I always suspected, reading Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes even as a kid, that Tallulah Bankhead’s performance as Regina Giddens could not have been as unrelievedly diabolic as legend would have it. The script itself wouldn’t have permitted that. And after interviewing in 1992 the late Florence Williams, who created the role of Regina’s daughter Alexandra, I had all the information I needed to make that point. But I wondered what Bankhead really thought, since she described Regina in her 1952 autobiography as “an unmitigated murderess.”
Of course Bankhead didn’t actually write the book; it was put together by her publicist, Richard Maney, working from transcripts of tapings she did, I think frequently on her own at home in Bedford Village, rather than working in a Q & A format with him. I’ve seen some of the transcripts, which are as wildly free-associative as one would expect from her. I never saw anything like that remark in the transcripts I looked at, but certainly she must have approved its inclusion in the book.
Bankhead was a courageous woman who was not afraid to buck the tide of public consensus. But at the same time, a star performer is extraordinary sensitive to public mood.
I felt that if she indeed by the early-1950s had endorsed that concept of Regina it somehow reflected what had grown to be a conventional wisdom, and a flattening one that perhaps conformed to the reactionary mood of the time. An ambitious woman’s trumping at all costs any obstacles to her success would not have been in sync with the mood of that moment.
Only after my biography was published, however, did I find a clincher proving to me that that she had, back in 1939 when she was acting the role, every intention of not playing Regina one-dimensionally, that she did admire much about Regina, as undoubtedly did Hellman herself.
“Regina is a woman with a masculine brain and born in the wrong period,” Tallulah told a reporter for the Daily News in an interview published April 30, 1939, two-and-a-half months after Little Foxes opened on Broadway. “If she’d been born in a metropolis, instead of in a small Southern town, if she’d been alive now instead of then, she’d probably have made something of herself—been a judge or a woman of real importance.”
Bankhead compared Regina favorably to another icon of Southern womanhood, Scarlett O’Hara, a role she’d recently screen-tested for unsuccessfully. “Scarlett is an unmitigated [obviously a favorite adjective of Bankhead’s, see above] sort of person, but Regina’s honest. She wouldn’t steal. She wouldn’t let her daughter marry that boy. Even when she’s at her worst, you feel that the audience is hoping she’ll come through all right.”