by Staggs, Sam
Robert Alda, as theatrical agent Allen Loomis, lecturing Lana on how to succeed in the theatre: “If the Dramatists’ Club wants to eat and sleep with you, you will eat and sleep with them. If some producer with a hand as cold as a toad wants to do a painting of you in the nude, you’ll accommodate him, for a very small part.” In this scene it’s not the lines that recall All About Eve but rather the line readings, for Alda’s phrasing and inflections are a pastiche of Bill Sampson’s speech to Eve that begins, “The Theatuh, the Theatuh.”
Lana, at rehearsal in an empty theatre, tells off the agent and also the playwright, though not so memorably as Margo chewing out Lloyd, Bill, and Max when she discovers that Eve is her new understudy. Later on, Lana at her dressing-room table is photographed from the same angle as Margo at hers.
Someone connected with Imitation of Life must have been a die-hard devotee of All About Eve, for there’s even a scene where Lana treats her mink coat like a poncho—as though acting out literally Mankiewicz’s witty dinner-table characterization of Margo Channing the first time he discussed the role with Bette. To round out the string of hommages, there are the inevitable parties—in this case, rather bloodless opening-night affairs where Lana and Company await reviews. It’s “Imitation of Eve,” all right, but Lana as Lora Meredith never wins a Sarah Siddons Award. Even Universal-International and Douglas Sirk couldn’t stretch a point that far.
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The Queen of the Extras
Who is Bess Flowers? Why, Bess is famous in her fashion, at least among connoisseurs of obscure actors and seekers of the recherché. For her brief role in All About Eve, credit is due but none is given. You find her name not on the screen but rather in scholarly lists compiled by passionate cinephiles.
Bess Flowers speaks one line, near the end of the picture when she congratulates the latest winner of the Sarah Siddons Award: “I’m so happy for you, Eve.” (She also appears in two other scenes: We see her on Walter Hampden’s right at the opening awards ceremony, and we glimpse her at Margo’s party.)
Bess Flowers (1900–1984) had a phantom career, for she appeared in hundreds of films and yet in a sense no one really saw her. That’s because she specialized in bit parts and walk-ons. And yet, according to John Springer and Jack Hamilton in They Had Faces Then, she attracted “a cult of her own in the forties and fifties.” If they ever make a film about her it will surely be called “Queen of the Extras,” for that is Flowers’ sobriquet among sharp-eyed film buffs. She appeared, perhaps not so coincidentally, in two fifties movies that owe much to All About Eve: The Bad and the Beautiful and Imitation of Life.
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All About Eve seems to have impressed any number of later dramatists, filmmakers, novelists, critics, cartoonists, drag queens, advertising copywriters, and merchants. Some of those who paid homage—like Gary Carey, author of the 1972 book More About “All Above Eve”—saw it in theatres when it came out. “I was a kid,” Carey recalls, “and I loved the theatre. All About Eve had an enormous impact on me.”
James Baldwin probably wouldn’t have used the phrase “enormous impact,” but he did incorporate a faint echo of Eve. In his best-selling novel Another Country (published in 1962) a character named Jane quarrels with her boyfriend, Vivaldo. Exasperated, Vivaldo says, “You say another word, baby, and I’m going to knock your teeth, both of them, right down your throat.” Baldwin continues: “This profoundly delighted her. She became Bette Davis at once, and shouted at the top of her voice, “Are you threatening me?” (In the movie, Margo shouts from the stage, “Are you threatening me with legal action, Mr. Fabian?”) And Baldwin’s novel, soon after the opening, goes into a long flashback à la Mankiewicz.
How much do Edward Albee’s best plays owe to All About Eve? “Fasten your seat belts” hovers as a potent but unstated epigraph to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; surely there was never a bumpier night than George and Martha’s. Albee’s nod to Bette Davis in that play, however, is not to Eve but rather to Beyond the Forest: One of Martha’s first lines is “What a dump!” Even so, Albee’s polished dialogue and poisonous wit point Evewards, not only in this early work but also across the decades from A Delicate Balance up to his latest success, Three Tall Women.
Who’s Afraid parallels All About Eve in several particulars. For example, the setting of Albee’s play is a drunken party. What’s more, George is younger than Martha and he taunts her about it. (“I’m six years younger than you are. I always have been and I always will be.”) Bill Sampson, of course, is eight years younger than Margo. More specifically, Albee’s play has at least half a dozen lines that match up with the Mankiewicz script either verbatim or in paraphrase, and certainly in tone and rhythm. Tabulated, they look like this:
1. Albee—MARTHA: “His wife’s a mousy little type.…”
Mankiewicz—MARGO: “Oh, the mousy one with the trenchcoat and the funny hat?”
2. Albee—MARTHA: “What do you take me for?”
Mankiewicz—ADDISON: “What do you take me for?”
3. Albee—GEORGE: “Don’t you condescend to me!”
Mankiewicz—MARGO: “Don’t be condescending!”
4. Albee—GEORGE: “Shucks!”
Mankiewicz—MARGO: “Shucks. And I sent my autograph book to the cleaners.”
5. Albee—GEORGE: “In my mind, Martha, you’re buried in cement, right up to your neck.”
Mankiewicz—MARGO: “It is my last wish to be buried sitting up.”
6. Albee—GEORGE: “I will not be made mock of!”
Mankiewicz—MARGO: “I will not calm down!… I will not be tolerated. And I will not be plotted against!”
7. Albee—GEORGE: “You’re spoiled, self-indulgent, dirty-minded, liquor-ridden.…”
Mankiewicz—ADDISON: “You’re maudlin and full of self-pity.”
What does all of this prove? Only that one of Broadway’s best playwrights was well acquainted with the work of one of Hollywood’s best screenwriters. And that Albee had a keen ear for movie dialogue.
Although there’s not a shred of evidence, it’s beguiling to speculate: What if Albee intended George and Martha as Bill Sampson and Margo Channing after they’ve been married for years? Or, if not that, the play might be taken as a typical evening—raucous and alcoholic—with Mr. and Mrs. Gary Merrill.
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If Albee pays elliptical tribute to All About Eve, Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, produced in 1968, throws the movie a nosegay in Act I and another in Act II. Michael, one of the main characters, subverts Margo’s camp line “I detest cheap sentiment” with his ultra-camp version of it: “I adore cheap sentiment.” Later, Michael describes another character this way: “Emory.… dislikes artificial fruit and flowers and coffee grinders made into lamps—and he likes Mabel Mercer, poodles, and All About Eve—the screenplay of which he will recite verbatim.” (The fictitious Emory was based on those real “boys in the band” who memorized chunks of the screenplay and recited it at parties, especially in New York.)
One could argue that Boys in the Band and other plays of its ilk, by and about gays, owe more to All About Eve than mere passing allusions. Various dramas by Edward Albee, Mart Crowley, Terrence McNally, and other playwrights seem not only stylistically but also thematically indebted to Eve. Similarities of style and language are obvious: Many of these plays attempt crisp, bitchy dialogue drawn from real-life gay repartee and filtered through old Hollywood movies. Epigrams, put-downs, good and bad jokes—such talk existed in gay life before Mankiewicz, of course, though Eve was a rich lode that helped crystallize and institutionalize it in later works.
In such Eve-ish dramas, a flamboyant queen—male or female—resembling Margo Channing is set upon by various enemies who may or may not be defeated. For example, Martha in Who’s Afraid; Emory and others in Boys in the Band; the lesbian “George” in The Killing of Sister George; even Maria Callas in McNally’s Master Class.
These works are highly theatrical and often succeed
because of their very staginess. They’re usually well-made plays in which originality is subordinate to the pungent camp, general “Macbethishness,” and, sometimes, lavish sentimentality. The end of Boys in the Band, for instance, is downright maudlin: Michael heads off to “a midnight mass at St. Malachy’s that all the show people go to.”
Charles Ludlam, founder of New York’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company and author of such plays as When Queens Collide, Stage Blood, and Camille, must have subsumed All About Eve along with his other influences: costume dramas, grand opera, penny dreadfuls, the glossy kitsch of pop culture, and especially the movies of Maria Montez. As playwright and actor (often in drag), Ludlam always seemed on the verge of outdoing every diva in history. A critic once wrote that Ludlam’s voice was “an amalgam of Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis, and Tallulah Bankhead on a wet day.” Ludlam himself—who, like Mankiewicz, drew upon Oscar Wilde—uttered this epigram to an interviewer: “It’s not easy to play a woman. I often think it must be hard for a woman to play a woman.” Margo Channing couldn’t have said it better.
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In the early 1960s Eve started to turn up on television. Soon it was a Late Show staple. It became a revival house favorite as well, and by the 1970s a Siamese-twin double bill of All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard played frequently at the Carnegie Hall Cinema and Theatre 80 Saint Marks in New York and in similar movie houses in San Francisco and Los Angeles. All those fans who had memorized the script flocked to these revival theatres again and again, where they recited dialogue in sync with the characters on-screen. They acted—or acted up—right along with Bette. They even upstaged her, for their performances grew so unrestrained you couldn’t hear anything else during long stretches of the movie.
Mankiewicz himself joined in the fun. His last film, Sleuth (1972) has a cast of two: Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. Seven names appear in the credits, however; one of the false cast members is “Eve Channing.” This in-joke is rather arch. Wittier was Mankiewicz’s statement, when Olivier and Caine both ended up in the Oscar race, that he was the only director ever to have his entire cast nominated for Academy Awards.
It was also in 1972 that Mankiewicz tried, rather ignobly, to tamper with another writer’s work. The book in question is More About “All About Eve.” It has the peculiar subtitle A Colloquy by Gary Carey with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Together With His Screenplay “All About Eve.” The odd thing about that subtitle is that it conceals so much—e.g., who the author really is and what the book is about. But in view of the muddle that beset the project, that gauche subtitle (dreamed up by Mankiewicz) seems a fair compromise. I recently asked Gary Carey about it, and this is what he said:
“The plan was to publish a series of important film scripts with introductions, annotations, and the like. The publisher wanted Mankiewicz to write the introduction to All About Eve, but he preferred having another writer interview him. His first choice was Mart Crowley, but Crowley wasn’t interested. I’m not sure why. One reason they approached me was because, a year earlier, for Pauline Kael’s The Citizen Kane Book, I had prepared five pages of notes on the shooting script of Citizen Kane. So the editor recommended me as the interviewer and Mankiewicz agreed.
“The publisher wanted the introductory interview fairly brief, about twenty-five or thirty pages. So I took the train up to Pound Ridge, New York, interviewed Joe, and found him charming. I asked my questions, and he answered them. I wrote it up and it ran to about thirty pages.
“I turned it in and the editor was happy with it. He sent it to Mankiewicz to check. When it came back to me it was at least twice as long, maybe longer. That’s when I realized that he probably didn’t know how to structure this kind of nonfiction. So what I had done was provide the structure. At which point he began to rewrite the dialogue. Specifically, he rewrote his own stuff. He expanded it, changed things around, and the result was that it lost all spontaneity.
“I didn’t object to his rewriting his own statements. Okay, I thought, if that’s the way he wants it—but he had also rewritten mine. And this is where the trouble started.
“Because he had edited the transcript so that I was saying things like, ‘All About Eve is the greatest comedy of manners since School for Scandal.’ I didn’t believe that, and I didn’t want to go on record as saying it. So I made some noise to the editor. He passed along my objections to Mankiewicz, at which point Joe became outraged. He told the editor. ‘If he’s so upset about the whole thing, I’ll take his name off it.’ My response was, ‘Fine, let him have the discussion with himself!’
“What eventually took place was this: A meeting was arranged with Joe, his agent Robert Lantz, and me. It was a breakfast meeting at one of those hotels near Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, maybe the Sherry Netherland, although I’m not sure after all these years.
“It turned out to be pleasant and civilized. Joe was kind of pissed that I wouldn’t go along with what he thought I thought about the movie. But he agreed finally to reinstate my material—to put back what I had originally said in the way I had said it. And that’s all I cared about. I didn’t want to come out looking like a horse’s ass. The restorations were made, which was all I had demanded. Ultimately, I felt that Mankiewicz treated me fairly, though he did everything he could to keep my name out of any publicity about the book. That was fine, too, because I was paid a flat fee and therefore got no royalties. And the book didn’t do very well anyway.
“I ran into Joe a few times in later years at critics’ parties and screenings, and our meetings were cordial. In the end, I came to be amused by the book episode. I learned a lot from it. One of the things it taught me was that I wanted nothing to do with Hollywood.”
And Carey did avoid Hollywood, though in later years he wrote biographies of some of its leading citizens, including Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Judy Holliday, and Louis B. Mayer.
When the book was published, Mankiewicz told a reporter, “I’m a pain in the ass with interviewers. Because too often they take it upon themselves to rephrase me, and if you make your living writing you don’t like to be rewritten in midair, so to speak.” He said he found his own quotes in the first draft “simplistic, skimpy, uninteresting,” and had therefore rewritten them.
Whether one accepts Mankiewicz’s version or Carey’s, the “colloquy” between them speaks for itself. (The word colloquy, chosen by Mankiewicz, is defined by some dictionaries as a conversation that is “formal or mannered.”) In this instance, Mankiewicz’s side of the conversation is not only mannered, it’s baroque. His comments on All About Eve, and his account of the rest of his career, are sometimes fascinating. His lengthy digressions, however, are maddening, and though the book is ostensibly a “biography” of Eve, it’s only through Carey’s clear journalism that the reader gets any of the “who, what, when, and where.” Mankiewicz supplies the “why,” but too often it’s turgid and meandering.
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Mankiewicz at his worst, however, was less turgid than Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the German director who paid him a dubious compliment in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972). One could go mad watching Fassbinder’s films, and madder still trying to locate his “meanings.” And so a brief pause only, to note the letter that lesbian fashion designer Petra Von Kant dictates to her mute secretary, Marlene. The letter is directed to a moneylender named Joseph Mankiewicz. In her silky “professional” voice Petra dictates, “Dear Mankiewicz, dear friend,” then leaves the rest of her message to Marlene’s discretion.
Is this allusion perhaps faintly anti-Semitic—pairing Mankiewicz’s name with an occupation once reserved for Jews, who were in turn condemned for their “sin” of usury? More likely, Fassbinder intended an abstruse compliment.
In 1977 the Canadian film Outrageous! starred chubby Craig Russell as a hairdresser whose night job is impersonating Garland, Streisand, Bankhead, et al., onstage at gay bars. For his first club date Russell wears a scarlet version of Margo Channing’s off-the-shoulders
gown. But instead of “Fasten your seat belts” he starts off with “What a dump!” and from there lapses into Bette-and-Joan shtick from Baby Jane. Surprisingly, his Bette Davis/Margo number is the weakest in his repertoire. He’s much funnier as the other Channing—Carol.
About the same time, but light-years from such drag monkeyshines, Films Inc. (a company that supplied classic movies to various nonprofit groups) put out an All About Eve discussion guide for use by schools, church groups, and cinema clubs. The brochure, written by a professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was entitled Dialogue With the World. A brief introduction of the film ends with forced theological insight: “One of the things we say in the Church about the Crucifixion is that it unmasked evil and showed it for what it really was. In a similar manner, the gradual ‘crucifixion’ of Margo reveals to us the true complexion and inner workings of the evil that makes a god of selfish ambition.” (The closest Margo comes to such deep thoughts is when she likens Eve’s love of the theatre to “all the religions in the world rolled into one, and we’re gods and goddesses.”)
On the last page of its last issue of the 1970s, Esquire in December 1979 ran a full-page caricature of the All About Eve cast, drawn by Edward Sorel. Three cast members were conspicuous by their absence from the cartoon: Thelma Ritter, Hugh Marlowe, and Celeste Holm.
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With each new decade, All About Eve became an increasingly recognizable American—and international—institution. Its characters and its dialogue were so familiar that they began to function as touchstones in the media and as shorthand in the marketplace.
In Evil Under the Sun (1982) Roddy McDowell played Rex Brewster, a prissy gossip columnist who reminded some reviewers of Addison DeWitt.
