Jay Presson Allen: Woman Screenwriter of the 1960s (1922–2006)

Jacqueline “Jay” Presson Allen, screenwriter and playwright, the only child of Albert Jeffery Presson, a salesman and department store manager, and Willie Mae (Miller) Presson, was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on March 3, 1922. She grew up in San Angelo and was a regular patron at the town’s movie house. She got bitten by the acting bug at an early age. In San Angelo’s public schools, Allen was a classmate of Edward Harte, son of Harte-Hanks Communications co-founder Houston Harte. The two were lifelong friends and godparents to daughters of the other. Allen attended the Hockaday School in Dallas (class of 1940). At age eighteen, she left for Broadway but quickly realized that acting was not for her.

Early Career

Allen married her first husband, singer Robert Davis, on December 24, 1941, in Arlington Heights, Illinois. The two were then principal actors in a traveling production of the operetta The Student Prince. While living in Southern California, Allen had bit parts in two feature films (An Angel Comes to Broadway in 1945 and Gay Blades in 1946) and wrote a novel, Spring Riot, published in 1948. She later attested that she turned to writing to gain the financial independence necessary to leave her first marriage.

Before she succeeded in Hollywood, Allen returned to New York. During the early days of television, the city was a hotbed of activity for nationwide broadcasts of dramas. Allen wrote scripts for Danger (1950–55), Armstrong Circle Theatre (1950–63), The Philco Television Playhouse (1948–56), Goodyear Playhouse (1951–57), Star Tonight (1955–56), and Matinee Theatre (1955–58). In 1955 she married Lewis M. Allen, with whom she had one daughter, Brooke Allen. During this time, Allen was an aspiring playwright. One of her early efforts was to dramatize The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a 1961 novel by Scottish author Muriel Spark. Though the play did not open on Broadway until 1968, a copy of the script came to the attention of Alfred Hitchcock.

Marnie (1964)

Allen was living in New York with her second husband and daughter when Hitchcock contacted her to work on his latest film. Hitchcock had acquired the rights to Marnie, a 1961 novel by British author Winston Graham. Allen later commented, “I think one of the reasons that Hitch was fond of me and filmed a lot of the stuff I wrote, was that I am frequently almost crippled by making everything rational. There always has to be a reason for everything. And he loved that.” When Hitchcock brought Allen to the Marnie project in 1963, she had no filmmaking experience. Her unproduced play, The First Wife, had resulted in a movie, Wives and Lovers, but it would not be released until later in the year, and she did not work on the screen adaptation.

Allen was not the first scriptwriter that Hitchcock had hired to adapt Marnie. Veteran screenwriter Joseph Stefano, who had scripted Psycho (1960) for Hitchcock, did the first draft of Marnie; the second was done by Evan Hunter, who had scripted The Birds (1963), Hitchcock’s previous film, as well as three episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62). Hitchcock, however, felt that Marnie required the input of a female scriptwriter. In later years Allen observed, “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.”

Allen apparently gave Hitchcock what he wanted, since she received sole writing credit on Marnie. The assignment was something of a plum, given the status of the director and the popularity of the male star, Sean Connery, at the height of his James Bond fame. In the decades since its release, Marnie has received many reappraisals from film scholars, though it was not a hit with the public or the critics when it was released in 1964. Nevertheless, it launched Allen’s screenwriting career. The film also launched the career of Hockaday School-classmate Louise Latham, whom Allen had suggested for the role of Bernice Edgar.

Screenwriting Career

It appeared that Allen’s next screenwriting credit would also be for a Hitchcock movie. The project was Mary Rose, a 1920 play by J. M. Barrie. Hitchcock couldn’t get Universal to greenlight the project, one he had been nurturing since the silent era. The script remains unproduced.

Allen was invited to write a film adaptation of her play The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which reached the screen in 1969. More adaptations followed: Cabaret (adapted from the 1966 Broadway musical) and Travels with My Aunt (adapted from a Graham Greene novel) in 1972, 40 Carats (adapted from Allen’s 1968 Broadway play, which was in turn adapted from a French play) in 1973, Just Tell Me What You Want (adapted from her own 1975 novel) in 1980, Prince of the City (based on a nonfiction book by Robert Daley) in 1981, Deathtrap (adapted from Ira Levin’s play) in 1982, and Lord of the Flies (adapted from the William Golding novel) in 1990. Travels with My Aunt was co-written with Hugh Wheeler, and Prince of the City was co-written with director Sidney Lumet, with whom she collaborated on several projects. Allen also adapted Mary Norton’s 1952 novel The Borrowers as a 1973 television film and co-wrote Funny Lady (1975), a sequel to Funny Girl (1968), with Arnold Schulman.

While Allen was duly credited on a number of films, she worked on other projects as a script doctor. “What I really like to do is a very swift rewrite for a great deal of money,” she opined. “Then I’m out of it. There’s no emotional commitment at all—your name’s not on it, you’re home free.”

For Cabaret, Allen received an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay, as well as nominations from the Golden Globe and British Academy Film awards, and earned a Writers Guild of America award. For Prince of the City, she also received nominations from the Oscars, the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics, and the Writers Guild of America. In Italy she won the 1980 David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Screenplay (Migliore Sceneggiatura Straniera) for Just Tell Me What You Want.

Unlike many screenwriters, Allen had no desire to be a director. “It seems perfectly clear to me that any project takes a minimum of a year to direct,” she observed. “I like to get things on and over with.” She was, however, credited as producer on Just Tell Me What You Want and as executive producer on It’s My Turn, Prince of the City, and Deathtrap.

Allen also wrote the pilot episode for the television series Family, which aired on ABC from 1976 to 1980, with several cast members earning Primetime Emmy Awards. She later created the medical drama series Hothouse (1988) for ABC, but it was cancelled in its first season.

Approach to Adaptations and Further Playwriting Career

Though credited as the creator of Family and Hothouse, Allen’s reputation in Hollywood was based not on original material, but on her ability to adapt stage plays and books. “The trick in adapting is not to throw out the baby with the bath water. You can change all kinds of things, but don’t muck around with the essence.” At the same time, she felt the author of the original material should not be possessive about adaptations. As Allen put it, “You sell your book, you go to the bank, you shut up.”

Her ability to adapt material from another medium also served her well as a playwright. In addition to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her stage adaptations included Forty Carats (1968) and A Little Family Business (1982). Together with her daughter Brooke, Allen co-wrote The Big Love (1991), based on a 1961 non-fiction book by Florence Aadland and Tedd Thomey. She was also hired to adapt the 1973 French play La Cage aux Folles, although her version was never produced. Tru (1989), though technically not an adaptation, was based on the writings of Truman Capote. Allen also directed both Tru and The Big Love. Though she was never nominated for a Tony Award, three of her plays were vehicles for Tony-winning actors: Zoe Caldwell for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Julie Harris for Forty Carats, and Robert Morse for Tru.

Honors and Legacy

In 1982 Allen was awarded Women in Film’s Crystal Award, established to “honor outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.” In 1997 she won the Writers Guild of America’s Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Career Achievement.

Screenwriters, unlike those who direct and act in screenplays, are rarely recognized by the public, even after a lengthy career. Such was Allen’s lot. Though she succeeded artistically and financially, and millions of moviegoers watched movies based on her scripts, her name was not a household word. She was humble about her art. “It always seemed like an exercise—like you were doing homework,” she remarked. “Writing wasn’t terrible, but you’d rather be out shopping, or playing tennis or poker, or something.”

Family and Death

Her second husband, Lewis M. Allen (1922–2003was a stage and screen producer. Among the Tony Award-winning plays he produced were Annie (1977), I’m Not Rappaport (1985), and Master Class (1995). He also produced a revival of The Iceman Cometh (1985) and his wife’s Tru and The Big Love on Broadway. He produced fourteen films, including François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Never Cry Wolf (1983), Swimming to Cambodia (1987), Miss Firecracker (1989), and two film adaptations of Lord of the Flies (1963 and 1990). Jay Presson Allen worked on the script of Never Cry Wolf and wrote the second version of Lord of the Flies. Before they met, Lewis Allen had been employed as a reader for producer Robert Whitehead and had rejected one of her plays. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin houses fifty-six boxes of manuscripts and papers pertaining to Allen and her husband in their archives.

Jay Presson Allen died of a stroke on May 1, 2006, at her home in Manhattan. She was survived by her daughter, Brooke Allen. She was buried alongside her husband at Old Chapel Cemetery in Millwood, Virginia.