Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  Horror mingled with fascination for Joe as Judy regaled him with tales over late-night drinks about the years of anguish at the hands of M-G-M and her mother. Judy had grown up on Lot One, she explained, and Joe realized everyone still treated her like that thirteen-year-old girl who had first come on the set. Joe knew Mayer was trapping Judy in roles of girl-next-door teenage fluff, one-dimensional characters not worthy of her talent. Don’t take every shitty role offered to you, he urged. She needed a protector from her mother and the studio, someone who didn’t care about her money—and Joe was happy to play the part.

  Joe knew she was harboring unconscious hostility toward Mayer and mother, so he brought Judy to the same Dr. Menninger who had treated his wife. Menninger would become the first in a long line of trained psychiatric professionals to meet with Judy Garland, and he would not be the last to suggest that Ms. Garland had serious problems. But Menninger’s prescription was unrealistic, though not at first to Joe’s ears: The good doctor advised that Judy should be in treatment for at least a year, away from Hollywood. With Mayer’s need to keep her star burning as brightly as possible, such a treatment was of course impossible, and Mayer told Joe so. Joe didn’t miss a beat. He devised another plan, and so soon Judy, now fully trusting Joe to understand her needs, was getting out of bed an hour early each day, before work required her presence at the studio, so that she could sit instead on the couch of none other than Dr. Ernst Simmel, the same renowned Freudian whom Herman had seen. There, in the deepest Freudian psychoanalysis the town could muster, she would, Joe hoped, pour out her anguish and come to understand her demons, and also, perhaps, become aware of her immense gratitude for the man who was making it happen.

  Judy Garland in the 1940s

  That man, of course, was not Louis B. Mayer.

  The truth is, Mayer was a difficult man to work for, and Joe had done it long enough.*2 That the final straw would come was never really in doubt. Joe’s decision to introduce Judy to psychoanalysis provided it at last. Like all the early moguls, Mayer had downplayed his religious and cultural identity (“hide the Jew” in him, in one mogul’s colorful phrase) in order to gain mass acceptance for his movies, and so he had become a full-throated proponent of Mom, baseball, and apple pie. Psychoanalysis, Dr. Freud’s “Jew religion,” which by stressing the Oedipal tendencies of young boys and the Electra complex of young girls, seemed to be undercutting or at least muddying the clarity and goodness of one’s central relationship with one’s mother, was not to be trusted.

  And Mayer had an ally: Ethel didn’t like the “Jew therapy” either. She insisted that Mayer step in and remove psychoanalysis—and Joe—from Judy’s life, and Mayer was only too happy to oblige. Since Judy had begun sessions with Simmel, Ethel had felt her influence slipping away. Asserting her own independence, questioning authority, Judy was changing and Ethel was alarmed. Mayer was not happy that anyone was rattling his big moneymaker, and undermining the sacred role of mother.

  Finally, Joe and Mayer had a showdown in Mayer’s office on the M-G-M lot. Mayer, who had always been suspicious of Joe, insisting on calling him “Harvard” in story conferences,*3 told Joe in no uncertain terms to stay away from Judy Garland. He then gave a long, impassioned homily about the importance and divinity of mothers. Mothers were holy, Mayer told Joe, and Judy Garland had to leave analysis immediately. Matching the mogul’s clichés, Joe told Mayer that the studio wasn’t big enough for the two of them and stormed out of the meeting.

  That the final straw for Joe was Mayer’s insistence on the holiness of the matriarchal role is illuminating. Like Herman, Joe rarely talked about his mother. To the Mankiewicz boys, it’s as if their mother didn’t exist. One can imagine Dr. Fred Hacker, Joe’s own long-time psychoanalyst and eventually a family friend to many Mankiewiczes, waxing about how curious it was that it was Mayer’s bringing up the importance of Mother that tipped Joe over the edge. The mother was inescapable, the root, primal. Joe would dispute it—she meant nothing, it was always Pop. Of course, as Hacker no doubt pointed out to Joe, in leaving Mayer, he was also defying his own current father figure.

  For Joe, escaping M-G-M and Mayer was the final step—what he called the end of his “black period” and the beginning of a kind of professional adulthood, of making his own way at last, starting down the path that would eventually lead to the director’s chair. Herman wouldn’t help him get there. Joe would do it on his own. He would live or die on his own merits, and on what he was able to do for whatever studio he ended up with. As for his heart, he had plans for that little instrument.

  The heart, though, has plans of its own. We can anticipate what it will do, but we can never truly know. So while we may think that Mama is a fool and an illiterate, we may be surprised by the surge of irrational hatred that courses through us when our stubby little hydrant of a boss brings her up in an argument, forcing us, despite our intentions, to speak in hot temper even when we had not planned to.

  Young Judy, of course, didn’t know that Joe’s defiance of Mayer was in part the surface of an internal struggle over feelings about his own parents. Instead, Judy saw Joe’s choice to quit M-G-M as the ultimate declaration of love and devotion. He was her hero, and this was her kind of love. The ideal man in her eyes, Joe was a standard by which she would measure all later lovers. She confided in her sister that she couldn’t imagine ever meeting a man as brilliant, kind, and attentive.

  For his part, Joe did care about Judy deeply. He would never stop fighting to get her the help she needed and the parts she deserved. But his feelings did not match Judy’s, not by a long shot. Speaking to Garland’s biographer Gerald Clarke, he explained the nurturing kind of love he felt for her: “I was in love—and I know this is a terrible analogy—the way you love an animal, a pet.” But while she was hearing wedding bells, Joe was hearing something else: the impending return of Rosa, who was coming home from the clinic in Topeka. After months of mostly furtive meetings, Joe broke the news to Judy that their affair had to come to an end. At the time, Judy took it well—like a champion, Joe thought. It was as if she’d both been expecting it, and, more terrifyingly, that she didn’t really believe it.

  As for Rosa, the homecoming was hardly what anyone would have wanted. There were, almost immediately, more tears, more fights, and eventually one frightening scene in a bungalow when Tom saw his mother go after his father with an actual carving knife. Even the aftermaths were scary, Rosa walking into Tom’s room the morning after the storm had passed, sitting on the boy’s bed and saying, glassy-eyed and blank, “I’m sorry, Tom. I’m so, so sorry.” And then, allowing herself to collapse into tears, and crying with her boy, shuddering the whole time.

  She was desperately ill, and no one knew how to help the poor woman. But can it have helped to be married to a man like Joe? Someone who sought control in everything he did, who was horror-struck at the thought that anyone knew how sick his wife was, even as he also played for whatever sympathy he could get? He would sit there, stoically, as she ran off at the mouth, cursing him for having ruined her career, for forcing her into the airless role of housewife, when she’d had such a promising future as an actress; pipe in mouth, Joe would listen and nod and then, when the steam had finally run down, would launch into a calm psychoanalytic disquisition on what was ailing her. Mad woman indeed. In his view, though, she simply had a desperate need to create drama. She had grown up in a family with a rich military background, but where the men and boys were the center of the action; only on the stage could Rosa claim an equal share of the attention. Now, with her career stalled, taking a back seat to being mother to Chris and Tom and playing the less than satisfying fulltime role of Mrs. Joseph Mankiewicz, she sought drama wherever and however she could find it.

  For Joe, it was the thunder and the storm yet again—what he was drawn to, irresistibly. A great storm, a howling wind, with him always at the cyclone’s calm eye, watching the rage swirl, and ev
en seeming to gain strength from it. Was it possible that he could find a way to orchestrate such a storm, gain control of it too, and in so doing master all the turmoil that had churned around him at the start? There was certainly room to try.

  Another storm soon clamored for his notice. Judy Garland had not given up easily. She telephoned “the most wonderful man she ever met” one afternoon in late 1943 or early 1944, and announced in that breathless way that Joe and audiences found so thrilling, that she was pregnant with his child. Joe took it ruefully. A pregnancy was largely wishful thinking, but he knew that she knew that it would get his attention, far more than love letters, flowers, or phone calls. Joe was convinced that the pregnancy was a ruse—more because of the way she told him rather than any physical impossibility—but he felt he could not call her out on the lie without injuring her fragile ego, so he agreed to join Judy on a secret trip to New York. There, in a doctor’s office on Sixth Avenue, an abortion would be performed, once the pregnancy was clearly established. First, the hesitant ex-lovers waited in an East Side apartment for the results of a pregnancy test. To no one’s surprise, the test results came back negative. Joe recalled that after that, “a little happy, a little sad,” the two of them went back to Grand Central and boarded a train back to Los Angeles.

  Although Joe urged Judy to move on, he was the love of her life, and to Joe’s frustration, she wouldn’t let him forget it. For the next decade or more, she was often asked to sing at Hollywood parties, and if Joe happened to attend, her song of choice was always Harold Arlen’s “Happiness is a Thing Called Joe,” which she sang at the piano with every eye on her. For Joe, it was a mix of embarrassment and pride to be the subject of her singing. Judy Garland, after all, was a brilliant and well-practiced performer, and she knew how to look pointedly at Joe while singing but with enough subtlety that no one else would notice. He urged her to stop, but she would laugh in coy refusal, her eyes glittering in triumph.

  While Joe found her neediness annoying, and never again reciprocated her feelings, speaking to Clarke decades after her death he could not deny that what he had with Judy was special: “I’ve had my share of affairs with women,” he said. “But they only exist as affairs with women. Every year, as I grow older, the memory…grows dimmer and dimmer. That isn’t the case with Judy. I remember her as I would remember an emotion, a mood, an emotional experience that is now an event.”

  Of all the females that inhabit the society of theater folk, the one for whom I have always felt the greatest compassion is she for whom, in that society, only one role is available: that of “wife to _______.”

  —Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1972

  * * *

  —

  Joe landed at Fox after leaving M-G-M, and his first decision there was fascinating. As his first picture to produce, he chose The Keys of the Kingdom, based on a novel by A. J. Cronin. Immediately, he rewrote Nunnally Johnson’s script,*4 about a humble Catholic priest, Father Chisholm (Gregory Peck), who withstands all manner of adversity and cruelty in serving thirty-five years as a missionary in a small Chinese village. Hoping for the same kind of lightning that had struck with other high-class literary adaptations set in foreign locales such as How Green Was My Valley or Goodbye, Mr. Chips, the studio intended the movie to make great use of the foreign setting. And to take fullest advantage of the exoticism the movie called for, Joe decided to cast, in the small but pivotal role of the stern European Mother Superior who disapproves of our hero, an actress he knew well who had begun her career on the Viennese stage: one Rosa Stradner.

  “Wife to _____.” Rosa Stradner in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944)

  Of course, it was not easy to cast his wife in the part. Though she had retained her striking beauty, the studio had hesitations—in part because the male star of the film, Gregory Peck, was young and largely untested, with only the as-yet-unreleased film Days of Glory under his belt. At the start of shooting, even after Rosa was cast, Ingrid Bergman, a bona fide box office draw coming off the hits Casablanca and For Whom the Bell Tolls and studio head Darryl Zanuck’s first choice for the role, became available. In a stunning act of chauvinism, Zanuck told Joe he’d give Rosa a two-picture deal if she stepped aside.*5 According to Nunnally Johnson, Joe got down on his hands and knees and pleaded with the studio to keep Rosa, and though Joe denied making such a dramatic appeal, there’s no doubt he needed Rosa to make the film. In the first place, it would get her out of the house and working again, away from the role of housewife she felt so confined and restricted by. Whether this particular role would actually serve to launch Rosa into the upper firmament of film stars was another story. In the end, the Bergman deal collapsed, perhaps because the role in question was small, largely unsympathetic, and quite curious indeed.

  That the one role Joe Mankiewicz ever wrote for his wife was that of a haughty and superior Catholic nun (literally, a Mother Superior), who treats the hero of the picture with thinly disguised contempt on meeting him, is interesting enough. But more curious is how the relationship developed between our hero Father Chisholm, a man who “failed in all things, except an understanding of his fellow man,” and the imperious Austrian-born nun, Maria-Veronica.*6 For while at first the Mother Superior, arriving at the Chinese village with two other nuns a day ahead of schedule and catching the priest unaware and in shirtsleeves, is disappointed in everything he does, toward the end of the movie, after witnessing his near-saintly response to mistreatment by others, in addition to physical heroism in defending his beloved church, she has a complete change of heart. On the eve of her departure from China after her difficult stay, she approaches the priest in his church and tells him she needs to tell him something, and it isn’t easy for her to say. Peck nods gently, encouraging her to unburden her heart, which she does, abjectly:

  From our first meeting…I have behaved shamefully and sinfully toward you. I want you to know that I am most bitterly sorry for my conduct. Believe me, no apology was ever more abject than mine…nor has anyone ever been less worthy of forgiveness.

  Joe’s wish fulfillment is working overtime here, putting words into his wife’s mouth that he must have dearly loved to hear her say off-screen. For her confession wasn’t just about her cruelty and coldness, but for her contempt for the man she had lived with side by side, whose virtues only made her own seem puny:

  I was born into arrogance, Father, and taught contempt for those who were not. How could I hope to live by the word of God which is the same for all men? From the beginning, your presence tortured me. I knew that yours was a true humility and that mine was a duty. I resented your deep and honest compassion because mine was difficult and filled with doubt and pain.

  Gregory Peck, Joe’s stand-in here, has little to do but gently accept this most submissive apology, to bask in the compliment and tell her she needn’t apologize. “You know,” he says piously, “we’re all children to God, and with His help, we’ll work and mature.” Fade out…on the scene, and on Joe’s hopes for how his marriage would resolve itself.

  Instead, after the picture was completed, but just six weeks before it was released to the public, a small item appeared in the Los Angeles Times of November 3, 1944, stating that Joe and Rosa had mutually agreed to separate, with Joe moving out of their home in Pacific Palisades and taking an apartment in Beverly Hills. The separation didn’t last, and though there’s no record of when or how the reconciliation was achieved, Joe maintained that though several analysts told him through the years he should leave the marriage, he felt he owed “an allegiance” to Chris and Tom to stay and try to make it work. So by the time Keys of the Kingdom opened in December, Joe and Rosa were arm in arm at the premiere. Of the boys, neither would remember this particular separation, and Chris would always claim he saw almost nothing of his actual mother in the role she played in the film.

  And so the miseries continued, for Joe and for Rosa, who would sob openly at dinner partie
s, yell and scream and race upstairs to shriek at the children, or complain about some guest or other molesting her, with Joe sometimes sitting quietly, sometimes trying to calm her, always dazed and despairing. Clearly, Joe needed these dramatic scenes too, and people who knew the couple sensed it. According to composer Johnny Green, “They wouldn’t have lasted if there wasn’t some need.” The fights were nearly constant, and often played out for an audience of friends and intimates. “Rosa would sit there sobbing while Joe walked out of the room, losing his temper: ‘You see! How can a man live like this?’ ”

  But Joe could live like that, and he did, though it was also clear that he dreamed for it to be over. If only Rosa would submit to him, she would find the happiness and peace she had been seeking all these years. As he’d had Mother Superior tell Father Chisholm in her apology, with a serene look overtaking Rosa’s beautiful face, “How strange that the moment of my greatest humiliation should bring with it the only peace I’ve ever truly known.”

  But life off-screen, as Joe well knew, was not make-believe.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Rosa was sometimes credited as Rose Stradner, but in the family, and to her colleagues, she was always known as Rosa.

  *2 In later years, Joe used to joke that Mayer was such a monster that he was sympathetic to the Nazis and agreed with them about everything—except one issue; but even on that one issue, Joe said, “Mayer was willing to negotiate.”

  *3 Joe said it was the only college Mayer had heard of.