Word: tallulah
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...Vietnam anomie far too explicit. ("Those people are grotesque," he complains of his parents' friends. "I want simple, honest people.") And maybe only a Brit could have envisioned Kathleen Turner, with her foghorn voice and faux Continental accent, as a bored Southern California housewife. Turner last played Tallulah Bankhead onstage, and doesn't seem to have paused for a cigarette in between. Her come-on to Benjamin is so overbearing and unsexy that it's a miracle the kid doesn't flee the room in horror. Forget Mrs. Robinson; paging Norma Desmond...
...genre. Instead of a freestyle skate, Arthur settles for the compulsory short program: a once-over-lightly reprise of her hits from stage (Fiddler on the Roof, Mame) and TV (Maude, The Golden Girls); a funny anecdote about each of the famous people she's worked with (Lotte Lenya, Tallulah Bankhead); and stilted "extemporaneous" banter with her pianist, Billy Goldenberg. The audience leaves to the accompaniment of the theme song from Maude but learns virtually nothing about...
...chain-smoking eventually wore her down, and the actress, who died in 1968, spent her last years parodying herself in TV guest spots (the celebrity who moves next door to Lucy and Ricky Ricardo) and polishing her own fading image. To a fan who asked if she was really Tallulah Bankhead, she reportedly answered, "What's left...
...left of her, actually. After at least seven books about her life, an off-Broadway musical in the '80s (starring Helen Gallagher) and dozens of female impersonators, the deep-voiced diva is back in no fewer than three plays. Tovah Feldshuh is the star and co-author of Tallulah Hallelujah!, an off-Broadway play in the form of a fictional USO show with Bankhead as host. Nan Schmid, formerly of the Second City improv troupe, wrote and stars in Dahling, in which eight actors portray more than 40 characters in Bankhead's life. And Kathleen Turner, last seen...
Granting that the stage bio is among the most debased of theatrical forms (a decent impersonation, a little library research and--presto!--you've got a play), Bankhead offers unusually rich material. The masochistic anecdotes just keep on coming. In Tallulah we learn that the star once fired a young Marlon Brando from her play The Eagle Has Two Heads because she couldn't stand him "yawning and pawing his privates during my speeches." In Tallulah Hallelujah! we find out that she had gonorrhea, wanted the Bette Davis part in Jezebel and turned down the role of Blanche...