by Staggs, Sam
The same could be said of Bette Davis, who had been a gay favorite since she became a star. It was natural that the success of All About Eve should converge with the Davis cult. Margo Channing might have been describing how Bette’s fans viewed Bette when she summed up Eve’s infatuation with the theatre: “All the religions in the world rolled into one, and we’re gods and goddesses.”
But gods and goddesses are remote. Even the commercial deities of Hollywood were elusive, since their newest picture often didn’t stick around long even when it was a hit. Outside of large cities, a film like All About Eve might play for a week or less. Movies weren’t shown on television until the mid-fifties, so those who wanted another crack at a certain picture had to chase it to neighborhood theatres or suburban drive-ins. Once the studio withdrew it from circulation, fans had nothing to rely on but memory. Cult followers of a movie really did need the drive and conviction of religionists.
There were ways, of course, to summon up fragments of the film. Stills gave many movies a lingering half-life, for they appeared not only in fan magazines but also in other national publications and often in local papers, thanks to Hollywood press-agentry. Devoted fans clipped and saved.
Before the concept of paperback “novelizations,” one movie magazine, Screen Stories, retold in prose each month the scenario of five or six of the studios’ biggest new productions. These retellings were illustrated with up to a dozen stills from the films, meaning that fans could revisit these movies provided they kept back issues of the magazine.
Bette Davis preserved the Screen Stories version of All About Eve in one of her scrapbooks. The adaptation covers a big chunk of the plot in this first galloping paragraph: “It was Karen Richards who found her, wide-eyed and tremulous, outside the stage door of the theatre where Margo Channing starred in Lloyd Richard’s play, Aged in Wood. Karen took her backstage to meet Margo after Eve said she hadn’t missed a performance since she came to New York. Stagestruck girls were a dime a dozen, but not girls like Eve. Eve was—different.”
Missing from the magazine layout in that prose condensation of the film is the still that would later become the most famous one from All About Eve and also one of the most immediately recognizable stills from the studio era. It’s the one with Anne Baxter on the left, then Bette, then Marilyn, and finally George Sanders on the far right. Although Screen Stories didn’t use this still in 1950 and other publications foregrounded different ones, a few years later this particular one had become emblematic of All About Eve. As a visual synecdoche, this photograph came to stand for a complex set of codes and cultural assumptions.
Like the Mona Lisa, Whistler’s Mother, and American Gothic, this still has been reproduced so often that, on the surface at least, it has lost some of its charge. But like those paintings, this image seduces the eye because it’s so many things at once: a fetching composition, an unforgettable portrait, an apparent fraction of something vast and meaningful. And like those paintings, it has become the punch line of an in-joke that not everyone gets.
According to Roland Barthes, “The still photo is not a sample but a quotation.” Meaning, presumably, that while a sample represents the whole, a still picture is an autonomous image pulled arbitrarily from a visual text.
Why did this particular image from All About Eve become the film’s virtual trademark? The easiest answer is that it’s the best composed. Of all the actor groupings in the dozens of stills from the movie, this has the best balance. The still photographer on Eve took a lot of stiff photos—the actors look posed; very little movement is implied. Perhaps this was intentional, since the movie was seen as talky and theatrical.
This much-used still also lacks movement. All arms but Bette’s are pointed straight down. George Sanders’ left hand is half-clenched, and Marilyn clutches her dress. But an invisible word seems to hover in the air, almost to jump from mouth to mouth like the marker on a TV sing-along jingle. No one’s mouth is open, yet the photograph resounds with silent dialogue.
Provocative, too, is the angle of the actors’ regard. George and Marilyn gaze at Anne Baxter. Why not at Bette? (Viewing this picture, don’t we assure ourselves that we would choose Bette for our focus?) Bette’s eyes cut toward Marilyn, as if to question her: “Why don’t you look at me?” Anne Baxter, in profile, is perhaps roving her eyes over them all in calculation.
Another possible reason this still became the film’s quasi-official logo is because it “quotes” a crucial plot turn. “This must be, at long last, our formal introduction,” says Addison to Eve just at this point in the film. Without this meeting, they might not have leagued against Margo.
From the way these four eyeball one another, we’re certain they’re having more than just a conversation. A jump from Hollywood all the way to the Italian Renaissance reveals this famous still as a profane parody of a genre—the “sacra conversazione,” or holy conversation—popularized by such masters as Veneziano and Bellini. In a sacra conversazione, the Virgin and Child are flanked on either side by saints who may converse with her, with the beholder, or among themselves.
Our Fox studio master, lacking a virgin, a child, and saints, elected instead to depict in his devotional image three types of female beauty: the unripened, slightly masculine Eve; Margo, past the stage of full bloom; and Miss Caswell, a shimmering blonde bouquet. (Underlining her flowery status is the corsage at her waist. Over her shoulder, Muse-like, is the portrait of Sarah Siddons.) George Sanders is perhaps intended as an epicene nosegay. As ironic punctuation, he and Anne Baxter, portraying characters of ambiguous sexuality, enclose parenthetically the two heterosexual goddesses.
Chapter 26
Real Diamonds in a Wig
As the cult spread, new converts demanded a vulgate that the masses could read. In 1951 Random House published the Mankiewicz shooting script. The author claimed, not quite accurately, that All About Eve was the first screenplay ever published in hardcover.
Even before publication, contraband copies of the script circulated from hand to hand. In New York and other stronghold cities, fans started acting out favorite scenes at cocktail parties. Some of the more zealous learned their lines as well as Bette and others in the actual cast had learned theirs. The difference was that these off-screen line readings added a second, even heavier, layer of camp.
The novelist Joseph Hansen, born in the 1920s and a Bette Davis fan from youth, recalls that the movie “kept circulating to second-run, low-price theatres for at least a year after its first release, and probably even longer.” Asked about gay attendance at these showings, Hansen says, “I suppose every gay guy with a passion for Bette felt wild enthusiasm for the picture from the very beginning. But we couldn’t run out and buy videos in those days.”
All About Eve appealed to other audiences as well. In April 1951, six months after its release, Darryl Zanuck mentioned the “large volume” of letters from habitual non-moviegoers. “Most of them are from people who say they had quit going to film theatres the past four or five years,” he said. “They had seen so many bad pictures that they had lost faith in the quality of screen entertainment. All About Eve may not make as much money as certain other films, but it has reached an audience that has been neglected.”
Not everyone wrote letters of praise, however. J. R. Moser, a member of the Fire Prevention Committee of Evansville, Indiana, was so distressed that he wrote to the National Fire Prevention Association, in Boston, about Bette’s smoking in a particular scene. His letter, dated November 20, 1950, and preserved at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, reads in part:
We have preached and preached not to smoke in bed, yet I viewed a movie last night where movie actors, under the influence of spirits, smoked in bed. This in my opinion encourages smoking in bed, as the public are quick to act on what they see done. I believe it is time we asked the cooperation of studios not to show actors smoking in bed. It is adult delinquency.
This letter reached Melvin Freeman, of the National Fir
e Protection Association, who in turn wrote to the New York office of the MPAA (i.e., the former Hays office, which by 1950 was known as the Johnston office): “The film that Mr. Moser has reference to is All About Eve with Bette Davis. Isn’t there something we can do to see that producers eliminate such sequences in films?”
By January 1951 copies of these two letters had arrived on the desk of Joseph Breen, who replied to his New York colleagues:
In the case of All About Eve, please have in mind that we have no authority, under the provisions of the Production Code, to withhold our approval of a picture because it contains a scene of a woman smoking in bed. When such eliminations are made, they are done voluntarily and willingly by the studio making the picture.
Bette herself probably never got wind of this little controversy. Years later, she talked about smoking as a characterization technique: “I discovered that for a performance a cigarette is a marvelous prop—sometimes for emphasis, sometimes for anger. For so many things. What emotions you can convey merely by putting one out! If I played a character who smoked, I didn’t just take a puff or two in one scene only. I smoked all through the film, as any serious smoker would.”
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The Cigarette Scorecard
Although Bette Davis is Hollywood’s most famous smoker, in All About Eve she meets her match. She smokes nine cigarettes, and Gary Merrill smokes an equal number. George Sanders smokes six, Hugh Marlowe three, Gregory Ratoff two, and Anne Baxter only one—at the end, when Eve makes herself comfortable with Phoebe. Apart from extras in a few scenes, no one else in the movie lights up.
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Later in 1951 a very different kind of controversy was avoided through the vigilance of State Department officials in Washington. Fearful of offending a friendly South American dictator, they persuaded 20th Century-Fox not to enter All About Eve in the International Film Festival held in Montevideo, Uruguay. Variety, in an item titled “All About Little Eva?,” revealed the reason why: “The story of a young film actress who is ruthless in her ambition and willing to step on necks of benefactors in order to get ahead in the theatre might be construed as paralleling the career of Eva Perón, wife of the president of Argentina. Latter lies just across the River Plate from Uruguay. Mme. Perón is a former actress.”
When the film—dubbed in German—opened in Vienna in February, 1952, the studio found itself threatened with a lawsuit. Maria Zeppezauer, daughter of the Viennese playwright Marco Brociner, claimed that All About Eve was plagiarized in part from her late father’s play Behind the Curtain, a local success when it was produced in 1909. The resemblances cited by the plaintiff—an aging female star, a youngster fighting to become famous, the involvement of a theatre critic—seem to have proved too flimsy for a judgment against 20th Century-Fox. Variety reported on March 5, 1952, that Mrs. Zeppezauer had “addressed a letter to the studio, pointing out similarities although she admits the film has differences in details from her father’s work. She stated she will present detailed financial demands later.” The lawsuit died on the vine. Fox’s extant legal files are silent on the matter.
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No Innuendos, Please—We’re Anglo-Saxon
Censorship during the studio era was not limited to Will Hays and his heirs. Local censor boards, in the United States and abroad, made cuts in films as they wished. Here are a few examples from All About Eve.
• In Massachusetts the following bits of dialogue were eliminated:
—“… rear end.” (Ritter)
—“something a girl could make sacrifices for” (Monroe)
—“take my clothes off”; “I consider it highly unnatural … unpregnant understudy”; and “I’m still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut” (Davis)
• In Australia the following exchange was eliminated: Monroe: “Now there’s something a girl could make sacrifices for.” Merrill: “And probably has.” Davis’s line, “A fur coat over a nightgown,” was also cut Down Under.
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* * *
In Britain, the situation was reversed. A 1952 film called It Started in Paradise, featuring Kay Kendall, blatantly borrowed the central theme of All About Eve and applied it to the London fashion world. The movie failed, but Kendall’s performance as a bitchy socialite gave her fledgling career a jump-start.
Hollywood, in the meantime, borrowed liberally from Eve, though subsequent fifties films contained no outright plagiarism. Besides, you can’t copyright a party, and that’s what caught the fancy of later filmmakers. Margo Channing’s welcome home–birthday party for Bill Sampson did for cocktails what Brando did for T-shirts and leather jackets—that is, established an institution.
The party, strictly speaking, is not a cocktail party. As far as we can tell from the movie, it begins long past the cocktail hour, usually defined as five to eight o’clock in the evening. But in the fifties a cocktail party had more cachet than similar social gatherings. (Elsa Maxwell’s Etiquette Book, published in 1951, devotes separate sections to “The Tea Party,” “Buffets,” “Breakfast, Brunch, Luncheon,” and “Cocktail Parties.” As for Hollywood movies, the author might have omitted all but the latter.)
Before All About Eve, cocktail parties in the movies were amorphous. It was liquor that mattered, not the stylishness of its consumption. The camera might follow any actor around the room, not just the star, for the cocktail-party set piece hadn’t yet evolved into a showcase for leading ladies. Near the end of Now, Voyager (1942), there’s a brief, nondescript celebration where cocktails are served, but it’s just that—pre-dinner drinks. In Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman (1947), there’s nothing distinctive about the boozy party scene. What we remember is Susan Hayward tossing them down. Gentleman’s Agreement, also made in 1947, has a demure little gathering where Gregory Peck meets Dorothy McGuire for the first time. It’s so subdued you expect them to sip Shirley Temples.
Mankiewicz might have borrowed two or three minor points from The Velvet Touch (1948), but How to Give a Party wasn’t one of them. In this backstage crime drama Dan Tobin plays an intrusive, epicene gossip columnist who writes “Broadway Chatter”; Rosalind Russell kills her producer with a theatrical trophy named the Player’s Award; and soon after its beginning the story dissolves into a long flashback. At the after-theatre party for great-lady-of-the-stage Rosalind Russell, other members of the cast—Claire Trevor, Leon Ames, Leo Genn—get an equal share of camera attention. At this party, the drinks are barely visible.
But the pattern changed around 1950, when on-screen drinking became more prominent and more sophisticated. No doubt All About Eve helped engineer the shift: Margo’s famous party became a convenient blueprint for movie cocktail parties for the next decade or so.
In 1952 The Bad and the Beautiful copied not only Eve’s flashback structure but Margo’s party sequence as well. If the Minnelli cocktail party mimics All About Eve, so does the rest of the movie—in spirit, if not visually. And certainly not in wit.
Ironically, Mankiewicz’s next soiree—in The Barefoot Contessa—has none of the style and wit of Margo’s party. This later one is a hysterical psychodrama, a Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Hollywood party. It takes place in an expensively ugly Los Angeles house. Among the guests are a self-proclaimed “tramp,” a rather self-righteous director (Bogart), and his “good” fiancée, Elizabeth Sellars, whose look of tight self-approval makes you root for the bad girl. Also on hand are a villainous producer (Warren Stevens) and a South American playboy (Marius Goring) who end up in a shouting match that has some of the lamest dialogue Mankiewicz ever wrote. Apart from its dispiriting badness, the worst thing about this party is that it shows no trace of borrowing from All About Eve. While everyone else in Hollywood was copying him, the only thing Mankiewicz borrowed from Eve was the name of a character. When Ava Gardner, as movie queen Maria Damata, stars in a film called Black Dawn, we see a shot of the marquee at the premiere. Her co-star is named “Lloyd Richards.” (This kind of coy in-joke,
rampant in the nouvelle vague, helped endear The Barefoot Contessa to Truffaut and Godard.)
Even a little throwaway movie like Serenade (1956), with Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine, contains a more stylish cocktail party than The Barefoot Contessa. Directed by Anthony Mann, Serenade is another backstage picture: Mario Lanza rises from the vineyards to operatic success but has romantic trouble when he marries Sarita Montiel (the Spanish Bette Davis) while trying to forget Joan Fontaine. At this Macbethish cocktail party, Fontaine wears a dress that’s a lot like Margo Channing’s. Vincent Price, playing a corrupt half gigolo, half homo derived from Addison DeWitt, filches an Addison line to fling at man-eater Fontaine: “We deserve each other.”
By 1959, when Imitation of Life was released, All About Eve had become the Queen Mother of backstage movies. In Douglas Sirk’s camp masterpiece, Lana Turner—ambitious, seductive, besotted by “the Theatre”—plays Lora Meredith, star of such Broadway hits as Summer Madness, No Greater Glory, Always Laughter, and Happiness. (Did Lloyd Richards come up with these titles? They’re every bit as fruity as Aged in Wood and Footsteps on the Ceiling. The difference is that Mankiewicz’s titles are blatantly tongue-in-cheek.)
The Imitation of Life screenplay (by Eleanore Griffin and Allan Scott) echoes Eve in several scenes. For example, Lana, a widow, telling boyfriend John Gavin about her theatrical beginnings: “My husband was in the theatre, too—a director—a good director. Everything I know, I owe to him. It was a small town, and a little theatre—but professional. When he died, I had to make a living doing something else. I never really wanted anything but the stage.… It took me five years to save enough money to come to New York.” (Eve Harrington, in Margo’s dressing room: “There was a little theatre group there … like a drop of rain on a desert. That’s where I met Eddie.… We played Liliom for three performances.”)
