by Nick Davis
Joe wasn’t happy about it, not at all. He knew that nearly every night, Rosa would go in and talk Chris’s ear off, crying and telling him what a lousy damn husband Joe was, seeking advice from a goddamn kid, ten or twelve or whatever he was now—and Tom was even worse, the poor kid had asthma and would have to go into the bathroom and suck on oxygen from a metal tank, trying to calm himself down, made so unhappy by his mother’s inappropriate and frankly crazy behavior—but honestly now, with all the Guild business Joe had to tend to, and the normal helping of studio politics, not to mention his actual work, trying to write and direct these pictures that were, leave us not forget, putting food on their plates, what more could he do?
What he could do, what he had done, once he’d achieved the level of success he’d reached after Eve cleaned up at the Oscars, was get the hell out of Hollywood. He and Herman had each talked about forty as being the age to get out of Dodge, and here Joe was, only two years late, and it was time to go. Robbie Lantz said the final straw was an incident where someone tossed a rock through the dining room window, and the only response from one of the boys was “Get the butler to deal with it.” Whatever it was, Joe was happy to make his escape. In September 1951, less than a year removed from his great triumph at the Guild and six months after he’d cleaned up at the Oscars, he negotiated an end to his contract with Fox, the family packed its belongings, and a Mankiewicz returned to New York at last.* Herman viewed it all ruefully, knowing that it was too late for him, but he was glad that Joe was getting out of town. For Herman, Hollywood had become home, he would die here, he’d known that.
So here Joe was, in March 1953, back for Herman’s goddamn funeral, and it was like he’d never left. Sara was still giving him those damn looks, and Rosa was still causing agony, and New York was no better on that score, and in some ways worse, what with the closeness of Broadway, the theater world almost mocking him with its proximity. And the move had begun with that damn fire, from which Joe wasn’t sure he’d ever recover—there had been two Bekins moving vans taking all the family belongings East, one full of clothes, toys, and the stuff of domestic life, the other full of Joe’s work. And of course that was the one that had toppled over on a lonely stretch of highway in Iowa of all places, skidding across the highway, slamming into a pylon, and bursting into flames. Three whole file cabinets’ worth of Joe’s scripts and notes had been incinerated, gone for good—twenty years of Joe’s life, vanished up into the Midwestern sky. Worse than that were the notes Joe had taken over the years for unproduced projects—screenplays and plays, dammit, plays he intended to write when he was in New York. What survived? A few pictures, some leather-bound editions of his favorite books, and, oh yes, the Oscars. No one would ever believe him that he wished it had been the other way around.
In the years that followed, friends and relatives, cousins and nephews and nieces would look at those Oscars—placed, no matter the home, in a prominent spot, four proud sentries guarding an entire life and reputation—and marvel at how they gleamed. No Oscars in the history of the world, Frank’s son Josh would say later, had ever been so beautifully taken care of.
Herman’s Oscar on the other hand, would grow dark from misuse, neglect, and lack of care. Resting for years on Goma’s mantel on 5th Anita Drive in Brentwood, it had the look of an ancient totem from a long-vanished tribe, a symbol of a forgotten time.
Skip Notes
* For Joe, it felt like now or never: “I said to myself, ‘If you don’t get out now, you’ll never get out,’ and nobody can say ‘Oh, he’s leaving because he can’t get a job.’ ”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MAN-ABOUT-TOWN
It is senseless to insist that theatrical folk in New York, Hollywood and London are no different from the good people of Des Moines, Chillicothe and Liverpool. By and large, we are concentrated gatherings of neurotics, egomaniacs, emotional misfits, and precocious children.
—All About Eve
The city was hot the day of his niece’s funeral. Joe sat in a rumpled light summer suit and looked across the aisle to the pew of his sister-in-law, Sara, who would now, in addition to being the world’s most pitied widow, add another title: poor Sara, who lost her goddamn daughter to a tragic death at the age of thirty-six. Joe craned his neck around and looked at the mourners and his stomach tightened. What kind of world does this to a woman in the prime of her life? What kind of pitiable goddamn God could there possibly be if this was how He was going to treat one of the few good ones to come along? Josie had her faults, God knows, but would it have been too much to ask for it to have been someone else slammed by that goddamn taxicab?…
Rosemary*1 squeezed his hand and tilted her head in the direction of Peter and the boys, now walking in. His nephew-in-law and the two boys, Timmy and Nicky, walking down the center aisle of this vast un-air-conditioned chapel, with all eyes on them in their ill-fitting suits and waffle-sized ties. But the boys looked okay. They looked like they would probably be able to survive this damn thing as well as anyone—boys had a way of doing that, didn’t they? The whole day, Joe told Rosemary later, he had found himself thinking of his own boys, not too distant in ages when they first moved to New York than Josie’s kids here, and how they had to survive so much, and while he knew Chris hadn’t exactly pulled out of it yet, he would, just give him time, and he knew Josie’s boys would be okay too…So funny, that there were all these sets of brothers….
* * *
—
And so, there they were, twenty-three years earlier—not in midsummer 1974 when Herman’s daughter Johanna died in a freakish car accident on the streets of Greenwich Village, but autumn 1951, with the Joe Mankiewiczes happily settling into an eleven-room apartment on Park Avenue and the boys sent off to private schools: Tom to St. Bernard’s, Chris to Collegiate. From the start, it seemed that the boys, like many sets of brothers two years apart,*2 had fallen into different grooves: Chris the sloppy underachieving mess, Tom in the do-goody, hard-working scholar role. In later years, in other ways, consciously or not, the boys’ relationship would come to echo that of their father and uncle, with several people suggesting a Herman–Joe dynamic in their ultimate paths. Tom, the younger, became, like his father, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, working on several James Bond movies, the first two Superman movies, and creating and running the popular Hart to Hart television series, while Chris, by many people’s reckoning (especially his own) the more brilliant intellect, had foundered in job after job, angering bosses with his disdain for the niceties of human interaction and completely unable to swallow the “Hollywood bullshit.”
As children, Tom’s and Chris’s estrangement was less pronounced than it would be in later years, but they were never great companions; they read different books, had different interests and friends, and, most seriously, viewed their father and mother in very different ways. While both boys were fascinated by movies, it was Tom who seemed to idolize his dad, and as soon as he was able, he could be found on Joe’s sets. Chris was moodier and took after his mother; he distrusted his father with every ounce of his being; his deep and pronounced love and knowledge of classical music came from Rosa. But in a family steeped in movies, there was almost nothing a boy could do with a devotion to classical music. Though in later years both his father and brother would make a show of bemoaning that Chris had never found his true calling and become, perhaps, some kind of musicologist, at the time Joe mocked Chris mercilessly for the way he swung his arms around pretending to conduct. One relative remembers a typical diatribe Joe hurled at the adolescent Chris in front of guests: “You think you’re Leonard Bernstein just because you throw your arms around like that, you don’t know the first goddamn thing about it.”
The brutality of the comment…It was as if Joe were determined to stick it to his sons, the way Franz had to him and Herman. And while Joe could certainly hide behind the fact that he was as unforgiving of himself as he was of his
two sons, that he never softened his own self-criticism (the movies he’d made were bad, he routinely told friends in New York, they were beneath him; he’d wasted his talents; he should be writing a play…), it didn’t make it any easier to be on the receiving end of such cruelty. To harangue one’s sons and detail their faults was simply par for the Mankiewiczian course. Interestingly, Chris sensed something else at work, a kind of autocratic gene that all family members are born with that endows one with an imagined special insight into the way people should be living their lives. Chris’s favorite title of any Joe Mankiewicz movie was House of Strangers.*3 “It’s funny,” he told me years later, “that a family of writers has such great difficulty communicating with each other. The problem in our family is, everybody wants to tell everybody what they want to tell them, and nobody wants to listen.”
In Chris’s mind, one of Joe’s biggest faults—and Chris was a fan of listing them—was that he never listened: not to his sons and certainly not to Rosa. Because while being yanked out of California was obviously a shock to both boys’ systems, New York didn’t bring any real change in their lives in one crucial way: their mother was still unstable. Ill, sick, crazy, angry—however the problem was defined, it was no easier to live with in New York than it had been in Hollywood, and now, for the first time, perhaps because the apartment was so vast, Joe and Rosa took separate bedrooms. But the boys shared a bedroom, meaning it was even more natural both for Rosa to be alone and for her to come to their room and berate the boys. Classically, each later felt that he was the one most often targeted by his mother’s rages. She would rant and yell, and it was impossible to do anything but sit and take it, no matter that it made everyone miserable and usually exacerbated Tom’s asthma to the point where even after his mother finally left the room and the boys would be alone in the dark, he would be wheezing so loudly he’d keep Chris awake. Chris would ask him to please let him get some sleep, and Tom would go into the bathroom and lie down on the floor, seeing his reflection in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Deeply unsettled by her desperation, Tom sensed his relationship with his mother growing increasingly bizarre, highlighted by her strange proclivity for predicting precisely how, and with whom, her youngest boy would lose his virginity.
Joe at the top of his game
In some families, these two brothers might have become closer than words, bonded by growing up in the same foxhole—but not these particular grandsons of Franz Mankiewicz, who instead became competitors and combatants. Chris and Tom would eye each other suspiciously at the breakfast table, seeing who could sit closer to Dad, and which of them could get him to look up from his paper, on those days when he was even home for breakfast—now that he was running an actual production company, he had less time, or so he would insist, for things like breakfast, lunch, or dinner—and catch the old man’s eye for a moment, perhaps tell him something funny that had happened at school, or maybe a witticism that had been thought of overnight, an idea that had been polished like a gem, to take to the King in the hopes of becoming the favorite.
The contrast between Joe’s personal life and professional life could not have been starker. For here was Joe at the top of the heap at last, cresting on the wave of his greatest success: friends with the smart set, free to do as he pleased in the great city that represented the opposite of everything he hated, and continuing to write and direct literate entertainment for the masses. Of course it may sometimes have been too literate; his first film after All About Eve was the aptly named People Will Talk, a speechifying movie starring Cary Grant as the brilliant Dr. Praetorious, a gynecologist who expounds at length on the virtues of psychiatry, one of Joe’s great interests. Interestingly, the woman in the movie, a pregnant widow who falls for Dr. Praetorious, was played by Jeanne Crain, for whom Joe had developed a strange antipathy, though he’d also cast her in A Letter to Three Wives. (When asked about the curious coincidence of her playing women named Deborah in both movies, Joe said, “I don’t like the name Deborah, and I don’t like Jeanne Crain.”)*4 Watching the film today, you are struck by how unlikely a pair Grant and Crain are, how patronizing he is, and how much the film seems to accept and even approve of the doctor’s pomposity. It is Joe’s own attitude toward women projected on a screen, unmediated by any Eve–Margo dynamic and without the luscious scorn of Addison DeWitt to leaven the proceedings. Dr. Praetorious claims to be fascinated by women—he’s a gynecologist, after all—but Joe cast an actress he loathed in the lead role, and Crain and Grant’s ultimately getting together feels much more like the demands of genre than any true meeting of the characters. As Chris says, “If your conception of conversation is, you’re on and you get to say everything, and everybody else is simply supposed to listen and basically applaud, laugh or whatever…” The movie feels lopsided and inauthentic. Joe’s difficulty in getting close to people had worked when it came to painting a portrait, as in Eve, of people who are admittedly damaged and neurotic and belong to a class of people—show people—who revel in their own hang-ups. But a movie like People Will Talk doesn’t have the built-in excuse of being a portrait of characters who can’t connect. Instead, it shows people not connecting, but thinking they are—haranguing each other with arguments, righteousness, and a sense of aggrievedness, as if the whole world somehow owes them the chance to speak and be heard. It’s not a bad goal, really, but as he talked about his father in later years, Chris loved to quote the old Whistler line: “Conversation is going to be difficult if others insist on talking.”
Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain in People Will Talk (1951)
There’s a peculiar irony at work in Joe’s personal challenge in opening up to people and, more important, allowing others to open up to him, namely that he’d built his professional life and reputation in large part on being so very good at listening. But there’s a huge difference between being a good professional listener, and listening well in real life. When Joe talked with his actors (or more germanely, his actresses), there was a goal: to draw out a performance to help make a great movie. He was masterful with actors and actresses—and, maybe because it was all make-believe, he was also able to reveal more of himself when dealing with them, the wit and warmth that he so often kept hidden. The story of his first meeting with Thelma Ritter is enlightening: After seeing the actress in a tiny part in Miracle on 34th Street, Joe realized he’d spotted “an almost extinct species in our theatrical ecology: the great character comedienne.” He went to New York to interview her. “I walk in nervous,” she said, “and besides I’d cut my finger and it’s all done up in bandages so it sticks out like a barber pole. Joe looks at me, looks at the finger, and says ‘Did you have it wrapped for a gift?’ So of course, I fell in love with him.”*5 Joe’s piercing blue eyes and understanding expression instantly relaxed his actresses. With them, he could calculate, cajole, and manipulate to get what he needed. But when he was at home, with his family, his children, his wife, there was no such goal. The goal was merely to live a good life, which at that point wasn’t something Joe put much stock in.
The value, always, was in the work. And so it was, even more than it had been in Los Angeles, for the Mankiewiczes of Park Avenue. Joe had come to New York with hopes of writing a few plays, and only making films that he wanted to make. He had his chance now to be his own man, and from 1951 onward, he seized it with both hands. He formed a production company, Figaro, named for the happy schemer of opera and literature as well as the French newspaper—and built his professional life into a structure in which he could operate with impunity and absolute power. There were challenges, of course—he had to raise money and sometimes go hat in hand to wealthy patrons who made him feel almost as powerless as he had with Mayer in Hollywood—but for the most part, he was running his own show. He brought on Robbie Lantz, his former agent in Hollywood, to help oversee the company, which in time became something like a second family, another one where he didn’t really have to listen to anyone.
<
br /> But Joe’s creative output in the years after his decision to move to New York yields a few serious questions: First, what of theater? Why did he never try it? Although he did stage a serious, well-regarded interpretation of the opera La Bohème at the Metropolitan Opera in 1952, he never succeeded in writing a play. Why? His own explanation, offered decades later, was glib but revealing: “It’s as if the theater were the one woman I wanted to go to bed with and she’s gonna turn me down.” So he never really asked.
And in film, another question: Why did Joe all but abandon the social comedies, the literate and satirical pieces that had made his reputation? His best films had mirrored and sometimes skewered society wittily and intelligently; why stop? Instead, with his almost unparalleled level of success granting him the ability to write his own ticket, Joe funneled his cinematic energies in the 1950s into an almost dizzying array of genres. He wrote and directed thrillers, musicals, and even Shakespeare over the span of a few years—5 Fingers, Guys and Dolls, and Julius Caesar among them—and in a man who was so closed off personally, it is important to look at these films to try to discern what was going on inside their maker, for the vitality and sheer number of them suggest that it was here that his heart really lay in the 1950s. True, without a strong producer to check his impulses, Joe often ended up indulging himself with longer and talkier scripts. But while it would be churlish to suggest that this second family’s offspring were as dear to him as his own children, there is no denying the care Joe gave his work during this time. Despite the genre switching, the attention paid off. The films, though none are classics on the order of All About Eve, are good, solid professional entertainments.