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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Most famous stage actors tactfully fade away. Who today is interested in Katharine Cornell, that First Lady of the American Theatre? Or that other First Lady, Helen Hayes? Or that First among Firsts, Ethel Barrymore? (Well, yes, she was the great-aunt of Drew.) Of the theatrical greats of their day, only Tallulah Bankhead, who died in 1968, has not gone gentle into oblivion. Since her death, there have been seven biographies, the latest, "Tallulah! The Life and Times of a Leading Lady," by Joel Lobenthal, published only this past fall. And her own book, "Tallulah," the No. 5 nonfiction best-seller of 1952 (No. 1 was the Revised Standard Version of the Bible; Whittaker Chambers's "Witness" was No. 9), is recently back in print.
Not many people remember Tallulah's stage performances, and almost nobody sees her few movies, yet here she is again, hectoring, demanding attention, catastrophically self-destructive; a star more than an actress, a personality more than a star, a celebrity before the phenomenon of celebrity had been identified. How appropriate that her final public appearance was on the "Tonight Show" (where she chatted with Paul McCartney and John Lennon). And what a complicated professional trajectory that suggests, given that her first real success--in London in 1923, forty years before the Beatles--was opposite Sir Gerald du Maurier, then the British theatre's leading matinee idol. ("Daddy," his daughter Daphne exclaimed, the first time she encountered Tallulah, "that's the most beautiful girl I've ever seen in my life.")
Tallulah, with her signature "dah-ling"s and her notorious peccadilloes and her endlessly caricaturized baritonal gurgle of a voice--a voice that the actor-writer Emlyn Williams said was "steeped as deep in sex as the human voice can go without drowning"--would be easy to dismiss as a joke if she hadn't also been a woman of outsize capacities. As it is, the story of her life reaches beyond gossip and approaches tragedy.
Tragedy, in fact, struck at the beginning. Her twenty-one-year-old mother--"the most beautiful thing that ever lived"--died of complications following Tallulah's birth, leaving her father, Will, so grief-stricken that he collapsed into a pattern of alcoholism, self-pity, and absence which lasted for years. The Bankheads of Alabama weren't rich, but they were aristocracy--Will Bankhead's father and brother were both United States senators--and the motherless Tallulah and her sister, Eugenia, were reared by their grandparents and aunts with strict guidelines (which they ignored) and a strong sense of privilege (which they indulged). Once Will pulled himself together, he went on to become a successful politician, ending as a much admired Speaker of the House under Roosevelt. Tallulah, in turn, was a lifelong passionate Democrat, and took credit--some of it deserved--for helping elect both Truman and Kennedy.
Politics was not the only passion that Tallulah inherited from her father--as a very young man, he had gone to Boston to try his luck as an actor. (He was hauled back home by a no-nonsense letter from his mother.) Even as a little girl, Tallulah was crazy to perform, and frequently when Will, somewhat the worse for drink, drifted home with his pals, he would lift her up onto the dining-room table and have her entertain the boys with risque songs. She revelled in it. A plump child with startlingly gold hair, Tallulah was an exhibitionist from the beginning.
Another side of her dramatic temperament expressed itself in wild tantrums when she didn't get her way. ("To deny me anything only inflames my desire.") She would throw herself down, beat the floor, grow purple in the face, scream bloody murder. Her sister would hide in the closet, but her commonsensical grandmother simply flung a bucket of water in her face.
There were...
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