Sam Staggs - All About All About Eve: The Complete Behind-The-Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made!

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Contents

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Chapter 4.

Chapter 5.

Chapter 6.

Chapter 7.

Chapter 8.

Chapter 9.

Chapter 10.

Chapter 11.

Chapter 12.

Chapter 13.

Chapter 14.

Chapter 15.

Chapter 16.

Chapter 17.

Chapter 18.

Chapter 19.

Chapter 20.

Chapter 21.

Chapter 22.

Chapter 23.

Chapter 24.

Chapter 25.

Chapter 26.

Chapter 27.

To Robert Sanchez, Glenn Russell, Evan Matthews,

Steve Lambert, Tim Boss, Cary Birdwell,

John Conway, Gary Schwartz,

and Warren Butlerwho know all about movies

Authors Note

Since All About Eve is, to me, one of the most entertaining movies ever made, I have tried to write an entertaining book about it. I like to think of my work as fan scholarship, or even camp scholarship, and why not? Surely a book about a particular movie should echo the voice of the movie itself.

To come at a Hollywood classic from every angle, as Ive attempted to do, you have to immerse yourself in all aspects of the production, as the moviemakers did. Its necessary to memorize the script. To learn your way around the sets and observe carpenters, electricians, stylists, and script-girls. Study every performance. You have to become a shadow director, as well as a shadow star, someone who sees everything but who remains out of camera range.

My chief method in tracing the route of All About Eve has been a production history of the film. The complete story, however, began long before anyone conceived such a picture, and continues long after: through the Broadway musical Applause and including quotations, references, and allusions to Eve right up to the present day.

I wanted to write not as a detached observer but rather from the point of view of an audience member trying to figure out why I like the movie so much, and why I still find it fresh after thirty or forty viewings. My approach is emotionalthats the fan response. But without research and a rigorous quest for accuracy and balance, the entire book might amount to little more than a studio press release.

Writing about the Hollywood of fifty years ago is a slippery job at best because so many of the peopleand the documentsare gone. And of course those in the motion picture industry, like the rest of us, have remembered what was favorable to themselves. Each one framed his or her narrative with an eye to flattering close-ups.

In trying to separate fact from myth, I have retained a constant skepticism. Many of the anecdotes recounted here derive, with variations, from several sources. Ive also included several from a single source, and a few from sources not entirely convincing. The quotes from various persons connected with All About Eve sometimes sound scripted, but theyre real. Attributions are given in the endnotes.

I might have caught a glimpse of the heart of the mystery from the rear, an unflattering angle which, paradoxically, has always excited me, possibly because it is in some way involved with my passion for backstage, for observing what is magic from the unusual, privileged angle.

Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge

Chapter 1

Fire and Music

1951

A terse headline in Variety on September 27, 1951, told the news: MANKIEWICZ, 20TH SEVER CONTRACT . Many in the industry were surprised that Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the Hollywood director and screenwriter, was quitting 20th Century-Fox, where he had spent the better part of a decade. His separation from Fox was amicable, as such things go; his valedictory to Los Angeles less so. Mankiewicz referred to the City of Angels as an intellectual fog belt.

Manhattan, he felt sure, would salute him. There he could breathe finer air. He expected to be smartly quoted all over town, and when he tossed out a bon mot his New York listeners wouldnt miss a beat. Nor would anyone complain Whats that supposed to mean? as they had done since his first day in the intellectual fog belt.

Two Bekins moving vans that would transport everything the Mankiewicz family owned across the country to their new home in New York were packed. One van was filled with household goods. The other contained what was irreplaceable: the writings of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, his papers, his many awards and citations.

Mankiewicz told a reporter he was off to Broadway to make my pitch for the theatre. Although he spent the rest of his life in New York, he never completed a play, and he never directed one.

1995

Celeste Holm, in her apartment on Central Park West, answered the phone herself. After hearing a description of the book in progress, titled All About All About Eve , she asked, Why the hell do you want to write that book?

Why? Because millions of people love the movie. And also because no one has told the story of how it came about and why All About Eve is considered both a Hollywood classic and a cult film.

I dont get it, she snapped. A work of art speaks for itself! I think a book like that is a waste of time. If people are interested, let them see the movie.

Ive seen it thirty times.

Then see it thirty more!

Look, Miss Holm, its not backstairs gossip Im after. But since Mankiewicz lost all his papers in the fire

I guess you want to talk to me about Bette Davis? Celeste Holm demanded, and without waiting for an answer she continued. Ive talked to everybody in the world about that movie!

Bette Davis? No. Id rather hear about you.

All this crap about booksI dont get it.

Suppose I send you a detailed letter about the book. Your memories of shooting All About Eve are important.

Well maybe. I dont know. Good-bye.

She never answered the letter.

1996

Told about the unproductive phone conversation with Celeste Holm, Kenneth Geist, Joseph L. Mankiewiczs biographer, remarked, When youre the last Mankiewicz survivor in New York, youve probably had enough.

1976

Im not a dinosaur, you know, harrumphed Celeste Holm when a reporter in Los Angeles asked her if All About Eve is the movie people best remember her for.

Didnt you see Tom Sawyer last year? she scolded. I played Aunt Polly. That was a hit too. Actually, I can tell a lot about somebody just from the movie of mine he mentions first. If you like All About Eve so much it probably means youre a Bette Davis nut, a late-show freak. The Broadway musical fans want to know about my playing Ado Annie in the original production of Oklahoma . And the socially conscious crowd, the urban liberals, talk about Gentlemans Agreement .

1951

Volumes of playsIbsen, Oscar Wilde, Kaufman and Hart, Rostand, Molire, Beaumont and Fletcher, even Clyde Fitch and old melodramasall of these crackled in the fire as if this were Berlin in 1933. Theatre histories, the works of Sigmund Freud, scripts and diaries, biographies of Minnie Fiske and Sarah Siddons and the Barrymores blazed up for a few minutes and then were gone. Mementos saved from movie sets melted like candle wax.

The fire grew and fattened, consuming every molecule of oxygen. It lapped up half a lifetime of memories. The highway itself seemed on fire, while inside the overturned Bekins van ugly smoke gnawed away at wooden crates, cardboard boxes, and metal file cabinets, which, despite their greater strength, would not survive.