Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (62 page)

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Tamara had endured three decades of neglect before she and her art were rediscovered. When Tallulah Bankhead returned to America in 1931 she, too, became aware of how fickle the forces of taste and fashion could be. Paramount Studios had been determined to market her as the new Marlene Dietrich, calculating that her musky vocal tones and deeply hooded eyes would mimic the extraordinary mystique of the German star, both their timing and judgement, however, were badly flawed.

Firstly the studio had failed to understand that Tallulah’s appeal was predicated on qualities very different from Dietrich’s. It was her comedic vitality that made her adorable to fans, and despite her considerable gift for sexual insinuation, she was not the languid femme fatale the studio bosses wanted her to be. The essential disconnection between Tallulah and her new image was evident in the first three films she shot in New York, in which her performances came across as both tawdry and flat. The fact that the material didn’t suit her also emphasized the lack of chemistry between her and the camera. Back in her teenage years, her features had been veiled by the magical but temporary dew of youth; now, in its starker adult form, her beauty looked almost caricatured on screen, as if the camera could find no mystery or nuance within it.

In early 1932, Paramount sent Tallulah out to Hollywood, hoping to restart her career. Gamely, she applied herself to the life of the studio star, buying a wardrobe of party frocks, renting a mansion and filling it with as many famous faces as possible. She flirted and flung out her best lines, was as outrageous as she knew how and, as always, ensured that the stories circulating about her, including a rumoured affair with Dietrich herself, were even more wicked than the truth.

All of Tallulah’s most self-promoting efforts, however, could not alter the fact that her arrival in Hollywood was unluckily timed. By 1932, the sobriety of the depression era was ushering in a new culture of piety into cinema. Salacious stories of film-star life and uncensored sexual content, which had been key to the industry’s rapid expansion, were now deemed inappropriate. A new Motion Picture Code had been introduced, determining the ways in which the studios should clean themselves up.

But Tallulah was incapable of moderating herself; in the late summer she gave an interview to
Motion Picture
magazine about her new life in Hollywood, and typically turned the conversation round to love and sex: ‘I haven’t had an
affaire
for six months,’ she complained, ‘the matter with me is I WANT A MAN!’
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Even in the wicked old world of Hollywood, women were not expected to issue such frank declarations of need. And although Tallulah’s line was quoted everywhere and the magazine’s circulation profited, she made the industry nervous. According to Douglas Fairbanks Jr, ‘we were a little frightened, a little on edge. You never knew what she was going to do.’

Just as Tallulah’s behaviour was out of key with the new Hollywood, so was the image that had been foisted on her. If sexual scandals were falling out of favour, so too were Dietrich-style sirens; already Paramount were seeking out more wholesome, fresh-faced starlets to sell to the public. Within a year it became evident to Tallulah that she had to leave – and when even the ubiquitous Elsa Maxwell failed to show up for her farewell party, she knew she was right to do so.

She travelled back to New York, and to what she considered her proper milieu, the stage. Aware that ten years was a very long time for an actor to have been absent from Broadway, she used her own money to fund and publicize her comeback production,
Forsaking All Others.
It was classic Tallulah material: a comedy about a spirited young bride and the adventures with which she consoles herself after being jilted at the altar. Yet while it attracted back many of her gallery fans, and some reassuringly good reviews, the play only ran for three months and lost Tallulah $40,000. These were hard times for the theatre, and even though she managed to keep her stage career active, it wasn’t until 1939 that she secured a long-running hit.

With every year that passed, Tallulah was also becoming more aware of her age. She was getting a little too gamey, a little too worldly to sustain her image as the darling ingénue. In 1938, despite being widely tipped for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in the film
Gone With the Wind,
she lost the part to an unknown English actress, Vivien Leigh, who was nearly twelve years her junior. The tyranny of youth was a fact of professional life, Tallulah knew that, but still she felt herself being edged onto shifting, uncertain ground.

Possibly she would have minded less if she had acquired the buffer of a family life, which in her fantasies, at least, she’d always craved. When she had been forced to have a hysterectomy in 1933, after being diagnosed with an advanced case of gonorrhoea, it had felt like a tragedy. Rumours circulated that she had caught the disease from the ‘divine’ Gary Cooper, whom she claimed she had always been determined ‘to fuck’. If so, this sexual conquest had deprived her of the beautiful babies she had imagined for herself, and for several months afterwards she was too depressed even to work.

She was still emotionally vulnerable in May 1937 when she visited London and re-encountered Napier Alington, newly single after the death of his wife. Cecil Beaton saw them together at a party and sensed her desperation. ‘Tallulah danced frenziedly, throwing herself about in a mad apache dance with Napier Alington. After he left she wept and bemoaned the fact that he had never married her. Then she threw off all her clothes, performing what she called ‘Chinese classical dances. In the midst of these outrageous situations one had to reluctantly drag oneself away.’
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Tallulah hated having to drag herself away, too, and in a reversion to her old pattern she rebounded from Naps into the arms of another, very different man. John Emery, an actor possessed of pleasant charm and matinee-idol looks, appeared to be the perfect remedy against Naps’s treacherous allure, and she was determined to have him. She met Emery at the end of July, proposed to him several days later and, on 31 August, they were married. Her impatience was driven not only by her hunger for love and stability, but also by the desire to offer her new life as a gift to her father. The previous year Will had been made Speaker of the House of Representatives, a position from which he might even aim at the Presidency, and Tallulah had long been conscious of the fact that her disreputable image was an embarrassment to him.

She wanted to present herself as the perfectly reformed daughter, and to that end she decreed that she and Emery would relaunch themselves as a classy, classic theatrical couple. There would be no more cheap comedies and sassy innuendo. Instead, in the autumn of 1937, she put together the finances for a production of
Antony and Cleopatra,
in which her husband would play Caesar and she, naturally, would be Cleopatra. Unfortunately, the critic who wrote that ‘Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night and sank’, summed up the general verdict that her acting skills were not remotely suited to Shakespeare. Nor, it turned out, was she suited to marriage.

Tallulah’s relationship with Emery foundered principally over her own exhausting need for attention and company. When she rudely claimed that her husband had not been big enough to satisfy her in bed, he retorted that she had never stopped talking long enough to notice; and their marriage had disintegrated long before their divorce was finalized in the summer of 1941. But if Tallulah minded the public humiliation, it was nothing compared to the grief she suffered over two infinitely more dreadful losses. The previous September, weakened by a recent bout of influenza, Will had suffered a fatal abdominal haemorrhage; just one day later Naps, too, had died, contracting pneumonia while on active war service in Cairo. These two men had been the loves of Tallulah’s life, and with their deaths she began to feel more deeply the chill of her own approaching middle age.

But, as always, distraction was provided by her career, which in 1939 had been given an unexpectedly successful new twist. She had been cast in
The Little Foxes,
a searingly political play by Lillian Hellman about the murderous struggle for money and power within a Southern family. Tallulah played Regina Giddens, a rapacious woman fighting for her rights, who was not only less sympathetic than any role she’d ever played, but also much older. New as this territory was, Tallulah recognized that Regina came with a complex history and a malevolent charisma that demanded real acting skills. Submitting herself to the discipline of her director, Herman Shumlin, she opened on Broadway to the most enthusiastic reviews of her career. The play not only survived twelve months in New York, but ran for a second year on tour.

Other significant roles followed, in Thornton Wilder’s
The Skin of our Teeth,
Alfred Hitchcock’s
Lifeboat,
and in a production of Noël Coward’s
Private Lives,
which she financed herself. By the time Tallulah was approaching fifty – an age she had always dreaded – she had started to market herself not only as a mature actress, but as a wickedly mature woman of the world. In 1950 she was hired to host a new radio talk show, NBC’s
The Big Show,
in which her self-parodying routine as a wise-cracking, hard-drinking roué gained her millions of devoted listeners. Two years later her memoir,
Tallulah,
topped the bestseller lists and was serialized in newspapers around the world. She was paid $20,000 a week to perform cabaret in Las Vegas, filling the house with her racy anecdotes and impersonations. Not only had Tallulah apparently survived the passing of her youth, she had become far richer and more famous than ever before.

Yet her new image had a brittle, almost desolate quality to those who knew her well. As she swaggered into a party or a bar yelling, ‘Isn’t anyone going to fuck me tonight?’ repeating the same old stories of her outrageous youth, Tallulah’s once bubbling mischief seemed shop worn.
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She tried to maintain her glamour with cosmetic surgery and thicker applications of makeup, but she was trying too hard, and her once scorchingly vivid features began to harden into a drag queen’s disguise. And because she was so successful at selling her public persona, she was also in danger of making herself less credible as an actor. Like Tamara courting Hollywood’s admiration, Tallulah was seduced into selling an image that could only damage her.

The crunch came in 1956 when she was offered the role of Blanche DuBois in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire.
It was the most important challenge of her late career, and Tallulah was determined to rise to it. However, her recent commercial antics had won her a new audience among young gay men, and it was they who crowded out the audience for
Streetcar.
It was a kind of tragedy for Tallulah that she had become a camp icon, for every line that she uttered became a prompt for laughter, and no matter what she or her fellow actors did, the audience was determined to treat Williams’s play as a screaming farce.

It wasn’t the death blow to her career, but after it she struggled. By the early 1960s she suddenly looked much older than her age. Some of the ravages of nicotine and alcohol could still be concealed by cosmetics, but they’d left her short of breath and inclined to clumsiness. Having once been so exhibitionist in her sexual demands, Tallulah now hated to be touched or even seen up close. There were no more lovers, only a series of tactful young men who could be hired or cajoled into taking care of her and escorting her to parties. She was still working, and there were nights when she could deliver a very competent performance, but there were also nights when she looked dangerously uncoordinated, and when her once perfect memory deserted her – occasionally her fellow actors were startled to hear her delivering lines from a completely different play.

Pills and drink cocooned her from too stark a realization of her own loneliness and professional decline, but they also precipitated the rapid deterioration of her health. She was only in her mid-sixties when she began to suffer intermittent hallucinations, her lungs began to fail and she lost her appetite for food. In December 1968, when she contracted Asian flu, she weighed only 100 pounds and was far too weak to fight the infection. The pugnacious life force at which her grandfather John had marvelled was all played out.

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Tallulah had lived her version of the flapper experiment with more public swagger than any of the other five women in this book. And by contrast, it was Diana Cooper who appeared to mellow into the most contentedly conventional old age. Certainly, once she had parted company with the theatre in early 1933, the trajectory of her life became more obviously pinned to Duff’s political career. She hosted clever little dinners for his colleagues, and when he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1937, she stamped her own brand of glamour on the running of Admiralty House. During the Second World War she accompanied him on his foreign postings: to America to drum up support for the British cause; to India and the far East to assess the readiness of British troops, and to Algiers in 1944, where he was sent as British Representative.

By 1945, when Duff was appointed ambassador to Paris and Diana became mistress of the British Embassy, she had apparently slipped into a life of irreproachable respectability. And yet, although it might appear as if she had put aside her old hankerings for independence, she had still not conformed to type. Her marriage to Duff continued to evolve in unpredictable ways, and while some of his mistresses (including the persistent Daisy Fellowes) remained a thorn in her side, others, such as the writer Louise de Vilmorin, became absorbed into her life.

Duff had fallen in love with the delicate, sharp-featured Lulu soon after they arrived at the Paris Embassy. But it was Diana, in her idealizing way, who came to love her more. Putting aside a room in the embassy for the younger woman’s personal use, she orchestrated a tender, rather joyous ménage between the three of them. And while she had always been convinced that she lacked any lesbian impulses, to her old friend Conrad Russell she acknowledged that Lulu was encouraging her to become ‘a little unnatural’ in her ‘ways’.
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