The Glamourous, Unpredictable...

TV sitcoms in the 1950s starred people like Ozzie and Harriet, Robert Young and Ann Sothern. Can you picture that crowd being joined by Tallulah Bankhead?

It never happened, though an NBC producer wanted it to, and Tallulah seriously considered it.

Somehow, I just can’t picture a laugh track-laden show with Tallu burning a roast just before her husband and his boss show up for dinner. I can’t picture her being bothered with cooking at all.

Tallulah was at her best not as a character but, like on radio’s The Big Show, playing herself. Well, a very watered-down version of herself. Her alcohol, drug and sexual exploits could never fly on the screen, small or big. Announcer Ed Herlihy’s introduction of her on The Big Show was the “glamourous, unpredictable Tallulah Bankhead.” Actually, she was very predictable, being fenced in by monologues by Dorothy Parker and a script by Goody Ace with help from Fred Allen. She was exactly what the listener expected her to be—theatrical, catty and filling the air with “dahrling,” like a drag queen version of her.

Then again, her appearance as herself on I Love Lucy in 1957 seems to have been a fiasco off-camera, with writer Madelyn Pugh saying Tallu kept forgetting her lines, appeared to have been boozing, and took off her clothes during a cast and crew meeting that she wasn’t invited to, but breezed in on anyways (Pugh noted, with relief, Bankhead was wearing panties). On camera, she was “magnificent,” as Desi Arnaz put it to Lucy chronologist Bart Andrews, who quoted Bankhead as saying she was dealing with “pneumonia” when rehearsing and filming the show.

The Big Show was a 90-minute radio variety spectacular that was unable to compete against the increasing number of TV stations signing on. It left the air in April 1952. Her autobiography was published that year and in 1953, she appeared, as herself, at the Sands Hotel, a smash hit.

TV Guide decided an article on Bankhead was due. It appeared in the issue of February 12, 1954, complete with photos. Her myna bird got in a witty remark, too.

THE THEATER’S only living legend, Tallulah Bankhead, greeted us at the door shivering in lounging pajamas and a cigaret, both of which she sported during the whole fantastic day of the interview. Secluded in “Windows,” a beautiful old rambling house 60 miles from New York, at the end of a climbing cow path ten miles from where the macadam ends, overlooking God’s green acres and a swimming pool, lives the woman extraordinaire, who more than anything else in the world, loathes being alone.
No isolationist, politically or socially, she houses three dogs, a cat, a Myna bird, a chauffeur, a cook, her secretary, Edie Smith, any number of neuroses, and on weekends, any variety of high- and low-brows.
The idyllic “Windows” erupts spasmodically, along with Tallulah. She’d stay there forever, never working, “if the wolf and Bureau of Internal Revenue would stay away from my door.”
Southern Ham
Admittedly lazy and a ham, she comes out of hibernation “only for money, dahling,” including the Jimmy Durante show date and U.S. Steel Hour’s “Hedda Gabler.” She has other offers. “I hate to say whose. If I turn anyone down I give the man a black eye and I don’t want to give those dahling Goodson-Todman boys a black eye. But I’m advised that panel shows are on their way out.” Bill Todman, who hasn’t heard the news about panel shows, says, “We have an audience participation show in the works, tailor-made for Tallu.” And he’s convinced she’s convinced.
She’s thinking more seriously about a situation comedy, a Fred Coe offspring. But with the wolf still at a distance, she reads through the night and sleeps through the day. Since she reads prone, with Doloras, a Maltese poodle, slung somehow around the top of her head, like a halo, she can’t abide heavy books. “I’ll wager I’m the only person who ever read ‘Gone With the Wind’ at one session,” she claims. “But it weighed so much, I ripped it in half. Read first one part, then the other—like that,” she tore an imaginary book in two.
Not an outdoor girl, she rarely rises before three, ventures into the open only in summer. “Dahling, I’m so unathletic, I’ve got a 60 foot pool that I’ve never seen the other end of.”
Tallulah is a determined Giant rooter. As a born Confederate, she has a distaste for all things Yankee, from baseball to pot roast.
She rarely remembers names, although she’s remarkably adroit at anything concerning Tallulah. “I haven’t been to the theater in seven years and a movie in 10. At the ball park, I blow my gasket if the Giants win, and I blow it if they lose. Either way I come home dead—a wreck.”
London Belle
For all who weren’t around for Tallulah’s first triumph 30 years ago, she was the belle of London at 21. She was born the second daughter of the great beauty, Adelaide, and the ambitious young lawyer. Will Bankhead, who was to become a Congressman and later, Speaker of the House. When Tallulah returned after her storming of the Isles, she was tagged “a second Marlene Dietrich.”
Back on Broadway, she appeared in a series of dismal flops, mediocre flops, and three or four plays that rated no score at all. She finally hit her stride as the predatory Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes,” again as Sabina in Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” and came off with the New York film critics award for her portrayal of a newspaper woman in the Hitchcock film, “Lifeboat.”
Glamorous, Unpredictable
By the time she stampeded into radio via NBC’s “The Big Show” she had worked up a reputation for being “fabulous, incredible, tempestuous, a character,” which she resents violently.
She talks endlessly, in paragraphs rather than sentences. She shows a distinct preference for prancing over walking. And she can throw a tantrum at the block of most any whim. This particular talent was perfected at the age of five when Daddy took sister (Eugenia) off on a picnic and left Tallulah home. Tallu flung herself on the floor, “got purple in the face and screamed blue murder.” Grandmother squelched both the tantrum and the young Bankhead with a bucket of cold water.
Her voice is her trademark, and although she sings in a virtual bass, she claims perfect pitch. “The gags about my voice didn’t just happen,” she confided. “I haven’t always sounded like the low end of a foghorn. But by the time I was six, I had the croup, whooping cough, pneumonia, mumps, tonsillitis, measles; everything settled right here in my chest.” She pounded, proving its whereabouts.
“I figured Durante has his nose, Benny has his miserliness, I would have my voice. But Bob Hope clinched it. He introduced me on ‘The Big Show,’ saying that I was going to sing, ‘Give My Regards to Seventh Avenue.’ I corrected him, ‘You mean, Broadway, Bob.’ He told me, ‘Tallulah, you’ll always be a block away.’ ”
During the tour of “Windows,” so named because it has 75 of them, Tallulah pointed out her prized possessions, ranging from her Augustus John portrait, which she values at $100,000, to Precious, the puppet designed for her by Burr Tillstrom.
She displayed her Myna bird, Cleo, and asked it to repeat her name. “Say Tallulah,” said Tallulah. “Birds can’t talk,” said Cleo.
Except Maybe Rosselini
At the door, Tallu charged, “I’ll bet you’re going home to write that I’m utterly mad, just like people expect me to be. It’s that stupid typing.” But though she defies being typed, and a trillion other natural laws, she conceded, “It’s true. If it had been me who ran off with Rosselini, no one would have given it a thought.”
—Katherine Pedell

Tallulah’s final performance was one watched by thousands upon thousands of children. Sources conflict about whether she requested the job, or producers reached out to her, but she portrayed The Black Widow on Batman in episodes that aired March 15 and 16, 1967 on ABC. Denis Brian’s biography “Tallulah, Darling” revealed during shooting she was suffering from emphysema and had problems walking, but she ran around as the script demanded like an old trouper. She died December 12, 1968 at age 66.