Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  Fortunately, the incident caused Herman to write again to George S. Kaufman, who wrote back optimistically that he looked forward to Herman’s “prospective return” to New York. But the truly fateful words were these: “I think you would be a wonderful man for my job here. I’ll be giving it up in about a year, I think. It doesn’t pay a million dollars, but I’ll do all I can if you say the word.” To Herman, that vague promise—Kaufman was leaving his job, Herman would become the head theater critic for The New York Times—was money in the bank. This time, he shared the truth with Sara, who told him, “Herman, it isn’t really a job offer, you know,” but for Herman, it was close enough. The boys from the Adlon poker game offered up enough mazuma to supplement what little Herman had managed to sock away from Isadora Duncan and the previous two and a half years. It was time, at last, to return to New York.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Mayer would go on to write a handful of Broadway plays and more than fifty screenplays, including Jack Benny’s To Be or Not to Be and parts of Gone with the Wind.

  *2 The split infinitive for effect is part of Herman Mankiewicz’s legacy.

  *3 The equivalent of approximately $30,000 in 2021.

  *4 Seldes’s own family would become quite well-known, including his brother, the journalist Gilbert, and Gilbert’s daughter, the Tony Award–winning actress Marian.

  *5 One of the curiosities in reading such reminiscences of people’s experiences with the pre-Hollywood Herman in Berlin and New York is how old Herman Mankiewicz already seemed. It’s as if they are describing a middle-aged man, not a twenty-three-year-old kid trying to figure out what to do with his life.

  *6 To be clear, Herman listened well sometimes; that is, when he wanted to listen, he would. Joe, too, would make listening a professional asset; his attentiveness to actresses would become almost legendary. But the idea that Herman Mankiewicz was always a great listener is not a sentiment that would have gone unchallenged by his wife and children.

  *7 The almost legendarily hedonistic culture of Berlin in the 1920s written about by Christopher Isherwood and immortalized in Cabaret was hardly enjoyed by Herman, who wrote that Berlin “remains unsmiling, and her night life is an insomnia cure.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  YES, THE NEW YORKER

  You don’t expect me to keep any of those promises, do you?

  —Citizen Kane

  The years that followed lie at the heart of the mystery. For if, as the fable suggested, Herman had been seduced away from the integrity and wonders of a certain-to-be-happy-life in New York City, then we would locate the man’s greatness in those few years in New York, and in plumbing the depths of the dilemma he faced all those years ago, we would see the choice he made in accepting Hollywood’s filthy lucre.

  Of course lives don’t really work that way. The choices people make may lead to different paths, but it’s certainly far from clear where those paths will lead when we make them. And so to put ourselves in Herman’s shoes when the fateful choice was presented to him, the important thing to remember is that at the time, it could hardly have seemed fateful.

  * * *

  —

  Herman’s professional life in New York from 1922 onward was as scrambling and catch-as-catch-can as it had been in Berlin, with the young man darting from one freelance writing assignment to the other and trying a variety of schemes to bring in extra income. But it was on a slightly higher plane, so that rather than in Women’s Wear Daily, his work during these next five years appeared in the New York World, The New York Times, and later, a new magazine called The New Yorker. Although the promised job replacing Kaufman as the chief drama critic of the Times never arrived (and Kaufman insisted he had never promised it, which was no doubt strictly speaking true—in fact, despite his success as a dramatist, Kaufman, to the consternation and surprise of many of his friends, held on to his day job till 1930), Herman found plenty of other outlets for his work. It was a good time to be a newspaperman in New York City. The newspapers were thriving, and the rise of mass communication had obliterated the idea of a newspaperman as a sober, dutiful reporter of facts, replaced now by the cynical, wisecracking know-it-all of whom Herman was an exemplar.

  George S. Kaufman, 1928

  He was also, of course, simply fascinated by the newspaper business. It was “the liveliest and most amusing of worlds,” according to memoirist Stanley Walker, city editor of the New York Herald Tribune, “like attending some fabulous university where the humanities are studied to the accompaniment of ribald laughter, the incessant splutter of an orchestra of typewriters, the occasional clinking of glasses, and the gyrations of some of the strangest performers ever set loose by a capricious and allegedly all-wise Creator.” And when, no doubt feeling guilty about having reneged on his non-promise to Herman—Kaufman, like Herman, had a way of promising things he wasn’t going to deliver—Kaufman called his friend Herbert Bayard Swope, the editor of the New York World, Herman found a steady job. The World, and Swope himself, would come to have a profound impact on Herman, providing him, though of course he didn’t know it, with grist for the mill that would ultimately produce Citizen Kane.

  The World had been started by Joseph Pulitzer, who’d found success in creating newspapers for the common man, as adroit in taking on the titans of Wall Street as they were in reporting the grisly details of a beheading in the Bronx, and he would be emulated throughout America by publishers like the young William Randolph Hearst. Hearst openly acknowledged that serving the common man was the key to success in the newspaper publishing business, and just as this lesson was not lost on Hearst, Hearst’s awareness of it was not lost on Herman. In Citizen Kane, after Kane’s guardian Thatcher upbraids him for a series of stories he ran against a crooked railroad company, the young Charles Foster Kane responds angrily, “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Mr. Thatcher, it is also my pleasure—to see to it that the decent hardworking people of this city are not robbed blind by a group of money-mad pirates because, God help them, they have no one to look after their interests.” This sentiment was echoed a few scenes later when Kane tells his comrades in arms Bernstein and Leland, “I will also provide them [the people] with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and human beings.” *1

  As for Swope, in addition to loving the running of a newspaper (“Thinks it would be fun to run a newspaper!” the guardian Thatcher sputters in response in Citizen Kane), Swope became something of a mentor to Herman. Flamboyant and imposing and with a swift and encyclopedic mind, the tall, red-headed Swope impressed Herman enormously, who went so far as to flatter him by imitation. One of Swope’s favorite phrases was to ask, “Where is it written that it has to be done like this?” Herman came to adopt the quotation for himself.*2

  Becoming something of a protégé to the older man, Herman wasn’t in the least bit afraid of Swope, and the two soon became known for their raging arguments, which often ended with Swope shouting apoplectically, “You whippersnapper, what do you know?” They also became good enough friends for Herman to exercise his wit against him: “Never Swope,” Herman advised another man who failed to show Swope the proper respect, “until you are Swopen to.”

  Herman simply loved the milieu of newspaper work. But here the snake starts to eat its tail, because when considering the newspapermen of the 1920s—the hard-boiled cynicism, the wisecracks, the hard drinking and devil-may-care attitude that permeated the whole endeavor—it’s almost impossible not to think of the wit-flying newspaper comedies of the 1930s, many of which Herman himself worked on, nearly all of which were written by the very same men who had lived the New York newspapering life in the twenties. (The list of great newspaper movies from Hollywood’s golden age is a long one, extending at least from The Front Page in 1931—written by Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur, two of Herman’s best friends—all the way through It Happened One Night and
His Girl Friday, and climaxing with what many consider newspaper films’ apotheosis in 1941, Citizen Kane.)

  But for Herman, that was all in the future. For the present, Herman was a reporter and critic, a writer for newspapers, and a someone who caused George S. Kaufman to pull Sara aside at a party and inform her that Herman was an extraordinary and exceptional young man from whom he, Kaufman, expected great things. And because of Herman’s quick wit and lively personality, he was also beginning to make his name—although, significantly, doing it less by his writing than by his life itself. The writer and playwright Ben Hecht, who had come to New York with his writing partner Charles MacArthur, was perhaps the first to see that Herman’s wit might not be something that would ever be captured fully on paper, though he lamented it. Hecht, who labeled Herman “the Voltaire of Central Park West,” said later that he “knew that no one as witty and spontaneous as Herman would ever put himself on paper. A man whose genius is on tap like free lager beer seldom makes literature out of it.”

  Sara in New York, 1920s

  To my grandmother, the key night in Herman’s cementing his reputation as a wit occurred the first night they were invited to the George S. Kaufmans for a dinner party. Such an invitation was no small thing. The Kaufmans, Beatrice and George, were an odd couple, completely unromantic and each bound up in a series of affairs, yet in all other respects devoted as husband and wife and famous for their dinner parties. Though the invitation was something many in New York longed for, it struck terror in the heart of Sara. It was her “first real exposure to all of these…brilliant and wonderful and witty people and I was scared out of my wits.”

  When they arrived, Sara did not let Herman out of her sight. “If he’d leave my side, I’d run and get him. I really behaved like an idiot and everybody was being terribly nice trying to make me feel at home.” The Kaufman dinners were convivial and lively, and the guest lists were practically a Who’s Who of New York’s smart set: Marc Connelly, Ben Hecht, Franklin P. Adams, Heywood Broun, and Alexander Woollcott were frequent attendees. That night, it was Herman who shone, keeping all in stitches: “[M]ost of Manky’s utterances, including his deepest philosophic ones, stirred laughter. Even his enemies laughed,” Hecht would say. After the elegant dinner, everyone gathered in the living room to play word games. “They were all very proficient at it and I was scared to death,” Sara said. “I don’t think I spoke two words.” Finally, Connelly, the playwright with whom Kaufman collaborated on a few of his early successes, rose with his wife to leave. Sara turned to her husband and said, “Look, Herman, people are going home.” Unfortunately, she said it louder than she’d intended, and everybody laughed uproariously. From that point on, for quite a while, Sara was referred to as “People are going home, Herman.”*3

  For Herman, the night was a smashing success. He had held his own with the greatest wits of the day, he had performed brilliantly at the word games, and even Goma said later that he’d established that he really was “the life of every party. He was such fun, and he had such wit—after that, he was terribly much in demand. Without him it could be a deadly evening.”

  Spoken wit, of course, always has a curious and unfortunate you-had-to-be-there quality. But how odd that the only witticisms of Herman’s that have come down from what Goma considered such a seminal evening were ones that involved deprecating his beloved wife—further evidence, if any were needed, that her reports of Herman’s gifts as a husband were overstated. In fact, when they did finally leave the party, Sara felt like she was being let out of a coffin. Years later she still claimed she could “get a cold chill” when she thought about that night.

  Herman in New York, mid 1920s

  But for Herman, it marked a turning point. Before this evening, young Herman was a reporter, a writer struggling with his demons, to be sure, but a man whose future would be in the field of journalism and literature—he would make his name with the written word. But hereafter, Herman Mankiewicz saw another way to make his name, and if he went for it with gusto, it wasn’t just because doing the other would prove difficult—but because going this route was going to be a hell of a lot more fun. Down this road, he would make his name not with his written word, but with his spoken word and his larger-than-life behavior that would make him a legend. Like Oscar Wilde, who famously put his talent into his work but his genius into his life, Herman would hereafter cultivate a personality that would be spoken about in almost reverent tones—as people speak of gorgeous dancers or other performers whose performances cannot be captured in any recorded way, but whose great accomplishments are necessarily ephemeral. An improvisational genius, Herman Mankiewicz had found his true calling. From now on, he would make of his life his greatest work of art. And if Herman had found his true calling as an improvisational actor, he was soon to find the first great theater for his performances—for soon after the evening at the Kaufmans, he became a member of the Algonquin Round Table.

  * * *

  —

  Sometime in the summer of 1919, or perhaps it was the early autumn, a group of three, though quite possibly more, leading members of the New York literary set—or maybe they were that only in their own minds but what’s the difference?—sent out private invitations to a luncheon to celebrate, or note, or at least thoroughly mock, the return of The New York Times theater critic Alexander Woollcott from the Great War. The invitations, which deliberately misspelled the name of the critic (who was notorious for his endless self-promotion, especially tales of his martial exploits, which often began with the phrase: “When I was in the theater of war…”), were sent to every editor or theater critic of note in the city and also provided an agenda of speeches to be given: all the speeches would be about the war, and all would be delivered by Woollcott himself. The luncheon would be held at the Algonquin Hotel, a converted apartment building on West Forty-fourth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues—at the center of Midtown Manhattan and spitting distance from Broadway. Among those attending that first day were Dorothy Parker, then drama critic for Vanity Fair, Robert Benchley, managing editor at Vanity Fair, Heywood Broun, theater and sports writer for the Tribune, and Harold Ross, an old friend of Woollcott’s. Despite the obvious sarcasm of the invitations, though, everyone present “acted obeisant to ‘the king of drama critics’ ” until one moment when Arthur Samuels, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, said, in response to Woollcott’s yet again beginning a story with “When I was in the theater of war,” “If you were ever in the theater of war, Aleck, it was in the last-row seat nearest the exit.” When the afternoon was over and everyone rose to leave, someone said, “Why don’t we do this every day?”

  Herman wasn’t at that first meal. And he likely wasn’t at the second, or even third. But as the fame of the Round Table spread, it wasn’t long before he was drawn into its orbit, for before long anyone who was anyone in New York’s theatrical and journalistic circles began to show up. Soon, actors and writers, everyone from Harpo Marx to Ring Lardner, Tallulah Bankhead to Helen Hayes, began to drop by for a session at the Round Table, and soon even the non-famous were coming to the Algonquin for lunch, just to catch a glimpse of the Round Table in action. At one such afternoon, with the Round Table breaking up for the day, and Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Parker, Ross, Kaufman, and the gang all heading back to work, Herman turned to writer and Broadway publicist Murdock Pemberton and said, “There goes the greatest collection of unsalable wit in America.” (Pemberton made sure that the remark found its way into newspaper columns.)

  In time, the bon mots piled up like linen napkins. When someone referred to liquor as slow poison, Robert Benchley replied, “Who’s in a hurry?” Once, when a passerby rubbed Marc Connelly’s bald head and said that it felt just like his wife’s behind, Connelly reached up, rubbed his own head, and said, “Why so it does.” When Noël Coward visited the Round Table, he did so on a day when he and Edna Ferber both happened to be wearing double-breasted suits. “You a
lmost look like a man,” Coward told Ferber, to which she replied, “So do you.” And then there were Dorothy Parker’s legendary quips; a now-forgotten woman visited the Round Table and bragged that she’d kept her husband for seven years, to which Parker said, “Keep him long enough and he’ll come back in style.” When it was reported that the solemn President Coolidge had died, Parker said, “How can they tell?” She once rose suddenly from the table and said, “Excuse me, but I have to go to the bathroom.” Then she added, “I really have to use the telephone, but I’m too embarrassed to say so.” The word games, the play, the droll understanding that people in power were boobs…the Algonquin Round Table had it all.

  But as with many groups of self-promoted and self-conscious artistic greats, the myth of the Round Table seems to have exceeded its members’ actual accomplishments. Years later, Parker herself assessed the Round Table’s whole existence rather unkindly: “The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were…”*4 And given all the eating and drinking and self-mythologizing that was going on, it’s fair to ask: How much work was anyone actually getting done?

  * * *

  —

  Herman said that at times in New York, he felt like a juggler, with so many different projects all proceeding, sometimes at breakneck pace, but more often with the speed of molasses, such that he would no doubt have agreed with the archetypal producers’ quip when asked what he’s working on: “I have a lot of irons in the freezer.” Frequently Herman would work at home on Central Park West in the mornings, where Sara, in the kitchen or with the baby in the living room, would love to hear the rhythmic clacking of the keys punching through the paper and striking the cylinder from the typewriter in the bedroom.*5 Usually Herman would be working on a play, like the one he and Connelly were writing together called The Wild Man of Borneo, which at first excited Herman with its comic potential: the play was about a medicine show faker pretending to be a great actor. He and Connelly had cooked up a number of terrific characters—the main character was a true mountebank, great for an actor like Louis Wolheim to play on stage*6—but the longer Herman toiled at it, the more it seemed like a pale imitation of other plays, not very good ones, that he’d suffer through as drama critic and then relish ripping apart when he got back to the Times’s offices.