All About “All About Eve” (40 page)

John Rechy, like many writers before and since, seems in thrall to
All About Eve
. In his 1988 novel,
Marilyn’s Daughter
, characters from the movie appear several times side by side with actual film stars. For example: “It was one of those affairs that everyone in Hollywood attends. On a veranda, Jane Russell waved … and blew them a kiss. With extreme formality, Marlon Brando was introducing everyone to Movita, his new wife. John Derek at her side, Louella Parsons sat like a toad on a peacock chair. Everyone ignored Eve Harrington and her companion, Phoebe.” Later, in a montage of salacious stories from
Confidential
, Rechy captures the spirit of that fifties scandal mag with zingers like
UPPERS, DOWNERS, AND JUDY
! and
EVE HARRINGTON’S GIRL
. Echoing a line from the Mankiewicz script, he writes, docudrama style, that “Jane Russell stood and applauded, champion to champion.”

*   *   *

At some point—was it in the turbulent eighties?— Margo’s most famous line widened from movie quote to American idiom. “Fasten your seat belts” is often used, on-screen and off, as a cool way of saying “Look out,” “Don’t mess with me,” “Hold on to your hat.”

In
Pretty Woman
(1990), when Richard Gere lets Julia Roberts drive his fancy car, she jumps in with the cry, “Fasten your seat belts.” Dixie Carter, in an episode of
Designing Women
, drawls as she sets out to right a wrong, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” In the March 1991 issue of
Torso
, a gay skin magazine, a four-page, XXX-rated cartoon sequence called “Heated Encounters” concludes with a sodomitic panel whose dialogue balloon is this: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy evening.” (One hopes the speaker’s romantic aim is better than his quotesmanship.)
Fasten Your Seat Belts
is also the title of a 1990 Bette Davis biography, written by Lawrence J. Quirk.

You’ll even hear it from the pulpit. At the world’s largest Metropolitan Community Church, in Dallas, on Pentecost Sunday in 1999, the Reverend Delores Berry, a dynamic African-American preacher and gospel singer, was introduced like this: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a rousing sermon.”

Less famous phrases from the movie turn up all over the place. In an ad for a new lesbian bar, the caption is “Where the Elite Meet.”
Publishers Weekly
, in an article on gay publishing trends, runs this subhead: “Is the Party Over, or Just Beginning?” The review of a mystery novel is headed, “Killer to Killer.” A television documentary on Bette Davis is, predictably, “The Bumpy Ride to Stardom.” These nods to
Eve
are not new. In
Touch of Evil
(1958), Janet Leigh says to Charlton Heston, “I’m very glad you’re very glad”—Welles’s (probably intentional) allusion to Margo’s line, “I’m so happy you’re happy.”

The name Eve Harrington is also ubiquitous. When Ron Leibman missed several performances of
Angels in America
on Broadway, a writer for
The New York Times
stated that his understudy, Matthew Sussman, was “hardly a reprise of Eve Harrington.” Leonard Maltin’s
Movie and Video Guide
mentions an “Eve Harrington-like characterization.” When Deborah Norville replaced Jane Pauley on the
Today
show,
New York
magazine likened Norville to Eve Harrington. Earlier, when Pauley replaced Barbara Walters, she too had been compared to Eve.

A made-for-TV movie on CBS in 1990 seems based on such network gossip. In
Her Wicked Ways
, Barbara Eden plays a respected television news correspondent who is stabbed in the back by ruthless newcomer Heather Locklear.

In
Sisterhood Betrayed: Women in the Workplace and the All About Eve Complex
, a 1991 self-help book aimed at career women, authors Jill Barber and Rita Watson devote chapters to both Eve and Margo: “The Eves in Our Midst,” “Don’t Be a Margo,” “Eves at the Top,” “How Margos Deal With Betrayal,” and so on. In their introduction, the authors promise that the book will “teach you how to recognize the telltale signs of an Eve in others as well as in yourself” and “how to overcome betrayal anxiety.” Later, in a grotesque jump from backstage conflict to current pop-psych, they explain that “Margo and Eve were in a codependency situation.”

Fans of
All About Eve
continue to write about the movie, to talk about it in interviews, to exploit it commercially. In my own novel,
MMII: The Return of Marilyn Monroe
(1991), Marilyn’s Miss Caswell appears in a fantasy scene. A character in Kurt Vonnegut’s
Timequake
(1997) says, “The greatest movie ever, as anybody with half a brain knows, is
My Life as a Dog
. The second-greatest movie ever is
All About Eve
.”

In 1998, the American Film Institute was more restrained than Vonnegut when it compiled a list of the top 100 American films. The selection was made by members of the film industry, including screenwriters, directors, actors, editors, cinematographers, executives, and historians. They ranked
All About Eve
number sixteen. Later that year
TV Guide
included
Eve
in its list of the fifty best movies to watch on television, describing it as “a smooth sip of champagne with a sprinkle of arsenic.”

Director William Friedkin, whose work includes
Boys in the Band
and
The French Connection
, first saw
All About Eve
in Chicago as a kid of twelve when it came out. He told an interviewer, “Over the years I’ve seen it probably twenty-five more times, and I’ve come to realize how brilliant it is. It gets richer and deeper for me. It really is a classic piece of American screenwriting and direction.”

Isaac Mizrahi, the fashion designer, claimed with convincing extravagance that
All About Eve
taught him “the meaning of life.” Specifically, Mizrahi pointed out the scene “when Celeste Holm is coming in from the alley on Broadway. She’s got this mink coat on and when she takes it off, she’s wearing this fantastic gray flannel jersey dress with matching gray flannel gloves. I always think, ‘Isn’t that so great that everything matches?’”

Paul Brown, a comedian on Comedy Central, gives “Seven Bad Reasons for Gays to Get Married.” Reason Number Five: “Both of you name
All About Eve
as your favorite movie of all time.” And here’s Margo Channing, paired with Mildred Pierce, both in caricature, on the front of a greeting card. They’re frowning at each other and holding a cake with many candles. “Happy Birthday” is the greeting. You open it and read, “From one Bitch Goddess to another.”

Less amusing is a 1993 neo-disco song called “All About Eve,” recorded by the group Fem 2 Fem. It’s no fun; it’s not even very danceable. The unfocused lyric mixes cinematic metaphors: The song starts out, “All about Eve, all about Eve, she devil, she devil, Wicked witch of the west—Hollywood, that is.”

In 1999, the novelist E. Lynn Harris said in a
Publishers Weekly
interview, “I have an idea for a book: A writer is outdone by his protégé, someone who learned everything about the business from the older writer, who poured his heart out to the upstart.” The interviewer asked Harris if he was planning an African-American
All About Eve
. “That’s right,” answered Harris. “That movie was something special.”

*   *   *

It was bound to happen: Adult entertainment meets
All About Eve
, with more mixing of cinematic metaphors. Gay filmmaker Marc Huestis said, “I used to work in a video store and people would rent
All About Eve
and they would also rent
All About Steve
.” Later there was
All About Yves
, and of course the inevitable “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a
humpy
night,” spoken by George Payne in the gay skin flick
Kiss Today Goodbye
(1980). (The prediction, of course, comes true.)
Fun Down There
(1990), a tepid turn-on with pretentions to plot, has supporting players who recite scenes from
All About Eve
and
Valley of the Dolls
.

A heterosexual turn-on with the cheesy title
The Budding of Brie
, said to follow closely the plot of
Eve
, is now extremely difficult to locate, even though it won the erotic movie equivalent of an Oscar in 1981.

Showgirls
(1995) won no awards, though it would surely qualify in the category of world-class vulgarity. If Eve Harrington had hitchhiked to Broadway in tight jeans and leather jacket, she would have been a lot like Elizabeth Berkley’s character, Nomi, in this hard-hearted howler. Nomi, a Las Vegas topless-and-bottomless dancer, will do anything to become the understudy of an aging headliner named Cristal.

Throughout the movie there are boneheaded winks in the direction of
All About Eve
. Nomi looks hungrily at a glitzy seminude casino revue, like Eve Harrington the first time she’s backstage. Cristal, the Margo Channing figure, says, “I haven’t missed a show in eight years.” (Karen to Eve: “Margo just doesn’t miss performances.”) The first time Cristal sees her future replacement, it’s when she looks up from her dressing-room table and the bold Nomi is standing in the door. Also like Eve, Nomi has an unsavory past. And when Cristal nixes her as understudy, Nomi pushes her down a flight of stairs.
Showgirls
is a good title; it’s the best thing about the movie if you don’t count such lines as “I chipped my tooth on a Quaalude.” But it could also have been called “All About Naked Understudies.”

Treacherous ingenues were around in movies long before
All About Eve
, of course. So were aging actresses, backstage melodramas, and satirical-sentimental tales about the pathos and glory of show business. Not until
Eve
, however, did any film shape all these motifs into a more or less realistic and believable account of unstoppable ambition, granite egos, and the politics of vanity. And Mankiewicz, like Molière, presented his dark drama in the form of chic comedy. It’s so light on its feet that many viewers mistake it for a testimonial to playacting. That’s Mankiewicz’s left-handed compliment to the theatre. With his right hand—the one he wrote with—he denoted a dangerous and dishonest milieu underneath the greasepaint.

Since 1950, few movies about show biz have been untouched by
All About Eve
. Its impact was so strong—a Hollywood big bang—that moviemakers and moviegoers couldn’t resist the Mankiewicz archetypes. That’s why we can’t watch
The Bad and the Beautiful, Imitation of Life, Anna, Bullets Over Broadway
, or a host of others without making the inevitable comparisons. The genetic code is there. Even when it’s dormant, or absent—as is probably is from
The Rose
(1979),
Frances
(1982), and
The Dresser
(1983)—we look for it anyway.

Chapter 27

Why, If There’s Nothing Else, There’s Applause

The ultimate tribute to
All About Eve
wasn’t in the movies but on the Broadway stage: the hit musical
Applause
, which opened in 1970.

Although Cole Porter, in 1957, toyed with a proposal that he write the score for a musical to be made of the film, Bette Davis herself seems to have been the first person to seriously conceive such a show. In a 1964 taped conversation later heard by Davis biographer James Spada, Bette was asked, “Would you ever go back to Broadway?” She snapped, “I
hate
theatre.” Mercurial as ever, a moment later she reconsidered: “But you know, I may. I’d love to do a musical version of
All About Eve
. It would be one of the great musicals of all time!”

But the obstacles, for Bette or anyone else, were formidable. For one thing, 20th Century-Fox wouldn’t release the rights. In addition, by the mid-sixties
All About Eve
was considered not a classic but simply another “old” movie. Lacking political thrust and not hip enough to interest those under thirty, the film seemed irrelevant to that
engagé
decade. Most damning of all, however, in the eyes of over-thirty producers, the story lacked the crowd-pleasing schmaltz of such shows as
Man of La Mancha
, a Broadway hit in 1965, and
The Sound of Music
, which was born again as a film that same year.

Charles Strouse, the composer of
Applause
, found out all of this when he went looking for backers for a musical based on
All About Eve
. Strouse, born in 1928, had seen the film when it came out in 1950. Years later, after he and lyricist Lee Adams had formed a songwriting partnership for such Broadway shows as
Bye Bye Birdie
in 1962 and
Golden Boy
two years later, Strouse got the idea of adapting
Eve
for the musical stage.

“I had a tremendous feeling for the movie,” Strouse recalls, “but I couldn’t get anybody else interested in it. I approached a famous producer/director with the idea. When I told him what I had in mind—the story of Margo Channing and Eve Harrington, to be played by Ethel Merman and Carol Lawrence—he looked at me and said, ‘No one is interested in the emotional problems of actors.’ That was Harold Prince, by the way. I spoke to a lot of other people about the idea, and no one cared.”

Strouse says these abortive conversations took place “sometime after
Golden Boy
and maybe even after
It’s a Bird It’s a Plane It’s Superman
[1966].” His idea took further battering when
Hair
opened in late 1967 and soon became a smash hit. “Reviewers proclaimed that from then on every show would be a rock musical. And they were right—for a time,” Strouse says. “During the next couple of years everybody was producing rock shows, and they were all failing. Then
Applause
opened and it was a dynamic success.”