by Staggs, Sam
* * *
Surprisingly, my paragraph on Eddie Fisher drew a great deal of reader response. Thinking I had settled the matter once and for all on page 172 with my assertion that the stage manager was played by an older actor and not by the singing ex-husband of Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor, and Connie Stevens, I was startled by this communiqué from Edward Amor of Madison, Wisconsin, a retired professor of theatre and drama: “As one who saw the film during its earliest release I remember rather vividly the one scene in which Mr. Fisher appeared. It took place backstage between him and Anne Baxter. Although I do not remember the precise dialogue, the scene dealt with the stage manager’s request that Eve go out with him. From the dialogue we gathered that they had been seeing each other. Eve, who was by now after bigger game, brushed him off. This is the only time I saw this scene, as by the time I saw the film for the second time it had been omitted, leaving only his name on the screen credits at the end.”
I’ve seen no version of the All About Eve script with such an exchange, although in Applause Eve Harrington uses a stage manager to further her ambitions, then dumps him.
I’m willing to let Bob Grimes of San Francisco have the last word in the matter. Here’s what he wrote: “I went with some friends to see All About Eve at the old Fox Theatre on a Sunday night right after it opened. I was particularly anxious to see my friend Eddie Fisher. At one point I lit a cigarette and then I saw arms waving and that was the end of Eddie Fisher in the film. He was of course the stage manager of Aged in Wood. I’ve seen it numerous times since and had a good look at him for his two seconds in the film.
“As for the mix-up with the singer, my friend claimed he had the rights to that name but since he was no longer active in his career he didn’t mind the young singer using the same name. At the time All About Eve was filmed, my friend Eddie worked at the Curran Theatre and had for some years so that’s how he got the job in the picture. He had been an actor on Broadway under the name Edward Fisher.”
* * *
When Karen Richards takes Eve Harrington backstage at the Curran Theatre for the first time, Eve lags behind to drink in the wonderment of all she surveys. She says, “You can breathe it, can’t you? Like some magic perfume.”
And you can. I recently went backstage at the Curran, and suddenly all the hokum about ghosts of dead actors lingering in the wings made believable sense. Perhaps I was especially susceptible to magic perfume that day, since my personal tour of the Curran was supervised by the world’s second-greatest Margo Channing. His name is Matthew Martin.
A few weeks earlier I had received a message from Matthew, who seemed delirious over my book. I dropped everything and telephoned him, for I was dying to hear more about this kid who memorized the script of All About Eve in junior high, then some years later played Margo en travesti to great acclaim in San Francisco. When he answered the phone I used an Addison DeWitt line: “That memorable night when Margo first dazzled you from the stage—what theatre was it in San Francisco? Was it the Shubert?”
Not one to miss a cue, he lapsed into Margo Channing, and we’ve been buddies ever since. In gay San Francisco, where nine out of ten men claim to do the best Bette Davis imitation you’ve ever heard, this one’s the Rolex and not the Mickey Mouse. Since I was on my way to San Francisco in a few weeks for a book signing, Matthew promised me an All About Eve tour of his hometown.
We started at the Fairmount Hotel, where cast and crew slept and mated while filming Eve. We prowled the alley beside the Curran, retracing the steps of Eve Harrington, who, waiting for Margo as usual, accosts Karen that fateful night. Matthew brought along a camera and Eve Harrington drag—trenchcoat and funny hat—in which we both posed. For this madcap photo session, he conscripted passing members of cast and crew of the current show at the Curran. An accommodating young gent named Joseph Vines, too young to have been corrupted by All About Eve (or perhaps deeming it wise to humor the deranged), permitted us to roam at leisure through the theatre.
“I’m not a drag queen, I’m an actress,” is Matthew Martin’s answer to the question, “What do you call what you do?” Before playing Margo in the camp musical parody Eve in 1998, he already had given Bette the treatment she deserved in Whatever Happened to B.B. Jane?, Hush Up, Sweet Charlotte, The Star, and the annual holiday drag romp Christmas with the Crawfords. Though La Davis is the diamond in his tiara, he’s also the ultra-utmost playing Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, or the Eileen Heckart role in The Bad Seed.
* * *
“The Bad Seed” is an epithet one might apply to Celeste Holm, who has shown her poison ivy side ever since she heard about this book. My request for an interview, detailed on page 2, drew a harpy’s response. Then, when Vanity Fair excerpted the book in April 1999, Holm wrote a rambling letter to the magazine in which she purported “to set the record straight.”
What she did instead was to confirm my accuracy by retelling, in her disgruntled way, several of the very same anecdotes that appeared in the Vanity Fair excerpt and subsequently in the book. She ended her letter with the disingenuous implication that I had made no effort to interview her: “And now he is doing a book—I would appreciate a call. I don’t remember any backstabbing at all.”
My response appeared along with her letter in the September 1999 issue of Vanity Fair. That magazine, seldom fainthearted, nevertheless shied away from the final sentence of my rejoinder, which said: “When Ms. Holm contradicts rumors of ‘backstabbing bitchiness’ on the set, she’s in complete agreement with Bette Davis, who said: ‘There was one bitch in the cast—Celeste Holm.’”
Since then, Holm’s drive-by insults have sounded increasingly desperate. In an interview with Boston’s Bay Windows she said, “This idiot who wrote the Vanity Fair story talked about skullduggery and backstabbing, but there was none of that. We all worked together in complete harmony.” In the next paragraph Holm contradicted herself with exquisite hypocrisy: “Bette Davis was one of the rudest people I ever met, so I never spoke to her.” Followed by another example of what Holm presumably considers “complete harmony”: “George Sanders was so anti-social, not one of us.”
In waging her jihad, Holm seems to have put that fifty-year-old Bette Davis grudge where her heart ought to be. Still shooting off opinions like a Saturday-night special, she told a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle that she refused my initial request for an interview because “I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew he was going to make us all sound like totally immature people, bitching and carrying on.” Such wobbly ESP on her part made me wonder if she’s trying to land a job on the Psychic Friends Network.
I’m often asked the reason for the Celeste Holm meltdown, but I don’t really have an answer. When people inquire how I feel about her malevolent taunts, I quote a Bette Davis line from Now, Voyager: “Let’s not linger over it.”
But Joan Rivers, interviewing me on her show, wouldn’t let go. “Come on,” she said, “why is Celeste Holm out of control?”
I replied, “Maybe it’s because Bette Davis has millions of fans, and Celeste Holm has three or four.”
But Joan will have the last word. She cracked, “Oh yeah, and you know what? One of those just died!”
* * *
Like a vaudeville hoofer, I keep running out for one more encore. In this case it’s to open a grab bag and toss shiny little Eve-ish items to the audience. Call them sound bytes, factoids, trivial pursuits, or miscellany; I use a more highfalutin term. To me, they’re flecks of gold dust dropped from the tail of Mankiewicz’s Comet. Infinitely younger and less elusive than Halley’s, this new comet orbits Hollywood forever, shining brighter than any star. Oh yes, All About Eve does outshine the stars, and why not? It is, after all, pure heaven.
My little rhapsody in the preceding paragraph sounds like a cue for Thelma Ritter to moan, “Oh, brother!” But even her poker-faced character, Birdie, might crack up watching Carol Burnett’s parody of All About Eve.
Carol, of course, p
lays Margo Channing. The skit opens with Margo in her dressing room, “looking like a junkyard.” Seated at her dressing table with hair taped down, she commands Vicki Lawrence, as Eve, to bring her wig. While Margo adjusts the hairpiece, Eve, behind her back, holds up a fancy gown and poses theatrically, bowing to herself in a mirror. Margo wheels around, catches Eve in the act, and drives her out.
Then Bill (Harvey Korman) enters as Margo is finishing her toilette at the dressing table. A second later, behind Margo’s back, he holds up the same gown and bows adoringly to himself in the mirror until Margo wheels around. She’s aghast as the skit ends.
When I stated on page 280 that The Budding of Brie, a heterosexual skin flick with plot lifted from All About Eve, was difficult to locate, I failed to reckon with the vast Internet marketplace. Recently I came across a Web site offering it for $9.95. According to a “customer’s movie review” posted on that site, “Hilary Summers is Brie, who begins as a celebrity-worshipping waitress and by shrewdly using her pussy as a career-advancement tool eventually becomes a movie star.”
For all I know, this cast may include more stars than there are in porno heaven: Jennifer Jordan as Diana, a fading movie star; Eric Edwards as Nicky, her film-director husband; and Laurien Dominique as the fading star’s best friend. Jake Teague plays Simon, a cynical film critic. As a further homage to Eve, the film is set in 1950.
The customer’s review continues, in prose that’s less purple than, ahem, brown: “The sexual heat in this film comes from Brie. Her scenes are frequent, and she does them enthusiastically, even an anal. This scene shows Brie concluding an alliance with Simon in the back of his limo. What does it tell us about Simon’s character that he demands anal on the first date, and won’t take no for an answer?” (Well, what does it tell us? That all cynical film critics demand anal on the first date?)
Brie sounds like two thumbs up, except for one thing. We learn from the review that several men in the supporting cast “look bored”; they’re “totally limp.” For such flaccid performances maybe thumbs are, after all, the most reliable way to measure.
Pop-cultural references to All About Eve seem increasingly widespread, threatening to bump competitors such as Terminator and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Jean Smart, a presenter at the fifty-second Emmy Awards, thanked her producers for letting her leave The Man Who Came to Dinner on Broadway and trek to Los Angeles for the evening. She also thanked her understudy in the play, “Julie ‘All-About-Eve’ Halston.” When the joke got a round of laughter, Smart added, “I thought that was a strange middle name, too.”
Techno dance group Fem 2 Fem (page 279) isn’t alone in using “All About Eve” as a song title. In 1994 the industrial-rap artist Marxman included a track entitled “All About Eve” on his CD 33 Revolutions Per Minute. The 1999 Cacophone recording label compilation Ultra Swank included a track entitled “All About Eve” by Annabel Lee. The English indie rock group The Wedding Present included “All About Eve” as a track on their 1987 release George Best Plus. A cut by rock guitarist Steve Vai on his 1996 album Fire Garden is “All About Eve,” and a song on the soundtrack of the 1999 Pedro Almodóvar film Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, which uses the 1950 film as its point of departure) is—what else?—“All About Eve.”
The theatre critic of Free Times, a giveaway paper in Columbia, South Carolina, calls himself Addison DeWitt.
The title of a recent mystery novel by Lev Raphael is Little Miss Evil. That’s a phrase from All About Eve, which is mentioned several times in the novel even though the setting isn’t show business but a midwestern university. Another mystery, The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case by George Baxt, has Tallulah making such statements as “Fasten your seat belts, dahlings, it’s going to be a bumpy party!”
Surprisingly, All About Eve appeals even to high-school students. Stan Wlasik, who teaches drama at El Rancho High School in Pico Rivera, California, recently had his students play virtually every scene from the film. He reports that they loved the characters and that they readily accepted all aspects of the adult comedy-drama, including the gay subtext. When I asked how he chose Eve rather than the usual drama-class fare, he answered: “High-school theatre should produce plays that are good literature, and what finer piece of literature can you get than All About Eve by Joe Mankiewicz?”
Such an eloquent summing-up explains the universal appeal of All About Eve, and also why the film will endure. It’s a lovely goodbye, so how about a theatrical close à la Mankiewicz: “Slow curtain—not the end?”
brief lives, etc.
All About Eve is sprinkled with theatrical allusions—actors, playwrights, critics, and the like. Many of these names were out of date even in 1950; today they’re known only to cognoscenti. The same is true of certain topical references. The following list includes names and groups not discussed elsewhere in this book. Since it would be cumbersome to quote all lines in the script where these various references occur, I leave the matching-up to the reader.
NB: Two of the names, Poodles Hanneford and Paula Wessely, are spoken so quickly by Bill Sampson and Addison DeWitt, respectively, that they’re quite hard to catch.
Beaumont and Fletcher: Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) and John Fletcher (1579–1625), English dramatists. Their names are always linked because of the plays they wrote together: The Maid’s Tragedy, The Scornful Lady, etc. Fletcher wrote fifty-two plays in all, fifteen of them with Beaumont, sixteen by himself, and the rest in collaboration with other playwrights, including, perhaps, Shakespeare. Beaumont also wrote several plays alone. John Aubrey’s seventeenth-century Brief Lives implies personal as well as professional intimacy: “They lived together on the Banke side, not far from the Playhouse, both bachelors; lay together; had one Wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same cloathes and cloake, &c; between them.”
Byron: George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) is best known as one of the English Romantic poets. He also wrote plays. His dramas, all tragedies in blank verse, were aimed at the library and not the theatre. “I have had no view to the stage,” Lord Byron announced in the preface to Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice. And yet this play was staged in London in 1821. Most of his others received theatrical productions as well: Werner, Sardanapalus, Manfred, The Two Foscari, et al. A soupçon of Byronic dramaturgy: The Doge, Marino Faliero, about to be beheaded for treason, delivers a stream of the play’s typically elaborate poetry:
“Thou den of drunkards with the blood of princes!
Gehenna of the water! thou sea Sodom!”
Eleanora Duse: Italian actress (1858–1924), one of the great tragediennes of world theatre. She toured Russia in 1881, where Chekhov saw her as Cleopatra and was captivated by her art. It has been suggested that he had Duse in mind when he wrote The Seagull. In London in 1895 she and Sarah Bernhardt appeared together in Sudermann’s Magda. Inevitably, the critics preferred one or the other. George Bernard Shaw preferred Duse. She disdained theatrical artifice, including the use of makeup on the stage, and was noted for her ability to blush or turn pale at will. Duse professed a Garboesque hatred of publicity, which of course ensured press coverage of her every move.
Jeanne Eagels: American stage and film actress (1894–1929). Eagels was once described as “a striking blonde with haunted eyes that always seemed to be masking some hidden pain.” In 1922, after eleven years on Broadway, she became a star “overnight” in Somerset Maugham’s Rain. Addicted to alcohol and any number of drugs, she grew as erratic on stage as Marilyn Monroe would later become on film sets, and for similar reasons. In 1927, during a performance of Her Cardboard Lover, Eagels stopped the play abruptly and ordered Leslie Howard, her leading man, to fetch her a drink of water. When Howard made no move to do so, she walked off the stage herself to get the drink while the audience waited impatiently. One of her lovers was Libby Holman, the torch singer who later served as mentor and lover to Montgomery Clift. Eagels died of a heroin overdose just as the Jazz Age ended.
In
1957 Kim Novak starred in The Jeanne Eagels Story. An issue of Screen Stories that year emblazoned Novak on the cover in the Eagels persona of femme fatale. Wearing a halter made of pearls, Novak stretched her voluptuous body across the magazine like a slinky bejeweled cat.
Minnie Fiske: American actress (1865–1932) noted for replacing bravura performance with psychologically realistic portraiture. She starred in the plays of Ibsen and also in newer fare such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Becky Sharp. Married to a playwright-journalist, she billed herself as “Mrs. Fiske” and resisted the formation of Actors’ Equity because she considered acting an honor, not a trade. An early animal-rights activist, she once had a man arrested for whipping his horse.
Clyde Fitch: American playwright (1865–1909) remembered for Beau Brummel, The Girl With the Green Eyes, and The City. When a character in the latter play learns that he has inadvertently married his sister, he brings down the second-act curtain shouting, “You’re a goddamn liar!” The word goddamn was so shocking that it caused the drama critic of the New York Sun to faint. Today Fitch’s plays hold little interest. Though they start out by creating conditions out of which a rigorous exploration of character and idea could develop, all degenerate into melodramatic devices and imposed happy endings. The denouement of The Girl With the Green Eyes tells enough:
JINNY (whispers faintly)
Dear Jack! You forgive me—all my beastly jealousy?
AUSTIN
There’s one thing stronger even than jealousy, my Jinny. And that’s love. That’s love! (He kisses her hands, and the curtain falls.)
The Hairy Ape: An expressionistic drama (1922) by Eugene O’Neill. The hirsute title refers to Yank, the protagonist, and also to a literal ape who might be said to steal the show by crushing Yank.
