Tallulah Bankhead on Norman Mailer (1948)
Nov 10th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Young Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead turned him into an overnight celebrity but it appeared early enough for its publisher to have serious problems with a pungent monosyllable that peppered the manuscript. Mailer had written naturalistically about the robust young Americans in uniform he’d known during World War II, and for him to have bowdlerized the lingo he’d found himself personally immersed in would have largely castrated his powerful novel. The publishers finally reached a triumphant compromise by merely replacing two letters with one and turning it loose in that only slightly castrated form – hoping and praying that even that wouldn’t land them in legal hot water.
According to the story I heard from Jerry Robbins – himself at that time (the late 1940s) a fairly new celebrity due to his smashing successes as choreographer of the ballet On the Town (expanded into the full-scale musical Wonderful Town), who in due time compounded his success and fame by taking an idea of his to Leonard Bernstein, who’d composed the music for both those works, who then collaborated with Jerry and a few more such exceptionally bright contemporaries (Betty Comden and Adolph Green plus Arthur Laurents, who wrote the script) in transplanting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into one of the tougher neighborhoods of that day’s Manhattan as the worldwide smash hit West Side Story.
As Jerry Robbins told it, Norman Mailer’s introduction to Tallulah Bankhead inspired one of her more memorable off-the-cuff ad libs: “Ah, yes – you’re that funny little man that doesn’t know how to spell fuck.”
