#dissolute

La Donna Scandalosa, a late-seventeenth-century memento-mori wax and cloth piece from Oratorio Compagnia dei Bianchi Della Giustizia, Naples. It was created to serve as a warning to women who have led a dissolute life.

Died on this day: debauched, bourbon-saturated wild woman of American stage and screen, the inspiration for Disney villainess Cruella de Vil AND Margo Channing in All About Eve (1950), (and the inspiration for legions of drag queens), that sophisticated lady with the soul of a hillbilly who once declared “I am the foe of moderation, the champion of excess” - Miss Tallulah Bankhead (31 January 1902 – 12 December 1968)! Later in life, when - in the words of her biographer Denis Brian - violently ravaged gardenia Bankhead looked “as though life had thrown her against a wall and she’d just covered up the scars with rouge and lipstick”, a fan stopped her on the street to ask, “Aren't you Tallulah Bankhead?” “I'm what's left of her, darling,” she responded. In 2024 I screened Bankhead’s final film – the underrated British-made horror flick Die! Die, My Darling! (1965) – at my monthly Lobotomy Room cinema club, and everyone present was mesmerised by her. Pictured: portrait of Bankhead in 1962.

Born on this day 124 years ago: dissolute, hellraising wild woman of American stage and screen, the inspiration for Disney villainess Cruella de Vil AND Margo Channing in All About Eve, cigarette-in-human form, sophisticated lady with the soul of a hillbilly, that violently ravaged, bourbon-saturated gardenia once described by her friend Marlene Dietrich as "the most immoral woman that ever lived” and by Cecil Beaton as resembling a "wicked archangel” - Miss Tallulah Bankhead (31 January 1902 - 12 December 1968)! Do something extra sensual and depraved in Bankhead’s memory today! Pictured: Bankhead in the 1930s looking like a Tamara de Lempicka painting come to life.

On this night in showbiz history (15 February 1956): a revival of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire starring fifty-four-year-old stage diva Tallulah Bankhead as Blanche DuBois (pictured) opened at New York’s City Centre following a disastrous tryout at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida. The volcanic Bankhead was something of a muse to Williams and there’s always been speculation that roles like DuBois, Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) and Flora Goforth in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963) were at least partly inspired by her (Bankhead did ultimately portray Goforth in a 1964 production). As her biographer Joel Lobenthal writes in Tallulah! The Life and Times of a Leading Lady (2005), “Rumour has it Tallulah had been offered the role of Blanche in the original production of Streetcar, which opened on Broadway in December 1947. Tennessee Williams said that he suggested Tallulah to producer Irene Selznick, who felt that she was too strong for the part. Had Tallulah been offered the part then, at age forty-five, she might well have found that the role of a Southern woman who drinks too much, is concerned about aging, and is promiscuous would have left her too personally exposed.” In any case, opening night was catastrophic (the audience frequently roared with inappropriate laughter), the reviews were mixed – but box office was good. Williams alternated between gushing effusive praise (“I'm not ashamed to say that I shed tears almost all the way through and that when the play was finished, I rushed up to her and fell to my knees at her feet” he wrote in the New York Times) and utter disdain (“The worst Blanche DuBois in the world was poor Tallulah, although I must say she was amusing” the playwright  told Rex Reed in a 1971 Esquire magazine profile).

Nice looking dollhouse on the marketplace