One-Woman Show

Monday, Nov. 22, 1948

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A few days later they were married. What was it like to be married to Tallulah? "In a way," muses Emery, "it was like the rise, decline and fall of the Roman Empire." It was not just that Tallulah had such odd cravings as a planter's punch for breakfast ("It's full of fruit and things, awfully good for you"), or that she liked to stay up three nights running, or that she once left $20,000 worth of jewelry in the keeping of a strange cabdriver. It was also not quite safe. Once Emery was telling her about a fight he had got into. "As usual," he recalls, "she got excited: 'Oh, if I'd only been there! Why didn't you kill the son-of-a-bitch?' And with that, she hauled off and hit me in the eye with all her might."

In 1941, Tallulah charged "mental cruelty" and they got a friendly Reno divorce. Says Emery, who is now married to Actress-Dancer Tamara Geva: "I'm still recuperating."

Trouper. A great trouper in the show-must-go-on tradition, Tallulah attended her father's state funeral in Washington, but gave up going to the burial in Alabama to keep her Little Foxes tour on schedule. In a Minnesota blizzard on the same tour, when railroad men said it was impossible to get her train to St. Paul for a matinee, she goaded them into hitching up a snow-plow that got her through on time. She is one of the few topflight actresses who will play one-night stands and Chicago summers—not that she pretends to like it. For weeks in Chicago last summer, she lived on watermelon, Vichysoisse and Daiquiris, and slept surrounded by ice cubes whipped by electric fans. When she played one-nighters in Peoria and Rockford, Ill, she described her reaction in one-word postcards to a Chicago friend: "God!" In Sacramento she insisted that the stage liquor be real.

Her friends say that Tallulah does not like the taste of liquor. But her distaste is catholic: she has tried almost every alcoholic drink known. She goes on the wagon for long periods. Her longest dry spell began with the fall of Dunkirk, when she vowed not to take a drink until the port was retaken. Meanwhile she drank Cokes, spiked with a dash of aromatic spirits of ammonia. She is a chain-smoker (British Craven As).

During her tour of Private Lives, the play sometimes ran shorter, because of Tallulah's rabid enthusiasm for the New York Giants. During afternoon ball games, Tallulah would race through her matinees in Chicago like Ty Cobb running the bases. During night games, the curtain went up late and intermissions were stretched out. As players came on stage they hissed bulletins to Tallulah ("The Giants are a run ahead") and Tallulah would hiss back: "What inning?"