Late career (1952–1968)
Bankhead wrote a bestselling autobiography Tallulah: My Autobiography (Harper & Bros.) that was published in 1952. Though Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye. Her highly public and often scandalous personal life began to undermine her reputation as a terrific actress, leading to criticism she had become a caricature of herself. Although a heavy smoker, heavy drinker, and consumer of sleeping pills, Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, in radio and television, and in the occasional film, even as her body got more and more frail from the mid 1950s up until her death in 1968.
In 1953, Bankhead was enticed into appearing in a stage act at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. She was paid a generous $20,000 per week for her appearances, reciting scenes from famous plays, reading poetry and letters that had the audience in stitches, and sang. Las Vegas critics bet her act would flop, but instead it was highly successful. She returned to the Sands for three years.
Around this time, Bankhead began to attract a passionate and highly loyal following of gay men, some of whom she employed as help when her lifestyle began to take a toll on her, affectionately calling them her "caddies". Though she had long struggled with addiction, her condition now worsened – she began taking dangerous cocktails of drugs to fall asleep, and her maid had to tape her arms down to prevent her from consuming pills during her periods of intermittent wakefulness. In her later years, Bankhead had serious accidents and several psychotic episodes from sleep deprivation and hypnotic drug abuse. Though she always hated being alone, her struggle with loneliness began to lapse into a depression. In 1956, playing the truth game with Tennessee Williams, she confessed, "I'm 54, and I wish always, always, for death. I've always wanted death. Nothing else do I want more."
Bankhead's most popular and perhaps best remembered television appearance was the December 3, 1957 episode of The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show. She played herself in the classic episode "The Celebrity Next Door". The part was originally slated for Bette Davis, but Davis had to bow out after cracking a vertebra. Lucille Ball was reportedly a fan of Bankhead and did a good impression of her. By the time the episode was filmed, however, both Ball and Desi Arnaz were deeply frustrated by Bankhead's off-camera behavior during rehearsals. It took her three hours to "wake up" once she arrived on the set and she often seemed drunk. She also refused to listen to the director and she did not like rehearsing. Ball and Arnaz apparently did not know about Bankhead's antipathy to rehearsals or her ability to memorize a script quickly. After rehearsals, the filming of the episode proceeded without a hitch, and Ball congratulated Bankhead on her performance.
In 1956, Bankhead appeared as Blanche DuBois (a character inspired by her) in a revival of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Williams (a close friend) had wanted Bankhead for the original production, but she turned it down. He called her Blanche "the worst I have seen", accusing her of ruining the role to appease her fans who wanted camp. She agreed with this verdict, and made an effort to conquer the audience which her own legend had drawn about her, giving a performance two weeks later of which he remarked: "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." The director remarked that her performance exceeded those of Jessica Tandy and Vivien Leigh in the role. However, the initial reviews had decided the production's fate, and the producer pulled the plug after 15 performances.
Bankhead received a Tony Award nomination for her performance of a bizarre 50-year-old mother in the short-lived Mary Chase play Midgie Purvis (1961). It was a physically demanding role and Bankhead insisted on doing the stunts herself, including sliding down a staircase banister. She received glowing reviews, but the play suffered from numerous rewrites and failed to last beyond a month. Her last theatrical appearance was in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963), a revival of another Williams play, directed by Tony Richardson. She had suffered a severe burn on her right hand from a match exploding while she lit a cigarette, and it was aggravated by the importance of jewelry props in the play. She took heavy painkillers, but these dried her mouth, and most critics thought that Bankhead's line readings were unintelligible. As with Antony and Cleopatra, the nadir of her career, she only made five performances, and in the same unhappy theater.
Among her last radio appearances was in an episode of the BBC's Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley in 1964. Bankhead, at 62 and audibly suffering from breathing difficulties from emphysema in the interview, frankly spoke of how hopeless she would be on a desert island, admitting that she "couldn't put a key in the door, dahling. I can't do a thing for myself." In the interview, host Plomley spoke of Bankhead's glory days as the most celebrated actress of 1920s London. Later he recalled of their interview, "She was a very frail and ailing old lady, and I was shocked to see how old and ill she looked as I helped her out of a taxi. She had come from her hotel wearing a mink coat slung over a pair of lounging pyjamas, and she leaned heavily on my arm as I supported her to the lift. Her eyes were still fine, and there was still beauty in the bone structure of her face beneath the wrinkles and ravages of hard living. Her hands shook, and when she wished to go to the loo she had to ask Monica Chapman to accompany her to help her with her clothing."
Her last motion picture was a British horror film, Fanatic (1965). Fanatic was released in the U.S. as Die! Die! My Darling!, which she protested, thinking it was exploiting her famous catchphrase, but did not succeed in getting it changed. During the screening she held privately for her friends, she apologized for "looking older than God's wet nurse" (in the film she wore no makeup and dyed her hair grey, and the director used very claustrophobic close-ups to accentuate her age and frailty). She called the B-movie horror flick "a piece of shit", though her performance in it was praised by critics and it remains popular as a cult film and with her fans. For her role in Fanatic, she was paid $50,000. Her last appearances on television came in March 1967 as the villainous Black Widow in the Batman TV series, and in the December 17, 1967, episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour comedy-variety TV series, in the "Mata Hari" skit. She also appeared in NBC's famous lost Tonight Show Beatles interview that aired on May 14, 1968. Sitting behind the interview desk and beside Joe Garagiola, who was substituting for an absent Johnny Carson, she took an active role during the interview, questioning Paul McCartney and John Lennon. George Harrison and Ringo Starr were not present and were in England at the time, as noted during the interview.
