With Billie (19 page)

T
here was a time when everyone knew about Tallulah Bankhead. She was a highly successful actress and her 1939 role in Lillian Hellman’s play
The Little Foxes
was described as ‘one of the great performances of the American theatre’. She was also acclaimed as a classic American beauty, with a small and sexy body, an alabaster complexion, aquiline features and long, wavy, auburn tresses.

Tallulah was born in 1902 and was a true child of the Deep South. Her grandfather John Hollis Bankhead came from slave-owning stock and ran a lucrative cotton mill in Jasper, Alabama. He had been elected to Congress in 1887 and became a Senator in 1905, keeping that prestigious position until his death in 1920. He was one of a group of powerful southerners who successfully opposed any attempt to put a ban on lynching.

Tallulah’s mother died shortly after her birth and she and her elder sister were brought up by their paternal grandparents in the wealth and opulence of the family mansion.
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Tallulah used to tell the story of how her grandmother would ride out every Thursday to the Negro section of Jasper, bringing the dirty laundry that needed washing and baskets of food to be distributed to the poor. And on Saturdays certain Negroes were allowed to come onto her land so that she could present them with cornmeal for their families. She had a little black book in which she kept a record of who had died and who had been born, and in that way she knew exactly how much cornmeal was required and there was no chance of anyone cheating her and ‘getting a bit extra for their chickens’.

According to one biographer,
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Tallulah inherited this ability to be ‘touchingly loyal and tender to individual black people, but if they transgressed, if they got proud, uppity and arrogant, then Tallulah “went South” ’. In later years she used to appear on radio talk shows and, in a broad southern drawl, she would entertain her listeners with stories about her old Black Mammy whom she loved so, and about Daddy and the Coloured People.

She never spoke of her own half-brother, and perhaps several other half-brothers and sisters, in these homely anecdotes. The half-brother in question was called John Quincy Bankhead. He lived with his mother in a shack somewhere behind the family mansion and was four years older than Tallulah. One day she suddenly realised that he was the spitting image of her grandfather, with the same tall frame and the same features, only his skin was darker. When she mentioned this resemblance to John Quincy, he replied in a very matter-of-fact way that ‘all Bankhead men, both coloured and white, was always tall’. She then asked her father to tell her more, and he smiled conspiratorially and said of course there was a blood tie, for after all ‘boys will be boys’.

From a young age Tallulah had learnt that she could draw attention to herself by being outrageous, and as she grew older, especially once the acting jobs were no longer on offer and her beauty was on the wane, this outrageousness took
over from everything else and knew no bounds. Tallulah loved to expose herself at parties, lifting her skirts and dropping her knickers, or showing off the effects of a recent breast implant. She lay on top of a grand piano and sang a drunken song, wearing nothing but a string of pearls. She was again naked when she hit a police officer who had come to the door of her apartment to complain about a particularly noisy party. When Eleanor Roosevelt came to tea, Tallulah made a point of talking to the President’s wife while sitting on the lavatory, with the door open.
^‡

Tallulah had a natural affinity for all sorts of drugs and stimulants. In later life she consumed vast quantities of the new amphetamines and barbiturates, and paid her doctors hundreds of dollars a week to give her injections of an opium derivative called Demerol, but during her early years she had a preference for marijuana and cocaine. She was part of the wealthy white jetset who would come uptown for the drugs, the music and other forbidden excitements.
^§
According to Pop Foster, she was a frequent visitor at the notorious Daisy Chain club and there were stories about a hunchback called Money, who was able to supply her with as much cocaine as she wanted. People remembered seeing Tallulah at the Hot Cha on 52nd Street, when the blind pianist Eddie Steele was playing. She would sing songs with him and sometimes would lead him to the dance floor and they would dance quietly in each other’s arms.

However, there was already a rather ominous note creeping into all this ‘fraternising’. When Tallulah’s respectable southern father, Daddy Dearest, heard reports that his daughter had been seen in Harlem, she immediately arranged for the film producer Walter Wanger to reassure her worried parent with
a confident string of lies. ‘Tallulah showed me your letter,’ he wrote. ‘I think it is scandalous that her sole trip to Harlem should be so misinterpreted. She was sent there with her director, Mr Cukor, to see conditions, as there is a Harlem night-club scene in her present picture. But after her visit it was decided the atmosphere was too vulgar.’

Throughout the 1930s Tallulah and Billie must have often come across each other, but it was in the summer of 1948 that they became close friends and perhaps also lovers.
^‖
Tallulah was performing in Noël Coward’s
Private Lives
on Broadway, and Billie was appearing with Count Basie and his Orchestra at the nearby Strand Theater, where in spite of the July and August heatwave, some of the largest audiences that New York theatre had seen in years turned up.
^a

Tallulah came to the Strand Theater every night of the week. She would sit in the front row, ‘as if this was the only show in the world’. After the show she and Billie and the comedian Stump Daddy would go to the White Rose bar to get drunk together. And they’d get Billie’s boxer dog Mister drunk as well and would laugh at his gentle confusion.

Because her Cabaret Card had been taken away from her since her time in jail,
^b
Billie could no longer sing in New York clubs that held a liquor licence; she had lost her easiest means of earning a living. She was forced to undertake endless tours from one city to the next and for several months Tallulah followed her whenever she could. She was in Hollywood in December 1948 when Billie was arrested after a fight broke out at Billy Berg’s, and she was still in Hollywood in January 1949 when Billie was arrested again and charged with possession of opium.

The circumstances of this second arrest were very dubious, but as a convicted narcotics user and felon, Billie was in serious trouble. She was in a panic, but Tallulah was very supportive and, when Billie threatened suicide, she even paid for a psychiatrist.

Tallulah also took the trouble of contacting J. Edgar Hoover, to see if he might be able to help. He was a family friend as well as Director of the FBI. She opened her letter to him with these words: ‘Knowing your true humanitarian spirit, it seemed quite natural … to go to the top man. As my Negro Mammy used to say, “When you pray, you pray to God, don’t you?” ’ Tallulah went on to explain the nature of her relationship with Billie and her understanding of the singer’s personality.

The two women never met again. In 1952, Tallulah was paid the vast sum of $30,000 for her ghosted show-business memoir,
^d
which was serialised in thirty American newspapers and in the
Daily Express.
The book was dedicated to Daddy Dearest and, although it was full of boastful
eccentricities and coy suggestions of wicked behaviour, it said nothing of Tallulah’s early sexual preferences, her fondness for illegal drugs, or her strong connection with Harlem and the jazz world. Her friend Billie Holiday was not mentioned once.

Three years later, when Billie was putting her name to her own ghosted life story,
Lady Sings the Blues
, a copy of the manuscript was sent to all the well-known people who might not want to appear within its pages. Orson Welles, who had been a friend of Billie’s when she was in Hollywood in 1942, made no objection, but others were less amenable. As Billie’s editor admitted when Linda Kuehl spoke to him, ‘everybody vanished’ under the real or perceived threat of a libel suit.
^e

In
Lady Sings the Blues
Billie spoke of Tallulah at some length. She described her as a ‘dear friend’ who recommended a psychiatrist at a time of trouble, and who sometimes came round to the house to eat spaghetti. Tallulah’s response was an immediate warning to the book’s editor: ‘Darling, if you publish that stuff about me in the Billie Holiday book, I’ll sue for every goddamn cent that Doubleday can make.’

Billie responded with a calm and heartfelt letter to Tallulah. ‘I thought I was a friend of yours,’ she said. ‘That’s why there’s nothing in my book that was unfriendly to you, unkind or libellous … Read it again. There’s nothing in it to hurt you. Straighten up and fly right, Banky. Nobody’s trying to drag you.’
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But Billie never received a reply to her letter, and the ‘offensive material’ was dutifully removed from the manuscript.

In later years Tallulah suffered from ‘several psychotic episodes in which she became very southern and very proud’. She was often heard to complain about how the Negroes
were ‘not what they used to be’. The peace strikes, the sit-downs, the new militancy had made them unacceptable as far as she was concerned. ‘I used to think that if I were ever in real trouble, I would run to Harlem for friends and shelter,’ she said. ‘Now I’d be afraid to go up there alone.’

Tallulah Bankhead died in New York in 1968. Her last discernible words were ‘codeine-bourbon’. According to Billie’s friend, the dancer Detroit Red, Tallulah’s sisters sent her body to Virginia to be buried, ‘so Negroes couldn’t come to her funeral … because she was a friend of Billie’s and of all the Negroes in Harlem and her sisters didn’t want no Negroes hanging around’.