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Today we celebrate the birthday of Miss Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968). I am a gay man of a certain age, and in my time, in my tribe, telling Tallulah stories and imitating the famed personality was de rigueur at brunches and parties. But, nowadays, do the kids even know who she is?
Bankhead lived a singular, spontaneously combustible life, brimming with panache. She loved men, women, liquor, and cocaine. She accessorized with cigarettes like an Alabama smokehouse. The Bankheads were a prominent Alabama political family, her grandfather and uncle were Senators and her father served as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Bankhead’s support of liberal causes, especially Civil Rights broke with the segregationist Southern Democrats and she often opposed her own family publicly.
There are so many great anecdotes about her. Here’s a favorite one:
It was 1931 and Bankhead was traveling to Hollywood for the first time. Riding with her on the train were Joan Crawford and her handsome husband, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Bankhead quipped:
“Joan, Dahling… you’re divine. I’ve had an affair with your husband, and watch out, you’ll be next.”
With Robert Montgomery in Faithless (1932), via YouTube
Bankhead was always frank and forthcoming about her sexual appetites. She was quite open about having lovers of both genders:
“My father warned me about men and booze, but he never said anything about women and cocaine.”
Among her conquests were Billie Holliday, actors Eva La Galliene, Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, Beatrice Lillie, and Alla Nazimova, plus writer Mercedes de Acosta. She had a decades long thing with actor Patsy Kelly. Bankhead never publicly described herself as bisexual. She did, however, describe herself as “ambisextrous”.
Bankhead certainly never hid her attraction to men, but her female relationships were marked by playfulness and devotion. She never stayed with any lover for very long, though Kelly lived with her at her estate in Bedford, New York.
Bankhead led a life of rapturous adventure and sensual celebration, peppered with her skewed humor and a penchant for quotable quips. She frequently hired friends as employees, the dividing line nearly invisible. She hired young, handsome gay men as her assistants, calling them her caddies. Her parties were legendary.
Her emotions were big, yet she took life’s disappointments in stride. In the early 1930s, when she was diagnosed with gonorrhea, she mischievously blamed Gary Cooper. In 1933, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to the disease. When she left the hospital, she told reporters: “Don’t think this has taught me a lesson!”
The Hays Committee oversaw The Motion Picture Production Codes, the industry moral guidelines that was applied to most American films by major studios from 1930 to 1968. The Hays Committee “Doom Book” was a list of 150 actors considered “unsuitable for the public”. Bankhead was Number One on the list, with the heading: “Verbal Moral Turpitude”. She publicly called Will H. Hays “… that little prick”.
When Dr. Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior In The Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior In The Human Female (1953), collectively know as The Kinsey Report, Bankhead announced:
“I found no surprises in the Kinsey report. The good doctor’s clinical notes were old hat to me. I’ve had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself.”
Bankhead had a long struggled with addiction, smoking and drinking most of her life, and as she grew older she began taking dangerous mixtures of drugs to fall asleep. She hated being alone, and her struggle with loneliness became depression. In 1956, playing a game of “Truth Or Dare” with Tennessee Williams, she confessed:
“I’m 54, and I wish always, always, for death. I’ve always wanted death. Nothing else do I want more.”
She got her wish just two weeks before her 63rd birthday.
Bankhead lived a life of audacious adventure and sensual sprees, and, she never wasted a moment of it.
Bankhead Quotes (and there are plenty of them, dahling…):
Here’s a rule I recommend: Never practice two vices at once.
I did what I could to inflate the rumor I was on my way to stardom. What I was on my way to really, by any mathematical standards known to man, was oblivion, by way of obscurity.
I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.
I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That’s what I call a liberal education.
I’d rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.
I’m as pure as the driven slush.
I’ve been called many things, but never an intellectual.
If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
It’s the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.
They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.
