Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  Of course, Joe didn’t create his masterpiece all by himself, and film’s collaborative nature sometimes challenges easy interpretations. For just as Orson Welles didn’t hurl a lightning bolt and create Citizen Kane out of nothing—he needed, in addition to Herman’s talents and those of his cinematographer Gregg Toland and his actors and his editor Robert Wise, studio executives and technicians, craftsmen and artists of all kinds to create his masterpiece—so too did none of Joe Mankiewicz’s films come only from a single source. To assume that Joe’s films were his, therefore, revealing his world view in a deep way, is both true but also overblown, a case of retrospect serving to smooth and make clearer what was not obvious then and what may not even be true at all. In the case of Joe’s greatest film, it would also obscure the contributions not just of its cast and crew, but the work of Mary Orr in the first place, and Darryl Zanuck, the film’s producer, who helped shape and whittle the script down into manageable form, and whose valuable presence in Joe’s work life is best seen by what happened to Joe’s movies when Zanuck was no longer a part of them.

  Nonetheless: All About Eve.

  It stands like a Colossus among Joe’s other movies. All of the archness in his other work which so often kept audiences at a remove now worked in his favor, beautifully; indeed, the movie is all about archness. There are defenders and even lovers of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, A Letter to Three Wives; Suddenly, Last Summer; 5 Fingers, No Way Out, Cleopatra, Sleuth, even The Barefoot Contessa. The list goes on and it’s impressive, but above all there is Eve: Yes, Eve. You all know all about Eve…what can there be to know that you don’t know…? The lines are so quotable: It’s about time the piano realized it has not written the concerto! The characters so delicious: What a story, everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end. The script so full of acid-tongued wit: Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke. It is above all such a thoroughly entertaining movie from start to finish—a movie about performance, about acting, about actors, about theater, about show business itself—and Joe never came close to equaling it. The reason for that, I think, is that both the film’s central dynamic—between the lovable, maddening elder and the scheming, ambitious usurper—and its setting were so central to the essence of Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

  As Herman longed for politics and journalism, Joe idealized theater.*1 He had fallen in love early, and his time in Hollywood had only strengthened his desire to fulfill what John Erskine had predicted for him all those years ago: to write a great play someday, the equal of Shaw or Wilde if not Shakespeare himself. For there it is again in All About Eve, evidence that Hollywood and movies are not the equal to live theater: the condescension with which the film world is viewed in the world of the movie itself, the assumption, in fact, that any intelligent person would prefer the theater to the movies. When Eve Harrington asks the young theater director Bill Sampson why he intends to go to Hollywood, he responds with a lengthy and defensive diatribe about the theater, beginning with a spin on a classic Mankiewiczian formulation, “What book of rules says the theater exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City?” The theater, Sampson goes on a little pompously (“Listen, junior, and learn,” he tells Eve), encompasses all kinds of performances, from opera to magic to minstrel to Donald Duck and everything in between—so movies themselves, bastard art form that it might seem, is part of the great Theater world as well. “Wherever there’s magic and make-believe and an audience, there’s theater…It may not be your theater, but it’s theater of somebody, somewhere.” But coming from an artist like Sampson, not to mention Joe Mankiewicz, there’s something slightly disingenuous about this common man pose. The fact is, Bill is clearly going to Hollywood for the money (despite maintaining that 80 percent of it will go to taxes) and a few lines later, he collapses back in his chair and says resignedly, “It’s only a one-picture deal.” He hasn’t been proclaiming the glories and democratic virtues of all kinds of theater because he believes it; in fact, trying to break free of the New York theater world, he’s been mocking its pretentions. Whereas the New York theater people only want the allegedly high art and the Hollywood movie people just want money, Sampson is hoping they are two sides of the same coin, a heady mixture of glamour and prestige and applause that can ruin you no matter which town you’re in. Sampson is merely trying to convince himself that Hollywood won’t ruin him.

  Joe in June of 1950, not long before the release of All About Eve

  But who had Hollywood ruined?

  By now, Joe’s older brother carried with him so much venom and hate toward the place where both of them made their lives, that it would have been impossible, even if Joe had never idolized Herman, for Joe not to have noticed it, regardless of how much of it may have rubbed off on the younger brother. But more than that, it was impossible for any son of an educated man who cared about history, language, literature, and politics not to end up thinking that the largely uneducated boorish men who ran the town were beneath them. Joe Mankiewicz, like Herman, Ben Hecht, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Fritz Lang and probably 97 percent of all the émigrés to Hollywood in this time, felt that he was better than the town. Joe called Hollywood “professionally and socially inbred and self-preoccupied—a weird mixture of goldmining camp and ivory ghetto.” But what made Joe different, and the reason he was able to thrive there, was that he knew it was all a game. He never took any of it that seriously—he worked hard, God knows, he wrote to the best of his abilities, and he resolved to make the best movies he could within the confines of the system, but, maybe because of Herman, he knew the game’s limitations, and as much as he pushed against them, he knew you had to play with the ball the big boys had thrown you, or they’d toss the ball to someone else. In his later years, Joe took to calling himself the oldest whore on the beat, but from the start of his directing career, he knew he wasn’t in it for love.

  Joe’s attitude can be found in Bill Sampson’s conflicted resignation as he slumps back and says, “It’s just a one-picture deal.” It’s crap he’s going out there for, and he knows it, but dammit, why is it only one picture?

  If Joe scorned Hollywood and the movies, he idealized New York and the theater, and so brought forth what Celeste Holm called his “love letter to Thespis,” which may have been possible only due to the inconvenient fact that Joe didn’t have any actual professional experience in the theater. So he was able to take his purest feelings about art and pour them into the theatrical world of the movie, and take his contempt for the business side of the film industry and pour that into the Hollywood of the movie. Consider the unseen film star who arrives late to Margo’s party, dumps her sable on the bed, then leaves early, significantly, as Birdie points out, “with half the men in the joint.” The simple equation: Hollywood equals prostitution. The theater, New York, Art with a capital A—these were what Joe valued and loved, and in the film these virtues are embodied by Margo Channing, Bette Davis’s magnificent creature—“a great star, a true star, she never was or will be anything less”—the one whom Eve Harrington sets her cold eyes upon. The gorgeous, thrashing whale, “something made of music and fire.” So Joe had his theme. Mary Orr’s story had lit the spark, but it had been lying there in wait for decades, ever since Joe had first hid in the closet listening to Herman and Franz rage.*2

  To write the script, Joe faced a challenge not unique to him, or Herman, or millions of other writers: namely, he disliked writing. But knowing this, he always isolated himself when he had a script to write, found his own private Victorville. In the case of All About Eve, after Zanuck had acquired the project for him,*3 and he’d worked on a long treatment while also overseeing the preproduction and production of No Way Out, he went off, alone, to the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara to write the script. Though he was in the midst of at least one affair at the time (and still saw Garland occasionally), Joe was insistent that the writing during this phase
be done in isolation, and so just as Herman had restricted his alcohol intake while at Victorville, Joe kept pretty much to himself while at San Ysidro. The ranch, which Joe’s great-nephew John later called “the place where God goes on vacation,” was sun-dappled and full of orange groves. There Joe poured it all out in his first draft. In the battle that rages between Margo and Eve, even or maybe especially when Margo is initially unaware of what Eve is after and is so patronizingly dismissive of her, Joe was writing out his version of the epic, endless battle between Art and Commerce, between New York and Hollywood, between Cain and Abel, Herman and Joe. Everything that Joe had in him, that he truly cared about, from the depths of his soul—not the pedantry of People Will Talk, not the political posturing of No Way Out, not the domestic infighting and soap opera of A Letter to Three Wives—but what Joe had been thinking about his entire life, ever since he was a boy. His nickel. How could he make it? How could he beat Herman?

  Pedantic, irritating, holier-than-thou, preachy, a talkative goddamn know-it-all—Joe Mankiewicz was all these things and more, and this made its way into his scripts—but he was also a little brother who, no matter how much he wanted to defeat his older brother, loved the guy. So it is that the starring role in All About Eve—in Joe’s entire oeuvre—is not Eve Harrington but Margo Channing. And Eve, Joe’s stand-in in the battle of the two? She gets her comeuppance in the end, Joe made sure of that—a shallow, hollow life of awards and no meaningful relationships, and destined, quite clearly, to be the victim of another Eve herself in the film’s Phoebe, who weasels her way into Eve’s hotel suite and life (being ‘helpful’ by picking up shards of broken glass) as surely as Eve wheedled her way into Margo’s life. As Phoebe holds up Eve’s Sarah Siddons Award in the film’s final shot and bows to an invisible, unheard, adoring crowd, she is determined to take from Eve whatever she is able, and the film’s final irony is bitter indeed: Eve Harrington wins, but she will not last.*4 Indeed, just as Eve is a kind of lesser, carbon copy version of Margo, Phoebe is a still more diluted version of Eve Harrington. The clothes and look may be similar, but underneath the carapace, the talent ebbs with each successive iteration.

  Joe knew, and he felt that Eve knew as well, that there was simply no filling the hole at the center of her being; he told Carey that at the end of the film Eve was confronted “by an acute awareness that in fact, ever since the beginning, she has been servicing a bottomless pit.” Only applause seemed to do the trick, of making her feel like a human being. As Eve tells the gathering at Margo’s party:

  Why, if there’s nothing else—there’s applause. It’s like—like waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up. Imagine…To know, every night, that different hundreds of people love you…they smile, their eyes shine—you’ve pleased them, they want you, you belong. Just that alone is worth anything.

  The love of applause and desperate need for approval is clear from the moment Margo catches Eve backstage, standing and bowing into a mirror, hearing that same adoring unseen crowd so familiar to megalomaniacs everywhere, just as Phoebe does at the end of the film. It’s also why Eve lashed out at Addison in the hotel room, giving voice, as Joe later said, “to the emptiness she was and had always been: “I had to say something, be somebody.” The action of the movie is driven by that one fact: Eve Harrington—Gertrude Slesczynski, after all—felt like nobody.

  As for Margo, sure, at times she’s annoying and self-dramatizing, but she is also, the film makes clear, somebody, and somebody who cares about other people. Bette Davis gives a sensitive, warm, and deeply intelligent performance,*5 which makes clear that it is in fact Margo’s vulnerability toward people (she misreads Eve and so “develop[s] a big protective feeling for her—a lamb loose in our big stone jungle”) that allows Eve to come in and nearly take everything from Margo that is rightfully Margo’s. But the film—Joe—won’t give Eve any lasting satisfaction—won’t give her even the satisfaction that Eve in Mary Orr’s original short story got, in stealing Karen Richards’s husband away from her. No, the film’s Eve is left with nothing but a hollow victory, an award where her heart should be. Most crucially, Eve is awarded at the end of the movie with a trip to Hollywood. And, as Phoebe remarks, looking at the trunks Eve has packed, she might be staying for a long time. In Joe’s view, what he often called the “cesspool” of Hollywood was the best, if not only, place for someone who possessed, like Addison DeWitt and like Eve herself, “a contempt for humanity, an inability to love or be loved, insatiable ambition—and talent.” And so he sends his Eve there.

  And Margo? While her fate is less anti-woman than many commentators have taken it to be—Margo makes clear that she’s not giving up acting altogether to be with Bill Sampson, but just the part of Cora, a part she is too young for anyway—Margo Channing is not about to be anyone’s hausfrau, though some have seen it that way. “Bill’s thirty-two,” she says early on of her lover. “He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he’ll look it twenty years from now. I hate men.” Now, at the end of the movie, she knows that the eight-year age difference between them “will stretch as the years go on,” and certainly she worries about the life she is about to embark on out of the spotlight, but even so, she is certainly far more fulfilled, having won Bill Sampson at last (or at least having allowed herself to be happy with the idea of becoming Mrs. Bill Sampson), no matter that he, like many of Joe’s male characters, could easily be described as a pompous, self-righteous ass, than she was when she was more entirely self-concerned. She ends happy, victorious, and triumphant. And in fact whenever Margo Channing disappears from the picture, the movie suffers for it.*6

  And Joe knew it. He knew that Margo won. He was thrilled that she won, and he claimed later in life that he despised Eve. “You gather I don’t like Eve?” he asked Gary Carey in More About All About Eve. “You’re right. I’ve been there.” But if Eve, for Joe, was the part of himself that he despised, then Margo was the part of Herman that he loved, the idealized Herman: confident, brave, funny, raging, self-loathing, brilliant. It’s as if by letting Herman win in the end, Joe was fantasizing that he himself was still the adoring younger brother, giving Herman the good life they both wanted, doing whatever he could to save the man.

  But one thing Joe could not do was change who he was, at least not yet. Which is why in the end the character he most identified with in All About Eve was neither Eve nor Margo but Addison DeWitt, the acerbic, almost gleefully venomous critic played with relish by George Sanders.*7 It is Addison whose suave and sophisticated voice provides the opening narration of the film, setting Joe’s scene with droll confidence, Addison who introduces himself with a pompous self-regard that is funny, self-aware, and echoes Joe’s own: “To those of you who do not read, attend the Theater, listen to uncensored radio programs or know anything of the world in which we live—it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself.” Yet a few moments later, DeWitt acknowledges that though he plays a critical role in the life of the theater, it is as “ants are to a picnic, as the boll weevil to a cotton field.” As full of obvious self-love as DeWitt is, he also doesn’t like himself very much.

  By making him our guide, Joe makes Addison, at least initially, a sympathetic figure, the one who gives the audience their privileged information regarding the other characters, especially since he doesn’t take part in much of the action of the film, at least in its first half. Addison is like our secret friend every time he shows up. His asides are deliciously arrogant, and in contrast to the other male characters—Joe freely admitted he found writing for men “damned limited…predictable, conforming” and he was hardly helped by Gary Merrill or Hugh Marlowe as the stalwart leading men anchoring the film like pillars of gray flannel rock—he delighted in Addison DeWitt. While it’s clear that no one else in the movie likes the guy, rare is the audience member who doesn’t revel in the villainous Addison DeWitt.

  Of course, being Joe’s surrogate, Addison admits he’s u
nlovable. In the New Haven hotel room prior to Eve’s opening, after DeWitt exposes the litany of Eve’s lies, he tells her how alike the two of them are, these Joe stand-ins: “You’re an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common…We deserve each other.” The bond between Eve and Addison at the end of the movie is fixed fast by their mutual need, if not outright contempt—it is nothing approaching love, and as Addison says, “that I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability.”

  What also makes it improbable, of course, is that Addison is an effete dandy, as queer as the day is long, and no more sexually attracted to Eve than he is to that boll weevil. It’s curiously remarkable that it took a man as flamingly devoted to his own heterosexuality as Joe Mankiewicz to create two such iconic gay characters, closeted though Addison and Eve may be. Indeed, Eve is an almost passionately asexual figure, in thrall not to sex or romance but to power and ambition. Still, can anyone doubt that if the film were made today, we’d get more than just the whiff Joe gives us of Eve’s lesbianism (walking up the stairs arm in arm with her roommate; Eve’s short mannish hair throughout, especially when she slips off her wig like a female impersonator in the film’s final scene; her quick attachment to Phoebe; the lack of any serious romantic heat between Eve and any of the male characters, notwithstanding the almost play-acted sexual longing she displays toward Lloyd Richards), or that Addison would not hail from what one critic, referring to Clifton Webb’s character in Otto Preminger’s Laura, calls “the Waldo Lydecker School,” whose closeted members’ relationships with women are proprietary rather than romantic?*8 As such, Margo Channing’s neuroses, her fear of aging, her sexual rage at the possibility of being passed over for a younger version of herself,*9 her professional anxieties, her drunken self-pity, and much of what makes Margo Channing so fascinating as a character comes from Joe’s understanding of how women operate. He was, in the end, more fascinated by women than men—as he said, “male behavior is so elementary that All About Adam could be done as a short.”