All About “All About Eve” (38 page)

Robert Alda, as theatrical agent Allen Loomis, lecturing Lana on how to succeed in the theatre: “If the Dramatists’ Club wants to eat and sleep with you, you will eat and sleep with them. If some producer with a hand as cold as a toad wants to do a painting of you in the nude, you’ll accommodate him, for a very small part.” In this scene it’s not the lines that recall
All About Eve
but rather the line readings, for Alda’s phrasing and inflections are a pastiche of Bill Sampson’s speech to Eve that begins, “The Theatuh, the Theatuh.”

Lana, at rehearsal in an empty theatre, tells off the agent and also the playwright, though not so memorably as Margo chewing out Lloyd, Bill, and Max when she discovers that Eve is her new understudy. Later on, Lana at her dressing-room table is photographed from the same angle as Margo at hers.

Someone connected with
Imitation of Life
must have been a die-hard devotee of
All About Eve
, for there’s even a scene where Lana treats her mink coat like a poncho—as though acting out literally Mankiewicz’s witty dinner-table characterization of Margo Channing the first time he discussed the role with Bette. To round out the string of
hommages
, there are the inevitable parties—in this case, rather bloodless opening-night affairs where Lana and Company await reviews. It’s “
Imitation of Eve
,” all right, but Lana as Lora Meredith never wins a Sarah Siddons Award. Even Universal-International and Douglas Sirk couldn’t stretch a point that far.

The Queen of the Extras

Who is Bess Flowers? Why, Bess is famous in her fashion, at least among connoisseurs of obscure actors and seekers of the recherché. For her brief role in
All About Eve
, credit is due but none is given. You find her name not on the screen but rather in scholarly lists compiled by passionate cinephiles.

Bess Flowers speaks one line, near the end of the picture when she congratulates the latest winner of the Sarah Siddons Award: “I’m so happy for you, Eve.” (She also appears in two other scenes: We see her on Walter Hampden’s right at the opening awards ceremony, and we glimpse her at Margo’s party.)

Bess Flowers (1900–1984) had a phantom career, for she appeared in hundreds of films and yet in a sense no one really saw her. That’s because she specialized in bit parts and walk-ons. And yet, according to John Springer and Jack Hamilton in
They Had Faces Then
, she attracted “a cult of her own in the forties and fifties.” If they ever make a film about
her
it will surely be called “Queen of the Extras,” for that is Flowers’ sobriquet among sharp-eyed film buffs. She appeared, perhaps not so coincidentally, in two fifties movies that owe much to
All About Eve: The Bad and the Beautiful
and
Imitation of Life
.

All About Eve
seems to have impressed any number of later dramatists, filmmakers, novelists, critics, cartoonists, drag queens, advertising copywriters, and merchants. Some of those who paid homage—like Gary Carey, author of the 1972 book
More About “All Above Eve
”—saw it in theatres when it came out. “I was a kid,” Carey recalls, “and I loved the theatre.
All About Eve
had an enormous impact on me.”

James Baldwin probably wouldn’t have used the phrase “enormous impact,” but he did incorporate a faint echo of
Eve
. In his best-selling novel
Another Country
(published in 1962) a character named Jane quarrels with her boyfriend, Vivaldo. Exasperated, Vivaldo says, “You say another word, baby, and I’m going to knock your teeth, both of them, right down your throat.” Baldwin continues: “This profoundly delighted her. She became Bette Davis at once, and shouted at the top of her voice, “Are you threatening me?” (In the movie, Margo shouts from the stage, “Are you threatening me with legal action, Mr. Fabian?”) And Baldwin’s novel, soon after the opening, goes into a long flashback à la Mankiewicz.

How much do Edward Albee’s best plays owe to
All About Eve
? “Fasten your seat belts” hovers as a potent but unstated epigraph to
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
; surely there was never a bumpier night than George and Martha’s. Albee’s nod to Bette Davis in that play, however, is not to
Eve
but rather to
Beyond the Forest
: One of Martha’s first lines is “What a dump!” Even so, Albee’s polished dialogue and poisonous wit point
Eve
wards, not only in this early work but also across the decades from
A Delicate Balance
up to his latest success,
Three Tall Women
.

Who’s Afraid
parallels
All About Eve
in several particulars. For example, the setting of Albee’s play is a drunken party. What’s more, George is younger than Martha and he taunts her about it. (“I’m six years younger than you are. I always have been and I always will be.”) Bill Sampson, of course, is eight years younger than Margo. More specifically, Albee’s play has at least half a dozen lines that match up with the Mankiewicz script either verbatim or in paraphrase, and certainly in tone and rhythm. Tabulated, they look like this:

1. Albee—
MARTHA
: “His wife’s a mousy little type.…”
Mankiewicz—
MARGO
: “Oh, the mousy one with the trenchcoat and the funny hat?”

2. Albee—
MARTHA
: “What do you take me for?”
Mankiewicz—
ADDISON
: “What do you take me for?”

3. Albee—
GEORGE
: “Don’t you condescend to me!”
Mankiewicz—
MARGO
: “Don’t be condescending!”

4. Albee—
GEORGE
: “Shucks!”
Mankiewicz—
MARGO
: “Shucks. And I sent my autograph book to the cleaners.”

5. Albee—
GEORGE
: “In my mind, Martha, you’re buried in cement, right up to your neck.”
Mankiewicz—
MARGO
: “It is my last wish to be buried sitting up.”

6. Albee—
GEORGE
: “I will not be made mock of!”
Mankiewicz—
MARGO
: “I will not calm down!… I will not be tolerated. And I will not be plotted against!”

7. Albee—
GEORGE
: “You’re spoiled, self-indulgent, dirty-minded, liquor-ridden.…”
Mankiewicz—
ADDISON
: “You’re maudlin and full of self-pity.”

What does all of this prove? Only that one of Broadway’s best playwrights was well acquainted with the work of one of Hollywood’s best screenwriters. And that Albee had a keen ear for movie dialogue.

Although there’s not a shred of evidence, it’s beguiling to speculate: What if Albee intended George and Martha as Bill Sampson and Margo Channing after they’ve been married for years? Or, if not that, the play might be taken as a typical evening—raucous and alcoholic—with Mr. and Mrs. Gary Merrill.

*   *   *

If Albee pays elliptical tribute to
All About Eve
, Mart Crowley’s
The Boys in the Band
, produced in 1968, throws the movie a nosegay in Act I and another in Act II. Michael, one of the main characters, subverts Margo’s camp line “I detest cheap sentiment” with his ultra-camp version of it: “I
adore
cheap sentiment.” Later, Michael describes another character this way: “Emory.… dislikes artificial fruit and flowers and coffee grinders made into lamps—and he likes Mabel Mercer, poodles, and
All About Eve
—the screenplay of which he will recite verbatim.” (The fictitious Emory was based on those real “boys in the band” who memorized chunks of the screenplay and recited it at parties, especially in New York.)

One could argue that
Boys in the Band
and other plays of its ilk, by and about gays, owe more to
All About Eve
than mere passing allusions. Various dramas by Edward Albee, Mart Crowley, Terrence McNally, and other playwrights seem not only stylistically but also thematically indebted to
Eve
. Similarities of style and language are obvious: Many of these plays attempt crisp, bitchy dialogue drawn from real-life gay repartee and filtered through old Hollywood movies. Epigrams, put-downs, good and bad jokes—such talk existed in gay life before Mankiewicz, of course, though
Eve
was a rich lode that helped crystallize and institutionalize it in later works.

In such
Eve
-ish dramas, a flamboyant queen—male or female—resembling Margo Channing is set upon by various enemies who may or may not be defeated. For example, Martha in
Who’s Afraid
; Emory and others in
Boys in the Band
; the lesbian “George” in
The Killing of Sister George
; even Maria Callas in McNally’s
Master Class
.

These works are highly theatrical and often succeed because of their very staginess. They’re usually well-made plays in which originality is subordinate to the pungent camp, general “Macbethishness,” and, sometimes, lavish sentimentality. The end of
Boys in the Band
, for instance, is downright maudlin: Michael heads off to “a midnight mass at St. Malachy’s that all the show people go to.”

Charles Ludlam, founder of New York’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company and author of such plays as
When Queens Collide, Stage Blood
, and
Camille
, must have subsumed
All About Eve
along with his other influences: costume dramas, grand opera, penny dreadfuls, the glossy kitsch of pop culture, and especially the movies of Maria Montez. As playwright and actor (often in drag), Ludlam always seemed on the verge of outdoing every diva in history. A critic once wrote that Ludlam’s voice was “an amalgam of Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis, and Tallulah Bankhead on a wet day.” Ludlam himself—who, like Mankiewicz, drew upon Oscar Wilde—uttered this epigram to an interviewer: “It’s not easy to play a woman. I often think it must be hard for a woman to play a woman.” Margo Channing couldn’t have said it better.

*   *   *

In the early 1960s
Eve
started to turn up on television. Soon it was a
Late Show
staple. It became a revival house favorite as well, and by the 1970s a Siamese-twin double bill of
All About Eve
and
Sunset Boulevard
played frequently at the Carnegie Hall Cinema and Theatre 80 Saint Marks in New York and in similar movie houses in San Francisco and Los Angeles. All those fans who had memorized the script flocked to these revival theatres again and again, where they recited dialogue in sync with the characters on-screen. They acted—or acted up—right along with Bette. They even upstaged her, for their performances grew so unrestrained you couldn’t hear anything else during long stretches of the movie.

Mankiewicz himself joined in the fun. His last film,
Sleuth
(1972) has a cast of two: Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. Seven names appear in the credits, however; one of the false cast members is “Eve Channing.” This in-joke is rather arch. Wittier was Mankiewicz’s statement, when Olivier and Caine both ended up in the Oscar race, that he was the only director ever to have his entire cast nominated for Academy Awards.

It was also in 1972 that Mankiewicz tried, rather ignobly, to tamper with another writer’s work. The book in question is
More About “All About Eve.
” It has the peculiar subtitle
A Colloquy by Gary Carey with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Together With His Screenplay “All About Eve.”
The odd thing about that subtitle is that it conceals so much—e.g., who the author really is and what the book is about. But in view of the muddle that beset the project, that gauche subtitle (dreamed up by Mankiewicz) seems a fair compromise. I recently asked Gary Carey about it, and this is what he said:

“The plan was to publish a series of important film scripts with introductions, annotations, and the like. The publisher wanted Mankiewicz to write the introduction to
All About Eve
, but he preferred having another writer interview him. His first choice was Mart Crowley, but Crowley wasn’t interested. I’m not sure why. One reason they approached me was because, a year earlier, for Pauline Kael’s
The Citizen Kane Book
, I had prepared five pages of notes on the shooting script of
Citizen Kane
. So the editor recommended me as the interviewer and Mankiewicz agreed.

“The publisher wanted the introductory interview fairly brief, about twenty-five or thirty pages. So I took the train up to Pound Ridge, New York, interviewed Joe, and found him charming. I asked my questions, and he answered them. I wrote it up and it ran to about thirty pages.

“I turned it in and the editor was happy with it. He sent it to Mankiewicz to check. When it came back to me it was at least twice as long, maybe longer. That’s when I realized that he probably didn’t know how to structure this kind of nonfiction. So what I had done was provide the structure. At which point he began to rewrite the dialogue. Specifically, he rewrote his own stuff. He expanded it, changed things around, and the result was that it lost all spontaneity.

“I didn’t object to his rewriting his own statements. Okay, I thought, if that’s the way he wants it—but he had also rewritten mine. And this is where the trouble started.

“Because he had edited the transcript so that I was saying things like, ‘
All About Eve
is the greatest comedy of manners since
School for Scandal
.’ I didn’t believe that, and I didn’t want to go on record as saying it. So I made some noise to the editor. He passed along my objections to Mankiewicz, at which point Joe became outraged. He told the editor. ‘If he’s so upset about the whole thing, I’ll take his name off it.’ My response was, ‘Fine, let him have the discussion with himself!’

“What eventually took place was this: A meeting was arranged with Joe, his agent Robert Lantz, and me. It was a breakfast meeting at one of those hotels near Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, maybe the Sherry Netherland, although I’m not sure after all these years.