All About “All About Eve” (25 page)

Chapter 18

And You, I Take It, Are the Paderewski Who Plays His Concerto on Me, the Piano?

Long before the advent of spoken dialogue in 1927, pictures had come to seem bare without music. Most major silent productions were released with an accompanying score, a practice that quickly became a tradition. Soon it was rare for a film to be released without at least a rudimentary score, and by 1950 studio brass had come to love background music. To them, a movie deprived of it was like an elevator without Muzak.

Alfred Newman, a top studio composer and head of Fox’s music department, was assigned to do the score for
Eve
. Newman once said: “I’m terrified every time I undertake a new film score. I sit and stare at the blank manuscript paper, pondering the unfathomable depth of my dry well. Finally, in pure desperation, before I can run and hide, I reach out and jab a quarter note onto the page.” Overcoming his usual creative anxiety, Newman soon set to work on
All About Eve
.

In a memorandum to Alfred Newman and to Zanuck, Mankiewicz stressed the importance of identifying each narrator—Addison, Karen, Margo—with a musical leitmotif, while reserving a separate theme for Eve. “The musical entity of our film,” he wrote, “consists of a basic theme, Eve—and three variations on that theme.”

Newman followed Mankiewicz’s directive, though not literally. Instead of the suggested basic theme and variations related to certain characters, Newman composed instead what he designated the “Overture” but which might just as well be called the “Theatre Theme.” Subordinate to this grand main theme are four separate, lesser ones: an identifying theme for Eve, and also one for each of the narrators of her story: Addison, Karen, and Margo.

Though
All About Eve
has sometimes been dubbed “All About Margo,” musically it might be called “All About the Theatre,” for the most recognizable tune in the score is the grandiose music which opens and closes the film. If ever you hum any part of the score, it will be this inflated, intentionally showy, grandiloquent melody. Page Cook, writing in
Films in Review
(August/September 1989) points out its resemblance to William Walton’s “opening and closing fanfares in his ‘Crown Imperial,’ composed for the coronation of George VI” in 1936.

Significantly, the “Theatre Theme” starts up even before the first scene of the movie. This tripping music plays over the 20th Century-Fox logo, that most glamorous of Hollywood trademarks with its spotlights searching the sky above an Art Deco studioscape. (It was Alfred Newman who composed and recorded the fanfare that normally accompanied this logo and that came to be recognized as a symbol of Hollywood magic.)

The “Theatre Theme” flows into “Eve’s Theme.” This seamless transition is intentional, anticipating musically Eve’s later declaration that the theatre “has given me all I have.” It also suggests the paucity of her life offstage. “Eve’s Theme” is not heard each time she’s onscreen, nor is she always visible when it is heard. Instead, the Eve leitmotif is used according to the dramatic requirements of a given situation.

During the opening sequence, in the dining hall of the Sarah Siddons Society, we hear “Addison’s Theme” for the first time. It is properly serpentine, like his name: adder, Addison. We hear only a few bars of this fluty, snake-charmer music, which might almost have been borrowed from a Maria Montez spectacle. We hear it again, more briefly still, when Addison, lurking outside the dressing room, overhears Eve’s attempt to seduce Bill.

Next comes “Karen’s Theme,” wistful and sweet, with a hint of soap-opera sentimentality. We hear it when Addison introduces her at the banquet. Variations on this Karen motif are repeated frequently, e.g., when she first encounters Eve near the stage door; again as she and Lloyd leave Margo’s dressing room; at the point when she decides to give Margo “a boot in the rear”; and while she’s watching Eve rehearse the role of Cora in Lloyd’s new play. Her theme also overlaps the scene following Eve in rehearsal, where Karen answers the late-night phone call from Eve’s girlfriend at the rooming house.

“Margo’s Theme”—and swirling variations on it—is considerably more subtle than Margo. It contains a musical nod to Liszt’s “Liebestraum” as well as a Stephen Foster–ish southern-belle motif, à la Hollywood, which is reprised full force during Margo’s curtain call and then backstage after her
Aged in Wood
performance. We first hear Margo’s theme when Addison introduces Margo to us at the Sarah Siddons banquet. It’s played again as Margo and Eve leave the airport after seeing Bill off, then it accompanies Margo’s narration of “Bill’s welcome home–birthday party, a night to go down in history.” It’s repeated as Margo arrives at the theatre for Miss Caswell’s audition, and a final time when Bill arrives at Margo’s house to comfort her after Addison’s scurrilous attack in his column.

Roughly one-half hour of the 138-minute film has musical accompaniment. In addition to the music that Alfred Newman composed for
All About Eve
, the film contains a generous amount of source music—that is, non-underscore by other composers. We hear “Liebestraum” endlessly at Bill’s welcome home–birthday party. It comes at us again when the car stalls and Margo turns on the radio. She turns it off and snaps, “I detest cheap sentiment.” A little later she turns the radio on again. This time, to everyone’s relief, it’s Debussy’s “Beau Soir” that’s playing.

The hapless pianist at Margo’s party tries to escape the “Liebestraum” moroseness with “Thou Swell” and “How About You,” but in vain; Margo won’t hear of it. Eventually, when Margo leads Max Fabian to the pantry for bicarbonate, the pianist seizes the chance to play “Manhattan,” “Blue Moon,” and other jaunty tunes. As a sly commentary on Margo’s quarrelsome mood, he plays a snatch of “Stormy Weather.” Later, during the nightclub scene, the band plays several fox trots, including “That Old Black Magic” and “Linger Awhile.”

Once Newman had managed to set down on paper his first tentative notes, the process accelerated. After two weeks of work with Edward Powell, his arranger, the score was finished. They prepared the orchestration for sixty pieces.

Sixty musicians were called for the first session on Stage 1, Fox’s soundstage especially prepared for recording. First, they rehearsed the music without film. Then
All About Eve
was projected again and again on a screen in front of Newman—now in his capacity as conductor—until he coaxed from his orchestra the exact interpretation he wanted for every musical note. In the glass-enclosed monitor’s booth the recording engineer manipulated the dials, controlling the different microphone levels until he got the right balance and blend of tones. Finally a recording of the first reel was made and played back for approval. Reel by reel this process continued, and the next day the printed recordings were sent to the music department for synchronization with the film.

When the music cutters had finished building the music tracks into the film, it was sent to Rerecording for the final operation in making a picture. With the arrival of these music tracks the highly skilled rerecorders now had some fourteen sound tracks covering dialogue, music, and sound effects to be electronically combined into the single master sound track. After seven days the rerecording was completed, and on August 15 the composite print of picture and sound was received from the laboratory, inspected by Mankiewicz, and approved by Zanuck.

Alfred Newman received an Oscar nomination for his scoring of
All About Eve.
The winner, however, was Franz Waxman for
Sunset Boulevard
. It’s doubtful that Newman suffered greatly from the loss, since he had won four Oscars already, for
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
(1938),
Tin Pan Alley
(1940),
The Song of Bernadette
(1943), and
Mother Wore Tights
(1947). He would win five more in the years to come, and during his long career he received several dozen nominations. (A reporter who interviewed Newman in 1960 referred to “the forest of Oscars and other awards which line the den of his home.”)

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1901, Newman was the eldest of ten children. In 1911 this vast family moved to New York, where little Al, already a seasoned prodigy, came to the attention of Paderewski, who gave him piano lessons. At sixteen, Al became musical director of the first
George White Scandals
on Broadway. He conducted several Gershwin shows before going to Hollywood in 1930. First he was music director for United Artists, then for Samuel Goldwyn. In 1939 he moved to Fox, where he headed the music department until 1960.

Newman once said, “If I want to write great music, I’ve no right to be in Hollywood. Good picture music must always be inspired by the picture of which it is a part and not by the desire of a composer to express himself.” Still, he sometimes wondered why the critics overlooked his contributions. The public, however, was not indifferent. Although the composer’s job was one of the most obscure in Hollywood, Newman, like other movie composers, received his share of fan mail. Not the usual kind asking for autographed pictures, but rather, in Newman’s words, “a high-class, impersonal, even rather learned kind, requesting information or entire scores or perhaps merely conveying compliments.”

Whatever its merits, Newman’s score for
All About Eve
is not considered one of his best or most effective. It does, however, accomplish its purpose, which is to underline and to heighten the emotional aspects of the film. Whether Newman himself is responsible for the entire score would be extremely difficult to determine. Like many of his colleagues, he didn’t write every note of the scores assigned and credited to him; as head of the department he could not be expected to. He wasn’t afraid to delegate, and he surrounded himself with an expert staff he could rely on to write music compatible with his own style. Frequently, however, a film would engage his sympathies so deeply that he made himself responsible for every note in the score. This was certainly true of
Wuthering Heights, The Song of Bernadette
, and his other major scores.

As for Newman’s musical idiom, it has been described as conforming, like most Hollywood film music, to a “traditional, late- nineteenth-century romantic rhetorical style, painting with broad colorful strokes on a large canvas.” Away from the studio, however, an earlier repertoire claimed Newman’s attention. Once or twice a month he took a busman’s holiday from composing. On those occasions he ducked out early from 20th Century-Fox to join a select group of movie musicians at someone’s house. There they would play chamber music by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven until the wee hours, pausing only to toast the masters with tankards of the best imported German beer.

*   *   *

Claude Stroud, the pianist at Margo’s party, had an elastic face like Joe E. Brown’s and a slightly demented, vaguely effeminate, slapstick quaver in his voice, also like Brown. Stroud began his career as an acrobat in a tightwire team, the other half being his twin brother, Clarence. The Stroud Twins, as they billed themselves, played circus engagements, toured in vaudeville, and later appeared in such Broadway musicals as
A Night in Venice
and
The Music Box Revue
. Rudy Vallee introduced the twins to radio on his popular show.

When Margo lambastes Birdie Coonan as “a fifth-rate vaudevillian,” she might have been referring to the sort of act that the Stroud Twins typified. Excerpts from a
Variety
review in 1939 convey the rather desperate seediness of their particular show-business ambience, redolent of Mama Rose and Gypsy, of Blanche and Baby Jane Hudson: “At the Orpheum in L.A., Sally Rand’s ‘World’s Fair Glamour Girls’ are given equal prominence with Clarence and Claude Stroud in current stage show, but hardly live up to the billing. Stroud Twins show much improvement in material and stage demeanor since last caught here, and aside from a few gags running perilously close to borderline of offensiveness, keep their auditors in constant uproar.” (The tail end of this low-comedy tradition hung on until the final broadcast of
The Ed Sullivan Show.
)

During World War II Claude Stroud entertained the troops in the Army Air Force show “Winged Victory.” Years later he took “The Claude Stroud Show,” as his USO tour was grandly billed, to Vietnam.

At the time of Stroud’s Vietnam performances, an eager-beaver USO press release described him as “a professional veteran with a droll, cigar-in-hand delivery … a stylized mixture of George Burns, Fred Allen, and Edgar Bergen.” Also on the tour was an accordionist (bizarre for 1968, when these young soldiers were listening to acid rock and Janis Joplin). Whereas Bob Hope took along a bevy of starlets on his tours, “The Claude Stroud Show” had but one: Susan McGuire, billed as “a tall, blonde, and very attractive entertainer with the right blend of intimate rowdiness and lady-like detachment.” It sounds more like stag night at the VFW than a show for virile youth.

When Claude Stroud died in 1986 at the age of seventy-eight, one of the few publications to run an obituary was
Variety
. It noted his radio career, his many TV appearances in the fifties and sixties, and his roles in such films as
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
(1961) and
My Six Loves
(1963).

No mention was made of
All About Eve
, and yet that cameo appearance is Stroud’s lasting toehold in celebrity. After all, Margo Channing sits beside him on the piano bench. Surely her proximity confers immortality of a sort. If you call the name “Claude Stroud” no one recognizes it, but explain that he’s the one who plays “Liebestraum” in
All About Eve
, and when Margo orders him to “play it again” he whines, “But that was the fourth straight time”—then of course everyone remembers. One brief scene, but if you were compiling a list of famous piano men in movies, you’d have to include Stroud along with Dooley Wilson in
Casablanca
, Charles Aznavour in
Shoot the Piano Player
, and Richard Pryor in
Lady Sings the Blues
.