by Nick Davis
The information must have been confounding. Alex knew Dad had been married before. The woman’s name had been Rosa, and she was Chris and Tom’s Mom, the lady who had died—but she was never spoken of. Like many things one was told as a child, it was not talked about. Now, on the airplane, the bare facts were laid out clearly and cleanly: this was not the mother of Chris and Tom, her considerably older brothers; there had been a third wife, even earlier—a woman named Elizabeth Young, an actress. Elizabeth and Joe had had a son in the 1930s, named Eric, who had gone to good schools and had become an international banker and been adopted by a man named Eugene Reynal who had been married to Elizabeth for a time.
Alex took the information in. She knew there were things you simply did not discuss. Unlike Herman’s side of the family, one didn’t fight back, or question what was presented. The process was merely “quiet absorption” of new information: “Right. Okay. Noted.” The simple white lie, told until she was old enough to grasp the real information, faded away. In its place now was nothing dark or sinister but actually something a little amusing, because soon enough Alex would be returning to school having acquired a new brother. She may even have been quietly tickled by how she might answer any questions that could come up from inquiring school mates: “How did that happen? Surely your Mum is a little old to have a new child!”
But what did Joe think? How had he managed it? As he sat in the first-class cabin on that TWA flight, twisting his body to speak across the aisle to Alexandra, what was the feeling in his chest? And what had it been all those years earlier, in the late thirties, after the divorce had gone through and the boy had been removed from his life?
Alex on the set of Sleuth with Laurence Olivier, c. 1972
To Joe Mankiewicz, it really wasn’t that complicated. His first marriage was like many of the unpleasant things that happened to him—it was something to be put in a box and stored away somewhere safe, where you never had to look at it. Certainly not something to be taken out and considered. As for the boy, well, Joe paid Elizabeth a considerable amount of alimony and child support, for fifty months anyway, but even after that, after Elizabeth remarried and asked Joe to allow her new husband, Eric’s stepfather, to adopt Eric and change his last name to his own, even after that, even after Joe realized that this other man would be “Dad” and he would be “Joe,” he made sure, even if he didn’t go as far as Franz, who urged him to forget the boy entirely and focus on his work—the work is what lasts, the work is what matters, Franz wrote Joe in a letter that reverberated through the decades—but Joe would do his best to see that the boy led a good life. Beyond that…He wouldn’t think of it. The boy was fine, would be fine. Joe told himself that and didn’t bother to see if he was shuddering anywhere down deep as he did so.
* * *
—
Herman was tired. He felt sometimes as if he were a man in a dusty western town, waiting for a train. The train wasn’t coming, there were no other patrons at the depot, and no one could give him any information. He started to worry the train wasn’t coming at all. Maybe he’d come on the wrong day. It’s possible the train was due tomorrow. Or, worse, he’d missed it entirely; it had come yesterday and would never come again. Still, he kept waiting. Deep into the 1930s he continued to try to convince himself that the train was just out of sight, coming soon.
Of course, by now the list of people he’d alienated was almost as long as the people he’d worked with, and much longer than those whom he just hadn’t gotten around to yet. After Paramount and a productive stretch at M-G-M in the mid 1930s, there really wasn’t much work for him in the late ’30s, and certainly nothing to excite him, or to cause him to pry himself from Romanoff’s or the Brown Derby any earlier after lunch. The wit was still there, and the talent was never in doubt, but more and more, the young writers weren’t hanging on every word when he came to the commissary. And his old pals weren’t quite as willing to put up with him anymore.
Alex knew him as “Cousin Eric.” Joe swims with his first son, Eric, in the 1970s.
Still, the spark remained. He retained genuine literary aspirations, still sent occasional pieces to The New Yorker. He had long filled his notebooks with ideas for plays, including a John Dillinger–inspired portrait of a gangster called “The Tree Will Grow,” though he’d abandoned it after the first act. In 1936, he actually went back to New York, allegedly for a two-week trip to research a film he was doing for M-G-M with the incongruous title “Princess of Pasha”—but in reality he wanted to test the waters for a possible return. He made the rounds of many old friends, and even more old haunts, and one afternoon found his way to the “21” Club, where he could be heard muttering, “Oh to be back in Hollywood wishing I was back in New York.” More soberly, there had been one final play—a form of honest writing, Herman felt. The play was The Meal Ticket, a comedy about a vaudeville family on the brink of big success in Hollywood when the eighteen-year-old daughter falls in love with a doctor and runs away with him. The play was financed by John Hay Whitney, and when it opened to awful reviews and closed in less than a week, it extinguished, seemingly for good, Herman’s dreams of Broadway.
The movies were as dreary as ever. One that held his interest for less than two weeks was a quick job for M-G-M, a rewrite of a movie musical based on a series of children’s books he was quite familiar with. Herman had read L. Frank Baum’s Oz books aloud to both Don and Frank when they were younger, and he’d enjoyed their whimsy, and also what Herman considered a very real anti-fascist sentiment hidden underneath the talking pumpkins and the like. For the rest of their lives, Don and Frank remembered the intense and admiring conversations their father had with them about the books. Still, despite his affection for the books, or maybe because of it, Herman didn’t believe they could translate into film and wrote the head boys at M-G-M a long memo dictating precisely why it was a bad idea to try to make a film of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Herman, though, was unable to alter the course of history, and the movie proceeded, though he dreaded the project. Within three days of being placed on the picture, he turned in a seventeen-page treatment. Five days later, Herman handed in the first fifty-six pages of the script, and though he felt he’d helped flesh out the characters in Kansas, he’d also added a redundant Pekingese named Adolphus Ajax Rittenstaufen III to compete with Toto. Finally, relief came at last—two other writers were assigned to the film, and Herman moved on.
One section from Herman’s work on the film bears closer scrutiny, though. In the pages he wrote, Herman rather casually decreed that when Dorothy finally lands in Oz after the cyclone has ripped her house from the Kansas plains, the film should switch from black-and-white to color. That one moment, a simple yet utterly transcendent moment of cinema, sticks out among Herman’s work, not merely for the fact that it is wordless and in some ways as much an idea one might have attributed to a director as a writer, but because of where in Herman it seemed to come from.*10
At the time, Herman was aware that his life had settled into a kind of monotony and routine which was joltingly in need of new energy. The routinized existence of studio, drinking, gambling, and family—it was like a black-and-white montage sequence without end. It needed color. The question for Herman was, would the color ever arrive? Would his moment ever come? And if it did, if some cyclone managed to lift him out of the doldrums, if that whirling tornado arrived to whisk him away from that dusty train depot and plop him down in a new place with mystical creatures and he actually crossed the threshold into a brave new colorful land, what would he be stepping into?
And: would he have to wipe his feet on the curb after he did so?
Skip Notes
*1 It’s worth noting that Joe named an actress in the picture and not Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone, or Robert Young, the three comrades of the title.
*2 Generally a supporter of labor unions, Herman felt, according to a fellow writer, that “the wri
ters had a good thing going” and he “didn’t want to rock the boat.” They were getting paid huge money to do something that wasn’t really writing; why jeopardize that?
*3 While she had no contractual rights to what Meryman put in his book, it’s entirely possible that after the interview she asked him not to include the story. He has now passed away, so we can’t be sure. But Goma was scary, and he was a very kind man.
*4 The boat taking Herman and Frank back to the United States, the Berengaria, was nicknamed the ‘bargain area’ for its inexpensive crossings.
*5 Still, in a letter to him once he was back in the United States, though she thanked him profusely for the call, she also called it “needlessly extravagant.”
*6 One of the only times he did speak out angrily against her was when she was trying to protect the boys from having to fight in World War II. As an ex-Marine and an unquestioning patriot who loved the United States and what it stood for (its politicians notwithstanding), Herman recoiled when informed that Sara had tried to call to find the boys a softer job than actually seeing battle. He thundered at her, “This man is trying to kill everyone in the world, and you think our boys should let others do the job? No!” Perhaps amazed by seeing his volcanic temper hurled in full force in her direction for once, she backed down. The boys went and served with distinction, with Frank, at the age of twenty-two, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.
*7 The letter went on: “If you care to believe the story your Ma will tell you that Johanna has said ‘Choo-choo’ and ‘I’ve been wondering when you were going to take me east to see my grandparents, my brother at Columbia, and the scenic beauties in and around the nation’s capital itself’—it’s perfectly all right with me. I won’t even say flatly that Johanna didn’t say those things. All I can say is that I didn’t hear them.”
*8 Perhaps Herman’s most famous witticism came about after he threw up, loudly and boisterously, in the rest room at a Hollywood dinner party thrown by the elegant producer Arthur Hornblow Jr. “Don’t worry, Arthur,” Herman reassured the host on his return. “The white wine came up with the fish.” To Herman aficionados, finding this casually brilliant wisecrack become a crucial plot point in the movie Mank, delivered in William Randolph Hearst’s palatial San Simeon dining hall at the end of a climactic speech in which the movie’s Herman (Gary Oldman) clumsily attempts to destroy Hearst in front of his mistress and guests before disgorging himself of a sickening stream of vomit, was like seeing a delicate Michelangelo sketch placed atop the pedestal of the David.
*9 Technically, Alex and I, though virtually the same age, are first cousins once removed, since she is the daughter of my great-uncle.
*10 It’s also notable because, “Rosebud” aside, it may be the most famous moment in Herman’s (if not all) cinematic history.
PART THREE
It’s like she was studyin’ you, like you were a play or a book or a set of blueprints. How you walk, talk, think, eat, sleep.
—Joseph L. Mankiewicz, All About Eve
CHAPTER EIGHT
AMERICAN
You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man.
—Citizen Kane
To Tolstoy’s credo that all happy families are alike and each unhappy family is unalike in its own way, Hollywood has added a corollary, namely that each family has its own movie. Not necessarily a favorite movie, but a movie that has infused the family—it goes beyond like or dislike, the film has become practically a religious totem for the members of the family, almost a sacred text. For some it’s Casablanca; others point to Star Wars or The Godfather; friends of mine insist their families swear by The Shawshank Redemption, quote it constantly, refer to it when beloved pets pass away.
For anyone associated with the name Mankiewicz, that text is Citizen Kane. Not that it’s such a great film—though it is—but more that the movie itself, in plot, script, shots, dialogue, music, and everything else associated with its making is simply a part of the air we breathe. Thus it is that this grandson of the man listed as co-screenwriter of the film issues a warning: if it’s possible that you have read this far without ever seeing it, it’s hard to imagine that this chapter will be in the least bit interesting, much less enjoyable, not to mention understandable, without a rudimentary knowledge of the movie. There will be no pop quizzes, no trick questions on the year that Kane’s mother entrusted him to Mr. Thatcher, no fill-in-the-blanks on the lyrics to “Dear Old Charlie Kane,” no essays requiring you to compare and contrast the men of the Inquirer with the men of the Chronicle.*1 But having seen the film at least once would probably help. The movie, simply put, is a part of my flesh, and so is its history.
“Sing Sing, Gettys! Sing Sing!” Orson Welles and Ray Collins in Citizen Kane
The fact is, Citizen Kane was made through such an odd combination of bizarre events, megalomaniacal personalities, strange coincidences, and unique sets of circumstances that in the end it has all come to seem inevitable. Of course, many films are made this way, through trial and error and crazy happenstance, those that are awful but make a lot of money, those that are great and largely forgotten, and those that are in the mass of middle mediocrity. The challenge for the biographer, much less the grandson, is to try to determine how it actually felt at the time, because as surely as biographers can say things like “meeting Welles was Herman’s last chance—almost certainly it was now or never,” it is equally certain that if indeed it felt that way to Herman (and I’m quite sure that it did, just because pretty much everything did), I’m equally certain that if, say, My Dear Miss Aldrich, a 1937 M-G-M movie which Herman seems to have written all by his lonesome with no John Houseman to hold his hand or Orson Welles to come along and confuse the issue of credit and control, had become a legendary, talked-about movie, then people would have come to think that for Herman, getting the go-ahead on writing that story, of a newspaper baron who dies and leaves his wealth and publishing empire to his only living relative who turns out to be an old maid schoolteacher from Nebraska, that assignment was surely the pinnacle, the one final moment where Herman J. Mankiewicz could seize the gold ring and show himself and everyone else what he really had in him. We would all be looking for clues of Herman’s life in the fact that Miss Aldrich (Maureen O’Sullivan) was from the Midwest—it was all about Wilkes-Barre, we might say—and we would see that Martha Aldrich’s initials were M.A.—‘Ma!’—and we would assume, no, we would know, that she was therefore based on Herman’s mother, Johanna, a woman so much on Herman’s mind in that magical year of 1937 that he named his daughter after her. We would see in Miss Aldrich’s decision to become a journalist herself, to demonstrate to the arrogant chauvinist managing editor (Walter Pidgeon) that a woman can be just as good as a man, an analogue for Herman’s attitude toward his own domineering father, to show him that becoming a writer was a viable career and that he could succeed on his own terms—and of course if we were so inclined, we could see in the inevitable romance and pairing of the old maid and the managing editor Herman’s ultimate fantasy that he would somehow earn his father’s love and bring peace at last to his own conflicted self.
There is evidence, in other words, for anything, wherever we look, if we want to look hard enough to find it. And it’s not that those things are necessarily wrong—almost by definition, anything a writer writes comes from himself, whether it’s a wild fantasy that seems to have no bearing on his actual life or something more closely aligned with his quotidian biographical details (Rosebud was Herman’s bike!)—but that it gets us no closer to understanding what it was actually like for Herman, himself, for real, to be working on the movie that became a masterpiece and the thing for which, both in and outside the family, he would be best remembered.
* * *
—
It was a stupid idea from the start. Why in the world Herman agreed to go east wi
th Tommy Phipps in the fall of 1939 he really didn’t know. And now look at him: lying pinned underneath Phipps’s Buick convertible, his leg throbbing with pain, Phipps moaning deliriously next to him. Idiot. He and Phipps both, but Phipps more, stupid heartsick kid whose endless dissections of the brief note he’d received when his girlfriend broke up with him had no doubt taken his mind from his principal task of driving. “What did she mean when she wrote ‘Take good care of yourself always Ethel’? Why was there no punctuation? What did she mean by ‘take good care’? Why hadn’t she just said ‘take care’? And what of this bewildering ‘always’?” If nothing else, the accident had shut Phipps up at last. The kid had broken his collarbone and was unconscious.
Of course, Herman did know why he’d decided to go. M-G-M had finally fired him for good, for one thing. Had it only been a few days ago that, having been given a final warning, he’d been gambling with the boys in the commissary? He knew he shouldn’t have been, Mayer had told him just the day before when he’d given him an advance on his weekly salary—but it was for such small stakes! He could still see Mayer glaring at him from across the room, spotting the final indiscretion. Herman had simply collected his hat and coat and left. Gone straight back to the office, taken his usual box of stationery and pencils and quit the lot, getting official word the next day never to return. He doubted any studio would hire him at this point.
