All About “All About Eve” (26 page)

Claude Stroud may or may not have played “Liebestraum” as they filmed the party scene. It made no difference, for the piano accompaniment was later dubbed.

Chapter 19

Wherever There’s Magic and Make-Believe and an Audience, There’s Theatre

Lyle Wheeler was one of the first craftsmen to set to work on
All About Eve
. George W. Davis shares art director credit, but since Wheeler was the powerful head of the Fox Art Department we must assume either that his was the greater contribution, or that his approval was needed for virtually every detail. In any event, it was standard Hollywood procedure that the supervisor of the studio art department be credited on major films whether he actually contributed or merely advised. Milton Krasner, who photographed
Eve
, later praised Davis, not Wheeler, as one of the very few art directors who always kept the cameraman’s problems in mind when designing sets, indicating that George Davis was more immediately involved with the film than Wheeler was.

I’ve waited to discuss art direction because the work of an art director can only be judged by looking at the finished film. However inventive and spectacular a look he may wish for the picture, the camera winnows out much of his decorative artistry. For that reason, it makes sense to discuss
All About Eve
’s mise-en-scène as a post-production phenomenon.

When we see a play, the stage designer’s work—including architectural elements and landscapes—is visible at all times until the scene changes or the act ends. (Special effects, such as fog and stage blood, of course appear fleetingly.) In films, on the other hand, the director and the editor select, in every frame, those elements of decor and setting that the audience will see. As Orson Welles said, “In the theatre there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time—in the cinema there is only one.”

Broadly speaking, the art director is responsible for the film’s total look as it’s being shot: locations, sets, furnishings, bric-a-brac. Often he determines the size of rooms (high ceilings or low?) and their configuration (L-shaped, square, or oval?), as well as the contents of those rooms. He and his staff decorate offices, airports, theatres, virtually every interior and outdoor space seen in a given picture. Sometimes the art director also advises on costumes—they shouldn’t war with the sets, of course—and lighting.

In
All About Eve
, a physical sense of place is not especially important. To every character in the film, only one place matters: the Theatre. Not a particular theatre, not the Curran in San Francisco or the Shubert in New York, but rather some abstract, platonic idea of a stage—it could be anywhere—that lets them reiterate their art, whether it’s playwriting, acting, directing, or writing columns about such stagecraft. As Bill Sampson puts it: “What book of rules says the Theatre exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? Or London, Paris or Vienna? Wherever there’s magic and make-believe and an audience—there’s Theatre.”

Art direction, like film music, should italicize certain plot aspects, certain traits of the main characters. But how was Lyle Wheeler to underline something so vague, so idealized? Addison DeWitt speaks for the other characters when he says, “I have lived in the Theatre as a Trappist monk lives in his faith. I have no other world, no other life.” The Mankiewicz script, rich in repartee, offered little inspiration for the physical world of Margo and Company. Margo’s dressing room is described as “a medium-sized box, lined with hot-water pipes and cracked plaster.” Mankiewicz located her living room “one floor above street level. A long narrow room smartly furnished.” Lloyd and Karen’s apartment is “one large room, a small foyer with a door to the corridor.” And so on. (Rookie screenwriters are often instructed not to “direct” the director in their scripts. Mankiewicz, in his, refrained from directing the art director.)

Wheeler’s solution to what he may or may not have considered a perplexing task was rather Zen-like. (A Zen apothegm runs, “In the beginner’s mind are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”) Ultimately, Wheeler let language speak for itself. Put another way, he refrained from placing visual distractions between Mankiewicz’s dialogue and us. This he accomplished by making the sets so unobtrusive that the viewer’s eye never flirts with decor. Instead, we focus on verbal stylishness. Consequently, we’re likely to remember
All About Eve
as having “almost no visual dimension,” which was Pauline Kael’s assessment of the film’s look.

It certainly wasn’t because Lyle Wheeler couldn’t pack every frame with visual affluence. As art director of
Gone With the Wind
, working closely with production designer William Cameron Menzies, he helped enrich the film with thousands of objects, from antimacassars to Atlanta’s burning skyline. And most of us remember
GWTW
visually; unless we belong to the cult, what do our ears recall but half a dozen famous lines and Max Steiner’s extravagant score?

All About Eve
, on the other hand, would probably have worked without any art direction at all. We can imagine its being filmed on the austere stage set of
Our Town
. In this respect the film remains aurally true to its radio-drama ancestor, Mary Orr’s “The Wisdom of Eve.”

More to the point is the subtlety and restraint that Wheeler and George W. Davis, his assistant, used throughout. Beginning at the Sarah Siddons Awards, less is more—though our eyes never feel cheated. At the banquet we see the awards themselves, we see sixty oil portraits on the walls, dozens of theatre people seated at tables, and on those tables cigarettes, lighters, liquor bottles, and glasses. Just enough. What we recall, however, are not objects but the faces of Addison, Eve, Margo, Karen, and the others, all of whom we meet in the first five minutes.

Margo’s dressing room, drab and utilitarian, looks like a thousand unglamorous dressing rooms in as many theatres. In it are plain chairs; a dressing-table with lighted mirror; notes and telegrams tacked on the wall; an old-fashioned floor lamp; a coffeepot, cups, and sugar bowl. The most interesting visual is a small caricature of Margo in
Aged in Wood
. Later, a large version of this drawing serves as a poster in the theatre lobby when Margo arrives to read with Miss Caswell.

Margo’s brownstone, presumably on the East Side of Manhattan, is conventionally decorated. We are not shown the outside, but the rooms appear to have been done up by an interior decorator with no particular flair. Margo’s living room has several Louis XV fauteuils among the contemporary sofas and armchairs. The piano is there, along with an ornate commode (there’s another one upstairs), a long marble mantelpiece, a portrait by Toulouse-Lautrec that is half hidden by an overzealous floral arrangement.

Margo’s bedroom is no star boudoir like Joan Crawford’s in
Mommie Dearest
. It’s downright plain compared to Norma Desmond’s in
Sunset Boulevard
, a bedroom that functions as Norma’s alter ego. (Lyle Wheeler and George W. Davis were nominated for Oscars, along with their set decorators Thomas Little and Walter M. Scott. The winners were Hans Dreier and John Meehan, the art directors of
Sunset Boulevard
, along with their set decorators.)

Appropriately, it’s the theatre—stage set, lobby, auditorium, and backstage—that reflects the most detailed art direction in
All About Eve
. That’s where we see the real glamour. Part of this elegance comes from the Curran Theatre’s natural grandeur, its gilded spaciousness and curvilinear sweep. We understand Eve’s captivation the first time she goes backstage, for its crannies resemble a curiosity shop. It’s jammed with intriguing props, antebellum furniture, outmoded Victoriana, and a large packing crate for the harp used in
Aged in Wood
. On this wooden box is printed the oblique warning “Handle With Care,” perhaps meant semiotically as “Handle
Eve
With Care”—a caveat that every character ignores. (Mankiewicz told an interviewer many years later that this warning sign was his idea, not the art director’s.)

Though we glimpse only a curtain call at the end of a performance of
Aged in Wood
, we can extrapolate from the witty stage set the sort of play Lloyd Richards has written. There’s a canopy bed to suggest genteel sex, the enormous harp (read “art” and “culture”), an odd sculptured dog—translation: “bitch.” We glimpse a row of columns, which, added to Margo’s Scarlett O’Hara hoop skirt, implies a honeysuckled Old South melodrama of wayward loves, betrayal, and lengthy speeches.

Aged in Wood

Fans of
All About Eve
often ask, “What is
Aged in Wood
based on?” There isn’t an answer, really. If Mankiewicz had a particular work in mind, he didn’t reveal what it was. It’s more likely that the title is a parody of every sentimental antebellum melodrama he had seen or read. Here are a few of the contenders.

Dion Boucicault’s
The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana
(1859). According to Ethan Mordden in
The Fireside Companion to the Theatre
, this play “tells of Zoe, a mulatto beauty caught between heroic George Peyton and the vicious Jacob M’Closky, a plantation overseer born in the north.
The Octoroon
proved as successful with southern audiences as with those in the north. The two sections saw the same work from different angles; the northerners linked Zoe’s personal tragedy (she takes poison) to the slavery system, while southerners delighted in hating M’Closky, a rat from Connecticut.”

Mankiewicz may well have been thinking of such popular plays as David Belasco’s Civil War romance,
The Heart of Maryland
(1895) and Edward Sheldon’s
Romance
(1913), which Mordden calls an “alas, my darling, we must part” salon piece.

In 1929 Mankiewicz had written intertitles for the silent picture
River of Romance
, based on Booth Tarkington’s play
Magnolia
. Both titles reek of hoop skirts and honeysuckle.

On the other hand,
Aged in Wood
may have been an in-joke referring to Bette’s unsuccessful attempts to win the role of Scarlett O’Hara and her revenge on David O. Selznick when she won an Oscar for
Jezebel
the year before
Gone With the Wind
was a candidate for Academy Awards.

The term “aged in the wood” is used in whiskey making.

Nowhere in the various dwellings—Margo’s house, Karen and Lloyd’s apartment, Eve’s seedy boardinghouse and her subsequent Park Avenue apartment, or the Taft Hotel suite in New Haven where Eve and Addison enact the film’s climax—nowhere do we observe personal items such as books, family photos, a childhood toy or memento, much less a live pet. Their homes are impersonal. Whatever domestic warmth these characters enjoy is in the theatre.

Which is Lyle Wheeler’s oblique and very fitting gloss on the Mankiewicz script. When Addison says, seated on the stairs at Margo’s party, “We’re a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we theatre folk,” he speaks as Mankiewicz’s mouthpiece. Throughout his life Mankiewicz scrutinized the theatre and its inhabitants. His obsessive fascination with the actor, the craft of acting, the actor’s persistent drive for success, and the vacuum in which the actor exists when not acting—these themes recur in several Mankiewicz films and in every serious interview he gave. And the word “actor” always means “actress.”

“Men are less complicated and less intriguing,” he said. “I’m talking about
actresses
—women who, since their earliest awareness of themselves, have been
compelled
to act in order to
be
. Margo Channing is a woman whose need to act equates with her need to breathe. Who, when she isn’t ‘on’—just isn’t, at all.”

Mankiewicz took all the stage as his world. Using the theatre (and its offshoot, Hollywood) as his laboratory of life, he found it heartless, delusional, bloody. But for those who, like Addison, have “no other world, no other life,” it also teemed with truth. For Mankiewicz, the theatre and its inmates disclosed humanity’s low secrets and lofty virtues. “I often wonder,” he said, “why serious students of the human psyche look to anything
but
theatre folk for most of the answers they seek.”

Lyle Wheeler, like Mankiewicz, was also a psychologist. While Mankiewicz excavated the souls of actresses, Wheeler translated abstract inner conflicts and desires into visible evocations of character. In
Laura
, he loaded every domestic interior to function as combined case history and diagnosis of its inhabitant. In
Rebecca
, Wheeler contrived an estate—Manderley—which, just as surely as the actors, gives a performance of dark precision.

In photographs taken of Lyle Wheeler in his prime, he resembles an almost-handsome, second-rank leading man of the Zachary Scott type. Wheeler’s well-shaped head, his arching eyebrows over quizzical eyes, and his Gable mustache create an effect of rather fierce determination. In one photo from the thirties, Wheeler, dressed in light slacks, dark blazer, and striped necktie, holds continuity sketches for the burning of Atlanta. According to some accounts, this conflagration was Wheeler’s idea. Certainly the fire solved one of the biggest scenic and special-effects problems of
Gone With the Wind
.

Lyle Wheeler supposedly conceived his brilliant plan one day while roaming the forty-acre backlot at Selznick International. Instead of tearing down the sets of
King Kong, The Garden of Allah
, and
The Last of the Mohicans
—all of them still standing at the time—why not torch them and use the footage in the new Selznick epic? Such a bonfire was cheaper than building a facsimile of Atlanta; it also served the studio as instant urban renewal.

Wheeler (1905–1990), a native of Massachusetts, studied architecture at the University of Southern California. It’s doubtful he ever heard a lecture there on how to burn a city, but then most of his training was on the job. Like other art directors during the studio era, he quickly learned to improvise.