by Staggs, Sam
“Elisabeth and Paul invited us to dinner. Paul Czinner had recommended the little Woodstock Inn in Woodstock, Vermont. At that time it was a plain and simple country inn; now it’s a Rockefeller-type resort. Well, Reggie and I checked into this inn and Reggie called Paul and said, ‘We’re here.’ Paul said, ‘As soon as you’ve had a shower and changed, come on over,’ and he gave Reggie directions through the New Hampshire countryside to the farm where he and Elisabeth were spending the summer. It must have been about twelve miles east of Woodstock.
“We found it. My husband was a good driver. I never drove. Never had the eyesight to pass the test, but anyway we had a pleasant visit with them. Elisabeth was as nice to me as if I had been her equal in the theatre. She made no distinction.
“While having drinks, we brought Paul and Elisabeth up to date with the latest theatre gossip from New York. Finally Paul looked at Elisabeth and said in his Hungarian accent, ‘I sink you should get busy vith the dinner, Reggie and Mary must be hungry.’
“Elisabeth, whose accent was almost more British than German, stood up and said, ‘Come on in the kitchen with me, Mary, and I’ll teach you how to cook Wienerschnitzel.’
“While the men were still talking about Victor Jory’s replacement, I went into the kitchen with Elisabeth. I watched one of the world’s great actresses bread veal and peel potatoes. Now, at that time she was already in her late forties but she looked young. She was always young-looking because she was small and moved around like a girl.
“She did this and that in the kitchen, whatever you do when you make Wienerschnitzel, but she talked up a storm all the while. Before long, coming to a pause in her dinner preparations and also in her running monologue, she looked at me and said, ‘You’re a young actress. Let me tell you about the one—’
“Now I must tell you that Elisabeth always called her ‘that terrible girl,’ ‘that awful creature,’ or ‘that little bitch.’ She never called the girl by name, although later I learned that the girl’s name is———” And here Mary Orr said, “But be careful, please, what you say about her, because she’s unpredictable. In a minute, you’ll understand what I mean. What’s that? Oh yes, she’s still alive. She’s no longer a girl, of course, after all these years. But I can assure you she’s still very much alive. I’ve met her!”
(And so for reasons of punctilio I’ll use the name “Miss X”—at least for now.)
“Anyway, the girl used to stand in the alley beside the Booth Theatre night after night, wearing a little red coat. I suppose she somehow saw every performance of The Two Mrs. Carrolls. Or maybe she only claimed she did.
“Elisabeth told me all this right there in the kitchen. ‘So, Mary,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t you be curious? I was too, and so one night I invited her into my dressing room.’
“It seems that from that very night the ‘terrible girl’ took over Elisabeth’s life. The girl lied to her, deceived her, did things behind her back—even went after her husband, Paul Czinner! And why not? He was in a position to do things for her. He was a well-known film director, and his shrewd management had been indispensable to Elisabeth’s career.
“Years later someone hinted at a lesbian relationship between Elisabeth and the girl. At that time I certainly never thought of such a thing. You didn’t think about such things, back then.
“This is such a story! Are you sure you want to hear all of it?” Mary Orr asked.
I assured her I was fascinated, and so she continued, “Well, one night Elisabeth invited the girl to come to her dressing room for a visit. She was touched that a young fan would feel such devotion toward her. And the girl had a faint accent. She was English, she told Elisabeth and Paul, and, like them, she had fled to America for fear the Germans might invade Great Britain. Elisabeth said the girl’s eyes filled with tears. I wouldn’t be surprised if Elisabeth’s did, too. After all, she possessed all the emotions of the theatre.
“So there they were at the Booth Theatre, on Forty-fifth Street, in Elisabeth’s dressing room one night after the performance. If they had turned on the radio they might have heard, ‘This is Edward R. Murrow, in London. Today more bombs fell on this city.…’ But they didn’t. Instead they all became friends.
“A few days later Elisabeth arranged for the girl to become a secretary of sorts to Paul. And of course the girl performed to perfection. What did girls do in those days? Back then I’m sure she made coffee for the boss, and for the boss’s wife, or maybe it was tea, since they all had English connections—although some of them, as you’ll see presently, were more English than others.
“What else did she do? She handled correspondence, ran errands, maybe typed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she massaged Elisabeth’s ego—maybe even her legs and feet as well, after a long day of acting. Whether she did the same for Elisabeth’s husband is anybody’s guess.”
Here Mary Orr takes a break to rest her voice. Her deft characterizations, full of detail, seem to have brought back colleagues long dead. As her narrative unfolds they make their silent entrances and exits once more there in her apartment, among her own relics of a life in the theatre.
* * *
Irene Worth is another actress connected to our story. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1916, she made her Broadway debut in 1943 in The Two Mrs. Carrolls. It is not important to know what role she played, for it was flimsy compared to her later career. After her unremarkable beginning, Irene Worth went on to create the role of Celia Copplestone in T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party at the 1949 Edinburgh Festival, and her classical roles range from the Greeks to Shakespeare, right up to the best female parts in Ibsen, Shaw, Chekhov, and Beckett.
Seldom memorable in her sporadic film roles, Irene Worth acted with Bette Davis and Alec Guinness in The Scapegoat in 1959. Bette played a crumbling bedridden countess; Miss Worth had a less vivid part.
But all of this was years in the future for the ingenue who landed a part in The Two Mrs. Carrolls. In 1943 Irene Worth got the role, did her job, and some time later went to England, where she made her career. None of this would concern us here except for a rumor that has buzzed around for years. That rumor casts Irene Worth as “the terrible girl” who inspired Hollywood’s Eve Harrington. “She clawed her way to the top,” declare the rumormongers. The savory little story is just what’s needed to confirm every tale of theatre skullduggery.
But it isn’t true.
Roy Moseley, in his 1990 book, Bette Davis: An Intimate Memoir (along with earlier writers who had broached the subject), unwittingly fueled the rumor with this anecdote:
All About Eve was based on Elisabeth Bergner, who was appearing on Broadway when a young actress playing a small part came to her to say she would be quitting. Miss Bergner asked “Why?” and the young actress said, “Because I’m not good enough, not good enough to be with you. You’re so magnificent!” Miss Bergner persuaded the young actress to stay on. Her name was Irene Worth and she grew into a star herself. The difference was that Bergner and Worth remained friends. This was the basis for the story of All About Eve but, of course, without the sense of evil which pervades the film.
Moseley was in a perfect position to verify his facts, since he writes elsewhere in the book that, as a theatrical agent in London, he represented Elisabeth Bergner during the 1960s. Oddly, however, he jumbled the story. But no matter how we view that scene of unworthy Miss Worth proclaiming, “I’m not good enough, not good enough”—as though she were one of the hundred neediest cases—still, it’s important to know that she didn’t carve her career from the flesh of another grande dame.
But her link to our saga is crucial, because shortly after Elisabeth Bergner and Paul Czinner took Miss X under their wing, Irene Worth announced that she was leaving.
In the meantime, according to Mary Orr, Miss X hadn’t been content merely to stand at the stage door, a loyal fan in a red coat. Nor was she satisfied with her subsequent status as secretary to Paul Czinner and factotum to her idol, Miss Bergner. With Irene Worth on the way
out, a replacement must be found. Miss X volunteered to read Miss Bergner’s role at the auditions so that Miss Bergner would not have to be bothered. Later that day, Miss Bergner was surprised to learn that Miss X had read. It was … terribly kind. And Elisabeth Bergner was generous. She, along with her husband and his co-producer, Robert Reud, decided to do something for Miss X.
The three of them went to Actors’ Equity to seek permission for the young Englishwoman to make her Broadway debut. Actors’ Equity investigated. A few days later Paul Czinner got a phone call. “No trouble at all,” he was told by the Equity rep. “The girl’s not English, she’s American. I guess you couldn’t tell the difference between an English accent and one of ours, could you?”
Czinner and Bergner accepted the young lady’s explanation. She told them she had to find out—in the company of experts—whether her British accent was as persuasive as she hoped.
Irene Worth, at her last performance, received several bouquets from producers and co-stars, and then—
But now Mary Orr is back, voice rested, and once more she takes up the narrative.
* * *
“Irene Worth had good connections in England, some big shot, I can’t remember who it was. He helped her get started in London, I think.
“As for ‘the terrible girl,’ Elisabeth thought her talented. I can’t remember, really, whether she became Elisabeth’s understudy, but it stands to reason that she would, even though she was much too young for the part. And the girl went on to win some kind of award.
“It was a thing called the John Golden Award. It was supposed to help young actresses. Help them do what? I’m not sure. But Golden did give the award, and ‘the terrible girl’ won it that year.” (Actor-director John Golden [1874–1955] also had two theatres named for him. The first, on West Fifty-seventh Street, later became a cinema. The second John Golden Theatre, on West Forty-fifth Street, was so named by Golden himself when he took it over in 1937. And the front of the latter theatre is the one you see—exteriors only—in All About Eve.)
“How far did she go in undermining Elisabeth’s career, you ask? Not far at all. Maybe she coveted Elisabeth’s starring role in The Two Mrs. Carrolls, but she never got it. Apparently she just gave Elisabeth a few unhappy nights. I don’t think it went much further than that.
“And yet, to return to that evening when Elisabeth Bergner told me the story in that farmhouse kitchen while she was furiously making Wienerschnitzel, you know, she just went on babbling about ‘that terrible girl’ who seemed to have provoked a crisis in her life. At the time, I assumed it had upset her because she had been so kind and then she felt she had been stabbed in the back. It certainly became an obsession with Elisabeth about that girl. Much later, I began to wonder if there had been a closer relationship than what Elisabeth told me. Maybe she had been terribly hurt. Broken-hearted. I don’t know; that’s just a guess.
“After dinner that night, as Reggie and I drove back in the moonlight to the Woodstock Inn, I asked him a question. ‘Did you ever see a girl in a red coat who hung out at the stage door every night?’
“He said, ‘Oh yes, I suppose I do remember her. Why?’
“I told him the story just as Elisabeth had told it to me. He was amazed, but after hearing it he recalled the girl who seemed to attend every night’s performance.
“As the director of The Two Mrs. Carrolls, he had a lot on his mind. All during the run he’d see the show once or twice a week, then he’d tell Elisabeth, ‘You’re overacting; don’t do that,’ or whatever.
“I remember the first night of previews, when the villain suddenly appeared through the window, it produced several loud screams from the audience and when Reggie went backstage after the show Elisabeth dressed him down. She said, ‘How could you do that—they screamed at me! I won’t stand for it!’ Of course, that’s exactly what Reggie had aimed for. He was so put-out he grabbed her by the shoulders and said, ‘You silly bitch, that’s what we want them to do, scream their heads off!’
“Paul Czinner was in the dressing room, and the moment Reggie finished scolding Elisabeth he turned to Paul and said, ‘I’m frightfully sorry!’ As an Englishman, he was embarrassed to have lost his temper.
“Czinner replied very calmly, ‘A little discipline for her is good. You should see vot Max Reinhardt vould do for her in Berlin!’
“The play ran forever, and then they took it on the road. One night when it was in Chicago, Elisabeth called up after a performance and said in mock horror, ‘Reggie, you must come here immediately! We have lost the scream!’
“You’ll have to forgive me, I’m telling you all these old tales, which can’t interest you very much. After all, you’re working on All About Eve. Are you sure you want me to go on? Well, it’s all fascinating to me, naturally, but that’s because I lived through it.
“My goodness, how did I get so far off the main path? To go back to my story, the next morning in Vermont I noticed Reggie getting up at some ungodly hour, about six o’clock. We hadn’t known each other too long then, you see. We weren’t accustomed to sharing a bedroom.
“I was bewildered. I said, ‘Why are you getting dressed at this hour?’ and he said, ‘I’m going bird-watching.’ He had never mentioned so much as a pigeon to me before that.
“‘Look out the window and see the robins,’ I grumbled, burying my face in the pillow.
“To which he replied, ‘Now look here, I’m an Englishman and all the birds up here are life species.’ Do you know what that means to a birder? It means they’re seeing a bird of a special species for the first time. That’s what every ornithologist lives for. It’s like hitting the jackpot.
“I groaned and turned over again. I looked at him and said, ‘What am I going to do in this stupid little inn all day long?’
“And you know what he answered? He said, ‘Sit down and write that story you told me last night. That’s a hell of a story, and if you don’t write it, who will?’
“What did I know about writing short stories? I had written a piece for the Pictorial Review about a young actress struggling to get on Broadway—it was about myself, really—and then Reggie and I wrote Wallflower, a play that opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre in January of 1944, about six months before the trip to Vermont that I’ve just told you about. I hadn’t written a lot, but then I was only twenty-six.
“Well, after Reggie went out to his birds, I had my breakfast downstairs—no room service in that little inn—and I thought a long time. Finally I went to the office and asked, ‘Is it possible to borrow a typewriter?’ They said, ‘We put an old one down in the cellar just last week when our new one came. Can you use the old one?’ I said, ‘I can’t type anyway, so it won’t matter whether I have the old one or the new.’
“They brought the typewriter up to our room. They supplied me with plenty of Woodstock Inn stationery, and I stuck the first sheet into the machine. Did you ever read Moss Hart’s Act One? There’s a line in it where he says, ‘The worst moment in a writer’s life is when he stares at the paper in the typewriter and the paper is white.’
“I stared at that piece of stationery, thinking, How do I tell this story? Should I have Elisabeth talking, or do I tell it through the eyes of the girl? Finally I decided to tell it through my own eyes.
“Reggie returned at five o’clock. We were going back to Elisabeth and Paul’s for dinner. He said, ‘Well, Mary, what have you done all day?’ and I screamed, ‘Get away! Don’t bother me!’
“He disappeared for another hour or so, and when I finally stopped he asked, ‘What’s this all about?’
“I said, ‘I’ve been writing that story.’
“He said, ‘Smashing! Read it to me,’ and I said, ‘No, I won’t read it to you. It’s not finished.’
“So for three more days, while we spent a long weekend at the Woodstock Inn and Reggie went bird-watching every day, I worked on that story, which, as you know, is ‘The Wisdom of Eve,’ the basis for Joseph Mankiewicz’s
movie, All About Eve.
“Eventually, the night before we were to leave for Skowhegan, I said, ‘I finished the story today.’
“Reggie said, ‘Give it to me and let me read it.’
“I said, ‘No, Reggie, I’ll read it to you, because you know I can’t spell, and my terrible punctuation would put you off.’
“He never said a word while I read him the story, from the first line: ‘A young girl is on her way to Hollywood with a contract for one thousand dollars a week from a major film company in her pocketbook,’ to the last: ‘She’s going to marry my husband, Lloyd Richards.’
“When I finished he just stared at me. I said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ and he said, ‘Who the hell taught you to write?’ I said, ‘God, I guess,’ and Reggie said, ‘That’s a great story, Mary. We must do something about it.’
“My agent turned it down cold. She said, ‘You can’t write stories—you should stick to plays, like Wallflower. You’ll never get this published in any magazine!’ I understand she was terribly upset a few years later when All About Eve won six Oscars.
“In the end, it was Reggie who sold the story.
“A man named Dale Eunson, from Montana, wrote a play called Guest in the House, which Reggie directed on Broadway. Dale had also been a screenwriter in Hollywood, and he had written several novels set in his home state. Somehow he became editor of Cosmopolitan.
“One night Dale and his wife gave a party at their house on East Sixtieth Street, and Reggie and I attended.
“The first thing you’re asked at a theatrical party is, ‘Do you have a job? What are you doing?’ When Dale asked Reggie that, Reggie said, ‘I haven’t a job at the moment, but Mary’s written an extraordinary story and since you’re the editor of Cosmopolitan, you ought to read it. You’ll like it. It’s about the theatre.’ Reggie didn’t mention that every other magazine in town had turned it down.
“Dale said, ‘Send it to me,’ and I did, and he bought it the next day, for eight hundred dollars. The story was published in the May nineteen forty-six issue.”
