All About “All About Eve” (48 page)

Facing Martina Lawrence at the end of this strange recital, I must have betrayed a look of panicked consternation. Martina snapped, “I have a feeling you are going to compound some more lies.”

That was too much. I was exasperated. “Please!” I said. “Why would I travel to New York to see you if I didn’t want the truth? I could write lies at home.”

Her bullying ceased. “I don’t expect other people, on the fringes of something, to remember all these things, but it happened to me, so of course I remember.”

We were friends again. And we had come to the end of our interview. “I’m afraid I’ve tired you with so many questions,” I said. “Let’s end on a positive note. About you. Are you happy?”

“Yes,” Martina said without a pause. “I have lived my life. I own a little flat. No one can ever raise the rent or take it away from me. I live in a city that is considered by many a very beautiful city, it’s a walking city and I’m a walker, I’m interested in art and architecture and history. I have the best of it, I would say.”

I turned off the tape recorder, and Martina walked me to the elevator. She rode with me to the lobby, talking all the while and intriguing our fellow passengers with her flair and her melodious, chiseled enunciation. Her vivacious presence signaled that she was out of place in an inexpensive tourist hotel. Those spectators in the lift, as Martina called it, seemed to wonder how she had strayed from the realm of opening nights and clumps of flowers in dressing rooms. We shook hands, and I walked out into East Fifty-first Street.

I felt as if I had awakened from a fever dream to reenter the reality of the city.

*   *   *

I confess that my final question was simply tossed out to help speed my departure. It was, of course, an echo of Mary Orr’s statement on Harry Haun’s tape, telling Martina, “I hope you are happy now.”

Martina’s cadenced answer to my question, however, vibrated in my head. It was sweet; it was poignant. And final. A playwright might have invented it to ring down the curtain, or a novelist to end a tale. Or was it yet another fork in the Borgesian path?

Walking around Manhattan that late afternoon, I felt that Martina had raised many more questions than she had answered. The main one being, Who on earth
is
Martina Lawrence? The New York setting produced this surreal image: She’s an invention of Damon Runyon … in collaboration with Truman Capote, for Martina Lawrence is Holly Golightly grown old. She’s also Kay Thompson’s Eloise, now a geriatric enfant terrible.

Why had she devoted her life to this mulish campaign of setting the record straight? Her own version differs mainly in particulars, not substantively, from Mary Orr’s story. And even though it stings to find yourself unflatteringly fictionalized, how could anyone stew for five decades over a second-rate story in a forgotten magazine? So what if she pinched a letter from a fur jacket? And “stalked” Elisabeth Bergner in some innocuous, juvenile way? There’s nothing so terrible about any of it.

In my fanatical mapping of the evolution of Eve Harrington, I had at last found the missing link: Martina Lawrence, who had spawned all subsequent Eves. I determined to dig deeper into the fossil remains of that eventful Broadway season in the mid-forties, looking for bones or even a petrified footprint.

*   *   *

I found instead Mary Diveny, who isn’t at all petrified and whose memory for detail rivals Martina’s own. She is “Diveny,” the friend Martina mentioned in our initial telephone conversation. I went to see her in
Marlene
, at the Cort Theatre on West Forty-eighth Street. Backstage after the play, I encountered an alert, kindly woman, a veteran actor who seemed as sensible and down-to-earth as everyone’s favorite aunt. She was rushing to the Port Authority terminal to catch a bus to her home far north of the city, and so we arranged to speak later by phone.

“I came to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and I lived at the Rehearsal Club from, I believe nineteen forty-five to nineteen forty-nine,” Mary Diveny said. “Early in nineteen forty-six I got a job in a USO touring company. We went overseas, and I returned to New York, and the Rehearsal Club, in August of ninteen forty-six. That’s when I met Martina. She had lots of people interested in her for different reasons. That’s because she was intriguing. She knew Guthrie McClintic, for example, who was married to Katherine Cornell. He was casting
The Playboy of the Western World
with Burgess Meredith. One of the young women in the cast wasn’t working out, so McClintic called Martina. She read for the part, but she wasn’t right for an Irish peasant girl. She told him, however, that she knew someone who would be perfect for it. He said, ‘Call her,’ and Martina did. ‘Come right down,’ she said. So I did, and I read for him and got the part.”

Martina had told me at one point about her aspirations to act, then later she disavowed them. I wanted to know whether she had been in pursuit of a theatrical career back then.

Mary Diveny said, “She would try everything. But without being able to stick to it. She probably thought she was going to be an actress but she just never knew how to go about it the right way.”

And did she have other jobs at the same time? “Oh, always,” her friend said. “She never had any money. So it was always a waitress job or whatever came along to support herself. We were all like that. I worked at the Russian Tea Room as a hatcheck girl and cashier.”

I asked if she knew Martina at the time of her involvement with Elisabeth Bergner. “No,” Miss Diveny said. “All that had taken place shortly before we met. But we were all very much aware of it at the Rehearsal Club. Martina was unhappy because the story didn’t reflect the way events turned out.”

“Do you believe all the details of that incredible Bergner saga?” I ventured.

“Well,” she answered, “really, I firmly believe it.”

“What was Martina like in those days?” I asked.

“She was effervescent and full of energy. And volatile. She was a very intense person. Martina comes to town once or twice a year, and I always learn something new about her. Another phase of her life that I hadn’t heard about before.”

If Mary Diveny, who seems as wise and stable as Jane Wyatt in
Father Knows Best
, doesn’t question the veracity of Martina’s adventures, then perhaps I shouldn’t. But in the case of M. Lawrence vs. E. Bergner, M. Orr, et al., I still felt like a hung jury of one, so I decided to call a final witness.

After burrowing through old newspaper files and current phone directories, I located another alumna of the Rehearsal Club, a former Rockette who knew Martina while living there. This person agreed to speak only on condition of “everlasting anonymity,” as she put it. Here is what she said.

“She was immature, unsophisticated, and naive. She’ll tell you that herself, and it’s true. She’s still naive, even though she has traveled the world. She is a waif, a lone person. That mother of hers—oh, she was mentally ill. I remember her mother coming and yelling at her on the street. She was a harridan. She was very heavy, and that’s why Martina is so thin. Because she would never, ever let herself be like her mother. She practically starved herself over the years trying to be as different as possible from that woman. She really did go to Hollywood, you know. After the John Golden thing. But the studio didn’t work out. It was a big, big disappointment. People would be very interested in her for a while, that accent and all those gestures, but Martina lacked discipline. She took an acting course or something for a few weeks, but that doesn’t do much for you, I’m afraid.

“And I can tell you something you don’t know. Martina later latched on to Renata Tebaldi. I gather she also played Eve Harrington to her, except that this was the world of opera. Good luck finding out about it. You won’t. Divas don’t like to admit they’ve been had.”

*   *   *

I found it curious that there was no sex in anyone’s version. Paul Czinner was homosexual, and it seems that his marriage to Bergner was platonic. Unlikely, therefore, that he would seduce Martina or be seduced by her. Bergner was either lesbian or bisexual, but according to Martina she made no advances. And despite her mistrust of Martina, they rekindled the friendship, after a fashion.

In 1972 Bergner was appearing at a theatre in Mannheim, Germany, in Eugene O’Neill’s
More Stately Mansions
, in German
Alle Reichtum der Welt
. Martina happened into town, looked up Bergner at her hotel, and they had a pleasant visit. But there’s always a strange twist to Martina’s tales, including this one. For Martina told me she wasn’t sure that Bergner recognized her. “She seemed confused, and I’m not at all certain she realized who it was,” Martina stated as though such vagueness were the norm.

They also corresponded. Martina showed me several letters from Bergner. The stationery bore the printed address 42,
EATON SQUARE, LONDON
. The letters, dated in the early 1970s, were pleasant but noncommittal, as though written to a young fan.

*   *   *

The categories to describe Martina Lawrence must exist in some diagnostic manual, but I don’t care to look them up. I think it’s in literature, not in psychology, where we find the better clues. During our interview I almost sensed two other people in the room, one elderly lady in conflict with another. The first was Ruth Maxine Hirsch, who never knew her father and whose illiterate, demented Polish-Jewish mother abused and hounded her. (“I was more afraid of her than of punishment in the orphanage,” Martina said.) Later, as Ruth eked out a living, her mother always turned up to revile and taunt. The fights and harangues continued until the mother’s death in 1981, when Martina was sixty years old. This aspect—the hardscrabble life of Ruth Hirsch—echoes the grimmest of Dickens and Zola.

The other side, Martina Lawrence, emerged from the orphanage to reinvent herself, only to lose the patronage of Bergner, her famous sponsor. It seems to have inflicted an unhealing wound. Then she glimpsed her reflection in the Orr story and the Mankiewicz film, and for half a century has nursed the quixotic obsession that she must correct the “errors” of fiction. Fiction, of course, is by definition incorrigible, and so her quest—years longer than Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale—turned into a dry, rattling pastiche. Call it Moby Eve.

Is Martina Lawrence the doppelgänger of Ruth Hirsch, or vice versa? The question echoes such uncanny tales as Poe’s “William Wilson” and Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer.” And the dual myth of Norma Jean versus Marilyn.

The most poignant parallel, however, is another Melville character, Bartleby the Scrivener. Once an employee of the Dead Letter Office, the passive-aggressive Bartleby clings to his idée fixe until it leads to grotesque and horrible inertia. The narrator ends the story with these resounding words: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”

When I think of Martina Lawrence, and of the eccentricity of her fifty-year crusade against a few contrived incidents in a magazine story, I don’t know which is more apt: “Ah, Martina! Ah, humanity!” or the Margo Channing line, “She’s a lamb loose in our big stone jungle.”

Regarding the Martina Lawrence hieroglyphs, and attempting to translate them, I write in vanishing ink. Before I reach the predicate, the subject has dissolved. It cannot be real, the conclusion I have reached: that Martina, using her brief appearance in Mary Orr’s story, inflated it to match the Mankiewicz script. In the depths of her mind she took up where the film faded out. And so it appears that Martina didn’t have her identity stolen. Instead, she abducted Eve Harrington and has held her captive these many, many years—in the dimension of Time.

afterword: “fasten your seat belts
again
”

A few months after
All About “All About Eve”
was published, a writer for the
Daily Express
in London interviewed me for that paper. The journalist, Viv Groskop, led with: “As the film celebrates its 50th anniversary, a book on the behind-the-scenes story has taken America by storm.” I savored the hyperbole even as I pondered the eclipse of British understatement. The sun never sets on media hype.

In a sense, however, Ms. Groskop got it right, for my book did stir up a tempest in a martini glass for
Eve
oholics, of whom I am an irretrievable one. I vowed long ago to stay off the wagon. My fellow junkies, to the last man and woman, presumably swore the same oath.

I was amazed at the landslide of reviews devoted to the book. In addition, I was interviewed over a period of months by newspapers, radio, television, and Web sites. At book signings around the country I met the hard-core
Eve
addicts and became friends with many of them. Some, like me, appear so far gone that, having stumbled upon each other as enablers, we fell into immediate co-dependence. Incurables, we stay obsessively in touch by mail and by late-night phone calls across distant time zones.

Legions of others wrote letters, telling me they’ve seen
All About Eve
fifty times, eighty, a hundred times or more and still counting. A few of these readers, oblivious to the opium-den allure of their suggestions, urged me to write another book about
Eve,
and another one after that. Indeed, I heard “Fasten your seat belts” so many times that I began to feel trapped in
All About Eve
the way Myron Breckinridge, the transsexual protagonist of Gore Vidal’s novel
Myron,
is trapped in the Maria Montez film
Siren of Babylon
.

Since I don’t plan additional volumes on
All About Eve
—at least not yet—I decided instead to add this afterword to the paperback edition. In doing so, I hope to appease the insatiable. Another reason for adding on is to make permanently available new information I’ve come across about the film and those who made it. Finally, this new chapter will modify and correct certain assertions made in the body of the book.

*   *   *

Soon after publication I received a letter from Christopher Mankiewicz, the son of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. I had not spoken with him while researching the book, mainly because lengthy conversations with his brother Tom convinced me I had heard all relevant family stories and filial opinions about the director of
All About Eve
. In fact, I didn’t even ask Tom to put me in touch with Christopher.