All About “All About Eve” (6 page)

It was lucky for Mary Orr that a second, prime-time broadcast was beamed all the way to California, for someone in Hollywood had the radio on that January night. And they liked what they heard.

Three days later, on Monday, NBC called Mary Orr at her apartment to give her the news. 20th Century-Fox had telephoned with a movie offer. What did she think of $5,000 for all rights to her original story and to this new play based on it?

In 1949, $5,000 was almost enough to live on for a year, even in New York. Even with hospital bills. And even after NBC deducted its percentage, which came to $750.

Mary Orr, like many people in the arts, didn’t know how to strike the best deals for herself. Having left the agent who said, “You’ll never get this published in any magazine,” Orr had handled her own literary affairs for a time before meeting Marcella Powers, a young agent at Music Corporation of America (now ICM). Understandably, Orr does not recall every detail of the negotiations, but she believes that it was Miss Powers who advised her on the thornier points of the contract that 20th Century-Fox drew up.

Technically, what Fox offered Mary Orr was an option. In the studio era (as now), only the author of a blockbuster best-seller might expect an outright offer to purchase film rights for a work. Far more likely, the work in question was optioned for a period of time—six months, a year, eighteen months—during which the studio sought to line up a good screenwriter, interest stars or their agents in the property, charm exhibitors with its commercial appeal, and so on.

Fox’s acquisition of the option on “The Wisdom of Eve” gave the studio exclusive control of the story in exchange for the $5,000 paid to Mary Orr. Considering that she was not a famous author, and that she was selling a short story rather than a novel, the option fee seems generous. (By comparison, in 1950 Alfred Hitchcock acquired rights to Patricia Highsmith’s first novel,
Strangers on a Train
, for only $7,500.) Mary Orr’s deal in 1949—roughly the equivalent of a modest year’s salary—was far more lucrative than the $2,000, $5,000, and $10,000 option fees that producers routinely offer today for first novels and other lesser works.

Between them, Miss Orr and Miss Powers cannily refused to relinquish all rights to the material. Instead, Mary Orr retained stage rights, so that today if the dramatic version of “The Wisdom of Eve” is performed anywhere, she gets a royalty. On the other hand, Fox refused to let her have mechanical rights, meaning that she gets nothing from television broadcasts and video rentals of
All About Eve
. But that was standard practice; even Joe Mankiewicz retained no mechanical rights to the film. He was paid for writing and directing, and got nothing else.

A more troubling aspect to Mary Orr, some fifty years later, is the matter of credit. She says, “A movie company takes advantage of anyone, if they can. You expect that. At the time, I was interested in the five thousand dollars they were paying for that little thing I had written in four days. I got the money and that’s that. But apparently Mankiewicz never wanted my name mentioned at all in connection with the work.”

Mary Orr’s name does not appear in the screen credits of
All About Eve
, although in the screenplay published by Random House in 1951, and reprinted in 1972, the title page reads: “All About Eve / A Screenplay by / Joseph L. Mankiewicz / based upon a short story by / Mary Orr.” In 1951, the preposition is “upon.” By 1972 it has been shortened to “on.” Because she retained stage rights, however, by the time the musical
Applause
opened on Broadway in 1970, Mary Orr received credit and Mankiewicz did not.

Darryl Zanuck seems to have found it anomalous that Mary Orr’s name was missing from the official screen credits of
All About Eve
. In a memo written in early November 1950, shortly after the film’s premiere, and sent to Fox story editor Julian Johnson, Zanuck inquired about the omission of Orr’s name. On November 10 Johnson replied that “no credits are put in a contract which are not required. No author credit was demanded and none was put in the contract.” Presumably, Mary Orr’s agent could have gotten screen credit for her client if she had thought to ask for it.

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.

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.”