All About “All About Eve” (44 page)

Len Cariou joined Bacall and Field in her hotel suite. She phoned Joseph Kipness, one of their producers, and let him have it. “If the ship sails without him, it sails without me!” she thundered. Ron Field made frantic signals across the room. With the evening performance coming up, he was afraid she’d damage her voice.

Kipness tried to placate her. “Gower just came down to visit, he’s passing through, we’re old friends. As a matter of fact, he’s meeting me in the bar in a little while.”

“Oh he is, is he?” Bacall growled.

She hung up and called her agent. “If Ron goes, I go. Make it clear to Kippy!”

Bacall was livid. She grabbed Cariou with one hand and Field with the other. “Let’s go to the bar and say hello to Mr. Champion,” she drawled, and the acid in her mouth could have etched metal.

Just before entering the bar she linked arms with her two men and in they marched. She smiled ravenously at Kippy and Gower.

“Great show,” said Champion, as Joe Kipness squirmed.

Bacall patted Ron Field’s shoulder. “It’s all because of him,” she purred. “I don’t know what I’d do without my director,” she added with satiny significance.

And that’s how Bacall showed them what a “difficult” star she could be. Years later, as an afterthought, she laughed about her scene in the hotel bar. “I did everything but flutter my eyelashes,” she crooned.

*   *   *

Diane McAfee’s replacement as Eve Harrington was Penny Fuller, who had previously auditioned for the part but couldn’t shake her misgivings about the show.

Toward the end of 1969 Harold Prince summoned Fuller from Los Angeles to audition for his production of the new Sondheim musical,
Company
. Fuller, many years later, recounts the story of her lucky breaks as though she were telling the plot of a Ginger Rogers movie: “After the audition for
Company
I was walking out of the stage door when this guy called my name. He said, ‘Oh, you’re here. We were going to fly you in but they wouldn’t pay for it.’”

Fuller looked at him in amazement, but before she could speak the man blurted out, “I’m the stage manager of
Applause
. I’m sure Ron Field will want to see you.”

“Fine,” she said, still taken aback.

How did this man know who she was and what she could do? Fuller’s nonchalant reply: “I don’t know, darlin’. I guess I was
somebody
.” Perhaps the stage manager had seen her in
Barefoot in the Park
, her first Broadway show. Or in
Cabaret
. In it, as Jill Haworth’s understudy, Fuller went on more than a hundred times. (“I developed an Eve Harrington reputation,” she says, “because I was the understudy who kept taking over. But unlike Eve, I was a nice person— as far as I knew, anyway.”) Besides her stage work, Fuller had appeared on television in
The Edge of Night
and other programs in the sixties.

She auditioned for Ron Field without having read all of the script of
Applause
. Everything was rushed because she had to catch a plane back to Los Angeles to do a pilot for a comedy series. She read the script on the plane. Her reaction: “I thought, Oh God, don’t let me get this because I don’t have the nerve to turn it down but I don’t think it’s very good.”

While shooting the comedy pilot Fuller got a call from a friend, a theatrical agent who had attended the gypsy run-through of
Applause
. He told her, “The show is fabulous, but the girl playing Eve—don’t think she’s there yet.” Penny was relieved. At least she had escaped the agonizing decision of whether to take the role or turn it down.

A few weeks later she was at the hairdresser’s. “My head was in the sink and they were rinsing out the soap,” she says, sounding like Ginger Rogers again. “Someone told me I had a call from my manager. They handed me the phone while my head was still in the sink. My manager announced, ‘They want you to fly to Baltimore tonight to consider replacing McAfee in
Applause
.’”

With her hair still damp she dashed home and threw clothes into a suitcase. In Baltimore, Larry Kasha’s secretary gave her a ticket for the next performance. Penny jumped when she saw the location. “You can’t put me in the second row. Those gypsies will see me and they’ll know why I’m here!” The secretary suggested, “Can’t you tell them you’re visiting an aunt in Baltimore?”

“Not with my reputation as Miss Replacement,” Fuller exclaimed. But it was the only seat left in the house. “So I go in, sit down, and of course the very first thing, one of the gypsies does a pirouette, sees me, and I could
see
him see me, and I could just
feel
him telling everybody backstage, ‘Penny Fuller’s in the audience!’”

When the performance was over Penny knew exactly what was wrong. “My job was literally to be the villain. As yet, Margo wasn’t really threatened.”

Next day, a Sunday, Penny agreed to replace McAfee. She met Lauren Bacall. On Monday she had a music rehearsal, Tuesday a rehearsal with understudies, Wednesday she learned a new dance from Diane McAfee, Thursday she rehearsed with the actual cast, Friday there was a dress rehearsal with orchestra and lights, and at some weary hour of the afternoon Larry Kasha brought her a sandwich. Groggy from fatigue, Penny said to herself, “This is the pinnacle, honey. It doesn’t get any bigger than this, when the producer brings you a tuna salad on rye.”

Penny Fuller seldom gets the jitters. That Friday night, however, waiting to go on, she panicked: “I’m about to play to a theatre full of people, in a show that I’ve had two rehearsals for.” Her next thought was more drastic: “If I get up right now and leave, nobody can stop me.” But the next moment it was too late. She heard the announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, at this performance the part of Eve Harrington will be played by Penny Fuller.”

At that instant she had a flashback to childhood. “When I was a little girl in Lumberton, North Carolina,
Photoplay
magazine ran a contest called ‘Come to Hollywood.’ I didn’t win. But I remembered that the magazine had three speeches for contest finalists. One was Ann Blyth’s thing from
Our Very Own
, which was about being adopted. I don’t remember what the second one was, but the third was Anne Baxter’s ‘Eddie and the Brewery’ scene from
All About Eve
. I had worked on that speech upstairs in my bedroom when I was ten years old. And now here I was, about to go onstage and play ‘Eddie and the Brewery,’ even though in
Applause
Eve’s boyfriend is no longer called Eddie and he’s not a soldier in World War II but in Vietnam.”

Penny Fuller vows it was the flashback that kept her from running out that night. “I said, ‘I gotta see if I can do this.’”

And she gave the performance of her life—in Diane McAfee’s clothes. “But Diane’s shoes didn’t fit me so I put a pair of gloves in them to keep them on. One of them flew off during a big number, so I just kicked the other one off and made it a theatrical moment.”

Next day all agreed: Penny Fuller was silicone injected into a sagging show. Lee Roy Reams says, “Diane McAfee and Penny Fuller are both friends of mine, but I have to say that changing the actress who played Eve made a big difference. Penny played the role as a
woman
. Diane played it as a girl. And a girl was no competition for someone of Bacall’s stature.”

No doubt Fuller was a more convincing Eve Harrington because, at age thirty, she was older than twenty-one-year-old Diane McAfee. She was also a more experienced actress.

Knowing that her portrayal of Eve must be unlike Anne Baxter’s in the film, Penny set herself a difficult task in the role. “I wanted to fool the audience at first, make them believe they didn’t remember the story right. I wanted them to think, Why, Eve really
is
a sweet girl.”

*   *   *

After Baltimore, the show moved to Detroit for a couple of weeks. There the reviews were much better. Next stop was New York for previews. And then March 30, 1970: opening night.

Perhaps a line from the Judy Garland song ran through Lauren Bacall’s head as that evening approached: “Until you’ve played the Palace, you haven’t played at all.” She had been in show business most of her life, her film work had made her famous, her dreams had come true—and yet how often Lauren Bacall had wondered whether she might end up like Bette Davis and so many other ladies in decline, doing third-rate pictures and tepid TV adaptations of schlocky best-sellers.

The Palace Theatre, at Broadway and Forty-seventh Street, was sold out. But were they coming to praise
Applause
or to bury it? After all, as one commentator pointed out, “It was the tenth musical of a long and dismal season, the year of one-word titles—
Coco
and
Jimmy
and
Purlie
and
Georgy
and
Gantry
.” Perhaps the show’s prospects were actually raised by such lackluster arrivals. The same commentator asserted that “it looked especially good at the end of a dreary week that brought both
Minnie’s Boys
and
Look to the Lilies
.” And
Applause
had time to establish itself as a smash before
Company
, that other one-word hit of the season, opened a month later.

Opening night was everything they hoped for. The show unfolded without a hitch. Curiously, no one connected with
Applause
remembers exactly who attended, though Betty Comden neatly evokes the splash: “Whoever first-nighters are, they came. Many famous people, many famous names.”

When Lauren Bacall made her entrance the applause was unstoppable.

At intermission Ron Field dared to be optimistic. He was a worrier, but—the show was actually going very well. No one forgot a lyric, flubbed a dance step, or missed a cue. Set changes glided with perfect precision; nothing stuck. If Ron superstitiously anticipated disaster in Act II, he was off. Nothing untoward took place. Then at last, the finale.

Field staged the curtain calls like a musical number. First the company took their calls, then stood in a V formation with arms outstretched toward Bacall, who was upstage center, at the apex of the V. Her back was to the audience. On cue she swirled around, flung her arms high in the air, and headed downstage. The audience adored her, loved her performance, loved her bow. She and all the others came back for repeated curtain calls.

Backstage—a mob scene. Bacall’s dressing room was jammed with photographers and well-wishers. Other dressing rooms bulged as well. It seemed that every co-star, agent, producer, and college roommate had packed in to embrace Penny Fuller, Lee Roy Reams, Ron Field, and everyone else in the show.

Seen in the lobby after the curtain rang down was Sidney Michaels. Various people who knew of his dismissal came to him and gushed, “You’re being really marvelous, really terrific about the whole thing, Sidney.” To which he replied, “Listen. I kept half of my royalties as part of the settlement. They’ve pulled off a hit and made me a lot of dough. Thank you, producers, and thank you, cast.”

At length the performers managed to change into street clothes for the trip to Sardi’s. Then there was the opening-night party at Tavern on the Green, in Central Park, hosted by Larry Kasha and Joe Kipness. Sometime after midnight they got hold of an early copy of the
Times
. A hush fell over the restaurant as Ron Field read aloud the review by Clive Barnes: “Whatever it is Miss Lauren Bacall possesses she throws it around most beautifully, most exquisitely, and most excitingly in a musical called
Applause
.… Miss Bacall is a sensation.… She sings with all the misty beauty of an in-tune foghorn.… Len Cariou is a bluff, tough delight.… As Eve, Penny Fuller has all the brassy, pushy, belty quality a young girl needs to make good.”

The following Sunday, Walter Kerr, the
Times
’s other theatre critic, headlined his piece,
BACALL TAKES YOUR BREATH AWAY
. Reviews were equally ecstatic in the
Daily News, Women’s Wear Daily
, and a host of other papers. A week later
Time
and
Newsweek
reviewed the show for the nation.

A notable dissenter, however, was Larry Cohen in
The Hollywood Reporter
. To him,
Applause
was “a splashy bitch of a show that reeks of calculation and unconscious perversity. At the same time
Applause
is sticking up its middle finger at show business, it is congratulating itself for its own insolence of spirit. It is a phony, oh-so-precious, aren’t-we-cute hatchet job. Miss Bacall can’t really sing or dance and the acting as opposed to the energy demands made upon her are minimal. What we are watching is the movie stripped of its guts.”

But New York was solidly behind
Applause
. Three weeks after opening night the show won four Tony Awards. It was named Best Musical, and Bacall Best Actress in a Musical. Ron Field won two Tonys, one for Best Direction and another for Best Choreography.

*   *   *

Bette Davis wasn’t about to give
Applause
any awards. But who would expect her to? After all, this was a pastiche of her best performance—but without her. In a
Playboy
interview years later she said, “I always imagined singing that song called “Fasten Your Seat Belts”—that would’ve been incredible. Then, when I saw it, Bacall didn’t even get a
laugh
on that line in the show, just banged a guitar and finished. I couldn’t believe my ears—one of the most famous lines!” Despite her misgivings, however, Bette saw the show not once but two times.

She didn’t attend opening night, though she did send Lauren Bacall a telegram with the gnomic message: “The years have gone and now you are me.”

Bette Davis and Betty Perske had met for the first time in 1939, long before the fifteen-year-old Perske ever dreamed she was destined for fame as Lauren Bacall. Their first encounter resembled a Lucy-and-Ethel escapade.

To begin with, it involved two Bettys and one Bette: Betty Perske, her friend Betty Kalb, and La Davis. Through a complicated network of family connections, the teenaged Bettys wangled an invitation to visit movie-star Bette while she was in New York. On a Saturday afternoon at teatime the two nervous, giggly girls arrived at the Gotham Hotel to pay a call on the Queen of Films.