All About “All About Eve”

by Staggs, Sam

  But to quote Max Fabian in the film, “This is for lawyers to talk about.” The legalities outlined here—who gets how much money and for what, whose name goes above the title, below it, and whose name gets left out—are standard points in every Hollywood contract, and have been for the better part of a century. Since they are haggled over so fiercely and often generate displeasure that lasts for years, they are matters of some interest in tracing the genesis of any film. Seen in the wider context of filmmaking, however, the deal that Mary Orr struck with 20th Century-Fox was sweeter than it might have been.

  Is Mary Orr justified in claiming that Mankiewicz somehow sought to suppress her name in connection with All About Eve? It seems unlikely that he did. Even if he had tried, he could not have buried the fact that his screenplay was based on her story. Not surprisingly, Orr is restrained in her admiration for the film. Few writers like the changes another writer makes in adapting their work.

  Mankiewicz and Orr, who never met, didn’t like each other. More accurately, neither one liked the idea of the other. Her comments to me implied a certain disgruntlement that All About Eve is so much more famous than “The Wisdom of Eve.”

  In 1989, at the age of eighty, Mankiewicz discussed his career with Peter Stone, himself a screenwriter. Their conversation appeared in the August 1989 issue of Interview, under the title “All About Joe.” That piece, which reads like a catalogue of slights to Mankiewicz during his sixty-year career, prompted the interviewer to remark, near the end of their talk, “Joe, throughout our entire conversation, I hear one thing over and over: anger.” Mankiewicz replied, “I am angry—very angry,” and explained that “I’ve never been recognized by my own country for my body of work. All over the world, but not in my own country.”

  Surely his grievance was misplaced, for Mankiewicz has often been ranked as one of this country’s most important filmmakers, along with Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Ford, William Wyler—in short, he belongs to the Hollywood pantheon. What’s more surprising, however, is what Mankiewicz had to say in that interview about the real Eve, Elisabeth Bergner’s “terrible girl,” and what he implied about Orr, creator of the fictional Eve:

  “About three years ago they presented me with the Lion d’Or at the Venice Film Festival. And I got this telephone call from an absolutely desperate-sounding woman. She said, ‘Mr. Mankiewicz, this is Eve.’ I said, ‘Eve?’ She said, ‘Yes, the Eve you wrote the movie about. I was the girl who stood outside the theatre.’ I said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’”

  “You didn’t believe her at this point?” asked Stone.

  “Not a word. So she says, ‘I know you don’t believe me, so I’m going to send you something.’ Sure enough, she sent me a copy of this autobiography by Elisabeth Bergner, the great German actress. She wrote about a play she had done in New York, The Two Mrs. Carrolls. This girl, wearing red stockings [sic], was there outside the theatre every single night of the run. Bergner tells this story to a group of people, one of whom was a shy, quiet woman who never opened her mouth. A couple of months later, Bergner picked up a magazine, and to her absolute amazement, she read the whole story. And the author of this magazine story was that woman who seemed so shy: Mary Orr.”

  “The woman who never opened her mouth, just listened,” said Stone.

  “As Bergner told the story, which was filled with many of the incidents that were also in the picture.”

  “So the girl on the phone really was Eve.”

  “Exactly. Hollywood bought the story, it became All About Eve, and Mary Orr made her fortune out of this. The only people who did not make anything were Eve and Elisabeth Bergner. And me … except for my salary.”

  “And two Academy Awards,” Stone pointed out.

  “I earned them.”

  At the time of this interview Mankiewicz was old and bitter. But age, and feeling undervalued, don’t really explain his claim that Mary Orr “made a fortune” from 20th Century-Fox. Even if he didn’t know the exact amount she was paid for the rights to her story—and it’s likely he didn’t—he surely knew that magazine stories sold to Hollywood have rarely made a fortune for their writers.

  In the interview, Mankiewicz seems to feel slighted that he, along with Eve’s prototype, and Elisabeth Bergner as well, didn’t get a cut of Mary Orr’s “fortune”: The only people who did not make anything were Eve and Elisabeth Bergner. And me … except for my salary.

  Though Mankiewicz perhaps didn’t realize it, he was quoting Elisabeth Bergner almost verbatim in the italicized lines above. Her book, wittily titled Bewundert Viel und Viel Gescholten—“Greatly Admired and Greatly Scolded”—devotes five pages to “the terrible girl,” although Bergner never employs that epithet in print. Bergner, in her eighties when the book was published, remembered certain details differently from Mary Orr. Bergner got the story title wrong, the amount of time necessary for publication, and at some point the girl had stopped wearing a red coat and put on red stockings instead. In general, however, Bergner’s version follows the one that Orr told me.

  Here’s how Bergner concludes her five-page anecdote about the would-be usurper:

  “But I’m telling this story now only because Reggie Denham asked about The Girl With Red Stockings. He didn’t know the outcome of the story which I’ve just told the reader.… Mary Orr was there and heard the story for the first time.

  “A few weeks later in New York, I was at the hairdresser’s when I picked up a magazine. There was this whole story printed under the title ‘Girl With Red Stockings.’ Without the names, of course. It was about the great actress and the girl who always stood outside the stage door and who told big lies in order to break into the theatre.

  “And the author of this magazine story was Mary Orr, the shy, quiet girl who had listened to my story that night.… Hollywood bought the story for Bette Davis, added some love intrigue, and it became the film All About Eve. This film became an international success and eventually a Broadway musical as well. And Mary Orr and all the parties concerned grew very rich from it. The only ones who didn’t earn anything from it were the real participants: the girl, my husband, and I.” (Emphasis added.)

  The peculiar, rankling relationship of Mankiewicz and Mary Orr resembles the struggle of an estranged couple for custody of an only child. That child is none other than Eve Harrington.

  * * *

  A few years after her phone call to Joe Mankiewicz, “Eve” made a call to a New York journalist named Harry Haun and poured out her story to him.

  Haun sounded both amused and perplexed as he told me about “Eve” one bright, sunny morning in his apartment on Riverside Drive in New York. He is a burly native Texan who for many years has been a journalist specializing in celebrity profiles. Among those he has interviewed are Celeste Holm and Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

  One day in the early 1990s, four decades after All About Eve was made, Haun answered his phone at the New York Daily News and heard an energetic voice telling him that she was the real Eve. Someone had sent her a copy of Haun’s article on the movie in Films in Review for March/April 1991.

  The caller was Miss X, who told Haun her real name: Martina Lawrence. But Haun already knew a Martina Lawrence: that’s the name of one of the twin sisters Elisabeth Bergner played in the 1939 British film Stolen Life. (The other twin was called Sylvina Lawrence. By the time Bette Davis starred in the Hollywood remake in 1946, the twins had become Kate and Patricia Bosworth.)

  Haun, considering the possibilities, set up a tea party so that Miss Lawrence could at last tell her version of the story. He also invited Mary Orr. If Joseph Mankiewicz hadn’t been infirm, Haun might have persuaded him to complete the family circle: Eve’s “parents” and their unholy offspring.

  Harry Haun’s original plan was a luncheon, but Mary Orr demurred. She told him, “I don’t want to suffer through lunch. I’ll come if you make it tea.” He chose the upstairs at Sardi’s because it’s uncrowded in the afternoon.
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  Haun recalls that “the girls eyed each other curiously, suspiciously.” Mary Orr remembers that “Martina and Harry did all the talking. I sat and listened.”

  What did they discuss?

  “At first, she wanted Harry to help her write her side of the story. Then she wanted me to rewrite the story from her point of view. I said, ‘I have no interest in doing that.’ I got the feeling she was desperate to find someone to help her. At the end of tea I excused myself. You see, I had nothing to say to her. I had satisfied my curiosity to see her after all those years.”

  For indeed, Mary Orr and Martina Lawrence had met before. It was after “The Wisdom of Eve” appeared in Cosmopolitan in 1946, but before All About Eve was filmed.

  “She came to my home one day, very angry,” Mary Orr recalls. “We lived on Central Park South then, in an apartment on the second floor. Somehow this girl got past the doorman and made her way upstairs. I suppose she had found my name in the phone book. She had discovered that issue of Cosmopolitan in a stack of old magazines at a dentist’s office.

  “Now, this was a couple of years after it was published. She rang my bell and when I answered she pushed in past me. She was livid. I had no idea why she had come, but she threatened to sue me. She had recognized herself in the story but, the statute of limitations having expired, she never found a lawyer who would take the case.

  “She lives in Venice, I believe. One of the things she said the day she broke into my apartment was, ‘You owe me a fare to Italy.’ And now, nearly a half-century later, she was in New York on a visit, trying to find somebody to write her story. That story—oh my, she thinks it’s her claim to fame, even though it was detrimental to her.”

  In his article for Films in Review, Harry Haun added a postscript about Martina Lawrence: “A former librarian who lives in Venice and works in a bookstore there … she insists she was never the premeditated plotter Mankiewicz made her out to be—that her skullduggery only existed in the mind of Elisabeth Bergner.”

  Mary Orr’s characterization of Martina Lawrence, and Harry Haun’s, left me unsettled. I felt as though I had been reading Henry James at his most ambiguous. Indeed, the donnée of this story was right out of James: a forlorn little American selling books in Venice for fifty years, trying in vain to make someone believe her. Martina Lawrence might have materialized from The Wings of the Dove or The Aspern Papers.

  Did she, I wondered, represent innocence betrayed, or evil understated?

  What if she was really just an ingenue who wanted a part in a play? Suppose Elisabeth Bergner projected wickedness onto a young girl’s innocent admiration? Bergner was a star. She could boost reputations, or destroy them. What if the unreciprocated advances of an aging actress had ruined the future of a naive girl in a little red coat (or was it red stockings?) who stood near the stage door night after night just to catch sight of her idol? And suppose this girl was not terrible at all. Suppose she was merely a fan—like the rest of us.

  Or just the opposite. Suppose the girl was a Machiavellianess who would stop at nothing. In that case, “The Wisdom of Eve” merely suggests all she’s capable of.

  That version would play like this: After a baroque flirtation with the vulnerable, middle-aged, émigrée actress, the caressing little serpent coiled around her victim, injecting malice with each caress. She would do anything at all for a part in a play. She would even, like a female Iago, turn her mentor’s “virtue into pitch.”

  Eventually I met Martina Lawrence face to face, but only at the eleventh hour. And rather than solve the mystery, she deepened it. But that conundrum comes later. For now, the one sure thing is this: If she hadn’t existed, neither Mary Orr nor Joe Mankiewicz could have imagined her quite so well.

  Chapter 4

  Zanuck, Zanuck, Zanuck

  In the spring of 1950 Joe Mankiewicz received his first two Oscars—Best Director and Best Screenplay—for A Letter to Three Wives. By that time 20th Century-Fox, where Mankiewicz was under contract as a writer-director, had optioned Mary Orr’s story. A year earlier this story had been given to Mankiewicz, who read it and apparently knew from the start that here, in a few pages, was the embryo of the picture he wanted to make about the theatre.

  On April 29, 1949, Mankiewicz had written a memo to Darryl F. Zanuck, production chief of the studio. The memo recommended that Fox exercise its option on “The Wisdom of Eve.” Mankiewicz also noted in his memo to Zanuck that the story “fits in with an original idea [of mine] and can be combined. Superb starring role for [Fox star] Susan Hayward.”

  The deal with Mary Orr and her agent was soon made, but Mankiewicz had little time to think about how he would treat the material, for he had just finished directing House of Strangers with Edward G. Robinson and Susan Hayward. With an opening date of July 1, Mankiewicz still had to supervise post-production work on the film.

  Much more demanding was his next assignment, No Way Out, a tense racial drama starring Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell, and Sidney Poitier. During the early summer he and Lesser Samuels collaborated on the screenplay for this movie, which was shot from October 28 through December 20. (The picture was not released, however, until August 1950.)

  Between completing the screenplay of No Way Out and the start of production, Mankiewicz in the summer and early fall of 1949 also wrote the treatment of the movie that would become All About Eve. To do so, he left home and sought the relative isolation of the San Ysidro Guest Ranch near Santa Barbara. There he followed his habit of writing at night: “I was alone and I would write from about eight P.M. until two or three in the morning, while listening to the radio. Next day I would play tennis and go for long walks, then start back to work after dark.”

  Like many writers of the time, especially male writers, Mankiewicz never learned to type. As the Hollywood Reporter once phrased it, he “penned his scripts in longhand.” From these manuscripts his secretary, Adelaide Wallace, would make typescripts with impeccable margins and faultless spelling.

  Mankiewicz said later that he worked on the treatment for three months, and the rough draft of the screenplay for six weeks. The treatment—which is a synopsis or detailed plot outline—was called Best Performance, Mankiewicz’s original title for All About Eve. It ran to eighty-two pages, double-spaced.

  It is impossible to reconstruct a complete and precise chronology of Eve’s evolution from story, to treatment, to script, and finally to completed film. But the copy of Mankiewicz’s treatment that Zanuck used to write his suggested revisions is dated September 26, 1949. This indicates that Mankiewicz worked on his treatment during the summer and early fall of 1949, spending, as he recalled later, three months on it.

  He would not, of course, have worked on treatment and script simultaneously. It seems likely, therefore, that with so many projects underway, Mankiewicz waited until he had finished shooting No Way Out in late December of 1949 before he began transforming his Best Performance treatment into the actual script that would later be renamed All About Eve. Zanuck was eager to see it.

  Darryl Zanuck’s biographer, Mel Gussow, describes the producer’s collaboration with Mankiewicz as one of “mutual trust with a healthy degree of mutual suspicion … they worked superbly together. Each honestly admired the other. Zanuck knew that there was no one better with dialogue on the lot and Mankiewicz knew that his outspoken comedies could not be made except in such an atmosphere of freedom as provided by Zanuck.”

  Zanuck produced three of the films Mankiewicz directed at Fox: No Way Out, All About Eve, and People Will Talk. Their actual collaboration, however, was more intricate than the above statistic indicates, for Zanuck, as studio production chief, was to some extent de facto producer of every film done on the lot. He and Mankiewicz retained their wary cordiality until 1963, when Zanuck fired Mankiewicz as director of Cleopatra and recut that ill-fated epic. (“He rechopped the picture,” said Mankiewicz.)

  Zanuck ran the show at Fox. He was responsible for all A product (as opposed to cut-rate B
pictures), in addition to which he personally produced one or two films a year. Naturally, he reported to the president of the company and the board of directors, most of whom were in New York, but generally they left the day-by-day business of making the movies up to him.

  Reading Mankiewicz’s treatment of Best Performance, Zanuck followed his custom of making notes in pencil throughout the text and inside the back cover. At one point he underlined a phrase in Addison DeWitt’s voice-over narration: “Eve … but more of Eve, later. All about Eve, in fact.” The phrase Zanuck underlined was “all about Eve,” which may have been the first dawning of the new title. At any rate, sometime during January 1950 the project acquired its new name.

  Elsewhere in the pages of Mankiewicz’s initial treatment, Zanuck expressed his concern about premature revelation of Eve’s villainy to the audience. “Beware of Birdie’s jealousy as it will tip off that Eve is a heel,” he wrote. Where Eve makes a sexual overture to Bill Sampson in her dressing room and kisses him, Zanuck’s reaction was: “This is all wrong. She is too clever to jump in so quickly.” The kiss was eliminated, but the overture stayed. Several long speeches were reduced to a few lines, with Zanuck’s marginal note, “This should cover it all.” There were professorial admonitions to “Make clear. This can be confusing.” Perhaps anticipating audience incredulity and wondering if viewers would suspend disbelief, Zanuck reacted to Karen’s draining the gas tank of the Richards’ car to make Margo miss her performance with: “This is difficult to swallow.” It stayed in, and it’s still a bit difficult to swallow.

  A major concern to the producer was a series of scenes, in the treatment, that depicted Eve’s calculated designs on Lloyd Richards. Zanuck wanted to cut the entire four pages that showed Eve and Lloyd spending time together in little cafés on side streets, in Lloyd’s apartment with Karen present and later without Karen, in Eve’s furnished room, and Lloyd going to see Eve late at night after a phone call from a friend of Eve’s. Zanuck noted: “Dull, obvious, dirty.… This is wrong.… All relationships with Eve and Lloyd [should be] played offstage by suggestion.… We get it by one brief scene at rehearsal.” Most of the superfluous material was deleted.