All About “All About Eve” (2 page)

The other author of
Citizen Kane
was Orson Welles. It’s not clear whether Herman Mankiewicz or Welles wrote the scorching end of that movie, but if it was Mankiewicz, the thundering irony is almost too painfully clear. That final operatic holocaust of Charles Foster Kane’s effects recurred somewhere on a stretch of highway that day in 1951 when Herman’s kid brother, Joe, lost the papers and mementos that meant more to him than anything else he had acquired in Hollywood.

Did Joe Mankiewicz, too, have some secret, half-forgotten “Rosebud” that vanished in the moving-van fire? And if so, did his, like Kane’s, represent an unhealed wound? Or—more likely—was the Joe Mankiewicz “Rosebud” a comic one, etched in irony and drenched with a certain kind of wit that later would assume the flashy name of “camp”?

That final fire at Xanadu, and the later one that consumed the Mankiewicz moving van, rhyme like a combustible couplet. It’s right out of a movie, you think. And then you say: Why not? In Hollywood, where life and art always overlap, who can tell the difference?

*   *   *

“I am too beautiful to be a
Hausfrau
!” shrilled the young woman, slinging the script across the sofa into a mound of cushions. “I vant to be an actress again!”

“But you’re a splendid housekeeper, my dear, you said so yourself. You said, ‘Every time I get a divorce, I keep the house.’”

Her husband’s cool rejoinder was too much. She burst into tears and slammed out of the room, followed by Josephine, her devoted boxer bitch, whose sharply barked laments on the stairs echoed those of her mistress.

A few miles west of Hollywood, in the mountain fastness of Bel Air, there lived a happy couple. He was Russian but, owing to his Oxbridge accent, his suave brittleness, and his waxy polish, he passed for an Englishman. The lady was a Magyar from Budapest who had once passed for an actress, though her stage debut was far away and long ago. As a thespian, this young woman was forgotten by the world, since her acting résumé contained but a single line.

Few in Hollywood had heard of an operetta called
Der Singende Traum
(“The Singing Dream”), much less of the soubrette with the given name of Sari who frolicked across the stage in Vienna a few years before World War II. But Sari Gabor Belge Hilton Sanders remembered the applause. She recalled gypsy violins at romantic suppers with gentlemen after performances, and ranks of roses in her dressing room. She craved new glories in America.

Sari Gabor, nicknamed Zsa Zsa, was desperate. Everyone she knew was famous: her sister Eva, starring on Broadway in
The Happy Time
; two of her ex-husbands, Turkish government press director Burhan Belge, and Conrad Hilton, the multi-millionaire hotelier; and Zsa Zsa’s third husband, George Sanders, had just landed the role of Addison DeWitt in Joseph Mankiewicz’s next movie,
All About Eve
.

At the age of thirty, give or take a little, Zsa Zsa had prospered, certainly; she wasn’t the former Mrs. Hilton for nothing. But to be an actress, to make films like her sister Eva and so many other girls she knew—now there was something worth making sacrifices for.

George and Zsa Zsa had been married not quite a year. Their nuptials (a word often used by Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper to announce a new Filmland alliance) had taken place on April 1, 1949, in Las Vegas. And George had been making movies ever since. He and Zsa Zsa had recently returned from Spain, where he filmed
Captain Blackjack
.

Later that afternoon, tears dried and makeup freshened, Mrs. George Sanders reemerged.

“Vy not, Georgie?” she said, smoothing the lapel of his smoking jacket. “Phoebe, ze high school girl—it’s a small role vich comes only at ze end of the picture.”

“My dear, I believe you might be a trifle mature for the part. Let’s see, Phoebe must be seventeen or so, and you were born in—”

“Look at ze script, George,” Zsa Zsa implored. “Zis girl stands in front of three long mirrors. Sink how lovely—three Zsa Zsas.”

A waft of his wife’s perfume brushed his nostril, and George wavered.

“Look here, I suppose…”

“Three Zsa Zsas at ze end of the picture,” she gurgled, tilting her exotic Hungarian head.

George disliked it when she gurgled. He reconsidered the threefold prospect of his wife.

She sucked in her breath and chattered on: “It’s only a walk-on at ze end, you know.”

George Sanders frowned. “It’s more than a walk-on,” he informed her with a certain superiority. “Besides, it’s unlikely that Darryl would give the role to an untried actress. And I’m not the least convinced that you know how to behave on a set.”

“Tell Darryl Zanuck that if I’m no good, ze studio can cut me off.” She made a sweeping gesture with her arms.

George Sanders didn’t say the first thing that came to mind. Instead he paused for a long moment, looked down at his drink, then slowly replied, “Don’t be silly. Acting isn’t for you.”

A half-century later, one might say that he was absolutely right. And wrong!

For Zsa Zsa soon made her debut in
Lovely to Look At
(1952), quickly reached her A-list zenith in John Huston’s
Moulin Rouge
the same year, and has been the Potboiler Princess ever since, most famously in
Queen of Outer Space
.

*   *   *

It was 1950, and Hollywood seemed fascinated with itself.

At Paramount, Billy Wilder was putting the finishing touches on
Sunset Boulevard
, with Gloria Swanson as silent screen star Norma Desmond, a glamorous old vamp, and William Holden as a down-at-heels screenwriter. Nicholas Ray was directing
In a Lonely Place
at Columbia, with Bogart also playing a screenwriter—this one suspected of a film-noir murder. Over at MGM they were contemplating
Singin’ in the Rain
, the gloriously energetic, tuneful, tap-dancing story of Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), another silent star—this one with a screechy voice that dooms her when talkies arrive. Even Marlene Dietrich was about to play a sultry actress resembling herself in the early airplane film
No Highway in the Sky
, speaking throaty lines such as “My films are a few cans of celluloid on the junk heap someday.” And at 20th Century-Fox, Joseph L. Mankiewicz had just started
All About Eve
, a film that, while technically about Broadway rather than Hollywood, amounted to exploratory surgery on the dysphoric underbelly of show business.

It was something of a miracle that his movie got made at all, at least the way it did, for Bette Davis hadn’t spoken to Darryl Zanuck, the producer, in nine years. And besides, Claudette Colbert had already signed to play the role of Margo Channing.
Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter
had announced the Colbert coup late in 1949.

Zanuck, moreover, had John Garfield in mind for Bill Sampson, Margo’s lover. He also thought José Ferrer would make a fine Addison DeWitt, and he wanted Jeanne Crain for the role of Eve Harrington. All these possibilities, and others, Zanuck jotted in pencil on the inside back cover of Mankiewicz’s original treatment of
Eve
. Zanuck’s early casting notes reveal Barbara Stanwyck, in addition to Claudette Colbert, as a possibility for Margo Channing. From the start, however, he favored Celeste Holm for Karen, Hugh Marlowe for Lloyd Richards, and Thelma Ritter for Birdie.

In early April 1950 Bette Davis was finishing
The Story of a Divorce
at RKO. This film, later retitled
Payment on Demand
, was her first after leaving Warner Bros., where she had been under contract for eighteen difficult years.

One day, during a lull in shooting while Curtis Bernhardt, the director, conferred with his cameraman, Bette got word that she was wanted on the telephone. Since filming had stopped for a time, she was able to leave the set and take the call in her dressing room. She had on one of the rather matronly dresses designed for her to wear in the picture.

“Hello, Bette, this is Darryl Zanuck,” said the production chief of 20th Century-Fox. His high-pitched Nebraska accent, full of sharp
r
’s and words bitten off at the end, was in marked contrast with Bette’s
r
-less New England speech, naturally full of broad
a
’s that had broadened even further as she acquired the florid stage diction of the time.

Bette knew Zanuck’s voice—and she didn’t believe this was Zanuck. Always suspicious, on screen and off, she assumed it was a friend playing a joke. After all, the last thing Zanuck had said to her, during their falling-out in 1941, was “You’ll never work in Hollywood again!”

“Hello, Darryl dear,” Bette crooned, sounding more Broadway-British than ever. “Lovely to heah from you.”

“Bette, I’ve got a script I want you to take a look at,” Zanuck said. “I think you’ll like it. And I hope you’ll want to do it.”

“Anything you say, my deah.” She sounded even saucier on the phone than she did on-screen. “If I like it, I
will
do it,” she said with a trace of malice and a soupçon of insolence. Bette couldn’t figure out which one of her friends was pretending to be Darryl F. Zanuck, so she decided to have a little fun herself, string him along, do an imitation of Bette Davis. Why not? Everyone else did.

By the end of the conversation, she expected this young man—who on earth could it be?—to end his charade with a guffaw. All the while, of course, Bette was puffing her cigarette like … well, just like Bette Davis.

“The only thing is, Bette, if you like it you’ve got to be ready to start shooting in ten days, wardrobe finished and all.”

“Right away, Darryl deah.” Bette said it as though she were Judith Traherne, the Long Island playgirl and horsewoman she played in
Dark Victory
.

“So you’re interested in the script?” Zanuck continued, making allowances for star extravagance.

“Anything you say, Darryl dahling.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know the name of the picture?”

“Oh, why not surprise me?” Bette said airily. She flung her cigarette hand over her shoulder like a boa.

“Bette, this script is by Joe Mankiewicz. It’s the picture Claudette Colbert was going to do before she broke her back.”

“Broke her back?” Bette yelped.

And then it dawned!

“Darryl! Is that really you?”

They talked for four or five minutes, during which Zanuck made her one of the best offers any film actress ever received. Bette jumped at the chance to read the script of
All About Eve
, which ultimately, as the critic Ethan Mordden has said, “might be the film that ruined Davis or the film that made her immortal.” Perhaps it did both.

Betty Lynn, playing the daughter in
Payment on Demand
, recalled later that Bette’s eyes were blazing when she returned to the set. Speaking at breakneck speed, Davis told her younger co-star that the phone call was from Zanuck and that he was sending over a script that had Hollywood in a buzz.

Bette’s Quarrel with Darryl Zanuck

In January 1941 Bette Davis was elected the first woman president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was a high honor, and Bette set out to serve with distinction. She soon locked horns, however, with some of her older colleagues. The first disagreement came when Bette suggested that holding the usual Academy Awards banquet in the Biltmore Hotel “might seem frivolous in light of the terrible struggle that our British and European friends are engaged in against the Nazis. Some have suggested we cancel it. I think a better solution would be to hold the ceremony in a theatre, charge a minimum of twenty-five dollars a seat, and donate the proceeds to British War Relief.”

Surprisingly, this plan was opposed as “undignified” by some members.

Next, Bette raised the issue of extras. Pointing out that many of them did not speak English and that few were capable of judging technical excellence in films, she suggested that they no longer be permitted to cast votes in the Oscar competition. This suggestion also met with disapproval from many members.

Her other recommendations also caused shock and consternation, so that Bette soon felt she had been chosen only as a glamorous figurehead whom no one cared to take seriously. A few days after the first meeting over which she presided, Bette resigned despite a warning from Darryl Zanuck, who had sponsored her for the presidency. How dire his prophecy, and how blind: “You’ll never work in Hollywood again.”

Jean Hersholt, who was elected to replace Bette, was a diplomat and a skilled politician. He soon maneuvered to deny extras the right to vote, and he paved the way to moving the awards ceremony from banquet hall to theatre. His success in the wake of Bette’s failure no doubt implies sexism on the part of the male-dominated Academy. But Bette’s bluntness and impatience, her refusal to compromise, surely helped alienate many whom she might later have persuaded.

An even smaller part than that of Phoebe, the young schemer who ends
All About Eve
, was the role of Miss Caswell. If Zsa Zsa Gabor had read the script carefully, she might have tried to grab that little bonbon of a role: Miss Caswell, given name Claudia, whom George Sanders describes as “a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art.” In the script, Mankiewicz describes her merely as “a blonde young lady.”

Ironically, though Zsa Zsa coveted the part of Phoebe, she was fleetingly considered for “the blonde young lady.” On the 20th Century-Fox casting director’s list, under the heading “Miss Caswell,” are the following names, most of them forgotten but two or three unforgettable: Virginia Toland, Barbara Britton, Karin Booth, Marie McDonald, Mary Meade, Joi Lansing, Adele Jergens, Marilyn Maxwell, Gale Robbins, Joyce Reynolds, Leslie Brooks, ZaZa [
sic
] Gabor, Lois Andrews, Myrna Dell, Angela Lansbury, Pat Knight, Cleo Moore, Ellie Marshall, Marilyn Monroe, Dolores Moran, Marian Marshall, Randy Stuart, Marjorie Reynolds, Arleen Whelan, Angela Greene, and Rowena Rollins.

At every studio, such lists amounted to little. They were devised when the casting director and his associates, thinking out loud, jotted a quick roster of possibilities. In this instance, at Fox, the casting office soon received a skeleton list from Zanuck and Mankiewicz. Later the casting director winnowed these starlet names. It’s impossible to determine how Zsa Zsa made it that far, though it’s likely that George Sanders mentioned her to Mankiewicz. Life at home no doubt became sweeter with the announcement, “I’ve submitted your name.” But Zsa Zsa wasn’t yet blonde, nor had she launched her Hollywood career. Soon she and all the others were out of the running.