​“Conscience isn’t like a liver, you can get on without it.”

Tallulah Bankhead, Performing This Marriage by Eliot C. Williams

Tallulah Bankhead was reciting a line from a play in which she was performing when she joked that a person could get by without a conscience. Given her outlandish lifestyle (which put tremendous stress on her own liver), the quip might have been something she came up with all on her own. In a less-talented actress, the scandalous behavior would have outshone the career (and eventually it did). 

From her heyday in the twenties through her death in the late sixties, Bankhead's hijinks practically kept the tabloids in business. Yet, no Real Housewife was she. Instead, Tallulah could channel the wit and deadpan delivery of Oscar Wilde. Consider the time she walked into a restaurant and discovered her then-lover, Lord "Naps" Alington, dining with his wife, and he pretended not to know her. Without missing a beat, she walked over to his table and inquired, "What’s the matter dahling, don’t you recognize with my clothes on?”

Image Credit: People on Parade

“Dahling, all the outrageous stories about me are true.”
 
Tallulah Bankhead, via Barnaby Conrad, Name Dropping, Tales from My Barbary Coast Saloon

Image via Museum of the City of New York, "Cecil Beaton: The New York Years"

“Tallulah never bored anyone, and I consider that humanitarianism of a very high order indeed.” 
 
Anita Loos, A Girl Like I

Image Credit: The Best of Beaton