Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  Then there was the work. Unlike the more solitary efforts of prose or even, usually, playwriting, screenwriting was a collaborative affair. Herman would hold forth in a roomful of other men—gag men and studio assistants, producers and secretaries. As Ben Hecht would later say, “Movies were seldom written. They were yelled into existence at conferences that kept going in saloons, brothels and all-night poker games.” It’s no wonder that Herman flourished. He was virtuosic in the room, lying low, looking out at them all from underneath his heavy-lidded eyes, curling his lips as an idea flashed through his mind and he’d bark out a new title designed to “hit the back wall of the theater.” “Paris,” he’d shout. “Where half the women are working women…” Then the celebrated Mankiewicz leer: “And half the women are working men.”

  The others lapped it up, and Herman was soon so prominent that he was being mentioned routinely in Louella Parsons’s columns, though initially she was complaining that the studios were paying too much obeisance to “eastern scribblers like Herman J. Mankiewicz…who have never proved they know anything about the tricky essentials.” Herman was convinced otherwise, and for the most part, the studio agreed. Everything he wanted, he got. He even told other writers how to get what they wanted from the studio, instructing one new arrival to complain immediately about the office he’d been given. “Tell them to repaint it! Get them to move your desk, move a couch, put a picture on the wall.” The point, Herman told the man, was to let them know you are there. “Never explain in this town,” Herman said. “Deny. Always deny.”

  As his comfort level increased, Herman went to Paramount chief Ben Schulberg and said he wanted to bring better writers to the West Coast, too. He told Schulberg he wanted to give a yearlong contract to his friend Ben Hecht, promising that if Hecht failed to write a successful movie, Schulberg could fire them both. Soon, Herman was sending the telegram that, aside from Citizen Kane, may be his most enduring literary legacy—the one he sent Hecht, imploring him to come west for three hundred a week to write for Paramount. “The three hundred is peanuts,” Herman added. “There are millions to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.”*3 Hecht, of course, accepted Herman’s call, and soon joined his old friend at Paramount, where without much delay he wrote a film called Underworld for director Josef Von Sternberg. The script took Hecht all of one week to write. When the movie opened, Schulberg announced his intention to give Hecht a bonus, whereupon Herman, though the exact choreography isn’t clear, intercepted it. Telling Hecht, “I just want it for a few days to get me out of a little hole,” Herman swooped in and took the money.

  Hecht was an understanding friend, and Schulberg an understanding gambling buddy—and boss. When Herman was having difficulty paying back the money, the three men arranged for Schulberg to grant Herman a $500-a-week raise. The money made Herman the highest-paid writer at Paramount—and it went straight to Hecht.

  If Herman bristled at the success of friends like Hecht, there is no evidence of it. Indeed, he maintained a rather magnanimous view toward those he considered his equals (or even betters) throughout his life. It was the great mass—of humanity in general, not just writers—toward whom he felt nothing but scorn. But with men like Hecht, Charles MacArthur, and later F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, other exiles from the East who were intending their stays in Hollywood to be short ones, Herman felt something akin to a brotherly regard (more brotherly, in fact, than to his actual brother). For the real work, it was always quite obvious, was not being done for the screen, but for the stage or the page. Herman continued, in those early years in Hollywood, to harbor the belief that New York was in his near future. The setbacks of his plays—his and Kaufman’s The Good Fellow ran for only six performances on Broadway in late 1926, and The Wild Man of Borneo fared little better the following year—did little to diminish his feeling that he would soon wrest himself from the bland comforts of California (“a lovely place to live, if you’re an orange,” in Fred Allen’s famous phrase) and return to the East. In the meantime, he would try to surround himself with as many of his old New York chums as possible.

  For another change had come to the movie business, one that demanded more writers and also proved Herman’s worth more than ever: sound. Anyone who could actually write the words that came out of the actors’ mouths would be even more valuable. An accomplished theater critic and playwright with an intricate knowledge of what worked and didn’t on Broadway, Herman was one of the few men in Hollywood with any experience writing dramatic dialogue. As the success of the talkies spread, Schulberg put Herman in charge of building a staff of dialogue writers and sent Herman on a two-week recruiting trip to New York, which Herman labeled the “Herman J. Mankiewicz Fresh Air Fund for Writers.”

  In the end, he and his screenwriting friends like Hecht and Nunnally Johnson would be instrumental in changing the course of Hollywood movies. Continuing the turn away from what they considered the sentimentalized slop of middle-American morality, Herman picked recruits in his own image: newspapermen who would overturn the romantic sentimentality that had a stranglehold on the movies. Together, they introduced loquacious and smart-talking characters. Herman and his team were growing in leaps and bounds.

  The only question was: Was there anyone whom Herman would not let into the club?

  * * *

  —

  Graduation day dawned sunny and bright for the Columbia graduating class of 1928. As the class assembled for the ceremony, young Joe Mankiewicz stood ramrod straight, eager to get on with the business at hand. Joe admired the pageantry of graduation, the playing of “Pomp and Circumstance,” the filing of the old dignitaries and alumni in their multicolored robes into the open-air auditorium at Columbia, but while he hadn’t exactly hated college, to him it had been something of a chore, a necessary hurdle before beginning his life. Like Herman, he had rocketed through high school in three years, and like Herman he now stood poised to graduate from Columbia at the tender age of nineteen. Like Herman, his immediate plans after graduation called for a trip to Berlin, where he, too, hoped to find work with the Chicago Tribune. But while Joe, as he stood under the trees in the open air and waited for his diploma, was still planning a career in academia, he also knew that Berlin was the capital of the thriving German film industry. His interest in movies would soon have Herman helping him secure a job with the leading German film company of the day, UFA, translating the inter-titles of silent films from German to English for foreign release. Like Herman, Joe had had a solid academic career, studying in the honors program tutored by Herman’s favorite teacher, John Erskine. Like Herman, Joe had concentrated his extracurriculars on the theater at Columbia, contributing to the annual Sophomore Show, sort of a Varsity Show of comedy and song-and-dance acts, as well as, like Herman, taking part in the Varsity Show itself his senior year.

  There were, of course, a few crucial differences with Herman. For one thing, according to Joe, sports. Joe told his biographer Ken Geist that he’d spent a considerable amount of time playing team sports at Columbia, winning athletic honors in football, baseball, and basketball. However, Joe’s senior yearbook (a yearbook, incidentally, on which Joe worked) notes that the only sport he played was freshman baseball, so it seems that here again either Joe’s memory was failing him or he was stretching the truth. But if so, to what end? The Mankiewiczes have never been a particularly athletic family or cared all that much about prowess on the athletic fields. The conjecture is unavoidable: Joe’s lifelong Eve Harrington–like tendency, to exaggerate and fabricate certain facts about himself so as to elevate his own importance or sense of self, was here being deployed to distinguish himself from the cheerfully unathletic Herman.*4

  But there were other differences as well. Joe had actually entered Columbia as a premed major, thinking in a loose kind of way that he might want to end up as a psychiatrist. However, he was quickly discouraged by a biology course i
n which he was required to dissect an earthworm and disembowel a frog, an exercise that “horrified and nauseated me.” But the final blow that ended his medical career was his physics class. “I got an F-minus,” he said. “There is no such grade, so I went to Professor Farwell and protested. He said, ‘I feel that I must distinguish between mere failure and total failure such as yours.’ ” Joe abandoned the sciences and switched his major to English.

  Also unlike Herman, he joined a fraternity, Phi Sigma Delta. His history here is suggestive, for while the frat didn’t have much of an impact on his life, it signaled in Joe a far greater willingness to conform to societal rules and roles than Herman possessed. Fraternities had reached their peak in numbers and influence at Columbia in the 1920s. Each of the thirty-six campus fraternities had its own social codes the frat brothers were expected to conform to—conventions on drinking, dress, and, of course, relations between the sexes. Joe didn’t merely tolerate life in the fraternity in a way that Herman never could have, he thrived within its clear social guidelines. He learned the history of Phi Sigma Delta, absorbing the songs, chants, and traditions faster than anyone else in his pledge class, exuding a knowledgeable ease with all of it within weeks of joining. Herman scoffed at it to Joe—“Lie down with idiots, you’ll wake up with your brains gone”—but Joe felt Herman was missing the point. When people liked you and trusted you, they listened to you, did what you asked, and took your advice. He realized that helping his frat brothers—whether with their homework or advice about what to say to that girl who kept talking to them on their way to French class—gave him social power and influence.

  And indeed, the young women from Barnard whom Joe met at dances were all quite taken with him. By making the pretty girl laugh who caught his eye at the mixer at Low Library, enchanting her with his wit and warmth, he quickly gained her confidence. Soon enough, he would be sitting at the edge of the mess hall with that pretty girl, hearing all about how she’s so tired of her roommate crying about her beau stationed overseas. Joe was never totally absorbed by their conversation; he knew with intuitive alchemical, scientific, and artistic sense exactly how long he had let her talk about her worries, making her feel understood, an investment he was sure would end in a major win: kissing under the maple grove next to her sorority when he walked her home.

  Throughout Joe’s rising social influence, he was powerfully aware of Herman’s long shadow. Joe’s best friend at Columbia was a would-be actor named Chester Eckstein. (Under Herman and Joe’s influence, Eckstein would ultimately change his last name—to Erskine, to honor the much-loved teacher. “You’re not going to get Eckstein in lights very easily,” Herman said.) Joe and Eckstein talked endlessly of the theater, “sharing gossip,” Eckstein later said, “because you feel you’re in it if you talk about it.” In addition, Joe and Eckstein worked together as aspiring humorists, sending twenty-five-to-fifty-word humorous sketches to magazines. One day, Joe came tearing up to the second floor of the fraternity house shouting, “They’ve bought it!” It was his first professional sale: a paragraph purchased by Life magazine for six dollars. But more significant than the sale was the author’s name, as listed in the magazine when the article ran: Joe Mason. Joe explained later, “I didn’t want to use my brother’s name—the name of Mankiewicz, at that time, belonging to him in the world of art and letters and to my father in the world of pedagogy.” It was a curious if admirable decision, not to trade on the family name, though not one that would be repeated.

  While he was in college, Joe also earned extra money for college by teaching English to foreigners three nights a week, and during the summers served as a counselor to theater-starved kids at a summer camp in the Hudson Valley, a camp partly owned by the Marx Brothers. According to Joe, “That’s where I had a fistfight with Zeppo when he wanted to play first base on the camp team. I was the coach, and the kids were supposed to play first base, not one of the owners of the camp. After all, the kid’s parents had paid a lot of money for these activities. I told him to get off the field, and one word led to another.”

  All the same, even while indulging in Joe’s love for theater and writing in college, Franz presumed that his youngest son’s future lay in academia. Joe didn’t disagree. The plan was to study at the University of Berlin, go to the Sorbonne, and finish at Oxford. Joe had been a superb student, and as he went up on stage and accepted his Columbia diploma, his teachers and his father were hoping and expecting that his future lay in the halls of academia. John Erskine was in fact even more specific than that. After the ceremony, Joe and Erskine had a long talk, and Erskine, the respected professor and author of celebrated novels, spoke of his great hope that after his European travels Joe would come back to Columbia as an instructor in English, and “by teaching, writing, and taking it more slowly, perhaps develop into a good writer.”

  The thought appealed to Joe. “He thought I might possibly write some plays and some books, and he was probably goddamned right.” But Erskine admitted he had a trepidation about Joe’s future. “He told me of his fear that I was going to follow the easy road and succumb to the blandishments of Hollywood.” Joe swore up and down that he wouldn’t.

  Less than ten months later, on his first night in Hollywood, Joe tagged along with Herman to a party at the Santa Monica home of Jesse Lasky, the head of Paramount Pictures. Joe was in a daze. He’d spent four glorious months in Berlin, where he’d held two journalism jobs while translating titles for foreign films, a period that he later described as an “absolute intoxication of theater, excitement, glamour, and sex,” leaving Berlin, he said later, only when a kindly bank teller told him to get out of town after he’d bounced a check. Following that, he’d spent three miserable months in Paris (“Everything that Paris was described as, Berlin is,” Joe said), where in March of 1929, he wrote his big brother a letter so despairing that Herman fired off another telegram with huge repercussions. For this one, no real wit was required: “For Christ sake come out to Hollywood.” So Joe did, with Herman arranging a job for $60 a week as a junior writer at Paramount. Joe would have to undergo a mild legal ordeal to get approved—he was still under age—but now, Herman had picked him up at the train station that afternoon and so here he was, in a borrowed suit and his one remaining good pair of shoes, attending his first Hollywood party.

  Herman had been absorbed into the maw and was holding forth among a group by an unused billiards table, and Joe was alone and exhilarated: “Imagine the man who discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb…There was Clara Bow, Gary Cooper, William Powell, Kay Francis—it was like being alone in a candy store no one’s watching.”

  Suddenly, he recognized a familiar back. “I saw a back, and I knew that back. I couldn’t place it.” But when the back turned around, he saw the face, one he hadn’t seen since graduation: John Erskine. Joe greeted his old teacher warmly, and asked what on earth the man was doing in California. Erskine, ten months removed from his powerful denunciation of the horrors of Hollywood’s easy money, replied that he was now working at Warner Brothers.

  Joe stood chatting with the man in a kind of disbelief. “At that moment, an illusion shattered that I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from. He had just sold The Private Life of Helen of Troy to Warners and was out there working on the screenplay.” As Joe and Erskine spoke, it dawned on him not only that people would all essentially do anything in their self-interest, that they would say anything at any time to further their goals, but that there was simply no use resisting Hollywood or what it offered.

  Joe took in the scene coolly, much more cool in fact than his old professor: “It skipped his mind completely that he’d delivered that impassioned speech about not going Hollywood, and he talked to me exactly like one Hollywood pro to another.”

  For Joe, the journey was complete. There was no use fighting it, and every reason to embrace it wholeheartedly—Hollywood, movies, the whole damn nonacademic fun of it. He had come to where Herman was.
And he would get everything he could from it, whether his brother did or not.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Three thousand miles away in New York, his worshipful younger brother remembered “fighting my way into the Paramount theater to be the first one to see The Last Command.”

  *2 Or new.

  *3 When I was growing up in New York, spending time in bookstores like Coliseum Books at Fifty-seventh Street and Broadway, I would invariably flip through books about Hollywood and check the index for mentions of Herman’s name, to find, about three-quarters of the time, this telegram, with its sublime “Don’t let this get around.’ ”

  *4 My mother once explained why gambling was her dad’s preferred pastime: “We are a family who sits rather than stands and lies down rather than sits. What we do well is talk and think. And gambling is a thing, if you’re not going to play a sport—[and] I think it’s fair to say that nobody in this family has ever really gone into any kind of sports in any way…[But] clearly you have to take some interest, so you watch it, and what is more interesting than watching it is betting on it.”