My review of Broadway’s Looped (the Tallulah Bankhead hit-job starring Valerie Harper) will run later, but there’s something I want to talk about first. In this biographical play, playwright Matthew Lombardo has taken several liberties with the truth, as is perhaps unavoidable when constructing a play. Some slide past (such as having Tallulah re-recording a single line of dialogue for her last film in Los Angeles, despite the film having been made in London). Otherwise seem mean-spirited, like claiming that Gary Cooper gave her gonorrhea during her stint out at Paramount in the 1930s. (According to Joel Lobenthal’s exhaustive biography of the late legend, Tallulah! The Life and Times of a Leading Lady, it was actually George Raft.)

But a great deal of time is taken up in Looped with discussions of Tallulah’s disastrous performance as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Having allegedly turned down the original production, her turn as Blanche is spoken of dismissively in Looped, as she gave in to the claque of her screaming gay fans and turned the role into camp. Lombardo also emphasizes how far the leading lady of the original productions of The Little Foxes and Skin of Our Teeth had fallen by appearing in a major play down in the wilds of Florida, at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. But that’s only half the story.

In fact, the Coconut Grove Playhouse production was an out-of-town tryout for a run at City Center, in New York. During the 1950s and ’60s, City Center was producing short runs of popular plays and musicals starring major stars (Bob Fosse in Pal Joey, Elaine Stritch in Wonderful Town) at affordable prices, and Streetcar was one of them. But Lombardo leaves the deliberate impression that Tallulah was so despised for her outrageous antics that she was no longer capable of facing the New York critics in a role as demanding as Blanche, preferring to take her celebrity to the hinterlands and frolic there. Not quite fair on a woman who worked harder than she let on, and definitely not fair on audiences who won’t know the difference.

More surprisingly than a playwright taking liberties with Tallulah’s life, though, is the total acceptance of the Coconut Grove Playhouse story by the New York critics. I have yet to read a single review that calls Lombardo out on his partial truth by adding that the production was always destined for New York. This is how fallacies and lies are propagated: by people who willingly accept whatever they’re spoon-fed. Still, my astonishment that Broadway critics aren’t entirely sure of their theatrical history (or aware that nifty little gadgets called Google and Wikipedia exist, which lists the City Center revival in Tallulah’s biography) is genuine. As if Looped weren’t a bad enough play (Tallulah as therapist!), now the glamorous, scandalous and courageous Tallulah has been thrown for a loop once more. And George Raft wasn’t even involved.

Photo by Carol Rosegg.