All About “All About Eve” (11 page)

The air was sulphurous. Other disputes ensued, one of which climaxed with the new husband hurling a steamer trunk at his cowering helpmate. But love caressed the turbid waters; the tempest subsided. And on May 1, 1947, Bette Davis gave birth to Barbara Davis Sherry—B.D.—who in years to come would be both the apple of her mother’s eye and the dagger in her heart.

In October 1949 Bette filed for divorce. The next day Sheilah Graham headlined:
BETTE DAVIS ACTS TO RUB OUT
3
RD MARRIAGE
. Graham, better remembered today for her liaison with F. Scott Fitzgerald than for her prose, continued: “Screen tragedienne Bette Davis chalked up another real-life setback late today when she filed suit for divorce from her artist-husband William Grant Sherry, accusing the muscular one-time masseur of rubbing her the wrong way.” The flippant tone of the column infuriated Bette, and she later retaliated by having Sheilah Graham barred from the set of her next picture.

Tempers cooled, and a few weeks later Bette and Sherry announced a reconciliation. Their riotous marriage lurched forward. On December 31, 1949, to celebrate New Year’s Eve, they went to the movies. They saw
Twelve O’Clock High
, starring Gregory Peck, Hugh Marlowe, and Gary Merrill.

In the spring of 1950 Bette started filming
The Story of a Divorce
, a more fitting title, under the circumstances, than
Payment on Demand
, which the picture was eventually called.

One night during that crowded month of April 1950, Bette didn’t make it home to dinner. The cast and crew of
Payment on Demand
surprised her with a forty-second birthday party two days before the actual date, April 5. Waiting at home for his wife, Sherry, by turns worried and annoyed, decided to pay a surprise visit to RKO. The studio gateman who let him in informed Sherry about the surprise party for Bette in the commissary. This was news to her husband. He hadn’t been invited.

By now the party was over, so Sherry made his way to Bette’s dressing room. There he found her and co-star Barry Sullivan in a very jovial mood, relaxing with post-party drinks and cigarettes and bursts of laughter. A terrible row took place. Sherry, perceiving Sullivan as “the other man,” slugged him, and the next day Bette filed for divorce again. It was while Bette was in the midst of this marital commotion that Darryl Zanuck phoned to offer her
All About Eve
.

Gary was married at the time to Barbara Leeds, a blue-eyed actress who wore her blonde hair in bangs and had a wide-open smile on a friendly face. Leeds was a Doris Day look-alike. Gary was thirty-six; his wife was thirty-three. They had married in 1941.

After his first encounter with “the Star” that Sunday for the makeup tests, he returned to his beach house in Malibu and entertained his wife and their Sunday-afternoon guests with stories of meeting Bette Davis. “I was appalled,” he said, describing the callous treatment she got from the makeup artists. He had developed a big, protective feeling toward her, as though she were a lamb loose in the Hollywood jungle.

He was right to call her “the Star.” Certainly Bette deserved the uppercase that he, a character actor, couldn’t help vocalizing, and perhaps the quotation marks in his voice as well. But Bette Davis, in April 1950, was a fading star.
Winter Meeting
(1948) had been the first of her pictures to lose money. Her behavior had become less professional and more unbearable on the set of each new and lackluster movie.

After
Beyond the Forest
, in 1949, it seemed impossible for her career to get any worse. And since “camp” as an aesthetic concept hadn’t yet been invented, no one realized that this movie would fester into immortality once Edward Albee featured a Davis line from it—“What a dump!”—thirteen years later in his play
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

On a hot day in August 1949 Bette left the Warner Bros. lot for the last time as a contract player at the studio that had hired her in 1932. Over the years at Warner she had quarreled and shouted. There had been lawsuits and threats. In Gary Merrill’s words, she had been “willing to confront dragons.” But so, it was said, had Jack Warner—a most unlikely incarnation of St. George. How could Miss Davis and Mr. Warner, as they politely referred to each other in correspondence and statements to the press, survive apart? Their fights were so invigorating.

As an actress, Bette Davis had also matured and perfected her craft at Warner Bros. Sometimes, especially when the joke was on someone else, she had even laughed. When she tried really hard, Bette could recall days of fulfillment when the Academy nominated her, nights of vindication when she won. There, at the studio, despite every conceivable setback, she had waxed from bette davis to Bette Davis, and then all the way, at last, to
BETTE DAVIS
. But she, like everyone else in town, being weighed in the scales of box-office gross, was found to have the precise value of her latest picture. And so she searched in vain for friends, colleagues, any longtime familiar face as she pulled up to the studio gate that final time. It was nearly the end of Hollywood’s first half-century, and on that piercingly clear summer afternoon everybody she knew was busy on a new picture. As the former Queen of Warner Bros. drove away, no one waved good-bye.

*   *   *

Zanuck wanted Jeanne Crain to play Eve Harrington. Though the years have reduced her star to the size of an asterisk, in 1950 she was famous. Under contract to Fox, Crain had become a favorite with fans and theatre exhibitors of the period.

On-screen she seemed passive and one-dimensional, especially in such treacly fare as
Home in Indiana
(1944) and
State Fair
(1945). She was not without acting ability, however, and in 1949 she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in
Pinky
as a black girl passing for white. That was also the year Mankiewicz used her in
A Letter to Three Wives
.

Despite her good performance as one of the ensemble in that picture, Mankiewicz was unenthusiastic when Zanuck urged him to cast her as Eve. When he told Zanuck that Jeanne Crain could never summon the “bitch virtuosity” needed to play Eve Harrington, Zanuck yielded. Mankiewicz then named the actress he considered right for the part.

“Anne Baxter as Eve?” Zanuck mused. “Joe, why the hell do you think she’s better than Jeanne?”

Mankiewicz sold Zanuck on Baxter, and since she was also under contract to Fox at the time, Zanuck okayed her for the part.

Anne Baxter’s version of how she came to play Eve Harrington differs from Mankiewicz’s. She claimed that the role was offered to her because Jeanne Crain got pregnant. And since Crain eventually bore seven children, the odds seem to favor Baxter’s account.

Chapter 7

San Francisco, An Oasis of Civilization in the California Desert

“Bette Davis was so rude, so constantly rude. I think it had to do with sex.” That’s how Celeste Holm remembered her co-star thirty-eight years after
All About Eve
. It’s a tantalizing thing to say, but Holm didn’t elaborate. One wonders whether she meant that Bette’s alleged rudeness had to do with rivalry between stars of the same sex, or whether Bette, like a lioness in rut, snarled when the number-two cat on the set—in this case, Celeste Holm— rubbed too close to her new mate—in this case, Gary Merrill.

The two women did not like each other. They met for the first time at a party shortly before the entire cast and crew left for San Francisco. When Mankiewicz introduced them, Celeste said, “I am so looking forward to working with you.”

Bette said, “So am I.”

It seemed they were off to a good start, even though Bette, during her reign as Queen of Warner Bros. if not of the jungle, was known as a cutthroat.

Compared to Bette, Celeste was something of a newcomer to pictures. Although she had won an Oscar for
Gentleman’s Agreement,
it was only for a supporting role. Would Bette Davis hold that against her? You hear all kinds of things in Hollywood, Celeste reflected, and if half the things you hear about Bette are true …

It’s possible that Bette viewed Celeste as something of a goody-goody with a sharp eye for the publicity value of righteousness. It was only a year before, after all, that Celeste starred as a tennis-playing nun in the Loretta Young vehicle,
Come to the Stable
. And a few days before she and Bette started work on
All About Eve
, Celeste read a lofty poem called “The Shadow of the Voice” during the Easter sunrise service at the Hollywood Bowl. The next day she was prominently pictured in the
Los Angeles Times
.

Then, too, Bette was forty and then some. Celeste hoped it wouldn’t bother her that she, Celeste, playing Margo Channing’s best friend, was so much younger. And looked so much younger. Celeste Holm was thirty.

A couple of weeks after Celeste and Bette’s first encounter, this strange group of stars began to descend on San Francisco. Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, and Hugh Marlowe flew from Los Angeles on Darryl Zanuck’s seaplane. But flying, in those days, was not considered the safest way to travel. Bette Davis got the real star treatment. She went by train.

On Monday, April 10, the Zanuck seaplane took off. “Noisy! Oh, my God,” moaned Celeste.

Gary was crowded beside Celeste, with Hugh scrunched up behind them in the plane’s rear seat. The roar of the engine grew even louder as the plane reached its cruising altitude. Small talk was out. Gary and Hugh studied their scripts, while Celeste filed her nails.

But Celeste liked to talk. She wouldn’t be drowned out by the motor. “Well,” she said, turning to Gary, “I wonder what—” but her words mixed with the rumble of the engine.

“I can’t hear you!” he yelled.

“
I said, I wonder what it’s going to be like working with the Queen Bee!”

Gary chuckled. He leaned close to her ear and called out, “I know one thing—it’ll all be over in eight weeks.”

Celeste laughed, and Gary laughed, and Hugh Marlowe wondered whether these shouted remarks wouldn’t strain their voices on the day before shooting was to start.

When the plane landed and the three of them were en route to their hotel, Celeste eyed Gary again. She seemed to be studying his face. Gary didn’t know it then, but Celeste’s mother was a professional portrait painter and Celeste, too, had a lively interest in art. (As Karen Richards in
Eve,
she’s a Sunday painter.)

“Are you Lithuanian or something?” she suddenly asked.

Gary was nonplussed. What a strange question, he thought.

“Pure early American,” he snapped. And he got one of those looks on his face, the kind he uses on Anne Baxter in the film when she tries unsuccessfully to seduce him in her dressing room.

“He was so defensive,” Celeste said later. “I love roots. I’m Norwegian on my father’s side, and on my mother’s side I’m everything. But I must have stepped on some kind of toes there. Gary does look Lithuanian, or something interesting. I guess everybody was nervous when we got to San Francisco.”

Perhaps Gary’s nerves made him peevish. After all, this was the biggest step of his career. And a few days earlier he had indeed met the Queen Bee, as Celeste blithely called her. He had been having drone fantasies ever since.

Then, too, Gary was a Merrill from Connecticut, so being labeled Lithuanian disturbed him on several levels. Next to a tenor, a deep-rooted New England actor is the touchiest thing in show business, or so an onlooker might have thought on that chilly day in San Francisco when Gary’s grumpy retort wounded Celeste’s feelings. Perhaps he felt some manly twinge when asked whether he was Lithuanian. For during the recent war, a third of the population of Lithuania had been cut down by invading armies. The question, if not impertinent, seemed to suggest all sorts of bad luck.

When Bette’s train pulled into the station in San Francisco, a battalion of reporters and photographers swarmed around it. The train stopped, passengers disembarked, and finally, amid a flurry of porters, railroad personnel, and studio emissaries, Bette descended onto the platform. Reporters called out questions while others scribbled answers and flashbulbs popped.

Bette’s entourage included her three-year-old daughter B.D. and the child’s nanny, a young woman named Marion Richards; Bette’s secretary; and a bodyguard to protect them against William Sherry, Bette’s estranged husband, who had made threats.

As they made their way into the station, Marion Richards was aghast to realize the photographers were taking pictures of her. “I was wearing sunglasses and my hair was the same color as Miss Davis’s,” she said later. “When we left the train they rushed up and began to photograph me. I said, ‘No, please, you’re making a mistake. That’s Miss Davis back there, in the fur coat, carrying the little girl.’”

The nanny, who had lived for some time in the house with Bette and William Sherry, knew Bette’s moods. She didn’t want to provoke one, however inadvertently. Bette shot her hapless employee a couple of looks indicating that she wasn’t happy at being upstaged, even accidentally. Having reclaimed the limelight, however, Bette let the incident pass without comment as she handed over her little daughter.

Half of Hollywood, or so it seemed, had arrived in San Francisco. For weeks now, Fitz Fitzgerald of the Fox Location Department had been arranging hotel reservations for all fifty-five members of the cast and crew. Most of them stayed at the Fairmont. He had also drawn up schedules of departure and arrival times for everyone, whether they were flying in, coming by train, or driving up from Los Angeles. In addition, Fitzgerald obtained the necessary permits for shooting. While he was doing all this, the head of the studio’s Transportation Department had put a fleet of trucks on the road to haul necessary shooting equipment.

Bette having made her star’s entrance, other trains and other planes filled San Francisco with celebrities. Thelma Ritter flew in from her home in Queens, New York; Anne Baxter arrived late that night because she hated to leave her husband, John Hodiak. George Sanders and his wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, arrived on the same flight as Marilyn Monroe.