Tallulah! by Joel Lobenthal

Author:Joel Lobenthal
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts
ISBN: 0060989068
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

The Little Foxes received its world premiere at the Ford’s Theater in Baltimore on January 30, 1939. Tallulah had not acted in that city since leaving for London. A hairdresser was scheduled to come down from Elizabeth Arden in New York but fell ill at the last moment. Tallulah herself had to create the soufflé of waves and ringlets she wore in the first act. Two hours before the curtain, she sat in her dressing room, putting up her hair and taking it down again, until by the time she had it pinned to her satisfaction, her arms ached. Shumlin walked by and asked her how she was feeling.

“Oh, God, just awful,” she said.

“Then you’re all right,” he told her, voicing a theatrical truism.

Hellman had given Regina an unforgettable entrance. Obliquely visible to the audience, she lingers in the dining room with Marshall, Alexandra, and Ben, while center stage in the living room, Oscar takes his tortured wife to task for chattering with their guest from Chicago. Decades later Hellman spoke of the “deep, thrilling” laugh that emanated from Tallulah at the dinner table. Hellman looked forward to it at every performance she watched, sharing in the prickles of anticipation that it sent through the audience. It was eerie, like the call of a hyena, feral ambition flaring up behind a decorous facade. And then Tallulah would glide through the dining-room archway with her guests, wearing a sinuous black velvet evening gown that defied the sweet-pea shades worn by Alexandra and Birdie.

A frothy lace border embroidered with paillettes snaked across her bare chest and arms. “She came out and all eyes turned to her,” Glenn Anders recalled. “Who was going to look at anybody but Tallulah?”

Tallulah had asked Anders to come down to Baltimore and critique her performance. “I didn’t have time to do more than tell her the good things,”

Anders said. But he advised her by letter that rather than batting coquet-tishly the black fan she held, she should do so languorously: “A queen has all the time in the world.” Tallulah told Shumlin about it, and when the director next ran into Anders, he thanked him, saying if he had given her one more correction at that point, “she’d have jumped on me.”

For all was not well in Baltimore, where Howard Bay, who had designed the sets, recalled to Carl Rollyson an intermittent cross fire between“Herman and Tallulah, Lillian and Herman, Tallulah and Lillian, and a little all around.” They wondered if the play was too bleak for a world poised on the brink of real convulsion. Was it going to be the hit that Hellman and Tallulah needed so badly? There was a consensus that the third act was too long. Donald Kirkley in the Sun had complained that “the pace fal-tered, some threads of the plot came unraveled, and there were traces of uncertainty and confusion.” Gilbert Kanour in the Evening Sun concluded that Hellman “let her fondness for phrases impede the rush of her drama

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