by Staggs, Sam
“That night, after the performance, I brought sandwiches and drinks backstage for Miss Bergner and Dr. Czinner. Then Alice asked me to go over the scene with her until Miss Bergner was ready for the run-through, and so we got started.
“At the high point of the scene, coming down the stairs, I had the strange feeling of being watched. I was without my glasses but I felt eyes on me. It was a tense moment in the play and I was too caught up in it to stop. When I got to the footlights—there was Miss Bergner!
“Several other people were around, on the stage and elsewhere. They were all watching Bergner. Those eyes I had felt fixed on me were hers. Only hers. I’m sure of that.
“I expected her to smile. To be rather amused at how well I was imitating her. Oh, but she continued to stare. She said nothing. My excitement, my joy, departed. I was miserable. Suddenly I had the flash of knowledge: I had done something terrible. Something wrong and horrible, and it had displeased her.
“Out front, towards the back of the theatre, a stagehand was replacing a bulb in the chandelier. He must have asked a question. We onstage didn’t hear it, but we did hear another stagehand call out an answer: ‘It’s that kid that’s always hanging around out front. She’s as good as Bergner and what’s more ya can hear her!’
“The silence was cold and deadly. Finally Dr. Czinner broke the dreadful impasse. He said that now Miss Bergner would take over.
“But Bergner, in a hoarse, tight voice, said, ‘No.’ She said that I was to continue in the scene so that she could watch ‘the other one,’ meaning Alice Buchanan.
“Later I was told that I should not have continued the scene. A couple of those present said that Bergner never took her eyes from me but watched as though hypnotized, fascinated, unbelieving, to see someone else do everything she did—subtle, personal, intimate gestures assimilated after weeks of keen observation. Of course she had some acting tricks. She had some coy, Mittel Europa mannerisms that could seem affected and cute. But imitation is the highest form of admiration, and that’s all I had shown Bergner. Admiration, and unconscious empathy.
“The next day—Wednesday, as I said—Alice Buchanan made her debut in the play at the matinee performance. At the intermission, I went downstairs to the ladies’ lounge to chat with Mrs. Moran, the attendant. I told her about the day before, how I was ‘discovered’ by Dr. Czinner at noon, and then by Miss Bergner that night. I was ecstatic, and still soaring.
“Three or four days later, in my capacity as secretary, I opened a letter addressed to Miss Bergner. But the letter was all about me! A fan letter to the great actress, but devoted to a girl that she, the writer, had watched and listened to in the ladies’ lounge at the Wednesday matinee. I shall always remember the well-meant but tactless lines that annoyed Bergner so: ‘Sometimes, Miss Bergner, we fail to see talent right under our very nose. This girl seems to work in some capacity around the theatre. She has all the markings of another Ingrid Bergman or, better still, Elisabeth Bergner.’
“Later, my cousin, Mildred Brody, a psychologist, said to me, ‘What kind of person writes fan letters like this? Let’s call her up and find out.’ The woman was named Bea Elkin and she lived in the Bronx. She told us she liked Bergner although she wasn’t really a fan. She said she had been very impressed by the girl and thought that by writing the letter she could help her in some way. For you see, she had overheard me telling Mrs. Moran about my ‘discovery.’ I remembered afterwards (with Mrs. Moran’s help) that during the intermission a woman had pretended to comb her hair there in the ladies’ lounge. But in reality, she was watching us in the mirrors that covered two or three walls.
“I took the letter to Dr. Czinner. I asked him if I might keep it without showing it to Miss Bergner. He said no, the letter was addressed to her; it was hers, she must see it.
“So I left it with her other letters. Several days passed. She said nothing about the letter. I began to wonder if it had ended up unread in those manila envelopes where she stuffed unopened mail. I was eager to know her reaction. And I wanted the letter for myself. It couldn’t mean much to her, I thought, but everything to me.
“Finally I could wait no longer. Ten days later I asked Dr. Czinner about the letter. For the first time ever he was cool and abrupt. He said Miss Bergner had read it. He said she didn’t need a third party to point out my talent. She recognized it, and so did he.
“I felt everything rushing to an end, and I wanted the letter as the one tangible proof that I hadn’t dreamed this whole episode.
“I went to Miss Bergner’s home while she was away. Thelma, her maid, told me she had seen Miss Bergner reading the letter, dwelling on it, and that she had taken it with her to the theatre. I returned to the Booth. Cordette, Miss Bergner’s theatre maid, whispered that the letter was in the pocket of Miss Bergner’s fur jacket. I said, ‘Look, Cordette, I’m taking this letter. I want it, and she’ll only tear it up anyway.’
“After the performance that Saturday night Cordette informed me that I was to wait in the greenroom for Miss Bergner. That night, it seemed she took longer than usual to remove her makeup and change into street clothes. At last she walked in. She told me she had read the letter.
“Then it began. She told me how hard she had worked on her voice, and how she had labored to learn stage movement, and there I was, without training or experience, doing the same things with such ease. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is talent.’ She said those words sadly, not with anger or bitterness. I tried to explain that it was only because I had studied her performances so closely that I could imitate her.
“She was so cold! Never before had I felt such a chill. I realized at once that, knowing the actress Bergner quite well, Elisabeth the human being was a stranger to me.
“Her next command was the thunderclap: I was banished from the theatre. She could no longer trust me; I had taken property that was hers. She did say I could continue working for Dr. Czinner and his co- producer in their office.
“She left me alone and I wept for a long time. Then she came back, ready now to leave the theatre and go home. Alone, without me. ‘Don’t feel so bad. You have talent,’ she said. She added that it had happened before; in Europe, clever young women had sought to use her to advance their careers. ‘You’re a better actress than they were,’ she stated. ‘I believed in your sincerity and your simplicity.’ (In Mary Orr’s story, the Bergner figure suspects that Eve wrote the letter herself. That leads to the split.)
“I was out of her life. To prove it even further, she told me I was not to accompany her and Dr. Czinner for the weekend to Lakehurst, New Jersey, where the Hindenburg had crashed and burned in nineteen thirty-seven. She never spoke to me again until we met twenty-seven years later.
“For several weeks after that terrible night, I waited in the alley six days a week, before and after every show, six evening performances and two matinees, hoping she would relent and speak to me. You see, I had a little part-time job, so I would come to the theatre in time for her arrival, then go about my business and come back when the play was over. But Bergner was unmoved. She ignored me.
“That’s where Mary Orr first saw me. She came to the theatre with her husband, Reginald Denham, the director of The Two Mrs. Carrolls.
“I kept on working for Dr. Czinner. One day he told me that the John Golden auditions for new talent would be held soon and he wanted me to enter. I told him I had no interest in becoming an actress and that the loss of Miss Bergner’s friendship was a high price to have paid for something I never wanted. Eventually I reconsidered, went to the public library, found my material—a scene from Anna Christie—and entered the competition. At the finals, I was one of four winners of the John Golden Awards, Anne Jackson was another. Then I left for Hollywood. It was May or June of nineteen forty-five. Miss Bergner’s play was no longer running at the Booth Theatre, having closed a few months earlier, on February third.
“At that time I had changed my name from Ruth Hirsch to Ruth Attlee-Stewart. You
see, my husband was Hans Gideon Stein, but to sound more American he changed it to John Gideon Stewart. By taking part of his name and adding Attlee, I became Ruth Attlee-Stewart, with a hyphen. No, no, Clement Attlee was not yet the prime minister of Great Britain, that was only after the war, in nineteen forty-five. Anyway, after I won the Golden Award, Bergner sent word by Mady Christians, the actress I was studying with, that I should take a professional name. She said that if I took the name Martina Lawrence, she would know it’s not a real name and she would be able to follow my career. Big deal! Here she wouldn’t speak to me, but she was interested in my career.”
Facing Martina Lawrence at the end of this strange recital, I must have betrayed a look of panicked consternation. Martina snapped, “I have a feeling you are going to compound some more lies.”
That was too much. I was exasperated. “Please!” I said. “Why would I travel to New York to see you if I didn’t want the truth? I could write lies at home.”
Her bullying ceased. “I don’t expect other people, on the fringes of something, to remember all these things, but it happened to me, so of course I remember.”
We were friends again. And we had come to the end of our interview. “I’m afraid I’ve tired you with so many questions,” I said. “Let’s end on a positive note. About you. Are you happy?”
“Yes,” Martina said without a pause. “I have lived my life. I own a little flat. No one can ever raise the rent or take it away from me. I live in a city that is considered by many a very beautiful city, it’s a walking city and I’m a walker, I’m interested in art and architecture and history. I have the best of it, I would say.”
I turned off the tape recorder, and Martina walked me to the elevator. She rode with me to the lobby, talking all the while and intriguing our fellow passengers with her flair and her melodious, chiseled enunciation. Her vivacious presence signaled that she was out of place in an inexpensive tourist hotel. Those spectators in the lift, as Martina called it, seemed to wonder how she had strayed from the realm of opening nights and clumps of flowers in dressing rooms. We shook hands, and I walked out into East Fifty-first Street.
I felt as if I had awakened from a fever dream to reenter the reality of the city.
* * *
I confess that my final question was simply tossed out to help speed my departure. It was, of course, an echo of Mary Orr’s statement on Harry Haun’s tape, telling Martina, “I hope you are happy now.”
Martina’s cadenced answer to my question, however, vibrated in my head. It was sweet; it was poignant. And final. A playwright might have invented it to ring down the curtain, or a novelist to end a tale. Or was it yet another fork in the Borgesian path?
Walking around Manhattan that late afternoon, I felt that Martina had raised many more questions than she had answered. The main one being, Who on earth is Martina Lawrence? The New York setting produced this surreal image: She’s an invention of Damon Runyon … in collaboration with Truman Capote, for Martina Lawrence is Holly Golightly grown old. She’s also Kay Thompson’s Eloise, now a geriatric enfant terrible.
Why had she devoted her life to this mulish campaign of setting the record straight? Her own version differs mainly in particulars, not substantively, from Mary Orr’s story. And even though it stings to find yourself unflatteringly fictionalized, how could anyone stew for five decades over a second-rate story in a forgotten magazine? So what if she pinched a letter from a fur jacket? And “stalked” Elisabeth Bergner in some innocuous, juvenile way? There’s nothing so terrible about any of it.
In my fanatical mapping of the evolution of Eve Harrington, I had at last found the missing link: Martina Lawrence, who had spawned all subsequent Eves. I determined to dig deeper into the fossil remains of that eventful Broadway season in the mid-forties, looking for bones or even a petrified footprint.
* * *
I found instead Mary Diveny, who isn’t at all petrified and whose memory for detail rivals Martina’s own. She is “Diveny,” the friend Martina mentioned in our initial telephone conversation. I went to see her in Marlene, at the Cort Theatre on West Forty-eighth Street. Backstage after the play, I encountered an alert, kindly woman, a veteran actor who seemed as sensible and down-to-earth as everyone’s favorite aunt. She was rushing to the Port Authority terminal to catch a bus to her home far north of the city, and so we arranged to speak later by phone.
“I came to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and I lived at the Rehearsal Club from, I believe nineteen forty-five to nineteen forty-nine,” Mary Diveny said. “Early in nineteen forty-six I got a job in a USO touring company. We went overseas, and I returned to New York, and the Rehearsal Club, in August of ninteen forty-six. That’s when I met Martina. She had lots of people interested in her for different reasons. That’s because she was intriguing. She knew Guthrie McClintic, for example, who was married to Katherine Cornell. He was casting The Playboy of the Western World with Burgess Meredith. One of the young women in the cast wasn’t working out, so McClintic called Martina. She read for the part, but she wasn’t right for an Irish peasant girl. She told him, however, that she knew someone who would be perfect for it. He said, ‘Call her,’ and Martina did. ‘Come right down,’ she said. So I did, and I read for him and got the part.”
Martina had told me at one point about her aspirations to act, then later she disavowed them. I wanted to know whether she had been in pursuit of a theatrical career back then.
Mary Diveny said, “She would try everything. But without being able to stick to it. She probably thought she was going to be an actress but she just never knew how to go about it the right way.”
And did she have other jobs at the same time? “Oh, always,” her friend said. “She never had any money. So it was always a waitress job or whatever came along to support herself. We were all like that. I worked at the Russian Tea Room as a hatcheck girl and cashier.”
I asked if she knew Martina at the time of her involvement with Elisabeth Bergner. “No,” Miss Diveny said. “All that had taken place shortly before we met. But we were all very much aware of it at the Rehearsal Club. Martina was unhappy because the story didn’t reflect the way events turned out.”
“Do you believe all the details of that incredible Bergner saga?” I ventured.
“Well,” she answered, “really, I firmly believe it.”
“What was Martina like in those days?” I asked.
“She was effervescent and full of energy. And volatile. She was a very intense person. Martina comes to town once or twice a year, and I always learn something new about her. Another phase of her life that I hadn’t heard about before.”
If Mary Diveny, who seems as wise and stable as Jane Wyatt in Father Knows Best, doesn’t question the veracity of Martina’s adventures, then perhaps I shouldn’t. But in the case of M. Lawrence vs. E. Bergner, M. Orr, et al., I still felt like a hung jury of one, so I decided to call a final witness.
After burrowing through old newspaper files and current phone directories, I located another alumna of the Rehearsal Club, a former Rockette who knew Martina while living there. This person agreed to speak only on condition of “everlasting anonymity,” as she put it. Here is what she said.
“She was immature, unsophisticated, and naive. She’ll tell you that herself, and it’s true. She’s still naive, even though she has traveled the world. She is a waif, a lone person. That mother of hers—oh, she was mentally ill. I remember her mother coming and yelling at her on the street. She was a harridan. She was very heavy, and that’s why Martina is so thin. Because she would never, ever let herself be like her mother. She practically starved herself over the years trying to be as different as possible from that woman. She really did go to Hollywood, you know. After the John Golden thing. But the studio didn’t work out. It was a big, big disappointment. People would be very interested in her for a while, that accent and all those gestures, but Martina lacked discipline. She took an acting course or somethi
ng for a few weeks, but that doesn’t do much for you, I’m afraid.
“And I can tell you something you don’t know. Martina later latched on to Renata Tebaldi. I gather she also played Eve Harrington to her, except that this was the world of opera. Good luck finding out about it. You won’t. Divas don’t like to admit they’ve been had.”
* * *
I found it curious that there was no sex in anyone’s version. Paul Czinner was homosexual, and it seems that his marriage to Bergner was platonic. Unlikely, therefore, that he would seduce Martina or be seduced by her. Bergner was either lesbian or bisexual, but according to Martina she made no advances. And despite her mistrust of Martina, they rekindled the friendship, after a fashion.
In 1972 Bergner was appearing at a theatre in Mannheim, Germany, in Eugene O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions, in German Alle Reichtum der Welt. Martina happened into town, looked up Bergner at her hotel, and they had a pleasant visit. But there’s always a strange twist to Martina’s tales, including this one. For Martina told me she wasn’t sure that Bergner recognized her. “She seemed confused, and I’m not at all certain she realized who it was,” Martina stated as though such vagueness were the norm.
They also corresponded. Martina showed me several letters from Bergner. The stationery bore the printed address 42, EATON SQUARE, LONDON. The letters, dated in the early 1970s, were pleasant but noncommittal, as though written to a young fan.
