My Life as a Mankiewicz (2 page)

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The Family

The Mankiewicz family was and is a complex network of literate, competitive achievers. The majority write or have written for a living. While capable of real affection, most of us rarely show it. Rather, we caress with one-liners (usually acerbic and at someone else's expense) or shrewd (we are totally convinced) observations on film, literature, politics, or the state of the world in general.

Pop

My paternal grandfather died before I had a chance to know him. “Pop,” as he was referred to by the family, was Professor Frank Mankiewicz, a German Jew who immigrated through Ellis Island with his wife, Johanna, at the turn of the twentieth century. They settled briefly in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where my father, Joe, and his older brother, Herman, were born, then moved to New York City, where Pop taught languages at Stuyvesant High School before becoming a distinguished professor at Columbia University. Later on, I actually met two of his former students: Sheldon Leonard, an actor who for years played small-time hoods, and who wound up the successful and wealthy television producer of
The Danny Thomas Show
and
The Andy Griffith Show;
and the versatile actor Ross Martin, best known for his costarring role in
The Wild, Wild West
with Robert Conrad. They both had warm memories of Pop.

There was a darker side to Pop, though, perhaps unintentional, but crucial to the sometimes crippling insecurities in his children and some of their children—the pursuit of excellence, taken to an obsession. The original parent who, when presented by his son with an exam on which he'd scored a 96, wanted to know what happened to the other 4 percent. Both Dad and Herman were, in effect, child prodigies. Both graduated from Columbia while still in their teens. Herman had a dazzling pre-Hollywood career: sportswriter, drama critic for the
New York World
, playwright, one of the legendary wits of the Algonquin Round Table with the likes of Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. His screenwriting career spanned a wide river from the Marx Brothers to the cinematically immortal
Citizen Kane.
More on Herman later. He died in his fifties, an alcoholic, compulsive gambler, unemployable and deeply in debt. To this day I'm convinced that as the eldest son, he finally cracked under Pop's impossible expectations of excellence and achievement.

At first, Dad was able to fly under that radar without missing a beat. Hell, he was nominated for an Oscar at twenty-one, writing the story for a movie called
Skippy
starring child actor Jackie Cooper. More than forty-five years later I was providing dialogue for Jackie while rewriting
Superman
, in which he played Perry White, editor of the
Daily Planet.
As Jackie said at the time, “I guess this is what they mean by ‘coming full circle.”'

Pop's obsession with excellence, seemingly no less than Ahab's with Moby Dick, ran deeply through the family. I wouldn't presume to know the full effect it had on Herman's children, Don, Frank, and Josie, and their children. I do know what I believe it did to my brother Chris, and to me. I grew up in a family where to be “a Mankiewicz” really meant that you had to
be
somebody.

There was a portrait of Pop that sat on the wall directly over my father's leather chair in his study where he wrote his screenplays. It remained in that exact place through four different studies in four different homes. Pop looked to be a stern, implacable person, neither a trace of twinkle in the eye nor a tiny curve of humor at the mouth. His eyes stared straight out, never leaving you. After Dad's funeral, back at the house, various members of the family assembled in the study. Dad's then wife of some thirty years, Rosemary, asked if anyone wanted the painting. Silence. No one did. Don was the only immediate family member who wasn't able to attend the funeral. It was conveniently decided that he should have it. The last I heard, he gave it to one of his sister Josie's sons, who now has it leaning against a wall in a Santa Monica apartment. Requiescat in pace, Pop.

Johanna Mankiewicz

Pop's wife. My grandmother, the mother of Herman, Joe, and their sister, Erna. I never heard her mentioned once in any way in any story ever told by any member of the family. There was no animosity involved—she was simply a nonperson. Until I was ten or twelve, if you'd threatened to kill me unless I gave you my grandmother's first name, I'd have had to have said, “Shoot.”

Dad

One of the most brilliant, complex, intensely literate, and conflicted human beings ever to inhabit the planet. Someone who began life as the kid brother and wound up the Don Corleone of his family. Every security and insecurity of his personality can be found in the characters of his best screenplays, as can many of the emotions he was somehow unable to express freely in real life.

He was both the protagonist and the victim of a long, punishing marriage to a beautiful, warm, but deeply troubled woman, Rosa Stradner, an Austrian actress. She was his second wife, and mother to me and my older brother Chris. Dad's first marriage, which lasted only a matter of months, was to a woman I would later know as Elizabeth Reynal, a Philadelphia socialite, wife of the noted publisher Eugene Reynal. She had a son by Dad, Eric, who became a successful investment banker and lives in the United Kingdom, and with whom I have a very cordial relationship.

Several years after Mother committed suicide, Dad married Rosemary Matthews, an Englishwoman who first went to work for him in Rome in the early fifties while he was directing
The Barefoot Contessa.
That's when I first met her, at age ten or eleven. They remained close friends and occasional coworkers (and almost certainly more) through the decade before Mother died, and had a daughter, Alexandra. I'm convinced that Rosemary's love and devotion to Dad added a decade or more to his life. Much more about Dad later. All about Dad.

Mother

The single most important influence in my life, although certainly not in the way she intended. She had a mental condition, a form of schizophrenia usually triggered by alcohol, and her health degenerated over the years until her untimely death in 1958. Beautiful and intelligent, a talented actress, she was haunted by a disease that made her absolutely terrifying at times, especially to a child.

She and my Austrian grandmother, whom we affectionately called “Gross” (short for
Grossmutter)
, fled Austria and the Nazis in the mid-thirties. My grandfather and an uncle, Fritz, stayed behind to fight for their country. No one ever found out what happened to the old man. Fritz became an SS officer and was executed against a wall in Aachen, Germany, by Allied troops. I never knew I had an Uncle Fritz until I was about ten. Dad didn't think it was a particularly good idea to have a precocious little motormouth running around Los Angeles in the forties talking about his uncle the SS officer.

Mother was immediately signed to a contract by MGM. She performed in only two films:
The Last Gangster
, with Jimmy Stewart and Edward G. Robinson, and more famously,
The Keys of the Kingdom
, with Gregory Peck, the film that launched his stardom. He played a priest who arrives in China as a young man and stays on for the rest of his life. Mother played a nun who is his constant companion throughout the film. I'm sure (from her) she had an affair with Greg on that movie, but when I got to know him later on in life and even dropped a couple of hints, I realized he was far too classy to comment on it. Dad produced
The Keys of the Kingdom
, which was released in 1944. He and Mother had fallen in love, married in 1939, and had their first child, my brother Chris, in 1940, followed by me in 1942. But her mental problems were surfacing, and upon completion of the film, she decided to quit acting and concentrate on herself and her family.

Actresses never really quit, you know. Over the years, Mother always thought about returning to it, and she even tried once in the late forties. I remember when Natalie Wood “retired” after she gave birth to her daughter, Natasha. We would go to the movies together from time to time, and as the lights lowered in the theater and the screen lit up, I'd look over at her. It was like sitting next to a racehorse nervously prancing in the gate, waiting for it to open, but saddened by the fact that she wasn't going to be running that day. Natalie's return to the screen was inevitable. Mother was cast in a play written by Edna Ferber and directed by George S. Kaufman but was replaced out of town, for reasons still unexplained. It was a bitter blow to her.

She had been voluntarily committed to the Menninger Clinic right after I was born in 1942. For the first year or so of my life, any form of maternal care was provided by my nanny, a wonderful woman named Jeannie Smith who coincidentally shared the same birth date with me, June 1. I don't think Mother ever got over the guilt of not being there for me then. This led to a bizarre relationship in which I was on the one hand the favorite child, and on the other, the one singled out as the primary recipient of her rage and desperation. It was also deeply sexual, though never physically incestuous. She was intensely concerned about where, when, and with whom I'd lose my virginity. In the fifties we'd have long conversations in her bedroom dressing room, often with her wearing only her underwear as she put on her makeup, preparing to go out for the evening. She was so wonderfully attentive to me that when I became the principal object of her uncontrollable rage, it was doubly terrifying.

The most lasting and life-altering effect she had on me, however, was putting me on an endless quest to find her again somewhere and cure her. I developed a strange form of radar that could immediately recognize a troubled woman (almost always an actress) and elicit an instant, receptive, silent reaction from her signifying that she recognized me too. Later on, after I'd had many disastrous affairs with troubled women, Natalie Wood joked: “Mank, you could take three different women, dress them identically, have them sit motionless on separate chairs with gags over their mouths, and like a pig with truffles, you could pick out the crazy one.” I was psychoanalyzed twice in my life. I knew all about my central problem but was either unwilling or unable to do anything about it. Much more about Mother later.

Uncle Herman

Several books have already been written about him: brilliantly witty, master of many forms of writing, intensely self-destructive, and hopelessly addicted to alcohol and gambling. He died penniless. Dad became the main support of his widow, Sara, and put their daughter, Johanna (Josie), through Wellesley College.

Herman was addicted to insulting studio executives, the more powerful the better. Darryl Zanuck, the absolute ruler of 20th Century Fox, had two noticeably protruding front upper teeth. Herman: “Darryl, you're the only man in the world who could eat a tomato through a tennis racket and never spill a drop.” To Harry Rapf, an MGM executive with a huge nose: “Harry, you're the only guy I know who could keep a cigar lit in a shower.” He once told Rapf about the brilliant new screenplay he was working on, about a little boy whose nose grew each time he told a lie. The nose became larger and larger…Rapf chased Herman out of his office. Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, began life in New York as a streetcar conductor. As it happened, the studio executive dining room was shaped like a train car. Whenever Herman was eating in there and Cohn entered, Herman would call out: “Ding, ding! Fares, please!” Cohn fired Herman several times, notably after he (Cohn) pronounced a certain Columbia film exactly seventeen minutes too long because “I shifted my ass in my seat seventeen minutes ago, and when I shift my ass, the movie's over.”

From out of the screening room darkness came a voice: “Imagine that. One hundred sixty million people in this country wired in to Harry Cohn's ass.”

Without turning, Cohn said, “That's Mankiewicz, and he's fired.”

When Herman first arrived in Hollywood, he sent a famous telegram to his friend the playwright Ben Hecht, in New York: “You must come out at once. There's millions to be made and your only competition is idiots.” Hecht and his writing partner, Charles MacArthur (who later married Helen Hayes) came out immediately. One notable evening, Herman and MacArthur were invited to an elegant dinner party at the home of Arthur Hornblow Jr., a sophisticated producer with a wife named Bubbles. They arrived dead drunk and continued to drink during dinner. Suddenly, Herman vomited on the table. There was a deafening silence. Herman wiped his mouth, looked at the Hornblows and said: “I'm terribly sorry, Arthur. But don't worry, Bubbles. The white wine came up with the fish.”

Years later I saw this incident immortalized in the form of an unpublished James Thurber cartoon on the wall of the office of Dave Chasen, the famous Hollywood restaurateur. Chasen's began as a chili stand in the thirties. Dave had been a “straight man” in vaudeville, moved out to Los Angeles, and changed professions. His chili was legendary. Movie people would pick some up in the morning on Beverly Boulevard (then little more than a field with a few houses), take it to the studio, and reheat it for lunch. Years later Elizabeth Taylor asked for Chasen's chili during the filming of
Cleopatra.
It was flown over by Pan Am pilots and delivered to Cinecittà Studios in Rome. When Dave decided to expand to a real restaurant, Dad was one of his original investors. As soon as I could afford it, I became a frequent patron there. Dave remembered Dad well and was welcoming. After he died, so was his widow, Maude. I always had access to the private office and was seated in the favored front section. During the sixties I attended a few Sunday-night Sinatra family dinners there. At the end of the meal, Frank was handed an envelope filled with freshly minted $100 bills. He liked the feel of new money and they simply added the amount to his check. Many of those new bills disappeared on his way out the door and the parking lot. Frank was a generous tipper.

Herman almost lived at Chasen's, drank there, and often slept it off in Dave's office when he was too drunk to drive home. On those occasions Dave would call Herman's wife, Sara, to report on his status. One morning he asked Herman, “How is Sara, by the way?”