All About “All About Eve” (36 page)

Tom Mankiewicz says he once discussed this line reading with Anne Baxter. She told him it was carefully rehearsed and completely intentional. Mankiewicz used a similar directorial device in
Sleuth
, his last film. He said, “I wanted Michael Caine to use his accent the way a violinist plays his instrument. Throughout the film I had him modulate his accent from upper crust to Cockney, according to the tension in a particular scene.”

Besides vocal clues to her sexual preference, there is also the matter of Eve’s costumes. In the theatre alley, where she accosts Karen Richards, Eve wears a drab outfit—as Margo puts it, she’s “the mousy one with the trench coat and the funny hat.” Some viewers see this get-up as boyish or tomboyish; others find it sexless. Vito Russo, in
The Celluloid Closet
, describes Eve in this early scene as “a sort of malevolent Huck Finn.”

To viewers in 1950, it’s likely that the trenchcoat and rain hat seemed natural. After all, it was a rainy night. (Some ladies in the audience, as well as furriers, might have pondered instead how Karen Richards would ever get her mink coat dry.)

And what about those bathrobes worn by Eve and her rooming house friend who makes the late-night call to Lloyd Richards? In Hollywood movies of the time, female boudoir apparel—nightgowns, robes, negligees—were used to bootleg a bit of sex and skin into a scene. (Celeste Holm is in a sheer nightie when she answers her bedside phone late at night.) But not here. Eve’s bathrobe, and her friend’s, reach to the neck, with no frills. In movie code of the time, such plainness would suggest an incomplete femininity. The scene’s harsh lighting also suggests something “unnatural” about Eve.

After the phone call she beams at the girlfriend. The smile could signal either “Let’s go to bed” or “Let’s go back to bed.” Whereupon Eve opens her arms in embrace, and they mount the stairs. But Lloyd Richards is on his way over. For Eve, it’s a bustling night—as lesbian and as thespian.

Randy Stuart, as the girlfriend, played her brief role entirely in right profile. It’s therefore surprising to see her full face in photos and in later movies such as
Room for One More
(1952) and
The Incredible Shrinking Man
(1957). She had a Piper Laurie kind of cuteness, which helped her get a Fox contract in 1943, when she was nineteen. But she was a pro already, having grown up in a theatrical family.

In the forties she was a member of Jack Carson’s radio show, appearing regularly as “The Hubba Hubba Girl.” In the fifties she had a recurring role on TV in
Wyatt Earp
and a returning role as Harry Morgan’s wife on
Dragnet
. She died in 1996 at the age of seventy-two, remembered, if at all, for her bit part in
All About Eve
. Was she photographed in profile because the camera favored one side of her face, or because, playing a crypto-Sapphist, she was seen as only half a woman?

From so many clues, vocal and visual, the audience was surely meant to infer something about lesbianism. Not the entire audience, of course, and not necessarily at a conscious level. But Mankiewicz the Freudian wrote, dressed, and directed Eve Harrington as more than just a “contemptible little worm”—Karen’s epithet. To him, she qualified for the archetype of the Killer Lesbian. (Years later, Mankiewicz was still getting mail that asked whether Eve had lesbian tendencies. “Absolutely!” he told an interviewer in 1980.)

It’s a grim joke that we learn “all about Eve” except who she really is. We’re left to guess her psychological structure from the clues we’re able to read. And many clues are homosexual, as they are with “that venomous fishwife, Addison DeWitt.” What Mankiewicz does reveal—Eve the deadly lesbian—now strikes us as retrograde.

But we shouldn’t judge Mankiewicz too severely. He was progressive even to encode the subject of homosexuality in the film. It’s important to realize, too, that he handled Eve’s lesbianism as neither funny nor shameful, nor frightening. We dislike her because she’s “little Miss Evil.” Whether that was intended as cause and effect—sexual deviance equals iniquity—is another matter, a subject for political debate. Mankiewicz, hewing to the psychoanalytic party line, half condemns and half bemoans the sad state of deviants via Addison’s lecture: “You’re an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common. Also a contempt for humanity, an inability to love and be loved … We deserve each other.” This view of homosexuality prevailed in medical and psychiatric textbooks of the time, and in books for the general reader.

But Mankiewicz broke with Hollywood tradition, and with American literary tradition, in one important way: The lesbian doesn’t die at the end. By contrast, just two years earlier Gore Vidal, one of the boldest pre-Stonewall gay writers, had the homosexual protagonist of
The City and the Pillar
kill his lover. Death to deviants was everywhere de rigueur.

If Mankiewicz beamed a ray of enlightenment from the screen with
All About Eve
, he later regressed. In 1958, in league with Vidal and Tennessee Williams on
Suddenly, Last Summer
, he filmed one of the screen’s most horrific gay deaths: Sebastian Venable killed and eaten by youths. Although Eve Harrington is about to be symbolically consumed by young Phoebe, the closest she comes to such literal devastation is when Margo threatens to “stuff that pathetic little lost lamb down Mr. DeWitt’s ugly throat.”

This is the most violent line in the film. As such, it vibrates with a kind of crude, brutal poetry. That’s one reason it’s disturbing. Another reason is that it suggests sexual violence by choking. We flash forward to Sebastian Venable’s flesh crammed down young throats. Involuntarily we recall a grisly panorama out of
Hollywood Babylon
, including the fellatio death of F. W. Murnau and the murderous dildo shoved into Ramon Novarro’s mouth by the hustlers who killed him. Margo’s line could have been written for Dirty Harry.

The line is crude because it’s so naked. It’s also blunt and ungraceful. Why, then, is it poetic in any sense? Because of its contradictory layers of meaning: a lamb, the emblem of innocence, is equated with Eve, “little Miss Evil.” Also because one of the dictionary definitions of “lamb” is “the flesh of a young sheep used as meat.” The word
pathetic
, which has come to mean, among other things, “emotionally moving,” originally had the stronger sense of “liable to suffer.” And the phrase
ugly throat
connotes something grotesque and diseased. Suddenly Margo has turned into a bacchante, a flesh-tearing handmaiden of Bacchus. She has regressed from Lloyd Richards to Euripides.

Pushed to its limit, the line is full of venom. In fact, it’s more punishing than anything written by Addison DeWitt in his column. After all, Addison surely told the truth about Margo and other “mature actresses” who continue playing youthful roles far longer than they should. Cruel, yes. But cruelty is part of a critic’s job description.

Addison’s column is reprehensible not for its candor but because of his motivation: he attacks Margo to boost Eve, his new trick. But how to explain Mankiewicz’s severity in writing the line about “Mr. DeWitt’s ugly throat”?

Mankiewicz himself might have explained it in Freudian terms. Having based Addison partially on himself, and writing the character as a foppish pseudo-fairy, the author must symbolically strangle his epicene creation. In other words, Addison étouffée. How? By stuffing a lesbian down his throat. But, to quote another sardonic line from Margo, “Tell that to Dr. Freud along with the rest of it!”

*   *   *

All of these slippery subtexts have some bearing on what Mankiewicz intended in
All About Eve
. But one reason it remains a fascinating film is that it eludes any one definitive reading. The more times you see it, the more loaded it seems with possible meanings. Conversely, it belies many of our projections. How can we not feel a bit foolish, poring over it as though it were Holy Writ?

Mankiewicz himself was dismissive of such endeavors. “I’m not prepared to say film is an art. I don’t know any films that are going to be around two hundred years from now. In Hollywood of the forties and fifties we had no illusion about what we were doing: turning out entertainment for the public.”

He was so right, at least the part about entertainment.
All About Eve
is indeed one of the most entertaining movies ever made, but to those long-ago gays who first elevated it to cult status it soared beyond entertainment. Watching it again and again, they began to venerate it. Not as a shrine to thwarted romance, like
Casablanca
, nor as a chapel erected to preserve vanished childhood, like
The Wizard of Oz
. Instead,
Eve
soon evolved into a rather raucous refuge from the anti-queer pogroms of cold-war America.

Its patroness was Saint Margo. Her very name comes from a Greek word meaning “pearl,” and to the sexually disenfranchised she was, from the start, a pearl of great price. Cultured, yes, but like that grain of sand in the oyster, always an irritant.

The same could be said of Bette Davis, who had been a gay favorite since she became a star. It was natural that the success of
All About Eve
should converge with the Davis cult. Margo Channing might have been describing how Bette’s fans viewed Bette when she summed up Eve’s infatuation with the theatre: “All the religions in the world rolled into one, and we’re gods and goddesses.”

But gods and goddesses are remote. Even the commercial deities of Hollywood were elusive, since their newest picture often didn’t stick around long even when it was a hit. Outside of large cities, a film like
All About Eve
might play for a week or less. Movies weren’t shown on television until the mid-fifties, so those who wanted another crack at a certain picture had to chase it to neighborhood theatres or suburban drive-ins. Once the studio withdrew it from circulation, fans had nothing to rely on but memory. Cult followers of a movie really did need the drive and conviction of religionists.

There were ways, of course, to summon up fragments of the film. Stills gave many movies a lingering half-life, for they appeared not only in fan magazines but also in other national publications and often in local papers, thanks to Hollywood press-agentry. Devoted fans clipped and saved.

Before the concept of paperback “novelizations,” one movie magazine,
Screen Stories
, retold in prose each month the scenario of five or six of the studios’ biggest new productions. These retellings were illustrated with up to a dozen stills from the films, meaning that fans could revisit these movies provided they kept back issues of the magazine.

Bette Davis preserved the
Screen Stories
version of
All About Eve
in one of her scrapbooks. The adaptation covers a big chunk of the plot in this first galloping paragraph: “It was Karen Richards who found her, wide-eyed and tremulous, outside the stage door of the theatre where Margo Channing starred in Lloyd Richard’s play,
Aged in Wood
. Karen took her backstage to meet Margo after Eve said she hadn’t missed a performance since she came to New York. Stagestruck girls were a dime a dozen, but not girls like Eve. Eve was—different.”

Missing from the magazine layout in that prose condensation of the film is the still that would later become the most famous one from
All About Eve
and also one of the most immediately recognizable stills from the studio era. It’s the one with Anne Baxter on the left, then Bette, then Marilyn, and finally George Sanders on the far right. Although
Screen Stories
didn’t use this still in 1950 and other publications foregrounded different ones, a few years later this particular one had become emblematic of
All About Eve
. As a visual synecdoche, this photograph came to stand for a complex set of codes and cultural assumptions.

Like the Mona Lisa, Whistler’s Mother, and American Gothic, this still has been reproduced so often that, on the surface at least, it has lost some of its charge. But like those paintings, this image seduces the eye because it’s so many things at once: a fetching composition, an unforgettable portrait, an apparent fraction of something vast and meaningful. And like those paintings, it has become the punch line of an in-joke that not everyone gets.

According to Roland Barthes, “The still photo is not a sample but a quotation.” Meaning, presumably, that while a sample represents the whole, a still picture is an autonomous image pulled arbitrarily from a visual text.

Why did this particular image from
All About Eve
become the film’s virtual trademark? The easiest answer is that it’s the best composed. Of all the actor groupings in the dozens of stills from the movie, this has the best balance. The still photographer on
Eve
took a lot of stiff photos—the actors look posed; very little movement is implied. Perhaps this was intentional, since the movie was seen as talky and theatrical.

This much-used still also lacks movement. All arms but Bette’s are pointed straight down. George Sanders’ left hand is half-clenched, and Marilyn clutches her dress. But an invisible word seems to hover in the air, almost to jump from mouth to mouth like the marker on a TV sing-along jingle. No one’s mouth is open, yet the photograph resounds with silent dialogue.

Provocative, too, is the angle of the actors’ regard. George and Marilyn gaze at Anne Baxter. Why not at Bette? (Viewing this picture, don’t we assure ourselves that
we
would choose Bette for our focus?) Bette’s eyes cut toward Marilyn, as if to question her: “Why don’t you look at me?” Anne Baxter, in profile, is perhaps roving her eyes over them all in calculation.

Another possible reason this still became the film’s quasi-official logo is because it “quotes” a crucial plot turn. “This must be, at long last, our formal introduction,” says Addison to Eve just at this point in the film. Without this meeting, they might not have leagued against Margo.