All About “All About Eve” (17 page)

The point she’s making here is neatly summed up by one of Bette’s friends, Roy Moseley: “How she behaved depended on whether she liked and respected the people she was working with. If she thought they were idiots she would do everything in her power to get rid of them. If that failed she would try to do their jobs for them. But if she liked and respected them she would do anything for them.”

Moseley buttresses this cogent assessment of Davis’s demanding professionalism when he describes one way she apparently did others’ jobs for them. “At home she had copies of her scripts bound in red leather, some of them covered in masses of handwritten notes. I was interested to see that the screenplay which had the fewest notes was
All About Eve
.”

It’s almost a disappointment to discover how few annotations Bette actually made in the script. When I examined her copy of it at Boston University, I found that most of her penciled comments occur in the dressing-room scene when Margo Channing first encounters Eve Harrington. She wrote the word “Drink” some half-dozen times. Beside Margo’s line, “It was Fort Sumter they fired on—” she wrote “One eyelash” and a few lines later on she inserted a caret and wrote, “Next eyelash.” There follow such mundane notes to herself as, “Start cold cream,” “Finish cold cream,” “Start to turn back to table,” “Start Kleenex with cold cream,” and “Light cigarette.”

More beguiling than Bette’s jotted reminders are the various stains throughout her copy of the script. On the title page I found two large splotches of ink. In a Rorschach test they would resemble blue irises beginning to wilt, as Bette’s career had wilted before
All About Eve
.

On page 26 I noticed a few brown coffee stains, one the size of a half-dollar, the others no larger than a penny.

Turning the page, I came across more brown stains, along with a tiny reddish smudge no bigger than a lentil. Lipstick, or a drop of blood? And if so, whose? A purely fanciful explanation would be that the blood was scratched from Celeste Holm after one “Good morning” too many.

On page 165 I stumbled on unmistakable lipstick, this time the faint outline of a kiss, as though Bette loves what Addison has just done to Eve: He has slapped her. And Bette kissed the page! Of course. Caught up in this bitchy brawl, wouldn’t she just? For, reading the script that first time, Bette was already Margo Channing. (Besides, she had a very
physical
relationship with her mementos. One of Bette’s scrapbooks has a picture of Joan Crawford with her teeth blacked out.)

Two pages later, more lipstick, as Addison reveals to Eve what he has learned about her sordid past.

Pages 170, 171, and 173: The red reappears, then trails away. I take it as Margo’s farewell kiss, since it’s Bette’s exit from the film. Her parting lines are calculated to leave ’em cheering: “Nice speech, Eve. But I wouldn’t worry too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.”

Chapter 13

A Little Taking In Here and Letting Out There

Mankiewicz soon realized that two weeks in the Curran Theatre wasn’t enough time. Production fell behind one day the first week. The second week, another day and a half.

Word came that Zanuck was getting upset. Thus began a rat-tat-tat of memoranda, phone calls, and wires. The subliminal message was always the same: “Catch up—or else.” (For Mankiewicz the “else” implied no more than the risk of strategic scenes hurriedly whacked from the movie. For directors held in less regard it could mean subsequent blacklisting as financially irresponsible, or even removal from the film.)

Whatever pressure Mankiewicz was under to speed up, it didn’t affect the way he handled actors. No one who worked on
All About Eve
ever suggested anything else. Bette Davis herself, a sensitive barometer of moviemaking pressures, registered Mankiewicz’s aplomb with this comment: “It was, for the most part, a happy and charmed set.”

It was also unusually quiet. Tom Mankiewicz, Joe’s son, recently described the hush that fell on his father’s sets. “Dad had the quietest sets in the business. Over the years I’ve worked as a writer, a director, an assistant director, and a producer, and so I’ve been on hundreds of soundstages in many different productions. Dad’s were the quietest. You walked on his set and you thought you had stumbled into a
take
. But then you noticed that the red light wasn’t on.”

Since Tom Mankiewicz was only eight years old when
All About Eve
was filmed, he didn’t observe the shooting of his father’s most famous film. He believes, however, that this set would have been as controlled and subdued as the Joseph L. Mankiewicz sets he visited later. (Father and son worked together on a film once, when Tom was second assistant director on
Cleopatra
.)

“Even the crew worked quietly,” Tom says. “Dad couldn’t stand screamers. Everything was under his control, and I believe that’s an important part of his best movies. They’re terribly controlled and precise. And yet there was a lot of humor on his sets.”

Everyone had a laugh the day Bette Davis took her bows. In the film, the only time we see Margo Channing before an audience is when she comes out for curtain calls after a performance of
Aged in Wood
. Shooting this scene required Bette, in hoop skirts and a dark wig, to bow again and again until every detail was perfect. But what actress can endure bowing to no applause? Bette’s performance in the Curran Theatre that day was witnessed only by a handful of the cast and crew.

After a dozen bows greeted by silence, Bette straightened up, walked to the edge of the stage, peered into the darkness, and shouted, “I want to tell you all that you have been a most abominable audience!”

At last she got her applause.

The day they shot the rain scene—the one that precedes Celeste Holm’s initial meeting with Anne Baxter in the alley—the sun was shining in San Francisco. Mankiewicz notified the cast and crew that he wanted rain outside the Curran Theatre at five o’clock that afternoon. Workmen set up hoses and sprinklers, and at the appointed hour everything was ready. “Okay, let’s have the rain,” Joe called out. Before the hoses could be turned on, however, clouds moved in and a chilly drizzle started to fall. Anne Baxter turned to Bette Davis and said, “Even God has heard of Joe’s two Oscars.”

At the end of two weeks plus in San Francisco,
All About Eve
moved to Los Angeles for more than a month of solid work.

Each day since the start of filming, the dailies—i.e., the unedited film shot on a given day, also called “rushes”—had been sent airmail to Los Angeles where, the following afternoon, Zanuck would gauge the progress of
Eve
. He watched the dailies immediately after lunch, usually in the company of his executive assistant, the head of the production department, and various other cronies. When the dailies were screened, Barbara McLean, head of the editing department, was always there in the projection room in the basement of the studio’s administration building.

On a typical day Zanuck, McLean, and company would settle in for an hour or so of watching the rushes from
Eve
and other films in production. “What have we got today, Bobbie?” Zanuck would ask, pressing the buzzer that notified the projectionist to begin.

Barbara McLean, a pad on her lap for taking notes, might say, “We start with Bette Davis raising hell when she learns about her understudy,” or whatever the particular scene involved.

*   *   *

“At the end of filming in San Francisco,” said Gary Merrill, “I got Bette’s permission to drive back to her house for the weekend, along with Bette’s sister, Bobby, and B.D., with the bodyguard in tow.” April had dissolved into early May. After spending the weekend with Bette at her house in Laguna Beach, Gary went home to Malibu. His wife, Barbara Leeds, seems not to have smelled a rat. A few days later the Merrills attended a dinner party where Gary, in an “alcohol haze” as he phrased it, started talking to some of the other guests about Bette Davis. What had it been like working with her, they wanted to know, and was she really the termagant that some people claimed?

“I’d marry Bette Davis in a heartbeat if she’d have me,” Gary announced. It’s easy to imagine the looks on faces around the dinner table. Later Merrill confessed that his statement was “not exactly the sort of thing to say in front of one’s own wife.” When Gary and Barbara Merrill returned home that night, “the dishes began to fly. Amongst the ruins of the china, we decided to get a divorce.”

A few weeks later Barbara Leeds Merrill, testifying in the divorce proceedings, intimated that “twenty-seven-year-old Anne Baxter had been Gary’s first choice for an affair in San Francisco.” But, she added, since Baxter was madly in love with her husband, John Hodiak, Gary had settled for Bette Davis, who was forty-two. To quote Bill Sampson in the movie, “It sounds like something out of an old Clyde Fitch play.”

On-screen and off, half of Hollywood seemed out to get Bette Davis. Was it, she must have wondered, because she was a middle-aged woman determined not to act her age?

*   *   *

On top of everything else, her cocktail dress didn’t fit. This dress, which Edith Head designed for Bette to wear in the party sequence, was everything it should be: tight-bodiced, wasp-waisted, full-skirted, shoulder-baring, ankle-skimming. Edith’s original sketch had a square neckline. The designer said she had high hopes for Bette’s dress because the fabric, brown
gros de Londres
(a heavy silk) photographs magnificently in black and white. And, to make the dress even more opulent, Edith trimmed it in sable.

While the cast was in San Francisco for two weeks, Edith had been working on the cocktail dress and other outfits that Bette would need for scenes to be shot at the studio in Los Angeles. Bette’s eleventh-hour casting as Margo Channing had left Edith and her staff in a tizzy, and so, because of their tight schedule, the dress wasn’t made up until the night before Bette was to wear it in the big scene.

Edith arrived at the studio early to make sure the dress was pressed and camera-ready. “There was Bette,” Edith recalled, “already in the dress, looking quizzically at her own reflection in the mirror. I was horrified. The dress didn’t fit at all. The top of the three-quarter-length sleeves had a fullness created by pleats, but someone had miscalculated and the entire bodice and neckline were too big. There was no time to save anything, and a change would delay the shooting.”

Edith told Bette not to worry about it. She, the designer, would take full responsibility for the snafu. But she dreaded the hassle. Edith walked to the door on jelly legs, turned the knob, and—

“No, wait,” Bette said. “Turn around and look, Edith.”

Edith took one look and her eyes brightened, even behind the tinted glasses that had become her trademark.

“Don’t you like it better like this, anyway?” Bette asked as Edith retraced her steps.

Bette had pulled the neckline off her shoulders and as Edith approached she wiggled one bare shoulder. “I could have hugged her,” Edith said later. “In fact, I think I did.” With a few simple stitches Edith secured the neckline in place, and Bette hurried off to the set. As Edith watched Bette sashay out, she realized that the dress—its form, color, fit, even its magnificent female susurration—swept along in exact rhythm with Bette. It contained her like a glamorous second layer of skin. The dress was exactly right.

It’s a shame Mankiewicz wasn’t there to record this scene, since one of his motifs is women’s clothes getting remade. Eve Harrington retailors a suit of Margo’s and in
A Letter to Three Wives
Ann Sothern attempts an impromptu makeover of Jeanne Crain’s tacky party dress. A variation on this theme takes place in Mankiewicz’s earlier film,
The Late George Apley
(1946). Peggy Cummins tries on the wedding gown handed down by her fiancé’s grandmother. It’s not her style, so she rushes off to New York to buy a modern one. In these scenes Mankiewicz was perhaps alluding to his mother, whom he described as “a very talented dressmaker.”

Celeste Holm, who only heard the story of Bette’s ill-fitting outfit long after the fact, observed that “Bette’s dress did just the right thing for her character. Margo had a terrible sense of being old. That dress made her all the more eager to show off her shoulders and be voluptuous” when Bill Sampson gets waylaid downstairs by younger, fresher Eve Harrington at Margo’s welcome-home party for him.

Charles LeMaire and Edith Head both won Oscars for their
All About Eve
costumes. Edith, however, always regretted that she started work on the picture too late to dress Marilyn Monroe. In fact, Edith never dressed Marilyn for a movie—surely a great lacuna in both careers. “I met Marilyn socially several times,” Edith said, “and we always talked about clothes. She was extremely knowledgeable about fit and fabric, which surprised me. I never thought she looked especially comfortable in what she wore. Every designer who worked with her cinched her and harnessed her. Marilyn was a free spirit who should have been dressed in such a way that she would be able to forget about her clothes. When a woman is sexy, she knows it and she doesn’t need clothes that constantly remind her.”

Chapter 14

A Career All Females Have in Common

Filming of the party scene, that first day on the studio set in Los Angeles, involved almost everyone in the cast. When Bette arrived, magnificent in her Edith Head gown and proud of her own improvements to it, not a thing was going on. People were standing, sitting, milling around, talking, yawning. “Why?” Bette asked.

She headed toward Gary Merrill and Hugh Marlowe, who were playing poker. “The new girl,” Gary informed her. “Marilyn Monroe. She’s almost an hour late.”

Just then Harrison Carroll, a veteran reporter for the
Los Angeles Herald Express
, strolled over to Gregory Ratoff and said hello.

“Ees that all I’m getting, a leetle hello?” Ratoff demanded in his blustery voice. Everyone liked to tease Ratoff, probably because he resembled his
All About Eve
character: “dear, sentimental, generous, courageous Max Fabian” from Eve Harrington’s point of view, a “sly puss” from Margo Channing’s. Ratoff’s accent and his shaggy-dog personality made him irresistible.