So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (2 page)

But typically, attached to the excitement came the burden of expectation. As the cousins of my generation texted back and forth about
Jeopardy!,
Nick Davis, the son of my dad’s sister, Johanna Mankiewicz Davis, wrote to all of us in
Jeopardy!
speak: “What is pressure?”

I’ve learned—and happily accepted, I think—that pressure is part of the deal of being a Mankiewicz. If you’re vaguely in the public eye—as many of us are—the presumption is you’d better be the smartest, funniest, wittiest guy at the dining room table, in the conference room, on the e-mail chain.

And certainly I feel that pressure, but I know I’ll never be the smartest, the funniest, or the wittiest. That job belongs to my dad.

FOREWORD

“Somebody’s Going to Offer You Something”

by Josh Mankiewicz

To this day, I can’t recall how he broached the subject. Then again, keep in mind that we’re talking about someone who never even says “hello” at the start of a phone call. So let’s just say this conversation was entirely his idea.

To be sure, this chat didn’t happen on the blower, as he used to hilariously refer to the phone. It happened face-to-face, and the backdrop was Lima, Peru. He was there because he was running the Peace Corps in Peru. I was there because at age seven you pretty much follow along when everyone else gets on a plane.

We were at my school, for some reason. Maybe it was meet-the-teacher day at Colegio Franklin Delano Roosevelt, maybe something else. What I remember most clearly was that he and I were alone on the playground, walking toward the (even in Peru) yellow school buses that would later that day take me home. I was holding his hand.

“You know,” he began, “someday someone’s going to offer you something.”

His voice had that I-need-you-to-pay-attention timbre that I had learned meant I had to stop what I was doing and listen up. So I did. I had, however, absolutely no idea what he was talking about. My expression made that clear.

“It might be a pill. It might be a cigarette,” he continued. “It might be a hypo.”

I was truly lost. I remember turning to look at him.

“What’s a hypo?” I asked.

“A hypodermic; a syringe,” he replied. “Like you get at the doctor.”

Who’s going to offer me that? I wondered.

Reading my mind, he told me, “It might be someone older, but more likely it’ll be a friend of yours, or a girl you like. They’re going to tell you that if you try this thing they’re offering, that you’ll feel great, better than you ever have before.”

He was thirty-eight then, a first-time dad who’d witnessed his own father legendarily lose quite a bit to booze, much of it poured by rich, famous friends. What’s not a part of that legend were all the times my grandfather missed with his family, the jobs he lost or didn’t get, the times money was tight, and probably the embarrassment of a son whose father wasn’t around at the times when all the other dads were.

So maybe he was thinking about all of that during that walk on a Peruvian playground. At the time, I had no idea. I was just absolutely mystified and astonished by his confidently stated ability to see into the future.

But we weren’t done yet.

“And here’s the thing,” he continued. “That friend of yours, he’s going to be someone you really want to impress. If it’s a girl, you’re
really
going to want her to like you. And when they offer you that pill or that cigarette, you are very much going to want to say yes.”

By now, we had stopped walking and were facing each other, father and son alone on a huge grass field. I remember what came next better than my own name.

“This next part’s important. When that time comes, I won’t be there to help you. It’ll probably just be you and this person you want to impress. You’re going to want to say yes. But you
have
to say no. The rest of your life might depend on it.

“And then,” he said, looking right at me, “that’s when we’ll know what you’re made of. You and me. We’ll both know.”

He had gauged one thing completely spot on: What he thought of me mattered more than just about anything else. I resolved in that moment that I would make him proud when I finally had to make that choice.

And of course, as the years rolled by, he was proven right again and again. I graduated from college in 1977, probably the only member of my class never to smoke dope. I worked in Miami in 1982, when the parties I went to were awash in coke. My career in network TV news spanned the years when serious alcohol consumption was an essential part of team building and social interaction. And I said no to all of it, knowing how bad it would have felt to let him down.

So I guess this is where I thank Dad for raising me to be such a square. I’ll almost certainly live longer as a result. But I also learned the truth of something he said, something else he wanted me to take to heart. It’s easy to have principles, he always said. What’s tough is to stand by them.

INTRODUCTION

Frank’s “Rosebud”

by Joel L. Swerdlow, Ph.D.

Frank did not “pass away” while working on this book; he died, and he would most certainly want me to make it quite clear that he is not “no longer with us.” He is dead. To soften or avoid the word “death” always bothered him.

In that spirit, Frank made a mistake related to this book. His error was not that he died; we got his stories down on paper before his sudden passing (sorry, Frank). His mistake was waiting so long to begin working on the book.

Frank and I were friends for more than forty years.

He first appeared on my radar—as a “Famous and Important” Person—in 1966, when he was Robert F. Kennedy’s press secretary. I was an undergraduate at Syracuse University and an informal member of Kennedy’s upstate New York Senate office. I never met Frank, but was amazed to learn while working on this book with him that during some of the telephone calls between Robert F. Kennedy and the county Democratic chairmen we worked hard to arrange, the Robert F. Kennedy at the other end of the telephone was Frank.

Fast-forward to 1971. I was close to finishing my Ph.D. in political science at Cornell University, and as I was chatting on the phone with Adam Walinsky, who had been RFK’s chief speechwriter, he said to me, “Frank has just joined George McGovern’s presidential campaign, and he’s right. We have to make sure the antiwar movement is as strong as possible within the Democratic Party.” Adam’s message was clear: Frank added gravitas to what looked like a quixotic effort.

I went to Washington, met Frank, and accepted a job organizing delegate slates in five industrial states. That kept me traveling, and I didn’t have much contact with Frank, but I took orders from him and came to him with problems. To my eye and ear, he often had an easy certainty far beyond what the facts justified. But he was almost always right, he made things happen, and I found solace in his certainties.

Then, in 1974, Frank and I happened upon each other at a book party for Gary Hart, McGovern’s former campaign manager who was soon to become a U.S. Senator from Colorado and later a presidential candidate. I was becoming a writer and supporting myself covering the Watergate conspiracy trial and occasionally the White House for National Public Radio. “Let’s do a book together,” Frank said.

Several publishers were interested in a political book, any kind of political book, by Frank. As we hung out and talked, we realized that political power in the United States had to a large degree shifted from political institutions to mass media, primarily television—which was new to his generation and natural as oxygen to mine. The result was our first book together,
Remote Control: Television and the Manipulation of American Life
. In this book, we were able to identify, document, and help people understand a wide range of changes television was wraughting (I’d love to discuss this word with Frank), but found ourselves unable to suggest much that anyone could do to maximize the benefits of and minimize the problems caused by these changes—the same basic conclusion reached by people today analyzing the effect of electronic screens. Technology, obviously via the conscious and subconscious actions of humans, seems to create its own imperative.

When our work became most intense, I spent several months living with Frank and his family. Thus began our friendship—equals, although by age and experience never equal. “I don’t ever want to hear you say I’m the same age as your parents,” he said, with no smile.

Telephone calls during the dinner hour in the Mankiewicz home were a Who’s Who in American politics and culture. The phone would ring, the telephone answering machine would kick on, and into the room would come the voice of a governor or movie star. Frank was
sui generis
. Few Americans, from any generation, have enjoyed his range of friendships and experiences. And perhaps most important, he straddled Hollywood and Washington, D.C., our two biggest factories of power and myth.

Given this, and Frank’s ear for language, a book about his life seemed inevitable. But as decades passed, something always held him back. “If I write my memoirs,” he told me, “all it will be is ‘I said this clever thing to that famous person, and then I said a second clever thing to another.’”

“You have been alive more than one-third the time the United States has existed,” I said to him a few years ago. “Your generation, with all of its ‘lasts,’ is passing. You are the last to know pre-television America, the last to work with old-fashioned political bosses, the last to experience an America not compelled to always be number one, the last to be shocked at the thought that a president of the United States would tell a lie, the last to have its thought processes shaped each day by a print newspaper. On top of that, you’ve been a kind of substantive Forrest Gump: Wherever history has been made, somehow you’ve been part of the action. And you’re such a good storyteller; you ought to get your stories down.”

Frank didn’t listen, or if he did listen, he didn’t agree, or if he did agree, he didn’t do anything about it.

But we soon started meeting for breakfast one or two mornings a week at our favorite places, the American City Diner and the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, D.C, just to talk and exchange ideas about politics and life. Frank decided to stop driving and asked me to take him to what had long been a private tradition, his visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Robert Kennedy’s birthday. Silences there brought us even closer.

The breakfasts were fun, full of laughter and insights into Washington, D.C., as it swirled around us, and we usually met at seven
A.M.
so we’d have plenty of time before the workday began (until the end, he still had full workdays). Even though I’d known Frank for decades, just about every question evoked another new story. Sometimes a story added substance that will interest future historians, as when a sitting associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, whom Frank had never met, called to offer advice about how to win an upcoming presidential election. Other times, the new material involved intimacy with the famous and the powerful. “The person you’ve been calling ‘Betty’ is really Lauren Bacall,” I once said, my voice rising. Bacall was, after all, one of Hollywood’s most honored and beautiful women. “Betty was her real name,” he replied. “When she was nineteen she married Humphrey Bogart, one of my father’s drinking buddies, and we became friends when I returned from the war.” Between such stories, we discussed politics, wars, sports, books, news, and people—always driven by ideas and laughter.

Then we decided to tape some of Frank’s stories and to take ourselves seriously; and at the suggestion of Patricia O’Brien, Frank’s wife, we looked at James Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
because it had revolutionized literature and invented the genre known as modern biography. We were initially hopeful, but saw that Boswell, while he had spent years hanging out with Johnson, did not start to write his book until after Johnson’s death. So still lacking a clear literary model, we continued our breakfasts.

Friendships and community developed in those restaurants; when I recently stopped by to tell them Frank died, the waitstaff hugged one another and openly wept. They, like me, were caught by surprise—what a marvelous era we live in: The death of a person in his nineties can seem premature. Frank was among the New Old, the growing group who remain healthy and vigorous after age makes them senior seniors. “Actuarial tables say I have an excellent shot of reaching a hundred,” he pointed out once. “And if I reach a hundred, who knows what pills might be available?” He was unabashed and excited as he anticipated his next ten years.

Of course, Frank knew death happens, and at times he could not hide his concern. But he fought back with wordplay—dry, absurd, insightful, clever, and often serious—that evoked humor from others. Everyone who knew him would recognize as pure Mankiewicz this snippet from my notes in 2012: “Frank has not been himself. One of his doctors called to say, ‘I’ve looked carefully at your EKG and some other tests, and I do not like what I see.’” This sent Frank, after weeks of unpleasant waiting, to a specialist. He came back elated. “I have a stenosis,” he said. “I don’t really know what it means. It, of course, is not good. Nobody says you can drink all you want because you have a stenosis, or your father was an athlete and you are lucky. You have inherited his stenosis. But the doctor did say, ‘Come back in six months. And we’ll look at it again. I think that by the time you are a hundred, we may have to do something about it.’”

Such humor filled Frank’s funeral service. A message from President Bill Clinton was read, and a news media star from NPR reminisced about the moment she met Frank and the moment she heard he was dead. But mostly, there was laughter. Even eulogies from family often sounded like stand-up comedy. Frank would have loved it and wished it could continue long into the night.

We funeral goers laughed so much, I’m sure, because in laughter we could still hear his voice and see his smile. And amid that laughter was mental calculation about how far back each of us went with Frank and whether we could imagine our own lives without him.