Birdie
Birdie, an old vaudevillian, is Margo’s dresser, maid and general factotum. Show business to the core—‘conceived during a split week in Walla Walla and born in a carnival riot’—unlike Eve, she is ‘fiercely loyal’ to Margo. This includes telling her the truth, and deflating Margo’s grandiose overblown behaviour. When Margo introduces her ‘good friend and companion, Miss Birdie Coonan’ to Eve, Birdie’s response is
‘Oh, brother!’. Her commentary on Eve’s rendering of her story enforces the
audience’s scepticism that the opening sequence has aroused. Birdie does
something that an actor never would: she walks across the ‘stage’ while Eve is
‘performing’, briefly breaking the spell, and distracting Margo, Karen and Lloyd, Eve’s ‘audience’. Once the story is finished, Birdie’s response, ‘What a story. Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end’ points out what the others discover later—it is fiction, it is melodramatic and unbelievable.
Birdie watches Eve in a way that suggests she sees her more clearly than the others do. As Eve ingratiates herself further into Margo’s life, Birdie says less, but that is less necessary once Margo begins to look at Eve differently. Birdie disappears from the film after the party scene. As Margo drunkenly sits beside the pianist, Birdie
walks through the room, bringing her a coffee. ‘Margo takes the onion out of her
martini, drops it into the coffee and waves Birdie away. Birdie goes’, the script tells
us.
• Why is Birdie absent from the film from now on? Is she still in Margo’s life? If
so, why isn’t she in any other scenes?
• Is the party scene the low point in the film for Margo?
• If Mankiewicz is interested in the choices people
characters making choices, good or bad?
VATE INSIDE STORIES 2014—ALL ABOUT EVE
KEY QUOTES: BIRDIE COONAN
• "I haven't got a union. I'm slave labor."
• "she's studyin' you, like you was a play or a book or a set of blueprints. How
you walk, talk, eat, think, sleep."
• "When she gets like this... all of a sudden she's playin' Hamlet's mother"
• "I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings, kid. It's just my way of talkin'"
• "I closed the first half for eleven years an' you know it!"
• "...next to a tenor, a wardrobe woman is the touchiest thing in show business"