All About “All About Eve” (32 page)

This was a one-hour radio version of Mankiewicz’s
All About Eve
. Such a stripped-down production strikes us today as bizarre. It’s as strange as hearing
Jurassic Park
reenacted on drive-time radio. But from the thirties to the fifties it was common practice for top stars (and lesser ones) to perform in radio adaptations of recent movies, either their own or others’. Bette Davis, for instance, did radio versions of
Dark Victory, Jezebel
, and
Now, Voyager
. (Her co-star in the latter, a presentation of
Lux Radio Theatre,
was Gregory Peck.) Hedy Lamarr and Alan Ladd once co-starred as Ilsa and Rick in a radio version of
Casablanca
.

November 16, 1952, was Tallulah’s Night of a Hundred Stars, and she was every one of them. Full of herself, she introduced the radio play like this: “Good evening, dahlings. The play we’re performing for you this evening on
Theatre Guild on the Air
is called—and I never could understand why [
audience laughter
]—
All About Eve
. True, there is an Eve in it, and what a part that is. There’s also a glamorous and brilliant leading lady of the theatre, whose true identity has been kept a secret too long [
loud laughter
]. Tonight, dahlings … tonight baby intends to do something about that [
laughter
]. So to get on with it, we raise the curtain on
All About Eve
. Hah!”

This radio version was adapted from the Mankiewicz screenplay by Arthur Allen, who took many an unfortunate liberty with the material. Like the movie, the radio play opens with Addison’s voice-over. But for radio the adapter used several lines that Mankiewicz, or Zanuck, had rejected. This is how the radio script begins: “Hello, permit me to introduce myself. My name is Addison DeWitt. I am a drama critic and columnist, which means I am essential to the theatre, as ants to a picnic or the boll weevil to a cotton field. The story properly begins one rainy night backstage at the Curran Theatre on Broadway [sic].”

Lines spoken by one character in the movie are distributed to other characters on radio. In the film, for example, when Karen says to Margo, “She worships you, it’s like something out of a book,” Lloyd retorts, “That book is out of print.” Now it’s Margo who speaks Lloyd’s line.

And not very well. Listening to Tallulah as Margo Channing—punctuated with endless “dahlings”—you realize how completely and inalterably the role belongs to Bette Davis. Tallulah sounds overconfident and tentative at the same time. She’s a little too drunk in the party scene, a little too strident throughout, and her Margo has none of the vulnerability of Bette’s. Hearing this performance, it’s easy to understand John Mason Brown’s famous review of her acting in
Antony and Cleopatra
: “Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra—and sank.”

Others also suffer by comparison with the movie cast. Eve Harrington, played by Beatrice Pearson, has the dithery voice of an ingenue Edith Bunker. Kevin McCarthy as Lloyd, Alan Hewitt as Addison, and Don Briggs as Bill are interchangeable. As Birdie, Florence Robinson at least does a near-perfect imitation of Thelma Ritter. And Mary Orr, who invented Eve in the first place, plays Karen Richards.

Asked what it was like to work with Tallulah Bankhead, Mary Orr still shudders. “I think she was a very bitchy woman, really I do. When we did the broadcast, she came over to me and said, ‘Dahling, I understand you wrote Margo Channing based on me?’ I said, ‘No, Miss Bankhead, she was based on Elisabeth Bergner.’ When she heard that, she thundered: ‘You didn’t?’ And she never spoke to me again!”

Bette continued to deny that she had Tallulah in mind while playing Margo. Asked by
Playboy
in 1982, “Was there any truth in the story that you were doing a bit of Bankhead shtick in
All About Eve
?” Bette responded, “No truth at all. We never even
thought
of her. Bankhead was
far
more eccentric than Margo Channing.”

Mankiewicz, too, dismissed speculation that Margo Channing was a caricature of Tallulah. “It’s nonsense,” he said. “If Claudette Colbert had played the role, everyone would have said we were doing a take-off on Ilka Chase.”

And yet the scent of Tallulah lingers. She’s like the victim in an Agatha Christie plot, albeit a comic intrigue sans murder. Unless, as Tallulah insisted,
All About Eve
was some form of character assassination.

Bette Davis is not the only suspect.

Perhaps this is the time to recall Edith Head to the witness stand. “I steeped myself in Tallulah,” she said, “and everything looked as if it was made for her, yet the clothes complimented Bette. What you must understand is that Bette was
becoming
Tallulah Bankhead or Margo Channing, or whoever the hell she was supposed to be.”

Anne Baxter, too, had reason to want Tallulah read. Read, that is, as the vainglorious prototype for Margo Channing, a temperamental aging actress who deserved what she got at the hands of Eve Harrington. For Anne Baxter was a Tallulah survivor—in 1945 they had co-starred in
A Royal Scandal
.

“Tallulah had a multitude of reasons for hating Anne Baxter, who played her lady-in-waiting,” said Bankhead’s biographer, Lee Israel. “There was Anne Baxter’s personality—which simply rubbed Tallulah the wrong way. There was her age, twenty-two—which simply rubbed Tallulah the wrong way. There was her politics—Republican—which simply rubbed Tallulah the wrong way. And there was the
deference
paid directly and indirectly to the younger actress, especially by Lubitsch, which was the most offensive phenomenon of all.”

It didn’t help that Anne Baxter’s grandfather, Frank Lloyd Wright, visited the set and watched Tallulah at work. “Not bad for an old dame,” he said loudly. Bankhead bristled. The next take required her to tap Baxter lightly with a slap. Instead she sent her reeling.

Ernst Lubitsch, who originally was to direct
A Royal Scandal
, suffered a heart attack and had to withdraw. His assistant, Otto Preminger, took over as director; Lubitsch stayed on as producer only. One day Lubitsch and Tallulah had a frightful row. She “reviled him with a barrage of scurrility that might have shocked Henry Miller” and stormed into her dressing room, where she ripped off her dress and hurled her wiglet across the room.

Did this perhaps inspire Anne Baxter’s fury in the scene where Bill Sampson rejects Eve’s advances? Scorned, Eve Harrington rips off her wig, bangs it onto her dressing table, snatches it up again, and tries to rip it apart. She seems about to destroy the room when Addison suddenly appears. If Tallulah recognized herself on-screen as the source of Eve’s rage, she perhaps had one more reason to hate Anne Baxter.

After
All About Eve
came out, Tallulah claimed that Mankiewicz had visited the set of
A Royal Scandal
five years earlier to study her mannerisms. Mankiewicz countered with suave malice: “I visited the set, true. But I was studying Lubitsch, not Bankhead.”

While we’re rounding up the usual suspects, we must include Darryl Zanuck. According to Tom Mankiewicz, “Zanuck’s choice for the role of Margo Channing after Claudette Colbert dropped out was Tallulah Bankhead. He and Dad had a big fight about the casting. That I know.” This assertion contradicts the written records of Zanuck, Joe Mankiewicz, and the Fox casting director. In fact, it’s a rather amazing fillip—tantamount to the appearance of a surprise witness.

When Zanuck uttered the name “Tallulah Bankhead,” Mankiewicz must have seen hell open up. Her presence would mean the end of his quiet, orderly sets. Tallulah would drink, she would snort. She would steal scenes and wreck the ensemble acting he had in mind for this film. And when Tallulah realized she was playing not only Margo Channing but Tallulah Bankhead as well, then what? Would she, like Bette Davis at Warner Bros., try to rewrite the script? Since Tallulah hated Anne Baxter, how would their scenes turn out, especially the early ones where Margo dotes on Eve?

We don’t know whether Tallulah ever got wind of her near miss with
All About Eve
. If so, it was doubtless on her long list of grievances when she called up Zanuck to threaten a lawsuit.

Tom Mankiewicz stops short of saying that his father based Margo Channing on Tallulah. Rather, he explains, “What Dad tried so hard to do was to create a three-dimensional Margo. I think those scenes about what it means to be a woman, and Margo’s relationship with Bill, are very un-Tallulah. Dad and Tallulah Bankhead didn’t know each other very well, so I’m not sure how he could have patterned the role on her.”

It’s demeaning to writers to see their characters pinned wriggling to the wall above a neat label “based on” some real person. That’s one reason Mankiewicz said later, when asked about the Margo–Tallulah connection, that the archetype for Margo Channing was the eighteenth-century English actress Peg Woffington. “I’ve always told the truth about that,” Mankiewicz told an interviewer, “and nobody has ever quite believed me.”

Mankiewicz undoubtedly directed Bette Davis to play certain scenes à la Tallulah. For instance, the one where Margo, arriving late for the audition, encounters Addison DeWitt in the theatre lobby. Addison says, “I refer to your new and unpregnant understudy, Miss Eve Harrington.… Didn’t you know?” Margo answers quickly, “Of course I knew.” But it’s not a Bette Davis line reading. Rather, it sounds like a drag queen doing Tallulah. Bette’s voice drops even lower; she seems to scoop the line up off the floor and throw it at George Sanders. And the words aren’t articulated, they’re carelessly poured out like bourbon at three o’clock in the morning. The line reading is intentionally undisciplined, and very effective. It’s a sign of Mankiewicz’s subtlety that he had Bette “do” Tallulah just this once, fast but with poisonous accuracy.

In the writing, however, he used the Bankhead household as a paradigm.

If Margo Channing—how she walks, talks, sleeps, thinks, drinks—resembles not only Bankhead but a bevy of other actresses as well, certain details of Margo’s living arrangements are less generic. After all, Mankiewicz knew the gossip. Actresses fascinated him, and so did the theatre. As a show-business insider and a connoisseur of scuttlebutt, there was little he didn’t hear.

He would have known all about Edie, for instance. Edie Smith became a devoted fan when Tallulah first appeared on the London stage in the twenties. According to a Bankhead biographer, “When Tallulah decided that she needed a live-in right hand, she invited Edie to work for her. Edie agreed. In no time at all, Tallulah was totally dependent on her new friend and factotum.” (In the script, Mankiewicz wrote: “That same night we sent for Eve’s things, her few pitiful possessions.… Eve became my sister, lawyer, mother, friend, psychiatrist, and cop.”)

Edie Smith, fortunately, had no designs on Tallulah’s career. That’s perhaps the reason she lasted some thirty years. “As scripts arrived, they were placed atop a monumental pile of similar entries which Tallulah never touched. Edie screened them and passed them on to Tallulah if they seemed suitable for her hybrid, hothouse talents.” (Mankiewicz’s script: “There’s the script to go back to the Guild.… It seems I can’t think of a thing you haven’t thought of, Eve.”)

If Edie Smith, devoted friend and handmaiden, served Tallulah as half Eve Harrington and half Birdie Coonan, Dola Cavendish was Bankhead’s Birdie with a million bucks but without the sassy comebacks. According to another biographer, Dennis Brian, “Dola was a wealthy Canadian who behaved as though Tallulah was the Empress of the British Empire and she, Dola, a humble and adoring subject.” (Margo Channing to Eve Harrington: “And please stop acting as if I were the Queen Mother.”) Brian said, “Tallulah never traveled with a pocketbook—emulating the Queen of England—but had Dola trailing after her carrying the petty cash.”

Dola, too, took a shine to Tallulah in London in the twenties. Too shy to wangle an invitation to meet her idol, Dola instead queried mutual acquaintances, “Can I help her in any way? Does she need any money?” It was Tallulah who finally insisted on an introduction to her mysterious benefactress. (Eve: “I’d like anything Miss Channing played in.” Margo: “Would you, really? How sweet.”)

Back in North America, Dola eventually moved into Tallulah’s house. “She shopped, helped with the mail, traveled with Tallulah, ran Tallulah’s morning tub, scrambled eggs for her at three o’clock in the morning, and listened adoringly when the actress, who was experiencing an increasing amount of difficulty falling asleep at night, wanted somebody to talk to until dawn.” (Birdie: “I haven’t got a union. I’m slave labor.”)

Tallulah, famously pan-sexual, seemed content not to awaken Dola’s dormant lesbianism. “I know what people think,” she told a friend, “but I’ve never even seen Dola in a slip.”

The household occasionally grew tense when Dola, or Edie, felt undermined by the other’s attempt to take over functions that belonged to her. (Margo: “Birdie, you don’t like Eve, do you?” Birdie: “You want an argument or an answer?”)

Dola and Tallulah spent forty years together, separated eventually by Dola’s death in 1966. Two years later Tallulah died.

Mankiewicz may also have borrowed from Tallulah to fashion Eve’s career. Phoebe, the high-school girl who sneaks into Eve’s apartment the night Eve wins the Sarah Siddons Award, tells her idol: “You know the Eve Harrington Clubs they have in most of the girls’ high schools? Ours was the first. Erasmus Hall. I’m the president.”

This strikes a false note to American ears, since fan clubs in the United States have always been devoted to film stars. But a similar, all-girl following sprang up around Tallulah in London. During the ten-month run of
The Dancers
in 1923, a fanatical claque of some two dozen Cockney girls, most of them in their late teens, cheered Tallulah’s performances from the gallery. They attended every possible performance and waited for her as she entered and left the theatre. Tallulah, only a few years older than they, was soon on a first-name basis with the gallery girls.