by Staggs, Sam
Not long after that, when Joan Collins was guest of honor on Dean Martin’s televised Celebrity Roast, Anne Baxter appeared not so much to skewer Joan as to contribute a note of civility to an evening of cruel put-downs. Baxter pointed out that Alexis Carrington, whom Collins portrayed on Dynasty, had learned some lessons in villainy from Eve Harrington. Baxter added that the two characters’ names even echoed each other.
Alan Rudolph’s 1984 film Choose Me is sprinkled with sly allusions to Eve. The first shot in the movie is a neon sign of “Eve’s Lounge,” owned and operated by Eve (Lesley Ann Warren.) A bit later, Warren utters an “Oh, brother” with a Thelma Ritter inflection; there is a character named Max; and in Rae Dawn Chong’s apartment the camera pans posters from many movies, including All About Eve. Scraps of dialogue seem to have mutated from the Mankiewicz script, as when Chong says to Warren, “I’m telling you, Eve—woman to woman.” (Addison DeWitt and Eve Harrington talk “champion to champion” and “killer to killer.”) Geneviève Bujold says she has never loved anyone. (Addison to Eve: “We have … an inability to love and be loved.”) Bujold, as radio sex therapist Dr. Nancy Love, speaks in a much lower, sexier voice when she’s on the air, indicating that Anne Baxter’s upper and lower registers in Eve may have given her the idea.
In 1985 a group of British singers formed a gothic rock group called All About Eve. They are often referred to as “the Eves.” From their songs and from information on their two Web sites, they must have chosen their name only because it struck them as euphonious, not because they felt any connection to the movie. It’s quite possible that “the Eves” have never seen Eve.
The 1987 movie, Anna, is like a deconstruction of All About Eve, for in it we see the grunge and not the glamour of life in the theatre. The movie is about the humiliation of over-the-hill actors who are out of work and desperate for any job at all. Sally Kirkland plays the middle-aged refugee Anna Radkova, a former film star in Czechoslovakia who can’t find a niche in America. Paulina Porizkova plays Kristina, also a Czech refugee, but a young, pretty one—an ambitious ingenue.
In a melodramatic variation on Eve Harrington, Kristina arrives penniless in New York and faints from hunger at the feet of ex–movie star Kirkland, who takes her in. Soon Kristina learns English and lands a Hollywood contract.
If you want to see a movie about an aging actress with everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end, this is the one to see. Anna, in a self-pitying Margo Channing mode, tells the ingenue: “You can borrow my life. Do whatever you want with it.” “Thank you,” says the younger woman. And she takes Anna literally. She appropriates Anna’s life story—imprisonment, escape from the Iron Curtain, loss of career and family, etc.—and recounts it as her own on a TV interview show. Whereupon Anna throws Kristina’s possessions out the window into the street.
Many years earlier, Margo Channing only threatened to “stuff that pathetic little lost lamb down Mr. DeWitt’s ugly throat.” But Anna doesn’t stop at threats: She shoots the young usurper, then suffers a nervous breakdown. Kristina, recovered and back on the set, supplies the voice-over denouement of this low-camp trinket by informing us that she has paid for a face-lift for her benefactress so that Anna can restart her career in Hollywood.
The year Anna came out, a theatre in New York held a Seven Deadly Sins Festival. The sins were represented by the following pictures: Greed by Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924); Lust by F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927); Envy by All About Eve; Gluttony by Percy Adlon’s Sugarbaby (1985); Sloth by Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oblomov (1979); Pride by Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); and Anger by Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936).
In 1988 Bette Davis made a commercial for Equal sweetener. Bette isn’t seen; instead, a little girl of ten or so lip-syncs her distinctive voice. The little girl wears a Margo Channing hairdo and gown. A pint-size grande dame, the child sits at a restaurant table while the contrived little vignette plays itself out. The commercial itself is no better and no worse than most. What’s interesting, though, is the advertiser’s assumption that millions of TV viewers will not only recognize Davis’s voice but will also get the Margo Channing allusion.
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Merchandising efforts using various cast members from All About Eve started even before the film was released. The exhibitor’s manual, prepared by 20th Century-Fox for theatre owners, shows Anne Baxter and Hugh Marlowe in print ads for Black & Decker’s electric tool kits. From the Saturday Evening Post, November 1950: “Take a Tip from Anne Baxter: Put Home-Utility on Your Christmas Gift List!”
Elsewhere in the exhibitor’s manual: “To add momentum to your campaign for All About Eve, a giant nationwide promotion has been set up in conjunction with the distributors of Sortilège, the famed French perfume. Special window displays, poster art, etc., will be used setting off this distinguished promotion. In addition, scene stills from the film will be used showing stars Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, and Celeste Holm seated in the famous Stork Club where Sortilège has become a noted table favor.”
Even then, merchants found Marilyn’s image irresistible. From the same page of the manual: “Starlet Marilyn Monroe, featured in All About Eve, lends her beauty to an endorsement of Sortilège that will be included in this exciting promotion package. Her picture will appear wherever the perfume is sold.” The list of stores included Neiman Marcus and Jordan Marsh.
By the 1990s, when Marilyn Monroe was as famous as God, her name and signature, now registered trademarks, were used as often as permission could be secured from Roger Richman, the lawyer in command of her estate. Often they were merchanted in tandem with All About Eve as well as with her starring vehicles. Foley’s Department Store in 1997 ran ads for “The Marilyn Monroe Collection (20% Off Entire Stock).” Among the items on sale were an “All About Eve Leopard Print Underwire Bra” at $25, with “Coordinating Bikini” for $12 more. Other undergarment choices included the “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Molded Foam Slip” and a “Niagara Bra and Lace Skirt with Thong.” Smart shoppers were also offered the opportunity to “join Foley’s Bra and Panty Clubs.” Those who did so were promised one free bra after purchasing six, or one free pair of panties after buying twelve.
Moving from underwear to formal wear, we come to the nineteen-inch hand-painted porcelain doll from the Franklin Mint in Pennsylvania. The full-page ad shows a small picture of Marilyn (cropped at the waist) in evening-gown costume from Eve. Beside her is the full-length doll in “shimmering white jacquard and softest faux fur. The waist of her gown is accented with silken roses, and she holds a satin evening purse in one hand. Elbow length sculptured white gloves, hand-painted shoes, and sparkling crystal drop earrings complete this memorable costume.” At the top of the page, above the images, we read: “The movie was called All About Eve but in the end it was all about Marilyn.” Which isn’t true at all, but it sounds good when you’re marketing dolls at $195 each, “payable in convenient monthly installments.”
Margo Channing dolls, created so far by hobbyists rather than manufacturers, appear regularly in such publications as Barbie Bazaar and Fashion Doll Makeovers. Bradford Samuel, creator of a recent one, adheres to painstaking craftsmanship. For his Bette-Davis-as-Margo-Channing doll, he attached to her tiny cigarette an even tinier puff of smoke.
Although Celeste Holm appeared in some stills from All About Eve that helped sell Sortilège perfume, she wasn’t called upon to endorse other products via her Eve connection.
In later years two members of the cast reached such legendary heights that contests were held to find persons resembling them. In New York, in the 1980s, there were Marilyn Monroe look-alike contests. In 1994 two plays about Bette Davis opened off-Broadway: P. S. Bette Davis, by Randy Allen, and Me and Jezebel, by Elizabeth Fuller. As a promotional gimmick for the latter, a Bette Davis look-alike contest was held in New York. The winner was James Beaman, who “seemed to know All About Eve by heart,” according to The New York Times.
Woody
Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway also came out in 1994, with Dianne Wiest as an over-the-hill and over-the-top actress who deftly bypasses Margo Channing. Playing hard-boiled Helen Sinclair, she’s half Norma Desmond and half Eve Harrington. Wiest even looks like an overripe middle-aged version of Eve. The resemblance is perhaps intentional, for All About Eve seems to loiter on the outskirts of this picture. Eve’s presence is veiled, however, except for one visual-and-aural quotation. That’s when Helen Sinclair throws a cocktail party. Her house is full of people, the atmosphere is vivacious, and the pianist is shot from the same angle as Claude Stroud, Margo’s piano player. Like Stroud, this one also plays a few bars of “Thou Swell.” Allen, as director and co-writer, gives an ironic final nod to Eve: The understudy goes on when the star, a gangster moll, gets bumped off by a hit man because she’s a lousy actress.
John Rechy, like many writers before and since, seems in thrall to All About Eve. In his 1988 novel, Marilyn’s Daughter, characters from the movie appear several times side by side with actual film stars. For example: “It was one of those affairs that everyone in Hollywood attends. On a veranda, Jane Russell waved … and blew them a kiss. With extreme formality, Marlon Brando was introducing everyone to Movita, his new wife. John Derek at her side, Louella Parsons sat like a toad on a peacock chair. Everyone ignored Eve Harrington and her companion, Phoebe.” Later, in a montage of salacious stories from Confidential, Rechy captures the spirit of that fifties scandal mag with zingers like UPPERS, DOWNERS, AND JUDY! and EVE HARRINGTON’S GIRL. Echoing a line from the Mankiewicz script, he writes, docudrama style, that “Jane Russell stood and applauded, champion to champion.”
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At some point—was it in the turbulent eighties?— Margo’s most famous line widened from movie quote to American idiom. “Fasten your seat belts” is often used, on-screen and off, as a cool way of saying “Look out,” “Don’t mess with me,” “Hold on to your hat.”
In Pretty Woman (1990), when Richard Gere lets Julia Roberts drive his fancy car, she jumps in with the cry, “Fasten your seat belts.” Dixie Carter, in an episode of Designing Women, drawls as she sets out to right a wrong, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” In the March 1991 issue of Torso, a gay skin magazine, a four-page, XXX-rated cartoon sequence called “Heated Encounters” concludes with a sodomitic panel whose dialogue balloon is this: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy evening.” (One hopes the speaker’s romantic aim is better than his quotesmanship.) Fasten Your Seat Belts is also the title of a 1990 Bette Davis biography, written by Lawrence J. Quirk.
You’ll even hear it from the pulpit. At the world’s largest Metropolitan Community Church, in Dallas, on Pentecost Sunday in 1999, the Reverend Delores Berry, a dynamic African-American preacher and gospel singer, was introduced like this: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a rousing sermon.”
Less famous phrases from the movie turn up all over the place. In an ad for a new lesbian bar, the caption is “Where the Elite Meet.” Publishers Weekly, in an article on gay publishing trends, runs this subhead: “Is the Party Over, or Just Beginning?” The review of a mystery novel is headed, “Killer to Killer.” A television documentary on Bette Davis is, predictably, “The Bumpy Ride to Stardom.” These nods to Eve are not new. In Touch of Evil (1958), Janet Leigh says to Charlton Heston, “I’m very glad you’re very glad”—Welles’s (probably intentional) allusion to Margo’s line, “I’m so happy you’re happy.”
The name Eve Harrington is also ubiquitous. When Ron Leibman missed several performances of Angels in America on Broadway, a writer for The New York Times stated that his understudy, Matthew Sussman, was “hardly a reprise of Eve Harrington.” Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide mentions an “Eve Harrington-like characterization.” When Deborah Norville replaced Jane Pauley on the Today show, New York magazine likened Norville to Eve Harrington. Earlier, when Pauley replaced Barbara Walters, she too had been compared to Eve.
A made-for-TV movie on CBS in 1990 seems based on such network gossip. In Her Wicked Ways, Barbara Eden plays a respected television news correspondent who is stabbed in the back by ruthless newcomer Heather Locklear.
In Sisterhood Betrayed: Women in the Workplace and the All About Eve Complex, a 1991 self-help book aimed at career women, authors Jill Barber and Rita Watson devote chapters to both Eve and Margo: “The Eves in Our Midst,” “Don’t Be a Margo,” “Eves at the Top,” “How Margos Deal With Betrayal,” and so on. In their introduction, the authors promise that the book will “teach you how to recognize the telltale signs of an Eve in others as well as in yourself” and “how to overcome betrayal anxiety.” Later, in a grotesque jump from backstage conflict to current pop-psych, they explain that “Margo and Eve were in a codependency situation.”
Fans of All About Eve continue to write about the movie, to talk about it in interviews, to exploit it commercially. In my own novel, MMII: The Return of Marilyn Monroe (1991), Marilyn’s Miss Caswell appears in a fantasy scene. A character in Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake (1997) says, “The greatest movie ever, as anybody with half a brain knows, is My Life as a Dog. The second-greatest movie ever is All About Eve.”
In 1998, the American Film Institute was more restrained than Vonnegut when it compiled a list of the top 100 American films. The selection was made by members of the film industry, including screenwriters, directors, actors, editors, cinematographers, executives, and historians. They ranked All About Eve number sixteen. Later that year TV Guide included Eve in its list of the fifty best movies to watch on television, describing it as “a smooth sip of champagne with a sprinkle of arsenic.”
Director William Friedkin, whose work includes Boys in the Band and The French Connection, first saw All About Eve in Chicago as a kid of twelve when it came out. He told an interviewer, “Over the years I’ve seen it probably twenty-five more times, and I’ve come to realize how brilliant it is. It gets richer and deeper for me. It really is a classic piece of American screenwriting and direction.”
Isaac Mizrahi, the fashion designer, claimed with convincing extravagance that All About Eve taught him “the meaning of life.” Specifically, Mizrahi pointed out the scene “when Celeste Holm is coming in from the alley on Broadway. She’s got this mink coat on and when she takes it off, she’s wearing this fantastic gray flannel jersey dress with matching gray flannel gloves. I always think, ‘Isn’t that so great that everything matches?’”
Paul Brown, a comedian on Comedy Central, gives “Seven Bad Reasons for Gays to Get Married.” Reason Number Five: “Both of you name All About Eve as your favorite movie of all time.” And here’s Margo Channing, paired with Mildred Pierce, both in caricature, on the front of a greeting card. They’re frowning at each other and holding a cake with many candles. “Happy Birthday” is the greeting. You open it and read, “From one Bitch Goddess to another.”
Less amusing is a 1993 neo-disco song called “All About Eve,” recorded by the group Fem 2 Fem. It’s no fun; it’s not even very danceable. The unfocused lyric mixes cinematic metaphors: The song starts out, “All about Eve, all about Eve, she devil, she devil, Wicked witch of the west—Hollywood, that is.”
In 1999, the novelist E. Lynn Harris said in a Publishers Weekly interview, “I have an idea for a book: A writer is outdone by his protégé, someone who learned everything about the business from the older writer, who poured his heart out to the upstart.” The interviewer asked Harris if he was planning an African-American All About Eve. “That’s right,” answered Harris. “That movie was something special.”
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It was bound to happen: Adult entertainment meets All About Eve, with more mixing of cinematic metaphors. Gay filmmaker Marc Huestis said, “I used to work in a video store and people would rent All About Eve and they would also rent All About Steve.” Later there was All About Yves, and of course the inevitable “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a humpy night,” spoken by George Payne in t
he gay skin flick Kiss Today Goodbye (1980). (The prediction, of course, comes true.) Fun Down There (1990), a tepid turn-on with pretentions to plot, has supporting players who recite scenes from All About Eve and Valley of the Dolls.
A heterosexual turn-on with the cheesy title The Budding of Brie, said to follow closely the plot of Eve, is now extremely difficult to locate, even though it won the erotic movie equivalent of an Oscar in 1981.
Showgirls (1995) won no awards, though it would surely qualify in the category of world-class vulgarity. If Eve Harrington had hitchhiked to Broadway in tight jeans and leather jacket, she would have been a lot like Elizabeth Berkley’s character, Nomi, in this hard-hearted howler. Nomi, a Las Vegas topless-and-bottomless dancer, will do anything to become the understudy of an aging headliner named Cristal.
Throughout the movie there are boneheaded winks in the direction of All About Eve. Nomi looks hungrily at a glitzy seminude casino revue, like Eve Harrington the first time she’s backstage. Cristal, the Margo Channing figure, says, “I haven’t missed a show in eight years.” (Karen to Eve: “Margo just doesn’t miss performances.”) The first time Cristal sees her future replacement, it’s when she looks up from her dressing-room table and the bold Nomi is standing in the door. Also like Eve, Nomi has an unsavory past. And when Cristal nixes her as understudy, Nomi pushes her down a flight of stairs. Showgirls is a good title; it’s the best thing about the movie if you don’t count such lines as “I chipped my tooth on a Quaalude.” But it could also have been called “All About Naked Understudies.”
Treacherous ingenues were around in movies long before All About Eve, of course. So were aging actresses, backstage melodramas, and satirical-sentimental tales about the pathos and glory of show business. Not until Eve, however, did any film shape all these motifs into a more or less realistic and believable account of unstoppable ambition, granite egos, and the politics of vanity. And Mankiewicz, like Molière, presented his dark drama in the form of chic comedy. It’s so light on its feet that many viewers mistake it for a testimonial to playacting. That’s Mankiewicz’s left-handed compliment to the theatre. With his right hand—the one he wrote with—he denoted a dangerous and dishonest milieu underneath the greasepaint.
