by Staggs, Sam
* * *
Anne Baxter called her director “Joe the Mank.” And since he had just won two Academy Awards for A Letter to Three Wives on March 29, a couple of weeks before they all arrived in San Francisco, Anne and others in the cast glued two large plastic Kewpie dolls—representing his two new Oscars—to the lectern where Joe kept his annotated copy of the script.
She had a secret crush on him. “John Hodiak and I were happily married then, but Joe’s wit, his modest perspicacity, and my latent father complex drew me to him like a magnet,” Anne Baxter confessed long afterward. “In fact, all the ladies on the set melted and gravitated to him as I did.”
Bette, in fact, suspected more than a crush. While making the picture, and long after, she reportedly believed that Anne and Mankiewicz had had a backstage affair. For twenty years Bette retained a nagging suspicion that Mankiewicz had somehow favored Anne Baxter, and that the favoritism involved sexual politics. According to Bette’s longtime secretary, Vik Greenfield, Bette at last came out with it. “We went to see Anne Baxter in Applause,” Greenfield said, “and when we were backstage, Bette asked Anne if she had an affair with Joe during the making of All About Eve. ‘No,’ said Baxter. ‘I always thought you did,’ said Bette.”
True or false? Why, one wonders, would Bette wait so long to ask the burning question? Surely the delay wasn’t caused by natural timidity. And since their paths often crossed, Bette could have interrogated Anne years before.
Anne Baxter corrected another misapprehension. Gossip to the contrary, she always denied there was any kind of feud between her and Bette on the set. “The studio tried to play that up all during the filming,” she said. “But I liked Bette very much. She’d come on the set and go ‘S-s-s-s-s’ at me, but it was just a joke between us.” Interviewed in the early eighties for the BBC documentary, Bette Davis: A Basically Benevolent Volcano, Baxter said, “She never threw fits without a damn good reason.” She was referring to Bette’s entire career, not to the placid set of Eve.
An interviewer asked Celeste Holm about working with Anne Baxter. “Oh, she was fine. But of course you know she was what’s-his-name’s granddaughter.”
“Frank Lloyd Wright,” supplied the interviewer.
“Frank Lloyd Wright,” repeated Holm. “And so she was very sophisticated and very, ‘Have you read the latest Christopher Fry?’”
Perhaps this breezy, left-handed compliment owes something to an anecdote that Anne Baxter had told earlier about Celeste. When cast and crew left San Francisco to complete filming at the studio in Los Angeles, they were scheduled to shoot on Stage 9, one of the smaller soundstages on the Fox lot. As Anne recalled, “Our assistant, Stan Hough, didn’t want to crowd the sets, and after pushing and fitting five portable dressing rooms here, there, and everywhere, he left Celeste Holm’s outside. Out in the cold was more to the point. Celeste took one look and tearfully flounced back to her permanent dressing room.
“Joe was horrified and furious. He all but foamed at the mouth. He knew how vital it was that we work easily together.
“Everything stopped for two solid hours while Joe, all three assistants, Celeste’s agent, and several emissaries from the front office made elaborate apologies. She came back on the set chin high, wet eyes shining resolutely—we couldn’t help wondering if she’d toured in Saint Joan.”
Celeste counters that this slight occurred because, sometime earlier, she had quit the studio and Zanuck now wanted to punish her. “Mr. Mankiewicz insisted that I play the part of Karen and Mr. Zanuck didn’t want any part of that. So when I arrived, my dressing room was out in the alley and everybody else’s was inside. Mankiewicz said, ‘What are you trying to do? Kill an actress?’”
In San Francisco Bette Davis was forced to use a small, dingy dressing room. She claimed she didn’t mind at all. She was even quoted as saying that Hollywood spoils actors by treating them too royally. “This cubbyhole,” she said nobly, “is all an actress needs. A place to hide while she changes clothes. I think those ankle-deep carpets, mirrored walls, and elegantly furnished suites Hollywood gives newcomers tend to magnify their opinion of themselves.” (P.S.: When Bette arrived back in Los Angeles, 20th Century-Fox saw to it that she got the plushest dressing suite in town.)
George Sanders, commenting on his two top female co-stars in All About Eve, sounded like one of those studio publicists hatching up a feud: “Bette upstaged Anne Baxter at every turn, and drove Anne to distraction. Playing a woman of forty who was jealous of a much younger woman, Bette played it as if it were happening to her personally. Anne caught the underlying tensions and viciousness. It is to her credit that it spurred her to act even better than she would have with a gracious co-star.”
Bette returned his fire. She had heard about Sanders’ bisexuality from Henry Fonda, an actor who disdained all deviation from what he considered the norm. This led Bette to characterize Sanders as a “bitch.” Bette said he was more of a bitch to work with than Miriam Hopkins had been (which, coming from Bette, was saying a lot) and that he upstaged her at every opportunity. “He won that goddamned award [meaning his Oscar for Best Supporting Actor of 1950] at my expense!” she snarled.
Was Bette justified in her disdain for Sanders? Curiously, he is perhaps the only person ever to admire the character of Eve, whom he called “the nearest thing to a heroine in our story.” Most of us see Margo as that heroine. After all, the beleaguered Margo survives not only her double-crossing friend, Karen, her unsupportive boyfriend, Bill Sampson, and the disloyal playwright, Lloyd Richards, but also “that venomous fishwife” Addison DeWitt and Eve, his unholy ally.
Sanders found nothing heroic in Margo Channing. He characterized her as “a vain, aging, flamboyant, temperamental woman … How many members of the audience could, or would have cared to, identify themselves with her?” The answer, of course, is that she’s the only one in the picture anyone can identify with—at least for very long. (Thelma Ritter’s friend-indeed role is too brief and too one-dimensional to arouse more than passing empathy.)
“Her lack of fundamental graciousness toward her co-players disgusted me,” Sanders sneered. He was referring, now, to Bette Davis, not Margo Channing. But just how gracious was he?
“George Sanders never spoke to anyone,” Celeste Holm said. “He was a brilliant actor, but he wasn’t much fun.”
* * *
George Sanders: A Psychological Self-Portrait
“The kind of actor I have become has been determined to a large extent by the weakness of my character. On the screen I am usually suave and cynical, cruel to women and immune to their slights and caprices. This is my mask, and it has served me faithfully for twenty-five years. But in reality I am a sentimentalist, especially about myself—readily moved to tears by cheap emotions and invariably the victim of woman’s inhumanity to man.”
—Sanders, Memoirs of a Professional Cad
* * *
“George slept soundly in his portable dressing room between shots,” Anne Baxter said. “It bothered me only once. Eve’s climactic scene, when Addison DeWitt confronts her with her real self and lays down their private ground rules, was a formidable challenge. It required a gamut of emotions, building to and culminating in hysteria and ending in acrid defeat.”
Baxter explained that she was a “starting-gate actress,” meaning she was ready to act long before she walked onto the set. In fact, even as she climbed into the makeup chair, she was already in character. For her, rehearsals differed very little from takes. But George Sanders “yawned his way through rehearsals.”
So when Baxter and Sanders did the first take of that climactic scene between Eve and Addison, it was like “opening night” for her, but for George it was more like closing.
“Take it easy, Annie,” Mankiewicz cautioned in a whisper.
“Godalmighty, Joe, I don’t know how. Can’t we stick a pin in George?”
“He’ll warm up,” Joe whispered. “Just be damned sure you don’t exhaust yoursel
f. Save yourself the first few takes.”
She tried to save herself, to hold back, but “by take five I was a rag.”
Mankiewicz called a short break and took George aside. He and Sanders talked quietly. Baxter remembered that Mankiewicz laid a hand on “George’s elegantly tailored shoulder” while they spoke.
She walked around, taking deep breaths and trying to relax without losing her emotional climax.
“Take six. Take seven—and George went off like a rocket.”
This sequence, where Sanders slaps Baxter and she flings herself across the hotel bed, is a little S&M masterpiece. Eve taunts Addison as if to provoke his wrath. She succeeds; he strips her emotionally and dominates her. Both grow more aroused as Addison’s vehemence reaches an erotic crescendo. The scene ends when Addison, having conquered her, makes Eve recite a brief masochist’s catechism:
ADDISON
Are you listening to me?
EVE
(She lies listlessly now, her tear-stained cheek against the coverlet. She nods.)
ADDISON
Then say so.
EVE
Yes, Addison.
ADDISON
And you realize—and you agree how completely you belong to me?
EVE
Yes, Addison.
The subtext of sexual frenzy, so camouflaged that Sanders and Baxter may well have been unaware of its implications despite their brilliance in the scene, suggests a lot about both characters. Just prior to the lines quoted above, Addison sneers at Eve: “That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability.” The most obvious interpretation of this line is, “That I should want such a weak, pathetic character as you.” Another possible meaning is, “That I should want you at all now that I’ve got you.” Or still another: “That I should want you or any woman.”
Shortly before this scene, Addison appears as an unmistakable voyeur. Standing outside Eve’s dressing room when she tries (with no luck) to seduce Bill Sampson, Addison is obviously aroused. His expression implies a vicarious thrill, perhaps onanistic.
In All About Eve, and in other Mankiewicz films, erotic scenes often involve a solitary character. The only time we see Bill and Margo in bed they’re 3,000 miles apart, talking on the phone. (Later, at the Curran Theatre, they play half of an unerotic fight on a bed onstage.) Eve’s initial seduction attempt—clandestine letters to Bill while he’s away—involves only her.
Even when a sex scene is played à deux, passion is subordinate to speech. Whether we believe her or not, Eve claims that the first night she and Lloyd Richards spent together they “talked all night.”
Put another way, orgasm in a Mankiewicz movie is deferred, sometimes forever. In The Ghost and Mrs. Muir Gene Tierney is sex-proof in her prolonged affair with the phantom, Rex Harrison. Only at her death does the honeymoon begin. Then there’s Addie Ross, the insinuating, invisible narrator of A Letter to Three Wives. The movie is structured on her epistolary seduction of the husband of one of the wives, yet she doesn’t get him after all. (Celeste Holm, narrating the voice-over role of Addie, makes her as vivid a character as anyone we do see.) In The Barefoot Contessa Rossano Brazzi tells Ava Gardner on their wedding night that his body was blown apart in the war. Though he bears no visible scars, we’re to understand that his penis is permanently dysfunctional.
To return to the hotel scene with Addison DeWitt and Eve Harrington—what a feat of directing Mankiewicz brought off: He coaxed fire from Sanders, once he woke the actor up. From Baxter, smoldering and ready to go off, he got fireworks. Scenes like this one, less famous than the “fasten your seat belts” set pieces, didn’t necessarily win Man-kiewicz his Oscars. But they do show his genius.
Chapter 12
A New Word for Happiness
At the time of All About Eve, Bette Davis’s screen persona bordered on the sadistic, owing to her punishing portrayals in such films as Of Human Bondage, The Letter, The Little Foxes, and Beyond the Forest. (Her sadistic apotheosis was still twelve years in the future, when she teamed up with the perfect movie masochist, Joan Crawford, for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) Bette had a cruel streak off-screen as well, as an incident in San Francisco unfortunately shows.
One morning, a week into shooting at the Curran Theatre, Davis and Baxter had just finished being made up for the dressing-room scene when Karen Richards introduces Eve Harrington to Margo and friends. “See you on the set, Bette,” Anne called as she whisked by.
Celeste Holm, early on the set as usual, had finished her makeup and was already in place, chatting with Gary Merrill and Hugh Marlowe. Thelma Ritter studied herself in a nearby mirror to make sure she looked dowdy enough for the scene.
A stagehand rushed up with a telegram addressed to Bette, and just then the assistant called out, “Everybody on the set, please.”
Bette tore open the yellow Western Union envelope, ran her eyes over the message, and grimaced. Moments later she strode onto the set with lips pursed. Her expression indicated grim pleasure.
The telegram was from William Sherry. His message pleaded with Bette to call off the divorce and try yet another reconciliation. Bette proceeded to read the telegram, with sarcastic emphasis and loud laughter, to everyone within earshot. Gary laughed loudest. Hugh Marlowe chuckled. Celeste lowered her eyes and pretended to pick a speck of lint off her skirt. Since she and Bette weren’t speaking, it’s doubtful she would have laughed even if she had found Bette’s performance hilarious. Anne concentrated on her lines—this was a very important scene for her—and pretended not to hear.
In the words of Marion Richards, little B.D.’s nanny, the telegram was “beautiful, tender, sweet.” Nurse Richards claimed that “Finally everyone was howling. The only one who didn’t go along with ridiculing it was Anne Baxter. She was offended by the whole thing. As was I.”
Marion Richards no doubt remembered precisely what happened that day on the set. She had a vested interest, for not long after Bette’s merciless reading of the telegram, William Sherry began writing letters to her. Bette was later to claim that Sherry had fallen in love with the young nanny before he and Bette split up. This Richards and Sherry denied.
But she did marry him. On August 6, 1950, not long after All About Eve was in the can, Marion Richards, in a seamless shift from nursemaid to stepmother, became Mrs. William Grant Sherry.
“Suddenly,” according to Bette’s biographer Barbara Leaming, “it was being said about town that in the innocent-seeming young nursemaid with ‘the face of an angel’ Bette Davis had discovered her real-life Eve Harrington. There was also speculation that Sherry’s involvement with the twenty-two-year-old had been going on for some time and that Davis’s affair with Gary Merrill was nothing more than a cover-up for her shame over having been abandoned for the much younger woman.”
If Bette’s affair with Gary was a mere cover-up, she enjoyed it to the full. Her spirits had lifted as soon as filming began. She played records on the set, between takes, and danced the Charleston for the entertainment of cast members. (We can guess which ones were amused.) In fact, the filming of All About Eve turned into perhaps the happiest professional experience of Bette’s life. The script helped, and Mankiewicz, of course, but so did love.
Celeste Holm excepted, Bette laughed and talked with her colleagues, which surprised Olivia de Havilland when she heard about it. For Bette usually avoided conversations on the set. According to de Havilland, “She would say good morning, but not a lot more. She was saving her energy.” Another co-star, Geraldine Fitzgerald, said, “Perhaps people got the impression that she was being testy because of her habit of repeating what you said after you said it. I think that was simply because she wanted to be sure she had gotten what you had said to her. I remember that once she was asked by Edmund Goulding, the director of Dark Victory, to stand “over there.” She retorted with “Over there?” And then she went over there and stood like she was asked to do.”
Bette told Anne Baxter, “
I thought I was through at forty-one. Then along came Margo Channing.”
A few years earlier, Bette had said at the end of Now, Voyager, “Don’t let’s ask for the moon—when we have the stars.” But now Bette had the moon as well, for in addition to playing Margo, Gary was her new lover. Every day, when work ended, she and Merrill went out to dinner, sometimes with others in the cast, sometimes alone. Anne Baxter recalled the “big martinis” they drank.
Bette, at this time, might well have borrowed a line from Eve Harrington: “There should be a new word for happiness.” At last Bette had work, and love, and plenty to drink. It’s a truism that life goes better when you’re getting laid, and Bette and Gary, after the martinis, spent every night together. Marion Richards, who shared a room with little B.D. directly under Bette’s suite, claimed she heard Bette’s bed “going up and down” all night, even though good hotels are constructed to minimize such sounds. And this was the Fairmont, a good hotel in San Francisco, where nervous fault lines mandate especial care in building.
Bette herself said of this period, “There is a near-perfect time in a person’s life, just past forty, when you have outgrown most of the wildness, either the work is going well or you have adjusted your sights, and you are at peace with your private self. The time may come only once, and this was mine.”
As filming in San Francisco drew to a close, Bette and Gary realized their affair had become serious.
The other man in Bette’s life was Joe Mankiewicz. Was it true, as Anne Baxter claimed, that their director knew so much about women that “we’re all just glass to him, and he sees everything that makes us tick”? If Mankiewicz “saw through” Bette Davis like a crystal clock, he no doubt perceived her enormous gratitude for a first-rate script and a sure-footed director with a polished style.
