Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (81 page)

Under her breath, Tallulah asked her co-star, Ruth Ford, “Why doesn’t he go take a flying fuck?”

At first, Ford—who had been cast as the “Witch of Capri”—and Tallulah bonded. Ford had been born in Mississippi, a state that neighbored Tallulah’s native state of Alabama, and Ruth was married at the time to the bisexual actor, Zachory Scott, who had scored a big hit opposite Oscar-winning Joan Crawford in
Mildred Pierce
(1945). But as the days wore on, Tallulah realized what a scene-stealing role Ford had.

“Miss Ford was the only one in the cast who could light a fire under Tallulah,” Hunter claimed. “The two women would stop at nothing to upstage each other, including kicking their chairs off their marks to subtly gain more audience attention.”

At rehearsals, Tennessee grew increasingly dismayed by Tallulah’s failure to grasp the role, especially the long, meandering speeches he placed into the mouth of Flora Goforth. “For the first time in her theatrical career, she couldn’t remember her lines.”

Hunter had his own reaction to Tallulah. In his memoirs, he wrote, “I saw this little old lady standing before me.”

Sensing that Hunter would discuss her, critically, with his gay friends, she said, “Say anything you want about me,
dah-ling
, just so long as it’s not fucking boring.”

“What pissed me off was Tallulah’s complete lack of professionalism, her inability to see beyond herself, beyond her reputation,” Hunter said. “She was dissipating an incredible God-given talent, especially when she decided to turn anything—
anything—
into high camp.”

The brilliant actress, Marian Seldes, had been cast as Tallulah’s secretary. “During rehearsal, she had to cater to Tallulah’s every whim, but she did it with grace and style, even when she had to run lines for Tallulah while she sat on the toilet,” Hunter said.

“She
[Seldes]
tried hard to hold us all together, while Tallulah’s insecurities threatened to blow us all apart,” Hunter said.

Hunter resented some of the interviews Tallulah gave, within earshot, to reporters. At one point, she told a journalist from
The (New York) Daily News, “
Tab, gay? I don’t really know,
dah-ling
. He’s never gone down on me.”

Once Hunter, in front of Richardson, was laboring through one of his longest and most difficult speeches. Nearby, to Seldes, Tallulah kept complaining loudly about her makeup.

Losing his patience, Hunter shouted at her. “Why the
fuck
don’t you shut up?”

She looked indignant. “You are the rudest man I’ve met since Marlon Brando.”

Before a fight could break out, Tennessee suddenly rushed down the aisle “flushed and disheveled,” in Hunter’s words, “cradling his Boston terrier and a silver flask from which he took copious swigs.”

“President Kennedy’s been shot! He’s dying in Dallas!”

Tallulah dropped to the floor onstage, and uttered “an Alabama bawl,” as Tennessee later recalled. “Ruth Ford, too, fell down on the stage and she cried even harder. Even in grief, Ford had to outdo Tallulah.”

Hunter later claimed that on that date, November 22, 1963, the 1950s came to an end and that Bette Davis’s “bumpy ride
[Her memorable line from
All About Eve
]
had truly begun.”

When Tallulah recovered, she wrote a note to Jackie Kennedy. “Your husband’s murder was one of the two most horrid moments of my life. The other was when my daddy in Alabama told me that Santa Claus did not exist.”

When David Merrick finally got around to seeing a dress rehearsal, he appraised
Milk Train
as so bad that he threatened to shut down the show before its Broadway opening. “Tallulah just isn’t up to it,” he told a drunken Tennessee.

The playwright defended his star. “We’ve got to hang in there. Don’t judge her by the rehearsals. I did the same thing with Laurette Taylor in
The Glass Menagerie
. She was awful during rehearsals, but pulled herself together and gave a performance that even today is part of theatrical legend. For all we know, Tallulah will surpass Laurette.
Milk Train
could become such a hit that Tallulah will be playing her until her dying day. She once told me that she wanted to die performing onstage.”

“At the rate she’s going, she will,” Merrick snapped.

Previews in Baltimore were a disaster. A third of the audience walked out before the play concluded. Richardson flew off to London to deal with his troubled marriage to Redgrave and to cast an upcoming production of
The Seagull
. Tallulah vowed never to speak to him again.

With trepidation, Merrick bravely—or foolishly—forged ahead and opened
Milk Train
on New Year’s Day, 1964, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in Manhattan.

On opening night, Tallulah’s voice was weak. She was drugged from having ingested painkillers to stem the ache of her burned hand. Whenever she for got a line, “she’d vamp until ready” in Tennessee’s words.

At her final performance on Broadway, Tallulah once again attracted her gay camp followers. Marian Seldes told
The New York Times
, “Her cult shrieked with laughter at the most inappropriate moments.”

John Chapman in
The New York Daily News
claimed that the opening night audience was one of the queerest since the early days of the Ballet Russe
[He meant the Ballets Russes]
in Monte Carlo.

“Most of the seats were filled with screaming queens,” Hunter said. “The play was nothing more than an excuse to wallow in their idol’s patented
schtick
. We were props to her one-woman show.”

One magazine asserted, “These gay lads had come to see a travesty and despite Miss Bankhead’s sturdy refusal to commit one, they applauded, as though by their actions, they could call it into being.”

Merrick closed the play after five performances.

Seldes said, “Tennessee was always so in and out of favor. You could almost chart his critical ups and downs, although it would break your heart if you did. But I wanted everything he did to be magic, and I was terribly disappointed that
Milk Train
didn’t go over. It’s an imperfect play, but it’s beautifully imperfect.”

After the closing, Tallulah put up a brave front. “I detest the theater,
dahlings
,” she told reporters.

When Tennessee heard that, he differed. “Tallulah loves the theater with so much of her heart that, in order to protect her heart, she has to say that she hates it. But we know better when we see her on stage.”

The failure of
Milk Train
had a lot to do with the lack of interest from audiences in the mid-1960s. They didn’t want to line up at the box office to see a play with mystical overtones that asked them to contemplate an aging dowager’s morbid obsession with her own impending death.

Milk Train
has never died. In England, as late as 1994, actor Rupert Everett, in drag, played Flora Goforth.

Tallulah kept her promise and never spoke to Richardson again, even when he approached her one night at a party in Manhattan. She snubbed him brusquely.

The bisexual actor and director never repaired his marriage to Vanessa Redgrave, and she divorced him in 1967. In 1991, at the age of sixty-three, he died of AIDS in Los Angeles.

[In all, Tennessee had tried to get Tallulah to appear in at least six of his plays, beginning with his early version of
Battle of Angels
and moving on through
The Glass Menagerie
and
A Streetcar Named Desire.

Unknown to most film and theater goers, he’d also tried to get her to star in two others of his dramas, not just
The Milk Train Does-n’t Stop Here Anymore
. Like her role as Flora Goforth, he wanted her to portray aging actresses
.

When she’d been performing as Blanche DuBois in
Streetcar
at the City Center, he’d approached her, asking if she’d consider playing Mrs. Karen Stone, a retired actress, in the film version of his short novel
, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.

She had read the novella, but refused any involvement in any possible film adaptation. The 1961 role went instead to Vivien Leigh, cast opposite Warren Beatty, who played an Italian gigolo
.

Tennessee had also offered Tallulah the role of Alexandra Del Lago in his memorable
Sweet Bird of Youth.
Along with Paul Newman, Geraldine Page played that part in the 1962 movie version. Tennessee’s interest in Tallulah’s involvement in that play was mostly confined to the 1959 stage version of
Sweet Bird
on Broadway
.

She was tempted to embrace the play but rejected the offer because she was already committed to star in another play
, Crazy October
, whose script had been written by James Leo Herlihy, her best friend. Estelle Winwood was in the play, as well as Joan Blondell. The producer, Walter Starcke, closed this campy play in San Francisco, not daring to send it to Broadway, where he had had much success with Christopher Isherwood’s
I Am a Camera
, starring Julie Harris.]

The last meeting between Tallulah and Tennessee came at a dinner party in Manhattan in 1965. “We had a wonderful time talking about those people we had either loved or hated,” Tennessee said. “When it came time to say goodbye, we hugged and kissed. At that time, because of the excessive amount of libations consumed, both of us were feeling no pain. I hugged her longer than usual, perhaps realizing that it was for the last time.”

In her final words, to him, she said, “Tennessee, you and I are the only consistently High Episcopalians I know.”