All About “All About Eve” Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1. Fire and Music

  Chapter 2. When Was It? How Long?

  Chapter 3. Minor Awards Are for Such as the Writer

  Chapter 4. Zanuck, Zanuck, Zanuck

  Chapter 5. Miss Channing Is Ageless

  Chapter 6. The End of an Old Road, the Beginning of a New One

  Chapter 7. San Francisco, An Oasis of Civilization in the California Desert

  Chapter 8. How Could I Miss Her? Every Night, Every Matinee

  Chapter 9. To Margo. To My Bride-to-Be

  Chapter 10. A Graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art

  Chapter 11. Killer to Killer

  Chapter 12. A New Word for Happiness

  Chapter 13. A Little Taking In Here and Letting Out There

  Chapter 14. A Career All Females Have in Common

  Chapter 15. The General Atmosphere Is Very Macbethish

  Chapter 16. I Call Myself Phoebe

  Chapter 17. The Time I Looked Through the Wrong End of the Camera Finder

  Chapter 18. And You, I Take It, Are the Paderewski Who Plays His Concerto on Me, the Piano?

  Chapter 19. Wherever There’s Magic and Make-Believe and an Audience, There’s Theatre

  Chapter 20. I’ll Marry You If It Turns Out You Have No Blood At All

  Chapter 21. You’ll Give the Performance of Your Life

  Chapter 22. Those Awards Presented Annually by That Film Society

  Chapter 23. Waiting for Me to Crack That Little Gnome on the Noggin With a Bottle

  Chapter 24. I Could Watch You Play That Scene a Thousand Times

  Chapter 25. Tell That to Dr. Freud Along With the Rest of It

  Chapter 26. Real Diamonds in a Wig

  Chapter 27. Why, If There’s Nothing Else, There’s Applause

  Postscript: Tell Us About It, Eve

  Afterword: Fasten Your Seat Belts Again

  Brief Lives, Etc.

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Also by Sam Staggs

  Copyright

  To Robert Sanchez, Glenn Russell, Evan Matthews,

  Steve Lambert, Tim Boss, Cary Birdwell,

  John Conway, Gary Schwartz,

  and Warren Butler—who know all about movies

  Author’s Note

  Since All About Eve is, to me, one of the most entertaining movies ever made, I have tried to write an entertaining book about it. I like to think of my work as “fan scholarship,” or even “camp scholarship,” and why not? Surely a book about a particular movie should echo the “voice” of the movie itself.

  To come at a Hollywood classic from every angle, as I’ve attempted to do, you have to immerse yourself in all aspects of the production, as the moviemakers did. It’s necessary to memorize the script. To learn your way around the sets and observe carpenters, electricians, stylists, and script-girls. Study every performance. You have to become a shadow director, as well as a shadow star, someone who sees everything but who remains out of camera range.

  My chief method in tracing the route of All About Eve has been a production history of the film. The complete story, however, began long before anyone conceived such a picture, and continues long after: through the Broadway musical Applause and including quotations, references, and allusions to Eve right up to the present day.

  I wanted to write not as a detached observer but rather from the point of view of an audience member trying to figure out why I like the movie so much, and why I still find it fresh after thirty or forty viewings. My approach is emotional—that’s the fan response. But without research and a rigorous quest for accuracy and balance, the entire book might amount to little more than a studio press release.

  Writing about the Hollywood of fifty years ago is a slippery job at best because so many of the people—and the documents—are gone. And of course those in the motion picture industry, like the rest of us, have remembered what was favorable to themselves. Each one framed his or her narrative with an eye to flattering close-ups.

  In trying to separate fact from myth, I have retained a constant skepticism. Many of the anecdotes recounted here derive, with variations, from several sources. I’ve also included several from a single source, and a few from sources not entirely convincing. The quotes from various persons connected with All About Eve sometimes sound scripted, but they’re real. Attributions are given in the endnotes.

  I might have caught a glimpse of the heart of the mystery from the rear, an unflattering angle which, paradoxically, has always excited me, possibly because it is in some way involved with my passion for “backstage,” for observing what is magic from the unusual, privileged angle.

  —Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge

  Chapter 1

  Fire and Music

  1951

  A terse headline in Variety on September 27, 1951, told the news: MANKIEWICZ, 20TH SEVER CONTRACT. Many in the industry were surprised that Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the Hollywood director and screenwriter, was quitting 20th Century-Fox, where he had spent the better part of a decade. His separation from Fox was amicable, as such things go; his valedictory to Los Angeles less so. Mankiewicz referred to the City of Angels as “an intellectual fog belt.”

  Manhattan, he felt sure, would salute him. There he could breathe finer air. He expected to be smartly quoted all over town, and when he tossed out a bon mot his New York listeners wouldn’t miss a beat. Nor would anyone complain “What’s that supposed to mean?” as they had done since his first day in the intellectual fog belt.

  Two Bekins moving vans that would transport everything the Mankiewicz family owned across the country to their new home in New York were packed. One van was filled with household goods. The other contained what was irreplaceable: the writings of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, his papers, his many awards and citations.

  Mankiewicz told a reporter he was off to Broadway to “make my pitch for the theatre.” Although he spent the rest of his life in New York, he never completed a play, and he never directed one.

  1995

  Celeste Holm, in her apartment on Central Park West, answered the phone herself. After hearing a description of the book in progress, titled All About All About Eve, she asked, “Why the hell do you want to write that book?”

  “Why? Because millions of people love the movie. And also because no one has told the story of how it came about and why All About Eve is considered both a Hollywood classic and a cult film.”

  “I don’t get it,” she snapped. “A work of art speaks for itself! I think a book like that is a waste of time. If people are interested, let them see the movie.”

  “I’ve seen it thirty times.”

  “Then see it thirty more!”

  “Look, Miss Holm, it’s not backstairs gossip I’m after. But since Mankiewicz lost all his papers in the fire—”

  “I guess you want to talk to me about Bette Davis?” Celeste Holm demanded, and without waiting for an answer she continued. “I’ve talked to everybody in the world about that movie!”

  “Bette Davis? No. I’d rather hear about you.”

  “All this crap about books—I don’t get it.”

  “Suppose I send you a detailed letter about the bo
ok. Your memories of shooting All About Eve are important.”

  “Well … maybe. I don’t know. Good-bye.”

  She never answered the letter.

  1996

  Told about the unproductive phone conversation with Celeste Holm, Kenneth Geist, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s biographer, remarked, “When you’re the last Mankiewicz survivor in New York, you’ve probably had enough.”

  1976

  “I’m not a dinosaur, you know,” harrumphed Celeste Holm when a reporter in Los Angeles asked her if All About Eve is the movie people best remember her for.

  “Didn’t you see Tom Sawyer last year?” she scolded. “I played Aunt Polly. That was a hit too.… Actually, I can tell a lot about somebody just from the movie of mine he mentions first. If you like All About Eve so much it probably means you’re a Bette Davis nut, a late-show freak. The Broadway musical fans want to know about my playing Ado Annie in the original production of Oklahoma. And the socially conscious crowd, the urban liberals, talk about Gentleman’s Agreement.”

  1951

  Volumes of plays—Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, Kaufman and Hart, Rostand, Molière, Beaumont and Fletcher, even Clyde Fitch and old melodramas—all of these crackled in the fire as if this were Berlin in 1933. Theatre histories, the works of Sigmund Freud, scripts and diaries, biographies of Minnie Fiske and Sarah Siddons and the Barrymores blazed up for a few minutes and then were gone. Mementos saved from movie sets melted like candle wax.

  The fire grew and fattened, consuming every molecule of oxygen. It lapped up half a lifetime of memories. The highway itself seemed on fire, while inside the overturned Bekins van ugly smoke gnawed away at wooden crates, cardboard boxes, and metal file cabinets, which, despite their greater strength, would not survive.

  A distant siren started up as photographs of Bette Davis charred in the flames like bacon strips. Nearby, a carton flared and that was the end of letters covering several decades: to and from Joe Mankiewicz and his brother, Herman, their sister, their parents, wives, nieces and nephews, and telegrams to them from half of Hollywood. Packed on the bottom of this box was a book of addresses: Celeste Holm in Manhattan, Thelma Ritter in Queens, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Merrill in Maine, Darryl Zanuck’s private phone number in his spacious suite of offices at 20th Century-Fox.

  When the call came, Joe Mankiewicz must have felt that the grandest era of his life had perished. The loss was devastating. Destroyed were hundreds of files dating back to 1929, the year he arrived in Hollywood as a twenty-year-old whose first assignment at Paramount was writing titles for silent movies. Had they survived, those files—along with manuscripts, correspondence, countless personal and professional items detailing two decades of Hollywood history—would now belong to an important university, or perhaps to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills.

  Years later, an interviewer asked Mankiewicz to enumerate all the awards for his most famous picture, All About Eve. He shook his head and said nothing, remembering the enormity of the fire. But losing track of the many awards for that film was the smallest part of his misfortune. “Forgive me,” he said at last, “but I can’t attach much importance to the fact that somewhere in those melted filing cabinets was the dust of a few more back-patting certificates or statuettes. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. It’s just that I miss so terribly all of my project notebooks, my manuscripts, my letters and diaries—the private documentation of my twenty-year stretch out there.”

  * * *

  Joe Mankiewicz liked fire imagery; he often used it in his work. Three examples from All About Eve come to mind. Bette Davis on Miss Caswell, played by Marilyn Monroe: “She looks like she might burn down a plantation.” Addison DeWitt describes Eve’s first onstage reading of Lloyd’s play as “something made of music and fire.” And when Bette says “Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke” and Eve replies “I’d like to hear it,” Bette’s sardonic punch line is “Some snowy night in front of the fire.”

  In his two or three best works, Mankiewicz was a comic, cynical Prometheus who snatched fire from Hollywood and sent it out across the world to millions of delighted moviegoers. The Mankiewicz flame from his best work as a writer/director—The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), which he didn’t write, and A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950), both of which he wrote and directed—burns as bright today as it did a half-century ago.

  Joe Mankiewicz owed his start in Hollywood to his older brother, Herman J. Mankiewicz, the witty, hell-raising screenwriter best remembered as co-author of Citizen Kane. It was Herman who brought Joe out to California in 1929 and introduced him to the right people. In later years Joe repaid the favor many times.

  The other author of Citizen Kane was Orson Welles. It’s not clear whether Herman Mankiewicz or Welles wrote the scorching end of that movie, but if it was Mankiewicz, the thundering irony is almost too painfully clear. That final operatic holocaust of Charles Foster Kane’s effects recurred somewhere on a stretch of highway that day in 1951 when Herman’s kid brother, Joe, lost the papers and mementos that meant more to him than anything else he had acquired in Hollywood.

  Did Joe Mankiewicz, too, have some secret, half-forgotten “Rosebud” that vanished in the moving-van fire? And if so, did his, like Kane’s, represent an unhealed wound? Or—more likely—was the Joe Mankiewicz “Rosebud” a comic one, etched in irony and drenched with a certain kind of wit that later would assume the flashy name of “camp”?

  That final fire at Xanadu, and the later one that consumed the Mankiewicz moving van, rhyme like a combustible couplet. It’s right out of a movie, you think. And then you say: Why not? In Hollywood, where life and art always overlap, who can tell the difference?

  * * *

  “I am too beautiful to be a Hausfrau!” shrilled the young woman, slinging the script across the sofa into a mound of cushions. “I vant to be an actress again!”

  “But you’re a splendid housekeeper, my dear, you said so yourself. You said, ‘Every time I get a divorce, I keep the house.’”

  Her husband’s cool rejoinder was too much. She burst into tears and slammed out of the room, followed by Josephine, her devoted boxer bitch, whose sharply barked laments on the stairs echoed those of her mistress.

  A few miles west of Hollywood, in the mountain fastness of Bel Air, there lived a happy couple. He was Russian but, owing to his Oxbridge accent, his suave brittleness, and his waxy polish, he passed for an Englishman. The lady was a Magyar from Budapest who had once passed for an actress, though her stage debut was far away and long ago. As a thespian, this young woman was forgotten by the world, since her acting résumé contained but a single line.

  Few in Hollywood had heard of an operetta called Der Singende Traum (“The Singing Dream”), much less of the soubrette with the given name of Sari who frolicked across the stage in Vienna a few years before World War II. But Sari Gabor Belge Hilton Sanders remembered the applause. She recalled gypsy violins at romantic suppers with gentlemen after performances, and ranks of roses in her dressing room. She craved new glories in America.

  Sari Gabor, nicknamed Zsa Zsa, was desperate. Everyone she knew was famous: her sister Eva, starring on Broadway in The Happy Time; two of her ex-husbands, Turkish government press director Burhan Belge, and Conrad Hilton, the multi-millionaire hotelier; and Zsa Zsa’s third husband, George Sanders, had just landed the role of Addison DeWitt in Joseph Mankiewicz’s next movie, All About Eve.

  At the age of thirty, give or take a little, Zsa Zsa had prospered, certainly; she wasn’t the former Mrs. Hilton for nothing. But to be an actress, to make films like her sister Eva and so many other girls she knew—now there was something worth making sacrifices for.

  George and Zsa Zsa had been married not quite a year. Their nuptials (a word often used by Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper to announce a new Filmland alliance) had taken place on April 1, 1949, in Las Vegas. And George had been making movies ever since. He and Zsa Zsa had
recently returned from Spain, where he filmed Captain Blackjack.

  Later that afternoon, tears dried and makeup freshened, Mrs. George Sanders reemerged.

  “Vy not, Georgie?” she said, smoothing the lapel of his smoking jacket. “Phoebe, ze high school girl—it’s a small role vich comes only at ze end of the picture.”

  “My dear, I believe you might be a trifle mature for the part. Let’s see, Phoebe must be seventeen or so, and you were born in—”

  “Look at ze script, George,” Zsa Zsa implored. “Zis girl stands in front of three long mirrors. Sink how lovely—three Zsa Zsas.”

  A waft of his wife’s perfume brushed his nostril, and George wavered.

  “Look here, I suppose…”

  “Three Zsa Zsas at ze end of the picture,” she gurgled, tilting her exotic Hungarian head.

  George disliked it when she gurgled. He reconsidered the threefold prospect of his wife.

  She sucked in her breath and chattered on: “It’s only a walk-on at ze end, you know.”

  George Sanders frowned. “It’s more than a walk-on,” he informed her with a certain superiority. “Besides, it’s unlikely that Darryl would give the role to an untried actress. And I’m not the least convinced that you know how to behave on a set.”

  “Tell Darryl Zanuck that if I’m no good, ze studio can cut me off.” She made a sweeping gesture with her arms.

  George Sanders didn’t say the first thing that came to mind. Instead he paused for a long moment, looked down at his drink, then slowly replied, “Don’t be silly. Acting isn’t for you.”

  A half-century later, one might say that he was absolutely right. And wrong!

  For Zsa Zsa soon made her debut in Lovely to Look At (1952), quickly reached her A-list zenith in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge the same year, and has been the Potboiler Princess ever since, most famously in Queen of Outer Space.

  * * *

  It was 1950, and Hollywood seemed fascinated with itself.

  At Paramount, Billy Wilder was putting the finishing touches on Sunset Boulevard, with Gloria Swanson as silent screen star Norma Desmond, a glamorous old vamp, and William Holden as a down-at-heels screenwriter. Nicholas Ray was directing In a Lonely Place at Columbia, with Bogart also playing a screenwriter—this one suspected of a film-noir murder. Over at MGM they were contemplating Singin’ in the Rain, the gloriously energetic, tuneful, tap-dancing story of Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), another silent star—this one with a screechy voice that dooms her when talkies arrive. Even Marlene Dietrich was about to play a sultry actress resembling herself in the early airplane film No Highway in the Sky, speaking throaty lines such as “My films are a few cans of celluloid on the junk heap someday.” And at 20th Century-Fox, Joseph L. Mankiewicz had just started All About Eve, a film that, while technically about Broadway rather than Hollywood, amounted to exploratory surgery on the dysphoric underbelly of show business.