All About “All About Eve” (18 page)

Born in 1897 in St. Petersburg, Russia (also the birthplace of George Sanders), Ratoff produced, directed, and acted in New York before going to Hollywood in the early 1930s. There he was often cast as eccentric directors and producers with ludicrous accents, like the one he plays in
Eve
. But Ratoff eventually directed more pictures than he appeared in, thanks to Darryl Zanuck.

The effusive and flamboyant Ratoff seems to have been as entertaining off-screen as on. Anne Baxter noted in her memoirs that “Grisha,” as he was affectionately known, “was a close friend of Darryl and Virginia Zanuck’s, a sort of court jester” who “spent most weekends with them at their home.”

Zanuck biographer Mel Gussow recounts a slapstick anecdote about the friendship. A picture directed by Ratoff proved to be a fiasco at a preview. As he and Zanuck drove back to the studio afterwards, Ratoff wept all the way. “How could I haff done this to you, Derrill? What a tragedy,” lamented the disgraced director. As they approached the gate of 20th Century-Fox, Ratoff flung open the car door and declared, “I’m going to kill myself!” Whereupon he jumped out and began running. “For Christ’s sake, stop him,” Zanuck yelled. Then he shouted after Ratoff, “Don’t worry, I’ll recut it. I’ll fix it. Come on to the house.” Ratoff slunk back into the car and at the Zanuck home he was put to bed in an upstairs guest room. Zanuck went downstairs, and when a long time had passed and he didn’t hear anything, he decided to tiptoe back upstairs. He peeked in. Ratoff was sound asleep. Zanuck shook him awake and yelled, “You son of a bitch! How the fuck can you sleep?”

Anne Baxter also had stories about Ratoff. She had known him in every sense of the word. Here’s an anecdote from her book,
Intermission
.

One Sunday in 1946, so Grisha described, Darryl was pacing around the pool in his bikini, swinging his polo mallet and cursing the problem of casting Sophie in
The Razor’s Edge
. Grisha spoke up: “Darryl, darling, what about Anne Baxter?”

“Nah!” Zanuck snarled disgustedly. “She’s a cold potato.”

With that, my pal Grisha went into action. “Darryl,” he growled with an evil leer, “please, darling, I have had it—it’s marvelous.”

“You’re kidding, Grisha!”

“That’s right, Darryl. Marvelous!”

Monday morning my agent got a call. Could I dine with Edmund Goulding, the man who would direct
The Razor’s Edge
, and test Tuesday?

The role won her an Oscar.

Harrison Carroll, the
Herald-Express
reporter, asked Ratoff a few questions for the paper before moving on to Bette Davis.

“Your throaty voice, Bette—are you doing a takeoff on Tallulah Bankhead?” he asked innocently.

“That throaty voice you refer to,” Bette answered, “is because I suffered a broken blood vessel on my last picture. Which reminds me, why didn’t you come to RKO and do a story on me then?”

Not letting her change the subject, the reporter continued, “Then the character is not in any way modeled after Tallulah?”

Bette threw back her head and laughed a baritone laugh. At that moment she would have reminded anyone of Bankhead. “No, it positively and specifically is not a takeoff on Tallulah.” Then she added, this time sounding more like Bette Davis, “Do you think we want to get sued?”

Just then Marilyn rushed in, out of breath as though she had run several blocks. Or just left the arms of a lover. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered to everyone and no one.

Mankiewicz talked with her quietly for a few minutes and then asked everyone to take their places. Gregory Ratoff gushed to Celeste Holm, “She ees going verrry far, thees dame, you wait and see.”

“Why?” Celeste snapped back. “Because she’s kept us all waiting an hour? I think it takes more than that.” Celeste arched an eyebrow and considered the irritating starlet, who looked rather lost. “Besides—she’s dressed ridiculously in that
tit
ular number. We’re filming a cocktail party. No one else is in an evening gown.”

Charles LeMaire had, of course, designed Marilyn’s
tit
ular gown, as Celeste slyly dubbed it, precisely as such. The first time he saw the Monroe figure he knew that Marilyn and décolletage went together like gin and vermouth. (Twenty years later, a picture of her in a low-cut gown was chosen to illustrate the entry “décolletage” in the first edition of
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
. For reasons of political punctilio the photo was dropped from later editions.)

Did LeMaire know how the camera would worship Marilyn during the brief time she’s on-screen? She steals her first scene with Bette Davis even while trying, apparently,
not
to steal it. Marilyn stands, barely moving except for her natural shimmer, and the viewer’s eye is glued to her long after she’s spoken her two or three lines. The strapless white gown helps, but the costume was incidental to her allure. Already, in the lobby scene filmed in San Francisco, the camera had devoured her and there she didn’t even wear the white gown. For that scene “she chose (with the approval of Zanuck and Mankiewicz) an item from her own wardrobe, a tightly woven sweater-dress that also showed her figure to good advantage in
The Fireball
and
Home Town Story
.”

It was just about this time that Constance Bennett, spotting the unknown but lovely young Marilyn Monroe at a Hollywood party, reportedly drawled, “Now there’s a broad with her future behind her.” And seeing Marilyn in
All About Eve
, you know it’s true, even without the hindsight.

*   *   *

For this party sequence, which runs for more than thirty pages in the script, LeMaire designed for Anne Baxter a rather mousy cocktail dress that alludes to Margo’s flashily glamorous one. The drabness is appropriate, since at this point in the story Eve is still vastly overshadowed by Margo. Perhaps we’re supposed to guess that Eve’s dress is one of Margo’s hand-me-downs. Earlier in the film Eve has altered one of Margo’s suits—“a little taking in here and letting out there”—which had become too “seventeenish” for Margo’s advancing maturity. Dressing Eve in her mentor’s outmoded clothes reinforces sartorially Birdie’s warning that Eve is studying Margo “like a play or a book or a set of blueprints.”

Zsa Zsa Gabor, a frequent visitor to the set, seems to have studied first one, then another, of the actresses who played scenes with her husband. Was she, like Eve Harrington, motivated by Thespis, or was she just on the lookout for rivals? Later she blithely wrote, “I liked Bette Davis and admired her acting.” Bette, in her own memoirs, didn’t exactly return the compliment, though she did recount an incident that took place one day at the studio.

Zsa Zsa (who, like Miss Caswell, might have passed for a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art, but was not) clicked onto the set in ultra-high heels and matching outfit. Spotting Mankiewicz, she fluttered over to him and said, “Joe, dahlink, I must take my husband avay from you.”

Mankiewicz slowly removed the pipe from his mouth, smiled, and said, “How are you, Zsa Zsa? I believe George is in his dressing room, taking a nap.”

“Ve haff to go shopping,” she cooed. “Dahlink, I promise to giff him back tomorrow.”

“Just a minute, honey,” Joe said with a frosty smile. “Just one thing. We’re making a fucking picture!” Suavely he took her arm, turned her toward the exit, and sent her on her way.

Perhaps the inopportune visit was merely a ruse on Zsa Zsa’s part, for she felt “wretched during the shooting because, whenever George made love on the screen, I was sick with jealousy.” Not that he kissed Marilyn on-screen, but someone reported to Zsa Zsa that the two lunched together in the studio commissary every day.

Irate, Zsa Zsa confronted George with this damning evidence. But her husband merely stared. For a long moment he didn’t speak. Then, with compassion in his voice, he said, “But the commissary is so crowded, the only place the poor girl can sit is with me. So I make room for her. And you know,” he added with admiration, “she writes quite good poetry.”

Zsa Zsa, caught off guard, was speechless for the only time in her life. “
Poetry!
” she thought. “How can I fight her poetry?”

But there wasn’t time to say anything, because at that very moment George Sanders grabbed his wife and made violent love to her. “Normally,” Zsa Zsa revealed later, “violent love wasn’t George’s style and, almost without thinking, I said, ‘George, I bet you were fantasizing about Marilyn all the time we were—’”

Livid despite his exertion, George picked up the former Miss Hungary and the future Queen of Outer Space, carried her bodily through the French doors and into the garden, and tossed her, squealing and kicking, into the swimming pool. After which he went upstairs for a long siesta.

The foregoing is told from Zsa Zsa’s point of view. But everyone in Hollywood remembers the past in highly idiosyncratic tableaux. This is Marilyn’s own flashback, from
My Story,
to that warm spring day in Los Angeles in May 1950:

I was sitting in the studio commissary having lunch with Mr. George Sanders. We had sat down at the same table more or less by accident, having entered the commissary together, also by accident. The whole thing was an accident. Mr. Sanders was just beginning to eat his chicken salad when the cashier’s assistant came to the table and told him he was wanted on the telephone.

About five minutes later Mr. Sanders returned to our table, called for the waitress, and paid his check.

“If you’ll pardon me, I must go now,” he said to me.

“But you haven’t had your lunch yet,” I said.

“I’m not hungry,” said Mr. Sanders.

“You said you were terribly hungry when you sat down,” I said, “and would have to be careful not to overeat. Why don’t you just have a bite so you’ll have some strength for your big scene this afternoon.”

Mr. Sanders looked so pale that I was really worried.

“Unless you’re sick,” I said.

“I’m in perfect health,” said Mr. Sanders, “and I must leave now.”

“I’ll drive you over to the stage,” I said. “I came in my car, and I noticed you walked.”

“Oh no, thank you very much,” said Mr. Sanders. “I don’t want to bother you.”

“It’s no bother at all,” I said. “I’ve finished my lunch. It’s a shame for you to walk all that distance on an empty stomach.”

I stood up and started to leave the commissary with Mr. Sanders, but he pulled briskly away from me and I couldn’t have kept up with him unless I broke into a trot. So I walked out slowly alone wondering what I had done to make Mr. Sanders rush away from my company.

On the set ten minutes later, Mr. Sanders’ stand-in, who was almost as charming and polite as the star himself, came to me and said, “Mr. Sanders has asked me to request of you that hereafter when you say good morning or good-bye to him, you will make those salutations from afar.”

I turned red at being insulted like this but I suddenly realized what had happened. Mr. Sanders’ wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, obviously had a spy on the set, and this spy had flashed the news to her that he was sitting at a table with me, and Miss Gabor had telephoned him immediately and given him a full list of instructions.

What They Said About Zsa Zsa and What Zsa Zsa Said About Herself

Oscar Levant: “Zsa Zsa Gabor has discovered the secret of perpetual middle age.”

Zsa Zsa: “After a certain age, dahlink, it’s either the face or the fanny.”

Oscar Levant: “Zsa Zsa not only worships the Golden Calf, she barbecues it for lunch. And she’s the only woman who ever left the Iron Curtain wearing it.”

Interviewer: “Zsa Zsa, how many husbands have you had?”

Zsa Zsa: “Do you mean apart from my own?”

Oscar Levant: “Zsa Zsa does social work among the rich.”

Zsa Zsa: “I don’t know anything about sex. I was always married.”

When someone complimented Zsa Zsa on the relatively modest jewelry she was wearing in a TV studio, she said, “Dahlink, these are just my working diamonds!”

Zsa Zsa: “The best way to attract a man is to have a magnificent bosom and a half-size brain and let both of them show.”

It’s curious that Marilyn didn’t use her memoirs to settle a score with Bette Davis. According to rumors that have circulated for nearly a half-century, Marilyn had to run away and vomit after filming her two scenes with Bette. Since Marilyn’s character, Miss Caswell, dashes to the ladies’ room to be sick after her audition, it’s possible that this rumor merges life with art.

But Gregory Ratoff, six years after
All About Eve
, told an interviewer that Bette went out of her way to make nasty remarks to Marilyn. One such, according to Ratoff, was this: “I know and you know and everyone knows that kitten voice of yours is goddamned lousy—and it’s lousy because you never trained it as a
real
actress does!” Ratoff claimed that Marilyn, after Bette’s broadside, went away to cry as well as to vomit.

*   *   *

Celeste and Bette had a big scene coming up. The party sequence had taken nearly a week. Four days were spent filming the Sarah Siddons Awards banquet and finally, with supper in the Cub Room of the Stork Club completed after several full days, all the big scenes involving five, six, seven, eight cast members and more were at last done. Now Mankiewicz concentrated on scenes that required two and three people.

And so, on one of the hottest days of spring, while searing lights burned down on them, Bette and Celeste bundled up in fur coats and played their car scene. Lloyd Richards and Karen are driving Margo to the station to catch a train back to New York for her evening performance when the car sputters to a halt on a snowy road. Footage of the surrounding wintry landscape, which the film’s second unit had shot several months earlier in upstate New York, was projected on a process screen behind the specially prepared car.

The scene gains momentum slowly. At first the dialogue is all about what time it is, when the train leaves, and how far it is to the nearest farmhouse. Then, when Lloyd leaves to seek help, the exchange between Margo and Karen becomes one of feminine intimacy. In musical terms, it’s a duet. The action stops while Margo bares her soul to Karen. The duet builds to Margo’s confessional climax, one of her most famous “arias.” It begins famously, “Funny business, a woman’s career” and goes on for several minutes, concluding with “Slow curtain. The end.”