All About “All About Eve” (5 page)

2. Mary Orr’s radio play,
The Wisdom of Eve
, performed on
Radio Guild Playhouse
on NBC, January 21, 1949. Important plot change: Margola, now called “Margo,” misses a performance, which she had not done in the short story. This radio production may have been directed by Harry W. Junkin; the supervisor of the
Radio Guild Playhouse
series was Richard McDonagh. Claudia Morgan played Margo Cranston, and Marilyn Erskine was cast as Eve Harrington.

3. The film
All About Eve
, written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz for 20th Century-Fox. Released October 1950. The screenplay was published by Random House in 1951, and again in 1972 in Gary Carey’s book for Random House,
More About All About Eve
.

4.
All About Eve,
radio version performed on
Screen Guild Theatre,
March 8, 1951, with Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, and George Sanders reprising their roles from the film.

5. One-hour radio version of the Mankiewicz
All About Eve
on
The Theatre Guild on the Air
series, NBC, November 16, 1952, starring Tallulah Bankhead as Margo Channing and Mary Orr as Karen Richards.

6. The stage version of
The Wisdom of Eve
by Mary Orr and her husband, Reginald Denham, using the characters and situations of the first radio version, carefully avoiding any Mankiewicz dialogue and plot changes. Published in 1964; available for amateur production through Dramatists Play Service, 440 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016.

7.
Applause
, stage musical with libretto by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Lee Adams. Work on the libretto was begun by Sidney Michaels, who was replaced by Comden and Green. Mankiewicz’s name does not appear on the program of
Applause
, which gives this line of credit: “Based on the film
All About Eve
and the original story by Mary Orr.”
Applause
opened March 30, 1970, at the Palace Theatre in New York and ran for 896 performances.

Chapter 3

Minor Awards Are for Such as the Writer

Scattered through various books are abbreviated accounts of how Mary Orr’s story “The Wisdom of Eve” found its way to Joseph L. Mankiewicz: A story editor at 20th Century-Fox read it in
Cosmopolitan
, thought of Mankiewicz, acquired the story, and soon the director set to work. In reality, however, the route was long and marked by surprise.

Mankiewicz himself said that after winning two Academy Awards (Best Director and Best Screenplay) for his 1949 film
A Letter to Three Wives
, he began thinking of the Oscar—and all such awards—as a symbol or a totem. Keenly aware of the conniving and skullduggery that often net such laurels, he realized that the subject “would make an excellent frame for a film about the theatre.” Mankiewicz found his “McGuffin”—the device to get the story going—in the Orr short story.

After this story appeared in the May 1946 issue of
Cosmopolitan
, it seems to have been offered to all the major film companies, including 20th Century-Fox, but no one wanted it then. At the time, much of the fiction that appeared in national magazines was routinely sent, either by agents or by authors themselves, to Hollywood. Story departments at the studios also vetted the magazines for potential material. It was eventually through this latter channel that Mary Orr’s story reached Mankiewicz. Curiously, however, it was not until 1949—three years after publication—that the story came to the attention of James Fisher, then head of Fox’s story department. Fisher, following standard procedure, sent copies of the story to the studio’s contractual producers, writers, and directors. Among the recipients was Joe Mankiewicz.

Half a century later, Mary Orr is still perplexed that it took her story three years to arouse interest. In retrospect, it seems made for the movies.

One reason there were no immediate takers in Hollywood is that Eve Harrington, in the story, suffers no retribution for her lies and deceit. From that first line, quoted earlier, where she’s on her triumphant way to Hollywood, to the final one where she has stolen Lloyd Richards from Karen, his wife, Eve is shining proof that immorality pays off—at least in show business. Eve, in the story, is a woman who “has it all” decades before the phrase became a shibboleth for ambitious American career women. She has celebrity, money, and a very useful fiancé.

By the 1940s, however, Hollywood movies had become suffocatingly moralistic. Transgressors—especially women—had to be punished. It was a gentleman’s agreement.

Even Joe Mankiewicz, who sneered at Hollywood hypocrisy, made sure, by picture’s end, that Eve is headed for a lifetime of empty tomorrows for her sins against Karen Richards and Margo Channing—both “good” women. Yes, Margo is “good” even though she sleeps with her boyfriend out of wedlock, hits the bottle when she’s down, and brawls when she’s mad.

Mary Orr’s Eve keeps her ill-gotten gains, but in the Mankiewicz script it’s Margo Channing who wins big. For Margo holds on to her career, marries the man she loves, and even gets the last word, to Eve: “You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.” This is Mankiewicz morality, a bit more realistic than Hollywood’s facile loftiness of the time, yet conventional enough to placate film-industry censors who insisted on penalties for the wicked, viz. Eve.

Is It Over—Or Is It Just Beginning?

“Margo Channing’s career is over at forty.”

—Molly Haskell,
From Reverence to Rape
(1974)

“Bette Davis’s Margo Channing in
All About Eve
knows … that though her audience approval may be like waves of love coming up each night, it won’t keep her warm when the wrinkles set. She ultimately opts for retirement and the role of wife to her younger director-boyfriend.”

—Marjorie Rosen,
Popcorn Venus
(1974)

“In the classic Hollywood film about the theatre,
All About Eve
, Margo Channing, the great star played by Bette Davis has, finally, to say that what she really,
truly,
wants is to be a ‘real’ woman; that is, a ‘married lady’ busy ‘doing things around the house,’ instead of starring in a major new play.”

—Harriett Hawkins,
Classics and Trash
(1990)

“At one fell swoop, in admitting that, yes, a woman must choose between happiness and a career, Margo seemed to undo all that Bette’s gutsier characters had proved about a woman’s capacity to function bravely and effectively on her own. Successful in the world as she may have been until now, Margo finally—wisely, the film insists—accepts that the time has come for this powerful, independent woman to stop fighting, step back, and let her husband take care of her.”

—Barbara Leaming,
Bette Davis: A Biography
(1992)

Fueled by feminist critics, the rumor has spread that Margo Channing gives up her Broadway career because she’s getting married at last. Thus,
All About Eve
seems to fit neatly into prevalent theories about Hollywood’s attitude toward women, about gender in fifties films, and so on. In this case, however, the neat fit comes from hearing only part of what Margo says.

She, Bill, Karen, and Lloyd are seated at a table in the Cub Room of the Stork Club. Margo and Bill have announced their forthcoming marriage, and Margo says, “Lloyd, will you promise not to be angry with me?” The reason she anticipates his anger comes a few lines later: “I don’t want to play Cora.” (Cora is the star role in Lloyd’s new play,
Footsteps on the Ceiling
.)

Karen is more shocked than Lloyd, and so Margo responds to her: “Now wait a minute, you’re always so touchy about his plays, it isn’t the part—it’s a great part. And a fine play. But not for me anymore—not for a foursquare, upright, downright, forthright married lady.”

Lloyd’s next line is politically correct: “What’s your being married got to do with it?”

Margo: “It means I’ve finally got a life to live! I don’t have to play parts I’m too old for—just because I’ve got nothing to do with my nights! Oh, Lloyd, I know you’ve made plans. I’ll make it up to you, believe me. I’ll tour a year with this one, anything, only—only you do understand, don’t you?”

The most important point is that Margo says nothing about giving up her career. Any actor who offers to “tour a year” with a play is not on the verge of retirement. She has toured before; Eve says she first saw Margo when she was onstage in San Francisco. Obviously, Margo plans to marry and to go right on acting.

What some critics haven’t heard, apparently, is Margo declining only the role of Cora, one of those “parts I’m too old for.” Margo is finally willing to admit how inappropriate the role is for her. Earlier in the film she had referred to Cora as “still a girl of twenty.” And Margo is twice twenty. How could anyone
not
admire her good sense? Some women of forty could play “a girl of twenty,” but Margo Channing is not one of them.

There is no hint from Bill that he wants Margo to retire, or even to curtail her career. On the contrary, he compliments her several times on her talent and also on specific performances. Even if he wanted her to give up the theatre, he probably wouldn’t say so. It’s Bill who is named Sampson, but the strongman of this story is really Margo.

Another reason, perhaps, why “The Wisdom of Eve” wasn’t quickly snapped up by a studio is its backstage setting. Films—honest films—about Hollywood and its denizens were dangerous. To studio moguls they represented a kind of nest-fouling. Besides, skeletons belonged in the closet, not on public display, and the studios spent thousands each year in hush money to keep closet doors shut. Furthermore, though Mary Orr’s story is ostensibly about the theatre, it’s easy to substitute “Hollywood” for “Broadway.”

On the West Coast, that swap made movie people squirm. At the time, show-biz self-contemplation was expected to take the form of harmless entertainments like
Stage Door
, teary fables (
A Star Is Born
), or frothy, lavish musicals such as
The Barkleys of Broadway
and
Summer Stock
. As Ethan Mordden has written about this backstage subgenre in his book
Movie Star
, “Films about Hollywood must either explore the corruption and silliness or must lie at length, for there is little that is truly exhilarating or noble or even nice about the place.”

For whatever reasons—and perhaps the only reason was oversight—Hollywood ignored “The Wisdom of Eve” for almost three years. Mary Orr, of course, didn’t sit around waiting for a call. With her husband she collaborated on
Dark Hammock
and
Round Trip
, plays that opened on Broadway and in which she also appeared. Orr continued writing short stories, and she acted in scores of radio plays.

But actors, then as now, went through lean times, and in January 1949 Mary Orr’s career was at its leanest. One day she went to NBC looking for work, and someone sent her to see Harry Junkin, the director of a dramatic series called
Radio Guild Playhouse
.

“I can’t give you a job, Mary,” Junkin told her in a voice not far from hysteria. “I haven’t even got a script for next Friday! You think you’re desperate? What about me?”

Ever resourceful, Mary Orr looked at him and said, “Harry, if I go home and write you a script over the weekend, will you give me a part—provided there’s a part in it that suits me?”

In a sense, she was right back at the Woodstock Inn, staring at a blank page. For although she had collaborated on Broadway plays, she had never tried her hand at radio drama. Mary Orr began to wonder if she would have to master a new genre every year. What next—a masque?

So far, 1949 was not going the way Orr wanted it to. She was out of work, her husband was out of work—and not only that, he was in Polyclinic Hospital with both legs smashed. Early one morning, out bird-watching, Reginald Denham was taking binoculars out of a suitcase in the trunk of his car when another vehicle ran off the road, plowed into him, and crushed his legs between the bumpers. At first the doctors thought they might have to amputate. Nine months later, he left the hospital.

“I had to pay all those bills,” Orr recalls. “What was I to do? After I left NBC I went to visit Reggie and I told him that if I could think up a radio play Harry Junkin would not only buy it from me, he’d let me act in it, too.”

Denham said, “Go home and dramatize ‘The Wisdom of Eve.’”

Mary Orr said, “But this is radio! I don’t know how to—”

“You act on radio all the time,” said her husband with a groan as he tried to shift his bandaged legs. “You know about voice-overs and the techniques they use on the air.”

And so the play, like the story, was written over a weekend.

“I’m a very fast writer,” Mary Orr says. “Once I get started I don’t look up. And I never go back and make changes.”

On Monday morning she delivered the play to Harry Junkin, who paid her $250 for it. Four days later, on Friday, January 21, 1949,
The Wisdom of Eve
was broadcast, with Claudia Morgan as Margo. (In the short story, the character was called “Margola,” with accent on the first syllable; this radio play is where she became “Margo.”) Marilyn Erskine played the part of Eve, and Mary Orr was Karen Richards.

Radio Guild Playhouse
was one of NBC’s sustaining programs, meaning that it was a prestigious offering and therefore not interrupted with jingles for shampoo or toothpaste. The show originated live from New York at 8:00
P.M.,
but this early-evening broadcast went only as far as Chicago. Because of the time difference between the East and West Coasts, a
second
live broadcast was done at 11:00
P.M
. Eastern Time, to accommodate listeners in the Pacific Time Zone who wanted to hear a play at the normal hour, eight o’clock. Actors who worked in such dual-broadcast programs often had time to return home or go out to dinner between the first and second shows. Or get drunk. According to Tom Hatten, a radio enthusiast and a CBS show-business correspondent in Los Angeles, “The big problem was keeping the actors sober for the second show.”