by Staggs, Sam
Evan: “Bette’s line in the dressing room, ‘Lloyd, honey, be a playwright with guts. Write me one about a nice, normal woman who just shoots her husband’—Is this an in-joke about Bette in The Letter, where the movie opens with her doing precisely that—shooting her husband?”
Robert: “And the heated exchange between Bette Davis and Hugh Marlowe about actors having to rewrite and rethink the playwright’s words to keep the audience from leaving the theatre—did Mankiewicz write that line with Bette herself in mind?”
Sam: “It could have been a sly Mankiewicz allusion to Bette’s reputation for rewriting dialogue that didn’t please her. But she never tried to rewrite Mankiewicz. He wouldn’t have stood for it, and since she loved his script there was no reason to try.”
Tim: “Margo, at the airport, wears only one earring because she was unable to locate the other one in her dressing room. That was thirty years before men—gay and straight—took up the earring fad.”
Joe: “I like that scene in the bedroom where they’re talking about fur coats. It’s not vital to the movie but it conveys Broadway opinion of Hollywood success.”
Evan: “Margo’s crack about the movie actress who has just arrived—‘Shucks, and I sent my autograph book to the cleaners’—perhaps reflects her bitterness at being overlooked by the movie studios. Bill has just directed a film in Hollywood; Eve will soon get a flood of offers. But Margo not at all.”
Gary: “For me the best part of the movie is when Bette Davis really becomes Bette Davis. At the cocktail party when she starts to get bitchy and nasty. That’s when the movie takes off.”
Glenn: “She played Margo Channing as a very complex character, while in many of her other movies she didn’t bring in the nuances that we see here.”
Robert: “Here she’s vulnerable, unlike the Margo Channing you see portrayed by drag queens. They do her as a hard-edged bitch. They seize on that aspect of the character. But if you pay close attention to Bette’s performance, Margo is more sinned against than sinning.”
Evan: “In Hollywood, during the thirties, forties, and fifties, the easiest way to make a joke about a woman’s age was to refer to the Civil War. For example, Bill says to Margo, ‘I’ve always denied the legend that you were in Our American Cousin the night Lincoln was shot.’ In Dinner at Eight there’s a similar reference to Marie Dressler’s advancing years.”
Sam: “Is Eve Harrington too evil?”
Evan: “The thing that keeps her from being so is that she is obviously a talented actress.”
Sam: “She’s never seen onstage, so how do we know?”
Evan: “Because Eve’s colleagues are astute observers of the theatre, right? You’ve got a playwright, a director, a critic—all three consider her a fine actress.”
Steve: “Do you think Addison DeWitt compliments and flatters Eve just to get at Margo?”
Glenn: “Addison likes that crowd. Margo’s crowd. He attends the cocktail party even though Margo says, ‘I distinctly remember, Addison, crossing you off my guest list.’”
Sam: “One criticism often leveled at Mankiewicz is that the smart people in Margo’s set would never have fallen for Eve’s manipulation and deceit. They would have seen through her right away.”
Glenn: “The audience is privy to her schemes before the other characters are.”
Gary: “Her deception is very subtle at first. It rises to a crescendo later, but in the beginning she seems genuine.”
Sam: “And theatre people can indeed be taken in by just the right kind of flattery. Think of Elisabeth Bergner.”
Glenn: “When Margo says, ‘Amen’ as Addison and Eve stroll away together at the party, what does she mean?”
Evan: “The word Amen is used at the end of a prayer or a statement to express approval. Margo seems to mean, ‘They are two of a kind; so be it. Let them scheme their evil schemes together.’”
Steve: “Just before that, when Addison sneers, ‘Dear Margo, you were an unforgettable Peter Pan—you must play it again, soon.’ What does he mean?”
Evan: “It’s a dig about her age. Peter Pan was ever youthful; Margo isn’t.”
Robert: “Karen’s remark about ‘That boot in the rear to Margo. Heaven knows she had one coming.… We’d all felt those size-fives of hers often enough.’ Just what is the literal meaning?”
Brian: “‘Size-fives’ refers to Margo’s shoe size. Meaning she had kicked all of them in the butt at one time or another. Or given them a ‘boot in the rear,’ to use Karen’s genteel phrase.”
Robert: “Does Eve have lesbian designs on Margo?”
Sam: “Wouldn’t you, if you were a lesbian?”
Chapter 25
Tell That to Dr. Freud Along With the Rest of It
Eve’s designs on Margo, if that’s what they are, never emerge, although the scene on the stairs hints that they exist.
MARGO
Put me to bed? Take my clothes off, hold my head, tuck me in, turn out the lights, and tiptoe out.… Eve would. Wouldn’t you, Eve?
EVE
If you’d like.
MARGO
I wouldn’t like!
If Eve’s acceptance of Margo’s “proposition” implies lesbianism, it’s Margo, ironically, who plays it like a bull dyke. Her point is this: Leave me alone, sister; tonight it’s Bill I’m after. When she’s drunk, Margo turns into a dominatrix with a tongue like a whip.
Earlier, Margo was not so dismissive. Less than an hour after Bill’s departure for California, she moved a stranger—Eve Harrington—into her house. “That same night, we sent for Eve’s things.… The next three weeks were out of a fairy tale, and I was Cinderella in the last act.… The honeymoon was on.”
This part of Margo’s voice-over narration suggests a great deal. For one thing, this is not how you hire an assistant; it’s how you start a love affair. Such haste, alas, leads to disaster, as it nearly did for Margo. But beginning that night, “the honeymoon was on,” since Margo Channing, like Cinderella in the last act, had found her “prince.” (And they lived happily for the next month or so, until Bill’s picture wrapped and he returned to New York.) How could Mankiewicz not have meant us to read Margo’s bisexuality from these clues? Maybe Bankhead’s, too; maybe everybody’s. After all, he had devoured Freud, and he lived in Hollywood.
Eve, of course, will sleep with anyone to boost her career. She beds both Addison and Lloyd, and makes a pass at Bill. Such expediency, however, doesn’t necessarily make her bisexual. Away from the theatre, she chooses women. She has a girlfriend at the rooming house, and in the final sequence she takes in Phoebe, the devious young fan, for the night. Or so it’s hinted. The lines, and the line readings, are suggestive. Eve says, “You won’t get home till all hours,” and Phoebe replies, “I don’t care if I never get home.”
Addison DeWitt—partially based on Mankiewicz, remember—is nobody’s fool, least of all Eve’s. Except for Birdie, he’s the only one who never falls for Eve’s deception. In these lines from the “Temporary Script” of March 1, 1950 (some later deleted—the deletions are shown in italics), Addison practically “outs” his protegée as they stroll down the street in New Haven:
ADDISON
Tomorrow morning, you will have your beachhead on the shores of Immortality.
EVE
Stop rehearsing your column.
ADDISON
I understand Eisenhower had a bad case of opening night jitters.
EVE
Isn’t it strange, Addison. I thought I’d be panic-stricken. Run away or something.
ADDISON
Eisenhower isn’t half the man you are.
These loaded references to General Eisenhower and the Normandy invasion are superfluous because Mankiewicz implies Eve’s masculinity in a number of scenes. The first tip-off comes when she emerges from the shadows in the theatre alley and calls out to Karen Richards in a voice from her lowest register. It’s almost a growl. Beginning with her next line, however, Eve speaks i
n a creamier, more feminine voice. From then on, she uses polished, actressy tones in the presence of her theatre friends. And she always speaks to Margo in her top register, her highest, most girlish pitch. Only in private—e.g., in her apartment in the final scenes—does Eve use her deeper “real” voice. Speaking to Phoebe, her young admirer, she sounds husky, rough-edged, aroused.
In a sense Anne Baxter read her lines as though she were singing opera: from lower register all the way to top notes. As Eve, she accomplished a diva’s feat. Her voice rose from contralto, through mezzo, all the way to soprano, and at each step she colored it to express the character’s deceit.
It was undoubtedly Mankiewicz who devised this vocal subtlety, since he loved opera as he loved all things theatrical. (The only time he ever directed for the stage was a 1952 production of La Bohème at the Metropolitan Opera, with Patrice Munsel, Richard Tucker, and Robert Merrill.) Our only real clue, however, to the source of Anne Baxter’s vocal virtuosity in Eve comes from Tom Mankiewicz, the director’s son. “One of Anne’s greatest line readings,” he says, “is only two words. It comes at the end, when Phoebe says to her, ‘You’re going to Hollywood, aren’t you? From the trunks you’re packing, you must be going to stay a long time.’ And Eve answers, ‘I might.’ There is this thing in the way she says ‘I might’—you just know she’ll stay forever, that she’s never coming back to the theatre, even though she said in her acceptance speech that her heart would remain there, on Broadway.”
Tom Mankiewicz says he once discussed this line reading with Anne Baxter. She told him it was carefully rehearsed and completely intentional. Mankiewicz used a similar directorial device in Sleuth, his last film. He said, “I wanted Michael Caine to use his accent the way a violinist plays his instrument. Throughout the film I had him modulate his accent from upper crust to Cockney, according to the tension in a particular scene.”
Besides vocal clues to her sexual preference, there is also the matter of Eve’s costumes. In the theatre alley, where she accosts Karen Richards, Eve wears a drab outfit—as Margo puts it, she’s “the mousy one with the trench coat and the funny hat.” Some viewers see this get-up as boyish or tomboyish; others find it sexless. Vito Russo, in The Celluloid Closet, describes Eve in this early scene as “a sort of malevolent Huck Finn.”
To viewers in 1950, it’s likely that the trenchcoat and rain hat seemed natural. After all, it was a rainy night. (Some ladies in the audience, as well as furriers, might have pondered instead how Karen Richards would ever get her mink coat dry.)
And what about those bathrobes worn by Eve and her rooming house friend who makes the late-night call to Lloyd Richards? In Hollywood movies of the time, female boudoir apparel—nightgowns, robes, negligees—were used to bootleg a bit of sex and skin into a scene. (Celeste Holm is in a sheer nightie when she answers her bedside phone late at night.) But not here. Eve’s bathrobe, and her friend’s, reach to the neck, with no frills. In movie code of the time, such plainness would suggest an incomplete femininity. The scene’s harsh lighting also suggests something “unnatural” about Eve.
After the phone call she beams at the girlfriend. The smile could signal either “Let’s go to bed” or “Let’s go back to bed.” Whereupon Eve opens her arms in embrace, and they mount the stairs. But Lloyd Richards is on his way over. For Eve, it’s a bustling night—as lesbian and as thespian.
Randy Stuart, as the girlfriend, played her brief role entirely in right profile. It’s therefore surprising to see her full face in photos and in later movies such as Room for One More (1952) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). She had a Piper Laurie kind of cuteness, which helped her get a Fox contract in 1943, when she was nineteen. But she was a pro already, having grown up in a theatrical family.
In the forties she was a member of Jack Carson’s radio show, appearing regularly as “The Hubba Hubba Girl.” In the fifties she had a recurring role on TV in Wyatt Earp and a returning role as Harry Morgan’s wife on Dragnet. She died in 1996 at the age of seventy-two, remembered, if at all, for her bit part in All About Eve. Was she photographed in profile because the camera favored one side of her face, or because, playing a crypto-Sapphist, she was seen as only half a woman?
From so many clues, vocal and visual, the audience was surely meant to infer something about lesbianism. Not the entire audience, of course, and not necessarily at a conscious level. But Mankiewicz the Freudian wrote, dressed, and directed Eve Harrington as more than just a “contemptible little worm”—Karen’s epithet. To him, she qualified for the archetype of the Killer Lesbian. (Years later, Mankiewicz was still getting mail that asked whether Eve had lesbian tendencies. “Absolutely!” he told an interviewer in 1980.)
It’s a grim joke that we learn “all about Eve” except who she really is. We’re left to guess her psychological structure from the clues we’re able to read. And many clues are homosexual, as they are with “that venomous fishwife, Addison DeWitt.” What Mankiewicz does reveal—Eve the deadly lesbian—now strikes us as retrograde.
But we shouldn’t judge Mankiewicz too severely. He was progressive even to encode the subject of homosexuality in the film. It’s important to realize, too, that he handled Eve’s lesbianism as neither funny nor shameful, nor frightening. We dislike her because she’s “little Miss Evil.” Whether that was intended as cause and effect—sexual deviance equals iniquity—is another matter, a subject for political debate. Mankiewicz, hewing to the psychoanalytic party line, half condemns and half bemoans the sad state of deviants via Addison’s lecture: “You’re an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common. Also a contempt for humanity, an inability to love and be loved … We deserve each other.” This view of homosexuality prevailed in medical and psychiatric textbooks of the time, and in books for the general reader.
But Mankiewicz broke with Hollywood tradition, and with American literary tradition, in one important way: The lesbian doesn’t die at the end. By contrast, just two years earlier Gore Vidal, one of the boldest pre-Stonewall gay writers, had the homosexual protagonist of The City and the Pillar kill his lover. Death to deviants was everywhere de rigueur.
If Mankiewicz beamed a ray of enlightenment from the screen with All About Eve, he later regressed. In 1958, in league with Vidal and Tennessee Williams on Suddenly, Last Summer, he filmed one of the screen’s most horrific gay deaths: Sebastian Venable killed and eaten by youths. Although Eve Harrington is about to be symbolically consumed by young Phoebe, the closest she comes to such literal devastation is when Margo threatens to “stuff that pathetic little lost lamb down Mr. DeWitt’s ugly throat.”
This is the most violent line in the film. As such, it vibrates with a kind of crude, brutal poetry. That’s one reason it’s disturbing. Another reason is that it suggests sexual violence by choking. We flash forward to Sebastian Venable’s flesh crammed down young throats. Involuntarily we recall a grisly panorama out of Hollywood Babylon, including the fellatio death of F. W. Murnau and the murderous dildo shoved into Ramon Novarro’s mouth by the hustlers who killed him. Margo’s line could have been written for Dirty Harry.
The line is crude because it’s so naked. It’s also blunt and ungraceful. Why, then, is it poetic in any sense? Because of its contradictory layers of meaning: a lamb, the emblem of innocence, is equated with Eve, “little Miss Evil.” Also because one of the dictionary definitions of “lamb” is “the flesh of a young sheep used as meat.” The word pathetic, which has come to mean, among other things, “emotionally moving,” originally had the stronger sense of “liable to suffer.” And the phrase ugly throat connotes something grotesque and diseased. Suddenly Margo has turned into a bacchante, a flesh-tearing handmaiden of Bacchus. She has regressed from Lloyd Richards to Euripides.
Pushed to its limit, the line is full of venom. In fact, it’s more punishing than anything written by Addison DeWitt in his column. After all, Addison surely told the truth about Margo and other “mature actresses” who continue playing yout
hful roles far longer than they should. Cruel, yes. But cruelty is part of a critic’s job description.
Addison’s column is reprehensible not for its candor but because of his motivation: he attacks Margo to boost Eve, his new trick. But how to explain Mankiewicz’s severity in writing the line about “Mr. DeWitt’s ugly throat”?
Mankiewicz himself might have explained it in Freudian terms. Having based Addison partially on himself, and writing the character as a foppish pseudo-fairy, the author must symbolically strangle his epicene creation. In other words, Addison étouffée. How? By stuffing a lesbian down his throat. But, to quote another sardonic line from Margo, “Tell that to Dr. Freud along with the rest of it!”
* * *
All of these slippery subtexts have some bearing on what Mankiewicz intended in All About Eve. But one reason it remains a fascinating film is that it eludes any one definitive reading. The more times you see it, the more loaded it seems with possible meanings. Conversely, it belies many of our projections. How can we not feel a bit foolish, poring over it as though it were Holy Writ?
Mankiewicz himself was dismissive of such endeavors. “I’m not prepared to say film is an art. I don’t know any films that are going to be around two hundred years from now. In Hollywood of the forties and fifties we had no illusion about what we were doing: turning out entertainment for the public.”
He was so right, at least the part about entertainment. All About Eve is indeed one of the most entertaining movies ever made, but to those long-ago gays who first elevated it to cult status it soared beyond entertainment. Watching it again and again, they began to venerate it. Not as a shrine to thwarted romance, like Casablanca, nor as a chapel erected to preserve vanished childhood, like The Wizard of Oz. Instead, Eve soon evolved into a rather raucous refuge from the anti-queer pogroms of cold-war America.
Its patroness was Saint Margo. Her very name comes from a Greek word meaning “pearl,” and to the sexually disenfranchised she was, from the start, a pearl of great price. Cultured, yes, but like that grain of sand in the oyster, always an irritant.
