Tucked away on a winding country road midway between Chestertown and Rock Hall on Maryland’s Eastern Shore lies St. Paul’s Episcopal Parish, more than 300 years old, with its picture-perfect, cozy brick church and surrounding 19-acre graveyard. One late afternoon when I visited, the serenity of the place was broken only by the chorus of ducks and geese enjoying the adjacent millpond. I was wandering the graveyard and having trouble finding a particular tombstone—the final resting spot of the turbulent, talented, and scandalous Tallulah Bankhead, star of stage, film, radio, and television from the 1920s until her death in 1968.

That the denizen of the Stork Club and other Manhattan watering holes who boasted “I’m the foe of moderation, the champion of excess” should end up in a quiet country churchyard in Kent County seems ironic; but her sister, Eugenia, who lived on a nearby farm, insisted. The pair, who had a contentious love/hate relationship during their lives, now lie side by side in the graveyard.

I was not the first person to look for Tallulah’s grave. Far from it. Sue Reep, the church secretary at St. Paul’s, laughed as she told me, “If I had a nickel for everyone who asked me where she was I’d be rich. You wouldn’t believe how many come.” According to Reep there’s a steady stream of visitors to the churchyard who venerate the once-great actress as a kind of cult figure and often leave bottles of bourbon (her favorite drink) or flowers atop her flat stone.

The celebrity’s grave is at the very edge of the churchyard, next to a stretch of woods and beneath a spreading tulip poplar—and about as far as you can
get from the church itself. Small wonder: The occupant of the grave supposedly never set foot in the church during her lifetime. 

And what a lifetime it was. The whole world knew her by her first name—“Tallulah”—a celebrity of the brightest magnitude and the highest paid actress of her day. She had a deep, smoky voice immediately recognizable to millions—a voice, in the words of a fellow actor, “steeped as deep in sex as the human voice can go without drowning.” She talked nonstop. One stunned listener said memorably: “I’ve just spent an hour talking to Tallulah for a few minutes.”

The actress famously doffed her clothes at parties, swore like a longshoreman, and was rarely seen without a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other. And then there were the drugs. “Cocaine isn’t habit-forming,” she once said. “I should know. I’ve been using it for years.” She laughed with abandon but was heartbreakingly lonesome, despite the entourage she surrounded herself with—as the years went on, mainly handsome, young gay men (she referred to them as her “caddies”), who fetishized her campy, over-the-top style.

Family life drew her to the Eastern Shore. Her nephew Billy, now in his late 60s, still runs a sheep farm in Rock Hall with his wife, Cindy. Both are regulars at Chestertown’s farmers market on Saturday mornings and I’ve enjoyed their delicious lamb chops and lamb sausage.

Billy has long since given up talking publicly about his famous aunt, but Cindy still speaks fondly of Tallulah. Though “diva-ish,” Cindy says, “she was very sweet and kind. Quirky. And demanding. I remember when she was trying to quit smoking, she insisted that someone sit next to her and blow smoke in her face.” (She never was able to break the habit.)

Cindy told me that blue-eyed Tallulah gave her permission to name her newborn daughter after the actress, with one proviso: “If her eyes turn brown, I have to rename her.” She was, of course, immediately smitten with the baby and referred to her thereafter as “my darling namesake Tallulah.”

Locals still recall the celebrity with affection. When Jim Messersmith and Barry Barr used to visit Rock Hall by boat, they’d hear stories of Tallulah’s exploits from the owner of the local marina. They were instantly hooked—so much so that when they established a hotel in 1999, they named it in her honor, Tallulah’s on Main. Its “Bankhead Suite,” appropriately enough, sports a queen-sized brass bed. (They didn’t come any brassier than Tallulah.) And a reproduction of Augustus John’s well-known painting of the actress (the original is at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery) hangs in the hotel’s parlor. Dressed in pale pink and pearls, her arms demurely folded, her heavy-lidded blue eyes looking downward, the young Tallulah appears both beautiful and sad.

Messersmith regaled me with stories about the actress in Rock Hall. She was known to do her food shopping at Myers Brothers, a small grocery store long since closed, that was next to the hotel.The grocers happily catered to Tallulah’s needs. If she placed an order by 9 a.m., they promised that she’d get whatever specialty item she needed from Manhattan by 5 p.m.—the bus driver would hand-deliver it.Stories about her continue to make the rounds: Tallulah in a duck blind dressed in mink and pearls (no camo for her), and flying with Kent County’s Louisa Carpenter, a DuPont heiress and early aviatrix.

Cindy Bankhead is not entirely convinced by some of the tales, remembering instead how Tallulah “liked to be inside” where she’d play cards with her sister, Eugenia, and entertain friends. The biggest chunk of time Tallulah spent in Kent County was during the last summer of her life. She stayed for several months after the ceiling of her New York apartment collapsed in July 1968. Cindy recalls that the siblings spent much of the time arguing over childhood grievances, continuing a life-long rivalry over their father’s affections. (William Bankhead, a powerful U.S. congressman from Alabama and Speaker of the House from 1936-40, supposedly preferred Eugenia to Tallulah, and the latter never forgot it—nor forgave her sister.)

Not long after her return to New York, Tallulah contracted Asian flu; that combined with the emphysema that she suffered from proved fatal. She died in December at age 66, her sister at her side. Leaving the world in melodramatic style, Tallulah’s last words were “Codeine ... bourbon.” Wrapped in a favorite dressing gown, her coffin lined in baby blue silk, Tallulah was buried at St. Paul’s; Eugenia threw herself on her sister’s casket during the service. Tallulah wanted her favorite motto, “Press On!” inscribed on her tombstone, but her sister won that final battle: The flat stone simply states the star’s name and the dates of her life span.

Even in death Tallulah continues to mesmerize. At least seven biographies have been written about her since 1968, and she’s been portrayed onstage by both Kathleen Turner in “Tallulah,” and Valerie Harper in “Looped,” the latter earning accolades this past summer at Washington’s Arena Stage. The play may yet end up on Broadway this fall. Tallulah, no doubt, would be thrilled.

Donna M. Lucey is the author of “Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age.”