Waves of Love

I can’t remember exactly when I first saw All about Eve, the 1950 Hollywood masterpiece written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and starring Bette Davis and Anne Baxter. I suspect it was sometime on late-night television in the mid 1970s. In those pre-VHS, pre-DVD, pre-internet days, my insatiable hunger for images could only be really satisfied by one source: movies, watched either at the cinema or the drive in, but especially at home on television. As a young teenager I would spend countless hours on the living room, sprawled on the floor in front of our already ancient three-in-one entertainment unit watching anything and everything, from Carry On films to courtroom dramas with Gregory Peck. At that age I didn’t look for understanding as a whole, and often didn’t care if I didn’t understand anything much at all. It was the window on other worlds that mattered. It was the endless succession of other universes, peopled by characters wearing everything from togas to tuxedos.

I do know with certainty that I watched All About Eve in 2001, the year my son was born. Like most new parents, my partner and I, finding ourselves confined to the house most evenings, relied on movies to pass the time together. Our choices were to some degree influenced by having a young baby in the house. Even though our son would be sound asleep in his room, it didn’t seem right to watch the coolly stylised violence of Tarantino, the forensic ironies of the Cohen brothers. Suddenly we wanted something gentler, less immediate, something completely removed from the harshness of the contemporary world.

We developed a taste for Hollywood classics. Favourites were Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), King Vidor’s Gilda (1946) and Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942). All solid melodramas, they were emotionally charged without being disturbing, glamorous pantomimes that engaged you then left you alone.[1] While it was clear from All About Eve’s DVD jacket that it was classic Hollywood with a twist—its blurb promised scintillating dialogue and a clever, cynical exposé of the New York theatre world—in truth I expected more of the same. Nothing quite prepared me for what was to come. Shot in a crisp yet nuanced black-and-white, the film dazzled and transported me in a way quite unlike anything I had seen before. From the moment you hear the voice of one of the film’s main characters, theatre critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders)—honeyed, eloquent, steeped in venom and cynicism—you realise you are about to experience something unique. By the end you are immersed in arguably one of the most potent and aesthetically brilliant summations of narcissism in any art form. And once it is all over, you know you will never be quite the same for having experienced it.

You’re not meant to watch a film like All about Eve on your living room sofa, a few metres away from the television screen, the DVD purring away. You’re meant to watch it as it was screened at its premiere at the Roxy on Broadway, in its day the world’s most resplendent picture palace theatre.

Who’s there on the red carpet? There’s Bette Davis of course, quietly confident she’s going to win, after a hiatus of more than a decade, yet another Oscar for best actress. There’s Anne Baxter, her co-star and rival for the same award. There’s George Sanders, husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor, and nominee for best supporting actor. And there’s the director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, already riding high on last year’s A Letter to Three Wives (1949), for which he won Oscar for both best director and screenwriter, and which has made him the golden boy of Hollywood. He’s fervently hoping he’s about to deliver yet another hit, and one that will earn him a place in film history. And that is exactly what happens. Come Oscar time, All about Eve breaks the record for the most nominated picture in Academy history: fourteen in all. (Even today, ’it is a record that is yet to be beaten.) And once again, Mankiewicz wins Oscars for best screenwriter and director. Davis and Baxter both lose, due to a split vote. All up, the film wins a respectable six awards.

The dramatic premise of All about Eve is elegantly simple. An ambitious young actress, Eve Harrington (Baxter) enters the life of an ageing theatre star, Margo Channing (Davis), and attempts to usurp her place. In the course of the ensuing story, deftly plotted by Mankiewicz, Eve manipulates everyone around her. She tries to steal Margo’s upcoming role in a major play, as well as her lover, a famous director, then the playwright who writes Margo’s plays (and is married to Eve’s friend and mentor, Karen).

The film is set in the world of New York theatre in the late 1940s, more or less the period in which it was made, and takes us behind the scenes in the spirit of ‘backstage’ films.[2] All about Eve’s main characters are theatre people, and Mankiewicz explores the nuances of this social and professional microcosm with a psychological complexity rarely before expressed in a Hollywood film of the studio era. In particular, Mankiewicz was interested in analysing the character type of the actor, one that came increasingly to preoccupy him. In an interview Mankiewicz explained his obsession with actors. Speaking about All about Eve, he said: ‘Most importantly, I guess, I wanted … to dramatize, if even briefly, my concept of the actor and his/her early flight into the “identity-proxy” or “personality-substitute” or “ego-alias” or whatever the hell else I’ve dubbed it.’[3]

The actor at the core of his cast is Bette Davis, who plays Margo Channing. Margo is a major Broadway star, in one of Broadway’s most successful plays (slyly titled Aged in Wood). She’s stylish, sharp-tongued, beautiful, brooding. The play is directed by her boyfriend, Bill, one of Broadway’s leading directors, and written by Lloyd, one of its leading playwrights.

Into this tidy, self-congratulatory world comes Eve Harrington, the star-struck ingénue with a shady past and a fawning manner that barely conceals her vaulting ambition. She’s discovered one night by Karen near the stage door, where she has waited yet again, hoping for a glimpse of her idol. Karen duly introduces her. Before the evening is out, Eve has made herself Margo’s private secretary, and by the time the film has ended, Eve has not only secured, over Margo, the lead in Lloyd’s new play, but has also won the coveted Sarah Siddons Society Award for new talent.

Thus All about Eve’s milieu is relationships, those between colleagues and lovers, friends and married couples. It is a finely calibrated analysis of how ambition figures in these contexts. These are people who work together, create together, force themselves on one another, and are forced upon one another. As you watch the spectacle of Eve’s unbridled ambition play itself out in this coterie you wonder how, without each other as stepping-stones, they would rise to meet their goals. How, without each other to react against, they would exist at all.

*

Mankiewicz’s reputation has not fared well in recent times. The fact that he made some of the most critically successful Hollywood films of all time (All about Eve, A Letter to Three Wives, 1949), as well as one of its most expensive flops (the lavish Cleopatra, 1960, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), would seem enough to make him a household name even today, along with near contemporaries such as Hitchcock and Orson Welles. Yet Mankiewicz has dropped out of view, even though All about Eve has had an enormous impact on other filmmakers in the sixty years since its release, with directors as diverse as Pedro Almodovar (All about My Mother, 1999) and Paul Verhoeven (Showgirls, 1995) producing work influenced by it. This influence has even tipped into direct (if unacknowledged) homage, with Alexander Payne’s Election (1999) transposing its core themes and many of its narrative techniques to the setting of an American high school, where a driven Reece Witherspoon lets nothing stand in her way in her campaign to become school president.

Mankiewicz was a fraught, contradictory figure: the mainstream Hollywood director with high culture tastes; the screenwriter who worshipped Shakespeare and craved to write sophisticated plays; the intellectual who could not resist the lure of mass audiences. Fuelling this identity crisis was an Olympian contempt for the hypocrisy of the world of money, ambition and ego he found in the movie industry, an industry he could not tear himself away from.[4] It is one mark of his genius that he did not try to suppress his contempt. But Mankiewicz’s contrariness, which often broke out into very public hostility when his career stalled after the failure of The Honey Pot (1965), perhaps explains why his reputation has not endured as it deserves to. Not even the success of his final film, Sleuth (1972), starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Kane (who both received Best Actor Oscar nominations), could reconcile him to a film industry he called ‘the ivory ghetto’.[5]

What was it about actors that so fascinated Mankiewicz? What aspect of human nature was it that they exemplified so well in general, and that his character of Eve embodied in particular? For Mankiewicz, Eve is the very essence of a certain type of ignoble ambition. ‘Eve is essentially—in the theatre, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, IBM, or wherever—the girl unceasingly, relentlessly, on the make.’[6] For those who might think Mankiewicz was somehow hostile or ambivalent towards actors (as Hitchcock famously was), this was not the case: his relations with them were by all accounts professional and cordial. [7] Rather, the personality type of the actor was simply his vehicle for the kind of ignoble ambition that could be found in any walk of life. And, for Mankiewicz, this ignoble ambition was precisely the kind of grand, Shakespearean theme he loved, and one that he transposed from the courts of royalty to a much different kind of aristocratic realm: the cult of fame and celebrity.

Eve’s ambition must have a goal, and the one Mankiewicz depicts is perverse, especially in light of how she goes about obtaining it. It is not power, the desire to have complete control over the destinies of others, that Eve seeks. It is, Mankiewicz shows us, nothing less than love. A key scene in the film illustrates this. Margo has thrown a birthday party for her lover, Bill, at her house. The evening has drawn to an end and Bill, in an expansive mood, is holding forth on the brutal sacrifices required to succeed in the theatre. From his perspective as a director, ’it is a lot of hard work for very little reward. Eve could not disagree more:

EVE: So little. So little, did you say?

Why, if there’s nothing else—there’s applause. It’s like—like waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up. Imagine … To know, every night, that different hundreds of people love you … they smile, their eyes shine—you’ve pleased them, they want You, you belong. Just that alone is worth anything …[8]

‘Waves of love’? This glimpse of Eve’s true motivations is unexpected. From someone so calculated we expect a more grasping, mundane ambition. Instead, in this short speech delivered in a kind of muted delirium, we are shown a core aspect of the human condition: the need to please, to belong, to be loved. Yet the borderline psychotic delivery of Eve’s monologue, amplified by the personality shift from willing doormat to rising star, does not make her any more sympathetic a character. Rather it makes her deeper and darker, more frightening for the fact that she seems to be the victim of inner motivations she can’t control.

It is the acuity of Mankiewicz’s psychological insight that makes All about Eve such a compelling drama. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV-TR, some of the key traits of ‘Narcissistic Personality Disorder’ are ‘a grandiose sense of self-importance’, ‘fantasies of unlimited success’, a belief ‘that he or she is ‘special’ and unique and … should associate with other special or high-status people’, ‘requires excessive admiration’, ‘has a sense of entitlement’.[9] Eve satisfies each of these criteria.

Mankiewicz’s focus on this theme, and its exploration in his chosen milieu, gives the film a contemporary resonance that few other films of its era can match. In our postmodern times much has been made of how we live in a world of heightened illusions that have become the norms to which we aspire. And we have seen these illusions largely take the form of a cult of celebrity and fame that seems to become more intense every day, wherein sets of transcendent individual types—Hollywood movie stars, singers, and the famous for simply being famous—become the bearers, the focal points for these illusions.

But what Mankiewicz shows are important aspects of the psychological origins of the obsession with fame and celebrity and the personal traits that drive it. To put it in kinder terms, these traits are the desire to maintain self-esteem, confidence, to be the best you can be, to be loved for who you are and what you do. In more pathological terms, these traits constitute the inability to control the need to be admired and loved, to confine it within socially acceptable limits and to succumb to the self-absorption, indifference to others, but also the need for their attention, that typifies narcissism. It is the depth and boundlessness of Eve’s desire that is so striking— its omnivorousness, its rapacity. As Mankiewicz states: ‘The goal—toward which Eve is fanatically and forever at full charge—is no less than all of whatever there is to be had.’ .[10]

All, it seems, for those ‘waves of love’.

Eve, however, is not as clever she seems. Through a series of duplicitous manoeuvres, she secures the lead role over Margo in Lloyd Richards’ new play, Footsteps on the Ceiling, but at a terrible personal cost. While she has been silently watching the others, stealthily making her moves, someone has been silently watching her. This is Eve’s downfall. The watcher is the theatre critic Addison DeWitt, who, to a large extent, makes sure Eve’s success is only partial. And for someone who wants it all, a partial victory is no victory at all.[11]

In a scene of astonishing intensity, Mankiewicz stages a decisive confrontation between the rising star who has begun to believe she is self-created and the theatre critic who has helped engineer her success, and now comes to collect his debt. In the character of Addison DeWitt, Mankiewicz pays the most backhanded of compliments to the species of animal known as the critic. What does a critic do? A critic, above all, stands at a remove from those who produce the art work in question. The critic shapes how the public understands what it enjoys or doesn’t enjoy. He or she can make and break careers by evaluating a performance and giving a verdict. They are like Tiresias of Greek mythology, occupying the netherworld between the world of gods and mortals, the artist and the public.

The scene’s dramatic tension is largely generated by a clash of wills where one powerful narcissistic force is vanquished by one even more lethal. It takes place on the afternoon before Eve’s debut in the new play, the all-important performance that will launch her career. Addison visits Eve at her hotel and finds her in high spirits. Rashly, she confesses to him that Lloyd Richards has fallen in love with her, that he is going to leave Karen, and that Eve and Lloyd are to be married. ‘Lloyd will write great plays for me,’ she tells Addison. ‘I’ll make them great!’[12] In her rapture, both feverish and icy, Eve exposes her ambition and narcissism to Addison and to the spectator. ’It is a stunning moment: few artists have captured so well the glacial coldness at the heart of the ability to bond with others while being so removed from them, to share common experiences only in order to channel them into the most self-centred gratifications.

But Eve’s ecstasy is not to last. Eve will not be marrying Lloyd, or anyone else, Addison tells her. Eve belongs to him. And in a silken, foppish speech that becomes increasingly taut but never breaks out directly into anger, Addison confronts Eve with her own outlandish lies about her past and makes her fully aware he has been watching her every move with a mixture of contempt and admiration. Finally, he makes a proposal of a kind, based on a tortured rationale of why they should be together. ‘You’re an improbable person, Eve,’ he says, ‘but so am I. We have that in common. Also a contempt for humanity, an inability to love or be loved, insatiable ambition—and talent. We deserve each other.’[13]

It is not only the drama of the events that gives the scene its potency. It is the sudden shift to yet another level of assumed omniscience. Eve has not noticed that Addison has been watching her watching the others. Blinded by her own ambition, she did not realise that Addison had designs on her, and that by threatening to expose her as a fraud, Addison has the power to do with her as he wants.

There is a third moment of narcissism in All about Eve that subsumes the others and makes the theme even more potent. In it, the ‘waves of love’ Eve so vividly describes as her motivating force take on a pictorial form of astonishing beauty and intensity. This moment of narcissism constitutes the film’s final sequence, which, I would argue, is also one of the great cinematic endings.

The sequence is as follows. Eve, dressed in a glamorous evening gown and cape, returns to her hotel room from the ceremony where she has just received the Sarah Siddons Society Award. Her performance in Footsteps on the Ceiling has been the success she has hoped for. Yet, on the night of her first great triumph, she is in the darkest of moods. She has refused to go to the party held in her honour, despite Addison’s entreaties. She has refused because none of her ‘friends’ (Margo and company, who also attended the award ceremony) will speak to her. They respect her talent, but despise her as a person.

When she enters her hotel suite she finds a young woman asleep on the sofa. It is Phoebe, a budding young actress who has managed to slip into Eve’s room. Eve’s first impulse is to throw her out, but Phoebe’s obvious worship of Eve sways her. In no time at all the girl is making herself useful, insinuating herself into Eve’s life. Thus, the story, in dramatic terms, comes full circle: Eve has fallen prey to a younger incarnation of herself, yet another young actress ‘on the make’. As a piece of storytelling, this symmetry is somewhat banal in its desire to make everything neat and tidy, even if the trope, with its self-reflexivity and recursiveness, nods to avant-garde aesthetics. But then Mankiewicz does something utterly extraordinary, particularly in terms of the use of the cinematic image, and it is all the more extraordinary because he is usually so fond of dialogue, sometimes to the point of garrulousness, to create his meanings. Using Phoebe as the central motif, he constructs an image that is perhaps the most powerful signifier of narcissism, of delusional self-love, ever created in cinema.

Eve, wanting to rest, tells Phoebe to start packing her things for her trip to Hollywood. Phoebe obeys. Alone in Eve’s bedroom, she puts on Eve’s glittering cape. She picks up the award. In an instant Phoebe is transformed from a working girl into something glamorous, transcendent. Once again, all of this is, in screenwriting terms, somewhat predictable. Phoebe is playing dress-ups. She is role-playing her fantasy. If the film were to end at this point, it would be, to use a DeWitt term, ‘the height of vulgarity’.

In the corner of the room is a group of three full-length mirrors angled in on one another. Phoebe, cape draped over her shoulders, holding the award as if it has just been bestowed on her, steps inside the mirror to admire her reflection. The screen is filled with an infinite multiplication of Phoebes, massed like a crowd of devotees in a cathedral. Clutching the award, Phoebe bows to the multitudes before her, and they bow back in deference. The theme music soars, endlessly echoing in a chamber that takes on a quality that is somehow more expansive than the flat screen it is projected onto, and that makes even the contemporary use of 3D somehow less immersive and all encompassing. This image of the caped, bowing Phoebe is one of the most compressed, potent images of the narcissistic self in any artistic form. There they are, the waves of love coursing in on themselves, confined to this tiniest, most intimate of spaces, a space filled to the brim with self-adoration. This infinitely mirrored self, cloaked in the symbols of adulation, is all that is needed to complete a circuit of total joy, where a single character is both actor and audience, hero and villain, the forces at play embodied in an image into which everything that preceded it is absorbed in an endless cycle.

No, I don’t exactly remember when I first saw All about Eve, but in the act of writing this essay a recollection has occurred, and it is the recollection of the pearlescent shimmer of that final image which had diminished over time, only to live on somewhere deep in my unconscious like some ghostly imprint. And the imprint left behind is of an endlessly reflecting surface of quicksilver, of something deeply beautiful, a beauty that took the form of the feminine but was not precisely femininity itself, rather a kind of generalised halo of beauty, grace and youth.

But it was also an image strangely corrupted. That beauty and youth was not innocent. Its perfection was harsh and cold and more than faintly sinister. But, at that time, as a young teenager, I couldn’t grasp why.

When I finally saw that image again in 2001, thirty or so years later, its specificity left me thunderstruck. It was as if something that had permeated my sensibility found itself crystallised on the screen before me, was made concrete and real again. It was as if I was being forced to face some essential truth about the artistic self, the everyday self, that I, as a writer, did not want to know about, but was forced to confront whether I wished to or not.

*

Mankiewicz didn’t make another film that matched All about Eve. He tried with The Barefoot Contessa (1956), starring Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner, but he failed. In that film he mounted a polemic against the movie industry itself (Bogart plays a film director, a thinly disguised Mankiewicz cipher), but this time his sparkling wit lapses into boorishness and didacticism. It is one of the least satisfying films he made. He tried again on an epic scale with Cleopatra. That film was vilified by the critics, who cruelly dubbed it Vegas on the Nile, and not without reason. While Cleopatra reprised some of All about Eve’s themes—the folly of ambition, the rapacity of power—it is a vastly inferior film, for reasons that had as much to do with the film industry and the restrictions of such an expensive project as anything Mankiewicz did or didn’t do. All about Eve was his true epic of the corrupted soul, a chamber piece that expanded intimate spaces to a vast scale few have rivalled.

Notes

1. These films were all made in the era of the Motion Picture Production Code (better known as the Hays Code), the set of regulations adopted by Hollywood to keep entertainment wholesome, and whose strongest influence spanned the early 1930s to the late 1950s. Back to article

2. A Hollywood subgenre that first sprang up in the form of 1920s musicals and evolved to include ‘showbiz’ dramas. Back to article

3. Quoted in Gary Carey, More about All about Eve, Random House, New York, 1972, p. 22. Back to article

4. Kenneth Geist, Pictures Will Talk, Da Capo Press, New York, 1983. Back to article

5. Geist, Pictures Will Talk, p. 398. Back to article

6. Carey, More about All about Eve, p. 28. Back to article

7. He had affairs with Judy Garland and Joan Crawford, as Geist recounts. Back to article

8. http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/all_about_eve.html. Back to article

9.http://web.archive.org/web/20050118025747/behavenet.com/capsules/disorders/dsm4tr.htm. Back to article

10.Carey, More about All about Eve, p. 28. Back to article

11.This also satisfies the Hays Code prescription that no evil act be represented ‘alluringly’: it must always be punished. http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html. Back to article

12.http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/all_about_eve.html. Back to article

13.http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/all_about_eve.html. Back to article