Are you about to come down with an attack of memoirs? However great the temptation, however high the publisher's guarantee, take the advice of an old memorialist and brush up on your spelling, your history, your punctuation and your arithmetic before you write so much as a line.
Let's go back to November of '52. Tallulah had been on the stands for
a month, was topping best-seller lists all the way from Brentano's to
Birmingham, Alabama. I was cooing over my press clippings, emerging
occasionally to take a bow from the balcony, when a letter from my old
friend and fellow drinker, Frank Sullivan, the sage of Saratoga, gave me
pause. He is the celebrated cliché-trapper, hypochondriac and wit who each
Christmas in The New Yorker pens holiday greetings to such of his
acquaintances as he can rhyme, Ethel Merman and S. N. Behrman, Alfred
Lunt and Martita Hunt, etc. He had just finished Tallulah and was lavish in his
praise of my style, my candor. He hinted that in me might be fused the
talents of the three Bronte sisters, Willa Cather, Dorothy Parker and Rebecca
West. I was about to interrupt this applause, call Sullivan and thank him in
person when he butted me. I was all this and more, he wrote, but-
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He quoted chapter and verse. On page 134 I had written: "I met Napier, Lord Alington, when I was living with Bijou Martin, through Geoffrey Homsdale," now the Earl of Amherst, then roughing it in New York, writing a daily theatrical column in the World. Never, said Sullivan, had so much errata been jammed into one sentence. He presumed I was speaking of his old friend Jeffrey Holmsdale, fifth Earl of Amherst. What quibbling, I'd spelled Amherst right, hadn't I?
While recuperating from this thrust I received a letter from an indignant bibliophile in Butte, Montana. I was mad as a clog dancer if I thought Mrs. Leslie Carter swung from a bell clapper in Shenandoah. There it was, plain as day, he shouted, on page 234. I was wrong on two counts, swore the outraged miner. Mrs. Leslie Carter wasn't in Shenandoah. Who was in Shenandoah? Phil Sheridan was in it, that's who. What's more, there was no bell clapper in Shenandoah. He said he'd let me in on a secret. The Belasco redhead, born Caroline Louise Dudley, had swung from a bell clapper, sure enough, but it was in The Heart of Maryland. I'd better watch my step.
No sooner had the bell clapper scandal died down than I was assailed in print by Richard Watts, Jr., critic, scholar and partisan of Irish whisky and Irish playwrights. Trying to impress the peasants in Tallulah, I'd taken time out to quote Juliet. To Watt's horror I had tossed in a comma after "thou" in her "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" speech. "I thought everybody knew better than that," he wrote. "If the comma were there it would mean that Juliet was wondering where Romeo was, which isn't what she was talking about at all. What she was brooding over was why his name had to be Romeo, which was a fighting word in her family." Watts, the comma carper!
Chastened by this rebuke and resolved hereafter to avoid Shakespeare as I would the junior jackal from Wisconsin, I was crushed when reprimanded for fouling up history. In my annals I had told of singing "The Star Spangled Banner" at Carnegie Hall at the instigation of Herbert Agar at a Freedom House tribute to Senator George Norris of Nebraska. Agar had told me Sergeant Eugene List would be my accompanist. "List was the enlisted man who played the piano for Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam," I wrote on page 284. It was Truman, not Roosevelt, who sat down at the conference table at Potsdam. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been dead for three months.
Jeffrey Holmsdale wasn't the only name I laid waste in my reminiscences. I used up three pages in sketching my romance with, engagement to, and flight from Count Anthony Bosardi. Fortunately, after introducing the Count to my rapt readers I waxed chummy, identified him only as Tony. He was count, all right, and his given name was Anthony. But it was Bosdari, not Bosardi. I must have had that restaurant on 44th Street on my mind. You know, the one with all the caricatures on the walls.
As sales for Tallulah rocketed, so did communications from readers who caught me with my facts down. Hobnobbing with royalty on Lord Beaverbrook's yacht on page 165, I saluted Lord Birdenhead as "Chancellor of the Exchequer." He never was any such thing, as enthusiasts all the way from Soho to San Francisco took time to tell me. He had been Lord Chancellor for two years. That was something else again. Glenn Anders is one of my oldest friends. He played with me in London in They Knew What They Wanted way back in 1926. That didn't stop me from shaving the final "n" from Glenn. To prove that I didn't discriminate against sex, I nipped the "e" off Faye when paying my respects to Skitch Henderson's bride. Violating Faye and Glenn didn't raise too great a storm among my followers, but they were loud in their protests when I corrupted Jeanne Eagels by transposing "l" and "e."
In an effort to show respect for my elders, I named Lillian Langtry as one of the actresses who played Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, a role and play which overpowered me on Armistice night, 1937. As every clod in the realm knew, wrote a costermonger from London, it was Lily Langtry, the Jersey Lily, Lady de Bathe, chum of Edward VII, who animated Cleopatra. Plowing through my past, I was incautious enough to say, "Footloose was four-week flop, but it added to my experience." It may have added to my experience but it contributed nothing to my accuracy. The Zoë Akins comedy ran for seventeen weeks in New York, for an entire season on tour. I take this opportunity to apologize publicly to Zoë for defaming her play and its stamina.
As long as I'm in a contrite mood I might as well square myself with Olga Lindo. Back in the twenties I was outraged when Somerset Maugham cashiered me, tapped Olga to play Sadie Thompson in Rain--this after I had rehearsed for a week. Speaking of this dark crisis in my journal, I wrote: "Olga Lindo opened in Rain. It was an immediate failure." It was nothing of the sort, Olga. It ran for nineteen weeks at the Garrick in Charing Cross Road. Just carried away by my indignation--twenty-five years later.
As I said earlier, dahlings, don't charge into your recollections headlong. Pause and reflect, look up dates, consult a proofreader. Just a minute, here's a late news bulletin. Mrs. Brock Pemberton challenges my statement that Edward Sheldon wrote Miss Lula Bett. Mrs. P. is right as rain. I'm getting so I can't tell one lulu from another. It was Lulu Belle that Sheldon wrote, with an assist by Charles MacArthur. Miss Lulu Bett? Why it won the Pulitzer Prize for Zona Gale in 1920. I must have been so busy with Nice People I didn't have time to read the papers.
WALLACE: Tallulah, as a Southern belle from Alabama and daughter of a long line of
Southern legislatures, do you consider yourself a typical Southerner?
BANKHEAD: I'm not typical anything. I'm Tallulah Bankhead.
How do you feel about our most prominent Southern senators?
Strom Thurmond? Remember me? I was for Truman - which automatically outlaws all
Dixiecrats! Eastland? Talmadge? Senators should uphold and respect the law of the land. I most
admired Senator George, who just died. It was a tragic thing he didn't run the last time because
he knew he would have been defeated on the segregation issue. Sparkman? He's from Huntsville,
Alabama, where I was born, and like all Southern legislators he was one of Daddy's protégés.
Estes Kefauver? Very courageous, very hard-working. Of course, people like Rayburn and
Senator Russell and Lister Hill do have affection and respect for Negroes, but they're politicians.
They face political problems and voting problems.
How do you feel about the KKK, the White Citizens Councils and men like Kasper?
They're shocking. The KKK is as vicious and as horrible as any Gestapo. Kasper is like all
fanatics -no one could be more evil. We have had so many to cope with -Eastland, Bilbo,
Rankin.
Are you sympathetic with the nonviolence tactics of Martin Luther King?
I think he has behaved magnificently. The wisdom of the Negro race has been outstanding. I
think the bus strike is a great example. I think there's a lesson in patience and tolerance in that
strike for everybody, whether colored or white ... .
Has communism made serious inroads into the American Negro community?
No. Communism has never penetrated to the Negroes, because their instincts are infallible. They
have genuine deep religion, they have respect for their parents. The Negro race has good manners
to the nth degree. They have extraordinary patience. You never see any Negro gangsters. Sure,
maybe they like to play the numbers and gamble, but so do I.
What is the basic thing that separates black and white in the South? Is it fear of intermarriage?
Oh, years ago they took a survey and found that almost no Negroes had any thought of
intermarriage in their minds. My secretary comes from the South; she has some Indian and white
blood and some colored blood. She says, "Well, Miss Bankhead, my grandmother didn't rape
anybody." ...
What is the fear then, Tallulah?
I think it is ignorance and panic. Ignorance causes panic, and vice versa. I don't know what those
people fear. I think the majority of Southerners' opinions shows a sad lack of understanding of
the Constitution and the Golden Rule.
Is this a blanket indictment of all Southerners?
No. There are wonderfully good and kind people in the South who believe that Negroes should
have every opportunity of education. Not believing in integration doesn't necessarily mean that
Southerners don't have love, respect and affection for the Negro. I think that Southern whites,
though misguided, have much more affection for Negroes than any other people in the United
States.
If they have all this respect and affection for the Negroes, why not give them the right to vote?
It's the editorials and radio and press that inflate the power of the bigots. I don't think that the
decent Southern people want the Negro to be disenfranchised ... .
Are you proud to be a Southerner?
I am proud to be a Southerner! I am. I am not ashamed of the South. I am ashamed of situations
in the South - things that have happened in the South.
Your grandfather, Senator John Hollis Bankhead, your father, Congressman William Brockman
Bankhead, Speaker of the House, and your uncle, Senator John Hollis Bankhead -what would
they say if they could hear you talk like this?
They heard me ever since I was born. Whom do you think I got these ideas from but from my
father? I came from a very human and wonderful family. And, after all, where do you think the
Southerners learn their good manners? From the people who rear them. The Negroes taught us
our good manners. I hope to God I don't ever forget my inheritance, the tolerant and
understanding way I was brought up. I'm proud to be the Southerner I am.
Do I detect a defensive note, Tallulah?
You don't think I'm proud to be a Southerner? I wouldn't be anything else. I'll tell you that. I
love those magnolias and all that Southern comfort. I'm not proud of all the South. As a matter of
fact, I'm not proud of all the United States. I think it's a bloody sick country. Everybody's scared
of the atom bomb, everybody's going to psychiatrists, the method school of acting is repulsive!
The only sane thing I have encountered lately is Senator McClellan -and that divine Bob
Kennedy.
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