The Books: Baseball: A Literary Anthology; from Tallulah, by Tallulah Bankhead

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Baseball: A Literary Anthology

Tallulah Bankhead’s autobiography, Tallulah: My Autobiography, is just as entertaining as you would imagine. It’s chatty, adorably self-involved, unashamed, and witty in a very particularly Southern way. Bankhead hailed from Alabama, and although her screen image may have had little to do with Southern belle-dom, that was the atmosphere from which she sprung, and the voice in which she speaks. No wonder she was so drawn to Tennessee Williams’ characters, especially Amanda and Blanche. Her off-screen personality often gets more attention, because … well, she was an attention-getter. There’s a famous photograph of her at some party gulping champagne out of her shoe. She went after sex like a Lothario. She was famously quotable. In 1932, she made the film Devil and the Deep, saying later, “Dahling, the main reason I [did the film] was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper!” (Who cam blame her?) She was a hard worker (Tennessee Williams had much to say about her work ethic – she played Amanda in Glass Menagerie, Blanche in Streetcar, and Mrs. Goforth in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, a production I so wish I had seen. Williams spoke of her courage in the face of criticism: she never stopped trying, and her willingness to go out onstage and face an audience who assumed she would fail had an almost superhero level of strength behind it. Bankhead was considered to be so bad as Blanche – and Williams thought so too – that the production was over before it began. But in later years, Williams had much more complex and nuanced things to say about Bankhead as Blanche. It makes me yearn to have seen her in these roles. Williams loved her.)

I always find her entertaining. Her face, her posture, her figure, remind me so much of my grandmother on the O’Malley side. Of course my grandmother was not a carousing floozy, but a traditional Catholic lady (albeit with a wise-cracking mouth, a love of pleasure and fun and an enormous belly-laugh, so maybe the resemblance is not just skin-deep.) Bankhead is insanely great in the The Cheat, a bizarre sexually-squicky violent pre-Code which involves her getting branded on the chest by a sexual maniac. (The Cheat is the movie where she wears this outfit, with no irony whatsoever.) She was in the running for the role of Scarlett O’Hara apparently but didn’t look good in Technicolor (according to those who saw the screen test.) She had a gigantic hit on Broadway in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, getting critical raves and a couple of awards. She was in a hugely popular revival of Private Lives that ran for a couple of years (and God, I would have loved to have seen her in that role). She also appeared in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, another good role in a major production. Her stage career was much more illustrious than her film career.

All of this is (or should be) well-known. What may not be as well known was Tallulah Bankhead’s firm residence in the Land known as the Passionate Sports Fan. Baseball seems to have been her main love, although she was equally fanatical about boxing. She grew up in a town that had a minor-league team, which initiated her into the pleasures and intricacies of baseball. She was no casual fan. She knew her stuff. She was a New York Giants fan all the way.

Exhibit A: Tallulah Bankhead in the stands:

This is not an act. This is real. During the end of the 2004 season, there were times when the game onscreen became so intense, I had to turn away, saying to my friends, “Please tell me when it’s over.”

She was so enamored of Willie Mays that she wrote an entire article about him for Look magazine. Please look at the first paragraph. I love her.

In that article she writes:

I keep a radio going in my dressing room whenever possible so I can hear the Giant games. I have always been a rabid Giant fan. The name Giants is right for my team. Who could stand in awe of a team named the Cubs? Cubs are cute. Or the Dodgers? I never dodged anything in my life. Cincinnati? Too many Republicans. Pittsburgh always depresses me. They beat the Giants too often, and the elevators in the William Penn Hotel are too confusing for words. What I like best about St. Louis is the zoo. And the beer is fine in Milwaukee. But the Giants are a name to look up to. And I simply must know how they are doing every day. Last summer during the Giants’ six straight over Brooklyn, I was on stage each day for most of the third act. So one of the cast wrote the inning score on a card and stuck it in his shirt where I could see it when he walked on stage.

Words cannot express how much I love that last story.

It reminds me of the time my cousin Kerry texted me a picture of herself while she was playing Abigail Adams in a production of 1776 at the Paper Mill Playhouse. If you know the show, then you know that Abigail is not on stage a lot. She comes on for her numbers and then disappears for long periods of time. How did Kerry occupy herself backstage? I’ll let the photo speak for itself. (Also, please note the sticker on the cover of Kerry’s laptop.) Tallulah Bankhead would have been in total sympathy.

I love that the editorial board of this baseball collection was aware enough of Bankhead’s fandom to include her writing. We need some ladies in there anyway. As Abigail Adams (speaking of which) chided her husband: “Remember the ladies!”

Bankhead’s prose does not, of course, have the tone of a professional sportswriter. It’s eccentric, it’s filled with breezy personal-confession moments, tossed off into the mix, and it’s very very funny. In the following excerpt, she describes how she (personally, you understand) has been the “hoodoo” for many a champion. She describes her love for Joe Louis, then a gift she sent to him as a good-luck charm, and then how he was knocked out in his next fight. Oops. The same thing happened with a tennis champion at Wimbledon: she met him, she gave him a four-leaf clover for luck, and he then proceeded to lose his next match. Then there were her beloved Giants, who lost the next game after she hosted a supper for the whole team. Bankhead was rightfully wary of jinxing her heroes after these devastating experiences. Like most sports fans, she was extremely superstitious.

I recommend her whole autobiography:

Here’s an excerpt. Please note the first sentence. Again, I love this woman.

Excerpt from Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Davidoff. from Tallulah, by Tallulah Bankhead

Though I remain serene when confronted with royalty, I get downright hysterical when looking at a champion in action. About to fly to England to start my radio season in “The Big Show” in the fall of ’51, my enthusiasm was chilled because I would miss the “Sugar Ray” Robinson-Randy Turpin fight, would be out of touch with the Giants, panting, when I left, on the heels of the Dodgers.

Attending a Giants game with me, say my cronies, is an experience comparable to shooting the Snake River rapids in a canoe. When they lose I taste wormwood. When they win I want to do a tarantella on top of the dugout. A Giants rally brings out the roman candle in me. The garments of adjoining box-holders start to smolder.

I once lured the young Viennese actor, Helmut Dantine, to a set-to between the Giants and the Pirates. Mr. Dantine had never seen a game before. My airy explanations confused the émigré. Rapt in his attention to my free translation of the sacrifice hit, Helmut was almost decapitated by a foul ball. Mr Dantine looked upon the faux pas as a hostile act. He felt I had tricked him into a false sense of security that the hitter might have an unsuspecting target. He left before the ninth, a grayer if not a wiser man.

It’s true I run a temperature when watching the Giants trying to come from behind in the late innings, either at the Polo Grounds or on my TV screen. I was hysterical for hours after Bobby Thomson belted Ralph Branca for that ninth inning homer in the final game of the Dodgers-Giant playoff in ’51. The Giants had to score four runs in the ninth to win. Remember? There was blood on the moon that night in Bedford Village. But I don’t know nearly as much about baseball as Ethel Barrymore. Ethel is a real fan, can give you batting averages, the text of the infield fly rule and comment on an umpire’s vision.

Someone has said that Ethel Barrymore has the reticence born of assurance whereas my monologues indicate my insecurity. The point is moot. It’s unlikely I’ll ever submit to a psychiatrist’s couch. I don’t want some stranger prowling around through my psyche, monkeying with my id. I don’t need an analyst to tell me that I have never had any sense of security. Who has?

My devotion to the Giants, dating back to 1939, has drawn the fire of renegades, eager to deflate me. One of these wrote that on my first visit to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn I rooted all afternoon for Dolph Camilli, the Dodger first baseman. I had been tricked into this treason, swore my enemy, because I wasn’t aware that the Giants wore gray uniforms when traveling, the residents white. Though I invaded Flatbush to cheer Mel Ott, Giant right fielder, I wound up in hysterics over Camili, because both had the numeral “4” on the back of their uniform. Stuff, balderdash and rot, not to use a few other words too hot to handle in a memoir.

A daughter of the deep South, I have little time for the “Yankees.” They’re bleak perfectionists, insolent in their confidence, the snobs of the diamond. The Yankees are all technique, no color or juice. But they keep on winning pennants year after year. Not the Giants! They’ve won one flag in the last fourteen years.