“My father warned me about men and alcohol, but he never said anything about women and cocaine.”
Famous for outlandish behavior, Tallulah Bankhead was a proponent of cocaine use as far back as her teenage years. She came from an upper-crust Alabama family; the daughter of former Speaker of the House William Brockman Bankhead. Tallulah’s childhood battles with croup were responsible for the husky voice that became her trademark. Starring in more than fifty theatrical productions, she won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for performances in The Little Foxes (1939) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). Her sporadic Hollywood career hit a high point with the lead in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), during the filming of which she apparently declined to wear underwear. Bankhead married just once, to actor John Emery, who divorced her four years later, citing mental cruelty. She said one of her biggest regrets was not seducing Greta Garbo. Bankhead’s final words are still the gold standard for the famous-to-be-famous crowd: “Codeine! Bourbon!”
PROBABLY, THE BEST PART she ever played was herself. Sure, Tallulah Bankhead occasionally received good notices for her stage and screen performances, but her fame rested almost entirely on the strength of her off-screen self—a hard-drinking, libidinous force of nature. (Bankhead proudly described herself as “pure as the driven slush.”) It’s likely even her peers could only tell you a handful of the twenty film roles she played, but her alcohol-and cocaine-fueled affairs were legendary. There was the time she threw a dinner party at her estate, Windows, and passed out, face-in-soup-bowl, before the champagne was even poured. Or how she bragged of having bedded over 500 men and women—Bankhead often described herself as “ambisextrous.”
And then there was the nudist thing. Bankhead would often answer the door completely naked. This, before the years in which she consumed five packs of cigarettes and two fifths of Old Grand-Dad bourbon a day (she claimed she could drink a bottle in thirty minutes). She took up residence at the Elysée Hotel, nicknamed the “Easy Lay.” In Burgess Meredith’s memoir, So Far, So Good, the actor talks about first meeting Bankhead. He arrived at a party in her suite only to find Bankhead stark naked, passing out cocaine and booze to guests. Having finished her hostess duties, she confided that she was dying of the “Grand Desire” and subsequently pulled Meredith into her bedroom.
Apparently, the moaning and the groaning were “operatic,” but just before consummation, Bankhead pushed him aside, saying “For God’s sake, don’t come inside me! I’m engaged to Jock Whitney!” That would be the son of famed businessman Payne Whitney.
There was the time she threw a dinner party at her estate and passed out, face-in-soup-bowl, before the champagne was even poured.
Bankhead would forever maintain, “What I do with my bits and pieces is my business,” and “For every fan that I lose who’s stuffy, two more come along who approve of my lifestyle.” And indeed, Bankhead’s escapades were funnier and more risqué than any film comedy she could have hoped to act in. A legendary such incident occurred the summer of 1933, two years after she returned from a triumphant decade-long stretch in the London theater. In the mood for an extended party, Bankhead did what any in-the-know actress would have done in those days. She showed up, resplendent in a heavily beaded gown and diamonds at the Garden of Allah.
She spent most of that evening making eyes at Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic gold-medal swimmer who had just made his Hollywood debut as Tarzan. But by five in the morning, she had grown tired of simply wondering what lay hidden beneath his loincloth. There are (at least) two different versions of what happened next. One is that Tallulah, having thus far failed in her advances on Weissmuller, decided to pull a damsel-in-distress, fling herself into the pool fully clothed, screaming that she was going to drown if someone didn’t save her. Someone like, perhaps, the Olympic swimmer standing nearby. The other version is that she and Weissmuller drunkenly dove in together.
Whatever the beginning, the stories share their most crucial detail: its ending. Once in the water, Tallulah’s dress and diamonds found their way to the bottom of the pool, and she found her way into Weissmuller’s arms, naked. As he carried her out of the pool, the gathered revelers stared at the spectacle of Tarzan and the Naked Socialite. “Everybody’s been dying to see my body,” Tallulah told the remaining partiers. “Now you can.”
IN 1906 A GROUP of investors led by California businessman Burton Green bought 4,500 acres of land west of Los Angeles in the hopes of striking oil. They drilled and drilled and drilled, but found only water. So they decided to build a city. They formed the Rodeo Land & Water Company and built a new subdivision named Beverly Hills—this because Green had just visited a Massachusetts town with a similar name.
When Green announced that parcels were for sale, he got approximately zero takers. After a few months of similar luck, he was truly desperate. So he built a huge pink hotel on the area’s only thoroughfare (a dirt-road extension of Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard), hoping to attract visitors. It was called the Beverly Hills Hotel. He hired Margaret Anderson, the manager of the Hollywood Hotel, to run the place. And there it stood for the next several years, empty—a huge pink monument to failure: remote and ridiculous.
Then, at last, Green got lucky. Movie star Douglas Fairbanks and his bride Mary Pickford built their dream estate nearby. Named Pickfair, the mansion quickly became the heart of the Hollywood party circuit, and soon every star wanted to live in Beverly Hills. The population tripled. And the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Le Jardin bar became their default nightspot. Each booth had a phone, each table a phone jack. Chaplin always got Table Number One. After every polo game, Will Rogers would hang out there with pals Darryl F. Zanuck and Hal Roach, and this inspired a 1937 name-change to the Polo Lounge. It remained a nexus of power for the entire century.
It is rumored that, in 1932, Johnny Weissmuller landed the title role for Tarzan when the director saw him jump into the hotel’s swimming pool to save a drowning girl. (It seems Weissmuller did this with some frequency.) Howard Hughes lived at the hotel for almost thirty years. Mia Farrow was supposedly banned from the Polo Lounge for wearing pants. Paramount signed itself over to Gulf + Western on a Polo Lounge table.
In 1972, G. Gordon Liddy called John Mitchell at the Polo Lounge the day after the Watergate break-in; their hotel phone records became crucial evidence against them. That same year, the hotel hosted Chaplin once again, returned from exile to receive an honorary Oscar. Elizabeth Taylor spent an astounding six out of eight honeymoons in the hotel’s bungalows. Neil Simon’s California Suite was filmed there, as was The Way We Were, American Gigolo, Shampoo, and much of the opening of Lauren Bacall and Gregory Peck’s Designing Women.
And let’s not forget—the Eagles used the hotel on the cover of their 1977 album Hotel California.
