Fifty years ago this month, the movie “All About Eve,” starring Bette Davis as Margo Channing — a quintessential actress, both celebrated and temperamental — opened at the Roxy in New York and became an instant classic. The film won six Academy Awards, including two for Joseph L. Mankiewicz, as screenwriter and director (the same prizes he had won the previous year for “A Letter to Three Wives”).
“All About Eve” stands as an acerbic satire on ambition and the egocentricity of those who dominate show business. It is also a salute to the indomitability of actresses like Bette Davis (and Margo Channing); to an ensemble cast, and to the wit and sophistication of Mankiewicz.
The story behind “All About Eve” has been told often — in books that include “Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking” (1971); “More All About Eve” (1972), which Mankiewicz wrote in collaboration with Gary Carey, and “All About `All About Eve’,” by Sam Staggs, which was published earlier this year. In the movie, Margo finds her life invaded by Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), a worshipful fan whose ingenuousness barely conceals her own deep ambition. Eve wants to be Margo, and with the help of the cynical theater critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) she will do anything to reach her goal. At a party, Margo finally confronts the challenge. “Fasten your seat belts,” she warns her guests. “It’s going to be a bumpy night.” This is just one of the film’s famous lines from a script filled with imperishable dialogue.
Having talked over the years to Mankiewicz, Davis and Zanuck, who produced it, I’m convinced that the making of the film was not “a bumpy night,” although there were twists and turns, a natural result of Hollywood during the days of the old studio system and of the sizable personalities involved.
The character of Margo started out as Margola Channing, the protagonist in a short story called “The Wisdom of Eve,” written by Mary Orr and published in May 1946 in Cosmopolitan magazine. Earlier that year, Orr had heard the true story behind the fiction while visiting the actress Elisabeth Bergner. Bergner told her about Martina Lawrence, a young woman who stood outside her stage door for months during the run of the play “The Two Mrs. Carrolls.”
According to Mankiewicz, “they brought the girl inside, and she became the secretary. The play had closed down, and they were recasting. When it came time to do a reading, she did the reading and even Bergner’s husband, Paul Czinner, said she was remarkable. In her memoirs, Bergner says, `Three weeks later I was at the hairdresser and someone gave me a copy of this Hearst magazine, and there was the whole story I told Mary Orr.”‘
After Orr dramatized the story as a radio play, it came to the attention of Mankiewicz, and he and Zanuck agreed it would be his next movie. The title was changed from “The Wisdom of Eve” to, briefly, “Eve Harrington,” then “Best Performance,” and finally, “All About Eve.”
When he was head of production at Twentieth Century-Fox, Zanuck referred to the screenwriter on a movie as “the present writer,” to differentiate him from all future writers who might be called upon to replace him or to supplement his work. This was not the case with Mankiewicz, who in his years at Fox rose to and remained a writer and director with creative control.
Mankiewicz (who died in 1993) left behind a legacy of films he made within and sometimes against the studio system. While many of his peers were making movies according to formula, he became a maverick insider in Hollywood. By his own measure, his films were “a continuing comment on the manners and mores of contemporary society in general and the male-female relationship in particular.”
In his script for “All About Eve,” he took the premise — the understudy who tries to steal the life of a star — and created his own story, adding and changing characters. On March 7, 1950, Zanuck finished reading Mankiewicz’s script and immediately shot off a memo:
“Without any question of a doubt you have done a remarkable job. The holes that were present in certain sections of the original treatment have disappeared.” Then he said he was writing a more detailed memo but wanted to make it clear that the script was 50 pages too long. “By that,” he said, “I mean it has the equivalent of 50 pages of too much story.” He reminded Mankiewicz that he (Zanuck) had improved “A Letter to Three Wives” by excising one of the wives (it had been “A Letter to Four Wives”).
In his follow-up memo, Zanuck said he had tried to edit the script of “All About Eve” as he would “if I were in the projection room.” Many of his suggestions worked their way into the final script, most of them about speeding up the story.
When all the many credits are distributed, one should go to Claudette Colbert for not playing Margo Channing. She had been signed for the role, but hurt her back and had to withdraw from the cast. With “Eve” about to go into production, Zanuck and Mankiewicz were desperate to find their star.
Earlier they had considered Marlene Dietrich (Zanuck’s choice) and Gertrude Lawrence (Mankiewicz’s choice). But now they turned to Davis, whose career was at an ebb. She read the script and leaped at the opportunity.
Years later in an interview, Davis freely referred to herself as “Colbert’s replacement.” “Joe told me that 10 directors called him and said he was crazy to work with me, that it would be suicide. One call said `you’re going to have the most fun of your life.’ I knew that was from Willie Wyler. All the others were from directors I had to save.”
Mankiewicz remembered all those warnings, including one from the producer Edmund Goulding, who predicted that Davis would come on the set, pencil in hand and rewrite the dialogue. To his surprise and pleasure, he found the opposite was true: “And not one syllable is different on the screen than in the screenplay.”
In two casting choices, Mankiewicz won over Zanuck: Zanuck wanted Jeanne Crain to play Eve Harrington and Jose Ferrer as Addison DeWitt; Mankiewicz insisted on Anne Baxter and George Sanders. He also played a pivotal role in the choice of a sexy actress to portray Caswell, whom DeWitt identifies as “a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art.” The agent Johnny Hyde asked Mankiewicz to give the part to his protegee Marilyn Monroe, even though Zanuck had let her go from Twentieth Century Fox.
The movie proved to be a high point for both the director and Davis. Throughout his career, Mankiewicz was adamant about ending movies with “a zinger,” to cap a film with one final striking image. At the end of “All About Eve,” a young woman invades Eve Harrington’s apartment. She puts Eve’s elegant cape around her shoulders, holds her Sarah Siddons trophy and stands before a mirror. As Mankiewicz said, “She bows and an exponential number of Eves are seen in the mirror.” He added, “The world is full of Eves.”
