The Theater: One-Woman Show

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Problem Child. To Tallulah, all the world's a stage and all the men & women merely supporting players. Much of her showing off is as natural as her dark honey hair. Some of it is a conscious offering on the altar of her own lurid legend. None of it is publicity-seeking in the strict box-office sense; it fills more personal needs that began forming on Jan. 31, 1901, when Tallulah was born in Huntsville, Ala.

Tallulah was christened beside the casket of her mother, Eugenia Sledge Bankhead, a Virginia belle whose great beauty inspired a published valentine by Critic Stark Young as late as 1943. Her mother died three weeks after Tallulah's birth, leaving the Bankheads without-the male heir they had hoped for. As she grew up, politics kept her father busy, and Tallulah and her older sister Eugenia * got along like "fiends." Tallulah spent her childhood shuttling between her Aunt Marie Bankhead Owen in Montgomery, her grandmother in Jasper, her father in Washington, and schools and convents in Virginia, Washington and New York. She had everything but the kind of attention that children ordinarily get from their parents. As a child ("I was a fat, pimple-faced kid"), she had tantrums that lasted for hours; as an adolescent, she was a rebellious problem pupil. At 16, she "placed" in a movie magazine beauty contest and implored her father, who was a frustrated would-be actor himself, to let her try the theater. By then, she was a girl with a ravenous hunger for attention; the hunger has still not been fully satisfied.

Anything But Dull. Tallulah has rarely been able to see someone else in the spotlight without writhing. During her early days in New York, she felt so painfully anonymous in theater audiences that she once lit up a cigar. (Said Critic Percy Hammond: "It is doubtless her way of being inconspicuous.") In London, piqued at the attention her composer-pianist was getting at a party, she set up shop in an adjacent room, leaving the door open. In the face of such competition, the soloist was soon playing only for the hostess. In Hollywood, sulking unnoticed at a party celebrating the premiere of a Norma Shearer movie, Tallulah finally cornered Miss Shearer's husband, the late Irving Thalberg, and spent 20 minutes hooting at his wife's abilities as an actress.

At the suggestion that all the stories told about Tallulah are a little too lurid to be believed literally, one old friend says solemnly: "I don't think there's anything you can say about Tallulah that isn't true." Another friend, asking Tallulah's permission before talking to a TIME reporter, was instructed: "Tell him everything, dahling, only don't make me dull."