The Theater: One-Woman Show

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Chain-Talker. In grease paint or out, Tallulah is always on stage and the curtain is always up. No longer a great beauty, and overweight for her 5 ft. 3, she is still magnetic. She is almost never silent or still. Says Actor John Emery, her ex-husband: "She is the only woman I ever knew who could carry on a conversation, listen to the radio, read a book and do her hair at the same time."

She is a chain-talker, and the only thing that stops her momentarily is the need for oxygen; she gasps, and the unpunctuated torrent of words gushes on until she must breathe again. When someone looks as if he may try to interrupt, she may shut her dark blue eyes or stare him down, but she keeps going. Her accent has been described by her ex-husband as "half British and half pickaninny." She does not even stop talking to smear on fresh lipstick; the words sound like a gurgle, but out they come.

What helps make a Tallulah filibuster spellbinding is the famed voice that can bounce a whisper off the balcony walls. Husky and vibrant (partly the product of childhood croupiness), it can shift without notice from a sigh in a rain barrel to a hoot in a hollow ("Are you ever taken for a man on the phone?" Columnist Earl Wilson once asked her. "No," she snapped. "Are you?").

Tallulah's physical stamina is rather frightening to her friends. Playwright Moss Hart once got away from one of her Hollywood parties at 6 a.m., passed her house late the next afternoon and claims the party was still going strong. On election night, rooting for President Truman and convinced that he would win, Tallulah did not go to sleep at all. Then she played a matinee and an evening show and went right on celebrating.

Her ability to keep going at high speed, despite a long record of maladies, also mystifies her doctors. She has suffered, loudly, from neuritis, bursitis, ulcers, double pneumonia, smoker's cough and acute gangrenous appendicitis. She also has psychosomatic laryngitis, generally brought on by stormy dealings with a producer. But through it all, the doctors are stumped for any medical rebuttal when she announces flatly: "I'm not built like other people." On the road, she uses three suitcases just for aspirins, Benzedrine, sleeping tablets, vitamins and other pharmaceutical odds & ends.

The Domestic Life. For all her highly publicized love life, Tallulah has had just one engagement and one marriage. The engagement, in London in 1928, was brief. It was virtually all over when her fiance, Count Anthony de Bosdari, told a reporter: "I am the master. I will do the talking."

The story goes that Tallulah fell for Actor John Emery because he reminded her of John Barrymore, o-n whom she had had a girlish crush. In any case, she knew, immediately on seeing him at a summer playhouse in 1937, that she wanted him. She rushed backstage afterward, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. As Emery recalls it: "She damn near knocked my tonsils down my throat."