Hey, Old Friends.. (and One New, Too)

I had a nice long stroll around Our Nation's Capital yesterday, and I grabbed the opportunity to drop into the National Portrait Gallery and pay my respects to some old familiar faces.

Birthday Boy: Thriller

I'm increasingly intrigued by the plethora of video riches now available for the asking on YouTube, not to mention taking advantage of same to fill some lamentable gaps in my education.  This weekend, for example, when not riveted by the Divine Miss M., I caught up on a very odd little film that is more discussed, I think, than seen: the Tallulah Bankhead vehicle A Royal Scandal.

Don't get too excited - it's awful.  It looks like they spent 70% of a moderately exiguous budget on gowns that make Bankhead look less like Catherine the Great than whomever it was that Margot Channing was playing in Aged in Wood, and the tone is sufficiently uneven that it seems like nothing so much as a Sternberg script directed as a Ritz Brothers epic.  Which is to say,  I suppose, it's a Fox attempt at sophistication, and despite a great deal of Acting from Miss B. (some of it, to be fair, good fun), it's flat as a pancake.

All that said, I did sit up and pay attention during the brief appearances by today's celebrant (102, were he still haunting us only on film), Mr. Vincent Price.  We are so used to him as a cheerfully menacing presence in bad horror films and on TV that it's easy to forget that he was in the beginning quite comely, not to mention that he had a good run as a leading man or featured player in the '40s before becoming entrenched horror pictures good and less so.  In Scandal he's the cheerfully effete French ambassador, who ends up as the Empress's consolation prize when she loses William Eythe (who's kind of a bore anyway) to Anne Baxter (who has a couple of oddly Sapphic moments as a lady in waiting, and even they're not very interesting).

While Price will doubtless have a kind of immortality for having lent his voice to Michael Jackson's monster (in more ways than one) hit, I'm awfully glad that at the end of his long career, he had two roles that gracefully limn his range as a screen presence.  In his final film, Edward Scissorhands, he revisited the Gothic guignol in which he he earned his living for so many years, gently sending up the very idea of a mad scientist, and it makes a fitting valediction.  Three years earlier, though, he recalls his days as a more romantic type in The Whales of August, where he is a touching foil for its formidable stars, Misses Gish and Davis, playing a gentle, faded Continental aristocrat (a senescent edition of his earlier ambassador, perhaps).

In his private life he seems to have been rather cheerfully effete himself, and in his final marriage found a soulmate in the mordant Australian phenomenon that was Coral Browne.  Immersed in art and cooking, they appear to have had a very good time.  After Tallulah, she must have seemed a rest...

Dueling Bankheads

She knew, of course, that in a way she was immortal. Looking in her mirror, Tallulah must have sensed that what she had created had taken on a life of its own, and that long after the little girl from Alabama had gone on before...

She'd show up the damnedest places - as, for example, in a TV movie, played by Mrs. Dick Cavett.

Or as part of the one-man repertory company that is the legendary Jim Bailey.

The essentials of the impersonation are consistent: the sweep of hair and slash of lipstick; cigarette of course; frequently a mink, for clutching and throwing off the shoulders; most generally a cocktail...

She can be played younger, with a dose of the glamour that dominated her life in the '20s and '30s (Miss Kathleen Turner seems altogether too gamine for the part, but the setting is suitably deco)...

Or older, dire and in her cups - although here, Miss Valerie Harper looks less Talluvian than like Mayor Rudi Giuliani on a bad night.

She's been played by the great - as here, by illusionist supreme Mr. Charles Pierce (we saw him do Tallu, darlings, yonks ago, and were greatly twisted affected by his performance, which was if anything more astonishing even than his Bette)...

And she's been played by the simply inevitable - is there a one-woman show that Tovah Feldshuh hasn't done? I'd look it up to make sure, but frankly I don't want my suspicions that this was a musical confirmed.

She's most recently been taken up as the subject for their ongoing cabaret/drag/performance art act by the duo who give this post its title. They venture pretty far afield from the source material, but the fundamentals - liquor, lipstick, excess, and a knack for the outrageous - are true to life.

What makes it work - whether for a roadshow turn like Harper's or Feldshuh's or for the alchemy of Pierce - is that the lady herself rose above the persona, or rather inhabited it so fully and unstintingly, with a talent and a kind of greatness of spirit that shine through, on some level, even the broadest burlesque, even the ones (and they were many, too many for the good of her reputation as an artist) she inflicted on herself.

Ah, but on a good night - I have been assured by Ones Who Were There - ah, then the angels sang. I've heard it on good authority that on some nights, during her too-short run in a revival of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, she could by sheer force of personality and utter fabulosity, strike gay not only the entire audience, but passers-by of the Brooks Atkinson Theatre for a distance of up to two blocks.

She's a kind they just don't make these days, but at least we can enjoy, to varying extents, the ways that others bring bits of her to life...

Party Chatter

Well, here's an odd little foursome. Tallu's clearly been caught in a brief pause in one of her trademark twenty-minute monologues, and her audience, rapt, are each caught up in their own individual reveries:

Dick: Yeah, I'd still tap that...

Pat: I don't know what she's on, but I want some!

Hedda: That bitch is wasted!

Meanwhile, the joke is on them, because Tallulah firmly believes that it's 1936 and she's chatting with Bob Hope and the Gish sisters.

If You're Thinking of Gifts...

...I can't imagine anything nicer than this lovely Tallulah Bankhead doll.

How have all these years passed without my knowing that out of her misbegotten Batman appearance came a genuine fashion doll? Give the old girl a hairdo, a little lippie, and a nice Scaasi muumuu and she'd be quite presentable.

Which is more than I can say for myself at the moment...

Grande Dame Guignol

Happy Hallowe'en! TJB has already heralded the holiday by bringing to mind one of Hollywood's scariest phenomena: the auto-trashing of stardom that many of Hollywood's biggest ladies participated in once their careers were heading to the far side of the arc of fame. The biggest stars dove in first, bringing us in 1962 the immortal spectacle that is Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.

I thought we might mark the day here at Café by taking a quick look at this same phenomenon, albeit generally one or two (or many, many more) rungs down.


Two years after Crawford and Davis, Olivia de Havilland put a toe into the exploitation waters with Lady in a Cage. She was joined in this macabre romp by none other than Ann Sothern.* She made sure it was a somewhat more old-school experience than Baby Jane by having her costumes by Edith Head and makeup by a Westmore, but even so, her Errol Flynn days at Warners feel very far away.

Nonetheless, she soldiered on; that same year, she replaced Crawford and joined Davis in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

1965 saw Tallulah Bankhead head to the UK to make what turned out to be her last feature, a Hammer horror first called The Fanatic and then re-titled, to maximally exploit her participation, as Die! Die! My Darling!**. Somehow the Italian title above just doesn't have the same ring.

Always eager to follow a trend, a few years later Shelley Winters (most of whose career was semi-exploitation anyway) flew to London for the first of her two "Question" thrillers, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (given the abbreviated title above for its U.S. release). Just about the best thing going for this one is its tag line: "The hand that rocks the cradle has no flesh on it!". Classy.

With that out of the way, Shelley hotfooted it back to LA to join Debbie Reynolds (and a startlingly star-studded cast that also takes in Agnes Moorehead, Dennis Weaver, and Yvette Vickers) for What's the Matter with Helen?. This one actually rises to the level of pretty good entertainment, with the two ladies playing Hollywood fringies in the 30s and more atmospherics than most of these pictures. It's sufficiently popular with at least one fan to have its own blog.

By the mid-70s, there were fairly few Big Ladies who hadn't found themselves wielding a knife, pushing a co-star down a flight of stairs, or otherwise generally trampling on the grave of Louis B. Mayer.

Perhaps the last of them was poor Veronica Lake, who was coaxed out of a boozy, reclusive retirement to appear ("star" just doesn't seem right) in Flesh Feast, a Miami-filmed quickie that makes Joan Crawford's Trog look like Grand Hotel. She plays a lady scientist who dabbles in experiments using maggots to carry out plastic surgery, and then someone wants to resuscitate Hitler, and... Oh, it's just awful, and she's terrible and sad.

Now that the line between "quality" entertainment and schlock has been more or less erased, it's hard to see any of today's star's getting much extra mileage simply out of appearing in shockers. A few decade ago, though, there was a palpable thrill in seeing somene like Bette Davis as a hag, or Olivia de Havilland menaced by beatniks, or even Veronica Lake as a sad shadow.

In any case, they mostly make fine entertainment for this spooky day, although I think myself that I'll induce the creeps by watching what I think is the scariest film to come out of a major Hollywood studio, Leslie Caron in Lili. But more of that anon.

* Moms Smackley's photostream has a snap of Miss Sothern in this that is something you want to see. Trust me.

** Hats off to the clever IMDb reviewer who points out that it could just as well be called Chew! Chew! The Scenery!.

Three on a Match

Here's a trio that must have been interesting backstage:

Blondell, Winwood, Bankhead: Hear No Evil, See No Evil, and Evil

How, one wonders, could a play starring these three Graces/Furies/Harpies not have been a smash? Well, Crazy October, a 1958 casualty up in New Haven, was definitely not.

Perhaps it was, if this summary is to be believed, because the plot sounds like the setup for a slightly queasy joke: "Tallulah plays Daisy, the proprietess of a roadside inn which she shares with a prostitute (Blondell) and a widow (Winwood), who is trying to get Daisy to cremate her husband."

In this context, why does "cremate her husband" sound like a euphemism for something much dirtier? And why is dear Miss Winwood dressed like Mamie Eisenhower? And to what extent is Miss Blondell actually having to prop her up? And (perhaps most tellingly regarding the fate of the play) why does Tallulah look as if she is going to swivel her head, drop her trick jaw, and devour the other two at one go?

We shall never know.

Holy Trinity II: The Bankhead Edition

Tallulah Times Three = Triple Trouble. But possibly worth it. Although distinctly not restful.

Who Can You Trust?

...If you can't trust a biographer of Tallulah Bankhead? From the New York Times comes this bizarre story - one that goes to show that Nasdijj, JT LeRoy, and James Frey haven't had the last word in literary finagling, after all.

Writer Lee Israel, having hit a rough patch in the early nineties, apparently used her pitch-perfect grasp of various luminaries' styles to write and sell "autographed" letters, including some that have ended up as part of their putative authors' canons.

Israel's Miss Tallulah Bankhead sits on my shelf back home, one of the very first star bios I ever read and one I still remember as a glimpse into a world I very much wanted to know more about (and, if possible, inhabit).

Earlier this year, I read the new Letters of Noël Coward, which includes samples of Miss Israel's "work." I don't claim any special expertise, but I remember thinking at the time that Coward's catty comment about Julie Andrews (and her overbite) seemed somehow off - I suppose I attributed it to his having had too much Champagne the night before, and would certainly never have thought it an outright fraud.

I don't know how I feel about the author now having written a book more or less celebrating her derring-do. But I have a sinking feeling I shall probably read it...