My Life as a Mankiewicz (52 page)

I got a call the next day from Ron Meyer saying, “What's the matter? Why didn't you hire Loni?”

I said, “I told you she was wrong. You said you knew she was wrong.”

“Burt's really upset.”

You just can't fucking win. My career had, apparently, peaked with
Dragnet:.
Now I was the exile from CAA with the
X
on his chest.

9

The 1980s Gallery

Uncle Hume

Hume Cronyn, one of Dad's closest friends, would say to me, “He brags on you all the time. Just not to you. That's just him.”

In 1981, Hume is doing
Honky Tonk Freeway
with his wife, Jessica Tandy. They're staying at a hotel two blocks up from Fox because it's easy for them to walk to Fox, where they're shooting. John Schlesinger is directing it. One night Hume is up in their suite with Jessie, and she's doing a crossword puzzle. He says, “I want to go down to the dining room. I'm feeling antsy. Do you want to come down?”

She says, “No, honey, you go down and get something to eat. I'll just do the crossword puzzle.”

So he goes down into the dining room, and there's William Holden having dinner with Sterling Hayden. So memorable in
Dr. Strangelove
, Sterling was a druggie in a wonderful way. He smoked marijuana. He lived on a houseboat on the Seine River in Paris. But he was in L.A., working. Hume walks into the dining room, and Bill and Sterling both go, “Hume!” because they had worked with him. Hume sits down, and they have the most wonderful dinner. Everybody is drinking way too much, Hume said. It's a long dinner. They finally wrap up. Bill is staying at the hotel, and Sterling has a car outside. Hume turns to Sterling and says, “So, Sterling, when do we see each other again?”

Sterling says, “Well, how long has it been since the last time?”

Hume says, “About thirty years.”

Sterling says, “Well, then I guess never.” Sterling hugs him with a bear hug and walks off.

Hume gets in the elevator. He walks back into his room with Jessie, and he is crying. She says, “What's wrong?”

He says, “I'm never going to see Sterling Hayden again.”

She says, “What are you, crazy? I'm going to call a doctor.”

Skitch Seitz

When I was at Yale, one of my roommates was Skitch Seitz. His real name was Raymond G. H. Seitz. His father was Major General J. F. R. Seitz, who was married to, of all people, Jessie Royce Landis, a wonderful actress who played Grace Kelly's mother in
To Catch a Thief
and Cary Grant's mother in
North by Northwest.
Skitch and I were close friends. He always wanted to be a diplomat. When we were shooting
Man with the Golden Gun
in Thailand, he was head of the CIA in Southeast Asia. He was instrumental in getting us helicopters from Air America to fly down to Phuket. Skitch had been head of the CIA in Africa, based in Lagos, Nigeria. Then he became undersecretary of state under James Baker during the Reagan administration. He and a couple of other guys that Secretary Baker co-opted were called the fabulous Baker boys. Skitch used to tell me stories. They would go and negotiate with Hafez al-Assad of Syria. Assad would start by having twenty or thirty toasts to this and that. You had to take some of his booze, a little sip on each toast, so he's hoping to get you a little whacked. He wasn't actually drinking his. It was water. As you got into negotiations, which are supposed to be very long, you would have to pee. But you couldn't leave the president of Syria. So Baker would artificially have these blow-ups where he would get so angry, “I am so outraged,” and he would walk out. Everybody would walk out with him, but of course, they ran to the men's room.

Skitch became undersecretary of state for Europe. During a brief period, I was going to do a movie about the Loch Ness Monster. It was a charming script. The producers didn't have a lot of money. George Bush Sr. was president. Skitch was named ambassador to England. He was ambassador to the Court of St. James. I couldn't believe it. So I would go over on location scouts, then go to Winthrop House. He was the only ambassador that didn't have a penny to his name. He lived on the government allowance in this huge house. I would hang out, and the marines would drive me home. He would give parties because it was all on the government nickel. Everybody was so impressed I was the roommate of the ambassador. When Clinton was elected, they replaced him, but he was so loved in England, Lehman Brothers hired him as a partner for Europe because he knew everybody in government in every country. For the first time in his life, he was earning a buck. He's gone through my life and I think about him all the time. Every time I see Jessie Royce Landis, I think of Skitch's father, the major general. At the time of Vietnam, I was terrified of being drafted. I remember General Seitz saying to me one night, “You don't think too much of the army, do you, Manky?”

I said, “Well, General, it certainly wouldn't be my profession.”

He said, “Well, let me tell you something, I don't think the army's going to think too much of you, either. So if you're ever called up, get in touch with me and I'll help you get out.”

This man was Patton's lead tank commander in World War II. Seitz's tank battalion arrived first on some cliffs that overlook Aachen, a German city that was the first city taken. They were almost out of fuel. They sent a message back to Patton saying, “We're here, but if we take the tanks into town, we're going to run out of fuel. We're going to be sitting ducks. We have no fuel left to negotiate a battle with.” They had plenty of ammunition. When they started lobbing shells into this town, which was a fairly big city, the Germans left. Retreated. And they captured Aachen. General Seitz said to me, “If the Germans had only known if they just came up the hill to get us, we couldn't go anywhere. If they had bazookas or antitank weapons of any kind, they could have just crippled us. We had nothing to fight with.” When he was made chief of staff of the Allied Forces in southern Europe, the first meeting between the British, French, Germans, and Americans was at Aachen. He said, “I checked into the hotel. I couldn't believe this city that I had destroyed was completely rebuilt and spanking new and wonderful. I remember walking into the Four Seasons, signing in, and thinking, God, if they knew who I was, they'd take me out and hang me in the public square.”

Lew Wasserman

Lew was a wonderful man to me. I used to see him and his wife, Edie, socially at their house, later on, after I, sort of, became somebody. We would run into each other at a couple of places. I'd see him at Natalie Wood's. He was the most powerful man in Hollywood by far at the time. He ran Universal, had run MCA (Music Corporation of America). Lew was second to Jule Styne when the company started in Chicago. It was very mob connected because to play in clubs in those days, you had to be mob connected. If you were representing musical acts, you had to play ball.

If you asked Lew to your house for dinner, you had better ask him for the time you were sitting down. In other words, if you're going to eat at eight, but you say, “Please come at seven,” he expects to eat at seven. He didn't have a lot of small talk. He'd talk at the dinner table. Natalie Wood knew if she was going to eat at eight, she asked Lew for eight, and he would come at five minutes to eight and we'd sit down. Sometimes he'd stay late. But he hated that hour of chit-chat before because people were always hitting on him for something. I got to know him better when I was doing
Diamonds Are Forever
at Universal, where we had rented stages. I got my first really snazzy car that I was leasing, a twelve-cylinder Jaguar. I drove up to Universal one day, and Lew was in front of me at the guard gate talking to the guard. He was in his twelve-cylinder Jag. It was about ten in the morning. I yelled out, “Hey, Lew, nice car!” He looked back at me and he lifted his sleeve and tapped his watch. He was usually there at six in the morning because it was nine o'clock in New York and he was doing business.

I had lunch at only two restaurants for twelve years. When I was at Warners, it was the Café Francais. I had the same table every day in the corner. Writer Frank Pierson had his table nearby. It was French country food, and I had the same thing every day, coq au vin. One day I was sitting there with some people. They were looking at the menus, and I said to the waitress, “And you know what I want.”

She said, “Monsieur, there is no coq au vin today.”

You might as well have told me Santa Claus was dead. I said, “There's no coq au vin?”

And she said, “Monsieur, be brave.” Annie, my assistant, was there. Ever since then, whenever we were in a pickle, Annie would say, “Monsieur, be brave.”

When I moved to Universal, which is not that far away, a new restaurant had opened on Lankershim Boulevard called Café Barzac. It was packed. I knew how to worm my way into a restaurant, and I had the corner table every day. I was in my office in my bungalow. It was about 11:00
A.M.
Lew Wasserman's secretary called. She said, “Mr. Mankiewicz, Mr. Wasserman is having a very important business lunch today, and he wanted to go to Barzac and they're completely booked. But we understand you have a table in the corner.”

I said, “Yes.”

She said, “Can Mr. Wasserman have your table today?”

I said, “I will never let him forget this. Yes, he can have my table.”

So Lew sat there with people from Matsushita and did a lot of negotiating in my booth. He called me to thank me. He said, “That's a nice table. Food's not bad, either.” He'd never eaten there.

When word came out that Lew had cancer, MCA stock shot up to like 55. Everybody thought, he's gonna die, and then they're going to take it apart and the pieces will be sold. The pieces are worth a fortune. Then came the word that he'd been successfully treated, and the stock sank again. Lew said to me, “Do you have any idea what it's like when people think you're going to die and the value of your company goes up, and then they find out you're getting better and it goes down? It's the most humiliating thing. I may not have that long. This is the kind of cancer that comes back. So I decided if anybody's going to sell MCA, I'm going to sell it. I don't want the stock price to go up or down based on whether or not there's an ambulance in my driveway.”

There was going to be yet another Writers Guild strike in 2002. One night shortly before he died, Lew said, “Are you guys going to strike? You shouldn't, you know. It's all different now. You have a twelve-month-a-year launching pad for new series. There's no fall season you can threaten them with anymore. Four companies own everything now. We used to have eight studios. Today, Time Warner owns TNN, CNN, TNT. Viacom owns Paramount, CBS, Nickelodeon, the Discovery Channel. Disney owns ESPN, ABC, ESPN1, and ESPN2. Fox owns Fox Sports Net 2 and 3 and Fox News. These four companies own everything. If I had to solve this strike today, I don't even know where I'd start.” One of the reasons it was so difficult to solve was that you didn't have that structure anymore. He was one of the people who built that negotiating structure. Now it's so nebulous. It's how much do you get of streaming off the Internet? The writers can say, “Well, we were out for another two or three weeks so that, on the streaming of original content, you're going to make $5.23.” They're going to steal from you anyway. But Lew was a titan.

Natalie Wood

Jack Haley Jr.'s house was where I met so many people who were so seminal in my life. One of them was Alan Pakula. We became friends, and he was so kind to me. I would spend a lot of holidays at his house, because I didn't have any family in L.A. He did a couple of pictures with Natalie Wood. I met Natalie through Alan, and we became really fast friends. And really close. She was divorced from R.J. Wagner at the time. He was the guest star of the
Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre
episode I rewrote. R.J. and I had become friends independently, and he actually hired me to write a screenplay for him, which never worked out.

Natalie was fiercely loyal to her friends. I was so desperate to keep her as a friend. Natalie was the one woman whom I swore to God, under no circumstances was I ever going to have an affair with. She knew it. She was so valuable to me and such a great friend. We would take sauna baths together, and we necked a couple of times. But all I knew was that everybody who'd ever had an affair with Natalie had lost her, meaning was no longer around, with the exception of Arthur Loew. It was instant simpatico. Right away, we just took to each other. Gavin Lambert wrote a book about her, and in it he described our friendship as a “fierce friendship.” Every time I'd been with somebody, I'd lost them. I didn't want it to happen with her.

Natalie was doing a movie called
The Great Race
with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. Dorothy Provine was also in the movie, and I was having a short, happy thing with Dorothy. Apparently, Natalie was cruel to her, and she wasn't a cruel person at all. Dorothy said, “I think she's jealous. I think she's saying, ‘I'm better looking than she is. What the fuck is he doing with her?'” Natalie was a fierce she-bear with her friends.

I really hung on to that friendship; it was amazing to have a friend who was that beautiful, smart as a penny, and really quick. I didn't have anybody like that in my life, and I thought, I'm just going to fuck this up. We're going to have an affair; it's not going to work out. She was four years older than I was. She had just done
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
, which would be a huge hit, and she was the only actor that had a piece of it, too, so she was doing very well. She couldn't not work. She'd been working since she was four years old, since
Miracle on 34th Street.
We used to go to the movies. She got so excited when the movie was starting. She was a great movie fan. She would say, “Let's go see Claude Lelouch's film,” and I'd say, “Okay.” We'd bring our Academy cards because you could get in free in those days. She'd say, “Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges,” the famous line from
Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
She would just show up at the theater, and the manager would come running out, “Oh, Ms. Wood, please come in.”

In 1969 she married a British talent agent named Richard Gregson, who was a wonderful guy; I liked Richard. They had a tumultuous marriage and they had Natasha, who's now an actress. Everything that Natalie wanted in life was to have a child. She quit acting to have that child. I saw her in the hospital. She used to love Mel Brooks'
2000 Year Old Man.
She'd memorized the whole album. There's a piece in there where Carl Reiner says to him, “When you were back in prehistoric times, two thousand years ago—” and Mel says, “We lived in caves.” “So, you didn't have countries with a national anthem.” Mel says, “No, every cave had a national anthem.” And Carl Reiner says, “Do you remember the national anthem of your cave?” Mel says, “Yeah. Let ‘em all go to hell except Cave Seventy-Six.” I walked into Natalie's hospital room, and there she was with the baby. She looked at me and sang, “Let ‘em all go to hell except Cave Seventy-Six.”