All About “All About Eve” (10 page)

Gertrude Lawrence was an extravagant performer, extravagant in the Josephine Baker mode except that Lawrence didn’t use tail feathers and peek-a-boo outfits. The obverse of Baker, actually, Lawrence achieved extravagance by suppressing it, so that her preposterousness remained mostly subliminal. Beautifully dressed and coiffed, with a hint of madness under the makeup, Lawrence suggested camp By Appointment to His Majesty the King. Though not well remembered today, Lawrence was a celebrity when Mankiewicz considered her for
Eve
. (Julie Andrews, who played her in the 1968 movie musical
Star!
, captured none of the above.)

In certain photos Gertrude Lawrence resembles Dietrich: hands in slacks pockets, eyelids down. In other pictures she has the searching eyes, the absurdly thin and arched eyebrows of Elisabeth Bergner. Elsewhere—in family snapshots of Gertrude digging in the garden, without makeup and with a head scarf knotted in front—she could pass for Minnie Pearl.

Her Margo Channing would have lifted the picture into the clouds of cracked-soprano loopiness, evoking weird echoes of the British jazz age: long cigarette holders, smoking jackets, and fox-trots. There’s a certain wan sweetness about Gertrude Lawrence and her era, which by 1950 had already vanished. But to have made it Gertrude Lawrence’s movie in the way that it became Bette Davis’s, Mankiewicz would have had to rework
All About Eve
. With Bette the movie flames, because she plays Margo as a walking bonfire. Gertrude’s Margo Channing would have sparkled, occasionally going off like a Roman candle.

Mankiewicz claimed he sent Gertrude Lawrence his treatment and she liked it enormously. But getting the actual script into her hands was another matter. More than twenty years after
All About Eve
, Mankiewicz said, “To this day, I don’t know whether Gertie ever did read it; I’m quite sure that if she had, she would have crawled to California to play it.”

Here is the Mankiewicz version of his dealings with Gertrude Lawrence:

“All scripts were first submitted to, and approved by, her lawyer, Fanny Holtzmann. Miss Holtzmann read the screenplay and called me at home to say she found it very good. There were only two changes she would insist upon:

“One: The drunk scenes would have to be eliminated. It would be preferable, in fact, if Miss Lawrence neither drank nor smoked at all on the screen.

“Two: During the party sequence, the pianist was not to play ‘Liebestraum.’ Instead, he would accompany Miss Lawrence as she sang a torch song about Bill.”

Mankiewicz makes lawyer Holtzmann sound creepily protective. But unless he omitted some key part of the story, Holtzmann’s alleged first stipulation makes no sense. Gertrude Lawrence was often photographed with a cigarette in her hand, and she was no teetotaler onstage or off.

Holtzmann’s second condition does ring true. What better place to showcase Gertrude Lawrence than at a piano in the middle of a cocktail party? And the suggested song—“Bill,” with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse and Oscar Hammerstein II—might have worked well as Margo’s anxious but witty homage to Bill Sampson just when she’s terrified of losing him to the younger, fresh-faced Eve Harrington.

Lawrence made only a handful of movies. Her last was
The Glass Menagerie
, filmed in Hollywood in 1949. Though it wasn’t released until the fall of 1950, glowing reports of her performance in it were current in Hollywood as soon as the movie was completed. That’s another reason Mankiewicz wanted her.

Lawrence’s husband, Richard Aldrich, wrote that, while Gertrude was vacationing in Florida, Mankiewicz “approached her agent to secure her for the lead in his forthcoming picture
All About Eve
. On her return to New York she discussed the proposal with Fanny Holtzmann. The script, which I read at Gertrude’s earnest request, gave promise of becoming one of the best pictures of the year. Not least of the inducements of
All About Eve
was the salary which the studio was prepared to pay to get Gertrude.

“‘I’m turning it down,’ she informed me.

“‘Are you sure that’s wise?’

“‘I’m sure it’s very foolish—financially speaking. And it won’t help my career. But I told you—I want to be Mrs. A.
Now
will you believe me?’”

The war, and their careers, had kept Richard Aldrich and Gertrude Lawrence apart for much of their marriage. Her desire to play “Mrs. A”—Mrs. Aldrich—led her to take a year off. That was 1950, the year of
All About Eve
.

Lawrence also had something else in mind. She had seen Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne in
Anna and the King of Siam
and loved the movie. According to her husband, “When she refused the offer to star in
All About Eve
, she asked Fanny to look into the possibility of securing for her the right to have a musical made” from the Harrison-Dunne film. Having acquired these rights, Gertrude went to Rodgers and Hammerstein, “who contracted to write, compose, and produce the musical which became
The King and I
.”

Gertrude Lawrence played Anna Leonowens in this smash musical until she was hospitalized with hepatitis in the late summer of 1952 and, instead of convalescing as she had planned, she slipped into a coma and died.

And that, in a very long nutshell, is how Claudette, Susan, Marlene, and Gertrude did not play Margo Channing.

Chapter 6

The End of an Old Road, the Beginning of a New One

We left Bette Davis in a blaze of nerves on the set of
Payment on Demand
after her phone call from Darryl Zanuck. Following that conversation she went through a pack of cigarettes in two hours. It was all she could do to finish the day’s shooting, especially because her scenes called for restraint.

A messenger arrived at RKO in the late afternoon carrying a large envelope with Bette’s name on it. Excited as she was, she didn’t know quite what to expect. How long had it been since she had read a good script? This one, despite the ballyhoo, might be no more than a cut above the others.

“Good night, good night,” she said briskly to director and colleagues. She started reading the script as her chauffeur drove off the lot, and her enthusiasm grew with each page she turned. Over an hour later, when the driver reached her Tudor-style house perched on a rocky cliff at 1991 Ocean Way in Laguna Beach, Bette knew this was the best script she had read in years. Possibly the best one ever.

Bette jumped out of the car and raced inside, not pausing at any window to regard the vast Pacific that seemed part of her own real estate. She was bustin’ to finish the script.

She stopped just long enough to pour herself a glass of scotch, then marched into her bedroom and, provisioned with plenty of cigarettes, didn’t come out again until she had not only finished reading
All About Eve
but had started to learn her lines.

Next morning she phoned Darryl Zanuck. Their conversation was full of goodwill. The most important line in it, of course, was Bette’s: “Darryl, I’d love to play Margo Channing.”

As soon as she hung up she called Mankiewicz. He invited her to dinner to discuss Margo Channing and the shooting schedule. No one remembered later where they ate, or what, but when decades had passed Bette still recalled what Mankiewicz told her about Margo: “He said she was the kind of dame who would treat her mink coat like a poncho!” And in the movie she does just that. Margo, leaving for the airport with Bill, stretches across the dressing-room chaise longue to scoop her fur coat off the floor.

Bette had five days left on
Payment on Demand
at RKO. She had looked forward to a vacation; now that was out. On the contrary, she must double up. Edith Head, at Bette’s insistence, was to design the Margo Channing outfits (but no one else’s) for
All About Eve.
Bette immediately started going to Edith for dress fittings at night after a long day’s work at RKO to finish up
Payment on Demand
.

The reason for this breakneck schedule was that the Curran Theatre in San Francisco had been rented for two weeks of location shooting to begin April 11. With a play closing and another to open soon, the Curran was available for only two weeks in April.

Since a number of scenes in
All About Eve
take place in a cavernous Broadway playhouse, it made artistic sense to shoot them in a real theatre. Apparently it made financial sense as well, for 20th Century-Fox, in budgeting the film, had decided that location filming in an actual old New York–style theatre was preferable to building a theatre set.

Lyle Wheeler, the art director, had scouted Los Angeles theatres but found nothing appropriate. The Ethel Barrymore in New York was briefly considered, but scheduling proved difficult, and the cost of flying cast and crew that far was prohibitive. Eventually Wheeler hit upon the solution of using the ornate old Curran, built in 1922 and only four hundred miles away. But this decision meant there was no flexibility in the starting date. Since Margo Channing was needed in virtually every scene to be shot at the Curran, Bette Davis didn’t get a single day off between pictures.

On April 5, 1950, Bette celebrated her forty-second birthday on the set of
Payment on Demand
. After cake and champagne, the cast and crew surprised her with a huge ostrich egg. For a moment Bette looked blank, then she read the inscription and laughed:
Thanks for being a Good Egg.

Two days later, on April 7, Bette signed her contract for
All About Eve
, and four days after that, on the eleventh, production began in San Francisco.

*   *   *

“Darryl Zanuck had a hair fetish. He didn’t like too much of it. I had a hairy chest and a messy head of hair.” This is Gary Merrill on how Mankiewicz overruled Zanuck in casting him, rather than John Garfield, as Bill Sampson. Since the time of
All About Eve
is one Broadway season, October to chilly late spring, Bill needn’t bare his chest. And in the movie his head of hair is more kempt than Margo’s.

“I never tried to get the part in
All About Eve
, never called an agent,” Merrill said some years later. “I thought about who might be chosen to play the part, but did nothing about it. I was lying on the beach at Malibu when the phone rang, and I almost missed hearing it. The call was from Joe Mankiewicz, asking if I would test with Anne Baxter for
Eve
.”

Along with Zanuck’s aversion to hirsute actors, he wasn’t easily convinced that Gary Merrill could play the Broadway director who loves Margo Channing but who also stands up to her. Zanuck grumbled that Gary Merrill “had only played around airplanes,” and he was right, for Merrill’s Hollywood career hadn’t led him beyond portrayals of lieutenants, commanders, and the like in such military aviation films as
Winged Victory
(1944),
Slattery’s Hurricane
(1949), and
Twelve O’Clock High
(1949).

“On Sundays,” Merrill wrote in his memoirs, “a large film studio is nearly deserted. The empty sets for westerns, New York streets, or Arabic marketplaces are rather eerie. One Sunday in 1950 I had been called to the studio for a makeup test with Miss Bette Davis.”

Bette Davis: “This was the first time I met Gary. They did photographic tests of us together. I was to look older than he as Margo. I did.”

Gary Merrill: “On that Sunday I went to the test stage, and there, being turned this way and that, as though she had just been picked up from a counter at a jewelry store, was the Queen, Bette Davis.”

Bette Davis: “I had seen the film
Twelve O’Clock High
and an actor in it named Gary Merrill. I had never seen him before and I was greatly impressed by his performance and looks.”

Gary Merrill: “The makeup people should have been pampering her but instead they were twirling her around, examining facial lines. They were trying to see if our age difference would be too noticeable. The professional attitude Bette adopted throughout the ordeal was impressive.”

Bette Davis: “Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism.”

Gary Merrill: “Bette had a few character lines around those incredible eyes, but here was a magnetic woman with a compelling aura of femininity who might also be willing to confront dragons. I was irresistibly drawn to her.”

Bette Davis: “People get the idea that actresses my age are dying to play younger women. The fact is, we die every time we play one.”

Gary to Bette: “Certainly wonderful of you to come to the studio on a Sunday.”

Bette to Gary: “For this part, I would come to the studio seven days and nights a week.”

Gary Merrill: “Never in the history of motion pictures has an actress been so perfectly cast.”

And so, sizing each other up, they both liked what they saw. But before the romance of Bette and Gary could take wing, each one had to shed a marital encumbrance.

*   *   *

Bette’s third marriage—to William Grant Sherry, variously characterized as “a muscle-bound sailor” who was “an artist of sorts” with a “bohemian attitude and blunt manner”—had been rather ludicrous from the start. According to one of Bette’s biographers, she “decided to marry him only a month after she picked him up at a party” in 1945. Already this sounds like the scenario of a boisterous Bette Davis picture, but it gets better—meaning much worse—during the next five years.

It’s easy to see why Bette fell for Sherry the Hunk. Hedda Hopper’s mouthwatering description would almost qualify for the pages of
Honcho
: “In a suit you couldn’t possibly guess what a handsome Greek God he was. Now he’d run up fresh from the sea with the water still glistening on his mahogany tanned skin. He was in navy trunks, and with a physique that would do for Atlas, stood before me, muscles rippling evenly under a firm skin, young, strong, and handsomely male. He has an even, confident, ingratiating smile, kindly but masculine as a left hook.”

Bette was starving, and here was her banquet.

But someone might just as well have sprinkled gunpowder on the bridal veil, for during the honeymoon trip to Mexico City Bette nagged and taunted, the bridegroom exploded, and somewhere in the middle of a cactus desert he shoved her from the car. A quickie Mexican divorce was the obvious solution, but the unhappy couple seemed determined to live miserably ever after.