All About “All About Eve” (37 page)

From the way these four eyeball one another, we’re certain they’re having more than just a conversation. A jump from Hollywood all the way to the Italian Renaissance reveals this famous still as a profane parody of a genre—the “sacra conversazione,” or holy conversation—popularized by such masters as Veneziano and Bellini. In a sacra conversazione, the Virgin and Child are flanked on either side by saints who may converse with her, with the beholder, or among themselves.

Our Fox studio master, lacking a virgin, a child, and saints, elected instead to depict in his devotional image three types of female beauty: the unripened, slightly masculine Eve; Margo, past the stage of full bloom; and Miss Caswell, a shimmering blonde bouquet. (Underlining her flowery status is the corsage at her waist. Over her shoulder, Muse-like, is the portrait of Sarah Siddons.) George Sanders is perhaps intended as an epicene nosegay. As ironic punctuation, he and Anne Baxter, portraying characters of ambiguous sexuality, enclose parenthetically the two heterosexual goddesses.

Chapter 26

Real Diamonds in a Wig

As the cult spread, new converts demanded a vulgate that the masses could read. In 1951 Random House published the Mankiewicz shooting script. The author claimed, not quite accurately, that
All About Eve
was the first screenplay ever published in hardcover.

Even before publication, contraband copies of the script circulated from hand to hand. In New York and other stronghold cities, fans started acting out favorite scenes at cocktail parties. Some of the more zealous learned their lines as well as Bette and others in the actual cast had learned theirs. The difference was that these off-screen line readings added a second, even heavier, layer of camp.

The novelist Joseph Hansen, born in the 1920s and a Bette Davis fan from youth, recalls that the movie “kept circulating to second-run, low-price theatres for at least a year after its first release, and probably even longer.” Asked about gay attendance at these showings, Hansen says, “I suppose every gay guy with a passion for Bette felt wild enthusiasm for the picture from the very beginning. But we couldn’t run out and buy videos in those days.”

All About Eve
appealed to other audiences as well. In April 1951, six months after its release, Darryl Zanuck mentioned the “large volume” of letters from habitual
non
-moviegoers. “Most of them are from people who say they had quit going to film theatres the past four or five years,” he said. “They had seen so many bad pictures that they had lost faith in the quality of screen entertainment.
All About Eve
may not make as much money as certain other films, but it has reached an audience that has been neglected.”

Not everyone wrote letters of praise, however. J. R. Moser, a member of the Fire Prevention Committee of Evansville, Indiana, was so distressed that he wrote to the National Fire Prevention Association, in Boston, about Bette’s smoking in a particular scene. His letter, dated November 20, 1950, and preserved at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, reads in part:

We have preached and preached not to smoke in bed, yet I viewed a movie last night where movie actors, under the influence of spirits, smoked in bed. This in my opinion encourages smoking in bed, as the public are quick to act on what they see done. I believe it is time we asked the cooperation of studios not to show actors smoking in bed. It is adult delinquency.

This letter reached Melvin Freeman, of the National Fire Protection Association, who in turn wrote to the New York office of the MPAA (i.e., the former Hays office, which by 1950 was known as the Johnston office): “The film that Mr. Moser has reference to is
All About Eve
with Bette Davis. Isn’t there something we can do to see that producers eliminate such sequences in films?”

By January 1951 copies of these two letters had arrived on the desk of Joseph Breen, who replied to his New York colleagues:

In the case of
All About Eve
, please have in mind that we have no authority, under the provisions of the Production Code, to withhold our approval of a picture because it contains a scene of a woman smoking in bed. When such eliminations are made, they are done voluntarily and willingly by the studio making the picture.

Bette herself probably never got wind of this little controversy. Years later, she talked about smoking as a characterization technique: “I discovered that for a performance a cigarette is a marvelous prop—sometimes for emphasis, sometimes for anger. For so many things. What emotions you can convey merely by putting one out! If I played a character who smoked, I didn’t just take a puff or two in one scene only. I smoked all through the film, as any serious smoker would.”

The Cigarette Scorecard

Although Bette Davis is Hollywood’s most famous smoker, in
All About Eve
she meets her match. She smokes nine cigarettes, and Gary Merrill smokes an equal number. George Sanders smokes six, Hugh Marlowe three, Gregory Ratoff two, and Anne Baxter only one—at the end, when Eve makes herself comfortable with Phoebe. Apart from extras in a few scenes, no one else in the movie lights up.

Later in 1951 a very different kind of controversy was avoided through the vigilance of State Department officials in Washington. Fearful of offending a friendly South American dictator, they persuaded 20th Century-Fox not to enter
All About Eve
in the International Film Festival held in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Variety
, in an item titled “All About Little Eva?,” revealed the reason why: “The story of a young film actress who is ruthless in her ambition and willing to step on necks of benefactors in order to get ahead in the theatre might be construed as paralleling the career of Eva Perón, wife of the president of Argentina. Latter lies just across the River Plate from Uruguay. Mme. Perón is a former actress.”

When the film—dubbed in German—opened in Vienna in February, 1952, the studio found itself threatened with a lawsuit. Maria Zeppezauer, daughter of the Viennese playwright Marco Brociner, claimed that
All About Eve
was plagiarized in part from her late father’s play
Behind the Curtain
, a local success when it was produced in 1909. The resemblances cited by the plaintiff—an aging female star, a youngster fighting to become famous, the involvement of a theatre critic—seem to have proved too flimsy for a judgment against 20th Century-Fox.
Variety
reported on March 5, 1952, that Mrs. Zeppezauer had “addressed a letter to the studio, pointing out similarities although she admits the film has differences in details from her father’s work. She stated she will present detailed financial demands later.” The lawsuit died on the vine. Fox’s extant legal files are silent on the matter.

No Innuendos, Please—We’re Anglo-Saxon

Censorship during the studio era was not limited to Will Hays and his heirs. Local censor boards, in the United States and abroad, made cuts in films as they wished. Here are a few examples from
All About Eve
.

• In Massachusetts the following bits of dialogue were eliminated:

—“… rear end.” (Ritter)

—“something a girl could make sacrifices for” (Monroe)

—“take my clothes off”; “I consider it highly unnatural … unpregnant understudy”; and “I’m still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut” (Davis)

• In Australia the following exchange was eliminated: Monroe: “Now there’s something a girl could make sacrifices for.” Merrill: “And probably has.” Davis’s line, “A fur coat over a nightgown,” was also cut Down Under.

*   *   *

In Britain, the situation was reversed. A 1952 film called
It Started in Paradise
, featuring Kay Kendall, blatantly borrowed the central theme of
All About Eve
and applied it to the London fashion world. The movie failed, but Kendall’s performance as a bitchy socialite gave her fledgling career a jump-start.

Hollywood, in the meantime, borrowed liberally from
Eve
, though subsequent fifties films contained no outright plagiarism. Besides, you can’t copyright a party, and that’s what caught the fancy of later filmmakers. Margo Channing’s welcome home–birthday party for Bill Sampson did for cocktails what Brando did for T-shirts and leather jackets—that is, established an institution.

The party, strictly speaking, is not a cocktail party. As far as we can tell from the movie, it begins long past the cocktail hour, usually defined as five to eight o’clock in the evening. But in the fifties a cocktail party had more cachet than similar social gatherings. (
Elsa Maxwell’s Etiquette Book
, published in 1951, devotes separate sections to “The Tea Party,” “Buffets,” “Breakfast, Brunch, Luncheon,” and “Cocktail Parties.” As for Hollywood movies, the author might have omitted all but the latter.)

Before
All About Eve
, cocktail parties in the movies were amorphous. It was liquor that mattered, not the stylishness of its consumption. The camera might follow any actor around the room, not just the star, for the cocktail-party set piece hadn’t yet evolved into a showcase for leading ladies. Near the end of
Now, Voyager
(1942), there’s a brief, nondescript celebration where cocktails are served, but it’s just that—pre-dinner drinks. In
Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman
(1947), there’s nothing distinctive about the boozy party scene. What we remember is Susan Hayward tossing them down.
Gentleman’s Agreement
, also made in 1947, has a demure little gathering where Gregory Peck meets Dorothy McGuire for the first time. It’s so subdued you expect them to sip Shirley Temples.

Mankiewicz might have borrowed two or three minor points from
The Velvet Touch
(1948), but How to Give a Party wasn’t one of them. In this backstage crime drama Dan Tobin plays an intrusive, epicene gossip columnist who writes “Broadway Chatter”; Rosalind Russell kills her producer with a theatrical trophy named the Player’s Award; and soon after its beginning the story dissolves into a long flashback. At the after-theatre party for great-lady-of-the-stage Rosalind Russell, other members of the cast—Claire Trevor, Leon Ames, Leo Genn—get an equal share of camera attention. At this party, the drinks are barely visible.

But the pattern changed around 1950, when on-screen drinking became more prominent and more sophisticated. No doubt
All About Eve
helped engineer the shift: Margo’s famous party became a convenient blueprint for movie cocktail parties for the next decade or so.

In 1952
The Bad and the Beautiful
copied not only
Eve
’s flashback structure but Margo’s party sequence as well. If the Minnelli cocktail party mimics
All About Eve
, so does the rest of the movie—in spirit, if not visually. And certainly not in wit.

Ironically, Mankiewicz’s next soiree—in
The Barefoot Contessa
—has none of the style and wit of Margo’s party. This later one is a hysterical psychodrama, a Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Hollywood party. It takes place in an expensively ugly Los Angeles house. Among the guests are a self-proclaimed “tramp,” a rather self-righteous director (Bogart), and his “good” fiancée, Elizabeth Sellars, whose look of tight self-approval makes you root for the bad girl. Also on hand are a villainous producer (Warren Stevens) and a South American playboy (Marius Goring) who end up in a shouting match that has some of the lamest dialogue Mankiewicz ever wrote. Apart from its dispiriting badness, the worst thing about this party is that it shows no trace of borrowing from
All About Eve
. While everyone else in Hollywood was copying him, the only thing Mankiewicz borrowed from
Eve
was the name of a character. When Ava Gardner, as movie queen Maria Damata, stars in a film called
Black Dawn
, we see a shot of the marquee at the premiere. Her co-star is named “Lloyd Richards.” (This kind of coy in-joke, rampant in the
nouvelle vague
, helped endear
The Barefoot Contessa
to Truffaut and Godard.)

Even a little throwaway movie like
Serenade
(1956), with Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine, contains a more stylish cocktail party than
The Barefoot Contessa
. Directed by Anthony Mann,
Serenade
is another backstage picture: Mario Lanza rises from the vineyards to operatic success but has romantic trouble when he marries Sarita Montiel (the Spanish Bette Davis) while trying to forget Joan Fontaine. At this Macbethish cocktail party, Fontaine wears a dress that’s a lot like Margo Channing’s. Vincent Price, playing a corrupt half gigolo, half homo derived from Addison DeWitt, filches an Addison line to fling at man-eater Fontaine: “We deserve each other.”

By 1959, when
Imitation of Life
was released,
All About Eve
had become the Queen Mother of backstage movies. In Douglas Sirk’s camp masterpiece, Lana Turner—ambitious, seductive, besotted by “the Theatre”—plays Lora Meredith, star of such Broadway hits as
Summer Madness
,
No Greater Glory
,
Always Laughter
, and
Happiness.
(Did Lloyd Richards come up with these titles? They’re every bit as fruity as
Aged in Wood
and
Footsteps on the Ceiling
. The difference is that Mankiewicz’s titles are blatantly tongue-in-cheek.)

The
Imitation of Life
screenplay (by Eleanore Griffin and Allan Scott) echoes
Eve
in several scenes. For example, Lana, a widow, telling boyfriend John Gavin about her theatrical beginnings: “My husband was in the theatre, too—a director—a good director. Everything I know, I owe to him. It was a small town, and a little theatre—but professional. When he died, I had to make a living doing something else. I never really wanted anything but the stage.… It took me five years to save enough money to come to New York.” (Eve Harrington, in Margo’s dressing room: “There was a little theatre group there … like a drop of rain on a desert. That’s where I met Eddie.… We played
Liliom
for three performances.”)