by Nick Davis
CHAPTER SIX
TRAPPED
Something told you to do as I say, didn’t it? That instinct is worth millions. You can’t buy it—cherish it, Eve. When that alarm goes off, go to your battle stations.
—All About Eve
Joe loved almost everything about the studio. He loved watching the men roll the hand trucks with scenery down behind the back lot, he loved the sound coming from the woodshop when the carpenters were sawing wood and banging hammers into nails constructing sets, he loved (absolutely loved, in more ways than one, about which more later) the starlets, the many young ingénues who would be parading around the lot, some flitting toward the commissary for a quick bite before auditions, others headed to the costume shop for fittings, some coming from who-knows-where with flushed cheeks, and others dashing from the set, dressed absurdly in eighteenth-century peasant garb, or bedecked as mermaids, bar wenches, prostitutes, nuns, aviatrixes, or nurses. And he loved, too, the work. He loved kibbutzing with the other junior writers, even those whom he thought were clearly inferior. He knew a good idea was bound to come from anywhere, and as the youngest writer on the Paramount lot, he was hardly in a position to impose his will on anyone yet. But he also knew it was just a matter of time before he’d be able to rise through the ranks. Sixty dollars a week wasn’t much to start with, but it was just a start, and he knew it wouldn’t take long for him to be earning, if not Herman-type money, at least a hell of a lot more than he was now.
Joe had little trouble adapting to whatever they threw at him. For a time he was enrolled in what was called the junior writer program, devoted to teaching the younger writers from back East the rudiments of screenwriting: tricks of the trade, Joe later said, which included how to establish the jeopardy that would “carry the furniture of the film” (like opening with a wide shot of the factory that would include a sign that said “Danger: Explosives” so that you could stage a chase through the area in the eighth reel), and also rules like the “what he doesn’t know,” a bit of back story, say, that Jean Arthur’s handsome young mechanic is, unbeknownst to her, actually the richest man in all of Australia.
“Joe loved almost everything about the studio.” Here he pals around with two friends, identified on the back of the photo only as “Claude and wife,” c. 1932.
Joe lapped it up. Always a good student, he learned the lessons well, and though surrounded by slightly older young men who had attended Yale and Harvard, he was the first one promoted out of the group and into a real writing job. As always, Joe, however witty and self-consciously funny as he could be, was studious and alert, and he took the craft of writing seriously. He imbibed the rules and learned them well. He knew something early on that it takes many writers years to discover—you have to know the rules in order to break them.*1
Immediately Joe impressed the directors he was assigned to. More than just being young and handsome, with a fresh and optimistic spirit that contrasted with many of the more cynical writers from back East (including Herman), he seemed unusually secure personally, and was, unlike nearly everyone else in Hollywood, perfectly willing to admit his weaknesses as well as his strengths. When he was assigned to the movie Skippy under director Norman Taurog, Joe told Taurog that while he was confident in his dialogue, and considered it excellent and natural, Joe thought it would be wise for the director to get someone else to handle the construction of the screenplay. Taurog was amazed: “I was strongly impressed by his not trying to bluff me that he could do everything.” Then, when the screenplay of Finn and Hattie, an adaptation of a novel by Donald Ogden Stewart, was completed, Joe went to Stewart and “very apologetically informed me he had just written the screenplay from my book, and forewarned me, ‘Don’t go to see it.’ ” The movie had dispensed with the book’s satirical tone and replaced it with broad comedy in service of Leon Errol, the film’s pratfalling star; Stewart would always like Joe as a result of that “voluntary apology.” Such examples of modesty and honest self-effacement were rare in Hollywood, and almost unheard of in a Mankiewicz.
Joe had another advantage of course: he was Herman’s brother. Everyone knew Herman; the name opened doors and greased wheels, and it had gotten Joe the job in the first place. At the time Herman was at the top of his game—Paramount’s best writer, writing for films ranging from Ladies’ Man to Man of the World to Love Among the Millionaires, he was also seen as almost an oracle on the lot. “[Herman] was the kind of guy who could pull a picture through to completion,” James M. Cain testified. “Nothing could blow him down or faze him or get his nerves.” But in part that may have been because of how he viewed his work: unseriously. How could he become truly disturbed by something that wasn’t very important? The Hollywood Reporter, which along with Variety was one of the official trade publications of the town and reflected its mores (or lack thereof), took note of the attitude and complained of writers who “sat at the famous ‘bachelor’s table’ in the Montmartre Restaurant—Herman Mankiewicz, the high priest. Here writers pledge themselves to a ‘few more years of tripe and then something worthwhile.’ ” As the Reporter sensed, since these first writers were making the big money, they tended to view the rest of the writers with disdain, especially the green young recruits from the East Coast colleges, who arrived full of spit and polish and would happily do the labor on dialogue that ran down the right hand side of the scripts—or the construction that took up the left-hand column—while their imagined betters, or bettors, were rolling craps and playing cards.
In fact, by the time Joe arrived at Paramount, Herman’s gambling was intensifying. Now that he was making big money, Herman was only too willing to raise the stakes on his poker games. As Richard Meryman later estimated, “one million dollars passed through Herman’s hands and left no residue”—a staggering achievement of a sort. His career seemed better than ever, and he had big funds at his disposal. Who could complain about a life like that? As for Joe, while not overly adoring of the kid, Herman treated him with respect and affection. He’d talked him up before Joe even arrived, proudly waving the telegram Joe had sent from Albuquerque announcing his imminent arrival: “two hours late. horses eaten by wolves. gold safe however.”
Joe’s rise pleased Herman enormously—and just as Joe benefited by Herman’s presence at Paramount, so did Herman gain reward from Joe’s being on the lot, and it was a reward that was even easier to calibrate than respect or residual affection, for Joe’s boss was Ben Schulberg, his frequent gambling buddy and one of his best friends. After Joe had established himself as a dialogue whiz and an all-around writer worthy of support, Herman decided that Joe was underpaid. He stormed into Schulberg’s office and demanded a raise on Joe’s behalf. A good half hour of conversation later, when Schulberg acceded to Herman’s demand and raised Joe’s weekly salary to $125, Herman pulled his brother aside and dispensed some hard-earned wisdom. “Money in this town never lasts,” Herman said. “Put twenty-five dollars a week into a savings account, and you’ll be glad you did.” Joe did as he was told, grateful and somewhat surprised at his brother’s words.
Six months later, Herman was in a tight spot and demanded all the money in Joe’s savings account.
For years, Joe had looked to Herman as his real father figure, outstripping the distant and imperious Franz. What to do, then, when your father figure turns out to be as disappointing, if in totally different ways, as your father himself? Joe had already absorbed the blows of Franz’s remoteness and coldness. Now, in Hollywood, Joe would be exposed to Herman’s utter unpredictability and unreliability, especially when it came to money. The hero worship that had nourished Joe, seen him through his difficult patches both in New York and Europe and brought him west, was eroding. Still, a Hollywood neophyte who owed so much of his life to Herman, he could hardly refuse him that first time. And Herman took full advantage of his position on the lot as a “god among writers,” one friend of Joe’s later recalled. “Joe was the kid brother all
right. Herman rode him, patronized him, did everything but send him out for cigarettes.”
Later, though it would never be easy, Joe would learn how to say no to Herman. Once, when Herman needed money to pay off an even larger gambling debt than usual, he told Joe to borrow on his life insurance for money. Joe refused. Herman responded by summoning Joe to a conference in the office of their mutual friend, writer Charlie Lederer. When he arrived, Herman banged a big book on a desk, startling Lederer’s office mate, writer James McGuinness, then announced, “This is a trial.” Then Herman turned to McGuinness and said, “Now will you kindly tell this little SOB what a brother is—that everything he has is mine.”
There is of course a huge difference in how a younger brother and a little brother perceive things. To the older brother, the younger brother can range from an afterthought to a usurper…but since all of life predates the little pisher, how in the world does he think that anything he gets does not belong to me? Does the Earth not depend on the Sun? Of course the older brother would take without asking. It is the little brother who wouldn’t dream of it. He may covet what the older brother has, but to get it will require cunning, patience, and resolve. To him, nothing is given. It will need to be earned, or taken.
* * *
—
“I see your career rising in the East, like the sun,” Addison DeWitt declared to Miss Caswell in All About Eve after the young ingénue (played to halting, ignorant perfection by Marilyn Monroe) has cajoled the old producer Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff, dyspeptic, irritable, also perfect) into getting her a drink at Margo Channing’s party. Like Miss Caswell, Joe was shrewd in his advancement, and his career initially seemed to consist of nothing but rising. He became an immediate favorite of the Paramount directors like Taurog, Norman Z. McLeod, and Edward Sutherland. “Joe Mankiewicz ruins you for anyone else,” Taurog said. “He never let me down.” When Joe was assigned to a picture, he invariably did the job more thoroughly and intelligently than the next fellow, and he was recognized almost immediately for his skill. After collaborating on the screenplay for the adaptation of the long-running comic book Skippy, in 1931, Joe was nominated for an Academy Award at the age of twenty-two, though the ceremony contained an early embarrassment which revealed Joe’s intense competitive streak as well as his laser-like focus on winning a golden statuette. Ever the professional, Joe soon refined the incident into a first-class anecdote. Apparently, according to Joe, the man announcing the award winner that year was an aging screenwriter named Waldemar Young, who, when he opened the envelope, said that “the choice was particularly pleasing to him because it was a friend of his—which I was, a young friend—but also because the subject matter was so American and so fresh…and went on describing Skippy. Then he announced, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Best in Screenplay Award goes to…’ and I stood up. ‘Howard Estabrook for Cimarron,’ and there I was, standing with egg dripping off my face.” Fortunately for Joe, Estabrook was right in front of him, “so I did the big ham bit of reaching over and shaking his hand, when I actually hated the son of a bitch.”
“A cloud floated right into my soup plate.” Poster for Dinner at Eight (1933)
Joe had learned quickly to adapt—to shake the hands of the sons of bitches he hated. Would it have been possible for Herman to have ever tried to get away with such a move? Would he have even wanted to?
For Herman, movie writing was increasingly becoming something of a chore, and here’s where the true tragedy of Herman’s output begins to dawn. It was the golden age of Hollywood comedies, or so we all later agreed, but Herman Mankiewicz didn’t value the work. His disdain is almost heartbreaking.
Consider Dinner at Eight, for which he was loaned out from Paramount to M-G-M. The movie sparkles from beginning to end, and it isn’t just because it’s based on a successful play by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman. Working with Frances Marion and Donald Ogden Stewart, Herman turned the play into a real movie, with scintillating lines from dazzling performers. It’s almost demoralizing to watch Jean Harlow’s spoiled blonde say, “Politics? Ha! You couldn’t get into politics. You couldn’t get in anywhere. You couldn’t even get in the men’s room at the Astor!” or Marie Dressler declaim, “And then I had a restful, nice luncheon…with four lawyers. On the eighty-eighth floor of the Watson’s building. You know, the sky club. A cloud floated right into my soup plate”—and think about not only Herman’s involvement in the movie, but his contempt for it.
In fact, the movie, about grasping ambition at the start of the Great Depression, has painful echoes to Herman’s situation. It’s the tale of an alcoholic former matinee idol on the down side of a once-brilliant acting career, portrayed with searing believability by John Barrymore. Those who know of Barrymore’s own alcoholism and self-loathing will likely see the added poignancy in this man who has “outlived everything but his vanity,” but what of the parallels to Herman’s life? Watching Barrymore decide to end his own life, seeing him turn on the gas in his hotel room, it isn’t just the waste of a character’s life that’s so sad. It’s the implied nobility that Barrymore brings to the act—almost as if someone, somewhere, lurking behind the actor, was agreeing with the decision: life is stupid and the people in it are idiots, and genius goes unrecognized, and maybe the whole thing isn’t really worth much in the end. The weariness in Barrymore’s performance, the utter defeat that he seemed so willing to embrace…is it wrong to wonder if some of this was placed there by Herman?
Herman’s derision for the work is unquestioned, and one interesting bit of evidence for his disrespect for it is that, unlike a lot of other screenwriters, Herman didn’t take his work home with him. According to my uncle Frank, while you might hear Pop complaining about various sons of bitches at the studio (Frank and Don’s name for Herman was the same as Herman and Joe’s for Franz), you never heard him talk about the actual work: no “how do I resolve this character problem” or “how can I get the hero back to town before the dynamite goes off without his knowing the dynamite is set to explode?” Nor even, according to Frank, did he talk much about the business of Hollywood—“There was no ‘Zanuck is smarter than Mayer,’ or ‘I’d rather work at Warner Bros. because they have a more sensitive understanding of character…’ No. No, they were all clowns. Idiots. The inmates were running the asylum.”
In fact, Frank often said, if you didn’t know what Herman did for a living, you wouldn’t know what he did for a living. Work, the way Herman lived, was something that was off to one side. You left in the morning, you came home in the evening, but you never talked about it. You suffered through it, you did it, but all the while you were dreaming that maybe in some alternate universe you were actually doing something you respected.
Ironically, the disregard that Herman had for the place may have been precisely what allowed my uncles Frank and Don (and later my mother) to grow up in such relative peace and normalcy compared to typical Hollywood children of celebrated parents. When you’re being driven from house to house in a limousine on Halloween, as Mom remembered doing with the Selznick children every year, and the chauffeur is going up the walk to collect the candy, it can tend to be a little hard to keep your priorities straight. But if the whole damn game is considered a waste of time, if you never go to your father’s movies because he thinks they’re slop and vomit, and he further believes that “there weren’t that many literate people in Hollywood, certainly not people with whom he could even talk,” then you’re liable to grow up feeling a certain distance from the place, something that prevents you from investing too much mental energy in the town and its games. Herman and Sara made a nice home on Tower Road in Beverly Hills, and Don and Frank grew up secure and happy, knowing their father was successful, and on balance a good dad, albeit distant, even diffident at times. Still, that he cared for them deeply they never doubted. And that he wanted to create a haven of his family life was also clear. It was a place he could escape the stupidity and madness
of the system that was, he felt, eating him alive. And so, rather than give lavish parties attended by actors and movie stars—“What have you got to say to a movie actor, and what has he got to say to you?” Herman would ask—when he and Sara did entertain, even if famous people attended their dinners, the guests would more likely be writers and playwrights from back East than performers: men like Alexander Woollcott, Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, S. J. Perelman, Jed Harris, and Bennett Cerf. Talking to Uncle Frank late in his life about his dad, you got the sense that Herman was trapped in Hollywood—utterly starving for intellectual stimulation and companionship, believing with every molecule of blood in him that he was wasting his professional life, but making far too much money to leave. Family would be, would have to be, his consolation.
Myrna Loy and Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama (1934)
But how much consolation could it really have been? Can a life be filled with genuine joy if you’re living in a perpetual state of rage at the people you work with, and for? If you grow up imagining that you will have tremendous success in a field that you respect and honor, having success, no matter how great, in a field you find demeaning and insulting and generating a product that is pap for the masses, who are generally slobs and fools, can’t possibly be balanced out by a loving family. Because if, as Herman felt, you are every day failing to be what you might have been, surely you can’t shower your family members with the kind of warmth and paternal love you’d want to. It’s hard, every dime-store philosopher will tell us, to love others if you don’t love yourself. So while it’s easy to respect Herman for all he accomplished with one hand self-tied behind his back, fighting through his self-loathing and addictions to become for a time that “god among writers,” and admirable to consider his devotion to his family, there’s also something ineffably sad about his warmth toward Sara and the kids. The bittersweet twinkle in his eyes as he watched Don and Frank play their childhood games was unmistakable—love for your family is wonderful, but is it enough?
