by Nick Davis
Afternoons, Herman would make his way downtown, either to a newspaper office or the home of a collaborator like Marc Connelly or George S. Kaufman. For Kaufman, Herman was doing a number of things: reviewing plays and revues, and also padding Kaufman’s weekly “news on the rialto” column or the “theatrical notes” Times column with items Herman got from friends. Too, Herman became press agent for Max Reinhardt’s production of Karl Vollmöller’s play The Miracle, and even found time to help produce, with Jed Harris, a play called Love ’Em and Leave ’Em, co-written by a man named John V. A. Weaver, a writer of such questionable promise his own father-in-law described him as a “used piece of soap.”
So amid all the activity, and with the Algonquin and nighttime drinking bouts thrown in, it’s fair to wonder what Herman’s own literary output as a writer in New York really was. In truth, it’s hard to determine. There were three plays in all that we know about, and a few others that would bear some kind of asterisk on the official baseball card record of Herman Mankiewicz’s New York years. First, there was his helping George S. Kaufman on one of the forty-five plays the man produced in his prodigious lifetime, a play called The Butter-and-Egg Man. Here, a problem crops up that will recur: Goma said he virtually rewrote Kaufman’s entire script from start to finish, though others said Herman merely added a few jokes. Regardless, the play was published—and produced—with Herman’s name nowhere to be found, which, according to Sara anyway, disappointed Herman. In fact, more than just about anyone else, Herman actually seemed to want what Kaufman had: a life as a successful playwright and man of the theater, to be a well-respected critic and man about town. But while Herman learned what he could from Kaufman, two of Herman’s weaknesses were Kaufman’s greatest strengths. Kaufman would never be considered the life of the party—he was a largely silent, taciturn man who saved his humor for his work. The other remarkable thing about Kaufman was that he never stopped working. In that respect Herman was virtually the antithesis of his hero. Goma said, “There was a real compulsion against working, against writing. Much as he wanted to and loved to. If only he could postpone that evil moment.” Goma took a long sigh, possibly thinking of other writers she knew who disliked the actual act. “He was like every other writer—except Ben Hecht and George Kaufman.”
Despite his distaste for the actual process, Herman never stopped wanting to be a comedy playwright. While in New York, he contributed skits to revues like the Ziegfeld Follies, George White Scandals, and the Little Show. He was thrilled whenever Kaufman asked him to collaborate, and Connelly’s invitation to work on The Wild Man of Borneo had both flattered Herman enormously and for the moment interrupted the collaboration of Connelly and Kaufman, at the time the most successful writing team on Broadway. But in the end, the script dragged on interminably, and Herman ended up leaving New York before it was ever produced.
The play with the most promise may have been a political satire called We the People. Herman set aside his August vacation to work on it in 1925. But where could he find the solitude the great work demanded? That summer, in Woodstock, New York, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur had rented a cottage with their wives, entertaining many of New York’s most famed theatrical personages, including the Marx Brothers. “Then one sunny afternoon,” according to Hecht, “Herman Mankiewicz appeared in the road in front of our house—as Jimmy Durante would say—unannounced. He carried two suitcases.” The larger one “contained sixteen bottles of Scotch and nothing else,” with which Herman “sat in a corner of an old couch for two weeks without moving” and “slowly and happily did away with his sixteen bottles,” refusing to join in on “horseshoes, croquet or swimming-hole activities.” Hecht reports that Herman showed up penniless because Sara refused to give him any money, knowing he would squander it on booze. “Poor Sara is an honest woman,” Herman told Hecht, “and doesn’t understand that liquor can be begged, borrowed or stolen by a man of firm character.” At the end of two weeks’ time, “a young and ravishing Sara finally arrived and carted her Herman off.” Somehow, eventually, We the People got written. And with Kaufman’s help, the play was accepted by a producer. But no production date was ever set, and Herman never saw a penny from it.
For Herman, though, while his theatrical career may have been dying a slow, honorable death, his journalistic efforts seemed to be heading in the right direction. For in February 1925, a new magazine had been born in New York City, one that seemed to embrace an attitude and spirit that Herman embodied. It was cynical, but also somehow humane, judgmental yet also proudly inclusive of differing opinions, worldly yet famously provincial, smart but routinely superficial—it was like the Algonquin Round Table trapped between the pages of a magazine, much like the butterfly that its dandified mascot Eustace Tilley examined through his monocle on its first cover. Yes, The New Yorker, and Herman would be its first drama critic.
The height of New York sophistication: Herman and Sara with Ben and Rose Hecht at Coney Island, 1926
And so the final battle began: apocalyptic if apocryphal, the war for Herman Mankiewicz’s soul, between Hollywood and New York—or, more specifically, The New Yorker. Herman’s relationship with Harold Ross, the coarse high school dropout from Colorado who ran the magazine, was notoriously tempestuous. Ross was a bit of a Western hayseed, gangly, lanky, and homely, and looked, Herman said, like a dishonest Abraham Lincoln. (“Be careful when you go to the theater,” Herman would warn Ross, “don’t sit in a box seat.”) Salty and crude where Herman and his pals cultivated a veneer of urbane sophistication, Ross was an unlikely leader of a magazine for the smart set, causing Ben Hecht to ask, “How the hell could a man who looked like a resident of the Ozarks and talked like a saloon brawler set himself up as pilot of a sophisticated, elegant periodical?” But Ross, for all his crudity, was ideally suited to birth a magazine that would capture the aspirations of a nation full of longing for the New York of the imagination. He was a gifted editor, and Herman’s work at The New Yorker stands out among his other journalistic work for its crispness and clarity. Herman actually learned a great deal from Ross, and according to Goma, Herman was “mad about” Ross, respected him deeply, and thought him “an enormous talent. Looking and acting like a hayseed and yet being so ultra sophisticated and knowing just exactly what he wanted that magazine to be like.” Ross had an instinctive compass for where he wanted the magazine to go, and if it took the magazine a while to find its footing and shed a sophomoric attitude, it was only because Ross was having trouble imposing his vision on the rest of the staff. Goma said he “could recognize immediately something he felt was not in the style of The New Yorker. He set that style and made everyone else conform.” As improbable as it may sound, Herman, the ultimate nonconformist, was willing to conform, at least for a while.*7
Despite his battles with Ross—and some were epic, with shouts and hurled bits of clothing behind closed doors, terrifying those in the office outside—Ross, who admitted he was petrified by Herman, was able to tame him into doing some of the best work of his life. Herman’s sentences, which heretofore had sometimes tended to careen terrifyingly all over the page, were now always in control, even the long ones: “Anyway, the new theatrical year allowed itself to be declared formally opened with the production at Maxine Elliott’s Theater, on the night of August 3, of Vincent Lawrence’s Spring Fever, and if the lessons of the past teach anything at all, they teach that you’ll get over it all right.” Or: “The Paris of A Night in Paris is, of course, the Paris of the man who has never been there, but, after all, there be among us cynical and jaded souls who insist that that Paris is the best Paris there is.” And while the prose was more refined, there was still an incisive wit that meshed perfectly with the wry, urbane tone that The New Yorker sought: “If Hecuba has tears, let her prepare to shed them now. They will produce The Morning After. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can be done about it.” He had no problem lobbing honest assessments of work he thought mediocre or bad. Of
Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms he wrote, “It is not one of O’Neill’s greatest plays but it is, fortunately, not among his worst, than which nothing is more dreadful.” Of a musical comedy called Oh! Oh! Nurse, his prescription was merely: “Our advice is to stay at home and read a bad book.” On the other hand, unlike the prevailing scorn of the Algonquinites, which tended to permeate much of the theatrical press of the day, Herman had no problem giving credit where it was due, in particular when it concerned unquestionably great plays or performers: “Miss Barrymore as Ophelia provided this deponent with one of the greatest joys of his theatre going life.” Nor was he above displaying the kind of fearsome quality that he was so well-known for in person, as when he marveled at the leading players in the “Negro musical comedy” Lucky Sambo, writing, “Of course, being Negroes, they probably receive about $100 a week—and this department is prepared to submit a list of six white comedians with one-tenth ability who receive over a thousand.” A visit to Chicago would yield a wonderful back-handed compliment to New York when comparing the theatrical cultures of the two cities: “In New York, where the drama is controlled absolutely by the theatre landlords, the playhouses are filled with trash. In Chicago, where this is not the case, the theatergoer can choose from among Shaw and Ibsen and Goethe and Shakespeare and Molière and any other book he has in his library.”
But Herman’s output, ultimately, was more than mere insults and wisecracks. Even as he hewed to the institutional demands of The New Yorker to be arch and superior, his writing could at times be perceptive and even wise. One piece, “The Big Game,” about attending a college football game out of town (between the fictional colleges Olav and Bayes), illustrates the tension between the two strains in Herman’s writing. The piece begins with a self-conscious literary device: a correspondent, the night before the game, “has sat in front of his typewriter for exactly fifty minutes in stony silence, thinking, thinking, thinking.” Then, inspiration strikes, and he reels off four paragraphs of sportswriter jargon: “All roads will lead to the Gump Bowl to-morrow….King Football reigns supreme in New Dijon to-night…Both teams engaged in a light drill this afternoon and returned to their quarters for the final skull practice.” But soon the piece grows beyond mere mimicry, as Herman drops the conceit of the sportswriter and describes the trains that depart the next morning from New York: “overfilled, overraccooncoated, overginned, overheated.” He draws a few quick sketches of some of those onboard: “a stout little fellow in the most expensive fur coat the world has ever known…[another man] out of medical school one year…trying to grow a mustache [who will] spend most of the time en route walking through the cars, greeting as many people as he can.”
The sketches deepen, most notably with a description of a “little older than average young woman” who is with an “average young man”:
She has made this trip now, in mid-November, for thirteen successive years, and she is getting just the least little bit fed up on it. In particular, she knows that she is going to be very annoyed when the young man tries to explain to her the difference between a touchdown and a fullback. Some day she is going to make one of the average young men that are her lot drink the gin all at once, instead of at such long intervals that its effect wears off; and then she’s going to be married; and if the average young man from then on feels that he must know how the game came out before the sport extras are on the street, let him install a radio in the parlor.
At the game, too, more bittersweet humanity sneaks into the piece: “A writhing young man is carried off the field and a greying woman shrieks.” And Herman’s deeper attitudes watching such a contest become clearer:
Cheer leaders have appeared and are doing their tricks. The cynic is impressed by the futility of life and endeavor. What becomes of cheerleaders, he wonders, after graduation? Are they loving husbands and kind fathers? Do their eyes ever get misty with the thoughts of the wild, old days that are no more?
At the end of the piece—the outcome of the game, of course, is of little concern (“The final whistle blows. Olav has won, or something”)—Herman describes the ride back, and the tone is even more melancholy. “The young doctor has caught a cold, and is in hiding.” No more is heard from the older than average young woman. “The trains roll into the stations,” and he ends on a note of simplicity: “Eighty thousand Americans have had a day of outdoor sport.”
This, then, was the Herman I first read as a boy in the crimson-bound volume of The New Yorker’s first year that Goma kept in her living room in Brentwood. He was witty, intelligent, and perceptive, and his voice was original and refined. For nearly a year he wrote a regular weekly column, reviewing two or three plays in brief and one at length. He was, Brooks Atkinson said, “saturated with the theatre.” The promise of future literary success was real.
So what happened?
For one thing, money. At some point in 1925, a press agent told him he could make a fortune in Hollywood. The idea percolated in Herman. The movies, of course, were a thoroughly inferior art form, derided and dismissed altogether by the Algonquinites and sophisticates of all kinds, so much so that when Herman asked Ross if he could add movie reviews to his charge for the magazine, Ross said, “You don’t want that. That’s for women and fairies.”
Still, the idea had taken hold. The press agent had urged Herman to come up with an idea for M-G-M about the Marines, and one day Herman happily told the Algonquin crowd that an idea for the movie had come to him—on the toilet. The room roared, and so did the lion. M-G-M offered Herman $500 a week to come west and work on a scenario for a few weeks. The money was nearly twice what Herman had ever been able to cobble together in his New York life.
And so, at the age of twenty-eight, he boarded a train, thoroughly expecting California to be a visit only, a one-time lark.
But he also needed the money. Gambling and drinking had continued apace in New York, as they would for the rest of his life. On his way to California, Herman stopped in Chicago, where he gave a speech on New York theater at the prestigious Book and Pencil club, got offered a job as drama critic by the Chicago Daily News, and promptly lost all the money he had on him, including the lecture fee, in a poker game.
California, as it was for many of the Easterners who headed there in the heady early decades of motion pictures, was a land of milk and honey. Having lived in the crowded confines of New York City for so long, Herman wrote Sara of his glee on his arrival: “Los Angeles is delightful beyond belief, with its tropical vegetation and its mad, colored, pretty bungalows.” And then there was the work itself. By the time he arrived, all interest in the Marine story had vanished from the halls of M-G-M, but Herman was told to try his hand at a vehicle for the master of disguise, Lon Chaney. Without delay, Herman set to work on a melodrama called The Road to Mandalay, which would be advertised as “A Thrilling, Throbbing Romance of Singapore.” To say that Herman enjoyed the work immensely wouldn’t be quite accurate, because he barely considered it work. It was too easy. Unlike the problems posed by reviews, or the intricate plotting of a stage play, screenwriting didn’t really consume much of his brain. Professionally speaking, Hollywood was a caper. The operating assumption was he’d soon get back to his real career, his work—and to New York.
“Then, suddenly, defeat! Shameful, ignominious…” The stentorian newsreel voice from Citizen Kane often bursts in when considering Herman’s life, and in particular that phrase from the moment when Kane’s meteoric political rise is cut short by scandal. In this case, it was no scandal that brought an end to Herman’s career in New York, merely his personality. But the news arrived as suddenly as in Citizen Kane: a telegram from Ross, informing him that his services at The New Yorker were no longer required.
There had been no last straw. It was merely the agglomeration of all the anguish Herman had caused Ross in their battles over his work, not to mention Herman’s attitude of sheer condescension toward him (as well a
s everyone else) that finally forced Ross to cut him loose. Herman had for so long regarded everyone he met as his inferior in terms of scholarship and intellect, and here was this yokel from Colorado telling him how to write. The fact that Ross had made Herman a better writer didn’t seem to factor into Herman’s thinking, for his disparagement of the man had never ceased, and Ross, who had long been both terrified and affronted by Herman and his temper, had finally taken the opportunity, emboldened by the three thousand miles between them, to fire him.
Herman was outraged, and no less furious when he got back to New York a few weeks later. For three years he had been building, haphazardly but somehow ineluctably, a career in New York City. His actual literary output from 1923 to the beginning of 1926 was indeed something of a marvel—the theater reviews and occasionals for The New Yorker, uncredited theater writing for the Times, book reviews for the Times, as well as the demanding attempts at production and playwriting—made more remarkable when you consider his almost nightly bouts of debilitating drinking. He was a man of prodigious talent and energy—who the hell was this boob, this dude, this rube from the middle of nowhere, to fire him? He told his confreres at the Round Table just precisely what he would do to Ross—Herman played gleefully with the phrase “limb from limb”—but of course word spread to Ross, and so when Herman finally walked through the front doors of The New Yorker’s lobby on West Forty-fifth Street one fine March day in 1926, news of his presence in the building scorched through the halls, and Ross, fearing for his life, hid in a coat closet. Herman stormed in, whacked Ross’s desk with his cane, and left the building.