by Staggs, Sam
Anne Baxter also had stories about Ratoff. She had known him in every sense of the word. Here’s an anecdote from her book, Intermission.
One Sunday in 1946, so Grisha described, Darryl was pacing around the pool in his bikini, swinging his polo mallet and cursing the problem of casting Sophie in The Razor’s Edge. Grisha spoke up: “Darryl, darling, what about Anne Baxter?”
“Nah!” Zanuck snarled disgustedly. “She’s a cold potato.”
With that, my pal Grisha went into action. “Darryl,” he growled with an evil leer, “please, darling, I have had it—it’s marvelous.”
“You’re kidding, Grisha!”
“That’s right, Darryl. Marvelous!”
Monday morning my agent got a call. Could I dine with Edmund Goulding, the man who would direct The Razor’s Edge, and test Tuesday?
The role won her an Oscar.
Harrison Carroll, the Herald-Express reporter, asked Ratoff a few questions for the paper before moving on to Bette Davis.
“Your throaty voice, Bette—are you doing a takeoff on Tallulah Bankhead?” he asked innocently.
“That throaty voice you refer to,” Bette answered, “is because I suffered a broken blood vessel on my last picture. Which reminds me, why didn’t you come to RKO and do a story on me then?”
Not letting her change the subject, the reporter continued, “Then the character is not in any way modeled after Tallulah?”
Bette threw back her head and laughed a baritone laugh. At that moment she would have reminded anyone of Bankhead. “No, it positively and specifically is not a takeoff on Tallulah.” Then she added, this time sounding more like Bette Davis, “Do you think we want to get sued?”
Just then Marilyn rushed in, out of breath as though she had run several blocks. Or just left the arms of a lover. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered to everyone and no one.
Mankiewicz talked with her quietly for a few minutes and then asked everyone to take their places. Gregory Ratoff gushed to Celeste Holm, “She ees going verrry far, thees dame, you wait and see.”
“Why?” Celeste snapped back. “Because she’s kept us all waiting an hour? I think it takes more than that.” Celeste arched an eyebrow and considered the irritating starlet, who looked rather lost. “Besides—she’s dressed ridiculously in that titular number. We’re filming a cocktail party. No one else is in an evening gown.”
Charles LeMaire had, of course, designed Marilyn’s titular gown, as Celeste slyly dubbed it, precisely as such. The first time he saw the Monroe figure he knew that Marilyn and décolletage went together like gin and vermouth. (Twenty years later, a picture of her in a low-cut gown was chosen to illustrate the entry “décolletage” in the first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. For reasons of political punctilio the photo was dropped from later editions.)
Did LeMaire know how the camera would worship Marilyn during the brief time she’s on-screen? She steals her first scene with Bette Davis even while trying, apparently, not to steal it. Marilyn stands, barely moving except for her natural shimmer, and the viewer’s eye is glued to her long after she’s spoken her two or three lines. The strapless white gown helps, but the costume was incidental to her allure. Already, in the lobby scene filmed in San Francisco, the camera had devoured her and there she didn’t even wear the white gown. For that scene “she chose (with the approval of Zanuck and Mankiewicz) an item from her own wardrobe, a tightly woven sweater-dress that also showed her figure to good advantage in The Fireball and Home Town Story.”
It was just about this time that Constance Bennett, spotting the unknown but lovely young Marilyn Monroe at a Hollywood party, reportedly drawled, “Now there’s a broad with her future behind her.” And seeing Marilyn in All About Eve, you know it’s true, even without the hindsight.
* * *
For this party sequence, which runs for more than thirty pages in the script, LeMaire designed for Anne Baxter a rather mousy cocktail dress that alludes to Margo’s flashily glamorous one. The drabness is appropriate, since at this point in the story Eve is still vastly overshadowed by Margo. Perhaps we’re supposed to guess that Eve’s dress is one of Margo’s hand-me-downs. Earlier in the film Eve has altered one of Margo’s suits—“a little taking in here and letting out there”—which had become too “seventeenish” for Margo’s advancing maturity. Dressing Eve in her mentor’s outmoded clothes reinforces sartorially Birdie’s warning that Eve is studying Margo “like a play or a book or a set of blueprints.”
Zsa Zsa Gabor, a frequent visitor to the set, seems to have studied first one, then another, of the actresses who played scenes with her husband. Was she, like Eve Harrington, motivated by Thespis, or was she just on the lookout for rivals? Later she blithely wrote, “I liked Bette Davis and admired her acting.” Bette, in her own memoirs, didn’t exactly return the compliment, though she did recount an incident that took place one day at the studio.
Zsa Zsa (who, like Miss Caswell, might have passed for a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art, but was not) clicked onto the set in ultra-high heels and matching outfit. Spotting Mankiewicz, she fluttered over to him and said, “Joe, dahlink, I must take my husband avay from you.”
Mankiewicz slowly removed the pipe from his mouth, smiled, and said, “How are you, Zsa Zsa? I believe George is in his dressing room, taking a nap.”
“Ve haff to go shopping,” she cooed. “Dahlink, I promise to giff him back tomorrow.”
“Just a minute, honey,” Joe said with a frosty smile. “Just one thing. We’re making a fucking picture!” Suavely he took her arm, turned her toward the exit, and sent her on her way.
Perhaps the inopportune visit was merely a ruse on Zsa Zsa’s part, for she felt “wretched during the shooting because, whenever George made love on the screen, I was sick with jealousy.” Not that he kissed Marilyn on-screen, but someone reported to Zsa Zsa that the two lunched together in the studio commissary every day.
Irate, Zsa Zsa confronted George with this damning evidence. But her husband merely stared. For a long moment he didn’t speak. Then, with compassion in his voice, he said, “But the commissary is so crowded, the only place the poor girl can sit is with me. So I make room for her. And you know,” he added with admiration, “she writes quite good poetry.”
Zsa Zsa, caught off guard, was speechless for the only time in her life. “Poetry!” she thought. “How can I fight her poetry?”
But there wasn’t time to say anything, because at that very moment George Sanders grabbed his wife and made violent love to her. “Normally,” Zsa Zsa revealed later, “violent love wasn’t George’s style and, almost without thinking, I said, ‘George, I bet you were fantasizing about Marilyn all the time we were—’”
Livid despite his exertion, George picked up the former Miss Hungary and the future Queen of Outer Space, carried her bodily through the French doors and into the garden, and tossed her, squealing and kicking, into the swimming pool. After which he went upstairs for a long siesta.
The foregoing is told from Zsa Zsa’s point of view. But everyone in Hollywood remembers the past in highly idiosyncratic tableaux. This is Marilyn’s own flashback, from My Story, to that warm spring day in Los Angeles in May 1950:
I was sitting in the studio commissary having lunch with Mr. George Sanders. We had sat down at the same table more or less by accident, having entered the commissary together, also by accident. The whole thing was an accident. Mr. Sanders was just beginning to eat his chicken salad when the cashier’s assistant came to the table and told him he was wanted on the telephone.
About five minutes later Mr. Sanders returned to our table, called for the waitress, and paid his check.
“If you’ll pardon me, I must go now,” he said to me.
“But you haven’t had your lunch yet,” I said.
“I’m not hungry,” said Mr. Sanders.
“You said you were terribly hungry when you sat down,” I said, “and would have
to be careful not to overeat. Why don’t you just have a bite so you’ll have some strength for your big scene this afternoon.”
Mr. Sanders looked so pale that I was really worried.
“Unless you’re sick,” I said.
“I’m in perfect health,” said Mr. Sanders, “and I must leave now.”
“I’ll drive you over to the stage,” I said. “I came in my car, and I noticed you walked.”
“Oh no, thank you very much,” said Mr. Sanders. “I don’t want to bother you.”
“It’s no bother at all,” I said. “I’ve finished my lunch. It’s a shame for you to walk all that distance on an empty stomach.”
I stood up and started to leave the commissary with Mr. Sanders, but he pulled briskly away from me and I couldn’t have kept up with him unless I broke into a trot. So I walked out slowly alone wondering what I had done to make Mr. Sanders rush away from my company.
On the set ten minutes later, Mr. Sanders’ stand-in, who was almost as charming and polite as the star himself, came to me and said, “Mr. Sanders has asked me to request of you that hereafter when you say good morning or good-bye to him, you will make those salutations from afar.”
I turned red at being insulted like this but I suddenly realized what had happened. Mr. Sanders’ wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, obviously had a spy on the set, and this spy had flashed the news to her that he was sitting at a table with me, and Miss Gabor had telephoned him immediately and given him a full list of instructions.
* * *
What They Said About Zsa Zsa and What Zsa Zsa Said About Herself
Oscar Levant: “Zsa Zsa Gabor has discovered the secret of perpetual middle age.”
Zsa Zsa: “After a certain age, dahlink, it’s either the face or the fanny.”
Oscar Levant: “Zsa Zsa not only worships the Golden Calf, she barbecues it for lunch. And she’s the only woman who ever left the Iron Curtain wearing it.”
Interviewer: “Zsa Zsa, how many husbands have you had?”
Zsa Zsa: “Do you mean apart from my own?”
Oscar Levant: “Zsa Zsa does social work among the rich.”
Zsa Zsa: “I don’t know anything about sex. I was always married.”
When someone complimented Zsa Zsa on the relatively modest jewelry she was wearing in a TV studio, she said, “Dahlink, these are just my working diamonds!”
Zsa Zsa: “The best way to attract a man is to have a magnificent bosom and a half-size brain and let both of them show.”
* * *
It’s curious that Marilyn didn’t use her memoirs to settle a score with Bette Davis. According to rumors that have circulated for nearly a half-century, Marilyn had to run away and vomit after filming her two scenes with Bette. Since Marilyn’s character, Miss Caswell, dashes to the ladies’ room to be sick after her audition, it’s possible that this rumor merges life with art.
But Gregory Ratoff, six years after All About Eve, told an interviewer that Bette went out of her way to make nasty remarks to Marilyn. One such, according to Ratoff, was this: “I know and you know and everyone knows that kitten voice of yours is goddamned lousy—and it’s lousy because you never trained it as a real actress does!” Ratoff claimed that Marilyn, after Bette’s broadside, went away to cry as well as to vomit.
* * *
Celeste and Bette had a big scene coming up. The party sequence had taken nearly a week. Four days were spent filming the Sarah Siddons Awards banquet and finally, with supper in the Cub Room of the Stork Club completed after several full days, all the big scenes involving five, six, seven, eight cast members and more were at last done. Now Mankiewicz concentrated on scenes that required two and three people.
And so, on one of the hottest days of spring, while searing lights burned down on them, Bette and Celeste bundled up in fur coats and played their car scene. Lloyd Richards and Karen are driving Margo to the station to catch a train back to New York for her evening performance when the car sputters to a halt on a snowy road. Footage of the surrounding wintry landscape, which the film’s second unit had shot several months earlier in upstate New York, was projected on a process screen behind the specially prepared car.
The scene gains momentum slowly. At first the dialogue is all about what time it is, when the train leaves, and how far it is to the nearest farmhouse. Then, when Lloyd leaves to seek help, the exchange between Margo and Karen becomes one of feminine intimacy. In musical terms, it’s a duet. The action stops while Margo bares her soul to Karen. The duet builds to Margo’s confessional climax, one of her most famous “arias.” It begins famously, “Funny business, a woman’s career” and goes on for several minutes, concluding with “Slow curtain. The end.”
Later Bette called this “one of the most descriptive speeches about the problems of an actress growing older.” She added that “the public, the critics, even friends, thought they saw glimpses of Bette Davis in these lines.” But Bette denied it emphatically: “This speech did not apply to me. I was not Margo Channing, her kind of actress, her kind of glamorous lady.”
Bette and Celeste played the scene like the finest of friends. The soundstage wasn’t air-conditioned, and with overhead lights ablaze, the temperature inside the coupe soon reached 100 degrees. When it was over they, and Mankiewicz, realized what a good job they had done, despite the dispiriting heat. (Makeup artist Ben Nye mopped perspiration off their brows many times, and repaired their dampened makeup.)
In spite of the friction between them, Bette maintained that the scene wouldn’t have been the same without Celeste. “She was perfect,” Davis said generously.
Not once but twice, as it turned out. When Mankiewicz and Zanuck viewed the rushes, they discovered that a slight jiggle in the process film had spoiled several shots. And so once more the following day Lloyd Richards crawled out of the car to go for help, while Bette and Celeste sweltered in mink as the lights grew hotter and both women, between takes, drank water as though they were field hands and not actresses.
For those outside of show business, it’s always surprising that actors who dislike each other can play scenes of affection, friendship, even love. Who would guess, watching Bette and Celeste in that car, that they had so little use for each other?
Just a few days earlier Bette had bruised Celeste’s injured feelings once again. They were filming the Stork Club sequence, whose main focus is the table where Margo, Bill, Karen, and Lloyd are seated. Predictably, these four sat for hours at the table while the crew made lighting checks, adjusted camera setups, and fixed the many other technical details of filmmaking.
Celeste felt uncomfortable when silence descended on a social affair, even one that was purely make-believe. So, in an effort to be pleasant and to lighten the drudgery of movie work, she told her table companions, “Do you know that the man who manufacturers Pyrex, when he found out that people were using those Pyrex teapots to make martinis in—he stopped making them?”
The charming response would have been something like “Oh really? How interesting.” But Bette was no specialist in charm. Besides, she had a husband she didn’t want, a boyfriend who was married, a career that was on the skids unless All About Eve could dredge it up from the muck. And this mention of martinis, reminding her of all those she had drunk last night, made her crave another one right then.
Gary Merrill and Hugh Marlowe chuckled politely at Celeste’s anecdote, one of them made a jovial retort, and Celeste herself laughed musically. When the mirth died down Bette glanced toward Celeste. Then she looked at Hugh, and finally turned her gaze to Gary. Lowering her eyelids for effect, she drawled: “I don’t know how I’ve lived this long without knowing that.”
* * *
The Wit and Wisdom of Dame Celeste Holm
In 1979 Celeste Holm, who is of Norwegian descent, was dubbed into knighthood by King Olav of Norway, thereby becoming Dame Celeste Holm. Prior to this honor, she was often quoted for her flippant and acerbic opinions. Following it, her statements took on a certain gravit
y. Herewith, a sampling:
“The life of an actress isn’t a bed of mink.”
—1946
“I have always, on some level, been aware of how cruel people are to each other. I have been so anxious to remind people of our imperative need for each other.”
—1988
“I have never been interested in making love with a man whose child I wouldn’t want to bear.”
—1955
“The basic theme [of All About Eve] irritates me. The theatre is not the jungle and we are not out to kill each other, because if we were we’d never get a show on. We are bonded to each other and must cooperate.”
—1989
“Television is just like summer stock, except that winter never comes.”
—1949
“My favorite show is always the one I am doing. All you have is now—do the best you can and enjoy it.”
—1980
* * *
But everyone loved Thelma Ritter. “One of my favorite people in the whole world,” Celeste Holm proclaimed years later. “She did life just right in this era of feminist crap. She was Catholic, she had been a leading woman in stock, she was a very good actress, she got married, she had children, then when the children were old enough she went back into the business. And that’s just the way to do it.” Celeste herself, married four times and always at work, didn’t do it that way.
