All About “All About Eve” (24 page)

Mankiewicz understood such enthusiasm. He told an interviewer, “My passion is eighteenth-century theatre.” He seems to have assessed the stars of two hundred years past as acutely as he scrutinized performances in Hollywood. Besides Sarah Siddons, Mankiewicz also admired Peg Woffington (ca. 1717–1760), a tempestuous Irish actress as theatrical off the stage as on. He said, “I think I’ve read everything written about her.” Mankiewicz stated flatly that Woffington was
the
prototype of Margo Channing.

But he named his imaginary award for Sarah Siddons, perhaps because the name rings with glamour and authority. The award was indeed pure fiction at the time of
All About Eve
, but two years later life imitated art.

In 1952 several prominent Chicago ladies founded the Sarah Siddons Society to recognize the role of women in the theatre. One of the founders, and an early president of the group, was Mrs. Loyal Davis, mother of Nancy Reagan. Every year since then the society has presented its annual award to an actress for an outstanding performance in a Chicago theatrical production. The first winner, for the 1952–53 season, was Helen Hayes. Soon the Sarah Siddons Award became the most prestigious in the American theatre, after the Tony.

Celeste Holm won a Siddons in 1968 for
Mame
, Lauren Bacall in 1972 for
Applause
and again in 1985 for
Woman of the Year
. The 1973 award went to Bette Davis. It was a special recognition for
All About Eve
on the twentieth anniversary of the society’s founding. The presenter was Anne Baxter. “I made an absolute fool of myself,” Bette said later. “Anne went on and on about me and I cried. It was the first time that I’ve ever broken down in public.”

Mankiewicz relished the sweet irony of all this, for he couldn’t suppress a smirk when discussing the Siddons Award. After all, he had dreamed it up to poke fun at the Oscars, the Tonys, and all manner of plaques, globes, medals, and certificates in the entertainment industry. But no one else took it lightly. His mock award was regarded very seriously by those who gave it and by the honorees. He told an interviewer, “I know Celeste Holm wept and thought it was a terribly important award. She wrote me a letter scolding me for not recognizing the importance of it.”

Perhaps her letter was superfluous. In 1991 an interviewer noticed Mankiewicz’s various awards on the mantel of his home in Westchester County, New York. There were his four Oscars; an Edgar for
Sleuth
; a D. W. Griffith Special Achievement Award; and “seemingly in a place of honor amid all the other awards, the Sarah Siddons Award for Achievement in the Theatre.” Made by a propman at Fox, it was the very one that opens
All About Eve
.

Sarah Siddons, meanwhile, has made a comeback. In the summer of 1999 a joint exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Huntington Library and Art Collections in nearby San Marino paid tribute to her. The centerpiece of the Getty’s exhibition was Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait,
Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse
. (It’s a copy of the Reynolds portrait that’s used in the movie.) Owned by the Huntington since the early 1920s, it was loaned to the Getty to hang with other grandiose portraits of Siddons painted by Gainsborough, Romney, Fuseli, and Thomas Lawrence. In addition, several new books about Siddons have recently been published.

Bette Davis probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn about the return of Sarah Siddons. In a way she almost predicted it. In 1957, while living in Laguna Beach, Bette took part in the town’s annual Festival of Arts, one feature of which is the Pageant of the Masters—a series of tableaux vivants with townspeople posing in recreations of great works of art. Bette looks every inch the Queen of Theatre in her representation of
Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse
. Before she donned the elaborate costume of Mrs. Siddons, however, Bette performed a lesser act of volunteerism. She was given a brush and can of paint, then sent to paint numbers on the backs of seats.

Screenwriter Philip Dunne, who knew Zanuck well, wrote that the studio head “was happiest when he was sitting in his projection room alone with his cutter, molding the picture closer to his heart’s desire.”

Zanuck himself told his biographer, Mel Gussow, “I work hard on scripts, and I’m a good script editor. But I think if I have any talent at all, it’s editing in the cutting room, more so even than editing a script.” Anyone who reads Mankiewicz’s
All About Eve
script and then compares it with the actual film is likely to agree.

Mankiewicz, for all his clever dialogue, sometimes didn’t know when to stop. For instance, in the scene where Addison, Miss Caswell, Bill, Eve, Karen, and Lloyd sit on the stairs discussing the maladjustments of life in the theatre, the dialogue sparkles because Addison’s self-importance ricochets off Bill’s common sense, and their weighty lines are both in counterpoint with the half-absurdist Marx Brothers frivolity of befuddled Max Fabian and the dizzy fox, Miss Caswell. But here’s the part of the scene that was cut, presumably by Zanuck, right after Max’s line “Did she say sable—or Gable?”

ADDISON

It is senseless to insist that theatrical folk are no different from the good people of Des Moines, Chillicothe, or Liverpool. By and large we are concentrated gatherings of neurotics, egomaniacs, emotional misfits, and precocious children—

MAX

(
to Bill
)

Gable. Why a feller like that don’t come East to do a play …

BILL

He must be miserable, the life he lives out there—

ADDISON

These so-called abnormalities—they’re our stock in trade, they make us actors, writers, directors, et cetera, in the first place—

MAX

Answer me this. What makes a man become a producer?

ADDISON

What makes a man walk into a lion cage with nothing but a chair?

MAX

This answer satisfies me a hundred percent.

This chitchat, had it stayed in, would have weakened the scene.

After viewing Mankiewicz’s rough cut, Zanuck asked for some structural changes. Besides reducing several overstuffed scenes, he also eliminated parts of the voice-over narration. The film, of course, is conceived as a story told from the points of view of its three narrators: Addison, Karen, and Margo. Addison’s voice is the first one we hear: “The Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished Achievement is perhaps unknown to you…” It continues until the freeze-frame that ends this first part of the awards banquet, then Karen’s voice takes over the narration: “When was it? How long? It seems a lifetime ago.” Margo’s narration is first heard as she and Eve leave the airport together after Bill boards the plane; she speaks in voice-over only once after that, as the party begins: “Bill’s welcome-home birthday party—a night to go down in history.”

Among the passages Zanuck deleted in the editing room was a portion of Margo’s airport voice-over explaining that they sent for Eve’s belongings that night and “she moved into the little guest room on the top floor.” This part was retained; thrown out was the following line, one of peculiar badness: “She cried when she saw it—it was so like her little room back home in Wisconsin.” (Had Mankiewicz temporarily forgotten that Margo detests cheap sentiment?)

Zanuck also discarded this purposeless voice-over passage of Karen’s as she repairs her makeup at Margo’s soirée: “It’s always convenient at a party to know the hostess well enough to use her bedroom rather than go where all the others have to go.”

And so on. The full catalogue of these cuts would require a variorum edition of the script, but even a sampling buttresses Zanuck’s contention that he was astute at separating cream from whey.

It’s not surprising that Mankiewicz strongly opposed Zanuck’s elimination of some footage that established and maintained the three interrelated points of view. It is surprising, however, that Mankiewicz apparently expected Zanuck to keep hands off such a long rough cut: It ran close to three hours.

Zanuck said, “All pictures are invariably long. I found out that sometimes it’s good to start with them too long. Then, in the cutting room you realize you’ve already expressed the same thought several times. I run a picture three times, stop after every reel, and ask, What does that tell us? That’s why cutting sessions run so long at night.”

Mankiewicz, of course, expected his original structure to remain as he filmed it. The story told from three points of view was reminiscent of
Citizen Kane
and therefore had not only cinematic but emotional resonance for Mankiewicz because of his brother’s intimate connection with that film. What rankled Mankiewicz more than the trimming of his three voice-over narrators, however, was Zanuck’s elimination of one scene that Mankiewicz had shot from two points of view.

This was Eve’s speech, on Margo’s staircase: “Why, if there’s nothing else, there’s applause. I’ve listened backstage to people applaud. It’s like, like waves of love coming over the footlights.” Mankiewicz wrote, and filmed, this speech as seen first by Margo and then by Karen. In the script, any distinction between these two scenes is murky and there is no clear reason for doing the same thing twice. (It’s unlikely that Mankiewicz had seen
Rashomon
, since it wasn’t released in this country until December 1951, although it’s possible the Japanese film was screened privately in Hollywood before then. Or Mankiewicz might have read the two stories by Akutagawa that the film was based on.)

How the two versions of Eve Harrington’s “Applause Aria” looked we cannot know, because Zanuck considered such a double-barreled view redundant. The point having been made, Zanuck scrapped the extra footage and retained Eve’s speech so that it’s seen from the point of view of anyone in earshot—including us, as it were.

Years later, when Mel Gussow interviewed Mankiewicz for the Zanuck biography, the director sneered: “Not bad for a little man. The essence of Darryl is also the essence of Napoleon.” But he also conceded that “Zanuck was a talented man, although the longer he is concerned with something, the worse he is. Just like his cutting—peak to peak to peak. In the days when character was developed more deeply, he would break a director’s heart and a writer’s heart. He was impatient with anything cerebral.”

Based on the available evidence—and it’s unfortunately scant—a lot that Mankiewicz considered “cerebral” in
All About Eve
amounted to grandstanding. It’s hard to believe the picture would have been better if Zanuck hadn’t used his scissors. Just look what happened to Mankiewicz
after
Zanuck. In
The Barefoot Contessa
, which Mankiewicz produced, wrote, and directed, he finally had the freedom to film a scene from two points of view. When Rossano Brazzi slaps the South American playboy (Marius Goring) who has insulted Ava Gardner, we see it twice: first from Brazzi’s point of view, a bit later from Gardner’s. It’s showy and superfluous, it adds nothing to this leaden movie, and a few years later it seems to have given Godard and Truffaut—both admirers of Mankiewicz—some of their worst ideas. The notion for this flashy duplication goes back to
Citizen Kane
’s twice-repeated opening night at the opera and the shifting encounters between Kane and his first wife at the breakfast table.

Once free of Zanuck’s control, Mankiewicz made three terrible films. After
The Barefoot Contessa
came
Guys and Dolls
and
Suddenly, Last Summer
, each one an artistic obituary. (And each one with its defenders.)

On the other hand, consider Zanuck’s astute shaping of Mankiewicz’s breakthrough picture,
A Letter to Three Wives
, the year before
All About Eve
. The film was based, like
Eve
, on a story in
Cosmopolitan
. The story, by John Klempner, bore the romantic title “One of Our Hearts.” Later the author expanded it into a novel titled
A Letter to Five Wives
, which Zanuck purchased on the basis of a synopsis. The material traveled from hand to hand until it reached Mankiewicz, who wrote a script called
A Letter to Four Wives
. Zanuck liked the script but wrote Mankiewicz a long memo telling him to eliminate one of the couples from the story. In other words, said Zanuck, “Cut one wife.” Afterwards even Mankiewicz conceded that he had made a better picture by following Zanuck’s advice.

Along with substantive cuts to
All About Eve
, Zanuck seems to have eliminated a bit part that has been mentioned in several reference books over the years. The end credits list Eddie Fisher as stage manager. I assumed, along with others who noticed the name, that it referred to the singer Eddie Fisher, who would have been about twenty-one years old when the picture was made. This is not the case. Tom Mankiewicz says, “Dad never mentioned that to me, and as far as I know he met Eddie Fisher for the first time when Eddie was married to Elizabeth Taylor in the late fifties.” Fisher’s two autobiographies contain no references to
All About Eve
. We see the stage manager of
Aged in Wood
when Margo is taking curtain calls, and we also see a stage manager at Eve’s rehearsal for
Footsteps on the Ceiling
. Perhaps one of them was named Eddie Fisher.

The Leading Man with No Lines

We see Craig Hill (born 1927) in a fleeting shot or two midway through the movie, with Eve in rehearsal for
Footsteps on the Ceiling
, Lloyd’s new play. Hill is presumably Eve’s leading man, yet he speaks not a line.

Craig Hill was a contract player from the late forties through the mid-fifties (
Cheaper by the Dozen, Tammy and the Bachelor
). From 1957 to 1959, he appeared in
The Whirlybirds,
a syndicated TV adventure series concerning helicopter heroics. Eventually he left Hollywood and at last report he owned and operated a restaurant in Bagur, Spain.

A week or so after Zanuck’s cuts, Barbara McLean had shaped and polished
All About Eve
to the point where it existed visually from beginning to end. But without a musical score it was like a page without punctuation—half naked, and in need of the aural part of its structure.