by Staggs, Sam
Since 1950, few movies about show biz have been untouched by All About Eve. Its impact was so strong—a Hollywood big bang—that moviemakers and moviegoers couldn’t resist the Mankiewicz archetypes. That’s why we can’t watch The Bad and the Beautiful, Imitation of Life, Anna, Bullets Over Broadway, or a host of others without making the inevitable comparisons. The genetic code is there. Even when it’s dormant, or absent—as is probably is from The Rose (1979), Frances (1982), and The Dresser (1983)—we look for it anyway.
Chapter 27
Why, If There’s Nothing Else, There’s Applause
The ultimate tribute to All About Eve wasn’t in the movies but on the Broadway stage: the hit musical Applause, which opened in 1970.
Although Cole Porter, in 1957, toyed with a proposal that he write the score for a musical to be made of the film, Bette Davis herself seems to have been the first person to seriously conceive such a show. In a 1964 taped conversation later heard by Davis biographer James Spada, Bette was asked, “Would you ever go back to Broadway?” She snapped, “I hate theatre.” Mercurial as ever, a moment later she reconsidered: “But you know, I may. I’d love to do a musical version of All About Eve. It would be one of the great musicals of all time!”
But the obstacles, for Bette or anyone else, were formidable. For one thing, 20th Century-Fox wouldn’t release the rights. In addition, by the mid-sixties All About Eve was considered not a classic but simply another “old” movie. Lacking political thrust and not hip enough to interest those under thirty, the film seemed irrelevant to that engagé decade. Most damning of all, however, in the eyes of over-thirty producers, the story lacked the crowd-pleasing schmaltz of such shows as Man of La Mancha, a Broadway hit in 1965, and The Sound of Music, which was born again as a film that same year.
Charles Strouse, the composer of Applause, found out all of this when he went looking for backers for a musical based on All About Eve. Strouse, born in 1928, had seen the film when it came out in 1950. Years later, after he and lyricist Lee Adams had formed a songwriting partnership for such Broadway shows as Bye Bye Birdie in 1962 and Golden Boy two years later, Strouse got the idea of adapting Eve for the musical stage.
“I had a tremendous feeling for the movie,” Strouse recalls, “but I couldn’t get anybody else interested in it. I approached a famous producer/director with the idea. When I told him what I had in mind—the story of Margo Channing and Eve Harrington, to be played by Ethel Merman and Carol Lawrence—he looked at me and said, ‘No one is interested in the emotional problems of actors.’ That was Harold Prince, by the way. I spoke to a lot of other people about the idea, and no one cared.”
Strouse says these abortive conversations took place “sometime after Golden Boy and maybe even after It’s a Bird It’s a Plane It’s Superman [1966].” His idea took further battering when Hair opened in late 1967 and soon became a smash hit. “Reviewers proclaimed that from then on every show would be a rock musical. And they were right—for a time,” Strouse says. “During the next couple of years everybody was producing rock shows, and they were all failing. Then Applause opened and it was a dynamic success.”
The road to vindication, however, was long and winding. The Charles Strouse–Lee Adams musical It’s a Bird It’s a Plane It’s Superman closed after a disappointing run of 129 performances. It was their last show for four years.
In the meantime, Strouse went to Hollywood in 1967 to compose the music for Bonnie and Clyde. His office at Warner Bros. was near the office of Sidney Michaels, a playwright whose biggest hit on Broadway was Dylan (1964), with Alec Guinness in the role of the bibulous Welsh poet. Michaels, who had come to Hollywood to write screenplays, was in an office across the hall from Warren Beatty’s. It was at Warner Bros. that he met Strouse.
Sidney Michaels recalls, “I was working on a script that never got filmed. They wanted some kind of follow-up to Rebel Without a Cause, so I went to San Francisco and looked around at the flower children. I came back thrilled and reported what I had seen. Jack Warner was horrified! But it didn’t matter anyway, because a few days later he sold the studio to Seven Arts, so that was the end of my screenplay.”
Michaels, who was born in 1927, had written a number of television dramas in the 1950s. In 1960 he wrote the script for the film Key Witness, directed by Phil Karlson, and in 1968 he collaborated with Arnold Schulman and Norman Lear on the script of William Friedkin’s The Night They Raided Minsky’s.
It was during their hectic months at Warner Bros. in the early part of 1967 that Charles Strouse approached Sidney Michaels with his idea for a musical based on All About Eve. At that point the show was still no more than a good idea. Michaels recalls that Strouse and Adams had not yet started the music when they asked if he would be interested in writing the book. Like everyone else in show business, Michaels had seen the movie in 1950. “I thought it was magnificent,” he says. “So of course I was excited about the idea of a musical based on All About Eve.” But first he told the eager composers, “Let’s get the Mankiewicz screenplay.”
They couldn’t. Twentieth Century-Fox refused them permission to use any part of the script, and Mankiewicz himself was out of the loop. As the studio’s employee, he had of course relinquished all rights to his work.
By mid-1967 Charles Strouse had finished composing the music for Bonnie and Clyde. Sidney Michaels had ceased work on the abortive flower-child script, and both had returned to New York. That’s when Applause first began to take shape. Week by week Strouse and Adams wrote songs and lyrics, which they sometimes kept but also often tossed out. Work went faster now that the problem of the libretto had been solved.
Since they couldn’t use All About Eve, they did the next best thing: They bought rights to Mary Orr’s story, “The Wisdom of Eve.” Or rather, Lawrence Kasha and Joseph Kipness bought the rights, for they had become producers of the nascent musical. In the late forties, when Mary Orr and her agent sold the story to Fox, they had retained stage rights, scarcely imagining the day when those rights might actually earn money. But that day had finally arrived. “This time, at least, I was one up on 20th Century-Fox,” crowed Mary Orr many years later.
Lawrence Kasha (1933–1990), a Brooklyn native, worked in regional theatre as a producer and director before coming to Broadway in 1963 as co-producer of She Loves Me. In 1964 he was associate director of Funny Girl, and two years later he staged a revival of Show Boat for the opening of the New York State Theatre at Lincoln Center.
Joseph Kipness (1911–1982), a Russian immigrant who came to this country at the age of twelve, made and lost several fortunes during his lifetime. In 1929 he started a freight company in the Manhattan garment district with one horse and one wagon. He expanded into the trucking business and the manufacture of women’s clothes, and later owned several restaurants, including Dinty Moore’s and the Stagedoor Canteen. His first big success as a Broadway producer was High Button Shoes, which opened in 1947 and ran for 727 performances. He produced some thirty plays in all, mostly musicals. Many were flops, but no matter how much money he lost, he was always stagestruck. He once told an interviewer, “The theatre has given me more happiness than I ever received in my life from anything else.”
Once Kasha and Kipness had secured rights to the Mary Orr story, Sidney Michaels forged ahead. He recalls working on the libretto by himself, then meeting Strouse and Adams periodically. “We worked together the way you always do,” he says. “You write something, you read it to each other, you play songs, you keep some things and reject others, you discuss and discuss and then you go back to work again.”
At that point the show was called Welcome to the Theatre, a title that was later transferred to one of its most memorable songs. According to Lee Adams, Make Believe served briefly as the title, then it was called Applause, Applause and finally shortened.
As the show took shape, its producers tried to interest Anne Bancroft in playing Margo Channing. She, however, refused to sign a minimum one-year contract, fe
aring that boredom would set in after so many performances of the same role.
Asked if he had anyone in mind for the show while writing his early drafts, Michaels says, “Lauren Bacall was under consideration from the outset. I was strongly in favor of her. In fact, I believe I was the first to suggest her.”
What happened next, at least the way Sidney Michaels remembers it, might be a scene from a movie—or from Applause itself. “I went to the theatre one night with my wife and we sat next to Jason Robards and Lauren Bacall, who were married at that time. I knew him, but not her. I explained to Jason that I was working on a musical based on All About Eve and asked if I could show him the script—intended for his wife, of course. I happened to have it with me that night. Jason said, ‘Fine.’ He took it and handed it to her. That’s how she got it, right there in a seat in the theatre. She read it and said she’d love to do it.”
Bacall, in her autobiography By Myself, is less specific. She writes, “I was approached about a musical version of All About Eve. The book was being written; nothing else was set.” A possible reason for the star’s vagueness is that, as the show moved forward, there were some bumpy nights. Before need arose to fasten seat belts, however, a director had to be found. It wasn’t easy.
According to Sidney Michaels, “We went to Ron Field after going to almost every director we could think of. We knew he was very talented, so we took it to him but he didn’t like it much.”
Ron Field (1934–1989) was born in Queens and began his career across the river in Manhattan as a child actor in the original production of Lady in the Dark (1941). He danced in such musicals as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949) and The Boy Friend (1954). In 1962 he choreographed the off-Broadway revival of Anything Goes. This soon led to jobs as a Broadway choreographer.
Field had never directed a Broadway show when the team from Applause went to see him. Some choreographers would have jumped at the chance; Field was cautious. No doubt he wanted his directorial debut to be auspicious. He also realized the danger of trying to remake All About Eve for the stage. “I was bucking a movie of great renown,” he said.
When Ron Field demurred, Sidney Michaels told his colleagues, “Listen, I think we’re going to keep on giving this play to directors and they’re going to keep on turning us down. I’d better readdress the libretto, because there’s obviously something wrong with it.” So he did. “I sat down for the next two weeks, rewrote the entire book, and this time when Ron Field read it he flipped. He said, ‘I’ll do it.’ And the next thing I knew they were asking me to leave!”
We have several very different versions of why the producers fired Sidney Michaels. According to Michaels himself, it was because of producer Lawrence Kasha. (The other producer, Joseph Kipness, was an old friend of Michaels. In fact, Michaels claims to have been instrumental in getting Kipness to co-produce.)
“Larry Kasha had a desire to direct the play,” says Michaels, seemingly without rancor some three decades after the event. “He invited me to his apartment one night and said, ‘I’m going to tell you my plans. We’ll use Ron Field and then when we get out of town I will take over the direction of the show.’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s such a great idea, Larry.’ And he said, ‘Oh really? Well, we’ll see.’ And the next thing I knew I was informed that I was out because they didn’t like my book.”
No one else connected with the show concedes such skullduggery. Lee Adams says, “My recollection is that we parted company because we didn’t think Sidney was writing the same show we were.” Both producers are now deceased. Kasha, however, told an interviewer in 1977: “I hired Strouse and Adams because I liked their work. At that time a writer named Sidney Michaels did the first couple of drafts of the script. And although I thought it was good, it wasn’t good enough and I didn’t believe that his script could work, and early on I had to ask him to leave. So we let him go and made a settlement with him and I hired Betty Comden and Adolph Green to do the book.”
Charles Strouse insists that Sidney Michaels’ book was rejected for a different reason. This is his version of events: “What happened on the road to Oz, so to speak, is that at a certain point in our work Lee Adams and I played the score for Lauren Bacall. She really liked it. Although she wasn’t yet ready to commit herself, she said she wanted to play the role of Margo Channing.
“The show wasn’t yet complete, however, at least not in her view. We got to know her better, we worked with her on some of the songs, but official rehearsals hadn’t begun. As we went further along, she said she couldn’t play Sidney’s book.
“She was the linchpin, of course, the one who was making the show happen. Since she was so positive about the songs—Lee’s and my work—we had to pursue what she wanted to pursue. And what she wanted was to bring in Comden and Green to write a new book.”
Lauren Bacall, in her published account, is once again vague. Her deft use of the passive voice omits details: “A settlement had to be made with the first writer—the decision had been made to replace him. The powers that be asked how I felt about Betty Comden and Adolph Green taking over.”
Sidney Michaels speculates that Bacall might have been averse to his book because “it had an equally large male lead opposite her. I heard she was upset over that; she refused even to answer her phone.”
Certainly at this point everyone involved in the show was at a disadvantage, the main reason being that they wanted to do a musical version of All About Eve, a property that simply wasn’t available to them. Mary Orr’s “The Wisdom of Eve” contains the juicy kernel of the film, but the story is slight and contrived. It lacks the witty Mankiewicz dialogue and also the breadth of his cynicism about the theatre and those in it. Although the story’s three main characters—Margola Cranston, Eve Harrington, and the playwright’s wife, who narrates—are cleverly delineated, they are all female. In other words, the Orr story lacks a leading man. A further handicap is that it has none of those unforgettable supporting characters who helped make the movie so enjoyable.
As dissatisfaction with Michaels’ book increased, Lawrence Kasha, through his lawyers, continued negotiations with 20th Century-Fox for rights to the Mankiewicz screenplay. In the 1977 interview quoted above, he detailed the process: “I went to David Brown, who’s now a partner of Dick Zanuck of Zanuck and Brown. He was then in charge of East Coast operations for Fox. I knew David and we talked about the project. I told him what I wanted to do and he said, ‘Well, contact the legal department and go through all that and I’ll tell them of your interest and the things you’ve produced.’ With his help and a little bit of persistence on my part I acquired the rights from Fox.”
It’s impossible to construct a precise chronology of Applause as it lurched from the Michaels libretto toward the new one by Comden and Green. A Charles Strouse aphorism seems especially relevant to those days of creativity and creative differences: “You’ll find in the theatre that everybody remembers something quite different.”
From Sidney Michaels’ recollections, however, it appears that the producers waited to fire him until they had his replacements lined up. This is his account of the coup de grâce: “A meeting was called in Charlie Strouse’s living room. Everybody was there—Joe Kipness, Larry Kasha, Strouse and Adams, Ron Field. We all sat down and it was Larry Kasha who said they weren’t happy with the book I had written, except for Ron Field, who always said he loved it. They informed me that they wanted something entirely different. When I left I said, ‘I don’t want you to use a word of my script. So now you’ve got the Mankiewicz script, terrific. Use it.’ They did ask if they could keep the structure I had created, the scenes in the restaurant and the subplot stuff, and I said yes. So they kept that.”
Unlike an MGM musical with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, a real show is fraught with maddening setbacks. For whatever ornery or perverse reasons, 20th Century-Fox did and didn’t grant rights to the Mankiewicz screenplay.
In May 1969, when Betty Comden and Adolph
Green were called in by the producers to write a new libretto, Lawrence Kasha had not yet secured any rights at all from Fox. Soon, however, through the efforts of the producers’ lawyers, the studio granted its oddly incongruous permission for the writers to use “a limited amount” of material from the film. “Only we didn’t know what ‘a limited amount’ meant,” Betty Comden said. “It can be very dangerous guessing about the meaning of such things.” Adolph Green added, “We were also prohibited from using any character that wasn’t in the original Orr story. That meant the part of the critic, played in the movie by George Sanders, had to go.”
During the summer of 1969, Comden and Green completed two rewrites of the show, in which they developed their own characters. By the second rewrite, these characters—including Margo Channing, Bill Sampson, and Eve Harrington—had evolved rather far from those of the Orr story as well as from those in All About Eve. For example, the Margo of Applause started her career in the movies and then moved to Broadway, à la Lauren Bacall. Among a host of other changes, the character of Addison DeWitt was split into two unequal parts: that of the producer, Howard Benedict (played by Robert Mandan), and the smaller part of a cheap Broadway columnist, Stan Harding (played by Ray Becker).
Suddenly, in a late-summer beau geste, Fox granted full rights to the movie script, possibly because Lauren Bacall had been officially announced as the star. She had just signed a run-of-the-play contract for ten thousand dollars a week. By then, however, the creative team of Applause had solved most of its problems and no longer required studio largesse. “Actually, we used very little of the movie script,” said Adolph Green. In the published version there are roughly a dozen lines taken verbatim from All About Eve.
