Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  “That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability”: George Sanders and Anne Baxter in All About Eve

  “What happens in the next reel? Do I get dragged off screaming to the snake pit?” Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in All About Eve

  And yet…And yet there remains the problem of Rosa. Chris Mankiewicz maintains that some of the dialogue in the party scene in All About Eve (“Cut! Print it! What happens in the next reel? Do I get dragged off screaming to the snake pit?”) was practically a transcript of what he heard growing up with his parents, whose battles never seemed to stop. But whatever went on between the two of them was far more serious than the battles between Margo and Bill. As Chris said, “Because when the lights are out and I’m lying in bed and I can hear them screaming at each other through the walls, I know what’s really going on.”

  What was really going on was Joe’s philandering. For there’s the crucial difference between real life and All About Eve—the real-life Margo Channing’s fears about Bill Sampson’s alleged infidelities are presented as pure paranoia, whereas in real life, Rosa’s fears were justified.*10 In fact, from the very beginning of his knowing Rosa, Joe was philandering. As Joe is getting Rosa pregnant with Chris and deciding to marry her, he is having affairs. As Tom is being born two years later and Joe is beginning his years-long affair with Judy Garland, he is telling Rosa he is not having any affairs, and she is ending up in a sanatorium. In Chris’s mind, his mother was never truly crazy, but was being convinced that she was going crazy by Joe’s constant lying. Was that craziness, or a picture-perfect example of gaslighting? While Rosa had serious mental illness, it’s impossible not to feel that Joe’s lies contributed to her demise. “She came at him with knives,” my mother said years later, “but boy was she provoked!”

  Joe with Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, and Celeste Holm on the set of All About Eve (1950)

  But for all of Joe’s faults—and he admitted them freely later in life, never claiming to have been a faithful husband to Rosa—I think he wished it could have been otherwise. Whatever went on behind closed doors between them, the happy ending between Bill and Margo was, to some extent, clearly another wish fulfillment on Joe’s part. “Heaven help me,” Joe had Margo Channing say, “I love a psychotic.” Joe loved Rosa, and he wanted, dreadfully, things to have been different between them. He wanted a wife whose work he valued, the way Bill valued Margo’s—and who was a success in her own right, not just the hausfrau who “could play the Eva Braun character and maybe one or two other roles” and pose at movie premieres for happy domestic pictures that belied her insecurity and misery. Still, however much Joe may have wished it, he was unequipped to make it so. Though Rosa’s work in their one collaboration had received generally positive reviews, The Keys of the Kingdom had led to no more movie roles. Her film career was over. She had returned to her miserable gilded cage in the role of Mrs. Mankiewicz, and Joe and Rosa had continued to battle on, Joe continued to philander, and Chris and Tom continued to grow up in an atmosphere of almost unbearable domestic tension if not downright abuse that magnified All About Eve’s party scene—to quote Lloyd Richards, “the general atmosphere [was] very Macbethish.”

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  In later years, Joe was proudly retrograde when it came to assessing and analyzing the work of artists. He told Gary Carey that “the offstage or offscreen moral and/or political propensities of creative talents should not be applicable to a judgment of their work.” What’s more, he seemed to delight in taking a perversely antipsychological stance with regard to the roots of his own films. So while he admitted that All About Eve had its genesis in his lifelong love of theater, he completely denied and in fact scoffed at the idea that his greatest film had anything at all to do with his feelings about his brother. In fact, he loved to state instead, almost gleefully missing the point, “Herman had nothing to do with All About Eve, and I had nothing to do with Citizen Kane.” Given Joe’s reverence for psychoanalysis, his staunchly incurious attitude toward the genesis of his own films is strange indeed. As my mother told Ken Geist, “He’s very versed in psychiatry, and you’d think…but it doesn’t get to him.”*11

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  On the night of March 29, 1951, Hollywood gathered to pay tribute to itself. All About Eve had been nominated for a record fourteen Academy Awards, breaking the mark set by Gone with the Wind eleven years earlier. In Beverly Hills, Herman Mankiewicz no longer even listened to the ceremony on the radio. He wasn’t well, and with no ability to affect the outcome, what could be gained by hearing his brother reap more plaudits? He took some satisfaction from the fact that his younger brother’s big successes always came from adaptations, that “Joe the genius” was never rewarded for original work, but overall, it was a hell of a lot easier to find other things to think about. Joe told friends with a sensible display of sympathy that it must have been hard for Herman watching his rise as Herman continued his one-way ticket to the bottom. In the ballroom, as Joe made his way through the crowd, one old-timer, a studio executive Joe had worked with years earlier, mistook him for Herman,*12 but Joe merely smiled and moved deeper into the throng of well-wishers, sensing that behind him the man’s companions were clarifying the confusion and telling the man the sad truth about Joe’s big brother: Herman had been in and out of work for a while, and the few scripts that came his way—like The Pride of St. Louis, a biopic of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball star Dizzy Dean and a pale attempt to duplicate the success of The Pride of the Yankees—had not been notable.

  Back in Beverly Hills, Herman fussed. The annual ceremony, according to his daughter years later, was never anything the family paid attention to. There was no ritual, no sitting around the radio together, not even the enchanting American tradition of mocking Oscar participants together. For Herman, the night of Joe’s greatest triumph was spent much like any other: reading. To the end, Herman was a voracious reader, and when it wasn’t politics or biography, he often as not kept a large pile of unread manuscripts and galleys sent to him by friends. In early 1951, that pile would have included Budd Schulberg’s Disenchanted. Budd had sent it to him more than a year earlier for his opinion when it was still in galleys, then a few months later the hardcover, which sat unopened and undigested for months. Budd wanted Herman to adapt it into a screenplay, and Herman’s reluctance could be found in the fact the book was still unopened. In Herman’s view, Schulberg had done his best work already—What Makes Sammy Run? was a damn good summation of everything that was wrong with the town, and its Sammy Glick was a beautiful embodiment of all of its most horrible characters rolled up into one hugely unsympathetic, grasping ball of ambition, who reminded more than one Hollywood reader of Joe. But now here was this book, Disenchanted, making its way up the best-seller lists, which seemed, from an unread perspective anyway, to be a vain attempt on Budd’s part at stepping in the same river twice; this one about a young screenwriter’s relationship with a novelist whose own career had, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, the character on whom the book’s Manley Halliday was based, seen far better days. Herman’s reluctance to read the book may also have stemmed from its intersection with his own life. The book’s main theme, in the end, was about confronting one’s own bitter disappointment and admitting that the great successes one had attained in the past couldn’t be repeated at will, no matter how hard one tried….

  The project that had most sparked Herman’s interest, and which had him holding out the most hope during the entire post-Kane era, with his health, career, and faith in the industry all in serious decline, was called “Woman on the Rock,” an original script that fictionalized the life story of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Herman’s script had been years in the writing, rewriting, and revisions, and he was at times certain it would be a worthy successor to Kane, a searing indictment of religious hypocrisy in America. It would prove to Welles, to Joe, to the
whole damn town, that he was still the master who fundamentally changed the rules of the game. This movie would also, not incidentally, serve as the tide that lifted him up from a sludge of medical and unpayable debts.

  It’s not hard to understand why the story of McPherson’s rise and fall was so tantalizing to Herman. Just as Hearst spewed sensationalized garbage to millions of American newspaper readers, so too a few decades later, McPherson sent what were often called “slap-stick sermons” into the ears of millions of Americans every Sunday. As a pioneer megachurch evangelist, she whipped crowds of thousands into frenzies at her Angelus Temple in Los Angeles by speaking in tongues, not to mention giving sight to the blind and healing the crippled.

  Reading about the lifetime of nonsense McPherson ladled out to audiences eager to gobble it up, Herman couldn’t fail to think of his little brother. Scooping up accolades left and right for churning out crowd-pleasers and being such a kow-towing sycophant…this is who gets rewarded for success in this country? Writing the script gave Herman the chance to unleash his anger against an enormous charlatan. Herman regained the twinkle in his eye, thinking of giving Joe and the industry the lecture of a lifetime: “You see what’s wrong with this country? Look at the kind of crap that rises to the top!”

  McPherson’s life had taken one particularly bizarre turn that became the focus of Herman’s script. On the morning of May 18, 1926, she did not arrive to preach at the Angelus Temple. Word spread, though no one knew whether it could be believed: she had drowned during a swim earlier that day. The Coast Guard patrolled up and down the coast, and deep-sea divers plunged into the water. No expense was spared in the resulting search. A month later, dazed and disoriented, Aimee Semple McPherson reappeared in a small Mexican town south of the Arizona border, and in a bedside interview painted a dramatic picture of her past month. She had escaped kidnappers who had drugged her and smuggled her over the border, holding her for ransom for weeks in a corrugated tin shack. It was a riveting story to be sure, but almost no one believed it.

  Soon, other stories emerged. Witnesses reported spotting McPherson in Northern California during the time she was supposedly bound and gagged, and worse, a married engineer who helped broadcast her radio program had disappeared at the same time. The headlines, gossip, and rumors continued until a judge decided there was enough evidence to proceed with charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice. But soon, witnesses recanted their stories, and others began to seem less reliable; charges were dropped. Controversy over the apparent fraud went unresolved. To Herman, it was all too juicy to ignore. He based the structure of his script with Kane forefront in his mind—using as the main plot device a newspaper reporter researching a retrospective story on the evangelist. As Hearst had become Kane, McPherson became Ruth Church, an alluring, dissolute dame.

  When Herman first completed the script, all those who’d shrugged him off like the plague in the previous few years, not taking or returning his calls, were now seeking him out. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to get their hands on the project. Directors William Wyler, Otto Preminger, and Joseph Losey were interested; so were actresses Evelyn Keyes and Mercedes McCambridge. Whether she’d read it or not, Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper declared it “one of the hottest scripts of the year” and said “every top star in town is drooling.”

  Sitting there determined not to listen to the Oscars broadcast at which All About Eve would be crowned, it must have been difficult for Herman to avoid thinking about what had happened next, and to wonder if he had done the right thing. First, Joseph Breen, who administered the Motion Picture Production Code and who had been the one to strike the dagger through the heart of “The Mad Dog of Europe,” brought this project to a screeching halt as well. The man who Herman delighted in calling “a devout Catholic layman and fathead,” known for forcing even Betty Boop into a housewife’s skirt, had pronounced that the script was in clear violation of the code, as it “cast ridicule” on evangelistic activities and portrayed religion as “a racket.” As there was no clear alternative path forward, Herman made changes Breen’s staff recommended, softening the piece’s hostility toward organized religion.

  But it rankled. The script, already overlong even in Herman’s eyes, had gotten even longer. But that was no excuse for what Herman did next. Was it just more showing off? Pure ego that drove him to do what he did, or, as Dr. Hacker would have suggested—and Sara would have agreed, had she known what he did because of course he’d hidden it from her—another act of self-sabotage and self-destruction for the ages?

  The project’s death blow came thusly by Herman’s own hand: he sent a copy of the script to McPherson’s daughter, Roberta Semple Salter, heir to her mother’s ministry.

  How did he imagine she would respond? While Herman probably understood the risk he was taking, as a gambler he would have loved the thrill and danger in sending the script. But more than that, in Herman’s brilliant, expansive, loving mind, it’s possible he assumed—“you don’t like spinach, you hate your parents”—that any daughter would in fact be thrilled to see that others knew how awful her parent was. Wouldn’t Herman have welcomed a script “The Imperious Professor, or ‘What Happened to the Three Points?’: The Franz Mankiewicz Story”? If he looked deep into his own motivations and his own miserable childhood, the ways he had suffered at the hands of a man whom so many looked up to and respected—even Jimmy Cagney thought his father a whale of a fellow—Herman must have thought that the child in such a situation would respond with sympathy—at last, someone sees the agony I endured!—rather than with a strongly worded attorney’s letter threatening to sue for libel and invasion of privacy. Perhaps instead of all interest in the film quickly fading, as no production company or studio would want to embroil themselves in a lawsuit, Herman would be welcomed with open arms, and he might even find a new friend in Roberta Semple Salter. The project lost all momentum. The studios and production companies moved on to other projects. Even Orson Welles, whom Herman sent the script to in a last-ditch effort to resuscitate the corpse, had no interest. Herman was left, a few months later, to readjust for the thousandth time his position in the wing back chair near the radio he refused to turn on and so hear his brother’s name called, again, as it had been at the previous year’s ceremony, not just once but twice. Disenchanted, indeed.

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  The Best Director award, Joe insisted, had been something of a surprise. How else could he explain his behavior when the award was announced? He had been backstage, chatting with fellow nominee Billy Wilder. (Earlier in the evening, Wilder had won for Best Original Screenplay for Sunset Boulevard, as Joe had won for Best Adapted Screenplay for Eve.) According to Wilder, Joe had been laying it on thick with fulsome praise, and what an honor it was just to be with Billy, to even be considered on the same par with him. “Then all of a sudden they announced [Joe] as the winner of the Best Director award, and he pushed me aside and rushed on the stage as if I were a stagehand. Suddenly his compliments cut off instantaneously, and with a cold glance at me as if to say ‘who are you,’ he just took off.” No “thanks, Billy, I gotta go now,” it was a cut as clean as a razor blade, and Joe was off to collect his prize. It was, Wilder said, “pure ambition.”

  Wilder said he’d never seen anything like it. Had he not seen the picture for which Joe was being honored?

  In later years, when Joe talked of the movie, and not just of Eve, but Phoebe, the young actress who enters Eve’s hotel room in the final scene, he would discuss the characters whose ruthless ambition is so terrifying as if they were utterly foreign to his own nature. But the fact that the portrait of ruthless ambition is so exact and precise, even today giving audiences chills, suggests that Joe must have sensed that it came from him. He may not have had the personal vanity of Phoebe, wearing a tiara and gazing lovingly at her own reflection, again and again in an eternity of mirrors as she holds up the coveted award, but Joe Mankiewi
cz knew narcissism and its discontents. As Phoebe prepares to help Eve, tired and drained after her triumph earlier in the evening, and worn out from the exhausting and ruthless climb to the top, Joe was reflecting on him and Herman as well. To the vanquished Margo Channing Joe had given the happy and fantastical ending he may have actually wished for Herman, a happy retirement from the game and a peace of mind that had always eluded his beloved and feared older brother. But to Eve, to himself, he had given no peace at all, only the sense that the game would never end, that there would always be more champions coming after him, determined to wrest away what he had gained.

  When Joe considered Herman at all now, it was with pity and concern, mostly. He knew Herman hadn’t escaped to that life he’d prescribed for Margo at the end of All About Eve, happily married and with a “home—not just a house I’m afraid to stay in.” Herman wasn’t in a house he was afraid to stay in—that was Joe, really—but his home was far from comfortable. No, when Joe pictured Herman now, the big brother was a shrunken figure back at Tower Road, rattling around the big old house with Sara, the boys off for good, into their adult lives, and though Herman fiercely loved young Johanna, who was growing up so beautifully (but also so strangely—the gloom and doom in the house was hard to escape, Joe assumed), Herman’s miasma had totally engulfed him now. It made Joe sad. Sara had told friends of a wretched moment not long before. She’d come across Herman in slippers and robe, in the middle of the night, sitting on the couch in his office, holding his dressing gown across his spindly knees and crying. He looked up at Sara with tear-filled eyes. For a while he didn’t speak, maybe because he wasn’t able to, or because the truth struck him as too cliché, too absurd, too basic a thought to express aloud. Finally he’d gotten the words out, a simple sentence: “I miss the boys.”