This post previously appeared last week, by mistake. Sorry. Put dead bats on my head. Cover me with honey and roll me on the ant heap. — Kim
When asked why she was leaving the New York theater business for Hollywood, the languorous Tallulah Bankhead is reputed to have said: “Fame, money and to fuck that divine Gary Cooper.”
Well. she achieved all three goals, and was scandalous in a time when scandal was assiduously avoided by the studio bosses. And her life… oy, what a life. (Read all about it here.) And then there was her beauty.
Thise eyes… that heavy-lidded, sleepy look… yikes. (And yes, she does resemble Bette Davis, and in more ways than one: they played pretty much the same roles, Tallulah on stage, and Davis in the movie versions.) And her posture? Someone once said of her that she didn’t sit in a chair or on a couch; she looked as if she’d been poured into it.
And let’s not even talk about what she did to a bed (both in pictures and in real life).
I find her fascinating, and I’m not the only one.
Exquisite. And let’s not even talk about that voice.
Something you may not have known about her: her father, US Representative William Brockman Bankhead (D-Alabama, 1917-1940), was Speaker of the House from 1937 to 1940.
That would raise eyebrows today. But even in the 1930s, I guess people said “She’s a grown woman, and can do what she wants.”
An early exemplar of RBF.
Was she capable of smiling?
Probably only when “fucking that divine Gary Cooper.”
If I recall correctly, in her later years she was in a play with a much younger actress who stated “I can upstage her anytime” Her reply was “I can upstage you without even being on stage”. True enough, in one scene she finished a martini and put the glass on a table before exiting the stage. The glass however was impossibly balanced on the very edge of the table and the audience was mesmerized watching it, how could it not fall off the table? The whispers from the audience finally upset the upstart actress enough that she knocked the glass off the table. Tallulah had placed a bit of double sided tape on the bottom of the glass!
Better late than never, but I fear few will see this now: John Forsyth: Alfred Hitchcock/ Tallulah Bankhead Story.