by Staggs, Sam
It’s demeaning to writers to see their characters pinned wriggling to the wall above a neat label “based on” some real person. That’s one reason Mankiewicz said later, when asked about the Margo–Tallulah connection, that the archetype for Margo Channing was the eighteenth-century English actress Peg Woffington. “I’ve always told the truth about that,” Mankiewicz told an interviewer, “and nobody has ever quite believed me.”
Mankiewicz undoubtedly directed Bette Davis to play certain scenes à la Tallulah. For instance, the one where Margo, arriving late for the audition, encounters Addison DeWitt in the theatre lobby. Addison says, “I refer to your new and unpregnant understudy, Miss Eve Harrington.… Didn’t you know?” Margo answers quickly, “Of course I knew.” But it’s not a Bette Davis line reading. Rather, it sounds like a drag queen doing Tallulah. Bette’s voice drops even lower; she seems to scoop the line up off the floor and throw it at George Sanders. And the words aren’t articulated, they’re carelessly poured out like bourbon at three o’clock in the morning. The line reading is intentionally undisciplined, and very effective. It’s a sign of Mankiewicz’s subtlety that he had Bette “do” Tallulah just this once, fast but with poisonous accuracy.
In the writing, however, he used the Bankhead household as a paradigm.
If Margo Channing—how she walks, talks, sleeps, thinks, drinks—resembles not only Bankhead but a bevy of other actresses as well, certain details of Margo’s living arrangements are less generic. After all, Mankiewicz knew the gossip. Actresses fascinated him, and so did the theatre. As a show-business insider and a connoisseur of scuttlebutt, there was little he didn’t hear.
He would have known all about Edie, for instance. Edie Smith became a devoted fan when Tallulah first appeared on the London stage in the twenties. According to a Bankhead biographer, “When Tallulah decided that she needed a live-in right hand, she invited Edie to work for her. Edie agreed. In no time at all, Tallulah was totally dependent on her new friend and factotum.” (In the script, Mankiewicz wrote: “That same night we sent for Eve’s things, her few pitiful possessions.… Eve became my sister, lawyer, mother, friend, psychiatrist, and cop.”)
Edie Smith, fortunately, had no designs on Tallulah’s career. That’s perhaps the reason she lasted some thirty years. “As scripts arrived, they were placed atop a monumental pile of similar entries which Tallulah never touched. Edie screened them and passed them on to Tallulah if they seemed suitable for her hybrid, hothouse talents.” (Mankiewicz’s script: “There’s the script to go back to the Guild.… It seems I can’t think of a thing you haven’t thought of, Eve.”)
If Edie Smith, devoted friend and handmaiden, served Tallulah as half Eve Harrington and half Birdie Coonan, Dola Cavendish was Bankhead’s Birdie with a million bucks but without the sassy comebacks. According to another biographer, Dennis Brian, “Dola was a wealthy Canadian who behaved as though Tallulah was the Empress of the British Empire and she, Dola, a humble and adoring subject.” (Margo Channing to Eve Harrington: “And please stop acting as if I were the Queen Mother.”) Brian said, “Tallulah never traveled with a pocketbook—emulating the Queen of England—but had Dola trailing after her carrying the petty cash.”
Dola, too, took a shine to Tallulah in London in the twenties. Too shy to wangle an invitation to meet her idol, Dola instead queried mutual acquaintances, “Can I help her in any way? Does she need any money?” It was Tallulah who finally insisted on an introduction to her mysterious benefactress. (Eve: “I’d like anything Miss Channing played in.” Margo: “Would you, really? How sweet.”)
Back in North America, Dola eventually moved into Tallulah’s house. “She shopped, helped with the mail, traveled with Tallulah, ran Tallulah’s morning tub, scrambled eggs for her at three o’clock in the morning, and listened adoringly when the actress, who was experiencing an increasing amount of difficulty falling asleep at night, wanted somebody to talk to until dawn.” (Birdie: “I haven’t got a union. I’m slave labor.”)
Tallulah, famously pan-sexual, seemed content not to awaken Dola’s dormant lesbianism. “I know what people think,” she told a friend, “but I’ve never even seen Dola in a slip.”
The household occasionally grew tense when Dola, or Edie, felt undermined by the other’s attempt to take over functions that belonged to her. (Margo: “Birdie, you don’t like Eve, do you?” Birdie: “You want an argument or an answer?”)
Dola and Tallulah spent forty years together, separated eventually by Dola’s death in 1966. Two years later Tallulah died.
Mankiewicz may also have borrowed from Tallulah to fashion Eve’s career. Phoebe, the high-school girl who sneaks into Eve’s apartment the night Eve wins the Sarah Siddons Award, tells her idol: “You know the Eve Harrington Clubs they have in most of the girls’ high schools? Ours was the first. Erasmus Hall. I’m the president.”
This strikes a false note to American ears, since fan clubs in the United States have always been devoted to film stars. But a similar, all-girl following sprang up around Tallulah in London. During the ten-month run of The Dancers in 1923, a fanatical claque of some two dozen Cockney girls, most of them in their late teens, cheered Tallulah’s performances from the gallery. They attended every possible performance and waited for her as she entered and left the theatre. Tallulah, only a few years older than they, was soon on a first-name basis with the gallery girls.
According to Lee Israel, “By the time Tallulah opened in Scotch Mist in 1926, she had amassed a gallery following more loyal, fervid, and numerous than any star in London. There were now hundreds of these girls; tailoresses, laundresses, clerks. On an opening night of Tallulah’s, they queued for blocks, waiting for their chance to crowd into the overheated gallery section, which comprised backless, hard tiers of pews.”
Mankiewicz may have had these Tallulah groupies in mind when he made All About Eve. In populating the film, he perhaps drew not only on Elisabeth Bergner and her “terrible girl” but also on Tallulah and her seraglio. For isn’t Margo’s household, at the beginning of the movie and for some time thereafter, an all-female ménage where even Bill Sampson, as Margo sharply reminds him, is a guest and not a director? (Are we meant to infer that in her house he’s also the erotic director only when she says so?)
Margo and Birdie live under the same roof in wisecracking domesticity. Margo’s big life demands minions, of whom Birdie—formerly “a fifth-rate vaudevillian”—is chief and indeed the only visible one until the advent of Eve. The collapse of vaudeville seems to have washed Birdie onto the shores of Margo, where she ingratiated herself as dresser, sidekick, friend, and maid-of-all-work. The two women are together all the time—at home and at the theatre.
Maybe that’s because Birdie is Margo’s closest link with reality. Only she can deflate that star ego with impunity. Their arrangement echoes Tallulah and Estelle Winwood, whose friendship endured for decades. Winwood, twenty years older than Bankhead, was a disciplined character actress who possessed the common sense that Tallulah lacked. (She reportedly also flushed Tallulah’s cocaine down the toilet every chance she got.) Although Winwood was married at various times during her long life, and Tallulah stayed married for a few years, they were often paired as lovers. Whether they were or not, Winwood moved in with Tallulah for several years during the forties.
Margo and Birdie, we assume, have been happily together for ages, since they know each other so well. Then Margo takes in Eve. Suddenly Margo’s house turns into a ménage à trois. Or, more ambiguously, a marriage of actresses. Birdie mistrusts Eve from the first, and as Eve gains favor with Margo, Birdie’s displeasure grows. Why doesn’t Birdie move out?
Because dramatically this marriage of thespians—Birdie the has-been, Margo at the zenith but on her way down, the ascendant Eve—is Mankiewicz’s triptych of the Three Ages of the Actress. It’s also his parody of the Three Graces.
Such a matchup flings open all sorts of archetypal doors: Birdie, though female, assumes the role that Josep
h Campbell labels “the Wise Old Man of myths and fairy tales, whose words assist the hero through the trials and terrors of the weird adventure.” Part of Margo’s weird adventure is turning forty. Meaning middle age, menopause, loss of ability to play Lloyd’s characters like Cora, who is “still a girl of twenty.” (Mankiewicz once referred to Margo’s crisis as a “professional menopause.”)
This is Margo Channing’s Long Dark Cocktail Party of the Soul. Suddenly beset by doubt and danger, she must undergo harrowing rites of passage. In Campbell’s words, these rites “occupy a prominent place in the life of a primitive society.” What society—in the eyes of Mankiewicz—could be more primitive than the theatre?
Folk mythologies, we read in learned books, populate every wild and unsure spot outside the normal traffic of the village with destructive and deceitful presences. Meet Eve Harrington. “The figure of the Tyrant-Monster,” to quote Joseph Campbell once more, is “self-terrorized, fear-haunted … the world’s messenger of disaster … with uncontrollable impulses to acquisition.” Eve, we recall, wreaks havoc in her drive for a part in a play.
But 20th Century-Fox in 1950 was hardly the right milieu for these Jungian snipe hunts. Mythic woolgathering never made a buck, and so perhaps it’s best to discard such airy speculations. Or, to adapt a Freudian adage to the matter at hand, sometimes an understudy is just an understudy.
Archetypes to one side, it’s true that Joe Mankiewicz had a way with actresses. Although George Cukor is Hollywood’s most famous “women’s director,” Mankiewicz is certainly a contender for the title. In Mankiewicz films, actresses often give better performances than actors. Starting with Gene Tierney in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, through the distaff cast of A Letter to Three Wives and Eve, and including some of his worst movies—The Barefoot Contessa, Suddenly Last Summer—the women come out ahead. Ava Gardner is the only good thing in The Barefoot Contessa. Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn, intentionally or not, achieve camp apotheosis at the hands of Mankiewicz in Suddenly Last Summer. In Cleopatra, he almost salvages Taylor. In fact, he comes close a number of times to salvaging the whole picture.
Apart from George Sanders in Eve and Brando, James Mason, and Gielgud in Julius Caesar, how many actors performed with great distinction in Mankiewicz films?
Asked by an interviewer whether, as a writer, he was more attracted to women and their problems, Mankiewicz answered, “I’m well-nigh besotted by them. Writing about men is so limited. Men react as they’re taught to react. Women are, by comparison, as if assembled by the wind.”
On the set of All About Eve, the editor Barbara McLean said to Mankiewicz, “You have a wonderful understanding of women. How do you know so much about them?” His answer: “What do you mean, how do I know so much about women? Because I live with them.”
Chapter 24
I Could Watch You Play That Scene a Thousand Times
In 1950, when Mankiewicz made that statement, he was married to the Austrian actress Rosa Stradner, his second wife. (After her death in 1958, he would marry once more.) Mankiewicz had also “lived with” women via numerous love affairs. Among his ex-girlfriends were Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Linda Darnell. It’s likely, though, that his answer to Barbara McLean also implied the women he lived with in literature.
“Literature” in this context includes movies, radio, and television, hit plays, magazines, and other forms of pop culture. Mankiewicz, as author of the All About Eve script and also as auteur of the film, was a practioner of literary craft in every sense of the word. His work, at its best, was worthy of comparison with that of leading novelists and playwrights of his time. He probably knew this, but in 1950 who would dare suggest what Brad Radnitz, president of the Writers Guild of America, West, stated so boldly in a 1997 interview: “The screenplay is the form of literature that has supplanted the novel in this century”?
Whether this new genre has really ousted the novel is open to long debate. Perhaps it’s safer, if less theatrical, to say that screenplays, and the movies made from them, have fused the novel and the drama, mixing in opera, dance, the circus, commedia dell’arte, and various earlier entertainments. This gallimaufry began in the 1890s with the first tentative films. By 1950 that new genre, the screenplay, could claim a small library of excellent writing. At its best, a shapely and polished script might achieve as much as any other written text. In the hands of a brilliant few it brought glory to the screen.
Mankiewicz, with All About Eve, matched anything in the pantheon of classic screenplays: Citizen Kane, by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles; Casablanca, by Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch; the joint screenplays of Billy Wilder and his various collaborators. The list of such works is small, but they’re so potent that they do indeed threaten to overwhelm the standard novel. And not only the novel, but plays and other traditional genres as well.
If we look for a movie masterpiece, we usually mean an entertaining story with memorable characters played by attractive or otherwise absorbing actors. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The story also has a point, which is not the same thing as a message or a moral. And the movie maintains the right rhythm for its material. When it’s over, we feel as though we’ve seen a movie and not a movie-of-the-week.
All About Eve meets these criteria. What the film isn’t, however, also counts. If we circle this movie as though viewing a piece of sculpture from behind, the changed angle privileges Eve’s negative properties. We see, so to speak, what isn’t there.
This is not a family movie; it’s strictly for grown-ups. Kids didn’t go for it then and they still don’t. It’s not corny or titillating or obvious like so many movies of its time, nor does it contain moral uplift. It has a bit of cheap sentiment—“You’re an improbable person, Eve, and so am I.… We deserve each other”—but not much. In no sense is All About Eve a mystery or a film noir, nor is it romantic except in the most astringent sense of that word. And it isn’t political, unless we read Eve’s treachery and deceit as a veiled allusion to conspiracies and witch-hunts of the time.
Thus the rear perspective. But in front, the normal viewing position, what do we find to account for this movie’s freshness? It’s one of the least dated films of the studio era. Even now, every time we watch it, we the audience tacitly repeat to the entire cast what Eve tells Margo early on: “I could watch you play that scene a thousand times.”
Another criterion for a movie masterpiece is that it have not only a text, but also a subtext. Or, in the words of film scholar Bernard Dick, “There is the film projected on the screen and the film projected from the screen. The first is the text—the collaboration between a director, a screenwriter, a cast, and a crew; the second is the subtext—the harmonization of the text and the associations it evokes in us.” In other words, we locate the subtext somewhere between ourselves and the screen.
Movies have always been layered with meaning. A film’s text—that is, its most obvious meaning and appeal—is often what reviewers and audiences respond to at first. Later on come explorations of the world below the surface, the subtextual tiers of a film’s visual and verbal content.
First the text.
All About Eve opened to loud applause. Following its premiere at the Roxy Theatre all eight of New York’s daily papers showered it with praise. Newsweek wrote that “Hollywood, in considering a theme so close to home, has maintained a highly literate and adult attitude.” Time considered it “probably Hollywood’s closest original approach to the bite, sheen, and wisdom of high comedy,” while Look proclaimed it “the most literate film of the year.”
Further afield, Good Housekeeping reviewed it from the rather poignant angle of America’s powerless wives: “The story of how an older actress, in the autumn of her fame, is succeeded by a younger woman … All About Eve dramatizes with insight, humor, and a bitter kind of sympathy, the fear every woman has of a rival whose weapon is youth.”
Christian Century, geared to mainstream Protestant readers, commended t
he film’s “discerning view of human nature and the theatre.” The review ended with this caveat: “Considerable drinking.”
In the days before thumbs decided a new film’s merit, newspapers across the country spread the excitement about Eve. But when it opened in Britain in December 1950, the reception was more restrained. Richard Winnington, for example, a critic for the News Chronicle in London, found Eve “disappointing” compared to A Letter to Three Wives. He noted, however, that the “stream of juicy epigrammatic wisecracks relating to the theatre had all the actors at the preview audience in fits.”
The French title was simply Eve. According to François Truffaut, “the fashionable viewers” made it a hit in Paris. A few years later Truffaut heard these same fashionable audiences hiss at La Comtesse aux pieds nus—The Barefoot Contessa—on the Champs-Elysées. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, writing in Cahiers du Cinéma, observed that “Mankiewicz only pretends to attack the theatre and its milieux, but it’s really a lovers’ quarrel.”
Eve was honored at the Cannes Film Festival. Dubbed into various languages, it won prizes from Cuba to Japan. Back in Hollywood, Hedda Hopper summed up industry opinion when she headlined a Davis profile, COMEBACK IN “EVE” PROVES BETTE’S STILL FILM QUEEN.
For a while in the fifties, All About Eve was famous mainly as a star vehicle that put Davis back in her rightful place. It was noteworthy also as a film that got a bunch of nominations and won half a dozen Oscars, and as the picture that boosted Marilyn Monroe, although no reviewer at the time even mentioned her performance. In the movie industry, it was seen as fierce studio competition for television.
* * *
A Place Out of the Sun
The oldest member of the cast in All About Eve was the first to die. On June 9, 1955, Walter Hampden, the “Aged Actor” who presents Eve Harrington with the Sarah Siddons Award, suffered a stroke in a taxicab en route to MGM. He died two days later, at the age of seventy-five.
