My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

  David was not above trying to control the lives of young people as well. He was utterly convinced that the only girl in the world for me was Candy Bergen. Beautiful, smart, another child of show business, what a perfect fit! Candy and I actually went out a few times and got to know each other fairly well. David may even have introduced us. She was and is an absolutely delightful human being. For years, whenever we ran into each other, we asked how the “kids” were, depending on whatever “divorce” settlement we were inventing at the time.

  David Selznick was wonderful to me. He encouraged me and believed that I would make it as a successful writer and director. He was a giant Energizer Bunny, never stopping to catch his breath, filling his days furiously with phone calls, memos, stories, and pieces of advice. I was honored when Jennifer asked me to be an usher at his funeral.

  Inger Stevens

  One of my first real crushes after arriving in L.A. My radar for troubled actresses must have been working overtime in Inger's case. She was a beautiful, total joy to me, and underneath, one of the most desperately unhappy human beings I've ever met. We were both shooting at Columbia, she on her hit TV series The Farmer's Daughter and I on The Best Man. We were introduced by a young actor, George Furth, whom I'd cast in a part in the film. (George, who was wildly gay, became a very observant, funny writer and famously wrote the book for Stephen Sondheim's production of Company on Broadway.)

  Inger and I spent parts of virtually every day together. Her dressing room on the lot was my second home. We constantly made each other laugh, even as the sadder details of her life became apparent: a broken, meaningless marriage to an agent, aborted major romances with Bing Crosby and especially Harry Belafonte while they were shooting The World, The Flesh and the Devil in Hawaii. In those days, if it ever came out that a blond, blue-eyed, wholesome TV sweetheart had had a passionate affair with a black man, even Belafonte, her career would have instantly been over. I soon found out that she was also secretly married to a black musician named Ike Jones. He wasn't treating her well, and she didn't know what to do about it. She was spiraling downhill mentally, but so good at putting on a cheerful persona that few people noticed. We slept together one night, or tried to. It was a total disaster. She was high on booze and antidepressants that no longer had any real effect on her. I was drunk. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Then the actual sobbing began. I didn't know what to do. I hadn't been that terrified since I was twelve years old, facing my mother in the middle of the night. Poor, dear, sweet Inger committed suicide at thirty-five.

  Harry Truman

  Although I never personally met the former president, he came to Yale while I was there to address a combined group of political science classes and remembered a moment that I found singular and touching. After he observed that a president's typical day is so busy he “didn't have time to take a piss in the White House,” someone asked him about his final day in office. How did it feel, after winning World War II, dropping the atomic bomb, carrying out the Marshall Plan, founding the CIA, integrating the armed forces—how did it feel to stand there watching Dwight Eisenhower take the oath of office, and in an instant, cease to be the president? Truman paused briefly. “You know what moment I remember best? I got in a car with a couple of Secret Service guys to drive to the airport for my flight back to Missouri. On the way, the car suddenly came to a stop. I asked what the hell was wrong. They explained it was a red light. We had to stop for a red light, just like everyone else. I hadn't stopped for a red light in seven years.”

  Jack Warden

  In the mid-sixties Malibu was still a small town. The people who lived there year-round were fairly well known to the Malibu sheriffs, who had a small station opposite the pharmacy, just outside the Colony gates. If you were pulled over for drunk driving within the city limits in those days and hadn't hurt anyone or done any physical damage, especially if you lived in the Colony or on the Old Malibu Road, they'd let you sleep it off in their little two-cell station without putting it on your driving record. In the morning they'd go across the street and get you breakfast at the pharmacy café and, after a stern admonition, let you go home. The talented actor Jack Warden (Twelve Angry Men, Heaven Can Wait) was a frequent guest at the sheriff's station in those days. He woke up one morning extremely hung over and found himself staring at a cellmate who had been arrested during the night. The guy squinted at him and said “N.Y.P.D., right?”

  Jack nodded. “Yes, I was in N.YP.D”

  “Lemme ask you something. You ever work with Peggy Ann Garner?”

  Jack thought, then said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact I have worked with Peggy Ann Garner.”

  His cellmate grinned: “I fucked her maid.”

  6

  The 1970s

  Arrival

  Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script.

  —Joseph L. Mankiewicz

  Diamonds Are Forever: Reinventing Bond

  In 1970, I was a Bond fan like everybody else. There was a screenplay called Diamonds Are Forever, and Sean Connery had turned it down. Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, producer of the James Bond movies, said: “We need a big rewrite and I want to have an American writer because it takes place in Vegas and the Brits write really lousy American gangsters. And I want the writer to be young. We gotta get young. But he or she has got to be able to write in the British idiom because we've got Bond and Moneypenny.” And David Picker, head of production at United Artists, said: “I saw a play the other night. A musical of Georgy Girl. I loved the book. It was written by Mankiewicz and I don't know him so he must be young. He's American and all the characters were British. And I thought it was written really well. So, why don't you add his name to your list?”

  So I went up to Cubby's house. Met the director, Guy Hamilton, who took a shine to me. They gave me the script. I had a good meeting. I was signed on a two-week guarantee for $1,500 a week. Even in those days, for a Bond movie that was nothing. They were willing to invest $3,000 in me. Cubby said, “I want you to rewrite the first thirty pages and hand them in, and let's see what we do.” I went down to the beach and worked my ass off. I thought, okay, this is your test. You ought to be able to write James Bond. You think you're this wonderful kind of cocksman. You love the movies. You think you write good dialogue. I turned it in, and waited. The phone rang one day and a female voice said, “One moment for Mr. Broccoli.” He got on the phone and said two words: “Keep going.” And hung up.

  I said, “All right, goddamnit, this is what you do for a living now. You are a writer. You are going to keep going and write a good screenplay. Here we go. Nobody's going to relieve you of your command, and you're going to see this thing through.” And son of a bitch, they sent Sean Connery my first sixty pages and he agreed to do the movie. They kept all of that from me because Cubby didn't want me to have a big head. As far as I was concerned, Sean was always going to do this, but John Gavin was signed as the backup Bond in case Sean didn't do it.

  I'm writing, and the pages are flying, and they're prepping the movie. I'm sitting in the bar of the Riviera Hotel with Cubby. I'm twenty-seven years old. The production manager, Milton Feldman, stops by. Cubby said, “Milton how is Sean's suite?” He was arriving the next day.

  Milton said, “It's great, Cubby. I got the golf clubs in there. I got the Glenlivet scotch.” Sean had the presidential suite.

  Cubby turned to me and asked, “How's your suite?”

  I said, “Cubby, I don't have a suite. I have a double room, but it's wonderful. I'm happy as a clam. It overlooks the Strip. Everything is great.”

  He said, “Milton, get Mankiewicz a suite.”

  Milton said, “But Cubby—,” and then looked at me and said, “No offense, Tom. But, Cubby, if we get him a suite, that's more money than we're paying him a week.”

  Cubby said, “I didn't ask you what it costs, Milton. He's writing the fuckin' movie. Get him a suite.” I thought, goddamnit, that was another nail that was
pounded into the board. That's right, I am writing the fucking movie. This isn't something you're dabbling in. There is a big engine going down the track here, and you're part of it. This is what I want to do.

  It's a strange thing when you are the son of somebody famous, especially somebody who was a writer and a director. You have tremendous advantages in that you can get people on the phone that you couldn't if your name was Tom Schwartz and you came from Kansas. But at the same time, there's a whole constituency that's really rooting for you to fail. Well, he's not his father, is he? Or, the only reason he got that was because he's Joe Mankiewicz's son. Or whatever. Writing was the perfect vehicle to refute all of that, because nobody buys a script because you're Joe Mankiewicz's son. Frankly, I wouldn't have gotten on The Best Man with those two young producers if I wasn't Joe Mankiewicz's son. They met me and liked me and said, “Fine.” But writing is the final proof, getting asked back because of the quality of your work.

  Genetically, the Mankiewiczes have something about writing. Uncle Herman wrote Citizen Kane, Dad wrote All About Eve. My cousin Don wrote the pilots for Marcus Welby, M.D. and Ironside and a Harper Prize novel. My cousin John, who is younger than I am, was one of the original writer-producers of House and is now doing The Mentalist. He goes all the way back to Miami Vice. So the Mankiewiczes have had a proclivity for writing. It's something in our DNA. Every Mankiewicz has good dialogue. Mankiewiczes are not as good at structure. But you can learn structure. You can't learn to write good dialogue. It's like you can go to acting school, but you can't learn how to be a wonderful actor. You either have something in you or you don't have something in you. You can shape it. You can use your craft. I always marvel when I look at Marlon Brando—and when I finally wound up working with him on Superman—and see the greatest actor of my lifetime on the screen. He has unbelievable talent, but he has unbelievable craft as well. I watched him take scenes back from people through his craft. He's also got terrific talent. Jack Nicholson also has terrific, terrific talent. He's not Jack Nicholson for nothing. Writing is a tremendous craft. But if you don't have the talent, all the craft in the world won't save a series or movie.

  Writing James Bond films was a total accident, and so many things in show business are. It was a product of a meeting between David Picker and Cubby Broccoli. I had nothing to do with it. If David Picker hadn't been in one of the four audiences to see Georgy!, I'd never have gotten that phone call. That's so true of so much in show business, where people are accidentally picked. The wonderful part of that accident was these were films that were nothing like the films that my father had made, which were very intellectual, almost plays. Magnificent work. But I had my own little corner of the sky. I could probably write James Bond better than Dad could no matter how good he was. It was more my generation, my time, and my kind of thing. That phone call was the most pivotal phone call because I had this grasshopper quality about me which was, all right, I'll do a little of this, I'll do a little of that. A couple of musical specials and a little surfing movie and then I'll try Broadway, but whoops, that didn't work. Then, all of a sudden, comes that time when you gather yourself together. I don't know what would have happened to me if Cubby had called and said, “I read the pages; thanks, but no thanks. We're going to go with someone else.” I don't know what I would have done. Done a Norman Maine from A Star Is Born and walked into the ocean. Or said, “Fuck it, let me try and be somebody's assistant.”

  The Bond movies started with Dr. No and From Russia with Love, which were fairly small in story and budget. The big fight between Sean and Robert Shaw was in a train compartment. Lotte Lenya had a little knife in her shoe. In Goldfinger, when that Aston Martin started firing machine guns and squirting oil and had an ejector seat, it gave the audience an appetite. You couldn't go back after that. The cars and gadgets were not in Ian Fleming's books. They were inventions of the screenwriters because Bond became almost a PG-13 family film, meaning that the audience wanted to be entertained; they wanted to roar at some outrageous device. Q became a hugely important character. Goldfinger was responsible for the whole thing when that Aston Martin appeared. Now, all bets were off with Bond.

  Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli were the producers. They traded first billing. Traditionally, one of them would take the next film and produce it principally. So, Diamonds Are Forever was Cubby's film. More important, Sean Connery loathed Harry. There was actually a clause in Sean's contract, which was hidden from Harry, that said, “Mr. Connery is never to see Mr. Saltzman while he's working.” Sean thought a lot of money had been stolen from him. As we got ready to shoot in Las Vegas, Harry showed up. He was a very volatile, pudgy, short guy. Tremendously smart. Like a shotgun, Harry could give you five rat-tat-tat ideas. Three of them would be no good, and two of them great, but he couldn't differentiate between them. He thought they were all great. He was Canadian, and he had produced new-wave British films—Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Entertainer and Look Back in Anger. Harry looked at the Bonds and the enormous success and all the money he was making as a bankroll to become Howard Hughes. When he showed up the day before shooting, everybody's going, “Oh, Christ.” He said, “No actor is gonna tell me whether I can be on the set of my movie or not.”

  The first night of shooting was in downtown Vegas. A car chase and a red Mustang. In Sean Connery's huge motor home were Guy Hamilton, Jill St. John, Cubby, and me. Just as we were about to do the first shot, there was a knock on the door and Harry walked in, defiantly. Sean stood up and grinned and said, “Harry,” and went over and kissed him on the cheek. Harry just stood there immobile, and left the next day. We never saw him again. Cubby and Harry had two different lifestyles and different sets of friends. Michael Caine was very loyal to Harry, for example. Harry had done The Ipcress File and helped Michael out a lot. Cubby and Harry had a company together called Danjaq, which still exists, named for their wives, Dana Broccoli and Jackie Saltzman. As they kept making pictures, Harry decided to become Hughes-like. He bought the Éclair camera company, which quickly went belly up. Then he decided to buy Technicolor. He went to board members privately and offered them all kinds of things, and suddenly they threw out the chairman of the board and Harry was now chairman of the board of Technicolor. Technicolor's stock was selling at thirty. When Harry was ousted two years later, it was selling at eight. Harry said to me, “Those bastards, I just walked in there one day and I'm out the fuckin' door. How can people do something like that?” I thought, Harry, that's just what you did. You fucked the last guy, they're not going to fuck you?

  Diamonds Are Forever was shot principally in Las Vegas under the watchful eye of Sidney Korshak, who was Cubby's great friend. Mr. Korshak at the time was, shall we say, “keeping” Jill St. John. God, Jill was beautiful. She's been a great friend over the years. At the time, there was going to be a national Teamsters strike, and Cubby said, “Jesus Christ, Sidney. We're shooting. This is gonna kill us.”

  Sidney said, “Don't worry, Cubby, there won't be one here.” He was the head legal advisor for the Teamsters union and ran the pension fund, which was hundreds of millions of dollars way back then. It was the biggest money pot in the world. Sidney was such a quiet power. He never threw his weight around that way that you could see. A few years after the Bonds, I was taking a girl to Vegas. We had a nice suite at the Riviera, because the Riviera was an old home to me. Eddie Torres ran the Riviera on a daily basis. (The father of Dana Torres, the Olympic swimmer—the older woman with a body you could strike a match on.) I walked into the Riviera with my girl, and Sidney was just checking out. He said, “Tom, how are you?”

  I said, “Fine, Sidney.”

  He looked over at the desk and said, “Are the guys taking care of you?”

  They said, “Yes, we are, Mr. Korshak.”

  He said, “Great. Well it was great to see you. I've gotta go to the airport.” All of a sudden, I was upgraded to the presidential suite. There was no charge. Just because I was lucky enough Sidney was stan
ding by the desk. Those days are long gone. I don't think that happens anymore.

  Cubby was a huge gambler. He would sit down and play baccarat every night. Cubby would never win or lose less than $10,000 or $15,000 a night. I would sit with him. The limit was $2,000. Minimum bet was $20. Cubby would put his $2,000 down, and I'd put my twenty bucks down. I noticed that when he lost, and he got up, he always tipped more heavily. One night I asked him, “Cubby, why do you tip more heavily when you lose?”

  He said, “Listen to me. In your life you're going to have a lot of successes and you're going to have some failures. You're going to have wonderful things happen to you and a couple of disasters. It's gonna go up and down. But you know what? First, you've got to be a gent.”

  Behavior was really important to Cubby, that you're a gentleman. You treated people well in that old-world, maybe Italian way. He couldn't stand it if somebody wasn't a gent. What Cubby didn't like about George Lazenby (who played Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service), outside of the fact that he wasn't that great as Bond, was an incident in Switzerland, where they were shooting. Lazenby walked into a store and wanted to buy a Walther PPK firearm. The saleswoman said, “You can't buy it, unfortunately, because we can't sell to foreigners.” He started to charm her and said he was James Bond and blah, blah, blah. She sold it to him. He got in trouble because he showed it to somebody and the police came and they went to her. And Lazenby's thing was, “She didn't have to sell it to me.” Cubby couldn't forgive that. He said, “I can't imagine that guy would try and let that girl suffer. He's the one that tried to buy the fucking gun. He's not a gent.”