Eight Books About a Pop Culture Phenom You’ve Likely Never Heard Of
by Mark B. Perry
“Divinely impossible.” “Glamorous and unpredictable.” These are just a few of the printable words used to describe a legendary beauty who packed London’s West End theaters with adoring fans in the 1920s, scandalized Hollywood in the 1930s, became the queen of radio and television in the ’50s, and even played a supervillain on the camp-fest Batman of the 1960s one year before her death at age 66. She originated roles on stage that were later given to Bette Davis for the film adaptations of The Little Foxes, Jezebel, and Dark Victory. With a biting wit and a pansexual penchant for outrageous behavior, she was Hollywood’s original Bad Girl and a celebrity personality before that was a thing. Of her many quips, this is one of the most representative: “Cocaine habit-forming? Of course not. I ought to know. I’ve been using it for years!” With her quotable wit and notorious exploits, she was instantly recognizable by her first name alone: Tallulah.
Yet today, inexplicably, Tallulah Bankhead has been largely forgotten. Before you read on, you might want to check out these clips of dear Tallu. Here she is interviewed by Edward R. Murrow. Here she is a guest on the Milton Berle Show with Frank Sinatra. I invite you to go down a Tallulah Bankhead Google Rabbit Hole!
I first came under the thrall of la Bankhead as a child when I happened to see her tour de farce performance parodying herself on The Lucy & Desi Comedy Hour (click the title to view a video), then was subsequently mesmerized whenever she’d turn up on talk shows of the era. I’ve always wanted to see Tallulah revered as more than a camp icon and outside the cliques of gay men of a certain age and female impersonators in their dotage, so I gave her a supporting role in my debut novel, And Introducing Dexter Gaines: A Novel of Old Hollywood, in which she appears as the best friend of Lillian Sinclair, my fictional movie star. I wanted to portray Tallulah as accurately as possible, and closely imitate her inimitable voice. Fortunately, for someone lesser known today, there are at least eight books about her, most of which proved invaluable and made my research feel more like recreational reading. 
Tallulah: My Autobiography by Tallulah Bankhead
The first and arguably most entertaining is Tallulah’s own memoir, a bestseller in 1952. Published at the height of her fame and notoriety, this breezy and quotable account of her life and career is worth a read not just for her turns of phrase, but also her artful circumnavigation of the truth, often in jest. Although the book is (somewhat) constrained by the mores of the early ’50s, it’s easy to imagine the more honest and salacious version she might have written had she lived beyond her 66 years.
Miss Tallulah Bankhead by Lee Israel
This excellent 1972 biography was the first, and fills in many of the gaps glossed over by Tallulah herself. Of note: Israel is an accomplished writer whose reputation was forever tarnished when she turned to selling forged letters purportedly written and signed by famous authors and other luminaries—the subject of her post-arrest memoir and the 2018 film, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Tallulah by Brendan Gill
Apparently written at the same time as Israel’s but published a year later in 1973, this reverential work is part eloquent biography, part gorgeous coffee table book filled with many seldom seen photographs. Though not as thorough as its immediate predecessor, what it lacks in detail is more than made up for by Gill’s almost worshipful tone.
Tallulah Darling: A Biography of Tallulah Bankhead by Denis Brian
Tallu-mania continued unabated with this 1980 offering. Full disclosure, this one is still in my TBR pile, but is worth noting as further proof that Tallulah’s legacy endures.
Tallulah Bankhead: A Scandalous Life by David Bret
This 1998 biography was published thirty years after Tallulah’s death. While Bret hews close to the established facts, he douses his narrative with explicit—and sometimes cringey—descriptions of Tallulah’s sexual exploits, many of which seem farfetched, even for one as outrageous as the book’s subject. Some things really are best left to the imagination.
Tallulah Bankhead by Bryony Lavery
Published in 1999 some 30 years after Tallulah’s death, this poetic love letter is worth reading for Lavery’s use of language alone, and speaks to the tenacity of Tallulah’s iconic appeal.
Tallulah! The Life and Times of a Leading Lady by Joel Lobenthal
Scholarly, scandalous, but never stuffy, this hefty 2004 masterwork is demonstrably the most thorough work in the Bankhead canon and might as well be called The Bible of Bankhead. Of all the aforementioned books, I confess this is my close second favorite to Tallulah’s own.
Tallulah: A Life From Beginning to End by Hourly History
Perhaps the oddest of these offerings, this latest entry appeared as recently as 2023 and is credited not to an individual author, but to an imprint publisher of nonfiction books in VERY LARGE PRINT that “take no more than one hour to read.” As a result, this is the thinnest, and one can only imagine how much was omitted in order to live up to their claim.
If you’re at all curious to learn more about this outrageously marvelous but mostly faded cultural icon, I recommend Tallulah’s memoir and Lobenthal’s biography… in that order. Still, Tallulah once famously said, “Say anything about me, dahling, as long as it isn’t boring,” and all of these offerings certainly honor those wishes.
