by Staggs, Sam
During the evening Pierce would switch from Carol Channing to Barbara Stanwyck to Joan Collins, while dwelling, of course, on legends from every drag queen’s pantheon: Marlene Dietrich (“I’m going to do a few numbers I did during the war. Some are in the audience tonight.”); Joan Crawford (“Your bathwater is ready, Christina. I’ve been boiling it for two hours.”); Mae West (“I feel like a million tonight, but I’ll take one or two at a time.”). But in looks, voice, and temperament, Pierce was always at his best as Bette Davis: “I’d like to do a scene for you—from all of my films!” (That “scene” was usually from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? or from Eve. If the latter, Pierce would innocently acknowledge Bette’s lofty co-star, “Celestial” Holm.)
Charles Pierce playing Bette Davis playing Margo Channing—it’s exhilarating, it’s camp art of the grandest kind. But surely we can be glad that Bette herself never got a crack at the musical. She was no singer (remember “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy”), and while the same could be said of Lauren Bacall, the difference is that Bacall creates the illusion that she’s singing. And Bette was no dancer, although as a young girl she studied briefly with Martha Graham. Graham’s tutelage, however, taught Bette the art of movement rather than the art of dance. (Bette said, “Every time I climbed a flight of stairs in films—and I spent half my life on them—it was Graham step by step.”)
The worst prospect of all, however, is that Bette would have wrecked the show, turning it into a drunken shambles by quarreling with everyone in sight. Which is what she had done during the 1961–62 Broadway season when she appeared in Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana. The same thing happened in 1974, when Bette took the title role of Miss Moffat. That time, however, the agony was shorter, since the play closed out of town.
Applause was too full of ghosts, which Bette could not have endured. And being something less than magnificent, the show depended for its life on a star who could command and enlarge it, namely Bacall. She was absolutely right for singing-and-dancing Margo, just as Bette had been perfect in the film. Bacall’s refusal to be anything but a star would convince just about anyone.
But time has been kinder to Bette. Watching a tape of Bacall in Applause, you admire her and give her her due. You believe every word of praise lavished on her, and still you look beyond Bacall to the black-and-white pentimento that emerges through the color and the songs. You even ask, and feel remorse for asking: Is this the real Margo Channing, or only the mock? For that earlier image burning into view will always be Bette Davis. How could it be otherwise? For Applause itself—whether in 1970 or today—amounts to little more than an adjunct to All About Eve, like an espresso bar in the basement of Bloomingdale’s.
Another title for the show might have been Forbidden Broadway—because of the hubris of trying to improve All About Eve, and also for the standard-issue music that resulted from that attempt. Did you ever know someone who would break into spontaneous parodies of generic Broadway show tunes? If so, then you’ve heard a good bit of Applause, even if you’ve never listened to the cast recording. All not-so-great musicals sound rather alike, and this one has plenty of clichéd tunes and lyrics. Detracting even more from the show is the book, which pushes the worn-out theme “Isn’t it wonderful, the theatre is awful but we’re putting on a show.”
Surely the most concise assessment of Applause—and the greatest compliment to All About Eve—came from Billy Wilder. Leaving the theatre, he quipped: “You know, this show would make a wonderful movie.”
postscript: tell us about it, eve
The book was finished. As far as possible I had unified the contradictory narratives and random gossip into an authentic account of All About Eve and all those connected with it.
Except for one person.
Being privy to remarkable depictions of Martina Lawrence from Mary Orr and Harry Haun, I tried early on to track her down. I looked up her name in the Venice telephone directory, but it wasn’t there. I checked with an overseas operator. No listing. I wondered if she had moved, vanished. Died.
A couple of years went by. On a later trip to New York, I saw Harry Haun again. This time he played the tape he had made at Sardi’s the day he invited Mary Orr and Martina Lawrence to tea. The voice, at last.
My first reaction was surprise. Martina Lawrence’s theatricality on the tape went beyond great-lady caricature. Her conversation was a performance, and the accent, which might pass for stage British to some ears, was still in place. For all of its transparency, the accent nevertheless created a certain enchantment. To hear the woman speak reminded me of precocious children wrapped up in fanciful games.
According to her rapid-fire autobiography on that tape, the life of Martina Lawrence was crowded with incident. Born in Chicago in 1921, she was named Ruth Maxine Hirsch. She spent a grim childhood, much of it in midwestern orphanages. At the age of eight she was brought to New York, and more orphanages. She said she acquired her accent from the movies.
In her early twenties she married a Viennese émigré Jew named Hans who, like Eve Harrington’s Eddie, served in World War II. She spoke at length about Elisabeth Bergner and Paul Czinner.
Mary Orr didn’t say very much, one reason being that her antagonist dominated the conversation. Unwilling to relinquish the past, Lawrence taunted Orr during one of several heated exchanges at the tea table: “You made quite a career mixing up fact and fiction.” The dispute grew so boisterous that Harry Haun intervened with, “Girls, girls, there’s no need for this.”
At the end of the party, Mary Orr said, “Anyway, Martina, I hope you’re happy now.” And as though to ring down the curtain, Martina paused, drew breath, and replied, “I am.”
The goneness of those long-ago events is all we can ever know for certain. At least that was my thought as I left Harry Haun that day. But he had dug up Martina Lawrence’s address in Venice, and when I returned home I wrote to her asking for an interview by mail or by phone. I received no answer.
Then one day, a month after my visit to Haun, he called with some news. He started out, “She’s baaack.” Indeed, she was in town. Harry had just spoken with Martina. He told me where she was staying and I telephoned her. During that first conversation she was chatty and coquettish. She told me she had received my letter before leaving Venice. “I have little interest in All About Eve,” she declaimed, “but people won’t let me escape it.”
I had no ready reply, nor did I need one. Suddenly she was wound up, telling me any number of things about herself and people she had known, friends and transgressors. Eventually I asked, “What brings you to New York?”
“I came to see Diveny, of course. You know we lost each other for all those years, and now she’s in a play. It’s not a frightfully large part, no, but you see, I wanted to give her my support. Diveny is a dear friend from long ago. The part is actually small, but important even though it’s a nonspeaking role, you know. Sian Phillips is the star, and the play is called Marlene. I found certain things in it that are quite inaccurate, as when she says something unflattering about my idol—Garbo. Oh, Garbo was the one I always loved most, and of course Elisabeth knew Dietrich, but no one was like Garbo. And by the way, you wrote in an article that Elisabeth Bergner was known as ‘the Garbo of the stage.’ Never! That’s not true at all! She was called ‘die zaubere Bergner,’ magical Bergner. I don’t mean she never had anything to do with Garbo, because in her book—she was in Hollywood and there is a scene where she says that Garbo made a pass at her. Sometime at a party. One was not sure of Bergner’s memory, either. In her autobiography there are lies, inaccuracies there, too.”
At last I put in that I’d like to hear the story from her, in person. She laughed musically and said, “I am not good at making a long story short.” Then, after some slightly flirtatious hesitation, she consented to an interview on condition that I accurately report her side of the story. “I want to clear my name,” she declared. A few days later, I flew to New York and spent an afternoon with
Martina Lawrence at the Pickwick Arms Hotel on East Fifty-first Street.
She is about five feet tall, and very thin. Her sharp features and lined face reminded me of Ruth Gordon in her later years. Martina—for we were soon using first names—was wearing a blue cardigan over a black turtleneck jersey, and black-and-white dotted slacks with large pantaloon legs.
On the day of our visit she was less ebullient than she had been on the phone. Sounding distressed, she asked, “How much time is it going to take? I mean, I’m an old lady and I might grow weary.”
I told her to let me know if she felt tired. The next thing she said was, “All of them have lied, starting with Mary Orr. And also Harry Haun, who said things that Mankiewicz was supposed to say that are not true. I never corresponded with Mankiewicz. He was the guest of honor in Venice at an event, and the big deal was All About Eve. I decided I was going to call up just for the fun of it. His wife said that he was on his way out the door, he was already late, the boat was waiting for him. I said, ‘This is Eve.’ And oh, she called him back. He wanted to know if I could send him something, the proof of who I was. And I left it off at the front desk of the Cipriani Hotel.”
I asked about Mankiewicz’s assertion that she sent him a copy of Elisabeth Bergner’s autobiography.
Martina said, “There were only four pages or so about me. I don’t recall whether I sent him anything else. And I never heard from him. Harry Haun also wrote that I am a librarian. Ridiculous! When I sent the material to Mr. Mankiewicz, there was a bookshop called the Libreria San Giorgio. And my godchild—she will inherit my flat and anything that I have—she was working there at the time, and she gave me a large manila envelope that had Libreria San Giorgio stamped on it. ‘Libreria’ for someone who doesn’t know Italian looks like ‘library,’ and it’s not. ‘Biblioteca’ means a library.”
(Rosemary Mankiewicz, the director’s widow, confirmed that she answered the phone in the Cipriani Hotel when Martina Lawrence telephoned. She also noted the date: April 9, 1987.)
Martina mentioned living at the Rehearsal Club around the time of the Elisabeth Bergner episode, so I asked her to tell me about it.
Those memories seemed happy ones, for she smiled and her voice relaxed. “It was a theatrical boardinghouse,” she said. “The Rehearsal Club was for aspiring actresses, singers, and dancers, at Forty-seven West Fifty-third Street. Anna Russell was there when I was. Two old brownstones were connected, and of course the play Stage Door by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman, and later the movie, were based on life at the Rehearsal Club.
“Anyway, one afternoon in June nineteen forty-six, the director, Kay Carlton, called me to her sitting room to show me the May nineteen forty-six issue of Cosmopolitan. A story in it, called ‘The Wisdom of Eve,’ had been brought to Miss Carlton’s attention by one of the older girls in the club who knew vaguely of my association with Elisabeth Bergner. I read the story and was flattered and fascinated, but shocked by its slant, by its erroneous point of view. There was so much that was true—people, incidents, attitudes, entire conversations—that it was impossible for a stranger to know where truth ended and fiction took over. The story branded the girl a clever, phony, scheming, unscrupulous bitch.
“After reading it in Miss Carlton’s office, I immediately went to see Mary Orr, the author. At first she denied any truth or coincidence of the story and accused me of being highly emotional and wrought up, of reading things into the story that were purely fictitious and created by her. I was angry now at her twisting things around and by her aggressivity. When I pointed out some obvious similarities, she changed her manner and told me how she had come to write the story and where she had gotten the facts. But the slant of it, of the girl’s motives, came, she said, only from Bergner.
“Now, if I had been the girl Elisabeth Bergner judged me to be, having been ‘seen through’ by her would have been only a temporary setback. ‘Eve’ would have known how to use the incident to good advantage. She would have exploited it to get herself publicity and attention, as she does in the story. But where had it gotten me?
“All I wanted from Mary Orr was her admission that the best parts of the story were true, based on fact; that the two protagonists were Elisabeth Bergner and me; and that seeing any resemblance to actual happenings was not some ‘figment of my imagination,’ as she had first said. When she realized that I probably would not follow up my visit with legal action, her sharp, aggressive manner became almost cordial. She seemed relieved. As though she had sized me up rightly—and so she had!—as an odd, offbeat, inexperienced girl who wouldn’t take the matter any further.”
I was perplexed at such naiveté. Martina’s anger seemed directed at the genre of fiction. Her gnawing unhappiness apparently fed on the plain fact that Mary Orr wrote a short story and not a literal account of certain events in the life of Martina Lawrence. My follow-up questions did not lead far.
She went on, “Most of the events were true. But to make up things, out of the top of one’s head, that’s wrong. That’s immoral, that’s unethical. You see, I’ve never liked fiction, Sam. Fiction, you can write anything you want.”
I changed direction by referring to a statement from Harry Haun’s tape: “You told Harry that you met Elisabeth Bergner and her husband by catching cabs. Will you elaborate?”
The oddity of such an encounter didn’t strike Martina as odd, or if so she didn’t let on. In fact, she took the phrase “catching cabs” almost as her madeleine to release the locked-up glories of her past. Her voice grew lyrical when she uttered the phrase.
“My husband was in the war, and I was staying at the Laura Spelman YWCA on October fourteenth, nineteen forty-four, my birthday. I was twenty-three that day. The institutional gloom of the place depressed me, and so I bought a ticket for standing room to see The Two Mrs. Carrolls at the Booth Theatre. However, that first time I saw Elisabeth Bergner on a stage bothered me. I was disappointed. I preferred her in the movies. I couldn’t hear her very well and thought she must be ill. After the performance I saw Dr. Czinner. Smelling to high heaven with eau de cologne. Anyway, I recognized him from magazines and things, and I mentioned something about how was Miss Bergner. He said, ‘Oh, you know Miss Bergner?’ I said, ‘No, I’ve only seen her in movies.’ He said she wasn’t well and had a cold and fever.
“After that first chat with Miss Bergner’s husband, I came to the Booth Theatre every evening. It seemed so wonderful and strange to me that someone I admired and identified with on celluloid made far away in other countries was here and accessible.
“I was quite surprised that Elisabeth Bergner didn’t have a car or a hired cab to take her home. I began to help Dr. Czinner flag down cabs. I always stayed in the shadows of the Booth Theatre in the alley to wait for Miss Bergner to arrive and leave the theatre. I never attempted to speak to her.
“After a month of flagging cabs and never missing her arrival and departure, my reward came. One afternoon after the matinee, Miss Bergner took me home with her, to Fourteen East Seventy-fifth Street. Dr. Czinner had told her I was more successful than he in catching cabs, and she thanked me. I told her I thought she should get home quickly on matinee days, to rest between performances. I felt protective towards her although we were very alike physically. I was a bit taller, with bigger feet. I wore her clothes but never the shoes she wanted to give me.
“Bergner didn’t eat anything that first day she brought me home. She heated up five frankfurters, set them alone on a plate before me, and sat opposite me while I ate them—staring with those enormous eyes of hers. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings and maybe never again be brought home. So I ate them and drank sweet, thick Turkish coffee brewed in its individual long-handled metal cup. That was the first of many visits to her duplex apartment on East Seventy-fifth Street.
“In the first weeks I knew Bergner she scarcely talked to me. She would exit from the stage door, come to where I waited, put her arm through mine, and take me with her to the waiting taxi.
In the cab, she sat drawn up small and remote in her corner, smiling shyly, grateful to me, I thought, for not pressing her into conversation. Sometimes she seemed puzzled. She must have had questions she never asked me. I felt it in her frequent staring—quizzical, curious.
“I became her secretary. I remember my amazement and dismay when I found quantities of unopened mail in several large manila envelopes. Letters dating back many months, some even a year. Miss Bergner gave instructions that I was to be allowed out front whenever I wanted to see the show, even though its success had made it standing room only. I came just about every evening to the theatre. It made me less lonely to have some fixed place to go.
“I also began to work in the office for Dr. Czinner and Robert Reud, the co-producer of the play.
“The time came when the actress playing the role of the first wife in The Two Mrs. Carrolls gave her notice; she was leaving the show. The casting call went out and actresses now began to stream in to the office to try out for the part. Dr. Czinner asked me to read the scene with them. The woman who was finally chosen used to come in the office when I was there alone and rehearse with me. Her name was Alice Buchanan.
“Then the day arrived when she was to rehearse on the stage. She was to have her only run-through with Miss Bergner that evening after the performance. It was a Tuesday. Miss Buchanan was to make her debut the next day, Wednesday, at the matinee. She was frightened and nervous. The idea of playing with an actress of Bergner’s stature and reputation awed and intimidated her.
“The stage manager called up Dr. Czinner’s office and asked for another script to be brought over to the theatre. I took it over, and when I arrived they were breaking for lunch. Since Alice Buchanan and I had done the scene together in the office, she begged me to stay and rehearse with her while the others were at lunch. I had memorized Miss Bergner’s part, so I did. It was fun having a stage to move around on. It was exciting to imagine an audience back in the last rows or up in the balcony and to know that we were projecting to them. When the scene was finished Dr. Czinner surprised us by appearing out of the first rows of the darkened theatre. He came onto the stage. He walked to me, past the actress, took both my hands in his and looked at me, smiled at me. He seemed very moved, very proud.
