Tallulah Bankhead, the actress known for her biting tongue and for starring in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, was born into a white Alabama political dynasty: Her father was a congressman, an uncle was a senator, and one grandfather was a Confederate army captain then later a senator. She was best known in the wide Black world for shouting jeers and curses at Nazis from her ringside seats during the Max Schmeling–Joe Louis fight.
She was best known at Ziggy’s School of the Theatre for being the weird white woman who would look at one boy in the tap class and say to everybody, “Doesn’t he look just like John H. Bankhead II dipped in chocolate?” She looked at another and asked, “Do you have any people in Jasper, Alabama?” When one of the older boys said, “Not all the Negroes in Detroit have family in Alabama,” Tallulah replied, “Of course not. But that child has my cousin Eugenia’s mouth. The men in my family were, for the most part, rapists who preferred the company of dusky women. I would like to know my cousins, if they would like to know me. Do you perhaps have any people in Como, Mississippi?”
The first time Tallulah saw Colored Girl she said, “You’ve got a Pettus forehead and Moore eyes. Those eyes in a white face stole many a boy away from me.” Ziggy said, “Let me help you here, Tallulah, before you say something that won’t be good for your health. This child, my goddaughter, was born fully armed for battle from her daddy’s head. Isn’t that right, Goddaughter? And Tallulah, isn’t it time for you to get over to the theater or somewhere?”
Tallulah Bankhead
PATRON SAINT OF: Orphans, Big Mouths, and Ill-Folk
I always call Tallulah Bankhead “the lady who knows no color” when I write about her in my columns, and I sang that song even louder after the 1951 trial of her maid. Tallulah charged the woman with kiting checks. The woman accused Tallulah of smoking marijuana and hiring gigolos. Tallulah was the one and only white woman I have ever been happy to see when I land in New York.
Evyleen Ramsay Cronin, Tallulah’s check-kiting maid, a former burlesque dancer, transformed checks for $27.50 into checks for $327.50 with a squiggle of pen ink. Her defense: She used the money she made from kiting the checks to provide Tallulah with extravagances. Why were my readers so interested in this case? Tallulah was from Alabama and Evyleen, the maid, was white.
Everybody in Detroit knew that white ladies from Alabama have Black maids. It’s how they do their part to preserve and announce the color line. They have Black maids as a way of insisting that Black folk are only fit to serve. Some white folk are not honest. So many reasons to forgive Tallulah her many evils and extravagances!
Hiring white maids was Tallulah’s lived way of proving that Black people aren’t in one fixed place and whites in another.
Willie Mays got me in tight with Tallulah. When Willie was playing, Tallulah never missed a Giants game. She would scream for him in the stands, hat on her head, tortoiseshell sunglasses perched on patrician nose, six or seven strings of small white pearls, wrapped around her neck, gold bracelet on one wrist, gold watch on the other, clasping her hands together in prayer when she thought the Giants needed it. I have sat beside her in the stands and witnessed this firsthand.
When Willie let it slip that he would often get up after breakfast and play stickball with the boys in his neighborhood and come home after a day game and play another hour or two out in the streets, she washed off all her makeup, took off all her jewelry, pulled on a pair of dungarees, and stood on his street corner, admiring from a respectful distance, with a cheap scarf around her head and huge cheap sunglasses obscuring most of her face. To be a part of his life out of the stadium, she made herself invisible.
We argued about Willie in 1954. She had published an article about Willie in Look magazine. I loved that she wrote Mickey Mantle was not in Willie Mays’s class. Delighted when she dismissed Mantle as a “laddybuck,” a word I had never heard but immediately understood and added to my arsenal. But why did she write this? “Negroes are natural athletes, dancers and musicians. They have grace, speed and superb reflexes.”
I hated that. She insisted she didn’t write those lines. Said all she did was let the editor tuck them in her article. She said, “I wrote, ‘Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare were the only true geniuses.’” I told her she should have insisted. She smiled. “It’s sweet to hear you believe I can insist and have it matter. I’m fifty-two, Zig. Old women have no power to insist.” Tallulah was honest as the day is long.
And fun as the night is short. That belle had the swagger to promise in the midst of all the politics that she observed and rejected, “I’ll have fun, if you’ll have fun, and we’ll have fun together!” When she came to Detroit in ’48 playing in Private Lives at the Cass Theatre, we would club-hop after her show until the sun started to rise. Then she would say, “I love zagging with Ziggy, but now it’s time to go home.” She would go back to her hotel, the Book-Cadillac, the tower the world said was the best hotel, and I would go back to the Gotham, which Tallulah acknowledged was the better hotel. That mattered to me.
Another favorite Tallulah sighting: September 20, 1955. I turned on the TV to see Tallulah on The Martha Raye Show. I know the date because I kept that page from TV Guide and taped it in my scrapbook. My students tuned in, too, because I wanted them to see Miss Gloria Lockerman, the twelve-year-old, brown, Baltimore brain, who had won $16,000 on the $64,000 Question quiz show by spelling “antidisestablishmentarianism” while wearing organdy and crinoline.
Gloria starred in a skit on The Martha Raye Show. My girls loved that skit. Gloria was smart as a whip. Her eyes flashed. She had one of those smiles that children get when they are raised by old folks, and that mirror the ways of old folks, a smile that doesn’t give too much away. Tallulah played Gloria’s good Fairy Godmother, “Twinkle Toes.” Martha Raye was her bad Fairy Godmother. Or maybe it was the other way around. When the actors came out to take their bows, at the end of the episode, Tallulah, spontaneously, kissed and hugged Gloria. Martha joined in. My girls loved seeing a brown girl turned into a kiss sandwich on coast-to-coast TV by white women. A large swath of the ofay world went berserk. Letters flooded into the network. The NBC affiliate in Mississippi threatened to cancel the show. Revlon threatened to pull its sponsorship. It was the beginning of the end of Martha Raye.
We were walking up Seventh Avenue from Minton’s Playhouse to the Apollo when Tallulah said she would do it again. It was the late fall of ’55. Some folks bird-watch. I car-watch. Rolling through Harlem were two-tone Bel Aire convertibles, in Sea-Mist Green and Neptune Green, in Shoreline Beige and Gypsy Red, in a whole raft of new colors the breadwinners were spraying that year. And on two-door hardtop Bel Aires, a fine old color, Surf Green. Looking especially good to me, Packard 400s in pretty, jewel-named colors, like Gray Pearl and Topaz, and, best, Raven Black and Torch-Red Thunderbirds. When you’re from Detroit in 1955, one of the great years of new-car design, walking up Seventh Avenue, you are home proud. And walking up Seventh Avenue, I was starting to get a new Tallulah proud.
With our arms crocked together she purred, “It is past time everyone sees Negro girls can be touched by white hands without lust or anger. If Martha loses her show, that is nothing compared to what Negro girls lose every day when people don’t understand that. Now, let’s stop talking politics. I hate cracking bores, and I don’t want to hate you, Zig.”
The last time me or my girls saw Tallulah was on television, the Batman show. She played Black Widow. She wore a black suit. The suit’s deep V-neck was trimmed with red. Her lips were also red. Her back was straight. She sported wonderful black leather gloves. But, best, she had a step, a turn—she could still do a turn—and when she walked away, you wanted to keep looking. It was a poem the way she shifted her weight as she turned. She was sixty-five, but she managed to look an old forty-five.
“There is nothing common about me,” her character stated, and it was true about the actress playing the role. One of her lines was a big, wonderful little rhyme: “If you wish to live and thrive, let the spider run alive.” She accused Batman and Robin of the fault she had accused me of: “You may be caped, and you may be dynamic, but you are cracking bores.” Tallulah snuck her own words into the script! After my girls saw that, Tallulah’s archaic put-down, “Cracking Bore!,” echoed around the dancing school for days!
I’ve had pains in my chest today. I took a pill before I started to write. Used to be I would never do that. I’m thinking about “never” a lot now. I have never been to the Kentucky Derby—anyplace south with that many white folks was never my scene. Things change. Every year now, I’m waving goodbye to a few more carloads of brown beauties driving to the Derby and providing unpaid taxi service to more and more gaggles of bronze girls clutching boarding passes to Louisville in one hand and tickets to the Derby in the other. Our women are determined to see and be seen, at the “run for the roses,” and to remind all who may have forgotten that the first jockey to win the Derby was a Black man, Oliver Lewis.
If I live long enough to see May, I’m going to the Derby. G. S. and her crew have been making that hatbox-and-mud-shoe-trip for too long without me. This is my year. There’s a horse I like they call Dancer’s Image. I saw him at the Woodbine Racetrack in Ontario, Canada. He’s gray, and he’s fast! If I make it to the Derby, I’m asking G. S. if Tallulah can tag along, too. And I’m betting on that horse with the stone Detroit, Ziggy Johnson’s School of the Theatre, swagger—Dancer’s Image.
LIBATION FOR THE FEAST OF TALLULAH BANKHEAD:
The Spider’s Web
2 jiggers of bourbon
Chocolate syrup in a squeeze bottle with a fine tip
Fill a wide coup glass with a very young bourbon, then drizzle a circle, within a circle, within a circle, within a circle on the top with chocolate syrup. Using a toothpick, draw a straight line from a point on the smallest circle to just beyond a point on the outside of the largest circle. Do this at 12 o’clock, and at five other points on the circle, evenly distributed to construct a chocolate spider’s web.