[Celebrity Murder Case 03] - The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case

by George Baxt

  He kissed her lightly on the cheek and then said with surprising vigor, “You can get me the late Clarence Darrow.”

  EPILOGUE

  The following September when Tallulah Bankhead’s autobiography, as ghosted by Richard Maney, was published, it soared to the top of the best-seller lists almost immediately. She succumbed to television’s seductively beckoning finger and starred in a series of musical extravaganzas called The All-Star Revue. The December 20th program featured Patsy Kelly, who was a smash hit, and it looked as though her career was reborn. Estelle Winwood drifted airily from flop play to flop play before deciding to head west and attempt to conquer Hollywood, which she eventually did. Dorothy Parker’s collaboration with Arnaud D’Ussaud, Ladies of the Corridor, did make it to Broadway and the critics declared open season on it. Its demise was mourned by very few, though several decades later it would resurface in an excellent television production, sadly long after Mrs. Parker’s death.

  As Armbruster Pershing predicted, Ted Valudni’s star reascended, and shortly before his death, as a very old man, he was given a testimonial dinner before a packed house and not one of the testimonials had the bad taste to remind those present of Valudni’s deplorable cooperation with HUAC.

  Joseph Savage was finally cleared of the blacklist but chose not to return to professional writing. Tallulah didn’t do the play he wrote for her because nobody would back it, and Joseph eventually wrote a book about his experience, which didn’t sell well.

  David Carney was returned to an insane asylum after he murdered his bothersome sister and her husband, who should have paid attention when he asked on the phone, “Can I come to dinner tonight and would you make my favorite pot roast and potato pancakes and then after the dessert and coffee I’m going to kill both of you.”

  Mitchell Zang extorted a large sum of money from an ignorant opera star (are there any other kind?), had plastic surgery to correct the scar on his left cheek, and went to Hollywood, where he became the star of a long-running television series thanks to having the good sense to switch from wooing actresses to wooing producers. He died last year of AIDS.

  Gabriel Darnoff never had another success on Broadway but was astonished at the hundreds of thousands of dollars he inherited when his mother died. Why, that foxy grandma! She had invested and salted away just about every nickel she had managed to wheedle out of him and his father. Darnoff emigrated to France, where he married a pretty Russian refugee who had had some success in her homeland as a Gogol dancer. Darnoff’s eldest son, Dimitri, recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for his brilliant book about his grandfather, Michael Darnoff.

  George Baxt went to England in 1957 for five years. In 1966 he published A Queer Kind of Death, which left him a mental wreck.

  Armbruster Pershing died of a stroke while playing tennis with his eighth wife, Natalie, who had affectionately dubbed him “Bluebeard.” To Natalie’s distress and chagrin, Armbruster left very little money, most of his fortune having been eaten up by divorce settlements and what he called acrimony payments.

  Oscar Delaney shot his wife, was acquitted, and won a police citation.

  Adam Todd left the force and became a private eye. His adventures are under option to a television network as a possible series for David Bowie.

  Annabel Forsythe opened a smart boutique in a better part of the Bronx, lost eighty pounds, and took a young lover, they are now two of the most successful crack dealers on the East Coast.

  Several years before her death, on the day Jacob Singer was honorably retired from the police force, Tallulah invited him to dinner at a very expensive restaurant on the East Side. They hadn’t seen each other in ages. Old age wasn’t kind to Tallulah, and she could have swatted Singer for looking exactly the way he had looked the day they nabbed Lewis Drefuss.

  Singer gallantly said to Tallulah, “Tallulah, you look sensational.”

  “Dahling, I’m not blind I saw myself in the mirror several times today and I look like an abandoned mackerel. What the hell, Jacob, I knew eventually my sins would catch up with me. Why, only last Friday, when I was a bit younger, the grandson of one of my British beaux asked if he could come visit me, and shortly after he arrived, the little monster—although he was a divine six foot three and perhaps nineteen or twenty years old at most—said to me, ‘Gee, Miss Bankhead, I’d never have recognized you from the pictures Grandpapa had of you starring in the West End.” Ye gods! The West End! The era of the dinosaur. Waiter! Another dry vodka martini for me and another of whatever the gentleman is drinking and I’m sure if you don’t hurry your blood will clot and where was I Jacob of course you read that my poor dahling Lewis hung himself in that awful place he was condemned to for the rest of his life his defense cost me a fortune but it was well worth it I adore him and I had him cremated and his ashes strewn across the floor at Sardi’s so everyone in the business could continue walking all over him and oh God I’m rattling away like a batch of tin cans tied to the rear of a car containing a bridal couple and Jacob I was good wasn’t I. I was a good detective and for crying out loud do you know what we ought to be doing we ought to be harmonizing a couple of choruses of ‘I Remember It Well’ oh let’s do and to hell with the other diners dahling and here’s the waiter dahling Mr. Waiter do you think you could rustle us up a pitch pipe well do your best dahling oh Jacob it’s so good seeing you again dahling!”

  AFTERWORD

  The murderer and his victims are fictitious, as is Tallulah Bankheads involvement with the blacklist. But the tribulations she encountered in trying to use the unfortunates on her program are true. I was there. I was an actors’ agent from 1951 to 1957, the worst years of the blacklist, and many of the events written about here are drawn from my own experiences. I have known the theory that Blanche Yurka murdered Smith Reynolds for about six years, since I heard it from an elderly gentleman who was once a celebrated Hollywood costume designer. I have checked and rechecked the facts and I am thoroughly convinced that Yurka (who, I might add, was a friend of mine) did it. And amusingly enough, Blanche was originally to star in my play, Laughter of Ladies, but so depressed the producers and director in rehearsal that she was replaced by Winwood.

  The facts of the blacklist and the real names I do use are all true and available to the public in Washington, D. C. Besides my own memories, I read Stefan Kanfers superb A Journal of the Plague Years, Gordon Kahn’s Hollywood on Trial, Alvah Bessie’s Inquisition in Eden, Merle Miller’s The Judges and the Judged, Only Victims, by Robert Vaughan (yes, the actorl), William Wright’s biography of Lillian Hellman (which has one astonishing error he reports Helman as being friendly with a woman named Hannah Dorner and then later in the book tells us Helman became friendly with a woman named Hannah Weinstein. Dorner and Weinstein are the same person, Dorner being her maiden name. It was Mrs. Weinstein who brought me to England in 1957 and launched my film writing career there). I was also privileged to read the manuscript of Jean Muir’s unpublished autobiography (ghosted by Hollis Alpert) and to jog the memories of some others to whom I am eternally grateful All film and theatrical information was culled from my own recollections.

  George Baxt