A month into my time of enforced isolation, the hunger hit me hard, as I knew it would sooner or later. I had to revisit the vipers’ nest, that dangerous and glamorous cradle of illusions found within one square mile of the cold, concrete heart of Manhattan. I’d been away from my people for too long.And so I returned to the magical kingdom of Broadway, or rather a version of Broadway as it never really was, yet somehow always was — and is, and ever shall be, in the minds of many of us who fell in love with the New York theater from a distance. It was time for my fix of “All About Eve.”For readers uninitiated in the joys of this addiction, “All About Eve” is the most pleasurable, most quotable film ever created about those who make their living on the stage. This 1950 anatomy of backstage backstabbing tells the story of an aging Broadway star, Margo Channing (Bette Davis, in full sail), whose romantic and professional lives are imperiled by her duplicitous young assistant, the title character (played by a vulpine Anne Baxter).Written and directed with galloping wit and gallons of gloss by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, “All About Eve” racked up 14 Oscar nominations, winning in six categories, including best picture. Reviews were gleeful in pointing out that the film industry — long a target of satiric disdain in Broadway plays — was finally getting a bit of its own back. (A prolific screenwriter and director, whose other credits include “A Letter to Three Wives,” Mankiewicz was a New York-to-Hollywood transplant with a lifelong crush on the theater.)“THESPIS ON THE ROPES; The Theatre Gets a Sock From ‘All About Eve,’” read the headline of Bosley Crowther’s Sunday column in The New York Times. Crowther, succumbing to the purpleness with which “Eve” tends to infect everyone who sees it, wrote with the excitement of a ringside boxing announcer: “Hollywood, butt of sarcasm from the stage for these many cruel years, has finally sent forth a Goliath that wrings David’s impudent neck after tossing his stinging stones back at him with swift and relentless force.”But after the dust cleared, it was obvious that theater, the so-called Fabulous Invalid, had not only been left intact but was also standing taller than ever. And for many people, including the 10-year-old, stage-struck me — who first saw “Eve” on television with eyes as big and devouring as Bette Davis’s — the movie became a definitive Bible of this business we call show, as sublime as it is ridiculous.At this point, I should explain what I do for a living — or did, before the theaters of New York were shuttered by a pandemic. I shall step aside here to let my vocation be described by one Addison DeWitt, a character portrayed with Oscar-winning acidity by George Sanders: “My native habitat is the Theater — in it, I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the Theater — as ants are to a picnic, as the boll weevil to a cotton field.”(Note: In Mankiewicz’s screenplay, “Theater” is capitalized, and it should be pronounced with that in mind.)Though I, too, am a Theater critic and commentator — and have been for 26 years at The New York Times — I have little in common with Mr. DeWitt other than my nominal profession and a fondness for dry martinis. I do not share his withering trans-Atlantic accent, his soigné wardrobe, his social coziness with the people he eviscerates in his column, nor his love for making and destroying reputations overnight.Nor are the show folk I write about much like the egomaniacal, mythomaniacal, dipsomaniacal crew that Addison chronicles. Yet the musky, intoxicating fragrance that permeates “All About Eve” has everything to do with why I came to New York, and how I wound up in my job.There have been cases made for “Eve” as a feminist film, and a misogynist one; as a homophobic work and a font of queer folklore (not mutually exclusive); as a serious slice of cinematic auteurism and a preening piece of unconscious camp. (Impersonations of Davis’s Margo were once a staple of drag acts.) There is, inevitably, a fanatic’s guidebook, Sam Staggs’s “All About ‘All About Eve.’”It has also inspired innumerable other works. The international roster of films that offer variations on the central female mentor and protégée relationship at the center of “Eve” are as varied as Pedro Almodóvar’s “All About My Mother,” John Cassavetes’s “Opening Night,” Olivier Assayas’s “Clouds of Sils Maria,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s “The Favourite” and — lest we forget — Paul Verhoeven’s “Showgirls.”There have been literal adaptations, too. The movie has been the basis of a hit musical comedy (“Applause,” which opened in 1970, starring Lauren Bacall) and a mixed-media deconstruction from the theater experimentalist Ivo van Hove, staged in London last year (starring Gillian Anderson). Neither captured the essence of the original, though.Perky, affectionate and upbeat, “Applause” translated the arrogant stiletto thrust of Mankiewicz’s dialogue into the crowd-courting bounce of clunkily rhymed song. The van Hove version, while it stuck close to the original screenplay, drained its vitality, creating a defeated kingdom of walking shadows, where artifice had lost its sheen and poseurs could no longer pose with conviction.And shiny artifice is what gives “Eve” its energy. The world of Theater, as Mankiewicz envisions it, is a place where exaggerated style, sweeping gestures and impeccably sharpened zingers are a necessary defense system for people whom Addison characterizes as largely “emotional misfits and precocious children.” It is said of Davis’s Margo that she “compensates for underplaying onstage by overplaying reality.”This makes the characters incredibly entertaining to watch when they feel threatened. Even as a young teenager, I didn’t mistake “Eve” for a work of realism. But the New York culture it represented, in which everyone is a self-invention and ambition is oxygen, was the place I dreamed of escaping to someday. “We are a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we Theater folk,” says Addison, and for me you could also substitute “New Yorkers” for “Theater folk.” “We are the original displaced personalities.”Such pronouncements exude the blessed reassurance of belonging to an exclusive sect. And perhaps what I love most about “Eve” is its portrayal of the theater as a religion, a celebration of the divine mystery of what happens when a performance onstage catches fire.We never actually see the performance of a play in “Eve,” which is probably for the best, although the uncanny fire emanated by Davis’s Margo gives you some hint of what she might deliver onstage. Instead, we see people hypnotized by the glow of theater’s promise, and listen to their accounts of triumphs past. “Eve,” with its multiple narrators, is all about storytelling, too, and mythmaking.That is, after all, why Eve insinuates herself into Margo’s life and studies her like “a set of blueprints.” The theater-struck, self-effacing waif she presents herself to be may be an act, but the theater-struck part is real. She’s not faking it when, taken backstage to meet Margo for the first time, she pauses to gaze out at the empty theater. “You can breathe it, can’t you?” she says raptly, “like some magic perfume.”I think most of us who came to New York to “make it” in the second half of the 20th century shared some of the wonder and appetite of Eve. Most of us also discovered pretty quickly that we lacked the ruthlessness (never mind the talent) that propelled her to stardom. And the Manhattan of Mankiewicz’s movie, if it ever existed, had long ago vanished, like a shimmery Brigadoon.Certainly, that was the case when I arrived in the bankrupt, dirty, dressed-down New York of the late 1970s. But the blazing energy of aspiration I felt from the movie was still there — cruder, perhaps, but equally exciting. And more than a few of the people I befriended turned out to be “Eve”-ophiles, as well.We quote lines from it to one another. The most famous is Margo’s warning at the start of her party: “Fasten your seatbelt. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” But my favorite is Addison’s put-down of an overwrought Eve: “You’re too short for that gesture.”Since I rarely fraternize with theater people, my life as a critic has seldom delivered those urbane, exquisitely timed moments that might have come from “All About Eve.” So I cherish the few that do. Several years ago, for example, I attended a Park Avenue dinner party where I found myself seated next to a well-lubricated, bejeweled woman who was going on about how insufferable a recent, starry production of “Othello” had been, one that I had praised lavishly.Though we had been introduced earlier, she evidently hadn’t caught my name, because she ended her tirade by saying, presumably in reference to The Times’s rave, “What happened to Ben Brantley?” I responded by turning my place card to her. She didn’t miss a beat. “I admire you so much,” she said, with a tremolo.Best of all was the time, 12 years ago, when I reviewed Patti LuPone on Broadway as Mama Rose in a revival of “Gypsy.” I had been less than enthusiastic about her in the part in an earlier concert version. But she was fabulous this time around. In my review I wrote, “And yes, that quiet crunching sound you hear is me eating my hat.”The next day a big, beribboned, circular box arrived in my office. Inside was an immense chocolate cowboy hat. The note from LuPone read, “I hope you’re laughing.”Was she kidding? That was a gift — and a gesture — worthy of Margo Channing. And for a few enchanted moments, I belonged entirely to the radiant, impossible landscape of “All About Eve.” More
