by Staggs, Sam
Poodles Hanneford: Equestrian clown and acrobat (1891–1967), scion of a family spanning at least 150 years of circus history in Ireland and later in the United States. Buster Keaton spoke of Poodles as “the only trained acrobat I ever saw who could take a fall and make it look funny.” Poodles made two-reel comedies in Hollywood. Then Fatty Arbuckle, ruined by scandal, hired him to appear under his direction. Part of Poodles’s act can also be seen in the Shirley Temple movie Our Little Girl (1935). He was most famous for stepping off the back of a horse as if he were an animated cartoon character, giving the impression of being momentarily suspended in midair.
Helen Hayes: The First Lady of the American Theatre (1900–1993) needs no introduction. But her film performances make you wonder if she was really that great onstage. Bette Davis couldn’t stand her. In 1984 they did a TV movie, Murder With Mirrors, at a time when Bette was already quite ill. Hayes said later, “She was imperious and very tough to get along with. I think we were all frightened by Bette.”
The Hundred Neediest Cases: A holiday charity drive started long ago by The New York Times, seeking contributions each year from Thanksgiving through the end of December.
Liliom: Eve Harrington claims that she and Eddie gave three performances of this play in a little theatre production. Written in 1909 by the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár, it was turned into the musical Carousel in 1944 by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Lunt and Fontanne: Alfred Lunt (1892–1977) and Lynn Fontanne (1887–1983) were the First Couple of the American Stage during the early part of the twentieth century. They married in 1922. Two years later they had an enormous hit in Molnár’s The Guardsman. From that point on they excelled in high comedy, and everyone called them the Lunts. Their good friend Noël Coward quipped that they were really the same person. Dedicated to the stage, the Lunts resisted Hollywood except for one unhappy venture, when they filmed The Guardsman in 1931. Upon their farewell in 1958, a Broadway theatre—the Lunt-Fontanne on West Forty-sixth Street—was named in their honor.
Richard Mansfield: American actor (1857–1907). On the eve of A Parisian Romance in 1882, Mansfield told some friends, “Tomorrow night I shall be famous. Come and see the play.” On opening night the audience recalled him a dozen times for curtain calls. He had made his beachhead on the shores of immortality. A series of hits—Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Richard III, Cyrano de Bergerac, Beau Brummel (especially written for him by Clyde Fitch)—established Mansfield as a leading American player. His 1894 Arms and the Man was the first Shaw production in the United States. Yankee audiences cheered his anti-royalist line in Beau Brummel. Out for a stroll, Beau meets a friend accompanied by the obese Prince of Wales, after Beau and the prince have quarreled. The protagonist inquires: “Who’s your fat friend, Sherry?”
Arthur Miller: Born in 1915, Miller was considered one of America’s three best living playwrights when his name popped up in All About Eve. The others were Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. Miller had been widely praised in 1947 for All My Sons, and in 1949 he had won the Pulitzer Prize for Death of a Salesman.
In December 1950, a month after the Hollywood premiere of Eve, Marilyn Monroe was walking toward the Fox commissary with Cameron Mitchell. Meeting two gentlemen, they stopped to chat. Mitchell introduced Marilyn to Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller. A correspondence sprang up between Monroe and Miller; they reportedly met from time to time during the early fifties. But Miller was already married, and Marilyn was hungry for stardom. By the time Monroe fled Hollywood for New York in 1955, the only roadblock to their romance was Miller’s wife. A trip to Reno removed that obstacle. The Monroe-Miller nuptials, held in the summer of 1956, drew as much worldwide attention as the spectacular marriage of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco in April of that year.
Helena Mojeska: “The Polish Bernhardt” (1840–1909) maintained one of the largest repertoires in the Western world, from Shakespeare to Scribe, Racine’s Iphigénie to the American melodrama East Lynne. She became an American citizen, but is buried in Krakow.
George Jean Nathan: American theatre critic (1882–1958) whose reviews from the 1920s to the 1950s elicited laughter and outrage, depending upon whether one was in the audience or on the stage. Perhaps he’s mentioned in All About Eve to draw attention away from Addison DeWitt’s resemblances to him. For example, both critics have vitriolic tongues, both are fastidious dressers with a liking for fur collars, both employ cigarette holders, and both enjoy the company of attractive young females who don’t mind listening for long stretches of time. Nathan was often accused of hating every play he saw. In his autobiography, Stars in My Hair, director Reginald Denham, Mary Orr’s husband and collaborator, had this to say about the man: “The rudest person to Mary and me among the Broadway critics was George Jean Nathan. He wrote that Orr and Denham were horticultural playwrights. Their first play was called Wallflower; the second [i.e., Dark Hammock] should have been called ‘Stinkweed.’”
Our American Cousin: A comedy by Tom Taylor, first produced in 1858. It is remembered for one reason: Abraham Lincoln was watching it the night he was assassinated (April 14, 1865).
OWI: Eve, having done her homework, knows that Lloyd served in the OWI. During World War II, the Office of War Information was America’s chief propaganda agency. The job of the OWI was to explain the war to the American people and their allies, to instill a will to win, and to be the government’s liaison with radio, movies, and the press.
Ignace Jan Paderewski: Polish pianist, composer, and patriot (1860–1941). As a young man he drew the sort of hysterical following that would later attend the likes of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. Liberace, another pianist of Polish extraction, once displayed on television a miniature piano given to him by Paderewski. He caressed the little piano, fondled it, creating such a treacly scene that millions of fathers forbade their young sons ever to touch the piano again.
Peck’s Bad Boy: When Lloyd accuses Margo of playing “Peck’s Bad Boy,” the allusion is to an 1884 play of that name by Charles Pidgin. Young Hennery Peck, a juvenile lead, is the bane of his neighborhood, creating mayhem and making life a roaring hell for everyone around him. In 1891 George M. Cohan, age thirteen, played the pugnacious Peck in a road company.
Ada Rehan: American actress (1860–1916), born in Ireland. Using her real name, Ada Crehan, she made her debut in 1873 in a melodramatic potboiler written by her brother-in-law. Soon thereafter, a printer’s error on a theatre program listed her as Ada Rehan, so she changed her name. She retired from the stage in 1905, when her brand of nineteenth-century acting was being replaced by a new naturalism.
Robert E. Sherwood: American playwright (1896–1955), author of serious-minded plays including Idiot’s Delight and There Shall Be No Night. Perhaps his most famous is The Petrified Forest, produced on Broadway in 1935 and filmed the following year by Warner Bros. Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis starred in the movie.
Stanislavski: Konstantin Stanislavski was the stage name of Konstantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev (1865–1938). Co-founder and director of the famous Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavski is also known for his theories of acting. In America the Stanislavski system evolved into a technique known as “method acting,” and was taught at the Actors’ Studio in New York. Marlon Brando, Maureen Stapleton, Marilyn Monroe, and many other actors studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio.
Svengali: A Hungarian musician in George du Maurier’s novel Trilby. He controls Trilby’s stage singing through his hypnotic power. A Svengali, therefore, is one who can exercise a sinister, mesmeric influence over another.
Thespis: A Greek poet and actor in the sixth century B.C., sometimes called the originator of tragic drama. When he stepped out of the chorus and spoke lines, an acting tradition was born. Long after his death, the word thespian became a synonym for “actor.”
Paula Wessely: Addison mentions this name in the same breath as Jeanne Eagels and Helen Hayes, when he’s telling Margo about Eve’s audition. Althoug
h Wessely is not a legend of the caliber of Eagels and Hayes, she became famous in the German-speaking countries in the 1920s. Born in Vienna in 1907, she was first a stage star, then enormously successful in films. In 1934, she co-starred with Rosa Stradner, Mankiewicz’s second wife, in So Endete eine Liebe (“Thus Ended a Love”). According to Cinzia Romani’s book, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich, “the Nazi regime put to use Wessely’s physical type—unglamorous, almost plain, the average middle-class German woman, someone whom audiences could easily identify with—by casting her in one of the most blatant of all German propaganda films, Heimkehr (‘Homecoming’), 1941.” Here are a couple of lines from the script: “Think of how it will be, just think! When everything around us will be German, and when we enter a store, we won’t hear Yiddish or Polish being spoken, but only German!” According to an Austrian Web site, she was still alive as of 1998.
Alexander Woollcott: American drama critic and playwright (1887–1943). He is best remembered, however, as the prototype of Sheridan Whiteside in the Kaufman-Hart farce, The Man Who Came to Dinner. Woollcott himself was a fat, owlish man, very different in appearance from the distinguished Monty Woolley, who played Whiteside in the 1941 film version. (Bette Davis plays second fiddle to the imperious Woolley.)
As theatre critic for the New York Times and other papers, Woollcott was capricious in his judgments. He believed Charlie Chaplin “the greatest living actor” and called The Skin of Our Teeth “head and shoulders above anything else ever written for our stage.” Both sharp-tongued and sentimental, he wrote nothing of enduring value. It was said of him that he had every aptitude for literature except a taste for the first-rate.
acknowledgments
My first explorations for this book were not encouraging. The main obstacle was the bleak fact of the moving-van fire that destroyed so much of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s material related to All About Eve. Mankiewicz himself was gone, and I didn’t know whether his survivors would welcome my overtures.
Only one member of the cast was alive, and early on I telephoned Celeste Holm. Her peremptory dismissal of my project, recorded at the beginning of this book, added to my doubts about this quixotic pursuit. I followed the phone call with a letter, which received no answer.
I wrote another letter, this one to Mary Orr, and a few days later she telephoned me. Immediately I went to New York and spent a long afternoon with her. We have stayed in touch since then, and I hope she realizes how very grateful I am. Without her, a crucial early section of this book would have been no longer than a paragraph.
From that point, momentum built. I reached Tom Mankiewicz, the director’s son, who extended every courtesy and spoke to me at length about his father’s career. He put me in touch with Rosemary Mankiewicz, the director’s widow, who was equally gracious.
These interviews, of course, had to be buttressed with all the thousands of facts and quotes and details available only in various print and electronic media. My search led literally across the country as I mined books, magazines, clipping files, cinema archives, and filmed documentaries for every conceivable embellishment to my “biography” of All About Eve.
At Boston University Libraries, where Bette Davis’s papers are housed, Karen Mix assembled precisely what I needed from the Davis archives. At the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Christopher Frith was particularly valuable. He pointed me in all the right directions and brightened my sometimes grueling task with his good humor.
Surely no one writing about the movies could survive without the endless expertise of the following specialists in Los Angeles: Ned Comstock, of the Cinema-Television Library of the University of Southern California; Brigitte J. Kueppers, of the Arts Library–Special Collections at UCLA; Gladys Irvis of the American Film Institute’s Louis B. Mayer Library; and the army of experts at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Among the latter, Scott Curtis and Faye Thompson gave me special help, and Ed Carter set up a special screening of the 1951 Academy Awards ceremonies.
At the Los Angeles Public Library I located materials not available elsewhere. At the Huntington Library in San Marino, Shelley Bennett and Jennifer Frias provided leads about Sarah Siddons. Robyn Asleson, also of the Huntington, started by helping me with Mrs. Siddons and went on to provide clues on any number of topics.
In Dallas, where I live, the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University was another gold mine, and Ron Davis, of the SMU History Department, brought many unusual sources to my attention.
Of all the collections I used, however, my most frequent quarry was the Dallas Public Library, with its excellent general collection and its outstanding holdings on film and theatre. Only rarely did I fail to find on the shelf exactly what I required. Robert Eason, now retired, was my earliest champion there. I also single out for praise every staff member in Humanities and in Fine Arts: Frances Bell, Rebecca Brumley, Roger Carroll, Yolanda Davis, John Elfers, Ruth Games, Tom Hannigan, Steven Housewright, Kate Jarboe, Kevin Jennings, Lisa Lipton, Ludmila Popelova, Ann Shelton, and Julie Travis.
Richard Kaufman, Principal Pops Conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, put me in touch with Patrick Russ, an orchestrator in Hollywood who read my pages on Alfred Newman and offered many helpful suggestions.
When the time came to write the chapter on Applause, I was fortunate in reaching many of those associated with the original production. Charles Strouse, Lee Adams, Sidney Michaels, and Betty Comden conveyed a sense of how they created their respective parts of the show. Those who performed at various times in it—Penny Fuller, Lee Roy Reams, Diane McAfee, Garrett Lewis, and Arlene Dahl—surprised me with how much they recalled after thirty years.
The friends to whom this book is dedicated—Robert Sanchez, Glenn Russell, Evan Matthews, Steve Lambert, Tim Boss, Cary Birdwell, John Conway, Gary Schwartz, and Warren Butler—deserve pages of thanks for all they have done. I met them soon after I arrived in Dallas, and once a month we watch a movie together. The first time I played host, I of course screened All About Eve. The discussion afterwards was lively, and since then there have been many others. They have helped me during every phase of this book, often dropping everything to boost me over a hump. To quote Max Fabian in the movie, “It’s friends that count. And I got friends.”
The following persons, many of them close friends, others acquaintances or even strangers, all took time to talk with me about Hollywood circa 1950 or to discuss All About Eve in particular. They answered questions in person, by mail, and over the telephone, and never lost patience with my greedy quest for more information on the topic. (One person in this list predicted that in twenty years I’ll still be prodding him for details as I complete Volume 18 of the All About Eve Encyclopedia, and he may be right.) I feel fortunate, personally as well as professionally, to have encountered each one: Donna Atwater, Brian Baldwin, Rudy Behlmer, Roderick L. Bladel, Gary Carey, Randy Carter, Diane Challis, Richard Challis, Mary Diveny, Roger Farabee, Kenneth Geist, Mel Gussow, Joseph Guy, Sarah Hamilton, Joseph Hansen, Aljean Harmetz, Joyce Saenz Harris, Tom Hatten, Harry Haun, Jeff Herrington, David Jones, Vernon Jordan, Pauline Kael, Gerry Kroll, David Lopes, Berri McBride, Pablo Navarro, Kenneth Neely, Lawrence J. Quirk, Nancy Davis Reagan, Lester Roque, Leigh W. Rutledge, Annie Stevens, Virginia Tobiassen, and Gina Zucker.
As I was finishing the book, Vanity Fair published a long excerpt from it. I wish for myself and for all writers the same editorial expertise and goodwill I encountered there. Those responsible for my happy experience are Graydon Carter, Wayne Lawson, Chris Garrett, James Buss, Ann Schneider, Michael Hogan, Pat Singer, Sharon Suh, and Mersini Fialo. And at the VF photo shoot: Brian Harness, Coby Markum, Yvonne Coan, and Katelin Burton.
My neighbors, Ed and Zeyphene McMackin, supplied everything from computer help to apple cobbler. My cats—Margo, Eve, Phoebe, and the anomalously christened Little Bit—did all the things that cats do, and I
cheer them for it. St. Jude lived up to his reputation.
Several persons who requested anonymity are also hereby acknowledged in petto.
At the last moment, just as I was ready to send my manuscript to the publisher, Martina Lawrence made a surprise visit to this country. I extended my deadline in order to include her intriguing story. Her statements added color and texture, and I’m grateful to her.
Among those who lowered the stress of publication, I thank Alan Kaufman of Frankfurt Garbus Klein & Selz for legal advice; Karen Pilibosian Thompson for meticulous copyediting; and Michael Connor of St. Martin’s Press for efficiency and good humor.
In the final spot of honor I salute my witty, perceptive, and enthusiastic editor, Elizabeth Beier, and my agent, Jim Donovan, whose love of books and movies makes him my ideal reader as well as my ideal agent.
selected bibliography
Two categories of books and periodicals are included in this bibliography: first, those that provided information on the many people connected with All About Eve and the Broadway musical, Applause, and second, books that in some way broadened my understanding of movies and those who make them. Some minor sources—books, newspaper and magazine articles, archival materials—are not listed below but are cited only in the notes section.
Acker, Ally. Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1991.
Affron, Charles. Star Acting: Gish, Garbo, Davis. New York: Dutton, 1977.
Aherne, Brian. A Dreadful Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.
Aldrich, Richard Stoddard. Gertrude Lawrence As Mrs. A.: An Intimate Biography of the Great Star. New York: Greystone Press, 1954.
Allen, Leigh. “The Filming of All About Eve.” American Cinematographer, January 1951.
Alpert, Hollis. The Dreams and the Dreamers. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
Andrew, Geoff. The Film Handbook. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.
