All of Me Two

I’m always a little curious as to how unpublished works come to the attention of filmmakers. Talent scout Irene Diamond read the original play script of Everybody Comes to Rick’s, famously, but what people are less inclined to say is how she got her hands on it. Similarly, I was able to find a 1984 New York Times article saying that the agents for Ed Davis submitted his manuscripts simultaneously to publishers and studios, and Me Two was never published and from what I read in the four paragraphs there, it may in fact not have been very good.

The article mentions the book’s “scatological side,” so that’s encouraging. Anyway, 99-year-old Cynthia Cutwater dies and transfers her spirit into “an aging derelict named Al.” The book was initially sold as a hypothetical pairing for Katharine Hepburn and Lee Marvin. They go off in search of her relatives. It is apparently less funny than the movie. And this, from a four-decade-old article about what’s going on in cinema is the most information I’ve got about the book.

The movie, meanwhile, is about Edwina Cutwater (Lily Tomlin), renamed for the pseudonym given to given to Davis in the unusual belief that it would sell better if a woman had written it. She’s not old, just sickly. He, meanwhile, is Roger Cobb (Steve Martin), jazz musician by night, lawyer by day. He’s turning 38 as the movie starts. He decides to quit jazz, actually work and being a lawyer, and marry his girlfriend, Peggy Schuyler (Madolyn Smith Osborne), at whose father’s firm he works. He’s sent to handle the last estate details of the dying Edwina.

Meanwhile, Edwina has made plans to transfer her soul into the body of Terry Hoskins (Victoria Tennant), to whom she’ll leave her entire estate. The mystic Prahka Lasa (Richard Libertini) will release Terry’s spirit into the ether, put Edwina into Terry’s body, and bugger off home to India. Unfortunately, the bowl with Edwina’s spirit in it hits Roger on the head, putting her spirit into his body. Neither of them are happy about this.

There were an awful lot of body-swap comedies in those days, weren’t there? Okay, so we’re about eight years out from Freaky Friday, but this isn’t even the only Steve Martin movie involving multiple people in a body. Just the year before, he’d done The Man With Two Brains. The mystic has aged poorly, and not just because he was played by a guy whose parents were Italian immigrants. Still, there’s a fun bit of nonsense later in the movie with the rapid-fire juggling of where Edwina’s soul is.

Roger makes the observation to Edwina that it won’t matter what body she’s in, because it’ll still be her. And to an extent, he’s right. Oh, sure, Edwina was trapped to a certain extent by her physical health issues, but a rich woman could find ways to do things that didn’t involve staying home all the time. And though goodness knows it was harder to make friends from your house in a pre-internet world, there were still things like pen pals—and, you know, she could’ve gone to school. There were lots of things a rich woman could do to make friends, but she didn’t seem interested in trying.

Largely, the point of the movie is that life is too valuable not to live it. Roger doesn’t want to be a lawyer. We don’t know why he became one—he tells a story, but it’s a lie. Probably he’s one of those people who got a job because you can’t make a living as a musician, and that’s awful. Roger’s good, from what we hear, and we don’t support talented artists enough. My daughter’s watching Tangled as I write, and let’s be clear—there’s a dream in here that’s very “your dream stinks.” But Roger’s dream? It’s a good dream. He wants to make money with his friend Tyrone Wattell (Jason Bernard), and that’s a good dream.

And I don’t know. Maybe the book’s terrible. Given I can’t find anything out about the author, including if anything of his was ever really published, probably it is and just the barest outline of the story is worth it. (Trying to search “Edwin Davis” brings up the guy who executed Leon Czolgosz, and “Ed Davis” results in a basketball player.) But my dream is that it wasn’t so damn hard to find works like that. Especially not the published ones. If it’s out of print, it should be print on demand or free online. According to IMDb, this Ed Davis died in Seattle nearly two decades ago, so he doesn’t need the money.

Next month, we get into the Christmas spirit with Opus and “A Wish For Wings That Work!”