All About “All About Eve” (31 page)

If some fiduciary academy had given awards for box-office success,
All About Eve
would have trailed any number of lesser lights. DeMille’s
Samson and Delilah
was number one at the box office in 1950, with $11 million in North American rentals.
Cheaper by the Dozen
made $4.3 million,
Twelve O’Clock High
$3.2 million.
Eve
brought in a respectable but unspectacular $2.9 million in domestic rentals, eventually going on to make $4.2 million in rentals worldwide.

All such figures, however, are necessarily approximate. To quote Aubrey Solomon, Jr., in his book
Twentieth Century-Fox: A Corporate and Financial History
, “In the golden years of Hollywood, when Twentieth Century-Fox, as well as the other studios, owned its own theatre chains, the entire business was a closed circle. Only studio bookkeepers knew for certain whether a picture made or lost money and even then they were never sure. The more money a movie grossed, the more overhead a studio lopped off that gross. With such practices, most movies never showed more than meager profits.”

Those unreliable studio account books need not detain us. Besides, even before profits were tallied,
All About Eve
was ready to assume a dual persona that no amount of box-office receipts could purchase. Like the improbable plot of some earlier Bette Davis movie—twin sisters living wildly unequal lives, or the fantastic metamorphosis of Charlotte Vale in
Now, Voyager
—this prestigious, award-winning movie was about to change. Starting out as a fine picture by almost any standard, it soon mutated into something more. This second personality had perhaps appeared as early as the premiere in 1950, and surely by Oscar night in 1951. For
All About Eve
, recognized immediately as a Hollywood classic, was soon to become a classic of camp.

Chapter 23

Waiting for Me to Crack That Little Gnome on the Noggin With a Bottle

Tallulah Bankhead was mixed up in
All About Eve
from the start, though no one could discern precisely how. Perhaps it was only because the movie capitalized on her campy style: the disdainful Bankhead grimace followed by a ribald put-down, the androgynous basso voice, the boozy mannerisms and the cocaine rhythm of her life. Or did Tallulah seep into the movie more insidiously than that? Bankhead herself was convinced that she and Margo Channing were the same.

She was right, but not entirely. If Tallulah had not existed, it would
not
have been necessary to invent her, for there was already Bette Davis. But without Tallulah to copy, Bette wouldn’t have excelled as the champion of high-camp theatrics. Without Mankiewicz, the Davis reputation might have expired like Rosa Moline at the end of
Beyond the Forest
—slumped on the wrong side of a tank-town railway track.

When
All About Eve
came out, there was no word to describe the aroma of Bette’s performance in it. The word
camp
was a subculture verb meaning “to cut up and carry on outrageously behind closed doors.” As a noun and adjective, it hadn’t yet ascended, in aesthetics and journalism, to the privileged plateau of “comedy,” “tragedy,” and “tragicomedy,” though it partook of all three. In the early fifties, even the euphemism “cult film” had no currency.

Those who responded to camp were initiates in the arcane lore of certain motion pictures that seemed loaded with startling subtexts—flamboyant alternative messages which the initiates alone seemed capable of deciphering. These cabalists cultivated devotion not only to such movies, but also to a certain brand of star. These revered stars—usually actresses—served as figureheads of a vast freemasonry, with its tacit fellowship and sympathy, its submerged rites and codes, its mysterious semiotics. One of the nicer names for this secret fraternity in those day was “homophile.” To outsiders the word sounded genteel, evoking classical antiquity and neurasthenic “bachelor” poets.

But these moviegoing homophiles cheered for a raucous kind of upside-down gentility. They endorsed Margo Channing’s sneering epithet for her best friend: “happy little housewife.” They loved it when Tallulah, at the end of her radio program, sang “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You” in such a low voice that her music director, Meredith Willson, intoned, “Thank you, Miss Bankhead, sir.”

And they must have considered 1950 an annus mirabilis, for it brought not only
Sunset Boulevard
and
All About Eve
, but also the debut of that very radio show where Tallulah began her campaign to snatch Margo Channing away from Bette Davis. That show was the place that launched a thousand quips.

By 1950 Tallulah’s acting career was virtually over. Too old for movies and too erratic for the theatre, Tallulah the Legend was now without an audience except for the friends, real and counterfeit, whom she regaled in supper clubs and at house parties. Already she was playing the one role that would last the rest of her life: Tallulah Bankhead. In a sense, that’s the only one she had ever played. The role was frazzled, and it had limited appeal.

To make matters worse, Bette Davis had starred in movie versions of Tallulah’s stage triumphs:
Dark Victory
(1939) and
The Little Foxes
(1941). A few years later, Bette and Tallulah both attended a party given by Jack Warner, Bette’s boss. Here is Bette’s account of their meeting: “Most of the guests had left. I was standing at the bar when up swept Tallulah. I was a bit anxious about what her behavior would be. ‘Dahling,’ she said, ‘you’ve played all the parts I’ve played, and I was so much better.’ ‘I agree with you, Miss Bankhead,’ I said. She wafted quickly out of the room. She didn’t get the fight she wanted.”

Bette’s soft answer chimes with other comments she made about Tallulah. For example, she always maintained that she didn’t go after the role of Regina Giddens: “On
The Little Foxes
I begged the producer, Samuel Goldwyn, to let Tallulah Bankhead play Regina because Tallulah was magnificent on the stage. He wouldn’t let her. He should have; I had to do that part exactly the way Tallulah did it, because that’s the way Lillian Hellman wrote it. But I was always sad that Tallulah couldn’t record Regina from the theatre, because she was marvelous.”

Bette could afford to be generous. To millions of moviegoers, she played the Bankhead roles as though Tallulah had never performed them at all. Tallulah, on the other hand, had but one reason to stroke Bette Davis, and that was to draw blood. And publicity.

The timing of Tallulah Bankhead’s
The Big Show
on NBC radio couldn’t have been better. The first broadcast took place Sunday, November 5, 1950, at 6:00
P.M
.—three weeks after
All About Eve
opened in New York, and four days before its Hollywood premiere. Tallulah’s big-name guests that night were Jimmy Durante, José Ferrer, Frankie Laine, Ethel Merman, and Danny Thomas. Immediately the show was a hit.

A running gag on the program was the feud between Tallulah and Bette Davis. The idea was funny, and Tallulah made it funnier. She exaggerated all the hostility she’d ever felt toward Bette, and the audience ate it up. It’s easy to imagine Tallulah’s delight: Now she could take revenge every week.

Someone asked Tallulah on the air if she had seen
All About Eve
. “Every morning when I brush my teeth,” she drawled. Later Tallulah growled, “Dahling, just wait till I get my hands on
that woman
. I’ll pull out every hair in her mustache.” Later still, she said, “If they ever make a film
All About Me
, I’ll play it myself.”

Away from the microphone, however, Tallulah wasn’t amused. She was furious that Bette had copied her hairdo, her voice, her exaggerated mannerisms. It didn’t help that
Time, Life
, and
Newsweek
, in their reviews of
All About Eve
, noted recognizable traces of Tallulah.
Life
stated flatly, “Bette Davis in the movie is obviously modeled on Tallulah Bankhead.”

All of this riled her so much that she threatened legal action. Tallulah called up Darryl Zanuck to rant: “That bitch stole my best stage roles for films, and now she is holding me up to public ridicule with her imitations.”

It’s possible that Tallulah’s threats worried Zanuck. He probably knew that in 1949 she had sued Procter and Gamble, NBC, CBS, and the Benton and Bowles advertising agency for the unauthorized use of her name in a jingle for Prell shampoo. The jingle went, “I’m Tallulah the tube of Prell / And I’ve got a little something to tell / Your hair can be radiant oh so easy / All you’ve got to do is take me home and squeeze me.” (Bankhead settled out of court for $5,000.)

According to some reports, Bette—perhaps at Zanuck’s behest—wrote letters, sent telegrams, even telephoned Tallulah to explain why her voice had sounded that way in the movie. But Tallulah was not mollified. “There was no intentional imitation of anyone,” Bette assured a reporter. “I feel that in this picture I played myself more than in any part I played in the last ten years. Maybe Miss Bankhead and I are alike, you see. That could happen.”

Spoken like a press agent. But Bette had a point. Meyer Berger, in a 1944 profile in the
New York Times
, might just as well have substituted the name “Bette” for “Tallulah”:

Standing still, Tallulah somehow gives the impression she’s at a destroyer’s prow, knifing into a howler. Her long, tawny hair whips into her face with every gesture. She flips it back impatiently every few seconds with a motion almost as regular as breathing. Her speech is a racing torrent, the whisper-in-a-rain-barrel sound of it curiously hypnotic. She paces like something wild that’s caged, chain smokes, drains off Cokes as fast as her maid snatches empties from under her restless fingers.

The rivalry was more than a decade old when Bankhead went on the air. Tallulah, knowing she had latched on to a good thing, wasn’t about to turn loose. One night on her radio program, in the middle of a recitation of her career achievements, Tallulah paused.

Her sidekick asked, “What happened next?”

“Bette Davis,” sighed Tallulah.

But once a week on radio wasn’t enough. Tallulah took her “Big Show” on the road. She opened a national lecture tour in Dallas on December 5, 1950. The evening was called “Tallulah Tells All.” The word
all
was no coincidence. Describing the evening in the
Dallas Times-Herald
, reviewer Clifford Sage captured Tallulah’s obsessive wit:

Someone in the audience wanted an imitation of Bette Davis. On the point of complying, Tallulah changed her mind. “Why should, I, dahling?” she asked. “She’s been imitating me long enough.” Then she gallantly took the curse off the comment with: “But really, it’s been sheer coincidence that Bette’s played the leading roles in such films as
Dark Victory
. I really admire her very much.” She twisted her shoulders in mock, saccharin modesty, and all but winked. “After all,” she added, putting back the curse, “where would Bette be without me—and where would I be without her, by the way!”

The
Dallas Morning News
, reviewing “Tallulah Tells All,” ran a photo of Bankhead above a look-alike picture of Bette as Margo Channing. The caption was
WHICH IS TALLULAH
? John Rosenfield, in the accompanying article, wrote that “if Miss Bankhead’s remarks are to be taken literally she hates Miss Davis’s innards.” He went on to note that “in
All About Eve
Bette Davis wears her hair as Tallulah does and shouldn’t, sports an Alabama accent offstage, makes Tallulah faces, admits to forty, and composes the nastiest insults ever offered as social amenities.”

The following year, for the new season’s first broadcast of “The Big Show,” Tallulah traveled to London. Convinced that the feud with Bette Davis was evergreen, Tallulah launched a fresh attack from overseas. “Don’t think I don’t know who’s been spreading gossip about me and my temperament out in Hollywood, where
that film
was made:
All About Me
. And after all the nice things I’ve said about that
hag
.”

But the jokes, only slightly recast, had begun to pall. It takes two clever people to stoke a feud, and their timing must be exquisite. Bette, for the moment, was busy elsewhere, and so Tallulah’s one-woman vendetta began to sound a little desperate.

The show, based on a scripted “comedy of insult” format, filled up with multitudinous references to Tallulah’s advancing age and her sexual aggressiveness. To guest George Sanders, she said, “I’ve decided to grow old gracefully.” To which he replied very dryly, “And have you?” Tallulah: “Whenever I’m in Hollywood I turn down dozens of offers.” Sanders: “Any for pictures?” And so on.

The next year, 1952, Tallulah’s autobiography was published. “Forced to vote for a Davis, I’ll take Jefferson and give you Bette,” she wrote on page 2. Farther on, she brought it up again. This time the cattiness was subdued right up to the last sentence, where she chose to insert the knife:

The gossips and the gadabouts made a great to-do about Bette Davis’ characterization of a truculent actress in
All About Eve
. These busybodies said Miss Davis had patterned her performance after me, had deliberately copied my haircut, my gestures, my bark and my bite. For comedy reasons this charge was fanned into a feud on my radio show. I was supposed to be seething with rage over the alleged larceny. In superficial aspects Miss Davis may have suggested a boiling Bankhead, but her over-all performance was her own. I had seen Miss Davis play Regina Giddens [in
The Little Foxes
] on the screen, and I knew I had nothing to worry about.

Later in 1952, Tallulah savored one of the most satisfying nights of her career. On Sunday evening, November 16, in a live radio broadcast from the Belasco Theatre in New York, NBC’s
Theatre Guild on the Air
starred Tallulah Bankhead herself as Margo Channing in
All About Eve
.