Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  By the time Tallulah was ten, Will believed the only way to manage his younger daughter was to send her and Eugenia away to school. It proved difficult to find one nearby that would take them both as boarders, and the one he selected, the Convent of the Sacred Heart, was over a thousand miles away in Manhattanville, a suburb of New York. Inevitably, both children were wretched. Eugenia coped as she always did, by being biddable and working hard, but Tallulah was in trouble every day. The actress in her might have been mesmerized by the rituals of the convent – she liked to drape herself in a black shawl and sit with lighted candles in front of her mirror, trying to imitate the nuns – but the tomboy in her was floored. Restless, homesick, unable to focus on her lessons and overwhelmed by the new regime of rules, she was continually being punished.

  She was also lonely. Most of the other girls in her class were from the North and were quick to judge her as a Southern outsider; her name sounded freakish to them* and her exhibitionism seemed absurd. Back home she might be considered naughty but she still fitted in with the gregarious spirit of the Bankheads, who for all their old-fashioned views on race and religion, possessed a colourful streak of non-conformity, what Tallulah would appreciatively call ‘style and dash’.6 Her grandfather’s loud voice used to ring through the house in Jasper, mixing up Shakespeare, proverbs and local vernacular. When his wife berated him for using low words like ‘ain’t’, he refused to listen, insisting that he would never gain another farmer’s vote if he spoke like a Yankee gentleman.

  Will could be equally extrovert when his mood was on an upward curve, declaiming poetry, cracking jokes, inventing games of flamboyant hilarity and sometimes offering his daughters spectacularly inappropriate treats. It’s doubtful that there were any other pupils from the convent watching the Broadway melodrama to which Will took Tallulah and Eugenia after their first term at boarding school. Titled The Whip it wrought delicious havoc on their ten- and eleven-year-old imaginations, its highly sexed plot line involving dissolute British aristocrats and its dramatically cacophonous stagings of a train wreck and car collision, leaving both girls ‘red eyed and disheveled’.7

  The other pupils in the convent apparently came from far more decorous backgrounds. When Tallulah tried to make them laugh, by telling stories or parading naked around the dormitory, they curled their lips in disdain: when she tried to join their games they regarded her simply as an annoyance. Inevitably, the more of a pariah Tallulah felt, the worse her behaviour became. At the end-of-term service, the pupils with the highest marks for conduct were given white veils to wear as they filed into chapel, and a white lily to hold. Tallulah, however, was singled out to walk in line with a black veil. Weeping, she felt like ‘an untouchable’.8

  After the convent Tallulah was sent to a succession of different schools, but she remained, intractably, a problem child. While she liked reading and was clever and inquisitive, she found it difficult to concentrate during class. Perhaps if she had been given more opportunities to perform in school plays or recitals she might have settled better. But while she loved to act and had a facility for learning chunks of poetry and dialogue by heart, she was rarely picked for anything but a minor part. Her behaviour was too unpredictable and she looked too odd. With the onset of puberty Tallulah had grown even plumper and her skin had broken out in sullen blooms of acne. With her hair still cut childishly and bluntly short, even the most flattering costume could not make her look appealing. Certainly never as appealing as Eugenia, who stoked Tallulah’s burning sense of injustice by being repeatedly cast in the end-of-term shows.

  By the age of thirteen Tallulah was spending most of her free time with her collection of stage and movie magazines, and with pin-up photos of her favourite stars: the haughty beauty Alla Nazimova and the adorably ringletted Mary Pickford. She was convinced she could become an actress, too, if only she were pretty like Eugenia, or like Zelda Sayre, a girl she knew in Montgomery. When Tallulah was small, she and Zelda had been rival tomboys, competing over backbends and cartwheels. But Zelda was now fifteen and had grown into a Southern belle, with beaux queuing up to dance with her and take her for rides.

  Tallulah felt even more excluded from the conspiracy of attractive girls when a new rival appeared for her father’s love. Having finally gained some control over his drinking and depression, Will had begun courting a young secretary, Florence McGuire, and when he announced he was going to marry her, Tallulah was outraged. She did everything she could to undermine Florence, mimicking the way she tried to conceal the Jasper twang of her accent. Yet, slowly, she began to revise her opinion as she discovered the benefits that came with a stepmother.

  Florence could make things happen. It was she who persuaded Will to buy his first motor car, a shiny Hudson roadster that brought tremendous zip and possibility to the family’s Sunday outings. And it was she, alone of all the family, who began to broach the subject of Tallulah’s appearance. Tallulah had always assumed that her spots and puppy fat were an intractable misery; no one had ever indicated that there might be a remedy. But Florence read the health and beauty columns of all the women’s magazines, and she not only suggested that Tallulah should let her dark blonde hair grow long and wavy, she also advised her to embark on a regime of diet and exercise.

  Tallulah could summon draconian forces of will when she cared about something, and within just a few months she managed to shed over twenty pounds and achieve a miraculous healing of her skin. To the mild astonishment of her family, she had actually made herself lovely. And as Tallulah gazed at herself in the mirror, admiring her dewy cheeks, perfecting a mistily fervent expression in her large blue eyes, she could see herself, at last, as an actress.

  The following year she moved one stage closer to her dreams. Will had run a successful campaign to be elected to the House of Representatives, and the whole family were moved to Washington, with Eugenia living in an apartment with Will and Florence, while Tallulah and her grandparents lived in the apartment immediately above. Mrs Bankhead’s dearest plan was to get her granddaughters launched in Washington society, but Tallulah was focused only on finding her way to the theatres and film studios of New York, which was now just over two hundred miles away.

  To some degree she’d inherited this dream from her family. Both her grandparents had been keen amateur actors in their youth, performing in plays to raise money for the Confederate cause. Will had been so caught by the acting bug that he’d come close to abandoning his legal training for a job with a small repertory company in Boston. Even poor, dead Ada had once fantasized about going on the stage. Reciting poetry in her bedroom she had confided to her friend Margaret Du Bois Smith, that she was already ‘an actress in her heart’; starring in school plays she had dreamed of following in the footsteps of Sarah Bernhardt, Mrs Fiske and Eleanora Duse, all of whom she had seen perform.

  As the daughter of an old plantation-owning family, Ada had no serious hope of fulfilling her ambition. It would have meant social disgrace. Yet in one generation much had changed and across America, thousands of girls were now dreaming, along with Tallulah, of becoming actors.

  It was a national obsession, and it was one that had been created primarily by the film industry. A stage artist like Bernhardt could make herself known and loved by many (Henry James commented that the term celebrity would have had to be invented for Bernhardt if it hadn’t already existed). On the first of her several tours to America she had performed in no fewer than fifty towns. Yet the size of Bernhardt’s public was always circumscribed by her medium and until 1912, when she made her first film, most of her fans would only expect to see her act once or twice in their lifetimes.

  In contrast, the cinema brought famous actors to every small town, almost every day of the week. By 1920 there were over twenty thousand movie theatres across America, in addition to the older, cheaper storefront nickelodeons that dominated the early years of cinema.* Young women who might never have had the opportunity to see Bernhardt or Fiske now imagined themselves
becoming another Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish.

  Their ambitions were also fostered by the industry’s new fan magazines. By 1917 there were around fifty in publication, and if their titles were generic – Picture-Play, Motion Picture Classic, Photoplay – so too were their contents. Page after page featured meticulously lit and staged studio portraits of current film stars, along with stories about their homes, cars and possessions and details of their personal lives. Much of what was printed was shameless fabrication, produced by a PR industry that was becoming more and more sophisticated at peddling celebrity wares. The extravagant fictions that were spun around Theda Bara dwelt on the Arabian background of this silver screen vamp, on her menagerie of exotic pets and her wild love affairs. Yet in reality Theodosia Goodman was the daughter of a Cincinnati tailor, an intelligent woman who between film engagements preferred to live quietly with her family and friends.

  The movie industry needed fantasy, not just to market their stars but to attract the lucrative advertising campaigns that came with them. Products of the new American mass market sold at a dramatically better rate when associated with a famous name. Picture cards of celebrities were given free with packets of cigarettes, and on the giant billboards that jostled for attention on American skylines and shop fronts, the eerily enlarged and blandly smiling faces of movie stars exhorted fans to buy face creams, hair pomade or mouth wash.

  On the other side of world Diana Manners and Nancy Cunard existed in a world of bombs, rationing and casualty figures. And although America too had entered the war in the spring of 1917, it meant little to girls like Tallulah. The stories that dominated her imagination revolved around lucky young women like Olive Thomas, the Pittsburgh shop assistant who less than three years earlier had entered a competition to find the ‘most beautiful girl in New York’ and had ended up contracted to the International Film Company and married to Mary Pickford’s actor brother Jack.

  Olive and Jack were now reputed to be ‘two of the gayest wildest brats who ever stirred the stardust on Broadway’,9 and it was in the June issue of Picture-Play that Tallulah spotted an item that promised her a chance to become gay and wild herself. The magazine was running a beauty contest, for which readers were invited to send in photographs; the prize was a role in a film to be directed and produced by Frank Powell in New York.

  Some of these competitions could be cruel scams, the ‘role’ nothing more than the chance to play an extra in a crowd scene.* Tallulah was deaf to any word of caution, however. She posed for her photograph in a borrowed hat and fox stole, and such was her excitement that she sent it off without remembering to write her name and address on the back. Three months later she was sitting with Eugenia in the local drugstore, drinking a Coca-Cola and leafing through the latest issue of Picture-Play, when there, among the gallery of twelve winning photographs, was her own picture. Above it was the dramatic headline WHO IS SHE? And beneath it an urgent request that the ‘mysterious beauty make herself known’.

  Tallulah recalled that her ecstasy could be heard a street away. ‘I dashed out of the drugstore, magazine in hand, screaming, “I’ve won it! I’ve won it! I’m going on the stage.”’10 As yet she’d given no thought as to whether her family would allow her to claim her prize, nor to the matter of a chaperone: Tallulah at fifteen and a half was too young, too naive and too dangerously headstrong to be allowed to head off to New York without some adult companion.

  During the noisy family debates that followed, other arguments were raised. Mrs Bankhead believed the film contract would do no good to Tallulah’s marriage prospects, which she considered central to her granddaughter’s future. Will’s objections were largely financial. His income was much reduced now that he had largely given up the law, and his congressman’s salary had to stretch to supporting his new wife, as well as Mrs Bankhead’s plans to launch Eugenia (and possibly Tallulah) into Washington society. Although Tallulah was supposedly being offered a weekly salary of $25 for filming her debut role, this would hardly cover the cost of keeping her and a companion in New York. Especially as Tallulah had made it plain that she intended to remain in the city once the film was made, in order to look for other work.

  Tallulah was incredulous at the opposition to her dream: she wept, she sulked, and she threatened hunger strike – a strategy that had served her well when she’d been trying to get herself removed from one of her several schools. Finally her grandfather intervened. Tallulah, he judged, was ‘a peculiar child … self-reliant to a fault perhaps and always thinks her plans are best’.11 It was clear to him that her ambitions would give the family no peace until she found a way to satisfy them, so he offered to subsidize Tallulah’s expenses, at least for the short term, and arranged for Tallulah’s Aunt Louise to accompany her to New York.

  It’s hard to know what the family were thinking when they let her go. Louise was never a forceful woman, with less of the Bankhead ‘dash’ than the rest of the clan, and she was at a particularly low ebb at this time: grieving the loss of her youngest son, William, to typhoid two years earlier, and the recent breakdown of her second marriage. She was hardly in a state to contain a tornado of energy, ambition and curiosity like Tallulah, nor to defend her from the perils of New York.

  The Bankheads believed they were aware of the dangers. They had read the headlines, and anticipated that the city might be a snakes’ nest of race activists, birth-control advocates, women’s trade unionists and drug fiends. They had instructed Tallulah in the importance of avoiding drink and men. Yet, still, they had very little inkling of the kind of professional pressures she might be pitted against.

  A range of abuse and exploitation was endemic in the film industry. Aspiring starlets were routinely asked to perform sexual favours in return for a film role, or to subsidize their earnings by working in the pornographic fringes of the business. Even in mainstream feature films, sex was a major selling point. Regulation of content wasn’t introduced until 1930, and when Theda Bara starred as Cleopatra, her costume was far more shocking than Maud Allan’s; her virtually naked breasts were supported by a brassiere of twisted wire snakes; the outline of her crotch tantalizingly visible behind an embroidered transparent skirt. When Clara Bow told her mother and aunt she was going into the movies, their reaction was typical of many Americans at that time – Clara would be making herself a ‘hoor’. The respectable Bankheads, by contrast, had little knowledge of what their Tallulah might become involved with.

  In late summer Tallulah arrived in New York ‘boil[ing] with excitement and ambition’12 as she waited for her new life to begin. She had been to the city before, on the occasional family outing to a Broadway show, but she had never lived there. To her joy, Louise had found an apartment on West 45th Street, right in the heart of the theatre district. Around her the names of her favourite actors were spelled out in electric lights, and Tallulah hummed with the knowledge that at any moment she might see one of them on the street – that one day she might even be working with them in the same studio or theatre.

  Almost all her dreams were crushed as news came through that the production company with which Tallulah was meant to be working had gone bankrupt, and the film assigned to her had been cancelled. The competition organizers at Picture-Play promised to find an alternative, but they could not specify when that might be, and Tallulah’s impatience rose to a nearly unendurable pitch when, instead of being transported to the magical world of the film studio, she was obliged to trail around the city in her aunt’s wake.

  Louise had her own purpose in accompanying Tallulah to New York, which was to visit some of the more celebrated spiritualists and mediums who operated there. She believed, fervently, in the possibility of making contact with her dead son William, and in that hope she had brought along his former fiancée Ola. Spiritualism was big business in America, especially among women.* Its eight million or more adherents ranged from political campaigners seeking guidance from the spirit world to the growing number of war-bereaved hoping for some message
from their slaughtered menfolk. Louise had no trouble finding ‘experts’ in New York who were willing to take her money for the promise of a word from William. And day after day Tallulah was forced to traipse with her and Ola through a succession of dimly lit rooms, where hushed exalted women chanted and consulted with cards.

  Finally, in October, she was delivered from this gloomy nether-world. A small part had been found for her in a new romantic comedy, Who Loved Him Best? Directed by Dell Henderson, it was a cheaply made feature, and Tallulah’s character, a bohemian girl called Nell, was only one level up from an extra.† Yet every day, she and Louise took a streetcar across the river to the film studio in Brooklyn,‡ and as Tallulah learned her way around the crowds of actors and technicians, the snaking yards of cable, the painted flats and giant Klieg lights, she saw only a world of glamour and possibility.

  She was lucky, too, that she came out of the filming well. In several key scenes she was positioned close to the main action, and was in shot sufficiently long for the camera to register the distinctive qualities of her face. Still not quite sixteen, Tallulah was intriguingly poised between woman and child. Her recently achieved cheekbones had brought sophisticated definition to her heart-shaped face, and there was a hint of the siren in her carefully plucked eyebrows and in the long hooded lids of her eyes. Her skin, however, was innocently creamy, and this was one of her key assets. The crudely undiffused lighting of the early twentieth-century studios was so brutally exposing to every line, freckle or pore that most young starlets were considered old by the time they were twenty-two. Youth was at a premium, and Tallulah had it.

  She herself was cock-a-hoop when she first saw herself on the screen. Making the film had been so delightful, she said it was a ‘terrible thing’ to be paid for it, and Will was not pleased when he heard that Tallulah had ebulliently torn up her first $25 pay cheque. She was determined to earn more, and soon, and during the early months of 1918 she scoured the trade press and pestered anyone she could find for information about work. Her family was impressed by her resolve and called in all their contacts in New York, including a business friend, James Julian, who knew the film industry. ‘My dearest Tallulah,’ Will wrote with pride, and perhaps some surprise, ‘you are certainly going at this thing like you mean business and I am betting on you and backing you to my limit.’13