My Life as a Mankiewicz (18 page)

“Yes.”

“Tom, this is Judy Garland.”

At first I thought someone was putting me on, but as she kept speaking I recognized the voice, slurred as it was. She sounded in trouble and asked for Dad's number. I gave it to her. Half an hour later my phone rang again. It was Dad, pissed because I'd given Judy his number. “She gets hopped up on pills and starts calling people. She won't get off the phone, she won't seek proper help, and those two bastards who pretend to be taking care of her, Freddie Fields and David Begelman, are robbing her blind.” Dad changed his home number the following day.

I finally met Judy about three years later. I was beginning life in Hollywood as a production assistant on
The Best Man.
One of the first people I met in L.A. was Guy McElwaine, at the time a press agent working for Jim Mahoney, among whose clients were Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland. Guy later went on to become a major agent and top executive at several studios. Judy was doing a television variety show at the time, directed by a young Canadian named Norman Jewison. (Years later, Norman became my neighbor in Malibu. He's a terrifically talented nice man who just won the Directors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award for films such as
In the Heat of the Night
and
Moonstruck.
Just recently, we had lunch at his beach house.) The musical supervisor on Judy's show was Mel Tormé, who had known her since their days at MGM and whom she loved and respected musically. Guy had mentioned to Judy that I was living in L.A. and that he knew me. “Oh,” she said, “bring him down, bring Tom Mankiewicz down, I want to meet him.”

I went to CBS for the taping one night. When we arrived, I could see her motor home in a cavernous hallway. It had fake grass, a picket fence, and a little yellow brick road up to the door. Guy and I walked onto the set, where a packed audience had been waiting for Judy over an hour. The crowd was getting restless. Judy had apparently refused to leave her motor home, upset about something she wouldn't divulge. Even Norman and Mel couldn't get her out. Guy had an idea. He took me out into the hallway. We walked up the yellow brick road to her door and knocked. “Whoever it is, get the hell out of here, leave me alone!”

Guy spoke softly: “Judy, I brought Tom Mankiewicz down here. Remember you said you wanted to meet him? Well he's right outside. He wants to say hello.”

There was a silence. The door suddenly opened and Judy Garland stared at me. “Hi,” I said. “I'm Tom Mankiewicz.”

She grabbed me in a bear hug and started sobbing on my shoulder. I was terrifically embarrassed, but it's a moment I'll never forget. She took me by the hand and led me onto the stage. The audience roared for her. She flashed a huge smile, got on her mark, and performed lights out as if there'd never been anything wrong.
Showtime!

It seemed Judy was always broke later on in her tragically short life. Even though she was highly paid, somehow she never had any money. Liza told me that when she traveled with her mom, they had a foolproof scheme, especially in the larger cities where Judy was so adored and respected. They would first check in to a suite at, say, the Pierre Hotel. Judy would be playing Carnegie Hall or somewhere equally prestigious. From the moment they arrived, every time they went downstairs to the car that took Judy to rehearsals or to dinner, they would bring some of their belongings with them in an overnight bag. By the time they checked out, none of their things were left in the suite at all. They'd go down in the elevator, get in the car, and drive to the airport, skipping out on the bill. Most hotels simply ate the charges since she was so loved and respected and they were proud to have had her as a guest.

When Judy made her famous “comeback” concert at Carnegie Hall, Frank Sinatra said to me: “She's the only singer in the business with the balls to finish with ‘Chicago' while playing New York. Here's a broad who ‘owns' a dozen classic songs, and none of them is ‘Chicago.' If you're going to sing it, you do it in the first twenty minutes, the first set, unless you're actually playing in Chicago.” What a monumental talent she was. Once-in-a-lifetime stuff. And at the time I met her, what a terribly sad human being.

Cary Grant

I was introduced to Cary Grant by my friend Peter Stone, who wrote the screenplays for
Charade
and
Father Goose
(which won the screenwriting Oscar) starring the great actor. Cary was shooting
Father Goose
at the time. Peter brought me onto the set. The cast and crew were working up high on a parallel. You had to walk up a ladder to reach them. Peter went first. I could see him taking Cary aside as I'd almost reached the top rung. Cary walked over, looked down at me, and said: “Are you Joe Mankiewicz's son?”

“Yes, I am.”

He extended his hand: “Here, let me help you up. That must be an enormous burden.”

Cary Grant had a reputation for being cheap, and while he was a charming man and a living legend, I saw nothing to disprove it. Peter and I had lunch with him at least three times, and I remember us picking up the check all three times. The Italian actress Claudia Cardinale was an international star then. Universal (where Cary had an exclusive deal) asked him if he would consider doing a romantic comedy with her. He was thinking about it. One day at lunch he said to me: “You're a bright lad. Peter (Stone) says you can write. See if you can come up with a premise for me.”

God, I worked hard. My story began with a “cute meet” for them in an elevator that suddenly loses power and stops, trapping the two leads inside. I won't bore you with the details, but Cary finally calms down a frightened Claudia by kissing her. When I told Cary this, he smiled at me: “No, no, Tom, I'm sure you meant she kisses
me.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“The woman always kisses me first. Even when it seems like a mutual idea, she actually kisses me.” In other words, Cary was the love object. He was so smart about himself. In the eighties (as you'll see) I had roughly the same experience with Robert Redford while rewriting
Legal Eagles.
He'd taken a page from Cary Grant's book. Cary never did do a picture with Claudia Cardinale. In fact, after
Father Goose
he did only one more film.

Cary was also the ultimate clothes horse. His suits were handmade by an anonymous tailor whose identity was a state secret. Martin Landau played James Mason's chief henchman in Hitchcock's classic
North by Northwest
, starring Cary. Hitchcock had a wonderfully warped sense of humor. He told Marty he'd found out who Cary's tailor was and would be sending Marty to him to have his suits in the film cut in exactly the same way as Cary's.
Exactly.
It would be their little secret. Marty's first scene was in the Chicago train station. There was a full crew and lots of extras. He'd never met Cary Grant. Marty was sitting in his chair waiting to work when he was approached by one of Cary's elegant posse: “Excuse me, Mr. Landau, but Mr. Grant wants to know where you got that suit.”

Marty looked across the station. He spotted Cary through crisscrossing people some fifty yards away. “I got it in Wardrobe, at Universal, a month or so ago.”

The man nodded, walked over to Cary, then crossed back to Marty again. “I'm sorry, Mr. Landau, but Mr. Grant says that's not possible.” Incredibly, Cary had been able to recognize the distinctive cut of his own tailor, even from that distance.

I once ran into him at Carroll & Co., a high-end clothing store in Beverly Hills, at their annual sale. There he was in the crowded shop, picking up some socks and underwear. Everyone pretended to shop, but they all watched Cary out of the corner of their eye. I asked him: “Doesn't this bother you a little, all of these people staring?”

“A little,” he said, “but if they ever stopped, I'd be absolutely panic stricken.”

But that never happened to him. He
was
Cary Grant. And keenly aware of it. Every time he entered the Universal commissary to take his table next to the back wall, the room stopped dead. Cary would walk briskly down the aisle of front tables, muttering under his breath as he went by: “Yes, it's me, it's me, it's me, it's me, it's me…”

The Tin Man

Jack Haley Sr. played that iconic role in
The Wizard of Oz.
Buddy Ebsen was cast at first, but his skin couldn't tolerate the silver makeup, so the part fell into Jack's lap. He and his wife, Flo, had come out to Hollywood after a long career in vaudeville. They were on “the road” for what seemed like forever, he told me. They never had a real home until they settled into the San Fernando Valley in the thirties. MGM put him under contract, usually for musicals and comedies, typically as the hero's best friend. He was getting a healthy weekly paycheck and decided to invest it in land. One acre in the Valley cost about a hundred dollars then. In the Antelope Valley (virtually uninhabited at that time) an acre went for twenty-five dollars. Jack bought several acres a week, every week, every month, every year. He told me: “I never really realized how much I was worth until my yearly land tax bill exceeded a million bucks by the late forties.” He became an independently wealthy land baron for the rest of his life.

Jack and Flo were devout Catholics. Jack became a Knight of Malta and donated millions to the church. When I met them through Jack Jr., they had a home in Beverly Hills and two cars: a Rolls-Royce and a station wagon, each with a plastic baby Jesus dangling from the rearview mirror. Flo, an absolutely dear woman, was trying to raise money for her local church (where I'd been christened in 1942) by driving nuns door-to-door in the neighborhood. She told me she was appalled at how cheap everyone was. Most of them wouldn't give her a nickel. Something suddenly occurred to me. I asked: “Flo, you aren't by any chance taking the nuns door-to-door in the Rolls-Royce, are you?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Well, if a group of Sisters piled out of a car like that in front of my house, asking for money…Why don't you try the station wagon?”

She did. Things instantly started to look up.

Jack told me wonderful stories about the making of
The Wizard of Oz:
“We were shooting ‘Follow the Yellow Brick Road.' Ray (Bolger), Bert (Lahr), and I were such hams. We started dancing down the road with Judy and Toto. Soon, the three of us were gesturing wildly, fighting for position, elbowing each other, and gently kicking the little mutt in the ass if he got in the way. Victor Fleming (the director) yelled, ‘CUT!' We stopped. He looked down at us from a crane. ‘You know what, guys? I can't see the little girl.'”

Every year Jack would give a Sunday open house for all the vaudevillians still alive and working. I never missed it. I could sit on the living room couch all day, for once with my mouth shut, and listen to Ray Bolger, Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, George Burns, and many others, swapping hysterically funny stories about an era gone forever, but certainly not forgotten in that room.

David Hemmings

Perhaps the most voracious, omnivorous consumer of life I've ever known. Wildly talented in uncountable areas, David only knew how to pursue life in excess. I saw him first (along with most of the moviegoing public) in Michelangelo Antonioni's
Blow-Up.
He looked like a Botticelli painting, a beautiful young man who was also clearly a wonderful actor. I first met him at a party at Peter Lawford's beach house when David was playing the evil Mordred in the movie version of
Camelot.
We bonded instantly. He was impossibly inquisitive, sopping up knowledge like a human sponge. He was a gifted artist, especially at caricatures, had a great sense of humor, and furiously consumed everything put in front of him. One didn't have “a” brandy with David, one had an entire bottle. He chain-smoked, screwed everything that moved and some things that didn't. He was an excellent guitarist, cofounded an important independent production company, Hemdale, owned and managed prize fighters, and directed Marlene Dietrich. His early career as a child operatic star ended abruptly when his voice cracked for all time onstage in Paris while he was singing the title role of Billy Budd in Benjamin Britten's opera.

David fell in love with Gayle Hunnicutt, an actress then under contract to Universal. They decided to get married. He asked me to be his best man. The wedding took place at the Beverly Hills home of Jack Hanson, the ex-minor league shortstop who, with his wife, Sally, became owner of the then ultra-chic haberdashery Jax, the equally trendy Daisy Discotheque (the first ever in Beverly Hills), and
Cinema
magazine. David stopped by my beach house in the morning to drive into town for the ceremony. He had so much brandy in my car on the way he could barely stand when he got out at Jack's house. My major function as best man was to keep him on his feet during the wedding.

We became even closer in London in the seventies, during which I was working on six films. David asked to meet me one night at an after-hours club on the King's Road, where he made me a unique proposition. He was part of a small group that was about to stage a political coup in the Seychelles, a popular resort destination in the Indian Ocean. I believe it was being done with the secret cooperation of a hotel chain. David's group needed money to bribe the country's tiny army and were a bit short on funds. Here was the proposition: if I came up with £5,000 (about $12,500 then) and they succeeded, I would become minister of culture. I swear. I wouldn't have to live there or become a citizen, but I would be the minister of culture. The irony of my being the screenwriter of the James Bond films at the time wasn't entirely lost on me, but I begged off. Too many bad things could happen to me as a result, and David wasn't exactly known for dotting all his i's and crossing all his t's in situations like this. As it turned out, the tiny army did take over the islands' only radio station, declared a new government, then were promptly arrested by the islands' equally tiny police force. Sic transit my potential ministry.

Years later I was directing the season opener of HBO's hit cable series
Tales from the Crypt.
It was a five-day shoot, popular to do at the time among fairly celebrated actors and directors, even though everyone got “scale” (union minimum pay). I had a part for a crazed, evil apartment building “super” who lived in the basement and gave Andrew McCarthy a love potion to make Mariel Hemingway go nuts for him. It was only a day's work. David was living in Idaho at the time, married to a woman named Pru, and I thought of him instantly. He immediately got on a plane, flew down, and gave an exquisite performance filled with wonderfully inventive bits of “business.” God, it was fun seeing him again. Even more fun to work with him. It would be the last time I ever did either one.