Word: tallulah
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...Tallulah, Darling, by Denis Brian
...blared forth in newspapers and magazines, on television and in movies. Biographies and autobiographies about and by celebrities actually deliver the shadowy scandals that fan magazines used to promise in misleading blurbs. And so many books are rattling once closeted skeletons that even gamy chronicles about the likes of Tallulah and Shelley have to fight for attention. Ordinary Americans, moreover, tend increasingly to litter casual small talk with personal secrets of a sort that only priests and the most trusted confidants once enjoyed...
...supporting cast spectacular. He has a night on the town with the Prince of Wales, whose spindly piano he inadvertently demolishes with one mighty chord. An actress in Greenwich Village cajoles him into playing by standing on her head, "exposing her bare secrets"; she turns out to be Tallulah Bankhead. In an audience with Mussolini, he feeds il Duce a line for a speech. He sits for Picasso, who sees him 24 different ways. Round the world he goes, bumping over the Alps in a cargo plane, hopping a banana boat in Panama, crossing Siberia on a dingy train. Wherever...
...magnet of the evening is Maggie Smith as Carson's wife Ruth. She seems to have slithered out of a Noel Coward comedy. Sophisticated, weary of it all, and restless, Ruth is given to brisk interior monologues, like "Help!" or "Watch it Tallulah!" Stoppard has given her a tasty collation of epigrams, and her delivery is succulent. Of her one-night London stand with Wagner, she notes that "hotel rooms constitute a separate moral universe." She develops a sensual fantasy crush on Milne and is heart-wrenchingly crushed when he is killed. Seductively comic, and amusingly seductive, Smith must...
...first play, Marian Seldes knew she would become an actress. Recently, she became an author as well. The Bright Lights: A Theatrical Life is not the autobiography of a famous person, because "I'm not famous." Nor is it a book of Theatrical Celebrities gossip, though memories of Tallulah Bankhead and Laurence Olivier fill the pages. Instead, The Bright Lights interweaves anecdotes with analysis to describe "a lifetime of work in the theatre." The work ranges from the triumph of Equus, which offered the change to act with three stars--Anthony Hopkins, Anthony Perkins, and Richard Burton--and the tragedy...