by Nick Davis
“An ideal dinner guest”: Joe in 1934
Joe, meanwhile, was relishing the life of the young man-about-town. He was handsome and much sought-after—an ideal dinner guest who didn’t bring nearly the level of tension to the table that his brother did. There was little chance he would throw up on the tablecloth, or get in a violent political battle, or make a scene of any kind—he was well-behaved and well-mannered. In fact, he had so much of that newfangled “sex appeal” that William Wellman once asked Joe when he would “give up this crap about writing” and offered him a contract as an actor (Joe respectfully declined). Joe was even used in Finn and Hattie, as a model in a photo for a magazine ad illustrating the “It” pose, with the ad copy asking, “Do women thrill at your approach?”
In Joe’s case, many did. A succession of starlets shared his bed, if not his heart.*2 At one point, Joe seemed poised to marry a young British socialite, if only, Herman said, so he could name his son Napier. Later, he was linked publicly to a number of different actresses, one of whom, Frances Dee, he later told Ken Geist, did break his heart. In fact, he told Geist that he had planned on eloping with her until he learned that she had already run off with another man, actor Joel McCrea.*3 Joe said that she was the great love of his life, though the story of their meeting one last time after she married McCrea is hard to believe. According to what one friend told Geist, Joe said he was driving his car down Coldwater Canyon, when a car pulled alongside, and there she was, Frances Dee, the beautiful dark-haired ingénue taking her car out for an afternoon drive. She “waved to him and pulled up at the side of the road…They looked at each other for a moment, and she suddenly reached out and embraced him passionately, kissed him, and then threw her car into gear and zoomed away.” Joe must have found it a reassuring story to tell, not only to others but to himself. After all, how easy and safe for Joe to have lost the one great love of his life before he actually got married. Looked at from the vantage point of a man with three marriages under his belt, it’s easy to view the story as apocryphal, Joe announcing to the world that he did in fact have a heart to break.
Man-about-town on a boat: Joe, mid 1930s
But Joe’s relationships with actresses would continue, professionally and personally, for the next three or four decades. For while Herman had nothing but indifference for actors, Joe would remain fiercely attracted to them his entire life, a moth to the flame. Sometimes, later, talking with actresses on film sets, he would see that they were hanging on his every word not just because he was the director, but because, literally, they didn’t know what to think until he told them. In a relationship with an actress, Joe could play several roles—devoted, adoring audience member and admirer who would happily shower her with support and love and feed her likely starved sense of self; director, there to cajole and wheedle and draw a great performance out of her; and most of all, Svengali—a near-hypnotic manipulator and overbearing mentor, there to tutor the actress and fill her presumably empty head with ideas. “You belong to me now,” a steely Addison DeWitt tells Eve Harrington toward the end of All About Eve. And it was this role, practically as the woman’s owner, that would keep ensnaring Joe, lasting through his first two marriages and exploding into personal turmoil and tragedy that would nearly derail his professional life, even as his understanding of the relationship would fuel his greatest work.
To Herman, an actress was someone who had nothing to say.
To Joe, that may have been the point.
* * *
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Joe’s Sunday wedding at Tower Road must have brought back memories for the groom. Joe had loved playing with Sara’s little sister Mattie at Herman’s wedding, and he would always remember the ice cream they’d snuck out with together on the back porch, as well as how Herman and Sara had behaved that afternoon—the way they looked at each other, held hands, even how she rolled her eyes at him when his friends had been drinking and confounding the rabbi. Now they were practically an old married couple, together almost fourteen years—Sara was in back talking to Elizabeth’s mother. Mrs. Von Schermerhorn was a horrid woman, but Sara managed to talk to her almost politely, probably the one member of the family able to swallow her distaste enough to be civil. Mrs. Von Schermerhorn had withheld her approval of Elizabeth’s choice in groom for some time—there were all kinds of excuses but in the end Joe felt it came down to good old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Of course, breaking past religious and cultural conventions in large part explained Joe’s reason for marrying this upper-crust New York City white doily of a debutante in the first place—Herman advised Joe to tell his mother-in-law-to-be that he’d happily reattach his foreskin if that would help ease her conscience on the matter—but in the end the fact that Joe was now making good money and had moved over to M-G-M, which was, even for stuffed shirts from back East, the most prestigious of all the studios, had finally allowed Joe to overcome their opposition. So now, at last, Elizabeth Young, an actress from the East, would become his bride.
Herman served as host for the afternoon, and fortifying himself with some scotch, did a fine job of it, seeing to the guests in the Tower Road garden, making sure everyone had canapes, or drinks, or both. Herman’s hair was thinning by now, and Joe, whose own mane was still lustrous and rich, couldn’t fail to notice how much Herman was beginning to resemble Pop, who sat sternly in the front row of seats. Herman’s twelve-year-old son Don sat next to his grandfather, though the old man didn’t have much of a relationship with his grandsons. Franz didn’t make it west very often, and Joe knew he should feel honored somehow that Franz had come for the wedding. But relations between Franz and Elizabeth’s mother had been icy from the start, and the wedding day didn’t change that.
Joe considered what the day meant. Did it mean anything? He’d gotten a squib in the Los Angeles Times about the wedding, and Louella Parsons had promised to write something about it. And maybe the wedding would finally calm Elizabeth down. The last few weeks had been tense. The woman was in constant need of flattery, it seemed to Joe. So like an actress, so emotionally unstable. The need was never-ending—but then again, look at her.
Joe’s first wife was a beauty, with dark hair and a lovely upturned nose, and her eyes conveyed intelligence and wit, though as Joe had already learned, what was conveyed in a performance was very often something that wasn’t there. At Tower Road that afternoon, Joe became bored with his wife. He wished he’d been able to get away with Herman and get a drink himself. He watched Herman that afternoon with Sara, and the way the two of them were so casually, genuinely affectionate with each other, even surrounded, as they were that afternoon, by so many Aaronsons. Joe knew Herman didn’t like his wife’s relatives always hovering everywhere, and he took comfort in that now, for Joe knew, as he looked across at Herman, so comfortable, so at home, so situated and right, that domestic security would never be his destiny.*4
Someone took a photograph of this moment, ten minutes before the noontime wedding. Joe looks like he is doing everything he can not to hurry things along, as if all he wants to do is get through this ceremony, then the lunch, then get as quickly as possible to the hotel, where there would no doubt be tears and some hours of talk, recriminations for something or other he’d done wrong, then some lovemaking, he could count on that. And then some sleep, and finally, a little more than twenty hours from now, it would be time to get back to the studio.
* * *
—
The marriage lasted three years, to the day.
In November 1936, Joe moved out of their apartment in Beverly Hills for the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and issued a statement that despite their irreconcilable differences, the two were parting on good terms. It was pure PR hogwash, and when Elizabeth filed for divorce, she claimed that Joe treated her cruelly, was overly critical of her, and no longer loved her. For his part, Joe was never entirely sure he had ever loved her, but he was certainly less interested in being with her
than he had been initially, and after the physical attraction wore off, Joe was left with an actress of limited depth who simply didn’t hold his interest, and whose utility had been outlived. He couldn’t be blamed. It had been a marriage of opportunism on both sides, and when he saw that she was desperately unhappy, he was more than willing to let her go, to grant her a divorce on the best terms imaginable. She was emotional and silly—the tears and the yelling and the jealousies—it all struck Joe as juvenile, and when, in the end, she testified that entire days went by without Joe speaking to his wife, he realized that of course the woman was right, but it couldn’t be helped.
For her part, she ended up getting married two more times, and toward the end of her life she hardly ever thought back to her first marriage. When she did, she remembered only distance, cruelty, and criticism. Sometimes she wondered if it had been deeper than that—deeper or more shallow, she wasn’t sure—she asked herself just how heartless Joe really was. In some moments, she thought maybe the coldness and the cruelty had been mere manipulation, a decision on his part to get her to go away so that he wouldn’t have to confront whatever it was he didn’t want to confront.
* * *
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To the biographer, a movie is a tricky artifact, most particularly because determining the various contributions of its makers can be so challenging. How can it be determined precisely what any one person’s contribution to a film was? Even if he is a total auteur, responsible for every line of dialogue and every positioning of the camera (as for instance with a man whose dream was more than anything else simply to be in control), it can be nearly impossible to say with any real certainty what anyone’s actual contribution to a film was, a feat made even trickier when considering the Hollywood movies of the 1930s and ’40s, when collaboration was the norm and creative credits were frequently handed out on an ad hoc basis. And when one throws into the mix a combustible nest of egos such as Hollywood was and will always be, sorting out one person’s contribution from another’s can be even harder. When, furthermore, two of the people who are battling for the credit are brothers with a lifelong relationship of such tension and complexity, it makes the task borderline impossible.
The most that can be said about Million Dollar Legs, therefore, the single movie on which both Herman and Joe received credit, is that in its own absurd and sophomoric way it’s a ridiculously delightful film—anarchic and funny and bizarre—almost surreal in its lack of narrative purpose and momentum. That Herman was listed as one of the producers and Joe as one of the writers is, more than eighty years later, truly incidental.
According to the other credited writer, Henry Myers, “Nobody but Joe Mankiewicz and I wrote a syllable of that script or created one of its ideas.” But while it would be nice to believe that, Million Dollar Legs sticks out almost like a sonnet among the epic prose poems of Joe’s other work. The film is a sixty-four-minute blitz of outrageous sight gags, wild verbal jokes (“Don’t talk to yourself, and if you do, lie”), and zany performances from a host of old-time comics—nothing at all like the more literate scripts Joe would come to write in later years, and even removed from his early work for Paramount by its riotous sensibility.
Jack Oakie and W. C. Fields in Million Dollar Legs, the only film on which both Herman and Joe received credit
In truth, the film, which recounts the attempts of American Migg Tweeny (Jack Oakie) to get the he-man president of the mythical Klopstokia (W. C. Fields) to enter the 1932 Olympic Games and so save the country from financial ruin, resembles nothing so much as a Marx Brothers movie without the brothers. Klopstokia is a country where all the girls are named Angela, all the men are named George, and when someone asks why, the only answer is “why not?” An opening title informs us that the country’s chief exports are goats and nuts, chief imports are goats and nuts, and chief inhabitants are…goats and nuts.*5 The country is also filled with supernaturally accomplished athletes, and when Migg Tweeny wonders what would happen if all the athletes in the country were laid end to end, the president’s daughter answers, “They would reach 484 miles.” Oakie asks, “How do you know?” “We did it once.” It’s modern and nutty and takes itself about as seriously as a piece of toffee. It also pokes fun at the very idea of its being a movie, with a self-consciousness that few movies of the time had.
In all of this, there is the whiff of Herman. And, according to Goma at least, he wrote the whole thing himself. Certainly, as producer, Herman would have guided the creation of the script, or at least goaded Joe into writing what he wanted. But it is well to consider a few other things before giving the senior Mankiewicz brother too much credit for its creation. First is the presence of Jack Oakie in the lead role. By that point in Oakie’s career, Joe had written three other movies starring Oakie, all of which took advantage of Oakie’s skill as a comic actor (or overactor—Oakie, a delightfully thick slice of vaudevillian ham, specialized in the double take). Joe knew what Oakie was best at on screen—and so knew how to write the kind of nonsense dialogue that Oakie excelled at, and to give other lines to other players to take best advantage of Oakie’s wild, open-faced reactions. Our man Joe Mankiewicz, it’s fair to say, had studied Jack Oakie and what made him work.*6
He had also, of course, been studying Herman. Following him to Hollywood, becoming a screenwriter, Joe had been emulating Herman professionally for years (and would soon be doing it personally as well, or trying to, with his marriage to Elizabeth Young), and he knew that being unruly, authority-defying, and full-of-a-low-regard-for-the-form in which he was writing were all essential ingredients of his brother’s personality. When he was assigned to Million Dollar Legs, therefore, and started to consider what the picture called for, it is likely that consciously or not Joe began to ape his brother’s personality in its creation. So perhaps the script for Million Dollar Legs was Joe writing as Herman, drawing on a wealth of emotional and logical information to make a classic Mankiewiczian farce.*7
“General dementia”: The Marx Brothers at their peak, c. 1931
Finally, though, there is Herman, whose own battles with anarchy were already well under way. The year before Million Dollar Legs, Herman had been assigned to ride herd on the Marx Brothers themselves, who had finally come to Hollywood to try to extend their brilliance at vaudeville and on the Broadway stage to the movies. As the producer of their first film, Monkey Business, Herman’s job was to make sure those brothers brought their famous chaotic humor and wit to the screen, within the confines of a Hollywood movie. And he had succeeded, brilliantly—the brothers were instant Hollywood stars.
But Herman hardly enjoyed the process. As he told the two writers assigned to the project, the Marx Brothers themselves, though good friends of his socially, were “mercurial, devious, and ungrateful. I hate to depress you, but you’ll rue the day you ever took the assignment. This is an ordeal by fire. Make sure you wear asbestos pants.” For five months, Herman presided over writing sessions in his office with the writers and the brothers themselves, who like Herman had trouble staying focused. The work sessions frequently deteriorated into “bedlams of shouted ideas, insults, trade-offs, and general dementia”—not to mention gambling and drinking. What the brothers needed wasn’t so much a producer as a policeman.
“This is an ordeal by fire. Make sure you wear asbestos pants.” Herman clowns with the Marx Brothers, here dressed with a Groucho mustache and a Harpo wig, next to Harpo in Hun outfit.
Still, it worked. And after the success of Monkey Business, Herman was assigned to produce their follow-up, Horse Feathers. That film, too, was successful, though Groucho, never known for generosity of spirit, especially when it came to people who were not his brothers, would later say that Herman’s contributions were less than exemplary, given that he was so often away gambling with Ben Schulberg, or drinking. In fact, Groucho said that as brilliant and talented as Herman was, he was generally useless after lunch.
Still, Herman couldn’t hold too much against Groucho. For Herman, Groucho was the key to the brothers’ success—he valued his intelligence and comic mind, while the others he thought were mediocre at best. In particular, Herman felt Chico’s talents were limited to an Italian accent, and while he came to like and appreciate Harpo’s mute performances, Herman also felt that Harpo took himself far too seriously. At one point during the creation of the script of Monkey Business, Harpo said that he wanted to read the whole script because, as he told Herman, “I want to find out what my character is.” With a somewhat sour expression, Herman looked at him and said, “You’re a middle-aged Jew who picks up spit because he thinks it’s a quarter.” That, Harpo told friends, “punctured his pretensions forever.” It also demonstrated Herman’s real-world weariness and his utter disregard for the Hollywood fantasy-game he was playing. He didn’t believe it, he didn’t support it, yet he seemed to be stuck in it—a success in all ways except the ones that mattered most, and to all people except the one person who mattered most. He was sinking deeper into a self-loathing morass from which it would be a monumental challenge to extricate himself, though he would have opportunities.
