My Life as a Mankiewicz (5 page)

I remember going to Disneyland in the late seventies with Kate Jackson and her little niece. She'd been somewhat known for a TV series called
The Rookies
, but now was one of Charlie's Angels, which made her as instantly recognizable as anyone in show business. The three girls had made the cover of
Time
magazine, for God's sake. Suddenly, restaurants you couldn't get into before are holding their best table for you. Going to be a little late? Don't worry about it. Disneyland called out security to escort us, no waiting in line, as hundreds of fans screamed at and for her. Kate, a very private person, seemed almost scared. “You know, Mank,” she said, “I'm still little Skater (her father's nickname for her) Jackson from Alabama. I haven't changed. Everyone else has.”

I never knew where Dad went those nights he left our Rome apartment. All he would offer by way of explanation was: “Somewhere down by the train station where I can sleep.” A few weeks before the end of shooting, Bogie and Betty Bacall invited me to have Sunday brunch with them in their suite at the luxurious Excelsior Hotel on the Via Veneto. I arrived at the appointed time, picked up the house phone in the lobby, and asked for Mr. Bogart.

He answered. “We're in 675, you know, just a couple of doors down from where Joe keeps his suite.”

I could hear Betty's voice in the background, warning him: “Bogie…”

“Come on up,” he said quickly.

It was a wonderful brunch. They were both so kind to me and such fun. When Betty wrote her autobiography
By Myself
, she inscribed a copy to me: “Tom. Remember Rome…Love, Betty.” By the way, the Excelsior Hotel is kind of near the train station. Say…two miles away.

Meeting a Killer

During the shooting, Dad had an important meeting in Paris on a weekend and took me with him. We stayed at the Georges V on the Champs-Elysées. I toured the city while he took care of his business. The next morning we were in the lobby about to check out when a voice made Dad turn: “Joe? Joe!” It was a shortish, distinguished-looking elderly man with long gray hair, wearing a fur coat.

“Hello, Felix!” Dad replied. They exchanged a hug. I was introduced. Felix wanted us to have dinner with him that night, but Dad explained we were on our way back to Rome.

As Felix started to walk away, Dad suddenly took my wrist and squeezed it tightly. “He's going to turn around. Remember his face.” I nodded. “Felix!” Dad called out. The man turned. “So good to see you again!”

Felix smiled and walked off. Dad looked down at me. “That was Prince Felix Yusupov. The man who killed Rasputin.”

I later learned about Rasputin, the “Mad Monk,” while reading about the Russian Revolution. Dad had met and known Yusupov in Hollywood at MGM in the thirties when the film
Rasputin
was made, starring John Barrymore. What better technical advisor could there have been on the film than the man who engineered his death?

Full Circle with David Lean

On another occasion (I believe Chris may have been with us, on vacation), we drove to Venice, which Dad wanted us to see. He also wanted to say hello to his friend David Lean, who was directing a film there starring another friend, Katharine Hepburn. It was called
Summertime.
I remember watching the shooting near the Grand Canal. When they wrapped for the morning, we all had lunch at the legendary Harry's Bar.

More than thirty years later I had a house in Kenya, having been lured there by Stefanie Powers, who knew it well through her relationship with William Holden (more about Bill later). She had and still has a beautiful home on the Mount Kenya Game Ranch, which Bill founded with his partner, Don Hunt. Inside the ranch's property sat the world-famous Mount Kenya Safari Club, also founded by Bill and several others. The superb British actor John Hurt had purchased a house there as well. It was during the Christmas holidays. Stefanie, Don and Iris Hunt, John and Donna Hurt, and I were about to leave by four-wheel drive for a game camp in the Northern Frontier District. The night before we left, David Lean showed up at Don's house, having just been married, at eighty-four, for the sixth time. He was going to take his new wife on an aerial tour of Kenya with his favorite female bush pilot, All-Weather Heather. We started talking at Don's bar. David wanted to know all about Dad, who was also eighty-four at the time. He had a quick smile, a sharp mind, and a gruffness about him that I later found out was at least partially put on. I took him to task politely for using the credit “A Film by David Lean” when he hadn't written the screenplay. Surely Robert Bolt's writing in
Lawrence of Arabia
was one of the principal virtues of that magnificent film.

“But don't you see, my dear Tom, that by the time I've finished fussing and tweaking the script, the camera, and the actors, it is a film by David Lean.” Case closed.

Stefanie and John Hurt were sitting a few feet away while we talked, listening with elephant ears and joining in the conversation from time to time. David feigned irritation. He was publicly famous for his supposed contempt for actors, although he certainly cast wonderful ones. At one point he turned to John Hurt and said, “You know, with all the money we pay you people, the least you could do is shut up once in a while.” Wow. He turned back to me: “You know, that's why I loved Bill Holden so. You could talk to him for hours and never get the slightest indication that he was an actor.”

David's current passion was to make a film of Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness.
Warner Brothers had only agreed to put up half the money. My little production company had a bungalow at Warners then. He asked me about the executives there. Why only half the money? I said: “My guess would be that it's going to be a very expensive film and at your age they're wondering whether or not you've lost it. If the film's a flop, their exposure will be cut in half, and if it's a hit, they'll say they always knew it would be and that's why they were the first to put up money for the legendary David Lean.”

David grinned: “You do know this business, don't you.” Then he said something quite touching. “When you get back to the States and see Joe, tell him that at our age we should direct a film together. I'll do all the wide bits and he can do those little sophisticated things he does so well.”

I told Dad. He smiled and said, “Actually, that's not such a bad idea.”

Two postscripts on David Lean. First, my assistant at the time (and for twenty-five years) was Ann Ford Stevens, née Ann Ford, daughter of Cecil Ford, a legendary British production manager who did
Bridge on the River Kwai
with Lean. When I told David, he grew instantly nostalgic. “Annie? Dear little Annie…is now your…my goodness…”

“Write her a note,” I said. “She'd be so thrilled.”

“Oh, no, dear boy, I simply don't do that sort of thing.”

During our long conversation I asked him several times again. Just jot down a greeting to her. No luck. The next day our group took off on Christmas safari. When I returned after New Year's, there was a handwritten note waiting for me at my house. It was from David Lean, addressed to Annie Stevens. She still has it.

I still had my bungalow at Warners in the early eighties. Steven Spielberg had one nearby. I was helping him out with the script of
Gremlins
, a film he was executive producing for his company. One day he came into my office and told me he was going to present the Best Director award at the Oscars. I was surprised, since the Academy (in my opinion) had treated him rather shabbily up to that point. In spite of his great films, he was still regarded by

some as an upstart. How could, for example,
The Color Purple
be nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, and two Best Supporting Actresses, and Steven not be nominated? If it was such a good film, surely the director must have had something to do with it. Steven explained: “David Lean is nominated for
A Passage to India.
At his age he may never make another film. In case he wins, I want to be the one who hands him the Oscar.” That's the kind of reverence in which Lean was properly held by every generation of filmmakers.

The Far-from-Reclusive Mr. Hughes

The Barefoot Contessa
received four Oscar nominations, including the statuette awarded to Edmond O'Brien for Best Supporting Actor. Dad called it his “best bad movie.” It was about a megalomaniac millionaire/tycoon/film producer, based on the real-life character of Howard Hughes. Ava Gardner was an actress who rises from obscurity to stardom, and Bogart was her washed-up director who'd seen better days. O'Brien played Oscar Muldoon, the press agent, a crude version of George Sanders's Addison DeWitt in
All About Eve.
Roles like these usually delivered the bulk of Dad's acerbic cynicism, especially about show business, and in both cases delivered Oscars to the actors as well.

The Howard Hughes character in the film was unmistakable. At the time, Hughes kept different women waiting for him in different places on a nightly basis in case he wanted to join them, all conveniently “under contract.” When the Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida seemed destined to become a star, Hughes brought her to California, offering a fat contract, and reportedly kept her a virtual prisoner in a rented house for days. When he finally showed up, she bashed him in the head with a vase and left. This incident is reenacted in the film when Ava Gardner bops Warren Stevens under the same circumstances. (It was further repeated much later in
The Aviator
, Martin Scorsese's film about Hughes.)

Dad knew Howard Hughes well in the thirties. After all, Hughes had bought the rights to
The Philadelphia Story
for his then paramour Katharine Hepburn. He was far from reclusive at the time, having affairs with many actresses and being conspicuously visible about town. By the early fifties he'd changed, leading a much more secretive life. Dad and Mother were in L.A. shortly before
Contessa
started shooting. As usual, Dad hadn't let his script be widely circulated. Only a chosen few had read it. One night, he got a phone call. It was Howard Hughes. He wanted to see Dad and would send over a car and driver to get him. Dad figured out that somehow Hughes had read or gotten wind of the script. He was privately furious, but agreed to meet him. Mother was terrified. Who knew what Hughes would do? He was a crazy man. Why did Dad have to go, why didn't Hughes come over to see him? Dad told her to calm down: “Howard's not going to kill me, I promise you.”

The limousine arrived. It took Dad to an unfinished section of a freeway past red warning cones that had been pushed over to the side. The limo stopped. Another limo arrived and flashed its lights. Dad left his car and joined Hughes, who immediately came to the point. He wanted Dad to drastically revise the character of the producer and totally eliminate the scene where he was hit in the head with the vase.

“I'll do what I can, Howard,” Dad said.

“That's all I'm asking for,” Hughes replied.

Dad exited the car and was driven home. He never changed a word of the script and never heard from Hughes again.

There's one line in the film that I always thought succinctly summed up Dad's attitude toward the motion picture industry. It's in a scene where Bogart has just screened Gardner's first film for a group of movie exhibitors. Their names are Mr. Black, Mr. Brown, Mr. Green, Mr. White, and so on. They like the film and agree to show it. “Gentlemen,” says Bogart, “it's a wonderful art we're doing business in.”

Back in New York

After we returned to New York from Rome, it was clear that Mother's situation wasn't improving. She was under the care of an eminent psychiatrist, but at that time there seemed to be no proper drugs available to alleviate her condition. I finally gathered the courage to ask Dad the question that Chris and I had been asking ourselves for so long: Why didn't they simply get a divorce? Why torture each other on an almost nightly basis with no end in sight? Dad explained as much as he had to, without any visible emotion. A divorce would mean she'd get automatic custody (especially in those days) of Chris and me, and he couldn't permit us to live in a household with someone that unstable, mother or not. He could go to court to have her declared mentally incompetent, but that would be a crushing public humiliation that he was unwilling to put her through. Obviously, it would have been almost equally uncomfortable for him, but he didn't go into that. For his entire life, if Dad didn't want to discuss something, it simply wasn't discussed. There was an impenetrable locked door in the man that would open only as far as he wanted to let it.

La Bohème

Mother was a huge opera fan. Some nights after a few drinks she would listen to one at top volume, usually a romantic tragedy such as
Tosca
, and preferably with an emotional star turn by a diva such as Maria Callas. She and Dad traveled in all strata of New York society and had made the acquaintance of the great Metropolitan Opera impresario Rudolf Bing. The family would go to the Met from time to time, eventually sitting in Bing's private box. All of a sudden, the project was on: Dad would direct a new production of
La Bohème.
It would be in English; Bing wanted to broaden opera's appeal, and Dad agreed. He'd always been obsessed with the idea of writing and directing for the theater, as evidenced by
All About Eve.
Staging an opera at the Met would be personally important for him, bring the right kind of notoriety and respect, and show that no matter how good his films were, he was more than just a movie guy.

The first problem he faced was that he didn't read music. So that Dad could familiarize himself with
La Bohème
, the opera boomed throughout our apartment on a daily basis until everyone in the family knew it by heart. To this day you can drop a needle at any point during the four acts and I'll start to sing along without missing a beat. Dad was now free to concentrate entirely on directing since the piece was totally familiar to him.