All About “All About Eve” (19 page)

Later Bette called this “one of the most descriptive speeches about the problems of an actress growing older.” She added that “the public, the critics, even friends, thought they saw glimpses of Bette Davis in these lines.” But Bette denied it emphatically: “This speech did not apply to me. I was not Margo Channing, her kind of actress, her kind of glamorous lady.”

Bette and Celeste played the scene like the finest of friends. The soundstage wasn’t air-conditioned, and with overhead lights ablaze, the temperature inside the coupe soon reached 100 degrees. When it was over they, and Mankiewicz, realized what a good job they had done, despite the dispiriting heat. (Makeup artist Ben Nye mopped perspiration off their brows many times, and repaired their dampened makeup.)

In spite of the friction between them, Bette maintained that the scene wouldn’t have been the same without Celeste. “She was perfect,” Davis said generously.

Not once but twice, as it turned out. When Mankiewicz and Zanuck viewed the rushes, they discovered that a slight jiggle in the process film had spoiled several shots. And so once more the following day Lloyd Richards crawled out of the car to go for help, while Bette and Celeste sweltered in mink as the lights grew hotter and both women, between takes, drank water as though they were field hands and not actresses.

For those outside of show business, it’s always surprising that actors who dislike each other can play scenes of affection, friendship, even love. Who would guess, watching Bette and Celeste in that car, that they had so little use for each other?

Just a few days earlier Bette had bruised Celeste’s injured feelings once again. They were filming the Stork Club sequence, whose main focus is the table where Margo, Bill, Karen, and Lloyd are seated. Predictably, these four sat for hours at the table while the crew made lighting checks, adjusted camera setups, and fixed the many other technical details of filmmaking.

Celeste felt uncomfortable when silence descended on a social affair, even one that was purely make-believe. So, in an effort to be pleasant and to lighten the drudgery of movie work, she told her table companions, “Do you know that the man who manufacturers Pyrex, when he found out that people were using those Pyrex teapots to make martinis in—he stopped making them?”

The charming response would have been something like “Oh really? How interesting.” But Bette was no specialist in charm. Besides, she had a husband she didn’t want, a boyfriend who was married, a career that was on the skids unless
All About Eve
could dredge it up from the muck. And this mention of martinis, reminding her of all those she had drunk last night, made her crave another one right then.

Gary Merrill and Hugh Marlowe chuckled politely at Celeste’s anecdote, one of them made a jovial retort, and Celeste herself laughed musically. When the mirth died down Bette glanced toward Celeste. Then she looked at Hugh, and finally turned her gaze to Gary. Lowering her eyelids for effect, she drawled: “I don’t know
how
I’ve lived this long without knowing that.”

The Wit and Wisdom of Dame Celeste Holm

In 1979 Celeste Holm, who is of Norwegian descent, was dubbed into knighthood by King Olav of Norway, thereby becoming Dame Celeste Holm. Prior to this honor, she was often quoted for her flippant and acerbic opinions. Following it, her statements took on a certain gravity. Herewith, a sampling:

“The life of an actress isn’t a bed of mink.”

—1946

“I have always, on some level, been aware of how cruel people are to each other. I have been so anxious to remind people of our imperative need for each other.”

—1988

“I have never been interested in making love with a man whose child I wouldn’t want to bear.”

—1955

“The basic theme [of
All About Eve
] irritates me. The theatre is not the jungle and we are not out to kill each other, because if we were we’d never get a show on. We are bonded to each other and must cooperate.”

—1989

“Television is just like summer stock, except that winter never comes.”

—1949

“My favorite show is always the one I am doing. All you have is now—do the best you can and enjoy it.”

—1980

But everyone loved Thelma Ritter. “One of my favorite people in the whole world,” Celeste Holm proclaimed years later. “She did life just right in this era of feminist crap. She was Catholic, she had been a leading woman in stock, she was a very good actress, she got married, she had children, then when the children were old enough she went back into the business. And that’s just the way to do it.” Celeste herself, married four times and always at work, didn’t do it that way.

Gary Merrill called Thelma “a character actress with great common sense.” The common sense shines through in every performance. How could she have played a woman who didn’t have it? One reason she’s perfect in
All About Eve
is that her character, Birdie, who abhors pretense and deception, is wise to Eve Harrington’s machinations from the start.

Like Birdie, Thelma Ritter had been a vaudevillian. Thelma on the vaudeville stage may not have “closed the first half for eleven years” as Birdie haughtily claims to have done, but Mankiewicz treasured her “as a fiddler would a Stradivarius.” He wrote the role of Birdie for her and no one else. “I adored her,” he said.

He, along with Zanuck, helped start her out in movies. In 1946 the director George Seaton, under contract to 20th Century-Fox, went to New York in search of character actors for
Miracle on 34th Street
. Seaton’s wife, a childhood friend of Thelma Ritter’s, introduced them and Seaton gave Thelma a walk-on as a harried housewife who argues with Santa Claus during the Christmas rush at Macy’s. Darryl Zanuck, after watching the rushes, ordered Thelma’s role enlarged. She went to Hollywood for three days of extra shooting.

When
Miracle on 34th Street
was released, Thelma (born in Brooklyn but long a resident of Forest Hills, Queens) took her young son and daughter into Manhattan to see the picture in its first-run engagement at the Roxy. “We sat behind some housewives,” she recalled, “and when I came on I heard one of them say, ‘My God, look at the face on that one!’”

It was a face that America would soon recognize. And it matched her gravelly umpire’s voice. After a bit part in
Call Northside 777
, Mankiewicz cast her as Sadie, Ann Sothern’s maid in
A Letter to Three Wives
. Sadie, though instructed to announce that “Dinner is served,” keeps right on saying it the old way: “Soup’s on!” What could be more American than that? And Americans—at least those who love movies—have been on Thelma Ritter’s side ever since.

A string of roles followed, each one played so indelibly that casting directors came to describe “a Thelma Ritter type” as the sort of character actress needed to play certain droll, gritty parts.

Thelma’s husband, Joe Moran, was a vice-president at the advertising firm of Young & Rubicam. Together the couple eventually earned enough money to maintain several homes, but Thelma preferred to do her own housekeeping, even in a hotel suite. “When I was running three houses,” she once said, “the place in Hollywood, the one in Forest Hills, and our summer place on Fire Island, I’d get a little confused. I’d reach for the mustard in Forest Hills and it wouldn’t be there and I’d say, ‘I bought some just yesterday.’ And I had—but in California.”

Thelma and Bette got along well together. One thing they had in common was reading. Although Bette’s work often left her too exhausted to read, she kept a stack of books beside her bed. Thelma read a book a day, bulleting through novels, scripts, and plays at top speed. She loved Dickens and tried to reread his novels about once a year. (Thelma herself, and the roles she played, are like Dickens characters translated into the American comic idiom.)

“I like Bette and she likes me,” Thelma said years after the two had worked together in
All About Eve
. “Maybe it’s because I’m homely and she has always thought of herself as homely. When we worked on
Eve
there was so much humor between us, both in our lines and in our chemistry off-screen, that she relaxed with me. I never had a single rough word with her.”

A few years later Bette returned the compliment as only she could. Playing a Bronx housewife in
The Catered Affair
(1956), she assumed the voice and accent of Thelma Ritter.

While Edith Head was staying up nights to complete Bette’s wardrobe, Thelma decided to buy the kind of dress Birdie would wear. She searched the rack at Macy’s, she looked at Gimbel’s, then she went home to Queens and shopped around. Where were all those $1.98 dresses that would look right for her character? At last she gave up and called Charles LeMaire at Fox. He fixed her up with a $1.98 dress—but it cost him $200.00 to do it.

Thelma’s maternal quality attracted Marilyn Monroe, and the year after
All About Eve
they worked together again, in
As Young As You Feel
. Ten years later they made their third film together,
The Misfits
(1961). Their relationship remained cordial, but by then even Thelma found Marilyn’s erratic work habits and perpetual tardiness exasperating. She complained along with everyone else on the set. But afterwards, when Marilyn was dead, Thelma said, “I adored that girl from the moment we met.”

Possibly the only criticism anyone ever leveled at Thelma is that she wasn’t on-screen enough. In
All About Eve
she vanishes during the cocktail party and isn’t seen again. She also disappears too soon from
The Misfits
, where she is one of the few actors who doesn’t resemble, emotionally at least, a walking skeleton.

One reason Thelma Ritter is so well remembered in
Eve
is because it’s her best role. Another is that, as she herself pointed out, “Birdie always says the thing people never can think of until it’s too late.”

*   *   *

Zanuck had no trouble getting Thelma Ritter to work for him at Fox. Celeste Holm was a different matter, and after he had lured her there he came to regret it.

Holm had the good fortune to play Ado Annie in
Oklahoma!
, which opened on Broadway on March 31, 1943. The reviews were ecstatic, and many of them singled her out for added praise (e.g., the
New York World-Telegram
: “Celeste Holm tucked the show under her arm.… This is an astounding young woman.”). Zanuck, ever alert to astounding young women, wanted to see more of her. He made several offers and finally Celeste, taking a break from the show in 1944, traveled to Hollywood to make a screen test.

Directed by Zanuck’s comic henchman, Gregory Ratoff, the test became a production. It required three weeks of advance preparation, and cost $2,500 to produce, a bundle in those days. Holm was filmed in black-and-white and also in Technicolor. Not only did she have the services of a full-time director, she also had a supporting cast that included Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Vincent Price, Mischa Auer, and Dick Haymes. “She is not just good,” shouted Gregory Ratoff when he saw Celeste on film for the first time. “She is zenzational!”

Zanuck, though less effusive than Ratoff, was nevertheless impressed by Holm’s screen test. He offered her a part in
Where Do We Go From Here?
(directed by Ratoff) in 1945. Celeste turned it down. Her success in
Oklahoma!
had unleashed a flood of offers from Broadway as well as Hollywood. As for the splashy screen test, Holm considered it a vehicle not only to show Fox what she could do, but also to show her what Fox could do. “I liked the stage,” she said. “I knew the stage. Pictures were an unknown quantity.”

Zanuck kept after Celeste, but in the meantime she was playing the lead in another Broadway musical,
Bloomer Girl
. Eventually he signed her to a long-term contract, a deal that soon made both producer and actress unhappy and led the studio at one point to put her on suspension. Celeste made her Fox debut in a slight musical called
Three Little Girls in Blue
(1946). Critical consensus was that even in a minor role she stole the film from June Haver, Vivian Blaine, and Vera-Ellen. A New York theatre colleague, Fitzroy Davis, later wrote that “Celeste had acquired an early genius for handling the press, and succeeded in obliterating from attention the three presumed stars of that film.”

Holm and Zanuck didn’t get along. “I could never communicate with him,” she admitted. “He loved girls, but he didn’t like women. A girl would say, ‘Yes, sir, whatever you say, sir.’ A woman said, ‘Wait a minute! This isn’t going to work.’”

Nevertheless, he gave her the role of an intelligent professional woman in
Gentleman’s Agreement
(1947), for which she won an Oscar. She was not badly used in any of the films she made at Fox during this period. The same cannot be said, however, of the unfortunate
Champagne for Caesar
(1950), which she made on loan to United Artists.

In the late forties, Celeste ran into Zanuck and his family at Sun Valley on a skiing trip. She liked the Zanuck children, and they seemed fond of her. She had also sung at an afternoon party in Hollywood, which the youngsters attended. It was only natural, then, that young Dickie Zanuck wanted to speak to the lovely young actress on the ski slopes. But his father warned him: “Don’t tell her how good she is. She’ll ask me for more money.”

Perhaps Dickie Zanuck praised her too much, for a year or so later Celeste was well paid for her work in
All About Eve
. She never changed her opinion of Zanuck, however. Long after he was dead and she had grown old, Celeste sniffed, “I understand he bought me because he did not want Louis B. Mayer to get me.”

Chapter 15

The General Atmosphere Is Very Macbethish

On the morning when Bette Davis, Gary Merrill, and Anne Baxter were to film the confrontational scene that lends Bill’s coming-home party its “Macbethish” air, Bette was worried. This pivotal scene is Margo’s awakening to the threat of Eve Harrington. The five pages of dialogue that Margo and Bill exchange in Margo’s living room must not become static even for an instant. If it did, the audience might lose interest. That would be fatal, because this scene functions as the door leading into the rest of the film.