by Nick Davis
The room rocked with laughter as Herman spun out his counter-fantasy, poking fun at the man, all done with that telltale combination of warmth and hostility. Romanoff’s was a central watering hole for half of Hollywood, and the only question was, would Herman be able to stop drinking enough to get back to the studio at all in the afternoon? As director Gottfried Reinhardt said, “Between the fourth drink and the twelfth drink, Herman was the most brilliant man you will ever listen to in your entire life. If you got him at the right time, with the right amount of lubrication, it was dazzling.” But frequently, as the afternoon wore on, the hostility would start to win out. Herman’s sweating would grow more profuse, and even as the room started to empty out, Herman would keep drinking, with predictable results. As Reinhardt said, “After about the twelfth or fifteenth drink, he was incoherent.”
Soon enough, the afternoon would be over. The laughter would die away, the drinks would be sipped more slowly, and now Sara would be standing by the table. She had missed her afternoon call from Herman, and when three o’clock came she’d made a few calls of her own, to the places where she might find him. Her investigation wouldn’t get very far—everyone protected Herman, no one would ever say a thing—and so she’d get in the car and drive to Romanoff’s. She’d stand over Herman and say his name quietly. He’d look up and nod, give his little two-finger salute to the table, gather his hat, and follow her out to the car without a word.
Herman’s adolescent behavior met its match in Sara’s maternal nature. Had Herman married a different kind of woman, there’s little doubt the marriage would have ended in divorce—few women really want to be chasing after their husbands all afternoon, retrieving them when their impulsive behavior has finally petered out. But because Herman’s appetites were so strong—the man was a stranger to impulse control—he needed tending as much as any wayward child. The sad truth was that, despite his protestations, Herman didn’t consider Sara an equal partner in an adult relationship—because it was hard for him to have any kind of belief in himself as an adult.
But what kind of woman puts up with this kind of treatment?
Her nickname in Hollywood was “poor Sara,” and of course it had been Herman who gave her the designation. (A friend once asked him how Sara was doing, and he said, “Who?” “Your wife, Sara.” “Oh, you mean ‘poor Sara’!”) Indeed, poor Sara suffered mightily and thoroughly at his hands. The drinking and the gambling were bad enough, but then, lately, there’d been the women. More and more, Herman had been having lunch with other women. They gobbled him up like pudding. He was flirtatious, appreciative, flattering, cuddly, enchanting, sweet, and warm. What wasn’t to like? Before long, gossip bloomed, usually about secretaries or actresses like Miriam Hopkins or Nancy Carroll, sometimes the wife of a studio executive who spent more time in the commissary than seemed right. Most deliciously, the family friend and movie star Margaret Sullavan had, according to her own therapist, “permitted the world to think that Herman had an affair with her, which was not even true—he never came close to her.” Herman was, in the therapist’s mind, “scared stiff.” But for his part, Herman saw no need to discourage any gossip. People were talking about him and beautiful women; why should that be stopped?
But while the Hollywood stories were just stories, there had been one actual moment of crisis, a turning point in Sara and Herman’s marriage that was so dramatic and sensitive that even though she told Richard Meryman about it when he interviewed her for her husband’s biography in 1972, by the time he was finished with his book a few years later, the story did not appear…*3
In the early thirties, the family had taken a trip to England, and in London, Herman had worked with a typist who came to the house every afternoon. According to Sara, the woman was “a real frumpy English secretary” who had become an object of humor to both Herman and Sara for her smell; after she left in the evenings, Sara would throw open the windows of the living room to rid the house of the odor. Finally, the family reached the end of its stay; Sara and Don were going on to Switzerland, and Herman was taking Frank back to the United States. But on their last night in London, Sara had been up packing and tending to the boys when she noticed there was no typing noise coming from the living room. “No typewriter, nothing, but I could see down the hall there was a light in the living room. My heart was pounding…” When she got to the living room, Sara found the woman and Herman in a clinch. A “ghastly” look came over the woman’s face and Sara, rising to the drama of the moment, told the secretary, “Out. Get your things and get out.”
Herman was mortified: “Humble, humiliated, and terribly, terribly sad, sorry and everything else.” Sara refused his entreaties, naturally. “I wouldn’t let him touch me, wouldn’t go near him,” and she slept in a separate room that night. The next morning, the family took a train to Dover to catch the boat for the continent: “He was with Don, giving Don the last instructions and trying terribly to catch my eye, and I was sick with hurt, it was the most miserable time I can ever remember.” Finally, at the dock, Herman held her and implored her not to go away feeling as she did, that he could explain, that he was sorry and miserable. But Sara refused to bend, boarded the boat, and left without a word. For the next few days she refused to phone Herman or accept his calls or flowers or answer any of his many apologetic cables. Finally, one night when Don was sick in bed with a cold at their hotel in Switzerland, Sara was downstairs having drinks (accepting the flirtatious attentions of a young man, which, she said, made her feel “a little more secure and wanted”) when a call came in:
A steward announced there was a call for Mrs. Mankiewicz from the SS Berengaria*4 and it was Herman and he said “Schnooks, I will jump overboard unless you tell me that you are going to forgive me. I can’t live this way, I’ll die. I can’t think of anything else. I’m absolutely at my wit’s end. Please tell me that you love me.”
For Sara, it was a watershed. She decided that torturing Herman further wasn’t going to help matters. She had loved Herman for years, and she felt that his heart was large. She knew how much he needed love, how much he had craved it as a child and hadn’t gotten it. “Herman,” she said at last, “I love you.” Decades later, she remembered cherishing what came next: “[R]econciliations were the most wonderful times of our married life.” She said that after that phone call, their relationship was reinvigorated, and that there was “something almost virginal about our relationship again.”*5 She remembered how fascinating Herman could be, how much she loved his famous laugh, how hard he could make her laugh. As for Herman, she said he seemed to appreciate her more after that. “To this day,” she said years later, “I start to tremble about it.” Telling Richard Meryman, “I’m saying some terrible things, I never told a person in the world,” she said Herman would “act amorous” and ask her, sometimes, to dance for him at night.
So now, years later, back in Hollywood, Sara was mostly untroubled by rumors and gossip. Rather than disparaging any potential rivals, Sara insisted, “I was smart about those things.” With hallmark self-possession and utter lack of self-doubt, she said: “I immediately made those women my friends. It was the best thing I could have done.” By befriending anyone who might be a rival, Sara turned the women into her allies, that much less likely to cheat on her with her own husband, but equally important, she made the women less attractive to Herman. After all, if a thing isn’t done in secret, it can hardly be worth doing.
And so Sara carried on, mothering Herman as best she could, protecting him, and also serving all too often as his kind of warden. Years later everyone would say how much they loved poor Sara, and yet also how sorry they felt for her. For there were times she didn’t find Herman at Romanoff’s. Often he would return home drunk and uncontrollable, madly bellowing about this or that, and Sara would try to find the root of the trouble. The next day, she’d go to the studio and attempt to extend the deadline for whatever he was working on, or when his issues were p
aying back debts, Sara would go to Louis Mayer (then the highest-salaried man in America), who would listen patiently to Herman’s problems and eventually decide to pay off the debts, more as a favor to Goma than anything else—the money of course would be deducted from Herman’s salary.
What made it all worthwhile, for Sara, was the verve with which Herman lived his life, and what surrounded it. Sara loved their life together and couldn’t conceive of anything else; she loved having the Marx Brothers over for dinner, their goosing her when her back was turned or throwing her about like a rag doll from Chico to Harpo and back again. She loved hearing Herman deal with Don and Frank, even when he was being a little too harsh and Franz-like for his own good; Herman hated to see the boys waste any time, and once told Don when he was lying on the floor listening to a baseball game on the radio, “I can’t think of anything sillier than listening to a ball game you can’t see.” Don, who’d inherited more than a little of his father’s wit, had a ready retort: “I can. Listening to a ball game that you can see.” Most of all, maybe, Sara loved Herman’s hands, the thick thumbs and round solid stubs of fingers, and the sound his hands made as he rubbed them together as he read the morning paper.
So as frustrating as it must have been to be Herman Mankiewicz’s wife, and as much as Sara was pitied in her day, there was an unquestioningness to Herman’s love and devotion that made everything else usually fall away. Time and again, those who spoke to Richard Meryman about Herman’s wit, those savage barbs he aimed in one direction or another, said there was only one exception to his withering sarcasm: he never once directed it at Sara. He could be exasperated with her, God knows, and funny about her, and he could be afraid of her, and deep down, he undoubtedly hated her from time to time (if you can’t hate spinach, surely you can hate your wife), but he never got seriously angry with her in public, or made her the target of his cruelest humor.*6
By then, though, Herman had mellowed somewhat. The cause of that was easy to trace, for in addition to Sara and the boys he now had another consideration to occupy him at Tower Road: at last, a daughter. My mother Johanna was born on October 2, 1937, and to Herman, who had grown up with boys (Erna/Erma notwithstanding), who enjoyed his own two sons enormously, whose every waking moment was dominated by his relationships with men, competing with other men—the primal relationship with his father writ small and large across all his relationships—the softening effect of having a young girl to care for cannot be underestimated. To a person, all of Herman’s friends and colleagues said the same thing: he loved having a baby girl. Someone he could love without reservation, complication, or competition. His wonder at her was constant; “I might, with more chance of success,” he wrote Don at Columbia, “try to put into words a picture of a moonbeam.”*7 According to Goma, “He never got over the miracle of having her.”
But if it was a miracle, it was also a miracle with an expiration date, at least in my mother’s mind later on. Her memories of her father were deeply colored by his early death when she was only fifteen, and so in all her recollections there is a deeply bittersweet tone, a melancholic view, a sense that, as with so many things Mankiewiczian, this will not end well. We can laugh and tell funny stories, we can admire our accomplishments, we can take great pleasure in our families and even, in rare instances, in those intimate moments when true connection is achieved. But fate will have the last laugh.
Johanna Mankiewicz, born October 2, 1937
My mother’s own early death was of course a repeat of that primal pattern, not just for me, but across the family. Most relevantly, her early death both robbed this book of one of its most important voices—and also set this book in motion. It’s doubtful that the two titanic figures of Herman and Joe would have loomed quite so large to me had she lived, for if she hadn’t died young, there would have been far less mystery about them both. Any questions would presumably have been answered by Mom herself, speaking to me directly, not through the decades from the tapes from Dick Meryman’s reel-to-reel recorder.
Here, then, in either book—the one where Johanna Mankiewicz lived, or this one, where random chance would strike her down at thirty-six—would come a section on her first memories. The pony rides at friends’ houses in Beverly Hills, Brooke Hayward’s house or at the Fondas’, where young Jane and Peter were playmates. The visits to the studio to see her father, and touring the gigantic sets, and seeing a memorable water tank with model boats the size of small dolphins. Being summoned into her father’s bedroom late at night when he got home from the studio, being asked to sit on his bed and tell her all about her day, and all the serious and not so serious questions he would ask her, all with a genuine interest and concern for her welfare. And then the tricks: the scares he would throw into her dates when they would bring her home from an evening, his deep voice booming from inside the house while she and the boy were lingering too long at the door: “What the hell’s going on out there? Get in here! It’s time to go to sleep!” The embarrassing mornings when he’d drive her to school still in his bathrobe. The way he would come to her junior high school basketball games and sit and cheer loudly, almost indiscriminately, in the stands, both thrilling and mortifying. The time he attended her gymnastics meet and sat in the bleachers with a portable radio blaring, because the Kentucky Derby was being run that day and a considerable amount of money was at stake. The pressure he put on her, in his own self-aware way, for he knew the cost and so tried not to be unduly judgmental. The way he looked at her, always, his eyes filled not just with love but a kind of astonishment, that she existed and always would. His smell in those late-night sessions in his room, the curious mixture of camphor oil and alcohol and a velvety cream he so often rubbed into his achy limbs. And most of all, the gentle kisses he would ask for, on his eyelids right before she left his room at night, little butterfly kisses he called them, that filled him with such gentle hope and her with such tender affection and pride.
“A picture of a moonbeam”: Uncle Don with his baby sister, my mother Johanna, late 1930s
Uncle Frank with Mom, late 1930s
Herman and Johanna, c. 1939
“If you listed all the things that would make a good father,” Mom said, “he wouldn’t in any way qualify.” Mom told this to Richard Meryman in 1973, more than two decades after her father had died. “And yet,” she continued, “if you knew him, and you knew that he loved you…that he was…then your father was the greatest thing in the whole world.”
Listening to the tapes now, you can practically hear her shake her head, as if she knows this description is inadequate. Indeed, her sympathy for her father’s biographers was deep:
So that’s what you can’t get to. The heart of this man was…it was unfathomable. He was just the most—and that doesn’t come through just through the facts, it doesn’t come through in the stories, it doesn’t come through in anything. There’s no way of showing that. He was the most loving, generous, loyal…you know, you say this….So we all forgave him.
The stories, then, Mom’s memories of her father, may be suffused with loss and melancholy, but the depth of her love for him is profound. At least by the time she recorded the interviews, she had started to understand some uncomplicated truths about her father. For all the absence and loss the memories contain, Herman’s real legacy, beyond the movies, beyond the self-loathing, beyond the funny stories and the “white wine came up with the fish,”*8 was actually far simpler: values, compassion, love, family, and the importance of forgiveness.
* * *
—
Joe’s legacy, at least for his own younger daughter Alexandra, would in some ways be similar—the stated values that Herman and Joe stood for and expressed were quite alike: the importance of work, of education, of family, of being a literate citizen of the world. But there were crucial differences. For one thing, Joe survived to tell the tale. Other, subtler differences appear as well…
In the 1970s, a few years after he had directed what would be his final movie, Sleuth, Joe found himself spending more time in Europe. It made sense; his third wife, Rosemary, was from England, and their daughter, my cousin Alex,*9 went to school in London for a time. To Alex, her life, which to an outsider like a cousin hearing about it in New York might have seemed glamorous or star-studded, was normal; her father feted at film festivals, her grandmother and aunt living in Spain, trips to Monte Carlo and Greece, companions like Christopher Plummer or James Mason or the Burtons of course, Richard and Elizabeth, whose world-famous romance Joe once jokingly took credit for, having directed them together in the notorious Cleopatra. Best of all, at least to cousins whose lives seemed monochromatic by comparison, were the visits Alex had paid to the set of Sleuth, where Laurence Olivier taught her how to sneer.
But amid all the European memories, one stands out, though it was far from glittering. Alex was on an airplane headed for Zurich with Mum and Dad, where they would be meeting again a man she’d come to know as “Cousin Eric,” but this time, Mum and Dad decided to tell her the truth: Eric Reynal was in fact her brother. He was born when Joe had been married before.
