All About “All About Eve” (50 page)

I’ve seen no version of the
All About Eve
script with such an exchange, although in
Applause
Eve Harrington uses a stage manager to further her ambitions, then dumps him.

I’m willing to let Bob Grimes of San Francisco have the last word in the matter. Here’s what he wrote: “I went with some friends to see
All About Eve
at the old Fox Theatre on a Sunday night right after it opened. I was particularly anxious to see my friend Eddie Fisher. At one point I lit a cigarette and then I saw arms waving and that was the end of Eddie Fisher in the film. He was of course the stage manager of
Aged in Wood
. I’ve seen it numerous times since and had a good look at him for his two seconds in the film.

“As for the mix-up with the singer, my friend claimed he had the rights to that name but since he was no longer active in his career he didn’t mind the young singer using the same name. At the time
All About Eve
was filmed, my friend Eddie worked at the Curran Theatre and had for some years so that’s how he got the job in the picture. He had been an actor on Broadway under the name Edward Fisher.”

*   *   *

When Karen Richards takes Eve Harrington backstage at the Curran Theatre for the first time, Eve lags behind to drink in the wonderment of all she surveys. She says, “You can breathe it, can’t you? Like some magic perfume.”

And you can. I recently went backstage at the Curran, and suddenly all the hokum about ghosts of dead actors lingering in the wings made believable sense. Perhaps I was especially susceptible to magic perfume that day, since my personal tour of the Curran was supervised by the world’s second-greatest Margo Channing. His name is Matthew Martin.

A few weeks earlier I had received a message from Matthew, who seemed delirious over my book. I dropped everything and telephoned him, for I was dying to hear more about this kid who memorized the script of
All About Eve
in junior high, then some years later played Margo
en travesti
to great acclaim in San Francisco. When he answered the phone I used an Addison DeWitt line: “That memorable night when Margo first dazzled you from the stage—what theatre was it in San Francisco? Was it the Shubert?”

Not one to miss a cue, he lapsed into Margo Channing, and we’ve been buddies ever since. In gay San Francisco, where nine out of ten men claim to do the best Bette Davis imitation
you’ve ever heard,
this one’s the Rolex and not the Mickey Mouse. Since I was on my way to San Francisco in a few weeks for a book signing, Matthew promised me an
All About Eve
tour of his hometown.

We started at the Fairmount Hotel, where cast and crew slept and mated while filming
Eve
. We prowled the alley beside the Curran, retracing the steps of Eve Harrington, who, waiting for Margo as usual, accosts Karen that fateful night. Matthew brought along a camera and Eve Harrington drag—trenchcoat and funny hat—in which we both posed. For this madcap photo session, he conscripted passing members of cast and crew of the current show at the Curran. An accommodating young gent named Joseph Vines, too young to have been corrupted by
All About Eve
(or perhaps deeming it wise to humor the deranged), permitted us to roam at leisure through the theatre.

“I’m not a drag queen, I’m an actress,” is Matthew Martin’s answer to the question, “What do you call what you do?” Before playing Margo in the camp musical parody
Eve
in 1998, he already had given Bette the treatment she deserved in
Whatever Happened to B.B. Jane?,
Hush Up, Sweet Charlotte,
The Star,
and the annual holiday drag romp
Christmas with the Crawfords
. Though La Davis is the diamond in his tiara, he’s also the ultra-utmost playing Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, or the Eileen Heckart role in
The Bad Seed
.

*   *   *

“The Bad Seed” is an epithet one might apply to Celeste Holm, who has shown her poison ivy side ever since she heard about this book. My request for an interview, detailed on page 2, drew a harpy’s response. Then, when
Vanity Fair
excerpted the book in April 1999, Holm wrote a rambling letter to the magazine in which she purported “to set the record straight.”

What she did instead was to confirm my accuracy by retelling, in her disgruntled way, several of the very same anecdotes that appeared in the
Vanity Fair
excerpt and subsequently in the book. She ended her letter with the disingenuous implication that I had made no effort to interview her: “And now he is doing a book—I would appreciate a call. I don’t remember any backstabbing at all.”

My response appeared along with her letter in the September 1999 issue of
Vanity Fair
. That magazine, seldom fainthearted, nevertheless shied away from the final sentence of my rejoinder, which said: “When Ms. Holm contradicts rumors of ‘backstabbing bitchiness’ on the set, she’s in complete agreement with Bette Davis, who said: ‘There was one bitch in the cast—Celeste Holm.’”

Since then, Holm’s drive-by insults have sounded increasingly desperate. In an interview with Boston’s
Bay Windows
she said, “This idiot who wrote the
Vanity Fair
story talked about skullduggery and backstabbing, but there was none of that. We all worked together in complete harmony.” In the next paragraph Holm contradicted herself with exquisite hypocrisy: “Bette Davis was one of the rudest people I ever met, so I never spoke to her.” Followed by another example of what Holm presumably considers “complete harmony”: “George Sanders was so anti-social, not one of us.”

In waging her jihad, Holm seems to have put that fifty-year-old Bette Davis grudge where her heart ought to be. Still shooting off opinions like a Saturday-night special, she told a reporter for the
San Francisco Chronicle
that she refused my initial request for an interview because “I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew he was going to make us all sound like totally immature people, bitching and carrying on.” Such wobbly ESP on her part made me wonder if she’s trying to land a job on the Psychic Friends Network.

I’m often asked the reason for the Celeste Holm meltdown, but I don’t really have an answer. When people inquire how I feel about her malevolent taunts, I quote a Bette Davis line from
Now, Voyager
: “Let’s not linger over it.”

But Joan Rivers, interviewing me on her show, wouldn’t let go. “Come on,” she said, “why is Celeste Holm out of control?”

I replied, “Maybe it’s because Bette Davis has millions of fans, and Celeste Holm has three or four.”

But Joan
will
have the last word. She cracked, “Oh yeah, and you know what? One of those just died!”

*   *   *

Like a vaudeville hoofer, I keep running out for one more encore. In this case it’s to open a grab bag and toss shiny little
Eve
-ish items to the audience. Call them sound bytes, factoids, trivial pursuits, or miscellany; I use a more highfalutin term. To me, they’re flecks of gold dust dropped from the tail of Mankiewicz’s Comet. Infinitely younger and less elusive than Halley’s, this new comet orbits Hollywood forever, shining brighter than any star. Oh yes,
All About Eve
does outshine the stars, and why not? It is, after all, pure heaven.

My little rhapsody in the preceding paragraph sounds like a cue for Thelma Ritter to moan, “Oh, brother!” But even her poker-faced character, Birdie, might crack up watching Carol Burnett’s parody of
All About Eve
.

Carol, of course, plays Margo Channing. The skit opens with Margo in her dressing room, “looking like a junkyard.” Seated at her dressing table with hair taped down, she commands Vicki Lawrence, as Eve, to bring her wig. While Margo adjusts the hairpiece, Eve, behind her back, holds up a fancy gown and poses theatrically, bowing to herself in a mirror. Margo wheels around, catches Eve in the act, and drives her out.

Then Bill (Harvey Korman) enters as Margo is finishing her toilette at the dressing table. A second later, behind Margo’s back, he holds up the same gown and bows adoringly to himself in the mirror until Margo wheels around. She’s aghast as the skit ends.

When I stated on page 280 that
The Budding of Brie
, a heterosexual skin flick with plot lifted from
All About Eve
, was difficult to locate, I failed to reckon with the vast Internet marketplace. Recently I came across a Web site offering it for $9.95. According to a “customer’s movie review” posted on that site, “Hilary Summers is Brie, who begins as a celebrity-worshipping waitress and by shrewdly using her pussy as a career-advancement tool eventually becomes a movie star.”

For all I know, this cast may include more stars than there are in porno heaven: Jennifer Jordan as Diana, a fading movie star; Eric Edwards as Nicky, her film-director husband; and Laurien Dominique as the fading star’s best friend. Jake Teague plays Simon, a cynical film critic. As a further homage to
Eve
, the film is set in 1950.

The customer’s review continues, in prose that’s less purple than, ahem, brown: “The sexual heat in this film comes from Brie. Her scenes are frequent, and she does them enthusiastically, even an anal. This scene shows Brie concluding an alliance with Simon in the back of his limo. What does it tell us about Simon’s character that he demands anal on the first date, and won’t take no for an answer?” (Well, what
does
it tell us? That
all
cynical film critics demand anal on the first date?)

Brie
sounds like two thumbs up, except for one thing. We learn from the review that several men in the supporting cast “look bored”; they’re “totally limp.” For such flaccid performances maybe thumbs are, after all, the most reliable way to measure.

Pop-cultural references to
All About Eve
seem increasingly widespread, threatening to bump competitors such as
Terminator
and
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Jean Smart, a presenter at the fifty-second Emmy Awards, thanked her producers for letting her leave
The Man Who Came to Dinner
on Broadway and trek to Los Angeles for the evening. She also thanked her understudy in the play, “Julie ‘All-About-Eve’ Halston.” When the joke got a round of laughter, Smart added, “I thought that was a strange middle name, too.”

Techno dance group Fem 2 Fem (page 279) isn’t alone in using “All About Eve” as a song title. In 1994 the industrial-rap artist Marxman included a track entitled “All About Eve” on his CD
33 Revolutions Per Minute
. The 1999 Cacophone recording label compilation
Ultra Swank
included a track entitled “All About Eve” by Annabel Lee. The English indie rock group The Wedding Present included “All About Eve” as a track on their 1987 release
George Best Plus
. A cut by rock guitarist Steve Vai on his 1996 album
Fire Garden
is “All About Eve,” and a song on the soundtrack of the 1999 Pedro Almodóvar film
Todo sobre mi madre
(
All About My Mother
, which uses the 1950 film as its point of departure) is—what else?—“All About Eve.”

The theatre critic of
Free Times,
a giveaway paper in Columbia, South Carolina, calls himself Addison DeWitt.

The title of a recent mystery novel by Lev Raphael is
Little Miss Evil
. That’s a phrase from
All About Eve
, which is mentioned several times in the novel even though the setting isn’t show business but a midwestern university. Another mystery,
The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case
by George Baxt, has Tallulah making such statements as “Fasten your seat belts, dahlings, it’s going to be a bumpy party!”

Surprisingly,
All About Eve
appeals even to high-school students. Stan Wlasik, who teaches drama at El Rancho High School in Pico Rivera, California, recently had his students play virtually every scene from the film. He reports that they loved the characters and that they readily accepted all aspects of the adult comedy-drama, including the gay subtext. When I asked how he chose
Eve
rather than the usual drama-class fare, he answered: “High-school theatre should produce plays that are good literature, and what finer piece of literature can you get than
All About Eve
by Joe Mankiewicz?”

Such an eloquent summing-up explains the universal appeal of
All About Eve,
and also why the film will endure. It’s a lovely goodbye, so how about a theatrical close à la Mankiewicz: “Slow curtain—
not
the end?”

brief lives, etc.

All About Eve
is sprinkled with theatrical allusions—actors, playwrights, critics, and the like. Many of these names were out of date even in 1950; today they’re known only to cognoscenti. The same is true of certain topical references. The following list includes names and groups not discussed elsewhere in this book. Since it would be cumbersome to quote all lines in the script where these various references occur, I leave the matching-up to the reader.

NB: Two of the names, Poodles Hanneford and Paula Wessely, are spoken so quickly by Bill Sampson and Addison DeWitt, respectively, that they’re quite hard to catch.

Beaumont and Fletcher
: Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) and John Fletcher (1579–1625), English dramatists. Their names are always linked because of the plays they wrote together:
The Maid’s Tragedy
,
The Scornful Lady
, etc. Fletcher wrote fifty-two plays in all, fifteen of them with Beaumont, sixteen by himself, and the rest in collaboration with other playwrights, including, perhaps, Shakespeare. Beaumont also wrote several plays alone. John Aubrey’s seventeenth-century
Brief Lives
implies personal as well as professional intimacy: “They lived together on the Banke side, not far from the Playhouse, both bachelors; lay together; had one Wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same cloathes and cloake, &c; between them.”