A Pink Saturday with Addison DeWitt

"San Francisco. An oasis of civilization in the California desert. Tell me, do you share my high opinion of San Francisco?"
—Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) in "All about Eve"

By the time Pink Saturday rolled around, I'd been Proud enough for one year. So instead of navigating the crowds at Castro and Market, I fled in the opposite direction, to Union Square, where Film Night in the Park hosted a screening of "All about Eve." And even though I felt like a Bad Gay for ditching my people's biggest annual celebration, what better way to mark the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots than by watching perhaps the bitchiest movie ever made? (The second bitchiest is probably "Laura"—but then I'm the sort of old soul known to fantasize about a cage match between Addison DeWitt and Waldo Lydecker.)

As we waited for the movie to begin, my friend Michael pointed out that the men in "All about Eve" aren't especially well-cast: Gary Merrill (who plays the director) is unremarkable, and Hugh Marlowe (the playwright) is downright wooden. Trouble is, the parts aren't that interesting to begin with. The film's screenwriter, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, lavishes his best lines on his female leads, and the men remain more or less incidental to the plot. Margo Channing (Bette Davis) may avow the importance of men in the movie's most famous speech ("Nothing's any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed, and there he is; without that, you're not a woman"), but it's all lip service.

Or nearly all. The one male character who manages to hold Mankiewicz's attention is Addison DeWitt (George Sanders, who won an Oscar for the role). Addison shows no sexual interest in Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) or in any other woman on screen, because he only understands male-female dynamics in terms of power.

He's also the only character who instantly sees through Eve's lies about her past in San Francisco. "All about Eve" plays on the old clichés about the West as a place where anyone can reimagine or reinvent themselves, often for the worse: Los Angeles is where ingenues become starlets and directors become hacks, while San Francisco is the preferred Western outpost for confirmed bachelors like Addison. Note, in the film's climactic scene, how savagely he mocks Eve's claim that she found new purpose in the City by the Bay: "You've never been to San Francisco," he says with contempt, using Eve's careless lie as leverage to claim power over her career.

As I watched that scene in Union Square on Saturday night, curled up under a blanket with a nice fellow, I thought about all of the Addisons  living in New York and San Francisco in the years before Stonewall. Not all of them were "gay" in the modern sense, in part because today's identity politics would have seemed so alien to many of them. Still, they were the childless gadflies who mercilessly critiqued the complacencies of mainstream heterosexuality, and as such they helped create a space in which the term "sexual identity" could eventually become the province of individuals rather than of entire societies. Men such as these were revolutionaries precisely because they were alone. And on an evening when thousands converged in the Castro to participate in an increasingly commoditized Pride celebration, I was happy to spend a few hours paying my respects to men like Addison—unlikely heroes audacious enough to care for nothing more than a natty suit, a well-turned phrase, and a solitary seat by the bar.
 
Topics: Gay , Gay politics , Gay culture , Gay events , Gay Pride , SF Gay Pride , Pride 2008 , SF Pride , Addison DeWitt , All about Eve , Stonewall