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January 31, 1902– Tallulah Brockman Bankhead
“I think the Republican party should be placed in drydock and have the barnacles scraped off its bottom.”
Today we celebrate the birthday of Miss Tallulah Bankhead. I am a gay man of a certain age, and in my time, in my tribe, telling Tallulah stories and imitating the famed personality was de rigueur at brunches and parties. But, nowadays, do the kids even know who she is?
Bankhead lived a singular, spontaneously combustible life, brimming with panache. She loved men, women, liquor, and cocaine. She accessorized with cigarettes like an Alabama smokehouse. The Brockmans and Bankheads were a prominent Alabama political family, her grandfather and uncle were Senators and her father served as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Bankhead’s support of liberal causes, especially Civil Rghts broke with the segregationist Southern Democrats and she often opposed her own family publicly.
There are so many great anecdotes about her. Let’s start with this one:
It was 1931 and Bankhead was traveling to Hollywood for the first time. Riding with her on the train were Joan Crawford and her handsome husband, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Tallulah Bankhead quipped:
“Joan, Dahling… you’re divine. I’ve had an affair with your husband, and watch out, you’ll be next.”
As a kid, Bankhead was a reader of movie magazines. One day, she spotted a contest for aspiring actors. A dozen winners would receive a trip to NYC and roles in a film simply on the strength of their submitted photograph. She sent her picture without any contact information, and when Picture Play Magazine ran her headshot with the caption: “Who Is She?”, her father replied with another copy of the photo and a letter of confirmation. He agreed to let his daughter go to NYC along with her aunt as chaperone.
With Robert Montgomery in “Faithless” (1932), via YouTube
In Manhattan, Bankhead and the 11 others got their first taste of stage and film acting. Bankhead was a natural, yet from the beginning, her career was filled with hits and misses, epic and trivial. She took to the glamorous, high-octane, dissolute lifestyle of actors and artists. Bankhead and the aunt moved into the Algonquin Hotel, the place with parades of celebrities and geniuses from a myriad of disciplines. She attended parties and found small stage parts until she reached the age of consent, when, at the urging of an astrologer, she left NYC and went to London where she had been invited to star in a play. For the most part she always preferred working on stage, where the nuances of her one-of-a-kind demeanor really came through.
For the next seven years, Bankhead was the toast of London. British audiences adored her, whether the projects were classy or tawdry. She drew a group of fans who emulated her and would cheer whenever she made an entrance. Delighted, Bankhead would wave back at them, saying, “Thank you, dahlings”.
In 1931, Bankhead left London, summoned by studios Paramount Pictures kept in NYC. She was paired with gay director George Cukor for the film The Tarnished Lady followed by two more, My Sin and The Cheat, all three in one year, and all three duds. She moved to Hollywood to see if she could do any better. Sadly, her films are mostly uninteresting and don’t really showcase her considerable talents, except for Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944). Her performance in that film is fearless and memorable. Hitchcock found a way to use Bankhead’s special skills.
In “Lifeboat” 1944, 20th Century Fox via YouTube
Not really making it in films, Bankhead returned to the stage, and the theatre is where she left her mark. She triumphed in all sorts of projects, including Sadie Thompson in Rain (1935), Antony and Cleopatra (1937), the conniving Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1940), Sabina in gay writer Thornton Wilder’s epic comedy of survival, The Skin Of Our Teeth, and Noël Coward’s Private Lives (1949).
Starting in 1950, she hosted The Big Show a popular radio variety hour in which she bantered with guests such as Lucille Ball, Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, and Ethel Merman. Her unique whiskey and molasses voice coupled with her dry wit and impeccable comic timing was perfect for radio.
Bankhead also became a popular cabaret artist. She played The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas making $20,000 a week in a show that included monologues, songs and banter.
In 1956, Tennessee Williams chose her for the first Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, playing Blanche DuBois, a character partially inspired by her. Williams had wanted Bankhead for the original production, but she turned it down. On opening night, Williams said her Blanche was “the worst I have seen”, accusing her of ruining the role by camping it up for her fans who wanted camp. Wanting the approval of the playwright, Bankhead worked on her performance and two weeks later Williams remarked:
“I’m not ashamed to say that I shed tears almost all the way through and that when the play was finished I rushed up to her and fell to my knees at her feet. The human drama, the play of a woman’s great valor and an artist’s truth, her own, far superseded, and even eclipsed, to my eye, the performance of my own play.”
However, the damage was done, and the revival soon closed, playing less than a month.
Yet, Williams used her again in a revival of another of his plays, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), directed by Tony Richardson. It was her last work on stage.
Bankhead was always frank and forthcoming about her sexual appetites. She was quite open about having lovers of both genders:
“My father warned me about men and booze, but he never said anything about women and cocaine.”
Among her conquests were Billie Holliday, actors Eva La Galliene, Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, Beatrice Lillie, and Alla Nazimova, plus writer Mercedes de Acosta. She had a decades long thing with actor Patsy Kelly. Bankhead never publicly described herself as bisexual. She did, however, describe herself as “ambisextrous”.
Bankhead certainly never hid her attraction to men, but her female relationships were marked by playfulness and devotion. She never stayed with any lover for very long, though Kelly lived with her at Windows, her estate in Bedford, NY.
Bankhead led a life of rapturous adventure and sensual celebration, peppered with her skewed humor and a penchant for quotable quips. She frequently hired friends as employees, the dividing line nearly invisible. She hired young, handsome gay men as her assistants, calling them her caddies. Her parties were legendary.
Her emotions were big, yet she took life’s disappointments in stride. In the early 1930s, when she was diagnosed with gonorrhea, she mischievously blamed Gary Cooper. In 1933, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to the venereal disease. When she left the hospital, she told reporters: “Don’t think this has taught me a lesson!”
The Hays Committee oversaw The Motion Picture Production Codes, the industry moral guidelines that was applied to most American films by major studios from 1930 to 1968. The Hays Committee “Doom Book” was a list of 150 actors considered “unsuitable for the public”. Bankhead was number one on the list with the heading: “Verbal Moral Turpitude”. She publicly called Will H. Hays “… that little prick”.
When Dr. Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior In The Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior In The Human Female (1953), collectively know as The Kinsey Report, Bankhead announced:
“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.”
Bankhead had a long struggled with addiction, smoking and drinking most of her life, and as she grew older she began taking dangerous mixtures of drugs to fall asleep. She hated being alone, and her struggle with loneliness became depression. In 1956, playing a game of Truth Or Dare with Tennessee Williams, she confessed:
“I’m 54, and I wish always, always, for death. I’ve always wanted death. Nothing else do I want more.”
She got her wish just two weeks before her 63rd birthday.
Bankhead lived a life of audacious adventure and sensual sprees, and, she never wasted a moment of it.
Bankhead Quotes (and there are plenty of them, Dahling…):
“Here’s a rule I recommend: Never practice two vices at once.”
“I did what I could to inflate the rumor I was on my way to stardom. What I was on my way to really, by any mathematical standards known to man, was oblivion, by way of obscurity.”
“I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.”
“I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That’s what I call a liberal education.”
“I’d rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.”
“I’m as pure as the driven slush.”
“I’ve been called many things, but never an intellectual.”
“If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.”
“If you really want to help the American theater, don’t be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.”
“It’s the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time”
“They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.”
Ellen DeGeneres just came out and asked former First Lady Michelle Obama when she appeared on her show today, what was inside that Tiffany box that Melania Trump awkwardly gave her last January. Obama revealed it was… . . 
