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I've often wondered if I wouldn't have spared myself— and Hollywood—many heartaches if I'd signed that contract and stayed in London.
Finally Tallulah came down. She curtsied to Du Maurier and he introduced her around as "mv little American leading lady." Then, instead of staying to meet the proper people, Talu gave him five minutes of her time and was off with a rabble of amusing but unstable companions she'd picked up at random during rehearsals.
The British public loved her escapades, humanly enough preferring cheerful sinners to painted saints. For years she was their darling. She was their darling long before she made that raucous "dahhh-hling" her catch line.
Tallulah was shrewd enough to do some worth-while things along with the fiddle-de-do-dad. After Augustus John, the famous British painter, had finished Du Maurier's portrait, he asked Tallulah to sit for him. Du Maurier's portrait was offered to his daughter, the author of Rebecca, but Tallulah was the one who eventually bought it. She remembered how good he was to her at a time when she was too harum-scarum to appreciate it. Both portraits now hang in the bedroom of her Bedford Hills home.
One day I went to one of Tallulah's sittings. For John she sat as still as the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead. Her hands folded demurely on her lap, she held the pose with a look of angelic serenity. I couldn't help remarking, "Talu, if you could only be like that in real life . . ."
The artist rumbled, "Would you ask the sun and the moon to stand still? This is Tallulah Bankhead!"
The largest single collection of Augustus John paintings is owned by the Cazalet family in London. The blue drawing room in Peter Cazalet's country home was designed around a blue necktie in one of John's portraits. The Cazalets didn't know who the subject of the painting was until I told them. It was Tom Mix; they'd never heard of him.
Although the huge, shaggy artist receives big prices for his paintings, he shook his leonine head in wonder when he learned that Mix made seventeen thousand dollars a week for riding a horse in front
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