The Theater: One-Woman Show

Even when it was new, 17 years ago, Noel Coward's Private Lives was no great shakes as a play. When it was revived this fall on Broadway, it had plainly not improved with the years. But last week, as it has for the past six weeks, Private Lives was packing the Plymouth Theater with as many standees as the New York Fire Department will allow. What the customers were crowding to see was not so much a play as a remarkable personality with a remarkable name: Tallulah Bankhead.

On stage, as well as off, Tallulah Bankhead mugs, flings, shouts and croaks her boisterous way through an outrageously florid, outrageously amusing imitation of Tallulah Bankhead. Many a mediocre play has been dragged beyond its deserved life span by Tallulah's gaudy brilliance, but this time she has turned one into a smash hit singlehanded.

Tallulah * is not the first lady of the theater. She is the theater's first personality. The theater's current first lady is a kind of composite of Helen Hayes, Katharine Cornell, Judith Anderson, Lynn Fontanne—and Tallulah. But Tallulah does not fit neatly into a category, and other ladies of the stage, whatever their virtues as actresses, pale beside her as stars pale when a bonfire is lighted.

Gaudy Legend. At 47, after three decades in the dazzled public eye, Actress Bankhead is one of the few people in the English-speaking world instantly and unmistakably identifiable by her first name. Her lounging, lionesslike vitality, her insatiable lust for life and her contempt for all forms of humbug have inspired a large body of legend. Her egomania is about as extreme as "the artistic temperament" can produce. She is exhibitionistic, extravagant, self-indulgent, unpredictable—and full of whims, radiant good humor and terrible rages. She is all these things in a very fulltime, wholehearted way.

The legend of Tallulah, which can no longer be completely separated from fact, pictures her as a combination of great lady and rowdy hoyden moving in an aura of sex and alcohol. She has been perfectly at ease in a San Francisco waterfront dive, in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, or playing poker with stagehands. She can quote readily, and at impressive length, from the Bible, Shakespeare, and a lavatory wall. Onstage she is gowned by famous designers (she was once called the "world's only volcano dressed by Mainbocher"). Offstage, she prefers slacks and a mink coat. Hollywood didn't know what to make of her, but London adored her for eight wild years.

Tallulah has always moved casually among the great and the near-great.* When she was a child in a Washington suburb, a kindly gentleman named Cordell Hull let her ride his ponies. She has swapped cabled pleasantries with her friend Winston Churchill. An admirer, Lord Beaverbrook, once gave her a party attended by such eager guests as the Aga Khan and Rudolph Valentino. Jock Whitney, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Kent, Ronald Colman—they have all flitted through the spotlight that trails Tallulah wherever she goes. In London, Lawrence of Arabia used to run out to get her fresh cigarettes when her supply ran low.