Born in New York, Hall began her career in 1912, writing poetry and articles for fan magazines. From 1922, she wrote a syndicated column, ‘The Diary of a Professional Movie Fan’, which led the way to her interviewing many of the biggest Hollywood stars of the era (her subjects including everyone from Humphrey Bogart to Joan Crawford, Lucille Ball to John Wayne).
In the following piece, Hall interviews one of the most outspoken stars ever, Tallulah Bankhead, and her subject doesn’t disappoint. In fact, Bankhead is so candid that the piece was to change the Hollywood system for ever. From its publication onwards, studios insisted that their stars be accompanied by minders, hence the ever-present PR managers of the modern media.
Has Hollywood turned a cold shoulder on Tallulah Bankhead? Persons In The Know have it that Hollywood has given her a shoulder very cold and very rigid, indeed.
According to these women-about-town, Hollywood’s most elite hostesses have run a blue pencil through the made up moniker of Bankhead.
These hostesses are pictured as confessing they are afraid of Tallulah. And the gossipers report that Marion Davies, Connie Bennett, and Bebe Daniels Lyon are among those who prefer not to be At Home to Tallulah.
It is said that, at formal dinner parties, where genteel elegance rests upon all, Tallulah is apt to give vent to words and expressions believed by our grandmothers to belong to truck drivers and longshoremen exclusively.
I am told that Tallul’ is never decently hypocritical. She is never hypocritical at all. She conceals nothing. She reveals All – and more than all. She disguises nothing. She calls a spade nothing but a spade – in Hollywood, where dirt is dug with dinner forks. She gives to all the functions of living and loving, of body and soul their round Rabelaisian, biological names. Crimson faces and heaving bosoms and masculine guffaws slide off the bawdy Bankhead like oil off water. She is no respecter of persons and no respecter of personalities.
It is said that she speaks of her love affairs with equal frankness. She has a romantic interlude and, afterwards, discusses it with lurid details and complete unreserve. It matters not whether the recent recipient of her favors happens to be among those present or not. Whether he is or whether he isn’t, she is said to dilate upon his ways and wiles, his abilities and disabilities, his prowess or his lack of prowess, with such consummate abandon that the unfortunate male, if present, can think of no recourse except immediate suicide.
No good hostess, I am informed, could dream of exposing her guests to such ribaldries. Tallulah’s wit, I am told, is barbed. Her shafts and arrows fly wildly through the Hollywood atmosphere, striking willy-nilly, where least expected. She is like a gilded bomb invited to rest among lilies of the field. Thus I have been told.
But Tallulah denies all this. She denies it vehemently, amusedly, scornfully and – can it be? – a little sadly. She denies everything that has been said about her, rumored about her and printed about her.
She ‘wears’ an exterior as, for certain purposes, a mummer wears a mask. She wears this exterior for protection, to save her neck, her face, her feelings. She took it off for me.
She said, to begin with (and oh, the rapid, dynamite, restless things she said!): Hollywood has been divine to me. I don’t know what you mean. If it is giving me the cold shoulder, I haven’t felt the chill. It is news to me. It may be that I am suspected of giving Hollywood the cold shoulder because I accept so few invitations. Because I have never given parties. Because such hospitality as I have accepted I haven’t returned. It has reached a point now where, if I gave a party at all, I would have to invite about five hundred people.
‘But this is all absurd. Most of the things said about me and printed about me are absurd and untrue. Not that I mind what people say – it’s all part of the game. They say, for instance, that Marlene Dietrich and I are furiously jealous, the one of the other. That we spend our spare time in brawling together like fish-wives all over the lot. I have just come, as it happens, from Marlene’s dressing-room where we had a dish of champagne together . . .’
(On this I can confirm Tallulah. Marlene’s dressing-room is next to Tallulah’s. Just before Tallulah came in, I heard her call back, ‘Thanks for the champagne, Marlene . . .’)
‘I am said to be lacking in seriousness, to have no serious side at all, to be unhurt by anything, to be incapable of hurt. Lies, of course. Here and now, for the first time, I deny that. I am serious. I am deadly serious. I am serious about my work. I am serious about love. I am serious about marriage and children and friendship and the whole stuff of life. I pretend not to be.
‘I have an inferiority complex. It is my defense mechanism working. So that, if I take a fall, if I fail here or fail there, if the movies or a man chuck me out on my ear, people will laugh it off and say, ‘Oh, well, Tallulah doesn’t care!’ But I would care. I’d care all right, but not so much as if people knew that I cared. I can’t bear pity. I can’t endure sympathy. A kindly pat on my bowed shoulder would drive me nuts.
‘I am deadly serious about my work. I’d have to be – anybody has to have any kind of lasting success. Nobody attains any kind of permanence unless he is serious. There are no such things as “the breaks”. Not for long. I have had no “angels” in my life, nobody has ever helped me. I wouldn’t be helped. What I have achieved, I have achieved by myself and I haven’t done it by not caring.
‘When I first started to make pictures, absurd stories began to circulate about me. I was said to be trying to “do a Garbo”. A fatal thing to say about anyone. Words perfectly calculated to arouse the defensiveness and rage of thousands of Garbo fans. Do you think I didn’t care about that? Don’t be a fool. I was said to have ordered Adolph Zukor off the set, not knowing who he was. Do you think I’m a fool? I knew perfectly well who he was and what business he had there. I asked him to leave because I was working with a new medium, because I was frightfully nervous and edgy and because his presence, of all persons, made me more so.
‘When I saw the preview of my first picture in the East, I managed to get out of the theatre, blind with tears as I was. I made my friends swear on my eyes (I’m superstitious about eyes, I’m something of an eye-worshiper) that they would never go to see that picture. I hadn’t learned how to make up, how to be photographed. I was full of inhibitions and uncertainties.
‘I am serious about money. I have my eye on a fixed sum. I may never reach it. I’m hideously extravagant. With all the money I made in London, I had to borrow a wad to get out of the place, skirts clean. I never leave a place owing bills. I’m serious about my credit, you know.
‘I’m serious about my ambition. Know what it is? I’ll give it to you – to have no ambition. To be without ambition of any sort is Heaven. Nirvana, the state of the blessed. I’ve been hag-ridden with ambition. It burns you up. It eats you alive. It drinks your blood and crumbles your bones. I want to be without it.
‘I’m serious about love. I’m damned serious about it now, of all times. I haven’t had an affaire for six months. Six months. Too long. I am not promiscuous, you know. Promiscuity implies that attraction is not necessary. I may lay my eyes on a man and have an affaire with him the next hour. But it is serious, The attraction is serious.
‘I am serious about marriage – too serious to indulge in it. I know myself too well. I never fool myself. I do fool everyone else. I know that once I get a thing – or a man – I’ll tire of it and of him. I am the type that fattens on unrequited love, on the unattainable, on the just-beyond-reach. The minute a man begins to languish over me, I stiffen and it is finis.
‘I am serious about wishing I had children – beautiful children. I wouldn’t care for the other variety. I love anything and everything that is beautiful. Perhaps beautiful is not the word – personality is more like it.
‘Of course, I am an extremist. I’m in transports of mad delight with living one day and bored to a hellish desperation the next day. When I am in heaven, I’m liable to rip the stars out of the sky and gut the moon. When I’m bored – no hell is so dark-brown and odorous.
‘I’m serious about the matter of good taste. Hollywood’s cold shoulder or warm heart to the contrary, I would feel acutely if I thought I had hurt anyone. I am not religious, but I would make a wide detour and put myself to a lot of inconvenience before I would make a ribald remark about a minister, or priest or rabbi to one of the faithful. The things other people hold sacred I am careful of. I might offend morals, but never good taste – the more important of the two.
‘My secretary says that I am mad, and tries to prevent me from saying it – and proving it – to the Press. At this moment she is making signs to me from the other room. Perhaps I am mad. How should I know? I think I am normal. I know that the things I do seem normal to me. And I repeat that I do not believe that mad people, or superficial people, or people who never take anything seriously get very far – or stay there.
‘There is nothing more to say about this Hollywood cold-shouldering proposition. Other than that I’ve never heard of it, have not been aware of it. And certainly I feel no equivalent emotion in myself. I like Hollywood. I find the people interesting and, very often, especially delightful. I don’t go around a great deal because it would bore me. I’ve done all the night-clubbing and partying I could swallow, in London and in Paris. It doesn’t interest me any longer, that sort of thing. I’ve had some close and personal friends from London staying with me. I haven’t needed outside entertainment. I play Bridge a little, very badly. I go to the movies, Garbo is a very great genius. I’m mad about her. And I’m not, as a rule, very fond of women. I’m crazy about Gary Cooper and Jackie Cooper, and Jack Oakie and Leslie Howard.
‘If there’s anything the matter with me now, it’s certainly not Hollywood or Hollywood’s state of mind about me, one way or the other. The matter with me is – I WANT A MAN! I told you I haven’t had an affaire for six months. I’m bored to the point of suicide when I’m not in love. When I am in love, I want to die. I always want to die when I’m on the top. When I’m down again, I want to fight back. I wish to God I could fall in love now – find someone to fall in love with. Six months is a long, long while. I want a man!’
I felt, when I left Tallulah’s dressing-room, that I had been closed in with a feverish, very tired, very mundane and effete tigress. She wore scarlet pajamas, tailored coat and trousers. Her nut-brown hair was long-bobbed and flying. She wore no make-up. Her eyes were strained and weary. She paced the floor, back and forth, to and fro.
She brought to mind the gallant, maniacal Mad Hopes, the obsessed Royal Family of Broadway – all of the fiercely desiring, fiercely living desperadoes, male and female, of theatre, of history, of life. She may be mad. But she is serious about it. She may be without a soul. She is not without a heart. She may make mock of lovers as dead to her as the dead yesterdays. She would never make mock of love. Nor of life. And if life or love make mock of her, she will answer back with an ironic laugh and a bawdy phrase – and tears in her heart.