QI The Book of the Dead

sizeable number of people – or animals. He would have found the experiences of Casanova or Cora Pearl interesting but unremarkable. He once said that ‘the only unnatural sex act is one which you cannot perform’. This was mind-blowing stuff for the 1950s and ushered in attitudinal changes from which our society is still reeling. The modern view of sex – where masturbation isn’t evil or harmful, homosexuality is widespread and enjoying sex doesn’t mean you are depraved – owes a huge amount to Kinsey’s work. By documenting behaviour that many people at the time thought was ‘abnormal’ and showing how widespread it actually was, he helped create a culture where sex could be seen as just another aspect of ordinary life.

     
    Some people didn’t wait for Alfred Kinsey to come along to know they needn’t be ashamed of their sexual desires, among them the actress Tallulah Bankhead (1902–68) who bragged that she had over 500 lovers. When the Kinsey report was published, she’d seen it all before: ‘The good doctor’s clinical notes were old hat to me,’ she remarked.
    As a girl Tallulah was short and plump, weighing almost 10 stones and just 5' 2" tall, but by the age of fifteen she had shed enough puppy fat to win a beauty contest in her home town, Montgomery, Alabama. This decided her to head for New York and try her luck as an actress. She went on to appear in over fifty plays and eighteen films, with her final appearance as a charactercalled the ‘Black Widow’ in a 1967 episode of Batman . Early on, she got a reputation for partying, and was a regular user of cocaine and marijuana. She was annoyed by what she saw as petit bourgeois fears about drug misuse, but chose humour to confront it: ‘Cocaine isn’t addictive,’ she said, ‘I should know: I’ve been using it for years.’ She was equally blasé about sex. She was once asked if it was true that she had been raped as a twelve-year-old on the drive of her father’s home. ‘Yes, it was awful, truly awful,’ she said. ‘You see, we had so much gravel.’
    Her early career on Broadway was a series of false starts but in 1923 she came to London to appear in a play called The Dancers opposite the suave elder statesman of the West End stage, Gerald du Maurier. Her lustrous hair, husky voice and exuberant cartwheels turned her into an overnight star. The writer and actor Emlyn Williams wrote that her voice ‘was steeped as deep in sex as the human voice can go without drowning’. Her most devoted fans were her ‘Gallery Girls’, a group of Cockney teenagers who cheered, stamped their feet and threw flowers onto the stage whenever she said a line. The writer Arnold Bennett was dazzled:
    Ordinary stars get ‘hands’. If Tallulah gets a ‘hand’ it is not heard. What is heard is a terrific, wild, passionate, hysterical roar and shriek. Only the phrase of the Psalmist can describe it: ‘God is gone up with a shout .’
     
    Winston Churchill was a regular at her shows and before long ‘to Tallulah’ had become a verb. She told an American reporter: ‘Over here they like me to “Tallulah”. You know – dance and sing and romp and fluff my hair and play reckless parts.’ After a triumphant and extravagant eight years, she returned to the USA to be signed up by Paramount who planned to make her ‘the newDietrich’. They didn’t: they made a string of turkeys. There was something about the nature of film that failed to capture what made her so sexy and delicious in the flesh. She continued to make the occasional movie but, through the 1930s and 1940s, her best work was on Broadway.
    Tallulah was bisexual but liked to joke that she couldn’t be a lesbian because ‘they have no sense of humour’, and she once let slip that she could never have an orgasm with anyone she was in love with. The only man she truly loved was an English aristocrat called Napier Sturt Alington, known as ‘Naps’, who was also bisexual. He married someone else, became a fighter pilot and died in the Battle of Britain. Tallulah married only once, in 1937 to the bit-part actor John Emery. She told friends that she had chosen him because he was ‘hung like John Barrymore’, but later confided that ‘the weapon may be of admirable proportions but the shot is weak’. They never had children and were divorced after four years. When she was thirty, Tallulah had to have a hysterectomy brought on by a bad case of gonorrhoea, an infection she blamed on