by Staggs, Sam
But these moviegoing homophiles cheered for a raucous kind of upside-down gentility. They endorsed Margo Channing’s sneering epithet for her best friend: “happy little housewife.” They loved it when Tallulah, at the end of her radio program, sang “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You” in such a low voice that her music director, Meredith Willson, intoned, “Thank you, Miss Bankhead, sir.”
And they must have considered 1950 an annus mirabilis, for it brought not only Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve, but also the debut of that very radio show where Tallulah began her campaign to snatch Margo Channing away from Bette Davis. That show was the place that launched a thousand quips.
By 1950 Tallulah’s acting career was virtually over. Too old for movies and too erratic for the theatre, Tallulah the Legend was now without an audience except for the friends, real and counterfeit, whom she regaled in supper clubs and at house parties. Already she was playing the one role that would last the rest of her life: Tallulah Bankhead. In a sense, that’s the only one she had ever played. The role was frazzled, and it had limited appeal.
To make matters worse, Bette Davis had starred in movie versions of Tallulah’s stage triumphs: Dark Victory (1939) and The Little Foxes (1941). A few years later, Bette and Tallulah both attended a party given by Jack Warner, Bette’s boss. Here is Bette’s account of their meeting: “Most of the guests had left. I was standing at the bar when up swept Tallulah. I was a bit anxious about what her behavior would be. ‘Dahling,’ she said, ‘you’ve played all the parts I’ve played, and I was so much better.’ ‘I agree with you, Miss Bankhead,’ I said. She wafted quickly out of the room. She didn’t get the fight she wanted.”
Bette’s soft answer chimes with other comments she made about Tallulah. For example, she always maintained that she didn’t go after the role of Regina Giddens: “On The Little Foxes I begged the producer, Samuel Goldwyn, to let Tallulah Bankhead play Regina because Tallulah was magnificent on the stage. He wouldn’t let her. He should have; I had to do that part exactly the way Tallulah did it, because that’s the way Lillian Hellman wrote it. But I was always sad that Tallulah couldn’t record Regina from the theatre, because she was marvelous.”
Bette could afford to be generous. To millions of moviegoers, she played the Bankhead roles as though Tallulah had never performed them at all. Tallulah, on the other hand, had but one reason to stroke Bette Davis, and that was to draw blood. And publicity.
The timing of Tallulah Bankhead’s The Big Show on NBC radio couldn’t have been better. The first broadcast took place Sunday, November 5, 1950, at 6:00 P.M.—three weeks after All About Eve opened in New York, and four days before its Hollywood premiere. Tallulah’s big-name guests that night were Jimmy Durante, José Ferrer, Frankie Laine, Ethel Merman, and Danny Thomas. Immediately the show was a hit.
A running gag on the program was the feud between Tallulah and Bette Davis. The idea was funny, and Tallulah made it funnier. She exaggerated all the hostility she’d ever felt toward Bette, and the audience ate it up. It’s easy to imagine Tallulah’s delight: Now she could take revenge every week.
Someone asked Tallulah on the air if she had seen All About Eve. “Every morning when I brush my teeth,” she drawled. Later Tallulah growled, “Dahling, just wait till I get my hands on that woman. I’ll pull out every hair in her mustache.” Later still, she said, “If they ever make a film All About Me, I’ll play it myself.”
Away from the microphone, however, Tallulah wasn’t amused. She was furious that Bette had copied her hairdo, her voice, her exaggerated mannerisms. It didn’t help that Time, Life, and Newsweek, in their reviews of All About Eve, noted recognizable traces of Tallulah. Life stated flatly, “Bette Davis in the movie is obviously modeled on Tallulah Bankhead.”
All of this riled her so much that she threatened legal action. Tallulah called up Darryl Zanuck to rant: “That bitch stole my best stage roles for films, and now she is holding me up to public ridicule with her imitations.”
It’s possible that Tallulah’s threats worried Zanuck. He probably knew that in 1949 she had sued Procter and Gamble, NBC, CBS, and the Benton and Bowles advertising agency for the unauthorized use of her name in a jingle for Prell shampoo. The jingle went, “I’m Tallulah the tube of Prell / And I’ve got a little something to tell / Your hair can be radiant oh so easy / All you’ve got to do is take me home and squeeze me.” (Bankhead settled out of court for $5,000.)
According to some reports, Bette—perhaps at Zanuck’s behest—wrote letters, sent telegrams, even telephoned Tallulah to explain why her voice had sounded that way in the movie. But Tallulah was not mollified. “There was no intentional imitation of anyone,” Bette assured a reporter. “I feel that in this picture I played myself more than in any part I played in the last ten years. Maybe Miss Bankhead and I are alike, you see. That could happen.”
Spoken like a press agent. But Bette had a point. Meyer Berger, in a 1944 profile in the New York Times, might just as well have substituted the name “Bette” for “Tallulah”:
Standing still, Tallulah somehow gives the impression she’s at a destroyer’s prow, knifing into a howler. Her long, tawny hair whips into her face with every gesture. She flips it back impatiently every few seconds with a motion almost as regular as breathing. Her speech is a racing torrent, the whisper-in-a-rain-barrel sound of it curiously hypnotic. She paces like something wild that’s caged, chain smokes, drains off Cokes as fast as her maid snatches empties from under her restless fingers.
The rivalry was more than a decade old when Bankhead went on the air. Tallulah, knowing she had latched on to a good thing, wasn’t about to turn loose. One night on her radio program, in the middle of a recitation of her career achievements, Tallulah paused.
Her sidekick asked, “What happened next?”
“Bette Davis,” sighed Tallulah.
But once a week on radio wasn’t enough. Tallulah took her “Big Show” on the road. She opened a national lecture tour in Dallas on December 5, 1950. The evening was called “Tallulah Tells All.” The word all was no coincidence. Describing the evening in the Dallas Times-Herald, reviewer Clifford Sage captured Tallulah’s obsessive wit:
Someone in the audience wanted an imitation of Bette Davis. On the point of complying, Tallulah changed her mind. “Why should, I, dahling?” she asked. “She’s been imitating me long enough.” Then she gallantly took the curse off the comment with: “But really, it’s been sheer coincidence that Bette’s played the leading roles in such films as Dark Victory. I really admire her very much.” She twisted her shoulders in mock, saccharin modesty, and all but winked. “After all,” she added, putting back the curse, “where would Bette be without me—and where would I be without her, by the way!”
The Dallas Morning News, reviewing “Tallulah Tells All,” ran a photo of Bankhead above a look-alike picture of Bette as Margo Channing. The caption was WHICH IS TALLULAH? John Rosenfield, in the accompanying article, wrote that “if Miss Bankhead’s remarks are to be taken literally she hates Miss Davis’s innards.” He went on to note that “in All About Eve Bette Davis wears her hair as Tallulah does and shouldn’t, sports an Alabama accent offstage, makes Tallulah faces, admits to forty, and composes the nastiest insults ever offered as social amenities.”
The following year, for the new season’s first broadcast of “The Big Show,” Tallulah traveled to London. Convinced that the feud with Bette Davis was evergreen, Tallulah launched a fresh attack from overseas. “Don’t think I don’t know who’s been spreading gossip about me and my temperament out in Hollywood, where that film was made: All About Me. And after all the nice things I’ve said about that hag.”
But the jokes, only slightly recast, had begun to pall. It takes two clever people to stoke a feud, and their timing must be exquisite. Bette, for the moment, was busy elsewhere, and so Tallulah’s one-woman vendetta began to sound a little desperate.
The show, based on a scripted “comedy of insult” format, filled up
with multitudinous references to Tallulah’s advancing age and her sexual aggressiveness. To guest George Sanders, she said, “I’ve decided to grow old gracefully.” To which he replied very dryly, “And have you?” Tallulah: “Whenever I’m in Hollywood I turn down dozens of offers.” Sanders: “Any for pictures?” And so on.
The next year, 1952, Tallulah’s autobiography was published. “Forced to vote for a Davis, I’ll take Jefferson and give you Bette,” she wrote on page 2. Farther on, she brought it up again. This time the cattiness was subdued right up to the last sentence, where she chose to insert the knife:
The gossips and the gadabouts made a great to-do about Bette Davis’ characterization of a truculent actress in All About Eve. These busybodies said Miss Davis had patterned her performance after me, had deliberately copied my haircut, my gestures, my bark and my bite. For comedy reasons this charge was fanned into a feud on my radio show. I was supposed to be seething with rage over the alleged larceny. In superficial aspects Miss Davis may have suggested a boiling Bankhead, but her over-all performance was her own. I had seen Miss Davis play Regina Giddens [in The Little Foxes] on the screen, and I knew I had nothing to worry about.
Later in 1952, Tallulah savored one of the most satisfying nights of her career. On Sunday evening, November 16, in a live radio broadcast from the Belasco Theatre in New York, NBC’s Theatre Guild on the Air starred Tallulah Bankhead herself as Margo Channing in All About Eve.
This was a one-hour radio version of Mankiewicz’s All About Eve. Such a stripped-down production strikes us today as bizarre. It’s as strange as hearing Jurassic Park reenacted on drive-time radio. But from the thirties to the fifties it was common practice for top stars (and lesser ones) to perform in radio adaptations of recent movies, either their own or others’. Bette Davis, for instance, did radio versions of Dark Victory, Jezebel, and Now, Voyager. (Her co-star in the latter, a presentation of Lux Radio Theatre, was Gregory Peck.) Hedy Lamarr and Alan Ladd once co-starred as Ilsa and Rick in a radio version of Casablanca.
November 16, 1952, was Tallulah’s Night of a Hundred Stars, and she was every one of them. Full of herself, she introduced the radio play like this: “Good evening, dahlings. The play we’re performing for you this evening on Theatre Guild on the Air is called—and I never could understand why [audience laughter]—All About Eve. True, there is an Eve in it, and what a part that is. There’s also a glamorous and brilliant leading lady of the theatre, whose true identity has been kept a secret too long [loud laughter]. Tonight, dahlings … tonight baby intends to do something about that [laughter]. So to get on with it, we raise the curtain on All About Eve. Hah!”
This radio version was adapted from the Mankiewicz screenplay by Arthur Allen, who took many an unfortunate liberty with the material. Like the movie, the radio play opens with Addison’s voice-over. But for radio the adapter used several lines that Mankiewicz, or Zanuck, had rejected. This is how the radio script begins: “Hello, permit me to introduce myself. My name is Addison DeWitt. I am a drama critic and columnist, which means I am essential to the theatre, as ants to a picnic or the boll weevil to a cotton field. The story properly begins one rainy night backstage at the Curran Theatre on Broadway [sic].”
Lines spoken by one character in the movie are distributed to other characters on radio. In the film, for example, when Karen says to Margo, “She worships you, it’s like something out of a book,” Lloyd retorts, “That book is out of print.” Now it’s Margo who speaks Lloyd’s line.
And not very well. Listening to Tallulah as Margo Channing—punctuated with endless “dahlings”—you realize how completely and inalterably the role belongs to Bette Davis. Tallulah sounds overconfident and tentative at the same time. She’s a little too drunk in the party scene, a little too strident throughout, and her Margo has none of the vulnerability of Bette’s. Hearing this performance, it’s easy to understand John Mason Brown’s famous review of her acting in Antony and Cleopatra: “Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra—and sank.”
Others also suffer by comparison with the movie cast. Eve Harrington, played by Beatrice Pearson, has the dithery voice of an ingenue Edith Bunker. Kevin McCarthy as Lloyd, Alan Hewitt as Addison, and Don Briggs as Bill are interchangeable. As Birdie, Florence Robinson at least does a near-perfect imitation of Thelma Ritter. And Mary Orr, who invented Eve in the first place, plays Karen Richards.
Asked what it was like to work with Tallulah Bankhead, Mary Orr still shudders. “I think she was a very bitchy woman, really I do. When we did the broadcast, she came over to me and said, ‘Dahling, I understand you wrote Margo Channing based on me?’ I said, ‘No, Miss Bankhead, she was based on Elisabeth Bergner.’ When she heard that, she thundered: ‘You didn’t?’ And she never spoke to me again!”
Bette continued to deny that she had Tallulah in mind while playing Margo. Asked by Playboy in 1982, “Was there any truth in the story that you were doing a bit of Bankhead shtick in All About Eve?” Bette responded, “No truth at all. We never even thought of her. Bankhead was far more eccentric than Margo Channing.”
Mankiewicz, too, dismissed speculation that Margo Channing was a caricature of Tallulah. “It’s nonsense,” he said. “If Claudette Colbert had played the role, everyone would have said we were doing a take-off on Ilka Chase.”
And yet the scent of Tallulah lingers. She’s like the victim in an Agatha Christie plot, albeit a comic intrigue sans murder. Unless, as Tallulah insisted, All About Eve was some form of character assassination.
Bette Davis is not the only suspect.
Perhaps this is the time to recall Edith Head to the witness stand. “I steeped myself in Tallulah,” she said, “and everything looked as if it was made for her, yet the clothes complimented Bette. What you must understand is that Bette was becoming Tallulah Bankhead or Margo Channing, or whoever the hell she was supposed to be.”
Anne Baxter, too, had reason to want Tallulah read. Read, that is, as the vainglorious prototype for Margo Channing, a temperamental aging actress who deserved what she got at the hands of Eve Harrington. For Anne Baxter was a Tallulah survivor—in 1945 they had co-starred in A Royal Scandal.
“Tallulah had a multitude of reasons for hating Anne Baxter, who played her lady-in-waiting,” said Bankhead’s biographer, Lee Israel. “There was Anne Baxter’s personality—which simply rubbed Tallulah the wrong way. There was her age, twenty-two—which simply rubbed Tallulah the wrong way. There was her politics—Republican—which simply rubbed Tallulah the wrong way. And there was the deference paid directly and indirectly to the younger actress, especially by Lubitsch, which was the most offensive phenomenon of all.”
It didn’t help that Anne Baxter’s grandfather, Frank Lloyd Wright, visited the set and watched Tallulah at work. “Not bad for an old dame,” he said loudly. Bankhead bristled. The next take required her to tap Baxter lightly with a slap. Instead she sent her reeling.
Ernst Lubitsch, who originally was to direct A Royal Scandal, suffered a heart attack and had to withdraw. His assistant, Otto Preminger, took over as director; Lubitsch stayed on as producer only. One day Lubitsch and Tallulah had a frightful row. She “reviled him with a barrage of scurrility that might have shocked Henry Miller” and stormed into her dressing room, where she ripped off her dress and hurled her wiglet across the room.
Did this perhaps inspire Anne Baxter’s fury in the scene where Bill Sampson rejects Eve’s advances? Scorned, Eve Harrington rips off her wig, bangs it onto her dressing table, snatches it up again, and tries to rip it apart. She seems about to destroy the room when Addison suddenly appears. If Tallulah recognized herself on-screen as the source of Eve’s rage, she perhaps had one more reason to hate Anne Baxter.
After All About Eve came out, Tallulah claimed that Mankiewicz had visited the set of A Royal Scandal five years earlier to study her mannerisms. Mankiewicz countered with suave malice: “I visited the set, true. But I was studying Lubitsch, not Bankhead.”
While we’re rounding up the usual suspects, we must include Darryl Zanuck. According to Tom Mankiewicz, “Zanuck’s choice for the role of Margo Channing after Claudette Colbert dropped out was Tallulah Bankhead. He and Dad had a big fight about the casting. That I know.” This assertion contradicts the written records of Zanuck, Joe Mankiewicz, and the Fox casting director. In fact, it’s a rather amazing fillip—tantamount to the appearance of a surprise witness.
When Zanuck uttered the name “Tallulah Bankhead,” Mankiewicz must have seen hell open up. Her presence would mean the end of his quiet, orderly sets. Tallulah would drink, she would snort. She would steal scenes and wreck the ensemble acting he had in mind for this film. And when Tallulah realized she was playing not only Margo Channing but Tallulah Bankhead as well, then what? Would she, like Bette Davis at Warner Bros., try to rewrite the script? Since Tallulah hated Anne Baxter, how would their scenes turn out, especially the early ones where Margo dotes on Eve?
We don’t know whether Tallulah ever got wind of her near miss with All About Eve. If so, it was doubtless on her long list of grievances when she called up Zanuck to threaten a lawsuit.
Tom Mankiewicz stops short of saying that his father based Margo Channing on Tallulah. Rather, he explains, “What Dad tried so hard to do was to create a three-dimensional Margo. I think those scenes about what it means to be a woman, and Margo’s relationship with Bill, are very un-Tallulah. Dad and Tallulah Bankhead didn’t know each other very well, so I’m not sure how he could have patterned the role on her.”
