All About “All About Eve” (20 page)

During rehearsal Bette said, “I don’t understand how to play this. What can we do so that it’s not just a talky scene?”

Mankiewicz puffed his pipe. Then he looked around the set. At last he said, “Do you see that candy jar on the piano?” He took Bette’s arm and they walked over to it. The candy jar was empty. Mankiewicz called over the second prop master and said something to him.

Later, when it was time to play the scene, Bette recalled what Mankiewicz had told her: “The madder you get, the more you want a piece of candy.”

Of course Margo craves a piece of candy. And of course she doesn’t dare, because actresses are always on a diet. And Margo at forty is on a stricter diet because she now suspects that her svelte young protégée is after Bill.

The cameras rolled. At Margo’s sarcastic line about Eve—“She’s a girl of so many interests”—Bette jerked open the candy jar, picked up a piece of chocolate, brought it to her mouth and
almost
popped it in, then threw it back in the jar.

Just then Bette made a peculiar face. Mankiewicz halted the shooting. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, Joe,” Bette said meekly. “I didn’t mean to, but I
loathe
eating chocolates in the morning.”

Mankiewicz and Bette huddled for a conference. Another prop man was dispatched to the commissary, and when he came back he brought tiny squares of gingerbread to masquerade as chocolates.

Then the scene continued. Margo’s anger builds; so does Bill’s. Outraged at what he considers her unwarranted jealousy of Eve, Bill lectures: “You have to keep your teeth sharp. All right. But I will not have you sharpen them on me—or on Eve.” Margo opens the candy jar again, quickly slams it shut, and snaps back: “What about her teeth? What about her fangs?”

Another angry lecture from Bill: “She hasn’t cut them yet, and you know it!… Eve Harrington has never by word, look, thought, or suggestion indicated anything to me but her adoration for you and her happiness at our being in love!” At this, Margo opens the candy jar, grabs the seductive piece of “chocolate,” throws it in her mouth, and chews furiously, eyes bulging as she swallows, seething all the while.

And that’s how a scene that was already good on the page turned out brilliant thanks to the director’s flourishes, and thanks also to an actress who knew what to do with “a genius piece of business,” in Bette’s words. (Ten years later Tony Perkins devised his own jittery candy-nibbling scene in
Psycho
. Was he thinking of Margo Channing at the Bates Motel?)

*   *   *

During the cocktail party we get a look at Margo’s bed, which is piled high with minks and sables—$500,000 worth, in fact. To Birdie, the bed looked like “a dead animal act.” Dead or alive, Fox was taking no chances. When the scene was shot, the studio posted special security guards to protect the furs.

During a break after Bette’s scene with the chocolates, Mankiewicz grinned and said, “I’m still waiting for you to start directing the picture. After all, Eddie Goulding said you would; he thinks you’re ‘a horrible creature.’”

Again, Mankiewicz heard that Bette Davis snort, which he thought deserved a copyright. “Mr. Goulding is a genius moviemaker,” she said, but was she sincere, or entirely ironic? It was hard to tell, even for Mankiewicz. “But he was always drifting away from the story. He also loved to act, so he would act out your part for you. And the way he acted out a role many times did not suit the way I thought the character should be. He
did
find me difficult, because I was very stubborn about the woman I was playing—and I didn’t think he could play her as well as I did.”

Later that day Bette herself got the chance to make a brilliant contribution, when the time came for her to speak what was destined to become an immortal line. Margo’s cue comes from Karen, who says: “We know you, we’ve seen you like this before. Is it over—or is it just beginning?”

Margo, instead of retorting immediately as indicated in the script, drains her martini, walks toward the stairs with a shoulder-rolling, hip-swinging swagger. She halts, swerves, regards Karen, Lloyd, and Bill with a scowl, then lets it rip: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!”

But Mankiewicz didn’t come up with this timing. It was Bette’s own. She said: “Those are things you should be able to do as an actress that a director wouldn’t think of telling you. When Margo holds back like that it lets you know she’s collecting more venom.”

(Twenty-five years later Bette was flying to Australia to do her one-woman “Bette Davis Show,” a retrospective of her life and career replete with film clips, reminiscences, questions from the audience, and tart remarks about former co-stars. As the distant lights of Sydney twinkled into view, the captain announced on the intercom that Miss Davis was invited to come forward and visit the cockpit. From there she would have a spectacular view of the city at night as the plane landed. As Bette went through the cockpit door she heard a roar of laughter from the cabin. Turning, slightly puzzled, she saw passengers pointing up to the illuminated sign that had just flashed on. It said, Fasten Seat Belts.)

In the “Fasten your seat belts” scene, Hugh Marlowe, as the playwright Lloyd Richards, is the least exciting actor on-screen. But Marlowe is that way throughout the movie, conforming to Hollywood’s image of writers. (This drab stereotype perhaps sprang from the low self-esteem of scriptwriters, who were bottom feeders in the studio pecking order. Irving Thalberg called them “jerks with Underwoods.”) But the cards are stacked against any actor who portrays a writer. Even Bette, playing a novelist-playwright in
Old Acquaintance
(1943), is rather sluggish. Like it or not, we recall not Bette but her co-star, the fidgety Miriam Hopkins.

Hugh Marlowe has no bravura scenes in
All About Eve
, or elsewhere in his career. (“He was a stick,” Mankiewicz said bluntly.) In fact, he’s one of those slow-burning, carbohydrate actors who all look like versions of Gregory Peck. (Such actors always resemble high-school principals.) But at least Hugh Marlowe, in
Eve
, gives good support. As unexciting Lloyd Richards he’s as firm as a new mattress.

Hugh Marlowe had three strikes against him from the start: his real name—it was Hugh Herbert Hipple. Born in Philadelphia in 1911, he grew up in the Midwest, started his career as a radio announcer at WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, and when he left the station his old job was given to another would-be actor named Ronald Reagan.

From Iowa, Marlowe headed for Hollywood but made a four-year stopover at the Pasadena Playhouse, a celebrated movie-actors’ training ground in those days. He made a film in 1936, two the following year, and eventually left town to appear on Broadway in 1942 with Gertrude Lawrence in Moss Hart’s
Lady in the Dark
, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin.

In the forties Marlowe was twice under contract to MGM, and twice dropped, before moving to 20th Century-Fox in 1948. There he played standard second leads: a songwriter in
Come to the Stable
(1949) with nuns Loretta Young and Celeste Holm, a fighter pilot in
Twelve O’Clock High
the same year, and a sculptor in
Night and the City
(1950).

Marlowe married and divorced several times. One wife was the actress Edith Atwater. Another was actress K. T. Stevens, the daughter of director Sam Wood. Marlowe spent the last thirteen years of his life appearing in the NBC soap opera
Another World
. He died in 1982.

Racier than any of his on-screen roles was an incident that took place when Marlowe was starring in
Anniversary Waltz
at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco in 1956. His co-star was Marjorie Lord, best remembered as the wife of Danny Thomas in the TV show
Make Room for Daddy
. A few seconds after the curtain went down on the second act, Lord slapped his face and sent him reeling. And Marlowe slapped her back.

The tabloids loved it.
HE KISSES, SHE SLAPS, HE’S FIRED,
headlined the
New York Journal-American
. In the
New York Post
the headline ran,
HE WHO GOT SLAPPED GETS THE GATE.
(Why didn’t some clever headline writer call the story
A BUMPY NIGHT
?)

Versions of the incident differed. The feud had started a week or so earlier when Marjorie Lord objected that Marlowe was “overly ardent in the love scenes.” She accused him of inventing “some quite violent embraces that weren’t in the script at all.” Different ways of playing the little family comedy were never quite resolved, and so, on a Thursday evening, something happened to provoke the fight.

Newspapers, even the louder ones, were circumspect at the time, so we don’t know precisely what Hugh Marlowe did. The
Journal- American
, quoting Marjorie Lord, titillates with ellipses: “Frequently he … well, some things just weren’t in the script.” Did his tongue wander, or was it perhaps that he goosed his co-star?

According to the gentleman himself, “I had just kicked the TV set at the end of the second act. I’m off balance. She swats me on the side of the face. So I slapped her right back in the heat of emotion. Miss Lord is a charming girl but new to the business.”

Marjorie Lord made her stage debut in 1936.

After the exchange of blows, the actors finished the performance. The following night, however, when Marlowe showed up at the stage door, it was barred to him. The theatre management had hired special policemen to keep down a row, and the actor was informed that his contract had been terminated.

To paraphrase Lloyd Richards, “The general atmosphere was very Macbethish.” More so, surely, than anywhere in those plays Lloyd kept writing for Margo:
Remembrance, Aged in Wood, Footsteps on the Ceiling
. Though we never see Margo perform in them, we can guess that Lloyd Richards writes quite conventional plays. As portrayed by Hugh Marlowe, how could Lloyd be more than a well-made playwright?

Chapter 16

I Call Myself Phoebe

“I always followed my cock, not my head, with the ladies,” Gary Merrill said. He didn’t make that blunt comment to Hedda Hopper, however, nor to Louella Parsons, both of whom were in a scramble for details of his romance with Bette Davis. Their pursuit seemed to go on around the clock now that
All About Eve
was finishing up and Gary and Bette had dropped even the trappings of propriety. They were living in sin!

One Monday, after Bette, B.D., and Nurse Richards had spent the weekend at Gary’s house, the phone rang. (That was the day Bette and Celeste filmed their 100-degree automobile scene, so Gary hadn’t been called to the studio.) Hedda Hopper jumped right in: “I know Bette spent the weekend with you!” She prattled on about what a great person Bette was and how much pain men had caused her. “And if you treat her badly,” Hedda warned, “you’ll be in a lot of trouble.” Meaning, of course, from the damage Hedda would inflict in her column.

Gary, half-playing Bill Sampson, turned on the sexy boyish charm. Hedda liked him, despite what her spies had reported: that he was a slob who didn’t make his bed and left stacks of dirty dishes in the sink.

A couple of hours later the phone rang again and it was Louella Parsons. “Is it true you have asked Bette to marry you?” Louella pried. If I can handle Bette Davis, Gary must have told himself, I can certainly deal with Louella Parsons, so he told her about the poodle he and Bette had bought that weekend for little B.D.

“But Gary,” Louella gasped, “poodles have to be clipped and combed. Don’t you dare neglect that animal! I’ve heard that you live in a messy place where the beds aren’t even—”

“I plan to let the poodle become a bum, like me,” Gary drawled.

Louella loved it, and next day she reported their conversation in her column, adding that “Gary looks like a beachcomber. He lives in dungarees and a plaid shirt, and he has the blackest beard in history.” Hedda picked it up later that week, rewording the shaggy-dog story only slightly.

From then on, Gary got good press from both ladies. One of them wrote a bit later (and the other soon wrote more or less the same): “I know a couple of Bette’s previous husbands quite well and they tell me Bette and Margo are one—the same unpredictable type of person, complete with the flinging around of mink coats and staccato excitability. Plus the genuine warmth and intelligence and sense of humor that Margo had. Margo, Bette—it’s all the same, and if you liked Margo, you’ll love Bette. Gary Merrill did and does, both ways.”

Toward the end of shooting at the studio, Bette and Gary played the scene where Bill rushes in to comfort Margo after Addison DeWitt’s devastating column. There was no need for the makeup man to supply glycerin tears, because Mankiewicz directed Bette to turn her back to the camera for Margo’s paroxysm of weeping. (“One’s back can describe an emotion,” Bette wrote in
The Lonely Life
.)

Margo’s body, from behind, heaves with sobs. She’s like an abandoned waif. Suddenly, at the door, there’s Bill, who runs to Margo, takes her in his arms and holds her. He says, “Bill’s here, baby. Everything’s all right, now.” Karen quietly exits, the scene ends, at least on-screen, but on the set that day it didn’t end quite like that. In fact, the embrace heated up, with passionate kisses added after the camera had stopped. At that point Mankiewicz called out, “Cut! Cut! This is not swing and sway with Sammy Kaye.” Bette raked her fingers through her hair. She and Gary repaired to her dressing room and didn’t return for three- quarters of an hour. (“All love scenes started on the set are continued in the dressing room after the day’s shooting.
Without exception
,” said Alfred Hitchcock. But in this case, five o’clock was too long to wait.)

As the end of May 1950 approached, completion of
All About Eve
was at hand. One important piece of work remained: retakes of the Stork Club scene. Bette, the first time, had offended Celeste with an unkind remark. Now Celeste had the last laugh.

The climax of this scene comes when Margo announces that she doesn’t want to star in Lloyd’s new play, and Karen breaks into peals of relieved laughter. Solved are everyone’s problems, particularly Karen’s—she has escaped Eve’s blackmail. Celeste’s laughter—first a husky cackle, then a tinkling bell—dissolves in silvery circles on the air.