Charm Read online

  Tallulah Bankhead, the actress and international celebrity, was in some ways charming, though stories about her are perhaps more charming than she was herself, as they say, in person. In a characteristic anecdote, Tallulah returns to her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, to visit her sister Eugenia. One night during her stay she is asked to babysit her sister’s two notoriously ill-behaved sons, boys of twelve and eleven. She is instructed not to mind what the boys do, apart from setting fire to the place, because they have been so long out of control that there is no hope of disciplining them now. When Eugenia and her husband return home around 10:00 p.m., to their astonishment they discover the house in perfect order and the boys both asleep. When they asked Tallulah how she accomplished this, she, in her husky voice, answers: “Not really a problem, dahlings. I taught the little devils a new game that they seem to have taken to straightaway.” When they ask her what the game is, Tallulah replies, “It’s called masturbation, dahlings.”

  Whether this is a true story, I do not know. But the story and the reigning impression of Tallulah Bankhead are a perfect fit. Tallulah was—her dates are 1902–1966—the beautiful Southern belle with entirely unedited, not to say foul-mouthed, speech added. She was the woman who said and did anything she wished. Her grandfather and uncle were U.S. senators from Alabama, her father was Speaker of the House. When she was forced into the hospital with a peritoneal infection, the result of boozing and partying and generally riotous living, upon her release, she called out to her physician, “Don’t think that this has taught me a lesson.” Tallulah Bankhead’s was the charm of complete abandon—not in the least charming when practiced by men—the charm, as she might have put it, of simply not giving a fuck about anything.

  To be in a position to do this, to live one’s life so carelessly, certain prerequisites are necessary. For Tallulah they were dazzling youthful beauty, talent (in her case as a stage actress), and lots of money (earned on the stage). A girl who never knew her mother, who died a few weeks after giving birth to her, who was never her father’s favorite daughter, who was a pudgy tomboy as a child, Tallulah nonetheless early sensed that hers would be a glittering life, and acted on that premonition. She threw tantrums, fits, and availed herself of other ploys that usually resulted in her getting her way.

  Get her way Tallulah pretty much did through much of her life. At seventeen she secured a part in a Broadway play, and was straightaway a hit, someone much talked about in New York. In her early twenties she moved to London, where her stage performances brought her even greater réclame. She became a central figure in smart society on two continents; friends with English royalty and the American wealthy. She went out to Hollywood for the money, which given the extravagance with which she lived she required in ample amounts. She never made the same impress in the movies that she had done on stage, but then neither did Hollywood make much of an impression on her. Her two great stage roles were those of Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams claimed he wrote the part of Blanche with Tallulah in mind. In 1939 she was on the cover of Life, of which there could be no grander publicity coup. In 1950 she was the mistress of ceremonies of The Big Show, a radio variety program that in its day had the highest ratings in the land.

  In the end Tallulah was more a celebrity than a performing artist. She was celebrated as a character, though a caricature perhaps comes closer to it. She had, to begin with, her wonderful name, Tallulah, which sounds like nothing so much as an exotic tropical flower. Then there was her voice, husky, dusky, with a touch of Southern drawl to it, exploited by every comic impressionist of the day, recognized by the entire nation. The television critic John Crosby claimed Tallulah’s voice had “more timbre than Yellowstone National Park.” Grain and texture were given to her voice by the 150 cigarettes she is supposed to have smoked daily. She was also a serious drinker, and did drugs, cocaine or whatever else you happen to have around the place. (“Cocaine isn’t habit forming, dahling,” she said. “I should know. I’ve been using it for years.”)

  Tallulah’s sex life was, to understate the matter a touch, gaudy. As a ballpark figure, she claimed to have slept with 5,000 men. She was heterosexual, she was homosexual, she was completely sexual. (“I’ve had a man and I’ve had a woman,” she said, “and there’s got to be something better.”) An insomniac who couldn’t bear to be alone, a logorrheic in need of a full-time audience, she used sex as a (generally ineffective) soporific.

  Like Judy Garland, Tallulah had a large male following of gay men. They were known, New Yorker theater critic Brendan Gill reports, as her “caddies.” The name derives from the fact that many among them ran errands for her; her life being in a permanent state of chaos, she had many errands to run. At her theatrical performances, Gill also reports, the caddies could be disruptive, caring chiefly for the campier bits in her acting, the bits when she was most Tallulah-esque.

  Funny things Tallulah said tended to get around. During an intermission at a Maeterlinck play that she attended with the New York Times theater critic Alexander Woollcott, she said, “There’s less here than meets the eye,” a remark that Woollcott put in his review in the next day’s paper, launching Tallulah as a wit. “What’s the matter, dahling,” she is supposed to have said when introduced to a man at a party, “don’t you recognize me with my clothes on?” She minored in non sequiturs: “We’ve just been reminiscing about the future,” she once said. Or, again: “I’d like to kiss you, dahling, but I’ve just washed my hair.”

  “I wish I had my life to live again. I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner,” is a remark of Tallulah’s that gives off a sad ping of autobiographical truth. Tallulah had two failed marriages, neither of which produced children. Instead of children she had lovers and, at one point, a lion cub that she kept as a house pet. She was a spendthrift, of everything, not just money but time, energy, people—she used them all up. Emotional spendthrifts usually operate, like financial ones, on deficits, which soon enough catch up with them.

  Tallulah’s caught up with her when she reached her fifties. Hard living didn’t do much for her looks, which were once thought so captivating. Her health began to go; heavy smoking entrapped her in emphysema. She began to mock her own behavior. “My heart is as pure as the driven slush,” she said, adding, “Say anything you like about me so long as it isn’t boring.” The problem was that, no longer beautiful or richly talented, she eventually did become a bit of a bore, predictable in her outrageousness, which meant that the outrageousness itself became a touch pitiful.

  Charmers, men or women, risk becoming bores in old age. People grew tired of the aging Tallulah’s loquaciousness. “I’ve just spent an hour talking to Tallulah for a few minutes,” the actor Fred Keating said. Profane language is more arresting coming from the mouth of a young and beautiful woman than from that of an aging woman with heavy smears of lipstick across her mouth. By her sixties Tallulah was ugly, and knew it—photographs of her in her last years bear out her self-estimate, for they all seem as if the lens were blurred—ugly enough not to wish to be seen before a large public. She was at Truman Capote’s famous party at the Plaza in 1966 where the guests wore masks, else she probably wouldn’t have attended. Complications from emphysema drove her into St. Luke’s Hospital in New York, where she made life hell for the staff, before sinking into a coma, and dying, at the age of sixty-six, with no one, including herself, wishing she had lived longer. Charm, too, can wear out its welcome; it’s a mistake to stay too long at the party.

  Audrey Hepburn’s charm, almost diametrically different from Tallulah Bankhead’s, never did wear out. Where Tallulah was aggressively loquacious, Audrey Hepburn came across as winningly reticent. Where Tallulah was shameless, Audrey Hepburn was, or certainly seemed, sensitive. Where Tallulah was unembarrassedly coarse, Audrey Hepburn was unfailingly refined. The two women serve to set the boundaries, north to south
, of female charm.

  Perhaps alone among movie stars, Audrey Hepburn was equally admired by women and men. Lots of women wished to look like her or yearned for her natural refinement or to be able to wear clothes as she did (with a helping hand here from Hubert de Givenchy); most men wished to protect her. She wasn’t about sex, or at least sex wasn’t the first thing one thought of when seeing her. She combined fragility and spriteliness, in a unique and immensely attractive way. Not for nothing did she regularly play in movies up against attractive older leading men: Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, William Holden, Fred Astaire, Rex Harrison. The attraction here was twofold: Their maturity meant they could protect her, and her youthfulness seemed to give them a second chance in life with a virginally fresh young woman.

  In reality there was nothing especially virginal about Audrey Hepburn, who seems to have had normal sexual appetites and, for a movie star, a normally adventurous sexual life. She turns out to have had the best of taste in everything but men. She had a misfired engagement with a Canadian millionaire; a love affair with the alcoholic William Holden; another with the playwright Robert Anderson, who wrote a roman à clef about it; two bad marriages, producing a son each; and a twelve-year-long live-in relationship in Switzerland at the end of her life with a man who had formerly been Merle Oberon’s much younger escort. If she had a weakness, it was in her choice of men; she was perhaps too passive, too ready to give herself over to men who wished to control her. Or was she instead one of those women E. M. Forster once described in Howards End as “stimulated by worthlessness in men.” The leading offender in the worthlessness category may have been her first husband, Mel Ferrer, quite as wretched a husband as he was an actor.

  No one has ever quite been able to nail Audrey Hepburn’s physical quality. Gamin, elfin, sprite, fey are among the words most often hauled out to do so, but none quite fits. In his splendid biography of Audrey Hepburn, Donald Spoto quotes a woman named Aud Johanssen, who danced with the young Audrey Hepburn in the chorus on the London stage, saying: “I have the biggest tits onstage, but everyone looks at the girl who has none at all.”

  Audrey Hepburn was five foot seven inches and weighed 110 pounds with a twenty-inch waist. More than anything else she longed to be the ballet dancer she so much appeared by nature physically intended to be. History, however, ruled otherwise. Her late girlhood and early adolescence, the time of crucial training for a ballerina, were spent at her grandparents’ home in Arnhem, in Holland, under the Nazi occupation. The same age as Anne Frank, whom she somewhat resembled, she lived under a reign of fear, ill-nourished—at one point the family diet was chiefly tulip bulbs—always expecting the worst. “I knew the cold clutch of human terror all through my teens,” she later said. She was sixteen when the war was over, too late to make up the lost years of training to achieve her dream of becoming a prima ballerina.

  She also suffered the loss of a father, a ne’er-do-well named Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, English on his father’s side, French and Dutch on his mother’s, who met and married Audrey’s mother, a Dutch baroness, in what was then the Dutch colony of Indonesia. A fascist, he was a supporter in England of Oswald Moseley, and he and Audrey’s mother actually lunched with Hitler before the war. Her father married her mother for her money, and left her and his young daughter when he had run through it. Audrey Hepburn grew up fatherless. This crushing fact weighed heavily on her lifelong insecurity and intermittent bouts of depression.

  Some of these hardships in Audrey Hepburn’s life worked to her advantage. She grew up, for example, tri-lingual, speaking English, Dutch, and French (her mother and father lived for a spell in Belgium), which gave her an odd but appealing accent. She had, in effect, no mother tongue. “There is no speech I can relax into when I’m tired,” she said, “because my ear has never been accustomed to one intonation.” Her speech, sounding mid-Atlantic with a slight hesitation to it, was like no one else’s and part of the appealing signature of her performance.

  Success came to her early. In 1953, when she was twenty-four, she won both an Oscar (for Roman Holiday) and a Tony (for Ondine) and many other awards beside. She never thought herself a first-class actress, but she had something quite as good as acting ability; she had natural charm. Audiences liked to look at her, listen to her, root for her. In her movies and in her life, she never lacked for a following.

  Her good taste extended to her choice of movie roles, with only a few exceptions (War and Peace, Green Mansions, and The Unforgiven perhaps most notable among them). She seemed to know what was best for her particular talent. From Roman Holiday through Nun’s Story, Two for the Road, Funny Face, My Fair Lady to Robin and Marian—all seemed roles made for her. Her taste in directors—William Wyler, Bill Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Stanley Donen, Blake Edwards, George Cukor—wasn’t bad either.

  Audrey Hepburn was chary of giving interviews. They made her nervous, doubtless because she recognized that there was something inherently wrong, cheapening even, in talking about oneself. When forced to give an interview to promote a film, she put off all questions about her personal life. Later in life she savvily turned down an interview request from Barbara Walters; savvily because to be asked about one’s personal life by Barbara Walters is automatically to forfeit one’s claim to charm by falling into the slough of vulgarity. No one ever would think to call Audrey Hepburn vulgar.

  On the personal front, she had things to hide. The fragility that was part of her film persona was also part of her actual life. She was delicately wired, and at different points in her life—she had five miscarriages and gave birth to a stillborn child—suffered nervous breakdowns. She did all she could to keep her failed marriages out of the press. Although she was rich, famous, beautiful, “rarely,” said her press agent Henry Rogers, “did I see her happy.”

  To hide one’s depression, disguise one’s defeats, show modesty in the face of enormous success, such are the ingredients for charm operating at a high level. In her quiet way, Audrey Hepburn was a great lady, and greatness, coming from unexpected quarters, is charming. About that charm there seems to be no disagreement, even among tough critics. Fred Zinnemann, who directed The Nun’s Story, said of her: “I have never seen anyone more disciplined, more gracious or more dedicated to her work than Audrey. There was no ego, no asking for extra favors; there was the greatest consideration for her co-workers.” Stanley Donen, who directed her in Two for the Road and Funny Face, said: “Her magnetism was so extraordinary that everyone wanted to be close to her. It was as if she placed a glass barrier between herself and the world. You couldn’t get behind it easily. It made her remarkably attractive.” Alfred Lunt said: “She has authentic charm. Most people simply have nice manners.” And Billy Wilder, who didn’t in the least mind knocking actors he directed, said: “Audrey was known for something which has disappeared, and that is elegance, grace and manners . . . God kissed her on the cheek, and there she was.”

  Donald Spoto tells that Mel Ferrer and Audrey Hepburn’s agent thought she ought to collect a royalty of some sort for allowing Hubert de Givenchy to use her name in connection with his successful perfume L’Interdit. Givenchy was even ready to do so, but Hepburn said absolutely not.

  I don’t want anything from Hubert. I don’t need his money—he’s my friend. If I’ve helped him build his perfume business, then that’s exactly what one friend should do for another. If someone else offered me a million dollars to endorse a perfume, I would do it—but Hubert is my friend. I don’t want anything. Yes, I even want to walk into a drugstore and buy the perfume at the retail price.

  For the last five or so years of her life—she died at sixty-four—Audrey Hepburn worked seven or eight months of the year for UNICEF. She visited Somalia and Ethiopia, and did so without any of the perks expected by the high-level celebrity that she indubitably was: She flew coach, rode in trucks, ate the same food as everyone else. Always a nervous public speaker, she none
theless gave endless speeches in the attempt to arouse interest in and raise money for the plight of starving children in Africa and Asia, and the speeches were apparently effective. A good heart on display, such as Audrey Hepburn possessed, one free of falsity and fakery, might itself be a strong definition of charm.

  Tallulah Bankhead and Audrey Hepburn, as I noted, describe the wide boundaries of modern female charm. Much charm, of course, lies within those boundaries—and also much false charm. I, for one, never found Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis especially charming. She was supposed to stand for refinement, high culture, art. Yet it all seemed so staged, which is to say unnatural, false, and therefore unconvincing. Everything in this act blew apart when Jacqueline Kennedy became Jackie O. by marrying Aristotle Onassis, a coarse billionaire, making plain that refinement, high culture, art wasn’t at all what she was about. What she was about, and had been all along, despite the heavy screen of public relations and image-making, was money. Jacqueline Kennedy was attempting to play Audrey Hepburn, outside the movies, until her love first for power and then for money, by becoming evident, ruined the act.

  Lillian Hellman was well on her way to being considered among the most charming of American women. She was a party-goer and a party-giver. Anyone who mattered in American cultural life was at one time or another a guest at her home on Martha’s Vineyard. Her plays and screenwriting had made her wealthy. Her long-standing love affair with Dashiell Hammett, a man hounded by the House UnAmerican Affairs Committee, somehow added to her luster. Most impressive of all she had faced down that same House on UnAmerican Affairs Committee. When asked to name the names of people in Hollywood and on Broadway whom she knew to be members of the Communist party, she said: “I cannot cut my conscience to fit this year’s pattern,” a remark which went instantly into all the books of quotations and made her a heroine of liberal American culture. At the Oscar Awards one year she received a standing ovation. From that time on, cynical friends said, she would accept only standing ovations.