Word: womans
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...could hear the distant thump of artillery and the crunch of aerial bombs. Ahead and in some hills to the south, puffs of white billowed where shells and bombs found targets. In a village which had been retaken from the Communists the day before, an old peasant woman squatted at a roadside pond unconcernedly whacking at her laundry with a wooden paddle. Behind her on the mud wall of her burned-out hut the Reds, before they were beaten back, had splashed slogans in white paint: "Fight to Nanking!", "Land for the Tillers!" and "Capture the liar Chiang alive...
Socially, young Tallulah went like a house afire, but her stage career languished in flop after flop. She dreamed of London. Every year she and Estelle Winwood would call on an old Scottish woman named Mrs. Bunce, who told fortunes in a Manhattan brownstone. Mrs. Bunce's routine was to open a Bible and poke a needle into it for an omen. One year, probing for Tallulah's future, the needle stuck on the name Jezebel. "Oh, that's terrible," said Estelle. "Jezebel was thrown to the dogs." "Yes," throbbed Tallulah, "but first she rode with kings...
...grease paint or out, Tallulah is always on stage and the curtain is always up. No longer a great beauty, and overweight for her 5 ft. 3, she is still magnetic. She is almost never silent or still. Says Actor John Emery, her ex-husband: "She is the only woman I ever knew who could carry on a conversation, listen to the radio, read a book and do her hair at the same time...
...Like the woman herself, Tallulah's theatrical style is a little more brightly colored than life, in the grand manner that makes modern naturalism seem flat and bloodless. "The boldness of her ease upon the stage," Critic John Mason Brown once wrote, "is on occasion as uncomfortable to watch as it is to see a guest making himself too much at home in another person's house...
...keep her gift under control over a long period. Her performances fluctuate more than most after the opening night. Says a friend: "The longer she plays in something, the less you see of the play, the more you see of Tallulah." She has turned Private Lives into a one-woman show-at once the triumph of a personality and the surrender of an actress. Says she: "I'm Tallulah in this play, and I'm not a bit ashamed...