Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  At first, Louis Mayer was wary. He didn’t trust Hepburn to carry a picture any more than any of the other moguls in town did, and he didn’t see how the play could possibly yield a second male star. But he believed in Joe, and in the end, trusted that his young producer, one of the most brilliant minds in Hollywood, was a consistent hard worker who always surpassed expectations. If anyone could, Joe could create a logical solution and an acceptable trial script, and get the rights for the movie.

  For weeks Joe puzzled it over, trying to decide how to change Barry’s script to create another male part worthy of a star…The brother? The father? The staunch, dull fiancé? Change the photographer accompanying the writer to a male part? No, that made no sense—there’s a love story there, a triangle with the photographer, and he didn’t want to get into some fool homo thing…the problem was this damn brother.

  And suddenly, there it was. The dream of so many younger siblings, not least of all Joe. The remedy was simple: get rid of the brother.

  By removing Tracy Lord’s brother from the movie, Joe could enlarge the part of her former husband who would ultimately win her back into one that a larger star could play, a role the debonair and eternally sophisticated Cary Grant would eventually land. He gave the ex-husband C. K. Dexter Haven many of the brother’s old lines, and now, with a killer test script in tow, Hughes relented, and The Philadelphia Story was M-G-M’s, and Joe’s, to make.

  Although Joe handed the script job to Donald Odgen Stewart, his influence on the final movie is felt everywhere. Having built the new story on a kind of fratricide, Joe further helped establish the dynamic between Hepburn and Grant’s characters by writing the film’s prologue in which Grant’s goal is made clear: knock the untouchable heiress down a few pegs. The prologue is a silent sequence, completely Joe’s idea, in which C. K. Dexter Haven (Grant) leaves his wife, Tracy Lord (Hepburn). He walks out of the house, carrying his bags, while Hepburn follows with his golf clubs, which she promptly dumps at his feet. She takes one club out and breaks it over her knee. Grant is about to smack her, but instead shoves her backward through the front door, creating a classic comedic tableau to begin the movie.

  The plot of the play was instantly appealing to Joe. The movie, post-prologue, begins on the day prior to Tracy’s second marriage to an upwardly mobile dull man—played by the stalwart journeyman actor John Howard, who the audience instantly knows is no match for the poised and clever Hepburn. When Hepburn realizes two invitees pretending to be her absent brother’s friends are actually gate-crashing reporters, she decides, with an almost Mankiewiczian thrill, that she’ll outsmart them. She puts on a show—masquerading around the house, creating caricatures of an upper-class snob, animatedly speaking French with her sister Dinah, deftly weaving insults and jabs into pleasantries, making the undercover reporters from Spy magazine (James Stewart’s and Ruth Hussey’s characters) squirm. Mocking the two, watching them writhe under her scrutiny, Hepburn is almost an amalgamation of Herman and Joe, smarter than anyone, proud and cold and dominant. Of course, the Mankiewiczes were no Main Line Philadelphia members of the Social Register themselves, but they did always claim the innate high status of intellectuals and could enjoy the victory of brainpower over lesser folk.

  The focus on the psychological state of the statuesque Hepburn character also appealed to Joe. When Tracy reveals to journalist Macaulay Connor (Stewart) that she divorced C. K. Dexter Haven because he drank, Haven complains that Tracy is not of this world as “she finds human imperfection unforgivable,” going on to say, “When I discovered that my relationship to her was to be not that of a loving husband and a good companion…but that of a high priest to a virgin goddess, then my drinks grew deeper and more frequent, that’s all.” Not for the last time, it would be the female character who would be more like Joe, for while Haven admits his vulnerability in talking about the causes of his drinking and wins audiences over with his easy, self-loathing, even Herman-like charm, the remote and less revealing Tracy has built walls around herself, much like Joe. Joe’s statement “I don’t think I’ve ever told the truth or confided in myself the way external people do” would not sound foreign on Tracy Lord’s lips.

  But masculinity would assert itself, of course—neither Joe nor the Hollywood machine would dare give complete autonomy to the woman over the man. Ultimately, it would be the man—the ex-husband in this case—who would position himself as the director of the final scene. Minutes before her wedding ceremony is to begin, Tracy Lord and her dullard of a fiancé split. Dexter then suggests that Tracy speak to the crowd assembled for her wedding, and she repeats these words as he dictates, in which she and the audience learn simultaneously that they are to be remarried: “Two years ago, you were invited to a wedding in this house. I eloped to Maryland, which was very bad manners. But I’d like to make it up to you now by going through with it as originally planned.” A woman, reciting, puppet-like, the words her ex-husband puts into her mouth could well be expected to offer some little expression of unease, but in the world of Hollywood movies—and especially a film based on a play by a man, rewritten into a script by another man, and overseen by a producer who’s a Mankiewicz, the woman doesn’t stand a chance, no matter that George Cukor, a “woman’s director” (Hollywoodese for “gay”), was directing. “You know how I feel?” Tracy asks Dexter after she’s finished being the dummy in this ventriloquism act. “Like a human, like a human being.” It wouldn’t be the last time that Joe would embrace a woman’s happy marriage as central to her own self-conception.

  Ruth Hussey, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, and Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story (1940)

  But while The Philadelphia Story ended on a note of equality among the sexes, the finale of Joe’s next film with Katharine Hepburn, Woman of the Year, would be downright reactionary. Produced the following year, it would be the first movie to pair the legendary screen team of Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. It was Joe’s idea to put the two together—he said later that he felt Spencer Tracy would be a perfect match for Hepburn’s stubborn streak, and he was justly proud of teaming the two stars for the first time. For years afterward, Joe loved to tell the story of their first meeting outside the studio commissary, after which Hepburn, clipped and aristocratic, watched Tracy walking away and told Joe, “He’s a little short for me, isn’t he?” “Don’t worry, Joe said, “he’ll cut you down to size.”

  Significantly, rather than a “woman’s director,” “man’s man” George Stevens directed, from a script attributed to Michael Kanin and Ring Lardner Jr. Hepburn’s Tess Harding is a self-confident, world-renowned journalist, humanitarian, and women’s rights activist, accomplishments that earn her the prize “Woman of the Year.” During the film, Harding feuds with the more conventional sports journalist Craig (Tracy) before finally, inevitably, their sparkling banter reveals that they love each other, and they marry. But then, Craig is left to wither in the shadow of a woman who feels good about herself. Although Tess Harding is in many ways unlike heiress Tracy Lord, both are presented as superior, haughty creatures, in whose comeuppance an audience will take great pleasure. Tess’s sin is one she shares with Joe Mankiewicz: arrogance. As she says, “I like knowing more about what goes on than most people.”

  Just as Cary Grant suffered under his “goddess,” Spencer Tracy endures the humiliations of a man with a more accomplished wife. He submits to the comic interruptions of a large crowd wanting to discuss war news on his wedding night. He quite literally wears the apron in the family, making his wife eggs for breakfast. But, finally married, before he heads off for work, leaving her alone for the day in their new house, he remarks, “The outstanding woman of the year isn’t really a woman at all.” To allow the comic reversal a restoration of traditional gender requires, the movie then offers a denouement, but the original one cooked up by Kanin and Lardner hadn’t done the trick. In it, to get back in her husband’s good graces after a quarrel, Harding researche
s and writes an article about boxing and puts his byline on it, and the two reconcile at a boxing match. The first preview audience of the film was cool to the ending, and something else was required.

  Joe’s solution, entirely his own, was the final breakfast scene, when to win her husband back, Harding attempts to transform herself into a docile, traditional wife and fails miserably. Her attempt to make him breakfast is both comic and unintentionally ludicrous—waffles explode as she watches helplessly, crying. When her husband comes in, she tells him she will become a true wife and give up journalism. The movie ends with seeming domestic bliss between the pair—though achieved only through reducing a highly successful and powerful woman to tears, making breakfast for her man—her aspirations diminished from the hope of exposing the horrors of Nazi occupation to the hope of pleasing her husband.*2

  Where did it come from, this final humiliation of Katharine Hepburn? Joe proudly told Ken Geist that he wrote the scene in anticipation of the response women audience members might have to Hepburn’s perfection throughout the first 85 percent of the film.*3 Her humiliation, he figured, would make her more palatable. “The average American housewife,” he declaimed, “seated next to her husband staring for two hours at this paragon of beauty, intelligence, wit, accomplishment, and everything else, cannot help but wonder if her husband isn’t comparing her very unfavorably with this goddess he sees on the screen…Now they can turn to their schmuck husbands and say, ‘She may know Batista, but she can’t make a cup of coffee, you silly bastard.’ ”

  Upon receiving Joe’s new ending, Hepburn had a similar reaction to a modern viewer. She called the breakfast scene “the worst bunch of shit I’ve ever read.” Kanin and Lardner, too, were displeased and rewrote some of the final scene’s dialogue, though to little effect: “Some of the worst lines we rewrote,” Lardner said, “but we couldn’t fix it, we couldn’t change it fundamentally.”*4 It is unsurprising that decades later, the movie less focused on creating a groveling, humiliated Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story, is still hailed as a classic, while Woman of the Year has faded from all but the most devoted cineastes’ lists.*5

  Hepburn and Tracy in Woman of the Year (1942)

  Still, for the moment, the film proved another success for Joe and the studio, landing on many critics’ top ten lists and cementing Joe’s status as the go-to producer on the Metro lot. But inwardly, Joe continued to seethe. Herman’s Oscar had only poured more salt in the wounds. Because as Joe, finally, dutifully, put in a call to Tower Road the night of Herman’s Citizen Kane triumph, hearing the domesticated bliss warbling in the background through the phone wires as the gathered crowd tried to summon Herman to the phone to talk to his kid brother—who was calling, after all, to congratulate the big macher—Joe heard again that his brother had, now, not just ultimate professional success with the Oscar, but something approaching a happy home life. Joe knew instinctively that it would be a while before he could ever attain that—his plan for being in decent relationships seemed modeled on the men and women in the two Hepburn pictures: the woman is wonderful and damn near independent, is in fact nearly the intellectual equal of the man; the man and woman spar for a few reels, falling in and out of love; finally, enough is enough and the man tells the woman what to do; the woman does it; there’s a happy embrace; fade out.

  It was bullshit, Joe knew, but it would have to do—for now.

  Skip Notes

  *1 These films included Bringing Up Baby, a box-office disappointment on its release in February 1938, but which is now regarded, at least by this non-relative of anyone associated with its making, as one of the three or four funniest movies of all time.

  *2 The film’s retrograde sexual politics were somewhat mortifying to me when I first saw it, at a revival house during college; hardly the thing with which to impress a date in the 1980s.

  *3 There are a full thirteen minutes of her failing at using kitchen appliances.

  *4 Once again, the Academy Awards provided Joe with a dramatic moment: at the 1943 ceremony, Lardner and Kanin picked up the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and Joe stood up to shake their hands as they passed him on the way to the stage. They snubbed him.

  *5 The ending is hardly the only thing that mars the film—its characters are far more broadly drawn than in The Philadelphia Story and generally less appealing, even down to the grating Greek refugee boy Tess wants to adopt.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A NEW HEART

  Maybe I wasn’t his friend. But if I wasn’t, he never had one.

  —Citizen Kane

  To those of us who never lived through it, there was always an irresistible allure and glamour to the age of coast-to-coast train travel, though how much old black-and-white movies contributed to the romance is anyone’s guess. The trains had wonderfully evocative names, like the Super Chief, the 20th Century Limited, and El Capitan—and there were the Pullman porters who paced the halls and cleaned your shoes (and just about everything else) overnight, and the dining car, where likely as not you’d find yourself seated next to a spy or a beautiful blonde, or best of all both in one, and you’d strike up an innocuous conversation as you ticked off the menu with the well-sharpened pencil so thoughtfully provided by the train. Of course, in reality, these trips were likely as mundane as a Greyhound bus trip from the Port Authority to New London (if perhaps less uncomfortable) and no doubt the movies and the people who remember them in books have romanticized them all out of proportion. For just ask yourself: What is it like to sit in a cramped compartment for three days and two nights with your brother who hates you on board a train carrying the dead body of your father back East?

  Such was the romance that greeted Herman and Joe in December 1941. The country was freshly at war. Herman had brought whiskey. Joe had brought his armor. Herman drank, drank some more, then decided to drink, before finally pulling himself together and doing some serious drinking. There was no reason not to drink. For Joe, the trip was an unrelenting nightmare. Herman was dismissive, antagonistic, and in the end cruel. For brothers, it’s never entirely right to use the word “unprovoked”—Joe had provoked Herman by being born—but as far as Joe was concerned, Herman’s attack had come without reason and from out of nowhere, an emotional Pearl Harbor that left him reeling. “You’re a lousy goddamn writer,” Herman blasted, and Joe shriveled; Joe wasn’t even writing much anymore, he was a producer, why was Herman even bringing it up? Also painful were the attacks on Joe’s character: “The only reason you’re still around is you kiss so much goddamn ass. Jesus Christ, doesn’t your stomach turn kissing so much goddamn ass?”

  It was the writing jibes that stung most. Witless, stupid, unoriginal. Each word another dart aimed right for where Joe was most tender and sensitive. Consciously or not, Herman was echoing Franz’s withering style. Joe’s work, he thundered, had no originality, no spark, no spirit. Joe was not only not talented, but he was such a goddamn know-it-all. What a combination! To be so lacking in talent and so full of oneself! Jesus, if Herman didn’t know better, he’d think Joe was a Protestant schoolmarm.

  To tell Herman that he’d had too much to drink never did any good, and it certainly didn’t help Joe on the train. If anything, it only turned up the flame. Herman, when he got going, could be vicious and relentless, like a heavyweight boxer circling his opponent, flicking, jabbing, each blow landing solidly, and somehow giving Herman more strength, to keep going, keep looking for that knockout punch. But really all he was looking for was any sign that Joe had feelings at all. Herman was so wide open, such an open book when it came to his emotions, his face so easy to read—he had no poker face at all, it was part of what accounted for his terrible luck at games of chance—when he was happy you knew it, when he was miserable you knew it, and when he was angry everyone in the room knew it—and now, the whole damn car on the Chief could hear them as the train rumbled east….

  But
Joe had his armor up, and there was no touching him. He sat there, taking Herman’s hits, one after the other—nodding, wincing a little, a kind of half smile to suggest to Herman, “Yes, this is all very smart, but in the morning you’re going to have a splitting headache and I’ll be the one to bring you bicarbonate of soda, and you’ll let loose a colossal belch and we’ll forget all about this, only I’ll still have a job at Metro and you’ll still be you, determined to destroy yourself.” For more than an hour Herman erupted, the whiskey fueling the rocket of his rage—and then, when Joe finally thought it was over, that the worst had come and gone, an innocuous remark started it all up again, and finally Herman brought out the biggest gun he had: Franz, the looming Lear whose shriveled body lay in a pine box four cars behind them in the Super Chief, hurtling toward New York City at 90 miles per hour.

  Franz in California, c. 1940

  At the age of sixty-nine, Franz had finally retired the previous month: November of 1941. For years Franz had come West in the summers, to teach and plan for a possible retirement. He had taken trips up to Puget Sound and imagined what kind of house he might build with the little bit of money he had put away, a small one to be sure, but with a study lined with books, to look out over the sea. He and Johanna had arrived on a Saturday and were staying in a small apartment by the marina. Herman and Sara had gone over Saturday night and had a peaceful visit. The next morning, as they were dressing to go see him again, the phone rang. Franz had been up early and was out walking to buy some fruit when he’d collapsed on the street. Herman and Sara got to the apartment in time to ride with him to the hospital in the ambulance. Herman kept gently teasing his father: “Some fine thing, you come here to California, this beautiful country, and what do you do, you fall down and get sick the first day. Utterly ridiculous the way you’re carrying on here, give us all a bad name.” Franz smiled, seeming to appreciate his son’s humor. Sara, looking at her stricken father-in-law, was wordless with fear.