Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (37 page)

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Aside from those two weeks of convalescence, Tallulah remained almost obsessively active on the London stage. Even when she knew a role was worthless she accepted it. To be out of work and invisible to her public was far more worrying to her than appearing in weak material. By early 1925, however, even she was aware that her poor choices of role were beginning to damage her career. She needed a part with ‘guts and swagger and shock’, and she accepted that she might have to take time off from the stage in order to secure it.
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At the forefront of her hopes was a play that had been successfully adapted for Broadway from Somerset Maugham’s short story, ‘Rain’. Its central character Sadie Thompson, a young prostitute who forms a complex bond with the religious zealot who attempts to reform her, had all the guts Tallulah craved. And when ‘Rain’ was scheduled for a London premiere, she was ready to go to any lengths to secure the role. Ignoring all the other new scripts that were being offered to her, she sailed to America to meet Maugham and to see the play for a second time, closely studying the interpretation of Jeanne Eagles, the American actress playing Sadie.

It all looked very hopeful. Tallulah was assured she had got the role and even took part in early rehearsals of the London production. Yet when Maugham came to watch, Tallulah seemed to him to lack personality, to be mimicking Eagles rather than finding her own way into the character and he demanded she be replaced. This was a level of professional and public rejection Tallulah had never encountered and it was as piercing to her pride as it was to her ambition. She couldn’t stand the idea that all of London would be talking about it, and it was partly to stage-manage the gossip that she returned to her flat, forced herself to swallow twenty aspirins and scribbled her suicide note, ‘It ain’t goin’ to rain no moh.’
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Twenty pills was nowhere near a fatal dose – simply enough to put Tallulah into a deep sleep and give her a bad headache the next morning – and even though she would dwell privately on the humiliation for several months, she was saved from more public mortification by a last-minute invitation to appear in Noël Coward’s latest play,
Fallen Angels.
Just a week before the play was due to open, one of its female leads had suffered a nervous breakdown and they needed to replace her. Tallulah thrived on this kind of brinkmanship, and having demanded – and secured – a weekly fee of £1.00, she zoomed straight into rehearsal with a vitality that a grateful Coward thought ‘little short of fantastic’. Aided by her photographic memory, she delivered a word-perfect performance on the opening night.
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The role was classic Tallulah material. She was playing Julia Sterroll, a young married woman who shares everything with her best friend: clothes, cocktails, even lovers. And if the material was a challenge to her vocally – the speed and nuance of Coward’s dialogue required a clarity of enunciation that occasionally defeated her Alabama accent – few actors could make a line sound as wanton as Tallulah. Responding to the accusation that Julia had become unhinged by alcohol, Tallulah’s ‘I’m perfectly hinged’ was delivered with a toss of her hair, a jut of her hip and an innuendo-laden catch in her voice that suggested a hundred forms of depravity.

Tallulah’s comic delivery was almost too effective on the opening night. With the pain of Maugham’s rebuff still stinging, she elicited howls of delight from the audience with her extemporaneous tweaking of the line ‘oh dear Rain’ into the knowing ‘My God RAIN’.
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And always inclined to boredom when a play’s run lasted longer than a few weeks, she found it hard to resist making more mischief. During one performance of
Fallen Angels
she replaced the ginger beer in the actors’ glasses with real champagne, generating an atmosphere of hilarity that grew ever more precarious with each scene.

Coward, convinced she was going to wreck his play, grew testy with Tallulah, but to her dedicated gallery-ites she could do no wrong.
Theatre World
now judged her to have a following ‘unlike that enjoyed by any other actress’.
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Most were clerks, shop girls, seamstresses or factory workers, and to them Tallulah and her characters represented a world of dreams. ‘Down there onstage she wears clothes that would cost a year’s earnings,’ reported Hubert Griffith in the
Evening Standard.
‘She moves in expensive apartments at Paris, Deauville, St Jean de Luz, young men in exquisite evening dress are rivals in love with her. Miss Tallulah Bankhead is on the stage what every woman in the gallery in some degree wishes to be, the dream fulfilment made manifest.’
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Although Griffiths referred to Tallulah by her full name, she would have been recognizable to his readers by her first name alone. The gallery-ites had long called her nothing but Tallulah, chanting, ‘Hallelujah Tallulah, our wonderful Tallulah,’ whenever she appeared onstage, but now the critics and commentators were adopting the habit too. Arnold Bennett, who would write an entire column about the Tallulah cult for the
Evening Standard
in early 1930, found the phenomenon remarkable. ‘Why is Miss Bankhead always called Tallulah? Nobody except the privileged Hannen Swaffer [critic of the
Express
] speaks of Marie [Tempest], Gladys [Cooper], Sybil [Thorndyke] and Evelyn [Laye].’
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Even more extraordinarily, she was also being elevated into a verb. To ‘do a Tallulah’ or just ‘to Tallulah’ had become recognized shorthand for the brand of provocative exuberance she exemplified. As she airily explained to a New York reporter, deployed to track her British success, ‘Over here they like me to Tallulah, you know, dance and sing and fluff my hair and play reckless parts.’
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Her appeal remained a mystery to some. Bennett admitted he was perplexed by the dedication of her fans, who seemed ‘to belong to the clerk class’, yet magically appeared to spend half their working week queuing for tickets to see her perform, and to stand patiently at the stage door afterwards, to see her walk to her car. Exactly what these ‘bright youthful and challenging … girls’ gained from their devotion eluded Bennett, beyond the competitive satisfaction of being able to boast ‘to their friends about the number of hours they have waited for the thrill of beholding their idol’.
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Bennett failed to see the effort that Tallulah herself made to secure the loyalty of these young women. She never took for granted the money they paid, nor the discomforts they had to endure. All the seats in the gallery were unreserved, and on opening nights some of them would begin queuing forty-eight hours beforehand. Those who had to leave the queue to go to work (in answer to Bennett’s conundrum) would keep their place by chaining little stools to the railings outside the theatre, with their name tags attached. Those who remained in line were served tea by the theatre management and sold sandwiches and cake by street vendors.

In return for their devotion, Tallulah showered her fans with special, small attentions. At every curtain call she reserved her first smile and bow for the gallery, and the most loyal core, around twenty or so, she invited backstage to her dressing room, where she learned their names and stories. One of them, Edie Smith, became her secretary and perhaps her most loyal and reliable friend. Edie had both the serenity and the spirit to ride Tallulah’s scattered moods. She didn’t mind performing menial tasks – Tallulah always depended on Edie to open the brand-new tins of her favourite Gold Flake cigarettes – but she would not be bullied. When the two of them were drinking in a bar one evening, Tallulah spotted a handsome man and instructed Edie ‘to go get him for me’. Edie, whose own tastes were exclusively for other women, was unimpressed. ‘I’m not pimping for you,’ she retorted. ‘Go get him yourself.’
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In September 1925, the fantasy world Tallulah inhabited onstage reached new heights with
The Green Hat,
a play adapted from the bestselling novel by Michael Arlen. Arlen had something like the status of Scott Fitzgerald among British readers. His tales of playboys and socialites, his descriptions of clothes, cars and love affairs were all frantically fashionable. And while today his style reads like a hothouse of florid literary tropes and overwrought sexual suggestion, at the time his references to abortion, venereal disease and mild erotic perversion were daring – Arlen broke taboos for a literary living.

The Green Hat
was his most successful and notorious work. Iris Storm,
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its heroine, was a young woman of vaguely déclassée status whose engagement to a young aristocrat, Napier Harpenden, is broken off by his family. Iris trails her broken heart through an apparently rackety lifestyle, eventually becoming engaged to a sporting hero, Boy Fenwick. Shockingly, Boy kills himself on his wedding night. And while the real reason is his shame at having contracted venereal disease, Iris chooses to defend his reputation rather than her own, by allowing everyone to believe that he died from despair at discovering she was not a virgin.

Through all this, Napier continues to love Iris, but when he again offers to marry her, she insists that his family and friends will always despise her as ‘used goods’. The story ends with her striking a heroic blow against those ‘shams with patrician faces and peasant minds’. Driving her yellow Hispano-Suiza into an ancient elm tree on the Harpenden estate, Iris kills herself.
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In some respects it was a very interesting role for Tallulah. Iris stood in a line of tragic heroines that went all the way back to Dumas’s Marguerite – a fallen woman with a heroic heart – and she challenged Tallulah to a new emotional range. Even more use to her, however, was the publicity surrounding
The Green Hat
from the moment it opened. Acted out onstage, Arlen’s plot and characters seemed more deviant than they had on the printed page, and when there were calls for the production to be banned, Tallulah shone in the scandal’s glare. To many people, Iris’s story blurred with her own, and they took as literal truth the claims of one critic that Tallulah ‘does not act Iris March, she is Iris March’.

Certainly Tallulah was acquainted with Arlen socially, or as Hubert Swaffen put it, belonged to the writer’s ‘semi-exclusive set’.
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And this social connection lent weight to the speculation that parts of her own life had gone into the invention of Iris. The parallels between her own lover Naps and Iris’s lover Napier were much commented on, and Tallulah herself claimed that at least one episode, involving a swim in the River Thames, was taken directly from her own adventures.
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If Tallulah benefited from the play’s publicity, however, she couldn’t stand the work itself. She found her lines almost unutterably pompous and Iris a humourless bore. Zelda and Scott came over from Paris and shared her dislike of both the production and (ironically) its author’s relentless self-publicity. Zelda wrote to a friend, ‘Just got back from bloody England where the Michael Arlens grow – hardy annuals it says in the seed catalogues.’
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Still, there was no doubting the play’s impact. The first-night audience for
The Green Hat
had been stiff with titles and celebrity: the Prince of Wales, Gladys Cooper, the Marchioness of Milford Haven (in a Russian headdress) and Lady Curzon were among the crowd at the Adelphi Theatre. A week later, when Beaverbrook took Tallulah to lunch with Lloyd George, she found the former prime minister in his living room, the floor covered with newspapers and all of them open at the pages reviewing her play.

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The question for Tallulah now was how to build on her success. She still regarded acting as a serious vocation, and she wanted to transcend her flapper repertoire, yet her range remained largely unproven. Directors appreciated her peculiar gifts: the intensity with which she reacted to other actors onstage; the sparkling wattage of her performances; the rare ability she possessed of holding an audience in the palm of her hand. Bennett would write, ‘I have seen Tallulah electrify the most idiotic, puerile plays into some sort of realistic coherence by individual force.’
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And yet nearly everyone agreed that she had little or no technique. Her diction was a continuing issue. Five years in London had muted her accent somewhat, but her delivery still retained husks of her Southern childhood, and it hadn’t been improved by her recent acquisition of what
The Stage
identified as ‘the modern drawl’.
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This was a vocal style made fashionable by the London crowd who in 1924 had been dubbed by Beaverbrook’s
Express
as the Bright Young Things. It was characterized by fantastically drawn-out vowels and barely articulated consonants;
Daarling, sweeetie, loooovely
were uttered as orgasmic sighs or gently rising shrieks. Yet what was de rigueur at a Soho party was a problem onstage
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and Tallulah’s audiences found her lines increasingly difficult to hear.

Along with her vocal manner, Tallulah’s reliance on certain physical affectations began to draw censure. At emphatic moments she would always shake back her hair; whatever character she was playing, her body assumed a fashionable flapper pose – back arched like a cat, shoulders drooping forward in a languorous slouch. Tallulah’s fans would not have her any other way, but critics saw her unvarying body language as symptomatic of a failure to fully inhabit her roles.

Even her finest qualities, her capacity to fizz and burn up the stage, were controversial. The drama critic of
Eve
magazine said she could be relied upon ‘to discharge more emotion and give more of herself in one undisciplined half minute than almost any English actress can contrive in three acts of polite disturbance.’
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Others, however, disparaged this gift as mere exhibitionism – a specious trick of personality that Tallulah was unable to deliver, reliably, every night. Noël Coward’s former lover, Jeffrey Amherst, who had watched her closely in
Fallen Angels,
observed, ‘Tuesday she might give a performance that would knock your eyes out. And then Wednesday night go off, and Christ knows what might happen.’
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