by Staggs, Sam
He did, however, record an album called The George Sanders Touch in 1958. On it he sang not arias but standards, including “September Song,” “As Time Goes By,” and “More Than You Know.” Included on the album was a song of his own composition, “Such Is My Love.” Sanders’s biographer, Richard VanDerBeets, describes the actor’s singing voice as “a rich baritone.”
* * *
In 1955 Marilyn herself told Joan Collins (who at that time was filming The Virgin Queen with Bette), “That woman hates every female who can walk. She made me feel so nervous. She didn’t talk to me at all, just sort of swept around the set, nose and cigarette in the air. She’s a mean old broad.”
Celeste Holm’s opinion of Marilyn has wavered. In 1978 she declared, “I saw nothing special about her Betty Boop quality. I thought she was quite sweet and terribly dumb, and my natural reaction was, ‘Whose girl is that?’” Ten years later Holm’s appraisal had become less brittle, more patronizing: “I always felt sorry for her. She had a pretty little figure and little button nose. She was a very strange girl, full of the unexpected. She wanted so much to amount to something. Poor little thing.” In recent television interviews Holm has implied that she instantly spotted a future star in the uncertain young actress. Time has been good to Marilyn, at least in the eyes of this colleague.
Barbara McLean, who edited All About Eve, was perhaps a more reliable talent scout than Monroe’s co-stars. In 1951, when director Henry King was casting Wait ’Til the Sun Shines, Nellie, Marilyn tested for a part. McLean, watching the test results with King, predicted: “That girl’s going to be a big star.” King answered, “Well, I haven’t got time to wait.” McLean’s rejoinder: “I’d sure take her if I was directing the picture.”
Anne Baxter wrote in her memoir, Intermission:
About a year earlier, I’d made a movie called A Ticket to Tomahawk. Marilyn Monroe played one of a trio of the required dancehall girls. The whole nutsy shebang was a spoof on Westerns, a form of high camp far ahead of its time. We shot on location 9,000 feet up in the Rockies. We were thereabouts for eight long weeks. All of us lived in Durango at the Royal Motel, a euphemism, and ate at the local greasy spoon called the Chief Diner. Marilyn Monroe came in with a different crew member every night, wearing the same sweater. She was eminently braless and I particularly remember the pink V-necked angora sweater. It was said she slept in it. We never saw hide nor hair of her, or of her two roommates [i.e., the other dancehall girls] outside of dinnertime or during their occasional days of shooting. They slept whenever possible and all day Sunday. Or were closeted in the only phone booth, calling Hollywood.
As it turned out, A Ticket to Tomahawk premiered in San Francisco during the filming of All About Eve. A few days before the world premiere at the Fox Theatre, at Market and Ninth, on April 20, 1950, local papers carried ads showing an Indian seated cross-legged holding up a sign: HEAP BIG FUNNY PICTURE! Few others agreed. Next day the papers ran a smattering of modest reviews.
Gregory Ratoff, playing producer Max Fabian in All About Eve, was enthralled by Marilyn’s Miss Caswell. Off-screen, he prophesied in his ebullient Russian accent: “Thees girl ees going to be a beeg star!”
Gary Merrill told an anecdote about a cast party that Bette hosted in a San Francisco restaurant: “Marilyn Monroe was seated next to Hugh Marlowe. The party went on quite late but Marilyn excused herself early because she had to work the next morning. We all knew that the scene was really Bette’s scene, and that Marilyn had only a few lines. After she left, we all wondered what was going to happen to the dumb blonde. The next day Bette and Marilyn played their scene. I recall that Marilyn had four or five lines. Bette had more, but she was an experienced actress and accomplished the scene with little bother. It had to be done in ten takes, however—Marilyn kept forgetting her lines. Obviously, this problem did not injure her career.”
Bette herself never had much to say about Marilyn, the only member of the cast whose fame was to equal Bette’s own. In her first autobiography, The Lonely Life, published in 1962, Bette doesn’t mention her at all. In This ’N That (1987), Bette’s rather sketchy second volume of memoirs, she is noncommittal: “Trivia fans remember All About Eve because in it Marilyn Monroe gave her first important performance on the screen.”
Zanuck and Marilyn retained a mutual disrelish. As the years went by, each commented on the other. When Zanuck, a consummate businessman, saw Marilyn’s star on the rise in 1951, he issued a press release naming her “the most exciting new personality in Hollywood in a long time.” A couple of years later, watching the rushes from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, he didn’t believe Marilyn was doing her own singing. When Marilyn got wind of his disbelief, she marched into the boss’s office and sang “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” just for him—no doubt with an angry edge that we don’t hear when she’s performing with Jane Russell.
Zanuck’s office was sixty feet long and had a grand piano in it. Picture him in a dash to the keyboard, where he starts to accompany Marilyn just as she reaches the second verse. But something is wrong with this picture: This is Fox, where they didn’t make MGM musicals.
Even in the mid-fifties, when Marilyn was an enormous star, Zanuck refused to renegotiate her contract. He also cast her in roles she didn’t like, which is one reason she rebelled. In 1954, at the time of one such rebellion, Zanuck issued a peevish statement to the press that said in part: “There has been so much talk about Marilyn Monroe that there is now a danger women moviegoers will say, ‘So, she makes men excited—enough of her.’ In the future she will make only two films a year and there will not be so many photographs of her sent around.”
Legal battles followed. Marilyn left Hollywood and spent more than a year in New York, returning to the studio in triumph early in 1956. Coincidentally, a month later Zanuck resigned and didn’t return to Fox until six years later. In 1960 Marilyn told an interviewer, “Mr. Zanuck has never seen me as an actress with star quality. He thought I was some kind of freak.”
At the time of Marilyn’s death in August 1962, Zanuck was in France, where he had spent most of his time since leaving Fox in 1956. (He had nothing to do with the studio’s firing her earlier in 1962, during the chaotic filming of Something’s Got to Give.) Learning that Marilyn was dead, Zanuck issued a statement. His sounds less self-serving than many others: “I disagreed and fought with her on many occasions, but in spite of the fact that I have not seen her for six years, we were always personal friends. Like everyone who knew Marilyn Monroe or worked with her, I am shocked. Marilyn was a star in every sense of the word. I do not claim to have discovered Marilyn Monroe. Nobody discovered her. She discovered herself. I was merely an instrument that provided her with the vehicles in which she was able to reach the theatre-going public of the world.”
Ten years after Marilyn’s death, Mankiewicz said: “I thought of her as the loneliest person I had ever known. Throughout our location period in San Francisco, Marilyn would be spotted at one restaurant or another dining alone. Or drinking alone. We’d always ask her to join us, and she would, and seemed pleased, but somehow she never understood or accepted our unspoken assumption that she was one of us. She remained alone. She was not a loner. She was just plain alone.”
Marilyn’s life is like a Hollywood remake of Rashomon; every version of it contradicts the others. For instance, it’s odd that Mankiewicz doesn’t mention Marilyn’s scene with Bette Davis, which, according to Gary Merrill, required ten takes. It’s the kind of amusingly ridiculous incident an efficient director like Mankiewicz would be eager to talk about. Or perhaps he considered it routine. After all, Celeste Holm and Anne Baxter, two seasoned players, required fourteen takes in their first scene together.
Another instance of Whose Version Do You Believe? involves a story about Marilyn’s reading matter on the set of All About Eve. Mankiewicz saw her one day with a book in her hand. Surprised, he called her over, asked what she was reading, and she didn’t answer; she just handed it to h
im. The book was Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Mankiewicz asked if she knew who Rilke was and she said no, so he told her a little bit about the German poet. Perplexed and intrigued, Mankiewicz asked if someone had recommended the book to her. Marilyn shook her head and answered, “No. Nobody. You see, in my whole life I haven’t read hardly anything at all. I don’t know how to catch up. So what I do is, every now and then I go into the Pickwick Bookshop and just look around. I leaf through some books, and when I read something that interests me I buy the book. So last night I bought this one. Is that wrong?”
Mankiewicz told her it was the best possible way for anyone to choose what to read. “She was not accustomed to being told that she was doing anything right,” he said. “She smiled proudly and moved on. The next day Marilyn sent me a copy of Letters to a Young Poet. I have yet to read it.”
In view of all that’s been written about Marilyn Monroe’s desire for culture and her efforts at self-improvement, the story rings poignantly true. But Marilyn herself told a story that was different in every particular. In her autobiography My Story—a posthumously published book that some Monroe biographers consider spurious but that nevertheless sounds convincing—Marilyn described Mankiewicz as “a different sort of director than Mr. Huston. He wasn’t as exciting, and he was more talkative. But he was intelligent and sensitive.” And, she continued, “I felt happy on the set.”
Marilyn, who according to one source dictated this memoir to a journalist in the mid-fifties, recalled that during the filming of All About Eve she was reading The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. (A turn-of-the-century muckraker, Steffens [1866–1936] reported on municipal corruption, labor problems, and social ills. He published The Shame of the Cities in 1904; his Autobiography came out in 1931.) According to Marilyn, “It was the first book I’d read that seemed to tell the truth about people and life. It was bitter but strong. Lincoln Steffens knew all about poor people and about injustice. He knew about the lies people used to get ahead, and how smug rich people sometimes were. It was almost as if he’d lived the way I’d lived.”
Here is Marilyn’s version of the Mankiewicz book discussion, taken from My Story:
The Lincoln Steffens trouble began when Mr. Mankiewicz asked me one day what was the book I was reading on the set. I told him it was the Steffens autobiography and I started raving about it. Mr. Mankiewicz took me aside and gave me a quiet lecture.
“I wouldn’t go around raving about Lincoln Steffens,” he said. “It’s certain to get you into trouble. People will begin to talk of you as a radical.”
“A radical what?” I asked.
“A political radical,” Mr. Mankiewicz said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of Communists.”
“Not much,” I said.
“Don’t you read the papers?”
“I skip the parts I don’t like,” I said.
“Well, lay off boosting Mr. Steffens, or you’ll get into bad trouble,” said Mr. Mankiewicz.
I thought this was a very personal attitude on Mr. Mankiewicz’s part and that, genius though he was, of a sort, he was badly frightened by the front office or something. I couldn’t imagine anybody picking on me because I admired Lincoln Steffens. The only other political figure I’d ever admired was Abraham Lincoln. I used to read everything I could find about him. He was the only famous American who seemed most like me, at least in his childhood.
A few days later the publicity department asked me to write out a list of the ten greatest men in the world. I wrote the name Lincoln Steffens down first and the publicity man shook his head.
“We’ll have to omit that one,” he said. “We don’t want anybody investigating our Marilyn.”
I saw then that it wasn’t just a personal thing with Mr. Mankiewicz but that maybe everybody in Hollywood was just as scared of being associated with Lincoln Steffens. So I didn’t say anything more about him, to anybody, not even to Johnny Hyde. I didn’t want to get him in trouble. But I continued to read the second volume secretly and kept both volumes hidden under my bed.
Whether Marilyn literally hid those books under her bed or not, it’s the right metaphor for America’s red scare in 1950. And nowhere was the scare more hysterical than in Hollywood. Perhaps Mankiewicz, a political liberal, was frightened, even though he had never belonged to a left-wing organization. Certainly he was aware that innocuous pursuits, such as reading books critical of America, could sometimes make one the object of unpleasant scrutiny. In fact, the red baiters gave Mankiewicz himself quite a scare over a loyalty oath, although his brush with the Hollywood Inquisition came later in 1950, several months after his admonition to Marilyn. (Kenneth Geist, in his biography Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, gives a full account of Mankiewicz versus the McCarthyites.)
Whether Marilyn read Rilke or Lincoln Steffens on the set of All About Eve is not of surpassing significance, except that Mankiewicz seems unfair in characterizing her as vacuous and cognitively haphazard. Those who knew her well have said she read a lot. At various times she read Shakespeare, Proust, Emerson, Joyce, Freud, the Bible. It’s just possible that she had a genuine interest in Rilke. The German actress Hildegard Knef, who was acquainted with Monroe at the time, said that Marilyn asked her a number of questions about German literature. And the day they met, Marilyn was carrying a copy of Rilke’s poetry under one arm.
Chapter 11
Killer to Killer
At the end of the first week of filming, everyone joined Mankiewicz to view the rushes. These various rudimentary scenes had been developed at the studio in Los Angeles, spliced into coherence by film editor Barbara McLean, and flown back to San Francisco.
Months of anxious preparation had led up to these images on a small portable screen. Here at last was the evidence to exhilarate or depress. Were they making an outstanding film, or just another picture? How well they all remembered big productions that began in giddy optimism and then petered out. In such cases, only frustration came from watching rushes—scenes that misfired, sequences that fell drably short of expectations.
On that Saturday night, after watching the results of their best professional efforts, they were all excited. Even this crude preview of Eve bolstered their faith. They were good; they were great. Monday morning, on the set, they were even better than before.
“Every day was like a glorious relay race,” Anne Baxter recalled of the time spent filming All About Eve. She added, “None of us, Marilyn Monroe included, none of us could wait to get to work.” In spite of the discontents common to every movie set—rivalry, suspicion, gossip, hangovers, upstaging, missed cues, catty remarks, delays, overtime, rumors, deadline pressure, sexual jealousy—even with a full measure of these, the making of All About Eve came to be a happy memory for Anne Baxter.
Excellence was the word she chose to sum it up. “I was good, I was respected, I had a great part, the script was superb, the actors were perfect and perfectly cast.” Although Baxter played a treacherous bitch, she made friends with her on-screen adversary, Bette Davis. (Their friendship lasted, and one May morning in 1983, while visiting Anne Baxter in Connecticut, Bette stepped out of the shower and toweling herself dry, discovered a lump in her breast. Anne comforted her seventy-five-year-old houseguest as best she could, never dreaming that Bette would outlive her by four painful years.)
Rapprochement with fellow actresses was rare for Bette Davis. A friend said, “Bette was really fond of only four female co-stars: Olivia de Havilland, Mary Astor, Anne Baxter, and Gena Rowlands, whom she favored above the others.” From colleagues, Bette demanded as much as she put forth. If they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, reciprocate, look out. Having worked with Errol Flynn in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex in 1939 and finding him insufficiently intense, Bette bad-mouthed him for the next fifty years. And then there was Susan Hayward, who played Bette’s daughter in Where Love Has Gone (1964). “She wouldn’t give me anything in our scenes,” Bette growled. “It was like pl
aying to a blank wall.” On the last day of filming Bette took off her wig, flung it in Susan’s face, and barked a valedictory “Fuck you!”
But Bette considered Anne Baxter superb in All About Eve. “Margo and Eve’s relationship worked on two or three levels,” Bette explained. “Anne was really playing a double role: one thing on the surface, another underneath. I called it the ‘sweet bitch.’ Her part was more difficult than mine.”
Anne Baxter, who made her Broadway debut at age thirteen, later revealed that she had patterned Eve Harrington on her own first understudy. That girl, she said, “was nice to everybody but me and would always be in the wings watching me like a hawk. In the movie I tried to follow Bette around with my eyes to get that feeling across.”
* * *
The Fate of Understudies
• Backstage at Phantom of the Opera (1943), the star soprano of the Paris Opéra, Madame Biancarolli, is drugged (by Claude Rains, the Phantom) so that his protégée (Christine DuBois, the star’s understudy) can go on. Later Madame Biancarolli is murdered by the Phantom.
• In The Actor’s Nightmare, a play by Christopher Durang, a man finds himself more or less forced to go onstage as an understudy having absolutely no idea of his lines or business. He flounders in Noël Coward, Shakespeare, Beckett, and finally in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, at which point he is executed—apparently for real.
• In 1934 Max Reinhardt came to Los Angeles to direct a stage production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl. The production became famous for several reasons, one of them being that it presented an unknown young actress named Olivia de Havilland. She had appeared in a local production of the play the previous year while a freshman in college and was briefly an understudy in the Hollywood Bowl production. Reinhardt chose her as a last-minute replacement for the star, Gloria Stuart, who was unable to go on. The following year Reinhardt used de Havilland in his film version of the play, and she has been a star ever since.
