"Hi, this is Christopher Mankiewicz, son of Joseph Mankiewicz, here to talk about All About Eve." "My name is Celeste Holm, and I played the part of Karen Richards in the movie All About Eve." "This is Ken Geist talking about All About Eve." "I wrote a book about Joseph L. Mankiewicz back in 1978, so long ago." "But I've written about the film again only two years ago, when I was sent a copy of All About "All About Eve,"" "which I disliked a lot." "One of the great ironies of this movie, the thing that my father, I think, brought up more often to festivals and more often to discussion groups, that he talked about, was the Sarah Siddons Award." "It drove him crazy, the irony that an award that he invented, and that somebody in the Fox props department made up for the purposes of the movie, actually became a real award, I believe, in Chicago," "and the topper was that its first recipient was Celeste Holm, who was in the movie." "We thought, "How could she have been in the movie" ""and understand what the award meant," ""in terms of the ambition and the phoneyness," ""and yet blithely go to Chicago and accept this award" ""from some two-bit person or group that said," ""'Let's have a Sarah Siddons Award', without seeing how silly that was?"" "He constantly talked about that, and how silly that was." "So..." "And it proved to him, everything that he had tried to lampoon or satirise in this movie, that art was imitating, or life was imitating art, rather than the other way around." "And Joe idolised and feared his brother Herman, who was a brilliant wit, a wonderful writer, a great figure, a figure of the theatre in New York." "He was a theatre critic for The New York Times at one point, and possibly The New Yorker." "He was a big..." "He was an Algonquin Club figure." "So of course he..." "And Herman was making sensational money, incredible money in Hollywood." "Hollywood has been a source of women, which is what Joe was truly interested in." "As a young man, a very handsome young man, of course, there would be a lot of attractive women." "And there were." "Chris Mankiewicz has alleged that Margo Channing has many attributes of his famous actress mother, a German actress named Rosa Stradner." "And I'm sure that's true." "I'm sure that's true." "That doesn't gainsay the fact that it's really about Herman and Joe and their rivalry." "And we didn't take that much further." "The ceremony, the Sarah Siddons Award." "There was no Sarah Siddons Award, of course, in 1950." "They invented it some years afterwards." "But that gold award is the Herman Mankiewicz Citizen Kane award that Joe would see every time he would go to Herman's house, and envied." "He wanted to have one and never thought he'd get one." "Joe saw that Oscar every time he went to Herman's house, and he thought, "I'll never get one."" "And in any case, the whole gestalt of the two Mankiewicz brothers was that Joe was the lesser and the less witty." "Even if Herman never called him "My idiot brother,"" "there was this hierarchy." "No one could ever be as witty as Herman Mankiewicz, even when he was plastered." "But Herman was descending, rapidly descending, because of these two terrible obsessions, gambling and drink." "He was going down the Hollywood ladder because he outraged all of his bosses." "And Joe was climbing, climbing, climbing." "These two people..." "And, of course, that's the dynamic of All About Eve as well, is that Eve is rising and Margo is getting older, and is older than her lover, or husband." "So Herman became a terrible burden, terrible debts to pay, having to finish Herman's scripts to bail Herman out, all a nuisance, a terrible nuisance." "And Herman was sick." "He was a drain and a drag." "I certainly think that All About Eve will remain one of the best pictures ever made." "What it lacks, interestingly enough, I mean," "I don't want to be competitive with his brother and Citizen Kane, but why Citizen Kane might be considered a greater film is because it has a visual aspect to it that Orson Welles brought to it, together with the great cameraman." "And had a certain kind of a..." "It wasn't quite so connect-the-dots." "It makes jumps." "It stylistically is more innovative, let's put it that way." "By the same token, my father was not innovative in a visual sense, and I think that's the drawback of him as a director, and even as a writer." "But his observances of character and of behaviour and of people," "I think, just from a pure writing standpoint, that will always stay as one of the great movies." "Because movies is a visual medium," "I think the visual area is where it will perhaps not rank among the top five, or, you know, but I think..." "Many friends of mine have always compared Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve, because they both were made, or released, in the same year." "And many people prefer Sunset Boulevard, and they do precisely because it has a more loony element to it." "It has a more imaginative and visual element to it." "It deals with more oddity." "It's not quite as..." "I won't say old-fashioned, but it's not quite as one-thing-follows-after-the-other." "But if you accept the tradition my father came out of, and that he was not a visual director," "I think it's about as good as that kind of filmmaking gets, even though it will never have that extra element of fantasy." "Although he was very proud, for example, in Suddenly, Last Summer, that section that was actually shot by Nick Roeg, that was like the one kind of fantasy thing that he shot, that he directed in his entire life." "Otherwise it could have been a theatre scene, people walking in doors and slamming doors." "It was very boom, boom, boom." "Those were his limitations." "But if you accept those limitations, I think he's as good a writer and as good a director of the behaviour as you could have." "But the magic, that's something else." "My favourite director is..." "My favourite director, Howard Hawks," "I would consider the antithesis of my father." "Howard Hawks' movies very often have the most silly screenplays you could imagine." "There isn't a much sillier screenplay than The Big Sleep." "But Hawks, who very much worked within the studio system, loved the studio system, he got magic on the screen." "If you think of To Have and Have Not, or any of those silly Bogart movies, and other movies that he did." "But they have some famous lines, some great lines." "And you have chemistry and magic between some of the actors." "What people remember about them is Bogart and Bacall and that kind of thing." "He brought a certain magic to his movies, with movie stars." "He could get them to really..." "There was a chemistry there that worked, like Rio Bravo." "The other thing about Hawks is that he could do almost any genre." "My father tried a Western." "It was terrible." "He tried a big epic, Cleopatra, which with all due respects to 20th Century Fox, was not in my view a great movie." "But he could not work in a lot of genres." "He was a sophisticated man." "His sense of humour was a sophisticated humour." "My father used to say the difference between him and Cecil B. De Mille was that Cecil B. De Mille was just as honest in the way he directed movies as my father was, except that a lot more people in the world saw things the way Cecil B. De Mille did," "that his style happened to coincide with the taste of a vast majority of the American public." "The style and the taste that my father had was not so popular, so his films would never gross as Cecil B. De Mille's." "It was not demeaning to Cecil B. De Mille that he was, you know, some trashy kind of thing." "No, he was honest." "He used to say to me, my father said," ""You can't direct something unless you believe in it honestly."" ""Direct well unless you believe in it honestly."" "The difference is you have to go with your taste and what you think is right." "Now, if it turns out you're some kind of effete snob whose taste doesn't..." "Nobody cares about your taste but other snobs, you won't direct long because nobody will care cos nobody's gonna go see your movies." "As long as you're honest, it's fine." "My father used to always say, "If you set out to make a good movie" ""and it doesn't work, at least you set out to make it good."" ""But if you set out to make a piece of shit and it doesn't make money," ""then all you've got is a piece of shit." ""So, at least try to make a good movie."" "He said, "Most directors I know try to make a good movie."" "He said, "It may not work out, but they try."" "You know, when this script..." "It was first published as the only movie script that was ever published by Random House, who published stage plays, Broadway plays." "This was published as a play." "And it's Mankiewicz's credential for becoming a playwright." "It's more like a play than it is a film." "It was so popular, especially in gay circles, where it became a cult film." "But many people would go to it over and over again in revival houses to memorise the exchanges, the wit, because it's just dotted with wonderful passages." "It occurs to me that with DVD and video tape, the next generation of film scholars will have something that we never had." "I had to see Joe's Paramount pictures once by UCLA renting a theatre for me, whereas on DVD and video tape, you can see them, you can stop them." "It will be a whole new thing." "And so they won't need the screenplay." "They can have their own DVD." "Your DVD." "I want to come back to the theme of the rivalry between Herman and Joe." "And Joe's wanting not only the award for Citizen Kane, which he wins for All About Eve, the writing and directing, which Herman hadn't won, but the structure of All About Eve, the structure that exists and the original one," "which was scenes written from Eve's speech on applause, which was in the script, and was shot from two points of view, the flashback technique, everyone's history." "It was very much intended to be a Citizen Kane kind of movie." "Herman's passion was the newspaper field, in which he excelled in New York." "Joe's was the fantasy occupation of the theatre, in which he would excel." "But the structure, the form of these films," "is somewhat similar." "Joe Mankiewicz was the only director I ever knew who cut while he was shooting." "In the middle of a scene, he'd put his hand over the camera and say," ""Cut two," and then we'd continue the scene, instead of bothering to stop the camera and start again." "Saved time." "Very good." "Most directors shoot the whole scene long shot, medium shot, close-ups." "Takes forever." "Boring." "He knew better than that." "He knew what he wanted on the screen, so he didn't bother to shoot what he didn't need." "That's helpful." "The courage of Bette Davis, from the first scene in the picture, she's covered in cold cream." "She looks grotesque." "She does a scene in bed with no makeup at all, at an age when an actress needs, of that age, needs a little makeup." "She is so middle-aged in that movie that you believe everything she's saying about..." "Maybe she was past 40." "She looks it." "I don't think that I could ever have made movies if I hadn't been on the stage first, because I knew where the laughs would be." "I was playing in a movie called Three Little" "Girls in Blue, which was a bit of nonsense, but at one point I said, "We have to cover there." The director said, "What?"" "I said, "There's a laugh there." "We have to cover for it."" "He said, "We don't wait for laughs."" "I said, "I know you don't, which is a great mistake," ""because an audience wants to laugh," ""and when they are not allowed to laugh in a theatre," ""it means they just shut up entirely," ""and it kills their responses." ""So you have to cover for laughter." ""In other words, oh, fix the flowers or something."" "I mean, every director ought to know that." "All About Eve is Joe Mankiewicz's greatest film." "In fact, you can compare All About Eve..." "All About Eve is a film, an inside-theatre film, a backstage-theatre film, by a man who had never been backstage." "It was all his wish, his strongest wish, to be a member of that New York community." "And when he himself tries to write a second All About Eve, to write a film about the film community in which he's been working for 30 years, and knows inside and out, backwards and forwards," "he writes The Barefoot Contessa and it's deadly." "So, you know, the admonition to write what you know is sometimes not the best." "But Barefoot Contessa on a double bill with All About Eve shows you how great All About Eve is." "I was really an adolescent or just growing up when I saw All About Eve and A Letter to Three Wives, and these were so atypical of the Hollywood film." "These were so well-written, so witty." "I was fascinated by this author." "Author-director." "And I heard stories about him." "There was a famous lawyer who lived near us up in Westchester named Arnold Grant, the only man to marry Bess Myerson twice." "Any case, Grant knew all the Hollywood..." "Was a Hollywood lawyer, and he told fascinating stories about Mankiewicz being a great devotee of psychiatry." "You see this through the film of All About Eve, the term "psychotic" and "paranoiac" comes out like thunder." "He is an analysand who advocated analysis." "He advocated psychoanalysis, but one of the ways that he became a Svengali, as far as hypnotising women, was to talk about their psychiatric syndromes, and he would get them to his analyst friends." "They would be into analysis, as you would be into yoga today, perhaps." "Margo Channing and her fears and her paranoia, which we'll get into as well, because that's one of my father's... indicative of his almost obsessive love of psychiatry and analysing women." "He used to send scripts to Menninger, Karl Menninger, the famous psychologist, to have the screenplay psychoanalysed to make certain he had the characters right, particularly the female characters." "He was very into that, into what makes women tick." "Many people think of my father as someone who should have been a theatre director and writer, and who loved the theatre." "He was an immensely knowledgeable man about the theatre, and dabbled in rewriting, doing doctor work on other people's plays." "And I think the truth of the matter is that he loved movies because he loved control." "And, as you know, in motion pictures, the director is the one that has absolute control over the film." "In theatre, it's the writer that has the control in the ultimate thing." "I don't think he could ever have ceded that to someone else." "He loved the control." "On the other hand, he was very embarrassed by bad movies and by what he thought were sleazy characters in the movie business." "And when we lived out here before he moved back East, he always prided himself in having doctors as friends and politicians and people who were not really in the film business." "He never hung out at movie parties or with movie people." "He was not that kind of fellow." "So, in a sense, he hated the milieu and the people that were in the film business." "The conflict is Joe's wanting the theatre in New York and the culture of New York, and making a very, very handsome living and being very successful in Los Angeles." "And Los Angeles was where he had his most valuable asset, which was his terrific editor in Darryl F. Zanuck, who would reduce the overlong scripts." "Although All About Eve, at two hours and 18 minutes, is overlong in itself." "And Zanuck was a very tough guy who liked to control and be Mr. Big Shot, and so forth." "My dad was also a big controller and didn't like to put up with any of that." "And he and Zanuck fought." "They were not great friends, let's put it that way." "At all." "I don't think socially they ever saw each other." "Certainly, at Fox they were not." "Zanuck respected the fact that my father's work was terrific." "And Zanuck was not stupid." "I'll give you a very interesting story." "A Letter to Three Wives was originally "A Letter to Four Wives."" "And my father wrote the script and it came in at, like, 160 pages." "And he worked on it and worked on it, and he reduced every scene down to almost the minimum possible." "Finally he went to Darryl Zanuck and he said," ""I just don't know what to do about this."" ""I've cut every scene down." "I can't see any other way of making this any shorter," ""and yet I know it's too long and I don't know what to do."" "And Darryl Zanuck said, "It's very simple, Joe." "Just take out one of the wives."" "And all of a sudden, my father, who credits him with saying this, said, "Of course."" "Then he could open the scenes up so they made sense, cos he only had three wives." "So Zanuck was not without his perceptions, and not totally without his..." "But personality-wise, forget about it." "He and my father were absolutely different." "My father couldn't stand him." "And, of course, in Cleopatra it all came to a terrible close." "Everything he said about Darryl Zanuck to me in the '70s was coloured by Darryl F. Zanuck coming in and having to take control, editing Cleopatra, a much longer movie than the one released." "Joe had some cockamamie notion that he could make it into two pictures," "Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra, when, of course, the public was only interested in seeing Antony and Cleopatra." "And the only good performance was Rex Harrison as Caesar." "So he felt that Zanuck had betrayed him, had taken it out of his control, and that picture cost him a lot in reputation." "But he certainly acknowledged that Zanuck, although an uneducated man, was a brilliant film editor, and was the one who could read a script and say," ""No, no, no." "Not 'Letter to Four Wives,' Letter to Three Wives."" "And that's what makes that movie the success that it is." ""Four Wives," which I've read in my day, is not nearly as successful." "So Zanuck was brilliant at that." "And I think that if you look at Joe Mankiewicz's films for 20th Century Fox, they are the best work that he ever did." "But he needed that man to say," ""That's good." "That's not so good." "Cut, cut, cut."" "Joe has trouble..." "He acknowledges Letter to Three Wives, but he has trouble with Darryl Zanuck because of Cleopatra." "My father was a very controlling man, and a man with a certain sense of, I won't say standoffishness, but a certain sense of wanting to keep himself at a distance from what he regarded as the lowlifes in the film business." "So, in that sense, I think part of him liked the theatre, the sense that it was the class, it was more artistic somehow and it had a tradition which you responded to." "But he loved the control of motion pictures, and that only motion pictures gave him." "He did shoot as a director, and write as a writer, as you might write for the theatre." "He was not a great visual director, and didn't see things really that visually." "But he loved what people said, how they acted, and behaviour." "He was fanatic about behaviour and about controlling behaviour." "That's why he loved the women and he loved their minds and so forth." "He was a very big philanderer and a lot of what I will say to you about Margo Channing has to do with that behaviour, which in her case is perhaps imagined and fearful because she's getting old." "In my mother's case it was definitely there." "There was a lot of rehearsal that went on in real life long before this movie was written." "So he was expert in dealing with that kind of flamboyant personality, as my mother was a European actress, very like the actual actress to whom this is supposed to have happened." "I think her name was Bergner or something like that, an Austrian as well." "In any case, I would just caution you not to think of him as a theatre director manqué or somebody who really wanted to be in the theatre." "I think he liked the discipline of the theatre and the fact that people were less interested in selling popcorn in the theatres, which was one of his great bête noires that he used to talk about in the studio system." "So it's a combination." "But given all, he loved the money of the movies, the women and the control of the movies, and you would get none of those in the theatre." "I think it's illustrative of the fact that he never wrote a play, he never directed one." "It shows you where his heart was, even though he tried to feel better about himself by moving the family to the East and having us grow up in New York, where he could hang out with more interesting people" "in politics, art and theatre." "He and Kazan, who was his buddy to some degree, and also a fellow New York denizen." "I don't think he's someone who ever got too interested in lenses or cinematography." "But again, as I was telling Peter Guber just yesterday, if you have a way with actors, if you can amuse them, if you can interest them, fascinate them, as he did with women," "that's directing, and if you can refine them, if you can find the precise word to get them to do the precise thing, they will do astonishing things for you." "There is no one, or there was no one more difficult to direct than Rex Harrison." "Mankiewicz did four pictures with him, and he does things for Joe, especially in Cleopatra, that nightmare, that are some of the best things of his career." "Well, he loved actors." "He spoke about writing a book from the '70s on about the great actresses." "That was, I'm sure, one project that he never... was blocked on, that he never finished." "Of course, there were actors that he absolutely detested, but for the most part, actors responded wonderfully well to him." "Behaviour, in short, those were the objects of his attention and what he believed was most important for a movie, and story and plot." "Not the surroundings, not the trappings of it." "That's one of the reasons why I think cameramen were just... didn't really love him, because he would never give them a chance to show off and do things, cos he wasn't interested." "There was a cameraman in New York who kept moving the camera to improve the shot, and he'd say, "Who moved the camera?"" "The cameraman said, "I thought it'd be better here."" "He said, "No, I want it here."" "He was never interested in the camera because..." "As I say, what went on in the scene was what was important to him, not that there was photography going on, and that it was being filmed, and "Look how we can move this camera around."" "His movies, and I think All About Eve is a classic example, you would assume this was a theatre director, someone from the old tradition of the theatre, where the word was king, where clearly structured..." "People..." "Where people open doors and go into rooms, he would never jump them into the room." "That was not his style." "That was not his..." "They had to..." "And it was a theatrical style." "And he was tied to that." "As I said, I don't think he could ever have accepted the fact that he wasn't the boss." "That's why he would have had to write the play and direct it in order for him to work in the theatre." "But he loved theatre people, but it's very much as the way in which a scientist loves to watch bugs or whatever." "I'm not..." "He loved the beauty of it and the glamour of it, in a sense, but he never hung out with it." "It was not his..." "He was appalled that Joan Crawford talked about their long affair in Ken Geist's book." "He said, "I can't believe that she would be quoted openly about it."" "He invited that book to be written." "Poor Ken Geist got slammed from stem to stern for going through with it." "But his idea was, "Polite people don't talk about certain things in public,"" "and the new form of biography just horrified him." "Thelma Ritter was such an addition to the picture." "Every time she opened her mouth it was a joy, because she always said what the audience was thinking, and so therefore there was a great sense of identification for them." "She was darling." "Wonderful lady." "Well, the greatest inspiration on the set was the invention of the chocolates." "Also, one of my favourite scenes..." "I think all of them are my favourite scenes in watching this film again." "When she's telling off..." "She's jealous of Gary Merrill's," "Bill Sampson's interest in Eve." "They've spent too long together." "And she's checking out the chocolates for the party, and she wants one, and she knows that she can't have a chocolate." "And she finally pops one." "I mean, this, for a man who was into psychiatry and psychology, is so much about compensatory behaviour." "I mean, it's almost a textbook situation and it's brilliantly funny." "But I think that chocolate scene was improvised." "So young and so fair." "I can't believe you're making this up." "It sounds like something out of an old Clyde Fitch play." "Clyde Fitch, though you may not think so, was well before my time." "I always deny that you were in Our American Cousin the night Lincoln was shot." " I don't think that's funny." " Of course it is." "This is all too laughable to be anything else." "You know what I feel about your age obsession." "And this getting into a jealous froth because I spent ten minutes with a stage-struck kid." " 20!" " 30 minutes, 40 minutes." "What of it?" "Stage-struck." "She's a young lady of qualities." "And I'm fed up with both the young lady and her qualities." "Studying me as if I were a play or a blueprint." "How I walk, talk, think, act, sleep." "How can you take offense at a kid trying to be like her ideal?" "There was once a book about the family called Hollywood Dynasties." "The writer in question asked me how I would characterise the Mankiewicz family, and I said I always would characterise it in the name of one of my father's really excellent movies called House of Strangers, because our family, which is a family that to a large degree" "is built on the ability to communicate and express ourselves in one form or another, mostly as writers, could never communicate with each other." "And in a very real sense, like in House of Strangers, each one of us leads a competitive and separate life." "I think one of the reasons why I married an Italian woman and acquired an Italian family was because I wanted to know what having a normal, regular family was like, where the mother-in-law comes, and children," "and people have a good time and everything." "Our family life was very, very different." "It was..." "My father, again, when the photographers of Life magazine would show up, or Look magazine, or whatever magazine it might be, or the newspapers, we were all trotted out like this loving, adorable family," "the typical, sort of, American family." "It was absolute lies." "The wonderful book about Joan Crawford is so accurately..." "I never met Christina Crawford, but I ended up in so many of the places that she ended up, in terms of where they put us for the summer so they could get away from the kids." "And the phoneyness, it was exactly the same kind of thing, where we were this loving family, and then, "Thank God they're gone." ""Go back to your room and don't come around."" "It was a lie." "To be fair to my father and to try to bend over backwards, he meant well in his own way." "There were moments, particularly after my mother died, when he tried to sort of be more fatherly and get more interested in what his children were doing, but he never revealed much about himself." "This is the problem." "He's not an open personality." "Again, a controller." "A typical director." "He loved to control other people." "And to him, I think even his family was, like, on a movie set." "It was kind of like, "All right, now." "Let's block this action here."" "Very little that was very, very genuine and spontaneous." "But he was not a bad man or a mean man." "He was in his own way a caring man, but a cold man." "And I think the essential thing about my father, to recall, is that he behaved in reaction to the way the two closest people in his life behaved." "That was his brother and my mother, his wife, both of whom were alcoholics who were almost out of control every day about something." "And I think he shuddered, and he was embarrassed by it, and I think he was determined that it would never happen to him." "And so he, in a way, his personality, when he drinks..." "I rarely saw him drink." "Jack Daniel's sour occasionally, and maybe a glass of wine, but very cautious about that, and because of the embarrassment of my mother and..." "By the way, relevant to All About Eve..." "Fasten your seat belts." "It's going to be a bumpy night." "The famous "Fasten your seatbelts." "It's gonna be a bumpy night" party could have been any number of a hundred parties at our house, where my mother, who was unfortunately an alcoholic, would tie it on, and would proceed to walk around the, you know..." ""Play Liebestraum again," or whatever it is." "But all this dialogue and these situations, as they say, were really art imitating life, rather than the other way around." "The parties that we had at our home, industry parties, although I was, needless to say, too young to attend them, although sometimes one could watch from upstairs, those parties could be patterned on the party in All About Eve," "where my mother would go around and say," ""I don't care what they want on the piano, if they don't like it, they can get out."" "And they'd sit down, I mean, and bitchy, bitchy, bitchy, bitchy, bitchy." "It was..." "She was..." "She was very unhappy, and she was a courageous woman, determined to, in a foreign language, to defend herself, and she was gutsy." "The other thing that both my father's agent Robert Lantz, and back in New York, who was a friend of my mother's, and Bert Allenberg of the William Morris Agency, who's dead, would say to you" "is that my mother was his greatest critic." "There is no doubt, I've always thought," ""How interesting it must have been for her to read the first draft of All About Eve."" "He always showed his work to her before anyone else." "At least this was what we were told." "I've never heard anyone deny it." "He never denied it." "She had a great theatrical sense about her." "And she was, as I say, very talented in her own way, although she was limited in ways that she could show it in this country." "But they had a very..." "Even their relationship was a love-hate relationship." "He was not just the evil, cruel, gaslight kinda fellow who just said," ""What do you mean?" "That's not true at all."" "In his own way, he did love her, and he was stimulated by her and respected her." "But when I said to him later in his life, "Why didn't you divorce her," ""and save us all this terrible atmosphere that we grew up in?"" "He said, "Oh, I couldn't, because I was afraid of what would happen to you kids."" "It's not that way at all." "He would argue," ""Well, your mother being Catholic, we didn't know a divorce was possible."" "He tried one excuse after the other." "The fact is, if he could keep her in her role where he wanted her to be, she was fine." "And since he was away for most of the day and many evenings, I must say, she ran him out of the house very often, it was no great problem for him, whereas a divorce might get messy and one thing or another." "Anyway, he..." "I cannot tell you how much I feel, when watching All About Eve, how much of that comes from my family's situation and from things that would go on there." "As rare and as wonderfully flamboyant and outrageous and exhibitionistic that it seems to the average viewer, that was absolutely what was going on at 111 North Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills in California at the time." "And it was probably going on in a lot of other homes too, for all we know, but it just happened to be shown in his film." "On the other hand, I must tell you that I absolutely love All About Eve." "I think it is an absolutely wonderful movie." "Yes, it's stagy, some people will say, and it's not John Ford, or it's not visually stunning or what have you, but it has just got some of the best writing ever in the history of movies, I think," "and it says a lot about people and about the industry and the actresses and the actors and their desperate need to make it and to stay there, and their fears." "Marilyn and I were in class together," "Lee Strasberg's class, in the Carnegie Hall Studios to the left of Carnegie Hall." "The day of my first exercises, which were prescribed by Lee, were a sense-memory exercise, starting with an imaginary teacup, hot teacup, tea bag, and a singing exercise to determine your areas of tension." "The singing exercise was not to be prepared as was the teacup." "You were to do it on the spot." "You were to sing to either one person in the class or the entire class, and you could sing "Happy Birthday" if you couldn't think of a song." "OK." "The day of the class." "You were not to be late at Lee Strasberg's class." "I was late." "The elevator in the Carnegie Hall building, the old one - forever." "I rang the elevator and I noticed, how could I help but notice, this extraordinary-looking woman." "To this day, I remember what she was wearing." "She was wearing skintight black zebra slacks." "No, black slacks, a zebra blouse with no brassiere." "No makeup whatsoever." "That's why I didn't know who it was." "And the richest mink coat that I have ever seen." "And instead of being a human being, of saying, "Are you going to Lee's class?" ""That elevator is forever." "Isn't it cold?"" "What everyone would say in such a situation," "I gawked at this woman for the seven minutes it took for the elevator." "I rode up in silence, and as we got off at Lee's studio," "I realised, "It's Marilyn Monroe," ""but with no makeup, no red lipstick."" "We occupied the last two seats in the class." "I'm sitting next to her, as if I weren't nervous already." "Now, Marilyn shook like a leaf, because she empathised with the person being called on." "They were never gonna call on her, but she was nervous, nervous." "So I did my teacup." "An abject failure." ""Sit down, totally conventional," said Lee." "Humiliation." "Now it's come time for my singing exercise." "I stand up, I make my decision." "I'm gonna sing "Bye Bye Baby" from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to Marilyn Monroe, in the back row." "I sang it." "Lee gets up, he says," ""This is the first time in this class that exercise has been done perfectly."" ""Look at his arms, look at his legs, look at his torso." ""Shoulders, absolutely free."" ""You'll never do it again." "Sit down."" "So now is my opportunity to speak to Miss Monroe." "I said, "You appreciate that was your song." "I did it for you."" "And she gave me this wonderful hug." "And she said," ""You were wonderful."" "And that was the year she died." "In class, once more after that." "Marilyn was certainly observed by the cast as a very forlorn, very lonely person, eating alone most of the time." "Her agent, who got her the part, a sort of diminutive but powerful agent at William Morris named Johnny Hyde, was in Los Angeles, of course." "But no one thought of Miss Monroe as a great, a supernova, least of all Joe Mankiewicz." "I once asked Joe to compare himself to George Cukor of The Women and so many..." "Pat and Mike and Adam's Rib and..." "I mean, a sublime director, known because he was gay." "The euphemism was that he was a woman's director." "By some miraculous happenstance, the men are equally good in the films, but a woman's director." "And... he said, "Yes, George befriended them." ""I bleep them."" "Well, that's gratuitous." "They are the two men who were the best directors of women of their era." "And it's too bad that he can't acknowledge it, or couldn't." "I didn't see the lesbianism that he referred to." "You have to look very quickly." "There are two instances." "Towards the end of the picture." "Nothing before." "Although her outfits are a little mannish." "There's the phone call, the late-night phone call to Lloyd Richards, made by her rooming housemate." "And the fact that not only has she gotten the housemate to make this insidious call, to steal him from his wife, but they link arms in their nightclothes and go upstairs together." "Well, now, you realise this is 1950." "You couldn't say anything..." "They couldn't kiss." "But you get the idea if you're looking." "And you certainly get the idea in the very final scene of the film, when she's so angry at this interloper who has insinuated her way into her suite." "Or when she says that she'll stay the night." "The short hair, right." "Yes." "My father really loved the character of Birdie, who represented to him the wonderfully unaffected person, the only honest person, who was not affected by the movie or theatre business, or all the phoney values that to him those businesses represented." "And her comments about, you know, "I played the thing."" "And then when she's doing the makeup, or Margo's taking off the makeup, or later, when the piles of mink coats are showing up." "Her caustic kind of thing." ""Who'd want to wear..."" "That was my father." "He loved that." "He loved those characters and loved writing about them, because to him, those were the real people and not all these phoneys that he really didn't like, although he was not averse to sleeping with them or taking their money," "but in terms of..." "He always felt a little bit of a..." "I think, a little uncomfortable." "Celeste Holm will tell you that it's a very distorted picture of the theatre, because the theatre is very collaborative, which is what you need to put a show on." "All About Eve is about bitchcraft and fights and insinuation." "But again, I told you that Joe had never worked in the theatre." "The rivalry between the salaries of Hollywood people and Broadway people are compared throughout the movie." "It's a central conflict in Joe, who's headed for, he thinks, for Broadway." "But, gosh, the theatre people, except for Eve, live..." "And even Eve has wonderful clothes." "Well, the relationship of everybody in this film is more about the relationship in movies than it is in theatre." "And it's written by someone who doesn't know theatre, but I always did, so I made my own adaptation." "He wrote a play, a play that was a novel that MGM owned, and I think he was going to produce it with Spencer Tracy." "And because, of course, it was Joe Mankiewicz, everyone joined forces." "Henry Fonda said, "I'll do it." David Merrick said, "I'll produce it."" "It's a deeply boring play." "And it was never done." "But you must know that in the... the last 40 years of Mankiewicz's life," "he had terrible blocks about writing." "In fact, one of the saddest things about the memorial conducted by Rosemary, his last wife, was to read from his later writings." "For a man who was a gifted writer, a brilliant writer, he began writing very poorly." "Well, my mother was a very famous actress in Vienna, a stage actress, theatre actress." "And indeed it's one of the great ironies that her understudy was Luise Rainer, who won the first two Academy Awards for Best Actress in the movie business." "She couldn't get a job, as it were, while her understudy was a big success in Hollywood." "Of course, my father very much wanted..." "This is not uncommon among movie people." "You marry the beautiful actress, and then you merely try to retire her and she becomes the hausfrau, the wife, the... whatever, and so she's all for you." "Unfortunately, once actresses have bitten the fruit of fame and glory and fortune, they don't like just being on the arm of somebody else." "And as his career went up and up, and she became simply Mrs. Mankiewicz, that sort of rankled with her." "She wanted attention, she was used to it, she was used to attracting men." "While she was at home with the children, he was cavorting with the most beautiful babes in Hollywood." "So obviously, this was not a recipe for a successful relationship, as it often isn't." "This is hardly a unique situation." "I don't know that All About Eve, which has unquestionably a unique status as..." "I think only Titanic has tied it in terms of the number of nominations, yet there were many categories that Titanic could have got that didn't even exist in the days of All About Eve." "But I think that..." "It is not my impression that when the movie was made, and this is just from what I recall hearing, that people walked away and said," ""We're making one of the great movies," ""or one of the most famous movies of all time."" "I mean, yes, it had a terrific script and all that, but I think it just clicked." "I don't think..." "It didn't..." "There were no..." "My father had a dislike for Hollywood, and for what..." "The direction..." "Indeed, he would say it has absolutely turned into the movie business that he feared it would." "He said, "It's crashing cars and trains and explosions," ""and noise and sound effects, and it's just..."" ""You know, forget about real people and real stories" ""and what could happen, or might not happen." "Who cares?"" ""It's visceral, it's a carnival, it's a circus."" ""That's what people want, to go and relax." "They don't want to worry about" ""what happened in that next scene." ""It doesn't make any difference to them."" "The same way that the plays of Sheridan and Congreve exist, even though a lot of their language is totally obscure, like Mankiewicz's theatrical reference, great language endures, great wit endures." "Almost everyone is very very amusing, even when they're being their most scathing, even when the playwright tells off Margo Channing for confusing the piano with the composer." "Even in these diatribes, they are tremendously gifted and witty writing." "And that's why Bette was such a good girl on the film." "She got to say all those wonderful things." "By the way, Marilyn Monroe, who had little or no ability as an actor, I mean, I don't think she ever..." "She went to Lee Strasberg later in life, but never performed." "She's excellent." "I don't know how many takes it took to get those scenes, but she's wonderful wobbling out of the ladies' room, and also on the staircase, making the right sounds to the producer." "I knew Marilyn Monroe very well off the set." "She had a psychiatrist, who I think was kind of helping her to grow up." "She'd never had a proper family life." "And so instead of trying to provide a family for her, in her sessions with him, she... he invited her to dinner." "So we all got to know her." "She seemed to be a lost, lonely little girl." "One of the key scenes in the film, for me, and for the honesty that it reflects, is the scene between Bill Sampson and Margo after the rehearsal, that's after the rehearsal which she is late for," "and she is jealous because Eve read the part in the rehearsal." "You may recall Addison DeWitt and Marilyn Monroe go out, she's clued in, then she pretends she didn't know, and she comes in saying," ""Here I am, ready to rehearse," and the whole thing blows up." "In this scene, where Margo comes in late for the rehearsal, she and Bill have a final climactic thing where he tries..." "After everybody's left, she's fought with the playwright," "Hugh Marlowe, who left in a snit, and everybody else has stomped out, and Eve has sort of gone away, and Bill is left with her on this bed, which is part of the set, I guess, of the scene." "The two of them try to have, or he tries to have a reconciliation with her." "And he says, "Stop being so paranoid," you know, and she says, "Oh, paranoid, I can't stand that word!" "I don't know what it means."" "And he says, "Maybe you should learn."" "This is the kind of thing that went on with my mother, which is to say that he was a great spouter of psychiatric terms." "He loved psychiatry, believed in it absolutely, and she was of course jealous of him, and in the case of my mother, was absolutely justified to be jealous." "He was just generally known to be a great womaniser," "Joan Crawford and all the other stars and people he had a romance or an affair with, and she, on the other hand, was locked off, she had no real opportunities to..." "It's frustrating when a woman doesn't know what to do about that, and she was Austrian, and it wasn't but ten years since she came to the country." "As somebody said," ""There are only so many parts for people with accents like Eva Braun."" "She didn't have..." "She was limited in what she could do, and in a way she was frustrated." "And so they would have tremendous fights, and tremendous attempts at reconciliation, and so forth." "She was a very brilliant woman, by the way, but in an intuitive sense." "Women have great intuition when their husbands screw other women." "At the very least, intuitive about that." "So in the case of Margo, being constantly fearful of losing her man to some young bimbo in Hollywood, or whatever it is, this, again, comes right out of the pages of reality as far as my mother was concerned." "And so much of that behaviour is behaviour that I saw in real life, growing up, and that actually did exist." "Those sort of platitudes about, "I've tried ," and the suffering husband, or whatever, of course, in my father's case, it's patently phoney, because although he would say to her, "You're imagining it," and this, and that," "I only need hardly point out that his current widow was hired as my mother's secretary." "I don't know how deeply one wants to go into this, but it's clear that this is not a man who's faithful to his wife, and she knew it." "And being an actress, and being, as most actresses are, very flamboyant, particularly when they're drunk, and feeling few, shall we say, impingements to exhibiting their frustration and their anxieties, a lot of that is, to me, this is..." "It's not Tallulah Bankhead, who always believed that she was the model for it." "As far as I'm concerned it was my mother, and indeed, this was at the height of their problems in California when this was written." "I'll tell you a story my mother told me." "Just around the time of All About Eve, he had gone to the Academy Awards, had won at least a couple, I think this was either the time of A Letter to Three Wives or All About Eve." "She recounted the following morning that that evening, when they were at the Academy Awards, that a man came up to him and said," ""Oh, Joe, I'm just so happy for you, how wonderful that you won the awards."" "And he looked at the man and said, "Do I know you?"" "And the man said, "No, we haven't met."" "He said, "Well, then, why do you call me Joe?" "Call me Mr. Mankiewicz."" "Now, this is revealing of his not-always-the-friendliest personality." "He could charm anybody when he wanted to, but he also kept a certain reserve." "He was not like his brother, who was very open and adored by people." "There were complaints about the fact that Bette Davis didn't win the Academy Award, because the voting, which was studio block voting to some degree, had been split between Bette and Anne Baxter." "He said, "People have always complained about that," ""how unfair that Bette didn't win," ""that Anne was even nominated, and so forth."" "He said, "You know, Anne Baxter had a much tougher role" ""to play than Bette Davis." ""And as a job of acting, it was as good if not better than Bette's," ""to the extent that it deserved a Best Actress award," ""because she had to be convincing" ""as this meek, whatever, pliant girl who meant no harm," ""but who really is exposed at the end" ""and becomes this rapacious, ambitious bitch," ""who will just do anything to get it."" "And so he always felt..." "He was very very complimentary about Anne Baxter, felt that she fully deserved the award, the nomination for the Oscar, even if it ended up costing Bette Davis an award for one of her most famous roles." "So, again, like in his writing, he appreciates the difficult chore rather than the easy one, which may be the flashiest one, the one that gets the most acclaim, but there's roles that are more difficult, he appreciated the art of acting" "or being able to pull that off, and in this case I think the same goes." "I don't think he'd ever, were he still with us, say that he preferred Bill Sampson's role to Addison DeWitt, nor would he probably be honest enough to say that he patterned Bill Sampson after himself." "That would be exposing himself a bit too much, or being too careful." "But he certainly was interested in, as I say, the more realistic, the psychological evolution of characters and characterisation, as opposed to the flashy stuff." "Of course, he wrote some great flashy lines in that movie, and I, like everyone else, enjoy them enormously." "Seems to me that the part I played is fairly self-explanatory, but I was in many instances the catalyst in much that happened in the picture." "Well, I thought, "For the good of all concerned, things need changing."" "And I tried to bring that change about." "Well, I think I was a wise counsellor, friend, participant, for the most part." "I painted that eggplant all by myself." "I had nothing to do, they were lighting the set, so I did it." "Well, there's an awful lot of standing around, sitting around, lolling around on set." "Waiting for the damned people to light the set." "Well, they're not damned people, but they're irritating." "So I just painted the picture while I was waiting around." "But my father used to always say," ""The reason why actors and actresses are so unbalanced in their personalities" ""is that they have very little sense of who they really are."" ""And they live their lives through the characters that they play."" "And so the more an actor or an actress doesn't know, really, who they are, the easier it is for them to adopt the personality of the role they've signed to play." "And they find a certain security and a certain form that now attaches to their life, at least their life as an actor or an actress, that they don't have in real life." "So that it's often a good thing, this sense of fear and uncertainty and everything else, because when you say," ""This is who you're going to be, this is how you're gonna dress,"" "and they go, "Ah!" and suddenly they begin to formulate a personality." "And that becomes comforting to them, because they suddenly relate to it." "Whereas in their own lives, they don't know." "Are they the character they played, or some other character, or no character at all?" "And they're very nervous, cos they don't, you know..." "If you grow up with fantasies, and uncertain as to who you are, then you are ideal for becoming an actor or an actress, or getting into the world of fantasy." "And after all, part of what makes movies such a weird business is that very thing, is the fact that dreamers get involved, people who say, "Oh, one day I'm gonna do this," ""I'll have that, I'm gonna become this..." ""It's the great..." "It's the lottery, it's..." "But it could happen to me."" "And yet the sense of rejection..." "Not the sense of rejection, but the constancy of rejection, of being turned down all the time, and not even able to show what you can do, in many cases," "I mean, this is a terrible beating that they take." "Joseph Mankiewicz was, I think, one of the two best directors I ever worked with." "The other was Elia Kazan." "He was enormously perceptive." "And he never told you what to do, he just sort of gave you a hint of what he wanted to have emphasised." "He'd whisper in your ear just before a scene, and, of course, he'd also whisper in the other actor's ear." "You always wondered what he'd said to the other one." "Well, first of all, shooting that scene was hot, but we were very good." "And I think we did it in two takes." "Well, it was in process, the scene was shot in process, so the scene of the countryside was behind us on a screen." "But it was hot in that car with the coats." "But we managed, because I think we did it in two takes." "My father was two people." "I knew him as a father, and in a non-business sense, in a non-creative sense." "This was not his best side." "As a professional, as a writer and a director and someone who worked in the creative arts, he was not only a brilliant and intelligent and brilliantly successful man, but he could charm the pants off of anyone," "and I constantly run into people, as indeed my brothers run into people, who have met him and knew him in the past and said, "Oh, what a charmer your father was, he was just so terrific."" "And there are people all over the industry who had affairs with him or had worked with him professionally, cameramen, other people, technical people, who just thought he was the best, just the most terrific." "He had a technique in directing of taking actors aside and quietly talking to them." "He never believed in embarrassing actors, speaking in front of the crew, or in front of even their fellow actors, and saying, "Can't you do better than that?"" "Or if they fluffed a line or they didn't know what exactly..." "Forgotten the staging or missed their mark or whatever." "He always tried to deal with them gently, he knew how fragile they were as personalities." "So to the extent that he applied his craft to you and wanted you to accomplish for him, he could be extremely considerate and extremely winsome." "He could be a terrific human being." "Unfortunately, as is so often the case, my father's career really came first." "As much as he loved his own family per se, or loved the idea of family, the truth of the matter is that his career was the most important thing to him." "He thought nothing of continually betraying my mother, let's say, having endless affairs that went on forever." "And, to him, being a success and writing and accomplishing what he could accomplish, that took precedence, so if you're a young boy, a young child growing up, you soon realise that you're not number one in terms of his attention," "and indeed you live in a family situation that is just simply awful." "My situation, growing up, was just a hellish thing." "So many of my friends we've talked about..." "We shouldn't mention their names." "But my mother committed suicide, and many of their mothers committed suicide." "They were deeply unhappy, these were actresses mostly, but deeply unhappy people who felt throttled and suddenly an ornament on somebody else's arm, and whose own problems and neuroses and ambitions were somehow stifled." "My mother, who had been an extremely successful actress at the Josefstadt in Vienna and whom Otto Preminger had directed," "I mean, she was with the Reinhardts, had been a tremendous talent, and basically came over to America and, with the exception of The Keys of the Kingdom, for Fox, with Gregory Peck, she basically didn't do any work here, and was sort of told," ""No, you take care of the children, you stay at home and be Mom."" "Well, today women don't put up with that any more." "But in those days that was the way most women were, and if you were, as we used to say..." "I married an Italian, my first marriage, and when I lived in Italy and worked over there," "I always noticed that Italian men married their mothers, then continued looking for girls." "So they wanted Mom at home to have the family and the children, and basically take care of them, by the way, and in the same sense my father was kind of that way." "I mean, my godfather was Spencer Tracy, they were very close for a time, and he introduced, of course, famously, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy." "And there were periods where he continued to live as a bachelor, even though he was married." "You don't drag along your children when you're a bachelor, hanging out with women." "So, as I say, there were two lives there." "The professional life, which was simply terrific, and the private life." "There was deep-seated jealousies and problems with his brother, who was also an alcoholic, in addition to my mother." "The other thing is, when you're a kid growing up, sex is important to you." "The one area that was simply... you could not mention anything about was sex, in our home." "If you did mention it, even in a joke, and that'd be the only place you could, my mother, like a Roman candle, would go up through the roof, cos it would remind her of her sexual frustration," "and more importantly my father's philandering and all of his infidelities." "So therefore we could have lived in a priest's home, we could have lived in this convent, where you couldn't even mention the subject, which is a somewhat unhealthy and constricted place for people to grow up in." "So this is, again, his private life was..." "Our private life, family life, was constricted by his professional life, his professional life had to be not mentioned at home otherwise it would be too dangerous." "So when you meet people who knew him as a director or who worked with him, chances are you will hear very nice things about him, and I would say that people who knew him on a more personal level" "would have to say he was tough." "Joe was in New York and Herman was out there, and that may be one of the key motivations for going to New York, his getting away from Herman." "Getting away from the reputation of being Herman's younger and less witty brother." "I don't know the details, but I do know that a Beacon's moving van, carrying most or all of Joe's memorabilia from Los Angeles, all of which he wished to preserve, was burnt, and very few documents survived," "one of which was the charred script of5 Fingers, and also the script of Million Dollar Legs, a truly delightful early collaborative film of Joe and Henry Myers." "And, you know, it was so good, and Pauline Kael hated Joe so much, that she insisted to me that Herman wrote Million Dollar Legs." "Well, fortunately, Henry Myers was still alive." "Joe, of course, thanks to some preservation, had the script." "It's a script by Henry Myers and Joe Mankiewicz." "It's in their handwriting, they get the credit." "I think Herman wrote one or two titles, you know, "In Klopstokia."" "But Pauline wouldn't give many breaks to Joe Mankiewicz." "Even when he was good." "Yes." "And all of his papers were burned up in a fire in the truck which brought them." "Terrible." "It was so painful for Joe." "Many scripts that were salvaged were charred around the edges." "But Joe had kept everything." "And these were, of course, in writing the book, very valuable to me." "For example, Michael Wilson assured me that that was his script for 5 Fingers." "One of Joe's very best pictures, maybe the next best picture after All About Eve." "And Joe went to his file cabinet, showed me the script, and there, in Mankiewicz's handwriting, is a complete rewrite of 5 Fingers." "Now, Joe doesn't get writing credit on the film, Michael Wilson does." "But I promise you, it's Joe's script." "And you can tell by listening to it." "It's wonderfully witty, as he was." "He treats Karen very sort of indulgently in the film." "My father sort of says, "Oh, the good little wife," ""she knew less than she'd let on,"" "or that, you know, I mean that somehow Hugh Marlowe, who played Lloyd Richards, was always sort of pulling the wool over Karen's eyes," "Karen didn't know, and so forth." "It's a sympathetic character nonetheless, and Celeste Holm does a wonderful job, notwithstanding Bette Davis' opinion of her." "I don't think it represents, however, any particular point of view about the wives of the theatre, of playwrights or screenwriters." "Hugh Marlowe is, I think, a little, in our context, today, a little sappy in terms of the playwright being intrigued by Eve, but this certainly goes on, and it's certainly something he would have observed," "and I'm sure probably he knew of situations similar to that." "I know that Addison DeWitt is a character my father based on several famous old critics in New York who were very waspish and, you know, sharp-tongued and so forth." "So I'm sure there were models for that that he used, but I don't recall him, as I say, really saying much about either Karen or Lloyd Richards." "Again, that's a thing very peculiar to the theatre, which is that the playwright gives the play to somebody, the playwright is in command." "He'd never really experienced that himself, never had that." "He was very much..." "That's the control issue that he loved in movies that was really not analogous to the theatre, where Lloyd Richards would have had that control." "My father also had, I must tell you, a love of what I shall call blue-collar characters." "Thelma Ritter, in that movie, who followed upon her really terrific success in, and discovery, I think, in A Letter to Three Wives." "He loved the characters of people like Thelma Ritter." ""Whatcha doing?" You know, I mean, sort of the common folk." "He was born in, my father was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1909." "Coal-mining town, which I visited and did a film with the Weinsteins nearby some years ago." "He walked to work, to school, with paper in the soles of his shoes." "The classic success story," ""I had nothing when I was a kid, my father was a teacher."" "If you go through his screenplays, there's almost always a mention of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania." "And there's also something about teachers and how underpaid they are, and how Texas oil millionaires are overpaid." "He had certain, you know, themes that he loved, and he was the great champion of the common man, let's say, the regular guy who struggled to make something of life, as opposed to the people who just inherited it," "or who just got it because they'd stumbled upon an oil well or a gusher suddenly showed up and they go, "I'm a genius, I got all this money from my oil well."" "His writing, Mankiewicz's writing was so good that we never had any temptation to fiddle with it." "We just learned them as written and said them as written." "They were too good to fiddle with." "There's a famous analyst who said to my father," ""Joe, I've investigated a lot of the things that you've told me, and they're lies."" "And he said, "I didn't tell you I would always tell you the truth."" "This is a process that he engaged in, and the idea of catharsis and writing it out and..." "It was in no sense an atonement, but it was very much a kind of a psychodrama, which he himself played various parts in." "I think if you look in any really terrific writer's work, usually there's a character that reflects a point of view that's that of the writer, where you sense this is the person that the writer is speaking honestly from." "In this case, the least attractive, it seems to me, and most suffering character, Bill Sampson, is my father." "Just as an example of how my father..." "What my father's approach to language was, and his pudeur, his sense of propriety, even though his actions as a philanderer and as a filmmaker may not have reflected it, but usually his screenplays did, you didn't talk about certain things." "Loretta Young was super-Catholic, as my mother was, and she had a little box which she would carry around on the MGM lot." "And any time somebody said a bad word, she would insist that you pay money as a penalty for that, so she'd say, "Put money in the box," and whatever." "One day she walked past the writer's or the director's table where my father was seated, in his slightly more unbuttoned mode" "than he normally was, and heard my father saying something about whatever, and using a dirty word." "And so she came over to him and said, "Joe, you said a bad word."" ""You have to put a quarter in the box," or whatever the going rate was." "He looked back and he said, "Tell me, Loretta," ""how much do I have to pay to tell you to go...yourself?"" "And he liked to tell that story, but in private." "But I will give you one final example." "What is the name of the critic at Life magazine who did The Men Who Made The Movies?" "Richard Schickel." "What was interesting is Richard Schickel went out to interview my father as part of his thing about The Men That Made The Movies, and they went out and they had like a run-through one afternoon." "My father told these fabulous stories, and Richard Schickel came back deliriously happy, thinking," ""This is gonna be terrific."" "And he showed up a couple of weeks later with a camera crew and the whole thing, and after they'd set up, he started to ask the same questions he'd asked two weeks earlier, and my father wouldn't repeat the stories, because, again..." "And Schickel was furious, of course, rightly so." "My father said, "Well, it's one thing to talk about whatever," ""but not on film, not for public consumption."" "I mean, he had that strange, or old-fashioned, if you like, or whatever, sense of what was proper and what wasn't, you might snigger." "But, I mean, he would very rarely talk about his affairs." "Until they became public." "He was appalled that people talked about their private lives." "He felt it had nothing whatever to do with their real work or value or what have you, it was not proper." "George Sanders was sort of challenging." "You had the feeling that there was more there than met the eye." "He committed suicide, you know." "So there was much more than met the eye." "Sad." "Very sad." "Life is such a gift, how could anybody do that?" "Just as much as my father never believed in the method system, although he taught just before he died at the Actor's Studio, which I always thought, again, another supreme irony." "Clearly, actors and actresses draw upon experiences in their own life situations to help them feel a certain part." "And there's no doubt that Bette Davis, with the anxieties she had gone through at the time and everything, could lay that right in to the psychological underpinnings of Margo Channing, and I'm sure she's felt, and said, even," "that she didn't even have to act, practically, that that was a role that fit her to a T." "And there's no doubt, I mean, it's just a memorable performance." "This is the woman that came in and said, "What a dump."" "She could lay those lines out there." "This absolutely fit her to a T, and I'm sure her own experience at that time of her career just made her even more sensitive, and respondent to the fears of Margo Channing, and of getting old, because she was certainly in that situation herself." "Colbert was signed for it, and suffered an injury on a Japanese prison-camp movie that she was making." "Literally broke her back." "She could not work, and they had a start date." "And there were many actresses considered," "I know Gertrude Lawrence was considered." "Everyone told Joe Mankiewicz, "My God, you don't know what you're..." ""The meat grinder."" "Edmund Goulding said, "She'll kill you, she'll just kill you."" "He had directed her in Dark Victory and a number of other pictures." "So he had heard the worst about Bette Davis." "She was a doll, a lamb chop." "She knew a good script when she came by one." "And All About Eve, I don't think she won the Oscar that year." "But it's one of the three or four top roles, and Davis must have played, what, 75?" "It's one of the great things that she did." "She's totally in tune with it, shall we say." "Years ago, I was in Italy, and I had lunch with Billy Wilder." "He was making a movie, Avanti!" "in Rome, with Jack Lemmon." "This was during the period that I lived in Italy." "And Billy told me this story, which my father denies." "My father always denied any story in which he was the butt of the joke, or where he didn't come off the best, and Billy, on the other hand, I must say, in fairness," "loved a good story even if it wasn't strictly true." "Billy and my father were backstage at the Academy Awards, for Best Director, it was." "And they had both previously won awards for Best Writer." "Best Screenplay, one original and one not original." "And as they were waiting for the Best Director nominations, uh, award to be awarded, my father was praising Billy, the honour of just being near him, of just being with him, what a great honour it was," "that he loved Billy and he loved his work and everything else." "And Billy said to me," ""Then the name came out that the winner was Joseph L Mankiewicz," ""and your father pushed me aside as if I were just a sort of stagehand," ""and rushed out to accept the award, and I was in the middle of a sentence," ""and I thought, 'Well, this is it."'" "I only mention it because it's fun, it's about All About Eve, which is about getting awards and how it reveals a certain thing." "My father would always tell you that he never was craven about awards, never cared, but when the award came, boy, he rushed out as fast as anybody would to get their award and leave the other person lying in the dust." "I always thought that was ironic and funny." "Of course, my father said it was absolute nonsense." "So also not a great fan of Billy Wilder's, by the way, or at least his humour." "But there's the story about it." "Like Billy Wilder, he'll be remembered as one of the last of the witty writer-directors." "Along with Preston Sturges and John Huston, who were men who made the transition from screenwriting to directing, when most screenwriters were told, "No, you cannot, you cannot."" "Even though, as Joe says, if you've written a picture, you've imagined it in your mind." "When the AFI had a dinner for Bette Davis, I was invited." "My father was one of the speakers." "After the dinner, I went up to the greenroom, where George Stevens Jr was holding forth, and Bette Davis was there." "I went over to see Bette Davis, and to tell her how much I always enjoyed her performances, and how excited I was at her getting the award, and all that kind of thing." "And she said, "Yes, it was an absolutely wonderful movie." ""Your father gave me a whole new career," she said." "With my father, and it's appropriate, tangentially, to All About Eve, because it has very much to do with ego, about "me," and how important "me" is." "He very much believed, at least publicly, that you had to deny yourself attention." "He resented directors moving the camera, cos to him it said, "Look at me!" ""Don't look at the actors, or at what's happening." ""Look at that pretty thing I'm showing you, or look at that thing in the foreground."" "It was, "Look at me,"" "and it was an example of the jealousy, and the ego of directors, who were asking the audience to look at what they were doing rather than to observe the action or whatever the scene was about." "And that was the foundation of that statement of his," ""Something should move the camera." ""It should never move simply because a director wants to move it."" "That's something he was very much against." "I can confirm absolutely that this was his belief, and undoubtedly the foundation of that belief was a director must subjugate his own personality to the service of whatever it is he's directing, and not try to show off and try to say, "Look at me, look at me."" "As I say, there was a great antagonism between Bette and Celeste, because Celeste had such good manners." ""Good morning, indeed!"" "And in that the scene is relieved by laughter over Margo's turning down the part, which Eve has just blackmailed Karen into getting for her." "Celeste has a particularly beautiful, distinctive, what she calls a "champagne laugh."" "And she can do it, because she's a really great technician, and a singer." "She can do it by the yard, as long as possible." "So while they were shooting that scene," "Bette Davis said to Celeste as gently as possible," ""How do you do that?" "I can't do that."" "And Joe, sizing up the situation, said," ""Perhaps you'll do it longer, Celeste, till she catches on."" "And they had much more laughter before it was cut." "But it's a technical thing that most actresses can't do." "Joe Mankiewicz is probably one of the most perceptive, knowledgeable, experienced directors I ever worked with." "Really wonderful." "He left you pretty much alone, except when he'd want a specific point brought out, or something." "He was wonderful." "When we were doing it, we had no idea how wonderful it was." "I knew it was good, but I just didn't realise how much of a classic it would become." "Celeste Holm will tell you she did not get on with Bette Davis at all." "Even though they're best friends in the movie, she and Bette Davis..." "Well, they patched it up towards the end, but they hated each other for years." "Oh, Bette..." "Celeste Holm is a great lady, and a first lady of the American theatre." "And she would always say graciously, "Good morning."" "And Bette Davis would say to her, "Oh, you and your good manners!"" "Celeste didn't take it well." "No, they're best friends in the film, but not in life." "Life imitates..." "Art imitates life in the Gary Merrill and Bette Davis, but not in Celeste and Bette." "I found Bette Davis irascible." "We were sitting at the table." "When you're waiting around for lighting, you say stupid things just to keep, somehow, the relationship in midair." "Well, I said something about the man who made Pyrex." "They made a Pyrex tea kettle, and then he found out..." "He was a teetotaller, and he found out people were using it to make martinis, and he stopped making it." "She said to me, "I don't know how I've lived this long without knowing that."" "You know, that kind of relationship." "Put the other person down for no particular reason." "I don't know what it is." "I just think it's bad manners." "She was not a problem at all." "I think Willy Wilder said to him," ""Don't worry about her, she's gonna be fine."" "Somebody else may have said, "She's gonna be lots of trouble."" "But, you know, it depends very much on..." "She professes that the script was so great that she was delighted." "Her career was in not very good shape." "That makes a big difference." "When we did Last Tango in Paris, Marlon Brando's career was zilch." "I mean, it was just before The Godfather, and when he worked..." "And really, when we shot this in Paris with nobody around, and he worked late, past the hours that he normally would work, he was an absolute doll, it was no problem." "So it depends on where and what time the actor's..." "How their career is going, or if they're happy to get the job and want to behave themselves." "I think Bette at that time was happy to get a part like this, when she was kinda down and out and not really doing terribly well." "I think she was on her best behaviour." "And again, of course, the capper is that falling in love with, uh... what's-his-name who played Bill Sampson..." "Gary Merrill." "Falling in love with Gary Merrill..." "What could be better?" "I mean, so you've got a great sexual thing going on, and you're working with a great script." "It's got to have been really easy." "She would have had no reason to act up." "This is one of the things that he did on Cleopatra when I worked on it." "He used, in a way, Richard Burton to get Elizabeth to be more professional, and he would get Richard to say," ""Elizabeth, let's go over our lines for tomorrow."" "And in a way, kinda, he used that relationship to his advantage, because, frankly, they didn't always come on the set in the morning knowing what to do, and their lines were always not very set." "Whereas the English, with their theatre tradition, and their more stringent training, they usually knew their lines dead on." "So, in a way, that gave her happiness, cos she had a new relationship, and by the same token presumably this happened for Bette, and so she had a good time." "I was just struck with how tiny and frail she was when I met her." "She was quite old, but she was always very tiny and frail, but her fights with Jack Warner were legendary, and she was a tough babe." "With a chance at a great part when you're not doing well, actresses, and actors, I dare say, as well, are more than happy to modify their behaviour, and be, as I say... as Marlon did, and as any actor in a certain situation," "would suddenly be more pliant to the director's will and not be so sticky." "Well, Joe Mankiewicz is a fascinating man." "His speech was fascinating." "His articulacy was fascinating." "His perceptions were fascinating." "Even when he would tell you the cruellest or nastiest story, and he was filled with them, there was a great deal, as Joe acknowledged, of Addison DeWitt in Joe." "I'm gonna tell one story which is..." "I think it's..." "Maybe it's in my book, I don't know." "Mike Frankovich was the head of Columbia Pictures on the west coast." "And Mike asked to have a dinner with Joe." "And he said, "Joe, there's something I'd like you to do." ""In your hands, this could be the inside story..." "I know how you hate television." ""This could be the inside story of the machinations of the television industry."" "Joe said, "I'm fascinated, I'm fascinated, tell me more." "Whose is it?" "What is it?"" ""I don't want you to leap to conclusions, Joe." ""I want you to do it, because we have a big investment in this novel." ""Say yes, you haven't done a film in a while."" ""Well, I have to know what the film is before I say yes."" ""Well, don't jump to conclusions." "It's The Love Machine, by Jacqueline Susann."" ""Oh," said Joe. "Well, in that case, I'd have to make a step deal."" "A step deal is for an unknown writer or director." "Each step of the way, each treatment, each draft, you can be cut off at a particular figure." "And Mike Frankovich said," ""Step deal?" "Joe, you haven't done a step deal since 1930." ""What are you talking about?"" ""OK," he said, "OK." "What's the first step?"" "And Joe said, "The first step is how much you'll pay me to read the book."" "But that's, I mean, that's cruel and hurt him, but that's also sublimely funny." ""How dare you insult me with that?"" "The payoff of All About Eve, the denouement, as it were, is Addison's unmasking of Eve." "That story..." "She was never in San Francisco, he proves." "The real story about the brewery and she had no husband, all of this is a fiction." "And that's meant to be a part of her calculation, part of her deception of these people." "And she deceives all of them." "But in a much greater sense, that is Joe Mankiewicz's view of human nature, is that all of us, to get on, to please, to make it in the theatre or in any profession," "distort ourselves as much more charming, kindly, virtuous people than we actually are." "And so when there are a myriad of Phoebes in the mirror, we're talking about the fact that not only is this a movie about succeeding, and succession, which are separate, but..." "There's a little bit of Eve in all of us." "My father was a disciple of Ernst Lubitsch, and would always say things like," ""You know, Ernst Lubitsch could do more by looking at just a door," ""and when you imagine what was going on behind the door it was much sexier," ""and much better, than actually showing anything that happened."" "So he had this pudeur, this sense of being proper, of not showing things and not really saying things." "He wanted to write and do as much as he could in the absolute classical way, without resort to what he felt was vulgarity or obscenity or anything like that." "And he could sense, I'm certain, that times were moving on, and, as an old English movie writer used to say, "The parade passed him by,"" "in a sense that it's a different style now, it's a different way." "People think of things differently, and he didn't." "He clung to standards that he felt were the good standards and the proper standards, and he hoped that his writing reflected that, so you wouldn't get a David Mamet kind of screenplay, I would say." "It was just not even possible." "I think my father will be remembered as a writer of considerable perception about the behaviour of people." "And that he knew how to write dialogue, he was a great dialogue writer." "And he was a great observer of people, and of their behaviour." "In a strange way, as Richard Burton said, he could have been an Oxford don." "He was an extraordinary man, who knew an extraordinary number of things." "But what he had about him that I always found the most interesting, was that he had a sixth sense." "My brother and I used to talk about we could go back and forth down a hall in front of his office, with a bag, and every time we would put, let's say, pillows in the bag," "he wouldn't say anything." "But if we put candy, or we put something that we shouldn't have, in the bag, he'd look up and he'd say," ""Hey, fellas, what have you got in the bag?"" "He had that sense, I don't know, about behaviour." "He could sense in the air, in the feeling, in the look of somebody." "He was extremely observant, extremely observant, and very very very clever about..." "He used to do The New York Times crossword puzzles every day, and the Sunday ones." "Something that his two children also have been passed on to." "And when he was in Vietnam, doing The Quiet American, he went running to a friend on the film, a friend of Leonard Bernstein, and said, "Look at this." He'd not only done the thing," "but he'd done the double acrostics and everything else, all in ink." "And he said, "I'd like you to show this to Lenny", meaning Leonard Bernstein." "And the friend of Lenny's said, "Joe, Lenny types them."" "But it's..." "To him..." "We used to have decoder rings when we were kids, and stuff." "Dick Tracy, or whoever, Flash Gordon or something or other." "And we'd go running in there with a coded message, and in two minutes he'd decode it, without the decoder ring." "He knew language, he knew..." "I mean, it was just amazing what he could do." "He knew how words were formed and, you know, this was a good thing and a bad thing." "If you spoke poorly, or you didn't say the right word, you'd get criticised like crazy." ""You're a dummy, an absolute..." You know, "How embarrassing."" "I think today, my own son, I forget what he scored on the SAT tests years ago." "If I'd had that..." "And he proudly gave me the score, if I had had that score, my father would have thrown me in a closet for being a dummy." "I mean, to him, you had to learn." "He was a man who loved competitive games, knowledge games played at the home." "If you didn't know who somebody was who was world famous in some..." "It could be nuclear physics, that you knew nothing about, well, you were an absolute jerk." ""Don't you read the papers, don't you know who the important people are?"" "And we used to play card games which involved the famous books written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Sir Walter Scott." "You had to know all the great books that have been written by all the great writers in European civilisation." "He was a tough, tough, stern taskmaster, in a way." "Perhaps not as tough as his father was, but we were very aware that it was battle time, you had to show up prepared, and be careful what you said, otherwise you were a dummy." "He was a tough guy." "George Sanders is, of course, a great actor in the history of movies." "Never better than in this film, which is a really sardonic role, which is, I think, part of Sanders' own persona." "This was a man who was always more gifted, with great acting gifts and painterly gifts and singing gifts, than he ever got an opportunity to exhibit in the films." "But boy, when he dresses down Eve in that New Haven room..." "Well, I think every appearance in this film is just magical, and if anyone deserved an Oscar for Supporting Performance, it's that one." "I think he will be remembered as a master of language, and a man who cared deeply about certain causes." "The other thing that I think should be emphasised about him, his greatest moments, in a way, were not on the screen." "When he was president of the DGA, his fight against the Communist..." "What shall I say?" "The De Mille putsch to throw out all the..." "To create a blacklist for all the directors, which he fought strictly on a matter of principle." "In fact, was damned by many of the leftists afterwards, because after he won the battle he said," ""Why don't you voluntarily sign the loyalty oath?"" "They thought, "We went through all this, now this guy says sign?"" "He was a super-Republican in the end, superpatriot." "He thought it wrong that people had to say which way they voted or what they believe, it's an American's right to believe what they want." "And as he said, with consummate logic, he said," ""The first thing that a Communist spy is gonna say is, 'I'm not a Communist'."" "No one's gonna say, "Oh, my God, you got me."" ""I can't sign that oath, I'm really a Communist, take me to prison."" "So what the hell's the point of it, except to embarrass people who were deluded earlier in their lives, and were temporarily Communists, or, in the case of a friend of mine, usually the wives were Communists and led the husbands into it." "But whatever it was." "So he was a crusader, I mean, if you talk to Sidney Poitier, he gave Sidney Poitier his first job, his first starring role," "And Sidney, to the day..." "You may have noticed on the Academy Awards this year, when Sidney won his honorary award, the very first person that he thanked was Joseph L Mankiewicz." "My father, as far as race was concerned, or whatever it is, was absolutely ahead of his time, he cared about that." "He cared about what he would call the good person, the common person, the person that's been shitted on, and he was a big supporter, but honest, in a quiet way, about that." "I mean, not so quiet always, but I'm saying it wasn't a pose, he wasn't into big award dinners and things like that." "But he cared about people, and in that sense he was a very honest and a courageous guy, in writing about what he believed." "As I say, whether it was championing the school teachers as opposed to the oil men, or making fun of the inane radio shows that he did in A Letter to Three Wives, or just anything, I mean, he was a good man." "He had really good qualities." "Not always an easy man to live with, needless to say, and not always fair, but he had his strengths, and I think he can be proud of those areas where he was honest and a true believer." "So, I mean, I think you have to honour the guy's public life to that extent." "He was never a coward, and fought for what he believed in, and wrote superbly well, even if it was a bit, in today's context, a bit old-fashioned in the sense that it seems wordy, and whatever." "But he loved words." "He loved words." "And I cannot tell you how much he would rewrite scripts, and work on every line of dialogue." "And as he himself said, he became a director to defend his dialogue and his writing, to not be harmed by directors who came along." "Always said, "A great script has already been directed," ""it was directed by the writer who wrote it and showed how it should be portrayed."" "Well, Hollywood likes sentimental endings, but of course I don't think there's anything sentimental about the end of All About Eve." "Not only do we see a myriad of images of Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe, coming on to conquer Eve," "but that's the whole..." "That's the greatest fear in Hollywood, is that the younger generation is right behind us, ready to take over everyone's position." "And they're all clutching to preserve it, except for Margo, who says, "I would rather be a housewife."" "ENGLISH" " US" " COMMENTARY"