Competing with Idiots Read online

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  Of the great romance of Herman Mankiewicz’s life, absolutely nothing is known of the moment his lips first parted for alcohol. We know that by the time he’d entered Columbia at the age of fifteen, he was already well familiar with liquor, most likely from the coal miners of Pennsylvania, and we know that his college years only solidified the relationship, so much so that by the time he graduated, he was placing on his senior page not a warbly quote from the Bard, or an earnest Emersonian proclamation about self-reliance, as his contemporaries did in the same way later generations would cite tide-beating boats. No, what nineteen-year-old Herman chose to quote was a couplet from Columbia’s own humor magazine, The Jester, written by Herman’s classmate (and future comrade in Hollywood), Morris Ryskind. The two-line ditty consisted not of words of wisdom, life advice, or sage remarks about Nature, but of a tribute, ironic and arch, to Herman himself:

  I’ll say this much for H. J. Mank,

  When anybody blew, he drank.*8

  It’s not just that Herman was freely admitting his weakness for drinking. It’s that he was already crafting an image of himself as worthy of spectacle, creating a persona that he knew might reap as much attention as his actual work. Indeed, it was during his college career that he realized for the first time the enormous effect he could have on people—to make them admire him, love him, wish to be in his presence—all of which was magnified by alcohol.

  Of course, at the time, alcoholism was no disease—it was an affliction, or a character defect, something the lower classes had to worry about and the weaker members of the human race had to be careful about, lest they slip into it. It carried with it both greater societal acceptance—especially among those who, like Herman, could be tremendously funny when drunk—and also more shame, for it wasn’t a disease over which one had no power, but rather a weakness in the character of the alcoholic. It may also have been a way to reject his family, and Jewishness. As Dr. Hacker put it, “It was unheard of in the family…Jews fool around. They cheat, they steal, they do God knows what, but they don’t drink.”

  At Columbia, Herman’s love for booze took hold. One of his main drinking buddies when he was there was a short, somewhat elfin kid from Harlem named Lorenz (Larry) Hart. Before Hart would team with Richard Rodgers to rewrite Broadway history, he was an introverted depressive at Columbia who found a comrade in Herman. On more than one occasion, Larry’s father would phone Franz Mankiewicz in the middle of the night, and the two would head out into the city in search of their drunken sons.*9 In fact, Herman loved drinking at Columbia, and he found to his delight that the campus bars were convivial places to drink and talk, and then drink some more and talk some more. Fifteen years after graduation, Herman happily answered the Columbia Alumni Association’s questionnaire about his time at the college. Asked if he belonged to any clubs, he replied that he did not but that he had been blackballed by three and expelled for nonpayment of dues by two others. In that same questionnaire, he also claimed that his recreations were “numerous—without exception illegal” and that his hobbies were “regular attempts to get away with my recreations.”*10

  Hand in hand with drinking went gambling, for like drinking, at Columbia gambling went from being a pleasant diversion to a dominant preoccupation in Herman’s life, something that today might have been labeled an illness he could no longer control. His future held ridiculously large and risky bets on USC football games, stunning profligacy at the track, and legendary bridge games with George S. Kaufman and Irving Thalberg with stakes routinely running into four figures. But at Columbia, Herman’s means were still very modest, so his gambling was at somewhat minimal levels. The money his father made as a teacher wasn’t enough to keep Herman in anything but old, shoddy suits, which according to one classmate changed color “depending on whether they had been rained on or not.” While the family’s means, or lack of them, had always been an issue Herman thought about, it was while he was at Columbia, out from under his father’s roof for the first time, that his own complicated relationship with money began to twist and deepen and coalesce into something that would eventually bring feelings of deep shame and humiliation not just to Herman but to those he loved.

  For Franz and Johanna, the issue of money had been, as it was for many immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York, fairly simple: you need it to eat and put a roof over your head. But that was about as far as it went. Franz had come to America because he thought it might be easier to earn more money and a better living given his talents and gifts. The idea of altering his behavior in order to seek more money would have been as absurd to Franz as the notion that his grandchildren would someday watch people walking on the moon on a screen in their living room. Money didn’t define you; it didn’t make you who you were; it was just a necessity. “Pop had a real contempt for money and the things money could buy,” Erna said. What mattered was “what you were inside—what you had learned that day: had you done something kind or worth doing?” But for a young man like Herman, gifted and prodigiously talented in so many ways, to be thrown into an environment like Columbia, surrounded by people of greater means and just starting to make his way in the world, money began to take on an almost holy glow. It could save you. It could lift you. It could remake your circumstances and, quite possibly, how you felt about yourself—maybe even, if you were lucky, how those around you (like your unsparing, unsentimental father) thought of you too.

  The challenge, of course, was simply phrased, as Mr. Bernstein would put it in Herman’s script for Citizen Kane decades later: “It’s no trick to make an awful lot of money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money.” The question would be: How to make the money? One could not stoop; one could not throw away one’s gifts; one had to do something worthy of being a Mankiewicz—or so, anyway, went one thread that wound through Herman’s mind, the strand that had Franz embedded in it. But another, countervailing argument, was equally strong: I am smarter and funnier than anyone; I deserve whatever I can possibly get from these idiots. But the friction caused by these two strains of Herman’s thought—the Franz and the anti-Franz, the “do something with integrity” versus “do whatever you want”—would create in Herman an almost unresolvable tension, which would eventually lead to a lifetime of mini–boom and bust cycles, especially in Hollywood, where he would earn enormous sums of money, live high on the hog for a time, then fritter it away, lose more than he earned in gambling and other pursuits, and have to start all over again. Simply put, Herman was terrible with money, all his life.

  While at Columbia, though, Herman did what he could to earn some. He typed other people’s theses, worked in a city playground one summer, and ran “a hip-pocket lending library of pornography. Fanny Hill cost a dollar an hour; The Memoirs of Josephine Mutzenbacker fifty cents.” And yet for all his poverty, he still managed to squirrel away enough to gamble. Classmate Howard Dietz, who later became an executive at M-G-M and designed the trademark logo of the roaring lion (as well as being a lyricist who wrote songs like “That’s Entertainment”), commented that one could often see Herman “darting into entryways for quick transactions with bookies.” But the exhilaration Herman felt on such occasions went beyond the actual money. What got to Herman wasn’t just the idea of trying to increase his modest stash. It was deeper and more fundamental than that.

  Herman J. Mankiewicz simply did not like the rules. As one friend later said, “Show me a rule, and Herman wanted to break it.” An iconoclast through and through, Herman took immense delight in thumbing his nose at authority.*11 But a man of excess to the last, Herman took questioning of authority to an extreme degree. From the basics on how to drive a car or eat in a fancy restaurant to more fundamental (and to his livelihood crucial) lessons on how to structure a screenplay or manage money, Herman refused to accept the rules that society presented him. While such iconoclasm can of course lead to originality and daring (it’s hard to i
magine the screenplay for Citizen Kane emerging from a two-day screenplay seminar), it also leads to a painful isolation from the world and fosters a curious condition; the feeling that the iconoclast is in some fundamental way better than the society whose rules he shuns and mocks goes hand in hand with the feeling that there is something essentially fraudulent and dishonest about one’s participation in society at all. The rules may be for losers and suckers, but at least those dumb clucks know where they belong. It’s awfully hard to succeed when you don’t buy into the game you’re playing.

  And so, Herman at Columbia did things in his own, possibly delightful way, even if not following life’s basic rules became as restrictive and confining as following the rules would have been. Thus in addition to the drinking and gambling, he would “push his food on his fork with his fingers, would belch, would use words forbidden then.” Really, the main thing that could be said of Herman at Columbia is that he absolutely relished the persona he was constructing. He loved shocking people, and he did it all day, every day—and long into the night. Known by his friends and roommates as prodigious in all things—eating, drinking, gambling, belching, farting—Herman in college enjoyed a seemingly bottomless well of appetites.

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  Goma had pictures everywhere. The side of her refrigerator was practically a shrine to dead relatives, and the coffee tables and bureaus were all topped with slippery pieces of glass that squatted on top of black-and-white photographs. Everywhere you looked—up from the breakfast table where you’d have your grapefruit, precut by Marta the maid with a serrated knife, or down the small carpeted hallway toward Goma’s room, between the framed Oscar nominations Herman had received for Citizen Kane and Pride of the Yankees, and certainly in the living room, you’d see photographs. Various Mankiewiczes, Aaronsons,*12 and other relatives and friends, though I never knew most of their names.

  Portrait of Herman as a young man, c. 1916

  One arresting picture was of a young boy in short pants, standing on a New York City stoop in wintertime in the snow. The boy is smiling and wears a black cap, with dirty blond hair peeking out from under it, and his expression conveys an impish delight in the world. As a young boy, I remember being inordinately pleased once when a great-aunt said the picture reminded her of me. But as much as I saw the physical resemblance, and thrilled to it—I looked like Herman! The great Herman who was so funny and wrote the best movie of all time!?—I also sensed something else in the picture that was slightly alien to me. Herman looked tough. He looked strong. He looked like the oldest.

  No matter how wayward Herman’s behavior, his years at Columbia were far from dissolute. Though he became known as “Mank the Tank,” he was no cartoon drunk; he was an immensely productive student. Here, especially when one considers that alcoholism is taking hold, the portrait of Herman Mankiewicz begins to evolve. The two-dimensional improviser, the quick wit, the man of enormous appetites was in fact much more. For one thing, you don’t get accepted into Columbia at the age of thirteen just by being naturally gifted and talented. But more than that, he was almost phenomenally prodigious while there. In addition to his efforts on The Jester, he also worked for the school newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, where he edited a humor column titled “The Off Hour” and also contributed political doggerel.*13 For two years he was a member of Deutscher Verein, the German club, and for three years a member of the campus poetry society, Boar’s Head. He also excelled in the classroom, graduating with honors in both English and German, taking a number of classes with John Erskine, a legendary teacher who had written popular novels like The Private Life of Helen of Troy and Penelope’s Man: The Homing Instinct.*14

  But for Herman, success in the classroom always took a back seat to his extracurricular activities. The real focus of his energies and passion was the stage. At Columbia, Herman Mankiewicz found his calling as a dramatic writer. And his devotion would demand far more than mere improvisation.

  The Varsity Show at Columbia was miles from your typical college production. Inaugurated in 1894 as a fundraiser for the school’s athletic teams, it had become such an entrenched tradition that even after it severed its fundraising connection, it maintained the name and continued as an annual event. Until 1907 it was performed in Carnegie Hall, then moved to the grand ballroom of the old Waldorf Astoria. And while the show was always an occasion for frivolity and fun for the audience, it was taken absolutely seriously by the performers and writers, offering them, as Richard Rodgers later said, “something no other school in the country could supply: an almost professional production.”

  By 1915, the show was so successful it was no longer being written by students; although many undergraduates still dutifully submitted scripts, it had been four years since anyone but a teacher or professor’s script had been chosen as the basis for that year’s production. In the fall of 1915, undaunted, Herman submitted his musical for acceptance to the Varsity Show selection committee.

  Titled The Peace Pirates, his show lampooned Henry Ford’s ill-fated mission earlier that year to stop World War I. Ford had assembled a bizarre crew of clergymen, politicians, pacifists, and businessmen and chartered a Norwegian ocean liner for a trip to Europe where Ford hoped to draw the Great War to a close. It didn’t work. His coalition argued and fought among itself, and the war kept right on raging. In The Peace Pirates, the ocean liner is torpedoed by a German U-boat, stranding the delegates on a deserted island.

  By January, Herman got the news, surprising and sweet: The Peace Pirates had defeated at least a dozen other hopefuls, among them at least three full professors. Herman Mankiewicz’s first play swung into production.

  The premise of The Peace Pirates reveals a penchant for irreverence and demonstrates an early willingness to take a swipe at titans—in fact, Herman was as unhesitant about attacking Henry Ford as he was his father, or as he would be two and a half decades later with William Randolph Hearst. Throughout, the libretto is the work of a precocious wordsmith with clear and obvious preoccupations, as with the show’s opening, a musical homage to drinking, or later a song of a waiter lamenting his lot:

  People may say a waiter’s life is free from worry and care,

  Taking the tips of every man who reads the bill-of-fare;

  But I want to tell you now—you may know it anyhow—

  This life is not at all desired, because we get tired—

  Chorus

  Of food, food, food.

  I’m sick of the sight of food.

  They take a seat and they eat and eat;

  It seems they never conclude.

  Wait, wait, wait,

  We bring them plate after plate.

  So pity the waiter, his life is imbued

  With food, food, food.

  Herman was tickled by the sight of a phalanx of tuxedoed waiters kicking on, arm in arm behind the main waiter, doing a cancan while singing the chorus, though impatient when the actors had difficulty in rehearsal getting the word “imbued” to scan properly to land the rhyme with “conclude.” Herman found most of the student actors so loud and self-concerned that after a time he could barely stand to be in the rehearsal hall.

  Better, to Herman, was the love ditty he’d written for the central couple in the show, whose chorus was itself deceptively simple and charming:

  If I were you and you were I,

  I could not live without me;

  If you were I and I were you,

  Why, I’d be just crazy ’bout me.

  I’d like me for my winning smile,

  I’d be near me all the while;

  If I’d be my wife,

  I’d be happy for life,

  If I were you.

  Beyond the cleverness of the wordplay, there is a kind of knowing narcissism in the song, a charisma that one may choose to like or dislike, but is un
deniable. Despite its tossed-off quality, the song reveals a writer in growing command of his craft.

  The show opened on April 12, 1916, to rave reviews. Of course the Columbia Daily Spectator praised the show, but more impressively, the New York Times gave it a glowing notice, calling the Mankiewicz script “particularly clever.”

  Herman Mankiewicz was triumphant at last. For the first time he had a success—the roar of crowds, the handshakes and claps on the back from strangers, a rave review in the New York Times for an essentially professional musical: in a roundabout kind of way, a smash hit on Broadway. He had harnessed his long-praised talents into something the world could look at and admire. A career with seemingly limitless promise spread out in front of him.

  There is no record of how Franz Mankiewicz reacted to this singular event.

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  For Joe, the next year, 1917, brought not success but trauma. He was eight years old when the flu epidemic that over the next two years would kill millions worldwide first hit New York City. Joe was one of the early victims, his flu spiraling into a case of double pneumonia, pleurisy, and emphysema that almost killed him. The world made little sense. He’d catch a glimpse of a worried-looking nurse or doctor, a bed curtain, the furrowed brow of Erna or his mother, but everything hurt. He felt like he was doused with flames or ice and could hardly breathe, a frightened boy with fitful dreams interrupted by the cries and smells of dying children all around him.

  One of the few things Joe looked forward to was a visit from Herman, a bright spot in the seemingly endless parade of nurses and orderlies and pasty-looking doctors at a series of different hospitals. Finally, the boy was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital where, according to Joe, he “was saved by a very famous doctor, Willie Meyer.” As Joe told the tale, this doctor, while on his rounds, “happened to be caught by my grin or something. He came over and talked to me and took me in hand by operating to remove a piece of my rib, which fixed me up.” Erna said that in lieu of the old rib, the doctor put in a new silver rib, the treatment for emphysema in those days, though later, quixotically, Joe denied the existence of the silver rib, joking that if he did have it, he’d have put a mortgage on it years ago.*15