set up a tea party so that Miss Lawrence could at last tell her version of the story. He also invited Mary Orr. If Joseph Mankiewicz hadn’t been infirm, Haun might have persuaded him to complete the family circle: Eve’s “parents” and their unholy offspring.
Harry Haun’s original plan was a luncheon, but Mary Orr demurred. She told him, “I don’t want to suffer through lunch. I’ll come if you make it tea.” He chose the upstairs at Sardi’s because it’s uncrowded in the afternoon.
Haun recalls that “the girls eyed each other curiously, suspiciously.” Mary Orr remembers that “Martina and Harry did all the talking. I sat and listened.”
What did they discuss?
“At first, she wanted Harry to help her write her side of the story. Then she wanted me to rewrite the story from her point of view. I said, ‘I have no interest in doing that.’ I got the feeling she was desperate to find someone to help her. At the end of tea I excused myself. You see, I had nothing to say to her. I had satisfied my curiosity to see her after all those years.”
For indeed, Mary Orr and Martina Lawrence had met before. It was after “The Wisdom of Eve” appeared in Cosmopolitan in 1946, but before All About Eve was filmed.
“She came to my home one day, very angry,” Mary Orr recalls. “We lived on Central Park South then, in an apartment on the second floor. Somehow this girl got past the doorman and made her way upstairs. I suppose she had found my name in the phone book. She had discovered that issue of Cosmopolitan in a stack of old magazines at a dentist’s office.
“Now, this was a couple of years after it was published. She rang my bell and when I answered she pushed in past me. She was livid. I had no idea why she had come, but she threatened to sue me. She had recognized herself in the story but, the statute of limitations having expired, she never found a lawyer who would take the case.
“She lives in Venice, I believe. One of the things she said the day she broke into my apartment was, ‘You owe me a fare to Italy.’ And now, nearly a half-century later, she was in New York on a visit, trying to find somebody to write her story. That story—oh my, she thinks it’s her claim to fame, even though it was detrimental to her.”
In his article for Films in Review , Harry Haun added a postscript about Martina Lawrence: “A former librarian who lives in Venice and works in a bookstore there … she insists she was never the premeditated plotter Mankiewicz made her out to be—that her skullduggery only existed in the mind of Elisabeth Bergner.”
Mary Orr’s characterization of Martina Lawrence, and Harry Haun’s, left me unsettled. I felt as though I had been reading Henry James at his most ambiguous. Indeed, the donnée of this story was right out of James: a forlorn little American selling books in Venice for fifty years, trying in vain to make someone believe her. Martina Lawrence might have materialized from The Wings of the Dove or The Aspern Papers .
Did she, I wondered, represent innocence betrayed, or evil understated?
What if she was really just an ingenue who wanted a part in a play? Suppose Elisabeth Bergner projected wickedness onto a young girl’s innocent admiration? Bergner was a star. She could boost reputations, or destroy them. What if the unreciprocated advances of an aging actress had ruined the future of a naive girl in a little red coat (or was it red stockings?) who stood near the stage door night after night just to catch sight of her idol? And suppose this girl was not terrible at all. Suppose she was merely a fan—like the rest of us.
Or just the opposite. Suppose the girl was a Machiavellianess who would stop at nothing. In that case, “The Wisdom of Eve” merely suggests all she’s capable of.
That version would play like this: After a baroque flirtation with the vulnerable, middle-aged, émigrée actress, the caressing little serpent coiled around her victim,
Harry Haun’s original plan was a luncheon, but Mary Orr demurred. She told him, “I don’t want to suffer through lunch. I’ll come if you make it tea.” He chose the upstairs at Sardi’s because it’s uncrowded in the afternoon.
Haun recalls that “the girls eyed each other curiously, suspiciously.” Mary Orr remembers that “Martina and Harry did all the talking. I sat and listened.”
What did they discuss?
“At first, she wanted Harry to help her write her side of the story. Then she wanted me to rewrite the story from her point of view. I said, ‘I have no interest in doing that.’ I got the feeling she was desperate to find someone to help her. At the end of tea I excused myself. You see, I had nothing to say to her. I had satisfied my curiosity to see her after all those years.”
For indeed, Mary Orr and Martina Lawrence had met before. It was after “The Wisdom of Eve” appeared in Cosmopolitan in 1946, but before All About Eve was filmed.
“She came to my home one day, very angry,” Mary Orr recalls. “We lived on Central Park South then, in an apartment on the second floor. Somehow this girl got past the doorman and made her way upstairs. I suppose she had found my name in the phone book. She had discovered that issue of Cosmopolitan in a stack of old magazines at a dentist’s office.
“Now, this was a couple of years after it was published. She rang my bell and when I answered she pushed in past me. She was livid. I had no idea why she had come, but she threatened to sue me. She had recognized herself in the story but, the statute of limitations having expired, she never found a lawyer who would take the case.
“She lives in Venice, I believe. One of the things she said the day she broke into my apartment was, ‘You owe me a fare to Italy.’ And now, nearly a half-century later, she was in New York on a visit, trying to find somebody to write her story. That story—oh my, she thinks it’s her claim to fame, even though it was detrimental to her.”
In his article for Films in Review , Harry Haun added a postscript about Martina Lawrence: “A former librarian who lives in Venice and works in a bookstore there … she insists she was never the premeditated plotter Mankiewicz made her out to be—that her skullduggery only existed in the mind of Elisabeth Bergner.”
Mary Orr’s characterization of Martina Lawrence, and Harry Haun’s, left me unsettled. I felt as though I had been reading Henry James at his most ambiguous. Indeed, the donnée of this story was right out of James: a forlorn little American selling books in Venice for fifty years, trying in vain to make someone believe her. Martina Lawrence might have materialized from The Wings of the Dove or The Aspern Papers .
Did she, I wondered, represent innocence betrayed, or evil understated?
What if she was really just an ingenue who wanted a part in a play? Suppose Elisabeth Bergner projected wickedness onto a young girl’s innocent admiration? Bergner was a star. She could boost reputations, or destroy them. What if the unreciprocated advances of an aging actress had ruined the future of a naive girl in a little red coat (or was it red stockings?) who stood near the stage door night after night just to catch sight of her idol? And suppose this girl was not terrible at all. Suppose she was merely a fan—like the rest of us.
Or just the opposite. Suppose the girl was a Machiavellianess who would stop at nothing. In that case, “The Wisdom of Eve” merely suggests all she’s capable of.
That version would play like this: After a baroque flirtation with the vulnerable, middle-aged, émigrée actress, the caressing little serpent coiled around her victim,
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