Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (39 page)

What Tallulah did not predict was that she would lose Naps to another woman. But in September 1928 it was announced that he had become engaged to Lady Mary Sibell Ashley-Cooper, eldest daughter of the Earl of Shaftesbury and exactly the kind of titled young woman his family expected him to wed. Tallulah could not help but be wretched at this final, absolute desertion. Nor could she help but be vulnerable to a man who very shortly afterwards presented himself as the ardent opposite of Naps: ‘a rugged Romeo’ who was masterfully determined to sweep her off her feet and into marriage.
⁵⁶

A few weeks after the news of Naps’s engagement, Tallulah went to Brighton for the weekend and met Count Anthony de Bosdari. A handsome and apparently wealthy Italian, he seemed to fall so possessively in love with her that by the time she’d returned home she found a note from him, announcing his intention to marry her. Three days later he arrived on her doorstep, insisting that he wouldn’t leave until she agreed to be his wife.

Tallulah was used to extravagant posturing from her lovers but Tony was in a different league. He appeared quintessentially and romantically European to her, with his brilliantined wavy hair, elegant manners and flamboyantly assertive masculinity. He claimed to be a cousin of the King of Italy and a graduate of Winchester and Oxford; and the arrogance of his background seemed to be channelled into the masterful way in which he walked into her house, instructed the butler to take the day off and told Tallulah to close her eyes as he slipped a diamond necklace around her throat.

Tony made her feel feminine and protected, and she interpreted his pursuit as genuine ardour. When he talked about their future together, the children they might have and the career he might pursue in politics, she allowed herself to dream of a blissfully restful life under his control. She agreed to his insistence on an early wedding, and her letter informing Will that she was likely to be married before Christmas painted a bright and hopeful future. She promised him that within a ‘decent space of time’ he might ‘expect a grandson’; he might eventually see her returning home.
⁵⁷

But it was still mostly fantasy – Tallulah barely knew her fiancé or even her own mind. Sara Mayfield, an old friend from Montgomery, was visiting London at the time, and she observed Tallulah veering back and forth in her enthusiasms, at some moments full of Tony but at others joking that she had other ‘bigger game’ on the romantic horizons.
⁵⁸
She had sufficiently pressing second thoughts to ask Tony for the marriage to be postponed for a month or two, and her doubts became more clamorous still when, early in the new year, she briefly accompanied him on a business trip to Berlin. At close quarters, Tony’s charm started to look suspect: he ‘oozed small gallantries’,
⁵⁹
and his motives for taking her to Berlin seemed ‘crafty and a bit twisted’, as she discovered that, without consulting her, he had offered her services as an actor to the film company with whom he was trying to finalize a deal. Clearly Tony had a loose relationship with the truth. And it was around this time that Tallulah discovered he had not only been married before meeting her, but that the divorce he’d obtained from his first wife might be shaky under British law. When she returned to London her friend Francis Laking presented her with even more disturbing information. He’d been digging around in Tony’s background and discovered he was much less wealthy than he claimed, so much less wealthy that the diamond necklace he’d given her with so much flourish had not yet been paid for. Far from having caught herself a rich and aristocratic businessman, Tallulah had been duped by a clever grifter.

Tallulah placed a telephone call to Berlin to tell Tony she would never see him again. Yet even though her friends congratulated her on a lucky escape, she smarted at the humiliation. Once again she had been abandoned, let down, and with her spirits already lowered by the loss of Naps, she found it hard to rally her usual defensive wit and defiance. As soon as there was a long break in her schedule, she ran away from London to take an extended holiday in the South of France.

Here she dedicated hours of consoling narcissistic attention to herself. If she couldn’t control her lovers, she could at least control her appearance. She tanned herself to a chic olive brown and dieted herself into thinness, observing with satisfied self-love the severity of her hip bones and the sleekness of her legs. Feeling that the short flapper hairstyles had become commonplace, she grew her hair longer ‘à la Greto Garbo’ and booked herself in for cosmetic surgery to slim down the bridge of her nose.
*

The past continued to hurt, however, and that autumn, when she sat for Augustus John, it showed in her portrait. John gave her an almost martyred quality, her cheekbones looked flayed, her eyes haunted under drooping lids. When the portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy, many who saw it complained that it was hideous, but Tallulah insisted to the
Sunday Express
that John had captured ‘the Real me’.
⁶⁰
Her readiness to claim this troubled image may also have been fed by other problems in her life. The Inland Revenue had recently been alerted to the fact that Tallulah had paid no taxes during the seven years she’d spent in London, and they were now demanding thousands of pounds – money she didn’t have. To add to her sense of persecution, she was also being targeted by some unusually scurrilous press.

By the late 1920s, the public’s addiction to celebrity gossip had become consuming. Journalists were encouraged to write about sexual or financial scandals with a detail that would previously have been merely hinted at: if they could find nothing genuinely outrageous to report, they followed the example of the American press and invented it. Tallulah had first fallen victim to this trend in 1927 when she was still friendly with Tony Wilson. The two of them had driven down to visit Tony’s younger brother at Eton, and taken the boy and some friends out to lunch at a nearby hotel. It was a minor infringement of the school rules, but when the press got hold of the incident they turned it into an inflammatory story. One report claimed that Tallulah and Tony had hired an aeroplane to snatch the boys away from Eton; another, more luridly, had suggested that there had been a sexual romp at the hotel involving Tallulah and five underage boys.

Her reputation had become so extreme that the public were willing to believe anything, and the story was so widely circulated that the police were forced to investigate. No scandal was uncovered, but that didn’t prevent a derogatory report being filed at Scotland Yard. It noted that Tallulah Bankhead had not only appeared in a ‘sex play’, but had a reputation as ‘a sexual pervert’ – presumably a reference to her affairs with women.
⁶¹
Ultimately she was judged to be of sufficiently disturbing moral character to justify some low-level surveillance, with a view to possible deportation.

The contents of that report were to prove poisonous. Six years later, when she was living and working in America, she applied for permission to join a five-week tour of British music halls. From the response of the official in charge, it was clear her visit would be strictly limited to that period: ‘Knowing what we do of this woman I think it is undesirable that she should be allowed to stay here.’
⁶²

Tallulah, of course, knew nothing of the file, but she could sense an atmosphere around her. Even in the theatre, she felt under siege. The antics of her fans were becoming destructive: When she had opened in
Her Cardboard Lover
in August 1928, the mob outside the theatre grew so rowdy that police were called. As Tallulah drove up to the stage door her car was nearly rocked onto its side. Even inside the theatre, the crowd remained hysterical, shouting and chanting so loudly that much of the dialogue was inaudible. Tallulah’s female devotees were becoming a liability, and actors and directors were beginning to say they would not work with her. She was accused of encouraging her fans’ behaviour, and insinuations were made in the press about her relationship with them. One journalist, noting that Tallulah had stripped to her underwear in yet another play,
*
commented, ‘I am told that these rather feeble attempts at immodesty are for the benefit of the feminine element of the audience. Well, well,’ sniggered the writer, ‘girls will be boys!’
⁶³

It was an ambivalent moment in British culture. As the popular press grew more sensationalist, the official forces of reaction and prudery were also gaining momentum. In 1928, the year before Tallulah’s fans were mocked for their sapphic tastes, the Home Secretary banned publication of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian bildungsroman
The Well of Loneliness.
Alongside suggestive adverts of flappers wearing short skirts and smoking cigarettes were newspaper articles voicing grave concern about the frivolous amorality of the nation’s young women. In 1930, when suffrage was extended to all women over the age of eighteen, the flapper vote was greeted with fear and derision by large sections of the male establishment.

The General Strike of 1926, when British workers joined forced with the miners to demand better pay and working conditions, had already revealed the limits of the nation’s party spirit. Jazz, cocktails, easy money, lax morals and experimental art looked suddenly irrelevant given this sudden baring of class hostility. The following year when Tallulah’s London friends staged a ‘Beggars’ costume ball, the spectacle of these rich young men and women gaily drinking champagne while aping the dress of the poor aroused sharp condemnation from a formerly indulgent press.

Tallulah herself had typically ignored the strike. Taxis had been unavailable, but when she needed a lift she’d simply flagged down a passing motorist, announcing sweetly, ‘I’m Tallulah, could you drive me to my rehearsal.’ However, by the end of the decade even she sensed that life was changing. Crashing markets spelled an end to a culture of fast credit and unbridled excess: the publication in 1930 of Evelyn Waugh’s
Vile Bodies
portrayed the butterfly brevity of London’s gilded youth. That same year Tallulah’s own irksome but irreplaceable gadfly Francis died – she claimed the cause was ‘drinking too much yellow chartreuse’, although it was more likely to have been diabetes. In his will Francis left ‘my friend Tallulah Bankhead all my motor cars’,
⁶⁴
but in fact he possessed none, and that same echo of loss and disillusionment reverberated through the play in which Tallulah opened that summer, written by her former New York mentor Rachel Crothers. Its title,
Let Us Be Gay,
sounded like a paean to a decade of pleasure, but its message was elegaic.

Tallulah’s character, Kitty Brown, was a young and very modern divorcee. Putting aside the hurt of a failed marriage, Kitty transforms herself into a flapper, taking lovers and making a career for herself as a fashion designer. She flaunts her new independence: ‘When I’m paying my own bills, men may come and men may go.’ And to her husband Bob, who is trying to win her back, she boasts of becoming as hard as any man ‘amusing myself with anything and everything that comes my way’.
⁶⁵
Yet an older friend of Kitty’s suspects that this lifestyle is not the magic formula it seems: ‘Women are getting everything they want now, but are they any happier than when they used to stay at home – with their romantic illusions?’ The play’s closing scene supplies the answer. As Kitty agrees to return to her husband she admits that her independence was never so much fun as she claimed. ‘I’ve been so gay,’ she admits, ‘so – so full of – so empty.’
⁶⁶

It was a line that Tallulah delivered with poignant conviction. She, too, was running on empty, barely able to deal with her mounting debts, unpredictable career and shiftless love life. She had no loyal husband to rescue her as Kitty did, so when a new man appeared, bringing with him the offer of a new start, Tallulah was more than ready to listen. Walter Wanger was an independent producer at Hollywood’s Paramount Pictures. He had a famously creative commercial touch – his film credits boasted Valentino’s
The Sheik
– and it was he who had successfully converted Covent Garden into a temporary cinema during the early 1920s, screening the premiere of Diana’s debut film. Now, in bed with Tallulah, Wanger seduced her with talk of a second film career. Hollywood, he told her, was on the hunt for fresh stars, actors with sufficient vocal skills to meet the demands of the new ‘talkies’. Tallulah was ideal – she had stage experience as well as glamour – and he promised that Paramount would market her as their next Marlene Dietrich; offering her a starting contract for five films and a weekly rate of $5,000, rising to $8,000 if the contract was extended. (Even in the turbulent economy of 1930, the film industry could still offer lavish inducements to its stars.)

Wanger waved this offer in front of Tallulah like a conjurer’s wand. At a stroke he would get rid of the creditors dunning her for cash and remove her from the stalemate of her stage career. For a day or two Tallulah demurred. She had grown to despise filming back in New York, and her one reluctant foray into a British studio had been a disaster –
His House in Order
was judged by
Film Weekly
to be ‘almost destitute of entertainment’.
⁶⁷
Yet Wanger’s terms made too much sense for her to turn them down. By the end of the year she had put her little house on the market, thrown her last party and played her last gig (a comedy sketch that ran for two weeks at the London Palladium).

Tallulah was ambitious enough to want to return to America as a conquering star: she lost weight through a reckless abuse of laxatives and prepared stories of her London career with which to impress her family and the press. Even so, she hated having to leave. Most of her adult life had been played out in London and she would always refer to her years there as ‘the happiest and most exciting in my life’. Whatever treacheries and setbacks she had suffered, whatever moments of nostalgia she had felt for America, the city had been her home. On 1 January 1931, as she boarded the
SS Aquitania,
she sobbed miserably. Her friend Audry had come to wave her off, and piteously Tallulah begged her to stay on board and come to America, too. Who did she have waiting for her? Aside from Will, most of her blood relatives were now dead or dispersed, and she feared her old theatre friends would have moved on. She suspected, too, that America in this new decade would be a very different country from the one she had left. She had first made her name as a fledgling flapper actress, when America was poised on the brink of the jazz age. Now, nearing thirty, she was returning to a far harsher climate; jazz was giving way to the depression era.