Culture Slut: Tallulah Bankhead & Camp Failure
Much like other people during these long winter lock-down days, I find myself revisiting past wrongs and imagining what I’d do differently. In French, it is called l’esprit de l’escalier, which translates to the mind on the staircase - that particular feeling of knowing what you should have said when it is too late. I think about the time I gave an entirely improvised dance performance for a holiday camp talent show and how I was suddenly so embarrassed that I ran off stage and hid, leaving my partner alone. I think about the time I was sent to all-day detention at secondary school because I was wearing a skirt (scandal!) and instead of doing the work teachers sent up, I wrote sad self-defeatist poetry. But more than anything else, I think about the 2019 Met Gala Camp: Notes On Fashion, and the truly shocking way in which nearly every attendee completely missed the mark.
Watching the fashion elite (and Rita Ora) scramble around to make sense of the intangible nature of camp was truly a sight to behold, and whilst so many tried so hard, so little was achieved. What was proved on the pink carpet that night was that campness is innate: It's not a costume, it's not a style, it barely has any signifiers - something is either camp or it is not.
Much like other people during these long winter lock-down days, I find myself revisiting past wrongs and imagining what I’d do differently. In French, it is called l’esprit de l’escalier, which translates to the mind on the staircase - that particular feeling of knowing what you should have said when it is too late. I think about the time I gave an entirely improvised dance performance for a holiday camp talent show and how I was suddenly so embarrassed that I ran off stage and hid, leaving my partner alone. I think about the time I was sent to all-day detention at secondary school because I was wearing a skirt (scandal!) and instead of doing the work teachers sent up, I wrote sad self-defeatist poetry. But more than anything else, I think about the 2019 Met Gala Camp: Notes On Fashion, and the truly shocking way in which nearly every attendee completely missed the mark.
Watching the fashion elite (and Rita Ora) scramble around to make sense of the intangible nature of camp was truly a sight to behold, and whilst so many tried so hard, so little was achieved. What was proved on the pink carpet that night was that campness is innate: It's not a costume, it's not a style, it barely has any signifiers - something is either camp or it is not.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
By far and away the campest person there was Dame Joan Collins, not because of her beautiful Valentino gown, but just by virtue of her character, her Joan-Collins-ness. I also had a soft spot for Gemma Chan, dressed by Tom Ford, for wearing a headpiece that was a recreation of the one worn by Elizabeth Taylor for the supremely camp film Boom!, which she also pinched afterward to wear on some red carpets. But again, it’s the Elizabeth Taylor connection that is camp, not the shiny metallic dress and cape.
In fact, after trawling through so many paparazzi pictures of the celebs making their entrances, the thing that starts to stand out is the pink carpet becoming more and more filthy, littered with stray feathers, loose beads, the detritus of overdone capitalist pigs in wigs. Maybe that was truly the campest element of the Met Gala, a discarded ostrich feather mashed into a cheap carpet by a rhinestoned shoe.
In the now institutional essay Notes On Camp, Susan Sontag talks a little about this idea of failure as part of this sensibility; “In naive, or pure, Camp, the essential element is a seriousness, a seriousness that fails.” Mae West only being lit by 10w rose-tinted light bulbs in her apartment to unsuccessfully hide her age is camp. Dannii Minogue, Kylie’s sister, is camp because she tried so hard as a pop star but could never compete in stardom. Shirley Bassey’s normally unshakeable voice cracking with emotion during This Is My Life is camp. Though something that I wish was spoken about more in-depth was the overwhelming sense and satisfaction of CAMP TRAGEDY.
CAMP TRAGEDY is the much more visceral, guttural cousin of camp failure. Feelings of isolation, loss, and loneliness pervade camp sensibility, as well as the aesthete posturings of the aforementioned essay. Sontag talks about being outside of camp and therefore being more able to observe it. She focuses a lot on the artifice of camp, but not much on the emotions of it. As someone who has lived it every day, the excess of emotion can truly give way to the most satisfying parts of camp.
Camp allows us to embrace failure, tragedy, and everything in between. Camp failure is Judy Garland forgetting the words to June Christy’s song Something Cool. Camp tragedy is Maria Callas dying alone in a Paris apartment listening only to recordings of her voice. Camp failure is spending days thinking about going out to the bars, getting dressed up to go, and then speaking to no one, just staring in solitude at the ice cubes in a vodka coke. Camp tragedy is the middle-aged drag queen who closes the first half of her act with a ballad dedicated to all the friends she lost during the AIDS crisis. Camp failure is lying down on your bed, putting on a playlist of sad songs, and intending to cry your heart out, but after all, you can't squeeze out even a single tear. Camp tragedy is spending your whole life being wonderful and charming and fabulous, but leaving no record of self behind, other than as a few lines in someone else’s diary “Saw Sebastian today, had the most wonderful time as usual, but had to dash off too soon.”
We have many gay icons who are well-documented beacons of camp tragedy; Judy Garland, whose early abuse led to drug addiction and alcoholism, Amy Winehouse, whose name became a byword for hard hedonism mixed with soft vulnerability, and Maria Callas, who let glamour and heartbreak eventually drain her life force. But there is one heroine that I particularly want to talk about, and that is the often impersonated but never replaced Tallulah Bankhead.
Bankhead was a stage, screen, and radio star, active from the 20s right through to her death in the late 60’s, and despite not being much of a generally recognized name now, her fingerprints are still all over pop culture. She was so recognizably herself that she spawned a new archetype; the lascivious, deep-throated, husky-voiced, hard-drinking, glamorous woman. Her idiosyncratic way of speaking sparked millions of impressions and any drag queen now who still drawls out an extended “daaaahrliiiing” can count themselves in her debt.
At the Ritz in London, you can order a champagne cocktail served in a glass Louboutin stiletto called the Tallulah, to commemorate the time she drank champagne out of her shoe because the bar staff weren’t quick enough for her. In the 1950 film All About Eve, Bette Davis plays one of her greatest roles as Margo Channing, who speaks and dresses and eviscerates in all the ways that Tallulah was famous for. In the 1961 Disney classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the character of Cruella De Vil was heavily influenced by Bankhead - so much so that Betty Lou Gerson, who voiced the character, does a straight impression of the star, including her infamous deep-throated laugh. Tallulah was also the character of choice for Drag Race UK star Joe Black, who is a perfect camp curator, bringing back the aging icons to our television and phone screens.
The tragedy of Tallulah Bankhead is that the full force of her genius was never captured on screen. By far her best-recorded performance is in Hitchcock’s 1944 film Lifeboat, but even in this, she is accused of playing too much to type, pleasing the audience, of disingenuously “camping”, to use Sontag’s words. Bankhead learned early on that the force of her personality was enough to carry her through life, so it was only rarely that she used the full range of her prodigious acting talents. She was so patchy that even though her close friend Tennessee Williams (camp) based the character Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire on her (camp!), she was not asked to play the role (camp failure!).
In the late 50s, when she was going through depression, alcoholism, and drug addiction, she did play Blanche (camp) but was sternly told off by Williams for making too much of a meal of it, by playing only Tallulah (camp failure!). She agreed and for the next performance she gave the greatest performance of her career, Williams is reported saying “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. The human drama, the play of a woman’s great valor and an artist’s truth, her own, far superseded, and even eclipsed, to my eye, the performance of my own play!” (CAMP!) He also said Bankhead blew Vivien Leigh’s film portrayal (camp) of the character out of the water, but the damage caused by Bankhead’s earlier performances had already sealed the run’s fate and it closed before the world could finally see her at her very best (CAMP TRAGEDY!).
I think about Tallulah every day and how I can be more like her.
She drank deeply from the well of life, both literally and figuratively, and let the world be changed by her mere presence there. I think of all the stars from the past I admire, and the thread of camp failure and camp tragedy runs through them. Shirley Bassey won’t achieve the veneration she deserves until she dies. James Bidgood is still alive and mostly unknown, living in a lost apartment in New York. My English teacher, who cried whilst reading us Auden poems, has lived as a repressed homosexual his whole life, with only his mother for company. Camp failure abounds.
What have I done? I left my dance partner alone on stage whilst I ran and hid. Now things are different. Maybe, despite being the most vital and sparkling personality in a room I will end up as just a footnote in someone else’s story. I don’t know how it will end, but even if I never achieve stardom or greatness, I will have been part of campness, which is more real than anything.
Words and Imagery: Misha MN
