by Nick Davis
Given his work with the Marx Brothers, it’s difficult to imagine that Herman’s influence had absolutely nothing to do with the creative chaos of Million Dollar Legs. But, not for the first time, Herman’s contribution was made better by the devotion and commitment of others on the project; had Herman alone been responsible for Million Dollar Legs, it’s doubtful that the spirit of inspired anarchy, even if it echoed Herman’s own sensibilities so accurately, could have been so successfully sustained throughout the sixty-four minutes. Herman’s own disdain for what he was doing was essential to his wit. One exchange in Million Dollar Legs shines with impertinence toward the work itself, and its provenance. When the Klopstokian athletes have arrived in Los Angeles for the Olympic Games, one says, “It never rains in Los Angeles,” only to be told, “Only money, only money.” But to shepherd something through all the way to greatness, you need more than disdain for the whole enterprise; you need true believers. The longer the two brothers stayed in Hollywood, the more it became clear that the one who did believe was Joe.
For a time in the early ’30s, they could easily have been confused for a happy pair of siblings, having the time of their lives as they rose in a flourishing new industry. Joe loved the bonhomie of the town, and for years he remained proud of the figure his brother cut. “My brother was one of the all-time popular dinner guests,” he said, a Hollywood celebrity in his own right. “He was a guarantee that the party would not suddenly die…Even if he got drunk and individually insulted every guest, that would make your dinner party the conversation piece the following day.” At one dinner party, Herman roared in late, to find that he had missed the entrance and exit of John Gilbert, the movie star whose career and life were spiraling downward after the advent of sound. Gilbert had apparently stormed in, boisterously drunk, and placed his gun in front of him on the dinner table, sending the entire party into a tizzy from which they still hadn’t recovered. “Oh, come on!” Herman bellowed, “How much can a gun eat?” Joe’s pride in Herman was real, and in later years he liked to portray the two of them almost as partners in crime in those early days. “We used to take people on together and tear them apart,” he said. “We had wonderful times.”
But the differences between them were always apparent. Marian Spitzer, a screenwriter who knew both men, said Joe “seemed like a nice, bright, modest, sweet, more respectable version of his brother.” John Lee Mahin, another writer who knew them both, said Joe was “a cool customer. He’s tougher than Herman. He’s smarter about himself. More regimented, more controlled.” But as Joe became better known, it was clear his reserve and caution would prevent him from becoming the kind of grandly popular figure Herman was. “Nobody seems to like him,” Mahin said. Where Herman was expansive and emotional, Joe was reserved and withholding. Even he admitted he would take on “the color of my environment without absorbing it.” But if Joe was recessive, Herman never was. After Joe’s Academy Award nomination, he’d wanted a raise from Paramount but was unsure of how to go about it. Herman solved the problem the way any younger brother would want an older brother to: he thundered into Paramount chief Ben Schulberg’s office and threatened to quit if Joe didn’t get another raise. Of course, because it was Herman, Schulberg called his bluff and let him leave the studio. For a few very terrifying days, neither Mankiewicz had a job; then, at last, Herman’s agent got both brothers raises, and all was well. For Joe, it was another lesson that Herman and money were not to be linked. He had already discovered that his brother, who borrowed money from just about everyone, had a reputation as one of the softest touches in the business, never denying anyone any money if they needed it for any reason. In part, this was because Herman simply didn’t understand money; as Dr. Hacker put it, Herman’s relationship to money was an “infantile regression. He had no relation to money…It didn’t mean anything if he had it, it didn’t mean anything if he didn’t have it.” So he would borrow, and loan, without reason. But with Joe, it was different. Herman continued to see Joe as a kind of extension of him, and so Joe’s earnings, whatever they were, were Herman’s too. As a result, Joe said he grew “terrified of Herman. I never felt I could call on him for help. Everybody else in the world could.” He was losing the one true ally he ever had.
Worse than that, in the thirties, Joe was always struggling, despite his success, to get out from under his brother’s long shadow. If Herman was a god among writers, Joe was not. “Even people who knew him,” one friend later recalled, “when they bumped into him around the studio, would say, ‘Hello, Herm—I mean Joe.’ ” It got so bad that one day Joe realized what would be engraved on his tombstone: “Here lies Herm—I mean Joe—Mankiewicz.”
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For Herman, the year after Million Dollar Legs saw an attempt, not the first and not the last, to break the Hollywood mold, to do something meaningful and lasting and real. Continually disappointed with the work he was being asked to do, Herman strained to write something of deeper importance, something that would last, that might even have a genuine impact on the world. In the back of his mind, therefore, as he went about his business, whether that business was gambling, riding herd on the Marx Brothers, driving to and from the studio, or working on scripts or outlines for films he felt were beneath his talents—he began casting about for ideas that might make him feel like he was contributing something of value to the world. In 1933, with Europe in the grip of a rising tide of fascism and intolerance, Herman hit on an idea that excited him at last—a film that would target the biggest idiot of them all: Adolf Hitler.
While much of the Hollywood output of that year was filled with lighter fare like Gold Diggers of 1933, King Kong, and 42nd Street—pictures that would take audiences’ minds off the rise of the fascist menace in Europe and the Great Depression that still held half the globe in its grip—Herman determined to take another route. In January 1933, Hitler had become chancellor of Germany; the following month, the Reichstag was engulfed in flames and civil liberties in Germany were halted; and by March 1933, Hitler was dictator. Here is a horrible, dangerous, evil anti-Semite. So: How to fight this man?
Herman’s response was in some ways to take a practical, two-pronged approach. He knew that the Hollywood studios would be loath to risk the big business they did in Germany by producing an original picture that attacked head-on the head of the German government. So rather than start from scratch, Herman determined that he had better write a stage play first, a property that the studios could then develop into a movie—which would shield the studios, Herman felt, from any suggestion from the German government that they had commissioned the work. Second, the play—and resulting film—would be a satire, and so not be directly about Germany or Hitler at all. Herman’s strategy here was less than subtle; he set his play in a fictional Transylvania and changed the dictator’s name from Adolf Hitler all the way to Adolf Mitler.*8
Herman worked on the play and discussed it with his friend, Sam Jaffe, then a producer at RKO, and when Herman had completed a draft, Jaffe optioned the property from Herman for a small price*9 without even considering producing the play on stage first; the two of them then hired a screenwriter, Lynn Root, to adapt it for the movies. The result, “The Mad Dog of Europe,” tells the story of two families, the Mendelssohns and the Schmidts, who live in Transylvania in the years following the Great War. The Mendelssohns are a Jewish family of war heroes who lost sons in battle and revere the Transylvanian homeland. The Schmidts, not Jewish, are good friends with the Mendelssohns and equally patriotic.
The film script tracks the changing nature of the friendship between the families as the Nazis and Mitler rise to power. Herman’s story demonstrates that, at first, everyone laughed at Mitler, a small whiny man who could barely hold a job as a housepainter, but then, when Transylvania lost the war, he was able to weasel his way into power through loud, obstreperous speeches in beer halls and gain influence, and the public went along with him like flun
kies following a studio boss. The character of Heinrich Schmidt, son of Herr Schmidt, embodies this change in the public. Originally a dear friend of the Mendelssohn clan, Heinrich finds himself changed by the war, becoming disillusioned, ultimately condemning the entire notion of compassion and the idea that Transylvania could attain glory again through anything other than the use of might: “Brotherly love! Humanity! Where have they brought us? If Transylvania doesn’t think of her future she’ll never have any.” Like many “good Germans,” Heinrich becomes angry and bitter, claiming “the good Transylvanian heart” has destroyed the country; the nation, he declares, should “be hard and strong and ruthless…crush [their] enemies, inside and out.” Heinrich happily becomes a Nazi and develops a deep love and respect for Mitler, even standing next to him in “awed silence” as Mitler finishes his memoirs in prison.
Remarkably, and presciently, Herman’s story dramatized one of the most disturbing aspects of a fascist’s appeal to the public, namely the way the public forgets. Early on, Professor Mendelssohn, patriarch of the Mendelssohn clan, is treated with respect by all; people compliment his son Johann’s war efforts and mention how their city “is proud of Johann.” But after Mitler has gained power, this same group of people “turn their backs on [him] and whisper among themselves.” The Transylvanian people forget themselves and happily follow an idiot so long as the trains run on time, and they turn on those who have earned their respect through diligence and hard work.
More disturbing, and probably more damning to the project’s ultimate prospects, Herman didn’t shy away from the overt racism and anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. The hatred that Hitler, the Nazi Party, and the public at large felt for the Jews is unconcealed. The script contains graphic dialogue depicting characters’ revulsion for the Jews: Mitler calls Heinrich “a Jew lover” and Heinrich labels Jews “enemies of Transylvania—parasites feeding on Transylvania’s blood.” When the Jews of Transylvania march down the street bearing placards that read “I am a Jew,” according to the screenplay, “Mud and filth [are] thrown at them by children and brutish looking adults…Stores padlocked. Windows bearing scrawled signs, ‘Don’t buy here—Jew!’…Children throwing stones through windows.” The horror is not hinted at or hidden under layers of sarcasm or satire; the scenes are explicit. The truth is ugly, but Herman wanted us to see it.
He also wanted people to see through Hitler’s tactics in his rise to power; the script demonstrates, without much subtlety, how Hitler convinced people to join the Nazi cause in Germany—by saying exactly what the group of people he was speaking to wanted to hear. So Mitler/Hitler gives each group a different scapegoat to blame for their struggles. He tells workmen that capitalism is the enemy, and to capitalists, he says labor and communism are to blame. Trying to get across “the illegitimacy of the movement,” how it’s all a sham, and that the German people need to wake up, Herman says through the character of Heinrich’s brother Fritz that the Nazis “don’t even make sense. No thinking person would listen to them.”
The problem, of course, is that it wasn’t clear the Nazis actually needed “thinking people,” any more than Hollywood needed “thinking people” to see its movies. Unthinking people—idiots—have an equal say, and sometimes they make up the larger share of the movie-going public, or the voting public, or the public that follows dictators of all kinds, political or cultural. In trying to make a bigger statement on humanity, the script falls into something of a trap, reading as moral instruction as much as entertainment. Desperate as he was to change things—in the world, in his own life—Herman and his screenwriter made a pitiful if noble attempt to call for people to embrace kindness again, compassion, love, and respect. As the character of the Countess states to a group of women, “We are all one in our hopes and in our griefs. Our sons are her sons, my sisters.” How noble a thought—we are all one—and yet how innocent, too, how doomed. Heinrich’s moral descent is underscored when Professor Mendelssohn’s daughter Ilsa tells him, “You’ve thrown away loyalty and love and honor.”
Of course, Herman was torn as to what would really happen in the real world. A democrat with a big D, Herman had long revered the idea of Democracy, and even began the film with an on-screen ode to its glories:
This picture is produced in the interests of Democracy, an ideal which has inspired the noblest deeds of Man. It has been the goal towards which nations have aspired—one after the other having asserted a determination to overthrow tyrants and erect a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Today the greater part of the civilized world has reached this stage of enlightenment.
Of course, Herman couldn’t let it go at that—he was still hoping this would be some kind of comedy—and so to the introduction was added a sarcastic coda:
THE INCIDENTS AND CHARACTERS IN THIS PICTURE ARE OF COURSE FICTITIOUS. IT IS OBVIOUSLY ABSURD TO ASK ANYONE TO BELIEVE THEY COULD HAPPEN IN THIS ENLIGHTENED DAY AND AGE.
The film’s story curiously reverses the normal pattern in Herman’s work, in terms of its attitude toward the family. Herman’s complicated feelings toward his own parents are hardly reflected in the portrayal of the parents in the film: the script’s parents are treated as heroes, people who see through Mitler and his tactics, martyrs who sacrifice their own lives rather than give up their belief in humanity. They are the voice of reason, harbingers of truth. At one point, Herr Schmidt says that his Nazi son lacks wisdom and that the country “is threatened from the inside” by Nazis. Refusing to follow the Nazis blindly, he supports his friends the Mendelssohns. Similarly, it is the Franz stand-in himself, Professor Mendelssohn, who is given one of the script’s most passionate defenses of Jewishness:
We Jews are good enough to die on the battlefield but not good enough to live in the Fatherland. You call us traitors—you’re following the greatest traitor the world has ever seen. Your Mitler—your leader! Promising everything, then throwing you Jews to kill so you won’t notice he can’t keep his promises. Every time he opens his mouth, he lies!
Of course, a lot of good it does the professor: At the close of his speech, the Nazis shoot him, and he falls across the body of his dead son like Jesus, arms spread in the form of a crucifix. Likewise, Schmidt is also killed for his beliefs. Speaking to his son as he lies dying, he says:
My son, I implore you…if you have a spark of humanity left, consider what you’re doing. Consider the millions of innocent men, women, and children whose lives you are destroying…who are even now cursing the name of Mitler and all of his officers.
It is worth noting that both these fathers—noble, heroic, but utterly doomed—are killed, and that Professor Mendelssohn’s wife, unable to cope with life without her husband, kills herself. Further, consider the fate of the two German brothers in the story, Fritz and Heinrich; Fritz, popular but doomed, who never joins the Nazi cause, while young Heinrich becomes a key member of the Nazi party, until his redemption at the story’s end. The unconscious desire is clear and even a little pat: Is it fair to suggest that Herman felt he himself would never succumb to the fascism of Hollywood group-think, while Joe would for a time yield to Hollywood temptations but ultimately turn his back on the town? In 1933, in the wake of their joint success in Klopstokia, it’s possible that Herman was already feeling like Joe was a “collaborator” and that he would need to be taken down a peg soon enough. But despite Heinrich/Joe’s conversion at the conclusion of the story, he is the one who is killed, in a noble sacrifice to save the life of Fritz/Herman, who escapes to safety.
Regardless, the project itself was troubled from the start. While Herman and Sam Jaffe desperately wanted the script brought to the screen, the film faced intense resistance from Hollywood. As Herman knew, there was a huge market in Germany for American films, and it had only grown since Herman’s stay in Berlin the previous decade. In addition to not wanting to jeopardize their German business, the studio owners had always been skitt
ish about their Jewishness, and putting forth any such staunchly anti-anti-Semitic film would only remind the movie-going public of the non-Christian nature of the men who ran the business. Assimilation was and would remain the cardinal rule for the men who had once been furriers, hat makers, and upholsterers. And so most Hollywood honchos rejected “The Mad Dog of Europe” in favor of maintaining the cooperative relationship they had with the German government, in which no films would condemn the Nazi Party, even as filmmakers and artists fled the Third Reich for Hollywood in droves. So as men like Fritz Lang left Nazi Germany to find work in Hollywood, the Hollywood establishment refused to produce films that could be considered anti-German. In particular, Georg Gyssling, the German consul in Los Angeles and a Nazi, threatened the Hays Office that if “The Mad Dog of Europe” were made, his government might ban all American films from showing in Germany.
Herman didn’t give up easily, even after Sam Jaffe, seeing the writing on the wall, sold the rights to the production to the agent Al Rosen. While Rosen continued his efforts to get financing for the picture, the Nazis upped the ante, threatening that if the film were produced, actual harm would come to the Jews in Germany. Rosen tried to convince executives in Hollywood to provide independent monetary support for the project and set up an independent studio to produce the film outside the studio system, but he found no takers. Finally, Joseph Breen, the moralizing Catholic who ran the voluntary Motion Picture Production Code under which the studios operated, weighed in. Breen declared: “Because of the large number of Jews active in the motion picture industry in this country, the charge is certain to be made that the Jews, as a class, are behind an anti-Hitler picture and using the entertainment screen for their own personal propaganda purposes. The entire industry, because of this, is likely to be indicted for the action of a mere handful.”
