by Staggs, Sam
Gary Merrill called Thelma “a character actress with great common sense.” The common sense shines through in every performance. How could she have played a woman who didn’t have it? One reason she’s perfect in All About Eve is that her character, Birdie, who abhors pretense and deception, is wise to Eve Harrington’s machinations from the start.
Like Birdie, Thelma Ritter had been a vaudevillian. Thelma on the vaudeville stage may not have “closed the first half for eleven years” as Birdie haughtily claims to have done, but Mankiewicz treasured her “as a fiddler would a Stradivarius.” He wrote the role of Birdie for her and no one else. “I adored her,” he said.
He, along with Zanuck, helped start her out in movies. In 1946 the director George Seaton, under contract to 20th Century-Fox, went to New York in search of character actors for Miracle on 34th Street. Seaton’s wife, a childhood friend of Thelma Ritter’s, introduced them and Seaton gave Thelma a walk-on as a harried housewife who argues with Santa Claus during the Christmas rush at Macy’s. Darryl Zanuck, after watching the rushes, ordered Thelma’s role enlarged. She went to Hollywood for three days of extra shooting.
When Miracle on 34th Street was released, Thelma (born in Brooklyn but long a resident of Forest Hills, Queens) took her young son and daughter into Manhattan to see the picture in its first-run engagement at the Roxy. “We sat behind some housewives,” she recalled, “and when I came on I heard one of them say, ‘My God, look at the face on that one!’”
It was a face that America would soon recognize. And it matched her gravelly umpire’s voice. After a bit part in Call Northside 777, Mankiewicz cast her as Sadie, Ann Sothern’s maid in A Letter to Three Wives. Sadie, though instructed to announce that “Dinner is served,” keeps right on saying it the old way: “Soup’s on!” What could be more American than that? And Americans—at least those who love movies—have been on Thelma Ritter’s side ever since.
A string of roles followed, each one played so indelibly that casting directors came to describe “a Thelma Ritter type” as the sort of character actress needed to play certain droll, gritty parts.
Thelma’s husband, Joe Moran, was a vice-president at the advertising firm of Young & Rubicam. Together the couple eventually earned enough money to maintain several homes, but Thelma preferred to do her own housekeeping, even in a hotel suite. “When I was running three houses,” she once said, “the place in Hollywood, the one in Forest Hills, and our summer place on Fire Island, I’d get a little confused. I’d reach for the mustard in Forest Hills and it wouldn’t be there and I’d say, ‘I bought some just yesterday.’ And I had—but in California.”
Thelma and Bette got along well together. One thing they had in common was reading. Although Bette’s work often left her too exhausted to read, she kept a stack of books beside her bed. Thelma read a book a day, bulleting through novels, scripts, and plays at top speed. She loved Dickens and tried to reread his novels about once a year. (Thelma herself, and the roles she played, are like Dickens characters translated into the American comic idiom.)
“I like Bette and she likes me,” Thelma said years after the two had worked together in All About Eve. “Maybe it’s because I’m homely and she has always thought of herself as homely. When we worked on Eve there was so much humor between us, both in our lines and in our chemistry off-screen, that she relaxed with me. I never had a single rough word with her.”
A few years later Bette returned the compliment as only she could. Playing a Bronx housewife in The Catered Affair (1956), she assumed the voice and accent of Thelma Ritter.
While Edith Head was staying up nights to complete Bette’s wardrobe, Thelma decided to buy the kind of dress Birdie would wear. She searched the rack at Macy’s, she looked at Gimbel’s, then she went home to Queens and shopped around. Where were all those $1.98 dresses that would look right for her character? At last she gave up and called Charles LeMaire at Fox. He fixed her up with a $1.98 dress—but it cost him $200.00 to do it.
Thelma’s maternal quality attracted Marilyn Monroe, and the year after All About Eve they worked together again, in As Young As You Feel. Ten years later they made their third film together, The Misfits (1961). Their relationship remained cordial, but by then even Thelma found Marilyn’s erratic work habits and perpetual tardiness exasperating. She complained along with everyone else on the set. But afterwards, when Marilyn was dead, Thelma said, “I adored that girl from the moment we met.”
Possibly the only criticism anyone ever leveled at Thelma is that she wasn’t on-screen enough. In All About Eve she vanishes during the cocktail party and isn’t seen again. She also disappears too soon from The Misfits, where she is one of the few actors who doesn’t resemble, emotionally at least, a walking skeleton.
One reason Thelma Ritter is so well remembered in Eve is because it’s her best role. Another is that, as she herself pointed out, “Birdie always says the thing people never can think of until it’s too late.”
* * *
Zanuck had no trouble getting Thelma Ritter to work for him at Fox. Celeste Holm was a different matter, and after he had lured her there he came to regret it.
Holm had the good fortune to play Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, which opened on Broadway on March 31, 1943. The reviews were ecstatic, and many of them singled her out for added praise (e.g., the New York World-Telegram: “Celeste Holm tucked the show under her arm.… This is an astounding young woman.”). Zanuck, ever alert to astounding young women, wanted to see more of her. He made several offers and finally Celeste, taking a break from the show in 1944, traveled to Hollywood to make a screen test.
Directed by Zanuck’s comic henchman, Gregory Ratoff, the test became a production. It required three weeks of advance preparation, and cost $2,500 to produce, a bundle in those days. Holm was filmed in black-and-white and also in Technicolor. Not only did she have the services of a full-time director, she also had a supporting cast that included Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Vincent Price, Mischa Auer, and Dick Haymes. “She is not just good,” shouted Gregory Ratoff when he saw Celeste on film for the first time. “She is zenzational!”
Zanuck, though less effusive than Ratoff, was nevertheless impressed by Holm’s screen test. He offered her a part in Where Do We Go From Here? (directed by Ratoff) in 1945. Celeste turned it down. Her success in Oklahoma! had unleashed a flood of offers from Broadway as well as Hollywood. As for the splashy screen test, Holm considered it a vehicle not only to show Fox what she could do, but also to show her what Fox could do. “I liked the stage,” she said. “I knew the stage. Pictures were an unknown quantity.”
Zanuck kept after Celeste, but in the meantime she was playing the lead in another Broadway musical, Bloomer Girl. Eventually he signed her to a long-term contract, a deal that soon made both producer and actress unhappy and led the studio at one point to put her on suspension. Celeste made her Fox debut in a slight musical called Three Little Girls in Blue (1946). Critical consensus was that even in a minor role she stole the film from June Haver, Vivian Blaine, and Vera-Ellen. A New York theatre colleague, Fitzroy Davis, later wrote that “Celeste had acquired an early genius for handling the press, and succeeded in obliterating from attention the three presumed stars of that film.”
Holm and Zanuck didn’t get along. “I could never communicate with him,” she admitted. “He loved girls, but he didn’t like women. A girl would say, ‘Yes, sir, whatever you say, sir.’ A woman said, ‘Wait a minute! This isn’t going to work.’”
Nevertheless, he gave her the role of an intelligent professional woman in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), for which she won an Oscar. She was not badly used in any of the films she made at Fox during this period. The same cannot be said, however, of the unfortunate Champagne for Caesar (1950), which she made on loan to United Artists.
In the late forties, Celeste ran into Zanuck and his family at Sun Valley on a skiing trip. She liked the Zanuck children, and they seemed fond of her. She had also sung at an afternoon party in Hollywoo
d, which the youngsters attended. It was only natural, then, that young Dickie Zanuck wanted to speak to the lovely young actress on the ski slopes. But his father warned him: “Don’t tell her how good she is. She’ll ask me for more money.”
Perhaps Dickie Zanuck praised her too much, for a year or so later Celeste was well paid for her work in All About Eve. She never changed her opinion of Zanuck, however. Long after he was dead and she had grown old, Celeste sniffed, “I understand he bought me because he did not want Louis B. Mayer to get me.”
Chapter 15
The General Atmosphere Is Very Macbethish
On the morning when Bette Davis, Gary Merrill, and Anne Baxter were to film the confrontational scene that lends Bill’s coming-home party its “Macbethish” air, Bette was worried. This pivotal scene is Margo’s awakening to the threat of Eve Harrington. The five pages of dialogue that Margo and Bill exchange in Margo’s living room must not become static even for an instant. If it did, the audience might lose interest. That would be fatal, because this scene functions as the door leading into the rest of the film.
During rehearsal Bette said, “I don’t understand how to play this. What can we do so that it’s not just a talky scene?”
Mankiewicz puffed his pipe. Then he looked around the set. At last he said, “Do you see that candy jar on the piano?” He took Bette’s arm and they walked over to it. The candy jar was empty. Mankiewicz called over the second prop master and said something to him.
Later, when it was time to play the scene, Bette recalled what Mankiewicz had told her: “The madder you get, the more you want a piece of candy.”
Of course Margo craves a piece of candy. And of course she doesn’t dare, because actresses are always on a diet. And Margo at forty is on a stricter diet because she now suspects that her svelte young protégée is after Bill.
The cameras rolled. At Margo’s sarcastic line about Eve—“She’s a girl of so many interests”—Bette jerked open the candy jar, picked up a piece of chocolate, brought it to her mouth and almost popped it in, then threw it back in the jar.
Just then Bette made a peculiar face. Mankiewicz halted the shooting. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, Joe,” Bette said meekly. “I didn’t mean to, but I loathe eating chocolates in the morning.”
Mankiewicz and Bette huddled for a conference. Another prop man was dispatched to the commissary, and when he came back he brought tiny squares of gingerbread to masquerade as chocolates.
Then the scene continued. Margo’s anger builds; so does Bill’s. Outraged at what he considers her unwarranted jealousy of Eve, Bill lectures: “You have to keep your teeth sharp. All right. But I will not have you sharpen them on me—or on Eve.” Margo opens the candy jar again, quickly slams it shut, and snaps back: “What about her teeth? What about her fangs?”
Another angry lecture from Bill: “She hasn’t cut them yet, and you know it!… Eve Harrington has never by word, look, thought, or suggestion indicated anything to me but her adoration for you and her happiness at our being in love!” At this, Margo opens the candy jar, grabs the seductive piece of “chocolate,” throws it in her mouth, and chews furiously, eyes bulging as she swallows, seething all the while.
And that’s how a scene that was already good on the page turned out brilliant thanks to the director’s flourishes, and thanks also to an actress who knew what to do with “a genius piece of business,” in Bette’s words. (Ten years later Tony Perkins devised his own jittery candy-nibbling scene in Psycho. Was he thinking of Margo Channing at the Bates Motel?)
* * *
During the cocktail party we get a look at Margo’s bed, which is piled high with minks and sables—$500,000 worth, in fact. To Birdie, the bed looked like “a dead animal act.” Dead or alive, Fox was taking no chances. When the scene was shot, the studio posted special security guards to protect the furs.
During a break after Bette’s scene with the chocolates, Mankiewicz grinned and said, “I’m still waiting for you to start directing the picture. After all, Eddie Goulding said you would; he thinks you’re ‘a horrible creature.’”
Again, Mankiewicz heard that Bette Davis snort, which he thought deserved a copyright. “Mr. Goulding is a genius moviemaker,” she said, but was she sincere, or entirely ironic? It was hard to tell, even for Mankiewicz. “But he was always drifting away from the story. He also loved to act, so he would act out your part for you. And the way he acted out a role many times did not suit the way I thought the character should be. He did find me difficult, because I was very stubborn about the woman I was playing—and I didn’t think he could play her as well as I did.”
Later that day Bette herself got the chance to make a brilliant contribution, when the time came for her to speak what was destined to become an immortal line. Margo’s cue comes from Karen, who says: “We know you, we’ve seen you like this before. Is it over—or is it just beginning?”
Margo, instead of retorting immediately as indicated in the script, drains her martini, walks toward the stairs with a shoulder-rolling, hip-swinging swagger. She halts, swerves, regards Karen, Lloyd, and Bill with a scowl, then lets it rip: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!”
But Mankiewicz didn’t come up with this timing. It was Bette’s own. She said: “Those are things you should be able to do as an actress that a director wouldn’t think of telling you. When Margo holds back like that it lets you know she’s collecting more venom.”
(Twenty-five years later Bette was flying to Australia to do her one-woman “Bette Davis Show,” a retrospective of her life and career replete with film clips, reminiscences, questions from the audience, and tart remarks about former co-stars. As the distant lights of Sydney twinkled into view, the captain announced on the intercom that Miss Davis was invited to come forward and visit the cockpit. From there she would have a spectacular view of the city at night as the plane landed. As Bette went through the cockpit door she heard a roar of laughter from the cabin. Turning, slightly puzzled, she saw passengers pointing up to the illuminated sign that had just flashed on. It said, Fasten Seat Belts.)
In the “Fasten your seat belts” scene, Hugh Marlowe, as the playwright Lloyd Richards, is the least exciting actor on-screen. But Marlowe is that way throughout the movie, conforming to Hollywood’s image of writers. (This drab stereotype perhaps sprang from the low self-esteem of scriptwriters, who were bottom feeders in the studio pecking order. Irving Thalberg called them “jerks with Underwoods.”) But the cards are stacked against any actor who portrays a writer. Even Bette, playing a novelist-playwright in Old Acquaintance (1943), is rather sluggish. Like it or not, we recall not Bette but her co-star, the fidgety Miriam Hopkins.
Hugh Marlowe has no bravura scenes in All About Eve, or elsewhere in his career. (“He was a stick,” Mankiewicz said bluntly.) In fact, he’s one of those slow-burning, carbohydrate actors who all look like versions of Gregory Peck. (Such actors always resemble high-school principals.) But at least Hugh Marlowe, in Eve, gives good support. As unexciting Lloyd Richards he’s as firm as a new mattress.
Hugh Marlowe had three strikes against him from the start: his real name—it was Hugh Herbert Hipple. Born in Philadelphia in 1911, he grew up in the Midwest, started his career as a radio announcer at WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, and when he left the station his old job was given to another would-be actor named Ronald Reagan.
From Iowa, Marlowe headed for Hollywood but made a four-year stopover at the Pasadena Playhouse, a celebrated movie-actors’ training ground in those days. He made a film in 1936, two the following year, and eventually left town to appear on Broadway in 1942 with Gertrude Lawrence in Moss Hart’s Lady in the Dark, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin.
In the forties Marlowe was twice under contract to MGM, and twice dropped, before moving to 20th Century-Fox in 1948. There he played standard second leads: a songwriter in Come to the Stable (1949) with nuns Loretta Young and Celeste Holm, a fi
ghter pilot in Twelve O’Clock High the same year, and a sculptor in Night and the City (1950).
Marlowe married and divorced several times. One wife was the actress Edith Atwater. Another was actress K. T. Stevens, the daughter of director Sam Wood. Marlowe spent the last thirteen years of his life appearing in the NBC soap opera Another World. He died in 1982.
Racier than any of his on-screen roles was an incident that took place when Marlowe was starring in Anniversary Waltz at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco in 1956. His co-star was Marjorie Lord, best remembered as the wife of Danny Thomas in the TV show Make Room for Daddy. A few seconds after the curtain went down on the second act, Lord slapped his face and sent him reeling. And Marlowe slapped her back.
The tabloids loved it. HE KISSES, SHE SLAPS, HE’S FIRED, headlined the New York Journal-American. In the New York Post the headline ran, HE WHO GOT SLAPPED GETS THE GATE. (Why didn’t some clever headline writer call the story A BUMPY NIGHT?)
Versions of the incident differed. The feud had started a week or so earlier when Marjorie Lord objected that Marlowe was “overly ardent in the love scenes.” She accused him of inventing “some quite violent embraces that weren’t in the script at all.” Different ways of playing the little family comedy were never quite resolved, and so, on a Thursday evening, something happened to provoke the fight.
Newspapers, even the louder ones, were circumspect at the time, so we don’t know precisely what Hugh Marlowe did. The Journal- American, quoting Marjorie Lord, titillates with ellipses: “Frequently he … well, some things just weren’t in the script.” Did his tongue wander, or was it perhaps that he goosed his co-star?
According to the gentleman himself, “I had just kicked the TV set at the end of the second act. I’m off balance. She swats me on the side of the face. So I slapped her right back in the heat of emotion. Miss Lord is a charming girl but new to the business.”
