Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  Alex knew the bare facts: Johanna had survived Franz and ended up in a nursing home in California, living there for three years until her death. Herman and Joe had rarely visited. But where had Johanna been buried? Luckily Joe’s final assistant, a woman who knew next to nothing about movies or Joe’s actual work, had kept immaculate files, which told the tale. Johanna’s body had been sent back to New York and been buried in a large Jewish graveyard in Queens. Franz had been buried in Mount Tremper in the Catskills, in Ulster County, New York, where he and Johanna had spent a few summers with their children, on a mountain overlooking a stream, now the site of a Buddhist monastery. Herman’s ashes had been scattered there too. But Johanna, Alex learned, ended up in the vast borough of Queens, where she had never lived, amid the most religious of all Jewish graves.

  One day in the mid-1990s, Alex and Rosemary went out to Queens to look for the grave, stopping first in the caretaker’s hut at the edge of the cemetery, where the man blew dust off a huge leather tome, opened it to find the plot number, and told them, “I have to warn you. That grave hasn’t been tended to in some time.” Rosemary and Alex made their way down the rows of religious gravestones, simple slabs for the most part, and finally found an old stone headstone, ivy wrapped around the name, still legible despite decades of exposure to the elements. The original Johanna Mankiewicz, a woman who had insisted on a Jewish burial, resting till eternity next to strangers. To another family, it might have seemed an unfathomable mystery. But, as Alex knew, no Mankiewicz is buried next to any other Mankiewicz.

  Joe may not have loved where his industry was going, but younger directors never failed to pay homage: with Martin Scorsese, at a restaurant in New York, 1991

  The family members are buried, as they lived, separately.

  * * *

  —

  The distance in the family and the endless striving, as well as the emphasis on career above all else, would last to the bitter end, a sad fact which was borne out when Tom died of cancer in 2010 at the age of sixty-eight. The way Tom’s death was greeted by a London paper was emblematic of the whole competitive mess, Franz’s legacy in a nutshell, for the second sentence of Tom’s obituary, after listing his work on the James Bond and Superman films, read: “Such credits could hardly rival the achievements of his father, Joseph Mankiewicz, who won four Oscars, including two for writing and directing All About Eve (1950).” As if that wasn’t bad enough, the article continued: “And even Joe Mankiewicz remains overshadowed by Herman Mankiewicz, Tom’s uncle, who cowrote Citizen Kane (1941) with Orson Welles.” Of course, such a chain could go on forever. Herman was overshadowed by Welles, Welles was overshadowed by Mozart, Mozart by Shakespeare, Shakespeare by Jesus, etc., etc….

  That competition would not only poison a person’s life, but also his death, seemed painfully unfair—and then I talked to Chris. Having spoken to them separately for the book already, I knew this set of Mankiewicz brothers hadn’t been terribly close, but I had no idea the depth of the resentments that lingered through the decades. The same afternoon my father called me with the news about Tom, I’d gotten a voice message from Chris, asking me to call. When I reached him, I said that I knew why he was calling, I’d heard about Tom. There was a brief pause on the other end of the phone, then Chris said, “Dammit! My thunder’s been stolen.” We kept talking for a while, and Chris said, “Of course I know it’s terribly boring to get a call like this out of the blue, telling you that someone you didn’t know very well and didn’t really care about has died.” I started to object: I liked Tom a lot, I may not have gotten a chance to see him very much—but Chris cut me off. With exquisite timing and classic Mankiewicz humor, he said, “No, I was talking about my feelings for the guy.”

  Joe with Rosemary and actor John Candy on the set of Delirious, directed by Tom Mankiewicz, 1990

  So that’s what it came down to, this horrible nonstop competitiveness. Was there no room for compassion, for caring? The drive to achieve, to compete, to make jokes and demonstrate your own brilliance, at the expense not just of the idiots you work with, but the entire industry, your own family, your brother…It can lead to an ambition that is founded on absolutely nothing but itself.

  * * *

  —

  In his final years, paralyzed and unable to produce, Joe found he was competing not just with his own high standards, but with his own past successes, and with each passing year, even the modest Sleuth came to seem like something he could never top.*7 And so the silence continued, and so too the almost hermetic existence of a man still young enough to travel, to write, to teach, and to attend film festivals. He sat for interviews, was the willing subject of retrospectives and television profiles, traveled with Rosemary and Alex and other old friends, and ventured forth on occasion to teach at programs such as the nearby Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. But his life was more and more circumscribed. Joe had long criticized the “ivory ghetto” of Hollywood for having little relationship to the real world outside it, but as he retreated more and more into himself in his Bedford estate, he was as isolated as anyone, his interaction with others, which he had never greatly valued, at an all-time low.

  Joe’s later years were filled with honors—here he receives the Erasmus Award in the city of Rotterdam in 1984.

  He settled comfortably into the role of a man whose bitterness was reaching new depths. Interviewers routinely referred to him now as cranky or irascible, though some professed profound agreement with his scathing attacks on current films, filmmakers, and filmmaking theories: Joe claimed, “I could blow out of my nose” better stuff than Woody Allen’s and Neil Simon’s output; Spielberg’s and Lucas’s movies were “a series of visual explosions that hurt my ears and give me a headache”; and “There’s nothing new about the director with his jacket draped over his shoulder and the pseudo-philosophical cop-outs—‘What do you mean, where are the tennis balls? Life is a tennis game without tennis balls…” He’d greet interviewers outside his big brick house, accompanied by his black Labrador, Cassius, still lean and hungry, and run through the contours of his life and career (though always careful to remind them that his own autobiography would be forthcoming, they shouldn’t expect to be able to capture his whole life—Geist had tried, and it was impossible, the book was excrement). He felt it could fairly be said that he “was there in the beginning, and that [he] saw the rise, peak, collapse, and the end of the talking picture.” He refused to speak of Cleopatra by name, calling it only “the humiliating experience,” but in the next breath he’d point to the house and say, “It bought us this!” Still, he wasn’t shy about sharing regrets. He told one interviewer he’d had “more talent than I’ve played fair with—I’ve pissed away a lot of talent.” And though he said it was far too early (“by several generations”) to say that film was Art, he was firm about what he had tried to do in his own work, namely “look at the truth of the milieu in which I live and work—look at it wittily.” That was the important thing: “You have to look at it with wit, because otherwise you’d cry.” The world remained full of idiots. We were all now “living in an age of illiteracy,” and he loved to quote Dr. Johnson’s famous dictum, which he said his father had drilled into him early on: “Relieve your mind of cant.” Don’t think foolishly.

  To the last, he was proud to play the snob, telling visitors that he wasn’t “all that involved with the unwashed and the unwanted. Granted, they’ve got their problems—they’re dreadful, and I want to help in any way I can. But I don’t want to write about them…Why must we always write about the lowest common denominator of humanity?”

  He took particular, wicked delight in one idiocy that he was proud to have played a role in birthing, a theatrical award called the Sarah Siddons Award, so named after the award at the center of All About Eve, given annually to the best performance by an actress on stage in Chicago (“that meat-oriented metropolis,” Joe called it, “where the
winds of culture blow cold”). Had they so totally missed the point of the movie? Did they not see that he had built his greatest film around a creature who was devoted to earning “this meaningless totem,” with “its implications as a sort of cockamamie immortality,” as an object of satire? “Could anyone conceivably have been taken in by such an ‘Award’?…It would seem,” he concluded about this real-life award that had gone to the likes of Helen Hayes, Carol Channing, and most delectably All About Eve’s own Celeste Holm, “that the idiocies of theater-folk within their world share with the idiocies of the outsiders, ‘the private people,’ within their world, one common characteristic: they are continuing, self-perpetuating idiocies.”

  It was during this period that I met Joe for the only time as an adult. Whatever his feelings about awards, this one was being given at the French consulate in Manhattan, and I tagged along with my father. In the years since, I’ve wished to go back to that moment and talk more with him, or somehow download my brain to find the memories of the day that must be stored there. But all I remember is Claudette Colbert at the door with the French ambassador, and the elegant, short, and pudgy older man who at that point was just my distant Great Uncle Joe, making a few choice, funny remarks when presented with the award.*8 Afterwards, Joe looked happy and a little cuddly. What lingers most of all from the afternoon was a warmth and what seemed for all the world like a gentle authenticity.

  Where we came in: Joe with Rosemary at the French consulate on the 1988 afternoon when I remet him

  I saw, in other words, what Joe wanted everyone to see, a seemingly happy and benign man with a keen intellect and a quick wit.

  There was no sense then, that this was a man who was cut off from others, that he had been driven so strenuously to compete, to win, to defeat anything and everything he ever came into contact with that he’d tied himself in so many knots and for well over a decade hadn’t written a word. No sense of the storm that had always raged, if not inside him, at least around him, even as he fought so desperately to keep it away. No sense of the man who was telling one of his relatives that he’d started ingesting large quantities of codeine, just because he could and because it helped stave off pain.

  And yet I have one other memory of the man, vivid and frankly sensual. There was, quite simply, a smell about my Great Uncle Joe that afternoon at the French consulate that I have never been able to shake; more than mere halitosis, a sour and dyspeptic odor was emanating from him that had the feel of something rotten, something deep within the man consuming itself.

  So in walking back through Central Park with my father that afternoon, and hearing the answer as to why exactly we had never really seen Joe while I was growing up, I was more than prepared to be judgmental and unsparing in my thoughts about the old guy. When Dad told me about Rosa’s suicide, and Mom’s feeling that Joe had set her up to find her aunt’s dead body, I was quick to write him off as an unfeeling brute. And heck, I figured, maybe that’s why the old man was so stenchy: he had no soul.

  But who was the soulless one? The accomplished writer-director who had brought millions to laughter, tears, and a better understanding of the human condition, or the entitled youth who had learned all the wrong lessons from his moderately celebrated relatives and so, though he had no idea what to do with his own life, considered himself superior to everyone he came across, even one of the very men who had planted this unearned arrogance? Not for years, decades—not until I realized that only by learning as much as I possibly could about Joe and his older brother, reading through the accounts of both their lives as well as hundreds and hundreds of pages of transcripts of interviews conducted with people who had actually known them and spent time with them, and then allowing the facts and stories to merge with my own imagination, could I approach fathoming the complexity of these two men. As Joe said, “I don’t think anybody exists as one pure note of music, or one color—people are fragmented.”

  Nothing was as simple as I’d thought.

  * * *

  —

  What he missed most were the actresses. Seeing them unsure of themselves in a scene, he would go to them, and quietly take them aside, look into their eyes with his own crystal blues, and softly ask them what was wrong. The entire apparatus of the movie set would be whirring and humming around them, but it didn’t matter. Everything else would come to a standstill when Joe worked with an actress. What he loved most, what he missed most, was the feeling that the two of them were the only people in the world. When he was with an actress, or an actor, time would simply stop. And when he’d made the bond with them—relaxed Linda, soothed Bette’s nerves, made sure Liz knew what she was supposed to do, calmed Monty down enough to at least get the poor man through the next take—he’d step back behind the camera, and in the same tone of voice he’d been using all along, just say, “Whenever you’re ready.” Not for Joe the booming, unnecessary and terrifying “Action!” A simple nod of the head to the camera operator to start rolling, and then a word or two to the actors, and the make-believe would begin.

  * * *

  —

  Joe died in February 1993, four years after I’d seen him last. Even though I’d dismissed him as second-rate Herman and barely considered him a relative, still I preened at the obituary on the front page of the New York Times, thrilling at the phrase “literate skeptic of the American cinema.” A few days later, at the funeral in Joe’s adopted hometown in Bedford, New York, I was pleasantly diverted by the sight of the elegant Hume Cronyn mourning so openly, crying and walking slowly through the crowd, though I was somewhat chagrined when I nearly knocked the old guy down the front steps of the church. (“Aren’t we Jewish?” one of the cousins asked as we left the church and headed back to Joe’s house.)

  There, the house filled with Joe’s cronies (and Cronyns) milling about, exchanging pleasantries and memories. With the stone fireplace and half-staircase, and the well-dressed guests from another era, it was almost as if the party in All About Eve had never ended, just mellowed a bit through the decades.

  At one point in the afternoon, I wandered off down the hall to Joe’s study and found myself standing alone with the four Oscars and the musty smell of decades of pipe smoke. Looking around at the mementos, I marveled at the lack of respect Joe had received from his family—no one seemed to like him very much, or treat him like what he so obviously was: one of the most successful movie makers of the twentieth century. And as I stood there, having accepted that my future would inevitably lie in some of the same fields that Joe had seemed to conquer to so much effect in the outside world—and so little in his own family—I realized that whether I wanted to or not, I would of course be competing with Joe as surely as he had with Herman. There was no avoiding it.

  But then something caught my eye, on a big mahogony desk: Joe’s Rolodex.

  It was opened, oddly, to Paul Newman’s name and number, neatly typed. It was exquisitely suggestive—had Joe been on the verge of a comeback, a movie with Paul Newman, when he died? I looked through the Rolodex—so many luminaries, so many well-known people, accomplished people in the arts—and then I realized that quite instinctively I was looking up my own name.

  It was there. My name, my address. The electric jolt that ran through my body cannot be overstated. I wandered back down the hall to rejoin the party (flipping the Rolodex away from my name first), bursting idiotically with the image of Uncle Joe instructing his secretary to type up a card with my name and address and phone number. He cared!

  “It was all over in about an hour”: Joe in his study

  I thought back to the cuddly old man with the pipe at the French consulate, and wished to God I’d known who he really was. I realized now that one of the reasons I’d always rooted for Herman in thinking about the two brothers was because he’d had a family—a wife, two sons, a daughter—whom he must have cared about, more than he might ever have admitted. His life was full of strug
gles and unpleasantness, and his desires to do something else, anything else, had been pronounced and even legendary, but what he did do, what was undeniable, was create a family, and out of that family had come my uncles, and my cousins, and my mother, and my brother, and me.

  But Joe had done the same thing. Watching Rosemary, speaking to her for this book, feeling her passionate devotion to Joe, seeing the wisdom in Tom’s declaration that being with Rosemary had added ten years to Joe’s life, hearing my mom on tape, despite all her problems with Joe, say “Rosemary’s just the best thing that’s happened to him…” And sensing Alex’s care and love for her father’s memory…Feeling in my bones the genuine love that emanates off the thousands of photographs boxed up in a storage cage in Rosemary’s nursing home…It was real. In those final years, decades really, with his work at a virtual dead end, what was sustaining him if not family? Joe loved his wife and daughter to the end, in whatever way he could; it was inarguable.

  And maybe that was the best the Mankiewiczes could do, this house of strangers—we’d live separately, die separately, be buried separately, but through it all, if we were lucky, the people we decided to spend our lives with, our friends and husbands and wives and children, we would try to curb our Franz-like tendencies to turn everything into a contest, resist the urge to label everyone else an idiot if they disagreed with us, and do what we could, if possible, to let people in, behind the armor and the wit.

  * * *

  —

  Joe Mankiewicz was not a religious man, and when he used the word epiphany one autumn day in 1992 at the age of eighty-three, he did so with a gently self-chiding laugh. But there was no denying what had happened to him that afternoon, and Alex was moved and almost honored to be there to hear about it. The season had been an unusually cold one, and Joe, who had recently returned from a trip to Europe, had been out for a brief walk with the dog that afternoon, on the gentle country roads around his house in Bedford. When he came back into the house, his cheeks were ruddy, and he told his daughter he’d had an epiphany. He shook his head with a kind of dazed expression and said that he finally realized he’d done some good things in his life.