Tallulah Bankhead
She was a strange one, and no mistake. Her needs were many and outrageous and unappeasable. Sometimes they coincided with her appetites and sometimes not. She despised hypocrisy, and her willingness to let the unconventional episodes of her private life be made public was a way of asserting that she had nothing to hide, nothing of which to be ashamed, nothing for which to feel remorse. Despite her remarkable intelligence, she may have believed this to be true. The violent scatological energy of her speech and the celebrated speed and frequency with which she shucked off her clothes and prowled about naked were intended to convey an impression of untrammelled emotional freedom, and the impression was false. The chances she took were extreme and necessary, and were readily misunderstood. She respected and disliked the theatre and gave up her life to it, but the common view of her, which she encouraged, was that she was somehow an undisciplined outsider, a gifted amateur, who drank too much and talked too much and turned cartwheels onstage for want of something more professional to do. The facts were otherwise. In the course of her career, she appeared in over fifty plays and over twenty movies; she travelled scores of thousands of miles with road companies and in summer stock, by train, plane, bus, and station wagon (she said once of “Private Lives,” “We have played this show everywhere except under water”); and she made uncounted hundreds of personal appearances in night clubs and on radio and TV shows. Year after year, she worked. Indeed, she may have worked harder than any of her fellow-actresses of the period, though she took care to conceal her drudging. She liked to be thought a party girl and a scapegrace, and she had reasons.
Lynn Fontanne said once of Tallulah Bankhead that she was the greatest natural talent of her time. Tallulah was also a shrewd judge of theatre; better than many actors of reputation, she could tell good from bad, and do so instantly. If most of the plays she appeared in were trash—why, most of the plays that most of our best actors appear in are trash, as most movies and novels and poems are trash. She did her best to find roles commensurate with her gifts. At nineteen, she was starring in a play written expressly for her by Rachel Crothers, one of the leading playwrights of the day; in her sixties, she was starring in “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” which Tennessee Williams said at the time he wrote with Tallulah in mind—a cruel confession, since the character she played was a harridan in a state of repulsive decay. The contemporary playwrights in whose works she starred make an impressive list. Among them, Crothers and Williams aside, are Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Sidney Howard, Jean Cocteau, George Kelly, Clifford Odets, Philip Barry, W. Somerset Maugham, Zoë Akins, and Noël Coward. The restless life force with which she was born was always ravenously seeking something worthy of containing it, or, with luck, consuming it, and the search was nearly always in vain. Howard Dictz’s remark to the effect that a day away from Tallulah was like a month in the country was clever and just, but even at the moment of laughing at it one couldn’t fail to wonder how such a remark must have struck its prompter. What was she to do with the thing she had become? She was different, and not alone in respect to her talent and vitality. She flailed about in paroxysms of disguised bewilderment, drinking and clowning and cursing and showing off. She was valiant and silly, and she knew it. But she was not rubbishy, and she knew that, too. Out of exceptional qualities, she invented by trial and error an exceptional self, which with a child’s impudent pretense of not caring she flung straight into the face of the world. Caught off guard, the world flinched and applauded, and it went on applauding to the end.
Even at birth, Tallulah was thought to be different from everyone else. Her mother, dying a few days after Tallulah was born, said of her that she would always be able to take care of herself—grim sentence of life to pronounce upon a child. The prophecy passed into the Bankhead family lore; Tallulah was to hear it again and again as she was growing up. Like all such family stories, it may have become a burden too accustomed to seem heavy. In any event, she turned the saying into a joke, laughter for her having many uses. The strength of her character showed itself early. In the cradle, she was already successfully pursuing privilege, by methods that served her all her life. Before she had learned to speak, she found the means, howling and kicking, to make herself the center of attention, and for well over sixty years she never willingly surrendered that position. During the mingled, indistinguishable days and nights of her prime, in London, New York, or Hollywood, wherever Tallulah was was where the party was. Round that rowdy, demonic apparition, now dressed with flapper chic in a frock by Worth, now naked to the last shadowy crevice of pale, plump skin, the rest of the dancers circled and drank and fell down exhausted and went to sleep; Tallulah danced on. If the party continued all night and then all day and then again all night, so much the better; her ideal was to leave the house, give a performance in a theatre, studio, or night club, and come back to find lights blazing, servants abed, the party still under way.
Tallulah’s motto was “Press on!” This had begun as an amusing maxim of the London era—the sort of catch phrase that the golden ninnies of “Decline and Fall” and “Vile Bodies” would shout to one another on the brink of some sick-making social catastrophe—but it became with time something genuine, something worth believing in. She told a friend of her later years that it would please her very much to have the words carved on her tombstone. (In reality, the stone, in Old St. Paul’s Churchyard, in Rock Hall, a little town on the Eastern Shore, bears only her name and the dates 1902-1968.) She pictured herself exhorting others from the immobility of the grave to plunge headlong into the intricate, messy thick of things. It was characteristic of her that, while she managed to take in the horror of not being able to move in death, the horror of not being able to talk was past imagining: Tallulah mute was no Tallulah. “Press on!” meant to her, in the words of a contemporary, the baseball player Satchel Paige, “Never look back—something might be gaining on you.” She had found her way to that stoic credo long before she found the words to utter it in. Better to make a fool of oneself in the center ring, jeered at by thousands, than not to be inside the tent; there were worse things than failure, and the worst of these things was to be ignored. She was always and at no matter what cost in emotion to herself and others intensely present, intensely to be reckoned with. Impossible for her to remain decorous and aloof upon the sidelines if there was hell to be raised elsewhere. On rare occasions—the inauguration of a President, the wedding of a goddaughter—she would seem to stand aside by choice, but the act of abnegation was so unlike her that it was conspicuous, and drew all eyes. She shimmered and burned in the wings, and so they were no longer wings; she had obliterated them.
Imperious and cajoling, Tallulah practiced an infant’s tyrannies among adults. The consequences ought to have been deplorable, but, to the scandal of many right-thinking people, they were not. She flourished and she made others flourish. She was superlatively acute in her intuitions, superlatively reckless, and, in her youth, superlatively ignorant. It seemed natural to her in those days to take the daydreams that clutter and befuddle the minds of schoolgirls, and make a program out of them. She assumed there was no hope so foolish that it could not be realized. Her lack of knowledge of the world made her all the readier to conquer it. She was assured by the greasy-paper, gushing movie magazines on which she doted that unknown girls from small towns became great stars overnight, and she believed it. She had, moreover, in her own eyes a certain hereditary preëminence. Jasper, Alabama, where she was born and grew up, might be a small town, but she was not an unknown girl. She was a Bankhead of Alabama, and the Bankheads were far from being nobodies. Her father was a member of the House of Representatives; her grandfather was a senator. They were big men at home, and they were pretty big men in Washington. Tallulah never doubted that to be a Bankhead was to insure respect wherever she might go, and it was ironic that she was to make her first name so famous throughout the world that even in her twenties her second name had become gratuitous. It was also ironic that she had made her first name famous by means not altogether respectable, which is to say by being incessantly gossiped about as well as by the hardest of hard work. No matter; she had passed into the language, and her patronymic had become a witticism by omission. Beatrice Lillie, on being informed that Tallulah was expected at a party, asked “Tallulah who?” and brought down the house.
Jasper, when Tallulah was growing up in it, was a sandy, leafy town in the thinly peopled piney-woods country that stretches north from Birmingham to the Tennessee border. The town was served by two railroads: the Southern and the so-called Frisco, whose official name, the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Company, had early proved more wistful than descriptive; its main line ran between Memphis and Pensacola, and it never pushed farther west than Texas. Jasper in Tallulah’s time had a population of two or three thousand. A number of mines were being worked in the vicinity, including the Bankhead mine, and creeks and fields, fishing and hunting waited within five minutes’ walk of the courthouse square. The town was all up hill and down dale, and smelled sweetly of pine and honeysuckle, sourly of box and the chunky soft coal that burned winter and summer in the kitchen grates. Jasper had been grubbed out of forest, and along the streets were stands of sweet-gum and oak and hickory and tulip trees. In a big white wooden house called Sunset, on a knoll on the edge of town, four or five generations of Bankheads and family connections and servants lived in a grand disorder of continuous hospitable comings and goings, and in their midst a girl with large, incandescent dark-blue eyes and long honey-colored hair threw her terrifying tantrums and got her way. “I would hurl myself on the floor and scream till I was purple,” she said long afterward. “My father would run away out of the house, leaving the women in charge.”
She was fat. She was motherless. She had a sister who was a year older than she, prettier than she, and, being in precarious health during the early years, more pampered than she. Eugenia, named for their mother, Adalaide Eugenia Sledge, was every bit as intelligent as Tallulah; indeed, among the friends they were to have in common there were some who considered Eugenia the more intelligent, as she was often the more exuberant and bizarre in her conduct. (Any list of Eugenia’s bizarreries must include her seven marriages, three of them to the same man. Over the years, Eugenia has lived in many countries, under many dispensations; at the moment she is living in Hawaii and, at the age of seventy-one, is said to be sampling life there with undiminished vigor and eccentricity.) No one was surprised by the intelligence of the Bankhead girls; the family was known to be brainy. The girls’ grandfather John Hollis Bankhead enlisted in the Confederate Army at the age of eighteen in 1860, and was mustered out at the end of the war with the rank of captain. By quickness of mind and unusual energy, Captain John, as he was ever after to be known, prospered in politics and business alike. Tallulah used to maintain that he once owned a controlling interest in the Coca-Cola Company; this was not so, but money came easily into his hands from here and there. In alliance with Oscar W. Underwood, his fellow-senator from Alabama, he created a political machine that secured for William Bankhead, his second son, a place in the House of Representatives; for John Hollis Bankhead II, his eldest son and namesake, a place in the Senate; and for Dr. Thomas M. Owen, who married his younger daughter, Marie, a post as head of the Department of Archives and History of the State of Alabama. (An elder daughter, Louise, helped her mother run Sunset. A younger son, Henry, spent much of his career in the Army.) Alabama was the first state to establish such archives; it did so in part because that inexhaustible busybody Marie Bankhead Owen wanted a suitable place in which to store the family memorabilia. During the thirties, she hornswoggled the Roosevelt Administration into constructing an enormous white marble mausoleum of a building for the Department of Archives; it is a far grander structure than the nearby state capitol, and Dr. Owen’s panelled office in the Department—which became Marie’s upon his death, for she was immediately appointed his successor—would not seem out of place in the White House.
Will Bankhead, the father of the girls, won a Phi Beta Kappa key at the University of Alabama, where he was on the football team, the baseball team, and the debating team. Upon graduating from the law school of Georgetown University, he set himself up in the practice of law in Huntsville, Alabama. He spoke and wrote with a Victorian orotundity well suited to what he would no doubt have called the hustings, and it is sometimes difficult to catch sight of the real man behind the fancy-Dan verbiage. He had once hoped to be an actor and was not above striking poses, privately as well as publicly. Tallulah quotes at length from his diary in her so-called autobiography, compiled by her friend and press agent Richard Maney from recollections she dictated at random into a device she never wholly mastered. (The autobiography was published in 1952 and was one of the best-selling nonfiction works of the year.) In an entry in his diary for January 31, 1904, the twenty-nine-year-old Will is full of maudlin eloquence and self-pity:
Six years have flown, and have flown almost with fury since last I wrote herein. The scene then was New York City, the writer a young struggler in the malls of a stupendous city, and his years were far fewer than now. Today, I write again in Huntsville, placid, tender old town in the shadow of the hills, and I am older far than they, and sadder.
This is my wedding anniversary. Four years ago I took to my heart and to my name the tenderest and the most beautiful girl the golden sunlight of Heaven ever curtsied to in caressing. Today out at Maple Hill cemetery, sleeping beneath a white shaft of marble, not as purely white as her soul but meant to typify it, sleeps that blessed dust “dearer to me than the ruddy drops that visit this sad heart,” my blessed Gene.
Will Bankhead was indeed a sad young man when he wrote those lines, and he was perhaps also a tipsy one. With reason, he had taken to the bottle. He was genuinely bereaved—he didn’t remarry for many years—and his daughters had been wisely bundled off to the swarming big house in Jasper, to be brought up by his mother and sisters and assorted hangers-on. The cases that came the way of a beginning lawyer in Huntsville were meagre both in substance and in payment: slim pickings for a handsome young spellbinder who had once been invited to join a theatre company in Boston and who had tasted briefly the exhilaration of a sketchy financial career in Wall Street. Few amusem*nts are available to the chaste and inconsolable save drink and brawling, and Will Bankhead’s pursuit of them was such that by Captain John’s standards he amounted to a family disgrace as well as a public nuisance; he was ordered to join his parents and babies in Jasper, where a strict eye could be kept on him. Even there, he was for a time drunken, combative, and suicidal. In one of Tallulah’s unpublished and not always reliable tapings she asserts that he twice took the Keeley cure, a then popular means of arresting alcoholism. Be that as it may, Will Bankhead pulled himself together, and by 1916, when, thanks to an ingenious stroke of gerrymandering devised by his father and brother, he was elected to Congress, he had learned how to drink in moderation. Congress then contained, as it always has, a notably high proportion of heavy drinkers, but Will Bankhead kept a stern hold on himself; he was mild, charming, dutiful, and accommodating. Far more liberal in his politics than the constituents he represented, he eventually became a loyal servant of the New Deal and saw to it that ample federal funds were continuously funnelled into the impoverished countryside of northern Alabama. In 1936, though he was by then in ill health, he was elected Speaker of the House, and at the Democratic Convention of 1940 he was a candidate for the Vice-Presidential nomination—a position that, despite Roosevelt’s having assured Bankhead that the race was open to all comers, went by Roosevelt’s command to Henry Wallace after a single ballot. It was just as well for the Party that Bankhead lost. On September 10, 1940, while he was getting ready to address a political rally in Baltimore, he suffered a ruptured artery and was taken to a hospital. Tallulah and her sister flew down from New York to be with him. Tallulah was in rehearsal before resuming a long national tour in “The Little Foxes;” the opening of the tour was to be at Princeton on the fourteenth. Tallulah and her father had met only at rare intervals in the previous twenty years, but he had remained—and would always remain—the most important figure in her life. Speaker Will in his last days said two remarkable things; they serve to make him a much more vivid presence to us than anything we have learned about the rest of his sixty-six years. At the hospital in Baltimore, a doctor examining him inquired, “Where is the pain?” Speaker Will replied, “I don’t play favorites; I scatter my pain.” Many years after the event, Tallulah confided to her friend Eugenia Rawls, who was acting with her in “The Little Foxes” at the time of Bankhead’s death, some of the details of her final meeting with her father. “He looked about thirty,” Tallulah said. “The doctor came in and he said Daddy had been unconscious. When he regained consciousness, he felt he had to go back to Washington, insisted on being moved. The last thing I did—it was September and hot, his feet were sticking out, and just before I left I stooped down and kissed his feet, and said ‘Do you love me, Daddy?’ and he said ‘Why talk about circumferences?’”
Circumferences—what can that mean? What can it not mean? Tallulah, who had a strong feeling for words, was haunted by “circumferences.” Her father had a wry sense of humor, but surely he was not being flippant on the edge of the grave. Whatever the word meant to him, Tallulah would have liked it to mean that his love for her was so great as to be without bounds. When she and her sister Eugenia were little, it was an accepted fact that Eugenia was their father’s favorite; Tallulah spent a lifetime seeking to redress that imbalance—of course, in vain. The wounds of childhood are never to be healed. The rivalry between the sisters was intolerable; so was the bond that held them together. Nevertheless, in her will Tallulah established a sizable trust fund in Eugenia’s behalf; she had helped her out often in life, and she would go on helping her out after death. She did her best to forgive Eugenia for being their father’s favorite, and she did her best to forgive her father for having made Eugenia his favorite. Someday, somehow, he would come to see how precious Tallulah was to him. It was only to be expected that her autobiography, published twelve years after Speaker Will’s death, would bear the dedication “For Daddy.” Who else had ever offered him a whole book?
It was Will Bankhead who first encouraged Tallulah’s interest in the stage. He had a voice, she was to say long afterward, like Lionel Barrymore’s, and his amateur playacting was in the robust Barrymore tradition. Once, in Washington, a few years before his death, he drove Tallulah from the railroad station to the theatre where she was starring in “Reflected Glory.” As they reached the stage door, he glanced about and said, “Oh, Tallulah, if I had only just had one whack at it!” He had had many a whack at it in private, for in the early days in Jasper, instead of reading bedtime stories to the girls, he would entertain them with long passages out of Shakespeare, the Bible, Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert W. Service, and James Whitcomb Riley. When Tallulah was four or five, her father took her to vaudeville shows in Birmingham, where—a quick study from birth—she readily memorized stanzas of songs that by her father’s standards were far too racy for little girls to sing.
Will Bankhead’s nicknames for Tallulah when she was little were Sugar and Dutch, the latter being at the time a common term for anyone who was fat. His nicknames for Eugenia were Nothin’ Much and Kildee, because she was so tiny. (The kildee, or killdeer, is a small plover, noted for its plaintive cry.) Will Bankhead called Tallulah by her baptismal name only when he was displeased with her, and then only very gently: “Just ‘Tallulah’ was enough to make me shake.” Many years later, when his daughters were among the most notorious international showoffs of the nineteen-twenties, Will Bankhead refused to find any public fault with them. He was a conventional man of his time and place, who knelt beside his bed every night to say his prayers, and who never swore or took the name of the Lord in vain, but no matter what scandalous activities Tallulah might be making headlines with, he would say, “Don’t criticize my daughter. Whatever faults she has are from me.”
No faults from the mother she never had, beside whose open coffin Tallulah was christened? The mother’s contribution to Tallulah’s character is worth speculating on, and perhaps the more so because it came from the far side of the grave. At this distance in time, it is hard for us not to judge harshly the economy of family emotion that led the Bankheads to link a funeral with a christening; a pious Episcopal man of God turned from ushering Ada Eugenia Sledge Bankhead out of this world to ushering her baby into it. What a bleak welcome it must have been, even if one was unable to take the measure of the bleakness until years later! “I never knew my mother,” Tallulah said. “She survived my birth by but three weeks. Her death was brought about by complications arising from my birth, but I never had any feelings of guilt.” Under the circ*mstances—for who would think of blaming a newborn infant for anything?—to protest that one feels no guilt is to imply that feelings of guilt are reasonable, do indeed exist, and are being purposely ignored. In Tallulah’s case, we know that she grew up believing that her father blamed her for the loss of his matchless bride. Hard enough not to be his favorite; harder still to be thought the occasion of what he called the greatest tragedy of his life; hardest of all to feel, like any motherless child, that she had been betrayed, and to know this feeling to be a forbidden one. It was Tallulah who had been wronged by Ada, not Ada by Tallulah, but who among the family would dare accept this version of the events that had overtaken poor Will? De mortuis nil nisi bonum; of Ada, the nonpareil (“the tenderest and the most beautiful girl the golden sunlight of Heaven ever curtsied to in caressing”), nothing but rhapsodies. Thus, to the guilt of having as an infant “murdered” her mother was added the guilt of blaming her for a betrayal that only Tallulah seemed to have any awareness of. Ada had abandoned Tallulah: in childhood there can be no graver injury than that. For the mother to have gone off to wherever it was she had to go, and not come back—for the mother to have forgotten the child! All the rest of her life, Tallulah was to suffer from the fear of being deserted, of being left alone by day or night, unguarded, unnursed, unloved. She wanted parties never to end and bridge games never to end and conversations never to end. She would turn friends into prisoners, locking their hats and coats in closets to keep the friends from saying goodbye. Like most of us, she feared the night more than the day, and her fear increased with age; predictably, her ways of dealing with it grew more unbecoming as they grew more unsuccessful. Drink, drugs, sex: they were for her the means by which to outwit an intolerable prospect, and they did not suffice.
Ada had done Tallulah another, more indirect injustice by dying: she had at once become a figure unchallengeably superior to any living person. It was true that Ada had been a celebrated beauty—Tallulah would quote with pride the opinion of the drama critic Stark Young that her mother had set a standard for beauty through the entire South in his time—and had died at twenty-one. The delicacy of her features, the exquisiteness of her coloring, the flirtatious piquancy of her manner were fixed forever; what would anyone wish to remember about her save that she was perfect? This was the burden Tallulah grew up under and would have been ashamed not to consent to bear.
Tallulah saw little of her father as she was growing up. She was shuffled at irregular intervals from her grandmother and Aunt Louise in Jasper to her Aunt Marie in Montgomery and back and forth among a half-dozen startled schools, and Will in mourning, his mind full of a sainted lost Ada, was only rarely before her eyes, silently reproaching her. Tallulah in Jasper claimed to be her grandparents favorite, though the grandparents themselves maintained that they loved all their grandchildren equally well. Tallulah Brockman Bankhead—she always signed her initials T.B.B., and not T.B.—had been named for her grandmother and had at least that claim to extra attention. The mother of the first Tallulah Brockman Bankhead, Mary Elizabeth Stairley Brockman McAuley, lived with the family in Sunset up to her death, in 1915, at the age of ninety-three. Mrs. McAuley and her first husband, James Henry Brockman, making their way into Alabama from the Carolinas long before the Civil War, had spent a night at Tallulah Falls, Georgia, already a well-known scenic attraction, and the family story was that they had conceived a baby there, to whom they gave the name of the falls in homage. The baby grew up to become a fitting consort for Captain John, matching him in energy and determination, and providing him with five able and aggressive children. (Except for Will, it was a generation of Bankheads notably fat, round-headed, and full of confidence.) Grandmother Tallulah was “Mamma” to her namesake, and she did her best to play a mother’s role at a difficult age—she was in her sixties by then—and with a most difficult child. She was a busy woman and not a subtle one, and she preferred quick results to lasting ones. Her method of attempting to control Tallulah’s continual tantrums was to spill a bucket of water over her; the problem was to have a bucket of water in the right place at the right time, for Sunset was a big house and there were barns and chicken coops and grape arbors and three acres of grounds, and Tallulah was apt to throw a tantrum anywhere, which is to say wherever she thought it would cause the most trouble.
Perhaps in despair of keeping his girls in school, Will took to telling them that if they knew Shakespeare and the Bible and could shoot craps, that was all the education they would ever need. Still, he had sought more formal knowledge than that for himself, and his poor jest may have concealed a profound unease about the failure of his fatherhood. In his early days as a widower, when he had drunk and sung and brawled and grieved, it must have consoled him to think that, however much he disgraced the family name, his daughters were growing up under the strict tutelage of his mother and sisters and would be sure to reach their high level of decorum and respectability. Life turned out to be less manageable than he had hoped. For one thing, his mother was often in Washington, taking care of old Captain John and enjoying the social perquisites of her husband’s increasingly important position in the capital. (Captain John was the last Confederate veteran to serve in the Senate.) For another thing, Tallulah fiercely disliked her Aunt Louise, who tried to keep things in order at Sunset. It became a question of which of them would be the first to reduce the other to tears. If Tallulah nearly always had a good time during her visits with Aunt Marie in Montgomery, it was thanks in part to the fact that Aunt Marie was far too busy with her own family and career—she was constantly dashing off unpublishable novels and unproduceable plays, and she later compiled a five-volume history of Alabama, in which the Bankheads were not neglected—to keep close watch on Tallulah, and thanks in part to the fact that she believed in Tallulah. She was proud of her from the beginning, and she never stopped being proud. On a visit to New York in 1939, when she was seventy, she said, “I’ve seen Tallulah in ‘The Little Foxes,’ I’ve seen the World’s Fair, and I’ve seen a fight at the Stork Club. Now I can go home and tell them I’ve seen everything.”
Montgomery proved a good place in which to practice showing off. If one’s family was important enough to have earned certain privileges, then one certainly ought to profit from them. Tallulah, fat and pimpled and far from beautiful, took care to make herself conspicuous. An adolescent dreamer of girls’ dreams by night, she was by day an athletic tomboy. Her boisterous physicality caused a stir in Montgomery. Once, when Tallulah was about eleven, no less a person than the Governor of Alabama tried to prevent her from cartwheeling the length of a street adjacent to the capitol. Tallulah sassily informed the Governor that she had disregarded his admonition because her grandfather had taught her that she was always to finish anything she had started. And who might her grandfather be? Senator John Hollis Bankhead, of Washington, D.C. Her answer flummoxed the Governor, as Tallulah intended it to. Over the years, she developed an acute sense of pecking orders, in and out of politics. She learned how little it takes to make people bleed, and sometimes she could not resist demonstrating her skill at this unpleasing game.
By a coincidence that must have been striking even then, in Montgomery while Tallulah was growing up a girl two years her senior was making local history with her beauty and grace and reckless ways. Her name was Zelda Sayre. What was there in the air of the little Montgomery of those days to foster such a trio of idol breakers as Zelda Sayre and Eugenia and Tallulah Bankhead? A few years later, they would be among those whom Scott Fitzgerald was celebrating when, in “The Great Gatsby,” he wrote, “In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” How far they had come, those three, and how quickly! They were clever and lovely and racy, and they would do anything on a dare. Men and women fell in love with them almost without regard to their sex. They charged the air around them with expectation: in their presence it seemed always that something wonderful was just about to happen. Whatever they did, it would be as if for the first time and as if without effort, a lightly thrown-away success. Effort and failure were for their imitators.
The hoydenish cartwheels and back somersaults and handstands that Tallulah perfected in the long summer afternoons of Montgomery were later to astonish New York and London, onstage and off. So were the words she learned in youth—the harsh, violent, incantatory slang that, like so much of the language in which we express emotion, has been slowly leaching up out of underground sources throughout this century. It is a slang that gained general acceptance among whites only during and after the Second World War and was not to become a commonplace of American speech until the nineteen-sixties. In the years when, as a well-born Southern girl, Tallulah ought to have been learning French and field hockey and penmanship at some proper finishing school, she was acquiring a mastery of vulgar English that afterward earned her a fame distinct from the fame earned by her beauty and talent and from that earned by her sexual and alcoholic misadventures. She was, one may say, incomparably foulmouthed. In the permissive seventies, when children in prams prattle billingsgate, it is hard to convey the effect that Tallulah’s language had upon most conventionally brought-up Americans of her time. It was an effect heightened by who one saw she was: so evidently a lady, dressed with care in her neat short white gloves and pearls, standing when older women entered the room, addressing them as “Ma’am,” and risking in their presence nothing stronger than an occasional muffled expletive. The real riches of her obscene tongue were enough to turn top sergeants into Trappists out of envy.
Since she had an excellent, if ill-trained, mind, what she said was often memorable, and so was the length at which she said it. A witticism that has been attributed to her friend Fred Keating—“I’ve just spent an hour talking to Tallulah for a few minutes’”—gives a sufficient hint of the torrent of words that the simplest inquiry was apt to release. She practiced free association on a titanic scale. The point at which one entered the maze of her mind bore little relation to the point at which one eventually emerged; the journey was exhilarating and unretraceable, and could prove tiring. A newspaper reporter might begin an interview with her backstage after a performance, hoping, with luck, to be granted twenty minutes of her time, and end the interview many hours later in her hotel bedroom, numb with information about politics, baseball, sexual intercourse, acting, the British Royal Family, mineral deposits in northern Alabama, gambling odds, gardening, breeds of dogs, brands of bourbon, and ballroom dancing.
From childhood, she displayed a knack for malapropisms and non sequiturs. Having so much to say and being eager that every word of it be rushed into the world as quickly as possible, she would brook no interference—least of all by her own critical faculties—with a free outpouring of ideas. Besides, she enjoyed making howlers. On hearing some novel blunder fall from her lips, she would salute it with a shout of admiring laughter. She retained all her life the literal-mindedness of the very young. At the end of a story, she always wanted to know what happened next. Once, she was told about an actress who got caught in a curtain as it was being hauled up into the flies. Tallulah asked, “How far up did she go?” On another occasion, she was visiting Donald and Eugenia Seawell at their farm on the Eastern Shore. Donald Seawell was her attorney for nearly thirty years. Eugenia Seawell—Eugenia Rawls on-stage—played with her not only in “The Little Foxes” but also in “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.” The Seawells daughter and son, Brook and Brockman, were her godchildren. Tallulah was taking a nap on a couch in the living room of the Seawell farmhouse when Eugenia Seawell caught sight of Brockman and a friend approaching the house by sailboat. Knowing that Tallulah disliked being awakened by unexpected incursions, Eugenia gently roused her and warned her of the imminent arrival of the two small boys. Silently, Tallulah reached for her handbag beside the couch, took out a comb, ran it through her hair, put on some lipstick, and lay back to continue her nap. Just before closing her eyes, she spoke for the first time. “Why are they coming by sailboat?” she asked.
A friend who once tested with a stopwatch Tallulah’s average flow of words per minute estimated that the daily total came to just under seventy thousand, which is equivalent of a short novel; on a long weekend she could approach without strain the wordage of “War and Peace.” If the quantity of words that Tallulah spoke was astonishing, still more astonishing was the voice she spoke them in. Over a period of twenty or thirty years, it became perhaps the most readily identifiable voice in the world. Thanks to her movie, radio, and TV appearances, its curious sound, at first hearing not unmistakably the voice of a woman, was familiar to tens of millions of people, and it was a sorry comic who in the shabbiest small-town night club could not provide an imitation of it capable of being instantly recognized and applauded. The voice was extraordinarily low, sweet, and husky, and the columnist John Crosby wrote of it that it had more timbre than Yellowstone National Park. It seemed to possess its own humid tropical climate; one felt drawn to it and warmed by it, and birds and animals found it every bit as irresistible as human beings did. Ever an ardent amateur pathologist, Tallulah attributed its low register to the variety of diseases she suffered during the first six years of her life; by her reckoning, these included tonsillitis, whooping cough, croup, measles, mumps, pneumonia, and smallpox. Whatever the cause of the voice, its effects were immediate and uncanny. Audiences sat smiling at it and basking in it, and the lines it spoke, which might be in the best drawing-room English of Pinero, Maugham, Barry, or Coward, would have proved equally satisfactory if they had been in Choctaw.
