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Tallulah Bankhead: Career
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In 1964, Bankhead experienced breathing difficulties and she visited the doctor. She was diagnosed with emphysema, undoubtedly caused by her 100-a-day habit. The doctor advised her to quit smoking, which she tried to do but she had been addicted to nicotine for thirty years. Back on the cigarettes, she carried on her career as best she could with the aid of her young caddies, one of whom had the job of holding her hand every night as she fell asleep. The once young and vibrant Bankhead found herself, as an old woman, keeping up a public façade regarding her social life whilst at the same time being terrified of her own mortality.
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Bankhead's career was in decline by the mid-1950s. Her outrageous behavior, fueled by a two-bottle-a-day consumption of Old Grand Dad , continued unabated. And behavior that was endearingly wicked in a flapper starlet of the Twenties was wearyingly vulgar in an aging, falling star in the Sixties. Bankhead never faded from the public eye, but was increasingly a caricature of her former self. By this time, when she appeared as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams 's A Streetcar Named Desire her adoring coterie of homosexual fans cheered and laughed at her performance, hurting its dramatic tone and preventing her from achieving the desired result of a faded Southern woman.
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As a teenager, Mrs. Bankhead herself had enjoyed performing in private theatricals to raise money for the Confederacy, and as a young man, Captain John loved to recite Shakespeare with his neighbors on his farmhouse porch in west Alabama. But a career in the theater was not what they envisioned for Will. Sitting on the Boston Commons, buffeted by the winter chill, he read his mother's letter demanding that he return. "And so I decided this little country boy had better go home," he told Tallulah many years later.
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Bankhead was born into a wealthy southern family in 1902. She was an actress and celebrity famed for her beauty and outrageousness. Bankhead debuted on stage in the early 1920s but failed to break into film. Lucky for her then that her theatre career kept her on booze and women for most of her life.
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In the 1930s and early 1940s, Tallulah attempted a movie career, but with little success. However, her impact on the Hollywood community was considerable. She rented the palatial home of silent movie star William Haines and hosted parties whose regular guests included Ethel Barrymore, Marlene Dietrich, and George Cukor.
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One of Bankhead's most notorious events was an interview that she gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932. She was obviously letting off steam from her frustrated attempt at a movie career and she ranted wildly about the state of her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:
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