TALLULAH BANKHEAD
Name: Tallulah Brockman Bankhead
Born: 31 January 1902 Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.
Died: 12 December 1968 New York, New York, U.S.
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 - December 12, 1968) was an
American actress, talk-show host and bonne vivante.
Bankhead was born in Huntsville, Alabama to William Brockman Bankhead and
Adelaide Eugenia Sledge, and was named after her maternal grandmother. She
has been described as "an extremely homely child", overweight and with a deep,
husky voice resulting from chronic bronchitis.
Bankhead came from a powerful Democratic political family in the South in
general and Alabama in particular. Her father was the Speaker of the United
States House of Representatives from 1936-1940 (in the 74th, 75th, and 76th
Congresses), immediately preceding Sam Rayburn. She was the niece of Senator
John H. Bankhead II, and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead. Bankhead
herself was a Democrat, albeit one of a more liberal stripe than the rest of her
family.
Her family sent her to various schools in an attempt to keep her out of trouble,
which included a year at a Catholic convent school (although her father was a
Methodist and her mother, who died at her birth, was an Episcopalian).
At 15, Bankhead won a movie-magazine beauty contest and convinced her family to
let her move to New York. She quickly won bit parts, first appearing in a non-speaking
role in The Squab Farm. During these early New York years, she became a
peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table and known as a hard-partying girl-about-town.
During this time she experimented with cocaine and marijuana, but did not
consume alcohol to any great degree. She became known for her wit, although as
screenwriter Anita Loos, another minor Roundtable member, said: "She was so
pretty that we thought she must be stupid." She became known for saying almost
anything, whether true or not. Once, while in attendance at a party, a guest
made a comment about rape, and Bankhead replied "I was raped in our driveway
when I was eleven. You know darling, it was a terrible experience because we had
all that gravel".
In 1923, she made her debut on the London stage, where she was to appear in over
a dozen plays in the next eight years, most famously, The Dancers. Her fame as
an actress was ensured in 1924 when she played the waitress Amy in Sidney Howard's
They Knew What They Wanted. The show won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize. She was famous
not only as an actress but also for her many affairs, infectious personality and
witticisms like "There is less to this than meets the eye" and "I'm as pure as
the driven slush." She was brash, brazen, and apt to say anything. This trait
made her widely popular. She was known for her promiscuous behavior, and had the
reputation of being sexually available to anyone she found attractive, famous or
not. Her longest known affair during this period in her life was with an Italian
businessman named Anthony de Bosdari, which lasted just over one year. By the
end of the decade, she was one of the West End's and England's best-known
and most notorious celebrities.
While in London, Bankhead also bought herself a Bentley, which she loved to
drive. She wasn't very competent with directions, however, and constantly found
herself lost in the London streets. She would telephone a taxi-cab and pay the
driver to drive to her destination while she followed behind in her car. The
press loved this.
Promiscuity came naturally to Bankhead, and she went to bed with anyone who was
interested. She professed to having a ravenous appetite for sex, but not for a
particular type. "I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position
makes me claustrophobic. And the others give me either stiff neck or lockjaw,"
she said. Once, at a party, one of her friends brought along a young man who
boldly told Bankhead that he wanted to make love to her that night. She didn't
bat an eye and said, "And so you shall, you wonderful old-fashioned boy."
She returned to the US in 1931 to be Paramount Pictures' "next Marlene Dietrich",
but Hollywood success eluded her in her first four films of the 30s. Critics
agree that her acting was flat, that she was unable to dominate the camera, and
that she was generally outclassed by Dietrich, Carole Lombard, and others. She
rented a home at 1712 Stanley Street, in Hollywood, and began hosting parties
that were said to "have no boundaries." On September 9, 1932, she was
featured on the cover of Film Weekly.
Bankhead's first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor, and
Cukor and Bankhead became fast friends. Bankhead behaved herself on the set and
filming went smoothly, but she found film-making to be very boring and didn't
have the patience for it. She didn't like Hollywood either. When she met
producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him, "How do you get laid in this dreadful
place?"
Bankhead herself was not very interested in making films. The opportunity to
make $50,000 per film, however, was too good to pass up. She later said, "The
only reason I went to Hollywood was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper."
One of Bankhead's most notorious events was an interview that she gave to Motion
Picture magazine in 1932. She was obviously letting off steam from her
frustrated attempt at a movie career and she ranted wildly about the state of
her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:
"I'm serious about love. I'm damned serious about it now.... I haven't had an
affair for six months. Six months! Too long.... If there's anything the matter
with me now, it's not Hollywood or Hollywood's state of mind.... The matter with
me is, I WANT A MAN! ... Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!"
Hollywood was becoming increasingly conservative, partly as a result of past
scandals, and partly because Will H. Hays and others had formed the infamous
Production Code. The code dictated not only what the studios could show in their
films, but how actors had to conduct themselves off-screen. As predicted, the
interview created quite a commotion. Will Hays was furious. Time ran a story
about it, and, back home, Bankhead's father and family were really rather
perturbed. Bankhead immediately telegraphed her father, vowing never to speak
with a magazine reporter again.
However, following the release of the Kinsey Reports, she was once quoted as
stating;
"I found no surprises in the Kinsey Report. The good doctor's clinical notes
were old hat to me..I've had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these
impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go
into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the
fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself."
Thus, comments such as that quoted above and many other actions in her life led
to her reputation, of which she never made excuses. She was outspoken and
uninhibited. By the standards of the interwar years, Bankhead was quite openly
bisexual, but she successfully avoided scandal related to her affairs,
regardless of the gender of her lovers. She was known to have stripped off her
clothes on several occasions while attending parties, which shocked people in
attendance, but nonetheless she remained magnetic to those who knew her well.
Her personality, it was said, made her almost irresistible as a friend, or a
lover.
Rumors about her sex life have lingered for years, and she was linked
romantically with many notable female personalities of the day, including Greta
Garbo, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne, Laurette Taylor,
Hattie McDaniel, and Alla Nazimova, as well as writer Mercedes de Acosta, and
singer Billie Holiday.
She was reportedly extremely excited when she was first able to meet the elusive
Garbo, but whether they were sexually involved has never been determined beyond
a doubt. The two women played tennis together often, and were said to have
enjoyed one another's company, but Garbo was extremely protective of her private
life and secretive about her lovers. Bankhead was married to actor John Emery
from 1937 to 1941.
Actress Patsy Kelly made a claim to author Boze Hadleigh, which he included in
his 1996 book about lesbianism in Hollywood's early years, that she had a long
lesbian affair with Bankhead. John Gruen's Menotti: A Biography notes an
incident in which Jane Bowles chased Bankhead around Capricorn, Gian Carlo
Menotti and Samuel Barber's Mount Kisco estate, insisting that Bankhead needed
to play the lesbian character Inès in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (which Paul
Bowles had recently translated), but Bankhead locked herself in the bathroom and
kept insisting "That lesbian! I wouldn't know a thing about it."
In 1932, she expressed some interest in spirituality, but did not outwardly
pursue it, except for a time when she met with the Indian mystic, Meher Baba.
In 1933, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy for
an advanced case of gonorrhea, which she claimed she contracted either from
George Raft or Gary Cooper. Only 70 pounds when she left the hospital, she
stoically said to her doctor, "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!"
In 1934, after recuperating in Alabama, she returned to England. After only a
short stay, she was called back to New York to play in Dark Victory. She
continued to play in various performances over the next few years, mostly
mediocre. Nevertheless, David O. Selznick called her the "first choice among
established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara. However, moviegoers answering a poll
thought otherwise.
Her screen test for Gone with the Wind put her out of the running for good.
Selznick decided that she was too old (at 34) for Scarlett's antebellum scenes.
Unable to capture Hollywood, Bankhead returned to her most-loved acting medium,
the stage.
Returning to Broadway, Bankhead's career stalled in unmemorable plays until she
played the cold and ruthless Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little
Foxes (1939). Her portrayal won her the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for
Best Performance, but Bankhead and Hellman feuded over the Soviet Union's
invasion of Finland. Bankhead (a staunch anti-Communist) was said to want a
portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief, while Hellman (an
equally staunch Stalinist) objected strenuously, and the two women didn't speak
for the next quarter of a century.
More success and the same award followed her 1942 performance in Thornton Wilder's
The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and
temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence Eldridge (Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus,
and also husband and wife offstage). During the run of the play, some media
accused Bankhead of a running feud with the play's director, Elia Kazan. Kazan
confirmed the story in his autobiography, and he stated that Bankhead was one of
the few people in his life that he ever actually detested.
In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as the cynical journalist, Constance Porter,
in Lifeboat. The performance is widely acknowledged as her best on film, and won
her the New York Film Critics Circle Award. Almost childlike in her immodesty, a
beaming Tallulah accepted her trophy and exclaimed, "Dahlings, I was wonderful!"
After World War II, Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noel Coward's Private
Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years.
The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command
10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast,
although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star,
and Bankhead's "best friend" from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968.
Bankhead circulated widely in the celebrity crowd of her day, and was a party
favorite for outlandish stunts such as underwearless cartwheels in a skirt or
entering a soiree stark naked. She is also said to have been so engrossed in
conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt that she dropped her drawers and used the
toilet while the first lady was still talking.
Like her family, Bankhead was a Democrat, but broke with most Southerners by
campaigning for Harry Truman's reelection in 1948. While viewing the
Inauguration parade, she booed the South Carolina float which carried then-Governor
Strom Thurmond, who had recently run against Truman on the Dixiecrat ticket,
splitting the Democratic vote.
Though Tallulah Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from
the public eye. Although she had become a heavy drinker and consumer of sleeping
pills (she was a life-long insomniac), Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s
and 1960s on Broadway, in the occasional film, as a highly-popular radio show
host, and in the new medium of television. Her appearance as herself on The
Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show in 1957 is a cult favorite, as is her role as the "Black
Widow" on the 1960s campy television show Batman, which turned out to be her
final screen appearance.
In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and
The Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy Show which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS
radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big
Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host, in
which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies but also performed monologues
and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars
from Broadway, Hollywood and radio--including Fred Allen, Fanny Brice, Groucho
Marx, Ethel Merman, Gracie Fields, Vera Lynn, Jimmy Durante, Martin & Lewis,
George Jessel, Judy Garland, Ethel Barrymore, Gloria Swanson, Jose Ferrer and
Judy Holliday, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than
dent Jack Benny's and Edgar Bergen's ratings.
Bankhead, who proved a masterful comedienne and intriguing personality, however,
was not blamed for the failure of The Big Show--television's growth was hurting
all radio ratings at the time, so the next season NBC installed her as one of a
half dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights.
Although critics, pros and the sophisticated set loved her, and Tallulah's
monologues became classics, she was not among the hosts renewed for the
following season.
Bankhead's most popular television appearance and the one that is still seen
widely today was her December 3, 1957 appearance on The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz
Hour. Bankhead played herself in the episode titled "The Celebrity Next Door".
The part was originally slated for Bette Davis, but she had to bow out after
cracking her vertebra.
Lucille Ball was a fan of Bankhead's and did a good impression of her. By the
time the episode was filmed, however, both Ball and Arnaz were at their wit's
end over Bankhead's behavior during rehearsal: she refused to listen to the
director and she did not like to rehearse. It took her three hours to "wake up"
once she arrived on the set and everyone thought she was drunk most of the time.
Ball and Arnaz apparently didn't know about Tallulah's antipathy toward
rehearsing or her incredible ability to memorize a script. The actual taping of
the episode went off without a hitch, and Bankhead impressed everyone with her
line readings and professionalism". Lucille Ball later said that she was
conned by Bankhead who purposely made her think she would screw up to throw her
off kilter. Desi Arnaz said that Bankhead walked all over him and Ball, and they
hadn't known this was typical behavior for Tallulah.
Bankhead also appeared as Blanche DuBois in a revival of Tennessee Williams's A
Streetcar Named Desire (1956), but reviews were poor. She received a Tony Award
nomination for her performance of a bizarre 50-year-old mother in Mary Chase's
Midgie Purvis (1961). Her last theatrical appearance was in another Williams
play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963). Although she received
good notices for her last performances, her career as one of the greats of the
American stage was coming to an end.
Her last motion picture was a British horror film Fanatic (1965) co-starring
Stefanie Powers, which was released in the U.S. as Die! Die! My Darling!.
Her last appearance on screen came in March 1967 as the villainous Black Widow
in the Batman TV series.
According to author Brendan Gill, when Bankhead entered the hospital for an
illness, an article was headed "Tallulah Hospitalized, Hospital Tallulahized."
This headline was a testament to Bankhead's large, charismatic personality (which
inspired much of the "personality" of the character Cruella De Vil in Disney's
One Hundred and One Dalmatians).
Bankhead had no children, but was the godmother of Brook and Brockman Seawell,
children of her lifelong friend and actress Eugenia Rawls and Rawls's husband,
Donald Seawell. She was known for her kindness to animals and children.
An avid baseball fan, Bankhead was a fan of the New York Giants. She once said
that, throughout history, there have only been two geniuses, "Willie Shakespeare
and Willie Mays."
Bankhead was also a fan of the soap opera, The Edge of Night. It has been said
that after watching a female character agonize over a man, Bankhead contacted
the producers of the show and said, "Why doesn't she just shoot the bastard?"
On May 14, 1968, Bankhead was a guest on The Tonight Show with Joe Garagiola as
the guest host, along with John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They were in New York
to announce the formation of their new company Apple Records. Bankhead,
reportedly a bit inebriated, told Lennon and McCartney that she would love to
learn how to meditate, as they had in India with the Maharishi in February 1968.
Around that time, fans were shocked to see Bankhead on the cover of The National
Enquirer. The tabloid informed its readers that the actress was aware that she
had only months to live. "There's nothing you, or I, or anybody can do about it,"
she was quoted.
Tallulah Bankhead died in St. Luke's Hospital in New York City of double
pneumonia arising from influenza, complicated by emphysema, at the age of 66 on
December 12, 1968, and is buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, Chestertown,
Maryland.
Name: Tallulah Brockman Bankhead
Born: 31 January 1902 Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.
Died: 12 December 1968 New York, New York, U.S.
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 - December 12, 1968) was an
American actress, talk-show host and bonne vivante.
Bankhead was born in Huntsville, Alabama to William Brockman Bankhead and
Adelaide Eugenia Sledge, and was named after her maternal grandmother. She
has been described as "an extremely homely child", overweight and with a deep,
husky voice resulting from chronic bronchitis.
Bankhead came from a powerful Democratic political family in the South in
general and Alabama in particular. Her father was the Speaker of the United
States House of Representatives from 1936-1940 (in the 74th, 75th, and 76th
Congresses), immediately preceding Sam Rayburn. She was the niece of Senator
John H. Bankhead II, and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead. Bankhead
herself was a Democrat, albeit one of a more liberal stripe than the rest of her
family.
Her family sent her to various schools in an attempt to keep her out of trouble,
which included a year at a Catholic convent school (although her father was a
Methodist and her mother, who died at her birth, was an Episcopalian).
At 15, Bankhead won a movie-magazine beauty contest and convinced her family to
let her move to New York. She quickly won bit parts, first appearing in a non-speaking
role in The Squab Farm. During these early New York years, she became a
peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table and known as a hard-partying girl-about-town.
During this time she experimented with cocaine and marijuana, but did not
consume alcohol to any great degree. She became known for her wit, although as
screenwriter Anita Loos, another minor Roundtable member, said: "She was so
pretty that we thought she must be stupid." She became known for saying almost
anything, whether true or not. Once, while in attendance at a party, a guest
made a comment about rape, and Bankhead replied "I was raped in our driveway
when I was eleven. You know darling, it was a terrible experience because we had
all that gravel".
In 1923, she made her debut on the London stage, where she was to appear in over
a dozen plays in the next eight years, most famously, The Dancers. Her fame as
an actress was ensured in 1924 when she played the waitress Amy in Sidney Howard's
They Knew What They Wanted. The show won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize. She was famous
not only as an actress but also for her many affairs, infectious personality and
witticisms like "There is less to this than meets the eye" and "I'm as pure as
the driven slush." She was brash, brazen, and apt to say anything. This trait
made her widely popular. She was known for her promiscuous behavior, and had the
reputation of being sexually available to anyone she found attractive, famous or
not. Her longest known affair during this period in her life was with an Italian
businessman named Anthony de Bosdari, which lasted just over one year. By the
end of the decade, she was one of the West End's and England's best-known
and most notorious celebrities.
While in London, Bankhead also bought herself a Bentley, which she loved to
drive. She wasn't very competent with directions, however, and constantly found
herself lost in the London streets. She would telephone a taxi-cab and pay the
driver to drive to her destination while she followed behind in her car. The
press loved this.
Promiscuity came naturally to Bankhead, and she went to bed with anyone who was
interested. She professed to having a ravenous appetite for sex, but not for a
particular type. "I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position
makes me claustrophobic. And the others give me either stiff neck or lockjaw,"
she said. Once, at a party, one of her friends brought along a young man who
boldly told Bankhead that he wanted to make love to her that night. She didn't
bat an eye and said, "And so you shall, you wonderful old-fashioned boy."
She returned to the US in 1931 to be Paramount Pictures' "next Marlene Dietrich",
but Hollywood success eluded her in her first four films of the 30s. Critics
agree that her acting was flat, that she was unable to dominate the camera, and
that she was generally outclassed by Dietrich, Carole Lombard, and others. She
rented a home at 1712 Stanley Street, in Hollywood, and began hosting parties
that were said to "have no boundaries." On September 9, 1932, she was
featured on the cover of Film Weekly.
Bankhead's first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor, and
Cukor and Bankhead became fast friends. Bankhead behaved herself on the set and
filming went smoothly, but she found film-making to be very boring and didn't
have the patience for it. She didn't like Hollywood either. When she met
producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him, "How do you get laid in this dreadful
place?"
Bankhead herself was not very interested in making films. The opportunity to
make $50,000 per film, however, was too good to pass up. She later said, "The
only reason I went to Hollywood was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper."
One of Bankhead's most notorious events was an interview that she gave to Motion
Picture magazine in 1932. She was obviously letting off steam from her
frustrated attempt at a movie career and she ranted wildly about the state of
her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:
"I'm serious about love. I'm damned serious about it now.... I haven't had an
affair for six months. Six months! Too long.... If there's anything the matter
with me now, it's not Hollywood or Hollywood's state of mind.... The matter with
me is, I WANT A MAN! ... Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!"
Hollywood was becoming increasingly conservative, partly as a result of past
scandals, and partly because Will H. Hays and others had formed the infamous
Production Code. The code dictated not only what the studios could show in their
films, but how actors had to conduct themselves off-screen. As predicted, the
interview created quite a commotion. Will Hays was furious. Time ran a story
about it, and, back home, Bankhead's father and family were really rather
perturbed. Bankhead immediately telegraphed her father, vowing never to speak
with a magazine reporter again.
However, following the release of the Kinsey Reports, she was once quoted as
stating;
"I found no surprises in the Kinsey Report. The good doctor's clinical notes
were old hat to me..I've had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these
impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go
into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the
fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself."
Thus, comments such as that quoted above and many other actions in her life led
to her reputation, of which she never made excuses. She was outspoken and
uninhibited. By the standards of the interwar years, Bankhead was quite openly
bisexual, but she successfully avoided scandal related to her affairs,
regardless of the gender of her lovers. She was known to have stripped off her
clothes on several occasions while attending parties, which shocked people in
attendance, but nonetheless she remained magnetic to those who knew her well.
Her personality, it was said, made her almost irresistible as a friend, or a
lover.
Rumors about her sex life have lingered for years, and she was linked
romantically with many notable female personalities of the day, including Greta
Garbo, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne, Laurette Taylor,
Hattie McDaniel, and Alla Nazimova, as well as writer Mercedes de Acosta, and
singer Billie Holiday.
She was reportedly extremely excited when she was first able to meet the elusive
Garbo, but whether they were sexually involved has never been determined beyond
a doubt. The two women played tennis together often, and were said to have
enjoyed one another's company, but Garbo was extremely protective of her private
life and secretive about her lovers. Bankhead was married to actor John Emery
from 1937 to 1941.
Actress Patsy Kelly made a claim to author Boze Hadleigh, which he included in
his 1996 book about lesbianism in Hollywood's early years, that she had a long
lesbian affair with Bankhead. John Gruen's Menotti: A Biography notes an
incident in which Jane Bowles chased Bankhead around Capricorn, Gian Carlo
Menotti and Samuel Barber's Mount Kisco estate, insisting that Bankhead needed
to play the lesbian character Inès in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (which Paul
Bowles had recently translated), but Bankhead locked herself in the bathroom and
kept insisting "That lesbian! I wouldn't know a thing about it."
In 1932, she expressed some interest in spirituality, but did not outwardly
pursue it, except for a time when she met with the Indian mystic, Meher Baba.
In 1933, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy for
an advanced case of gonorrhea, which she claimed she contracted either from
George Raft or Gary Cooper. Only 70 pounds when she left the hospital, she
stoically said to her doctor, "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!"
In 1934, after recuperating in Alabama, she returned to England. After only a
short stay, she was called back to New York to play in Dark Victory. She
continued to play in various performances over the next few years, mostly
mediocre. Nevertheless, David O. Selznick called her the "first choice among
established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara. However, moviegoers answering a poll
thought otherwise.
Her screen test for Gone with the Wind put her out of the running for good.
Selznick decided that she was too old (at 34) for Scarlett's antebellum scenes.
Unable to capture Hollywood, Bankhead returned to her most-loved acting medium,
the stage.
Returning to Broadway, Bankhead's career stalled in unmemorable plays until she
played the cold and ruthless Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little
Foxes (1939). Her portrayal won her the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for
Best Performance, but Bankhead and Hellman feuded over the Soviet Union's
invasion of Finland. Bankhead (a staunch anti-Communist) was said to want a
portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief, while Hellman (an
equally staunch Stalinist) objected strenuously, and the two women didn't speak
for the next quarter of a century.
More success and the same award followed her 1942 performance in Thornton Wilder's
The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and
temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence Eldridge (Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus,
and also husband and wife offstage). During the run of the play, some media
accused Bankhead of a running feud with the play's director, Elia Kazan. Kazan
confirmed the story in his autobiography, and he stated that Bankhead was one of
the few people in his life that he ever actually detested.
In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as the cynical journalist, Constance Porter,
in Lifeboat. The performance is widely acknowledged as her best on film, and won
her the New York Film Critics Circle Award. Almost childlike in her immodesty, a
beaming Tallulah accepted her trophy and exclaimed, "Dahlings, I was wonderful!"
After World War II, Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noel Coward's Private
Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years.
The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command
10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast,
although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star,
and Bankhead's "best friend" from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968.
Bankhead circulated widely in the celebrity crowd of her day, and was a party
favorite for outlandish stunts such as underwearless cartwheels in a skirt or
entering a soiree stark naked. She is also said to have been so engrossed in
conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt that she dropped her drawers and used the
toilet while the first lady was still talking.
Like her family, Bankhead was a Democrat, but broke with most Southerners by
campaigning for Harry Truman's reelection in 1948. While viewing the
Inauguration parade, she booed the South Carolina float which carried then-Governor
Strom Thurmond, who had recently run against Truman on the Dixiecrat ticket,
splitting the Democratic vote.
Though Tallulah Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from
the public eye. Although she had become a heavy drinker and consumer of sleeping
pills (she was a life-long insomniac), Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s
and 1960s on Broadway, in the occasional film, as a highly-popular radio show
host, and in the new medium of television. Her appearance as herself on The
Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show in 1957 is a cult favorite, as is her role as the "Black
Widow" on the 1960s campy television show Batman, which turned out to be her
final screen appearance.
In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and
The Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy Show which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS
radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big
Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host, in
which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies but also performed monologues
and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars
from Broadway, Hollywood and radio--including Fred Allen, Fanny Brice, Groucho
Marx, Ethel Merman, Gracie Fields, Vera Lynn, Jimmy Durante, Martin & Lewis,
George Jessel, Judy Garland, Ethel Barrymore, Gloria Swanson, Jose Ferrer and
Judy Holliday, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than
dent Jack Benny's and Edgar Bergen's ratings.
Bankhead, who proved a masterful comedienne and intriguing personality, however,
was not blamed for the failure of The Big Show--television's growth was hurting
all radio ratings at the time, so the next season NBC installed her as one of a
half dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights.
Although critics, pros and the sophisticated set loved her, and Tallulah's
monologues became classics, she was not among the hosts renewed for the
following season.
Bankhead's most popular television appearance and the one that is still seen
widely today was her December 3, 1957 appearance on The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz
Hour. Bankhead played herself in the episode titled "The Celebrity Next Door".
The part was originally slated for Bette Davis, but she had to bow out after
cracking her vertebra.
Lucille Ball was a fan of Bankhead's and did a good impression of her. By the
time the episode was filmed, however, both Ball and Arnaz were at their wit's
end over Bankhead's behavior during rehearsal: she refused to listen to the
director and she did not like to rehearse. It took her three hours to "wake up"
once she arrived on the set and everyone thought she was drunk most of the time.
Ball and Arnaz apparently didn't know about Tallulah's antipathy toward
rehearsing or her incredible ability to memorize a script. The actual taping of
the episode went off without a hitch, and Bankhead impressed everyone with her
line readings and professionalism". Lucille Ball later said that she was
conned by Bankhead who purposely made her think she would screw up to throw her
off kilter. Desi Arnaz said that Bankhead walked all over him and Ball, and they
hadn't known this was typical behavior for Tallulah.
Bankhead also appeared as Blanche DuBois in a revival of Tennessee Williams's A
Streetcar Named Desire (1956), but reviews were poor. She received a Tony Award
nomination for her performance of a bizarre 50-year-old mother in Mary Chase's
Midgie Purvis (1961). Her last theatrical appearance was in another Williams
play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963). Although she received
good notices for her last performances, her career as one of the greats of the
American stage was coming to an end.
Her last motion picture was a British horror film Fanatic (1965) co-starring
Stefanie Powers, which was released in the U.S. as Die! Die! My Darling!.
Her last appearance on screen came in March 1967 as the villainous Black Widow
in the Batman TV series.
According to author Brendan Gill, when Bankhead entered the hospital for an
illness, an article was headed "Tallulah Hospitalized, Hospital Tallulahized."
This headline was a testament to Bankhead's large, charismatic personality (which
inspired much of the "personality" of the character Cruella De Vil in Disney's
One Hundred and One Dalmatians).
Bankhead had no children, but was the godmother of Brook and Brockman Seawell,
children of her lifelong friend and actress Eugenia Rawls and Rawls's husband,
Donald Seawell. She was known for her kindness to animals and children.
An avid baseball fan, Bankhead was a fan of the New York Giants. She once said
that, throughout history, there have only been two geniuses, "Willie Shakespeare
and Willie Mays."
Bankhead was also a fan of the soap opera, The Edge of Night. It has been said
that after watching a female character agonize over a man, Bankhead contacted
the producers of the show and said, "Why doesn't she just shoot the bastard?"
On May 14, 1968, Bankhead was a guest on The Tonight Show with Joe Garagiola as
the guest host, along with John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They were in New York
to announce the formation of their new company Apple Records. Bankhead,
reportedly a bit inebriated, told Lennon and McCartney that she would love to
learn how to meditate, as they had in India with the Maharishi in February 1968.
Around that time, fans were shocked to see Bankhead on the cover of The National
Enquirer. The tabloid informed its readers that the actress was aware that she
had only months to live. "There's nothing you, or I, or anybody can do about it,"
she was quoted.
Tallulah Bankhead died in St. Luke's Hospital in New York City of double
pneumonia arising from influenza, complicated by emphysema, at the age of 66 on
December 12, 1968, and is buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, Chestertown,
Maryland.