The Theater: One-Woman Show

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Summing up her impact on London (1923-31), Socialite Columnist Charles Graves says: "She popularized smoking in the days when few nice girls smoked. She killed the stage-door Johnny—he couldn't get through the hundreds of girls outside the stage door . . . She popularized the words 'divine' and 'darling' and bacchanalian parties."

The frenzied girl fans hit their emotional peak in 1930 at her last London play, Let Us Be Gay. They waited in line for 36 hours to get in. When the doors opened, police cordons crumbled under a wild stampede, and some who had been first in line picked themselves up to find the theater full. Halfway through the show they stormed, 100 strong, into the lobby, yelling and screaming, until the bobbies rallied to throw them back.

Throughout her London success, few critics considered Tallulah very seriously as an actress. But her looks were really something. Cecil Beaton called her "... A wicked archangel with . . . carven features . . . Her eyelashes, like a spreading peacock's tail, weigh down the lids over her enormous snake-like eyes . . . She is cadaverously thin ... the most easily recognizable face I know and ... the most luscious . . . cheeks like huge acid pink peonies . . . eyelashes built out with hot liquid paint to look like burnt matches . . . Her sullen, discontented, rather evil rosebud of a mouth is painted the brightest scarlet . . . shiny as ... strawberry jam

Augustus John painted her portrait. It stole the show one year at the Royal Academy and now hangs opposite her bed in Windows, where it is the first thing she sees when she wakes up. In 1932, she turned down $100,000 for it.

Tallulah's gay parties at her house off Berkeley Square became notorious. She allegedly got Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson tipsy and took pictures. But she generally behaved like a duchess at society functions. An exception was one big masked ball, given for charity at Devonshire House, and attended by every socialite from the Duke of Kent down; some time during the evening Tallulah was seen turning perfect cartwheels around the room.

Bad Girls. Her career has held few disappointments. One of the biggest was Somerset Maugham's refusal to let her play Sadie Thompson in Rain in 1925. * She was so depressed by losing the part that she cast herself in the role of a would-be suicide and swallowed a handful of aspirins ; but she woke up next morning feeling better than she had for a long time. Another big disappointment, years later, was not getting the lead in Gone With the Wind.

In 1931 the movies had begun to talk, and Tallulah returned to the U.S. to get a word in. Under a $100,000 Paramount contract, she played bad girls redeemed by the love of a good man in a series of pictures with titles that now sound like perfumes ( Tarnished Lady, My Sin, Faithless). The pictures gave off a bad scent, and Paramount dropped her option. Her movie career was a failure until Alfred Hitchcock cast her in Lifeboat (1944), which won the New York film critics' award for the best actress' performance of the year. Her only movie since, A Royal Scandal (1945), was an indifferent picture that won her good reviews as Catherine the Great.