Hollywood: Were Hattie McDaniel and Tallulah Bankhead Really an Item? – Vanity Fair

The secret lives of Hollywoods closeted movie stars serves as the main engine of Hollywood, Ryan Murphys splashy reimagining of cinemas golden age. The Netflix miniseries takes heavy inspiration from the life of Scotty Bowers, the late Hollywood pimp who worked at a gas station that doubled as a sex work operation. Reportedly, Bowers set up queer trysts for everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Cary Grant. While those two stars dont get the in-depth treatment in Hollywood, the series does take a look at the rumored affair between Hattie McDaniel (played by Queen Latifah) and Tallulah Bankhead (Paget Brewster), portraying the pair as lovers in episode five.

In the episode, the duo are cozied up at McDaniels house, chatting amiably about their all-night fling with one of Bowerss employees. The show treats the relationship as a fact, presenting McDaniel and Bankhead as an established couple. In real life, rumors persisted for years about the pairbut its hard to pin down when and where those rumblings first began.

Like many stars who may have been closeted in that era, neither woman ever confirmed the whispers, though the McDanielBankhead affair has been repeated in nonfiction books like The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood and The Sewing Circle, a contested account of lesbian and bisexual women in Hollywood. In 2000, there was even a musical about the pair, titled Tallulah and Hattie: Dead at the Pearly Gates Cafe. The affair, it seems, has become an accepted part of each actors respective Tinseltown lore.

Beyond the affair, though, both women had active romantic lives. McDaniel, the Gone With the Wind star who made history as the first black actor to win an Academy Award, married four times over the course of her career. She had two brief marriages early on in her career, the Hollywood Reporter notes, long before starring in Gone With the Wind.

In 1941, she married Los Angeles real estate agent James Lloyd Crawford; four years later, they got divorced. McDaniels married a fourth, and final, time in 1949, to interior decorator Larry Williams; they divorced the following year. McDaniel never had children, entrusting her legacy to her sister Etta, whose children maintain it to this day, per THR.

Bankhead, meanwhile, developed a reputation over the course of her career as a sexual provocateur, often remembered more for her larger-than-life personality than her onscreen pursuits. I was obsessed with Tallulah Bankhead, because she was so ballsy and out there, and also felt never seen and never appreciated, Murphy told Vanity Fair. A big Broadway actress, came to Hollywood, didnt have the success that she wanted.

Still, Bankhead was well known in A-list Hollywood circles. We all adored her, Joan Crawford once said, according to The New Yorker. We were fascinated by her, but we were scared to death of her too. She had such authority, as if she ruled the earth, as if she was the first woman on the moon.

As The New Yorker notes, Bankhead claimed to have slept with 500 people, and was rumored to have had affairs with a slew of starsincluding actor Eva Le Gallienne and actor John Emery, whom she married in 1937, then divorced four years later. During their marriage, she reportedly developed a habit for sneaking guests into their bedroom while Emery slept, then pulling back the covers on him. Did you ever see a prick as big as that before? she would say, according to The New Yorker. Soon she sang a different tune: Well, darling, the weapon may be of admirable proportions, but the shot is indescribably weak.

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Hollywood: Were Hattie McDaniel and Tallulah Bankhead Really an Item? - Vanity Fair