Lobenthal, Joel by Tallulah!

Author:Tallulah!
Language: eng
Format: epub

Shumlin again sounded out Hellman about Tallulah, but Hellman thought she might be too young. Tallulah was only thirty-six when she began rehearsals, but Shumlin had seen her frequently onstage, and “knew her power, her style, her authority . . . her wonderful vitality and a marvelous freedom . . . a daring and a boldness that I liked very much.”

Shumlin’s casting sense was remarkably acute and each role received as perfect a personification as could be imagined. Ben, point man in the family’s operations until Regina trounces him, was Charles Dingle (whom Hellman could apparently forgive for his appearance in the ill-fated Days to Come). Carl Benton Reid was his hapless brother, Oscar, given the thin end of the wedge by both Regina and Ben. Lee Baker was William Marshall, and Horace Giddens was played by Frank Conroy. Dan Duryea played Oscar’s wastrel son, Leo, before beginning a long career in Hollywood.

Patricia Collinge was Tallulah’s virtual costar, this being the first play in which Tallulah had been so equally paired with a woman since Fallen Angels in 1925. Collinge played Oscar Giddens’s wife, Birdie, the daughter of old Southern aristocracy, a pitiful figure of ravaged gentility. Birdie was just as great a part as Regina, and Tallulah knew it. Kenneth Carten said Tallulah told him she had even originally told Shumlin she would play either Birdie or Regina.

Collinge had been a leading Broadway actress for almost thirty years, but had been away from Broadway for four years, devoting herself to writing. Her play Dame Nature had recently been produced by the Theatre Guild.

To play Regina’s daughter Alexandra, Shumlin hired Florence Williams, a twenty-eight-year-old native of St. Louis who had trained to be a concert pianist before falling in love with the theater in her teens. She had acted on Broadway with Lillian Gish, Judith Anderson, Helen Menken, Gladys Cooper, and Glenn Anders. “It was my very great pleasure,” Shumlin wrote soon after her Broadway debut in 1933, “last night to see you in Girls in Uniform, and I wish to take this opportunity to tell you how beautiful a performance you gave and thank you for it.” Earlier he had courted her unsuccessfully for a lead in The Children’s Hour.

Shumlin’s intensity was reflected in the preparations for the play. “Herman conducted as though he knew that he had a classic,” Williams recalled. “We had banquets on the stage,” laid out for breaks in rehearsal.

“Ham, roast beef, every kind of bread you can think of.”

Gathering material for her play, Hellman had raided the skeletons in her own family’s closets. The painstaking efforts of Shumlin and his team nearly caught her red-handed. During the second-act breakfast scene, a newspaper is casually perused by the Hubbards. Shumlin instructed stage manager Ben Krantz to find and reprint an authentic vintage issue. Hellman gave an approximate population, location, and year. But when Hellman saw the facsimiles Krantz had printed, she went through the roof: “Get all those destroyed immediately. I’ll be sued! I’ll be sued for libel.

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