My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

  I could hear Betty's voice in the background, warning him: “Bogie…”

  “Come on up,” he said quickly.

  It was a wonderful brunch. They were both so kind to me and such fun. When Betty wrote her autobiography By Myself, she inscribed a copy to me: “Tom. Remember Rome…Love, Betty.” By the way, the Excelsior Hotel is kind of near the train station. Say…two miles away.

  Meeting a Killer

  During the shooting, Dad had an important meeting in Paris on a weekend and took me with him. We stayed at the Georges V on the Champs-Elysées. I toured the city while he took care of his business. The next morning we were in the lobby about to check out when a voice made Dad turn: “Joe? Joe!” It was a shortish, distinguished-looking elderly man with long gray hair, wearing a fur coat.

  “Hello, Felix!” Dad replied. They exchanged a hug. I was introduced. Felix wanted us to have dinner with him that night, but Dad explained we were on our way back to Rome.

  As Felix started to walk away, Dad suddenly took my wrist and squeezed it tightly. “He's going to turn around. Remember his face.” I nodded. “Felix!” Dad called out. The man turned. “So good to see you again!”

  Felix smiled and walked off. Dad looked down at me. “That was Prince Felix Yusupov. The man who killed Rasputin.”

  I later learned about Rasputin, the “Mad Monk,” while reading about the Russian Revolution. Dad had met and known Yusupov in Hollywood at MGM in the thirties when the film Rasputin was made, starring John Barrymore. What better technical advisor could there have been on the film than the man who engineered his death?

  Full Circle with David Lean

  On another occasion (I believe Chris may have been with us, on vacation), we drove to Venice, which Dad wanted us to see. He also wanted to say hello to his friend David Lean, who was directing a film there starring another friend, Katharine Hepburn. It was called Summertime. I remember watching the shooting near the Grand Canal. When they wrapped for the morning, we all had lunch at the legendary Harry's Bar.

  More than thirty years later I had a house in Kenya, having been lured there by Stefanie Powers, who knew it well through her relationship with William Holden (more about Bill later). She had and still has a beautiful home on the Mount Kenya Game Ranch, which Bill founded with his partner, Don Hunt. Inside the ranch's property sat the world-famous Mount Kenya Safari Club, also founded by Bill and several others. The superb British actor John Hurt had purchased a house there as well. It was during the Christmas holidays. Stefanie, Don and Iris Hunt, John and Donna Hurt, and I were about to leave by four-wheel drive for a game camp in the Northern Frontier District. The night before we left, David Lean showed up at Don's house, having just been married, at eighty-four, for the sixth time. He was going to take his new wife on an aerial tour of Kenya with his favorite female bush pilot, All-Weather Heather. We started talking at Don's bar. David wanted to know all about Dad, who was also eighty-four at the time. He had a quick smile, a sharp mind, and a gruffness about him that I later found out was at least partially put on. I took him to task politely for using the credit “A Film by David Lean” when he hadn't written the screenplay. Surely Robert Bolt's writing in Lawrence of Arabia was one of the principal virtues of that magnificent film.

  “But don't you see, my dear Tom, that by the time I've finished fussing and tweaking the script, the camera, and the actors, it is a film by David Lean.” Case closed.

  Stefanie and John Hurt were sitting a few feet away while we talked, listening with elephant ears and joining in the conversation from time to time. David feigned irritation. He was publicly famous for his supposed contempt for actors, although he certainly cast wonderful ones. At one point he turned to John Hurt and said, “You know, with all the money we pay you people, the least you could do is shut up once in a while.” Wow. He turned back to me: “You know, that's why I loved Bill Holden so. You could talk to him for hours and never get the slightest indication that he was an actor.”

  David's current passion was to make a film of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Warner Brothers had only agreed to put up half the money. My little production company had a bungalow at Warners then. He asked me about the executives there. Why only half the money? I said: “My guess would be that it's going to be a very expensive film and at your age they're wondering whether or not you've lost it. If the film's a flop, their exposure will be cut in half, and if it's a hit, they'll say they always knew it would be and that's why they were the first to put up money for the legendary David Lean.”

  David grinned: “You do know this business, don't you.” Then he said something quite touching. “When you get back to the States and see Joe, tell him that at our age we should direct a film together. I'll do all the wide bits and he can do those little sophisticated things he does so well.”

  I told Dad. He smiled and said, “Actually, that's not such a bad idea.”

  Two postscripts on David Lean. First, my assistant at the time (and for twenty-five years) was Ann Ford Stevens, née Ann Ford, daughter of Cecil Ford, a legendary British production manager who did Bridge on the River Kwai with Lean. When I told David, he grew instantly nostalgic. “Annie? Dear little Annie…is now your…my goodness…”

  “Write her a note,” I said. “She'd be so thrilled.”

  “Oh, no, dear boy, I simply don't do that sort of thing.”

  During our long conversation I asked him several times again. Just jot down a greeting to her. No luck. The next day our group took off on Christmas safari. When I returned after New Year's, there was a handwritten note waiting for me at my house. It was from David Lean, addressed to Annie Stevens. She still has it.

  I still had my bungalow at Warners in the early eighties. Steven Spielberg had one nearby. I was helping him out with the script of Gremlins, a film he was executive producing for his company. One day he came into my office and told me he was going to present the Best Director award at the Oscars. I was surprised, since the Academy (in my opinion) had treated him rather shabbily up to that point. In spite of his great films, he was still regarded by

  some as an upstart. How could, for example, The Color Purple be nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, and two Best Supporting Actresses, and Steven not be nominated? If it was such a good film, surely the director must have had something to do with it. Steven explained: “David Lean is nominated for A Passage to India. At his age he may never make another film. In case he wins, I want to be the one who hands him the Oscar.” That's the kind of reverence in which Lean was properly held by every generation of filmmakers.

  The Far-from-Reclusive Mr. Hughes

  The Barefoot Contessa received four Oscar nominations, including the statuette awarded to Edmond O'Brien for Best Supporting Actor. Dad called it his “best bad movie.” It was about a megalomaniac millionaire/tycoon/film producer, based on the real-life character of Howard Hughes. Ava Gardner was an actress who rises from obscurity to stardom, and Bogart was her washed-up director who'd seen better days. O'Brien played Oscar Muldoon, the press agent, a crude version of George Sanders's Addison DeWitt in All About Eve. Roles like these usually delivered the bulk of Dad's acerbic cynicism, especially about show business, and in both cases delivered Oscars to the actors as well.

  The Howard Hughes character in the film was unmistakable. At the time, Hughes kept different women waiting for him in different places on a nightly basis in case he wanted to join them, all conveniently “under contract.” When the Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida seemed destined to become a star, Hughes brought her to California, offering a fat contract, and reportedly kept her a virtual prisoner in a rented house for days. When he finally showed up, she bashed him in the head with a vase and left. This incident is reenacted in the film when Ava Gardner bops Warren Stevens under the same circumstances. (It was further repeated much later in The Aviator, Martin Scorsese's film about Hughes.)

  Dad knew Howard Hughes well in the thirties. After all, Hughes had bought the righ
ts to The Philadelphia Story for his then paramour Katharine Hepburn. He was far from reclusive at the time, having affairs with many actresses and being conspicuously visible about town. By the early fifties he'd changed, leading a much more secretive life. Dad and Mother were in L.A. shortly before Contessa started shooting. As usual, Dad hadn't let his script be widely circulated. Only a chosen few had read it. One night, he got a phone call. It was Howard Hughes. He wanted to see Dad and would send over a car and driver to get him. Dad figured out that somehow Hughes had read or gotten wind of the script. He was privately furious, but agreed to meet him. Mother was terrified. Who knew what Hughes would do? He was a crazy man. Why did Dad have to go, why didn't Hughes come over to see him? Dad told her to calm down: “Howard's not going to kill me, I promise you.”

  The limousine arrived. It took Dad to an unfinished section of a freeway past red warning cones that had been pushed over to the side. The limo stopped. Another limo arrived and flashed its lights. Dad left his car and joined Hughes, who immediately came to the point. He wanted Dad to drastically revise the character of the producer and totally eliminate the scene where he was hit in the head with the vase.

  “I'll do what I can, Howard,” Dad said.

  “That's all I'm asking for,” Hughes replied.

  Dad exited the car and was driven home. He never changed a word of the script and never heard from Hughes again.

  There's one line in the film that I always thought succinctly summed up Dad's attitude toward the motion picture industry. It's in a scene where Bogart has just screened Gardner's first film for a group of movie exhibitors. Their names are Mr. Black, Mr. Brown, Mr. Green, Mr. White, and so on. They like the film and agree to show it. “Gentlemen,” says Bogart, “it's a wonderful art we're doing business in.”

  Back in New York

  After we returned to New York from Rome, it was clear that Mother's situation wasn't improving. She was under the care of an eminent psychiatrist, but at that time there seemed to be no proper drugs available to alleviate her condition. I finally gathered the courage to ask Dad the question that Chris and I had been asking ourselves for so long: Why didn't they simply get a divorce? Why torture each other on an almost nightly basis with no end in sight? Dad explained as much as he had to, without any visible emotion. A divorce would mean she'd get automatic custody (especially in those days) of Chris and me, and he couldn't permit us to live in a household with someone that unstable, mother or not. He could go to court to have her declared mentally incompetent, but that would be a crushing public humiliation that he was unwilling to put her through. Obviously, it would have been almost equally uncomfortable for him, but he didn't go into that. For his entire life, if Dad didn't want to discuss something, it simply wasn't discussed. There was an impenetrable locked door in the man that would open only as far as he wanted to let it.

  La Bohème

  Mother was a huge opera fan. Some nights after a few drinks she would listen to one at top volume, usually a romantic tragedy such as Tosca, and preferably with an emotional star turn by a diva such as Maria Callas. She and Dad traveled in all strata of New York society and had made the acquaintance of the great Metropolitan Opera impresario Rudolf Bing. The family would go to the Met from time to time, eventually sitting in Bing's private box. All of a sudden, the project was on: Dad would direct a new production of La Bohème. It would be in English; Bing wanted to broaden opera's appeal, and Dad agreed. He'd always been obsessed with the idea of writing and directing for the theater, as evidenced by All About Eve. Staging an opera at the Met would be personally important for him, bring the right kind of notoriety and respect, and show that no matter how good his films were, he was more than just a movie guy.

  The first problem he faced was that he didn't read music. So that Dad could familiarize himself with La Bohème, the opera boomed throughout our apartment on a daily basis until everyone in the family knew it by heart. To this day you can drop a needle at any point during the four acts and I'll start to sing along without missing a beat. Dad was now free to concentrate entirely on directing since the piece was totally familiar to him.

  Opening night was a genuine success. The English lyrics by songwriter Howard Dietz were solid and easily flowing with only a few forced, wince- inducing rhymes. The cast was superb. It included the great tenor Richard Tucker, the popular and beautiful coloratura Patrice Munsel, and Robert Merrill, the reigning lyric baritone of his day, forever famous in New York for his full-throated version of the National Anthem at Yankee Stadium. All forms of theater have their own particular conventions, as Dad quickly found out when he was led onto the stage and joined the cast for a standing ovation. He looked down into the orchestra pit and gestured for the conductor, Alberto Erede, to join them.

  “Alberto!” he called out. “Come up, Alberto!” Erede didn't budge.

  Merrill leaned in and yelled into Dad's ear: “He answers to Maestro!”

  Dad yelled, “Maestro!” gesturing again. Erede came up at once.

  Dad's production of La Bohème lasted for more than a decade at the Met. It had wonderful, modern, and inventive directorial touches. Merrill tried to get him to direct a production of Otello in which he was to play Iago, but Dad decided to quit opera while he was ahead. Next stop, Broadway? It never happened. Despite his near worship for the theater, only a few faint attempts materialized. According to Moss Hart, when he visited his dear friend and coplaywright George S. Kaufman, who was terminally ill in the hospital, Kaufman looked at him and said, “Don't worry, I'm not going to die until Joe Mankiewicz writes his first play.”

  When Moss Hart was directing the classic musical My Fair Lady, he gave a young actress what I consider to be the ultimate piece of direction. She played one of the maids who greeted Julie Andrews when she returned triumphantly from the ball and sang “I Could Have Danced All Night.” They were out of town, putting the number on its feet for the first time. Moss told the maids, “You can fuss about her as the music begins, then gradually make your way out through the side doors, leaving Julie alone to sing.”

  One of the maids was a through-and-through Method actress, the Actors Studio being all the rage then. “But I wouldn't leave,” she told Moss. “I'd want to hear all about it. I'd have no motivation to go.”

  Moss said he understood her point, but Miss Andrews was going to be alone onstage for the number, so she'd better find her motivation.

  “I don't think I can,” the actress replied.

  “I forget,” said Moss. “How much are we paying you a week?”

  “One hundred fifty dollars,” came the reply.

  “Ahhhh,” he said. “There's your motivation!”

  Prep School

  Chris was already attending Lawrenceville. My grades at St. Bernard's were excellent and the school's reputation as a prep school feeder immaculate, so I pretty much had my pick and settled on Philip's Exeter Academy. It was the classic New England prep school nestled in a small New Hampshire town. Unlike some young teens who are apprehensive leaving home, I welcomed the prospect eagerly, with a real sense of relief. Exeter became my safe place where I could make new friends and develop myself in private, at my own speed.

  Exeter was a happy, creative, and constructive time for me. As I mentioned earlier, my cousin Josie was attending Wellesley College and I could go down to Boston (it was only one hour by train) to see her. The work was challenging enough to make it interesting. I sucked at math or any kind of science but was a star in English, French, Latin, and History. I joined the school Dramatic Club and costarred in a production of Gore Vidal's Visit to a Small Planet. Gore, himself an Exeter graduate, actually came up to see the production and was quite complimentary to me. He couldn't have known at the time, but he would be adapting Tennessee Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer for Dad in a few years, and I would be the “production associate” (glorified gofer) on his screen version of his hit Broadway play The Best Man in 1963. It was the first film I worked on after college. I also wr
ote for The Pean, the school yearbook. The editor was Peter Benchley (who wrote Jaws), then a couple of years ahead of me. I came full circle with Peter while doing a major rewrite on the screenplay of his second novel, The Deep, filmed some twenty years later in the Caribbean.

  Mother rarely came up, so I was surprised when she called one day and said she was coming to Boston to spend the weekend with me. We went to the theater on Saturday night. It was a play heading for Broadway, starring Louis Jourdan (of Gigi). After the performance, the three of us had dinner. I didn't know she even knew him. Then we went up to his suite. After some strained small talk, the situation seemed pretty clear to me: they were interested in each other. I excused myself politely and went to my room. On Sunday, Mother and I saw the sights in Boston and she put me on the train back to Exeter. No mention of Louis. Looking back on it now and considering Dad's record of serial infidelity, I suppose a little turnabout was fair play.

  Westchester

  We started renting a house out of town every summer. Once in Long Island, then repeatedly in Westchester County, where Dad was eventually to spend the final decades of his life. Our favorite place was Mount Kisco. Our best friends up there were Bennett Cerf (Random House publisher and permanent panelist on What's My Line), his wife, Phyllis (later married to New York mayor Robert Wagner), and their son, Chris, who was my age. The area was and continues to be (along with Bedford, Katonah, and Pound Ridge) a rustic haven catering to the wealthy.

  Mother wasn't doing well. She took a great many prescription pills, sedatives mainly, in an attempt to control her illness. I met my first steady girlfriend in Mount Kisco. Her name was Freddy Espy. It was puppy love run amok. Endless teenage necking without consummation. She was a talented artist and sent me countless letters at school filled with hearts of all sizes and idealized depictions of herself as a love-smitten pixie. Freddy would later marry the celebrated George Plimpton Jr. (author of Paper Lion), the editor of the Paris Review and a wonderfully literate and amusing man with whom I would later spend delightful evenings in New York and L.A.