All About All About Eve. - Review - book review

All About All About Eve * By Sam Staggs * St. Martin's Press * $24.95

All About All About Eve is exactly that--author Sam Staggs has cobbled together every known fact about Joseph Mankiewicz's peerlessly witty 1950 drama. The story of two-faced Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), who kick-starts her own acting career by worming her way into the inner circle of aging star Margot Channing (Bette Davis), proves to be, at age 50, as rich in trivia as Gone With the Wind.

The book errs on the side of too much detail. (Do we really need the life story of every bit player?) But Staggs scores a real coup in tracking down Martina Lawrence, the real-life inspiration for the treacherous Eve. Now living in Venice, Lawrence says she's far more benign than the movie Eve--just what Eve herself would say!

Staggs also plumbs the film's homosexual subtext. He suggests that there's more than banter going on between Eve and Margot--and that real-life bisexual George Sanders's character, ruthless theater critic Addison DeWitt ("that venomous fishwife," someone calls him), is a closet case looking for a lavender marriage with latent lesbian Eve. (Did Mankiewicz intend Eve to have lesbian tendencies? "Absolutely," he told a reporter in 1980.) If it all sounds too far-fetched, rent the movie again and wear your pink glasses. Subtext or not, you can never see too much of the great Bette Davis as she whirls on the camera and spits, "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"

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