Jacqueline “Jay” Presson Allen (March 3, 1922 – May 1, 2006) was an American screenwriter, playwright, and novelist. Known for her withering wit and sometimes off-color wisecracks, she was one of the few women making a living as a screenwriter at a time when women were a rarity in the profession.New York Times, Obituary. May 2, 2006. She was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, for Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972) and Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City (1981), among several other accolades.
Early life Allen was born Jacqueline Presson in San Angelo, Texas, on March 3, 1922, the only child of buyer Willie Mae (née Miller) and department store merchant Albert Jack Presson.Profile Filmreference.com; accessed October 16, 2014. She was never particularly fond of her given name, and decided to use her first initial when writing. She would spend all day at the movie house every weekend, from 1 p.m. until somebody dragged her out at 7 p.m. From that time on, movies became very important to her and she knew she would not be staying in her hometown. She attended Miss Hockaday's School for Young Ladies in Dallas for a couple of years, but later said she left the school "having had no education to speak of".McGilligan, 1986.
Career Early work Allen skipped college and left home at the age of 18 to become an actress. She said her career in New York City lasted "for about 25 minutes" when she realized that she only liked rehearsals and the first week of performance, and would rather be "out there" where the decisions were being made.Acker, 1991. pp. 201–203. In the early 1940s, she married "the first grown man who asked me," Robert M. Davis, a promising young singer, and they lived in Claremont, California, during World War II. She continued acting while in California; she has a small credited role (under the name Jay Presson) in the 1945 film An Angel Comes to Brooklyn and can be glimpsed briefly as "Miss Zelda" in the 1946 film Gay Blades.
Allen became a writer by default, having always read constantly. Being able to write pretty well, she decided to "write her way out" of the marriage and set out to become financially independent of her husband. She always claimed her first husband's big fault was marrying someone too young. Her debut novel, Spring Riot, was published in 1948 and got mixed reviews. Her next effort was a play, which she sent to producer Bob Whitehead. Because he had produced Member of the Wedding, she thought he would like it since her play was also about a child, but the play came back from Whitehead's office rejected. Allen waited for a couple of months and sent it back, rightly figuring that some reader had rejected it instead of Whitehead himself. This time Whitehead read the play and instantly optioned it, but due to casting problems her play was never produced on stage. The reader who had initially rejected her play was Lewis M. Allen, whom she would later marry.
Allen returned to New York and performed on radio and in cabaret, both of which she loathed, and would go through the whole performance wishing to be fired. In the meantime she started writing again, little by little, and sold some of her work to live television programs like The Philco Television Playhouse. When she married Lewis M. Allen in 1955, they moved to the countryside, where Lewis wrote and Allen in her words "didn't want to do anything." She had a baby, and spent two and a half "absolutely wonderful years in the country."
Eventually the couple came back to the city to work. By then, Bob Whitehead had become a good friend and encouraged Allen to write another play. She drew on her married life and wrote The First Wife, about a suburban working couple. It was made into the film Wives and Lovers in 1963, starring Janet Leigh and Van Johnson. When Allen read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark, she instantly saw play potential where no one else did. After undergoing hypnotherapy to alleviate a yearlong bout of writer's block, Allen produced a draft of the play in three days.L.A. Times. October 5, 1982. 6.
Marnie While The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was still an unproduced script, Alfred Hitchcock read it and offered Allen the script for Marnie (1964). Hitchcock brought Allen to California to work on the film at Universal Studios in the San Fernando Valley. Allen, who lived close by, would bicycle to work. This upset Hitchcock, who insisted that a limousine be sent for her every day, whether she wanted it or not.
In Allen's opinion, she could not learn fast enough to make a first-rate movie, although she thought Marnie did have some good scenes in it. Hitchcock would have made her a director but she told him no. Said Allen: "It seems perfectly clear to me that any project takes a minimum of a year to direct. I like to get things on and over with. ... Did you ever hear the phrase, 'the lady proposes, the studio disposes'? I didn't make it up. I would never propose myself as a director." Under Hitchcock's mentoring, Allen developed the screenwriting talent she would use the rest of her career. Allen wrote that she never felt discriminated against. While being one of the rare female screenwriters in Hollywood in the 1960s, she said "almost all of the men I worked with were supportive. If I was getting a bum rap somewhere, I didn't know it."
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, about an iconoclast Scottish girls' school teacher, did not premiere on the London stage until after Marnie'''s completion. Produced by Donald Albery, it premiered at the Wyndham's Theatre in May 1966 with Vanessa Redgrave and ran hundreds of performances. In January 1968, it opened in New York with Zoe Caldwell as Brodie and ran for an entire year. Allen also wrote the screenplay for the 1969 film starring Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens.
Said Allen: "All the women who played Brodie got whatever prize was going around at that time. Vanessa did, Maggie [Smith] did".
Forty Carats After Jean Brodie, Allen had another success on Broadway with Forty Carats (1968). Her adaptation of the French boulevard comedy by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy premiered in December 1968 with Julie Harris as the 42-year-old who has an affair with a 22-year-old man.The Guardian Obituary, May 5, 2006; accessed October 17, 2014. Harris won a Tony Award for her performance. In 1973, Allen adapted her play for the screen, which turned out to be a critical and commercial disappointment.Alternate Film Guide. May 2, 2006; accessed October 16, 2014.
Travels with My Aunt Robert Fryer, who had produced the Jean Brodie film, had collaborated with Katharine Hepburn to make the film version of Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt (1972), specifically for George Cukor to direct. Cukor for some reason was not getting any work and Hepburn was casting around for projects. They asked Allen to come on board for the script, but she was busy and instead suggested Hugh Wheeler. After a few months, Fryer and Hepburn still weren't happy with Wheeler's script, so Allen agreed to work on the project and wrote a very straightforward script for them. But Hepburn had just starred in the disastrous adaptation of Madwoman of Chaillot and did not want, in Allen's words, "to play another crazy old lady." Hepburn was reluctant to let Cukor down and would not admit her reservations and began to find fault with the script, even rewriting many sections herself. Consequently, Allen finally gave up the endeavor, telling Hepburn that she ought to write it herself, which the actress did. Eventually, Hepburn provoked the studio into making her quit the project, leaving Fryer free to bring Jean Brodie's Maggie Smith onto the picture. One speech of Allen's remains in the script, otherwise it is all Hepburn's product. The Writer's Guild refused to put Hepburn's name on the script because she was not a guild member; Fryer refused to let Allen take her name off because she was the one he paid, and Wheeler was burned that he received no credit at all.
Cabaret Structure was what Allen brought to the screenplay for Bob Fosse's Cabaret. The producers had not wanted to film the stage script by Joe Masteroff and John Van Druten, and felt that not portraying the male lead as a homosexual was dishonest to the story. They wanted to go back to Christopher Isherwood's original novel Goodbye to Berlin of 1939, but the Berlin stories weren't structured in any linear fashion and Allen had to diagram the entire story.Crist, 1984. pp.282–311. Allen and Fosse got along badly from the start: she found him "so depressed that it took two hours just to get him in the frame of mind for work."Gottfried, 2003. p.205. In Allen's opinion most of the humor from the original was lost; she believed Fosse did not really like the lead character of Sally Bowles at all. She worked on the screenplay for ten months, but in the end Fosse and the producers were still unhappy with the final form, and having commitments elsewhere, Allen handed the script over to her friend Hugh Wheeler.
Funny Lady In Allen's opinion, the problem with Funny Lady was that Barbra Streisand had not wanted to do a sequel to Funny Girl and was determined to give the director, Herbert Ross, a hard time. The picture does, however, contain some of Allen's most satisfying work, some of which she doesn't remember writing and just seems to have come out of nowhere.
Family The idea for the television show Family was born in Aaron Spelling's kitchen, where he and Leonard Goldberg came up with the idea about a show that centered on the emotional life of a family. They pitched the idea to Allen and she liked it. Allen spent two weeks at the Beverly Hills Hotel while she knocked out a script. Len and Aaron loved it; it was touching and had marvelous moments of compassion, and was exactly what they had talked about in the kitchen. The pilot was great, but ABC did not buy it. It was not until two years later that ABC entered a production deal with Mike Nichols, who turned down all their ideas in favor of the script for Family that his Connecticut neighbor Jay Allen had shown him. It was Nichols who brought in Mark Rydell for the pilot, which premiered at 10:00 pm on March 9, 1976; the series went on to run for four years and 86 episodes.Spelling, 1996. p.97. Later in life Allen would remark about television: "I hate it, I hate it because the buck doesn't stop anywhere."
Just Tell Me What You Want! "Male characters are easier to write. They're simpler. I think women are generally more psychologically complicated. You have to put a little more effort into writing a woman." – Jay Presson Allen.
Allen wrote the novel Just Tell Me What You Want! in 1969, with the idea of turning it into a screenplay. After having trouble getting together a production, Allen sent it to Sidney Lumet, who surprisingly wanted to do it. In her opinion, Lumet was a wonderful structuralist but has his most difficult time with humorous dialogue; he had not found a way to shoot humorous dialogue as brilliantly as he shot everything else.
Prince of the City