Awards,” Stone pointed out.
“I earned them.”
At the time of this interview Mankiewicz was old and bitter. But age, and feeling undervalued, don’t really explain his claim that Mary Orr “made a fortune” from 20th Century-Fox. Even if he didn’t know the exact amount she was paid for the rights to her story—and it’s likely he didn’t—he surely knew that magazine stories sold to Hollywood have rarely made a fortune for their writers.
In the interview, Mankiewicz seems to feel slighted that he, along with Eve’s prototype, and Elisabeth Bergner as well, didn’t get a cut of Mary Orr’s “fortune”: The only people who did not make anything were Eve and Elisabeth Bergner. And me … except for my salary.
Though Mankiewicz perhaps didn’t realize it, he was quoting Elisabeth Bergner almost verbatim in the italicized lines above. Her book, wittily titled Bewundert Viel und Viel Gescholten —“Greatly Admired and Greatly Scolded”—devotes five pages to “the terrible girl,” although Bergner never employs that epithet in print. Bergner, in her eighties when the book was published, remembered certain details differently from Mary Orr. Bergner got the story title wrong, the amount of time necessary for publication, and at some point the girl had stopped wearing a red coat and put on red stockings instead. In general, however, Bergner’s version follows the one that Orr told me.
Here’s how Bergner concludes her five-page anecdote about the would-be usurper:
“But I’m telling this story now only because Reggie Denham asked about The Girl With Red Stockings. He didn’t know the outcome of the story which I’ve just told the reader.… Mary Orr was there and heard the story for the first time.
“A few weeks later in New York, I was at the hairdresser’s when I picked up a magazine. There was this whole story printed under the title ‘Girl With Red Stockings.’ Without the names, of course. It was about the great actress and the girl who always stood outside the stage door and who told big lies in order to break into the theatre.
“And the author of this magazine story was Mary Orr, the shy, quiet girl who had listened to my story that night.… Hollywood bought the story for Bette Davis, added some love intrigue, and it became the film All About Eve . This film became an international success and eventually a Broadway musical as well. And Mary Orr and all the parties concerned grew very rich from it. The only ones who didn’t earn anything from it were the real participants: the girl, my husband, and I.” (Emphasis added.)
The peculiar, rankling relationship of Mankiewicz and Mary Orr resembles the struggle of an estranged couple for custody of an only child. That child is none other than Eve Harrington.
* * *
A few years after her phone call to Joe Mankiewicz, “Eve” made a call to a New York journalist named Harry Haun and poured out her story to him.
Haun sounded both amused and perplexed as he told me about “Eve” one bright, sunny morning in his apartment on Riverside Drive in New York. He is a burly native Texan who for many years has been a journalist specializing in celebrity profiles. Among those he has interviewed are Celeste Holm and Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
One day in the early 1990s, four decades after All About Eve was made, Haun answered his phone at the New York Daily News and heard an energetic voice telling him that she was the real Eve. Someone had sent her a copy of Haun’s article on the movie in Films in Review for March/April 1991.
The caller was Miss X, who told Haun her real name: Martina Lawrence. But Haun already knew a Martina Lawrence: that’s the name of one of the twin sisters Elisabeth Bergner played in the 1939 British film Stolen Life . (The other twin was called Sylvina Lawrence. By the time Bette Davis starred in the Hollywood remake in 1946, the twins had become Kate and Patricia Bosworth.)
Haun, considering the possibilities,
“I earned them.”
At the time of this interview Mankiewicz was old and bitter. But age, and feeling undervalued, don’t really explain his claim that Mary Orr “made a fortune” from 20th Century-Fox. Even if he didn’t know the exact amount she was paid for the rights to her story—and it’s likely he didn’t—he surely knew that magazine stories sold to Hollywood have rarely made a fortune for their writers.
In the interview, Mankiewicz seems to feel slighted that he, along with Eve’s prototype, and Elisabeth Bergner as well, didn’t get a cut of Mary Orr’s “fortune”: The only people who did not make anything were Eve and Elisabeth Bergner. And me … except for my salary.
Though Mankiewicz perhaps didn’t realize it, he was quoting Elisabeth Bergner almost verbatim in the italicized lines above. Her book, wittily titled Bewundert Viel und Viel Gescholten —“Greatly Admired and Greatly Scolded”—devotes five pages to “the terrible girl,” although Bergner never employs that epithet in print. Bergner, in her eighties when the book was published, remembered certain details differently from Mary Orr. Bergner got the story title wrong, the amount of time necessary for publication, and at some point the girl had stopped wearing a red coat and put on red stockings instead. In general, however, Bergner’s version follows the one that Orr told me.
Here’s how Bergner concludes her five-page anecdote about the would-be usurper:
“But I’m telling this story now only because Reggie Denham asked about The Girl With Red Stockings. He didn’t know the outcome of the story which I’ve just told the reader.… Mary Orr was there and heard the story for the first time.
“A few weeks later in New York, I was at the hairdresser’s when I picked up a magazine. There was this whole story printed under the title ‘Girl With Red Stockings.’ Without the names, of course. It was about the great actress and the girl who always stood outside the stage door and who told big lies in order to break into the theatre.
“And the author of this magazine story was Mary Orr, the shy, quiet girl who had listened to my story that night.… Hollywood bought the story for Bette Davis, added some love intrigue, and it became the film All About Eve . This film became an international success and eventually a Broadway musical as well. And Mary Orr and all the parties concerned grew very rich from it. The only ones who didn’t earn anything from it were the real participants: the girl, my husband, and I.” (Emphasis added.)
The peculiar, rankling relationship of Mankiewicz and Mary Orr resembles the struggle of an estranged couple for custody of an only child. That child is none other than Eve Harrington.
* * *
A few years after her phone call to Joe Mankiewicz, “Eve” made a call to a New York journalist named Harry Haun and poured out her story to him.
Haun sounded both amused and perplexed as he told me about “Eve” one bright, sunny morning in his apartment on Riverside Drive in New York. He is a burly native Texan who for many years has been a journalist specializing in celebrity profiles. Among those he has interviewed are Celeste Holm and Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
One day in the early 1990s, four decades after All About Eve was made, Haun answered his phone at the New York Daily News and heard an energetic voice telling him that she was the real Eve. Someone had sent her a copy of Haun’s article on the movie in Films in Review for March/April 1991.
The caller was Miss X, who told Haun her real name: Martina Lawrence. But Haun already knew a Martina Lawrence: that’s the name of one of the twin sisters Elisabeth Bergner played in the 1939 British film Stolen Life . (The other twin was called Sylvina Lawrence. By the time Bette Davis starred in the Hollywood remake in 1946, the twins had become Kate and Patricia Bosworth.)
Haun, considering the possibilities,
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