All About “All About Eve” (3 page)

Instead, Marilyn Monroe played Miss Caswell, and of the actors who appeared in
All About Eve
she is the only one whose career was to ascend. For others in the cast—Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Gary Merrill, Celeste Holm, Hugh Marlowe, George Sanders, Thelma Ritter, and for Mankiewicz himself—
All About Eve
was the climax. Never did a single one of them surpass, or even equal, what he or she did so brilliantly, with such verve and wit, in this film. For all of them the picture was a watershed that separates what they hoped to accomplish in the movies from the actual roles that life, or Hollywood, dealt from its unmarked deck.

Marilyn Monroe went up, and up, and up, but for the others a long descent began the day
All About Eve
was in the can. If not for this movie, half the cast would be forgotten.

The Casting Couch

Nancy Davis Reagan didn’t know in 1950 that she was under consideration for the role for Karen Richards. When I queried her in 1998, she said she had never heard that her name was on the casting director’s list. Nor was she aware that the man she would marry two years later, in 1952, was also in the running for a part in
All About Eve
. And yet there is the name Ronald Reagan, along with twenty-four other contenders, jotted down for the character of Bill Sampson. If Reagan, and not Gary Merrill, had gotten the part, it would have been his second movie with Bette Davis. It might also have changed the course of history.

Consider how Hollywood history might have been different if the casting director had prevailed in his various recommendations. The following lists are not complete; rather, they are selections of the most intriguing possibilities.

KAREN RICHARDS

Nancy Davis

Alexis Smith

Ann Sothern

Shirley Booth

Patricia Neal

Margaret Sullavan

Ruth Warrick

Jessica Tandy

Barbara Bel Geddes

Arlene Dahl

Joan Fontaine

BILL SAMPSON

Robert Cummings

William Holden

Edmond O’Brien

Zachary Scott

Glenn Ford

Ronald Reagan

Montgomery Clift

Robert Young

ADDISON DEWITT

José Ferrer

Clifton Webb

Claude Rains

Basil Rathbone

Charles Laughton

Vincent Price

Adolphe Menjou

EVE HARRINGTON

Jeanne Crain

Ann Blyth

Elizabeth Taylor

June Allyson

Olivia de Havilland

Donna Reed

Mona Freeman

MARGO CHANNING

Katharine Hepburn

Ginger Rogers

Greer Garson

Joan Fontaine

Joan Crawford

Paulette Goddard

Rosalind Russell

Hedy Lamarr

Gloria Swanson

Norma Shearer

MAX FABIAN

Everett Sloane

Walter Slezak

Fred Clark

George Jessel

Zero Mostel

Chapter 2

When Was It? How Long?

Our story actually begins several years before Joe Mankiewicz began filming
All About Eve
. During the 1943–44 Broadway season, at the Booth Theatre on Forty-fifth Street in New York, the Austrian actress Elisabeth Bergner (1897–1986) was appearing in a stage thriller called
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
. In the play, Bergner had the role of a devoted and unsuspecting wife who is slowly being poisoned by her husband.

The play is creaky by today’s standards. It was creaky in the forties, but without the competition of television drama, such plays often did very well, and
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
turned into a fashionable hit. (One reviewer called the play “the largest bundle of nineteenth-century heroics the twentieth has ever offered with a straight face.”)

In Europe Elisabeth Bergner had been called “the Garbo of the stage.” Bergner herself once summed up her career with this line: “Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Chekhov, Shaw, Barrie, and Shakespeare again and again and again.”

She made movies in Germany (
Fräulein Else
, 1929;
Der Träumende Mund
[“Dreaming Lips”], 1932), and also in England, where she had immigrated. When the British film
Catherine the Great
was banned shortly after opening in Berlin in 1934, Hitler’s chief propagandist, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, wrote in the Nazi Party newspaper
Völkischer Beobachter
: “The attempt to present in Berlin émigré Jews, especially the warped Elisabeth Bergner, and to make money from them in Germany, represents an inartistic effort that must be resisted.”

Since the German-speaking countries were dangerously inhospitable, Bergner and her Hungarian husband/manager, Paul Czinner, remained in England. There she filmed
As You Like It
(directed by Czinner) in 1937 with the promising young actor Laurence Olivier. In this film, perhaps her best known, Bergner is a riveting presence. She has the wide, pleading eyes of a northern Renaissance Magdalene and, around her mouth, traces of a smirk. Her exuberant, full-bodied voice resembles an unlikely admixture of Eva LeGallienne and Mae West.

Two years after
As You Like It
, Bergner starred in
Stolen Life
with Michael Redgrave, which Warner Bros. remade in 1946 starring Bette Davis and Glenn Ford. Hollywood released this later version—the story of twin girls, one good, one bad, and both of course played with gusto by Bette—as
A Stolen Life
.

Having come to the United States when a German invasion of Great Britain seemed likely, Elisabeth Bergner was content to appear in plays by authors other than the great European dramatists. After all, the competition was formidable—Helen Hayes, Katherine Cornell, Lynn Fontanne—and many actors whose first language wasn’t English ended up playing stock parts: peasants, spies, fortune-tellers, and Nazi brutes.

We don’t know Bergner’s thoughts on Martin Vale (nom de plume of Marguerite Vale Veiller), the author of
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
, but from all accounts the actress threw herself into the play and gave it her best. In fact, she seems to have poured into this melodrama not only more than it deserved but more, almost, than it could take. Bergner wasn’t merely histrionic; she was over the top.

One reviewer, commenting on “the way she laid down a rose, the way she staggered up and down the stairs,” concluded that “Miss Bergner is a prize package of theatrical trickery who overdid the cuteness and melting connubiality.” In other words, she chewed the scenery.

George Bernard Shaw put it this way after seeing her in his
Saint Joan
: “Miss Bergner played Joan as if she were being burned at the stake when the curtain went up, instead of when it went down.”

Elisabeth Bergner gave almost 400 performances of
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
. It was during the run of this hit that she inadvertently played out, offstage, the events that would later come to be associated with Margo Channing. What happened to Margo in the film had already happened in real life to Elisabeth Bergner: There really was an Eve.

*   *   *

At this point in the narrative I introduce Mary Orr, who lives on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York. She is a playwright, an actress, and the author of novels and short stories. I recently spent an afternoon with her, and this is what she told me.

“My husband, Reginald Denham [1894–1983], directed
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
on Broadway with Elisabeth Bergner. After Elisabeth left the play in New York—which must have been in the summer of 1944—for a brief vacation before starting the national tour, her husband, Paul Czinner, called my husband on the phone. Actually, Reggie and I weren’t married at that time, but we both knew that he would be my husband before long.

“Incidentally, you know, don’t you, that Paul Czinner [1890–1972] managed every detail of Elisabeth’s career, and had done so throughout their marriage? He was one of the producers of
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
. Well, one day Paul called up and said, ‘Reggie, could you come to New Hampshire and spend a weekend with us? I think we should discuss who is going to play opposite Elisabeth on the road, because Victor Jory won’t go.’

“I think Victor had had enough of Elisabeth, to tell you the truth. But anyway, he had refused the tour and they had to find a new leading man. So my husband said to Paul Czinner, ‘I have to drive Mary up to Maine next weekend. She’s acting in summer stock in Skowhegan.’

“I was a young actress in my twenties then, considerably younger than Reggie, and I had to take whatever acting jobs came along, even if it meant that Reggie and I would spend most of the summer apart. That wasn’t easy, you know, because we were very much in love.

“Anyway, Reggie said to Paul, ‘We could make a detour on our way to Maine, spend a long weekend with you and Elisabeth, and then I can drive Mary to Skowhegan on Tuesday.’

“And that was what we did. We drove to New Hampshire, and it took a long time in those days because there were no interstates. Reggie and I stopped at Woodstock, Vermont, which was the nearest town to where this farm was that Elisabeth and Paul had taken for the summer.

“Now, Elisabeth was a very interesting character. I want you to realize that. Why? Well, for one thing, off the stage she was a little German
Hausfrau
, and then on the stage she was another person. Absolutely.

“Elisabeth and Paul invited us to dinner. Paul Czinner had recommended the little Woodstock Inn in Woodstock, Vermont. At that time it was a plain and simple country inn; now it’s a Rockefeller-type resort. Well, Reggie and I checked into this inn and Reggie called Paul and said, ‘We’re here.’ Paul said, ‘As soon as you’ve had a shower and changed, come on over,’ and he gave Reggie directions through the New Hampshire countryside to the farm where he and Elisabeth were spending the summer. It must have been about twelve miles east of Woodstock.

“We found it. My husband was a good driver. I never drove. Never had the eyesight to pass the test, but anyway we had a pleasant visit with them. Elisabeth was as nice to me as if I had been her equal in the theatre. She made no distinction.

“While having drinks, we brought Paul and Elisabeth up to date with the latest theatre gossip from New York. Finally Paul looked at Elisabeth and said in his Hungarian accent, ‘I sink you should get busy vith the dinner, Reggie and Mary must be hungry.’

“Elisabeth, whose accent was almost more British than German, stood up and said, ‘Come on in the kitchen with me, Mary, and I’ll teach you how to cook Wienerschnitzel.’

“While the men were still talking about Victor Jory’s replacement, I went into the kitchen with Elisabeth. I watched one of the world’s great actresses bread veal and peel potatoes. Now, at that time she was already in her late forties but she looked young. She was always young-looking because she was small and moved around like a girl.

“She did this and that in the kitchen, whatever you do when you make Wienerschnitzel, but she talked up a storm all the while. Before long, coming to a pause in her dinner preparations and also in her running monologue, she looked at me and said, ‘You’re a young actress. Let me tell you about the one—’

“Now I must tell you that Elisabeth always called her ‘that terrible girl,’ ‘that awful creature,’ or ‘that little bitch.’ She never called the girl by name, although later I learned that the girl’s name is———” And here Mary Orr said, “But be careful, please, what you say about her, because she’s unpredictable. In a minute, you’ll understand what I mean. What’s that? Oh yes, she’s still alive. She’s no longer a girl, of course, after all these years. But I can assure you she’s still very much alive. I’ve met her!”

(And so for reasons of punctilio I’ll use the name “Miss X”—at least for now.)

“Anyway, the girl used to stand in the alley beside the Booth Theatre night after night, wearing a little red coat. I suppose she somehow saw every performance of
The Two Mrs. Carrolls.
Or maybe she only claimed she did.

“Elisabeth told me all this right there in the kitchen. ‘So, Mary,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t you be curious? I was too, and so one night I invited her into my dressing room.’

“It seems that from that very night the ‘terrible girl’ took over Elisabeth’s life. The girl lied to her, deceived her, did things behind her back—even went after her husband, Paul Czinner! And why not? He was in a position to do things for her. He was a well-known film director, and his shrewd management had been indispensable to Elisabeth’s career.

“Years later someone hinted at a lesbian relationship between Elisabeth and the girl. At that time I certainly never thought of such a thing. You didn’t think about such things, back then.

“This is such a story! Are you sure you want to hear all of it?” Mary Orr asked.

I assured her I was fascinated, and so she continued, “Well, one night Elisabeth invited the girl to come to her dressing room for a visit. She was touched that a young fan would feel such devotion toward her. And the girl had a faint accent. She was English, she told Elisabeth and Paul, and, like them, she had fled to America for fear the Germans might invade Great Britain. Elisabeth said the girl’s eyes filled with tears. I wouldn’t be surprised if Elisabeth’s did, too. After all, she possessed all the emotions of the theatre.

“So there they were at the Booth Theatre, on Forty-fifth Street, in Elisabeth’s dressing room one night after the performance. If they had turned on the radio they might have heard, ‘This is Edward R. Murrow, in London. Today more bombs fell on this city.…’ But they didn’t. Instead they all became friends.

“A few days later Elisabeth arranged for the girl to become a secretary of sorts to Paul. And of course the girl performed to perfection. What did girls do in those days? Back then I’m sure she made coffee for the boss, and for the boss’s wife, or maybe it was tea, since they all had English connections—although some of them, as you’ll see presently, were more English than others.