by Staggs, Sam
Lawrence made only a handful of movies. Her last was The Glass Menagerie, filmed in Hollywood in 1949. Though it wasn’t released until the fall of 1950, glowing reports of her performance in it were current in Hollywood as soon as the movie was completed. That’s another reason Mankiewicz wanted her.
Lawrence’s husband, Richard Aldrich, wrote that, while Gertrude was vacationing in Florida, Mankiewicz “approached her agent to secure her for the lead in his forthcoming picture All About Eve. On her return to New York she discussed the proposal with Fanny Holtzmann. The script, which I read at Gertrude’s earnest request, gave promise of becoming one of the best pictures of the year. Not least of the inducements of All About Eve was the salary which the studio was prepared to pay to get Gertrude.
“‘I’m turning it down,’ she informed me.
“‘Are you sure that’s wise?’
“‘I’m sure it’s very foolish—financially speaking. And it won’t help my career. But I told you—I want to be Mrs. A. Now will you believe me?’”
The war, and their careers, had kept Richard Aldrich and Gertrude Lawrence apart for much of their marriage. Her desire to play “Mrs. A”—Mrs. Aldrich—led her to take a year off. That was 1950, the year of All About Eve.
Lawrence also had something else in mind. She had seen Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne in Anna and the King of Siam and loved the movie. According to her husband, “When she refused the offer to star in All About Eve, she asked Fanny to look into the possibility of securing for her the right to have a musical made” from the Harrison-Dunne film. Having acquired these rights, Gertrude went to Rodgers and Hammerstein, “who contracted to write, compose, and produce the musical which became The King and I.”
Gertrude Lawrence played Anna Leonowens in this smash musical until she was hospitalized with hepatitis in the late summer of 1952 and, instead of convalescing as she had planned, she slipped into a coma and died.
And that, in a very long nutshell, is how Claudette, Susan, Marlene, and Gertrude did not play Margo Channing.
Chapter 6
The End of an Old Road, the Beginning of a New One
We left Bette Davis in a blaze of nerves on the set of Payment on Demand after her phone call from Darryl Zanuck. Following that conversation she went through a pack of cigarettes in two hours. It was all she could do to finish the day’s shooting, especially because her scenes called for restraint.
A messenger arrived at RKO in the late afternoon carrying a large envelope with Bette’s name on it. Excited as she was, she didn’t know quite what to expect. How long had it been since she had read a good script? This one, despite the ballyhoo, might be no more than a cut above the others.
“Good night, good night,” she said briskly to director and colleagues. She started reading the script as her chauffeur drove off the lot, and her enthusiasm grew with each page she turned. Over an hour later, when the driver reached her Tudor-style house perched on a rocky cliff at 1991 Ocean Way in Laguna Beach, Bette knew this was the best script she had read in years. Possibly the best one ever.
Bette jumped out of the car and raced inside, not pausing at any window to regard the vast Pacific that seemed part of her own real estate. She was bustin’ to finish the script.
She stopped just long enough to pour herself a glass of scotch, then marched into her bedroom and, provisioned with plenty of cigarettes, didn’t come out again until she had not only finished reading All About Eve but had started to learn her lines.
Next morning she phoned Darryl Zanuck. Their conversation was full of goodwill. The most important line in it, of course, was Bette’s: “Darryl, I’d love to play Margo Channing.”
As soon as she hung up she called Mankiewicz. He invited her to dinner to discuss Margo Channing and the shooting schedule. No one remembered later where they ate, or what, but when decades had passed Bette still recalled what Mankiewicz told her about Margo: “He said she was the kind of dame who would treat her mink coat like a poncho!” And in the movie she does just that. Margo, leaving for the airport with Bill, stretches across the dressing-room chaise longue to scoop her fur coat off the floor.
Bette had five days left on Payment on Demand at RKO. She had looked forward to a vacation; now that was out. On the contrary, she must double up. Edith Head, at Bette’s insistence, was to design the Margo Channing outfits (but no one else’s) for All About Eve. Bette immediately started going to Edith for dress fittings at night after a long day’s work at RKO to finish up Payment on Demand.
The reason for this breakneck schedule was that the Curran Theatre in San Francisco had been rented for two weeks of location shooting to begin April 11. With a play closing and another to open soon, the Curran was available for only two weeks in April.
Since a number of scenes in All About Eve take place in a cavernous Broadway playhouse, it made artistic sense to shoot them in a real theatre. Apparently it made financial sense as well, for 20th Century-Fox, in budgeting the film, had decided that location filming in an actual old New York–style theatre was preferable to building a theatre set.
Lyle Wheeler, the art director, had scouted Los Angeles theatres but found nothing appropriate. The Ethel Barrymore in New York was briefly considered, but scheduling proved difficult, and the cost of flying cast and crew that far was prohibitive. Eventually Wheeler hit upon the solution of using the ornate old Curran, built in 1922 and only four hundred miles away. But this decision meant there was no flexibility in the starting date. Since Margo Channing was needed in virtually every scene to be shot at the Curran, Bette Davis didn’t get a single day off between pictures.
On April 5, 1950, Bette celebrated her forty-second birthday on the set of Payment on Demand. After cake and champagne, the cast and crew surprised her with a huge ostrich egg. For a moment Bette looked blank, then she read the inscription and laughed: Thanks for being a Good Egg.
Two days later, on April 7, Bette signed her contract for All About Eve, and four days after that, on the eleventh, production began in San Francisco.
* * *
“Darryl Zanuck had a hair fetish. He didn’t like too much of it. I had a hairy chest and a messy head of hair.” This is Gary Merrill on how Mankiewicz overruled Zanuck in casting him, rather than John Garfield, as Bill Sampson. Since the time of All About Eve is one Broadway season, October to chilly late spring, Bill needn’t bare his chest. And in the movie his head of hair is more kempt than Margo’s.
“I never tried to get the part in All About Eve, never called an agent,” Merrill said some years later. “I thought about who might be chosen to play the part, but did nothing about it. I was lying on the beach at Malibu when the phone rang, and I almost missed hearing it. The call was from Joe Mankiewicz, asking if I would test with Anne Baxter for Eve.”
Along with Zanuck’s aversion to hirsute actors, he wasn’t easily convinced that Gary Merrill could play the Broadway director who loves Margo Channing but who also stands up to her. Zanuck grumbled that Gary Merrill “had only played around airplanes,” and he was right, for Merrill’s Hollywood career hadn’t led him beyond portrayals of lieutenants, commanders, and the like in such military aviation films as Winged Victory (1944), Slattery’s Hurricane (1949), and Twelve O’Clock High (1949).
“On Sundays,” Merrill wrote in his memoirs, “a large film studio is nearly deserted. The empty sets for westerns, New York streets, or Arabic marketplaces are rather eerie. One Sunday in 1950 I had been called to the studio for a makeup test with Miss Bette Davis.”
Bette Davis: “This was the first time I met Gary. They did photographic tests of us together. I was to look older than he as Margo. I did.”
Gary Merrill: “On that Sunday I went to the test stage, and there, being turned this way and that, as though she had just been picked up from a counter at a jewelry store, was the Queen, Bette Davis.”
Bette Davis: “I had seen the film Twelve O’Clock High and an actor in it named Gary Merrill. I had never seen him before and I wa
s greatly impressed by his performance and looks.”
Gary Merrill: “The makeup people should have been pampering her but instead they were twirling her around, examining facial lines. They were trying to see if our age difference would be too noticeable. The professional attitude Bette adopted throughout the ordeal was impressive.”
Bette Davis: “Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism.”
Gary Merrill: “Bette had a few character lines around those incredible eyes, but here was a magnetic woman with a compelling aura of femininity who might also be willing to confront dragons. I was irresistibly drawn to her.”
Bette Davis: “People get the idea that actresses my age are dying to play younger women. The fact is, we die every time we play one.”
Gary to Bette: “Certainly wonderful of you to come to the studio on a Sunday.”
Bette to Gary: “For this part, I would come to the studio seven days and nights a week.”
Gary Merrill: “Never in the history of motion pictures has an actress been so perfectly cast.”
And so, sizing each other up, they both liked what they saw. But before the romance of Bette and Gary could take wing, each one had to shed a marital encumbrance.
* * *
Bette’s third marriage—to William Grant Sherry, variously characterized as “a muscle-bound sailor” who was “an artist of sorts” with a “bohemian attitude and blunt manner”—had been rather ludicrous from the start. According to one of Bette’s biographers, she “decided to marry him only a month after she picked him up at a party” in 1945. Already this sounds like the scenario of a boisterous Bette Davis picture, but it gets better—meaning much worse—during the next five years.
It’s easy to see why Bette fell for Sherry the Hunk. Hedda Hopper’s mouthwatering description would almost qualify for the pages of Honcho: “In a suit you couldn’t possibly guess what a handsome Greek God he was. Now he’d run up fresh from the sea with the water still glistening on his mahogany tanned skin. He was in navy trunks, and with a physique that would do for Atlas, stood before me, muscles rippling evenly under a firm skin, young, strong, and handsomely male. He has an even, confident, ingratiating smile, kindly but masculine as a left hook.”
Bette was starving, and here was her banquet.
But someone might just as well have sprinkled gunpowder on the bridal veil, for during the honeymoon trip to Mexico City Bette nagged and taunted, the bridegroom exploded, and somewhere in the middle of a cactus desert he shoved her from the car. A quickie Mexican divorce was the obvious solution, but the unhappy couple seemed determined to live miserably ever after.
The air was sulphurous. Other disputes ensued, one of which climaxed with the new husband hurling a steamer trunk at his cowering helpmate. But love caressed the turbid waters; the tempest subsided. And on May 1, 1947, Bette Davis gave birth to Barbara Davis Sherry—B.D.—who in years to come would be both the apple of her mother’s eye and the dagger in her heart.
In October 1949 Bette filed for divorce. The next day Sheilah Graham headlined: BETTE DAVIS ACTS TO RUB OUT 3RD MARRIAGE. Graham, better remembered today for her liaison with F. Scott Fitzgerald than for her prose, continued: “Screen tragedienne Bette Davis chalked up another real-life setback late today when she filed suit for divorce from her artist-husband William Grant Sherry, accusing the muscular one-time masseur of rubbing her the wrong way.” The flippant tone of the column infuriated Bette, and she later retaliated by having Sheilah Graham barred from the set of her next picture.
Tempers cooled, and a few weeks later Bette and Sherry announced a reconciliation. Their riotous marriage lurched forward. On December 31, 1949, to celebrate New Year’s Eve, they went to the movies. They saw Twelve O’Clock High, starring Gregory Peck, Hugh Marlowe, and Gary Merrill.
In the spring of 1950 Bette started filming The Story of a Divorce, a more fitting title, under the circumstances, than Payment on Demand, which the picture was eventually called.
One night during that crowded month of April 1950, Bette didn’t make it home to dinner. The cast and crew of Payment on Demand surprised her with a forty-second birthday party two days before the actual date, April 5. Waiting at home for his wife, Sherry, by turns worried and annoyed, decided to pay a surprise visit to RKO. The studio gateman who let him in informed Sherry about the surprise party for Bette in the commissary. This was news to her husband. He hadn’t been invited.
By now the party was over, so Sherry made his way to Bette’s dressing room. There he found her and co-star Barry Sullivan in a very jovial mood, relaxing with post-party drinks and cigarettes and bursts of laughter. A terrible row took place. Sherry, perceiving Sullivan as “the other man,” slugged him, and the next day Bette filed for divorce again. It was while Bette was in the midst of this marital commotion that Darryl Zanuck phoned to offer her All About Eve.
Gary was married at the time to Barbara Leeds, a blue-eyed actress who wore her blonde hair in bangs and had a wide-open smile on a friendly face. Leeds was a Doris Day look-alike. Gary was thirty-six; his wife was thirty-three. They had married in 1941.
After his first encounter with “the Star” that Sunday for the makeup tests, he returned to his beach house in Malibu and entertained his wife and their Sunday-afternoon guests with stories of meeting Bette Davis. “I was appalled,” he said, describing the callous treatment she got from the makeup artists. He had developed a big, protective feeling toward her, as though she were a lamb loose in the Hollywood jungle.
He was right to call her “the Star.” Certainly Bette deserved the uppercase that he, a character actor, couldn’t help vocalizing, and perhaps the quotation marks in his voice as well. But Bette Davis, in April 1950, was a fading star. Winter Meeting (1948) had been the first of her pictures to lose money. Her behavior had become less professional and more unbearable on the set of each new and lackluster movie.
After Beyond the Forest, in 1949, it seemed impossible for her career to get any worse. And since “camp” as an aesthetic concept hadn’t yet been invented, no one realized that this movie would fester into immortality once Edward Albee featured a Davis line from it—“What a dump!”—thirteen years later in his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
On a hot day in August 1949 Bette left the Warner Bros. lot for the last time as a contract player at the studio that had hired her in 1932. Over the years at Warner she had quarreled and shouted. There had been lawsuits and threats. In Gary Merrill’s words, she had been “willing to confront dragons.” But so, it was said, had Jack Warner—a most unlikely incarnation of St. George. How could Miss Davis and Mr. Warner, as they politely referred to each other in correspondence and statements to the press, survive apart? Their fights were so invigorating.
As an actress, Bette Davis had also matured and perfected her craft at Warner Bros. Sometimes, especially when the joke was on someone else, she had even laughed. When she tried really hard, Bette could recall days of fulfillment when the Academy nominated her, nights of vindication when she won. There, at the studio, despite every conceivable setback, she had waxed from bette davis to Bette Davis, and then all the way, at last, to BETTE DAVIS. But she, like everyone else in town, being weighed in the scales of box-office gross, was found to have the precise value of her latest picture. And so she searched in vain for friends, colleagues, any longtime familiar face as she pulled up to the studio gate that final time. It was nearly the end of Hollywood’s first half-century, and on that piercingly clear summer afternoon everybody she knew was busy on a new picture. As the former Queen of Warner Bros. drove away, no one waved good-bye.
* * *
Zanuck wanted Jeanne Crain to play Eve Harrington. Though the years have reduced her star to the size of an asterisk, in 1950 she was famous. Under contract to Fox, Crain had become a favorite with fans and theatre exhibitors of the period.
On-screen she seemed passive and one-dimensional, especially in such treacly fare as Home in Indiana (1944) and Stat
e Fair (1945). She was not without acting ability, however, and in 1949 she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Pinky as a black girl passing for white. That was also the year Mankiewicz used her in A Letter to Three Wives.
Despite her good performance as one of the ensemble in that picture, Mankiewicz was unenthusiastic when Zanuck urged him to cast her as Eve. When he told Zanuck that Jeanne Crain could never summon the “bitch virtuosity” needed to play Eve Harrington, Zanuck yielded. Mankiewicz then named the actress he considered right for the part.
“Anne Baxter as Eve?” Zanuck mused. “Joe, why the hell do you think she’s better than Jeanne?”
Mankiewicz sold Zanuck on Baxter, and since she was also under contract to Fox at the time, Zanuck okayed her for the part.
Anne Baxter’s version of how she came to play Eve Harrington differs from Mankiewicz’s. She claimed that the role was offered to her because Jeanne Crain got pregnant. And since Crain eventually bore seven children, the odds seem to favor Baxter’s account.
Chapter 7
San Francisco, An Oasis of Civilization in the California Desert
“Bette Davis was so rude, so constantly rude. I think it had to do with sex.” That’s how Celeste Holm remembered her co-star thirty-eight years after All About Eve. It’s a tantalizing thing to say, but Holm didn’t elaborate. One wonders whether she meant that Bette’s alleged rudeness had to do with rivalry between stars of the same sex, or whether Bette, like a lioness in rut, snarled when the number-two cat on the set—in this case, Celeste Holm— rubbed too close to her new mate—in this case, Gary Merrill.
The two women did not like each other. They met for the first time at a party shortly before the entire cast and crew left for San Francisco. When Mankiewicz introduced them, Celeste said, “I am so looking forward to working with you.”
