Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (19 page)

Louise flinched from imagining what else Tallulah might be doing, and eventually she just abandoned her task. In the summer of 1918, she joined the Red Cross and sailed to Italy to help with the war effort. Her departure created a kerfuffle of reorganization as Aunt Marie and Florence agreed to take it in turns to come and stay with Tallulah at the Algonquin. But both women were shocked by the life Tallulah was leading there. ‘It was hell,’ Florence claimed, and neither of them was prepared to endure the responsibility of managing it. By early 1919, the Bankheads reluctantly accepted that they would simply have to trust seventeen-year-old Tallulah to survive New York on her own.

They did what they could to control her from a distance.
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Will begged the Algonquin’s manager Frank Case to impose a midnight curfew – a self-defeating threat, since she simply spent the night with a friend if she arrived back late. ‘I can either run a hotel or I can look after Tallulah,’ Case reported back. ‘I can’t do both.’
²¹
James Julian was deputized to send home regular reports, and various members of the family kept up a stream of anxious, admonitory letters, begging Tallulah to keep on the straight and narrow. Will’s focused on the need to restrict her spending and her new cigarette habit: ‘I hope you are not smoking too many, as they are mighty bad for you, your nerves and looks too.’
²²
Those from Tallulah’s grandmother appealed hopefully to her virtue: ‘I love you so dearly. It seems impossible for you ever to disappoint me and shatter my hopes.’
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In all the family correspondence was the unstated but clearly understood threat that if Tallulah really disgraced herself she would be ordered back home. But she did have others looking out for her. Estelle Winwood had long seen through Talullah’s bluster to the uncertain, needy child beneath, and so, too, had Jobyna Howland, a six-foot blonde actress with an inventively foul mouth and openly bisexual tastes. When Tallulah had first taken up smoking she’d been startled in the lobby one afternoon by a loud voice that ‘had barked,
Take that cigarette out of your mouth, you infant
’.
²⁴
It had been Jobyna, and after Louise’s departure she and Estelle appointed themselves unofficial guardians, making sure Tallulah was safely in her bed most nights and that she was not, at least, starving.

Tallulah had no concept of budgeting. Half of her $50 weekly allowance went on lodgings, but the rest was often splurged on a new hat or theatre tickets. By the end of the week she had nothing left for food and depended on Estelle and Jobyna to smuggle her into parties where she could eat for free. She was acquiring a slightly ragamuffin air; her one good evening dress looked soiled, the heels on her shoes were worn and she didn’t always wash as carefully as she might.

As yet she wasn’t wasting any of her allowance on cocktails or champagne – Will’s drinking had cast too long a shadow over her childhood for Tallulah to find it alluring – and the following year, when the new Prohibition laws made the sale of alcohol illegal, she was one of the few people in showbusiness not to be bothered. If Tallulah was keeping her promise to her family to steer away from drink, she was also being careful around men. She was still, in many ways, an innocent. One night at the Algonquin she’d been roused from sleep by Estelle Winwood knocking on her door in a desperate state. A man with whom she’d been drinking in the bar had forced himself into her bed and had not used a condom, and she needed to know if Tallulah had a douche bag she could use. Tallulah, anxious, sympathetic and wide-eyed at her friend’s distress, had no idea what such a thing was. Growing up among the Bankheads, she had been kept in ignorance of the most basic facts of life, and even now she’d had no practical experience of them.

The extent of her naivety might have shocked the men who were beginning to hover around her. With her carefully made-up face and glossy pout, heavy lidded eyes and plush little body, Tallulah looked absurdly, forwardly sexual. As the actress Jane Cowl observed, there were moments when her youth already looked ripe for corruption: ‘Her face is like an evil flower … She’s so intense she vibrates. She’s one of the most violently beautiful women I’ve ever seen.’
²⁵

Tallulah hardly acted the virgin, either. She was still delighted by the novelty of her beauty and by the permission it gave her to flirt. She was also genuinely curious about what sex might be like. Even before Louise’s departure there had been moments when, giving her aunt the slip, she had been alone with a man in the back seat of a taxi or in a dark corner at a party. Such experiences were perilously interesting: ‘More than once,’ she admitted, ‘I trembled on the brink of compliance.’
²⁶

There were forces much stronger than desire holding Tallulah back, though, and technically at least she would remain chaste for another three years. She was terrified of her family hearing rumours of scandal and ‘withdrawing [her] from the tournament’,
²⁷
and she was even more terrified of getting pregnant. The episode with the douche bag had inspired Estelle and Jobyna to impart a few salient facts about babies and contraception, and they had done so in a way that warned Tallulah of the danger and unpleasantness involved.

European women were beginning to enter a modern era in birth control, with the arrival of the Dutch cap. In America, however, a puritan majority remained opposed to the general availability of contraception. For most young women in 1918, the only ways to avoid getting pregnant were using vinegary-smelling douches or the thick Trojan condoms their lovers might have picked up from a barber’s – the new latex brand would not be introduced until the following year.
*
Both were unreliable, and at this stage of her career, when Tallulah was far hungrier for success than she was for a man, she would not run the risk.

She did, however, discover that New Yorkers had ways of enjoying themselves beyond those known to the Bankheads. As Tallulah would frequently and famously quip, ‘My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.’ Caught as she was between curiosity and caution, Tallulah was soon trying both.

The first time she experimented with cocaine, Tallulah was at a party where her host had invited her to follow him into the bathroom for a sniff. She had been terrified – ‘my brow clammy, my knees rattling [I was] sure I’d take off through the air like a rocket’.
²⁸
But the effect had proved delightfully euphoric and, like Tamara in Paris, she came to rely on the drug to lift her energy and confidence. It was hard to believe there was anything wrong with a substance so easy to acquire. The medical establishment regarded it as a useful stimulant, and while its growing association with crime, especially black crime, had resulted in restrictions of its legal sale and distribution, large quantities remained in circulation. Tallulah knew of several young boys who hung around outside a tearoom on West 40th Street offering bags of ‘snow’ for $50. Estelle berated her for the habit, saying that Tallulah couldn’t afford it and that it made her ‘dirty and rude’.
²⁹
She would routinely search her clothes for the little packets Tallulah kept knotted up in her handkerchiefs, flushing them reprovingly down the toilet. Yet Tallulah could always find someone at a party or dinner who would offer her more, and if there was none, she simply crushed an aspirin and pretended.

To equally little effect, Estelle tried to quell the rumours that were beginning to circulate about Tallulah and women. In the summer of 1919, Ethel Barrymore had introduced a young European actress, Eva Le Gallienne, into the Algonquin circle. Eva was just nineteen, pale, delicate and intense, and to Tallulah her life story was fascinating. As the daughter of the poet Richard Le Gallienne, she had been introduced to Sarah Bernhardt in Paris when she was just fourteen. Once she had embarked on her own stage career, Eva had moved from Europe to California, where she had been seduced by Alla Nazimova, one of Tallulah’s first idols.

Tallulah was both flattered and uncertain when Eva began to show an obvious interest in her, sending notes and presents to her room and inviting her out for dinner. She had only the vaguest idea of what a lesbian relationship might involve, and she had to go and ask one of her friends at the Algonquin – a young man with whom she’d developed a semi-sisterly, semicoquettish relationship – ‘What is it [they] do?’ The young man readily offered to show her, at which point Tallulah retreated. But there was a quality about Eva herself, simultaneously exotic and unthreatening, that emboldened Tallulah to respond to her overtures.

The affair lasted only a few months – Eva required a degree of intimacy that Tallulah found cloying and exhausting – but she very much enjoyed Eva’s sexual tutelage and was interested in experiencing more. The affairs she had at this time were mostly with women older than herself. Mercedes de Acosta, who was in New York at this time, claimed she was one of them; and there was also an unidentified New York hostess to whom Tallulah would later refer as ‘the only woman’ she had truly loved.
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In some ways these affairs were an extension of the vivid crushes she’d formed as a child – on the sweet-faced Sister Ignatia, for instance, who had been the only nun to show Tallulah any kindness during her first term at boarding school.

Certainly these women felt a much safer option than men. Early in 1920, John Barrymore had offered her a role in his new film,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
if she agreed to have sex with him, and Tallulah had backed away. However tempting the trade – Barrymore was her idol – she had sharp enough instincts to sense that he was too obviously ‘a hunter’ and that she would end up as his victim.
*

At this point in her career, Tallulah also found that women could be more professionally helpful to her than men.
^†
She was trying now to direct her career towards the stage. Her last movie performance in
The Trap
had been quite successful and had yielded the offer of a contract with Sam Goldwyn’s studio. Yet she had come to feel that the ‘flickers’ was a medium far inferior to live theatre, requiring little more of its performers than mugged expressions and exaggerated gestures and she was impatient to test herself as a real actor.

In an attempt to gain more stage experience Tallulah had accepted work with a repertory company in West Somerville, Massachusetts. It was punitively hard: she was rehearsing and acting several plays in rotation while living in primitive digs – a tiny room up three flights of stairs with ‘no private bath’ and little heating. She lasted only a few weeks there, but it was not the work that broke her but her fear of being too far away from the centre of the action in New York and of missing out on a new role or career break.

That break came in the summer when Jobyna put Tallulah in touch with Rachel Crothers, who was one of the most respected playwrights and directors in New York. While she was discreet about her private affairs with women, Crothers was active in promoting their public careers, and she took a great interest in Tallulah – Ann Andrews considered it to be ‘sort of … a crush’.
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Not only did she allow Tallulah to understudy Constance Binney, the female lead in her latest play,
39 East,
she also steered her towards polishing her craft. Tallulah might have ‘spark and instinct’, but she had no technique, and it was on Crothers’s advice that she attempted her first professional training, taking lessons in elocution, deportment and classical ballet.

With Crothers as her mentor, and Estelle and Jobyna as her guardian aunts, that summer Tallulah was being steered towards what she believed was her true destiny. As she wrote confidently to her grandfather, ‘I am going to make good with a bang! Wait and see. Then you will be proud of your bad little girl with her bad little temper.’
³²
For a few thrilling performances, while Constance Binney was taking weekend breaks, Tallulah was onstage as the play’s heroine, Penelope Penn. And although her contract with the play was terminated by a near comic farrago of events, including an actors’ strike and Tallulah being stricken with a severe case of appendicitis, it effected a crucial change in her fortunes. She was offered a second play,
Footloose,
in which her portrayal of a young woman victimized by a predatory older man earned recognition from the
New York Times
for ‘her considerable power’ and ‘real skill’.
³³
And in early 1921, Rachel Crothers offered her the lead in her next play,
Nice People.

Tallulah’s character was Hallie Livingstone, a beautiful, independent, wise-cracking flirt. A few months earlier
The Flapper
had done extraordinary business at cinemas across America, with Olive Thomas (the girl Tallulah had longed to emulate) starring as a new kind of heroine, with short skirts, a cigarette habit and a smart, independent attitude. Hallie was the same breed of heroine. Her dialogue was studded with careless, colourful slang: everything was ‘divine’, ‘dahling’, ‘mad’ and ‘the cat’s pyjamas’. She was fashionably treacherous and fashionably blasé about sex, commenting coolly to her friend Teddy, ‘I adore a man who is absolutely mad about me and yet who controls himself in that perfectly marvelous way.’
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Hallie was, above all, an ideal role for Tallulah. The deep, throaty catch in her voice, heightened by the smoking of which Will despaired, was perfectly modulated to deliver every sexual irony and innuendo in the lines that Crothers had written for her. During the twenty weeks in which the play ran at the Klaw Theatre,
Nice People
not only earned her praise as a fine comic actor, but in the feisty character of Hallie, she had found the mould for her own offstage image.
*