My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

  She mumbled, “Hello”; she was asleep.

  I said, “Doris, I'll explain tomorrow, but if it's good enough for David Lean, it's good enough for me.”

  I was shooting on board a boat, and Doris, with earphones on, was in a little boat with some crew members because we couldn't all fit on the boat where I was shooting. They sprung a leak, the little boat was sinking, and Doris's script was soaked. The script supervisor's script has got all of the shots in it. After I finished shooting that night, I walked into the production office, and there was Doris in the corner, ironing her script on an ironing board, drying it out. Now that's somebody who's really dedicated. She just wanted everything to be perfect. She was of the old school.

  One day, while we were shooting the pilot, I was walking down the street at Fox. I ran into Aaron Spelling, who said, “Tommy, I missed the rushes today but I hear they were good.”

  I said, “Aaron, they look like a million bucks.”

  He said, “They better look like two million-three!” Very expensive pilot.

  Aaron's Broadcasting Company

  Spelling-Goldberg owned their own shows; that's how they got so powerful and wealthy. They had a wonderful show called Family—Mike Nichols directed the pilot—and they had Starsky and Hutch, Charlie's Angels, Fantasy Island, T.J. Hooker, and now, Hart to Hart. At the time, they controlled eight sound stages at Fox out of fifteen. ABC would get an episode for two runs, and then, hello, it was a Spelling-Goldberg show; they owned it. And they owned the negatives. They were on the cover of Time magazine. Charlie's Angels was a phenomenon. R.J. and Natalie owned 50 percent of the show because they had starred together in a television movie for Spelling-Goldberg and part of the deal was co-ownership of a series. R.J. also owned half of Hart to Hart; he was a big star, and they gave him 50 percent. Months earlier, we were in Aaron's office—R.J., Aaron, Leonard, and Guy McElwaine, who was RJ.'s agent and had been Natalie's agent—sitting around a table, talking about Hart to Hart and who would play Jennifer Hart. R.J. said, “Well, as you guys know, I have costar approval.”

  And Aaron said, “Well, somebody who owns 50 percent of the show should have costar approval.”

  R.J. said, “Well, I don't know. I own 50 percent of Charlie's Angels. I haven't seen a dime.”

  There was a silence, and Leonard said, “I'll tell you what. Before you leave here, we'll write you a check for two million dollars in cash and you give up your 50 percent of Charlie's Angels. Fair?”

  Guy McElwaine said, “Don't do it.” I knew he wasn't going to do it anyway.

  Aaron was so different from Leonard, and they would play good cop and bad cop. And they did it wonderfully. They would have been together forever if not that the wives didn't like each other very much. Aaron would be in the cutting room and he would turn to the editor after a rough cut and say, “What a wonderful job,” even if it wasn't. Whereas Leonard might say, “Who the hell cut this? Jose Feliciano?” That was the difference in style.

  I was looking for a mansion; we were always shooting in mansions and we were running out of mansions. I said, “Oh, fuck, we're really up against it next week; I can't find a mansion.”

  Aaron said, “My God, they should all be available. The show is so loved, and we're so careful with the crews, and we sign the guarantee, and if anything gets damaged…”

  I said, “Aaron, I'll tell you what. You're right. Why don't we use your house?”

  He said, “Are you out of your fucking mind? I'm not letting a movie crew in my house.” I said, “Okay. The defense rests, Your Honor.” During the time Aaron built that huge house, the writers had a long strike.

  I had a big fight with the Writers Guild when I had three Hart to Harts I was committed to directing, and they said, “You can't come on the lot to direct those shows,” and I said, “I've got to.” They said, “No, you'll be crossing the writers' picket line, and you're a member of the Writers Guild.”

  I said, “Yes, but I'm also a member of the Directors Guild and I have a legal contract. I've got to fulfill it.”

  They finally said, “Well, okay, but we know you. You're famous for rewriting. No writing on the set.”

  I went on to direct the show, and the very first scene, Robert Wagner said, “Aw, Jesus, there's gotta be a better line than this.”

  I said, “R.J., there is, but I can't tell you.” Then, what I'd do is, I'd say to the grip, “Go tell Mr. Wagner your mother wears army shoes.”

  During the strike, which lasted a long time, I was picketing MGM with a very talented writer who's a friend of mine, David Giler, who had written a lot of wonderful scripts. It was ninety-eight degrees. There were about ten of us marching up and down, and across the street was a liquor store. I said to David, “I'll tell you what. I'll chip in, you'll chip in. Why don't you go over there and get us some ice-cold champagne?”

  David did, and a couple of the people in line were just outraged. One of them said to David, “Do you realize that at any given moment, 72 percent of the Writers Guild is unemployed?”

  And David said, “Do you realize that at any given moment, 85 percent of the Writers Guild is untalented?” We had our champagne.

  Writers are terrible picketers. A lot of them haven't been out in the sun much in their lives. They don't know how to walk. They mill around and get caught in crosswalks and traffic. With writers, it looks like a jailbreak. They don't know what to do, and they're marching this way and that way. Writers Guild meetings are more like a socialist cell meeting in the thirties, where people get up and yell, “I was blacklisted in nineteen—” and somebody else says, “Sit down and shut up.” People get up and they're booed. Thousands of writers were assembled in front of Fox. I was walking with a guy named Ben Joelson, who was one of the staff writers on The Love Boat, and we were stopped by KFWB and KNX Radio. A reporter said, “This is an amazing show of strength.”

  And Ben said, “Yeah, tomorrow we're going to be picketing Aaron Spelling's house, but we're going to need more writers.”

  Aaron was really hurt by that. When he built that huge mansion, which was just unbelievable, he said to me, “I grew up as the son of a Jewish tailor in Dallas, Texas. And I wasn't much to look at. And I worked my way up through all of this. I don't fly. I don't like to travel, and they make fun of me for having a big home. I earned every dollar.”

  After the Hart to Hart series was off the air, there were eight movies done of Hart to Hart on network and on cable. R.J., as I've mentioned, owned 50 percent. Stefanie, when she was signed, had no piece of the show because she couldn't demand it, really, with her track record in series television at the time. Later on, in her third year, when she renegotiated, she got 5 percent of the show profits, but her profit definition was worse than mine. I had 2.5 percent of the show, and my agent said to me, “Good luck ever seeing anything.” We sued Spelling-Goldberg and Columbia. We all met in our lawyer's office on Sunset Boulevard: Aaron, Leonard, R.J., Stefanie, me, and the Spelling-Goldberg lawyers. Sidney Sheldon, who still got credit for creating, also had a small piece of it. Aaron's attitude was, “Listen, we all know each other. We like each other. We've had dinner at each other's homes. If we owe any money, we should be paying it.”

  Leonard said, “I object to the fact that this entire meeting is based on the supposition that we're crooks. If somebody wants to call me a crook, I'd like them to do it right now.” He said to Stefanie, “Do you think I'm a crook?” Stefanie launched into this speech about all things socioeconomic of the world. She talked for twenty minutes and never said anything. And he said, “Mank?”

  I said, “Look, Leonard, nobody's calling anybody a crook. All I can tell you is that I have a business manager and I have a lawyer and they say I'm owed money, and if I am owed money, I'd like to have the money. That's all this is about.”

  And Leonard said, “Okay, R.J.?”

  R.J. said, “Yeah, I'll call you a crook.” Right there. It was amazing. I don't think Leonard's ever forgiven him for it. When they've run in
to each other since, Leonard's still a little frosty.

  We couldn't settle, and we went to court. Our attorney, Don Engel, negotiated the figure up to 92 percent of what we were owed, and it was a lot of money. We were playing in 125 countries, and everybody was saying, it is impossible that this is not generating income. No matter what the books say, it's got to be in profit. Of course, it's a Spelling-Goldberg show, so ABC stayed out of it entirely. While I was tense about it, for Aaron and Leonard, after having done umpty-ump series and been through so many legal fights, it was just business. When R.J. and Natalie were suing Spelling-Goldberg about their 50 percent Charlie's Angels ownership and then Aaron and Leonard countersued, I sent a telegram saying, “The Empire Strikes Back!”

  Spelling-Goldberg was the most successful production company in television. ABC was called “Aaron's Broadcasting Company.” Leonard said, “Basically, Aaron does Charlie's Angels and Starsky and Hutch, I do Family and Hart to Hart, and nobody does Fantasy Island.” It was a delight to work there because they ran their own shop. You didn't have to deal with levels of studio executives. Aaron's bungalow, as I've mentioned, was my father's bungalow when he was doing All About Eve and A Letter to Three Wives. They built another bungalow just like it next to it, and the two bungalows together were Spelling-Goldberg.

  7

  The 1970s Gallery

  Paddy Chayefsky

  Whiplash smart, wonderfully talented, actively plain looking, simultaneously cynical and sentimental. Among other things, Paddy was famous for going everywhere without his wife, who apparently had no interest in show business whatsoever. I once explained to him what a great advantage that was—he could go to almost any restaurant or party with whatever woman he chose and introduce her as his wife, no one being the wiser.

  Paddy was the only screenwriter I've ever heard of who had the contractual power to approve or even replace a director on an original screenplay of his. He'd cut his teeth in the theater, where these powers belonged to the author of the play, and insisted on carrying them over to film as a condition of purchasing his original work. At the start of The Hospital (a frightening indictment of the health care system, absolutely relevant today), starring George C. Scott, he had chosen a young director, Michael Ritchie, who had made Downhill Racer with Robert Redford. But Paddy grew increasingly disenchanted with him. He told United Artists he wanted to replace Ritchie with Arthur Hiller. UA executives balked, explaining to Paddy that with Hiller, “All you're going to get is the script.”

  “Aha!” Paddy shouted. He got Arthur Hiller.

  I used to play poker with Paddy in New York in the seventies. One night, the game broke up late, about 2:00 A.M. Paddy, an actor named Larry Blyden, who was on Broadway at the time, and I got into the apartment house elevator on the twentieth floor and pressed the button for the lobby. After a couple of floors, the elevator suddenly shook—then stopped dead. We were stuck, suspended some seventeen stories high. Silence. We tried the little phone on the wall—it didn't work. We pressed the red emergency button—nothing. I was stunned. Larry suddenly fell apart. He turned to me, panicked: “You write James Bond,” he said in all seriousness. “How the hell would James Bond get out of here?”

  “Larry, he'd take the sliding panel off the roof and climb up the cables to the next landing, except this roof's rock solid and I can't climb cables.” I looked over and down. Paddy was slumped in the corner. “Paddy, are you all right?”

  He looked up. “Oh, sure…except for the fact that I told my wife I'd be home by midnight, I lost over a thousand dollars in the game, and now I'm stuck in the middle of a goddamn Neil Simon play.” Eventually, we heard someone moving in the hall above, banged on the walls, and yelled. He called the apartment house manager, and we were finally cranked up.

  His brilliant screenplay for Network was described by critics at the time as a scathing satire of the future of television news. Paddy always insisted that actually it would become “a fucking documentary.” In it, Peter Finch's newsman, Howard Beale, rants and raves as a perfect precursor of today's Glenn Beck on Fox News. Part of Beale's bizarre broadcast was a feature called Vox Populi. When Katie Couric took over the CBS Evening News, one of the added features (eventually dropped) was—you guessed it—Vox Populi.

  Paddy and Bob Fosse

  The brilliantly talented choreographer-director Bob Fosse told me this wonderfully revealing story about Paddy: Bob (the only choreographer I ever saw who always worked with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth) was in a Chicago hospital, in immediate need of a dangerous heart operation. He asked his two best friends, Paddy and playwright Herb Gardner (A Thousand Clowns), to fly out on the day of the procedure. In the hospital room, Bob handed them copies of his will in which he had named them coexecutors. He explained there was a real chance he wouldn't survive the operation and asked them to sign the document before he went into surgery. Herb, in tears, did so immediately. Bob then looked over at Paddy, who sat in the corner, reading. “Is something wrong, Paddy?”

  “No, but I never signed anything in my life I didn't read first.”

  The hospital orderlies were prepping Bob to leave. Paddy finally looked up: “I'm not in your will.”

  “No, you're not, Paddy. You're fabulously successful. I'm leaving everything to Gwen (Verdon) and the kids.”

  Paddy rose and crossed to him. “I can't believe I'm not in your will.” He tossed the document onto the bed. “Fuck you, then. Live.”

  Bob said those were the last words he heard before he was wheeled out. As he put it: “Paddy's way of saying how much he loved me.”

  Tony Curtis

  I met Tony Curtis in Rome. He was very outgoing, very nice. I knew him when he was married to Janet Leigh. As everybody knows, his real name was Bernie Schwartz. He got so elegant. He dressed so well. He said to me, “You know, you think you're dressing well, but you're not.”

  I said, “I'm not?”

  “No. Have you got five hundred dollars?”

  “Sure I do, Tony.”

  “I can dress you for five hundred dollars. We'll go to Brioni's, and you're going to thank me for the rest of your life.”

  I said, “But, Tony, I don't want to.” He kept telling me that he'd heard from so many people how bright I was.

  I hadn't seen Tony in years, and I ran into him at a party in L.A. The next day, his secretary called. “Mr. Curtis is having a dinner party Sunday night and he wondered if you'd like to come.” Tony had divorced Janet and was married to an Austrian actress named Christine Kaufmann. Tony bought a huge house on Sunset Boulevard that was once owned by Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. Later, Cher had it. It looked like a property out of another country, huge rolling grounds, trees, paths, and a big house. The house was decorated like the Great Gatsby. There was a dining-room table for thirty people. He didn't know a lot of the people that he had invited. He used to invite people over who he had heard were bright. That night, Buck Henry, who was a terrific guy and a wonderful writer, was there. I asked, “So how long have you known Tony, Buck?”

  He said, “I don't know him at all. I shook hands with him once, but I got an invitation. I wanted to see what was going on.” We privately polled people, and a lot of them didn't know Tony Curtis very well. He just decided to collect these people.

  After dinner, all the women retired to the living room, and the men took a walk through the grounds. He had a walking stick for each guy. These paths seemed to go on forever. Buck said, “Don't look now, but I think I see Jack Haley, Burt Lahr, and Ray Bolger coming the other way.” We caught up with Tony in the front, and Buck said, “Quite seriously, Tony, why do you ask people over that you don't know?”

  Tony said, “I'll tell you what I learned early on in life. You've got to spend your life with people who are smarter than you are, who know more than you do, who are more experienced at a lot of different things than you are. And the only people worth knowing are people who hang out with people who are smarter than they are.”

 
; We kept walking, and Buck said, “Well, in that case, Tony, what are we doing here with you?”

  Tony was a terrific guy. He was married several times and he fucked a lot of women, but he acted very gay in his older age. Some actors and producers who suddenly get rich acquire an incredible thirst for elegance, for sophistication. You're Bernie Schwartz from the Bronx, but boy, you couldn't tell now. He asked me over a couple of times. The only time I ever met Desi Arnaz was there. I was shocked, and I mean this in a totally heterosexual way, at how good looking he was. He was very serious. He was in the middle of divorcing Lucille Ball. I had met her down in Palm Springs a few times. Boy, she was one tough lady. Always very nice to me, but really tough. There's a line in Georgy!, “tough as old boots.” She had a certain charm to her. The two of them revolutionized television. I thought, Desi doesn't look at all like the one on television. “Lucy, you got some 'splaining to do.” He looked like a very serious, great-looking guy. I heard he screwed everybody in the world, and I could tell why. If I was a woman, I'd have gone for him just like that.

  Tony Curtis was such an underrated actor. He was great, and best when he played creeps. He played the Boston Strangler, he was fabulous; Sweet Smell of Success, when he played Sidney Falco, the press agent, he's brilliant. He was in a picture with Debbie Reynolds called The Rat Race. He was just wonderful. He was so much better than he was as romantic leads, although he could do those too.

  Marlene Dietrich

  I went with Natalie Wood to Garson and Ruth Kanin's house one night. The guest of honor was Marlene Dietrich. The Kanins were in the habit of inviting so-called legends to dinner, and afterward everyone would ask the “legends” a question. There was always an eclectic group of people present. In this case, it was the famous lyricist, Alan J. Lerner, one might say a legend in his own right; David Picker, who was then head of production for United Artists; Don Rickles and his wife; and myself and Natalie. The first question fell to me, unfortunately, and I was a bit flustered, not knowing what to ask. Finally, I said, “Who was the best actor you ever played with?”