My Life as a Mankiewicz (56 page)

The Coen brothers make wonderful films that no one sees.
Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski. No Country for Old Men
. That was such a great movie. I was hypnotized by it. It was well written, wonderfully played, so perverse, and brave. They have the courage to make these idiosyncratic movies that they know in advance are not going to be huge grossers. But they go ahead and make them anyway.
Fargo
was a wonderful picture. You knew everybody in that movie: Bill Macy, Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi. These were real people. They were all just great. I admire work like that so much.

A major disappointment to me is Quentin Tarantino. After his first two pictures, I thought he was going to be a wonderful director. They're still the best two he ever made,
Pulp Fiction
and
Reservoir Dogs
. He just has never grown up. He's never made a movie about a human being. I thought, here's somebody who, as he gets older and more experienced, is going to make some real movies. I look at the trailer for
Inglourious Basterds
—oh, Jesus, I don't want to see that. It's just fooling around. He should be making some real movies.

Brokeback Mountain
was an exceptional piece of work. Ang Lee is one of my favorite directors, even when he goes to wretched excess like the Chinese exotic film he did. But why I think he's so good—George Stevens was like this, and Sydney Pollack was like this—is if I cut the main titles off and showed you
Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain
, you would swear on your life they were not directed by the same person, but they were all directed by him. He threw himself into the project, into the style, the way George Stevens could direct
Swing Time
with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, a musical, then
Gunga Din
, a huge adventure picture, then
Woman of the Year
, a sophisticated romantic comedy with Tracy and Hepburn, then
A Place in the Sun
, a moving melodrama, then
Shane
, a great western. You look at those and say the same guy could not possibly have done that. Sydney Pollack, the most underrated director, could do a social picture like
Absence of Malice
, then do a hysterical comedy like
Tootsie
, then do a lyrical love story like
Out of Africa
because he threw himself into it. I miss those people. As they start to drop, it's the last generation for me of really good filmmakers.

I got to know Jack Lemmon at Irving Lazar's parties. I really liked Jack. He was a wonderful guy, wonderful actor. He liked to drink and play the piano. One night, during a party, Jack and I were lying on chaises by the pool. He asked, “What are you doing next?”

I said, “I'm doing another comedy.” Beat. I asked, “What are you doing next?”

Jack said, “Doing another film with Walter Matthau.” Silence. He said, “You went to Yale, didn't you?”

I said, “Yeah. You went to Harvard.”

Jack said, “That's right.” Pause. He said, “What a waste of a great fucking education.”

Suffer the Pain Alone

When George Peppard said to me, “I told my agent, ‘I didn't know Tom was a great writer; all I know is he's fucking my wife,'” I said to him, “George, what can I tell you? Your agent's right and you're right.” That was so unlike me because I am not a conflict person. I do not dare the person I'm saying things to to take a swing at me. I heard so much screaming and yelling when I was growing up, doors slamming, and I spent so many nights on the bathroom floor wheezing, that I will avoid conflict if I can. I wouldn't call myself a coward. I have a very dexterous personality; I can figure out how to get out of the situation, and then come home and direct all the pain on me. Suffer the pain alone. I'm running from conflict and anxiety that, as a kid, I experienced with my mother and father. What I'm running to is some kind of peace. It's never going to be realized in the sense that you can't ever have perfect peace. If you had perfect peace, you'd be a vegetable. A certain amount of stress keeps you alive. In all the relationships I had, I was having the same relationship with my mother in various ways, where I was hopelessly attracted to women who were troubled. They could recognize in me the perfect foil, the perfect person to get involved with, because it made me even more solicitous, more eager to help. You feed off each other that way. The opposite reaction was the screenplay I wrote where there was a guy on the beach who was an ex-detective and a young, cute girl in a bikini who had a crush on him. She asked, “What is your ambition in life, Nick?” He said—I said—“To be left alone.” Even though I never did a movie about it, I always liked characters like Jim Rockford or Harry O living on the beach. There was this thing about leave me alone. Let me be. One of the reasons I may have had a talent for adventure and comedy is that it was so distracting from having to sit down and write serious things.

I'll never find peace. On one hand, I've led a very successful life. I have lots of friends. But on the other hand, I'm sixty-eight years old, I live alone with two cats, I have no children, and I've never been married. I don't know anybody who has it all. Rich people would never commit suicide if the solution was to have money. Although, to be able to live a comfortable life is a tremendous advantage. I've successfully sat on the demons that I have inside me. I don't take tranquilizers, maybe one five-milligram Xanax every three weeks. My cousin John, who used to take a lot of drugs, calls them training wheels. He said, “Five milligrams of Xanax, I wouldn't even know what that is.” I've been in analysis a couple of times in my life. One of the things that has always driven me crazy about analysis, if I can use that reference, is when am I through? I've heard about Woody Allen going to the analyst for forty years. I didn't want to. You have a problem? Now fix it. The two times I went into analysis, both were as a result of my getting involved over and over again with the same woman. I thought, okay, when you get cured…in other words, it's like having a rash and it goes away, or you have a cold, then you don't have a cold. There seemed to be no end. I'd go into a session, and I felt as a human being, much less as a writer, that I was losing my spontaneity. Everything I was going through during the day, I knew I was going to report on tomorrow. I was censoring myself, saying, “Here, I'm doing this again.”

Fred Hacker, who had been my mother's analyst, was personally taught by Freud. He was a family friend. In the beginning, when I was late for an appointment by three minutes, I said, “I'm sorry I'm late.”

Fred said, “There is no correct time to arrive at the analyst. If you're early, you're anxious. If you're late, you're hostile. And if you're on time, you're compulsive. So, don't worry about it.”

He was totally bizarre, as most great analysts are, and he never paid a parking ticket. But he was finally arrested. One hundred thirty-four parking tickets. The judge said to him, “Dr. Hacker, you are an embarrassment. Here you are, one of the eminent psychoanalysts in the world, and you have 134 parking tickets. I can't even explain it.”

Fred said to him, “Your Honor, it is possible to cure cancer and die of the disease.” So, Fred was sentenced to fifteen weekends in the Beverly Hills jail. He shared a cell with a kleptomaniac who took his pen.

Tuesday Weld was really in trouble, freaking out one night, and I called Fred and asked him if he'd go out and meet her. I think he saved her life. Tuesday had the attention span of a hamster. She saw him once and she called him the Wizard. This is why I love Fred so much. In the early seventies, when Elizabeth Ashley and I were going together, she gave a dinner party at her house. The buffet table was outside. In the center of the table in a jar were joints. There were lots of people from the music business. Tuesday was there. I asked Fred to come. I said to Tuesday, “We're going to ask the Wizard.” Fred came by for a drink. He stood there, looked at Elizabeth, who he thought was clearly nuts, looked at me, then looked at Tuesday. He asked Tuesday and me to go into the corner with him. He said, “Do either one of you ever talk about me, that I'm your analyst or I'm helping you?”

I said, “No,” and Tuesday said, “No.”

Fred said, “Good. Keep it that way. I have a reputation to uphold. I would hate to have people think that you were my patients.” Then he left. That kind of analyst I really enjoyed.

The other analyst that I had was more serious. I would ask, “When is this over?”

He would say, “Well, when do you think it should be over?”

“When I'm cured.”

“What do you think a cure is?”

“When I'm coping.”

“Are you coping?”

“If you answer one of my questions with a question again, I'm going to come over and wring your neck.”

“You see, you are crazy!” I had been through so many bad relationships and I was really depressed that I started to go five days a week. Then, thank God,
Superman
came along. I had to go to England. I was there for a long time and I never went back. By the way, I felt a lot better not going back, because part of my experience with the second round of analysis was like self-flagellation. I was punishing myself every day by saying what I wasn't doing right. And son of a gun, I had a romance with maybe the loopiest, in the most wonderful way, person I was ever with, Margot Kidder, and I could handle it just fine. It wasn't destroying my life. Nobody knew Margot was bipolar. She had many eccentricities. I said to Dick Donner, who always joked with me about crazy people, “Margot is the only person I know where all the craziness is directed against herself. She's a kind person. There's nothing about her that intentionally tries to hurt anybody else. Although she makes so many missteps, they're all directed against herself.” I could understand a person like that.

There was one relationship—I don't want to name her specifically—in which the woman wound up being one of the few that's not a friend anymore. She was nuts. One day I came home, and I had a problem. She was so uninterested in it because she was so narcissistic. I turned to her and said, “You know what? For the past ten months, I have been a combination lover, father, brother, psychiatrist to you. I've poured myself into you, and I come home with a problem one day and you're off in the corner putting chewing gum on the cat's face.” I meant that figuratively speaking.

She said, “Oh, no, Mank.” But, I knew.

I just said, “Okay.” It wasn't so much anger as disappointment that she wasn't interested in my problem and I didn't have what I thought I had, which is somebody who was going to reciprocate when I had a problem.

There's no question that abandonment is a huge deal for me. In my relationships, I would leave first because I was sensing that they were going to. I live alone, and I feel guilty leaving a dog in my house if I'm gone all day. But I've grown to love cats, and cats have personalities that are so matched with mine. I decided to get two cats. I went to the Amanda Foundation and found a cat named Margot—that was the name from the shelter. She was two or three years old. They said, “She's a touch nuts, Margot, and you're probably best off with a kitten. If you get another cat the same age, they'll probably fight.” I found a little orange tabby, a kitten. Brought them back home. I had the litter box and the food set up. Margot just terrorized this kitten for two or three days. Margot would live behind the television set. I would never see her, but I could clearly see she ate in the middle of the night. She used the litter box. But she would terrorize the kitten. After three days, I called the Amanda Foundation and said, “I'm afraid I'm going to have to give one back.”

The girl said, “No, no, we were waiting for the call. Poor Margot, she doesn't get on with anybody.”

I said, “No, I want to keep the crazy one. I'm going to have to give the kitten back because the kitten is going to find a wonderful home. She's great.” Abandonment. I couldn't even drive the kitten back. Three days! There was no relationship. Annie, my assistant, had to drive the kitten back to the Amanda Foundation.

Then Margot sat behind the television for another two days. One day she was walking through the living room on her way to eat, and I was watching television. There was no contact between us. I said, “Hey!” She turned and looked at me, and I said, “It's just you and me, kid. Just the two of us in the house. Better get used to it.” She walked on, and about ten minutes later, I'm watching television and I feel Margot rubbing against my knee. Then we were so close. She was with me nine years. A raccoon got her one day. I felt a sense of abandonment that I hadn't felt since my mother died, like I'd lost mother again. Margot had left me. It wasn't that she had been killed by a raccoon, but she left me. Here I was, fucking alone again. Yes, it was a cat, but I had poured so much affection. We were inseparable. I said, “Okay, I'm gonna get cats again.” I was not going to be dependent on one animal. So I got a mother and son: Colors is a calico and Mr. Squirt is an orange tabby. The three of us are like a traveling act around the house. The two keep each other company, but it also has to do with I'm never going to rely on one animal, because if that animal leaves me, I am alone again.

Almost every woman I've ever had a relationship with of any import is a friend today. Always made sure that they were still friends. I tend to make friends for life. Margot Kidder and I just talked the other day. Stefanie Powers and I are very close. So many women that I've slept with and had relationships with, I still know. Not Elizabeth Ashley, I don't see her. She got to be a theatrical impersonation of herself. But she was very smart and bright when I was going out with her. I'm friends with almost all the women.

Time Out of Life

I lived a charmed life working with Cubby Broccoli on the Bonds, Donner on
Superman
, and Jack Haley Jr. with the musical specials. But the business side just got uglier and uglier and uglier. I was getting older, I'd sold the house in Kenya, and I'd gotten on the Board of the L.A. Zoo. They elected me chairman, and I started to meet all these wonderful people who were in different walks of life. I thought, you know, unless a project is really good, I don't give a shit now. I was with Ron Mardigian at William Morris through
Superman
. Then I moved to Jeff Berg and ICM. Jeff sought me out. Then Ovitz and CAA. Ron is a very good friend of mine right now. If you look me up, my representation is Ron Mardigian, because we have a perfect relationship—I have no intention of working, and he has no intention of getting me work. Working was a release to a lot of people. I'm sure John Candy felt that way when he was working. It was almost time out of life. Of course, you're privileged if you're good at what you do, you have an assistant like Annie and another assistant back at the bungalow, and they'll pick this up for you and a teamster will drive you home, and you don't really have time to think about what isn't going well in your life because you're shooting again tomorrow. You've got problems there, but they're wonderful problems. We're all rowing in the same direction. So for me, working was easier than living a lot of the time.