Word: tallulah
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...other end of the scale of seriousness are two works notable for their sheer larkish effrontery. In George Baxt's The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case (St. Martin's Press; 228 pages; $15.95), the ferocious actress is joined by such other real-life viragoes as Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Baxt's comic turn mingles the actual and the imaginary like a pun-obsessed spin-off of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and has a similarly political bent. Set in 1952, it sketches deft parallels between the paranoia induced by a serial killer and the mania generated by McCarthy-era blacklisting...
Versatile as she is, Bijoux has a personality as distinct and as difficult as Tallulah Bankhead's. Charm is decidedly not her main attraction. She has been afflicted with flatulence, for example, which bothers everybody but her, and when she nips at Ritter's hand, she is not necessarily acting...
Jones does not simply drop names; he hurls editions of Who's Who. He is a compendium of tittle-tattle, from what the ladies found so impressive about Porfirio Rubirosa to what turned Tallulah on. Scenes of East Side literary salons contrast to the human litter of West 42 Street, innocence flirts with cynicism, and beauty is played off against corruption. Where invention beckons or libel laws counsel, there are fictional characters. Jones himself appears to be a perverse projection of a Capote who might have been...
...saying something more directly" or "Miss Edwina (his mother) can best be described as a Prussian general -- an inefficient Prussian general." His phrase turning is ornamented $ with borrowings from other writers ("I like Dorothy Parker's line 'Scratch an actor and you'll find an actress' ") and fellow melancholics ("Tallulah said . . . 'If I had my life to live over again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner' "). The evening's reverberant themes are guilt at having abandoned his troubled family, which was the nub of his first great hit, The Glass Menagerie, and passion for work, which Williams bluntly...
...family; in the evenings he cultivated those who could advance his name. Photography seemed the speediest escalator. His soft-focus portraits made the magazines, appeared on dust jackets and in galleries. Edith Sitwell posed for him, projecting a "haggish" aura but displaying her medieval ivory hands to great effect. Tallulah Bankhead postured against a background of balloons. He exuded charm: "Not only do I take photographs but I am an entertainer as well and this afternoon my performance was much appreciated and the audience laughed at all they should." By working assiduously for years, always looking out for the main...