All About “All About Eve” (29 page)

And, when the movie ended, there was long and enthusiastic applause.

It was a night of Hollywood festivity. Dinner parties preceded the premiere, one hosted by Zanuck and another by Mankiewicz. After the film there were more parties, in homes and in nightclubs along the Sunset Strip.

The studio bash was held at Ciro’s. Bette’s “date” was her mother, Ruthie. A telephone was brought to their table and Bette placed an overseas call to Gary in Germany. “It was Bette’s night of triumph,” wrote Louella Parsons. “It was heartwarming to see the great and the near-great of Hollywood line up to pay her tribute.”

Sitting in the front banquette of Ciro’s, with Clifton Webb and Jane Wyman close by, Bette heard a commotion at the front entrance. “I’m surprised they’ve got any flashbulbs left,” she muttered to Ruthie. “Who’d arrive at this hour?” Turning her head, Bette saw another star framed in the doorway, wearing a red brocade gown under a full-length white mink coat. The star was posing for pictures.

Presently the new arrival, floating on glamour, made her regal way toward Bette. Under her breath Bette said, “Oh, Christ!” For her new admirer was Joan Crawford.

(Many years later, each time
All About Eve
was shown on television, Joan took her phone off the hook so that she wouldn’t be interrupted. “She must have seen it ten times,” said a friend. She pointedly told the same friend that she watched it “because of the
script
and the
director
.” But Mankiewicz, Joan’s former boyfriend, said, “She never told
me
she liked it.”)

Bette was not delighted to see Joan that night, but even an unwelcome apparition couldn’t dim her triumph. They kissed and exchanged warm words, these two who had both so recently been labeled “box office poison.” Once again Bette Davis was a force to be reckoned with. From there, it was on to the Oscars.

Things I Promised Not to Tell

This phrase, which is neither seen nor heard in the film, occurs in the script. There, Mankiewicz designates it as the title of Addison’s newspaper column the day he attacks Margo. But that’s only one bit of minutiae connected with
All About Eve
. I hope some readers will find the following as irresistible as potato chips.

• Several lines in
Eve
were not exactly new. Margo’s retort to Karen, “I’m so happy you’re happy,” was heard in
Dragonwyck
(1946), the first film Mankiewicz directed. (He also wrote the script.)

• In
Bordertown
(1935), Bette Davis taunts Paul Muni: “You’ve an adding machine where your heart ought to be.” In
Eve
, she tells Anne Baxter, “You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.”

• In
Beauty for the Asking
(1939), starring Lucille Ball, there is a character named Eve Harrington. She’s played by Leona Maricle in this obscure comedy revolving around cosmetics and hairdos.

• There are two allusions to Cole Porter songs in
All About Eve
. When Margo proclaims, “I hate men,” she’s quoting the title of a number from
Kiss Me, Kate
. Karen’s query to Bill Sampson when he’s comforting Margo after Addison’s newspaper attack—“I guess at this point I’m what the French call de trop?”—comes from, and rhymes with, “You’re the Top.”

• In Mary Orr’s story “The Wisdom of Eve,” Margola (the prototype for Margo) lives in a “nest of forty rooms at Great Neck, Long Island, called Capulet’s Cottage.” Too bad Mankiewicz didn’t use this name for a Margo Channing hideaway; it’s the perfect retreat for a star who lives like an institution.

• Cora, the name of the heroine in Lloyd Richards’ new play
Footsteps on the Ceiling
, is the name of the character played by Lana Turner in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1946).

• Kenneth Anger, in
Hollywood Babylon II
, refers to
Eve
as a “triple-suicide movie.” His tasteless epithet is not entirely accurate. It’s true that Barbara Bates and George Sanders killed themselves, but the death of Marilyn Monroe is best described as mysterious.

• Several members of the
All About Eve
cast wrote, or co-wrote, autobiographies. George Sanders was first, with
Memoirs of a Professional Cad
in 1960. The only one to write two autobiographies was Bette Davis:
The Lonely Life
in 1962 and
This ’N That
in 1987. Gary Merrill’s 1988 memoir is
Bette, Rita, and the Rest of My Life
. Anne Baxter’s autobiography, published in 1976, is titled
Intermission
. Marilyn Monroe perhaps dictated
My Story
to a journalist sometime in the 1950s; it was published in 1974.

• The only female character in the film who is not, and has never been, on the stage is Karen Richards, played by Celeste Holm.

• For die-hard trivia fans who also speak French: Match the line from
Eve
with its translation in the subtitled version shown in France.

(Answers: 1-B; 2-E; 3-A; 4-D; 5-C)

Chapter 22

Those Awards Presented Annually by That Film Society

At the end of 1949, the San Francisco Drama Critics Council had named Bette “Worst Actress of the Year” for
Beyond the Forest
. At the end of 1950, the same group voted her Best Actress for
All About Eve
. Accolades arrived almost daily: Bette Davis, “Actress of the Year,”
Look
magazine; “Best Actress,” the French film industry; “Most Popular Actress,”
Photoplay
. Bette shared the latter award with Joan Crawford.

Joan herself made several minor 1950 best-lists, for she had appeared in two Vincent Sherman pictures:
The Damned Don’t Cry
and
Harriet Craig
. In January 1951, when both Joan and Bette made the
Photoplay
list, both agreed to attend the ceremony the following month to accept their gold medals.

February 12, the day of the
Photoplay
awards party. In the middle of the afternoon Bette’s phone started ringing. “Haven’t you heard? You’re nominated! And
All About Eve
got more nominations than any other picture, ever.”

Joan Crawford, who had expected an Academy Award nomination for one of her Vincent Sherman pictures, got none. She was shattered. Feeling ill, she took to her bed and canceled her scheduled appearance at the
Photoplay
awards dinner that night.

Bette, wearing a black cocktail dress and a flowered hat, swept into the party with her arm locked in Gary’s. She drank champagne. She accepted a kiss from her former co-star Ronald Reagan and congratulations from his fiancée, Nancy Davis. Jane Wyman and her new beau, Hollywood attorney Greg Bautzer, seated beside Bette and Gary, congratulated her on her honors and wished them all the best as newlyweds.

The evening was well underway when Bette stretched across Greg Bautzer to ask Jane Wyman a question. Waving her cigarette toward an adjacent table, Bette whispered, “Who
is
that kid between Ann Blyth and Elizabeth Taylor? He keeps staring in my face.”

“Don’t you know him? That’s Joan Crawford’s son, Christopher. He’s only nine years old, but he’s accepting the award tonight for his mother.”

“How
sweet
,” said Bette. “And just where is Joan?”

“She’s at home ill,” Jane Wyman explained.

“Oh,” replied Bette in a stage whisper. “Something
fatal
, I hope.”

*   *   *

It was Anne Baxter’s fault that Bette didn’t win the Oscar. If Anne hadn’t insisted on running against Bette for Best Actress, Baxter herself might well have gotten the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress, and Bette might have won another Oscar, her third, for her performance as Margo Channing.

Although Baxter played the title role, and was on-screen as much as Davis, the part of Eve Harrington seemed less important than the role of Margo Channing. It still does. For one thing, Anne Baxter had the ingenue role, while Bette played the star. Also, Eve was younger, while Margo had reached her full-bodied zenith. And, using a purely intuitive criterion to determine whose role is supporting and whose is not, everyone feels that the movie would survive without Anne Baxter, though not without Bette Davis.

Baxter had already won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for
The Razor’s Edge
in 1946 but she considered
All About Eve
her breakthrough picture. If she didn’t qualify as Best Actress now, she never would.

And so she campaigned hard for a nomination in the Best Actress category. The thrust of her campaign took place within the walls of 20th Century-Fox, because the designation of each nomination was made by the studios, regardless of the role’s billing or importance. It’s hard to blame Baxter for convincing Zanuck to boost her into Best Actress. Besides, they all thought she had a good chance of winning. The competition—or so it looked early in 1951—shouldn’t have been too hard to beat.

For starters, Bette Davis was unpopular all over town. Too many directors, producers, writers, and technicians knew, either firsthand or from rumors, what a monster she could be on the set. The long history of the Academy Awards proves that Oscars have often been given not as true rewards for professional excellence but rather as bouquets to persons the industry wishes to exalt. They have also been denied to those who didn’t meet Hollywood norms. And so, with her reputation, and since
All About Eve
hadn’t yet been validated as an Oscar classic, there seemed little chance that Bette Davis could win another Academy Award.

Gloria Swanson, who hadn’t worked in years before
Sunset Boulevard
, was a contender, but how many Academy members would vote for her as that dotty old vamp who made Hollywood squirm? Judy Holliday in
Born Yesterday
looked like a flash in the pan; besides, she was considered a visitor from Broadway. Eleanor Parker, a nominee for
Caged
, seemed anything but a front runner. And so Anne Baxter started to look like a shoo-in.

Consequently, on February 12, 1951, when the Academy Award nominations were announced, Anne and Bette were neck-and-neck on the Best Actress list. They were the first two actresses ever nominated for starring roles in the same film. Later Mankiewicz said, “Bette lost
because
Annie was nominated. Annie lost
because
Bette Davis ditto. Celeste Holm lost because Thelma Ritter was nominated, and
she
lost
because
Celeste ditto.”

Celeste and Thelma, of course, were nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category.
All About Eve
was nominated for a total of fourteen awards, the most nominations ever received up to then, and for many years to come. It held the record until February 1998, when
Titanic
tied it with fourteen nominations.

Eve
was also nominated in the following categories: Best Picture; George Sanders as Best Supporting Actor; Mankiewicz as Best Director and for Best Screenplay; Milton Krasner for Best Black-and-White Cinematography; Lyle Wheeler, et al. for Best Art Direction and Set Decoration in Black-and-White; 20th Century-Fox Sound Department for Best Sound Recording; Alfred Newman for Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture; Barbara McLean for Best Film Editing; Edith Head and Charles LeMaire for Best Costume Design for a Black-and-White Picture.
Eve
won in six of the nominated categories.

In later years the Academy Awards came to be described as “a symbol that captures the essence of American popular culture” and “the most visible prize in the world.” But on the night in question—March 29, 1951—the Oscar ceremonies were visible only to those in attendance, for they were not televised until 1953. Even so, Oscar was perhaps the most
audible
prize in the world, for awards night had been broadcast complete on radio since 1945. (The Academy, with admirable foresight, filmed these pre-television Oscar events, and recently, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I watched the awards for 1950, as different in comportment from the present day as the court of Versailles is from Las Vegas.)

Then as now, Oscar fever raged for days before the event. Even airline passengers were susceptible. Sam Lesner, a film writer for the
Chicago Daily News
, reported on March 27 that “the beautiful sunset over Los Angeles didn’t jibe with a movie poll taken among passengers on our plane as it approached the film capital. Ballots handed out by the plane’s stewardesses showed Bette Davis, instead of Gloria Swanson of
Sunset Boulevard
fame, as the top actress of 1950.”

Long before 8:00
P.M
. on awards night the stars began arriving at the RKO Pantages Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Thousands of fans cheered the arrival of Elizabeth Taylor, Dean and Jeanne Martin, Louella Parsons, Ronald Reagan, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Darryl Zanuck, Esther Williams and Fernando Lamas, and George Sanders with pre-blonde Zsa Zsa.