Tallulah Bankhead was born 119 years ago today.
Bankhead was an actress of the stage and screen, talk-show host and bonne vivante. She was also known for her deep voice, flamboyant personality and support of liberal causes, which broke with the tendency of Southern Democrats at the time to support a more conservative agenda.
She came from the powerful Bankhead-and-Brockman political family, active in the Democratic Party in the South, in general, and Alabama, in particular.
Her father was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936 to 1940. She was the niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead.
In her autobiography, Bankhead claimed that her "first performance" was witnessed by none other than the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Her Aunt Marie gave the famous brothers a party at her home near Montgomery, Alabama, in which the guests were asked to entertain.
"I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher," Bankhead wrote. "The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright."
At 15, Bankhead won a movie-magazine beauty contest and persuaded her family to let her move to New York. She quickly won bit parts, first appearing in a nonspeaking role in The Squab Farm. During these early New York years, she became a peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table and was known as a hard-partying girl-about-town.
During this time, she began to use cocaine and marijuana, going as far as saying, "Cocaine isn't habit-forming and I know because I've been taking it for years." However, she did not consume alcohol to any great degree. She also became known for her outspokenness.
Once, while in attendance at a party, a guest made a comment about rape, and Bankhead reportedly replied, "I was raped in our driveway when I was eleven. You know darling, it was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel."
She professed to having a ravenous appetite for sex, but not for a particular type. "I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic. And the others give me either stiff neck or lockjaw," she said.
Once, at a party, one of her friends brought along a young man who boldly told Bankhead that he wanted to make love to her that night. She did not bat an eye and said, "And so you shall, you wonderful, old-fashioned boy."
Rumors about Bankhead's sex life have lingered for years, and she was linked romantically with many notable female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne, Hattie McDaniel and Alla Nazimova, as well as writer Mercedes de Acosta and singer Billie Holiday.
Actress Patsy Kelly claimed she had a sexual relationship with Bankhead when she worked for her as a personal assistant.
John Gruen's Menotti: A Biography notes an incident in which Jane Bowles chased Bankhead around Capricorn, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber's Mount Kisco estate. She insisted that Bankhead needed to play the lesbian character Inès in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (which Paul Bowles had recently translated), but Bankhead locked herself in the bathroom and kept insisting, "That lesbian! I wouldn't know a thing about it."
Bankhead never publicly described herself as being bisexual. She did, however, describe herself as "ambisextrous.”
On December 12, 1968, Bankhead died in St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan at 66. The cause of death was pleural pneumonia, complicated by emphysema, malnutrition and possibly a strain of the Hong Kong flu which was running worldwide at that time. Her last coherent words reportedly were, "Codeine ... bourbon."