by Staggs, Sam
Bette said, “So am I.”
It seemed they were off to a good start, even though Bette, during her reign as Queen of Warner Bros. if not of the jungle, was known as a cutthroat.
Compared to Bette, Celeste was something of a newcomer to pictures. Although she had won an Oscar for Gentleman’s Agreement, it was only for a supporting role. Would Bette Davis hold that against her? You hear all kinds of things in Hollywood, Celeste reflected, and if half the things you hear about Bette are true …
It’s possible that Bette viewed Celeste as something of a goody-goody with a sharp eye for the publicity value of righteousness. It was only a year before, after all, that Celeste starred as a tennis-playing nun in the Loretta Young vehicle, Come to the Stable. And a few days before she and Bette started work on All About Eve, Celeste read a lofty poem called “The Shadow of the Voice” during the Easter sunrise service at the Hollywood Bowl. The next day she was prominently pictured in the Los Angeles Times.
Then, too, Bette was forty and then some. Celeste hoped it wouldn’t bother her that she, Celeste, playing Margo Channing’s best friend, was so much younger. And looked so much younger. Celeste Holm was thirty.
A couple of weeks after Celeste and Bette’s first encounter, this strange group of stars began to descend on San Francisco. Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, and Hugh Marlowe flew from Los Angeles on Darryl Zanuck’s seaplane. But flying, in those days, was not considered the safest way to travel. Bette Davis got the real star treatment. She went by train.
On Monday, April 10, the Zanuck seaplane took off. “Noisy! Oh, my God,” moaned Celeste.
Gary was crowded beside Celeste, with Hugh scrunched up behind them in the plane’s rear seat. The roar of the engine grew even louder as the plane reached its cruising altitude. Small talk was out. Gary and Hugh studied their scripts, while Celeste filed her nails.
But Celeste liked to talk. She wouldn’t be drowned out by the motor. “Well,” she said, turning to Gary, “I wonder what—” but her words mixed with the rumble of the engine.
“I can’t hear you!” he yelled.
“I said, I wonder what it’s going to be like working with the Queen Bee!”
Gary chuckled. He leaned close to her ear and called out, “I know one thing—it’ll all be over in eight weeks.”
Celeste laughed, and Gary laughed, and Hugh Marlowe wondered whether these shouted remarks wouldn’t strain their voices on the day before shooting was to start.
When the plane landed and the three of them were en route to their hotel, Celeste eyed Gary again. She seemed to be studying his face. Gary didn’t know it then, but Celeste’s mother was a professional portrait painter and Celeste, too, had a lively interest in art. (As Karen Richards in Eve, she’s a Sunday painter.)
“Are you Lithuanian or something?” she suddenly asked.
Gary was nonplussed. What a strange question, he thought.
“Pure early American,” he snapped. And he got one of those looks on his face, the kind he uses on Anne Baxter in the film when she tries unsuccessfully to seduce him in her dressing room.
“He was so defensive,” Celeste said later. “I love roots. I’m Norwegian on my father’s side, and on my mother’s side I’m everything. But I must have stepped on some kind of toes there. Gary does look Lithuanian, or something interesting. I guess everybody was nervous when we got to San Francisco.”
Perhaps Gary’s nerves made him peevish. After all, this was the biggest step of his career. And a few days earlier he had indeed met the Queen Bee, as Celeste blithely called her. He had been having drone fantasies ever since.
Then, too, Gary was a Merrill from Connecticut, so being labeled Lithuanian disturbed him on several levels. Next to a tenor, a deep-rooted New England actor is the touchiest thing in show business, or so an onlooker might have thought on that chilly day in San Francisco when Gary’s grumpy retort wounded Celeste’s feelings. Perhaps he felt some manly twinge when asked whether he was Lithuanian. For during the recent war, a third of the population of Lithuania had been cut down by invading armies. The question, if not impertinent, seemed to suggest all sorts of bad luck.
When Bette’s train pulled into the station in San Francisco, a battalion of reporters and photographers swarmed around it. The train stopped, passengers disembarked, and finally, amid a flurry of porters, railroad personnel, and studio emissaries, Bette descended onto the platform. Reporters called out questions while others scribbled answers and flashbulbs popped.
Bette’s entourage included her three-year-old daughter B.D. and the child’s nanny, a young woman named Marion Richards; Bette’s secretary; and a bodyguard to protect them against William Sherry, Bette’s estranged husband, who had made threats.
As they made their way into the station, Marion Richards was aghast to realize the photographers were taking pictures of her. “I was wearing sunglasses and my hair was the same color as Miss Davis’s,” she said later. “When we left the train they rushed up and began to photograph me. I said, ‘No, please, you’re making a mistake. That’s Miss Davis back there, in the fur coat, carrying the little girl.’”
The nanny, who had lived for some time in the house with Bette and William Sherry, knew Bette’s moods. She didn’t want to provoke one, however inadvertently. Bette shot her hapless employee a couple of looks indicating that she wasn’t happy at being upstaged, even accidentally. Having reclaimed the limelight, however, Bette let the incident pass without comment as she handed over her little daughter.
Half of Hollywood, or so it seemed, had arrived in San Francisco. For weeks now, Fitz Fitzgerald of the Fox Location Department had been arranging hotel reservations for all fifty-five members of the cast and crew. Most of them stayed at the Fairmont. He had also drawn up schedules of departure and arrival times for everyone, whether they were flying in, coming by train, or driving up from Los Angeles. In addition, Fitzgerald obtained the necessary permits for shooting. While he was doing all this, the head of the studio’s Transportation Department had put a fleet of trucks on the road to haul necessary shooting equipment.
Bette having made her star’s entrance, other trains and other planes filled San Francisco with celebrities. Thelma Ritter flew in from her home in Queens, New York; Anne Baxter arrived late that night because she hated to leave her husband, John Hodiak. George Sanders and his wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, arrived on the same flight as Marilyn Monroe.
Long after George and Marilyn were dead, Zsa Zsa wrote about the trip: “I had met Marilyn in the commissary and noted that she was extremely adept at wiggling her ass and batting her eyelashes. On the plane to San Francisco, I had the window seat, Marilyn the aisle—with George, appropriately, sandwiched in the middle. Marilyn spent most of the trip batting her eyelashes at George, who turned to me when we were alone and said, with a mixture of sympathy and pride, ‘Poor girl, she has it bad.’ ‘George,’ I said in fury, ‘don’t flatter yourself, she’s having sex with everybody.’”
Marilyn later said this about her first encounter with Zsa Zsa: “I saw she was one of those blondes who put on ten years if you take a close look at them.”
Marilyn’s memory of Zsa Zsa as a blonde is inaccurate, however. It probably dates from a year or so later, because in 1950 Zsa Zsa still had the dark auburn hair she was born with. But Marilyn was right: Her adversary did look mature. Not only was her hair undistinguished, but her teeth hadn’t been capped and her nose was considerably less svelte than it later became. Zsa Zsa’s eternal youth lay ahead.
If every copy of the All About Eve script had been lost, Mankiewicz could have fashioned a similar vivisection from what his cast said to, and about, one another. But he was too busy to take notes. He had been in San Francisco for several days planning, with cinematographer Milton Krasner, how to use the Curran Theatre to maximum effect during the scant two weeks it belonged to them.
Monday, April 10, had been a long day for everyone. Now, at last, with flowers in every suite and champagne cooling in buckets, those who had c
ome to make this movie were ready to get started.
These actors had, in a sense, spent years and years preparing just for the next day, just for April 11, 1950, the first day’s work on All About Eve. What did it all mean? So far they knew only that they had witty lines to speak, a terrific story, and that Joe Mankiewicz outranked the directors they usually worked with.
But so much could go wrong. It had happened in the past, to them, to others. They felt anxiety; they felt a tingling anticipation. And something else, just beyond the borders of consciousness, some vague pattern that the mind glimpses but cannot grasp. Bette summed it up later: “There was just a smell about it—you just knew it had to be great and that it would be great for all of us.”
The phone rang in Bette’s suite. Marion Richards answered in the sitting room. “Miss Davis,” she said when she knocked on Bette’s bedroom door, “it’s Mr. Merrill. He’s calling up everyone to go down to the bar for drinks.”
Gary got no refusals. There wasn’t a teetotaler in the bunch.
Celeste said, “That first night we all went for drinks at the Fairmont, where they had a bar that went around and around. Everybody was showing off. Bette had taken one look at Gary and Gary had taken one look at Bette, and something had happened.”
When the long evening finally wound down they all went back to their rooms. But Zsa Zsa wouldn’t stop talking. “Later that evening,” she said, “I was able to prove my point. Our hotel suite was right next door to Marilyn’s and I took George aside and said, ‘Why don’t we keep our door ajar tonight and watch how many men go into Marilyn’s room?’ Ever the voyeur, George agreed and watched with me as four different men from the movie’s crew each, in turn, visited Marilyn’s room and made love to her.’”
Marilyn’s rejoinder: “People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of a mirror instead of a person. They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts.”
* * *
The first day of filming, Bette Davis awoke without a voice. She tried to speak but no words came.
The trouble had started a few nights earlier in Los Angeles when William Sherry dropped by her house at Laguna Beach. He had come to try to talk her out of a divorce.
Bette peered out. Sherry called to his wife. His voice sounded round and firm and manly, like his biceps. But for Bette the charm had worn off. She wanted more than muscles.
Sherry’s timing wasn’t good. It was late and Bette needed sleep. The arrival of her third husband annoyed her. Whatever he had to say he could say to her lawyer. She greeted him curtly: “You can’t come in.” Instead, Bette pranced out on the front lawn in her nightgown. Moonlight frosted ocean waves as the tide heaved against the rocks. Under different circumstances she might have dissolved into his arms with one of those romantic lines such as “Don’t let’s ask for the moon—when we have the stars.”
Instead she looked at him and said, “I thought I told you not to come here, Sherry.”
He said he’d like to come in, try to work things out, get back together.
That did it. Playing Bette Davis roles all these years had left its mark. “Haven’t you heard?” she taunted. “I’m making a new picture. You know who with? Joe Mankiewicz. He’s a real man. He’s a genius. He makes a living all his own!”
Bette’s taunts hit Sherry like a kick in the groin. “Shut up!” he yelled as he made a lunge.
Bette ran inside her house and locked the door. She’d show him. There followed a lava-spill of abuse half remembered, perhaps, from Mildred, Bette’s character in Of Human Bondage. She wanted Sherry to hear every word, even with the heavy Tudor wooden door slammed in his face. Before the scene played out, she had vented so long and loud that her husband, as though emasculated, had slunk away into the shadows. He quietly got in his car and drove away.
Bette, though very weary, didn’t sleep at all that night. Her throat ached and toward morning she spat blood into a handkerchief.
And now, to wake up in San Francisco ready to begin the first mile of that long comeback road, and discover that her voice had failed …
“Call a doctor!” she rasped into the phone.
The specialist told her to rest her voice for a day or two. He assured her the problem was neither serious nor permanent.
But Joe Mankiewicz turned pale when Bette arrived at the Curran Theatre and pulled him close to whisper something desolate. “Oh, what am I going to do about it?” she moaned.
Joe didn’t panic. He patted her shoulder, smiled, and said, “Honey, we’re going to keep it.” Actually, Joe liked this new sound, her injured voice. “It’s the whiskey-throated voice that Margo should have,” he said. “A bourbon contralto.”
“Now I sound like Tallulah Bankhead,” Bette muttered.
“Don’t admit it,” cautioned the sly director.
Bette loved this sort of secret.
“And one more thing,” Mankewicz added. “Even when your throat improves, I want Margo to sound like this. Can you keep it up for a month?”
He called rehearsal. Although Bette had to guard her voice, she could compare her interpretation of Margo Channing with the director’s. She could even mouth her lines as long as she “saved” most of her voice; opera singers do it at rehearsals all the time. Later Mankiewicz said, “Bette was letter-perfect. She was syllable-perfect. The director’s dream: the prepared actress.”
On the first day of shooting, very little film was actually shot. Mankiewicz and his cast and crew were getting used to one another and to the Curran Theatre, which echoed their noisy preparations. Electricians were everywhere, rigging lamps and laying cables, while set dressers rearranged furniture, hung drapes, and tested props. Carpenters already had erected scaffoldings, and now they checked them one last time to make certain every plank was in place. Early on, these same carpenters had built a long, sturdy platform that extended out from the stage and over a section of the theatre’s orchestra seats to provide unhampered working space for Krasner’s camera and the Junior Crane on which it was mounted.
Now an apprentice carpenter fixed a balky door; another tried to remove a squeak from a loose floorboard. Camera assistants and soundmen laid tracks, adjusted booms, and tested acoustics. Mankiewicz seemed to be everywhere at once, conferring with the crew, talking with the cast. By late afternoon he and Milton Krasner, his director of photography, were ready for their final survey. At last the set was ready; it looked perfect.
Mankiewicz had guessed it earlier, but at day’s end he felt confident he’d be able to make the picture he wanted. In retrospect, he summed it up like this: “Bette’s professional attributes were not unique within the Eve company. Without exception, the entire cast was no less conscientious.”
We get an idea of Mankiewicz’s rehearsals from Bette’s recollections: “The rehearsal period was very important. A great director will let his cast run through the script three or four times. The actors would do it how they felt it, how they saw it. He would then start correcting this or that. All this was prior to the director’s trying anything with the camera. You see, the camera should follow the actor.”
In some cases, of course, the camera follows a stand-in. On March 15 Mankiewicz, along with Milton Krasner, a couple of Krasner’s assistants, and Gaston Glass, the picture’s first assistant director, had flown to New York. There, using doubles for Bette Davis and Celeste Holm, they shot background plates of the John Golden Theatre which would tie in with the scenes to be filmed inside the Curran. (Background plates are scenes filmed at locations remote from the studio, then projected on a background screen in the studio with the players performing in front of them. The camera is synchronized with the background projector so that the shutters of both machines open and close simultaneously.) In the film, we never see the outside of the Curran Theatre—only the John Golden.
Shooting after midnight in front of the Golden, Krasner and his assistants got unexpected help from a member of the NYPD. The policeman, an amateur photographer, told Krasne
r: “You’ve not got very much depth in the background over there. How’d you like some of those neon signs in the distance to be lighted up?” Krasner liked the suggestion. The officer sent a rookie to speak to several shop owners and café managers a block away, who agreed to light up their signs.
While in New York Krasner also made background plates of the exteriors of the 21 Club and Eve’s Park Avenue apartment building. These were used as establishing shots for interior scenes to be filmed later at the studio. As there was no snow in Westchester for the country road sequence (which eventually had to be photographed at the Canadian border), they moved on to New Haven for additional footage.
There, exteriors of the Shubert Theatre and the Taft Hotel were photographed, with doubles used for Anne Baxter and George Sanders. Eventually, back at Fox, these New Haven background plates were projected on a screen behind a treadmill as the two actors strolled down this “virtual” street, with Addison telling Eve: “And tomorrow morning, you will have won your beachhead on the shores of Immortality.”
Chapter 8
How Could I Miss Her? Every Night, Every Matinee
A clever graffito sums up Hollywood’s most famous costume designer: “Edith Head gives good wardrobe.” Bette Davis explained why: “While other designers were busy starring their clothes in a film, Edith was making clothes to suit a character.” And that’s why Bette chose Edith to design Margo Channing’s outfits.
At the time, Edith was chief designer at Paramount, where she had just dressed Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard. Then Bette got the part in All About Eve and the race was on to complete Margo’s wardrobe in time for filming.
Charles LeMaire, executive director of wardrobe at Fox, happened to be Edith’s friend. He had already dressed Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter, Barbara Bates, and an unknown blonde named Marilyn Monroe for the film. (After Claudette Colbert’s injury forced her to drop out, the outfits LeMaire had designed for her were recycled for other Fox stars in later films.)
