All About “All About Eve” (27 page)

Finding architectural work scarce during the Depression, Wheeler took a job as sketch artist and draftsman at MGM in 1931. Later he became supervising art director for Selznick International. He worked for a time for Alexander Korda before moving to Fox in 1944. In 1947 Zanuck promoted Wheeler to head of the art department, a position he held until he turned freelance in 1962.

Wheeler worked on some 400 films during his long career. Nominated twenty-nine times for Oscars, he won five: for
Gone With the Wind
(1939),
Anna and the King of Siam
(1946),
The Robe
(1953),
The King and I
(1956), and
The Diary of Anne Frank
(1959).

In 1989, a year before Wheeler’s death, a poignant story appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
under the heading
THE DIARY OF LYLE WHEELER’S OSCARS
. A Southern California couple had unwittingly become the owners of all five of his Academy Awards. This couple, attending a sale at a storage facility that was auctioning the property of tenants with delinquent bills, bought several plain brown boxes for twenty dollars apiece.

Returning home to Long Beach, the man and woman opened the shabby cartons. They were dumbfounded to find, staring up at them through lidless eyes, five tarnished statuettes issued by the most famous Academy in the world. Fearing burglary or notoriety, the couple waited almost three years before revealing the Oscars, which they had purchased in 1986.

In the early 1980s Wheeler had lost a calamitous amount of his savings in a failed investment. These losses, coupled with age and infirmity, forced him to sell his home and many possessions and to deposit the rest, including his Academy Awards, at a storage company. Eventually, when he wished to reclaim his goods, he found that the storage bill, in excess of $30,000, was more than he could afford. So, many of his sketches, artworks, books, research materials—and the five Oscars—were left behind. Soon everything was crated up and sold off along with used appliances, scratched furniture, and photographs of faces long dead.

But Lyle Wheeler’s work, if not his name, had become famous. As film assumed its place among the fine arts, coteries had grown up around art directors, cameramen, composers, editors—all those craftsmen who once were taken for granted on the Hollywood assembly line. When the story of his lost Oscars was printed in the paper, an outpouring of public sympathy came his way. Then, in a noble gesture right out of a Frank Capra film, an admirer of Wheeler’s vast body of work stepped forward.

Bill Kaiser, forty-one-years-old, had once worked for a year as a film librarian. He was crazy about movies, always had been, and knew an astounding amount of Hollywood lore. But library pay was no good, so he earned a nursing degree and eventually became a hospital administrator in Tuxedo Park, New York, a small town about thirty miles northwest of New York City.

One night Kaiser, his wife, Joan, and their two children were eating dinner when they heard on the evening news that the Southern California couple planned to sell Lyle Wheeler’s Oscars one by one, beginning with his last award, for
The Diary of Anne Frank
. The asking price was $21,250.

Joan Kaiser noticed that her husband had stopped chewing and his face had turned pale. She turned to Bill and asked, “Do you know who Lyle Wheeler is?”

“Know who he is?”
Bill yelped. “Every other movie on television has his name on it!” Later, when Kaiser recalled the night of the newscast, he said, “I was angry, I was depressed, I was moved. I decided to do everything I could to restore those Oscars to Lyle.”

Kaiser soon tracked down Malcolm Willits, an expert on Hollywood artifacts and owner of the Collector’s Book Store, at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. Willits planned to auction the
Anne Frank
Oscar on behalf of the couple who had discovered the cache at the storage-company sale.

But Kaiser had something else in mind. With Joan’s approval, Bill dipped into their savings account, the one they had started when they married sixteen years earlier. The removal of $21,250 left the account close to depletion.

“No, I’m not at all upset over how he’s spending the money,” Joan told a reporter. “It’s not as though we’re taking food from the mouths of our children. We saved it for something important, and this Oscar is important.”

The onrush of news almost overpowered Lyle Wheeler. At eighty-three, he was frail and worn out. A widower, he lived alone in a retirement home in Culver City on a fixed income of $1,000 a month. But now, suddenly, he was famous. Whether he was famous now, in the troubled present, or whether all the fuss was as distant as turning on the television and seeing a movie he had designed years and years ago, Lyle could not quite puzzle out. Too much good news is not so different from bad news, he must have thought as messengers of good fortune paraded through his bedroom.

He had just won another Oscar!

Or so it seemed, although with so many people telling him things it was difficult to sort it out. Someone had just announced to Lyle that in a few days he was to appear at a private awards ceremony in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel where, long ago, the first Oscars were presented to Janet Gaynor and Emil Jannings. That was before Lyle himself had worked on a picture, which seemed strange because he felt like the oldest man in Hollywood, now that so many of the stars were dead.

The subdued ceremony in the Blossom Room lacked the ballyhoo that had accreted to the Academy Awards over the years. Instead, a small group of friends, family, and reporters gathered to watch Wheeler accept the award for Best Art Direction for
The Diary of Anne Frank
—surely the first time anyone ever accepted the same Oscar twice.

The award was presented by Terry Moore, who used to be famous and who had worked in eight of Wheeler’s films, including
Daddy Long Legs
(1955) and
Peyton Place
(1957). “It gives me great pleasure…” she said with an enormous smile as Lyle was helped onto the podium amidst warm applause and cheers.

“I didn’t believe I was ever going to see even one of these again,” the winner said, looking down at the prodigal Oscar, now safe in his arms. A tear rolled from Lyle’s eye and dropped onto the little man’s twenty-four-karat gold stomach. The statuette, worn and pitted by time, was as dear as a puppy or a kitten to the elderly man. He clutched it tightly in his trembling hands.

Afterward, a reporter asked Lyle what he planned to do with his restored treasure. He paused for a long moment and then said, “Well, I want to put it someplace where it won’t be stolen.”

Chapter 20

I’ll Marry You If It Turns Out You Have No Blood At All

Zanuck, having made his revisions on the rough cut of
All About Eve
in June 1950, saw no need for retakes. Mankiewicz and others at the studio took this as proof of the producer’s confidence in the picture.

In the editing room, Barbara McLean incorporated Zanuck’s changes. Then she “cut in” the main title, which, after several modifications in design, had now been approved by director, producer, and art director. The studio’s legal department, after careful scrutiny, had also approved the credit titles, making sure that each one conformed to the rather fussy contractual stipulations of all concerned.

Redubbing was required for certain lines impaired by outside noises during shooting. One of those “loops” involved Bette Davis and George Sanders. Mankiewicz, ever protective of his work, at first declined Barbara McLean’s offer to do the looping with the two actors. (In technical language, looping is the process of recording post-synchronized replacement dialogue, specifically by running loops of film through a projector and dubber, repeatedly recording the replacement dialogue until the performer achieves or approximates lip sync.)

“Back then I would sit and do all the loop lines,” McLean recalled later. “I used to do it on all the actors. I told them how to read. But Mankiewicz said, ‘I’m going to do my own.’ I said, ‘Well, Joe, why don’t you let me do it? Bette is going away. If you don’t like the way I do it, you can do them over again.’”

Bette and George read for Barbara, and she inserted their redubbed lines without a seam. “By golly,” she said, “Joe never changed one word.”

With all such fine-tuning complete, the picture again went to Zanuck for inspection. He made a few minor adjustments and the next day the film was delivered to the Production Code Administration. A routine form letter, dated July 11, 1950, went out from Joseph I. Breen to Colonel Jason Joy at 20th Century-Fox, informing the studio that
All About Eve
had been given the necessary certificate of approval. Attached to the letter was Certificate No. 14544.

For each film reviewed by employees of the Production Code, a detailed summation page was drawn up that functioned as a de facto moral index of the film’s content. In the case of
All About Eve
, this summation page tallies “much drinking.” It also lists “happy ending, in sense that each achieved his or her goal,” and in answer to the question, “Does picture end with promise of marriage or continued love?” the censors wrote “Yes.”

Bette Davis and Gary Merrill must have wished occasionally during the 1950 midsummer that they were back at Fox, where their chief irritant was the disapproval of Celeste Holm. They exhausted themselves dodging reporters and denying rumors that they would marry as soon as they shed their respective spouses. These denials were calculated to keep the estranged Mrs. Merrill and Bette’s estranged husband from gaining undue legal advantage in divorce proceedings. In addition, although Bette and Gary were living together, it was necessary to keep up the wholesome fiction that they were merely “dating.”

Thanks to a quickie divorce granted in Juárez, Mexico, Bette Davis became a free woman on July 4, 1950. Back in Los Angeles, she assumed a distraught expression for waiting reporters at the airport. “No one is very happy, really, about a divorce,” she confided to the press.

In a more straightforward vein, William Sherry told other reporters the same day, “I shall set off a great big firecracker in honor of my own independence.”

On July 27, Barbara Leeds obtained an interlocutory decree in her divorce from Gary Merrill after testifying that he had said he no longer loved her, that he neglected their guests at parties, and that he once told her she “looked like a dog.” Under a financial settlement signed July 26, he promised to pay her $1,000 a month until her death or remarriage.

But the interlocutory decree was a first step only. California law stipulated that the divorce would not become final for a year. And so Gary flew to Juárez, where he also obtained a quickie Mexican divorce early on the morning of July 28. That afternoon, he married Bette Davis.

The ceremony was performed at the home of divorce attorney José Amador y Trias by Judge Raúl Orozco. Bette wore a navy blue dress with white gloves. Gary wore a gabardine suit with a maroon tie. The service was performed in Spanish. After the marriage Bette refused to pose for a photograph kissing her new husband. She had done it before at one or two of her weddings and considered it bad luck.

A few weeks later, two fillers appeared in
The New Yorker
. Bette preserved both of the wry press slip-ups in a scrapbook:

Orozco, addressing Miss Davis, asked: “Usted, Bette Davis, toma Gary Merrill como su legitimo esposo?”

The attorney translated the question: “Do you, Bette Davis, take Gary Merrill for your lawfully wedded husband?”

“eYs,” Miss Davis replied.

—
Indianapolis Times

You won’t catch Bette napping.

LIFE IN HOLLYWOOD DEPARTMENT

[Sheilah Graham in the
Mirror
]:

Bette Davis’s new mate, Gary Merrill, expects his marriage to last five years.

Bette Davis: “An hour after I married him, I knew I had made a terrible mistake.”

Gary Merrill: “The downfall of the marriage was Bette’s stubborn insistence on perfection. She would empty the ashtray before the cigarette was out, and she had the bed made before my feet hit the ground.”

Bette Davis: “The joke was on both of us. I loved making a home for him, but he did not at all like that domestic side of me. He wanted me to be Margo Channing.”

Gary Merrill: “The stars of
All About Eve
co-opted the movie and lived it out in their off-screen lives. They were already living out the script even before they were signed for the movie. Bette Davis played out the role in our marriage—and Gary Merrill went right along. She had shattered all his dreams with her disdain for everyone’s feelings but her own, her insensitivity, and her humiliating insistence on having her own way. She did not care who was cut down with the sharp scythe of her tongue, she was self-righteous in her desire to be the queen.”

Bette Davis: “Not long after our divorce in nineteen sixty, I ran into Joe Mankiewicz at a party. For years I had been asking him to write a sequel to
All About Eve
, telling what had happened to Margo and Bill. I said, ‘You can forget about the sequel, Joe. Gary and I played it and it didn’t work.”

A Flash-Forward

The marriage of Bette Davis and Gary Merrill was tidy in only one respect: It lasted exactly a decade, from 1950 to 1960. Otherwise it was a parade of depressing floats: drunkenness, strife, abuse. We therefore fast-forward to the end, when Bette and Gary toured the country during 1959–60 in “The World of Carl Sandburg.”
Life
reported late in 1959 that they had so far “brought the show to 21 cities … Using excerpts from the poet’s stories, songs, verses, and jokes, the team puts on a breezy, poetic vaudeville.” Pictures accompanying the feature show the two looking grim and aged beyond their years.

The marriage had ended long before, though the divorce was yet to come. During the tour Gary and Bette scarcely spoke to each other off-stage. In San Francisco they stayed in separate rooms at the same hotel they had occupied during the making of
All About Eve
.