Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (38 page)

In many things Tallulah could be a perfectionist – costumes and lighting mattered tremendously to her – yet in other respects her performances were slapdash. Dialogue that effervesced with wickedness could just as easily fall flat; it wasn’t acting craft she delivered, merely the mood of the moment. Josephine, taken to task for the same weakness, worked stubbornly to overcome it, but few considered Tallulah capable of the same effort. Basil Dean, who produced many of her plays, came to the final judgement that she ‘lacked a sense of dedication that alone could overcome her basic lack of training … approaching the theatre and indeed each aspect of her life as an experiment, quickly to be dropped when unsuccessful’.
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Maturing as an actor would also require Tallulah to become more selective about her roles, holding out for parts that gave her depth or cast her against type. This she couldn’t do. Time and time again she returned to her default material, the glamorous fallen woman or the spirited working girl. In her defence, there weren’t many alternatives on the London stage, but she had also got herself into a situation where she needed to earn a great deal of regular money. Although her fees had gone up to £250 a week by the end of 1925, and would rise to £500 by the end of the decade, Tallulah spent her money much faster than she acquired it.

She was under pressure from her fans, too. The gallery-ites had exacting views about the material in which they wanted to see her, and by now it was becoming difficult for her to disappoint them. Tallulah’s next play, a slick and racy melodrama about modern marriage called
Scotch Mist
went down well, but the one that followed, in May 1926, met with unnerving disapproval from her fans.
They Knew What They Wanted
was precisely the kind of professional challenge for which Tallulah was ready. She played Amy, a young working-class girl from California who agrees to marry Tony, a sixty-year-old Italian winegrower. Amy means to be a good wife to Tony, but when he’s crippled by a bad fall, she yields to the temptation of his handsome foreman Joe. Temptation leads to pregnancy but, in a rare exception to the prevailing theatrical norm, the script doesn’t punish Amy with death and disgrace. Instead, it allows Tony to accept the illegitimate baby as his own, and Amy to return to her marriage.

Not only was this story unusually nuanced for the time, the dialogue in Sidney Howard’s script was exceptional, compelling and poignant. Tallulah recognized its quality and was determined to do it justice. She went shopping for her own costumes, a wardrobe of modest frocks that totalled barely £6, unlike the Chanel gowns she had worn in
The Green Hat,
and spent hours talking through Amy’s character and situation with Glenn Anders, the broad, handsome American actor who was cast as Joe.

Anders was impressed by her thoroughness: ‘Tallulah was trying her damnedest. She would do anything.’
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And many judged this to be the performance of her career so far. During the scene in which Amy battles between her conscience and her feelings for Joe, she evoked an anguished sexual hunger that, according to her fellow actor Cathleen Nesbitt, was far more raw and candid than Tallulah’s usual romping. At the moment when Amy and Joe finally touched, a little shiver went through her body that communicated itself to the entire audience. As Nesbitt recalled, ‘I’ve never seen anyone able to create such erotic tensions without any words.’
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Almost every review concurred that Tallulah had fully transcended her usual ‘farrago’ of trash. James Agate praised her for ‘a piece of sincere emotional acting felt from the heart and controlled by the head.’ St John Irvine in the
Observer
high-lighted a ‘nervous intensity I hardly suspected her to possess.’
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That night Tallulah went out dancing with Anders at the Embassy Club. He was dressed in white tie and tails, she wore a long green gown, and catching sight of their reflection in the ballroom mirrors, Anders murmured into her ear, ‘God, we dance beautifully together.’ The Prince of Wales was in the crowd watching, and for Tallulah it felt like a perfect affirmation of her success.
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Yet if she was getting the professional endorsement she craved, her gallery fans were sadly disappointed. Amy’s cheap frocks and drab marriage carried no appeal for them; the dialogue lacked any kind of innuendo for them to shriek over, and there weren’t the usual curtain calls at the end of each act, allowing them to demonstrate their Tallulah-love. After a few performances most had drifted away.

Going onstage without the assurance of their presence was disorienting for Tallulah, who had never lost her old childhood terror of abandonment. And she would only risk alienating her gallery-ites one more time, when she took the role of Marguerite in a 1930 revival of Dumas’s
La Dame aux Camélias.
She was drawn to the role because of its associations with Sarah Bernhardt – still the legend by which she and her generation measured themselves. But she also intended this period classic to silence reviewers, who’d begun to jeer at the frequency with which she and her characters ended up in their camiknickers onstage: ‘Let them say I undress in that!’
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she retorted hopefully.

Yet as the tragic courtesan Marguerite, Tallulah pleased neither her critics nor her fans. The long literary monologues she had to deliver, the confining crinolines and ringlets she had to wear, the pose of saintly self-sacrifice she had to adopt, were too alien. Tallulah admitted that she felt a ‘phoney’, and her fellow actress Joan Matheson said it was as though some ‘terrific vitality’ in her had been ‘crushed’.
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Normally Tallulah’s dressing room was the social heart of any new production, buzzing with drinks, laughter and impromptu parties, but her reviews for
La Dame aux Camélias
were so harsh that the rest of the cast kept their distance.

No wonder she kept reverting to type. The critics might revile the predictability of plays that revolved around sex and cocktails, but the gallery never applauded louder than when Tallulah opened in
Gold Diggers
in December 1926, playing a feisty, cartwheeling chorus girl whose Charleston was acclaimed by Adele Astaire as the best she’d ever seen. When Tallulah played her final tempestuous scene in
Garden of Eden
(May 1927), dressed only in her underwear, she elicited nightly shrieks from her fans.

Glenn Anders, who had grown close to her during the run of
They Knew What They Wanted,
was one of the few people to whom she confessed the vulnerability of her situation: dependent on her fame yet also trapped by it. She feared that most of the people who clamoured for her company were attracted only by the lustre of her celebrity. And yet she couldn’t resist making herself even more conspicuous. In late 1927 she bought a three-storey mews house in Mayfair, which she had designed in exquisite art deco style, silver paintwork setting off gold rug, pink upholstery and dark wood panels. There, she entertained on a lavish scale, inviting crowds of people to parties at which she served nothing but caviar and champagne cocktails. A young actor, Charles Bennett, who was invited to one, was astonished to see ‘all the big stars, the most famous people in England’ spilling out of Tallulah’s tiny drawing room into the kitchen and up the stairs.
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A party she gave for Ethel Barrymore went on for three days, simply segueing into yet another party that she’d arranged for yet another famous friend.

Tallulah had set in motion a social cyclone. And even if she feared that it was all glitz and opportunism, she had no idea how to bring it to a halt. She was as caught by the mechanism of celebrity as Zelda and Scott had been in New York. One clear register of her éclat was the degree to which she was courted by the Bright Young Things. Obsessed with getting as much press coverage as possible, these aesthetes and exquisite rebels would tip off gossip columnists (often their friends) with the location of their next stunt: ramping up the extravagance and campery of every new costume ball. For them, having Tallulah on their guest lists was the surest guarantee that the newspapers would take an interest.

So well known was she that if she went to the theatre as a member of the public, half the auditorium would get up to crane a look at her. It was gratifying to her ego, but even Tallulah recognized how unfairly it drew attention from the actors she’d come to see. In 1927 her celebrity reached its apotheosis. It was the year she was voted one of Britain’s ten most remarkable women;
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the year that Oliver Messel went to a fancy dress ball dressed as the character she played in
Garden of Eden;
the year in which stories of her rumoured engagement to Prince Nicholas of Romania were reported avidly on both sides of the Atlantic.

But to Cecil Beaton, Tallulah appeared to be turning into a parody of herself. He observed that the dewy sheen of her beauty had hardened to a more artificial brilliance: ‘Her cheeks are huge acid-pink peonies. Her eyelashes are built out with hot liquid paint to look like burned matches, and her sullen discontented rosebud of a mouth is painted the brightest scarlet, and is as shiny as Tiptree’s strawberry jam.’
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Her girlish recklessness had hardened, too, into something more predatory. It was by then an open secret that any handsome actor in the same cast as Tallulah would have to run the gauntlet of her sexual advances. One young man, invited to her house for tea, was placed directly opposite her as she sat with her legs spread and angled, so that he could see directly up her skirt. Godfrey Tearle, her co-star in
Scotch Mist,
was coerced into rehearsing a love scene of such blatant realism that his watching wife was reduced to tears. Basil Dean wrote later, ‘It was as if her Godfrey was being raped before her eyes.’ As she left the stage, Tallulah commented with callous joy, ‘Good thing I had me drawers on, wasn’t it?’
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The tone of her voice was one that would have been recognized, immediately, by Eugenia Bankhead. She had heard it throughout their childhood as Tallulah had channelled her insecurities into baiting and bullying her older sister. Even now, the old rivalries could still surface – and they did so with a vengeance when Eugenia arrived in London in the spring of 1928, announcing that she planned to join Tallulah on the stage.

For the past few years Eugenia and her husband Morton had been living a nomadic life between New York and Europe. Much like the Fitzgeralds, they’d been travelling to escape their problems. Recently, however, their marriage had reached a point of crisis and Eugenia had walked out on Morton, determined to forge a new, professional life for herself. Initially, Tallulah hadn’t felt threatened by her sister’s decision to do this on the London stage. Although Eugenia had secured a part with unusual speed, as a dancer in Kenyon Nicholson’s new play
The Barker,
it was only a very small role. And Tallulah was confident that she had largely been given her chance because of the Bankhead name, a name she had personally made famous.

Perhaps Eugenia realized that, too, which might also explain why she also deliberately set out to seduce the man Tallulah was seeing at the time. Tony Wilson was tall, blond and, just nineteen years old, was as overwhelmed by Eugenia’s flattering advances as he was innocently unaware of the trouble he would cause by responding. He had no idea that for Tallulah, Eugenia’s treachery would awaken the resentment she had suffered as a child, during all those years when her older sister had absorbed so much of their father’s love and attention.

If Tallulah had been mean and angry then, her rage as an adult was implacable and it sent Eugenia scurrying back to Paris (and into Morton’s arms), creating a breach between the two sisters that lasted for several years. Eugenia’s betrayal was, however, only a prelude to a far deeper pain. For a while Tallulah had been seeing Naps only intermittently, but she still hadn’t abandoned her dream of a shared future with him. The previous year they had met up in Paris, where she’d been having costumes fitted at Molyneux for her role in
The Gold Diggers.
They’d had a delirious few days together of drinking, dancing, lovemaking and chatter. And when Naps said he had to leave – he was travelling on to Lake Geneva for treatment of his chronic tuberculosis – he delighted Tallulah by suggesting that she follow him. As usual, he was typically dilatory about the arrangements and took a detour to a casino in Venice, leaving her hanging around in Lake Geneva for two days, ignorant of his whereabouts. Yet when, finally, he did arrive, it was for another ‘two magic weeks’ of happiness.

This on-off relationship with Naps was a cruel conundrum for Tallulah. At moments when she felt unhappy and ‘hag-ridden by ambition’, she longed to settle into marriage. Recently she had been wondering if she might like a child – women with babies were often surprised by the tender interest she took in them. She’d even wondered about leaving the stage. After nearly a decade of striving and working she was tired, and as she admitted rather wistfully in a column she wrote for the
Sunday Express,
she longed to have a break from the ‘exciting and harrowing’ strain of her career.
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Ideally she would do so with Naps, who still aroused her, amused her and interested her in ways that no other man could. She knew that she could never love anyone as intensely as him, and yet he continued to treat her with the same carelessness as he treated his money at the roulette table. On her journey back to London she wept over her inability to keep him and her inability to let him go. She was terrified that eventually it wouldn’t matter either way, and that his health or his perverse instincts of self-destruction would kill him. ‘I knew he was doomed. I had a feeling he welcomed that doom.’
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