Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  But there’s a curious aspect to Herman’s lifelong battle for Franz’s approval, especially after he returned from Europe. Unlike many, Herman wasn’t competing just against the standard his father had set down in his childhood. During much of Herman’s adult life, Franz was still an active presence. For all his judgment and criticisms of his sons, Franz was very much a part of their daily lives. To the end of his life, the old man was involved in Herman’s adult life—by Herman’s design. Whatever it was that he was getting from Pop—even when it was dismissal—Herman craved it.

  The tragedy, of course, is that Franz was enormously proud of his first-born son. He crowed over his accomplishments, puffing his chest up, one friend recalled, as he told of Herman’s achievements at Columbia. He cared deeply about Herman, and his daughter-in-law came to rely on him for all kinds of advice. And later, when Herman and Joe were in Hollywood, succeeding in a field for which Franz had no feel and even less regard, Franz knew enough, Erna said, to be proud, and to brag about their accomplishments as best as he could understand them. One famous family tale, usually trotted out to show how unfeeling and mean Franz was, also speaks to some glimmer of pride in his sons: when they had films out in the cinemas, Franz, who of course had no time for the frivolity of movies, would pay his money to go in and watch. He’d see one of their names in the opening credits—Written by Herman J. Mankiewicz, or Produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, or in the case of 1932’s Million Dollar Legs, Produced by Herman…, Written by Joseph…—two names! His sons!—and then leave the theater. He was satisfied that they were out in the world, making some kind of impact, even if it wasn’t one he would ever appreciate or understand.

  Under such a thumb, Herman grew up with one real goal in mind and it wasn’t artistic satisfaction or mastery over his craft. No, what Herman wanted from the world was something it couldn’t possibly give: love. With such an impossible goal, his professional ambition was never to attain just success or awards or even acclaim; in fact, his precise ambition is challenging to trace, but revelatory. For instance, he never said, not once that anyone could recall, “I want to write” or “I want to be a writer.” Instead, the idea was to have written.

  For Goma, the actual wedding day, Thursday, July 1, 1920, was something of a trial. An extraordinarily hot day in Washington, DC, the day began with enormous promise, the twenty-two-year-old Sara Aronson rising early in the bedroom she shared with one of her five sisters. Sara was the first of them to be married; as much pride as I had in the Mankiewicz brothers growing up, the sheer intellectual heft of the Aaronson sisters was nothing to sneeze at—each sister smarter and sharper than the last, and if intelligence wasn’t enough, force and bossiness would do. Other than Goma, the ones I knew all had living husbands, each in descending order of meekness and gentleness; the women ran the show. And Herman, at least before the wedding, had certainly given every indication of playing his role to the uxorious hilt. In one of his final letters to her from Europe, he wrote how their reunion would be:

  The sun will be shining and the birds singing and I’ll walk down Fairmont Street and climb the steps and ask for “Miss Sara” and [Sara’s younger sister] Mattie will say, “What name, please?” and I’ll tell her and she’ll say, “How do you spell it?” and I’ll wait twenty minutes and grumble terribly at the delay. And then my sweetheart will come down languidly to greet me. Oh, Schnutz, you will be all bathed and napped and pink dressed, won’t you, darling. And shamefacedly we’ll kiss right in front of everybody, won’t we? We will, you know.

  Fantasist that he was, it’s unlikely the scene played out exactly as he imagined it, but Herman did get one detail right: the sun was shining, mercilessly, on the wedding day. In later years, Herman and Sara enjoyed talking of the wedding day’s particulars: the simple Orthodox ceremony, the scorching heat in the depth of the Washington summer, the irreverent fly that buzzed around the rabbi’s nose, and in particular the appalling behavior of two of Herman’s closest friends from Columbia, Milt Wynn and Edwin Justus Mayer,*1 who had taken to drinking quite early in the day. Sara’s parents had arranged for a piano player to be at the ceremony, to play a few religious songs, but at one point Milt and Eddie eased the poor man off the piano bench and began singing a song to Herman whose lyrics were something like, “Good-bye, boys, I’m through.” Iconoclast though he may have been, Herman was not amused and snapped at his friends to knock it off. As Sara said, “They were drinking like mad, these two.” (In later years, the two men suggested that the real reason Herman was so incensed was because he couldn’t join them in their cups.)

  Herman’s behavior after the wedding, both that afternoon and in the few days following, was eye-opening for Sara. An hour or so after the ceremony, as the photographer herded everyone out for formal photos, Herman encouraged Sara’s little brother Meyer to perform acrobatic tricks with Milt and Eddie. For one picture, Herman had one arm around Sara, one around her sister Naomi, and he shouted, “Which one is the bride?” There was elaborate food, and the guests were ebullient, but growing up in a prim and sheltered Orthodox family, Sara was starting to realize just exactly with whom she had thrown in her lot. Herman’s little brother Joe, eleven at the time, spent most of the day down in the cellar eating up all the ice cream with Sara’s little sister Mattie. It was, according to Sara, “a nice, noisy wedding,” but by seven or eight o’clock, she was exhausted and decided it was time for her uncle Meyer to drive the newlyweds to their hotel, where, after committing the faux pas of inviting Meyer up to see the honeymoon suite (the man politely demurred), which Herman would tease her for mercilessly in the decades to come, Sara went up to the bedroom with Herman. There, according to legend, absolutely nothing happened. Nothing, that is, aside from Sara’s first experience of sleeping, or trying to, in the same room with a man who snored like a bulldozer.

  The following morning, Sara and Herman had to be at the train station early to catch the train up to New York, in order for Sara to avoid traveling on the Sabbath. Though Herman was all his life irreligious and even hostile to organized religion, he was always deferential to Sara’s religious wishes. Sara’s family met the young couple at the station to see them off, and there was both loud gnashing of teeth and wailing—especially from Sara’s next-younger sister Ruth, miserable that Sara was leaving her and getting married—and also a good deal of chiding, especially from Sara’s aunts, about the previous night and what had, or had not, gone on in that hotel room now that the two were man and wife. Finally, Sara brought all the teasing to an abrupt halt when, no longer able to stand it, she shut them all up by announcing quite loudly, “Look, he slept in one bed, and I slept in another bed.” With everyone properly chastened, there was an awkward silence, and the newlyweds boarded the train.

  The romance continued to not blossom*2. On the train north, Herman whipped out a stack of newspapers and started plowing through them. Years later Sara joked that he did so because “it was already an old marriage by that time, twenty-four hours,” but at first she didn’t consider it a joking matter. As he continued to ignore her for the duration of the trip, interrupting his reading once in a while to pat her hand or offer some other slight gesture of affection, her mouth began to dry. Her heart, which had stopped doing somersaults, now settled into her stomach. And when the train pulled into Penn Station, things didn’t get any better. They decided to eat dinner at the counter there: their first dinner together, and their first Sabbath dinner. Because Sara kept kosher, she couldn’t eat any meat, and she also didn’t like fish, so her dinner consisted of Grape Nuts. Not Herman. The sensitive new husband ordered a full-course meal. What’s more, on his way to the counter he bought a copy of the evening paper, which he folded lengthwise to make for convenient reading while he ate.

  Now, at last, Sara permitted her self-pity to consume her. “My heavens above,” she thought, “is this what being married means? No Sabbath dinner, no candles, no nothing.” She felt bereft.


  But then, at last, the marriage began in earnest: Sara looked at Herman and started to try to understand who he was and what made him tick. Years later, she described the scene as one that required a mirror to bring her to full realization. She looked across the counter behind the bar and saw a mirror in which she could see both Herman’s reflection and her own. Thus able to get some distance on the scene, she sized up her view: a young man, twenty-two years old, with his nose stuck in his paper, slurping coffee and gobbling down steak. He was with his young wife, and she was, Sara liked to allow, a beautiful young girl, but the young man was consumed with other thoughts: he was a newspaperman and he was reading about the world, studying the news of the day, honing his intellect and learning his craft. Something stirred in Sara Mankiewicz. As she watched him read his paper so intently, she felt a new feeling: pride. Pride in what she had done, and pride in her own personal newspaperman. “You’ve just married the greatest guy in the world,” she thought, “not just a ninny who’s going to make love to you in the railroad station.” Fifty years later, telling Herman’s biographer Dick Meryman about that moment still brought tears to her eyes, and when she thought back, she let the silence sit there for a good long time. Finally, on the tape, you hear Meryman say, “Are you okay?” And Goma’s voice is loud and authoritative: “I’m more than okay!”

  And yet, Goma’s insistence notwithstanding, there is something about the scene that balks at such an easy interpretation. Had she really been so at peace with the moment, would she have been flooded with such depth of feeling? Was it possible that the moment still nagged at Goma decades later? For if there was pride at Herman’s disappearing into the newspaper, and into his own brilliant mind, the thoughts and ideas about the world no doubt racing full speed ahead as he pored over the agate type of the Sun and World, present too was the knowledge that for Herman Mankiewicz, connection—human connection, feelings and sympathies and the free and easy exchange of intimacies with other human animals—would never be high on the list of priorities, stated or otherwise. Faced with that knowledge, Sara Aaronson had no choice other than to make peace with it. Human connection would have to come later, if at all.

  * * *

  —

  The 1920 Democratic convention was under way in San Francisco. Herman was aware of Sara of course, he could feel her staring at him above the World, he could sense how much she wanted his companionship, and he was not above, as he had done on the train, looking up at her from time to time and granting her a real, warm, genuine smile. He did love her. She was so pretty, his little Schnutzie, and he adored making her laugh more than just about anything in the world. But the importance of what he was reading was never in doubt: Franklin Roosevelt, the handsome young cousin of the former president, had just resigned his office as assistant secretary to the navy in order to pursue the vice presidency.

  Herman knew that whatever was actually happening in the world, whatever was being written about or spoken about, whatever, in the end, was famous—those things were ultimately of more value than whatever Sara, or for that matter he, would have wanted in any given moment. And so he told his young wife of his frustration at not having been sent to cover the convention, and threw in some casual condemnations of the man responsible for the indignation, the editor with the strawberry nose. But as he told Sara, there was no use working himself into a lather over it. He’d just have to put his head down and go to Berlin, do the best he could there, and show them all that no one alive possessed a keener political mind.

  Still, the mention of Berlin surely would have caused a shudder to run through Herman’s body. His young bride was no more than two feet from him, across the table with her spoon still stuck in her Grape Nuts. He always loved her sweet regard for the old ways, and her utterly trusting nature. Herman loved to read the newspaper, but while sometimes it would deliver information he craved, sometimes it was just newsprint to let wash over him. For now, Sara was his, and she loved him. That was enough.

  * * *

  —

  Sara stood on the deck of the great ocean liner with her new husband, and she felt her whole body singing. The SS Kroonland was bound for Holland. From there the young couple would go to Berlin, where Herman would start a much-discussed job with the Chicago Tribune. They stood on deck and waved down from the throng to the wharf, where many in Sara’s family—mother and father, brother, sisters, grandfather, aunts and uncles—were present, waving handkerchiefs and tossing confetti as the ship pulled out. Herman and Sara stood on the deck, waving goodbye to their family, to America. Sara was thrilled.

  Looking back years later, she would admit that it was odd that Franz had accompanied them on their honeymoon in Far Rockaway, but now, she felt warm about the time they’d spent with Herman’s parents, who had taken a summer rental in nearby Rockaway. The week at the beach had been practically a family vacation, with Joe, cousins, and even Eddie and Milt, the two young jokesters from the wedding, all flocking together in a cavalcade of games and picnics. And, almost presiding over the entire week: Franz himself. It’s possible Herman was so much in thrall to the old man that he couldn’t even conceive of striking out on his own, even at the very symbolic moment when he might have been.

  Newlyweds Herman and Sara in the summer of 1920

  One incident from the week at the beach did nag at Sara, though. On the way back to their hotel one evening, walking along the boardwalk listening to the waves crash on shore, Franz had lingered behind the others, for a chance to be alone with Sara. “Herman,” he told her out of nowhere, “has his faults, but Herman is a very good boy.” Sara looked at Franz, almost dumbfounded. Despite her disillusionment with Herman’s apparent lack of interest in her on the train and at the station, she really had no idea what faults Franz was talking about. She couldn’t imagine: this was her young man, her man of the world, who had taken care of all the preparations for their trip, who had made her get her visa long in advance of their leaving for Europe, and who had taken immediate control of all their money, which was no small sum. (Sara had brought to the marriage a dowry of approximately $2,500,*3 but she wanted nothing to do with the money and was “terribly glad” to give it to him and “let him handle” it. Only later would she admit she had no idea “how quickly he would dispose of it.”) But faults? Sloppy, maybe, but was sloppiness a fault?

  On the boat, the two traveled in a first-class stateroom, a luxury, Sara joked, paid for “by my rich husband—with my money.” And it was there, in the stateroom on the first or second night out of port, where Sara finally began to understand what Franz might have been getting at. The two had retired early, and when they got to the room, almost immediately, Herman said, “Where’s that wine you got?” As wedding gifts, Sara had received a few bottles of a very sweet port wine, a Jewish wine often used for kiddush, and she’d brought a couple of bottles along.

  “It’s in the old trunk,” she said.

  “Let’s get it out and have a little bit of it.”

  “Sure,” Sara said, and she did get it out, even though she didn’t really want any. Herman poured Sara a glass, then one for himself, and eventually he poured her another, as well as himself. Then another, and another. Sara looked at the man. She knew nothing about real drinking. To Sara, you drank only a little bit of wine on special occasions, or on the Sabbath, a little schnapps or wine to make the kiddush prayer. Sara had never seen anyone drink the way Herman was drinking. He was greedy, almost lascivious in his thirst.

  That night, she went to bed consumed with a kind of horror that her husband had drunk an entire bottle. In the morning, the feeling grew worse; looking around the stateroom, she realized that on the sly he had also finished the entire second bottle. That morning, with her husband in bed, still a sleeping log (one being loudly sawed in half), she realized she was married to a man who had finished off two bottles of wine—an incomprehensible feat to her—and understood in full what her father-in-law had
been talking about.

  For Sara Aaronson Mankiewicz, barely twenty-two years old, this was a defining moment. The Mankiewiczes have never been a people who listened to their intuition particularly keenly—but what must it have felt like in Sara’s stomach, seeing that she had married a man of such tendencies? Above all else, Sara was a realist. She looked at him and consciously made another decision, like the one she’d made in the railroad station bar, and this one was to ignore the gnawing sense that the ship was steaming toward a collision. A man who loved to drink and postwar Germany, a place of violent excess, was not a match made in heaven. Goma considered the two bottles, looked at Herman, and went for a walk on deck, to get some air and clear her head. She looked out at the sea, the whitecaps, the foam. Above: the broad sky. Ahead: the promise of Berlin, Herman’s job at the Chicago Tribune, and the start of their lives. She would not mention the two bottles to Herman. In fact, she would do her best not to think about them.

  * * *

  —

  Herman Mankiewicz arrived in Germany in the fall of 1920 having told his young wife that a job with the Chicago Tribune awaited him in Berlin. Sure enough, after a couple of days in town helping Sara get settled in at their hotel, Herman began leaving bright and early every morning to report to work at the Tribune offices at the Hotel Adlon, returning home in the evening with a pocketful of paper money. The German mark was almost notoriously worthless, but money was money, and the couple was blissfully happy in those early days in Berlin. Postwar Germany had much to offer a young couple, though in truth what the city had most of all in addition to rampant inflation was galling poverty, political uncertainty, and an almost legendarily debauched culture that Herman and Sara would be front row viewers of, if not full participants in, for the next two and a half years. Their first hotel was a true fleabag in Friedrichstadt in the center of Old Berlin—a hotel that had been advertised as the only Kosher hotel around, but whose main inhabitants seemed to be cockroaches and prostitutes. Still, and despite the many “boy whores” who, rouged and powdered, appalled Herman with advances on him (which Sara found so amusing), it wasn’t a bad place to make a home base while Herman scoured the city looking for work.