The Book of the Dead (23 page)

Tallulah took her clothes off in public so often that her friend Estelle Winwood asked, “Why do you do that, Tallulah? You have such pretty frocks.” She was notorious for not wearing underwear, and delighted in showing off the fact to as many people as possible. When the film crew complained of her regular exposures on the set of
Lifeboat
in 1944, Alfred Hitchcock’s laconic reply was: “I don’t know whether that’s a concern for wardrobe or hairdressing.”

Interviewing Tallulah was never easy. When
Time
magazine tried it in 1948, their reporters came away bemused. She had played the piano, performed some ballet, told jokes, done impersonations, made them lunch, plied them with mint juleps, and talked without pause—accompanied by several dogs and her free-flying budgie, Gaylord, whom she had taught to drink champagne. (Luckily, by that time, she had got rid of her pet lion, Winston, and her chimp, King Kong.) As usual, her conversation was peppered with bon mots, which included, “I never think out anything, dahling; I do it instinctively or not at all. I do things I’d loathe in anybody else.” Trying to pinpoint her age, the reporters sought verification from her older sister, Eugenia, who sighed:
“Every time Tallulah knocks a year off her age, I have to, too. I’m not sure how long I can keep it up.”

Success, as opposed to notoriety, returned to her life from two unexpected quarters. In 1950 she became the host of a weekly celebrity talk radio slot called
The Big Show.
It featured Tallulah reciting Dorothy Parker monologues, interviewing other stars, and introducing comic turns by the likes of Jimmy Durante and Groucho Marx. Held together by her unpredictable charm, it became an instant hit. Then two years later her autobiography
Tallulah
went straight to the top of the bestseller lists. She had recorded most of it on a tape recorder and it reads like one long, frank, funny, opinionated Tallulah monologue.

This welcome return to the limelight couldn’t mask her rapid descent into dependency on drink and sleeping pills. She recruited a bevy of young men as her assistants, calling them her “caddies.” Although they were usually gay, they often had to sleep in her bed because she was terrified of being alone. At night, one of her boys would tape her wrists together to stop her taking any more pills. Raddled, frequently irrational, her looks a grim parody of her former beauty, she still had her sense of humor. Not long before she died, a fan approached her and asked if she was Tallulah Bankhead. “Well, I’m what’s left of her, darling,” she replied.

Long after her death, declassified British government papers revealed that Miss Bankhead had been investigated by MI5 in the 1920s over allegations that she had corrupted the morals of pupils at Eton with indecent and unnatural acts. No conclusive proof was ever found.

If there is one thing this chapter does prove conclusively, especially in the work of Alfred Kinsey, it is that between the sheets at least, there is no such thing as normal. Or as Woody Allen put it, “Sex between a man and a woman can be a beautiful thing—provided you’re between the right man and the right woman.”

*
Literally, “The Red (or Auburn) Moon,” from her round face and red hair, but it’s cleverer than that. In French
La Lune Rousse
also means “The April Moon,” one that coincides with the frosts that can destroy the shoots of young plants.

CHAPTER FIVE

Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.

JEAN ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN (1755–1826)

W
hat would Brillat-Savarin have made of Aristotle, who liked camel meat and fried pregnant cicadas, or Friedrich Nietzsche, who gave up alcohol and tobacco and spent a lot of time at the local pastry shop wolfing down cakes and pies?

Trickier still would have been Pliny the Elder, whose larder contained fresh gladiator blood (as a cure for epilepsy), hares’ testicles (for relief of pain in the loins), and lynx urine (sore-throat gargle).

Ludicrous though these remedies sound, we should be careful before we write them off. Dietetics is a more complex science than astrophysics—we know less about the effects of the food we eat than we do about the galaxies.

Nothing brings the dead more vividly to life than finding out what they ate. It makes the famous seem more human, and shines a light on the obscure.

We know very little about the life of
Helena, Comtesse de Noailles
(1824–1908), but we know quite a lot about her theories on food and health. Born into the English aristocracy, she had a short-lived marriage to a French nobleman and her only child died at birth. Fabulously rich but bored much of the time, Helena migrated between her houses in England, Paris, Montpellier, and the French Riviera. In her fortieth year, she saw a striking portrait of a girl aged about six by the Parisian society painter Ernest Hébert (1817–1908). She asked to buy the picture but was told it had already been sold to Baron James de Rothschild. Undaunted, she decided that if she couldn’t own the painting she would acquire its real-life subject instead. She discovered that the child, Maria, had been brought to Paris by her feckless Italian father, Domenico, and that he was willing to allow her to be “adopted” for two bags of gold, with which he planned to return to Italy and set up his own vineyard. He made only two conditions: that the girl would be brought up as a Catholic and that she would be treated as an equal, not a servant. The comtesse agreed and Maria’s life changed forever.

It was a privileged but peculiar existence. The regulations laid down by the comtesse dominated Maria’s whole childhood and, in due course, the lives of her English husband and their two children as well. They were kept in line by the threat of losing the inheritance promised by their “grandmother,” and dread forebodings passed around the family breakfast table whenever an envelope arrived from France embossed with a capital
N.

Loose clothing was one of Madame de Noailles’s iron rules. So when Maria was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Sussex, she was excused from wearing a school uniform. She also had to have her own exclusive supply of fresh milk. This was provided by the
comtesse’s personal dairy herd, installed on the grounds of a large house she had bought on the nearby downs. Each winter, the comtesse left England for fear of catching the flu, and later instructed Maria to do the same with her children in the autumn, the climate being especially unhealthy when the leaves were falling, especially from the oak trees, of which, she said, England had too many.

At mealtimes Helena de Noailles’s eccentricities really came to the fore. When Maria and her children came to visit, she would eat with them only if her food was served on plates hidden from view by a two-foot-high silk screen. She never revealed why.

The comtesse always slept with a loaded pistol beside her bed, even when she stayed in a hotel, where she also demanded that a string of fresh onions be hung on the door to ward off infection. A visitor to her bedchamber noted the silk stockings stuffed with squirrel fur wrapped around her forehead and chin to prevent the formation of wrinkles. To avoid bronchitis, she would eat plate after plate of fresh herring roe. Once Maria and her husband received a gift from the comtesse of three dozen bottles of Bordeaux and fifty bottles of port. Along with the alcohol came instructions that they should drink the port only at sunset mixed with a little sugar. It was to be diluted with soft rainwater collected from the roof of their house by the servants, under strict supervision by Maria’s husband, Philip.

Helena was sprightly and energetic into her mideighties, vigilant for the smallest error. Her granddaughter, named Helena in her honor, recalled the comtesse shrieking hysterically at the staff because one of the blue silk covers on her bedroom door handle had fallen off. The glare from the naked brass was, she said, damaging to the eyes. A similar theory led her to replace the lower half of all her windowpanes with red
glass, which, she explained, was both healthier and more cheerful. And cows were essential. As well as fresh milk, they produced methane: her herds were always encouraged to graze near the open windows of her houses. She suggested to her grandson Philip that instead of enrolling at medical school he should become a vet, thus contributing much more to the good of humanity. She said she had read in the
Royal Agricultural Review
that “children brought up on good milk seldom become drunkards.” If Philip switched to veterinary medicine, she promised, she would give him some money from the sale of land in England, which would otherwise be going to help needy Armenians. He declined.

On one occasion, Maria and her children were summoned to the south of France to mingle with polite society. They were under strict instructions to accept no invitations to afternoon tea at five o’clock. This was the hour when the comtesse believed most people caught the flu, not by mixing with other people but because there was a dangerous “miasma” in the air at the end of the day. One of her visitors made the mistake of wearing high heels. After the comtesse had asked to examine them, she threw them onto the fire. Flat, broad shoes, she always said, were better for the general health, and in 1866, she wrote a letter to the
Medical Times and Gazette
extolling the benefits of going barefoot:

Look at the magnificent gait of a barefoot Highland girl and the elastic play of every muscle, and compare her feet with those of girls who have been tortured in boots, too short or too narrow at the toes…. As for cleanliness, feet freely exposed to the air are not offensive, but the smell of unwashed feet enclosed in dirtier stockings and shoes is very unwholesome, whereas no one ever felt disgusted at the little bare brown feet of Italian peasant children.

When Helena de Noailles died, her doctors said she had lasted longer than expected, subsisting largely on a diet of champagne and, of course, fresh milk.

In her will, she endowed an orphanage for the daughters of clergymen, where, even after death, her regulations lived on. Any potential inmates were to have their skulls examined by two independent phrenologists, to ensure that they were “firm spirited and conscientious.” None of the girls was to be vaccinated—the comtesse believed vaccinations led to other illnesses—and no girl under ten was to be taught any mathematics except for multiplication tables.

There was nothing remotely cranky about
George Fordyce
(1736–1802). He was a respected doctor who fought against quackery, exposing the ineffectiveness of treating epilepsy with a forehead paste made from ground-up elks’ hooves, and producing important theses on fever, smallpox, diet, and metabolism. He also conducted experiments in heated rooms that proved for the first time that the human body could effectively regulate its temperature whatever the environment.

But Fordyce was as famous for his poor bedside manner as he was for his medical expertise. With his patients he was blunt and taciturn: A consultation usually consisted of asking his patients to stick out their tongues and have their pulses taken. “That will do,” was his usual pronouncement before writing out a prescription.
Born in Aberdeen, he came from a family of high achievers: Two of his brothers were doctors, one a Presbyterian minister, one a banker, and one a professor. At fourteen he gained his MA from Aberdeen University and spent several years apprenticed to his uncle, a doctor in Rutland. Returning to Scotland, he graduated in medicine at Edinburgh when he was only eighteen. His curt manner may have been exacerbated by the tragic loss of both of his sons in childhood, one of them by drowning in the Thames. He also had two daughters, one of whom married Samuel, brother of Jeremy Bentham.