All About “All About Eve” (15 page)

I saw then that it wasn’t just a personal thing with Mr. Mankiewicz but that maybe everybody in Hollywood was just as scared of being associated with Lincoln Steffens. So I didn’t say anything more about him, to anybody, not even to Johnny Hyde. I didn’t want to get
him
in trouble. But I continued to read the second volume secretly and kept both volumes hidden under my bed.

Whether Marilyn literally hid those books under her bed or not, it’s the right metaphor for America’s red scare in 1950. And nowhere was the scare more hysterical than in Hollywood. Perhaps Mankiewicz, a political liberal, was frightened, even though he had never belonged to a left-wing organization. Certainly he was aware that innocuous pursuits, such as reading books critical of America, could sometimes make one the object of unpleasant scrutiny. In fact, the red baiters gave Mankiewicz himself quite a scare over a loyalty oath, although his brush with the Hollywood Inquisition came later in 1950, several months after his admonition to Marilyn. (Kenneth Geist, in his biography
Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz
, gives a full account of Mankiewicz versus the McCarthyites.)

Whether Marilyn read Rilke or Lincoln Steffens on the set of
All About Eve
is not of surpassing significance, except that Mankiewicz seems unfair in characterizing her as vacuous and cognitively haphazard. Those who knew her well have said she read a lot. At various times she read Shakespeare, Proust, Emerson, Joyce, Freud, the Bible. It’s just possible that she had a genuine interest in Rilke. The German actress Hildegard Knef, who was acquainted with Monroe at the time, said that Marilyn asked her a number of questions about German literature. And the day they met, Marilyn was carrying a copy of Rilke’s poetry under one arm.

Chapter 11

Killer to Killer

At the end of the first week of filming, everyone joined Mankiewicz to view the rushes. These various rudimentary scenes had been developed at the studio in Los Angeles, spliced into coherence by film editor Barbara McLean, and flown back to San Francisco.

Months of anxious preparation had led up to these images on a small portable screen. Here at last was the evidence to exhilarate or depress. Were they making an outstanding film, or just another picture? How well they all remembered big productions that began in giddy optimism and then petered out. In such cases, only frustration came from watching rushes—scenes that misfired, sequences that fell drably short of expectations.

On that Saturday night, after watching the results of their best professional efforts, they were all excited. Even this crude preview of
Eve
bolstered their faith. They were good; they were great. Monday morning, on the set, they were even better than before.

“Every day was like a glorious relay race,” Anne Baxter recalled of the time spent filming
All About Eve
. She added, “None of us, Marilyn Monroe included,
none
of us could wait to get to work.” In spite of the discontents common to every movie set—rivalry, suspicion, gossip, hangovers, upstaging, missed cues, catty remarks, delays, overtime, rumors, deadline pressure, sexual jealousy—even with a full measure of these, the making of
All About Eve
came to be a happy memory for Anne Baxter.

Excellence
was the word she chose to sum it up. “I was good, I was respected, I had a great part, the script was superb, the actors were perfect and perfectly cast.” Although Baxter played a treacherous bitch, she made friends with her on-screen adversary, Bette Davis. (Their friendship lasted, and one May morning in 1983, while visiting Anne Baxter in Connecticut, Bette stepped out of the shower and toweling herself dry, discovered a lump in her breast. Anne comforted her seventy-five-year-old houseguest as best she could, never dreaming that Bette would outlive her by four painful years.)

Rapprochement with fellow actresses was rare for Bette Davis. A friend said, “Bette was really fond of only four female co-stars: Olivia de Havilland, Mary Astor, Anne Baxter, and Gena Rowlands, whom she favored above the others.” From colleagues, Bette demanded as much as she put forth. If they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, reciprocate, look out. Having worked with Errol Flynn in
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
in 1939 and finding him insufficiently intense, Bette bad-mouthed him for the next fifty years. And then there was Susan Hayward, who played Bette’s daughter in
Where Love Has Gone
(1964). “She wouldn’t give me anything in our scenes,” Bette growled. “It was like playing to a blank wall.” On the last day of filming Bette took off her wig, flung it in Susan’s face, and barked a valedictory “Fuck you!”

But Bette considered Anne Baxter superb in
All About Eve
. “Margo and Eve’s relationship worked on two or three levels,” Bette explained. “Anne was really playing a double role: one thing on the surface, another underneath. I called it the ‘sweet bitch.’ Her part was more difficult than mine.”

Anne Baxter, who made her Broadway debut at age thirteen, later revealed that she had patterned Eve Harrington on her own first understudy. That girl, she said, “was nice to everybody but me and would always be in the wings watching me like a hawk. In the movie I tried to follow Bette around with my eyes to get that feeling across.”

The Fate of Understudies

• Backstage at
Phantom of the Opera
(1943), the star soprano of the Paris Opéra, Madame Biancarolli, is drugged (by Claude Rains, the Phantom) so that his protégée (Christine DuBois, the star’s understudy) can go on. Later Madame Biancarolli is murdered by the Phantom.

• In
The Actor’s Nightmare
, a play by Christopher Durang, a man finds himself more or less forced to go onstage as an understudy having absolutely no idea of his lines or business. He flounders in Noël Coward, Shakespeare, Beckett, and finally in Robert Bolt’s
A Man for All Seasons,
at which point he is executed—apparently for real.

• In 1934 Max Reinhardt came to Los Angeles to direct a stage production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the Hollywood Bowl. The production became famous for several reasons, one of them being that it presented an unknown young actress named Olivia de Havilland. She had appeared in a local production of the play the previous year while a freshman in college and was briefly an understudy in the Hollywood Bowl production. Reinhardt chose her as a last-minute replacement for the star, Gloria Stuart, who was unable to go on. The following year Reinhardt used de Havilland in his film version of the play, and she has been a star ever since.

Anne Baxter called her director “Joe the Mank.” And since he had just won two Academy Awards for
A Letter to Three Wives
on March 29, a couple of weeks before they all arrived in San Francisco, Anne and others in the cast glued two large plastic Kewpie dolls—representing his two new Oscars—to the lectern where Joe kept his annotated copy of the script.

She had a secret crush on him. “John Hodiak and I were happily married then, but Joe’s wit, his modest perspicacity, and my latent father complex drew me to him like a magnet,” Anne Baxter confessed long afterward. “In fact, all the ladies on the set melted and gravitated to him as I did.”

Bette, in fact, suspected more than a crush. While making the picture, and long after, she reportedly believed that Anne and Mankiewicz had had a backstage affair. For twenty years Bette retained a nagging suspicion that Mankiewicz had somehow favored Anne Baxter, and that the favoritism involved sexual politics. According to Bette’s longtime secretary, Vik Greenfield, Bette at last came out with it. “We went to see Anne Baxter in
Applause,
” Greenfield said, “and when we were backstage, Bette asked Anne if she had an affair with Joe during the making of
All About Eve
. ‘No,’ said Baxter. ‘I always thought you did,’ said Bette.”

True or false? Why, one wonders, would Bette wait so long to ask the burning question? Surely the delay wasn’t caused by natural timidity. And since their paths often crossed, Bette could have interrogated Anne years before.

Anne Baxter corrected another misapprehension. Gossip to the contrary, she always denied there was any kind of feud between her and Bette on the set. “The studio tried to play that up all during the filming,” she said. “But I liked Bette very much. She’d come on the set and go ‘S-s-s-s-s’ at me, but it was just a joke between us.” Interviewed in the early eighties for the BBC documentary,
Bette Davis: A Basically Benevolent Volcano
, Baxter said, “She never threw fits without a damn good reason.” She was referring to Bette’s entire career, not to the placid set of
Eve
.

An interviewer asked Celeste Holm about working with Anne Baxter. “Oh, she was fine. But of course you know she was what’s-his-name’s granddaughter.”

“Frank Lloyd Wright,” supplied the interviewer.

“Frank Lloyd Wright,” repeated Holm. “And so she was very sophisticated and very, ‘Have you read the latest Christopher Fry?’”

Perhaps this breezy, left-handed compliment owes something to an anecdote that Anne Baxter had told earlier about Celeste. When cast and crew left San Francisco to complete filming at the studio in Los Angeles, they were scheduled to shoot on Stage 9, one of the smaller soundstages on the Fox lot. As Anne recalled, “Our assistant, Stan Hough, didn’t want to crowd the sets, and after pushing and fitting five portable dressing rooms here, there, and everywhere, he left Celeste Holm’s outside. Out in the cold was more to the point. Celeste took one look and tearfully flounced back to her permanent dressing room.

“Joe was horrified and furious. He all but foamed at the mouth. He knew how vital it was that we work easily together.

“Everything stopped for two solid hours while Joe, all three assistants, Celeste’s agent, and several emissaries from the front office made elaborate apologies. She came back on the set chin high, wet eyes shining resolutely—we couldn’t help wondering if she’d toured in Saint Joan.”

Celeste counters that this slight occurred because, sometime earlier, she had quit the studio and Zanuck now wanted to punish her. “Mr. Mankiewicz insisted that I play the part of Karen and Mr. Zanuck didn’t want any part of that. So when I arrived, my dressing room was out in the alley and everybody else’s was inside. Mankiewicz said, ‘What are you trying to do? Kill an actress?’”

In San Francisco Bette Davis was forced to use a small, dingy dressing room. She claimed she didn’t mind at all. She was even quoted as saying that Hollywood spoils actors by treating them too royally. “This cubbyhole,” she said nobly, “is all an actress needs. A place to hide while she changes clothes. I think those ankle-deep carpets, mirrored walls, and elegantly furnished suites Hollywood gives newcomers tend to magnify their opinion of themselves.” (P.S.: When Bette arrived back in Los Angeles, 20th Century-Fox saw to it that she got the plushest dressing suite in town.)

George Sanders, commenting on his two top female co-stars in
All About Eve
, sounded like one of those studio publicists hatching up a feud: “Bette upstaged Anne Baxter at every turn, and drove Anne to distraction. Playing a woman of forty who was jealous of a much younger woman, Bette played it as if it were happening to her personally. Anne caught the underlying tensions and viciousness. It is to her credit that it spurred her to act even better than she would have with a gracious co-star.”

Bette returned his fire. She had heard about Sanders’ bisexuality from Henry Fonda, an actor who disdained all deviation from what he considered the norm. This led Bette to characterize Sanders as a “bitch.” Bette said he was more of a bitch to work with than Miriam Hopkins had been (which, coming from Bette, was saying a lot) and that he upstaged her at every opportunity. “He won that goddamned award [meaning his Oscar for Best Supporting Actor of 1950] at my expense!” she snarled.

Was Bette justified in her disdain for Sanders? Curiously, he is perhaps the only person ever to admire the character of Eve, whom he called “the nearest thing to a heroine in our story.” Most of us see Margo as that heroine. After all, the beleaguered Margo survives not only her double-crossing friend, Karen, her unsupportive boyfriend, Bill Sampson, and the disloyal playwright, Lloyd Richards, but also “that venomous fishwife” Addison DeWitt and Eve, his unholy ally.

Sanders found nothing heroic in Margo Channing. He characterized her as “a vain, aging, flamboyant, temperamental woman … How many members of the audience could, or would have cared to, identify themselves with her?” The answer, of course, is that she’s the only one in the picture anyone
can
identify with—at least for very long. (Thelma Ritter’s friend-indeed role is too brief and too one-dimensional to arouse more than passing empathy.)

“Her lack of fundamental graciousness toward her co-players disgusted me,” Sanders sneered. He was referring, now, to Bette Davis, not Margo Channing. But just how gracious was he?

“George Sanders never spoke to anyone,” Celeste Holm said. “He was a brilliant actor, but he wasn’t much fun.”

George Sanders: A Psychological Self-Portrait

“The kind of actor I have become has been determined to a large extent by the weakness of my character. On the screen I am usually suave and cynical, cruel to women and immune to their slights and caprices. This is my mask, and it has served me faithfully for twenty-five years. But in reality I am a sentimentalist, especially about myself—readily moved to tears by cheap emotions and invariably the victim of woman’s inhumanity to man.”

—Sanders,
Memoirs of a Professional Cad

“George slept soundly in his portable dressing room between shots,” Anne Baxter said. “It bothered me only once. Eve’s climactic scene, when Addison DeWitt confronts her with her real self and lays down their private ground rules, was a formidable challenge. It required a gamut of emotions, building to and culminating in hysteria and ending in acrid defeat.”