My Life as a Mankiewicz (3 page)

“Sara?” Herman replied. “Don't you mean poor Sara?” The name he gave her stuck. Many of their friends referred to them afterward as “Herman and poor Sara.”

Herman was a compulsive gambler. He loved to bet on the ponies. He and Dad were at Santa Anita one day, trying to dope out a race. Herman looked out at the tote board and observed: “I don't know why it says five-to-one and eight-to-one out there. Every bet is even money. Either the horse wins or it doesn't.” What a brilliant rationale for a disastrous betting system.

The most poignant remark of Herman's I remember was one passed on to me by Dad. Herman was dying of multiple causes in a Los Angeles hospital. He was only in his fifties. Dad had flown out from New York (where we were living at the time) to see him. They talked for a while. There was a lapse in the conversation. Herman looked up at Dad and said: “You know what? I never had a bad steak in my life. Some were better, some were worse, but I never had a bad one.”

Aunt Sara

“Poor” Sara was an absolutely delightful person, totally dedicated to Herman and her children, Don, Frank, and Josie. I saw a great deal of her when I came out in the early sixties and often had dinner at her house. She had two idiosyncratic expressions I've never forgotten. If you told her you'd run into someone she knew or was interested in, she'd say, “So tell me from hello-hello.” And if you agreed to have dinner on a certain night, she'd say, “So I'm inking you in for Thursday.” She had deeply adoring memories of Herman. She could talk about him for hours, and you'd never know he ever made a bet or had a drink.

Cousin Josie

My favorite family member ever, Herman's youngest child. Beautiful, devastatingly funny in a dry, smart way, and so very kind and attentive to me. We became extremely close. Dad once actually called it “an unhealthy relationship.” Josie was four years older than me and as luck would have it, in the mid-fifties went to Wellesley College while I was going to Exeter, a prep school just across the New Hampshire border. She'd often have me down on weekends, when I would repeatedly “fall in love” with one of her friends, who all seemed so desirable, mature, and attractive. There's a terrible gulf between men and women at that age. The four years between sixteen and twenty might as well be forty, especially if you're the guy.

Josie graduated with honors. Dad, who'd put her through college, got her a job at
Time
magazine, working for the legendary editor Henry Gruenwald. She eventually became the first woman to be credited as an editor in the history of the magazine. Josie wrote an acclaimed novel,
Life Signs.
She married Peter Davis, later famous for making the Oscar-winning anti-Vietnam documentary
Hearts and Minds.
They had two sons, Nick and Tim.

In the last summer of her life, she rented a house just up the road from my place in Malibu. I'd go with her to watch the kids play Little League, and we'd talk for hours on end. When she returned to New York later that year, she was walking on the street with Nick and Tim when a taxi went out of control, jumped the curb, and killed her in front of her children. I was devastated at the news. Suicide and death were invading my life like a plague at that time. This loss was totally unacceptable. I called Sara and told her I couldn't go to the funeral. I simply didn't have the strength. Sara knew how close we were and understood completely.

Aunt Erna

Pop's only female child. Pushy, forceful—I suppose it wasn't easy competing for Pop's attention while two overachievers like Herman and Dad were around—she made her presence known. Married to a doctor and living in New York, she occasionally came out to California, usually staying with Herman. Once my mother asked me (at about age six) to call over there and welcome her. She dialed and handed me the phone. Herman answered.

“Hi, Uncle Herman,” I said. “Is Aunt Erna there?”

“If she was, wouldn't she have answered the phone?” he replied.

Years later, after Mother's suicide, I suppose Erna considered herself the ranking female Mankiewicz and was bitterly disappointed when Dad married Rosemary—she never liked her, and she showed it. Dad got Erna various jobs over the years and was virtually her sole financial support for the last decades of her life.

Cousins Don and Frank

Herman's sons. After serving in the army in World War II, Frank went to law school at Berkeley, ran for the California State Assembly, lost, became a successful lawyer, then quit his practice to join the Peace Corps as a worker in Peru. He soon became head of the Peace Corps for Latin America, then served as Robert Kennedy's press secretary until the tragic assassination. He later ran the Peace Corps with Sergeant Shriver, was a newspaper columnist and a TV political host, and is now vice chairman of Hill & Knowlton, a powerful Washington lobbying firm.

Don made impressive use of the Mankiewicz family writing gene. He wrote a Harper Prize novel,
See How They Run
, and the pilots for two enduring television series,
Ironside
and
Marcus Welby, M.D.
He was Oscar nominated for the screenplay of
I Want to Live
, served on the board of the Writers Guild, and like his father, remains one of the most dedicated handicappers in the history of horse racing.

Josh, Ben, and John

Frank's son Josh has had a notable career in broadcast journalism and is presently a senior correspondent on NBC's
Dateline.
Josh's younger brother, Ben, has been a sportswriter, had his own satellite radio show, took a turn as a television movie critic, and is the present host of Turner Classic Movies, as well as the CNN movie critic on weekends. Don's son, John, has been a masterful writer-producer in television, from the original
Miami Vice
to
House
and
The Mentalist.

Pop should be beaming with pride somewhere. No matter what it cost them emotionally—no matter how badly the pursuit of excellence could screw them up—everyone was somebody.

Our Religion

Dad, the son of Jewish parents, was a confirmed atheist most of his life. Mother was a fairly observant Roman Catholic, her own mother a devout one. Her religion insisted on any children she had being brought up Catholic—not to do so meant her marriage wouldn't be recognized in the eyes of the church. Chris and I were baptized at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. Dad always insisted he wouldn't have cared if we were brought up as Buddhists; he just wanted to marry the woman. But he drew the line at nuns. We were not to be taught by nuns. When Dad married Rosemary several years after Mother died, she happened to be the daughter of the Episcopal archdeacon of London. Jews, Catholics, Episcopalians, and atheists—quite an ecumenical family.

I went to church regularly as a child. The Catholic religion was uncompromising in the forties—if you ate a cheeseburger on a Friday, the clouds would part and lightning would strike you in the head. Dad always insisted that if I really had faith, he'd envy me. I never believed him. I stopped going to church after we moved to New York, except on the “big days” like Easter and Christmas. Since then I've shot filmed sequences in churches several times and entered many more, and I've always dipped my fingers in the holy water, genuflected, and made the sign of the cross every time I walked in, whether out of respect or fear I'm not sure. I never understood how the God and Jesus I knew could let such misery exist in the world, especially when suffered by innocents. I remember how chilled I felt in my early teens when I went to a performance of Archibald MacLeish's
J.B.
, a modern version of the book of Job. In the cast was a young Christopher Plummer playing the part of the Devil. At one point he leans in to the anguished Job and whispers in his ear: “If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God.” That line left an impression on me. When I found myself directing Chris Plummer in
Dragnet
some thirty-five years later, I quoted the line to him—he remembered it as if it were yesterday.

Dad and Rosemary agreed they would be buried next to each other in an Episcopal cemetery in Bedford, New York. Shortly before his death, Dad was visited by the local minister, who told him how delighted he would be to have him. Dad asked, “May I be buried with a few of my favorite books?” No problem. “I've smoked a pipe my whole life—I'd like to include a few of my favorites and my tobacco.” No problem. “And there, in that urn on the mantle, are the ashes of my dog, Brutus, who was my companion for many years. I'd like them buried with me too.”

“I'm afraid not,” came the reply. “Nothing to do with our religion, but you can't bury animal remains in a human cemetery—it's a state law. Sorry.”

Dad nodded. The day of his burial he was lowered into the ground with books and pipes. Inside the tobacco pouches were the ashes of Brutus. Dad always liked to have the last word.

2

The 1940s

Growing Up

The difference between life and the movies is that scripts have to make sense and life doesn't.

—Joseph L. Mankiewicz

In the 1940s Beverly Hills was almost a bucolic community compared to today. A small, prosperous town with a trolley car running along Santa Monica Boulevard that could take you all the way to downtown L.A., what there was of it then. Benedict and Coldwater Canyons were paved for only a mile or so before they turned into dirt roads. Many people kept horses up there, and some preferred to ride into town on errands. Shops on Rodeo and Beverly Drives actually had the occasional hitching post to accommodate the equestrians who also used the grass median strip (still there) in the middle of Sunset Boulevard to make their turn onto the proper cross street. I remember up Benedict Canyon was the estate of Tom Mix. Tony the Wonder Horse could be spotted grazing there from time to time. Coming full circle, I spent many a night on part of that property during the past two decades in a house belonging to close friends.

I grew up in a substantial home on the corner of North Mapleton Drive and Sunset Boulevard. Tennis court, swimming pool, huge lawn, beautiful gardens—the whole nine yards. Our neighbors included Alan Ladd next door plus Harry James and Betty Grable across the street. Around the corner, on Faring Drive, lived Fanny Brice. From time to time my brother and I would walk up to the front door and ring the bell, and she would come out and do Baby Snooks for us from her famous radio show.

Because of an accident of birth, my brother Chris (born in October) was destined to be two years ahead of me (born in June) in school, even though he was only a year and a half older. He was already in the first grade before I'd been to kindergarten. According to Dad, I was so upset by this and so anxious to be going to school along with Chris that he had the prop department at MGM make up a fake birth certificate showing me eligible for the first grade. The exclusive El Rodeo School in Beverly Hills accepted the document without a question. I skipped kindergarten. When Chris started the second grade I was one year behind him, in first grade. A few years later Dad confessed to his “mistake,” but since I'd been doing well academically, the school agreed it would be silly to hold me back at that point. As I said, Beverly Hills was a much smaller town then.

What consistently strikes me is all the different ways I came “full circle” despite growing up mainly in New York and not really returning to Los Angeles until I'd graduated Yale in 1963. The house I grew up in was later owned by Aaron Spelling, for whom (along with Leonard Goldberg) I cowrote and directed the two-hour television movie-pilot of the series
Hart to Hart
more than thirty years later. I remember giving Aaron a picture of myself as a kid on the diving board of what was now his swimming pool. I never knew Alan Ladd Jr. (who was somewhat older than me) while he lived next door, but I either wrote, produced, or directed three films at two different studios while he was head of production, and a damn good one too. The Fanny Brice home on Faring became the home of Jerry Moss, cofounder (with Herb Alpert) of A&M Records, for whom I wrote a musical Tijuana Brass television special in 1968. Jerry became and continues to be one of the closest friends I've ever had. Thomas Wolfe once observed, “You can't go home again.” I guess he didn't know what he was talking about.

Timber

My closest pal in the forties was our dog, Timber, a magnificent German shepherd who was so smart, loving, and protective to my brother Chris and me. The school bus would let us off at the corner of Mapleton and Sunset around three thirty, and Timber would be waiting there to escort us up the street and the long, steep driveway home. To me it was magical, as if he secretly carried a watch. We'd explore the neighborhood together, poking around vacant lots, once even dislodging a grounded hornet's nest. The angry swarm pursued us all the way home, stinging us repeatedly as we ran.

When we were about to move to New York in 1951, Dad announced that Timber couldn't come with us. Chris and I were in tears. But Dad was right, of course. Timber was getting on and had been used to running free his entire life. “You can't keep him cooped up in a New York apartment and walk him around the block twice a day,” Dad said. “You guys are going to have longer school hours and go to prep school, I hope. I'll be gone every day. What's he going to do? Lie around in a room twelve floors above a street full of traffic?” We gave Timber to a friend of Dad's at Fox, Otto Lang, who had a ranch in Sun Valley, Idaho. I ran into Otto much later on and he told me how happy his years with Timber were up there, and how much he loved him. So did I, pal.

The Battle for Hollywood

Before the release of
All About Eve
in 1950, and just before our family moved to New York, what my cousin Don later called “the Battle for Hollywood” took place, and Dad was directly in the eye of the storm. It was the time of the “blacklist.” The country was obsessed with the red scare, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was actively investigating the motion picture community, Senator Joseph McCarthy was in full flower, and lives and careers were being destroyed wholesale by the slightest implied “pinko” association. Dad was president of the Screen Directors Guild at the time. Cecil B. DeMille, who wielded great power in Hollywood, was instrumental in getting him elected to that position. Dad had just won two Oscars for writing and directing
A Letter to Three Wives.
DeMille reasoned that a talented and popular young director would reinvigorate the Guild. Most important to DeMille, a virulent right-winger, Dad (later a lifetime liberal) was a registered Republican. While Dad and Mother were on vacation in Europe, DeMille took it on himself to announce that every director in the Guild would be required to sign a loyalty oath to the United States government in order to be able to work in Hollywood. When Dad and Mother returned on the
Queen Mary
, a gaggle of reporters met Dad on the New York docks. They asked him what he thought of the loyalty oath proposal. Dad was shocked. This was the first he'd ever heard of it, and he was president of the Guild. “I'm against it,” he told them. “I think it's insulting to the membership to question their patriotism and totally unnecessary.” By the time he returned to California, the Guild members had gone ballistic.

DeMille and the right wing of the Guild asked Dad to reconsider his stance. He refused. The shit hit the fan. The Hearst newspapers played it up big. They already hated the name Mankiewicz because of Herman's having written
Citizen Kane.
Hearst columnist Louella Parsons had a popular national radio show at the time. On it one night she observed, “Isn't it a pity that Joe Mankiewicz, who Hollywood has nurtured and honored, has turned out to be a ‘fellow traveler.'” At school, Chris and I were called “Commies” by some of the other kids. We were a family under siege. DeMille and his cohorts sent motorcycle riders out at night to Guild members' homes, asking them to sign a petition calling for Dad's impeachment. Not to sign would be considered un-American. Dad's position seemed hopeless. At one point, he, John Huston, and George Stevens were even locked out of Guild headquarters with no one seeming to be able to find the right key to let them in.

Dad was running out of time. He placed an ad in
Variety
asking any director who agreed with him to show up that night in the back room of Chasen's restaurant. Out of several hundred Guild members, only twenty-five came. But what a twenty-five: William Wyler, George Stevens, John Huston, Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and others. Richard Brooks, who was there and at that point had directed only several minor action movies, told me later on: “I looked around that room and said to myself, shit, look at all the Oscars walking around in here. No matter what happens, all these guys are going to continue working and I'll get blacklisted.”

The showdown occurred at a black-tie meeting of the Directors Guild in the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was not open to the public. Before anyone spoke, they had to identify themselves to the stenographer who was taking down everything that was said. At that time, only directors belonged to the Guild (no assistant directors or production managers, as is the case today) and there was only one female director, the actress Ida Lupino. This resulted, Dad remembered, in every speaker beginning with “Gentlemen, Miss Lupino…” DeMille spoke first, making his case: these were dangerous times; foreign infiltration into the fabric of America was a real danger. He went on to list the names of some who opposed him. Dad was appalled when, for some peculiar reason, DeMille affected a thick foreign accent while naming them: “Villy Vyler, Billy Vilder,” and so on. Rouben Mamoulian
(The Mask of Zorro, Blood and Sand)
stood up. He told DeMille he'd never been ashamed of his accent before and wasn't going to start now. William Wyler rose angrily and asked DeMille what he was doing during World War II when he, Wyler, was making
The Memphis Belle
in an American bomber on missions over Germany. The meeting was spiraling out of control.

Finally, the great John Ford stood up. Dad's stomach churned. Ford's politics were to the right of Attila the Hun, but no director in the history of Hollywood had ever been held in higher esteem. Ford introduced himself to the stenographer: “My name is John Ford. I direct westerns.” Nervous laughter from those assembled. Ford began: he supposed that he and Joe Mankiewicz didn't share one political opinion, that he was much closer in social philosophy to DeMille. But, he went on to say, and directly to DeMille, he didn't like DeMille personally, and especially the way he'd insulted some of his fellow directors in his speech tonight. As for himself, he'd be happy to sign a loyalty oath, but goddamnit, no one was going to force him to do it. “So what do you say?” he asked the crowd. “Why don't we all go home and give the Polack”—Dad—“back his job?”

Dad won the impeachment vote in a landslide. He never forgot Ford for what he did. DeMille left the meeting a broken man. Later on, to appease the entire Guild, especially the center right led by Frank Capra (himself an immigrant from Sicily), Dad did accept the idea of a loyalty oath, but only on a voluntary basis. He never signed himself, nor did many others. In many ways, this was Dad's finest hour. He stood up for what he believed with the odds heavily stacked against him and at great personal risk to his reputation and career. Later on he told me: “Looking back on it, I wish I hadn't been so dismissive of the oath right there on the New York docks. Maybe I could have returned to L.A. and negotiated a compromise, the kind we finally came up with. But DeMille made that impossible, and when you say what you really feel and you mean it, you have to see it through.”

Shortly afterward, Dad resigned as president, but not before admitting assistant directors and production managers into the Guild. He was moving to New York and was a filmmaker, not a labor executive. He wanted Chris and me to grow up in an international city bursting with energy. The home of Broadway, the
New York Times
, the Yankees, Giants, Dodgers, and Wall Street. He wanted us to get an eastern education at the best schools in the country. He was, after all, the son of a distinguished professor. He actually believed that kids shouldn't be allowed to go to school in blue jeans. He used to say about Los Angeles only half in jest: “I don't think that people were physically meant to live here. It's an artificially inseminated desert. When the ‘big one' hits, it's going to crack off and fall into the ocean. Later on, neon signs will float to the surface and the rest of the world will wonder what everyone did here.”

Mother in the 1940s

Despite her illness, Mother was an extremely intelligent woman and capable of great warmth. She had a unique ear for languages and spoke English and later Italian fluently, without a trace of accent. She was of tremendous help to Dad as an in-house critic of his screenplays. He routinely solicited her opinion and acted on it. Their relationship was doubtless eroding, but I was too young to understand that. The house on Mapleton was the last time they shared a bedroom. The abortive attempt to return to the stage must have been a crushing disappointment to her. There is correspondence from both writer Edna Ferber and director George S. Kaufman commenting on what a marvelous performance she gave and how she “handled the situation with such great dignity,” but no reason is given for her replacement out of town. I can only assume her mental illness must have flared up one night and it scared the hell out of them.

Dad in the 1940s

Dad was, simply put, a serial philanderer. He'd had many affairs while writing and producing at MGM, most notably with Loretta Young, Judy Garland, and Joan Crawford. Louis B. Mayer, self-appointed father to all at Metro, was extremely upset about Garland in particular because of her young age. But Dad and Judy either couldn't or wouldn't let go of each other. Their relationship included Judy becoming pregnant by him and having an abortion (I can't prove this, but I know it's true). Their affair continued well after he was married to Mother and Judy had married Vincente Minnelli. In the seventies I was best man at Liza Minnelli's wedding to Jack Haley Jr. in the same little Santa Barbara church where Judy had married Vincente. Liza and I were close at that time—she was literally bursting with humor and talent. She knew all about her mother's long affair with Dad and kidded that we could have been half brother and sister. She also told me that whenever Judy sang “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe,” it was silently dedicated to him. More about both Judy and Liza later.

Joan Crawford also lasted quite a while. Apparently (according to Dad), she stood over my baby crib one night, while mother was in Menninger's, looked down at me, then turned to him and said, “That should be mine.”

Louis B. Mayer had always wanted to create a new Irving Thalberg for himself at MGM, and he selected Dad to fill that role. By the time he was thirty, Joseph L. Mankiewicz had already produced more than twenty films—among them,
Million Dollar Legs
, Fritz Lang's
Fury, Manhattan Melodrama
(John Dillinger went to see it the night he was shot leaving the theater), and
The Philadelphia Story.
He also “fixed” most of the screenplays and had been Oscar nominated for screenwriting. But Dad wanted to direct, to direct what he wrote, and Mayer refused, telling him, “You have to learn to crawl before you can walk.” By letting Dad direct he would lose the most promising producer he had on the lot. Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox had no such limitations in mind, however. With the implicit understanding that he would become a director, Dad moved to Fox in the mid-forties.