by Staggs, Sam
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All About the Many Versions of “Eve”
The following chronology of “The Wisdom of Eve,” All About Eve, and Applause was compiled in 1970 by Roderick L. Bladel, of New York, and is used here with his permission. I have updated it somewhat.
1. Mary Orr’s short story, “The Wisdom of Eve,” Cosmopolitan, May 1946, p. 72. Leading characters’ names: Margola Cranston and Eve Harrington.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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.
