All About “All About Eve”

by Staggs, Sam

  Reading the script, LeMaire realized that All About Eve could end up a very good picture indeed, the kind of film where the costumes themselves help characterize the women who wear them.

  The theatrical setting added to LeMaire’s enthusiasm, for he himself had started out as a costumer on Broadway. Born in Chicago in 1897, LeMaire performed in vaudeville in his teens and early twenties. In 1921 he moved backstage to wardrobe. Soon he had a reputation, thanks to his showgirl costumes for such Jazz Age extravaganzas as the Ziegfeld Follies, George White’s Scandals, and the Earl Carroll Vanities.

  Later he helped create circus spectacles for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. In the forties, LeMaire was on radio with Fashion Show of the Air. Before going to Hollywood, he operated a dressmaking establishment in New York.

  “Sure I would have liked to dress Bette Davis,” LeMaire recalled, “but I was already on another film. I had confidence that Edith could do it, so I asked for her on loan.” While LeMaire was arranging to borrow Edith Head from Paramount, Mankiewicz phoned her and said, “I love your work. Just do what you think is right.”

  Edith said, “Bette and I had done a few films already and we had a good working relationship. She trusted me.” During her final week on Payment on Demand at RKO, Bette left the studio every day in the late afternoon and rushed to Paramount for conferences and fittings with Edith. The two women had most recently worked together on June Bride (1948), a comedy in which Bette played a magazine writer. For that role, Edith designed a coat dress with both open and concealed pockets (the latter for pencils, memo pads, and the like). Bette liked the coat dress so much that she had six of them made for herself in various colors.

  “She was wearing one the day we started working on All About Eve,” said Edith. “She strode about, hands deep in her pockets, studying the fabrics, the sketches. For each costume, I’d place my favorite sketch on top, then alternates. In nothing flat, she’d whipped around the room, selected each of the top drawings, and was saying, ‘When do we fit?’”

  “Edith always took time to read the script and understand the character,” Bette said. “She managed to make you look as good (or as bad!) as the script allowed.”

  If Mankiewicz thought he alone knew the secret of Bette’s Tallulahesque way of speaking, he was wrong. Edith Head, immediately spotting Bankhead as Margo Channing’s prototype, had her researchers bring in every still of Tallulah they could find. “I steeped myself in Tallulah,” said the crafty Edith, “and everything looked as if it was made for her, yet the clothes complimented Bette. She is such a good actress that she makes clothes belong to her.”

  Edith suggested that Bette wear mostly full skirts in the picture, but a suit with a tight skirt in the theatre scene where, after berating Bill, Lloyd, Eve, and Max, Margo ends up alone onstage in the empty theatre. Since this suit was needed early on for sequences to be filmed at the Curran, Edith set to work on it right away.

  Toward the end of this scene, the script indicates that “Bill grabs her, pulls her down on the bed.” The night Bette came for the fitting, she tried on the gray suit. “I hope you’ve made it very strong, Edith,” she said.

  While Edith circled Bette, stopping to eye her from various angles, a seamstress made minor adjustments with pins. Suddenly Bette wheeled across the office—“she has a walk like a whiplash,” Edith said—seized two big ottomans, and shoved them against the couch. Then she zipped back over to Edith and the seamstress, who knelt down to stick a pin in the hem.

  A moment later Bette screamed, swept across the room, and dived onto the improvised bed. “We thought we had gouged her with a pin,” Edith said. “Or that she was having a fit. But as Bette got up, laughing, she said, ‘That’s exactly what I want—strong clothes to help me move. Guess it’ll work.’”

  That dive-bomber business wasn’t in the script, of course, but Bette had already decided how she would play the scene. And Edith had decided on accessories for the suit. She planned for Bette to wear a white handkerchief in the suit’s left-hand pocket, a tailored blouse with a black bow tie, and strapped black patent leather pumps.

  Mankiewicz always required costume tests to make sure his stars looked exactly right, and in spite of his tight schedule with Eve, he demanded the same tests now. Principal actors were photographed wearing each costume. Then Mankiewicz himself, or the costume designer, wrote suggestions right across the photos. Bette, he thought, looked too tightly tailored in Edith’s costume, so he ordered some modifications. The result was that, in the film, Bette’s blouse had frills and a white tie at the neck. She also wore a small diamond pin in place of a handkerchief, and black kid pumps without straps. The suit remained untouched.

  * * *

  April 12, Wednesday morning, day two of All About Eve. By seven o’clock hairdressers and makeup artists were at work on Anne Baxter and Celeste Holm, for this morning they were to film the first meeting of Eve Harrington and Karen Richards. This was an important scene because it gained sympathy for the stagestruck young Eve, whose idolatry of Margo Channing seemed so innocent. Indeed, it set the tempo and timbre of Anne Baxter’s entire performance. While Anne was made to look dowdy in a trenchcoat, Celeste was glamorized in mink. As makeup was carefully applied, and hair combed and sprayed, both actresses brushed up their lines with the script clerk.

  Mankiewicz, too, had been on the set long before shooting was scheduled to begin. If any problem arose, it was his duty to solve it. Besides, he was a perfectionist. Part of his job, too, was to determine the camera setups. From there the cinematographer assumed responsibility for lighting the set.

  Milton Krasner and his assistants, along with electricians and grips, had also been at work since the crack of dawn to prepare the lighting for the first scene, which was a night shot in the alley beside the Curran Theatre. To film this night scene in daytime, Krasner had the whole area covered with tarpaulins to obscure the sun and its reflections. Then appropriate lighting was set up to create the low-key illumination that would mimic night. Sound men tested their channels, prop men checked props, and the assistant director took a last-minute look at everything. At 9:00 A.M. the cameras rolled.

  What we see at the beginning of the scene is Karen Richards getting out of a taxi. She takes a step, hesitates, looks curiously about, then makes her way into the alley, heading for the stage door. As she passes a recess in the theatre’s exterior wall, Eve steps out of the shadows and calls out softly, “Mrs. Richards.” The scene takes up three pages in the script.

  To film it took half a day. From nine o’clock until long past lunchtime, they did it over and over again. At first the lighting wasn’t exactly right, Mankiewicz thought, and so they did another take. This time Krasner wasn’t satisfied; they repeated it. A streetcar grinding up a nearby street spoiled the third take, then Anne Baxter flubbed a line. Before Mankiewicz got what he wanted they had repeated the scene more than a dozen times. Only after the fourteenth take did the director finally say “Print it.” At last, well on toward two o’clock in the afternoon, hungry actors and crew members escaped the alley and hurried next door to Clift’s Redwood Room for lunch.

  “Miss Holm seemed anything but exhausted by her ordeal of fourteen takes,” wrote John Hobart of the San Francisco Chronicle, who had waited more than an hour to interview Celeste that day. “The blonde actress looked bright-eyed enough to cope with fourteen more.”

  Fresh from her Easter Sunday performance at the Hollywood Bowl a few days earlier, Celeste sounded very New Age. According to the reporter, “Miss Holm has developed a personal philosophy that seems to have worked out well. She believes it is ‘important in life to know one’s self and to know what general direction one wishes to take, that with this self-knowledge decisions become relatively unimportant, for the right things will happen to you.’”

  When lunch was over, Celeste, Anne, Joe, Milton, and the others reassembled to shoot the continuation of the sequence. This takes place backstage as Karen leads Eve to Margo’s dressin
g room. The short scene having gone well, by six o’clock the day’s shooting was over. Exposed film was packed up and airmailed to Fox’s lab in Los Angeles. The next day—Thursday, April 13—was Bette’s first appearance before the cameras. Thanks to the throat specialist, her voice had improved. Her pain had diminished, and so had her panic.

  Now Mankiewicz had a new fear. What if Bette’s voice stayed husky for a week or so, then healed? That would be a calamity. Besides, hearing Bette in this lower register convinced him that it was exactly the way Margo Channing must talk.

  By now everyone on the picture knew why Bette’s voice had dropped. Reporters who visited the set, however, were told that she had strained it on her previous film. This version appeared in all the papers, no doubt to the amusement of the San Francisco doctor who treated her, and who knew the real story.

  Mankiewicz ribbed his star that day on the set. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” he said. “But I warn you—if your voice improves too much we’re going to start off each morning with a screaming scene.”

  Chapter 9

  To Margo. To My Bride-to-Be

  During the first week of filming, Bette Davis and Gary Merrill fell in love. Celeste Holm: “And from then on she didn’t care whether the rest of us lived or died. Why, I walked onto the set the first or second day and said, ‘Good morning,’ and do you know her reply? She said—”

  Bette Davis: “Oh shit, good manners.”

  Celeste Holm: “I never spoke to her again—ever.”

  Gary Merrill: “There is truth in the idea that an actor’s personality is created in the parts he or she plays. My role was that of Bill Sampson, who was in love with Margo Channing, and as the film progressed I became infatuated with Bette.”

  Bette Davis: “On my first day of shooting, as Gary and I rehearsed our first scene together, I took a cigarette out of a cigarette case and waited for Bill Sampson to light it. He went on with his lines. I kept waiting for a light. When I realized he was ignoring the gesture, I asked if he were going to light my cigarette? He looked me squarely in the eye and said…”

  Gary Merrill: “I don’t think Bill Sampson would light Margo’s cigarettes.”

  Joe Mankiewicz: “He’s right, Bette. Bill would never light this dame’s cigarette.”

  Bette Davis: “I looked at Gary for a minute. Of course Bill Sampson wouldn’t. I wondered if that was Gary Merrill speaking to Bette Davis, to establish who was boss, or was it his opinion of what the character would do? I’m not quite sure to this day.”

  Joe Mankiewicz: “Margo Channing waits for no man! Margo wouldn’t stand for Bill’s ‘babying’ her, not for a minute.”

  Bette Davis: (pause) “You’re quite right, Mr. Merrill. Of course Bill wouldn’t light her cigarette.”

  Gary Merrill: “At first, since I love kids, I played games with Bette’s three-year-old daughter, B.D., who was on location. As B.D. (her name is Barbara Davis, but Bette always called her B.D.) became more comfortable with me, so did her mother. And as I earned more of their trust, Bette opened up and began confiding in me about her problems.”

  Bette Davis: “The unholy mess of my own life—another divorce, my permanent need for love, my aloneness. Margo Channing was a woman I understood thoroughly. I had hard work to remember I was playing a part.”

  Gary Merrill: “Before long we were walking about holding hands, going to the movies.… From simple compassion, my feelings shifted to uncontrollable lust.”

  Bette Davis: “The last place I expected to find love was on a movie set.”

  Celeste Holm: “It was not a very pretty relationship; they laughed at other people. Bette and Gary formed a kind of cabal, like two kids who had learned to spell a dirty word.”

  Bette Davis: “There was one bitch in the cast—Celeste Holm.”

  Gary Merrill: “Would Miss Davis like coffee? A cigarette? A sandwich? Someone murdered?”

  Bette Davis: “I sensed in Gary my last chance at love and marriage. I wanted these as desperately as ever. I had been an actress first and a woman second.”

  Gary Merrill: “I walked around with an erection for three days.”

  Bette Davis: “I started falling in love with him when I observed how he could relax in bed all day long for two solid weeks.”

  Zsa Zsa Gabor: “There was one bed on the set and every time we came back after lunch, it was obvious that Gary and Bette had been using it during the break.”

  Bette Davis: “That bed was for a scene in All About Eve but it was so comfortable that, between shots, the whole cast stretched out on it. Most of us would lie there for a few moments then pop up for cigarettes or something. Not Gary. He just lay there, completely at ease, until his scenes were called.”

  Gary Merrill: “We only played two love scenes before I said, ‘Will you marry me?’”

  Bette Davis: “I had fused the two men completely—Bill Sampson and Gary Merrill. Margo Channing and Bill Sampson were perfectly matched. I was breaking every one of my rules. I always swore I’d never marry an actor.”

  Chapter 10

  A Graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art

  As early as All About Eve, the root system of the Monroe legend had begun to spread, though no one guessed then at its vitality. Marilyn’s brief scenes in the picture, along with her earlier appearance in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, are mere buds. But the twig surged, redoubled, and took over the forest.

  After interviewing about a dozen young actresses, including Sheree North, for the role of Miss Caswell, Mankiewicz proposed the name of Marilyn Monroe. Zanuck hit the ceiling. He had dropped her from the Fox roster a couple of years earlier because, Marilyn herself later claimed, he considered her unphotogenic. She had played bit parts in several Fox pictures, and Zanuck had excised her from all but one or two. On the day of her dismissal a studio official explained: “Mr. Zanuck feels that you may turn into an actress sometime, but that your type of looks is definitely against you.”

  The screenwriter Ben Hecht once defined a starlet as any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel. According to Mankiewicz, Marilyn’s two or three years as a member of the 20th Century-Fox “stock company” left little time for acting. “For the most part she auditioned a great deal, late afternoons, in executive offices.”

  Why did Mankiewicz want her to play Miss Caswell? “There was a breathlessness and sort of glued-on innocence about her that I found appealing.” But Zanuck might have foisted another girl as the “graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art” if Marilyn’s protector, Johnny Hyde, hadn’t intervened.

  Hyde, fifty-four years old at the time, was a short, wizened man with severe heart trouble. He was also a top agent at William Morris. Though married, Hyde was in love with Marilyn and by all accounts he treated her well. Unlike most other men she knew at the time, he also respected her and seems to have recognized the talent that her insecurities concealed. Without Hyde’s interest, Marilyn might have remained unknown.

  Johnny Hyde brought her to see Joe Mankiewicz. Hyde wanted his girlfriend/client to work often, and in important films. “He haunted my office,” Mankiewicz said. Even after choosing Marilyn for the part, Mankiewicz had no intention of defending her against Zanuck’s caprice. “I wasn’t about to tear up my contract and stomp out if she didn’t get the part,” he said.

  Once Hyde had convinced the director that Marilyn was the one, he set to work on Zanuck. Hyde, because of his status as a top movie agent, was in a position to overcome Zanuck’s resistance, if not his reluctance. “On March 27, 1950, Marilyn Monroe was signed for five hundred dollars a week—on a one-week guarantee,” Mankiewicz later recalled. With this initial agreement came a long-term contract with Fox, which remained in effect, with modifications, through June 1962, when the studio fired her for the second time. Two months later Marilyn Monroe died.

  Today Marilyn, in her fleeting scenes in All About Eve, is intoxicating. At the time, however, she commanded scant attentio
n. Reviewers overlooked her when the picture came out. Until Niagara, three years later, it was cheesecake more than film roles that kept her going. In the years following All About Eve, Marilyn’s co-stars seemed dazed that their own careers faltered while hers mushroomed. After her death, when the myth obscured the facts, various members of the cast ransacked their memories for details of the fledgling goddess during that long-ago April.

  “And that poor Monroe child—Marilyn—Marilyn was terrified of Bette Davis!” This is George Sanders speaking in 1970, two years before his suicide. “During one scene in a theatre involving Marilyn, Bette Davis, and me, Bette whispered after a shot, within poor Marilyn’s hearing: ‘That little blonde slut can’t act her way out of a paper bag! She thinks if she wiggles her ass and coos, she can carry her scene. Well, she can’t.’”

  Reporting Bette’s unkindness to Marilyn, George Sanders overlooked his own. Ten years earlier, in his Memoirs of a Professional Cad, Sanders himself had written condescendingly: “Even then, on the set of All About Eve, Marilyn struck me as a character in search of an author and I am delighted she found Mr. Miller eventually.”

  * * *

  The Love Songs of Addison DeWitt

  If George Sanders had been more ambitious, he might have left acting for a career in opera. During an appearance on Tallulah Bankhead’s radio show in the early 1950s, he sang the aria “In lacerato spirito” from Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. His well-trained voice was so pleasant that many in the studio audience did not believe it belonged to George Sanders. They left convinced that he had mouthed a recording of someone else’s singing.

  Sanders’ vocal coach in Hollywood was Maestro Cepparo. One day, without George’s knowledge, the maestro planted the manager of the San Francisco Opera Company near the open door while George sang several arias. According to George’s friend Brian Aherne, who was present, the gentleman immediately offered George the role of Scarpia in Tosca for the upcoming opera season. To the astonishment of all present, Sanders said he did not want to become an opera singer. He politely but firmly declined the offer.