A ladette long before her time

Tallulah Bankhead was a ladette long before the term was even coined: loud, foulmouthed, a two-bottles-of-bourbon-a-day woman, a gay icon; she always made a point of publicising the physical attributes of her male friends and liked to conduct interviews while sitting on the toilet. Much of this now comes across as mere silliness, and you can sympathise with the exasperated cousin who summed her up as "like a buzzsaw. She was on all the time . . ." Still, she could be kind and unstintingly generous, and by the end of the book - when she's getting physically frail but is still, basically, as tough as old boots - you have to admit to a grudging admiration. The list of secondary characters, meanwhile, is to die for, including as it does an unkempt Brando ("scratching his private parts with one hand, he held out the other and said `hi' . . ."), a cocky James Dean (he pushed Bankhead up against a wall and feigned sex with her in the corridor of a TV studio to the astonishment of a passing tealady, pushing her trolley open-mouthed. "Well darling," Tallulah asked her. "How was it for you?") and the despised Tennessee Williams. La Bankhead initially turned down the part of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire because he refused to remove the word "nigger" from her dialogue; when he subsequently offered her a revival of another of his plays, he was told, with typical Bankhead brutality, to "go peddle your filth else where".