"The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again,
I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner." - Tallulah Bankhead

There’s never been anyone in show business quite like Tallulah Bankhead.  A daughter of the Alabama aristocracy, she became notorious for her scandalous behavior and outrageous wit. Born in 1903, Tallulah was a sexually aggressive woman and openly bisexual long before women’s liberation and Stonewall.

Tallulah was an exhibitionist, a libertine, an alcoholic, a cocaine addict and a non-stop partygoer. She was also a Broadway, Hollywood, radio and television star, a best-selling author, a political progressive, a civil rights activist and the talk of London, New York and Hollywood from her teens until her death in 1968. Her husky voice, penchant for referring to one and all as “dah-ling” and oversized personality made her the inspiration for Blanche Dubois, Cruella De Vil, and countless drag queens.

Tallulah’s great performances on the stage in The Little Foxes, Private Lives, and The Skin of Our Teeth and on the screen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat were overshadowed by her notorious antics and romantic escapades.  Her lovers included Billie Holliday, Marlene Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller, Gary Cooper, John Barrymore and many, many others.

She delighted in greeting visitors naked or turning cartwheels without underwear. Rarely without a drink or a cigarette, Tallulah was a famous raconteur, enthralling her friends with now-famous quotes such as “I am as pure as the driven slush,” and “my father warned me about men and booze but he never said anything about women and cocaine.”
        
A great beauty in her youth, addiction and disease accelerated her aging.  In the fifties and sixties she still enchanted audiences as talk-show staple and guest star (including “I Love Lucy” as herself and “Batman” as the Black Widow), but her great performances were behind her. In 1965 she made her last film appearance in the horror film Die! Die! My Darling!, a performance which inspired Matthew Lombardo to write Looped.