Tallulah

Her father and her uncle were U.S. congressmen. Her grandfather was a U.S. senator. Although born to privilege in Alabama and groomed in a convent school, Tallulah Bankhead resolved not to be just another southern belle. Quickly she rose to the top and became an acclaimed actress of London's West End and on the Broadway stage. Her performances in many plays of the 1920s brought her to the notice of Hollywood. She starred in such Paramount films as My Sin, Faithless, The Devil and the Deep, and Thunder Below. Even though she won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for her leading role in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), she never achieved the prominence in movies that she enjoyed in the theater and on radio. On the New York stage she originated the starring roles of Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and of Sabina in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. Tallulah, like Eudora, Flannery, and Coretta, was a southern woman identifiable by her first name. Her flamboyant public personality may be the most fully realized and memorable character Bankhead ever played. She became famous for her snappy repartee, candid quotes, and scandalous lifestyle. She was disposed to remove her clothes and chat in the nude. Overfond of Kentucky bourbon and wild parties, she was a lady baritone who called everybody “Dahling.” In Tallulah, first published in 1952 and a New York Times bestseller for twenty-six weeks, Bankhead's literary voice is as lively and forthright as her public persona. She details her childhood and adolescence, discusses her dedication to the theater, and presents amusing anecdotes about her life in Hollywood, New York, and London. Along with a searing defense of her lifestyle and rambunctious habits, she provides a fiercely opinionated, wildly funny account of American stage at a time when the movies were beginning to cast theater into eclipse. This is not only a memoir of an independent woman but also an inside look at American entertainment during a golden age.

From its beginning as a tourist destination in the preaCivil War era, Tallulah Falls has drawn large numbers of travelers and adventurers. The earliest written account of Tallulah, published in 1819 in the Georgia Journal, stated, athe cataract of Niagara and its great whirlpool and banks, is the only superior natural curiosity to the Rapids of Tallulah, that I have ever seen.a Soon tourists were flocking to the area, and by the 1840s, groups of visitors were common. With the arrival of the railroad in 1882, hotels and businesses sprang up, leading to an increase in the number of visitors. Quite naturally, photographers have long been drawn to the lush natural beauty of the area, as well as the wealthy tourists and the hotels that catered to them.

Glamorized, mythologized and demonized – the women of the 1920s prefigured the 1960s in their determination to reinvent the way they lived. Flappers is in part a biography of that restless generation: starting with its first fashionable acts of rebellion just before the Great War, and continuing through to the end of the decade when the Wall Street crash signalled another cataclysmic world change. Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka were far from typical flappers. Although they danced the Charleston, wore fashionable clothes and partied with the rest of their peers, they made themselves prominent among the artists, icons, and heroines of their age. Talented, reckless and wilful, with personalities that transcended their class and background, they re-wrote their destinies in remarkable, entertaining and tragic ways. And between them they blazed the trail of the New Woman around the world. Tallulah’s Story is extracted from Judith Mackrell’s acclaimed biography, Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation.

Description: This Book provides a quick glimpse about the life of Tallulah Bankhead

Jamie and Tallulah is a story of an inspiring friendship between a boy and a girl who meet while spending the summer in Maine. Tallulah takes time to record their adventures in pictures and words in a journal given to her by her grandparents. Jamie and Tallulah is a sweet and poignant story for children of all ages.

This is a memoir by John C. Wilson, a key figure of Broadway during the 1940s and ‘50s. Wilson died in 1961, three years after penning his autobiography. This newly discovered memoir stretches from Wilson’s youth at the turn of the twentieth century to his semi-retirement in the late 1950s. A Broadway producer and director, Wilson was close friends with some of the most notable figures in the world of entertainment, including Cole Porter, Tallulah Bankhead, and Noel Coward, with whom Wilson had an intimate relationship. Thomas Hischak, a noted author of several books on theatre, fills the gaps left in Wilson’s prose to help the reader put the events of his life and career into context.