Poetry from The Literary Review
From Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse
David Trinidad, Jeffery Conway, Lynn Crosbie
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Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse, forthcoming in the fall, is a collaboration with Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosbie. Phoebe 2002 is a mock-epic based on the 1950 movie All About Eve, starring Bette Davis as Broadway star Margo Channing. In this excerpt, Margo is in the middle of an argument with her lover, Bill Sampson. Mulciber is our nickname for costume designer Edith Head. Davis's voice cracks at the word “paranoiac”— betraying her real-life hoarseness: a few nights before filming this scene with Merrill, Davis had engaged in a shouting match with third husband William Sherry, a “muscle-bound sailor” type, and had injured her throat: Davis “spat blood into [her] handkerchief” and croaked when she spoke. Mankiewicz liked Davis's husky intonation: “It's the whiskey-throated voice that Margo should have,” he said, “a bourbon contralto.” Davis worried she sounded too much like truculent theater grande dame Tallulah Bankhead, and was correct to fret. Bankhead was inclined to despise Davis, who had had several screen successes in parts Bankhead originated on Broadway: Jezebel, Dark Victory, The Little Foxes. A furious Bankhead would later contend that Davis's characterization of Margo Channing was a complete forgery of Bankhead's own hairdo, voice and exaggerated mannerisms, and would frequently refer to All About Eve as All About Me. Bankhead used her early fifties radio program, “The Big Show” (NBC), to conceive, perpetuate and promulgate the Bette Davis-Tallulah Bankhead feud: “Dahling,” she growled, “just wait till I get my hands on that woman. I'll pull out every hair in her mustache.” From the start, Edith Head recognized Bankhead as the prototype for Margo Channing: she “steeped [herself] in Tallulah” and designed Davis's costumes to look as if they were made for Bankhead—thus did Mulciber fuel the Divine Feud. In later years, Tallulah's outlandish behavior would appeal to “certain homosexuals.” Like Davis, she earned the distinction of “queens' queen”; “[Judy] Garland . . . [Marlene] Dietrich, Mae West, [and] Joan Crawford ranked among their other favorites.” Davis et al symbolized a “kind of atrophy, the . . . triumph of form over content”: “they were about glamor rather than glamorous.” What biographer Lee Israel says about Bankhead easily applies to Davis and Crawford: “Her lip-line had ceased . . . to have anything to do with the shape of her mouth.” Bill calls Margo “an hysterical, screaming harpy.” Davis, let us not forget, got her “Tallulah-esque” voice by screaming hysterically at third husband William Sherry. Harpies are winged demons, usually depicted as birds with women's heads and sharp claws. Davis most closely resembles the harpy Aello (wind-squall). Manly Sherry slunk away from their shouting match “as though emasculated.” In the pantheon of raspy-voiced actresses, however, Davis does not place very high. Her voice healed, returned to its normal register. Bankhead, Lauren Bacall, Colleen Dewhurst, Elizabeth Ashley, Brenda Vaccaro, and others out-rasp Davis in this regard. Eulogizing Dewhurst, Michael Feingold captured the magic of her voice: “frogged around the edges with the rasp of a thousand cigarettes . . . It's what Eternity would sound like . . . if it smoked too much.” Davis/Margo slumps into sobs after Bill leaves. Her whimper, though not as relishable as Dewhurst's rasp, has a sonority all its own. Davis will whimper her way through many a potboiler: as Margaret Elliot, washed-up Crawford-like actress in The Star; as Baby Jane Hudson, “an elderly alcoholic harridan of unbearable frumpy ugliness.” (Davis chose her own “ghastly-white” makeup: “I wanted to look outrageous, like Mary Pickford in decay”); as poor muddled Charlotte Hollis; as the demented, murderous “Nanny”; and so forth. Davis's whimper: a flag of defeat, symptom of collapse. Davis's whimper: one more wrinkle, sag; another man (Oscar?) lost. Davis's whimper: cooing pigeons, a whole pitiful flock. In the following excerpt, Margo, who has just learned that the much younger Eve Harrington has surreptitously been made her understudy, argues with producer Max Fabian and playwright, Lloyd Richards. Feminist theory is consumed with women and rage, an emotion seen as everything unexpressed; as something appropriate to the occasion, that is, always being suppressed. Rage is rarely viewed for what it is, as simple as hate or violence, and larger, more operatic in women because of the lack of access to superior physical strength and weaponry. It is tiresome to talk about women and wrath in any other way than, say, Max does, by leaving the audience, muttering, as Margo performs her anger: “Are you threatening me?” she says, venomously, and he retreats, as though afraid. Men are not genuinely afraid of women's anger: women, rarely, can beat them up. They are, however, truly afraid that the show will never end. All of the men in the film are afraid that Margo won't stop acting, ever. Lloyd writes younger and younger roles (“Blossom,” a girl of 12); Bill walks away from her bed/set; Addison evokes dead actors as her colleagues; and Max, again, centres his argument on “run of the play” contracts, a notion that, exhausting him, devolves into mumbled sounds. Margo is, in this scene, a genuine kazoo and sparkler set, the power of her rage approximating that of a mean-minded shrew, beating, jealously, a young girl: “Christina, a child of seven.” [Katharina (Elizabeth Taylor), locked up between belligerent rampages, spits out, “All things living, a man's the worst!” as Petruchio (Richard Burton) revels with his entourage. Bianca, her fair and younger sister, looks on with mirth] Margo, untamed and determined, pulls off her dainty white gloves (to reveal her talons), faces her quarries center stage, slyly elicits from them their ignoble acts, eviscerating them with an “enchanting” demeanor all the while. The obscurantist trilogy of men come clean: Eve is the understudy. “Well, well. Eve's not working for Max after all. Max, you sly pusssss.” She lights up, listens to Lloyd gush about Eve's reading, brushes aside Eve's protestations: “I was dreadful . . . I don't deserve to be anyone's under study, much less yours.” Lloyd goes on, “She was a revelation.” Margo's invidious tongue unleashes the unspoken, unholy epiphany: “It must have been a revelation to have a twenty-four-year-old character played by a twenty-four-year-old actress.” The date of this movie is 1950, and 24 years before was 1926—the year of the Tiger. The Tiger woman is feared and even reviled by the philosophers and wise men who rule Chinese astrology. She's considered a “man-hater” who wants to run the world. Her mantra? “All hail me the unparalleled performer.” Eve slowly and quietly retreats from the group (awestruck by Margo's fire?): “Tyger Tyger . . . Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” [Bette Davis (done up in queen drag), pulls court lady (dewy Joan Collins) to her bedside, scolds her for “stealing” her love interest, Sir Walter Raleigh (hot Richard Todd). Her Majesty yanks off her own nightcap to show her rubber “baldness,” hisses, “Do you think I have ever put meself(!) on the list of pretty faces and empty heads?” The girl's great breach of loyalty prompts Queen Elizabeth's screech: “Take her away! Take her away!”] Max clears his throat to warn that other trilogy of terror (Bill, Lloyd & Eve), who are about to play doctor onstage, that Hurricane Margo is headed their way. Writer and director freeze, hands in pockets (to hide schoolboy erections?), as Eve slides off the bed to once more stand at attention (her erection?) before the star. This is the first and only time the two women will appear on the same stage (“Heav'nly ground”) together, and they both, to quote Sylvia Plath, act, act, act “for the thrill”: “two venomous opposites.” Sugar-coated, of course, as they are playing to the men. Neither will ever more acutely “know what lies are for.” Eve: “Miss Channing, I can't tell you how glad I am . . .” (pause) “. . . that you arrived so late.” Costume-wise, the younger actress has the upper hand here; in this case “Joe the Mank” (Anne Baxter's pet name for her director), rather than Mulciber, is to blame. Head planned for Davis to wear a suit with a tight skirt; accessories were to include “a white handkerchief in the suit's left-hand pocket, a tailored blouse with a black bow tie,” the aforementioned white gloves, “and strapped black patent leather pumps.” When he viewed the costume tests for the theatre scene, Mankiewicz thought Davis looked “too tightly tailored,” and ordered modifications. Though the suit remained the same, Davis ended up wearing a blouse with a frou-frou white bow at the neck, a curved half-moon-shaped diamond pin instead of a spiky hanky, and kid pumps without straps. In her skintight V-neck, Baxter exemplifies firmness, conicity: her tits are frighteningly dagger-like, especially when she darts across the stage to “act” with Margo. “. . . those entrancing pointed breasts which never have confined a heart.” Eve's mammillary aggression can be seen as a personal (woman-to-woman) as well as a culturally symbolic power play. In his book Life: The Movie, critic Neal Gabler shows how, at the end of the 1800s, America's urban centers were increasingly divided between elitist “symphony halls, art museums and opera houses, on one side, and [lower class] vaudeville theaters, burlesque houses, dime museums and amusement parks, on the other.” According to Gabler, the legitimate theater would emerge by the turn of the twentieth century and would “finalize the divorce between high culture and low.” The theater became the domain of the aristocracy (“where the elite meet”), who attempted to “ensure that the masses would be excluded from high culture forever” through the process of “sacralization”: lifting art “into the realm of holiness.” Thus: “The elites retained control of high culture . . . and the heathens were permitted to promote and control mass entertainment.” Such entertainment included motion pictures and, later, television. Via these popular divertissements, the middle class would eventually “displace the elite as the custodians of culture,” all the while harboring its own genteel aspirations. True to her class (“Schlameel, Schlamaazal”), Eve aspires to overthrow, replace Margo; and succeeds—briefly. But to remain in the theater (of the 1950s, at least) would be a step “way up in class.” Eve, like Miss Caswell, is destined for a more demotic art, what Neal Gabler dubs the “glorious dumb fun” of films and TV. About another Gabler (Hedda), Chekhov once remarked: “If a pistol is introduced at the end of the first act, it has to be fired at some point later in the play.” Guns have pointed at Eve throughout the movie—when she reached for her golden award; when she crouched, timid mouse, in Margo's dressing room—but now a real one is about to go off. Margo lights a cigarette; an argument with Lloyd explodes. They bicker, the harp—with several broken strings—between them. Margo brandishes her smoking gun. Eve slinks backwards, her “lowly creep.” A second fight, between Margo and Max, ignites. JUDGE BRACK (shouting from below). No-no-no! Don't point that thing at me! HEDDA. That's what comes of sneaking in the back way. (She fires.) Max, “a dyink man,” bellows: “This concerns a run-of-the-play contract!” [Faultfinding Helen Lawson (Susan Hayward) grumbles as she tosses stills onto her dressing room floor: “No good! Shhh . . . lousy! A beast! Out!” Moments later, flustered Anne Welles (Barbara Parkins) stupidly comments: “That girl who is singing out there, she's very good, isn't she?” Helen snaps at the director: “The song goes, and the kid with it.” The director counters: “That girl has a run-of-the-play contract.” Helen snarls: “I know all about run-of-the play contracts!” Then lights up a cigarette and puffs, puffs, puffs] Margo drops her butt, crushes it, like an insect, with the toe of her pump. Lay that pistol down, babe Lay that pistol down Pistol packin' Margo Lay that pistol down Works Cited All About Eve. (movie, 1950). Baudelaire, Charles. “Lethe,” translated by Richard Howard. Blake, William. “The Tyger.” Considine, Shaun. Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud. Dexter, Al. “Pistol Packin’ Mama.” (song). Gabler, Neal. Life: The Movie. Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler. Translated by Rolf Fjelde. Israel, Lee. Miss Tallulah Bankhead. “Laverne and Shirley.” (sitcom, 1976-1983). Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Plath, Sylvia. “Lesbos.” Staggs, Sam. All About All About Eve. The Taming of the Shrew. (movie, 1967). Valley of the Dolls. (movie, 1967). The Virgin Queen. (movie, 1955). |
