All About “All About Eve” (21 page)

Bette thought it was the damnedest thing: Celeste could laugh on cue, like Shirley Temple crying real tears. Bette herself was capable of almost everything else, but a few seconds of laughter left her winded and she had to start over.

“Cut,” Mankiewicz called. He had the shots he wanted.

“I can’t do that,” Bette grumbled. For the first time in weeks she addressed Celeste when the camera wasn’t on. “How do you do that?”

“It’s easy,” Celeste answered.

“Well,
I
can’t do it,” Bette repeated.

Mankiewicz (who, according to Celeste, enjoyed showing Bette that there were other actors in the picture) said, “Would you like to do it again, Celeste?” And she seized the chance to giggle on and on until at last Mankiewicz, highly amused, puffed on his pipe and said, “Okay.”

As a practical joke—or was it retaliation for her laughter?—Gary Merrill, now entirely in league with Bette, told Celeste about a new shampoo. For he had discovered that she had a hair-washing compulsion. Gary, along with a couple of others in the company, sent Celeste on a wild goose chase around Los Angeles in search of an extraordinary new hair product called F.A.G. The cockamamie acronym supposedly stood for “follicle aggrandizement gel,” which was reputed to work wonders. So off went Celeste, to this pharmacy and that, asking brightly, “Do you have any F.A.G. shampoo?”

*   *   *

At the end of
All About Eve
a stagestruck teenager is about to loot Eve Harrington’s life just as Eve had plundered Margo’s. Although these final scenes in the movie were not literally the last ones Mankiewicz shot at 20th Century-Fox toward the end of May 1950, this is where we leave the set. Principal photography is over, the cast has worked long and brilliant hours, and a coherent film remains to be shaped out of thousands of celluloid images.

The
All About Eve
Network

Hollywood—both the geographical entity and the state of mind—has always been a small town where people know one another and work together. Here is a tabulation of instances when Mankiewicz directed
Eve
’s cast members in other films, and also when cast members (and the ubiquitous Zsa Zsa Gabor) worked together in earlier and later films.

Mankiewicz directed George Sanders in
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
(1947), Thelma Ritter (and Celeste Holm, voice-over only) in
A Letter to Three Wives
(1949), Walter Hampden in
Five Fingers
(1952).

Bette Davis and Walter Hampden appeared in
All This, and Heaven Too
(1940). Davis and Barbara Bates were in
June Bride
(1948). Davis and Gary Merrill appeared in
Another Man’s Poison
(1951) and
Phone Call From a Stranger
(1952).

Gary Merrill and Hugh Marlowe appeared in
Twelve O’clock High
(1949). Merrill and George Sanders appeared in
Witness to Murder
(1954). Sanders and Randy Stuart were in
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
(1951).

Sanders and Zsa Zsa Gabor co-starred as hard-boiled lovers in
Death of a Scoundrel
(1956), but by then they had been divorced for several years. Gabor and Marilyn Monroe both had small parts in
We’re Not Married
(1952).

Hugh Marlowe and Celeste Holm were in
Come to the Stable
(1949).

Anne Baxter and Marilyn Monroe appeared in
Ticket to Tomahawk
(1950). They were both in
O. Henry’s Full House
(1952), and so was Gregory Ratoff.

Marilyn Monroe and Barbara Bates appeared in
Let’s Make It Legal
(1951). Monroe and Hugh Marlowe were in
Monkey Business
(1952). Monroe and Thelma Ritter appeared in
As Young As You Feel
(1951) and
The Misfits
(1961). Ritter and Bess Flowers were in
Move Over, Darling
(1963).

Thelma Ritter and Hugh Marlowe were in
The Birdman of Alcatraz
(1962).

Barbara Bates, who plays Phoebe, the ambitious teenager that Eve Harrington will come to regret taking in, has become a Hollywood ghost. If you mention her as a cast member of
All About Eve
you’re likely to hear, “Which one was she?” Everyone recalls that final shot of Phoebe bowing to herself—and to us—in front of Eve’s triptych of mirrors, her image reflected to infinity. But who was Barbara Bates?

For one thing, she never took to Hollywood, though she eventually ended up in the pages of
Hollywood Babylon
. She was born in Denver in 1925, and her start in movies sounds like something invented by a press agent, as indeed it was, for the story was told by Barbara’s first husband, who had worked as a Hollywood publicity man for some twenty years when he met Barbara in 1944.

His name was Cecil Coan and, according to his version, he was on a bond tour with several stars in the closing days of World War II. During an appearance in Denver, Coan and his stars—or were they really starlets?—noticed a lovely teenager who pressed forward to gather autographs. “You’re a remarkably pretty girl,” said Coan. “I suppose you know that?”

“I’ve heard,” Barbara answered seriously and without a trace of flirtation. They chatted and Barbara revealed her dreams of being an actress.

“Well,” said the suave middle-aged publicist, “if you’re ever in L.A. look me up.” He gave her his card, as he had given it to many before.

Later that year someone called on Cecil Coan. Who is it, he thought as his secretary ushered the girl warily into his office, I don’t think I’ve ever laid eyes … “You remember me,” Barbara said, and it was not a question but a statement, for she took people, quite literally, at their word.

Getting a studio contract wasn’t so hard if you had connections, and when Barbara signed with Universal the Denver papers ran stories about her for weeks. She made her debut as one of Yvonne De Carlo’s handmaidens in
Salome, Where She Danced
(1945).

Cheesecake. The word puckered Barbara’s lips like a lemon, and yet she posed endlessly in shorts, swimsuits, tight sweaters, and Rosie-the-Riveter coveralls for photos intended to stimulate servicemen in the lapsing days of war.
Life
magazine put her on the cover, and that issue—May 28, 1945—reportedly sold more copies on Denver’s newsstands than any other magazine had ever sold before.

“I was never the pin-up type,” Barbara said wistfully some years later, long after she had married Cecil Coan and, having been dropped by Universal, had become a featured player at Warner, where she played the title role in
June Bride
, starring Bette Davis. But everyone eventually quarreled with Warner Bros., and Barbara, too, left after a blow-up. Depression, never far away, gripped her with icy fingers. Her despair was profound but somehow it seemed not totally related to reversals in her career.

By the end of 1949 life called to her, and she answered. Barbara and Cecil moved into a new house in Benedict Canyon, they spent weekends sailing their yawl in Pacific waters, and 20th Century-Fox, where Barbara had a new contract, cast her in
Cheaper by the Dozen
.

And then Joseph L. Mankiewicz structured his new screenplay so that a bit player monopolizes the screen at the end, and the final fade-out is hers rather than Anne Baxter’s or Bette Davis’s. A small part, yes, but it was Barbara Bates’s most important one and the one for which she is remembered, if at all.
The Hollywood Reporter
said of her performance in
All About Eve
: “Barbara Bates comes on the screen in the last few moments to more or less sum up the whole action and point of the story. It’s odd that a bit should count for so much, and in the hands of Miss Bates all the required points are fulfilled.”

Later she appeared insignificantly in
The Secret of Convict Lake, Let’s Make it Legal, Rhapsody
, and many other fifties films, until she and her husband moved to London in hopes of aggrandizing her career. Barbara made two pictures there. On two others she was replaced after filming had begun. It was rumored she had severe personal problems, but no one found out what they were.

The Coans returned to Hollywood and Barbara made her last movie,
Apache Territory
, in 1958. From time to time she managed to appear on a lone television show. She made two TV commercials, one for floor wax and another in which she appeared with Buster Keaton in praise of some product long forgotten.

While Cecil Coan suffered a decline from cancer, Barbara Bates trained to become a dental assistant and when her husband died in 1967 she returned to Denver, though without fanfare, for she had not fulfilled the hometown dreams. It was said that she could have been as famous as Linda Darnell, but look how she had let folks down.

She took a job in a hospital, where none of the patients dreamed that this middle-aged woman with the sad, weary face had once been a movie star. One day she ran into her childhood sweetheart from long ago, and they married. The marriage made the papers, though far from the front page. Barbara’s mother, Eve Bates, told a reporter, “Barbara is finally at peace with herself.” But Mrs. Bates’s assessment was premature.

Three months after the marriage, on March 18, 1969, Barbara Bates, in a mood of sunless depression, turned on the gas and died by asphyxiation.

But what of that final scene, where Barbara Bates, as Phoebe, is trapped among endless reflections of herself, without companion? This is how Mankiewicz conceived the scene in his screenplay: “Slowly, she walks to a large three-mirrored cheval. With grace and infinite dignity she holds the award to her, and bows again and again … as if to the applause of a multitude.”

A significant fact about Mankiewicz and his mirrors is that he borrowed the whole thing from Orson Welles, who had done it famously in
The Lady From Shanghai
(1948). Both directors flash these mirror sequences as a final virtuoso flourish, though in the Welles film noir Rita Hayworth shoots down her husband, Everett Sloane, and he shoots her, shattering the mirrors to bits. As both lie dying in the wreckage of splintered glass, Sloane says to Hayworth: “For a smart girl, you make a lot of mistakes.”

This same line, though of course unspoken, is implicit in the mirror-ending of
All About Eve
. Ironically it is we, the audience, who “speak” the line, however silently or subliminally, to Eve Harrington. We gasp at her deadly error, which is the same one Margo made: The enemy was at the gate, and now the enemy is invited in … to devour. Mankiewicz implies, with his mirrored multiplicity of Phoebes, that the plague of Eves and Phoebes is unstoppable; cut down one and a hundred more spring up. If Mankiewicz is in any sense a visionary, his vision is this: that show business survives on the bloodsucking of its many Eves and Phoebes.

In less baroque terms, we might wonder why Mankiewicz added this ten-minute coda with Eve and the brazen intruder and that looking-glass into forever. It has been pointed out that formally, the story ends after Eve’s speech at the Sarah Siddons banquet, when Margo speaks her final line: “You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.” Richard Winnington’s comment, in London’s
News Chronicle
in 1950, is typical of those who find the ending unsatisfactory. He called it “an artistically unjustifiable would-be clever climax.” The film critic Richard Corliss calls the ending of
All About Eve
“a totally redundant coda which blunts Mankiewicz’s modestly ironic point.”

Had the film ended with Margo’s devastating little speech, we would have come full circle, back to the awards dinner where the picture opened. At that point, everything wise and witty having been said, we know all about Eve, Margo, Bill, Karen, Lloyd, and everyone else in the story. There’s no real need to visit Eve’s opulent new Park Avenue apartment. We can imagine her improved circumstances, as well as the lack of pleasure they’ll bring.

Perhaps Mankiewicz felt that ending the movie with Margo’s speech would smack of the well-made play. That kind of neat, final-curtain ending belongs to the theatre, not to the movies. And though Mankiewicz was often accused of making filmed plays rather than “cinematic” movies, in this looking-glass dénouement he followed his visual instinct.

It’s unorthodox to introduce a new character to end a movie, but Mankiewicz, like all Hollywood moralists, didn’t trust his audience to draw their own conclusions. (Although he might have, since
All About Eve
is a picture for grown-ups.) But even if he had, the censors hovered close by, insisting that evil be punished. And Eve’s Sarah Siddons Award was hardly a punishment.

Tradition required that Hollywood fables, even shrewd and amusing Mankiewicz fables, must carry an unambiguous message at the end. (The fables of La Fontaine, pungent and witty, also follow this format. Each fable consists of a little play—the “body” as La Fontaine himself called it—to which a brief maxim or teaching—the “soul”—is often attached.)

The “body” of
All About Eve
is the main story, which begins and ends at the Sarah Siddons banquet. Actually, Margo’s final line contains the law and gospel of the story. “You can always put that award where your heart ought to be” implies: Have a heart, love with your heart, use your heart for forgiveness, and never trade it for gold or high regard. (Unlike the Tin Man, Eve doesn’t realize that she lacks a heart.)

But some commentators see the Eve-and-Phoebe sequence—Mankiewicz’s “second” ending, as it were—as an ethical pop quiz pinned to the movie: “Did you pay attention? All right, question number one: What is Eve Harrington’s punishment for all her nasty deeds? Two: True or false, we all get what we deserve in the end.…”

If we look for the difference, in movies, between art that reveals a new vision and craft that retools a familiar blueprint, that difference is perhaps this: that an artist—whether writer, director, actor, or even producer—allows the viewer room enough to create his own final ending, along with the meaning that ending implies, while others include a manufactured meaning with the ticket price.