"A star more than an actress, a personality more than a star." Such was the manner in which the critic Robert Gottlieb described Tallulah Bankhead, in a 2005 New Yorker piece. His valedictory (upon publication of her seventh biography), was that she "substituted personality for technique and eccentricity for effort" in one of the twentieth century’s saddest talent squanderings, one that reduced the actress to spending her last twelve years longing to die. "And since she was intelligent," Gottlieb added, "she must have been aware of the waste. No wonder she despaired."
Tallulah probably left her pure talent on stage in The Little Foxes and on film in Lifeboat (you would be very hard pressed to find anyone comfortable referring to her by her surname even now), but she did find one outlet, neither stage nor screen, where substituting personality for technique and eccentricity for effort actually did her a huge favour. Even, you dare say, to the extent of making her likeable in human terms because in no small part it shaped hers into a kind of comic image, and because she was smart enough not to think it beneath her to succumb.
The Big Show (the title notwithstanding, calling it an extravaganza may have been an understatement) began on NBC radio in 1950 as an instant hit with critics and listeners, even if its most effective valedictory referred with cruel wit to the primary target it couldn't arrest.
It was, wrote the New York Times critic Jack Gould, "good enough to make one wish he had seen it," but when television wasn't keeping people from caring much about this Sunday night spectacular of the mind's eye ("you could almost hear the sequins," the critic Gerald Nachman has written), Jack Benny (and other former NBC stars who had followed him jumping to CBS a year or so earlier) was. The show was probably lucky to live two years.
Throwback and forward pass at once, The Big Show revived the earliest successful radio style of the music-and-mirth variety. Not for nothing, perhaps, did such far earlier radio stars as Eddie Cantor and Ed Wynn turn up. It introduced a kind of pilot fish for Ed Sullivan's weekly television variety spectaculars, even if The Big Show wasn’t going to go far enough in absurdism to follow an operatic aria with an animal act.
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