Ohhhhh, TALLULAH!

I'm coming up in August on the 2 year anniversary of not posting anything to this blog.  This is embarrassing, but, if the truth be known, I forgot where my blog was.  I mentioned this to a friend and she gave me a very strange look and remarked, "That's crazy.  How do you do that?"  First of all, I'm a Montgomery native and we're all crazy down here.  Who else but crazy people would start a war (It's the Civil War Sesquicentennial so bare with me.) against an enemy that outnumbered us 4 to 1 in military age men, had all the nation's industry, superior transportation systems, a Federal government that had been in existence for almost a century, and scads of money?  Second, it's easy.  I couldn't remember how to get to this blog to update so I started another one somewhere else and then lost it, too.  Well, enough of this. 

I, along with my partner, Jacque, pictured with me in period costumes, are well into our second month of leading Civil War Tours in the Huntsville and North Alabama area.  We're sitting in front of the birthplace of Tallulah Bankhead.  She has nothing to do with the Civil War, but since I've been gone for two years I decided I needed to come back with a real doozy.

Tallulah liked men, women, bourbon, cocaine, and cigarettes.  She also liked, actually had to be, the center of attention at every party.  If she wasn't, she took her clothes off and stood around in the nude.  She liked doing cartwheels while wearing no underwear.  Once a delivery boy came to her door and she answered the door in the nude, grasping between pointer and middle finger her ever present cigarette in it's long holder.  His mouth dropped wide open.  She asked, "What's wrong?  Haven't you ever seen a woman smoke a cigarette before?"

She, like many other actresses in her day, desperately wanted the role of Scarlett O'Hara.  Being a Southern women, many down in these parts believed she would indeed be chosen for the role.  Well, she wasn't.  Why, you ask?  First of all, she had a bad reputation that Margaret Mitchell in her wildest dreams could not have come up with.  Second, she was 36 years old and it was doubtful she could have pulled off the opening barbecue scene when Scarlett is only 16.  Or, was she 18 and her waistline 16?  I seem to have forgotten. 

She drove a Bentley, but having no sense of direction, had to call a cab which she then followed in her own car.  Preferring the stage to movies, she spent time in London, but was threatened with arrest for corrupting the young men of Eaton.

Once at a party with Eleanor Roosevelt Tallulah had to go to the ladies room, and invited Eleanor to come with her.  She kept the stall door open, dropped her pants, sat on the toilet, and continued her conversation with the First Lady.  Upon learning that Shirley Temple was often filmed through gauze, Tallulah remarked that perhaps she should be filmed through linoleum.

Ahhh, we sure know how to turn them out down here, don't we?  I think it was Laurel Ulrich who said, "Well behaved women seldom make history."  And with this I will close.