Two European
immigrants coming to Demopolis in western Alabama during the 1800s could
have never foreseen the dynamic roles played by their families in the
cultural landscape of Twentieth Century America. Isaac Marx fled Germany to
escape persecution of Jews and arrived in Demopolis in 1844. Albert
Tallichet, a gentile from Switzerland, established a Demopolis grocery
business during the mid 1800s. Isaac's great granddaughter Lillian Hellman
gained fame as one of the country's pre-eminent playwrights. She partnered
in Hollywood with the nation's most honored filmmaker, William Wyler.
Albert's great granddaughter Margaret Tallichet became Mrs. William Wyler in
1938.
Photo Right: Margaret Tallichet, a Demopolis descendant also known as Mrs. William Wyler, on the left in the Hollywood picture from the 1930s.
The
Marxes and the Tallichets of Alabama were role models for pioneering
immigrant families of the Nineteenth Century. Isaac began life in Demopolis
as a peddler, who walked door to door with housewares for sale. His
persistence paid off, and after the Civil War, the well established Isaac
began to build 
businesses in Demopolis for his many sons. Two of his sons
became the president and vice president of Marx Banking Company, adjoined by
the livery stable operated by two more sons.
The Marxes were an Alabama dynasty before Reconstruction. They began to migrate to New York where banking fortunes were not limited by the pocketbooks of former plantation society. In a family full of ambitious sons, Isaac's daughter Sophie held her own. She married Leonard Newhouse, a Demopolis liquor dealer and secretary of the local Opera Association. The daughter of Leonard and Sophie, Julia Newhouse, followed the family's pattern of attending the prestigious Marengo Female Institute in Demopolis and Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans. But, Julia never had her mother's ambition and quickly abandoned her college career to marry Max Hellman, a New Orleans shoe salesman. Sophie Marx Newhouse never missed an opportunity to belittle Max and mock his poor business sense in front of Julia and her granddaughter Lillian.
Picture Above: Julia Newhouse was the mother of playwright Lillian Hellman and a native of Demopolis. Photo courtesy of the Lillian Hellman estate.
This "angry comedy" within Hellman's family became the basis for her play "The Little Foxes." She told a reporter with the Los Angeles Times on June 4, 1975: "I belonged on my mother's side to a banking, storekeeping family from Alabama and Sunday dinners were large, with high spirited talk and laughter from the older people of who did what to whom." The fictional Hubbards at the center of the play did not favorably depict the Marxes who, in contrast to their fictional counterparts, were instrumental to the religious and commercial development of their early Alabama town.
At age
68, Isaac Marx lit the perpetual lamp at the dedication of the first temple
in Demopolis on
Thanksgiving Day, November 30, 1893. He was also a member of
the original Jewish congregation formed in 1858. As the Marxes helped to
establish a temple, the Tallichets participated in the founding of the
Demopolis Methodist Church, the river town's first sanctuary. Albert
Tallichet is listed among the charter roster of members in 1840. Albert and
his wife Louisa Monnier Tallichet both fell victim to a yellow fever
epidemic in 1853, but their son Albert Compton Tallichet survived the
tragedy to carry on the family's role in the church and in the life of the
town.
Photo Right: Writer Lillian Hellman, descendant of the Marx and Newhouse families of Demopolis. Photo courtesy of the Lillian Hellman estate.
Tragedy overtook the Tallichet family again in 1895 when nineteen year old Eugene H. Tallichet, Albert's grandson, died just before Easter. A stained glass window entitled "The Resurrection" and dedicated to the young man's memory remains part of the collection of historic windows in the Methodist Church. Another grandson of Albert's, David Compton Tallichet, moved to Dallas where his daughter Margaret was born in 1914.
Photo
Left: Talli Wyler
Margaret
Tallichet graduated from Southern Methodist University and left for Los
Angeles in 1936 to visit a cousin at UCLA. She remained in Hollywood and
tried acting, even testing for Scarlett in "Gone With The Wind." Then she
was introduced by an agent to William Wyler. After three weeks of their
first meeting, Margaret Tallichet and William Wyler were married. Thereafter
"Talli" Wyler supported her husband's career and abandoned her own. She
befriended her husband’s Hollywood collaborators including another daughter
of Demopolis: Lillian Hellman.
The friendship of Lillian Hellman with Margaret Tallichet and William Wyler was the culmination point of a remarkable American story of immigration, persistence and ecumenical spirit that originated in Demopolis. Their creative legacy contained the works on stage and screen that stirred a nation.
Left: Playwright Lillian Hellman. Photo courtesy of
the Lillian Hellman estate.
Right: Bette Davis and William Wyler at his 75th birthday party.
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| For Information
contact: The Hellman Wyler Festival Birmingham Festival Theatre: 205-933-2383 Marengo County Historical Society: 334-289-0282 |
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