All About “All About Eve” (49 page)

That was a mistake. Christopher Mankiewicz, in his letter, congratulated me on the book and also took me to task. “I only regret you never bothered to get in contact with me,” he wrote, “as I could have … advised you that my younger brother Tom was
not
an assistant director on
Cleopatra
, as I
was
(Tom was a student at Yale at the time and only visited during his vacations, while I had taken a year off from Columbia), and the second assistant director, by the way, was a young man (later a television director) named Richard Lang. The production credits will confirm this.” (It’s a matter of semantics. Here’s how Tom Mankiewicz responded: “We were all assistant directors. Richard Lang, as the Guild second assistant director, was on it for the whole time. Chris and I were on it at various times, with school mixed in.”)

The moment I finished reading Christopher’s letter, I phoned to apologize for my oversight. We spoke for more than an hour, and during the conversation he revealed something that only a family member could really know: “I have no doubt that my father was more influenced by my mother’s psychological state and behavior than by anything or anyone else at the time
All About Eve
was written.” Meaning, of course, that despite the superficial resemblance of Margo Channing to Tallulah Bankhead and various other actresses, it was Rosa Stradner, Mankiewicz’s second wife, who provided the bedrock of Margo’s personality: the grandeur and the charm, but also the neurotic insecurity and the lethal belligerence.

Rosa Stradner, born in Vienna in 1913, appeared on stage and made about a dozen pictures in Europe before immigrating to the United States in 1936. The following year she made one film at Metro,
The Last Gangster
. While at the studio she met Mankiewicz, whom she married in 1939, the same year she was loaned to Columbia for
Blind Alley
.

Described by a friend as “the Viennese equivalent of Ava Gardner,” Rosa Stradner did not find success in Hollywood. Her final picture was
The Keys of the Kingdom
(1944), produced and co-written by her husband. In it she played the haughty mother superior of a missionary convent in China. Despite her admirable performance, she received no subsequent film offers. Gregory Peck, on the other hand, probably owes his stardom to this picture. Making his second screen appearance, he played the young priest. Peck was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor and hasn’t been idle a day since.

According to Tom Mankiewicz, “They had an affair, Gregory Peck and my mother, on that film.” Perhaps Rosa Stradner’s affair was in self-defense, for, in the words of her other son, “she was a woman who was continually betrayed. She was often institutionalized by my father, who was busy fucking Judy Garland at the time he was sending my mother away and calling her ‘a very sick woman.’”

The bumpy marriage of Stradner and Mankiewicz differs only in particulars from any other unhappy match. Drinking, fights, insults, slammed doors, threats of suicide by the unstable wife, the husband’s serial infidelity—Margo Channing and Bill Sampson lived an idyll by comparison.

*   *   *

Curtain going up on the Mankiewiczes at home, on North Mapleton Drive in Beverly Hills, on any given night … Their colonial-style house sits on a hillside, and a log fire burns as guests drink and converse. One frequent visitor, Gottfried Reinhardt, likes to say, “Fasten your seat belts, we’re going to the Mankiewiczes’ for dinner.” For the decibel level has risen as Joe and Rosa go at one another.

“It was a predictable event,” says Christopher Mankiewicz, “that my mother would hit the martinis and there would be a big scene. That cocktail party in
All About Eve
—it could not be more typical of almost any party given at our house. It seems so clear to those of us who were there that the inflections, the over-the-top dialogue, seem lifted out of our dining room. Even that scene on the bed on stage where Bill pins Margo down—my brother and I agree that the scene, and the dialogue, are exactly Mother and Father.”

Tom Mankiewicz, though in general agreement with his brother, still maintains, as he has all along, that his father consciously and intentionally modeled Margo Channing on Tallulah Bankhead. “But I would agree with Chris to this degree,” he said, “that when Bill throws Margo down on the bed and tells her to stop the paranoid outbursts, it sounds like Dad and Mother having a fight. The main difference is that Mother had severe mental problems, which Margo Channing did not have.”

Christopher Mankiewicz: “I think so much of Margo Channing is patterned on Mother’s behavior. She was an aging European actress, whom my dad had to live with. People sometimes identify my father with Addison DeWitt. When they tell me that I say, ‘You’re wrong. My father isn’t Addison DeWitt; he’s Bill Sampson.’ In some ways I find Bill the most corny character in the movie—with all of his attitudes and opinions, certainly the way he tries to deal with and humor Margo, he’s absolutely Joe Mankiewicz trying to deal with his wife, Rosa Mankiewicz.”

Rosa Stradner Mankiewicz committed suicide on September 27, 1958.

*   *   *

Mary Orr knew nothing of the Mankiewiczes’ private lives when she wrote a sequel to “The Wisdom of Eve.” Published in
Cosmopolitan
in July 1951, “More About Eve” is just that. Like the first Eve story (which appeared in
Cosmopolitan
in May 1946), this one is narrated by Karen Richards. It takes place three years after the events in “The Wisdom of Eve.” At the end of the original story, Eve Harrington is on her way to Hollywood with playwright Lloyd Richards, Karen’s husband, and Karen is en route to Reno for a divorce.

In the sequel Karen tells how “Eve had quickly found out that a writer is the lowest form of vertebrate in the movie jungle and had discarded him before the ink on my Reno decree had time to dry.” Karen takes Lloyd back because she still loves him. Soon after, Lloyd writes a play called
Autumn Leaves
. He realizes that the perfect actress for the lead is his ex-lover, Eve Harrington. Karen eventually comes round, and Eve gets the part.

The rest of the story is about the play in rehearsal, the Philadelphia and Boston tryouts, then opening night on Broadway. Eve’s costar is Cecil Clive, an alcoholic actor who has been away from the theatre for years. Now in AA, he seems ready for a comeback, and indeed the out-of-town reviews favor him over Eve Harrington.

But Eve is a take-no-prisoners thespian. On opening night she sabotages her costar and the play by pushing him off the wagon. Aided and abetted by Eve, the male lead enters drunk. The play flops, and a few weeks later Cecil Clive commits suicide. Eve, however, triumphs once more: she is signed to star in the film version of
Autumn Leaves
.

Curiously, Margo Cranston (called “Margola” in the first story) barely makes an entrance in the sequel. Still married to her director husband, she gives birth at age forty-three to twins, whom she names Karen and Lloyd in honor of her closest friends.

I’ve no idea why Mary Orr never mentioned this sequel when I interviewed her. By the time I learned about the follow-up story from Gary Gabriel of New York, Miss Orr was in ill health. When I phoned her we had a cordial chat, though I was saddened to realize that she had very little memory left. The most she could tell me was, “I’m afraid a lot of this is quite foggy to me.”

*   *   *

Roy Moseley was among the first readers to come forward with clarifications after
All About “All About Eve”
was published. On page 21 I quoted his assertion that the Margo Channing–Eve Harrington liaison took shape from Irene Worth’s professional adulation of Elisabeth Bergner. Then I wrote, rather unkindly, that “he jumbled the story.” Such was not the case, and here I wish to “unjumble” Roy Moseley: “Elisabeth Bergner told me that Irene Worth was a brilliant young actress. Bergner supported her to the full. Irene Worth indeed said to Elisabeth Bergner, ‘I’m not good enough to act on the same stage with you,’ but Bergner would have none of it. She asked Worth to stay on longer with
The Two Mrs. Carrolls,
and the younger actress did so. In that sense, the malignant Eve Harrington was based on a benign professional relationship.”

In Los Angeles Roy invited me to dinner, and we’ve had several subsequent phone conversations. I never doubted the truth of his assertion, as far as it went; as I wrote on page 21, “It’s important to know that [Irene Worth] didn’t carve her career from the flesh of another grande dame.” I do maintain, however, that precisely because of this lack of conflict, Irene Worth played but a minor role in the Bergner-Channing-Harrington nexus; otherwise, how to account for Martina Lawrence, whose strange story occupies pages 319–335?

*   *   *

Several alert readers—Peter Rawlings of England, Larry Spinelli and Ron Mandelbaum, both of New York—pointed out that I erred on page 244 with the statement that in
The Letter
Bette Davis shoots her husband. It’s her
lover
who takes the bullets.

Larry Spinelli also added an amusing bit of trivia about Bette Davis’s line referring to the Cub Room of the Stork Club as the place “where the elite meet.” He told me in a letter, “I can trace that line way back to the forties. There was a weekly radio show called
Duffy’s Tavern
. The show always began with a phone ringing. The phone would be answered by a bartender in this manner: ‘Duffy’s Tavern, where the elite meet to eat. Archie the manager speaking; Duffy ain’t here.’”

Peter Rawlings and another reader in England, Leigh Eduardo, brought to my attention the British film
Connecting Rooms
(1969) and its clever allusion to
All About Eve
. The picture stars Bette Davis and Michael Redgrave; Bette plays the unlikely role of a London street musician. Near the end of the film, according to my informants, Bette plays her cello on the pavement near a theatre. Behind her, a shot of the marquee reveals what’s on:
Remembrance
, starring Margo Channing. (One of those informants, Peter Rawlings, appeared as an extra in
Connecting Rooms
.)

James Robert Parish of Studio City, California, and David Windsor of Los Angeles, enlightened me about Margo Channing’s curtain call in
Aged in Wood
. On pages 161–162 I wondered whether the look of surprise on her face was an error that should have been edited out or, rather, a blatant example of faux humility. Both gentlemen assure me it’s the latter, and that Mankiewicz probably had Tallulah Bankhead in mind.

I quote from David Windsor’s letter: “I had the privilege of working as an apprentice at the Theatre-by-the-Sea in Matunuck, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1954 when Miss Bankhead was appearing in a boulevard comedy called
Dear Charles
. At the end of the play, she was discovered facing upstage during the solo curtain call, just like Margo’s curtain call. I also saw this two years later at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Florida, where she was murdering
A Streetcar Named Desire
. I asked her maid, Rose, if she always did this and Rose told me that it was a Bankhead tradition.”

And from James Robert Parish: “The curtain call was
not
a mistake. This was adapted from a Tallulah Bankhead gimmick. When I was doing props at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s, Bankhead came through in two plays:
Here Today
in 1962 with Estelle Winwood in the cast, and
Glad Tidings
in 1964. Tallulah used that identical curtain call of being ‘caught by surprise’ on stage while the audience applauded; I was told she had used it for years.”

Tom Stempel of Los Angeles pointed out an incorrect attribution. “On page 139,” he wrote, “you have Irving Thalberg calling writers ‘jerks with Underwoods.’ Thalberg was way too classy to say that. What you are thinking of is Jack Warner’s calling them ‘schmucks with Underwoods.’”

Another sleuth, David Marshall James of Columbia, South Carolina, sent me an info byte as delicious as a potato chip. Referring to Addison DeWitt’s voice-over introduction of Margo, and the claim that “she made her first stage appearance, at the age of four, in
Midsummer Night’s Dream
,” he speculates that it’s a clever allusion “to Judy Garland’s now-famous stage debut at the same age, made more memorable by her refusal to leave and her unrehearsed multiple choruses of ‘Jingle Bells.’ Mankiewicz surely knew this tale from Judy.”

In his letter, this reader also commented on the ending of
All About Eve
and the implied identity theft as the young girl, Phoebe, adores herself in Eve’s mirrors. He added a view I didn’t fully explore, viz., that those mirrors reflect the
past
as well as the future: “What Eve has done will be done again and again; also, what she has done has already been done over and over by other actresses. The mirror sequence therefore reflects the lives of Sarah Siddons and all those Restoration and Eighteenth-Century actresses that Mankiewicz knew so well. And the spectacular cape that Phoebe dons is sans period: it suits yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”

Something else about the ending, which I noticed only in the DVD version: in those mirrors you glimpse the almost subliminal face of a technician standing not quite out of camera range!

Further news from the technological front: there’s now a restored print of
All About Eve
. That’s not to say lost footage has been discovered and spliced in; rather, the picture quality is reportedly 80 or 90 percent better, and the soundtrack has been completely restored. According to film preservationist Shawn Belston, “Just before Bette Davis says ‘Fasten your seat belts’ you can actually hear her gulping her martini—that’s how nice the quality is.”

*   *   *

Surprisingly, my paragraph on Eddie Fisher drew a great deal of reader response. Thinking I had settled the matter once and for all on page 172 with my assertion that the stage manager was played by an older actor and not by the singing ex-husband of Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor, and Connie Stevens, I was startled by this communiqué from Edward Amor of Madison, Wisconsin, a retired professor of theatre and drama: “As one who saw the film during its earliest release I remember rather vividly the one scene in which Mr. Fisher appeared. It took place backstage between him and Anne Baxter. Although I do not remember the precise dialogue, the scene dealt with the stage manager’s request that Eve go out with him. From the dialogue we gathered that they had been seeing each other. Eve, who was by now after bigger game, brushed him off. This is the only time I saw this scene, as by the time I saw the film for the second time it had been omitted, leaving only his name on the screen credits at the end.”