Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  The Chicago Tribune job, of course, did not exist.

  Herman pushed through the swinging doors into the lobby of the Hotel Adlon and moved toward the hotel bar, the center of the thriving expat and journalistic community in Berlin. Herman must have made his way toward it hungrily. Along the way, in the hotel’s vast central hall, he would’ve spotted the Roman-style bust of the kaiser, whose eyes followed one around the room. The pressure was real. Herman had to find a job, and quick. The man who had promised the job for him last summer in Paris—well, it had been almost a promise, or maybe it had been enough of one to convince Herman that it wouldn’t exactly be difficult to get the job—was no longer in Berlin, and Herman was now stuck enacting this ridiculous charade for Sara.

  Already it had been close to two weeks, and the only work he’d been able to find was a job at a warehouse unpacking cases and crates from trucks and loading them into the warehouse of a department store. They paid in marks every evening, and Herman was waiting for the day when Sara might ask him why an American newspaper would pay in marks. He also wondered if she’d notice the calluses developing on his hands. So far, he was getting away with it, but this couldn’t possibly last, and his back was killing him.

  He would’ve sidled up to the bar, put his foot on the brass footrail that ran alongside the bottom of the banquette, and glanced around. It wasn’t quite ten in the morning, the regulars wouldn’t get in for another half an hour or so—soon enough the journalists would be gathering in droves at the ornate bar, to exchange ideas, kibbutz about work, and enjoy the hotel’s advanced plumbing, still a rarity in postwar Berlin—but wait, was that the Sports Editor? Herman didn’t give a damn about sports, but he drained his coffee, approached the man with a steady gaze, and stuck out his hand. Then Herman launched into a disquisition on the Kaiser Himself. Herman had a lot of ideas about the man, from theories on his diet to a dissection of his monetary policy blunders, and he would weave it all into something resembling a coherent argument, and more than that, a vivid tapestry that seemed to bring the man to life, the Kaiser’s moustache dripping in the cold winter air outside a palace in Wannsee…The editor’s eyes danced as he listened to Herman, the room was filling up with other journalists, and soon enough the man was ordering Herman a drink. It might not be what he’d promised Sara, but everything would work out. He’d land on his feet. He always did.

  * * *

  —

  Herman’s journalistic life in Berlin proceeded from these kinds of improvisations, and before long he was cobbling together actual paying work. A few weeks of haunting both the Adlon bar and then the lobby of the Chicago Tribune offices across the street, and he managed a meeting with Tribune bureau chief George Seldes,*4 who hired him as a part-time assistant. Then, for $15 a week, he became a stringer for Women’s Wear Daily, writing short pieces on business and culture. Soon enough, Herman was writing theater pieces for The New York Times and making a decent enough living, and more than that, beginning to make a name for himself in the heady world of newspapers in the 1920s. To Herman, the life of a newspaperman was almost ideal: the pace was fast, the assignments were quick—Herman was always an extremely fast worker, when he did work—and most of all, the life itself called for a personality that Herman fell into naturally. He relished the role of the hard-bitten newsman. According to Rebecca Drucker, a part-time New York Tribune reporter then stationed in Berlin, Herman played the jaded journalist to perfection: “Toughness was what Herman aimed for, no question. By toughness, I mean you couldn’t be caught off guard, couldn’t be surprised at anything. You never sounded like an intellectual. You knew where the best food and drink could be found and what things cost and how to manipulate money. You gambled. And you could bull your way into any place, and you had no illusions.”*5

  And because Herman knew how to talk the talk, it’s not difficult to understand how, no matter what a neophyte he must have been at the Adlon, he quickly won over the Berlin crowd. His first tool was his wit, which always struck most people as both faster than anyone else’s, and also somehow more humane, even as lacerating as it could be. Drucker remembered that during one of the frequent workers’ strikes currently taking place in Berlin, Herman offered anybody at the bar one thousand marks for a good German translation of the line “It will never get well if you picket.” In addition to his wit, he had a genuine warmth of personality. Sigrid Schultz, the main secretary of the Chicago Tribune office in Berlin and not Herman’s biggest fan, couldn’t help admitting that he was “somebody you liked to talk to. He had a way of looking at you from under the eyelids—a look of observing very, very closely whenever you said anything.” He listened.*6

  Herman in Germany, early 1920s, sitting to the left of Chancellor Josef Wirth

  Herman also enjoyed the entrée being a reporter gave him to people and places that had previously been denied him, and he made the most out of his newly bestowed access. One picture from the times shows him at a garden party hosted by Germany’s chancellor, Josef Wirth. In the picture, he is seated at table with five other people, one of them the chancellor himself, sitting directly on his right. Herman’s eyes are twinkling with delight, and his mouth is open as he leans toward the chancellor, a young man thrilled to be confabulating with some of the most important people in the country.

  But other, more disturbing patterns started to emerge in Berlin. For one, there was his problem with deadlines. Because he was such a facile and fast writer, Herman often waited till the last minute—or even after the last minute—before turning in his pieces. For Women’s Wear, for which he mainly wrote a variety of pieces on political, business, and cultural matters,*7 deadlines were Saturday, and he often missed them, sometimes disappearing when the assignments were due. On more than one occasion, Sigrid Schultz, who had helped get him the job, had to track him down, take him to the Chicago Tribune office, and lock him inside until he’d finished his piece.

  Then there was gambling. The wagering that he’d begun in college and which would reach ruinous proportions in Hollywood was in its ascendance in Berlin. The Adlon had a luxurious bridal suite which, when available, was supplied for free to the American journalists for their poker games, at which Herman was a regular attendee, and loser. Later, when Herman was returning to the States, he appealed to his poker buddies to help fund his passage, which they generously did by pulling a small percentage from every poker pot. Once Herman was sailing safely back to America, one of the correspondents at the poker table asked all the players present whom Herman owed money to, beyond what they’d just given him. Every single man raised his hand.

  Too, there was the matter of Sara. What was already clear, from the misadventure with the Tribune job alone, was that Herman was setting Sara up to be his policeman, a warden, someone to lie to and evade, someone to impress with big promises—not a true partner to share life’s joys and sorrows with. As it was, it wasn’t until years later that Herman came clean to Sara about the Tribune affair. Then again, Sara herself was starting to become known around Berlin, and some even speculated that, for instance, the Women’s Wear job had come about because of pity. Though Sigrid Schultz had put in a good word on Herman’s behalf, she later admitted, “I did it partly for his wife. I liked her, and I thought she had a problem with that husband.” The pattern of people pitying Sara, and helping Herman as a result, had begun.

  But Herman’s work, when he did it and when he delivered it on time, was good and starting to get noticed. When Herman wrote his first freelance theater pieces for The New York Times, along with the check for his work, he received generous praise from no less than George S. Kaufman, then the Times’s leading drama critic. As Kaufman explained, the check was for eight dollars, “with deductions for dashes, as is the benevolent custom of the office.” He then declared point-blank: “Your stuff is great. Woollcott thinks so, too. I have liked everything, uniformly, except the long piece that you wrote, and the chief reason I d
idn’t like that is that we haven’t room for long pieces.”

  Herman was honing his critical faculties in Berlin, though interestingly, while the dire political and economic situation there produced much innovation within the arts, making the city the unquestioned center of theatrical invention, Herman found much of the theater lacking. “The only real theatrical novelty of the past weeks,” he wrote early on, “has been the success of the woman boxers at the Metropol Cabaret.” Later, he gave a facetious nod to his boyhood home when he claimed the setting and direction of one play were “considerably inferior to what Poli’s stock company in Wilkes-Barre used to provide.” But beneath the gibes about Berlin’s theatrical disappointments—“At the present time, the German theatre is as frankly commercial as ever the American theatre was and is, without many of the redeeming features to be found [in America],” he wrote at one point—lies a curious fact. Herman Mankiewicz, theater buff, was in Berlin as the avant-garde of German theater was coming into its own, yet he seemed not only to dismiss nearly all of it, but to seek out plays which had nothing to do with it. Why? Why was a young man so antagonistic to all that was new and potentially revolutionary in an art form he proclaimed to revere? And in a man who despised authority and thumbed his nose at convention in so many things, why did he come to hate the avant-garde with such passion? In truth, for all his gifts as a dramatist and skill as a writer, Herman always preferred the traditional to the groundbreaking, and he thought the more radical innovations of the German theater directors off-putting and pretentious. It was a harbinger of some of his objections to Orson Welles’s techniques in Citizen Kane—and a window into a curious aspect of his personality.

  There’s a photograph of Herman with Jack Dempsey in Berlin—whenever a famous American came to town, Gilbert Seldes would ask Herman to be his tour guide and, according to Sara, he “carried off the honors very nicely”—taken in front of the Chicago Tribune office, the name of the paper painted in its trademark font on the storefront window, the words just above the heads of Dempsey’s manager, Dempsey, and, to the left of the great fighter, Herman in his suit charmingly short in the arms and legs. Next to the preternaturally strong and confident Dempsey, Herman looks every bit his age, the tough reporter replaced by a vulnerable young man somewhat adrift in life. He looks, frankly, terrified. It’s no surprise that such a man, as much as he may have been attracted to anything that would threaten to upset the established order, was also profoundly conflicted about it and might in the end adopt a deeply cynical tone toward anything truly revolutionary. Let us remember, after all, that as much as Herman may have hated his father, he had invited the man on his honeymoon.

  So while he continued to scramble professionally—he tried all sorts of schemes to earn additional cash: having noticed, while taking a political science course at the University of Berlin, that there were no flower carts outside, he hired a fräulein to tend a flower cart there; he tried to sell German war planes to someone Goma described as “an unsavory Pole”; and for a time he even got involved in the stock market and foreign currency exchange manipulations—for Herman, the two and a half years in Berlin were notable mostly for the pillars he erected for a traditional life. His marriage was thriving. When she heard Herman coming home at night, Sara would hide. He would call out, “Schnooks, where are you? Come out!” Then he’d laughingly search throughout the apartment until Sara jumped out at him. They had their first child, my uncle Don, born in January 1922, in a hospital on the edge of town. A union strike had left the place without electricity, and it was so dark and freezing that Goma slipped into bed wearing her fur coat but then, grand martyr that she was, allowed her midwife to swipe her hot water bottle to keep her feet warm. Herman happily handed out cigars; his one moment of anguish seemed to come when he considered the circumcision, tears streaming down his face. “Why do they have to do that to a tiny baby?”

  On the whole, things in Berlin were moving in the right direction. Herman’s writing was gaining notice, and though he had already started to complain to Goma that he wasn’t yet writing a great American novel or hugely successful plays, there was little doubt, at least outwardly, that such successes lay in his future.

  By the spring of 1922, Herman had decided that it was time to bring his young family back to New York—Berlin was no place to raise a child, and Herman and Sara had both started to miss home and family far too much—but the problem was, he didn’t have enough money for the passage. The answer, at first, seemed to come strolling gracefully into the lobby of the Hotel Adlon. It may have been Herman’s own first encounter with greatness.

  Herman (right) with Jack Dempsey (center) and Dempsey’s manager, Jack Kearns (left), in Berlin, 1920s

  One afternoon in May 1922, the telephone rang at the flat off Potsdamer Strasse. Herman informed Sara that he would be bringing home some guests for dinner, two people he’d met at the Hotel Adlon: the young Russian poet, Sergei Yesenin, and his wife, Isadora Duncan. To Herman’s generation, Duncan was an almost unmatched icon, combining both personal notoriety and artistic reputation. The woman had completely revolutionized modern dance—drawing inspiration from the ancient Greeks, inaugurating a free-flowing form of dance she’d often perform barefoot and wearing a toga, sometimes not even that, a performance she proclaimed had evolved from the swaying and movement of Nature Herself. Duncan in fact was so revolutionary she didn’t even consider her form of performance to be dance. “I am an expressioniste of beauty,” she said proudly. “I use my body as my medium, just as the writer uses his words. Do not call me a dancer.” Whatever she was, she was wildly successful, especially once she took her act to Europe, where she performed publicly on vast stages before thousands or privately in salons for a well-to-do few. It was while she was in Berlin that month that she and Herman crossed paths at the Adlon, and Herman almost immediately hit upon an idea on how to put their meeting to good use.

  “Don’t be surprised at Yesenin,” Herman told Sara over the phone. “He’s crazy. And he eats nothing but cucumbers and sour cream.” Even so, when Herman arrived home with the two guests, Sara was baffled and astonished by their bizarre behavior. “They were both out of control,” she said. The night was more than memorable. “Her conversation was all on a very high level of gaiety. She was funny, gay. There was lots of laughter. And that madman—nobody could understand. She would tell him things in English and he would pretend to understand. I’m sure he didn’t understand a word. [He] laughed boisterously and started quoting Russian poetry, and she would get up and stamp her feet and do a revolutionary dance.” The evening devolved into chaos soon enough, with Herman openly making fun of Duncan, the dancer far too drunk to understand, and the crazy Russian spouting his poetry and comprehending nothing anyone was saying. But by the time the night was over and Herman was placing the bizarre couple in a taxi back to the Adlon, Herman’s scheme had borne fruit. He had been offered a job as Duncan’s press agent. The money Herman so desperately wanted to get home was within reach.

  All that was needed now was for him to manage her upcoming tour of European capitals, a task easier said than done. While Isadora Duncan may have been Herman’s first exposure to genius, in some ways it was like looking in a mirror. To begin with, the woman’s finances were an absolute disaster (in part because she had generously established dancing schools for impoverished children across the continent). Her attorney had sold her house in Berlin for a fraction of its value, and much of her property, furniture, and library had disappeared. What’s more, a bank account in Berlin had been impounded because of her communist sympathies, and, according to a letter Herman wrote Sara, “There were some checks in Russia that Isadora ‘forgot about.’ It seems she gave blank checks to the director of her Moscow school with which to buy food, and he’s been indelicate enough to use them.”

  The tour began in July in Brussels, where she had an advance sale of $12,000. Herman was there with her, and his first encounter with her ac
tual work was something of a letdown. “The diva has danced twice,” he wrote to Sara, “and she ain’t so good. It’s true that every one of her movements, her poses, calls to mind one’s general impression of Greek art and even the faint memory of some vase or column somewhere, but on the whole there’s a fleshiness and a lack of fire that makes it impossible to keep up any illusion.” That she wasn’t the Isadora of old could be forgiven, since she was forty-four now and overweight, but it didn’t bode well for the tour. Next up was Paris, where the Trocadero had guaranteed Duncan ten concerts with a chorus of Russian children, but the Kremlin would not let the children leave Russia. Duncan’s response was to cancel both the Paris concerts as well as the ones Herman was currently promoting in London and to head to Venice for a rest. By this time, Herman had lost all patience with the woman, and when he asked her for his back pay, she “threw a random handful of cash at his feet” and “railed at him for his disloyalty.” Dismayed by the encounter, and somewhat disgusted by what he took to be her charlatanism, Herman returned to Berlin, no closer to getting back to New York than when he’d left.