Competing with Idiots Read online

  To his peers, Joe Mankiewicz was virtually beyond reproach, not only for the merit and quality of his work, but also for his sophisticated and unimpeachable behavior on the set. Linda Darnell said, “Joe never shouts on the set, he never even raises his voice.” Celeste Holm, one of his Eve stars, said, “He starts out by assuming that you’re a professional and that you have at least reasonably good sense.” Richard Burton called Joe “well-nigh perfect. He let me have my head and curbed me very gently and subtly when I threatened to tear a passion to tatters.” Michael Caine said Uncle Joe was “bloody marvelous,” Sidney Poitier gave endless credit to him for starting his career and directing him so well, and Bette Davis said simply, “Mankiewicz is a genius.” But it wasn’t just the actors. Erna insisted he always had the best relationships with the people on his sets. “His crews always adored him. He lived with them and laughed with them and was always on good terms with them.” And Joe’s son Tom, who himself would go on to a successful career in Hollywood as a screenwriter and script doctor, claimed that there was always kidding and jokes on his father’s sets and more people laughing than on any other set he ever saw. In sum, Joe achieved supreme success in Hollywood’s fickle world, and he did so by applying the “concentration of desire, ambition and sacrifice” that Bill Sampson said the profession, unlike any other, demanded. But it’s hard not to wonder at what cost.

  The bare facts of Joe’s private life would give comfort to any enemies. He divorced his first wife Elizabeth after just three years of marriage, and his marriage to his second wife Rosa was a continuous nightmare that ended with her suicide. He and his father never had much of a relationship, and though he was close to his mother in his childhood, at some point in early adulthood he exorcised her completely from his life. He was estranged from his sister Erna for the latter third of her life, largely because she felt he had become a monster of selfishness and wasn’t worth trying to maintain a relationship with, and when she lay dying in the hospital room that she would never leave, even though it was her last wish to be reunited with her only remaining brother, he refused to come. His older brother Herman, never the real champion of Joe’s that a younger brother might have wanted, in addition to famously calling him an idiot, was, when he wasn’t deriding him, often as not borrowing money from him that he seldom bothered to return. As for his own children, Joe was never close to his two (acknowledged) sons, ending in an uneasy truce with his younger, Tom, while his elder son Chris openly despised him. Then there was the little matter of the other son whose existence he wouldn’t admit to publicly, and rumors of a second family in Europe that slithered through our family for years. And though he did end his life seemingly happily married to his third wife, Rosemary, and they’d had a marvelous daughter, there’s no denying that as he lived out his days in Bedford, New York, Joe had pretty much alienated everyone who was close to him, and not by accident. “I’m a very, very internal guy,” Joe told his biographer Ken Geist in 1973. “I don’t think I’ve ever told the truth or confided in anyone the way external people do.” Tom agreed, telling me, “Dad was so controlled that you never knew what he really thought. He lived that whole life without ever sharing what he really felt with anybody.”

  But it hadn’t always been that way. The boy who hid in the closet hearing Herman and Franz rage at each other had possessed a delicacy that would later find its way into the gentlest sections of his screenplays. And despite their later struggles, Erna insisted to the end that he had been “the sweetest child,” a fact that utterly shocked some of those who had known Joe only as an adult.

  Among those was his own son, Chris. In the 1970s, when Chris was in his thirties, he joined his aunt Erna in Brentwood for lunch at the home of his aunt Sara, Herman’s widow. After lunch, Erna asked Chris to take her to the nearby farmer’s market, and he obliged. In the parking lot of the market, standing near the car, Erna suddenly told Chris, “It’s terrible about your dad, what a terrible monster he became.” Chris was shocked. He wasn’t aware that there was a time when Joe hadn’t been a monster. But in fact there was. “He was such a sweet child,” Erna told her nephew. “We all loved him so much.” Chris realized then that he’d always assumed the monster he’d known was the only Joe Mankiewicz there had ever been. But the tears rolling down Erna’s cheeks as she described the angel she’d grown up with told a different story indeed. It was a story with its own echoes in Joe’s greatest script. For All About Eve’s Eve Harrington, remember, didn’t really exist: born Gertrude Slescynski, she invented Eve Harrington to escape a past she wanted nothing to do with. In the end, the story of how Joe evolved is a similar tale of reinvention, more subtle to be sure, the story of a little brother with nowhere else to turn.

  * * *

  —

  Joe had lost track of the time, which happened a lot, especially in the summer after the family had moved uptown, closer to Columbia, where Herman went to school and Pop now taught, now that the family had moved back to New York City. Joe had fallen in with a gang of boys who called themselves the Mudcats, and the Mudcats played a lot of stickball out on Seventh Avenue, or on the other side of 110th Street, in Central Park, and prided themselves on playing so late that their mothers would start yelling down at them from surrounding buildings. In fact, Joe never really lost track of time; he only pretended to. He knew when it would start getting late, and he’d sometimes be running around the bases and even stick his tongue out of his mouth in a way that would display, to anyone who might be watching, intense concentration. Joe knew that any third party observing him would absolutely know that there was no way the boy could possibly guess what time it was. How was he to sense when it was time for supper? What if he hadn’t seen that man with the pocket watch about twenty minutes ago? It would have been easy for him not to have seen that, and anyway, what if the mother of that kid with the harelip hadn’t come looking for him at seven? She didn’t usually do that, and it was easy enough for Joe to pretend she hadn’t come tonight.

  But now that the cat was out of the bag—there had been too many other grown-ups shouting down, and it was practically dark now, the streetlamps were on, and the game had broken up—there was no use in trying to act like Joe didn’t know he was late—it was time to head home. He did it slowly. He knew Pop would be waiting, with the strap. Joe figured if he walked slowly enough, maybe he’d figure something out before he got there. Usually, he did.

  For one thing, there was Herman. If Herman was home, Joe stood a fighting chance. So Joe would ring the buzzer downstairs, and when someone answered, Joe would call out, “Is Herman there?” If the answer was no, Joe would likely sit on the stoop and wait until Herman did arrive. A few minutes later, there’d come Herman, swinging up the street, his pants too short, looking uncomfortable and even somehow disheveled in his gabardine suit, and he’d smile that crooked smile at Joe and know that it was time to move into protector mode. They’d head up together and Herman would happily argue Joe’s case, telling his parents they shouldn’t punish Joe. He’d offer any number of reasons for them to excuse Joe’s tardiness—the kid is too young, he can’t tell time, he’d been waylaid by a peddler who spoke no English and demanded to have the afternoon newspaper read aloud to him front to back. And almost always, the tactic worked. Joe learned, literally, how to bat his eyes, and usually Pop had no time for such nonsense anyway, and Mama liked the play of it all. When Herman had done his duty, he’d give a little two-finger salute to Joe and head toward the kitchen to get a bite to eat: liverwurst if there was any left. Joe would look after him, full of pride and hope.

  Herman, Joe said later, was the only one permitted to see the full range of feeling inside him. “When I was a boy, I used to bare my heart in the most childish way—actually open—no defenses—to Herman. He was the father figure I wanted.”

  Then again, there were the fights, the shouts and yelling, the horror of hearing Franz fulminate at Herman for some infraction, real or perceived. Co
ming home late, getting a 94 on a test, an incident with a bottle of beer that shamed the professor in front of his colleagues. The litany of embarrassments and horror stories would fill Joe with as much shame as he had pride in the moments of Herman’s great accomplishments. Then there was that memorable afternoon when Joe and a pack of younger boys had chased Herman and his friends after the older boys had seemed to make off with some loose change from the ice cream parlor. Theft? Not exactly, but then why was the store owner’s cousin so furious as he ran after Herman and the other boys?

  Many feelings coursed through Joe as he and the others bounded after Herman and the older boys: shame, pride, guilt—but there was something else nagging at him as he ran: Was he running with his brother, or was he running with the pack? It wasn’t at all clear to Joe whose side he was on.

  I am not my brother, nor am I his keeper. I am my own person, and I will not be judged by his actions. It is this, as much as anything, that defines the moment of selfhood that all younger brothers arrive at—this moment of realizing we are separate. This moment when Abel understands he is not Cain, nor even Kane.

  Franz Mankiewicz had no time for bad puns, no time for entertainment, and even less for what is now called the entertainment business. It was sheer frivolity—work was something else. Work was hard, demanding, and, above all, serious. To Joe and Herman, growing up in such a home, where Pop’s every pore oozed learning and books, education and teaching, it would be a true challenge to escape the path of academic achievement that Franz seemed to have laid out for them. For a time, Herman seemed to be hewing to the path. Missing three points or not, his scholastic career was utterly brilliant. The boy excelled at every school he ever attended, and nearly every subject. He sped through Hillman in record time, graduating when he was only fourteen—making pocket money on the side, ho-hum, by translating friends’ Latin homework for a dime. Even more impressive, he’d passed the entrance examinations to Columbia University when he was only thirteen. (Columbia’s bylaws prevented him from attending till he was fifteen.)*6 Still, with Franz Mankiewicz as a father, it was never nearly enough. And how must Herman have felt when Franz seemed to horn in on his own glory by following his acceptance to Columbia by going there himself as a teacher and beginning his tenure on the first day of Herman’s freshman year? Of course, Herman likely told himself that Pop was doing what was right; as hard as it was to get into an Ivy League school as a student, think about how many fewer spots there were for teachers.

  What’s more, Pop was beloved by his students. With the Mankiewicz home constantly filled with young people seeking his advice on any number of issues, resentment of Franz, or dislike for him, must have felt doubly ungrateful to Herman. Franz was devoted to his students, who loved him back with a ferocity bordering on idolatry. Franz made sure his students chose the best schools to get into, and in a long career that included teaching stints at Columbia, CCNY, and Stuyvesant, one of the city’s finest public high schools, he always prepared them to take the proper exams and helped them get scholarships. His roster of students over the years (ranging from the critic Alfred Kazin to the producer-actor Sheldon Leonard) was filled with devotees who remained forever grateful for Professor Mankiewicz’s tutelage. My uncle Frank, Herman’s second son, told me when I set out on this project: “All through my adult life, I don’t think there’s a month goes by that somebody doesn’t say to me, ‘Are you related to a Professor Frank Mankiewicz who taught at CCNY?’ ” Like any good Mankiewicz, Uncle Frank’s delight had some educational bias baked in, and much to do with the fact that he was recognized for a relative who made his name in academics as opposed to the entertainment industry.

  In fact, Franz’s complete disregard for the entertainment industry was the source of both of his sons’ conflicted attitude about success in Hollywood, as well as of one of the more repeated family anecdotes, about Franz’s most famous student, James Cagney. Visiting his sons in Hollywood in the thirties, during the height of Cagney’s fame, Franz was taken by Joe to the famed Brown Derby for lunch. No doubt Joe thought hobnobbing with the leading lights of Hollywood might impress the impossible-to-impress professor. While they were there, Cagney spotted and approached his former high school teacher. Franz had never been great with names and faces, and so while he vaguely recalled Cagney he couldn’t place him. Finally, the former student from Franz Mankiewicz’s classes at Stuyvesant High School said, “I’m James Cagney,” which at long last jogged Franz’s memory. “Of course,” Franz said. “How nice to see you again.” Franz stared at Cagney a moment, then said, “Tell me, Cagney, what are you doing these days?”

  With such a father, it is no surprise that Joe became something of a mama’s boy. “By necessity, Joe spent most of his time with our mother,” Herman said. “She raised Joe—Pop had no time for him.” For Joe, this wasn’t necessarily such a bad thing. He had dodged a pretty dangerous bullet, and in its place was his mother, Johanna—who, whatever else she may have been, seems to have been warm and accepting, and Joe’s first audience.

  From the beginning, Joe Mankiewicz knew how to render his mother absolutely helpless with laughter. As a boy, he had a cherished bathrobe, and the older and more tattered it became, the more he loved it. He used it as the central prop in a comic routine that brought his mother and sister to hysterics. Erna and Johanna would be sitting on the sofa in the living room, talking or listening to the radio or phonograph records, and Joe would emerge with the robe flung over his shoulder like a matador’s cape. Hurling himself dramatically down at the feet of his plump mother, who was already shaking with laughter, the little boy would look at her soulfully and then say to her with an unplaceable accent, “I love you. Flee with me to my hacienda. I will learn you to make mad love.” Over the years, Joe did this routine many times, but each time it was as if it were happening for the first time, with Johanna doubled over in laughter.*7

  A cute scene, and what a stark contrast with Herman, not just for how much Joe was craving attention and love, and how much he actually got these things from Johanna, but because of the work ethic embedded in it. Joe worked hard on his bathrobe routine, perfecting it and learning through trial and error what particular words to stress as he played the scene. Which word would get Erna in stitches, which one Mama? Never great with accents, Joe soon stumbled across the old vaudevillian’s trick when tasked with performing something at which he has no skill: the harder you try, the funnier it is. Thus, the more seriously Joe pushed a Spanish accent, the more ridiculous the effect—and so he drove even harder into mock-Spanish. He also did wonders with the robe—taxing his imagination to come up with different ways of wearing it, of flashing it about or twirling it around him before laying it to rest gently on his shoulder. He tried kneeling, burying his head in his mother’s lap, long, soulful looks out the window, then quick turns back to Johanna and Erna. Whatever worked.

  To Herman, if it didn’t happen naturally, it wasn’t worth it. Repeating a joke, refining an anecdote, polishing a story until he got it just right, working up a “routine”—these were of less than little interest to him, and worse, in real life struck him as almost morally bankrupt. He’d do it occasionally, and God knows as a professional writer he had to, but he didn’t value it, and certainly didn’t appreciate a worked-on performance the way his brother did. To him, the spontaneous remark, the bon mot that people would still be talking about days later—this was the pinnacle. In later years, after a particularly brilliant riposte, he got in the habit of turning to someone—anyone—and saying, “You should write that down.” The point was, Herman wasn’t about to. To write it down was to kill it, to deny it of its essence, the spontaneity and sheer coruscating brilliance of the original remark cheapened by the act of even appearing to work on it. He was funny, he simply was. He would not appear to work on it.

  To Joe, working on it, refining it until you got the damn thing right, was both a skill and a talent. Hard work was a virtue. And in f
act, Joe saw little else from Pop other than work. The man was working furiously at a variety of academic posts as well as a few other odd jobs on the side, like translating travel brochures and laxative ads—there’s no question that Joe prized his father’s tremendous work ethic, even as it pulled Pop away from the family and caused them to keep moving neighborhoods, even after the move back to New York—Franz kept getting new teaching jobs and wanted to move closer to them, and the attendant salary increases allowed for better and roomier digs, to accommodate his ever-increasing need for bookshelves. “I can’t remember all the different places we lived in New York City,” Joe said. “I know we lived in Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay, three or four locations on the Lower East Side, Harlem, and Madison Avenue. We were moving all the time.” There were always new neighborhoods, “new gangs of kids, new adjustments. I made no friends.” With an obsessive, violent, angry father, a mother who alternated between timid acceptance of the man and rueful avoidance of him, and a household that kept relocating, Joe felt very little stability as a child and made few lasting attachments. Years later, he would look back and say, almost as a regretful boast, “I have no contact today with anyone who knew me as a child.”

  In fact, like Herman, Joe was quite popular among his peers. “He had friends,” Erna said, “but he made friends quickly and then moved on to the next set quickly.” In fact, Joe was developing the social skills, the charm and ease of manner, the Mankiewicz wit, that would mask any inner turmoil. Establishing friendships but never close ones and not keeping them long, Joe was learning how to armor himself against the world. In a house dominated by an exacting, demanding academic with no regard for the frivolities of movie making and the theater, it’s easy to see why a young boy might feel lonely, especially if he is in thrall to an older brother who was devoted above all else to entertainment. Entertainment, and being entertaining, which was becoming easier every day.