Hello, darling! A diva gets her due

Joel Lobenthal's "Tallulah!" undertakes the Sisyphean task of redeeming the life of the wondrous actress from the entrenched notions surrounding her. When the author becomes too noble, his subject breaks away from him -- even from beyond the grave, Bankhead can grasp control. The emergent portrait is one of contradictions, excesses, destructiveness.

While unearthing unlikely communists of her own, Bankhead denounced the House Committee on Un-American Activities. A woman who lavished gifts and defended friends, she turned her back on Billie Holiday, her former lover, as related by Lobenthal; she had players fired who might upstage her. A Southern aristocrat, she decried vulgarity, yet converted it into a dubious art, performing without underclothes to the horror or delight of front-row audiences; she might greet houseguests in the nude. At age 36, she pursued the film role of Scarlett O'Hara, supposedly in her teens when "Gone With the Wind" opens. Despite her devotion to the theater, she performed under the influence of alcohol and cocaine. She demanded footlights to flatter her appearance. She claimed more than 180 desultory sexual conquests, with both men and women. And always, always, like a petulant child, she expected love as her due.

The exclamation mark in the title of Lobenthal's biography asserts the difficulty he faced in reassessing Bankhead's extravagant reputation beyond the exaggerations. Utter her name among theatrical aficionados and the initial reaction will likely be laughter, at least a chuckle -- not necessarily derisive, often loving -- almost in tribute, but nonetheless laughter at her extreme reputation. What will probably follow from the initiated will be a suggestive anecdote.

Bankhead's life is rich in anecdotes, and Lobenthal offers a trove of choice ones, often as evidentiary "truths": Bankhead and Marlene Dietrich, periodic lesbians, weigh the pluses and minuses of sex with women and sex with men. When Bankhead and Lillian Hellman, at odds over Hellman's enduring support of Stalin, meet accidentally, Bankhead issues her trademark "Hello, darling!" -- realizing, too late, that she has greeted the archfiend Hellman.

To rebut the charge that Bankhead most often "played only herself" at the expense of a playwright's characterization, Lobenthal analyzes in usually admiring detail everything she appeared in, including the movie clunkers that marked her limited Hollywood career, the only notable one of her films being Hitchcock's "Lifeboat," in which indeed she gave a sumptuous performance as herself. It was the theater that created her extravagant fame.

Continuing his defense, Lobenthal denounces theatrical pedants who demand technique "indiscriminately without clarifying what technique actually means." He lauds Bankhead's elegant style. He dismisses Lee Strasberg's dizzying Method acting technique to support Bankhead's rejection of it as "amateurish"; and he offers examples of lavish praise she received, as well as the snippy assaults she endured. She was celebrated as Regina in "The Little Foxes" and bravely played Cleopatra in Shakespeare's drama -- while complaining about the jangling bracelets another actress wore. Lobenthal renders his verdict: The roles for which she was castigated were beneath her, and she brought freshness even to the most turgid dramas.