Another side of a movie legend

[IndianaGreen]

Another side of a movie legend

A new play about controversial actress Tallulah Bankhead previews this week in New York City, but it leaves out some of her most important controversies.

February 19, 2010

"DESPITE ALL you may have heard to the contrary, I have never had a ride in a patrol wagon" is the opening line of Tallulah Bankhead's 1952 autobiography. This one sentence speaks volumes about the sensational, controversial (pick your adjective) public image of the stage and screen star of the 1940s. It was an image she worked hard at creating and maintaining.

Over the years, she has been the subject of six plays, including the most recent, Looped, written by Matthew Lombardo and starring Valerie Harper, that begins previews this week in New York City. This is quite a feat for someone who starred in only a dozen films, the most famous being Alfred Hitchcock's 1944 Lifeboat.

Why the interest? A lot of Bankhead's attraction comes from her biting, sarcastic sense of humor and her flouting of America's hypocritical morality when she was most in the public eye.

The ads for the upcoming Broadway show includes these lines:

She answered her front door naked. She went out in public without panties. She drank like a fish, popped pills, smoked like a chimney, cursed like a sailor, slept indiscriminately with men and women--and was eminently and shockingly quotable. Long before today's misbehaving celebrities, there was acclaimed star of stage and screen, Tallulah Bankhead.

Well, maybe so, but what's been omitted from the many plays and biographies about Bankhead are the courageous stands she took against Jim Crow in American theater, and in support of campaigns to stop lynching, expose the horrors of the Southern sharecropping system and defend accused murderer James Hickman.

http://socialistworker.org/2010/02/19/another-side-of-a-movie-legend

[panader0]

1. In '68 or '69 a friend of mine and I went to Maui from Oahu to surf

and bicycle around. On our way up Haleakala, we were picked up by two young folks in white gowns and an older woman they called Miss Bankhead. I'm sure it was her. They carried us up the mountain to her home were she said we could camp for the night. She said to come into the house later to listen to ghost stories. She showed us to a place in a bammboo grove and said it was a good spot to sleep. Within ten minutes we were surrounded by large rats on the ground and in the bammboo. We left without the stories. A very strange woman.

[xchrom]

2. I wanna be Tallulah when I grow up. Nt

[Captain Hilts]

6. On the Corbis website there is a hilarious photograph of Bankhead at a war-era fundraiser

talking to Eleanor Roosevelt. They're both leaning over Schubert, who sits between them, and laughing hard. Some guys had all the luck!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. Wow, I had no idea

:wow:

[mackerel]

4. Love her deep voice

[Captain Hilts]

5. Lombardo is a former soap opera script writer who makes up stuff. This play isn't biography.

It's drama.

He's a real sleeze with a stereotypical gay man's obsession with drama divas.