All About “All About Eve” (16 page)

Baxter explained that she was a “starting-gate actress,” meaning she was ready to act long before she walked onto the set. In fact, even as she climbed into the makeup chair, she was already in character. For her, rehearsals differed very little from takes. But George Sanders “yawned his way through rehearsals.”

So when Baxter and Sanders did the first take of that climactic scene between Eve and Addison, it was like “opening night” for her, but for George it was more like closing.

“Take it easy, Annie,” Mankiewicz cautioned in a whisper.

“Godalmighty, Joe, I don’t know
how
. Can’t we stick a pin in George?”

“He’ll warm up,” Joe whispered. “Just be damned sure you don’t exhaust yourself.
Save
yourself the first few takes.”

She tried to save herself, to hold back, but “by take five I was a rag.”

Mankiewicz called a short break and took George aside. He and Sanders talked quietly. Baxter remembered that Mankiewicz laid a hand on “George’s elegantly tailored shoulder” while they spoke.

She walked around, taking deep breaths and trying to relax without losing her emotional climax.

“Take six. Take seven—and George went off like a rocket.”

This sequence, where Sanders slaps Baxter and she flings herself across the hotel bed, is a little S&M masterpiece. Eve taunts Addison as if to provoke his wrath. She succeeds; he strips her emotionally and dominates her. Both grow more aroused as Addison’s vehemence reaches an erotic crescendo. The scene ends when Addison, having conquered her, makes Eve recite a brief masochist’s catechism:

ADDISON

Are you listening to me?

EVE

(
She lies listlessly now, her tear-stained cheek against the coverlet. She nods.
)

ADDISON

Then say so.

EVE

Yes, Addison.

ADDISON

And you realize—and you agree how completely you belong to me?

EVE

Yes, Addison.

The subtext of sexual frenzy, so camouflaged that Sanders and Baxter may well have been unaware of its implications despite their brilliance in the scene, suggests a lot about both characters. Just prior to the lines quoted above, Addison sneers at Eve: “That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability.” The most obvious interpretation of this line is, “That I should want such a weak, pathetic character as you.” Another possible meaning is, “That I should want you at all
now that I’ve got you
.” Or still another: “That I should want you
or any woman
.”

Shortly before this scene, Addison appears as an unmistakable voyeur. Standing outside Eve’s dressing room when she tries (with no luck) to seduce Bill Sampson, Addison is obviously aroused. His expression implies a vicarious thrill, perhaps onanistic.

In
All About Eve
, and in other Mankiewicz films, erotic scenes often involve a solitary character. The only time we see Bill and Margo in bed they’re 3,000 miles apart, talking on the phone. (Later, at the Curran Theatre, they play half of an unerotic fight on a bed onstage.) Eve’s initial seduction attempt—clandestine letters to Bill while he’s away—involves only her.

Even when a sex scene is played
à deux
, passion is subordinate to speech. Whether we believe her or not, Eve claims that the first night she and Lloyd Richards spent together they “talked all night.”

Put another way, orgasm in a Mankiewicz movie is deferred, sometimes forever. In
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
Gene Tierney is sex-proof in her prolonged affair with the phantom, Rex Harrison. Only at her death does the honeymoon begin. Then there’s Addie Ross, the insinuating, invisible narrator of
A Letter to Three Wives
. The movie is structured on her epistolary seduction of the husband of one of the wives, yet she doesn’t get him after all. (Celeste Holm, narrating the voice-over role of Addie, makes her as vivid a character as anyone we do see.) In
The Barefoot Contessa
Rossano Brazzi tells Ava Gardner on their wedding night that his body was blown apart in the war. Though he bears no visible scars, we’re to understand that his penis is permanently dysfunctional.

To return to the hotel scene with Addison DeWitt and Eve Harrington—what a feat of directing Mankiewicz brought off: He coaxed fire from Sanders, once he woke the actor up. From Baxter, smoldering and ready to go off, he got fireworks. Scenes like this one, less famous than the “fasten your seat belts” set pieces, didn’t necessarily win Man-kiewicz his Oscars. But they do show his genius.

Chapter 12

A New Word for Happiness

At the time of
All About Eve
, Bette Davis’s screen persona bordered on the sadistic, owing to her punishing portrayals in such films as
Of Human Bondage, The Letter, The Little Foxes
, and
Beyond the Forest
. (Her sadistic apotheosis was still twelve years in the future, when she teamed up with the perfect movie masochist, Joan Crawford, for
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
) Bette had a cruel streak off-screen as well, as an incident in San Francisco unfortunately shows.

One morning, a week into shooting at the Curran Theatre, Davis and Baxter had just finished being made up for the dressing-room scene when Karen Richards introduces Eve Harrington to Margo and friends. “See you on the set, Bette,” Anne called as she whisked by.

Celeste Holm, early on the set as usual, had finished her makeup and was already in place, chatting with Gary Merrill and Hugh Marlowe. Thelma Ritter studied herself in a nearby mirror to make sure she looked dowdy enough for the scene.

A stagehand rushed up with a telegram addressed to Bette, and just then the assistant called out, “Everybody on the set, please.”

Bette tore open the yellow Western Union envelope, ran her eyes over the message, and grimaced. Moments later she strode onto the set with lips pursed. Her expression indicated grim pleasure.

The telegram was from William Sherry. His message pleaded with Bette to call off the divorce and try yet another reconciliation. Bette proceeded to read the telegram, with sarcastic emphasis and loud laughter, to everyone within earshot. Gary laughed loudest. Hugh Marlowe chuckled. Celeste lowered her eyes and pretended to pick a speck of lint off her skirt. Since she and Bette weren’t speaking, it’s doubtful she would have laughed even if she had found Bette’s performance hilarious. Anne concentrated on her lines—this was a very important scene for her—and pretended not to hear.

In the words of Marion Richards, little B.D.’s nanny, the telegram was “beautiful, tender, sweet.” Nurse Richards claimed that “Finally everyone was howling. The only one who didn’t go along with ridiculing it was Anne Baxter. She was offended by the whole thing. As was I.”

Marion Richards no doubt remembered precisely what happened that day on the set. She had a vested interest, for not long after Bette’s merciless reading of the telegram, William Sherry began writing letters to her. Bette was later to claim that Sherry had fallen in love with the young nanny before he and Bette split up. This Richards and Sherry denied.

But she did marry him. On August 6, 1950, not long after
All About Eve
was in the can, Marion Richards, in a seamless shift from nursemaid to stepmother, became Mrs. William Grant Sherry.

“Suddenly,” according to Bette’s biographer Barbara Leaming, “it was being said about town that in the innocent-seeming young nursemaid with ‘the face of an angel’ Bette Davis had discovered her real-life Eve Harrington. There was also speculation that Sherry’s involvement with the twenty-two-year-old had been going on for some time and that Davis’s affair with Gary Merrill was nothing more than a cover-up for her shame over having been abandoned for the much younger woman.”

If Bette’s affair with Gary was a mere cover-up, she enjoyed it to the full. Her spirits had lifted as soon as filming began. She played records on the set, between takes, and danced the Charleston for the entertainment of cast members. (We can guess which ones were amused.) In fact, the filming of
All About Eve
turned into perhaps the happiest professional experience of Bette’s life. The script helped, and Mankiewicz, of course, but so did love.

Celeste Holm excepted, Bette laughed and talked with her colleagues, which surprised Olivia de Havilland when she heard about it. For Bette usually avoided conversations on the set. According to de Havilland, “She would say good morning, but not a lot more. She was saving her energy.” Another co-star, Geraldine Fitzgerald, said, “Perhaps people got the impression that she was being testy because of her habit of repeating what you said after you said it. I think that was simply because she wanted to be sure she had gotten what you had said to her. I remember that once she was asked by Edmund Goulding, the director of
Dark Victory
, to stand “over there.” She retorted with “
Over there?
” And then she went over there and stood like she was asked to do.”

Bette told Anne Baxter, “I thought I was through at forty-one. Then along came Margo Channing.”

A few years earlier, Bette had said at the end of
Now, Voyager
, “Don’t let’s ask for the moon—when we have the stars.” But now Bette had the moon as well, for in addition to playing Margo, Gary was her new lover. Every day, when work ended, she and Merrill went out to dinner, sometimes with others in the cast, sometimes alone. Anne Baxter recalled the “big martinis” they drank.

Bette, at this time, might well have borrowed a line from Eve Harrington: “There should be a new word for happiness.” At last Bette had work, and love, and plenty to drink. It’s a truism that life goes better when you’re getting laid, and Bette and Gary, after the martinis, spent every night together. Marion Richards, who shared a room with little B.D. directly under Bette’s suite, claimed she heard Bette’s bed “going up and down” all night, even though good hotels are constructed to minimize such sounds. And this was the Fairmont, a good hotel in San Francisco, where nervous fault lines mandate especial care in building.

Bette herself said of this period, “There is a near-perfect time in a person’s life, just past forty, when you have outgrown most of the wildness, either the work is going well or you have adjusted your sights, and you are at peace with your private self. The time may come only once, and this was mine.”

As filming in San Francisco drew to a close, Bette and Gary realized their affair had become serious.

The other man in Bette’s life was Joe Mankiewicz. Was it true, as Anne Baxter claimed, that their director knew so much about women that “we’re all just glass to him, and he sees everything that makes us tick”? If Mankiewicz “saw through” Bette Davis like a crystal clock, he no doubt perceived her enormous gratitude for a first-rate script and a sure-footed director with a polished style.

Still, he had been more than a little apprehensive about working with such an obstreperous diva, for Bette’s reputation was no secret. As soon as
Variety
and the other trade papers announced that Bette was replacing Claudette Colbert, Mankiewicz got several cautionary phone calls from directors who had worked with her in the past. (Along with one congratulation: William Wyler, who had directed Bette in
Jezebel
[1938],
The Letter
[1940], and
The Little Foxes
[1941], phoned to tell Mankiewicz that working with Bette would be a ball.)

The most explicit warning came from Edmund Goulding, a friend of Mankiewicz’s who had directed Bette in four films:
That Certain Woman
(1937),
Dark Victory
(1939),
The Old Maid
(1939), and
The Great Lie
(1941). On the last film it is a Hollywood legend that Bette and her co-star, Mary Astor, rewrote the script daily. “Dear boy,” moaned Goulding in a Noël Coward accent, “have you gone mad? This woman will destroy you, she will grind you down to a fine powder and blow you away. You are a writer, dear boy. She will come to the stage with a thick pad of long yellow paper. And pencils. She will write. And then she, not you, will direct. Mark my words.”

Mankiewicz, girding his loins, prepared for the worst—“Always a good thing to prepare for, among theatre-folk,” he said. Goulding’s forecast proved inaccurate. In place of squalls came halcyon days. “Stormy Weather” occurred but once, briefly on-screen in a few bars of piano music at Margo’s cocktail party.

Long after
All About Eve
, Mankiewicz brimmed with compliments for his leading lady: “Barring grand opera, I can think of nothing beyond her range.” And Bette brimmed back: “Mankiewicz is a genius—the man responsible for the greatest role of my career. He resurrected me from the dead.”

Toward the end of their smooth sojourn in San Francisco, Mankiewicz decided to tell Bette about Goulding’s call. (Goulding had said, “And you may quote me, dear boy.”) One afternoon, as they sat around between camera setups, Mankiewicz put it to her. “After those warnings, I expected you to be Lady Macbeth—and instead you’re Portia.” Whereupon he began reciting Portia famous speech, “The quality of mercy is not strain’d, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.…”

Bette stopped him with a snort. “That inimitable Davis snort,” Mankiewicz called it; “then she laughed. Her snort and her laugh should both be protected by copyright.”

She said, “I am neither Lady Macbeth nor Portia. But yes, I suppose my reputation is pretty much as advertised.”

“Why haven’t I seen any sign of it?” Mankiewicz asked.

“Look, Joe,” she said, “you know as well as I that there is nothing more important to an actress than a well-written part—and a director who knows what he wants and knows how to ask for it.” She thumped the
Eve
script. “
This
is heaven,” she said, “but as often as not the script has been a compromise of some sort. And the director can’t make up his mind whether we’re to stand, sit, run, enter, or exit; he hasn’t the foggiest notion of what the scene is all about or whether, in fact, it’s a scene at all.”