Eve Arden: She Knew All the Answers
“When men get around me, they get allergic to wedding rings,” says Eve Arden’s Ida in Mildred Pierce (1945), a film that won Arden her only Academy Award nomination. Ida is a good egg, a steady, loyal friend to Joan Crawford’s Mildred. “You know, big sister type,” she says, in that inimitably sardonic, wised-up, swooping voice of hers, as she pours herself a stiff drink. “Good old Ida, you can talk it over with her man to man,” she says, of those men who treat her as if she isn’t a woman. Ida says that men are “stinkers” and “heels,” but she doesn’t sound all that mad about it. There isn’t a trace of self-pity in her tone, either. Arden never asks for sympathy. In fact, she never asks for anything. Some things seem to confuse, or bemuse, her on screen, but she was usually just playing that for laughs.
Born Eunice Quedens in 1908 in Mill Valley, California, she was a child of divorce raised mainly by her mother, who encouraged her to drop out of high school and go on the stage. She toured with a stock company and made her film debut in Song of Love (1929), a creaky musical where she played a romantic rival to the heroine. She went back to the stage, only making a brief, uncredited appearance in the Joan Crawford vehicle Dancing Lady (1933) as a blond actress who gets fired when she objects to her treatment in rehearsal. She speaks in a thick Southern accent but then drops it: “I told you that Southern accent would sound phony!” she tells her agent in her own voice. There could be no such artifice for her. Even when she later did Russian and French accents on screen, they were burlesque routines and not meant to be taken seriously.
Statuesque at 5 foot 8 inches, she joined the Ziegfeld Follies in 1934 and was encouraged to change her name. Spotting a perfume bottle in her dressing room with the name Evening in Paris and a cosmetics bottle labeled Elizabeth Arden, she came up with her new name: Eve Arden. There were a few more years on stage before she returned to the movies in 1937 to play a girl called Eve in Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door. If that movie makes a religion of wisecracking, then Arden is its high priestess, lounging around the Footlights Club for out-of-work actresses with a white cat named Henry draped around her shoulders like a stole.
Eve has lines under her eyes and looks a little tired; she always seems to be reclining. She’s mainly an audience for the other girls, waiting out their carbonated and inventive complaining until the moment when she can add her own topper and make the whole place explode with laughter. “There’s no such thing as a fifty dollar bill,” she insists, and of all the girls she gives Katharine Hepburn’s society dilettante the hardest time. “Is it against the rules of the house to discuss the classics?” asks Hepburn, to which Arden replies, “No-o-o, go right ahead…I won’t take my sleeping pill tonight.”
I’ve seen Stage Door countless times, and so I know what Arden will say and when she will say it and how, but when I try to re-create some of her line readings by saying them out loud, I am unable to get them right. I think it’s because she weights every single word heavily as her reading goes playfully up and down the vocal scale but her overall delivery is still somehow airy, both throbbing with thick sarcasm and strangely light. “Olga wants peace, peace at any price!” cries one of the girls, to which Arden sharply cracks, “Well, you can’t have peace without a war.” That “war” comes out as “wa-a-er,” as if she likes to pick one word to spread her thickest sarcasm over.
When Hepburn asks her what she’s done in the theater, Arden says, “Everything but burst out of a pie at a Rotarian banquet,” a weird line, but one that Arden plays against with her facial expression. She seems to be signaling that Eve has done things like that, but she’s too tired now for chorus girl hanky-panky with jerky businessmen. “Never heard of him,” she says, when Hamlet gets mentioned. “Oh certainly you must have heard of Hamlet,” says a dim Southern girl, to which Arden replies, “Well, I meet so many people,” in a “nice,” polite, nearly ghostly fashion. It’s a profound kind of wisecrack in the very original way that Arden delivers it. She was capable of hitting a pure note of comic exhaustion, like a faded memory of a past life that does not touch her anymore.
Arden never signed to one studio for long, and she made a surprising number of poverty row and independent productions in the 1940s and early ‘50s. She wrestled with Groucho Marx in At the Circus (1939), meeting his aggression with her own, but she often found herself dead last in the cast list. In a bit in Raoul Walsh’s Manpower (1941), the 33-year-old Arden says to pal Marlene Dietrich, “I’m 25, look 35 and feel 50,” and this pitiless line got at something essential about Arden, because there isn’t much difference between her at age 30 or 50 or 70. Her type stays the same no matter what her age, a woman who is past it all and unimpressed and just making the best of things.
Weary of typecasting as sarcastic secretaries and good sports, Arden returned to the stage for a bit but soon went back to support glamour girls like Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (1944) and Ava Gardner in One Touch of Venus (1948), which is really a film about Arden and her deepening existential dilemma as she looks at gorgeous Ava and looks at herself and wonders, “Why am I me, and why is she that?” Arden flirted with prettiness whenever she opened her blue eyes wide, but she usually did this only for parody purposes. She seems uncomfortable as a promiscuous actress in The Voice of the Turtle(1947), as if she knew that her natural role on screen was to patiently listen to the Joan Crawfords of this world and gently mock their emotional grandiloquence from the sidelines.
After years of playing support, Arden finally won a star vehicle of her own, first on radio and then on television, as schoolteacher Connie Brooks in Our Miss Brooks, which ran through most of the 1950s. Arden was consistently, tirelessly inventive in that long-running series, mastering the art and timing of situation comedy and providing a template for later players. In the twenty or so minutes of each Our Miss Brooks episode, Arden generally manages to get at least three to four laughs. The writing for that show was usually good or at least serviceable, and if it was ever a little less than that, Arden would still find her laughs in between the lines with little looks and reactions of distaste, disgust or dismayed confusion. She could get a laugh just by smoothing down her skirt, or wincing slightly.
She returned to the screen in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), wearing some grey in her hair as James Stewart’s loyal, kindly and largely unpaid secretary, a woman who will pour some more coffee for you in the middle of the night. It might do to say that Arden’s film characters are stoic or resigned, but that’s not quite it. There’s something else about them, something unclear but suggestive. There’s something even a little mysterious and unplaceable about Eve Arden on screen, as if she isn’t giving too much of herself away for us. She does her job, like her characters do, and we get to enjoy the sound of her helplessly skeptical voice, which enlivened many movies less classic than Stage Door, Mildred Pierce and Anatomy of a Murder, but we don’t ever really get the real her and how she actually feels. She and her characters have retreated somewhere private where they cannot be reached. Maybe that’s why she had such a long career, because audiences always wanted more of her.
She appeared on television a lot as an older woman, dryly reacting to the wacky Kaye Ballard in another series, The Mothers-In-Law, and matching her sour comic timing with Bea Arthur in an episode of Maude. She was still at school as the principal in Grease ( 1978), as if Connie Brooks had climbed up the ladder but still had to put up with inane students and low-level jokes. One of her last credits was as the Wicked Stepmother in Cinderella for Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre series in 1985. Rather satisfyingly, the 77-year-old Arden is asked to gloat over treating the pretty young Jennifer Beals “like dirt” because she and her daughters have not been as well-favored by dissembling nature.
Arden married twice, the second time happily to actor Brooks West, and she raised four children, three of whom were adopted. After her death in 1990, her long-time publicist and manager Glenn Rose said, “She kept being cast as this sarcastic, acid-tongued lady with the quick retort and put-down. In real life, Eve would have never put anyone down. She wasn’t that kind of person.“
by Dan Callahan