Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (35 page)

Offstage, too, Diana continued to be much seen and admired. She was as famous for hosting wicked little dinner parties as for being an entertaining guest. When Cecil Beaton met her in Venice in 1932, with St John Hutchinson and Maurice Baring in tow, he considered that, even at forty, she was ‘the most beautiful English woman alive today. Her lips were japonica red, her hair flaxen, her eyes blue love-in-the mist’.
⁷²

But Diana was also moving into a new chapter in her life. Although she was rarely in the nursery, depending on a staff of nannies and nursemaids for her son’s daily care, the arrival of John Julius had changed her. She felt the gravitational pull of family now, alongside her restlessness, and from this point on, Duff’s career as writer, politician and diplomat took unquestioned precedence over her own. During the following years the crowds of admirers that had followed Diana so faithfully began to disperse, and in private moments she may have regretted their passing. Yet in contrast to the driven ambitions of Tallulah or Josephine, her own impulse towards the stage had always been driven by marriage to Duff. And it was Duff who would remain the keystone of her life.

Chapter Eight

TALLULAH

When Diana was touring with
The Miracle
Duff had kept her regularly updated with London news. Olga Lynn was his prime source of gossip, and in December 1924 she passed on to him the story of a young American who had reacted with surprising vehemence to rumours of her lesbian activity. Word for word, Duff related the anecdote: ‘Gerald du Maurier asked [Raymond] whether Tallulah was a sapphist, and he … said she was – so Tallulah came up to him and said she was going to smack his face.’
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In London, as in New York, Tallulah Bankhead was making her presence felt. When she’d first set out for England in January 1923, Tallulah had no certainty of finding either work or welcome there. The play in which she’d hoped to star, Gerald du Maurier’s
The Dancers,
was already in rehearsal with someone else in the lead role, and the two people she most wanted to see in London didn’t even know she was coming. Charles Cochran, Tallulah’s contact with the great du Maurier, had told her very firmly to stay put in New York, while Naps Alington, her elusive lover, had remained out of contact since he’d left her over a year earlier.

But Tallulah possessed wonderful powers of determination and denial. On the crossing over she had found a good-looking student with whom to flirt away her fears of the ocean and had wired Cochran to inform him she was on her way. She was sure the impresario wouldn’t dare abandon her once she was in London, and she guessed correctly. Not only did she persuade him to meet her train and drive her to her room at the Ritz (an excessively expensive luxury she had allowed herself, to boost her confidence and image), she also persuaded him to take her to the Wyndham Theatre to be introduced to du Maurier the following day.

Her plan for the meeting was simply to pretend that she had never received Cochran’s pre-emptive telegram, informing her that she no longer had a role in du Maurier’s play. She bounced into the actor’s dressing room with her personality at full flourish, her eyes wide, her smile even wider as she fanfared her arrival, ‘Well, here I am.’
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The tall, fair Englishman who rose to greet her, however, was not easily bounced. Sir Gerald’s manners were too perfect to point out the obviousness of Tallulah’s lie, but there was steel in his voice when he insisted he could do nothing to alter the play’s casting.

Tallulah had no alternative strategy and, disconcerted, she left the dressing room, blinking away tears. Cochran, however, was now warming to her cause; he enjoyed a gamble, and this American girl was proving to be an interesting wild card. He offered to arrange a second meeting, advising Tallulah that Sir Gerald had a weakness for glamorous women, and pointing out that she would stand a far better chance if she were wearing something other than her day suit and hat: ‘He absolutely
must
see your hair.’
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The following night Tallulah re-presented herself at the actor’s dressing room in her one good evening dress, with her hair falling in a barely restrained tumble down her back. She looked peachy, dynamic, hopeful and by a lucky stroke, she exactly resembled the image du Maurier had always had of his heroine. Certainly she impressed his teenage daughter, Daphne, when she happened to walk in on the meeting. ‘Daddy,’ she blurted afterwards, ‘that’s the most beautiful girl I ever saw in my life.’
⁴

Sir Gerald kept his feelings close, however, and the next morning Tallulah woke in her unaffordable hotel room feeling lonely and deflated. Writing a letter home to her friend Estelle, she berated her ‘foolhardy venture’ and ‘pigheaded pride’. ‘I’ve got sixty dollars left. I don’t know whether to commit suicide.’
⁵
But du Maurier had been doing some calculations overnight. He’d been having doubts about the actress he’d already cast as Maxine Hoff, his play’s heroine. She was meant to be a high-spirited, sweet-tempered cabaret dancer, and Dorothy Dix, who had recently had a baby, lacked the energy he required. Although it would be expensive to replace Dix,
*
du Maurier thought he saw qualities in Tallulah that might translate into very compensatory box-office gold.

Tallulah had barely finished her letter to Estelle when a call came through to her room from Viola Tree, du Maurier’s coauthor. Viola and Sir Gerald had talked the matter over and agreed that Tallulah should be hired. She was triumphant, of course, ready to whoop and gloat over the success of her plan, but
The Dancers
was due to open in under a month, and suddenly Talullah was under immense pressure. She had to move out of the Ritz and find a flat to rent; she had a long script to learn, and she had to ingratiate herself with an unknown group of British actors, who were unhappy about Dix’s sacking and very sceptical of this American replacement.

Tallulah’s first encounter with
The Dancers
cast was uncomfortable. Accustomed to the casual manners of Broadway and the Algonquin, she had no idea that British actors abided by a more old-fashioned code. When she breezily asked during rehearsal where the toilets were, she was greeted by a frigid silence, punctuated only by a few nervous titters. ‘The cast was horrified,’ recalled Una Venning. ‘This was something that was
never
said among men.’
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It took a little while for Tallulah to recover from that social misstep, and she coped, as she always did, by throwing up a smokescreen of clowning and bluster. Her irritated, critical colleagues waited hopefully for her to be quashed by Sir Gerald, who was not only directing the play but playing opposite Tallulah as her lover Tony. Yet du Maurier was rather delighted by his new protégée. He liked the gusto she brought to the rehearsal room, and he liked even better the very obvious reverence she felt for him. To Tallulah, du Maurier was an exemplar of the classic English acting style, and she was eager to learn from his direction and craft. At his suggestion, she even gave up smoking so that she could build up sufficient stamina for the dance sequences in the play.
*

Pleasing Sir Gerald mattered so much that by the opening night, on 15 February, Tallulah’s courage and her nerves were in shreds. She wept through the first interval, convinced she was a failure, and was genuinely surprised by her reviews, which were almost unanimous in approving ‘the sincerity and tenderness’ of her acting.
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In fact, Tallulah could not have found a better vehicle for her London debut. Her own role was one she knew exactly how to play – a small-time Canadian dancer who wins her man through the sheer spark of her personality – yet the themes and plotline of
The Dancers
also proved to be of hugely topical interest.

The other ‘dancer’ in the play was Una, a young socialite to whom Tony has been formally engaged for several years. A ‘neurotic and erratic nightbird’, her passion for jazzing lures her into an underworld of nightclubs and dangerous liaisons, and when she falls pregnant by one of her dance partners she kills herself out of shame. In 1923 this was a fate that many parents had started to fear for their own daughters. The jazz culture had taken almost as profound a hold on Britain as it had on America and France, and it was met with uncomprehending resistance by many in the older generation. To them, jazz represented a threat to the nation’s moral identity; its warping rhythms and melodies sounded like the music of a drug addict, and the frenetic sexual angularity of its dances was no less disturbing.

The Breakdown,
a 1926 painting by John Bulloch Souter, would capture the intensity of this hostility in its portrayal of a black musician seated astride a toppled statue of Minerva while a naked white girl dances the Charleston. At its most dangerous, jazz was credited with encouraging an entire generation’s rebellion against God, the Empire and society. At the very least it was seen to spearhead the new American culture that was colonizing Britain, with its easy money and facile system of values. It was seen to be heralding a world in which words like ‘marvellous’, ‘wonderful’ and ‘divine’ were squandered on ‘the colour of a new lipstick or the texture of a silk stocking’ and ‘life was not worth living unless somebody was having an affair with somebody else.’
⁸

The fact that it was young women who appeared most captive to jazz culture made
The Dancers
appear very current. While Maxine Hoff embodied the virtues of the modern flapper – independent, charming and brave-hearted, she fully deserved her eventual marriage to the rich and aristocratic Tony – Una embodied all the flapper’s failings: an object lesson for any young woman with too easy a taste in cocktails and men.

The play ran for an exceptional forty-three weeks. And during that time du Maurier continued to congratulate himself on casting Tallulah. Among a nation of Marjories, Nancys and Veras the mere sound of her name was exotic to the British public; even more appealing was her sexy Southern drawl and uninhibited energy. To the droves of young women who came to watch her from the cheap gallery seats she became a kind of heroine. These gallery-ites were as fervent a force in British theatre as their New York counterparts. Young working women who spent much of their income on following their chosen stars, they were both feared and courted by theatre managers. If they took against an actor or a production they were brutal in their condemnation, booing, laughing and leading slow, satirical hand-claps, but their approval was correspondingly passionate. Having adopted Tallulah as a new idol, they flocked to the Wyndham Theatre several times a week, following her performances with an almost sexual adulation. Innocent phrases from her lines were transmuted into a private code, eliciting giggles and screams whenever she spoke them.

A few weeks after the play opened, Tallulah decided to get her hair fashionably shingled. All of the London actresses she’d met were advising it, and Gladys Cooper steered her towards the celebrity Parisian hairdresser M La Barbe, who paid regular visits to London. Du Maurier was furious when he first saw the result: there was a particularly affecting scene in
The Dancers
that pivoted around Maxine slowly unpinning her hair in front of Tony, and now it would have to be rescripted. Tallulah’s gallery-ites, however, saw her new haircut as a flapper call to arms, and a few them actually took to cutting their own hair during performances and throwing their shorn tresses down onto the stage as Tallulah took her curtain call.

With a speed that exceeded even her own ‘pig headed’ expectations, Tallulah was becoming famous. But she had not only come to London to find theatrical acclaim; she had come to track down her beloved Naps. As she was sailing to England, Tallulah had imagined exactly how their reunion would go. Naps would seek her out, filled with remorse for abandoning her in New York, while she would be cool, dignified and aloof. However, once she had managed to get hold of him by telephone, she was overtaken by love and impatience. She was still at the Ritz when Naps appeared in the lobby with a Pekinese dog tucked under his arm as a peace offering. Tallulah’s shriek of ‘Daaarling’ could be heard throughout the hotel as she tore down the stairs and into his embrace.

It was as if the year of separation had never happened. Naps’s delicate, dissolute features were still mesmerizing to her, no less his maddening elusiveness. He made a fuss over her, suggested a thousand plans for showing her London, but offered no apologies for having deserted her, nor for the fact that she would have to share him with Edward Lathan, his new boyfriend. For the moment, Tallulah was too happy to mind, and it was frequently on the arms of both men that she went out to dine at the Ivy and the Eiffel Tower, and began attending the competitively extravagant costume balls that were so much in vogue among the city’s young and rich.

Tallulah found this compulsion for fancy dress extraordinary. ‘At the drop of a Homburg all of London’s
jeunesse dorée
would tog themselves out in masquerade.’
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Some of these costume balls had themes (one notoriously invited its guests to dress in babies’ clothes and to drink champagne from babies’ bottles). Impersonating celebrities was also popular: in 1926 London would be full of Josephine Baker lookalikes and in 1927 Oliver Messel would cut a dash as Tallulah herself. Tallulah’s own first costume in 1923 seemed slightly less attention grabbing: she dressed up as a courtier from Versailles, with Naps as her identical twin. But even so, she turned her outfit to flamboyant effect. As the two of them made their entrance, she gestured to her blue satin breeches, saying loudly to Naps, ‘These things are all right for you. But what do I do if I have to pee?’
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