All About “All About Eve” (9 page)

In the script, Mankiewicz describes Margo’s dressing room and then adds, “A door leads to an old-fashioned bathroom.” Birdie, of course, makes several trips into and out of this bathroom. But it made Breen nervous. His letter states, “We presume that there will be no notice of a toilet in the bathroom in these scenes.”

When Colonel Joy, in a subsequent memo, conveyed Breen’s apprehension to Mankiewicz, the retort was: “By my Oscars, I promise to show no indication of a toilet. Has it ever occurred to Joe Breen that the rest of the world must be convinced that Americans never relieve themselves?”

Next was a line that, if retained, would have made Thelma Ritter as notorious as Jane Russell, though for a different reason. Mankiewicz has Birdie say, in the dressing-room scene, “I’ll never forget that blizzard the night we played Cheyenne. A cold night. First time I ever saw a brassiere break like a piece of matzo.” Breen, not tickled, noted dryly that “the reference to the brassiere should be changed or eliminated.”

And so it was, as Mankiewicz surely expected. It’s likely he conceded that Borscht Circuit line as a gambit for retaining Birdie’s crack, “Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end.” Breen also found this one “vulgar” and recommended that it be changed or eliminated, presumably because verbal references to the posterior were off limits although visual ones were not.

Colonel Joy, as go-between, reported Breen’s request to Mankiewicz, adding helpfully, “Insomuch as Bridie’s line is at the end of the shot, perhaps you can let it go the way it is and clip off ‘rear end’ if we have to, although I don’t think we will.” Mankiewicz replied impatiently, “The word
should
be ‘arse.’ What do you suggest we substitute for ‘rear end’? ‘Backside’? ‘Butt’? What would you think of ‘snappin’ at her transmission’?”

In the pantry scene where Margo supplies Max Fabian with bicarbonate of soda for heartburn, the script reads simply, “Max burps.” This troubled Breen, who wrote worriedly, “We presume there will be nothing coarse about the burp.” But the Production Code, to his chagrin, lacked a subsection on prohibited human rumbles, and so Gregory Ratoff, as Max Fabian, produced one of the great screen belches, perhaps surpassed only by Elizabeth Taylor’s in
Secret Ceremony
—although hers seems unscripted, a comic fringe benefit of the fried chicken she devours in a scene with Mia Farrow.

Curiously, Breen had missed an earlier Max Fabian burp. On page four of the script, at the Sarah Siddons Awards, Mankiewicz had indicated that Max “drops the powder into some water, stirs it, drinks, burps delicately, and closes his eyes.” Perhaps it was the word “delicately” that made this foreshadowing burp acceptable.

On page 119, the word “tart” was unacceptable to Breen and so it disappeared.

A few pages on, Breen and his fellow readers discerned a nuance that any literary critic might envy. Karen and Lloyd are arguing over Eve. Lloyd says, “That bitter cynicism of yours is something you’ve acquired since you left Radcliffe,” and Karen snaps back, “That cynicism you refer to, I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys!” Her line always gets a laugh, one reason being that its meaning sounds submerged and elliptical. It could mean all sorts of things, or merely the obvious.

But Breen had little doubt. When told of it, Mankiewicz snorted. Zanuck swore. Colonel Joy pointed out diplomatically to Mr. Breen that perhaps someone had misconstrued the comic intent of that exchange between husband and wife. Breen wrote back: “The dialogue is still considered highly questionable. The lines seem open to an interpretation that the reference is to menstruation.”

Joseph Breen yielded on the line, but the matter of bathrooms would not go away. We can imagine the grimace on Breen’s face as he finished dictating a long memo: “We suggest that you soften the reference to the ‘Ladies’ Room’ by possibly referring to it as the ‘Lounge Room’ or the ‘Powder Room’ or something similar. The line, ‘I understand she is now the understudy in there’ seems somewhat vulgar, and we ask that it be changed.”

Now it was Mankiewicz’s turn to grimace. Of all the idiotic, half-baked— He sighed and puffed harder on his pipe. “Changing ‘Ladies’ Room’ to ‘Powder Room,’” he wrote in an exasperated memo, “is not only childish but will most certainly hurt Bill’s comment” (referring to Eve Harrington, Bill says, “I understand she’s now the understudy in there.”). Exhausted by such extreme literal-mindedness, Mankiewicz concluded rather pedantically, “‘Understudy’ refers to
ladies
and not to
powder
.”

On this point Mankiewicz prevailed, and on Breen’s final point he also refused to budge. Referring to the hotel-room scene where Addison slaps Eve, Joseph Breen wrote demurely: “We ask that the slap across the face be eliminated.”

It wasn’t, and when Breen saw this slap on screen in its context of implied sado-masochism, he may well have bemoaned his leniency in letting the pagans retain such perversion.

Chapter 5

Miss Channing Is Ageless

For Claudette Colbert April really was the cruelest month—at least in 1950, for that’s when she lost the part of Margo Channing. Colbert was forty-seven at the time, late autumn for a movie actress in those days. The first long shadow had crept across her career six years earlier when she played—reluctantly—the role of mother to adult Jennifer Jones and adolescent Shirley Temple in
Since You Went Away
(1944). Anyone in Hollywood could have told you that her best films were behind her:
Cleopatra, Imitation of Life, It Happened One Night
, all released in 1934;
Drums Along the Mohawk
(1939);
Palm Beach Story
(1942); and many others. She no longer got the star treatment—or the star roles—of earlier years, when she was, in the words of her
Midnight
co-star Don Ameche, “completely spoiled.”

As long as Oscar nominations, and one Oscar, were appearing on schedule, and a Colbert movie was practically guaranteed at the box office, she demanded that cinematographers shoot her from certain angles; above all, they must photograph only her left profile, for she considered her right one unflattering. (Colleagues called the right side of her face “the dark side of the moon” because no one ever saw it.) Claudette also insisted that the studio have a driver on call for her around the clock, whether she went anywhere or not.

The words used to describe Colbert were “high-spirited,” “silken,” “charming,” “sophisticated,” “strong-minded.” She was a lady, even when her left nipple bobbed above the white surf as she bathed in asses’ milk in
The Sign of the Cross
(1932). Accordingly, one definition of a Hollywood lady might be that, in such circumstances, her left profile will always upstage her left nipple. Claudette Colbert was untouched by scandal and aloof to feuds, although she did quarrel with Noël Coward once, provoking him to say of the petite actress, “If she had a neck I would wring it.”

Darryl Zanuck had loftier ambitions for Colbert when he thought of her as Margo Channing in
All About Eve
. For one thing, she had class, and Fox put a premium on class. Then, too, Colbert’s forte was comedy, and she knew how to wear elegant clothes. She also had a sly wit, which seemed right for Margo, and Colbert’s on-screen persona was a woman who always did the right thing. Margo Channing didn’t always do the right thing but her character was sympathetic, and who wouldn’t pull for Claudette Colbert against the nasty usurper, Eve? In Fox films, Zanuck liked good characters good and bad ones sexy.

And Claudette was certainly good. She once said she got tired of playing noble roles and would have liked to play more feline characters. That’s why Margo Channing thrilled her. Mankiewicz seemed happy that she would be his star. Perhaps he responded to what a critic later called “the hard-softness of Colbert’s sophistication.”

Colbert could hardly wait to finish
Three Came Home
. The director, Jean Negulesco, wanted realism in this World War II drama in which British and American families on Borneo are sent to prison camps by the Japanese invaders. Colbert knew all along that she was giving an outstanding performance, so when Negulesco directed her to play a jungle rape scene in the most harrowing way possible, she complied. The scene called for her to fight off a prison guard, the would-be rapist. As the cameras whirred, Colbert thrashed about, she fought and kicked and bit as though her life depended on it, as indeed the character’s did.

When Claudette screamed, then fell writhing to the ground, it looked like the climax of the scene. An instant later, however, the cast and crew realized it was something more. Negulesco rushed to her, along with his assistant and several other actors in the film. Someone called an ambulance and a couple of hours later word reached the set that the star would remain hospitalized indefinitely with a ruptured disk.

Colbert knew then that she would never make
All About Eve
. “I cried for days,” she said many years later. “Days! I cried for years.”

But studios will always be kind, especially when they stand to lose money on an injured star. “Fox couldn’t have been nicer,” Colbert went on. “They waited for me as long as they could. They waited two months, and Joe Mankiewicz was adorable. He used to send me flowers tied to a pogo stick.”

In her later comments Colbert throws light on how Mankiewicz conceived
her
Margo Channing: “Joe’s idea originally was that Anne Baxter as a young girl looked very much like me. And that was the point of it—that this young girl had a fixation about the older actress. She looked like her, and she thought she could be better. When Bette did the role, it became a whole different thing.”

Suddenly, hearing that, you can almost imagine Colbert in the role. For the first time, the original casting makes sense. Otherwise, it’s rather a stretch to imagine her as Margo because Colbert has the “unyielding good taste” not of Margo Channing but of Karen Richards. Colbert—flamboyantly bitchy? Colbert delivering such lines as, “Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke”? Colbert gulping a martini and then swooping down the stairs like a maddened bat?

No. Colbert’s Margo would have been far more secure than Bette’s. Davis was brass; Colbert platinum.
Her
Margo, threatened by Eve and attacked by Addison, would have been moderately surprised but lightly self-mocking. (“Colbert would have been a piss-elegant drunk,” Mankiewicz said later.) With Claudette Colbert as Margo, the problem of Eve Harrington might have resembled a drawing-room comedy where an upstart must be dealt with in Act II and put in her place by the end of the third act.

Years later Mankiewicz admitted that he still thought about Colbert in the role: “The question of aging would have been emphasized if Claudette had played Margo. Margo can’t play her usual roles because she’s too old. But, in the eyes of the public, Bette Davis was never really young. And so that dimension of the aging actress is somewhat eclipsed with Bette playing Margo Channing.”

When Colbert talked about the movie in later years she said, “Bette did a great job! I know how much it meant to her at the time, because she had her share of personal and professional woes.” Asked if she felt any bitterness over the loss, Claudette replied, “It wasn’t my conception of the role, but I resent those false reports that portray me as ungracious to a fellow artist who gave as much to the role as Bette did.”

Bette and Claudette crossed paths occasionally over the years, and neither hissed. Sometime in the 1960s, after both women had long since grown used to playing someone’s mother, Claudette told Bette, “I envy you your career. Do you know why? It’s because you played older women before you had to. Now you’ll never have to cross the age bridge.”

In her autobiography,
The Lonely Life
, Bette wrote: “I say thank you to Claudette Colbert for hurting her back. Claudette’s loss was my gain. No broken back—no Gary Merrill. I must confess, in the years that followed I felt less and less thankful to Claudette’s broken back.”

With Colbert’s back in a steel brace and the rest of her in traction, a replacement had to be found. No doubt Mankiewicz was fearful that Zanuck might use Colbert’s indisposition as an excuse for offering Margo to the actress he had favored from the start: Marlene Dietrich.

Zanuck and Mankiewicz had tussled over this one before. Mankiewicz objected strenuously to Dietrich. Later he explained why: “I was, and am, a great admirer of Marlene. But from what I knew of her work and equipment as an actress, I simply could not visualize—or hear—her as a possible Margo.” Anyone who questions Mankiewicz’s judgment in this instance should imitate Dietrich’s voice and accent while repeating the line “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” It takes forever.

Dietrich, an on-screen paean to artificiality, might have stolen
All About Eve
, but it would have been petty theft. The script was already a tribute to artifice. The right actress to play Margo was therefore one with dirt on her shoes—an American Anna Magnani—and one earthy enough to make you believe it when she calls herself “a junkyard” and orders new girdles a size larger. But Dietrich, even in 1950, was far beyond girdles. As an actress, she was approaching those unworldly contours befitting the inflatable dress she wore in her nightclub act during the long twilight of her career.

Mankiewicz wanted Colbert’s replacement locked in as fast as possible. Otherwise, Zanuck might revert to Susan Hayward, whom Mankiewicz had originally mentioned as a possible Margo Channing and who was right there on the Fox lot, under contract and available. Now, however, she seemed wrong to Mankiewicz, one reason being her age: Hayward was only thirty-two; Margo was forty.

Mankiewicz had a viable second choice, an actress who had long ago learned every theatrical trick and who was famous for her stage work in London and New York. Gertrude Lawrence was fifty-one, but with her swooping archness, her great-lady-of-the-stage mannerisms, and a zany sophistication that had served her well in Noël Coward comedies, she deserved the compliment that Lloyd Richards, in the
Eve
script, paid his leading lady: “Margo, you haven’t got any age.”