Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  He may as well have kept on going. Never again would Herman Mankiewicz be a celebrated young writer of promise in New York City. Never again would he ride a constant wave of impending literary success. The theater was not working out. The debts were piling up. The weather was too grubby. The boys needed food, and Sara a nicer home. Enough was enough. California, here we come.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Of course, part of what makes Citizen Kane so brilliant is that it’s impossible to tell if Kane really means what he says, or, even if he does, how the audience is supposed to feel about that. Kane’s friend Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten) holds on to Kane’s similarly high-minded Declaration of Principles, telling Kane with an utterly sober expression that he is going to keep the Declaration, as he has a feeling it could prove to be very important someday, “like the Declaration of Independence.” Kane looks at Leland with a quizzical smile, unable to tell whether Leland is being duly and properly reverential of the great young man, or is totally mocking him. There can be little doubt that Orson Welles provided most of the sincerity these moments called for, with Herman ladling in the cynicism.

  *2 In fact, the phrase became a standard in the Mankiewicz family, and there is something in the phrase—the elevation of a thing being written down in order to give it substance—that recalls that this family is in fact Jewish to the core, despite all protestations and evasions. Judaic culture, for over two millennia anyway, has been founded upon a dissection of the recorded word, and both Herman and Joe loved Swope’s remark. One hears echoes of it in nearly all of Joe’s screenplays—from Cleopatra’s opening narration to Kirk Douglas’s desecration of the art of advertising in A Letter to Three Wives—and throughout his career, Joe’s work is extremely literary and word-conscious (the film is about A Letter to the wives, after all, not a phone call).

  *3 Sara’s desire to leave didn’t persuade Herman. They stayed a good while longer, and when Sara quietly beseeched him to go home, Herman responded—playfully, she insisted decades later—by telling her, “You go play over there—get a coloring book and color something.”

  *4 “People romanticize it,” Parker said. “It was no Mermaid Tavern, I promise you. These were no giants. Think of who was writing in those days—Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. Those were the real giants.”

  *5 She also noted the frequent long silences from the bedroom, when she assumed Herman was either grappling with a writing problem, or, more accurately, not grappling with it.

  *6 In 1941, the play would be adapted for the screen with the lead character now played by Frank Morgan, the veteran character actor whose more famous charlatan was the Wizard of Oz.

  *7 He was unable, though, to persuade many of his Algonquin confreres to join the new venture, consoling Ross by telling him, “The half-time help of wits is no better than the full-time help of half-wits.”

  PART TWO

  You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.

  —The Last Tycoon, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HOLLYWOOD

  Life, every now and then, behaves as if it had seen too many bad movies when everything fits too well: the beginning, the middle, and the end, from fade-in to fade-out.

  —The Barefoot Contessa

  In the early days of the old movie palaces, the Nemo, on the corner of 110th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, was not one of the great ones. It wasn’t as large as the Roxy or as ornate as the Loew’s on 175th Street, and as for grandeur, it had very little. What it had was movies, and lots of them. For Joe Mankiewicz, who had followed in his brother’s footsteps and entered Columbia at the age of fifteen, that was enough. In later years, Joe would claim that his matriculation was “four years devoted to establishing an all-time attendance record at the Nemo movie theater and an all-time nonattendance record at a course in neoclassicism.” To Joe, sitting in the plush seats of the Nemo, listening to the piano player, eating his peppermint stick, and staring up at the screen and watching the films was heaven. He was, at last, in a place he felt comfortable and safe. But there’s a curious aspect to Joe’s moviegoing. Not for him the safety of losing himself in a fantasy up on the silver screen; Joe wasn’t Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo, though he stared at what he saw just as avidly as Mia Farrow’s Cecilia did in the Woody Allen film about a woman whose dreams of escape are made real when the movie star she reveres jumps off the screen. No, Joe Mankiewicz didn’t get lost in the story, or hardly ever. He saw Sunrise, for instance, and marveled at how the film re-created a dreamscape of a modern American city, but he was never once taken in by the pantomime. He respected the movies, even loved them for what they could do; he saw their power; and he knew, he could sense in his bones, that what the movies were giving the other people in the theater was incredibly valuable. His self-mocking claim that his education had been as much at the movies as at Columbia wasn’t the idle boast of someone who loved to talk about how much class he missed. Joe Mankiewicz was studying the movies.

  “Ragpickers” and “pissants”: Irving Thalberg, Louis B. Mayer, and Will Hays in Hollywood, 1925

  As he walked out of the theater, he would have shielded his eyes almost absentmindedly from what he knew would catch others by surprise: the daylight. Joe hadn’t entered that dream-like state that so many did when they went to the movies. He hadn’t lost his sense of self, his sense of place, not for a single second. He was six blocks south of the main entrance to Columbia, eight blocks south of Phi Sigma Delta, his fraternity. He walked slowly up Broadway. The sun dipped behind a cloud. The movies. He knew Pop didn’t think much of them, and Herman even less—was Joe the only one to see they were going to be the most important form of communication in this century? There was so much power there. That word again: power. Herman thought the only ones who had it were the politicians, them and the robber barons, the tycoons and captains of industry, but Joe knew power came in many different forms.

  If you really wanted to control things, Joe thought, you could do a lot worse than be in the movie business. Herman’s first few letters back from California had been full of delightful descriptions of the foibles of the men he was working with—the “ragpickers” and “pissants,” the “Jew tailors” who were setting themselves up as arbiters of actual taste—and Joe’s favorite, the “blintze brains.”

  God, how Herman was thriving: $400 a week, with another $5,000 for every produced story, with a guarantee, he said in his letter, of four stories a year. Joe did the sums in his head, and the result was practically unfathomable—Herman J. Mankiewicz, making $40,000 in a single year? For writing the titles for silent movies he wouldn’t attend even if you dragged him there in a straitjacket?

  Joe might have quickened his pace, but more likely thought better of it. Young Joe Mankiewicz realized that walking fast wasn’t going to get him where he wanted to go any faster than walking slowly would. He steadied his gait and crossed Broadway, walking straight toward the sun, now descending over the river to the west. Setting over a future that didn’t seem so far away anymore.

  * * *

  —

  But Columbia was not all that easy for Joe, for the principal reason that he was still very much living in Herman’s shadow there. Though he would rarely admit it, except to toss it off as part of a gibe, the comparisons made Joe feel small. When he joined the honors English program like Herman, he found many of his teachers still laughed, remembering The Peace Pirates nearly a decade before. They inquired about Herman’s well-being, asking Joe to send their regards in his letters. Herman had a play reviewed in the Times when he was Joe’s age! Yes, Joe had joined the Deutscher Verein as Herman had urged, but the main theater he was
involved with was a play he helped produce called Ein Knopf, a silly little German one-act, about an absentminded professor with a button sewn on his coat to remind him to kiss his wife. This was not anything like The Peace Pirates performance that would bring Mama and Erna to tears, possibly even make Papa proud.

  Yet Joe did make a name for himself at Columbia in his own right. He always did brilliant work, refining everything he worked on with Pop’s voice in his head urging him on, telling him that if the analysis of Kant treatises he was writing for his philosophy course was anything less than perfection, he may as well throw it into the fireplace. He was dependable, orderly, and polite, dazzling and impressing teachers, not like Herman, who would allow himself to fly into arguments with his teachers when he thought they were wrong.

  As he sat in his English classes at Columbia, Joe felt a familiar feeling sneak into his belly—one he’d felt at P.S. 64 and Stuyvesant. So many people, even the teachers, got lost in the plots of the novels and plays they read. How his class discussions would bore him—his fellow students lamenting the fate of Steerforth or Uncle Tom in that damn cabin. Never Joe. Joe read to understand the author’s tricks. What are the best plot devices, what distinguishes the ordinary from the great? How had Dickens made Steerforth’s death work on us when the character had been so heartless just a few chapters earlier? Was it Harriet Beecher Stowe’s prosaic and dull voice, or something else, that caused the boy next to him to snore and drool into his notebook as the class argued about the characters? And how had Antigone’s sacrifice been set up so beautifully in that play? These were Joe’s concerns at Columbia, but to his literary acumen he added something else, something that Herman never possessed: a hope that his comrades would accept his brilliance easily without feeling he was condescending to them. Even as Joe knew that he could dissect a book and explain his thoughts about it more clearly than anyone else in the room, he was equally careful to measure out Mankiewiczian charm and ease. So while he explained precisely why Antigone’s familial sacrifice was so arresting to a Hellenic audience, it likely would not have amazed his classmates, or bothered them, that this brilliant young classmate was destined to do great things.

  * * *

  —

  Herman’s contempt for California didn’t come all at once. Like the vegetation which covered the hills he drove through on his way to work, it took some time to reach full flower. He arrived in July of 1926 and sent for Sara and the boys in September. They rented a house on upper Vine Street, Herman happily walking from the kitchen into the living room singing “We’re in the money, we’re in the money.” What wasn’t to like? The weather was ideal and virtually identical day to day, and better than that, the money was great.

  Ah, yes, the money. His friend Walter Wanger was a producer at Famous Players–Lasky Corporation, one of the newer studios, and he’d arranged Herman’s deal for him. Joe was right about the details of the money: the studio, which would soon change its name to Paramount, paid Herman $400 a week and $5,000 for each original story that ended up being filmed, with a minimum guarantee of four stories. For the first time in his life, Herman had real money to spend, and though he wasn’t particularly organized about it, he started getting rid of the money nearly as fast as he could: fine clothing, gold golf clubs, membership in a country club, a convertible Cadillac, and a Buick were soon his.

  As for the work, he continued to regard it with suspicion. One eye was still on New York, and would be for a while. Before finally packing up and heading west, his hopes for a plum job in New York had briefly soared when the New York Times fired their theater critic Stark Young, only to plummet when the job went to Brooks Atkinson. Now he was writing Atkinson, a natural rival if ever there was one, asking if the Times would take him back if he failed in California. Atkinson, not quite believing him, had said that the Gray Lady would indeed open her arms to Herman if need be. But Herman’s center of gravity slowly caught up with him. California was where he was. And the movie studio was his home now.

  In the first place, he was afforded more respect than he’d ever had in New York. Unlike the other writers, who were housed far from the executives in a shed-like building at the edge of the studio, Herman was given a large office in a bungalow near the administration building. And the work itself was a breeze. Responsible for all the printed titles in Paramount’s films, Herman oversaw the construction of the stories and proved himself a much more adept scenarist than anyone else on the payroll. The time spent in theaters absorbing the work of other playwrights was now put to good use. Providing the voice and understanding of a critic, especially on the story line or concept, Herman’s insights often made the difference between success and failure, between a story that worked and one that didn’t.

  “We’re in the money”: Herman poses for a publicity photo on the set of Laughter (1930) with, from left, Diane Ellis, Nancy Carroll, and Fredric March.

  “Is that beard supposed to be Russian? It looks like an ad for cough drops!” Poster for The Last Command (1928)

  And most of all, there was the wit. For much of the life of the art form, silent movies had been devoted to melodrama, so titles were mostly simple and often florid, righteous declarations, conveying moral rectitude and judgment of the characters. Herman injected brio and style: “I’ve got as much chance to wash in private as a six months old baby” may not be an epigram worthy of Wilde, but to silent film audiences it moved things along in a much livelier way than earlier titles like “the fragrant mystery of your body is greater than the mystery of life.” Soon, Herman’s success in titling was noticed across the burgeoning industry. Director Josef von Sternberg got Herman to title The Drag Net, Thunderbolt, and The Last Command, the latter a fascinating film about a group of Russian aristocrats who are forced to flee during the Revolution and, led by a charismatic former general, find work in California; in Herman’s colorful phrase, “And so the backwash of a tortured nation had carried another extra to Hollywood.” Herman’s titles poke fun at the pretensions of Hollywood—the movie director, needing “Russians,” complains to the exiled general, “Is that beard supposed to be Russian? It looks like an ad for cough drops!”*1 Paramount’s chief, B. P. (Ben) Schulberg, became a huge Herman supporter, and the two men were soon drinking and smoking cigars together. More than that, they were gambling.

  Now that Herman was making good money, the gambling took even more serious hold. Of course he was not alone. Gambling was as common in Hollywood as booze. There was everything from poker at dinner parties to pitching pennies and rolling dice in the office. On weekends, much of Hollywood would go down to Mexico to hit the casinos and racetracks just across the border. For a time, both the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety printed racing charts and bulletins, and illegal casinos like the Colony Club and the Clover Club sprouted off Sunset Boulevard. Like everything in Hollywood, gambling became another way to compete, though winning and losing, for Herman, wasn’t so clear-cut. In fact, for Herman, it became almost a status symbol, how much he could afford to lose at a place like the Colony. Betting more than you had was part of the thrill. It was a way of showing courage. As Ben Schulberg’s son Stuart said, “My father and Herman believed that the courage you showed through gambling was a badge of honor, of manhood.”

  Like the drinking, the gambling has been passed down through my family largely as fodder for anecdotes. His penchant for difficult bets was so well-known that Variety wrote in 1926, “On football wagers everybody phones, rushes and probes to find out who Mankiewicz likes—to bet the other way.” Years later, he and Joe were at Santa Anita, betting on horses, and toward the end of another losing afternoon, Herman decided to put all his remaining money on a horse that was listed at 40 to 1. Joe, who had watched with mounting disbelief as Herman placed difficult bet after difficult bet, losing them all, finally asked his brother, “What the hell are you doing? Don’t you know that horse is 40 to 1?” Herman looked at Joe with a curious exp
ression. “What are you talking about? It’s fifty-fifty. Either the horse wins or it doesn’t.”

  * * *

  —

  On Christmas Eve, 1926, Herman was driving his Buick convertible to a party in Beverly Hills. Driving past a policeman on Sunset Boulevard, Herman gleefully hoisted his hands in the air and said, “Look! No hands!” The car swerved and was demolished.

  * * *

  —

  Herman’s early days in Hollywood could make for a peppy montage sequence in an old*2 biopic, the kind where about twenty minutes in the hero first enjoys the fruits of his first act’s labor. Along with the money and the prestige come fun with Sara—lovemaking in both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century meanings of the word. But if this imagined movie has any depth, alongside the gags and delicious jokes, all brimming with Herman’s unique sparkle, are scattered here and there a few seeds for his third-act fall from grace: Herman, in the money at last, his nose buried deep in the Daily Racing Form, sits idly in his office on the Paramount lot when the studio chief comes calling to check on his next screenplay, and without looking up from his perusal of odds on the fourth race at Santa Ana says, “I’ve always felt that when a man stops reading, he stops learning.” Herman and Sara, on a yacht with Charlie Chaplin, Pola Negri, and William Randolph Hearst, heading to Catalina Island for the weekend. Herman, trying to rent a blimp to float high across the Rose Bowl during a big USC football game, trailing a sign that reads “Send Your Boy to an Eastern College.” Herman and Sara in Palm Springs for the weekend. Herman, with his gambling debts constantly piling up, confidently telling friends, “They can’t fire me. I owe them too much money.”