June 2000 Cover
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...and then some
By
Michael Bronski
All About All About Eve
Sam Staggs
St. Martins Press
How to order
Fasten your seat belts its going to be a bumpy night" snaps Bette Davis's Margo Channing in Joseph Mankiewicz's classic bitch-fest
All About Eve as she fumes about her lover's possible indiscretions with her
protege. Mankiewicz's dialogue was so sharp, so on-target that some of it has entered common usage, divorced from any connection with the film. For gay men
All About Eve has become a camp classic, but this stature should
not detract from the fact that it is a great, and finely tuned, work of art. But art is never as much fun as camp and Sam Staggs in
All About All About Eve: The Complete Behind-the-Scenes Story of the
Bitchiest Film Ever Made (St. Martin's Press,
$24.95) has complied every possibly fact, gloss, and imaginable sort-of-fact about this Oscar winning tale of backstage and back-stabbing intrigue in the Broadway theater.
Some film writers do their homework; not Staggs-- he has written a doctoral dissertation on
All About Eve. Every detail of the story, every hint to their origins, every account of the filming, as well as the lives
of its stars and All About Eve's later incarnations as a Broadway musical are covered here. Staggs is a great detective and aside from interviewing all of he film's makers and stars-- and their relatives if need be-- he has
pieced together such a plethora of detail, apocrypha, rumor, innuendo, and facts that no one who loves the film will not be surprised by something.
But such nitpicking collecting of information would be silly, self-aggrandizing, or even pointless it if didn't continually keep our interest and erect itself into a large, more sustained edifice. Almost by an act
of will Staggs is able to marshal this minutia into a real book, that deals with broader themes and places the film in a larger cultural context.
Sometimes the results are startling as when Staggs compares similarities of dialogue from
All About Eve to Edward Albee's Whose Afraid of Virginia
Woolf-- a play that has the former's quick tongue if not
its heart and soul.
Of course one of the long-standing queen debates at parties has been who was the
real life model for Margo Channing. Many claim Tullulah Bankhead-- really an obvious answer-- while others vouch
for Laurette Taylor or even the redoubtable Mrs. Fiske. Staggs, of course, enters into this discussion but uses it as a stepping off place for a mediation on the place and position of the bitch-goddess (a phase coined by
philosopher William James) in our political and theatrical culture. But after this-- quite smart-- meditation he drops his bombshell and delivers, in Sam Spade-esque fashion, how he tracked down the young actress who was actually
the model for the deviously-- and devilishly-- ambitious Eve Harrington.
The story of his detection, and the sad and somewhat frightening story of this woman's life makes
All About All About Eve not only the best book on the movie, but a terrific book about film, the theater, and
the vagaries of fame, fortune, and, failure.
| Author Profile: Michael Bronski |
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Michael Bronski is the author of
Culture Clash: The Making of Gay
Sensibility and The Pleasure
Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the
Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes
frequently on sex, books, movies, and
culture, and lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. |
| Email: |
mabronski@aol.com |
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