If I could choose from the present or the past one person I would like to head the list of guests at my most memorable New Year's Eve party, it would have to be an actress Americans of my generation remember well: Tallulah Bankhead.

Tallulah was the original of the star who made a "grand entrance" an hour late with theatrical cries of "Hello, daaaahlings!" encompassing everyone in the room, between puffs on her ubiquitous cigarette. Bette Davis in "All About Eve" was but a pale imitation of Bankhead at her best. Tallulah said it herself: "Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it."

Tallulah was, in essence, the greatest drag queen of all time, except for the fact that she was not a man -- sort of. Her heterosexual misadventures were famous while she lived ("It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time."), but after her death the other side of her private life came to the fore -- among them tales of her cruising the streets of New York in a chauffeur-driven limousine picking up pretty girls along the way.

As she phrased it, "My father warned me about men and booze, "but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine."

I saw her "live" only once, in a performance of a bad play called "Dear Charles," where in one line she referred to a mistakenly conceived child as "a shot in the dark." It was a sex romp typical of the roles in which she excelled -- lofty ladies with cool manners and hot pants who lived beyond the realm of common humanity. She was a star in all the media of her time, on radio, stage and screen. People named their cats, their dogs, their daughters, their guppies after her. She was everywhere, like a bad child who was into everything, but one whom you could only adore.

Her eccentricities were legion, the most notable being her penchant for receiving interviewers while naked in bed. No one seemed to mind. She was Tallulah, after all! It would have been fun to know her. It would have been a fabulous New Year's Eve party with no one but her in the room.

My good friend Michael, the columnist who offers us Twin Peeks" at the Silverfoxes Clubhouse, sent me some Bankhead anecdotes on New Year's Eve which started this train of thought. Let me share them with you now.

Tallu was invited to a party at the home of a couple who had two unruly children. Believe it or not, Tallulah was the first to arrive, and the host and hostess were quite embarrassed by their young hellions who were upstairs in their room making a racket.

To the couple's surprise, Tallulah offered to visit the children and calm them down. Up she went, returning to the living room twenty minutes later. There was complete silence upstairs. The hostess, dumbfounded, begged to know how her guest had accomplished this feat.

"Simple, daaaahling," Miss B. replied, "I taught them how to masturbate."

Then there was the time during WW II when Tallulah was appearing at a benefit in upstate New York, offering an evening of monologues and recitations.

At the beginning of the performance, some mishap occurred with the counterweight system in the flies, and a flurry of black curtains came crashing to the stage. They enveloped the star.

In the face of panic from the audience, Bankhead emerged unscathed from the tangle after a minute or two of struggle. Dusting herself off, she drew herself up and crowed, "I feel as though I've been fucked by a nun!"

THE END