All About “All About Eve” (14 page)

“And that poor Monroe child—Marilyn—Marilyn was terrified of Bette Davis!” This is George Sanders speaking in 1970, two years before his suicide. “During one scene in a theatre involving Marilyn, Bette Davis, and me, Bette whispered after a shot, within poor Marilyn’s hearing: ‘That little blonde slut can’t act her way out of a paper bag! She thinks if she wiggles her ass and coos, she can carry her scene. Well, she can’t.’”

Reporting Bette’s unkindness to Marilyn, George Sanders overlooked his own. Ten years earlier, in his
Memoirs of a Professional Cad
, Sanders himself had written condescendingly: “Even then, on the set of
All About Eve,
Marilyn struck me as a character in search of an author and I am delighted she found Mr. Miller eventually.”

The Love Songs of Addison DeWitt

If George Sanders had been more ambitious, he might have left acting for a career in opera. During an appearance on Tallulah Bankhead’s radio show in the early 1950s, he sang the aria “In lacerato spirito” from Verdi’s
Simon Boccanegra
. His well-trained voice was so pleasant that many in the studio audience did not believe it belonged to George Sanders. They left convinced that he had mouthed a recording of someone else’s singing.

Sanders’ vocal coach in Hollywood was Maestro Cepparo. One day, without George’s knowledge, the maestro planted the manager of the San Francisco Opera Company near the open door while George sang several arias. According to George’s friend Brian Aherne, who was present, the gentleman immediately offered George the role of Scarpia in
Tosca
for the upcoming opera season. To the astonishment of all present, Sanders said he did not want to become an opera singer. He politely but firmly declined the offer.

He did, however, record an album called
The George Sanders Touch
in 1958. On it he sang not arias but standards, including “September Song,” “As Time Goes By,” and “More Than You Know.” Included on the album was a song of his own composition, “Such Is My Love.” Sanders’s biographer, Richard VanDerBeets, describes the actor’s singing voice as “a rich baritone.”

In 1955 Marilyn herself told Joan Collins (who at that time was filming
The Virgin Queen
with Bette), “That woman hates every female who can walk. She made me feel
so
nervous. She didn’t talk to me at all, just sort of swept around the set, nose and cigarette in the air. She’s a mean old broad.”

Celeste Holm’s opinion of Marilyn has wavered. In 1978 she declared, “I saw nothing special about her Betty Boop quality. I thought she was quite sweet and terribly dumb, and my natural reaction was, ‘Whose girl is that?’” Ten years later Holm’s appraisal had become less brittle, more patronizing: “I always felt sorry for her. She had a pretty little figure and little button nose. She was a very strange girl, full of the unexpected. She wanted so much to amount to something. Poor little thing.” In recent television interviews Holm has implied that she instantly spotted a future star in the uncertain young actress. Time has been good to Marilyn, at least in the eyes of this colleague.

Barbara McLean, who edited
All About Eve
, was perhaps a more reliable talent scout than Monroe’s co-stars. In 1951, when director Henry King was casting
Wait ’Til the Sun Shines, Nellie
, Marilyn tested for a part. McLean, watching the test results with King, predicted: “That girl’s going to be a big star.” King answered, “Well, I haven’t got time to wait.” McLean’s rejoinder: “I’d sure take her if I was directing the picture.”

Anne Baxter wrote in her memoir,
Intermission
:

About a year earlier, I’d made a movie called
A Ticket to Tomahawk
. Marilyn Monroe played one of a trio of the required dancehall girls. The whole nutsy shebang was a spoof on Westerns, a form of high camp far ahead of its time. We shot on location 9,000 feet up in the Rockies. We were thereabouts for eight long weeks. All of us lived in Durango at the Royal Motel, a euphemism, and ate at the local greasy spoon called the Chief Diner. Marilyn Monroe came in with a different crew member every night, wearing the same sweater. She was eminently braless and I particularly remember the pink V-necked angora sweater. It was said she slept in it. We never saw hide nor hair of her, or of her two roommates [i.e., the other dancehall girls] outside of dinnertime or during their occasional days of shooting. They slept whenever possible and all day Sunday. Or were closeted in the only phone booth, calling Hollywood.

As it turned out,
A Ticket to Tomahawk
premiered in San Francisco during the filming of
All About Eve
. A few days before the world premiere at the Fox Theatre, at Market and Ninth, on April 20, 1950, local papers carried ads showing an Indian seated cross-legged holding up a sign:
HEAP BIG FUNNY PICTURE
! Few others agreed. Next day the papers ran a smattering of modest reviews.

Gregory Ratoff, playing producer Max Fabian in
All About Eve
, was enthralled by Marilyn’s Miss Caswell. Off-screen, he prophesied in his ebullient Russian accent: “Thees girl ees going to be a beeg star!”

Gary Merrill told an anecdote about a cast party that Bette hosted in a San Francisco restaurant: “Marilyn Monroe was seated next to Hugh Marlowe. The party went on quite late but Marilyn excused herself early because she had to work the next morning. We all knew that the scene was really Bette’s scene, and that Marilyn had only a few lines. After she left, we all wondered what was going to happen to the dumb blonde. The next day Bette and Marilyn played their scene. I recall that Marilyn had four or five lines. Bette had more, but she was an experienced actress and accomplished the scene with little bother. It had to be done in ten takes, however—Marilyn kept forgetting her lines. Obviously, this problem did not injure her career.”

Bette herself never had much to say about Marilyn, the only member of the cast whose fame was to equal Bette’s own. In her first autobiography,
The Lonely Life
, published in 1962, Bette doesn’t mention her at all. In
This ’N That
(1987), Bette’s rather sketchy second volume of memoirs, she is noncommittal: “Trivia fans remember
All About Eve
because in it Marilyn Monroe gave her first important performance on the screen.”

Zanuck and Marilyn retained a mutual disrelish. As the years went by, each commented on the other. When Zanuck, a consummate businessman, saw Marilyn’s star on the rise in 1951, he issued a press release naming her “the most exciting new personality in Hollywood in a long time.” A couple of years later, watching the rushes from
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, he didn’t believe Marilyn was doing her own singing. When Marilyn got wind of his disbelief, she marched into the boss’s office and sang “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” just for him—no doubt with an angry edge that we don’t hear when she’s performing with Jane Russell.

Zanuck’s office was sixty feet long and had a grand piano in it. Picture him in a dash to the keyboard, where he starts to accompany Marilyn just as she reaches the second verse. But something is wrong with this picture: This is Fox, where they
didn’t
make MGM musicals.

Even in the mid-fifties, when Marilyn was an enormous star, Zanuck refused to renegotiate her contract. He also cast her in roles she didn’t like, which is one reason she rebelled. In 1954, at the time of one such rebellion, Zanuck issued a peevish statement to the press that said in part: “There has been so much talk about Marilyn Monroe that there is now a danger women moviegoers will say, ‘So, she makes men excited—enough of her.’ In the future she will make only two films a year and there will not be so many photographs of her sent around.”

Legal battles followed. Marilyn left Hollywood and spent more than a year in New York, returning to the studio in triumph early in 1956. Coincidentally, a month later Zanuck resigned and didn’t return to Fox until six years later. In 1960 Marilyn told an interviewer, “Mr. Zanuck has never seen me as an actress with star quality. He thought I was some kind of freak.”

At the time of Marilyn’s death in August 1962, Zanuck was in France, where he had spent most of his time since leaving Fox in 1956. (He had nothing to do with the studio’s firing her earlier in 1962, during the chaotic filming of
Something’s Got to Give
.) Learning that Marilyn was dead, Zanuck issued a statement. His sounds less self-serving than many others: “I disagreed and fought with her on many occasions, but in spite of the fact that I have not seen her for six years, we were always personal friends. Like everyone who knew Marilyn Monroe or worked with her, I am shocked. Marilyn was a star in every sense of the word. I do not claim to have discovered Marilyn Monroe. Nobody discovered her. She discovered herself. I was merely an instrument that provided her with the vehicles in which she was able to reach the theatre-going public of the world.”

Ten years after Marilyn’s death, Mankiewicz said: “I thought of her as the loneliest person I had ever known. Throughout our location period in San Francisco, Marilyn would be spotted at one restaurant or another dining alone. Or drinking alone. We’d always ask her to join us, and she would, and seemed pleased, but somehow she never understood or accepted our unspoken assumption that she was one of us. She remained alone. She was not a loner. She was just plain
alone
.”

Marilyn’s life is like a Hollywood remake of
Rashomon
; every version of it contradicts the others. For instance, it’s odd that Mankiewicz doesn’t mention Marilyn’s scene with Bette Davis, which, according to Gary Merrill, required ten takes. It’s the kind of amusingly ridiculous incident an efficient director like Mankiewicz would be eager to talk about. Or perhaps he considered it routine. After all, Celeste Holm and Anne Baxter, two seasoned players, required fourteen takes in their first scene together.

Another instance of Whose Version Do You Believe? involves a story about Marilyn’s reading matter on the set of
All About Eve
. Mankiewicz saw her one day with a book in her hand. Surprised, he called her over, asked what she was reading, and she didn’t answer; she just handed it to him. The book was Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet
. Mankiewicz asked if she knew who Rilke was and she said no, so he told her a little bit about the German poet. Perplexed and intrigued, Mankiewicz asked if someone had recommended the book to her. Marilyn shook her head and answered, “No. Nobody. You see, in my whole life I haven’t read hardly anything at all. I don’t know how to catch up. So what I do is, every now and then I go into the Pickwick Bookshop and just look around. I leaf through some books, and when I read something that interests me I buy the book. So last night I bought this one. Is that wrong?”

Mankiewicz told her it was the best possible way for anyone to choose what to read. “She was not accustomed to being told that she was doing anything right,” he said. “She smiled proudly and moved on. The next day Marilyn sent me a copy of
Letters to a Young Poet.
I have yet to read it.”

In view of all that’s been written about Marilyn Monroe’s desire for culture and her efforts at self-improvement, the story rings poignantly true. But Marilyn herself told a story that was different in every particular. In her autobiography
My Story
—a posthumously published book that some Monroe biographers consider spurious but that nevertheless sounds convincing—Marilyn described Mankiewicz as “a different sort of director than Mr. Huston. He wasn’t as exciting, and he was more talkative. But he was intelligent and sensitive.” And, she continued, “I felt happy on the set.”

Marilyn, who according to one source dictated this memoir to a journalist in the mid-fifties, recalled that during the filming of
All About Eve
she was reading
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens
. (A turn-of-the-century muckraker, Steffens [1866–1936] reported on municipal corruption, labor problems, and social ills. He published
The Shame of the Cities
in 1904; his
Autobiography
came out in 1931.) According to Marilyn, “It was the first book I’d read that seemed to tell the truth about people and life. It was bitter but strong. Lincoln Steffens knew all about poor people and about injustice. He knew about the lies people used to get ahead, and how smug rich people sometimes were. It was almost as if he’d lived the way I’d lived.”

Here is Marilyn’s version of the Mankiewicz book discussion, taken from
My Story
:

The Lincoln Steffens trouble began when Mr. Mankiewicz asked me one day what was the book I was reading on the set. I told him it was the Steffens autobiography and I started raving about it. Mr. Mankiewicz took me aside and gave me a quiet lecture.

“I wouldn’t go around raving about Lincoln Steffens,” he said. “It’s certain to get you into trouble. People will begin to talk of you as a radical.”

“A radical what?” I asked.

“A political radical,” Mr. Mankiewicz said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of Communists.”

“Not much,” I said.

“Don’t you read the papers?”

“I skip the parts I don’t like,” I said.

“Well, lay off boosting Mr. Steffens, or you’ll get into bad trouble,” said Mr. Mankiewicz.

I thought this was a very personal attitude on Mr. Mankiewicz’s part and that, genius though he was, of a sort, he was badly frightened by the front office or something. I couldn’t imagine anybody picking on me because I admired Lincoln Steffens. The only other political figure I’d ever admired was Abraham Lincoln. I used to read everything I could find about him. He was the only famous American who seemed most like me, at least in his childhood.

A few days later the publicity department asked me to write out a list of the ten greatest men in the world. I wrote the name Lincoln Steffens down first and the publicity man shook his head.

“We’ll have to omit that one,” he said. “We don’t want anybody investigating our Marilyn.”