by Staggs, Sam
Joan Kaiser noticed that her husband had stopped chewing and his face had turned pale. She turned to Bill and asked, “Do you know who Lyle Wheeler is?”
“Know who he is?” Bill yelped. “Every other movie on television has his name on it!” Later, when Kaiser recalled the night of the newscast, he said, “I was angry, I was depressed, I was moved. I decided to do everything I could to restore those Oscars to Lyle.”
Kaiser soon tracked down Malcolm Willits, an expert on Hollywood artifacts and owner of the Collector’s Book Store, at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. Willits planned to auction the Anne Frank Oscar on behalf of the couple who had discovered the cache at the storage-company sale.
But Kaiser had something else in mind. With Joan’s approval, Bill dipped into their savings account, the one they had started when they married sixteen years earlier. The removal of $21,250 left the account close to depletion.
“No, I’m not at all upset over how he’s spending the money,” Joan told a reporter. “It’s not as though we’re taking food from the mouths of our children. We saved it for something important, and this Oscar is important.”
The onrush of news almost overpowered Lyle Wheeler. At eighty-three, he was frail and worn out. A widower, he lived alone in a retirement home in Culver City on a fixed income of $1,000 a month. But now, suddenly, he was famous. Whether he was famous now, in the troubled present, or whether all the fuss was as distant as turning on the television and seeing a movie he had designed years and years ago, Lyle could not quite puzzle out. Too much good news is not so different from bad news, he must have thought as messengers of good fortune paraded through his bedroom.
He had just won another Oscar!
Or so it seemed, although with so many people telling him things it was difficult to sort it out. Someone had just announced to Lyle that in a few days he was to appear at a private awards ceremony in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel where, long ago, the first Oscars were presented to Janet Gaynor and Emil Jannings. That was before Lyle himself had worked on a picture, which seemed strange because he felt like the oldest man in Hollywood, now that so many of the stars were dead.
The subdued ceremony in the Blossom Room lacked the ballyhoo that had accreted to the Academy Awards over the years. Instead, a small group of friends, family, and reporters gathered to watch Wheeler accept the award for Best Art Direction for The Diary of Anne Frank—surely the first time anyone ever accepted the same Oscar twice.
The award was presented by Terry Moore, who used to be famous and who had worked in eight of Wheeler’s films, including Daddy Long Legs (1955) and Peyton Place (1957). “It gives me great pleasure…” she said with an enormous smile as Lyle was helped onto the podium amidst warm applause and cheers.
“I didn’t believe I was ever going to see even one of these again,” the winner said, looking down at the prodigal Oscar, now safe in his arms. A tear rolled from Lyle’s eye and dropped onto the little man’s twenty-four-karat gold stomach. The statuette, worn and pitted by time, was as dear as a puppy or a kitten to the elderly man. He clutched it tightly in his trembling hands.
Afterward, a reporter asked Lyle what he planned to do with his restored treasure. He paused for a long moment and then said, “Well, I want to put it someplace where it won’t be stolen.”
Chapter 20
I’ll Marry You If It Turns Out You Have No Blood At All
Zanuck, having made his revisions on the rough cut of All About Eve in June 1950, saw no need for retakes. Mankiewicz and others at the studio took this as proof of the producer’s confidence in the picture.
In the editing room, Barbara McLean incorporated Zanuck’s changes. Then she “cut in” the main title, which, after several modifications in design, had now been approved by director, producer, and art director. The studio’s legal department, after careful scrutiny, had also approved the credit titles, making sure that each one conformed to the rather fussy contractual stipulations of all concerned.
Redubbing was required for certain lines impaired by outside noises during shooting. One of those “loops” involved Bette Davis and George Sanders. Mankiewicz, ever protective of his work, at first declined Barbara McLean’s offer to do the looping with the two actors. (In technical language, looping is the process of recording post-synchronized replacement dialogue, specifically by running loops of film through a projector and dubber, repeatedly recording the replacement dialogue until the performer achieves or approximates lip sync.)
“Back then I would sit and do all the loop lines,” McLean recalled later. “I used to do it on all the actors. I told them how to read. But Mankiewicz said, ‘I’m going to do my own.’ I said, ‘Well, Joe, why don’t you let me do it? Bette is going away. If you don’t like the way I do it, you can do them over again.’”
Bette and George read for Barbara, and she inserted their redubbed lines without a seam. “By golly,” she said, “Joe never changed one word.”
With all such fine-tuning complete, the picture again went to Zanuck for inspection. He made a few minor adjustments and the next day the film was delivered to the Production Code Administration. A routine form letter, dated July 11, 1950, went out from Joseph I. Breen to Colonel Jason Joy at 20th Century-Fox, informing the studio that All About Eve had been given the necessary certificate of approval. Attached to the letter was Certificate No. 14544.
For each film reviewed by employees of the Production Code, a detailed summation page was drawn up that functioned as a de facto moral index of the film’s content. In the case of All About Eve, this summation page tallies “much drinking.” It also lists “happy ending, in sense that each achieved his or her goal,” and in answer to the question, “Does picture end with promise of marriage or continued love?” the censors wrote “Yes.”
Bette Davis and Gary Merrill must have wished occasionally during the 1950 midsummer that they were back at Fox, where their chief irritant was the disapproval of Celeste Holm. They exhausted themselves dodging reporters and denying rumors that they would marry as soon as they shed their respective spouses. These denials were calculated to keep the estranged Mrs. Merrill and Bette’s estranged husband from gaining undue legal advantage in divorce proceedings. In addition, although Bette and Gary were living together, it was necessary to keep up the wholesome fiction that they were merely “dating.”
Thanks to a quickie divorce granted in Juárez, Mexico, Bette Davis became a free woman on July 4, 1950. Back in Los Angeles, she assumed a distraught expression for waiting reporters at the airport. “No one is very happy, really, about a divorce,” she confided to the press.
In a more straightforward vein, William Sherry told other reporters the same day, “I shall set off a great big firecracker in honor of my own independence.”
On July 27, Barbara Leeds obtained an interlocutory decree in her divorce from Gary Merrill after testifying that he had said he no longer loved her, that he neglected their guests at parties, and that he once told her she “looked like a dog.” Under a financial settlement signed July 26, he promised to pay her $1,000 a month until her death or remarriage.
But the interlocutory decree was a first step only. California law stipulated that the divorce would not become final for a year. And so Gary flew to Juárez, where he also obtained a quickie Mexican divorce early on the morning of July 28. That afternoon, he married Bette Davis.
The ceremony was performed at the home of divorce attorney José Amador y Trias by Judge Raúl Orozco. Bette wore a navy blue dress with white gloves. Gary wore a gabardine suit with a maroon tie. The service was performed in Spanish. After the marriage Bette refused to pose for a photograph kissing her new husband. She had done it before at one or two of her weddings and considered it bad luck.
A few weeks later, two fillers appeared in The New Yorker. Bette preserved both of the wry press slip-ups in a scrapbook:
Orozco, addressing Miss Davis, asked: “Usted, Bette Davis, toma Gary Merrill como su legiti
mo esposo?”
The attorney translated the question: “Do you, Bette Davis, take Gary Merrill for your lawfully wedded husband?”
“eYs,” Miss Davis replied.
—Indianapolis Times
You won’t catch Bette napping.
LIFE IN HOLLYWOOD DEPARTMENT
[Sheilah Graham in the Mirror]:
Bette Davis’s new mate, Gary Merrill, expects his marriage to last five years.
Bette Davis: “An hour after I married him, I knew I had made a terrible mistake.”
Gary Merrill: “The downfall of the marriage was Bette’s stubborn insistence on perfection. She would empty the ashtray before the cigarette was out, and she had the bed made before my feet hit the ground.”
Bette Davis: “The joke was on both of us. I loved making a home for him, but he did not at all like that domestic side of me. He wanted me to be Margo Channing.”
Gary Merrill: “The stars of All About Eve co-opted the movie and lived it out in their off-screen lives. They were already living out the script even before they were signed for the movie. Bette Davis played out the role in our marriage—and Gary Merrill went right along. She had shattered all his dreams with her disdain for everyone’s feelings but her own, her insensitivity, and her humiliating insistence on having her own way. She did not care who was cut down with the sharp scythe of her tongue, she was self-righteous in her desire to be the queen.”
Bette Davis: “Not long after our divorce in nineteen sixty, I ran into Joe Mankiewicz at a party. For years I had been asking him to write a sequel to All About Eve, telling what had happened to Margo and Bill. I said, ‘You can forget about the sequel, Joe. Gary and I played it and it didn’t work.”
* * *
A Flash-Forward
The marriage of Bette Davis and Gary Merrill was tidy in only one respect: It lasted exactly a decade, from 1950 to 1960. Otherwise it was a parade of depressing floats: drunkenness, strife, abuse. We therefore fast-forward to the end, when Bette and Gary toured the country during 1959–60 in “The World of Carl Sandburg.” Life reported late in 1959 that they had so far “brought the show to 21 cities … Using excerpts from the poet’s stories, songs, verses, and jokes, the team puts on a breezy, poetic vaudeville.” Pictures accompanying the feature show the two looking grim and aged beyond their years.
The marriage had ended long before, though the divorce was yet to come. During the tour Gary and Bette scarcely spoke to each other off-stage. In San Francisco they stayed in separate rooms at the same hotel they had occupied during the making of All About Eve.
Even more dispiriting is the sad fact that professionally they had declined, in less than a decade, from the acidulous wit of Mankiewicz to the folksy pieties of Sandburg, the Norman Rockwell of American Literature. The pithiest comment on their endeavor came from an unlikely source.
Ethel Barrymore lay on her deathbed, drifting in and out of consciousness. A friend, uncertain whether she was even awake, tried to rouse her with light conversation. “And you know,” he said, “Bette Davis and Gary Merrill are touring in ‘The World of Carl Sandburg,’ reading his poetry.” Ethel’s eyes flew open. “Thanks for the warning,” she whispered.
Bette’s career during the next three decades, until her death in 1989, includes few of the performances one wants or expects. The public never turned against her, however, and many of her fans dutifully attended the trashy movies and watched the tepid TV dramas in hopes of another comeback. The closest thing to it arrived in 1962, when Bette teamed up with Joan Crawford for the infamous What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Whatever its shortcomings, it’s fixed forever in the Davis canon. Just when she seemed most passé, she gave perhaps the strongest screen performance of the early sixties, a moribund time for old Hollywood but a final electroshock to Bette’s legend.
Gary Merrill didn’t have a legend, and so the countless movies and TV appearances he made after All About Eve are hardly remembered at all. One day about 1965, in a deep depression, he considered jumping from the terrace of his small New York apartment. But he lacked the energy and the courage. He had sunk to the bottom of his life. A few days later, when he turned on the television, he heard familiar voices. All About Eve was on the late show. “I sat and watched it unfold,” Gary recalled in his memoirs. “I hadn’t seen that movie since it first came out, fifteen years before.”
By the time the movie ended, Gary realized that he would never quite know where Margo Channing and Bill Sampson ended and Bette Davis and Gary Merrill began. And it no longer mattered. To Gary, that night in front of the TV, the fault for what went wrong between them seemed mostly Bette’s. “She had totally cut herself off from others. I finally understood why she had chosen The Lonely Life as the title of her book—and she was welcome to it. I began to laugh at the marvelous joke. I felt a sense of liberation when I realized that Bette had been as big a fool as I.”
After their divorce the former lovers rarely crossed paths, though Gary publicly denied the accusations made against Bette by her daughter, B. D. Hyman, in My Mother’s Keeper. Gary Merrill died of lung cancer on March 5, 1990, exactly five months after Bette.
* * *
Chapter 21
You’ll Give the Performance of Your Life
Zanuck’s confidence in All About Eve verging on enthusiasm, he saw no need for audience previews with their questionnaires and dubious suggestions for improving a film. The only screening was for members of the press from Hollywood and around Los Angeles.
* * *
All About Eve and Its Trailers
The studio produced four trailers, one way of signaling exhibitors that this was an important picture. As a signal to theatregoers, three of the four trailers included special material. For example, one opened with this title: “Scoop! Bette Davis Tells Newsweek Magazine All About Eve. Reporter Leonard Slater Interviews Famous Actress on the Set.”
In a contrived interview conducted on a sofa, the stiff reporter says, “Miss Davis, may I have your opinion of her?” Bette’s answer, surprisingly, is entirely the words of Addison DeWitt: “The golden girl, the cover girl. The girl next door [etc.].” She winds up her animated speech with more of Addison’s words: “A contempt for humanity and the inability to love or be loved … insatiable ambition and talent.” (Bette’s pronunciation of those two words, here and in her movies, always sounded like “luff” and “luffed.”)
The one-minute interview is followed by half a dozen lively scenes from the picture, lasting about two minutes.
In a separate trailer, Anne Baxter is interviewed by a different reporter, and Celeste Holm by a third, who asks, “Miss Holm, what was your experience with Eve?” Her saucy reply: “Well, she never fooled me much—just too much. I recognized all her weapons of warfare a little too late. Her beauty—her heartlessness. She had the manners of an ambassador and the morals of a pirate.”
The regular trailer was more formal, beginning with the title, “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Theatre Announces a Motion Picture So Unusual in Quality…”
* * *
These entertainment journalists no doubt arrived at the studio screening room expecting a fairly good picture. The more skeptical among them, however, recalling Bette’s recent flops, weren’t betting on the Davis future. Who could remember the last time she was really good?
The lights went down. Over two hours later, when they went on again, there was a moment of silence. And then it burst out—applause, more and more of it. They began to stand up, and an instant later the most influential movie audience in Southern California was on its feet. The tribute was to All About Eve and everyone responsible for it. But especially Bette Davis. Applause lasted until the room was half empty. By the time they got back to their typewriters, the press had forgotten all about Bette’s last few movies. This new one proved how good she was. It had “Box Office Hit” written all over it.
Soon, the buzz in Hollywood was that All About Eve looked like a masterpiece and that Bette Davis had orchestr
ated the comeback of the year. Everyone in town was eager to see it, but first there was the New York opening. The Hollywood premiere would follow a few weeks later.
The picture opened at the 6,200-seat Roxy, on Seventh Avenue at Fiftieth Street in the Theatre District, on Friday, October 13. No actor would have opened a movie on such an unlucky day, but moguls and businessmen and theatre exhibitors don’t depend on luck. They depend on cash, good reviews, word of mouth, weekend crowds. And fanfare.
The Roxy itself had enough decorative fanfare to upstage most films that played there. Built on a scale to rival Radio City Music Hall, the Roxy could have passed for a tarted-up branch of the Metropolitan Museum. The theatre featured a five-story rotunda large enough to hold 4,000 people, an architectural theme that grafted Renaissance details on Gothic forms with fanciful Moorish overtones, a music library, a set of twenty-one grand chimes weighing 10,000 pounds, fourteen Steinway pianos scattered throughout the theatre, an electrical plant sufficient to serve a town of 25,000, and washroom facilities for 10,000. The theatre’s battalion of ushers, drilled by a former Marine, so impressed Cole Porter that he paid the young men a musical compliment. In “You’re the Top,” one of his witty superlatives is “You’re the pants on a Roxy usher.”
Having chosen this sumptuous setting, Fox attempted a prestigious road-show policy for Eve. Ads in the New York papers, allegedly placed by “the Men and Women of 20th Century-Fox,” explained that “when we first saw All About Eve, we became aware that its utter fascination and charm were immeasurably due to the fact that we were seeing it the only way it should be seen—from the beginning.” Patrons of the Roxy, therefore, would be admitted only at the start of scheduled showings—four a day. Prices started at $1.00 for a 10:30 A.M. weekday show and increased to $2.00 on weekends.
