Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (17 page)

Tallulah suffered because she wasn’t pretty, and she also suffered because she was a girl. Carelessly Will had let slip that he would have liked his second child to be a son, and so Tallulah, along with Nancy Cunard and legions of other confused daughters, grew up believing she might have been more lovable had she been male. She tried to appease Will by becoming the next best thing, the Bankhead tomboy; while Eugenia offered her father smiles and obedience, Tallulah’s gifts were cartwheels, daredevil courage and a willingness to use her fists in an argument.

She also became the family clown. When Tallulah was five, Will took her to a vaudeville show to take away the pain of a trip to the dentist. She was far too young for it, but she loved every act, especially the ‘risqué chanteuse’ who was the star of the programme. During the ride home she mimicked the singer’s routine in her husky little voice, having no idea why its innuendo-laden lines (‘When he took his hat I wondered when he’d come again’) should make her father laugh so. The song became Tallulah’s special link with Will. If he was feeling lonely he would wake her and lift her up onto the dining table so that she could perform it again. One night he even got her to sing it for friends he’d brought home after an evening’s drinking.

It was a dubious lapse of judgement on Will’s part, letting his daughter sing burlesque to a room full of grown men, but to Tallulah, the raucous delight of her late-night audience was entrancing. ‘The cheering of a crowd did things to my spine, to my mind,’ she wrote in her memoir.
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‘I’ve often tingled to applause, but never did I have such tingles as that night.’ You could make people love you, she discovered, by keeping them entertained. However, she found it hard to moderate her tone. Tallulah’s hunger for attention was extreme: when she was cast in a school play she ruined her scene by improvising additional lines for herself and turning cartwheels across the stage. When she told a funny story she could ruin the effect by laughing herself into a state of collapse. She was an emotional windmill at full sail. Small grievances produced torrents of tears; anger made her violent. After an argument with her younger sister, Eugenia learned it was safest to get herself behind a locked door otherwise Tallulah would ‘be breaking into the room and be twisting my arm’.
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By the time Tallulah was ten, Will believed the only way to manage his younger daughter was to send her and Eugenia away to school. It proved difficult to find one nearby that would take them both as boarders, and the one he selected, the Convent of the Sacred Heart, was over a thousand miles away in Manhattanville, a suburb of New York. Inevitably, both children were wretched. Eugenia coped as she always did, by being biddable and working hard, but Tallulah was in trouble every day. The actress in her might have been mesmerized by the rituals of the convent – she liked to drape herself in a black shawl and sit with lighted candles in front of her mirror, trying to imitate the nuns – but the tomboy in her was floored. Restless, homesick, unable to focus on her lessons and overwhelmed by the new regime of rules, she was continually being punished.

She was also lonely. Most of the other girls in her class were from the North and were quick to judge her as a Southern outsider; her name sounded freakish to them
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and her exhibitionism seemed absurd. Back home she might be considered naughty but she still fitted in with the gregarious spirit of the Bankheads, who for all their old-fashioned views on race and religion, possessed a colourful streak of non-conformity, what Tallulah would appreciatively call ‘style and dash’.
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Her grandfather’s loud voice used to ring through the house in Jasper, mixing up Shakespeare, proverbs and local vernacular. When his wife berated him for using low words like ‘ain’t’, he refused to listen, insisting that he would never gain another farmer’s vote if he spoke like a Yankee gentleman.

Will could be equally extrovert when his mood was on an upward curve, declaiming poetry, cracking jokes, inventing games of flamboyant hilarity and sometimes offering his daughters spectacularly inappropriate treats. It’s doubtful that there were any other pupils from the convent watching the Broadway melodrama to which Will took Tallulah and Eugenia after their first term at boarding school. Titled
The Whip
it wrought delicious havoc on their ten- and eleven-year-old imaginations, its highly sexed plot line involving dissolute British aristocrats and its dramatically cacophonous stagings of a train wreck and car collision, leaving both girls ‘red eyed and disheveled’.
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The other pupils in the convent apparently came from far more decorous backgrounds. When Tallulah tried to make them laugh, by telling stories or parading naked around the dormitory, they curled their lips in disdain: when she tried to join their games they regarded her simply as an annoyance. Inevitably, the more of a pariah Tallulah felt, the worse her behaviour became. At the end-of-term service, the pupils with the highest marks for conduct were given white veils to wear as they filed into chapel, and a white lily to hold. Tallulah, however, was singled out to walk in line with a black veil. Weeping, she felt like ‘an untouchable’.
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After the convent Tallulah was sent to a succession of different schools, but she remained, intractably, a problem child. While she liked reading and was clever and inquisitive, she found it difficult to concentrate during class. Perhaps if she had been given more opportunities to perform in school plays or recitals she might have settled better. But while she loved to act and had a facility for learning chunks of poetry and dialogue by heart, she was rarely picked for anything but a minor part. Her behaviour was too unpredictable and she looked too odd. With the onset of puberty Tallulah had grown even plumper and her skin had broken out in sullen blooms of acne. With her hair still cut childishly and bluntly short, even the most flattering costume could not make her look appealing. Certainly never as appealing as Eugenia, who stoked Tallulah’s burning sense of injustice by being repeatedly cast in the end-of-term shows.

By the age of thirteen Tallulah was spending most of her free time with her collection of stage and movie magazines, and with pin-up photos of her favourite stars: the haughty beauty Alla Nazimova and the adorably ringletted Mary Pickford. She was convinced she could become an actress, too, if only she were pretty like Eugenia, or like Zelda Sayre, a girl she knew in Montgomery. When Tallulah was small, she and Zelda had been rival tomboys, competing over backbends and cartwheels. But Zelda was now fifteen and had grown into a Southern belle, with beaux queuing up to dance with her and take her for rides.

Tallulah felt even more excluded from the conspiracy of attractive girls when a new rival appeared for her father’s love. Having finally gained some control over his drinking and depression, Will had begun courting a young secretary, Florence McGuire, and when he announced he was going to marry her, Tallulah was outraged. She did everything she could to undermine Florence, mimicking the way she tried to conceal the Jasper twang of her accent. Yet, slowly, she began to revise her opinion as she discovered the benefits that came with a stepmother.

Florence could make things happen. It was she who persuaded Will to buy his first motor car, a shiny Hudson roadster that brought tremendous zip and possibility to the family’s Sunday outings. And it was she, alone of all the family, who began to broach the subject of Tallulah’s appearance. Tallulah had always assumed that her spots and puppy fat were an intractable misery; no one had ever indicated that there might be a remedy. But Florence read the health and beauty columns of all the women’s magazines, and she not only suggested that Tallulah should let her dark blonde hair grow long and wavy, she also advised her to embark on a regime of diet and exercise.

Tallulah could summon draconian forces of will when she cared about something, and within just a few months she managed to shed over twenty pounds and achieve a miraculous healing of her skin. To the mild astonishment of her family, she had actually made herself lovely. And as Tallulah gazed at herself in the mirror, admiring her dewy cheeks, perfecting a mistily fervent expression in her large blue eyes, she could see herself, at last, as an actress.

The following year she moved one stage closer to her dreams. Will had run a successful campaign to be elected to the House of Representatives, and the whole family were moved to Washington, with Eugenia living in an apartment with Will and Florence, while Tallulah and her grandparents lived in the apartment immediately above. Mrs Bankhead’s dearest plan was to get her granddaughters launched in Washington society, but Tallulah was focused only on finding her way to the theatres and film studios of New York, which was now just over two hundred miles away.

To some degree she’d inherited this dream from her family. Both her grandparents had been keen amateur actors in their youth, performing in plays to raise money for the Confederate cause. Will had been so caught by the acting bug that he’d come close to abandoning his legal training for a job with a small repertory company in Boston. Even poor, dead Ada had once fantasized about going on the stage. Reciting poetry in her bedroom she had confided to her friend Margaret Du Bois Smith, that she was already ‘an actress in her heart’; starring in school plays she had dreamed of following in the footsteps of Sarah Bernhardt, Mrs Fiske and Eleanora Duse, all of whom she had seen perform.

As the daughter of an old plantation-owning family, Ada had no serious hope of fulfilling her ambition. It would have meant social disgrace. Yet in one generation much had changed and across America, thousands of girls were now dreaming, along with Tallulah, of becoming actors.

It was a national obsession, and it was one that had been created primarily by the film industry. A stage artist like Bernhardt could make herself known and loved by many (Henry James commented that the term celebrity would have had to be invented for Bernhardt if it hadn’t already existed). On the first of her several tours to America she had performed in no fewer than fifty towns. Yet the size of Bernhardt’s public was always circumscribed by her medium and until 1912, when she made her first film, most of her fans would only expect to see her act once or twice in their lifetimes.

In contrast, the cinema brought famous actors to every small town, almost every day of the week. By 1920 there were over twenty thousand movie theatres across America, in addition to the older, cheaper storefront nickelodeons that dominated the early years of cinema.
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Young women who might never have had the opportunity to see Bernhardt or Fiske now imagined themselves becoming another Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish.

Their ambitions were also fostered by the industry’s new fan magazines. By 1917 there were around fifty in publication, and if their titles were generic –
Picture-Play, Motion Picture Classic, Photoplay
– so too were their contents. Page after page featured meticulously lit and staged studio portraits of current film stars, along with stories about their homes, cars and possessions and details of their personal lives. Much of what was printed was shameless fabrication, produced by a PR industry that was becoming more and more sophisticated at peddling celebrity wares. The extravagant fictions that were spun around Theda Bara dwelt on the Arabian background of this silver screen vamp, on her menagerie of exotic pets and her wild love affairs. Yet in reality Theodosia Goodman was the daughter of a Cincinnati tailor, an intelligent woman who between film engagements preferred to live quietly with her family and friends.

The movie industry needed fantasy, not just to market their stars but to attract the lucrative advertising campaigns that came with them. Products of the new American mass market sold at a dramatically better rate when associated with a famous name. Picture cards of celebrities were given free with packets of cigarettes, and on the giant billboards that jostled for attention on American skylines and shop fronts, the eerily enlarged and blandly smiling faces of movie stars exhorted fans to buy face creams, hair pomade or mouth wash.

On the other side of world Diana Manners and Nancy Cunard existed in a world of bombs, rationing and casualty figures. And although America too had entered the war in the spring of 1917, it meant little to girls like Tallulah. The stories that dominated her imagination revolved around lucky young women like Olive Thomas, the Pittsburgh shop assistant who less than three years earlier had entered a competition to find the ‘most beautiful girl in New York’ and had ended up contracted to the International Film Company and married to Mary Pickford’s actor brother Jack.

Olive and Jack were now reputed to be ‘two of the gayest wildest brats who ever stirred the stardust on Broadway’,
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and it was in the June issue of
Picture-Play
that Tallulah spotted an item that promised her a chance to become gay and wild herself. The magazine was running a beauty contest, for which readers were invited to send in photographs; the prize was a role in a film to be directed and produced by Frank Powell in New York.

Some of these competitions could be cruel scams, the ‘role’ nothing more than the chance to play an extra in a crowd scene.
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Tallulah was deaf to any word of caution, however. She posed for her photograph in a borrowed hat and fox stole, and such was her excitement that she sent it off without remembering to write her name and address on the back. Three months later she was sitting with Eugenia in the local drugstore, drinking a Coca-Cola and leafing through the latest issue of
Picture-Play,
when there, among the gallery of twelve winning photographs, was her own picture. Above it was the dramatic headline WHO IS SHE? And beneath it an urgent request that the ‘mysterious beauty make herself known’.

Tallulah recalled that her ecstasy could be heard a street away. ‘I dashed out of the drugstore, magazine in hand, screaming, “I’ve won it! I’ve won it! I’m going on the stage.”’
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As yet she’d given no thought as to whether her family would allow her to claim her prize, nor to the matter of a chaperone: Tallulah at fifteen and a half was too young, too naive and too dangerously headstrong to be allowed to head off to New York without some adult companion.