That most astute of reviewers, Lynn Barber, recently wrote of this curiously bloodless biography that the subject is a minor star, now only remembered for one film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. While this may be true, I imagine none but a dedicated cineaste can now name a film of Gloria Swanson’s apart from Sunset Boulevard, or any of Norma Shearer’s, both huge stars and Tallulah Bankhead’s Hollywood contemporaries. In fact Tallulah made nearly 60 appearances in films and theatre, some of them laughable, some memorable, all of them idiosyncratic because of her unique style. She was also one of the most famous figures of the 20th century.
Hemingway once said about Marlene Dietrich, Bankhead’s sometime ‘rival’ and great friend (when both were doing cabaret in Las Vegas, they would drink together while discussing the respective merits of homo- and heterosexuality), that if ‘she had only her voice, she could break your heart’. Tallulah Bankhead’s voice could be said to have broken her own heart. The Southern drawl that had so beguiled 1920s Mayfair Johnnies — and quite a few Mayfair ladies — very soon, via regular shots and snorts, deepened, and, morphing from madcap into the madly camp, she became forever after saddled with the fog-horn and fag-hijacked ‘Daaaa ling’.
While the copious coke and champagne may have contributed to her strangely blank regard — the ‘dead eyes’ remarked upon by the director George Cukor made her passport to Paramount somewhat arbitrary — she nevertheless became a stellar figure on the Broadway stage, though she grew to dread playing to theatres crammed with queens screaming with delight at every line she uttered, however serious the work, however renowned the author, many of whom wrote specifically with her in mind.
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