And so I decidedthis little country boy had better go home," he told Tallulah many years later.

Tallulah's mother, Adelaide Eugenia Sledge, was "Ada" to her friendsand family, but "Gene" to her husband. She was just as high strung as Willand just as keen on the stage. The younger of two daughters, Adelaidegrew up in Como, a small town in northern Mississippi. She never knewher mother, who succumbed to infection soon after delivering her in 1880;her father subsequently remarried. Her grandfather had amassed a smallfortune and he doted on his lovely young granddaughter. As a teenager, shewas sent to Paris, returning with trunks full of couture clothes that rusticComo offered few opportunities to display. But Adelaide thought nothingof donning a Paris gown to trundle off down the dirt roads of the town.

Her education was slightly more ambitious than one would have expectedof a woman of her time and class. At fifteen, she spent one year atthe Salem Female Academy in North Carolina, which had been founded byMoravians in the eighteenth century. She took all the required courses:Latin, math -- arithmetic, algebra, and geometry -- French history, physicalgeography, and "miscellaneous," which that year meant grammar, compositionand dictation, natural history, penmanship.

Her father paid extra every quarter so that Adelaide could also availherself of vocal lessons and a class in elocution, and Adelaide performed inseveral school performances. In the early 1940s, a classmate of Adelaide'scame backstage to see Tallulah and told her that she had inherited her talentfrom her mother, citing as evidence Adelaide's ability to faint on cuewhenever a certain young Moravian doctor appeared in her vicinity ...

Tallulah!
The Life and Times of a Leading Lady. Copyright © by Joel Lobenthal. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

---

Excerpted from Tallulah!: The Life and Times of a Leading Lady by Joel Lobenthal
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.