The Theater: One-Woman Show

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15% & Footlights. As the theater's first personality, Tallulah currently commands its stiffest terms: 15% of the gross receipts, plus 25% of the net profits. During the 53-week cross-country tour that preceded the New York opening, the current revival of Private Lives took in about $1,000,000. Tallulah's average estimated weekly income, not including an occasional $2,500 to $3,000 for a radio stint: $5,500.

Yet, says Tallulah, "I'm always broke." Her extravagance is so well known that her retinue tries not to let her carry money; when she has it, she often hands out bills to cabdrivers and rest-room attendants without even looking at the denomination. But she has invested heavily in bonds, and is building an annuity that will some day pay $500 a month—maybe enough to keep her in perfume and pet food (her menagerie has included a lion cub, a marmoset, several dogs and a parakeet).

Tallulah's contract gives her more than money: there are special riders to make sure that she runs the show. She gets the right to pass on the hiring of the play's directors, players, company manager, stage manager, pressagent and costumer. One clause commits the management to give her footlights, which have been going out of fashion on the New York stage. Tallulah insists on them because they offset overhead lights that throw unflattering shadows.

Despite her tremendous drawing power (she once broke attendance records in Boston during a blizzard that stopped traffic and closed the schools), some of Broadway's top producers and directors swear they will never again have any truck with her. (Says one: "The woman is constitutionally unable to fit harmoniously into a group effort.") Mostly, these people are merely unwilling to follow the one tested formula for getting along with Tallulah: give in to her. The formula seems to work for Producer John C. Wilson; he also put on her last show, Jean Cocteau's The Eagle Has Two Heads, a bad play that tempted Tallulah because it gave her a 17-minute monologue and a chance to do a queenly death scene tumbling down a flight of red-carpeted stairs.

She has quarreled with almost every producer, director and playwright who has crossed her path in recent years. Oddly, the bitterest feuds have involved her best plays. She does not speak to The Little Foxes' Producer-Director Herman Shumlin and Playwright Lillian Hellman (both leftists whose rows with Tallulah were political as well as professional). She does not speak to The Skin of Our Teeth's Producer Michael Myerberg and Director Elia Kazan. Shumlin will not even discuss her. Billy Rose, who starred her in Clifford Odets' Clash By Night, is more reticent about Tallulah than he is on most topics. During that play, in which Tallulah carried on several concurrent vendettas, she referred to Rose as "a loathsome little bully," and stopped talking to him. (His defense: "How can you bully Niagara Falls?")