All About “All About Eve” (45 page)

Bette Davis was a study in graciousness. She offered her visitors tea, but they were too terrified to drink it; their hands were so shaky they couldn’t hold cup and saucer. Predictably, both girls told the star that they had seen all her pictures, loved every one of them, and how they too wanted to act in movies. Rather than tossing off a sardonic Margo Channing–like quip, Bette was patient and kind, giving the usual advice about learning one’s craft, jobs in summer stock, and the like.

Eventually there came a long pause. Betty Kalb gave Betty Perske a meaningful look: time to go. They gushed, “Thank you so much, Miss Davis,” “We’re thrilled to meet you,” and so on. They all shook hands and the girls walked into the corridor. They took a few steps down the hall toward the elevator and—Betty Kalb fainted! The girls were mortified, but apparently Miss Davis had closed her door already and so knew nothing of the ignominious collapse.

They rushed to a nearby drugstore for restoratives, and a few days later both girls wrote florid letters of thanks to their idol. And Bette Davis wrote back. Her letter to the future Lauren Bacall included the words, “I hope we meet again sometime.”

Bacall included this anecdote in her 1979 autobiography,
By Myself
. When Bette Davis read it, she chortled, “What Miss Bacall leaves out is that she fell into a dead faint and had to be carried back into the apartment again.”

Did she faint, or didn’t she? With so many Bettys in the same hotel suite, it’s easy to understand the confusion over exactly who passed out and who administered first aid.

Davis and Bacall crossed paths once or twice at Warner Bros. in the forties, but they never became well acquainted. So Lauren Bacall was almost as nervous when Bette Davis paid her a backstage visit in 1970 as she had been that Saturday afternoon in 1939.

One night at intermission the
Applause
cast got word that Bette Davis was in the audience. When the play ended she knocked on Bacall’s dressing-room door. “She sat on a chair, not on the love seat, which might have indicated she would stay awhile,” said Bacall, who remembers her as reserved and polite but not effusive. Nervously making conversation, Bacall indicated that she felt ridiculous playing Bette’s part.

After a short time, Bette rose to leave. At the door she told Bacall, “No one but you could have played this part—and you know I mean that.”

Following her guest out of the dressing room, Bacall introduced others in the cast to Bette. According to Lee Roy Reams, “Bette Davis was professional in her demeanor that night. Not the friendliest or warmest of people, but professional.” She did sign his
Applause
poster, however, which became a treasured memento.

Joe Mankiewicz, like Bette Davis, was irritated by the transformation of
All About Eve
into
Applause
. His son recalls a telephone invitation to Mankiewicz from Lauren Bacall: “Joe, you have to come down opening night.” Explaining that his father and Bacall had been friends for years, Tom Mankiewicz quotes his father as saying, “Betty, I don’t think I’m ever gonna see it. I think it was a pretty good movie and I don’t understand why you have to stop it fourteen times for songs.”

Mankiewicz did see the show eventually, and afterwards he and his wife, Rosemary, went to dinner with Lauren Bacall. According to her, “He was happy to see how much of his work had been kept in our show and liked it better than he had anticipated.” Or was he just being kind?

Charles Strouse heard, through mutual friends, that Mankiewicz was hurt by the omission of his name from the playbill and from the Tony Awards ceremony. “I don’t blame him at all,” says Strouse. “If I had been asked to speak at the Tonys, I would have said ‘First of all let’s thank Joe Mankiewicz for writing this masterpiece.’” Had he given that speech, Strouse no doubt would have thanked Mankiewicz also for suggesting one of the show’s best songs. It came about like this.

In the summer of 1969 Mankiewicz was finishing his penultimate film,
There Was a Crooked Man
. Strouse, already at work on
Applause
, was hired to compose the film’s score. As he and Mankiewicz grew better acquainted, Strouse filled him in on details of the musical. Mankiewicz said, “You know that the most famous line from
All About Eve
is ‘Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.’”

“Yes,” said Strouse.

“If you don’t turn that line into a song, you’re crazy,” said Mankiewicz.

And so “Fasten Your Seat Belts” became one of only two memorable songs from the show. (The other is “Welcome to the Theatre.”) Significantly, it’s Bacall’s first big let-’er-rip number, with a bossa nova beat whose catchy rhythms emphasize Margo’s high-voltage petulance. Most important, despite this song’s evocation of Bette Davis in
All About Eve
, it’s one of the places in the show where Bacall seizes Margo Channing and makes the character her own.

*   *   *

On May 4, 1970, exactly five weeks after opening night, four students were killed at Kent State University in Ohio when National Guardsmen opened fire during an anti-war protest. At her curtain call that night, Lauren Bacall waited for the applause to die down, then she made this announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, could we have a moment of silence for the students who were killed today at Kent State.” Silence descended on the house, except for a handful of playgoers who hissed and booed. Such reactions were not rare, even in “liberal” New York, at the height of the Vietnam War. Penny Fuller recalls a sign the stagehands posted backstage:
AMERICA
—
LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
.

Bacall stayed with the show in New York almost eighteen months. In 1971 she left Broadway for the national tour, after which she did the London production of
Applause
. Bacall’s replacement on Broadway was Anne Baxter. The irony was exquisite: Eve the victimizer had lapsed into her victim.

But Rita Hayworth, not Anne Baxter, had been the producers’ original choice as Bacall’s replacement. Several months prior to Bacall’s departure, Ron Field flew to California for a meeting with Hayworth. Although she had not yet been diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, Field guessed immediately that she wouldn’t be able to perform in the show. He later revealed that during their interview she could scarcely remember what she had said a moment earlier.

The producers, however, liked the idea of a marquee that read
RITA HAYWORTH IN APPLAUSE
. So she came to New York. In preparation for the role she went to a vocal coach, the dance captain gave her exercises, and Ron Field put her on a daily regime from ten o’clock to six. Sadly, after a month and a half of work, Rita Hayworth couldn’t remember any of her lines. She declared to columnist Joyce Haber that she bowed out because she wouldn’t have had enough time to rehearse the role. She also insisted that after weeks in New York she still hadn’t met Ron Field.

Haber interviewed Anne Baxter shortly after the Rita Hayworth debacle. “It has put a helluva lot of pressure on me,” Baxter said, “stepping in at the last minute. I’m tired of stepping in for people. I did that for fourteen bloody years at Fox. Anytime anybody didn’t want to do something, I had to take over.”

Ron Field was relieved that Baxter consented to step in once more. Later, however, describing her performance, he paid her a left-handed tribute: “After a couple of weeks she began to play it like a film actress pretending to be in a stage play in a movie. In other words, when people in movies pretend they’re on the stage: (very overdone)
How are you?
You know, it is all like pseudo–stage acting. The audiences didn’t mind, however. By that time, a year and a half into the show, you don’t get sophisticated playgoers. It’s mostly tourists. But she had enormous energy and the crowds kept coming, so I thought I’d just let her be.”

Baxter’s colleagues from the cast are more charitable. Penny Fuller describes Bacall’s performances as “platinum and silver” while Anne Baxter as Margo was like “burgundy and chocolate.” She considers Bacall “a movie star/actress” and Baxter “an actress/movie star.” Fuller adds, “It was Bacall’s charisma and her persona that carried the show when she was in it. And that’s not to belittle her acting. It was Anne Baxter’s acting, on the other hand, and not charisma, that defined her performance.”

Lee Roy Reams points out that both actresses “were very musical, and both understood the sense of the music.” One reason their performances were so different, he explains, is that physically Anne Baxter was “a smaller presence” while Bacall was “a long-legged lioness.”

Shortly after Anne Baxter joined the show, Reams’s mother died. Preparing to go home for the funeral, he found on his dressing-room table an airline ticket and a sum of money. Anne wouldn’t admit they were from her, but Lee Roy was convinced they were.

Penny Fuller and Anne Baxter also formed a friendship. Sensing, during Baxter’s rehearsals, some of the new star’s difficulties, and well aware herself of the problems of being a replacement, Penny went shopping at Tiffany’s for a gift, “a little silver apple, the kind you use for saccharine or sugar pellets or some such.” On it she had engraved:
Good-bye Eve, Hello Margo. Love AB from PF
. When Penny left the show Anne gave her a similar amulet, engraved:
Good-bye Eve, Hooray Penny. Love PF from AB
.

*   *   *

On Penny’s last matinee in the show, she got a big surprise. “The theatre was very crowded that day, not because it was my last performance but because the show was still packing ’em in. During my early scenes I heard a peculiar sound offstage. I couldn’t imagine what the hell it was: jingle, jingle, jingle.

“It kept on, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a small figure in the wings. On the arms of that small figure, gold bracelets were jangling like wind chimes. A little later, when I was about to make another entrance, I saw who
that
was:
That
was Bette Davis, standing there watching me, and jangling.” Anne Baxter had invited Bette especially to see her and Penny Fuller together in the roles Baxter and Davis had once played. Since there wasn’t a seat out front, even for Bette Davis, Anne brought her backstage and Bette watched the entire performance from the wings.

By then, Ann Williams had left the show. Her replacement in the role of Karen Richards was Gwyda DonHowe, who, according to Lee Roy Reams, “did one of the best Bette Davis imitations you’ve ever heard.” The night Bette watched from the wings, everyone in the cast felt they were under a microscope. The Davis scrutiny made Gwyda DonHowe especially nervous, so that her line readings began taking on rather inappropriate Bette Davis inflections. “It was all very strange that night,” Lee Roy Reams recalls.

Bette lingered after the show, since she and Anne Baxter were good friends. Chatting with Lee Roy, Davis said, “I hate what they did with your character. No harm in the way you played it. I just don’t like them changing that wonderful character, Birdie.”

Gwyda DonHowe and her husband, producer Norman Kean, spent their lives in the theatre, from the time they met while working in summer stock in 1957 until a January day in 1988 when he murdered her as she lay sleeping and then jumped to his death from the roof of their apartment building.

*   *   *

Penny Fuller elected not to do the national tour of
Applause
. She felt she had played Eve Harrington long enough. “It was a hard part to do,” she says, “so much bitter anger in the character.” But she did consent to appear in the show for six weeks in California. In San Francisco, she and Bacall played Eve and Margo at the Curran Theatre where, two decades earlier, Mankiewicz had filmed the theatre scenes of
All About Eve
. (Many years later, Penny Fuller and Lauren Bacall did a benefit together. They hadn’t seen each other in ages. Penny knocked on the door of Bacall’s dressing room and in a sweet, girlish voice, said, “Miss Channing?” Bacall raced to the door and the two howled with laughter.)

When Bacall left the national tour she was succeeded by Eleanor Parker. In London, Bacall played Margo Channing for a year at Her Majesty’s Theatre with Angela Richards co-starring as Eve Harrington. A filmed version of the London production was telecast on CBS in 1973.

Meanwhile, back on Broadway, Anne Baxter left the cast of
Applause
at the end of April 1972, after some ten months as Margo Channing. Her replacement was Arlene Dahl, a leading lady in Hollywood movies of the fifties who later became a businesswoman and an expert in the art of staying beautiful long past youth.

Before Arlene Dahl knew she would join the cast, she saw Bacall in the show, and later she saw Anne Baxter. After both performances she went backstage to greet her old friends from Hollywood. Dahl recalls that “Anne showed me a calendar on which she was X-ing off the days until she could end this run. You see, she was frightened every time she did the dance numbers. In one number she was tossed from dancer to dancer, and she was afraid they were going to drop her. She had had a dream about it.”

Then Arlene Dahl was named as Baxter’s replacement and there was a spat. It mystified Dahl, because she considered Baxter her friend. She says, “When I came for rehearsals I was hoping, and had been told, that I was to use Anne Baxter’s dressing room. But that did not happen. She wouldn’t let me share it. I don’t know why, but I used the leading man’s dressing room instead. Which was unfair.”

Although she had signed a six-month contract, Arlene Dahl stayed in the show for a much shorter period. According to her, Hitchcock’s new film
Frenzy
was booked for the Palace, forcing
Applause
to close earlier than planned. Ron Field told a different version. When an interviewer asked him about Arlene Dahl, he said, “Oh my God, I didn’t even pay attention. Larry Kasha put her in and the show closed two weeks later.” (In fact, Arlene Dahl’s first performance was on May 1, 1972, and she stayed with the show until it closed three and a half weeks later, on May 27.
Frenzy
opened in June at the Palace; according to
Variety
, “House taking summer off from legit.”)