Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  That afternoon, tests, blood taken. And then, that night, as they were leaving the hospital, Herman asked his father, “Papa, what can I bring you tomorrow? What would you like to have?”

  Eyes rheumy behind thick lenses, Franz looked at his oldest son. Could anyone doubt the depth of love the man had for Herman? Did Herman really doubt it? Of course Franz never said it; one didn’t say such things. He had never told Herman—or Joe or Erna for that matter—that he loved them. He had been exacting and severe, a disciplinarian who expected the best of everyone at all times, who demanded that people behave their best, do their finest work, work their hardest, no matter what. And now he saw Herman’s supple face, lined with worry and genuine concern, the oldest son who could never do enough to break down the walls of his reserve. He saw Herman’s pain and anguish, a boy hanging on his father’s every breath, and Franz answered the only way he could: “A new heart.”

  The following morning he was in a coma. Herman was a wreck. He sat beside his father’s bedside that whole day, and the next, day after day, weeping. Franz would never come out of his coma, and Herman was there every day. He didn’t go to work all that week—“It didn’t take much to keep him from working,” Goma admitted—and he sat talking quietly to his unconscious father, stroking his father’s hand gently, sometimes just calling to him, “Papa, Papa. Pop.” An eight-day-long vigil.

  Joe came to the hospital once, didn’t stay long. He saw there was nothing to be done and made to leave. Herman told him, “If only we had six more months.” Joe, practical and sensible, knew six months wouldn’t make a difference. He’s going to have to go eventually, he told Herman as he grabbed his hat and headed back to the studio. Somehow, Joe had already made peace with the fact of their father’s death, long before. He had cut ties years ago—he couldn’t even remember when, and he knew he wouldn’t be further hurt when Franz was finally gone.

  Now, on the train, Herman ripped into Joe for being unfeeling, cold, heartless—what kind of an artist could create anything truly original if he doesn’t even mourn his own father? Herman bellowed and blew, the storm of Joe’s childhood coming back to him full on, but now Herman was both men rolled into one, Herman and Franz both, and that titanic powerful storm was sweeping through Joe, a cold wind howling, and this time there was no closet in which to hide, no harbor, no peace anywhere on this train rocketing east.

  But, curiously, Joe found that he didn’t need it. As the two brothers battled it out, it is well to return to the classic movie trope of cross-country train trips, with their close-ups of locomotive engines pumping madly, smoke billowing, and crisscrossing train tracks. For so long, Herman had been in front—larger, beloved, more successful in so many ways…but Joe had been gaining steadily. Now, on the Chief, carrying their dead father’s body east for burial, had Joe passed Herman at last?

  Joe looked at Herman, and he felt the unwitting power of being unharmed by his brother’s colossal temper. He saw that Herman was just being himself, raging, angry, alcoholic, out of control, a complicated system of neuroses and complexes that Joe knew had predated Joe and would continue regardless of what he did or didn’t do. Joe was frequently in awe of this magnificent creature: like a whale thrashing in the waves, with half a dozen harpoons in him but refusing to go down, blood spouting everywhere—a gorgeous, natural, beautiful thing—a force all its own, something to behold the same way you would appreciate an actress like Bette Davis in full emotional tilt. Joe heard Herman telling him now what Franz had evidently told him—that Herman was the talented one, that Herman should be making more money, and what on earth did they pay Joe all that money for? Pop at least respected me, but you…Herman’s voice was trailing off, the alcohol thickening his tongue and the wit curdling in on itself, there were no punch lines anymore, just blind blows, most of which were missing.

  Joe knew that there were no knockouts in this fight, for even if Herman landed a punch, Joe kept bouncing up, and he knew, and this knowledge became the steel of his armor, that he would actually one day make something of this, this creature, this gorgeous lovely Herman, and his own cold resolution to outlast him no matter what. Things could get awfully bumpy, this emotional turbulence that would swirl around you, even if you were the cause of all the Sturm und Drang. In such a situation, the only thing to do was to fasten your seat belts.

  In some ways, Joe knew he was still training for the big fight. He didn’t know when the fight would come, but he knew he’d win, and he knew that he was training all the time—at the studio, and, more and more especially, at home. With Rosa.

  * * *

  —

  Vienna’s Josefstadt theater is one of Europe’s grandest and greatest old theaters, having been in continuous use since 1788. Ludwig van Beethoven, Richard Wagner, and Johann Strauss conducted there, and famous directors and actors, from Otto Preminger and Max Reinhardt to Klaus Maria Brandauer, have done acclaimed work on its stage. In the 1930s, one of the theater’s leading lights was a gifted and volatile actress named Rosa Stradner.*1 Stradner was a stunning-looking woman and notoriously mercurial. According to one of her Viennese friends, Austrian director Walter Reisch, she was “beautiful beyond description…the Viennese equivalent of Ava Gardner, a femme fatale or dangerous woman with syndromes, which were part of the chemistry of her own life.” In time, she would become Joe’s second wife, and though her career would wither in the United States, her star shone so brightly on the Viennese stage that even a few years after her suicide, her special qualities would be remarked upon to one of her two sons.

  Tom Mankiewicz, Joe and Rosa’s second son, loved to tell a gloriously awkward story about the time he was at a Hollywood party in the early 1960s and came across Oskar Werner, the acclaimed Austrian actor then becoming well known in America for Jules and Jim, Ship of Fools, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. At the party, Werner was drunk, and he took exception to someone calling him German. According to Tom, Werner “snapped at this guy, ‘I’m not German, I’m Austrian.’ There was a big silence, and me being a big kissy face twenty-three-year-old kid, I said, ‘You have to understand, to call an Austrian a German is a little bit like calling an Irishman an Englishman, they don’t appreciate it.’ ” Oskar Werner was delighted, and asked Tom how he knew so much about Austrian resentments. Tom said that his mother had been Austrian, an actress in fact. Werner asked her name, and when Tom told him, Werner’s eyes lit up. “The Josefstadt theater, 1935.” Tom nodded proudly. Werner smiled thoughtfully, then said, “When I first masturbated, it was to a picture of your mother.”

  The room went silent. Tom stared at the man. “If you live fifty lives, no one is ever going to tell you that. The only thing I could say,” he told me forty years later, “was thank you.”

  * * *

  —

  Such was the fate of Rosa Stradner, by all accounts an accomplished and talented stage actress who, discovered by Louis B. Mayer’s talent scouts and brought to Hollywood as a possible foreign star in the manner of Hedy Lamarr, essentially became Joe Mankiewicz’s frustrated hausfrau, a woman with not much of a career, few friends, no outlet for her substantial emotional undercurrents, a love of alcohol, and a husband who, despite his considerable and public embrace of psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding what makes humans tick, seems to have had a tin ear for his wife’s distress.

  They were married in 1940. Joe, of course, was quite the ladies’ man, and during the years leading up to World War II, he had made it a special habit of squiring the leading German-speaking actresses around the studio when they came to try their hand in Hollywood. His list of affairs was long: at various times he was linked with stars from Myrna Loy to Linda Darnell to Judy Garland. But Rosa was the one he married, and despite what her firstborn Chris may say, it’s not just because he got the woman pregnant. No, there was something else at work, and it had to do with Joe’s own need for control. Here was a talented and well-bred Catholic actress
from Austria—how impressive indeed to land her. She was cultured and refined, everything Joe aspired to be; indeed, her decorous refinement represented everything Franz wanted for his sons, so she was exactly what Joe would want to own and possess. What’s more, her professional time in Hollywood was, unlike those of the other starlets he spent time with, frustrated from the start, as she was tossed into not-great films like The Last Gangster and Blind Alley, where her accent lay in that netherworld between Garboesque allure and Teutonic flatness.

  Rosa would not be meeting Joe, ever, on equal footing. She would not, could not compete with him. What could be better?

  Joe never wanted to meet anyone on a level playing field, especially women. Them, he was glad to woo, to charm, to persuade that he understood. And he wasn’t entirely wrong. Even a strong woman like Joan Crawford, who admitted that for a time she was madly in love with Joe, said, “I don’t know of any woman who knew him at all who wasn’t in love with him. At one time or another, all the ladies at M-G-M were in love with him.” But while Joe had been able to imbue Crawford and so many of the others with a kind of confidence that they otherwise may have lacked—Joe’s “crooked little smile that was absolutely irresistible to any woman…gave me such a feeling of security I felt I could do anything in the world once I got on that stage”—for Rosa, he could only try, and fail, to keep her confidence up. Yet because of her cultured background, he also sensed that in some deep way she was worthy of him, as the others were not. For someone like Joe who didn’t really want to be known, someone with what Addison DeWitt later called “an inability to love or be loved” and who told Ken Geist that he became so “adept at participating in almost everything without becoming part of anything,” it was a perfect marriage.

  Joe with his boys, Chris (left) and Tom (right), c. 1944

  But what did marriage mean to the Joe Mankiewicz of the early 1940s? Think of Joe’s depiction of Katharine Hepburn as the successful journalist diminished to a groveling hausfrau—not too far from the domestic situation he created for himself. Rosa Stradner’s exotic talent, discovered by Mayer, had been whisked off to Hollywood without protection. When the roles dried up and her emotional health wavered, she was happy to blame Joe for ending her career and subjugating her to a subservient wifely role. While life on the stage and screen had made her feel alive, Rosa was stifled by Joe’s expectations—to be the perfect hostess to the never-ending stream of Hollywood types who Joe brought home, and to take care of babies Chris and Tom. As Joe never wanted to consider anyone, especially a woman, his equal, the lopsided domestic dynamic he portrayed on screen and in his marriage was his ideal.

  In the meantime, Rosa was never alone in being the object of Joe’s attention and desires. At the studio, the process by which Joe came to know actresses—convincing them to speak at length about their own lives, encouraging them to share details with him about their relationships with their mothers—often came with an agenda. According to Lyle Wheeler, an art director who worked with Joe on many projects at Fox, Joe definitely thought he would get more out of his leading ladies if they were in love with their producer. Again and again, in his many romantic affairs, women succumbed to Joe’s charms, as a wise man/psychoanalyst, confessor/lover. Sometimes subtly, sometimes more crudely, Joe undermined these self-confident women (as Tracy’s character does Hepburn’s), making them feel weak, insecure, and vulnerable. This may have been key to his technique in wooing women. Giving women the feeling that only he can help them get through the traumatic elements of their life (elements that he himself has forced them to confront) was likely at least in part, as Chris suggests, a manipulative scheme to win them over romantically. It “was his way of getting girls in the sack,” Chris said. “It was manipulation, an intellectual game.”

  The game was a dark one, and ultimately unwinnable: Joe’s desire to prevail, to get the script, the Oscar, to have the power, and to prove that he could beat anyone in town was matched by an insatiable desire to be adored by his actresses, for them to want him, to need him. As he tried to distinguish himself from his brilliant, sloppy, irresponsible, and raging brother, he built a façade of near invulnerability, someone who could advise the beautiful women who needed him, hear their worries, and comfort them.

  For Rosa, then, the nightmare of her life was to oscillate back and forth between being condescended to—looked after, maybe even with a gentle touch, but there was no mistaking Joe’s superiority as he tended her needs with such an ostentatious uxoriousness—and being cheated on. This kind, misplaced swan from the Vienna stage, emotional and lost to begin with, was being driven slowly mad by a man who pretended to care for her—hell, he did care for her—but continued to philander and so drive her into paroxysms of jealousy.

  “The pain is invisible”: Rosa, Joe, and the boys, early 1940s

  So it was that Rosa Stradner, living with Joe, became classified as mentally ill. She went to sanatoriums. She fought with Joe, bitterly. She threw things at him. He ducked, and the items hit the wall. He tried to soothe her, all soft tones and honeyed phrases. She yelled. He yelled back. She threw more. He clenched his pipe in his mouth and walked out—would go for long drives, to this or that starlet’s house, for affairs that were far more than mere flings. “It was not a thing,” Joe said indignantly when Ken Geist used the word to describe one such relationship with actress Linda Darnell. “I don’t have things!” On the tape, you hear a pause, then a silence and the draw on his pipe as he tries to get his mind off the unpleasant Rosa. Linda, he finally says, was a “marvelous girl with very terrifying personal problems.” The attraction to unbalanced women was constant. Rosa. Darnell. Crawford.

  Then of course there was Judy Garland.

  When you’re Judy Garland, say, and at age three, you’re shoved onto a stage into a spotlight to sing “Jingle Bells,” and from that moment on, you’re told and told and told by everyone—from audiences that cheer you in that spotlight when you sing, to a draconian mother who drills the unshakable conviction into you (you’ll carry it with you until you die)—that only in that spotlight, singing as loud as you can…were you even acceptable to society, much less attractive in any way at all—how the hell can you possibly, for the rest of your life, know who you really are?

  —Joe Mankiewicz, 1972

  Joe’s affair with Judy Garland blossomed at a curious moment in his domestic life. Rosa had just been committed to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, for the first time. She was sent there for nine months of treatment after a particularly hellish battle with Joe had left her in a near-catatonic state. So Joe was, in a sense, looking for a new “case,” and in late 1942, twenty-year-old Judy Garland was a willing and available patient. She was also temporarily unattached because her year-and-a-half marriage to musician David Rose was ending. Joe said, “I’d never met someone like Judy at the time. I’m not talking about her talent. She was the most remarkably bright, gay, happy, helpless, and engaging girl I’d ever met.”

  Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in The Pirate

  But Judy was different from the starlets who typically shared his bed. “You can write down everything Lana Turner ever thought and felt and meant,” he said years later, “and then put the pencil down,” he said. “That’s it, a closed book. But I don’t think anybody’s going to close the book on Judy Garland.” He was particularly fascinated by her psychological condition, why she clung to her lovers like a safety net, and why at twenty years old she still consulted her mother and M-G-M studio chief Louis B. Mayer about every element of her life, down to what color lipstick to put on in the morning.

  Since the moment “Baby” had stepped on stage at age three with her two older sisters, Jimmie and Mary Jane, Garland had been instructed that all that mattered was her performance on stage. Ethel Marion Milne, Judy’s mother, whose life’s ambition was to make her daughter a star, was overbearing and severe, sometimes locking Baby in closets to f
orce obedience. Constantly pushing her daughter to exhaustion with a brutal regimen of dance and voice classes, auditions, and performances, Ethel gave Judy pep pills for the day and counteracted them with sleeping pills at night.

  When Judy was signed by Metro at age thirteen, Ethel finally met her match, Mayer, who was just as eager to mold Judy into a star. Calling her “my little hunchback,” Mayer felt Judy Garland’s body was the property of M-G-M, contributing to her overall feeling that she was an ugly duckling. Battles were fought over every French fry and spoonful of ice cream, ending ultimately in Judy adding diet pills to her drug cocktail. By the time Joe met her, the barrage of criticism had crushed her self-esteem. “Until M-G-M I had enjoyed being myself,” she said later. “I had been judged by my talent, but in the movies beauty was the standard of judgment—and definitely I didn’t have it.” Her abuse by the studio has been well documented. Between 1939 and 1943, she was a virtual indentured servant to M-G-M, making ten pictures in all. On the rare occasions that she was not completely done in from exhaustion at the end of the day and ventured out on the L.A. club scene, a publicist from Metro, stationed at all major clubs, would ridicule her, worried that one too many sightings in clubs would tarnish Judy’s virginal, girl-next-door image.