Competing with Idiots

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Competing with Idiots Page 33

by Nick Davis


  But Hepburn regretted taking the part almost immediately after filming began. Interestingly, she later claimed it was Joe’s poor treatment of Montgomery Clift, the troubled actor playing Joe’s psychoanalytic stand-in Dr. Cukrowicz, that pushed her over the edge. Long tortured over having to hide his own homosexuality, and now addicted to drugs and alcohol after a painful car crash had permanently disfigured his face and nearly ruined his career a few years earlier, Montgomery Clift was a movie actor through and through, and he had difficulty memorizing the long lines the script called for. According to Hepburn, Joe was unrelenting, cruel, and unforgiving toward Clift. (Both Jack Hildyard and Taylor, a friend and confidante of Clift’s for years, disputed Hepburn’s account. They found Joe enormously patient with Clift, an observation supported by Ken Geist, who visited the set and saw Joe calm the actor’s acute anxiety by speaking quietly to him and massaging his neck and shoulders.) More important, Hepburn found her own role so unsympathetic that she wanted to play Violet as insane, perhaps to distance herself from the character. Further, she was upset by the lighting scheme Joe had worked out with Hildyard. Joe decided to make Hepburn, then only fifty-two, look as young as possible when she discussed Sebastian’s life, and then change camera angles and lighting after the truth of his death came out. “I wanted her suddenly to look old,” Joe said. “In other words, the destruction of the legend about Sebastian, her son, destroyed her illusion of youth. Kate sensed what Jack and I were up to…and she didn’t like what I was doing.” It struck Hepburn as somehow uncompassionate—not to her; she was an actress known for her lack of vanity—but to the character herself. Although Joe and Hepburn had worked well together on The Philadelphia Story, and she’d even enjoyed him on Woman of the Year, no matter her disdain for the chauvinistic ending he’d grafted on, by now she had come to the conclusion that Joe Mankiewicz hated women, telling one friend “this director has got it in for women.” Was it possible that Joe was working through his continuing anger at Rosa—for her life, her miseries, the distress she had inflicted on him, as well as her violent death—on his actresses? Hepburn may have thought so, as a legendary, potentially apocryphal story from the set makes clear. It has long been the custom on a movie set to applaud when a leading actor or actress finishes work. This happened on Hepburn’s last day on the set, and she took in the applause of the crew and cast with a relieved smile. Then she made sure to ask one of the production assistants, “Am I really done, are my services truly no longer required?” Upon being told that yes, she was finished on the film, she went to Joe Mankiewicz and, with cast and crew watching in amazement, spat in his face.

  “This director has got it in for women”: Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, and Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer, 1959

  She was not the only one upset by the movie. Tennessee Williams himself publicly criticized the picture, saying that Hepburn and Taylor were miscast and unhappily telling his biographer that “a short morality play, in a lyrical style, was turned into a sensationally successful film that the public thinks was a literal study of such things as cannibalism, madness, and sexual deviation.” Joe himself defended the film by criticizing the source material, saying that the play was “badly constructed and based on the most elementary Freudian psychology.”

  It didn’t matter. The film remains a powerful piece of work six decades later and was a huge hit for Columbia Pictures. Both actresses were nominated for Oscars, though Joe, to his chagrin, was not. Still, with Taylor now one of the world’s most bankable movie stars, and the lure of her in a famous publicity shot, pouting bewitchingly and spilling out of a one-piece white bathing suit on a Spanish beach, the film brought Joe all the way back. After a series of perfectly respectable films, Joe Mankiewicz was now, once again, at the top of his game.

  Did anyone care if the game was solitaire?

  Skip Notes

  *1 Joe’s third wife was named Rosemary; his second was named Rosa, or Rose; yes, this was confusing.

  *2 The difference between Chris and Tom was twenty months, not too far off from Don and Frank’s twenty-six months, or the twenty-two months between Tim and me.

  *3 Joe routinely derided his 1949 film starring Edward G. Robinson, a neo-noir about an Italian-American family whose members all seem motivated not by love but by hate, but it holds up pretty well. Once you get past the hammy mid-century Italian accents (“I do-a what-a I think-a is right!”), the acting is excellent, anchored by Robinson’s controlling, vicious father whose rages and legally questionable business practices have poisoned his four sons. Now that The Godfather and The Sopranos routinely top lists of the greatest screen achievements of the last half century, House of Strangers, about the dissolution of an Italian-American family in the wake of criminal charges against the patriarch, seems ripe for a critical renaissance.

  *4 Why Joe had such an aversion to the actress is hard to discern, as is why he continued to cast her if he disliked her so much; originally he’d cast Anne Baxter to play the role in People Will Talk, but Baxter, ironically, had to give up the role when she became pregnant. “I could only rarely escape the feeling that Jeanne was a visitor to the set,” Joe said of Crain, who had been raised in a Catholic home in Santa Barbara and had been an ice skater before becoming an actress, and who fought fervently for Republican causes in Orange County. Joe found her “very pleasant, very shy, and very devout,” and it’s likely that this sane creature just never responded to Joe in any way. “She was one of the few whose presence among the theater-folk I have never fully understood.”

  *5 The affection was mutual: Joe wrote the part Birdie Coonan in All About Eve for Ritter, and said that she was “that rare performing talent which the writer and/or director must treasure as a fiddler would a Stradivarius.”

  *6 Twenty years later, Mason said that the film was in fact Joe’s last good one, maintaining of Joe-without-Zanuck: “I personally have not seen a Mankiewicz film that appeared to be well directed since then.”

  *7 Even the generally better received Romeo and Juliet in 1936, directed by George Cukor and starring Norma Shearer and the forty-three-year-old Leslie Howard as the star-crossed teenage lovers, had flopped at the box office.

  *8 Short for the German Grossmutti (grandmother).

  *9 Around this time, Joe took his niece Johanna to Romanoff’s for a sixteenth-birthday lunch and explained how women should enter a room: “He said, ‘Now the kind of woman I want you to be is a woman, shoulders back, proud of your body.’ ” My mother paused in recollection. “He was really kind of a pig, a chauvinist…‘Always walk into room as if you are better than anyone in it.’ Which is not my idea of how to walk into a room. My idea,” she said, “is to slouch in…But Joe said, ‘There is no woman I have ever slept with who couldn’t walk into this restaurant right now and I wouldn’t be proud and pleased to see her.’ ” The anecdote is perhaps not the definition of “avuncular.”

  *10 Poitier testified to Joe’s enormous skill in getting him, an inexperienced newcomer, to “unact.” Again and again, in interviews and tributes decades later, Poitier would say some version of “Joe Mankiewicz is totally responsible for whatever success I had in motion pictures.” For in addition to casting him in his first major role in No Way Out, Joe saw to it that Zoltan Korda considered Poitier for the lead role in his screen version of Cry, the Beloved Country the following year. Taken together, the two pictures made Poitier a star.

  *11 Another echo of his older brother: “Mank,” Orson Welles once declared of Herman, “always needed a villain.”

  *12 “I put it you, your honor, my Lords,” Chris says decades later, lapsing into an imitation of a nineteenth-century British barrister, “that someone who was genuinely concerned about his wife would have jumped into a car, or hired a car, or in some way gotten his ass up to Mount Kisco to find out what was wrong with her. Instead he dillydallied
for many hours, finding no one except your mother, whom he finally pressured into going with him.”

  *13 The note, which according to The New York Times of September 28, 1958, was largely indecipherable, though police were quoted as saying, “Mrs. Mankiewicz indicated that ‘she was tired,’ ” soon vanished.

  *14 Chris had himself been in and out of therapy for much of his teen years, ending it when he arrived home not long after one appointment to find his father irate: “How could you tell your doctor that?!” Chris decided that any doctor with a direct line to his father was probably not one he’d care to visit.

  *15 Still, on one occasion, Alex heard her father muttering to himself that his relationship with Rosa had been the most significant of his life.

  *16 There is more than a whiff of Stalin-era whitewashing of history here, ironic for several reasons, not the least of which is that Herman had died on the same day as the Russian dictator. This odd coincidence prompted a classic Mankiewiczian remark from my uncle Don, who had broken the news to his younger brother Frank over the phone: “Well, Pop died this morning, but so did Joe Stalin, so we split the double-header.”

  *17 Echoes of Rosa’s agony surely reverberated for Joe.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A RIVER IN EGYPT

  You know it’s possible, Octavian, that when you die, you will die without ever having been alive.

  —Cleopatra

  In the Maine house where my father now lives there are two drawers full of old photographs, in one of which is a white leather photo album full of eight-by-ten pictures of the wedding day of Johanna Mankiewicz and her husband, Peter Davis. The photos are all in black-and-white. Two nights earlier, the director George Cukor, who had become closer to Goma since Herman’s death, threw the young couple a dinner dance, and many of the attendees at the wedding are Hollywood luminaries of one kind or another; the pictures are full of famous or at least semi-famous names: you can see a Selznick or two, a Hayward or two, maybe even a Fonda. Though most of the photographs are staged, as was the custom of the time, the actual pictures are surprisingly candid-looking, almost as if the camera had been snapped a split second too early or too late. In an almost astonishingly high percentage of the pictures my mother has her eyes closed.

  It was Sunday, September 13, 1959.

  In one of the pictures, Mom is walking in on the arm of her uncle Joe. She is on his right, smiling beneath her veil, and Joe is leaning down toward her with a complaisant smile, as if confidently checking that all is going well on his niece’s perfect day. It is a warm picture, and easy to imagine, had things gone a little differently, that either or both of them might have framed the picture to keep in a prominent spot. My mother loved her uncle, he had truly done everything one could have hoped for after Herman’s death. The checklist was easy to run down; he’d paid for Wellesley, sent her on a glorious trip to Europe the summer after graduation, and given her a delicious twenty-first birthday present: charge accounts at all the major New York department stores. “He was wonderful to me,” she said. For more seriously, emotionally, he’d intervened when, at the age of nineteen, she’d become engaged to a man whom just about everyone thought was wrong for her,*1 and eventually he helped her extricate herself from that situation with such grace and courtesy*2 that now, among the literally hundreds of telegrams that greeted the young couple after the ceremony was one from that former fiancé.

  Mom and Uncle Joe on her wedding day, September 13, 1959

  She was grateful too to Uncle Joe, because she knew it wasn’t easy for him. After the events of last autumn—the word “suicide” would never be used in Joe’s presence, any more, for that matter, than “Rosa” would—Josie had moved for a few months into the Park Avenue apartment, where Joe went through what she later termed a “gay Merry Widower” period, Uncle and Niece seeming to delight in each other’s company, capped with his buying her a huge television set for Christmas. Then, when he went off to Europe for a month to clear his head and returned to sell the apartment and make a new start in a huge townhouse on East Seventy-first Street, she’d continued to serve as his unofficial hostess. Though he was not a man easy with his feelings, she believed his heart was in the right place, and she often remembered something her father said of Joe: “Uncle Joe is a nice man as long as he’s reminded he is—but he needs to be reminded.”

  Her wedding day was certainly an occasion to reflect on what a wonderful surrogate father he had been. She and two of her bridesmaids would always remember the day their sophomore year at Wellesley when the school held a Father’s Day. “I invited him,” Josie said later, “and he came and he spent I would say ten straight hours with a bunch of giggling crazy girls. It was just marvelous…It meant everything to me…He’d been decent and wonderful and took a large group of my friends out. Unostentatiously, not looking for credit.” He did it, she said, “out of love.” It remained her fondest memory of him.

  But too, there’d always been his strange insistence—and Josie sensed it had to do with why he’d acted as he had that horrible afternoon in Mount Kisco—on her knowing the truth about her father. “He was very concerned that I know the real facts of life. It was crucial to him that I understand that my father was this bad gambler and a big drinker, and he was constantly telling these stories. That [my father] was deeply unhappy, was the thing I had to understand.” Sometimes, it seemed downright inappropriate, as with Joe’s telling her why Herman didn’t cheat on Sara. Joe told her that Herman wanted to sleep around, but he couldn’t. “He insisted that my father was a Victorian in the worst ways.” But nastiest of all was the afternoon when Joe showed his niece one of the few things that had been saved from the fire that had destroyed most of his files: a sheet of unpaid IOUs Herman had given Joe. “And that he had saved it to show to the daughter of the man who had written them [all those years before]…Why? Why not let go of those?” Josie sensed Joe’s deep need, even now, to show the world who was who in the Mankiewicz family. Would what she called the “great resentment and great hostility” ever go away?

  Wedding Day: Goma, Mom and Dad, and Erna Stenbuck, née Mankiewicz, 1959

  Still, Uncle Joe had supported her in every conceivable way, and there was no denying how good it was of him to come all this way and orchestrate the wedding so beautifully. He had been busy finishing his latest film, Josie knew—Suddenly, Last Summer, which she came to regard as the best movie Joe had done since All About Eve, probably due to the fact that its subject matter—madness, really, and lies and deception—was almost as close to Joe as the theater was. But more than his professional success was his impressive sense of control; when he arrived at the Jaffes’ for the wedding rehearsal, he immediately took command, directing the proceedings and shunting aside the poor rabbi, who in Joe’s view had gotten it all wrong. Joe decided that the bride and groom should not face away from their guests. “You!” he had barked at the rabbi. “Who do you think these people have come to see, Rabbi, you?” Joe instructed Johanna and Peter to turn around and face the guests, with the rabbi’s back to the gathering, facing the swimming pool.

  But something else distressed Johanna as she and Joe walked in. She thought back to earlier in the year, in the spring, when she had told Joe that she really was getting married this time, and to whom. She knew, or she thought she knew, that Joe liked Peter. This young man had everything someone like Joe would want; he was whip smart and had graduated from Harvard at twenty, his father was a screenwriter who’d worked with Joe at M-G-M, his late mother had been the novelist and screenwriter Tess Slesinger, and he was clearly a principled and intelligent young man with a promising future in journalism. There was really nothing not to like about Peter Davis, or so his besotted bride-to-be felt.

  And yet. There it was, when Josie told her uncle of her plans, the grimace that he couldn’t prevent from taking over his face. And it was so unfair, what Uncle Joe had said.
Thin? The word made it seem like Peter would never amount to anything, it was so patronizing, and wrong, just plain wrong—and why? Because Peter was bad at word games? Because he had told her he wouldn’t come over if the television was on? That may have been snobbish—hell, it was snobbish, but Joe was the one who hated television, whose dismissal of it in All About Eve had been so devastating. This is a serious, profound man I’m about to marry, Joe is wrong, anyone could see that, and it was desperately unfair. “I like Peter,” Joe had said, tapping his pipe. “He’s a perfectly nice guy, but he’s a little…” She couldn’t even think about it.

  But still: Just what the hell did he mean? Thin? Am I marrying an envelope?

  As Joe escorted her to the rabbi, along the side of a beautiful pool overlooking the entire town, the town over which her uncle and her father and their friends, now gathered here to celebrate her, held such dominion, she walked happily toward her groom. This is a man I can live with. This is a man of smarts, of ambition, of drive…Years later, she would describe her husband, who himself employed a jaw clench not unlike her uncle’s, as always looking like he just stepped from a bracing shower…Ready to move forward into the world, to attack, to achieve…And of course Johanna Mankiewicz knew that some people weren’t in fact like that. Some people are happy with what they have. They don’t push and prod and seek always the next big thing, the next accomplishment, book, novel, assignment, job, movie—they take what is given them and form their lives cheerfully and without complaint. But she and her almost-husband came from stock where such behavior was virtually unthinkable, and as Josie stepped forward toward her groom, Joe watched with a grin, then resumed his place in the audience, having directed his niece in the way that she clearly wanted him to.

 

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