QI The Book of the Dead

going to bed with Gary Cooper. Leaving hospital in a very weakened condition, and having lost a lot of weight, she barked at her doctor, ‘Don’t for one minute think this has taught me a lesson!’
    She was the mistress of the one-liner. When a former lover came up to her excitedly babbling that he hadn’t seen her for many years, she shot back: ‘I thought I told you to wait in the car.’ Arranging an assignation, she scribbled a note: ‘I’ll come and make love to you at five o’clock. If I’m late start without me.’ She talked non-stop: one of her friends followed her around for a day, timing her with a stopwatch, and estimated that she spoke 70,000 words – the length of a short novel. As the Hollywood publicistHoward Ditz wearily remarked, ‘A day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country.’ Sometimes her mouth got her into serious trouble. Speaking to a fan magazine in 1932, Tallulah confessed that she hadn’t had an affair for six months, adding, ‘Six months is a long, long while, I WANT A MAN!’ This drew a sharp reprimand from Will Hays, Hollywood’s censor and moral guardian, for allowing a star to indulge in ‘verbal moral turpitude’.
    Tallulah took her clothes off in public so often that her friend Estelle Winwood asked, ‘Why do you do that, Tallulah? You have such pretty frocks.’ She was notorious for not wearing underwear, and delighted in showing off the fact to as many people as possible. When the film crew complained of her regular exposures on the set of Lifeboat in 1944, Alfred Hitchcock’s laconic reply was: ‘I don’t know whether that’s a concern for wardrobe or hairdressing.’
    Interviewing Tallulah was never easy. When Time magazine tried it in 1948, their reporters came away bemused. She had played the piano, performed some ballet, told jokes, done impersonations, made them lunch, plied them with mint juleps and talked without pause – accompanied by several dogs and her free-flying budgie, Gaylord, whom she had taught to drink champagne. (Luckily, by that time, she had got rid of her pet lion, Winston, and her chimp, King Kong.) As usual, her conversation was peppered with bon mots, which included, ‘I never think out anything, dahling; I do it instinctively or not at all. I do things I’d loathe in anybody else.’ Trying to pinpoint her age, the reporters sought verification from her younger sister Eugenia who sighed: ‘Every time Tallulah knocks a year off her age, I have to, too. I’m not sure how long I can keep it up.’

    Success, as opposed to notoriety, returned to her life from two unexpected quarters. In 1950 she became the host of a weekly celebrity talk radio slot called ‘The Big Show’. It featured Tallulah reciting Dorothy Parker monologues, interviewing other stars and introducing comic turns by the likes of Jimmy Durante and Groucho Marx. Held together by her unpredictable charm, it became an instant hit. Then two years later her autobiography Tallulah went straight to the top of the best-seller lists. She had recorded most of it on a tape recorder and it reads like one long, frank, funny, opinionated Tallulah monologue.
    This welcome return to the limelight couldn’t mask her rapid descent into dependency on drink and sleeping pills. She recruited a bevy of young men as her assistants, calling them her ‘caddies’. Although they were usually gay, they often had to sleep in her bed because she was terrified of being alone. At night, one of her boys would tape her wrists together to stop her taking any more pills. Raddled, frequently irrational, her looks a grim parody of her former beauty, she still had her sense of humour. Not long before she died, a fan approached her and asked if she was Tallulah Bankhead. ‘Well, I’m what’s left of her, darling,’ she replied.
    Long after her death, declassified British government papers revealed that Miss Bankhead had been investigated by MI5 in the 1920s over allegations that she had corrupted the morals of pupils at Eton with indecent and unnatural acts. No conclusive proof was ever found.

     
    If there is one thing this chapter does prove conclusively, however, especially in the work of Alfred Kinsey, it is that,between the sheets at least, there is no such thing as normal. Or, as Woody Allen put it, ‘Sex between a man and a woman can be a beautiful thing – provided you’re between the right man and the right woman.’
    * Literally, ‘The Red (or Auburn) Moon’, from