Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

*4 The arbitrators at the Screen Writers Guild ruled it a cocredit.

  *5 There is no record of Zanuck speaking to Rosa herself about this possibility.

  *6 Joe changed the nationality, which had been Bavarian in the book, for Rosa.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SHIPS IN THE NIGHT

  If you’d only see her…You’re her whole life—you must have spotted her by now, she’s always there.

  —All About Eve

  A man is in his early forties, having suffered through a virtual lifetime of feeling that he has not fulfilled his potential, squandered his talents on projects that are beneath him. Then, finally, with Herculean effort, and through a fortuitous set of circumstances, he finds himself summoning from the depths of his experience and his soul The Great Work, a piece that plumbs his deep knowledge of American politics and journalism and takes advantage of his special gifts as a wit. He is rewarded for this work with his industry’s highest award, and in the succeeding years the stature of this work will only grow.

  “Why did he not revive?” Herman and his Oscar

  Why does this man not revive? Why does his life continue on its slow, gradual, even graceful downward spiral? Where is the restart that he so desperately needed, and that by God he’d now earned? Why didn’t it come?

  For a moment, it appeared that it might have. The calls that ricocheted around the Biltmore Hotel ballroom for Herman on the night of the 1942 Oscars continued to echo for a few months. Looking at the bare facts of his career, the grandson-fan can see that Herman soon earned another choice assignment—The Pride of the Yankees, in the year following Kane—which, while not the ground-breaking film Kane was, is about as good a sports biopic as one could hope for in Hollywood’s golden age, with a wealth of powerful moments. To his many baseball-loving descendants, these lines would be quoted and requoted with glee: Lou Gehrig’s German immigrant parents, who had for so long held up to young Lou his (fictional) Uncle Otto as a paragon whose career as an engineer should be emulated, rather than pursuing this baseball nonsense, shouting out “Otto Schmotto” when Gehrig slams a key home run; Gehrig telling Billy, the prototypical dying kid in a hospital, “I’ll hit two homers for you if you hit one for me”; Lou telling the doctor who tells him he’s dying of an unpronounceable disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, soon to be known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), “Well, Doc, if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that all the arguing in the world can’t change the decision of the umpire”; and finally, of course, what Herman and his coconspirator on the screenplay Jo Swerling took from Gehrig’s actual speech on his retirement from baseball, though they moved it from the beginning of Gehrig’s speech to the end: “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”*1 The taut screenplay earned Herman his second straight Academy Award nomination. (Again, he would not attend the ceremonies, and this time his pessimism would prove founded, for the film lost out to Mrs. Miniver in the adapted screenplay category). He was getting full-time work from the studios again—Fox, Columbia, Universal. So—what happened?

  New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia with Herman at Yankee Stadium, shortly after The Pride of the Yankees

  First of all, alcohol. After Kane, Herman tried for a time to repeat what had worked in Victorville: no drinking (or not much—he and Houseman, remember, would head down to that desert canteen for a nightly drink), and more discipline and devotion to the work. But he’d never respected the work in the first place, and it wasn’t Kane anymore—the people making the movies weren’t interested in breaking new forms, or tackling great subjects, or tearing down iconic figures like William Randolph Hearst. They didn’t want Herman’s greatest expressions on journalism, politics, human psychology, or even memory (“a white dress she had on”). They wanted formula, dependability, hits. And so, as it happened, shortly after Franz’s death, Herman began to drink again, heavily. Welles’s dismissal of the Rosebud technique—“dollar book Freud”—comes to mind, for it’s as if Herman’s self-destructiveness simply wouldn’t allow him to conquer the demons of the past. And without Franz to resist, to rebel against, and to measure his failure against, it’s as if Herman didn’t know where to turn. Without the sand in the oyster, how could he possibly make any more pearls, even if they were only cast before swine?

  In addition, Citizen Kane laid a curious kind of curse on Herman. Kane’s success had come with a man, Welles, who was himself so antagonistic to the Hollywood system that it had been a natural pairing for Herman, and the two men had enjoyed having their cake and eating it too—making the ultimate “movie movie” while at the same time thumbing their noses at Hollywood conventions. There was no way to repeat it, and Herman knew it would be fruitless to try, especially since after Kane and Welles he would be returning to a system that had less use of his particular genius.

  So while some of the movies ended up being entertaining enough (The Pride of the Yankees would be joined in this class by the compellingly strange noir Christmas Holiday and the Jack Oakie vehicle Rise and Shine, based on a Thurber short story), they were anything but entertaining experiences for Herman. And the drinking didn’t help. It certainly didn’t help his relationship with the producer of The Pride of the Yankees, the maddening and prolific Sam Goldwyn. While Herman could be very funny when talking about working for Goldwyn—the ex-haberdasher-now-mogul wanted the game shortened to two strikes and three balls, Herman claimed, because baseball dragged: “Can we do that, Mank? Make it strike two, you’re out!”—he was humiliated in the actual writing process. Unbeknownst to Herman, Goldwyn at one point hired another writer to write a parallel script, then when he spotted Herman inebriated one afternoon, summoned Herman into his office to read the script, showing him what a real screenwriter could do without drinking. Herman glanced through the other man’s pages, then said: “He should drink.”

  In truth, Goldwyn proved so impossible to work with on The Pride of the Yankees—with an irritating combination of stubborn ignorance about baseball and bizarre attention to the movie’s every single detail—that he practically drove any teetotalers on the set to the bottle. M-G-M veteran director Sam Wood, who was known for controlling his temper and proudly never yelled on set, could not hold back his criticism of Goldwyn in a note to Herman: “I dismiss Goldwyn as a loathsome person, something you would expect to find under damp logs when you roll them over. If he had been where he belongs, making button holes, we would have had a better picture.” Working with Goldwyn only deepened Herman’s frustration that with nearly everyone around him playing the Hollywood game, he could no longer hope to find many people to work with who even wanted to turn the system on its head.

  For Herman, the years after Kane were a succession of those kinds of experiences—he wasn’t the young whippersnapper anymore, and the competition was no longer idiots, but ambitious young Sammy Glicks who were less willing to sit with the aging self-loathing screenwriter in the commissary and hang on his every word about how stupid and corrupt everything was. Now, when they saw him coming, it was “Ho-ho, here comes crazy Mank,” or, even worse, they’d slide out of the way.

  The little matter of his younger brother becoming an even more powerful and successful man in the town surely did not help. Joe, now, lived in a bigger house, drove nicer cars, and had his phone calls returned. He was the rich uncle who gave his niece and nephews their biggest Christmas present, the one they would save for the last to open—“because it would always be something marvelous,” according to my mother. The antagonism toward Joe grew. The totality with which Joe had accepted the rules of the Hollywood game, the thoroughly bankrupt values he had embraced…In the 1930s, when Herman signed a big contract at M-G-M, Sara had written Herman a letter instructing him how to treat the little pisher: “Did you show that big producer Joe and his wife your contract and was he properly impressed and depressed? Please be very superior and important with him.” Now that the roles were so
obviously reversed, there was little to do but try to wring pleasure out of Joe’s perceived moral failings, and his inability to get close to people. “Just once,” Herman said, “I’d like to meet somebody at Joe’s birthday party I’d seen the year before.” The characters had solidified in nearly everyone’s mind: Joe was cold and isolated, Herman a big-hearted mess. “Joe was a man of principles, a fighter for causes,” Erna said, “but you could sit for an entire evening and be practically in tears, and he wouldn’t notice. If there was something bothering you and you walked into a room where Herman was sitting reading, after three or four minutes he would look up and say, ‘What’s the matter, kid?’ ”

  “Young man, you must learn to crawl before you can walk”: Joe Mankiewicz, c. 1940s

  But as his drinking and gambling swelled, Herman’s situation became ever more unstable. With increased debts came increased risks to try to earn money back. The family silver was pawned. The house was mortgaged more than once to pay off bookies. The good doctor Hacker analyzed it all as “a surrender gesture, an attempt to play forever the role of an infant, a total falling-apart, an inability to handle himself, total reliance on other people, particularly his wife, a real return to the womb,” and even Herman recognized the horrors his behavior inflicted on those around him. The toll his misbehavior took on his wife and children made him miserable. He quoted a favorite playwright to make his point: “Like Shaw said, ‘Parents should be a warning to their children, not an example.’ Nobody can deny I’ve been a good bad example.” Even toward Joe, Herman understood the role he was playing: “I’ve been an influence on Joe’s life,” he said, “but it’s been mostly negative.” After one particularly hellish evening when Joe had been witness to one of Herman’s more bellicose drunken performances at a producer’s dinner party—vomiting, insulting the producer, calling the producer’s wife names—Joe asked Herman, “How can you do this? It’s so embarrassing to the people who invited you.” Herman responded: “Who invited me? I crashed the party.”

  Many of the other so-called “best” Herman Mankiewicz stories come from this period, though a drumbeat of misery plays under all of them: Herman, fired for drinking at Universal and replaced by a man named Dwight Taylor, marching soberly into an executive’s office a week later and getting his job back by asking, “Don’t you think Herman Mankiewicz drunk is still better than Dwight Taylor sober?” Herman, telling a friend that with the help of psychoanalysis, he had finally determined that he wasn’t a drunk: “It is not Herman Mankiewicz who is drinking. It is the little boy in me!” Most famously, the encounter with the head of Columbia, Harry Cohn, when Cohn was explaining to a roomful of executives and writers that he knew a movie was lousy when his ass twitched during the screening. Herman leered at Cohn, and the story goes that one man even whispered, “Don’t say it, Mank,” but it was impossible for Herman to resist. “What makes you think,” Herman asked after an impudent pause, “that you have the monitor ass for the entire world? Where is it written that your ass is wired to all other asses?”*2 (He was fired the next day.)

  There was no escaping the dreadful fact that he liked the work even less than ever. The movies included the creaky melodramatic romance The Enchanted Cottage, the costume spectacular The Spanish Main, and so many others for which he received, thankfully, no credit*3 that he ended up telling Joseph Cotten, “My contract says I have to come to work and write so many hours a day. But it doesn’t say I have to admit what I’m writing.” John Houseman summed up Herman’s predicament: “When you can earn twenty-five hundred dollars a week making jokes, and working two or three hours a day in the studio and having long lunches and getting drunk or making more jokes, why would you go to an attic and beat your brains out doing something you’re afraid you might not be able to do?”

  Herman in the 1940s, when it was all about lunch

  Herman was in fact still submitting occasional satirical pieces to magazines, but most went unpublished, and he was so stung by the impersonal rejection letters he received from The New Yorker that he wrote his old adversary Harold Ross a funny if heartbreaking letter stating, “Somebody is getting your mail before it reaches you and attempting to ruin you by returning all worthwhile contributions.” Thereafter, the rejection letters came from Ross himself, including one which stated baldly why Herman was trying too hard: “It is overweighted because you are in California, wasting the best years of your life.”

  Herman, of course, disagreed. The best years had already been wasted.

  * * *

  —

  Joe’s escape from Louis B. Mayer worked out beautifully. As his contract still had nearly two years to run, it was left to Mayer to decide what to do. In those days, the studios would assign contracts to other studios when situations like this occurred, and Joe was worried he would get sent to Warner’s where he would likely never get a chance to direct his own pictures. Instead, Mayer—feeling guilty, or just unknowingly—did Joe the greatest favor he possibly could have by sending him to 20th Century–Fox. There, Joe negotiated a deal that not only gave him a slight raise but in which the studio promised him that he would be given a chance to direct at last.

  Sitting in a director’s chair for the first time did not provide Joe an epiphany. It didn’t announce to him anything he hadn’t already known. This was where he had wanted to be for some time—the director controlled everything in a picture—and now that he’d finally gotten here, it felt right and inevitable and just plain decent. He’d worked hard for it, and he wasn’t going to squander the opportunity.

  And so in the late forties Joe Mankiewicz, sober and dutiful, directed his first five movies, learning a little more each time. Careful and precise, unafraid to admit what he didn’t know about directing, Joe was wise and smart on these films—taking baby steps in each one to better himself and his directing technique, and deliberately choosing scripts others had written so as to focus on learning his new craft. On his first film, Dragonwyck, he learned much about camera placement from his cameraman, Arthur Miller, who told Joe just to place the camera where he would want it to be in a theater*4 and also said to him, “I have all these other directors’ experience at your disposal—for Chrissake take advantage of it;” on his second film, the mystery Somewhere in the Night, Joe knew that suspenseful night and fog sequences would require expert editing and so asked the editor, James Clark, to be on set as much as possible to ensure he got the proper coverage; on The Late George Apley, Joe, worried that his films were becoming too stagey, fell so much in love with crane shots that he received word from his producer Darryl Zanuck: “you’ve earned your wings, you can come down now.” Through it all, he was learning, studying, and working to understand his hard-earned role. And the movies themselves, while no masterpieces, are models of a kind of ’40s studio efficiency, but with enough traces of wit to suggest that more than a mere studio hack was at the helm. Many of the performances—both from those, like Walter Huston and Vincent Price in Dragonwyck, who were used to acting with spirit, as well as some, like Nancy Guild in Somewhere in the Night or Vanessa Brown in The Late George Apley, who were not—glow with life.

  For while the technical side would never come easily to Joe, directing actors would prove much easier. It was there he shone from the start. For one thing, Joe had a genius for finessing those around him into doing what he wanted. He was affable, gentle, persuading, and always so erudite and intelligent that his actors felt listened to and understood. He spoke with them at length, especially the actresses, about their own lives and—that favorite word of Joe’s—their “neuroses.” They came to feel so known by him that it was no surprise that more than a few of them did end up in love with him. At his office on the lot, he kept a drawer full of gold pencils, all given to him by actresses. Gene Tierney fell under Joe’s spell and as a result was able to deliver, in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, the most sensitive work of her career, as a believably repressed and intelligent woman who finds h
erself in love with the ghost of a salty sea captain (Rex Harrison, preening, obnoxious, brilliant). When seen today, the performances are nuanced, human, and full of a kind of relaxed compassion rare in studio films of the era. While Joe would later tell Ken Geist that in this first batch of films he was concentrating upon learning the craft of directing and the technical side of the job, it’s also true that the performances throughout are almost uniformly excellent.

  Gene Tierney in Dragonwyck (1946)

  At last, on Escape, his fifth picture for Fox, as they were setting up for a shot, Joe let Rex Harrison in on a little secret. Harrison was a gifted stage actor who was doing his best to tone down his natural ham for the camera, and Joe was helping enormously, as he also had in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Indeed, Joe considered Harrison such a great instrument capable of speaking intelligent and erudite dialogue that he would end up modestly referring to the actor as his very own “Stradivarius” and cast him several times over the next three decades (most notably in Cleopatra and The Honey Pot), something of an alter ego for Joe. Now, looking at the technicians on the Dartmoor stage set in England where Escape was filmed, he pulled Harrison off to the side. “I suppose,” he confided, “that this shall be the last film I shall ever direct unless I have written it myself.” It was said almost casually, the way he liked to talk to actors, keeping them comfortable and in his orbit. But Harrison understood immediately that Joe was dead set on directing his own stories from now on.

  Joe may have been the inspiration for Sammy Glick, the hero of Budd Schulberg’s lacerating satire of Hollywood, What Makes Sammy Run?