Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (18 page)

During the noisy family debates that followed, other arguments were raised. Mrs Bankhead believed the film contract would do no good to Tallulah’s marriage prospects, which she considered central to her granddaughter’s future. Will’s objections were largely financial. His income was much reduced now that he had largely given up the law, and his congressman’s salary had to stretch to supporting his new wife, as well as Mrs Bankhead’s plans to launch Eugenia (and possibly Tallulah) into Washington society. Although Tallulah was supposedly being offered a weekly salary of $25 for filming her debut role, this would hardly cover the cost of keeping her and a companion in New York. Especially as Tallulah had made it plain that she intended to remain in the city once the film was made, in order to look for other work.

Tallulah was incredulous at the opposition to her dream: she wept, she sulked, and she threatened hunger strike – a strategy that had served her well when she’d been trying to get herself removed from one of her several schools. Finally her grandfather intervened. Tallulah, he judged, was ‘a peculiar child … self-reliant to a fault perhaps and always thinks her plans are best’.
¹¹
It was clear to him that her ambitions would give the family no peace until she found a way to satisfy them, so he offered to subsidize Tallulah’s expenses, at least for the short term, and arranged for Tallulah’s Aunt Louise to accompany her to New York.

It’s hard to know what the family were thinking when they let her go. Louise was never a forceful woman, with less of the Bankhead ‘dash’ than the rest of the clan, and she was at a particularly low ebb at this time: grieving the loss of her youngest son, William, to typhoid two years earlier, and the recent breakdown of her second marriage. She was hardly in a state to contain a tornado of energy, ambition and curiosity like Tallulah, nor to defend her from the perils of New York.

The Bankheads believed they were aware of the dangers. They had read the headlines, and anticipated that the city might be a snakes’ nest of race activists, birth-control advocates, women’s trade unionists and drug fiends. They had instructed Tallulah in the importance of avoiding drink and men. Yet, still, they had very little inkling of the kind of professional pressures she might be pitted against.

A range of abuse and exploitation was endemic in the film industry. Aspiring starlets were routinely asked to perform sexual favours in return for a film role, or to subsidize their earnings by working in the pornographic fringes of the business. Even in mainstream feature films, sex was a major selling point. Regulation of content wasn’t introduced until 1930, and when Theda Bara starred as Cleopatra, her costume was far more shocking than Maud Allan’s; her virtually naked breasts were supported by a brassiere of twisted wire snakes; the outline of her crotch tantalizingly visible behind an embroidered transparent skirt. When Clara Bow told her mother and aunt she was going into the movies, their reaction was typical of many Americans at that time – Clara would be making herself a ‘hoor’. The respectable Bankheads, by contrast, had little knowledge of what their Tallulah might become involved with.

In late summer Tallulah arrived in New York ‘boil[ing] with excitement and ambition’
¹²
as she waited for her new life to begin. She had been to the city before, on the occasional family outing to a Broadway show, but she had never lived there. To her joy, Louise had found an apartment on West 45th Street, right in the heart of the theatre district. Around her the names of her favourite actors were spelled out in electric lights, and Tallulah hummed with the knowledge that at any moment she might see one of them on the street – that one day she might even be working with them in the same studio or theatre.

Almost all her dreams were crushed as news came through that the production company with which Tallulah was meant to be working had gone bankrupt, and the film assigned to her had been cancelled. The competition organizers at
Picture-Play
promised to find an alternative, but they could not specify when that might be, and Tallulah’s impatience rose to a nearly unendurable pitch when, instead of being transported to the magical world of the film studio, she was obliged to trail around the city in her aunt’s wake.

Louise had her own purpose in accompanying Tallulah to New York, which was to visit some of the more celebrated spiritualists and mediums who operated there. She believed, fervently, in the possibility of making contact with her dead son William, and in that hope she had brought along his former fiancée Ola. Spiritualism was big business in America, especially among women.
*
Its eight million or more adherents ranged from political campaigners seeking guidance from the spirit world to the growing number of war-bereaved hoping for some message from their slaughtered menfolk. Louise had no trouble finding ‘experts’ in New York who were willing to take her money for the promise of a word from William. And day after day Tallulah was forced to traipse with her and Ola through a succession of dimly lit rooms, where hushed exalted women chanted and consulted with cards.

Finally, in October, she was delivered from this gloomy nether-world. A small part had been found for her in a new romantic comedy,
Who Loved Him Best?
Directed by Dell Henderson, it was a cheaply made feature, and Tallulah’s character, a bohemian girl called Nell, was only one level up from an extra.
^†
Yet every day, she and Louise took a streetcar across the river to the film studio in Brooklyn,
^‡
and as Tallulah learned her way around the crowds of actors and technicians, the snaking yards of cable, the painted flats and giant Klieg lights, she saw only a world of glamour and possibility.

She was lucky, too, that she came out of the filming well. In several key scenes she was positioned close to the main action, and was in shot sufficiently long for the camera to register the distinctive qualities of her face. Still not quite sixteen, Tallulah was intriguingly poised between woman and child. Her recently achieved cheekbones had brought sophisticated definition to her heart-shaped face, and there was a hint of the siren in her carefully plucked eyebrows and in the long hooded lids of her eyes. Her skin, however, was innocently creamy, and this was one of her key assets. The crudely undiffused lighting of the early twentieth-century studios was so brutally exposing to every line, freckle or pore that most young starlets were considered old by the time they were twenty-two. Youth was at a premium, and Tallulah had it.

She herself was cock-a-hoop when she first saw herself on the screen. Making the film had been so delightful, she said it was a ‘terrible thing’ to be paid for it, and Will was not pleased when he heard that Tallulah had ebulliently torn up her first $25 pay cheque. She was determined to earn more, and soon, and during the early months of 1918 she scoured the trade press and pestered anyone she could find for information about work. Her family was impressed by her resolve and called in all their contacts in New York, including a business friend, James Julian, who knew the film industry. ‘My dearest Tallulah,’ Will wrote with pride, and perhaps some surprise, ‘you are certainly going at this thing like you mean business and I am betting on you and backing you to my limit.’
¹³

Without the support of
Picture-Play,
however, the audition process was a lonely, testing time for Tallulah, as she waited in line along with dozens of other girls, being stared at and scrutinized as though she were horseflesh. She was also worried that her family would withdraw their financial support if she didn’t get a paying role soon; John Bankhead was an enthusiast, but he didn’t have infinite resources.

It was a long and anxious three months before Tallulah got her next engagement, a walk-on part in a stage comedy called
The Squab Farm.
Frederic and Fanny Hatton’s script was a satire on the new starlet culture and, ironically, it gave Tallulah her first lesson in how harshly competitive the acting business could be. There were several other young women in the cast, all with more experience than her, and they were disinclined to welcome this bouncy, privileged sixteen-year-old into their midst. While the play was in rehearsal they spoke so little to her and offered her so little practical help that Tallulah felt as though she were back at the convent, despised and unwanted. When she broke the golden rule of theatre and whistled inside the dressing room, the other girls were so savage that she went back to her room and wept.

She was unhappier still when the play opened in March and her photo appeared in the
Sunday Morning Telegraph
accompanied by a puff piece hailing her as the star of the show. Some Bankhead string-pulling had got the piece published and while she tried to assure everyone that it was ‘bilge’, her fellow actors refused to speak another word to her. The forty-five performances the play managed to run were professionally horrible: the reviews were bad, morale was low and she herself ‘felt more lonely than ever’.
¹⁴

By slow increments, however, her career began to advance. Two small film roles followed, along with a couple of precious mentions in the press. One line in the
Tribune,
praising her as a novice of rare intelligence and beauty, caused much rejoicing in the Bankhead family and was read with triumph by Tallulah. Significantly, too, she was beginning to make friends and contacts within the profession. Early in 1918, when Ola decided to quit New York, Louise reduced their living costs by moving them into a hotel. She had heard that Commander Evangeline Booth, heroine of the Salvation Army, had frequented a suitable establishment close by on 45th Street, and judged that she and Tallulah could find modest, respectable lodgings there.

It was only when they arrived in the crowded lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, and a couple of powdered, painted and obviously ‘theatrical’ women emerged from the elevator doors that Louise suspected she had been misinformed. When they were eating their first evening meal, she realized the full extent of that misinformation, as a number of startlingly familiar actors, including Ann Andrews and Douglas Fairbanks Junior, came in to dine. The hotel that Louise had so innocently selected was one of the great social hubs of New York. Actors like the Barrymore siblings (John, Ethel and Lionel) rented suites there while they were performing on Broadway, and after performances, everyone dined at the Algonquin restaurant. The following year, the hotel would also become famous for hosting the Round Table – the New York circle of wits and media pundits that included Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun and Dorothy Parker.

Tallulah had a few tense moments watching Louise’s initial reaction, terrified her aunt might insist they pack their bags and leave. But Louise shared the Bankheads’ susceptibility to theatre glamour, and if she feared that it would make her task of chaperoning harder, she couldn’t deny that the Algonquin was an ideal place for her niece to acquire professional contacts. As for Tallulah, arriving in the hotel was like walking into the pages of
Picture-Play.
The first time she found herself in an elevator alone with Ethel Barrymore, she had to lean against the wall for support, feeling herself in the presence of a goddess: ‘Her imperious manner, the scorn in her voice, the contempt of her eyes, the great reputation in which she was cloaked, made a violent impact on me.’
¹⁵

She was also determined to make an impact herself, and whenever she wasn’t occupied with work, she hung shamelessly around the hotel’s public spaces, looking out for actors to engage in conversation. When there was an after-show party or dinner being held in the restaurant, she flirted or clowned her way into the middle of it. ‘I would have jumped off a cliff to gain the praise of the quality folk I met on these midnight parties,’ Tallulah recalled.
¹⁶
And frequently she went too far. ‘I was such an idiot I put on this big act; I was so nervous all the time they thought I was putting on airs and it was sheer nerves.’
¹⁷

The British actress Estelle Winwood was living in the Algonquin at this time and remembered disliking her at first: ‘She’d come in and flounce around. What for? Nobody cared about her then.’
¹⁸
And yet Tallulah made herself hard to resist. Estelle admitted she had never ‘seen anyone so pretty’, and like other of the hotel regulars she was gradually beguiled by this extraordinary looking child, with her Southern drawl and her entertaining manner. Tallulah was a wickedly accurate mimic, and she secured some of her first invitations to the dining tables of the Algonquin by imitating the very celebrities with whom she longed to be friends. Her entrée to a party hosted by Condé Nast, the New York publisher, was given on the understanding that she would perform her Ethel Barrymore routine.

What touched these tough, cynical professionals was the ferocity of her enthusiasm. Tallulah borrowed newspapers and magazines so that she could keep up with industry gossip, and she insisted on seeing every new show or film, often more than once. Estelle Winwood was astounded when Tallulah informed her that she’d been to see her perform in the Broadway play
Why Marry Me?
eighteen times. Within a few weeks, Tallulah had become a kind of pet among the Algonquin regulars. The actress Ann Andrews had never met anyone with her vitality: ‘It seemed her feet could hardly stay on the ground.’
¹⁹
Frank Crowninshield, editor of
Vanity Fair,
found her ‘scorching eagerness to be somebody’
²⁰
both remarkable and very sweet.

She was, however, too much for Louise. As Tallulah was accepted by this racy, adult community, she began to pick up its ways. She took up smoking, she learned words that would have scandalized her grandmother and she stayed out late, leaving a telephone message for her aunt, if she remembered. By the summer it had become impossible for Louise to keep up. Between the auditions, rehearsals, photo shoots and performances, the lunches, dinners and late-night parties, Louise was run ragged. She felt a failure as a guardian, and what clinched her despair was the discovery that Tallulah, desperate to earn some extra money, had gone off to a photographer’s studio and posed for him semi-nude.