Competing with Idiots

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Competing with Idiots Page 16

by Nick Davis


  The movie was doomed. Louis B. Mayer, the head of M-G-M, laid it all out explicitly: “We have a terrific income in Germany, and as far as I’m concerned, this picture will never be made.”

  Herman never got over the irony: His attempt to reveal the truth about Nazi Germany was stopped by the Nazis in the United States, a land of supposed freedom and democracy. It was too dispiriting for words.

  Skip Notes

  *1 By the late 1940s and early ’50s, there was an unstated rule in Hollywood screenwriting circles: a good picture—a quality picture not a B movie—could never be made if it was full of voice-over. Joe Mankiewicz had learned the rule so well that he was able to obliterate it in films like A Letter to Three Wives, All About Eve, and The Barefoot Contessa.

  *2 In the mid-1960s, watching his son Tom navigate through Hollywood’s social world as a young man, Joe gave him a piece of paternal advice on dating actresses; the crassness of this counsel would echo through the decades and contribute to Joe’s poor reputation in my own nuclear family. “Never fuck a starlet,” Joe told Tom, “when you can fuck a star.”

  *3 Joe was not too distraught to spread the story that Dee had confided in producer David O. Selznick that she had chosen McCrea over Joe when she realized that her attraction to Joe was purely physical.

  *4 Thankfully, he was wrong. Reader, he has a heart.

  *5 Even Henry Myers admitted Herman wrote the opening titles after an early preview of the film bewildered audiences.

  *6 In fact, though Joe called him a “dreadful person,” he also worked well with the film’s other big vaudeville star, W. C. Fields. Writing part of the Fields movie If I Had a Million, Joe had coined Fields’s stock phrase “my little chickadee,”‘ which so delighted the generally bitter Fields that according to Joe he bought the saying from Joe for fifty bucks.

  *7 More than anything, what this particular biographer-descendant takes from the film is that here is something both men made and enjoyed. Watching the film is the closest we will ever get to watching the two brothers play.

  *8 Seven years later, Chaplin used a similar strategy in making The Great Dictator, about the Tomanian dictator Adenoid Hynkel.

  *9 One thousand dollars for eighteen months.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MONKEYBITCH

  Joe Mank—pictures smell of rotten bananas.

  —from the notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald

  It was generally accepted among a certain part of the literary set in Los Angeles’s burgeoning cultural scene in the late 1930s that Joe Mankiewicz didn’t measure up. His work was good, excellent in fact, but there was a strain running through later comments from people who worked with him during that period, and it was what generally gave rise to the idea that Joe may have been the inspiration for Sammy Glick, the monomaniacally ambitious hero of Budd Schulberg’s lacerating satire of the town, What Makes Sammy Run? And Joe was keenly aware of his reputation. In fact, until All About Eve, he worried that his lasting legacy in Hollywood would be as the man who had dared to fire the great F. Scott Fitzgerald—that “Joe Mank” would forever represent all that was unsophisticated and antithetical to Art in Hollywood. Yet curious ironies always lie at the heart of the clash between art and commerce, and certainly between Fitzgerald and Joe. The hero of Fitzgerald’s final, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was Monroe Stahr, the head of production at a studio not unlike M-G-M, where Fitzgerald famously spent his final fruitless years. Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood was, like many East Coast writers, Joe’s brother among them, extraordinarily frustrating, and unlike many who came to loathe the town and its conventions, Fitzgerald never made his peace with the place. Partly this was because unlike men like Herman, Fitzgerald actually seemed to believe in the movies. His Monroe Stahr was based on Irving Thalberg, the brilliant head of production at M-G-M, who despite having fired Fitzgerald managed to earn the writer’s respect and admiration. Where Herman derided nearly everyone who worked for the studios, Fitzgerald saw that Thalberg had a kind of genius for understanding what it was that made movies work—and Fitzgerald, in his encounters in Hollywood, was vitally anxious to make his work there work. While of course he needed Hollywood’s money and wouldn’t have been there without it, he wasn’t just in it for a quick buck—he wanted his movies to last, to be great. To Herman, who hosted Fitzgerald more than once at Tower Road and in fact counted “Scotty” as one of the few literate men he could talk to in the entire boob-filled movie colony, Fitzgerald’s attitude, while charming, was utterly naïve and, at least in Herman’s mind, doomed to fail. The forces aligned against a writer with that kind of integrity, Herman felt, were too great. The enemy in California, Herman had come to see, was not just the system itself, but the group of people who manipulated it and ran it. The studio chiefs. The producers. The people with no real class or taste. Boobs. Clucks. Idiots. The people, in other words, like his brother Joe.

  The ultimate irony is that after Irving Thalberg’s untimely death at the age of thirty-six, the man many assumed would be groomed to be his eventual replacement at M-G-M—the stand-in for the stand-in for Monroe Stahr, Fitzgerald’s great hero, one of the few brilliant individuals capable of holding the “whole equation in his head”—was none other than the man whom Fitzgerald came to despise so much that behind his back he had taken to calling him Monkeybitch.

  Joe loved golf. And pipes.

  And his dogs.

  In 1934, after Joe had written a succession of pictures for M-G-M and was itching to move to the director’s chair, Louis B. Mayer told him that he had to produce before he could direct: “Young man, you must learn to crawl before you can walk.” For Joe, crawling was an apt metaphor for producing, and decades later he would still say it was the best description of producing he had ever heard. It held none of the glamour or ultimate artistic power of directing, and very little of the creative joy he could sometimes associate with writing. Instead, it was a painstaking, slow process to produce a film from start to finish, make sure that all the necessary things were done to ensure its successful completion. The task also involved more groveling and supplication than even Joe sometimes felt able to swallow. But produce he did, and in the next eight years, Joe’s record at M-G-M was remarkable. Included among his productions were A Christmas Carol, The Shopworn Angel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Strange Cargo, The Philadelphia Story, and Woman of the Year.

  But perhaps no production was more storied than Three Comrades, and the tale of its making is a perfect parable for Joe in Hollywood—how he was misunderstood, how he applied his talents, and how he was derided, ultimately, for doing his job so well. The film was, in Joe’s own mind, a rather silly little “women’s picture” set in the wild years after World War I in Europe. For the first draft of the screenplay Joe sought for the job a man he felt was uniquely qualified to write a movie set during the Jazz Age, seeing as how he’d coined the term and all.

  By the time Joe called F. Scott Fitzgerald onto Three Comrades, the shine was definitely off the one-time wunderkind of American letters. Deep into his tempestuous marriage with the flighty (or manic-depressive) wife Zelda, this was Fitzgerald’s third go-around in Hollywood. The first, in 1927, had been an eight-week stay courtesy of M-G-M, full of wacky Scott-and-Zelda-show-up-at-a-party-on-all-fours-barking-like-dogs kind of shenanigans, and which did little to convince the Hollywood machers that the man would be able to convert his mastery of the novel into effective screenwriting. The second, while Scott applied himself more vigorously, had also flamed out with a failed screenplay, this one for an adaptation of a novel called Red-Headed Woman which Thalberg himself had called off. Now, in this third go-round, Fitzgerald, desperate for success, was happy to be engaged by M-G-M for $1,000 a week. And Three Comrades, at least initially, seemed a good fit for his talents—the story of three young men in World War I who become enchanted by a young woman
, a consumptive who would be played by Margaret Sullavan. A doomed love affair set in the 1920s might be just the thing for Fitzgerald, and Joe was hopeful that the writer would be a good match.

  But from the opening pages of his first draft, Joe sensed that maybe Fitzgerald wasn’t the right man. He recoiled at some of Fitzgerald’s scene settings, which, to be fair, are a little much: “She seems to carry light and music with her,” Fitzgerald’s description of Sullavan’s character reads. “One should almost hear the music of the ‘Doll Dance’ whenever she comes into the scene—and she moves through the chaos of the time with charm and brightness, even when there are only sad things to say.”

  In the end, though, it wasn’t descriptive writing like this that bothered Joe so much—as florid and overdone as it may have been, the worst that could be said for it, really, was that it was irrelevant to the process of making a movie—it was the dialogue. Here, Joe was on firmer ground. To a novelist, a line of dialogue from one lover to the other like “I don’t think about anything—except about us and the sun and the holiday and the sea” may make all the sense in the world. But to Joe’s ears, the line was virtually unplayable, and coming from an actor’s mouth was almost a guarantee to spur mocking laughter from an audience.

  As for Fitzgerald, the heartbreaking thing is that he cared so much. He handed in his script to Joe in early January 1938, just a few weeks before shooting was to begin—and within a week, Fitzgerald was reading an entirely new script, churned out by Joe and the team of junior writers whom he now commanded at M-G-M. Reading the two scripts side by side, it isn’t at all clear that one is better than the other—if anything, Joe’s version can seem more pretentious. But it’s also, quite obviously, more of a movie. It moves. Dialogue crackles, sometimes with forced wit—but always with a kind of directness and power—that “playing to the back wall” rule that Joe had come to understand, and which Fitzgerald, alas, did not.

  In horror at the resulting script, the novelist wrote the producer a scathing letter. “You are simply tired of the best scenes because you’ve read them too much…You are or have been a good writer, but this is a job you will be ashamed of before it’s over. The little fluttering life of what’s left of my lines won’t save the picture…Recognizable characters they simply are not, and cutting the worst lines here and there isn’t going to restore what you’ve destroyed. It’s all so inconsistent.” But consistency of tone, of character—these were secondary in Hollywood, not nearly as important as action and story. Joe saw that Fitzgerald, despite his almost pathetic protestations in the letter (“For nineteen years…I’ve written best-selling entertainment, and my dialogue is supposedly right up at the top”), simply didn’t have the knack for screenwriting.

  Joan Crawford and Clark Gable in Strange Cargo (1940)

  In later years, Joe defended himself:

  I personally have been attacked as if I spat on the American flag because it happened once that I rewrote some dialogue by F Scott Fitzgerald. But indeed it needed it! The actors, among them Margaret Sullavan,*1 absolutely could not read the lines. It was very literary dialogue, novelistic dialogue that lacked all the qualities required for screen dialogue. The latter must be spoken. Scott Fitzgerald wrote very bad spoken dialogue.

  The irony is that so many who did have the knack for screenwriting would have given anything to be able to do what Fitzgerald could do—what self-loathing screenwriter from the 1930s wouldn’t have traded his entire output to have written The Great Gatsby?—but Fitzgerald was too blinded with fury to see the truth.

  When Fitzgerald finally saw the movie a few months later, his companion Sheilah Graham recalled that he was “miserable.” “That S.O.B.,” he growled when he came home from the theater, and furiously, helplessly, as if he had to lash out at something, he punched the wall, hard. “My God, doesn’t he know what he’s done?”

  What he had done was make a movie. When Fitzgerald had been in the depths of his rage at Joe, he’d even allowed himself one vain wish, which seems to get to the heart of the problem for many of the New York writers who came west, including Herman. “My only hope,” he’d written Joe, “is that you will have a moment of clear thinking. That you’ll ask some intelligent and disinterested person to look at the two scripts…I am utterly miserable at seeing months of work and thought negated in one hasty week.” What Fitzgerald utterly misunderstood, or couldn’t bring himself to act on anyway, was where the power in the relationship actually lay. Fitzgerald was a screenwriter—the old joke about the Polish starlet sleeping with the screenwriter made sense precisely because writers were so low on the Hollywood food chain—they were “schmucks with Underwoods,” in Jack Warner’s famous phrase—and if the movies could somehow have been made without them, the studios would have been a far happier place. While Scott understood that intellectually, in his heart he was an artist who had, in Gatsby, in This Side of Paradise, in Tender Is the Night, shown himself capable of painting a rich world full of human beings of complex emotions, of passion, of settings with music and color and light—and here was Fitzgerald who understood the power of the medium so well, whose hero Stahr in The Last Tycoon was in some ways his greatest creation since Gatsby precisely because he understood this powerful new mechanism for art and commerce so thoroughly—here was Fitzgerald understanding all this, having proven his own genius time and time again in the novel, and so he didn’t see himself as stooping to screenwriting so much as being the first artist in a line of artists who would be making movies…And it was he, F. Scott Fitzgerald! Surely a man as cultured as Joe Mankiewicz would see that and let some reason and wisdom and smarts prevail.

  Ernst Lubitsch with Joe, early ’40s

  The plaintive end of Scott’s letter to Joe is painful to read not just because the man is so obviously doomed to lose, but because even at the end, he seemed to grasp so little how the game was played: “Oh, Joe, can’t producers ever be wrong? I’m a good writer—honest. I thought you were going to play fair.”

  Where is it written that Hollywood ever had, or ever will have, anything to do with fair?

  * * *

  —

  The highlight of the workday, for Herman, was lunch. His life had fallen into a predictable routine. The morning would consist of a hearty breakfast, usually something with ham or sausage washed down with black coffee, then a slightly late arrival at the studio. There’d be some work on a script—maybe a newspaper picture for Luise Rainer (or was it Constance Bennett? One year they wanted to make Constance Bennett a star, so what Herman liked to call his “employer’s discourteous demands on my time” had expanded to include a trifling newspaper picture, After Office Hours, though he’d found it fun to write for Gable, actually)—but usually, there would be another writer assigned to do it with him, and as Herman liked to say, “nothing puts me to sleep faster than my collaborator’s typewriter,” so no use killing yourself if they get some other “stout little fellow” to work on it too. In addition to the writing, morning held the distraction of phone calls; M-G-M wasn’t known as the country club for nothing. Herman would pick up the telephone and make a bunch of calls. The one to Sara right as he arrived, of course, asking how the day had gone. (“Herman, you just left,” she’d say. “Give me one thing,” he’d plead. “Surely something must have happened.” His desire to avoid work was never more impressive than when he had work to do—a disease that Herman and other Mankiewiczes used to call Schreibfaulheit, literally “writing laziness,” though John Houseman would call it “neurotic inertia.”) And then calls to various friends or other studio executives, often trying to find work for friends, or getting caught up on political matters, raging about some new cockamamie scheme of the writers to unionize.*2 So, all in all, for a morning at M-G-M, not an awful one. And now here we are: Romanoff’s at last, and lunch.

  Herman would slide into the table kept for him opposite the bar, and hold forth. It was the central tabl
e in the entire restaurant, the prestige table, Herman knew. He could have been back in New York at the Algonquin; most of the club’s members had pretty much all moved west by now. The wit here wasn’t as celebrated, far from the Broadway press agents and newspaper reporters, but the barbs, from Herman anyway, were just as fast and furious. Herman would vent on any number of topics, from another screenwriter’s work (“that man should never be allowed alone in a room with a typewriter”) to his own work habits (“a loafer is a loafer is a loafer”) to the peccadilloes of Hollywood types (“If people don’t sit at Chaplin’s feet, he goes out and stands where they are sitting”). Herman would expound deliciously, the food wolfed down and the drinks flowing naturally and easily, at least in the beginning.

  Sometimes, the object of Herman’s humor was the restaurant’s owner, a man everyone called Mike who claimed to be a fallen Russian prince named Mychal Andreyavitch Dmitry Romanoff. Nearly everyone thought the man absurd, knowing he was an imposter and probably from Hoboken, but Herman would go further: “This man here,” he told the gathering once, “everyone knows he’s no goddamn prince.” He gripped Romanoff’s arm. “That’s why we eat here. But what the hell do you think we’d do if we found out your secret, Mike?” For a moment, the man looked scared. “Secret?” “Yes,” Herman exploded. “You actually are a prince! You pose as a foolish imposter pretending to be a prince, but in reality—you are one! If we find that out, Mike, your cover as a total fraud will be blown, you’ll lose all face in this town, and no one will ever eat here again!”

 

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