Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  “Had he not seen the picture for which Joe was being honored?” Joe and Billy Wilder, c. 1951

  It wasn’t just the boys, of course—it was their childhoods, and his own, the youth and vigor of his own earlier days forever vanished, the young man tootling around Hollywood in his DeSoto, careening carelessly into accidents but rebounding so beautifully, the screenwriter barking at others in story conferences and bringing the room into helpless states of laughter, the wiseacre with Kaufman back in New York, the tongue-tied press agent with Isadora Duncan, the uncertain reporter standing next to Jack Dempsey in those trousers so painfully short, the glowering young doughboy just back from the Great War, ready to conquer the world, take a bride, make a fortune, and show these idiots there was no one ever quite like him. Herman missed that boy most of all.

  * * *

  —

  When Johanna grew up, she wrote a novel, Life Signs. And in that novel, the heroine has a dream in which she visits the Hollywood home of her childhood. She floats through the house, seeing it like a single long shot from a film—panning past the library, bookshelves everywhere, through the dining room, candles burning, a pyramid of fresh fruit, and then up the back stairs to her father’s office. It’s all wrong in the dream, no one should be there, she nearly always came home to an empty house after school, with her mother off shopping, getting her hair done, or with friends, and her father at the studio, but in the dream, it’s as if there is a presence in the house, drawing her on—the wind stirring the papers in her father’s office, cigar ashes everywhere—then through her own childhood bedroom, past the little girl’s bed, ruffled and flowered, into her mother’s bedroom, the white bed, the chaise lounge, and then, at last she stops outside her father’s room. She knocks but does not enter. She stands there, motionless. And from within she hears a voice. “It won’t be long,” her father says from the other side of the door. An ambulance is coming. “Sit with me,” he whispers. “Don’t let me be alone.”

  In the novel, the character wakes from the dream with a start, to find that her father is dead, life has moved on, it is years later and she is in her own bed, next to her sleeping husband. She is not going to go in and relive those memories, sit with her father, and whisper quietly so her mother doesn’t hear them, tell him about her day and who said what to whom.

  And my mother is not with her father and mother, but with her husband, my father. It is the summer of 1971, and she is writing this novel in a summer home we have taken on Long Island. She is plumbing her childhood memories, and it can be painful and unpleasant, but waking in her bed, she knows that she is no longer there, in an airless house on Tower Road, lured on by a barely living father who will cast such an enormous shadow.

  Will she ever escape it? She will have risen beautifully in the years after Tower Road, graduating with glowing marks from Westlake School for Girls, then Wellesley, where classmates and professors alike will seem to compete to see who loved her most—then a stellar career at Time-Life, breaking hearts throughout the building and becoming the first woman on the masthead at Time magazine—Johanna Mankiewicz Davis, though after a few weeks she will insist that the magazine drop the “Mankiewicz” from her name.

  But still she is shadowed, and so are all the Mankiewiczes, by what Herman’s voice has said: “It won’t be long.”

  It cannot last, this dream. Nothing can.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Just as Joe described Citizen Kane as “an absolutely perfect marriage of writer and material, as it combined the political and sociological aspects that Herman knew better than almost anybody,” All About Eve was a perfect marriage for Joe and his own theatrical “aspects.”

  *2 Joe had also been struck by the “strangely unenduring gratification” he felt on winning the Directors Guild Award in May 1949 for A Letter to Three Wives, and he’d already been considering a film centered on the idea of an award before he was first shown Orr’s story.

  *3 Fox bought Orr’s short story “The Wisdom of Eve,” which had run in Cosmopolitan in May 1946, for $5,000.

  *4 As Joe later put it, Phoebe “will become another Eve,” and the mirror reflects “that the world is full of Eves, and that they will be with us always.”

  *5 On the first day of an abbreviated rehearsal schedule (Bette Davis had replaced Claudette Colbert in the role after Colbert suffered a slipped disk), Davis’s voice was unusually husky, and she apologized to Joe, as she was just getting over a cold; Joe smiled and told her to keep the deep voice. Davis later said that by giving her the role, “Mankiewicz resurrected me from the dead.”

  *6 Interestingly, though the film today can seem dominated by Bette Davis’s powerful and charismatic performance, before the film came out, Joe’s identification with Eve was so strong that he was convinced that the film was going to make a huge star out of Anne Baxter.

  *7 Sanders’s own curious life story contains depths at which a footnote can only hint. Born in Russia to British parents, he left the country during the Russian Revolution, became an actor known for playing cads (so much so that his memoir was titled Memoirs of a Professional Cad, though he later proposed A Dreadful Man for his biography), married Zsa Zsa Gabor among three other wives, and left one of the world’s most maddeningly inconclusive suicide notes when he killed himself at the age of sixty-five: Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

  *8 Today’s Addison would likely be a gay, theater-mad blogger: a different movie indeed.

  *9 The Eve-as-younger-Margo theme would have been more explicit had Claudette Colbert, whom Joe originally cast in the role of Margo Channing, not suffered her ruptured disk and been forced to withdraw from the production less than ten days before shooting began—Colbert and Anne Baxter are almost freakishly similar in appearance, whereas the sui generis Bette Davis looks nothing like Baxter.

  *10 Chris: “Although in Eve, Bill Sampson is not fucking Eve Harrington and is supposedly fair to Margo, in our story, he is fucking her. In real life Dad is fucking the Eve Harrington all the time!”

  *11 It is one of the chief regrets of this book that I was never able to ask Joe about his feelings for Herman, and how much they had influenced, consciously or not, the writing of All About Eve. Instead, I asked Rosemary, his devoted third wife and widow, who gave me the answer he himself probably would have given, though her answer was probably far shorter. In fact, she used only one word for the theory that All About Eve had anything to do with Joe’s and Herman’s relationship: “Absurd.”

  *12 Joe, in repayment, will neglect to remember the man’s name when he tells and retells the anecdote in future years.

  PART FOUR

  Life was about to be very different, had already started to be; she would have to learn to take happiness in stride, along with the other. She was neither doomed, nor saved. There was love in her, and anger, the same as everyone else. She would get back to essentials, her husband, her children; she might try some poetry, dream on paper. She was special, she was ordinary; like her father, unlike him, like her mother, unlike her, she was whoever she chose, she would belong to herself.

  —Life Signs, Johanna Davis

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  NO WAY OUT

  There is a man / a certain man

  And for the poor you may be sure / That he’ll do all he can!

  Who is this one? / This favorite son?

  Just by his action / Has the Traction magnates on the run?

  Who loves to smoke? / Enjoys a joke?

  Who wouldn’t get upset / If he were really broke?

  With wealth and fame / He’s still the same

  I’ll bet you five you’re not alive / If you don’t know his name.

  —Citizen Kane

  On August 28, 19
63, Martin Luther King Jr. led the March on Washington and delivered his stirring oration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking out over the nearly half a million who had gathered to protest on behalf of the civil rights movement. That same day presented, for celebrated movie director Joe Mankiewicz, a chance to take part in a curious television program called Hollywood Roundtable. A special-event colloquy hosted by David Schoenbrun, the show presented a conversation with six Hollywood celebrities talking about the movement and giving “their own personally held views on Negro Rights.” Sitting across from Charlton Heston, Sidney Poitier, and Harry Belafonte and next to Marlon Brando and James Baldwin, Joe kept his pipe firmly in his mouth and spoke of the “urgency of human rights in America now.” The Hollywood celebrities were each earnest, well-meaning, and achingly sincere. Brando talked about his wish that the day’s march had brought the world “one step closer to understanding the human heart.” Heston admitted with a movie star’s practiced pang that until recently all he’d done about civil rights was talk about it at cocktail parties, and while Baldwin expressed his belief that “the first step [toward progress] probably has to be somewhere in the American conscience,” it was in many ways Joe Mankiewicz who took the lead on behalf of the Hollywood liberals. “The time has come,” Joe concluded as the others nodded in agreement, “to stop dreaming this dream and wake up to it.”

  By now, Joe was more than a decade removed from Hollywood, but his place in the industry was secure, and more than that, his persona had now morphed into something far larger than that of a mere moviemaker. By 1963, Joe Mankiewicz had become a Conscience Personified, a far cry from the grasping, striving, Sammy Glick–like figure that Herman and his pals had derided. Though hale and hearty in his early fifties, Joe now was almost an éminence grise, a figure of renown and respect. His reputation had transformed not just through his actual work in movies, but by his bull-dogged insistence upon changing the way the industry saw him. He had willed the change into being, bent perception to his desire. The crucible had come during his now-legendary tenure as head of the Screen Director’s Guild,*1 and while it hadn’t exactly been “I Have A Dream,” few in Hollywood had ever forgotten Joe’s leadership on behalf of an oppressed minority. For a man who took great pride in his commitment to social justice, his guidance of the Guild through a long and perilous fight against forces of intransigence and intolerance may have been his finest hour. He had cared, he had fought, and he had helped people. In the New York years that followed Herman’s death, in fact, the episode was something Joe delighted in being talked about…

  * * *

  —

  In April 1950, Joe had been elected president of the Screen Director’s Guild. He was pleased to gain the post and so represent his confreres in the challenging battles for better studio conditions, increased wages, and the all-important issue of residuals in the fledgling television industry. But it soon became clear that his control was nominal—Cecil B. DeMille, one of the founding fathers of the film industry, was the real force controlling the Guild. The sixty-nine-year-old DeMille was exasperating, imperious, and a die-hard Republican red-baiter. At the time, Joe was a Republican too—he called himself a “Pennsylvania Republican”*2—and ordinarily, serving as figurehead to an angry, out-of-touch old-timer might not have bothered Joe. But this was no ordinary time. The Red Scare was gathering steam, and while Joe tolerated DeMille’s other peccadilloes, he didn’t feel he could sit idly by as DeMille made it his personal mission to expel Communists from Hollywood. The battle was waged over loyalty oaths, which would require that a member declare that he had never joined the Communist Party, though of course it was perfectly legal to have done so. One studio head had happily told DeMille that such an action would have a steamroller effect; all other guilds and unions in Hollywood would soon go along. With the House UnAmerican Activities Committee already sending a group of moviemakers, the “Unfriendly Ten,” to jail for refusing to cooperate and name names, there was rampant fear that an industry-wide blacklist was inevitable, and many were all for it, among them Hedda Hopper, who added her feeling that “those who aren’t loyal should be put in concentration camps before it’s too late.” Anti-Communist fervor in California was rampant, intensified by the volatile U.S. Senate race then being waged to unseat Helen Gahagan Douglas, a woman whose opponent, Whittier’s own Richard M. Nixon, had labeled the “pink lady” because of her sympathy for left-wing causes. Many in Hollywood were holding their breath wondering who was next, and DeMille was posing as a man offering a simple solution: Who wouldn’t sign a loyalty oath other than someone who was disloyal to this great country that had given all of them so much?

  Joe and many others in Hollywood didn’t see it that way. You didn’t have to be a Communist or even much of a Communist sympathizer to understand that there was a slippery slope from loyalty oaths to outright fascism, and that the movement begun by Senator Joe McCarthy and his terrifying, if almost cartoonlike declarations that “I have here in my hand a list of names…” could be a step toward the kind of authoritarianism that the country had just defeated in World War II. Of course DeMille knew that Joe was opposed to the loyalty oath—like many in Hollywood, Joe had publicly rejected the idea. At that point in his life and career, Joe was not particularly political, even calling himself “the least politically minded person in the world,” but he did care about doing what he could for those he was in a position to help, from the beauties he met on set to promising young writers who reminded him of himself. And he was horrified by the witch hunt he saw brewing in Hollywood, calling those hunted “as much [a minority] as the Negro and the Jew…being slandered, libeled, persecuted, and threatened with extinction.”*3

  The drama’s next act came in the summer of 1950, as Joe and Rosa sailed home from a vacation in France after completing the filming of All About Eve. With Joe beyond telephone reach, DeMille seized the opportunity and called an emergency meeting of the Guild. There he crafted his mandatory non-communist oath, and, using an open ballot system, he and his pals were able to bully enough people into voting in favor of its creation.

  When Joe landed in New York and learned what had happened, he was furious. He blasted the idea that the meeting had been held because of a so-called “emergency” and said that using an open ballot system was a brazen scare tactic. But worst of all, when Joe got back to Hollywood and convened his own meeting of the Guild’s board, he learned that DeMille and one of his chief allies, Frank Capra, were introducing a new bylaw—one that would require the Guild to send producers a list of directors who refused to sign the oath—essentially, in Joe’s view, a blacklist. Capra resisted the use of the word blacklist, pointing out that producers could still hire anyone they wished. Joe found that idea absurd: “ ‘This guy’s un-American but you can hire him…’—that’s a blacklist!” Still, a lot of Hollywood’s top directors weren’t convinced. John Ford told Joe, “I will not stand for any blacklist, but why shouldn’t a man stand up and be counted?” “Because,” Joe thundered, “nobody appointed DeMille to do the counting!” Like a chess master, Joe seemed to be thinking several steps ahead: he agreed to sign the oath as an officer of the board, but he refused to sign it as a member, putting that year’s Oscar-winning director on his own Guild’s blacklist. Then he volunteered to step down from the board, knowing DeMille and his cronies would look awful if they accepted the resignation. With all of Hollywood caught up on the ongoing battle, the next day’s Daily Variety blared “Mankiewicz Will Not Sign Oath.”

  With the news buzzing through town (the story was so widespread that Chris and Tom, all of eight and ten, were called “Commies” by fellow students at the El Rodeo School in Beverly Hills, and they tearfully asked their father why he wasn’t signing), DeMille upped the ante. First he screened several of Joe’s films, looking for Communist propaganda, but having apparently failed to find any evidence of pinko-ness, he convened a secret meeting of board members on the Paramount lot. This tim
e, however, not all the board members were invited; against the rules in the Guild’s own bylaws, DeMille and his cronies invited only sixteen members of the board, including Frank Capra and Leo McCarey, but deliberately excluding any known Joe-supporters like Fred Zinnemann, Nicholas Ray, and Robert Wise. The “council of sixteen” drafted an anonymous ballot to recall Joe from the presidency, the entire text of which stated: “This is a ballot to recall Joe Mankiewicz. Sign here [box] yes.” The ballot was then mimeographed—with dozens of copies flying off the mimeograph machines in the Paramount basement that evening. But DeMille and his pals were careful. They needed only 60 percent of the Guild’s directors to win a recall, and they didn’t want any of Joe’s friends to tip him off, so Vernon Keays, the executive secretary of the Guild, combed through the list of the Guild’s directors and excluded those who might tell Joe of the attempted coup. Then messengers on motorcycles stormed off into the night with 160 envelopes to see what could be done.