Summary
We see rehearsals for Lloyd’s play and hear Karen narrate, “Lloyd never got around to asking me whether it was alright with me for Eve to play Cora.” Karen sits in the audience as Eve rehearses her part onstage, and tells us that Bill didn’t want to direct the play with Eve in it at first, but eventually came around to doing it. We see Lloyd and Bill fighting about Eve as Karen narrates, “Margo never came to rehearsal. Too much to do around the house, she said.” Bill storms offstage and Eve runs after him to bring him back onstage. Karen narrates, “I never knew Lloyd to meddle as much with Bill’s directing, as far as it affected Eve, that is.” Karen then tells us that she stopped coming to rehearsals after a certain point and the scene shifts and we see her lying in bed, as her voiceover narrates, “I felt helpless. That helplessness you feel when you have no talent to offer outside of loving your husband.” She laments the fact that she is not novel to Lloyd, that he already knows everything about her.
The phone rings in Karen’s room, which startles her. She picks it up and it’s a woman who lives across the hall from Eve who wants to talk to Lloyd, and tells Karen that Eve is hysterical and has been crying all night in her room, but refuses to see a doctor. Lloyd wakes up and turns on the light as Karen asks if Eve asked the girl to call. The girl says Eve didn’t ask, but that she’s seen Eve with Lloyd and assumed they must be good friends, so thought she’d call. Lloyd picks up the phone and asks where Eve is. When Eve’s neighbor tells him that she’s in her room, he assures her that he’ll be right over. Karen looks at him curiously as he hangs up. As we see the neighbor hang up the phone in their apartment building, she walks towards the stairs where Eve is sitting, smirking and not crying or inconsolable at all. The girls smile at each other, put their arms around one another and go upstairs.
We see a theater in New Haven, where Lloyd’s new play is being performed, as Addison narrates in voiceover, “To the theater world, New Haven, Connecticut is a short stretch of sidewalk between the Shubert Theater and the Taft Hotel…it is here that managers have what are called out of town openings, which are openings for New Yorkers who want to go out of town.” We see Eve and Addison arriving at the theater in New Haven. They relish the beautiful day and Eve’s starring debut the following day. Eve tells Addison that she thought she would be nervous, but she is sure that she will succeed. The scene shifts to the hotel at which they’re staying. As Eve opens the door to her room, she delights in the thought of her imminent stardom. She tells Addison she’s going to sleep and he marvels at her ability to sleep on such a momentous occasion—“the mark of a true killer.” Eve stops him, wanting to know what he means, but he brushes it off with a joke. She invites him into her room.
Addison notes how nice her hotel room is. Fabian is paying for it on Lloyd’s insistence, she tells him. After she offers Addison a drink, she tells him that she doesn’t like to drink, but that Lloyd drinks after they finish work, so he set up a bar in her room. Eve then tells him that she and Lloyd are having guests up to her room after the show that evening, and Eve’s intimacy with Lloyd surprises Addison. When Addison begins to wonder why Karen isn’t in New Haven for the opening, Eve interrupts him to tell him that Lloyd is leaving Karen to marry her. “Lloyd loves me. I love Lloyd,” Eve tells him, but Addison is suspicious and accuses Eve of loving him for his success and his career. Eve becomes overcome with excitement at the thought of marrying Lloyd; “there’s no telling how far we can go,” she says dreamily. When she tells Addison that he’s the only one who knows about it other than Lloyd and her, he suggests that Karen seems to know, but Eve insists that she doesn’t, and that Lloyd woke her up at 3 o’clock at her apartment the other night to profess his love and tell her that he’d left Karen.
“We sat and talked until it was light,” she tells Addison. Eve wants him to be excited for her, but he is disturbed, and asks Eve what she takes him for, and if she’s mistaken him for one of the other people she’s duped. “I’m Addison DeWitt. I’m nobody’s fool, least of all yours,” he says. Eve tells him that she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but he remains firm. Frustrated and anxious, she insists that she must nap, but Addison says, “It’s important that we talk, killer to killer…Lloyd may leave Karen, but he will not leave Karen for you.” Eve is angry and asks him what he means, so Addison clarifies even further that he does not consent to Eve marrying Lloyd, and after tonight, he tells her, “you belong to me.” Eve cannot believe what Addison is saying, and when she begins to laugh at Addison’s insinuation that they are meant to be together, he slaps her viciously. She orders him to leave, and goes to pick up the phone, but he tells her not to. When she instinctively follows his orders, he knows he still has a strong influence over her.
Approaching her, Addison reveals all that he knows about her: “To begin with, your name is not Eve Harrington. It’s Gertrude Slescynski.” He then reveals that he has heard from her parents, who haven’t heard from her in three years, and that he knows that she had an affair with her boss at the brewery where she worked, and was paid $500 to leave town, which she used to get to New York. Horrified at all of the secrets Addison knows, Eve runs from the room, slamming the door behind her. Addison follows her into the room, where she is sobbing. “There was no Eddie, no pilot. You’ve never been married. That was not only a lie, it was an insult to dead heroes and the women who loved them.” Sobbing, Eve tells him that she had to tell Margo something in order to get Margo to like her. “She liked and trusted you. You paid her back by trying to take Bill away,” Addison snarls at her, which Eve vehemently denies. “I was there!” Addison snaps at her, before revealing that he also knows that she blackmailed Karen for the part in the new play. Addison then reveals that he just had lunch with Karen that afternoon, who told him what happened. Standing, Addison wonders why he wants Eve so badly, and tells her, “You’re an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common. Also a contempt for humanity, an inability to love and be loved. Insatiable ambition…and talent. We deserve each other.” Before leaving, Addison gets Eve to admit that she “belongs” to him. As he walks out, she sits up and says that she cannot go onstage that night. “You’ll give the performance of your life,” Addison says, then goes.
The scene shifts back to the moment from the beginning of the film in which Eve is receiving and claiming the Sarah Siddons award. In voiceover, Addison says, “She gave the performance of her life, and it was a night to remember, that night.” Eve steps up to the podium to collect her award and makes a speech. She delivers a modest and serious speech, dedicating it “to my friends in the theater, and the theater itself, which has given me all that I have.” She then thanks Fabian, Karen, Margo, Bill, and Lloyd, who each look at her contemptuously. Addison watches her from his seat, as she announces her departure to go to Hollywood to make a movie and concludes her speech to thunderous applause. Lloyd and Karen kiss, as Fabian invites them over for a party. Karen congratulates Eve brusquely, as Addison puts her coat over her shoulders. Margo then approaches her and says, “Nice speech, Eve. But I wouldn’t worry too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.” Eve turns to Addison and tells him that she doesn’t want to go to Fabian’s party, and he eventually agrees to go in her place.
The scene shifts and we see Addison dropping Eve off at their apartment. Eve goes upstairs and lets herself in, turning on some lights and going into the living room to pour herself a drink. On a nearby chair, a girl is asleep, but Eve doesn’t realize until after she’s poured her drink. “Who are you!” she exclaims, seeing the girl, and the girl tells her that she snuck in when the maid wasn’t looking, but urges her not to call the police, as she didn’t steal anything. When Eve asks her what she wants, the girl tells her she was just looking around doing some research for her report for the Eve Harrington club at her school in Brooklyn. Eve lights a cigarette, as the girl offers to clean up the drink that Eve spilled when she saw her. When Eve asks how the girl will get home, she assures her that she doesn’t care if she never gets home. They are interrupted by the buzzer, and Eve encourages the girl to answer it. It’s Addison and when he asks who she is, the girl simply tells him that Eve is resting. Addison hands the Sarah Siddons award over to the girl, telling her to give it to Eve, who left it in the taxi. The girl introduces herself as Phoebe, and Addison asks if she wants that award someday. “More than anything in the world,” she tells him. Addison urges her to ask Eve how to get one, then leaves. Eve calls to Phoebe to ask who it was, and Phoebe tells her it was the cab driver, with the award. Eve asks Phoebe to pack it, and the girl goes into Eve’s room, tries on Eve’s jacket covetously, picks up her award, looks at herself in the mirror, and bows at her reflection.
Analysis
After Margo’s excitement about pursuing the married life and leaving the theater behind, this section of the film presents a contrastingly helpless view of marriage, through Karen’s frustrations with her life as the playwright’s wife. We see her lying in bed, stricken with the realization that she “felt helpless. That helplessness you feel when you have no talent to offer outside of loving your husband.” In the previous scene, Margo left the theater feeling a relief at not having to rely on her talents, but instead pursuing a “real” life as a wife. Karen, on the other hand, feels powerless in her role as a wife to an artist. Without “talent,” Karen is rendered helpless, unable to know quite what she has to offer to the artistic process. She thinks to herself, “Everything Lloyd loved about me, he’d gotten used to long ago.” Karen finds herself at odds with exactly what Margo so struggled against: novelty. Margo resented Eve precisely because she was younger and threatened to take her place. As a novel person on the scene, Eve presented a great threat. Now, Karen too contends with Eve’s novelty, her youth and her unknownness. Not only that, but Eve is aiming to seduce her husband, and she feels powerless to stop it. For the first time, Karen fully understands the marginalization that Margo faced.
Eve only gets more and more malevolent in this part of the film. Her performance in the ladies' room at the Cub Room was enough to lose the audience’s trust, and she only continues her project of deceit in this final section of the film. Eve is a shifty villain, because for so much of the film she seemed like a meek and modest girl. After she gets a dose of power and acclaim, however, she becomes a monster. We saw how she snarled at Karen and threatened her with bad press. Now, we see her disingenuousness, when she enlists her neighbor to call the Richards’ apartment and get Lloyd to come over and check on her. The neighbor tells the Richards that Eve is inconsolable and in need of a doctor, but when she hangs up we see that this isn’t the case at all. In fact, Eve is smirking and watching the whole thing unfold in her favor. She is a conniving character, immoral and remorseless, who can say one thing and do another.
Even Addison DeWitt, the man who so dutifully helped Eve go ahead with her scheme to dethrone Margo Channing, begins to notice just how ruthless the young actress is, and wonder if she’s going a bit far. When he escorts her to her hotel room in New Haven, she tells him she is going to take a nap before her big debut. He glibly calls her ability to relax and sleep in anticipation for such a night “the mark of a true killer,” which startles and offends her. Then, when she announces to him that Lloyd is leaving Karen for her, he calls her out for pursuing Lloyd for his status as a successful playwright, an opportunistic and careerist move; “Lloyd is commercially the most successful playwright in America,” he retorts to Eve’s claims that she loves Lloyd. Here, even the man who helped to consolidate Eve’s reputation and fame sees through her act, and recognizes her for what she is, a “climber” and a remorseless “killer.” It takes one to know one, of course, and Addison is just as conniving and coercive as Eve, as when he reveals to Eve that he will not allow her to marry Lloyd, because she “belongs” to him. When Eve dares to laugh at Addison’s presumptions, he slaps her and warns her never to laugh at him. Theirs is a strange partnership, mean-spirited and codependent, and they struggle to parse out their own distinctive desires from one another. Eve’s career is dependent on Addison’s good press, and in putting her reputation in his hands, she has made a deal with a particularly smug devil. Because of this, they are the perfect match, each completely cut off from reality and empathy, in a violent tug-of-war that has only to do with their strategic professional ambitions, and nothing to do with their sense of ethics or of their real desires.
Perhaps the most shocking revelation of the film is Addison’s admission that he knows that Eve has lied about nearly every element of her life and was run out of town when she had an affair with her boss at a brewery. It is in this moment that we first see the veil lifted on Eve’s mysterious temperament and unpredictable performance. Stripped of her mask, Eve—otherwise known as “Gertrude”—is a puddle on the floor. Throughout she has been a vaguely sweet and almost impenetrably calm character, with flashes of bad temper and malice. With Addison’s revelation, she is rendered completely inconsolable, slamming doors and throwing herself on the bed, distraught and sobbing. For the first time in the film, Eve’s defenses fall, the act disappears, and she is left naked and vulnerable, an opportunistic woman with a penchant for lying, who became the victim of a bad choice and a compulsion to social climb. The title becomes an ironic one as we the viewer realize that we never knew “all about Eve,” at all. In fact, there never was an Eve to know. Eve was an illusion, meant to cover up the pain of a difficult life.
All About Eve is a masterclass in screenwriting, acting, and direction. Each scene unfurls with suspense and excitement, and the way it switches perspectives and narrators creates a mysterious tone. One gets the sense that there is always something hidden, an element of theater that has yet to be revealed, which draws the viewer in and fully entwines them in the world of the film, an unusual rarefied world, that of the theater. Mankiewicz’s script is witty and flowery, intelligent and sharp, at turns beautiful and bitchy, reflecting the emotional vacillations that its characters go through with an unhinged facility. The performances of the stars, Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Gary Merrill, and Celeste Holm, are all distinct and nuanced, which helps to clarify the complex and ever-changing emotional journey of the film. It is an astounding portrait of women set against one another under patriarchal structures, and a searing satire of the lengths to which some people go and the lives they will sacrifice in pursuit of their own fame and glory.
