Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  But if it’s a missing piece, it’s a piece that was put there by—and taken away from—Herman Mankiewicz.

  Herman was, in fact, drawing on his own life. He’d had his very own Rosebud, and unlike Kane’s, it wasn’t a sled that symbolized the loss of his mother, but a bicycle that stood for the possibility, ever elusive, of paternal acceptance and love—and for escape.

  The Mankiewicz family had moved to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1904. Franz had uprooted the clan from New York and headed west when he’d been hired to edit the Wilkes-Barre German newspaper Demokratischer Wachter. But while you could take Franz out of the city, you couldn’t take the city out of Franz. He remained as oppressive to Herman even in that verdant valley as he’d been in New York, and in Pennsylvania, there was often no way to get away.

  Too, there was school. Herman excelled at the private Harry Hillman Academy, but the pressure from his father to be perfect was enormous. Those missing three points were as crucially disastrous as ever, and worse now, because Franz was breathing down his young son’s neck. Literally. Soon after they’d moved to Wilkes-Barre, Franz had become friendly with the headmaster at Hillman, and before long he was earning extra money tutoring some Hillman students in French and German. Shortly after that, the nightmare scenario for all children: the modern language teacher fell seriously ill and Franz became a full-time teacher at Hillman. Herman’s demanding father now became his most demanding teacher. In class, according to one of Herman’s classmates, Franz would “bulldog Herman as though he wished Herman wasn’t around. He wanted Herman to equal or excel everyone else, and he hated it when Herman showed up badly in front of us.” For Herman, it was torture. “Those years,” Joe later said on Herman’s behalf, “must have been terrifying and destructive beyond description.”

  For Franz, it came down to equipping his young son with the tools he would need to survive: discipline and a good education. No doubt as a German immigrant, Franz would have found laughable the notion that he was a cruel father, simply because he demanded his eldest son put forth his best effort during his formative years. But while the brutality of Franz’s disciplinary measures could be debated, the significance of one incident cannot be: what happened to Herman’s bicycle.

  Herman with his “Rosebud” bicycle in Wilkes-Barre, c. 1907

  When Herman was ten, his father promised him a bicycle for Christmas. Like many immigrant Jewish families of the time, the Mankiewiczes struggled with their Judaism, a battle that would echo for decades across the family. Joe would later describe his father as a “rip-snorting atheist,” but according to Herman and Joe’s sister Erna, Pop did accede to the wishes of the Wilkes-Barre Jewish community by having Herman sent to the Reform synagogue for Sunday school. But when the rabbi took issue with Franz’s insisting on his family celebrating such long-standing German traditions as Christmas trees and Easter eggs, Franz withdrew his son. Thus, Christmas was celebrated in the Mankiewicz home, and in 1907, when ten-year-old Herman rushed down to the Christmas tree that morning, he came expecting to celebrate the holiday with a promised new bike that he had spied in the window of a local store. For a moment, Herman couldn’t find the bike and thought his father was playing a rare joke on him. But alas, no bike was there, probably because Franz was too poor to afford it at the time, though it could also have been merely his famous absentmindedness. The memory of that pit in his stomach, the feeling of emptiness as he looked around the room and realized there was no bicycle, stayed with him forever, even though a few short weeks after Christmas, Franz did provide his firstborn the long-awaited bike. But where the one in the window had a racing stripe Herman would never forget, this one was ordinary and drab. As always with a Mankiewicz, the negativity of the original lack-of-bike would outweigh the positivity of the bike’s ultimate, if belated arrival—especially because the bike would not be Herman’s for long.

  One afternoon, for having committed some forgotten offense, Herman was confined to his house by his mother, and to insure he wouldn’t leave, she hid the stockings he needed for his knickers. (Goma later cited this incident as evidence of Johanna’s simpleminded incompetence as a mother. “He wasn’t going to the pool room,” Goma said. “He was going to the library. She should have encouraged that!”) Herman retaliated by sneaking into his mother’s room, putting on a pair of her stockings, and pedaling off to the library a few blocks away. When he emerged from the library a few hours later, the bicycle was gone, the victim of a rare hiccup of Wilkes-Barre crime. Herman was mortified and embarrassed and trudged home through the snow. When he got there, Franz, for once, didn’t beat him.

  Instead, as punishment, he never replaced the bicycle.

  Skip Notes

  * It’s also a gimmick with a maddening inconsistency, for after Kane says the word, he drops the snow globe, which shatters on the floor, and it is only then that the nurse hurries into the room. If he was alone in the room, who heard the man say “Rosebud”?

  CHAPTER TWO

  GERTRUDE SLESCYNSKI

  I am nobody’s fool. Least of all yours.

  —All About Eve

  To the end of his life, Joe Mankiewicz insisted that his first memories were of hiding.

  He remembered, most acutely, the sound and the feeling. Hiding inside his bedroom closet while he heard shouts titanic and epic. The raging storm outside made him feel like a cabin boy, a stowaway on a ship crossing the Atlantic, cowering in a barrel, while outside he felt the presence of the storm and the high seas, a horrible wind, with him just listening, crouching in fear, resting safe in the closet amid the musty smell of moth-eaten old suits Pop had worn long before Joe had been born. He was safe, but God, that storm! For it wasn’t just Pop who was bellowing with anger, but Herman too. Herman was both braving Pop and also giving as good as he got—the yells were so frequent and joined together that at a certain point Joe lost the ability to distinguish between Herman’s voice—loud, clear but with that telltale drag at the end of every word, Herman used his voice like a trumpet player—and Pop’s, deeper but brusquer, barking almost, a dog with sandpaper stuck in his windpipe. Herman braved the storm so much that he became the storm, and he would wear Pop down, getting louder and louder as the storm raged: “Where in Christ is it written that a boy has to follow every goddamn diktat that…” In the closet, Joe, leaning against Pop’s suits, knew that if he waited long enough, as he would have to, Herman would have defeated the storm—or ridden it out until at last it would pass and Joe would be safe. He could emerge and resume life until the next storm came.

  Joe hid, and was safe—because of Herman.

  If Franz was the pole around which Herman rotated, for Joe it was Herman himself who stood as the center of his universe. “Other people have got a father complex,” Joe said later. “I’ve got a Herman complex.” To Joe, Herman was the one who got everywhere first—to Columbia University, to Berlin, to Hollywood, to marriage, to kids, to success in the movie business, to the Oscar, and finally of course to the final finish line, the grave. More than eleven and a half years younger, Joe was always competing with a big brother who was larger than he could ever be: larger, louder, funnier, smarter, more outrageous. In every meaningful way Herman simply took up more space. With Herman the acknowledged star of the family, Joe not only idolized him but naturally modeled his behavior on Herman’s—with a few crucial differences. For one thing, Joe was keenly aware of the agony Herman’s angry and later drunken behavior caused his father, and Joe wanted no part of that. Joe wanted to succeed, always. He could never understand Herman’s self-destructive behavior. Drinking, or gambling, or fighting with those who had the power to help you; these things made no sense to Joe. Why would you impede your own progress as Herman seemed to do almost deliberately? Joe’s goal was simple: to find out what the game was, and win. Often, the game was to compete with Herman. But given his brother’s tremendous head start in life, not to mention nearly a dozen ye
ars of people thinking Herman was the cat’s pajamas, could the younger brother ever catch up?

  To Herman, the answer was easy, a two-letter word that rhymed with Joe. Herman began by viewing his brother as an adorable little plaything, cute and round like a beach ball, and early on he took pride in his young brother’s scholastic achievements and then later his rapid early ascent in Hollywood. But having helped Joe get a foot on the Hollywood ladder, he watched, somewhat stunned, as Joe proved himself a master of a game that Herman couldn’t stand even to consider, let alone actually play. To the end of his life, Joe insisted that Herman had loved him dearly, and he refused to acknowledge to anyone other than maybe himself how much scorn Herman actually directed at him. Though it was well documented and sometimes seemed that nearly half of Hollywood had heard Herman utter the phrase, Joe pooh-poohed the notion that Herman ever referred to him as “my idiot brother”—as in “M-G-M made my idiot brother a producer” or “my idiot brother is directing a picture for Fox.” But while Joe may have invented a fiction for himself—that he was merely an adoring younger brother and Herman the proud older brother—Herman refused to see Joe as an equal, or anything remotely resembling a threat. He’d given Joe his entrée to Hollywood, taught him where to sit in the Paramount commissary (in the back under the windows, the better to observe the whole room), whom to befriend (the right-hand man to the head of production), whom to avoid (the secretaries to the head of production), what the rules were (never raise your voice in a meeting with the head of production, don’t screw the secretaries of anyone in the production building but confine yourself to the outer bungalows), which ones could be flouted with impunity (the secretary rule, broken by nearly everyone), and which would require a defter touch (the politics of the studio were complicated, and Herman loved talking politics). It’s as if Herman never really took Joe seriously. Then again, whom did he take seriously, other than himself? Certainly not members of his own family…

  Joe (second row, seated, second from far right) graduating from eighth grade at the age of eleven

  When psychoanalysis swept Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s, Herman and Joe were both caught in its path. Joe saw a man with the deliciously analytic name of Dr. Hacker,*1 and Herman saw a man named Dr. Simmel.*2 For two years, Herman went almost religiously, three or four times a week, lying on Simmel’s couch, free-associating, telling the man all that he felt he could bear to tell another living soul. But finally, Herman had had enough. After months of complaining to my grandmother about the lack of progress he was making, he decided to quit. He went in to Simmel and broke it off. The story my family likes to tell is that he gave Simmel a bit of a farewell speech. He explained to the man that the analysis had not worked. Two years earlier, he began, he gambled, he drank, he was deeply in debt, he felt distant from his wife, and he was miserable about his career. Now, two years later, he gambled, he drank, he was deeply in debt, the distance from his wife hadn’t lessened, and he was miserable about his career—plus he’d lost a lot of money to his shrink (“He couldn’t stop my gambling,” Herman told friends, “but at least now I know why I gamble.”). Simmel, or so it is said, understood and agreed to end the sessions. The two men shook hands and Herman walked to the door. There he paused and turned back to the doctor. “By the way,” he said, “I have a sister, and I hate her.”

  Oh yes, the sister: Erna, so forgotten, not just by Herman, but Joe as well. The Mankiewiczes were a family dominated by men. Born seven years after Herman and with the distinct disadvantage of being female in a Prussian household, Erna was clearly and quite obviously shunted aside in favor of her brothers.*3 In her youth she had loved them both fiercely. First Herman, so brilliant, so imposing, so large and dominant and dazzling—then Joe, more studied, but equally brilliant. And it was Erna who saw, probably before anyone else, that Joe was determined above all else to outdo Herman. As for Herman, he admitted ruefully to Life magazine for a profile of Joe in 1951, “Joe was fiercely ambitious as a kid,” but he’d never really understood what Joe would do with all that ambition. By the time Herman realized Joe might actually be a threat, it was too late.

  In the late 1940s, after Herman’s peak, he ran into another screenwriter at a men’s room in M-G-M. The other writer was a man named Frank Davis, who would in time become my other grandfather*4…

  The two men know each other, if only slightly, and don’t exchange more than a few pleasantries as Herman completes his business then goes to the sink and washes his hands under the chrome-plated tap. He grabs one of the folded linen towels at the side of the sink, dries his hands, then looks back at Frank Davis, finishing at the urinal. “My brother Joe,” Herman says out of nowhere, “is a real shit.” He tosses the towel down in the hamper. “And someday you’re going to find out why.” With that, Herman strides out of the bathroom, and pretty much out of Frank Davis’s life, though Frank had reason to recall the moment a decade or so later in Beverly Hills, sitting by the agent Sam Jaffe’s swimming pool, watching his twenty-two-year-old son Peter stand stiffly next to a rabbi, and all heads turning to see young Johanna, Herman’s now fatherless twenty-one-year-old daughter, walk down the aisle with her uncle Joe Mankiewicz. Was Joe a shit? Why? Frank Davis squinted into the setting sun and watched the young woman who would be his daughter-in-law walk in on the arm of this successful and solid director. A shit? Frank never really knew what Herman had meant. But he never forgot it either.

  About midway through All About Eve, Bette Davis’s Margo Channing throws a welcome-home party for her lover and soon-to-be fiancé, Bill Sampson, who has been off in Hollywood directing a movie. Toward the end of that famously bumpy night, a small group of partygoers sits on the stairway discussing the merits of the theater world and the psyches of its denizens. Addison DeWitt, perhaps the greatest of all of Joe’s male characters and the one whom he identified as his mouthpiece, an endlessly cynical critic unable to see the good in anything, comments on how those who populate the theater, from the playwright on down to the costume girl, are quite abnormal. The director Bill Sampson disagrees. He contends that any abnormalities theater folk might have are merely a reflection of the abnormalities evident in any aspect of society. In other words, theater people are just like the rest of us, only more so. But Sampson adds, “To be a good actor or actress or anything else in the theater means wanting to be that more than anything else in the world. It means a concentration of desire, ambition and sacrifice such as no other profession demands.” At which point Joe’s camera cuts to Eve Harrington. She sits just below Bill on the stairs, nodding in almost hypnotic agreement to all he says; she would, and did, do anything to rise to the top of the theater world. Ambition incarnate, she too as much as Addison DeWitt came from the soul of her creator. It was Eve who would give Joe his greatest success, and the film for which he would be most remembered, even if few people knew the depth of its autobiographical sources.

  Unlike Herman, Joe enjoyed a mostly happy and successful career, and though like his brother he sometimes yearned for a different life than the one he ended up with, few careers in the movies were as successful or meteoric as Joe’s. After coming to Hollywood at his brother’s urging in 1929, he had become, at the astonishing age of twenty, by far the youngest member of Paramount studio’s writing staff, named one of the ten best dialogue writers of the year after writing a Jack Oakie movie titled Fast Company. Two years and dozens of screenplays later, he received his first Academy Award nomination for a now-forgotten picture called Skippy*5 (based on a comic strip about a mischievous if sometimes melancholy ten-year-old boy), and three years after that, he was writing for M-G-M, Hollywood’s most prestigious studio. A year later he’d risen to producer, and for the next ten years, he oversaw more than twenty films, including Fritz Lang’s Fury, George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story, and George Stevens’s Woman of the Year. By 1945, he was writing and directing, which a few years later led to a feat that has yet to be duplicated: double Oscars, s
creenwriter and director, for movies in two consecutive years: A Letter to Three Wives in 1949, All About Eve in 1950. He continued to write and direct for the next two decades, and while he may never again have regained those heights, he was always on the short list of Hollywood’s top directors, directing such movies as Guys and Dolls; Julius Caesar; Suddenly, Last Summer; The Barefoot Contessa; and Sleuth, for which, at the age of sixty-two, he captured yet another Academy Award nomination for his direction of the film’s only two actors, Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, both of whom received Best Actor nominations. (Joe liked to joke that he was the first director in history whose entire cast received Academy Award nominations.)

  “There was a time when he was not a monster”: Joe (right) and Rosemary (left) in Rome during the filming of Cleopatra, flanking his sister Erna and Cleopatra production manager Johnny Johnston