Brilliance and bathos

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’.