Odd this day

3 January 1922

Tallulah “I’m as pure as the driven slush” Bankhead coined the phrase “less to this than meets the eye” on this day.

Tallulah has had it with your shit

The occasion was the first night of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Aglavaine and Selysette in New York, and according to the New York Times’ review of the play, her assessment was accurate. It was, critic Alexander Woollcott wrote, “best summed up by the beautiful lady in the back row, who said: ‘There is less in this than meets the eye’.”

Woollcott, a New Yorker writer and member of the Algonquin Round Table, didn’t say so, but he knew this had happened for three reasons: he’d taken her there, she was sat next to him, and it was him she’d said it to.

This was not Bankhead’s first time at phrase-coining. She had moved to New York five years earlier as a teenager, and been warned by her father to steer clear of boys and booze in the Big Apple. “He didn’t”, she later remarked, “say anything about women and cocaine”, and maintained that the latter wasn’t

habit-forming — and I know because I’ve been taking it for years.

She had described herself as ‘ambisextrous’, declared (not unreasonably)

It’s the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.

and, according to Paul Donnelley’s Fade to Black — a book of movie obituaries, said of her appearance in 1932’s The Devil and The Deep:

Dahling, the main reason I accepted [the part] was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper!

The following year, she apparently had an emergency hysterectomy made necessary by gonorrhoea and remarked

Don’t think this has taught me a lesson!

But being unrepetant about her private life didn’t necessarily mean she wanted other people talking about it. She apparently said of Bette Davis:

When Donald Sutherland made a movie with her, she allegedly

wandered into my dressing room completely nude. I couldn’t help staring and she said, ‘What’s the matter, dahling? Haven’t you ever seen a blonde before?’

Her longtime girlfriend Patsy Kelly said:

(That does, indeed, sound like a story embellished in the retelling, but that “relaxing with a lady friend” is admirable, isn’t it?)

And, on 7 September 1951 (which is, perhaps, another anniversary we should mark), she drank champagne from a shoe at the Ritz.

The phrase ‘life goals’ is a little overused, perhaps, but a life composed entirely of #LifeGoals does seem worth commemorating — even if her time on Earth was rather shortened by the fun with which she packed it. She died from pneumonia at just 66. In his Tallulah: The Life and Times Of a Leading Lady, Joel Lobenthal says her last words were:

codeine — bourbon.