You haven’t heard it all until you’ve encountered the chaos of Tallulah Bankhead. This stage actress struggled to break into Hollywood while racking up over 500 lovers of both genders. Come for the unhinged antics of a starlet. Stay for her surprising activism.
This episode pairs well with:
Tallulah’s Ex-Girlfriend and WWII Spy: Toto Koopman
Transcript:
Theresa: Hi, and welcome to the Unhinged History Podcast, the podcast where two people compulsively comb through wiki commons trying to find images of some obscure event in history and then figure out the backstory behind it, report that history to their friend and allow you to listen in like the little KGB e-dropper that you apparently are. I’m host one, I’m Teresa, and that’s…
Angie: I’m Angie, and I just want to know if you combing the wiki commons archive is where our story comes from today. What? What? What?
Theresa: Oh, that’s right, because I’m going only. I am… Dang it. Okay, I was hoping to do more of writery, but here we are. Okay. If you want to hand it over all…
I mean, why not? Hey, I’m just going to give you my notes. You tell me the story I wrote down, and we’re going to have a great time. It’ll be so much fun. Okay, so a couple weeks ago, I told you about Toto Koopman, first biracial model slash World War II spy slash she can do anything you can do. Better in backwards. And in passing, I made a comment about one of her lovers, Tallulah Bankhead, and said, I’ve got to cover her. Today I’m going to cover her.
Angie: Today is the day. I’m so excited that it is a week forever.
Theresa: Thank you. My sources, Women’s History Network, the Politics of Tallulah Bankhead by Ashley Stinson, the New Yorker, darling, the strange case of Tallulah Bankhead by Robert Gottlieb.
Angie: Alabama Women’s… Is this a strange case? Yes. Oh, okay. Sorry.
Theresa: No, no, no, just shows you’re listening to me, and I’m here for that. I like being observed. Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame, Tallulah, Brockman Bankhead 1903 to 1968, and Tallulah Bankhead, a passionate life biography. Are you ready? Yes. Okay.
Thank you. Tallulah, Brockman Bankhead, born in Huntsville, Alabama 1902. Now we got Ada, Tallulah’s mother. She dies, not dries, tragically of blood poisoning just three weeks following Tallulah’s birth. And on her deathbed, she told her sister-in-law to take care of Eugenia, Tallulah’s older sister, and then follows it up by saying, Tallulah will always be able to take care of herself. Okay. This baby is weeks old, and mother is like, no, that one’s got it. Honestly.
Angie: Okay. Yeah, okay, because listen, when my youngest was born, I knew he was going to rule the world. It’s like, yep. You got it, Bob. I can’t, yeah, I can go, mom, go. All right.
Theresa: Because I’m just like, look, this little thing needs help with everything. But maybe that was indicative of me needing to pair it.
Angie: I taught you how to use a spoon. This is kind of what I always remind my teenagers. Like, don’t be a jerk. You couldn’t eat before me.
Theresa: So Tallulah’s mom’s death haunts her for her entire life. It also really destroys her dad because Aida is only 21 years old, and he described, dad describes her as the most beautiful thing that ever lived. Her mom is so beautiful. Yeah, that, yeah. So Will, dad is so grief-stricken that he collapses into a pattern of alcoholism, self-pity, and absence, not abstinence, for years.
Angie: I hate it when that happens. Anything but therapy. And that’s what this episode’s called.
Theresa: Now, I should let you know that the bank heads of Alabama, they’re not rich, but according to sources, they’re aristocracy. William Bankhead’s father and brother are both United States senators. Okay. So, so they’re doing all right.
Yeah. I mean, not rich, but they have power. They have enough money to keep their heads above water.
The motherless Tallulah and her sister, Eugenia, are both reared by their grandparents and aunts with strict guidelines, which they ignored. And then they have this incredible sense of privilege, which everybody indulged. Good for them.
What’s the worst that can happen? Now, as they grew up in Jasper, Alabama, in this, okay, so they’re not rich, but quote, they live in a mansion built in 1910. So, they’re not rich. I mean, look, they’re maybe not on paper, right? Maybe they don’t have the liquid assets.
Angie: It’s just very in the mattress.
Theresa: Yeah. But Senator John Hollis Bankhead, grandpa, is the one who kind of gives them all this, that, you know, they text marriage, but eventually they move to boarding schools and they change boarding schools at a regular clip and this tends to correspond with Tallulah getting expelled.
Angie: Tends to correspond.
Theresa: Yes. Oh, okay. Now, Tallulah and Eugenia’s grandmother and aunt are determined to make proper Southern ladies out of both of them. And soon it becomes obvious to anybody with a set of goddamn eyes that the girls are becoming a handful. Shocking, right? So, William, dad, proposes enrolling them in a convent school to tame them.
Angie: I, this is not going to go well.
Theresa: His mother, grandma, who is a stout Episcopalian, she kind of refuses at first, but then she changes her mind then when she learns it’s the only type of boarding school that would admit girls as young as Ted.
Angie: Oh, my God. That has the same, the exact same attitude as me threatening to send my eldest to military school when he was like seven. I 100% was not going to but the threat was there and he thought it was delightfully not what he wanted.
Theresa: But see now, imagine you’re like, you know what? You know, we need to not, we need to keep them in the Protestant faith. They’ll take them now.
Angie: Bye girls, I packed your bag. There’s sandwiches inside. I was just going to say there’s little sandwiches.
Theresa: So 1912 both girls are promptly enrolled at the convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York. Okay. Now, Taluah hates convent school. He’s talking. Grandma and father are impressed by these new things called manners which she displays. It’s their novel. They’ve never shown up before. Okay. Now.
I want this. Will pulls himself together and he goes on to be a successful politician ending up as the much admired speaker of the House under Roosevelt. Oh, okay.
Taluah in turn is a lifelong passionate democratic person who takes credit, some of it deserves for helping elect both Truman and Kennedy. Okay. Get it.
Okay. Now politics, they’re not the only passion that Taluah gets from Daddy Dearest. When he’s a young man, he had gone off to Boston.
He wanted to try his luck as an actor. Okay. Yeah, this fits.
This checks. But that no nonsense Episcopalian mother of his hauls his ass back home with a no nonsense letter. And the like her. I mean, I kind of see the full dynamic. To Lula as a little girl, she is super hell bent on performing and frequently will when he comes home absolutely hammered with his pals, he lifts her up onto the dining room table and he has her entertain the boys with the risque songs.
Angie: Of course. I thought we were doing so well. Okay.
Theresa: Now she revels in this and she’s this plump little child with startlingly gold hair and she apparently was an exhibitionist from the beginning. Oh, good for her. Now this she has this other side of her dramaticness that comes out and it is it expresses itself in these incredibly wild tantrums. When she doesn’t get her way, she throws an absolute connection fit.
Angie: I was good. I was expecting to hear literally anything but wild tantrum like that seemed par for the course. So you said it. I was like, oh, wait, nope.
Speaker 4: That’s wrong.
Theresa: Yeah, I can’t be that this was this was two in line. Teresa is going to come out with something non sequitur. She would later go on to say to deny me anything only inflames my desire. I’m going to need that.
Angie: I’m going to I’m going to need that. Like on a t-shirt.
Theresa: Now she’s described as throwing herself down. She would beat the floor. Her face would grow purple as she would scream bloody murder. Okay. It was so bad. Her sister would hide in the closet. And her common sense school grandmother who would not deal with this nonsense would just eat a bucket of water on to Lula’s face.
Angie: Which hit it together. Yeah.
Theresa: I honestly it is this entire thing is a mood.
Angie: The whole family is a mood. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So.
Theresa: The attempts at that conventional education for the bank head girls kind of goes awry because Eugenia, because this is the south. She is she has her debutante here and she would elope with a boy that she met that day. Like she was skedaddles.
Angie: If my sister was that damn dramatic about everything and this handsome boy walked in and I was a debutante I would be like me. Bye. Yeah. This can’t be worse. Yeah.
Theresa: So to Lula at age 15 convinces her family she’s born to be an actress. They know they’ve seen it. The writing’s been on the wall. Now her senatorial grandfather he ends up trying to pull strings to get her on to Broadway. She gets chaperoned by Aunt Louise and they find themselves living at the Algonquin hotel which ends up having like I know I’ve heard that like so many other actresses background from this time period right like this was kind of like the who plays and when she’s there she encountered the great and near great of the theatrical profession she’s interacting with John Barrymore who true to form tries to seduce her in his dressing room. And she ends up having no schooling as an actress. The next line is she also lack discipline. But the show. She didn’t pick it up anywhere and she had this incredible charm and looks and she was held in on prevailing.
She is quoted to say I was consumed by a fever to be famous even infamous. Same is saying. Yeah. So around age 15 she just overnight turns into this beautiful young woman. Remember we told like as a little one she was kind of plump.
So Eugenia at 16 gets married to Lula she’s got a lot more on her mind than boys and life for her is about to just skyrocket because she’s an avid reader of fan magazine think like Tiger beat of our. Yeah. Yeah.
Now she submits her photo to picture play which I guess was a magazine they’re conducting a contest and awarding a trip to New York plus a part in a movie to 12 lucky individuals based solely on photographs. Wow. Okay. Okay. To Lula learned that she’s one of the winners while browsing through a magazine at a local drug store.
Angie: Now was she already in New York by this point. No. No, no, no.
Theresa: I kind of told the story a little bit out of order. Sorry. That’s okay.
Angie: I just was like wait we’re already there.
Theresa: No we were not. I’m sorry. This is how she gets to New York. There’s so when she enters the contest there’s a slight problem to Lula failed to give her name and address so that they she could contact directly. So her Lula the photo in the magazine is who is she that’s how it’s captioned and they asked for the mystery lady to contact them at once. Picture play is satisfied when daddy dearest Congressman William Bankhead sends them a letter with a duplicate photo of to Lula like this is the same image.
This is my kid. Okay. Now to Lula flip in a static because who wouldn’t be but dad and grandma are a little hesitant about sending this hellion to New York.
Fair. But William Bankhead realizes that to Lula there’s going to be no sleep till Brooklyn. She’s not letting anybody have peace until she gets consent to go. And so you know who she reminds me of is Alice Roosevelt.
Angie: Yes, very much so. I love it. Okay.
Theresa: This is when to Lula’s grandfather agrees to finance her stay in New York and and Louise goes to act as a chaperone. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. So to Lula generally is out of funds. She’s scrounging up any meals she can get her hands on she’s running up these massive bills via Gunkwine whose long suffering owner is a man named Frank Case who announces at one point I can either and here’s where you’re going to get some Alice Roosevelt buys. I can either run this hotel or look after to Lula Bankhead. I can’t do both.
Angie: Yes, I knew there was going to be a phrase like that. I can either run the country or take care of Alice.
Theresa: You pick. Yeah. Now she is slowly progressing from these walk-ons and small parts to these are in these very lackluster undistinguished plays. And it’s five years in New York that she’s trudging through and she’s trying to get this big breakthrough that’s not coming. She’s frustrated. She’s anxious and she’s broke.
And this is when she gets this once in a lifetime opportunity to play opposite. Should have looked at how to say his name. Du Moirier in London. I’m sure he’s important. I literally don’t say his name again. I didn’t care. And this is when she leaps at the opportunity because she is going to conquer the West End.
And so she takes off to England to become an actress in 1920s London. Okay. Are you ready? Because this was the lead up. I’m so excited. In her desperation to be noticed, she’s experimented with alcohol and cocaine. Shocking. But her main shock tactics, they involve sex.
Angie: You know, you know how typically the sentence is at no point did I expect the next word to be what it was. This whole thing. I’m like, yep.
Theresa: Yeah. This is the logic train. This is what happens. And that feels uncomfortable.
Speaker 4: Now, she has her first affair with the celebrated actress Eva Gallien. This woman’s like three years her senior. And although she liked to boast about her, a regular life life saying, I’m a lesbian. She announced to a stranger at a party. What do you do?
Angie: Okay. I love this for her. She also told a friend I could never become a lesbian because they’ve got no sense of humor.
Angie: I love her. I mean, and her grandma is just dying. I can just hear her.
Theresa: I would say this woman’s rolling in her grave, but she hasn’t been able to stop and die yet.
Angie: No, she’s never going to have the opportunity to.
Theresa: So later, she has friends like women like Billie Holiday. I love Billie Holiday. I know. Now on the whole, Tallulah does have a taste for men. And it’s early on that she meets a man that she cared for probably the longest and most deeply. It’s a man whose name is Napier George Henry Stewart Arlington. He goes by Naps.
Angie: Oh, good. And I’m excited for that. Naps is the third.
Theresa: I should. It’s not Arlington. It’s Aileen Penn. Aileen Penn Barron. Okay. All right. Now in the words of a guy who I’ve never heard of before, her biographer, Lee Israel, the biographer, he describes Aileen Penn as a soft spoken, blond, tubercular, well cultivated, bisexual with sensuous, meaty lips, a distant, antique charm, and a mysterious or a history of mysterious disappearances with a streak of cruelty.
Angie: I need you to know I heard no words past meaty lips. Do you want me to repeat it? Absolutely not.
Theresa: Yeah. So. That is a killer and meaty lips.
Angie: That is a description right there.
Theresa: So to Lula, Spencer time in London playing some contrarian women, and this ends up shaping the person and activist that she’s going to become. Okay. Which was a sentence I didn’t see coming, but I was here for. There’s an actress named Viola tree who claimed that bank head was already a great conversationalist on political matters. And decades later, journalist Brendan Gill wrote that when the press interview to Lula, they were indulged with quote. Information about politics, baseball, sexual intercourse, acting the British royal family, mineral deposits in Northern Alabama, gambling, odds, gardening, breeds of dogs, brands of bourbon and ballroom dancing.
Angie: At no point did I expect the next word. So thanks. That say this girl was not ADHD.
Theresa: I don’t know. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. So she’s performing in 16 plays during those eight years in England. She refers to that as her most exciting and she acquires this following of mostly young women. She ends up buying a Bentley and then she dabbled in the drug scene. I feel like dabbles is probably wrong word. It’s probably revels.
Angie: I think you’re probably right. I feel like dabbling was when you were first experimenting with it.
Theresa: I don’t know if experimenting versus turning it into profession. Yeah. Yeah. Now she has a string of affairs. She also becomes engaged to two men. Neither relationship kind of works out and there’s a shock. I know. I mean, everything about this as this girl has commitment issues. Playwright Zoe Akin claims that Bankhead had quote, neither the patient’s nor the intention on waiting for opportunity.
Angie: Okay. She’s going to go and make it myself.
Theresa: So she’s got this glorious hair. She has a unique voice and accent. Like, you know, you’ve heard of people like of the quintessential old timey voice. Darling. The transatlantic. The darling is Tallulah.
Angie: Love that.
Theresa: That’s where that comes from. Now she has this unrestrained dancing and cartwheeling. Now during her career in England, she cartwheeled whenever the script allowed and sometimes when it didn’t. Cartwheeling was her deal.
Angie: I would like to see a script that allows for cartwheeling.
Theresa: I’ve never, I was a theatrical minor and I never had a script that they called for it.
Angie: I can’t say in all the scripts I’ve read or seen in my entire life and there have been many I have ever seen a time for a cartwheel. So good for her, I guess. Maybe she wrote them in herself. It sounds like it.
Theresa: She did a 10 month run of a play called The Dancers, probably cartwheel heavy, where there’s a group of rabid young women who gather nightly in the gallery to express their love for this heroine. They’re screaming, they’re stomping, they’re throwing flowers.
Within three years, she attracted the most loyal and vociferous following in London. She ends up having, okay, so Arnold Barnett or Bennett notes, ordinary stars get hands and I’m assuming they mean claps. If Tallulah gets a hand, it is not heard. What is heard is a terrific, wild, passionate, historical roar and shriek.
Angie: Okay, so pre-beatles.
Theresa: Yeah. And then he goes on to say, only the phrase of the psalmist can describe it. God is gone up with a shout. Wow, okay. Yeah, so comparing her to biblical. Love it for her. I mean, yeah, okay, so she informed a reporter from New York, quote, over here, they like me too. Tallulah, you know, dance and sing and romp and fluff my hair and play reckless parts. This chick became a verb.
Angie: Love that for her. In me and all of us.
Theresa: Now she described or she’s described as an, what’s called an accessible icon, which I found fascinating. She revels in her fans’ idolatry. And so she always acknowledges them, whether she’s on stage, whether she’s off, she blows them kisses and utters the phrase, thank you, darlings. And this results in everybody just going ape.
Angie: It’s working. Yeah. I’m a fan. I don’t even know what she looks like an I’m a fan.
Theresa: After a performance, she greets her fans. She signs autographs, chats with them. She like does the human thing where she asks about their family. And then she even invites them to her dressing room or to come home with her for a visit. Okay. Like this is how you end up dead. This is how the true crime things start.
Angie: I’m glad I wasn’t the first person that thought that.
Theresa: Okay. Well, you’re welcome. That’s what I’m here for. Now there’s one of these devout devoted gallery girls named Eddie Smith. She becomes Tallulah’s employee and is with her for 30 years. So this works out for us. Wow. Okay. Remember how I told you that Tallulah bought herself a Bentley?
Angie: And then dabbled in drugs.
Theresa: Well, okay. Maybe they’re coinciding because she ends up not being good with directions. Shocking. And she constantly finds herself lost in London. And so she goes whenever she’s incredibly lost. She telephones a taxi cab and pays the driver to drive to her destination while she follows behind the car.
Angie: I love that. This is old-timey. I, P, Tallulah, you would have loved Apple Maps.
Theresa: I know. It’s incredible. The press also loves this because now they just need to find a Bentley following a taxi and they’ve got the opportunity to take a perfect shot.
Angie: Oh my gosh. Did you can imagine like just a random Tuesday at the Bentley’s out?
Theresa: There’s a black taxi in front of it. Everybody take pictures. We’ll get a good shot if we just keep holding down that capture button. Mm-hmm. So Tallulah plays in London. She’s in like 16 different plays. Some of them are just incredible garbage and others are Pulitzer Prize winnings.
Like the Pulitzer Prize winning one is the one titled, They Knew What They Wanted. I didn’t see it. Read it.
I don’t know anything about it. But she ends up missing playing a part for Sadie Thompson in Somerset, Maham’s Rain. And when Maham mixed her at the last minute, it makes her so despondent that she contemplates suicide.
Angie: No. I need her to live. I need her to be the 80-year-old woman in the hideous captain with the giant hair.
Theresa: Don’t ruin this for me. I’m not going to. No. One biographer said she’d swallowed 20 aspirin and scrambled a suicide note that said, It ain’t going to rain no mole. And then she laid down where she intended to just give it up. The next morning she wakes up. She’s feeling fine and she’s awaken by a phone call, begging her to step into a leading role in Noll Coward’s Fallen Angels.
Angie: The visual that just gave me. I’m going to die here. And then, hmmm, the last thing morning.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and everything goes her way, you know? And I feel like that is such a good encapsulation on a reason to stay, because you don’t know what the next 12 hours will bring. That’s true. Now, apparently, she doesn’t just work while she’s in London. Shocker. Shocking.
Angie: She’s cartwheeling around London.
Theresa: I mean, I’ll get to that. I’ll get to the cartwheeling. Don’t you wait. Or just you wait. I will wait. Thank you so much. She becomes famous for these offstage shenanigans, probably equally that are up to her film-point performances. Now, in her autobiography, she confides, quote, Have I darkly hinted that for eight years I shall cut a great swath in London? Well, damned well did. And it was all to spur my ego.
Electrifying. London bow clamored for my company. Like, this girl just knew exactly what she wanted, and she went and took it. Oh, love that for her.
She has this highly publicized fling with tennis champion Jean Jean. John, I don’t know. Borotra. Borotra? Look, I’m not a big-headed person.
What do I know? And then she also has a fling with Lord Birkenhead, and then their fraudulent Italian aristocrat, who she almost marries. And the fraudulent Italian aristocrat, that ends up being in the Toto book. I didn’t cover it because I just was like, okay, I’m not going to really talk about this guy much. But to know that like, oh yeah, I forgot that she almost married that dude.
Angie: A fraudulent Italian aristocrat. And you’re like, meh.
Theresa: Yeah, I mean, for both stories, it was just kind of like, you know, these are things. But okay, like there’s like a family of these Italian brookies.
Angie: That’s like a normal thing for them. It’s hilarious. Right.
Theresa: Like, but they all are like, oh, we are Italian nobility. And everybody just kind of goes, okay.
Angie: Yeah, sure, whatever. Love you wife, man. I can do cartwheels.
Speaker 4: So this is just another day in her life.
Theresa: Now, Naps Ellington, he is always on her mind and apparently often in her bed.
Angie: Love this for her.
Theresa: Now she’s approaching 30 and this is when he really just feel deep in her feels because Naps is getting married to the daughter of an Earl. And she, I know. I hate this for her. She’s basically out of money now because she spends everything that she’s earned and then some. Well, she bought a Bentley.
Angie: I think I feel like that in and of itself.
Theresa: Okay. Now suddenly this is where the sky is open again and she gets this another windfall when there is an offer from Paramount that starts at $5,000 a week in 30 money.
Not to do cartwheels. Now this is the moment when she is just, so Hollywood is trying to like snatch up every attractive movie star or stage or they can find and Tallulah is exotic. She’s got this husky seductive voice and they’re thinking she could be the next Greta Garbo. So we should get her in there.
And so we have a letter that she wrote to her dad in January of 1931 where she embarks for New York where she says to dad, Hollywood for me, I’m afraid. I don’t think that’s bad. No, I don’t think so either. It’s for the next year and a half that Bankhead would make six feature films and a boatload of money, but none of these films really pan out.
Angie: Okay, but she has a boatload of money and she can do cartwheels.
Theresa: So, and you know what? Maybe I don’t put it in here, but at some point they, oh, I’ll come back to the cartwheels bit. I’ll come back to the cartwheels bit if I didn’t put it in my notes because I may not have. She explained that her more risque characters are always repentant in adherence to this 1934 Haze code. So filmmakers are needing to kind of add redemption arc to these broken, lost, crazy women. Now, despite that, Bankhead claims to have no regrets about her time in California because eventually she returned to her teenage.
Okay. Now, one thing said it didn’t matter whether she was leaping off a balcony to go back to her blind husband, escaping from a submarine that her crazed husband had sabotaged or going on the streets to procure money for medicine needed for her desperately ill husband. So there’s, you see the theme, right?
We have to, we have to have a reason that she’s being insane. Reviewers either said that she was wasted on such a cliche or that she didn’t live up to them.
Angie: I feel it’s so opposite.
Theresa: Like, it’s basically they don’t like her because she’s a woman. That’s what it’s okay. That’s what it pans out to me. Like, and I’m probably adding my own spin on this a bit too hard. But either way, the audiences aren’t really taking to her. It’s just not working. George Cooke who directed her once, he said that she just wasn’t naturally photogenic, that she’s got these beautiful bones, but her eyes were not made for movies.
They somehow looked hooded and dead. But the reality is that she, and I’ve heard other people describe this, there’s a different kind of acting you need for stage versus you need for movies. And she ends up always projecting this larger than life personality to the audience.
And as a result, it’s always too big. And Tamara is like the nuance. They like the subtle eyebrow movement.
They like those small twinges that show that there’s a lot of depth and personality and nuance. So these movies basically suppressed and caged her. Now, Beth Davis tends to kind of be her film rival who actually survives and thrives in this kind of environment. Now she benefits from studying Tallulah’s vocal patterns and mannerisms and she earns up the screen where Tallulah douses it.
Angie: Okay. So we just, we figured it out for, for Davis. Yeah. Okay.
Theresa: Now, Bankhead goes on to get engaged in politics in 1930s during the Great Depression. She’s got one person who writes about her saying, Fredriskson, who says that in 1936, Bankhead lent her support to National Sharecroppers Week, something her father found particularly embarrassing. To sharecroppers, like, this is the South, right? They, they live in a big ass mansion.
Angie: Let’s think about it. And I’m going to support the local farmers. That’s, oh my God, that’s so embarrassing. Why would you do that? Well, there’s a low of the low. There’s a low of the low.
Theresa: Now, 1939, Tallulah advocates for the Work Progress Administration or WPA support for theater. Now, in addition, she also, I love this bit, she campaigned for the acquittal of the Scottsboro boys. They’re nine young black men, wrongly convicted in Alabama. Yeah. Okay.
Angie: Good for her. She is, she is working for all the right things. Dad’s just being a jerk.
Theresa: I mean, that is a white politician from the South. Fair. You know, like when you lay it out like that, you can see how the pieces line up. In the 30s. So, yeah. Yeah. You say the 30s, but honestly, if you said the 2030s, I’d buy it.
So would I. Now, she’s having all this fun in Hollywood as well. She’s being Tallulah. She’s got her roles, her suntan, nonstop parties. Joan Crawford, reminisced. Okay. We all adored her. We were fascinated by her. We were scared to death of her too. I can’t imagine Joan Crawford being scared of anything.
Angie: Honestly. Yeah. You’re right.
Theresa: She goes on to say she had such authority as if she ruled Earth and she was the first woman on the moon. Okay. And then we’ve got Tallulah’s sexual escapades. This includes an encounter with Johnny Weismueller who played Tarzan in the Garden of Aulah Pool in which she reported that she had been a very satisfied Jane. Now, the drill thread, the biggest scandal was when she was created or that she created was a remark that she kind of tossed off in an interview. She says, I haven’t had an affair for six months. Six months? Too long.
I want a man. Now, apparently, because we’ve got that haze code going, this isn’t the kind of publicity that the studios really want because they’ve got to have redemption arcs to everything and then Tallulah, Tallulah’s. Good for her. She’s just saying it like it is. I know. So she kind of gets like just, she ends up back in Broadway. That’s what happened. She ends up back in Broadway.
Angie: Now… Well, good. She can find a New York man then.
Theresa: For another half a dozen years, she kind of failed at everything she does on stage. One thing happens that’s awful in 1937. She decides to do Anthony and Cleopatra, but she’s got no classical technique and she refuses. She refuses to be coached.
She also butchers the tech. First Cleopatra? Yeah. Oh, honey. Now, in the climactic scene where Cleopatra’s handmaidens were eliminated, she can’t have the deaths of the handmaidens because she’s like, no, absolutely not.
There’s only one death in that scene, mine. So she modifies the script. One critic wrote that she was, quote, more a serpent of the swanee than a Nile.
Another quips, Tallulah Bank had barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra and sank. Oh, that’s rough. So critics are not kind, but to be fair, I feel like she earned it. Now, she gets trapped in this disaster with a dude who’s John Emery, who’s a second-rank actor. And Tallulah had kind of picked up on the summer circuit and kind of rather casually married this guy.
Angie: Oh, just kind of rather casually. Okay.
Theresa: Like you do. Like most marriages just rather casually married. Now, Emery’s this good-looking. He’s capable. He’s amiable. And do you remember that one actor I said, John Barrymore, who tries to seduce her early on? He bears a resemblance to John Barrymore.
Now, not only, okay, so when he revealed himself to the dressing room, Tallulah had sworn herself to anyone with an earshot, never to sleep with anyone who wasn’t, quote, hung like Barrymore. The way you pulled that drink from your mouth. I just want to say I saw that. I recognize your ability to not spit take on camera. I appreciate the dedication.
Angie: I don’t know what to make of that. Because I thought, I thought when he presented herself to him that she was like, no, thank you.
Theresa: She was like, no, thank you, but she’s also like, very nice.
Angie: I’ve seen the standard.
Theresa: And so she goes on to say that she’s going to stick to her word. But then she also at some point says that she’s claimed like 500 or more conquests.
So it’s very difficult to think that she both maintained 500 horse drawn carriages. And also that number. Thanks for that. You’re welcome. The story goes on to be a little bit more crazy. By the way, I hope you’re not listening to this with your young kids in the car. If you’ve made it this far, Godspeed, they’ve made it this far.
Angie: They know, I mean, or they’re super young and we’re banking on them. Not remembering either way. Okay. No, so back to to hung like Barrymore. One of Tallulah’s party tricks was to escort guests to the master bedroom where she would bling back the covers on the bed where hubby is sleeping and cry out. Did you ever see a prick as that as big as that before?
Angie: Why is he sleeping at her party?
Theresa: Because the party probably went for 72 hours and he can’t do enough cocaine. That checks.
Angie: That checks. Okay.
Theresa: So, okay, size matters, but apparently not enough because she also tells people, well darling, the weapon may be of admirable proportions, but it’s shot is indescribably weak. Okay. Now, apparently, when you say things like that about your husband, the marriage tends to not last very long.
Angie: It would not have lasted past the first time we see the covers back and asked how lovely my prick was.
Theresa: I mean, I guess that depends on the relationship and what happens immediately after. I mean, I don’t know. But, okay, during the 30s, Tallulah enters the hospital for what is announced as an abnormal tumor.
Okay. What it actually is is a case of gonorrhea. Chocking. Okay, so this ends up being so violent that it brings her close to death. She has a radical hysterectomy and by the time she leaves the hospital, she’s down to 70 pounds. Oh, wow. Now, she’s undaunted and she announces to her doctor, don’t think this has taught me a lesson.
Okay, live your life. Can’t stop, won’t stop. Can’t stop, won’t stop. Now, the hysterectomy left her not only psychologically shaky, but also, quote, erotically diminished.
So she testified that her lack of physical pleasure and she’s telling Tennessee Williams’ friend, Sandy Campbell this, that while she couldn’t reach an orgasm with any man that she was in love with. And I’m just like, okay, wait a minute. Like, we have, like, there’s so many people writing down the T around this woman. Yeah, okay. She gives an example of multi-millionaire, Jock Whitney, that, you know, basically like, yeah, if I love him, I can’t, I can’t come to fruition. Now, um, Louis, but she doesn’t love him.
I think the men’s fine. Oh, that’s, that’s kind of the implication. Louise Brooks reported to kind of finance a lots of, you know, going through the grapevine quote, I always guessed that she wasn’t interested as interested in bed as everybody thought. So Tallulah seems to care about the conquest more than she does the actual physical act. She’s just cardinauts is in the bed post. Good for her.
Angie: Now, she has a goal. She is going to achieve it.
Theresa: Another aspect of her pathology is her unrestrained exhibitionism. I don’t know if we’ve touched on this yet. He, he, he, I feel like the whole thing has been unrestrained exhibitionism. She’s famous for throwing off her clothes at parties, leaving the bathroom door wide open and working without panties on.
Angie: Gonna live her life, man.
Theresa: Maybe this is, this is where the, this is where the cartwheels come in.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah. Okay.
Theresa: That makes sense. I did put it in my notes. She’s performing in Thornton’s Wilders, the skin of our teeth. So many people in the audience come plain. That the actor’s equity had an order to tell her to wear underpants on stage.
Angie: Could you imagine? Could you imagine coming into work and the notes from your boss are, could you please wear underwear? Yeah, please, please.
Theresa: 17 families spoke to us on stage or on stage in a very caring like attitude.
Angie: We’ve been, people have, have thoughts. Yeah.
Theresa: Could you please take it sales or dropping? We just want to keep you employed. It’s just panties. That’s it.
Angie: That’s all I’m asking. You could take them right off as soon as we’re done.
Theresa: Yeah, just backstage even. Don’t even just as long as you’re on stage. Yeah. It’s around this time that that marriage implodes because apparently Brofky is just done with these antics.
Angie: Hung like a very more. Yeah.
Theresa: That marriage. Okay. Yeah. Now, when she’s making the movie lifeboat with Alfred Hitchcock, he’s fielding complaints, quote, with his much quoted deliberation about whether the wearing pants or underwear needs to be referred to the makeup or hairdressing department.
Angie: That’s a problem for Alfred Hitchcock.
Theresa: I mean, the man who we all know by name. And he’s just like, maybe if we comb it differently.
Angie: If I was a hairdresser, I would quit my job that day. I’m out like absolutely not. Come on. I’ve tried to eat it together. I really.
Theresa: We’re still in the 30s. I don’t know what you’re what you’re on about. I’ve got I’ve got decades. I got it. Now, from her start, her political mentor had always been her father and he ended up kicking the bucket in 1940. And although she’d always claimed that he was the most important figure in her life, the harsh reality is that they are basically never comfortable being near each other. And so they basically spent no time together. Her biographer, Lopenthal, he is convincing when he says that paper trail records put her attempts to define boundaries in the relationship.
But when she did write her invariable reconciliation of only good news also tells us that she also sought his approval. OK. So all of this makes sense to me. Like I it it it matches my confirmation bias that I have on who I think she is in relation to her dad. Yeah. Now, all of her relationships with her biological family are about this complicated, but she does start shocking.
I know, right. Surprise. She does build this new family and she has there’s this young actress, you general who ends up playing her daughter in this in. I think it’s the movie, the little foxes and Eugenia ends up becoming an integral part of her life and she made Rawls’s husband, her lawyer. And apparently there was a shampoo commercial that used the name to Lula and advertising jingle and to Lula takes the shampoo company to court and wins. OK. Now she ends up becoming the godmother of this couple’s two children.
Which is that is wild. OK. If anything happens to me, you know who needs to take care of you two girls. To Lula, this incredible motherly figurehead. She’ll raise you right.
Angie: I just, you know, I’m thinking, OK, maybe from the perspective of like teaching them how to get what they want. Like don’t back down. You do like that. But I can’t see her cutting up peanut butter and jellies anytime soon.
Theresa: No, no. She’s not putting Band-Aids on boo boo’s. Kissing them making better. No, OK. But either way, when to Lula would end up passing, she would leave each of these girls a quarter of her very large estate.
OK. OK. Now. Rawls ends up in a book saying that she both loved and understood the older woman saying, quote, to Lula could be savaged. Her appetite of mind and body wild sometimes grows as if everything had to be possessed, devoured and destroyed. None of this mattered. It was though all the dross burned away, leaving someone frail and loyal and eager to please. You know, the perfect people to have as godmother to your two children. Yeah, this checks.
OK. Yeah. In 1948, Bankhead endorsed Democratic president contender Harry Truman’s civil rights platform and spoke out against the Dixie Crats who bolted from the party. Good for her.
The International Ladies Garment Union or Garment Workers Union invited to Lula to introduce Truman on the radio. So she is just. Doing everything big and believing things and acting on them. And I love this.
The following year. This is probably my favorite part of this entire story. I really hope you hear every single word of this. Bankhead wrote Federal Bureau of Investigation director J Edgar Hoover about iconic jazz singer Billy Holiday’s drug arrest. OK, to Lula strategically reminded Hoover of his relationship with Will Bankhead. To Lula, unfortunately, you stereotypes in the letter that implied that her friend and rumored lover was weak and needed psychological help. That parts of me, unfortunately, but however, like the references to her father, this could have been an attempt to persuade the reactionary Hoover. Over the phone to Lula claimed that holiday should not be, quote, confined within prison walls. Good. Now, when holiday died in 1959, Bankhead sent roses for her casket with a card reading. God bless you. Love from to Lula. But the fact that this woman stood up to J Edgar Hoover was like, remember your relationship with my daddy? Maybe you need to stand down.
Angie: Maybe you should sit down.
Theresa: Darling. Maybe you’re doing too much.
Angie: Hoover never.
Theresa: 1950 to Lula ushered out commercial radio with a bang as she ends up in seeing this weekly hour and a half extravaganza called The Big Show. Surprise. Everybody, including her, didn’t realize that this was going to be hailed by critics as the potential savior to radio. It’s an immediate hit.
Okay. Now, listening to air checks of the Big Show today is like slipping through the cracks in time. You have Eiffel Merman, plugging call me, madam, and trading insults with tell you Jimmy Duarte is making hash of his lines. You got Groucho Marx. He’s singing some enchanted accent or some enchanted evening with a Yiddish accent. Bob Hope is cracking Benny Henge or Jack Benny jokes. Till Lula is cracking bet Davis jokes because she’s accusing bet Davis of taking everything that she does turn it to stage. And when she isn’t, and that’s when she’s not doing Dorothy Parker monologues. So it is just this huge variety show for that.
And this is an incredible what it says like this quote is you give you rise to her generosity, her sense of fun, her self deprecation, her giggle, her unerring timing. This was a deserved but short lived success as radio inevitably lost out to television.
Angie: Video killed the radio star.
Theresa: Exactly. Exactly that. So during the 1950s, she published eyes, her connections with black public figures ordered to bring attention and resources to the civil rights movement. Bankhead and jazz legend W. C. Handy endowed funds to support black musicians until Lula spoke at a dinner for handy at the wall of the Astoria in 1951. Okay.
Now, 1952 Bankhead wrote an article for Ebony about jazz musician Louis Armstrong and four years later, Bankhead spoke at a civil rights rally in New York City, along with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Angie: Wow. Now, All I can think of is the gonorrhea. And she’s she just like turning a whole secured life.
Theresa: Yeah, because it’s not only Eleanor Roosevelt. Rosa Parks is there. And then there’s another woman authoring Lucy, who’s the first black student to enroll at the University of Alabama. That is so cool. So this is such. And it like this is one of those stories where you’re like this woman is so deep. It’s hard like to reduce her down and she she typically just gets reduced down to just this sex crazed starlet. Yeah, that’s unfortunate. But when you when you pull back the cover a little bit, you’re like, no, there is multitudes within this human.
Angie: And you really have to say pull back the cover.
Theresa: That was unintentional. Okay. No, 1960 journalist, Alan Morrison interviews Bankhead about her politics for Ebony and Bankhead did not discuss the South history on race as she didn’t embrace these anarchanistic customs from the time period. So that is kind of this incredible thing. You know, she. Okay, I go into the next paragraph. I won’t I won’t devour. I won’t separate from my notes too far because there’s so much stuff in my brain that I want to give you everything all at once.
And then I’m going to best at my own story. But there’s also kind of problems that she has because there’s an example of a photo of Tallulah in fur and she’s beside her mate in 1949. Bankhead had accused the former mate of stealing from her. And this ends up forcing the woman to come forward with the truth that the money that was quote stolen went to pay for drugs and sex for Tallulah. So complicated figure.
Mm hmm. Now, on the other hand, Morrison goes on to say that Tallulah consistently spoke out against lynching and disenfranchisement. Bankhead also, and this is probably the best part of the story. Well, not the best part of the story because I said about everything here. Had the foresight of casting aside this myopic understanding of racial inequality as solely a southern problem. She instead is also pointing out issues like housing in the urban north. Good. But she’s like, look, this isn’t just a south thing. We’re all guilty of it. It’s systemic. Good for her. This woman somehow passes the age 50.
Angie: I have been wondering this whole time, like, how are we still alive? I mean, Spike, because I bet your grandma’s still alive, too.
Theresa: Now, Tallulah’s demons are also growing stronger. And while she’d always been a heavy drinker, she’s now consuming a quart of bourbon a day. Oh, OK. Now, she’s mixing this with. Twinall, Benzadrin, Dexadrin, Dexamil, and morphine. OK. Now, she’d always been an insomniac, but now she is a rantic for sleep.
Angie: OK. Maybe, maybe put down that cocktail. Yeah.
Theresa: Yeah. Maybe that’s not helping. Now, as far back as 1948, she’d been observed knocking back five sequinols, which I think are kind of a sleep aid. And a brandy chaser after a night of drinking.
Oh. And she can’t bear to be alone. Friends, colleagues, servants, and the young men she attached to, whom she called her caddies, would be weadled and ordered to sit on her bed or lie in her bed all night while she struggled for sleep.
Could they sleep? I don’t think so, because the next line is she couldn’t stop talking. Someone followed her around one day and claimed that she racked up 70,000 words, the length of a novel. Wow.
Songwriter Howard Deets commented, a day away from Tallulah is like a month in another country. Wow. OK. Biographer Lopenthal writes, bills for rolls and rolls of three-inch adhesive tape, observed in her hotel room suite. As it turned out that her maid was taping her wrist together at night to keep her from taking more pills during the intervals of wakefulness. Like, yeah, like tying her wrist together like an inmate. Wow. One night, a colleague saw her in a hotel hallway, quote, a wild woman like a cage temp. Lopenthal, champ, sorry, champ, not champ.
Angie: OK. I’m like, what kind of animal is that? I’ve never heard of that before. You won’t see it at the zoo.
Theresa: Lopenthal continues, strigoe haired, barely wrapped in a thin robe. She flailed at the wall, sputtering, where am I? There were serious accidents and psychotic episodes because she was violent under sedation. Wow. So that’s great.
Angie: That hysterectomy really did her in.
Theresa: I mean, I feel like Berth really did her in. I mean, she’s been a vibe from the start. That’s true. Orson Wells called her the most sensational case of the aging process being unkind. Ooh. He goes on to say, I’ll never forget how awful she looked at the end and how beautiful she looked at the beginning. And that is just harsh and probably a way I would describe somebody. Like, hey, look, this is what it is. She would go on to say, or like, so at some point, just maintaining that self-deprecating humor that she had, somebody on the street would ask, aren’t you Tallulah Bankhead? And she’d answer, I’m what’s left of her darling.
Angie: I mean, OK. At least she recognizes it.
Theresa: For years, she’d been going on saying that she wanted to die. And once playing the truth game with Tennessee Williams, she confessed, I’m 54 and wish always, always for death. I’ve always wanted death.
Nothing else do I want more. And it’s more than a dozen years later in 1968 that she succumbs. She ends up getting double pneumonia. Her last words. Coding. Burban.
Damn. Now, on and off screen, Tallulah Bankhead played the villain. Her favorite role was the murderous Regina in Alabama born playwright, Lillian Helman, The Little Foxes in 1939. She gave a high camp performance in the 1967 Horm film Fnatic. Though she enjoyed playing the careless rebel, Tallulah was a champion of the poor, the outsider and the underdog. While she sometimes got it wrong, she rarely kept quiet about what she thought was right. As Bankhead told Ebony in 1960, quote, if you say you believe in something, say it loud enough to be heard.
Angie: I adore her.
Theresa: And let me show you pictures of Tallulah. I imagine her as Cruella Deville. Actually, she was the inspiration for Cruella.
Angie: I was going to ask you that. Sounds like she sounds like she’d be such a good Cruella Deville. That’s amazing. So. Oh, wow. Okay. So she is stunning. Yeah.
Theresa: The second picture is Tallulah and Toto.
Angie: I was going to ask where’s the connection. Like I’ve been waiting. But I can’t.
Theresa: Well, they dated and then Toto was like, this girl is great and great fun. But I mean, honestly, she’s a bit chaotic and I need, I can’t.
Angie: Is this, did they date when she was in England? I think so. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. So the first picture is your like, your essential black and white, like headshot. She’s got the long pearls on the perfectly red. You know, those lips are red.
Theresa: Oh, they’re blood red, but they’re black in the image because black and white, but they’re red. Blood red.
Angie: The incredibly thin eyebrows, the finger waved hair, but it’s down. So just very glamorous. Like she is gorgeous. In the second picture, she is with Toto and they are, are they both wearing first?
Theresa: I believe so. Yeah. She’s got that, that’s that Fox tail hanging right down there. So that’s her stole. I believe. Yeah. That’s what it looks like to me. Okay. They are just stunning.
Angie: Yep. It’s definitely giving Cruella Deville. Yeah.
Theresa: So Tallulah is kind of propped on the back of the chair, stole wrapped around like her elbows as she’s kind of reclined with a cigarette.
Angie: And it’s, it’s white, but her gown is black or the stool is white, black, but her gown is white. Yeah.
Theresa: And then this is grandpa. That is dad. That is Tallulah. And that is Eugenia. And I don’t understand why they say that she finally blossomed into the same beauty as Eugenia, because I am not seeing Eugenia as this incredibly beautiful girl. She just looks kind of dowdy in this image.
Angie: In this image. Yeah, very much so. Tallulah is definitely taking the, taking the stars here on this one. Yeah.
Theresa: And then the last one I have is this promotional image of Tallulah Bankhead and Clive Brooke in Tarnished Lady by Paramount Pictures.
Angie: She is leaning on the, on a bar, cigarette in hand, hand on face, like, uh, why am I here?
Theresa: Her other glass, her other hand is holding a glass of probably bourbon. Yep.
Angie: Oh my gosh. How, how much fun. What a life. I’m still stuck on the fact that like you made the comment that life has been out to get her since she was born. And I’m like, honestly, I’m glad she beat it.
Theresa: Yeah. I mean, but she’s just one of those incredibly larger than life stories. And I, I loved being able to piece together a lot of that nuance. Yeah.
Angie: Because I think you’re right. You would, you would typically get the whittled down version. I mean, going through the
Theresa: sources, it was either you got activist Tallulah, they kind of mentioned the acting, or you got the, can you believe that she did cartwheels without panties? But it wasn’t like the holistic view of like, okay, but and, okay.
Angie: And then we can all do crazy things, but be right about our thought process. Yeah. Yeah. I love that for her. Get it Tallulah. Thank you for that.
Theresa: And I think about this when I meet young children named Tallulah. I will too. And I’m just like, either your parents didn’t know or they, they have, they have big, big plans for you child. And I hope they also involve therapy. Because therapy would have helped. Baby.
Angie: I think she wasn’t going to go, but everybody else will. Yeah. Everybody else is going to need it.
Theresa: But yeah, if you are thinking, holy Toledo, what happens when both Angie and Theresa tell stories the same day? Yeah, we don’t know. Let us know. But join us next week where we probably do the same thing. And we have like joined together and tell shorter stories. Rate, review, subscribe, come back and share us with your favorite person who ought not to be the godmother of your children.
Speaker 4: And on that note, bye.
Unhinged History 
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