The Theater: One-Woman Show

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Sound & Fury. For all her garish conduct, Tallulah is capable of great charm, dignity and kindness. During the filming of A Royal Scandal, an older actor blew his lines in one scene 85 times, but Tallulah never made the slightest show of impatience. Her genuine respect for age is linked to her reverence for her parents, whose pictures are always on her dressing-room table. Last year she spent 20 minutes getting a long-distance call through to her gardener so that she could wish him a merry Christmas. Preposterously openhanded with money and gifts, she is also generous with her stage experience in helping other players.

The cyclone called Tallulah, full of sound & fury, pulls wildly at everything around it, but it has a vacuum core of insecurity and loneliness. Behind its protective bluster and bombast, Tallulah's loneliness makes curious demands. She cannot sleep without a radio blaring near by; turn it off and she wakes up. When a power failure stilled her radio in the country, she insisted on keeping a guest up all night, talking, until the electricity came on again. She hates to be alone; she almost never is.

John Emery recalls that she would start drinking after "someone would say the wrong thing at a party and she would take offense." A onetime secretary-companion notes: "She's like a child . . . She broods all night. She'd keep me up hour after hour going over everything that'd been said, worrying about what she'd said and done." Herman Shumlin once said: "Like all important people, she is always filled with fear—the gnawing, consuming fear that she may not be quite good enough."

Like the woman herself, Tallulah's theatrical style is a little more brightly colored than life, in the grand manner that makes modern naturalism seem flat and bloodless. "The boldness of her ease upon the stage," Critic John Mason Brown once wrote, "is on occasion as uncomfortable to watch as it is to see a guest making himself too much at home in another person's house."

As an actress, Tallulah is a hard worker and a "quick study." Her portrayal of the down-South Borgia in The Little Foxes was a fine piece of serious acting, and, without letting herself go completely in

The Skin of Our Teeth, she brought off a brilliant piece of comedy as Sabina, the eternal wanton. But she lacks the stability and discipline to keep her gift under control over a long period. Her performances fluctuate more than most after the opening night. Says a friend: "The longer she plays in something, the less you see of the play, the more you see of Tallulah." She has turned Private Lives into a one-woman show—at once the triumph of a personality and the surrender of an actress. Says she: "I'm Tallulah in this play, and I'm not a bit ashamed of it."