by Staggs, Sam
It was something of a miracle that his movie got made at all, at least the way it did, for Bette Davis hadn’t spoken to Darryl Zanuck, the producer, in nine years. And besides, Claudette Colbert had already signed to play the role of Margo Channing. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter had announced the Colbert coup late in 1949.
Zanuck, moreover, had John Garfield in mind for Bill Sampson, Margo’s lover. He also thought José Ferrer would make a fine Addison DeWitt, and he wanted Jeanne Crain for the role of Eve Harrington. All these possibilities, and others, Zanuck jotted in pencil on the inside back cover of Mankiewicz’s original treatment of Eve. Zanuck’s early casting notes reveal Barbara Stanwyck, in addition to Claudette Colbert, as a possibility for Margo Channing. From the start, however, he favored Celeste Holm for Karen, Hugh Marlowe for Lloyd Richards, and Thelma Ritter for Birdie.
In early April 1950 Bette Davis was finishing The Story of a Divorce at RKO. This film, later retitled Payment on Demand, was her first after leaving Warner Bros., where she had been under contract for eighteen difficult years.
One day, during a lull in shooting while Curtis Bernhardt, the director, conferred with his cameraman, Bette got word that she was wanted on the telephone. Since filming had stopped for a time, she was able to leave the set and take the call in her dressing room. She had on one of the rather matronly dresses designed for her to wear in the picture.
“Hello, Bette, this is Darryl Zanuck,” said the production chief of 20th Century-Fox. His high-pitched Nebraska accent, full of sharp r’s and words bitten off at the end, was in marked contrast with Bette’s r-less New England speech, naturally full of broad a’s that had broadened even further as she acquired the florid stage diction of the time.
Bette knew Zanuck’s voice—and she didn’t believe this was Zanuck. Always suspicious, on screen and off, she assumed it was a friend playing a joke. After all, the last thing Zanuck had said to her, during their falling-out in 1941, was “You’ll never work in Hollywood again!”
“Hello, Darryl dear,” Bette crooned, sounding more Broadway-British than ever. “Lovely to heah from you.”
“Bette, I’ve got a script I want you to take a look at,” Zanuck said. “I think you’ll like it. And I hope you’ll want to do it.”
“Anything you say, my deah.” She sounded even saucier on the phone than she did on-screen. “If I like it, I will do it,” she said with a trace of malice and a soupçon of insolence. Bette couldn’t figure out which one of her friends was pretending to be Darryl F. Zanuck, so she decided to have a little fun herself, string him along, do an imitation of Bette Davis. Why not? Everyone else did.
By the end of the conversation, she expected this young man—who on earth could it be?—to end his charade with a guffaw. All the while, of course, Bette was puffing her cigarette like … well, just like Bette Davis.
“The only thing is, Bette, if you like it you’ve got to be ready to start shooting in ten days, wardrobe finished and all.”
“Right away, Darryl deah.” Bette said it as though she were Judith Traherne, the Long Island playgirl and horsewoman she played in Dark Victory.
“So you’re interested in the script?” Zanuck continued, making allowances for star extravagance.
“Anything you say, Darryl dahling.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know the name of the picture?”
“Oh, why not surprise me?” Bette said airily. She flung her cigarette hand over her shoulder like a boa.
“Bette, this script is by Joe Mankiewicz. It’s the picture Claudette Colbert was going to do before she broke her back.”
“Broke her back?” Bette yelped.
And then it dawned!
“Darryl! Is that really you?”
They talked for four or five minutes, during which Zanuck made her one of the best offers any film actress ever received. Bette jumped at the chance to read the script of All About Eve, which ultimately, as the critic Ethan Mordden has said, “might be the film that ruined Davis or the film that made her immortal.” Perhaps it did both.
Betty Lynn, playing the daughter in Payment on Demand, recalled later that Bette’s eyes were blazing when she returned to the set. Speaking at breakneck speed, Davis told her younger co-star that the phone call was from Zanuck and that he was sending over a script that had Hollywood in a buzz.
* * *
Bette’s Quarrel with Darryl Zanuck
In January 1941 Bette Davis was elected the first woman president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was a high honor, and Bette set out to serve with distinction. She soon locked horns, however, with some of her older colleagues. The first disagreement came when Bette suggested that holding the usual Academy Awards banquet in the Biltmore Hotel “might seem frivolous in light of the terrible struggle that our British and European friends are engaged in against the Nazis. Some have suggested we cancel it. I think a better solution would be to hold the ceremony in a theatre, charge a minimum of twenty-five dollars a seat, and donate the proceeds to British War Relief.”
Surprisingly, this plan was opposed as “undignified” by some members.
Next, Bette raised the issue of extras. Pointing out that many of them did not speak English and that few were capable of judging technical excellence in films, she suggested that they no longer be permitted to cast votes in the Oscar competition. This suggestion also met with disapproval from many members.
Her other recommendations also caused shock and consternation, so that Bette soon felt she had been chosen only as a glamorous figurehead whom no one cared to take seriously. A few days after the first meeting over which she presided, Bette resigned despite a warning from Darryl Zanuck, who had sponsored her for the presidency. How dire his prophecy, and how blind: “You’ll never work in Hollywood again.”
Jean Hersholt, who was elected to replace Bette, was a diplomat and a skilled politician. He soon maneuvered to deny extras the right to vote, and he paved the way to moving the awards ceremony from banquet hall to theatre. His success in the wake of Bette’s failure no doubt implies sexism on the part of the male-dominated Academy. But Bette’s bluntness and impatience, her refusal to compromise, surely helped alienate many whom she might later have persuaded.
* * *
An even smaller part than that of Phoebe, the young schemer who ends All About Eve, was the role of Miss Caswell. If Zsa Zsa Gabor had read the script carefully, she might have tried to grab that little bonbon of a role: Miss Caswell, given name Claudia, whom George Sanders describes as “a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art.” In the script, Mankiewicz describes her merely as “a blonde young lady.”
Ironically, though Zsa Zsa coveted the part of Phoebe, she was fleetingly considered for “the blonde young lady.” On the 20th Century-Fox casting director’s list, under the heading “Miss Caswell,” are the following names, most of them forgotten but two or three unforgettable: Virginia Toland, Barbara Britton, Karin Booth, Marie McDonald, Mary Meade, Joi Lansing, Adele Jergens, Marilyn Maxwell, Gale Robbins, Joyce Reynolds, Leslie Brooks, ZaZa [sic] Gabor, Lois Andrews, Myrna Dell, Angela Lansbury, Pat Knight, Cleo Moore, Ellie Marshall, Marilyn Monroe, Dolores Moran, Marian Marshall, Randy Stuart, Marjorie Reynolds, Arleen Whelan, Angela Greene, and Rowena Rollins.
At every studio, such lists amounted to little. They were devised when the casting director and his associates, thinking out loud, jotted a quick roster of possibilities. In this instance, at Fox, the casting office soon received a skeleton list from Zanuck and Mankiewicz. Later the casting director winnowed these starlet names. It’s impossible to determine how Zsa Zsa made it that far, though it’s likely that George Sanders mentioned her to Mankiewicz. Life at home no doubt became sweeter with the announcement, “I’ve submitted your name.” But Zsa Zsa wasn’t yet blonde, nor had she launched her Hollywood career. Soon she and all the others were out of the running.
Instead, Marilyn Monroe played Miss Caswell, and of the actors who appeared in A
ll About Eve she is the only one whose career was to ascend. For others in the cast—Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Gary Merrill, Celeste Holm, Hugh Marlowe, George Sanders, Thelma Ritter, and for Mankiewicz himself—All About Eve was the climax. Never did a single one of them surpass, or even equal, what he or she did so brilliantly, with such verve and wit, in this film. For all of them the picture was a watershed that separates what they hoped to accomplish in the movies from the actual roles that life, or Hollywood, dealt from its unmarked deck.
Marilyn Monroe went up, and up, and up, but for the others a long descent began the day All About Eve was in the can. If not for this movie, half the cast would be forgotten.
* * *
The Casting Couch
Nancy Davis Reagan didn’t know in 1950 that she was under consideration for the role for Karen Richards. When I queried her in 1998, she said she had never heard that her name was on the casting director’s list. Nor was she aware that the man she would marry two years later, in 1952, was also in the running for a part in All About Eve. And yet there is the name Ronald Reagan, along with twenty-four other contenders, jotted down for the character of Bill Sampson. If Reagan, and not Gary Merrill, had gotten the part, it would have been his second movie with Bette Davis. It might also have changed the course of history.
Consider how Hollywood history might have been different if the casting director had prevailed in his various recommendations. The following lists are not complete; rather, they are selections of the most intriguing possibilities.
KAREN RICHARDS
Nancy Davis
Alexis Smith
Ann Sothern
Shirley Booth
Patricia Neal
Margaret Sullavan
Ruth Warrick
Jessica Tandy
Barbara Bel Geddes
Arlene Dahl
Joan Fontaine
BILL SAMPSON
Robert Cummings
William Holden
Edmond O’Brien
Zachary Scott
Glenn Ford
Ronald Reagan
Montgomery Clift
Robert Young
ADDISON DEWITT
José Ferrer
Clifton Webb
Claude Rains
Basil Rathbone
Charles Laughton
Vincent Price
Adolphe Menjou
EVE HARRINGTON
Jeanne Crain
Ann Blyth
Elizabeth Taylor
June Allyson
Olivia de Havilland
Donna Reed
Mona Freeman
MARGO CHANNING
Katharine Hepburn
Ginger Rogers
Greer Garson
Joan Fontaine
Joan Crawford
Paulette Goddard
Rosalind Russell
Hedy Lamarr
Gloria Swanson
Norma Shearer
MAX FABIAN
Everett Sloane
Walter Slezak
Fred Clark
George Jessel
Zero Mostel
* * *
Chapter 2
When Was It? How Long?
Our story actually begins several years before Joe Mankiewicz began filming All About Eve. During the 1943–44 Broadway season, at the Booth Theatre on Forty-fifth Street in New York, the Austrian actress Elisabeth Bergner (1897–1986) was appearing in a stage thriller called The Two Mrs. Carrolls. In the play, Bergner had the role of a devoted and unsuspecting wife who is slowly being poisoned by her husband.
The play is creaky by today’s standards. It was creaky in the forties, but without the competition of television drama, such plays often did very well, and The Two Mrs. Carrolls turned into a fashionable hit. (One reviewer called the play “the largest bundle of nineteenth-century heroics the twentieth has ever offered with a straight face.”)
In Europe Elisabeth Bergner had been called “the Garbo of the stage.” Bergner herself once summed up her career with this line: “Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Chekhov, Shaw, Barrie, and Shakespeare again and again and again.”
She made movies in Germany (Fräulein Else, 1929; Der Träumende Mund [“Dreaming Lips”], 1932), and also in England, where she had immigrated. When the British film Catherine the Great was banned shortly after opening in Berlin in 1934, Hitler’s chief propagandist, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, wrote in the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter: “The attempt to present in Berlin émigré Jews, especially the warped Elisabeth Bergner, and to make money from them in Germany, represents an inartistic effort that must be resisted.”
Since the German-speaking countries were dangerously inhospitable, Bergner and her Hungarian husband/manager, Paul Czinner, remained in England. There she filmed As You Like It (directed by Czinner) in 1937 with the promising young actor Laurence Olivier. In this film, perhaps her best known, Bergner is a riveting presence. She has the wide, pleading eyes of a northern Renaissance Magdalene and, around her mouth, traces of a smirk. Her exuberant, full-bodied voice resembles an unlikely admixture of Eva LeGallienne and Mae West.
Two years after As You Like It, Bergner starred in Stolen Life with Michael Redgrave, which Warner Bros. remade in 1946 starring Bette Davis and Glenn Ford. Hollywood released this later version—the story of twin girls, one good, one bad, and both of course played with gusto by Bette—as A Stolen Life.
Having come to the United States when a German invasion of Great Britain seemed likely, Elisabeth Bergner was content to appear in plays by authors other than the great European dramatists. After all, the competition was formidable—Helen Hayes, Katherine Cornell, Lynn Fontanne—and many actors whose first language wasn’t English ended up playing stock parts: peasants, spies, fortune-tellers, and Nazi brutes.
We don’t know Bergner’s thoughts on Martin Vale (nom de plume of Marguerite Vale Veiller), the author of The Two Mrs. Carrolls, but from all accounts the actress threw herself into the play and gave it her best. In fact, she seems to have poured into this melodrama not only more than it deserved but more, almost, than it could take. Bergner wasn’t merely histrionic; she was over the top.
One reviewer, commenting on “the way she laid down a rose, the way she staggered up and down the stairs,” concluded that “Miss Bergner is a prize package of theatrical trickery who overdid the cuteness and melting connubiality.” In other words, she chewed the scenery.
George Bernard Shaw put it this way after seeing her in his Saint Joan: “Miss Bergner played Joan as if she were being burned at the stake when the curtain went up, instead of when it went down.”
Elisabeth Bergner gave almost 400 performances of The Two Mrs. Carrolls. It was during the run of this hit that she inadvertently played out, offstage, the events that would later come to be associated with Margo Channing. What happened to Margo in the film had already happened in real life to Elisabeth Bergner: There really was an Eve.
* * *
At this point in the narrative I introduce Mary Orr, who lives on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York. She is a playwright, an actress, and the author of novels and short stories. I recently spent an afternoon with her, and this is what she told me.
“My husband, Reginald Denham [1894–1983], directed The Two Mrs. Carrolls on Broadway with Elisabeth Bergner. After Elisabeth left the play in New York—which must have been in the summer of 1944—for a brief vacation before starting the national tour, her husband, Paul Czinner, called my husband on the phone. Actually, Reggie and I weren’t married at that time, but we both knew that he would be my husband before long.
“Incidentally, you know, don’t you, that Paul Czinner [1890–1972] managed every detail of Elisabeth’s career, and had done so throughout their marriage? He was one of the producers of The Two Mrs. Carrolls. Well, one day Paul called up and said, ‘Reggie, could you come to New Hampshire and spend a weekend with us? I think we should discuss who is going to play opposite Elisa
beth on the road, because Victor Jory won’t go.’
“I think Victor had had enough of Elisabeth, to tell you the truth. But anyway, he had refused the tour and they had to find a new leading man. So my husband said to Paul Czinner, ‘I have to drive Mary up to Maine next weekend. She’s acting in summer stock in Skowhegan.’
“I was a young actress in my twenties then, considerably younger than Reggie, and I had to take whatever acting jobs came along, even if it meant that Reggie and I would spend most of the summer apart. That wasn’t easy, you know, because we were very much in love.
“Anyway, Reggie said to Paul, ‘We could make a detour on our way to Maine, spend a long weekend with you and Elisabeth, and then I can drive Mary to Skowhegan on Tuesday.’
“And that was what we did. We drove to New Hampshire, and it took a long time in those days because there were no interstates. Reggie and I stopped at Woodstock, Vermont, which was the nearest town to where this farm was that Elisabeth and Paul had taken for the summer.
“Now, Elisabeth was a very interesting character. I want you to realize that. Why? Well, for one thing, off the stage she was a little German Hausfrau, and then on the stage she was another person. Absolutely.
