All About “All About Eve” (7 page)

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.

Like most treatments, Mankiewicz’s is a typical writer’s “workshop” where he lays out all his materials, from which he will soon extract and polish the actual script. What sets this treatment apart, however, is the degree to which Mankiewicz has already nailed down the structure of his screenplay. Even at this stage, the material is unmistakably Mankiewicz’s own; it bears his fluency, his wit, and also his excesses. It’s an excellent example of how to transform a well-tailored treatment into an even better script.

Perhaps most surprising is the discovery that many of the film’s best lines—“Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” and “You can always put that award where your heart ought to be,” to cite two of the most famous—were already there at this early stage of
All About Eve
.

Instructive, too, are the changes and omissions made either by Mankiewicz or Zanuck. For example, in the treatment Karen and Lloyd “wish Bill all sorts of bad luck” as he leaves to go to Hollywood. In the film Karen says, “Good luck, genius,” and Lloyd merely shakes Bill’s hand. Someone realized that most moviegoers would be confused by the theatre shibboleth “break a leg.”

There’s even a whiff of deference to McCarthyism. In the treatment, Mankiewicz has Eve tell Margo, in a cab from LaGuardia after they’ve put Bill on the plane, that she—Margo—needs galoshes. Eve knows this because she has watched Margo’s comings and goings so closely. Referring to Eve’s surveillance, Margo quips, “You’re not on one of those congressional committees, are you?” This sly political reference must have given Zanuck the willies, for he slashed through it with a heavy pencil—markedly heavier than elsewhere—as though the House Committee on Un-American Activities were reading over his shoulder.

At the end of the treatment, the young girl, Phoebe, doesn’t slip into Eve Harrington’s apartment as she was to do later, in both script and film. Rather, she calls out from the shadows near the entrance to Eve’s Park Avenue building. Eve invites her in for a drink. And the girl is not a high-school student but a young working woman who “worships Eve from afar.” Nor does Phoebe hold Eve’s award to her breast while bowing into an infinity of mirrors; that cinematic finale came later. The treatment ends as Addison DeWitt’s taxi “drives off and is lost in the lights of the city.”

After incorporating various changes suggested by his producer, Mankiewicz delivered his first draft of the screenplay—dubbed the “temporary script”—to Darryl Zanuck on March 1, 1950. According to 20th Century-Fox’s records, Mankiewicz’s services as writer (for accounting purposes) terminated on March 24, 1950. Adhering to studio bookkeeping policy, Fox subsequently started Mankiewicz’s “assignment as director” at the beginning of April.

Mankiewicz was luckier than most screenwriters: His scripts were lightly edited, if at all. (Unlike the writer who once told a companion at the premiere of a film he had written, “Shh! I thought I just heard one of my lines.”) In the case of
All About Eve
, the trajectory from treatment, through various drafts of the shooting script, to the actual film was uncluttered by compromise. In this sense,
Eve
“belongs” to Mankiewicz as a novel belongs to its author. He owns it as few studio directors ever owned their films.

Zanuck, of course, served as “editor” to the Mankiewicz screenplay, as he had done on the treatment. After reading Mankiewicz’s lengthy first-draft “temporary script” in March 1950, he praised it highly but suggested some changes and cuts. Zanuck wrote in a memo, “I have tried to sincerely point out the spots that appeared dull or overdrawn. I have not let the length of the script influence me. I have tried to cut it as I am sure I would cut it if I were in the projection room.”

The “temporary script” of March 1 ran to 223 pages. After Zanuck’s cuts and Mankiewicz’s own, the next—and final—version had slimmed to 180 pages. Most of the changes involve shortening or condensing.

Overall, the “temporary script” is not radically different from the final version. But there are some intriguing changes. For example, the “temporary” has a five-page scene in Max Fabian’s limousine after Margo’s cocktail party. Karen and Lloyd ride with Max and they all talk about Margo’s outrageous behavior at the party. They also discuss Eve as a possible understudy for Margo. Karen and Lloyd urge Max to give Eve the job. Max demurs. It’s a long, chatty scene that stops the story dead.

Deleted, also, was a four-page scene in the Richards’ country house. Dialogue from this scene was saved, however, and added to the lines spoken in the car by Margo, Karen, and Lloyd.

Elsewhere in the “temporary script” are such unpolished, rather pedestrian speeches as this, spoken by Addison to Eve: “What do you take me for? A talented newsboy like Bill Sampson? Or Margo—a gifted neurosis? Or Lloyd Richards—a poetic bank clerk? A refined Girl Scout—like Karen? Look closely, Eve, it’s time you did. I am Addison DeWitt. I am nobody’s fool. Least of all yours.”

In the revision, Mankiewicz turned it into this trenchant exchange: