All About “All About Eve” Read Free Page A

for star extravagance.
    “Anything you say, Darryl dahling.”
    “Wouldn’t you like to know the name of the picture?”
    “Oh, why not surprise me?” Bette said airily. She flung her cigarette hand over her shoulder like a boa.
    “Bette, this script is by Joe Mankiewicz. It’s the picture Claudette Colbert was going to do before she broke her back.”
    “Broke her back?” Bette yelped.
    And then it dawned!
    “Darryl! Is that really you?”
    They talked for four or five minutes, during which Zanuck made her one of the best offers any film actress ever received. Bette jumped at the chance to read the script of All About Eve , which ultimately, as the critic Ethan Mordden has said, “might be the film that ruined Davis or the film that made her immortal.” Perhaps it did both.
    Betty Lynn, playing the daughter in Payment on Demand , recalled later that Bette’s eyes were blazing when she returned to the set. Speaking at breakneck speed, Davis told her younger co-star that the phone call was from Zanuck and that he was sending over a script that had Hollywood in a buzz.
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    Bette’s Quarrel with Darryl Zanuck
    In January 1941 Bette Davis was elected the first woman president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was a high honor, and Bette set out to serve with distinction. She soon locked horns, however, with some of her older colleagues. The first disagreement came when Bette suggested that holding the usual Academy Awards banquet in the Biltmore Hotel “might seem frivolous in light of the terrible struggle that our British and European friends are engaged in against the Nazis. Some have suggested we cancel it. I think a better solution would be to hold the ceremony in a theatre, charge a minimum of twenty-five dollars a seat, and donate the proceeds to British War Relief.”
    Surprisingly, this plan was opposed as “undignified” by some members.
    Next, Bette raised the issue of extras. Pointing out that many of them did not speak English and that few were capable of judging technical excellence in films, she suggested that they no longer be permitted to cast votes in the Oscar competition. This suggestion also met with disapproval from many members.
    Her other recommendations also caused shock and consternation, so that Bette soon felt she had been chosen only as a glamorous figurehead whom no one cared to take seriously. A few days after the first meeting over which she presided, Bette resigned despite a warning from Darryl Zanuck, who had sponsored her for the presidency. How dire his prophecy, and how blind: “You’ll never work in Hollywood again.”
    Jean Hersholt, who was elected to replace Bette, was a diplomat and a skilled politician. He soon maneuvered to deny extras the right to vote, and he paved the way to moving the awards ceremony from banquet hall to theatre. His success in the wake of Bette’s failure no doubt implies sexism on the part of the male-dominated Academy. But Bette’s bluntness and impatience, her refusal to compromise, surely helped alienate many whom she might later have persuaded.
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    An even smaller part than that of Phoebe, the young schemer who ends All About Eve , was the role of Miss Caswell. If Zsa Zsa Gabor had read the script carefully, she might have tried to grab that little bonbon of a role: Miss Caswell, given name Claudia, whom George Sanders describes as “a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art.” In the script, Mankiewicz describes her merely as “a blonde young lady.”
    Ironically, though Zsa Zsa coveted the part of Phoebe, she was fleetingly considered for “the blonde young lady.” On the 20th Century-Fox casting director’s list, under the heading “Miss Caswell,” are the following names, most of them forgotten but two or three unforgettable: Virginia Toland, Barbara Britton, Karin Booth, Marie McDonald, Mary Meade, Joi Lansing, Adele Jergens, Marilyn Maxwell, Gale Robbins, Joyce Reynolds, Leslie Brooks, ZaZa [