Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  The question was: what stories did Joe have to tell?

  First up was one that took full advantage of Joe’s love of women, flashbacks, and voice-over. Yet Joe’s role in creating the film A Letter to Three Wives was far from certain at the outset. After Zanuck purchased the short story “One of Our Hearts” by John Klempner, a Cosmopolitan story that the author later expanded into what Joe called an unnecessarily dull and long novel, Joe got to work to create an acceptable treatment. He pored over his treatment late into the night, listening to the British rain after long days of work on Escape. But his first draft did not meet Zanuck’s expectations, and Joe was crushed; the story had so much potential, and he was certain he could turn it into something great.

  In fact, Zanuck and Joe had long held each other in mutual wary contempt, so it is hardly a surprise that Zanuck favored another producer’s treatment and gave him the go ahead to make the film. To Zanuck’s chagrin, that producer, Sol C. Siegel, then turned around and selected Joe to write and direct the picture. Zanuck’s protestation over the choice was memorable: “For Chrissake, that arrogant bastard. I can’t get along with him now, after four flops. If he gets a hit with this, he’ll be unlivable!” Siegel replied, “I’ll take my chances.”

  Joe had to admit that Zanuck’s intuition was brilliant when taking a first look at a script or a picture, and he was sheepishly appreciative when Zanuck wisely diagnosed that the problem to Joe’s overly long original script “A Letter to Four Wives” was “you’ve got one wife too many.” But by and large, Joe was wary of giving Zanuck too much time with an editor’s pen—the longer Zanuck had to analyze a film, Joe felt, the higher the chance he would cut from peak to peak of action. Joe liked words; Zanuck tolerated them. Yet Joe would always shake the hands of sons of bitches he hated, and so the two made their peace.

  * * *

  —

  Like many actresses before and after her, Linda Darnell, who played Lora Mae, the most captivating of the three wives, was swept away by Joe. He was funny, perceptive, handsome, attentive, and took her seriously in a way that her husband, the cinematographer J. Peverell “Pev” Marley, never managed to. Like Garland, Darnell had a terrible relationship with her mother and would empty her heart out to Joe at private lunches in his dressing room. Intrigued by her neuroses, Joe readily dispensed his psychoanalytic advice, which she consumed eagerly along with her baked pears. As he did with many of his actors, Joe helped cultivate her talent, leading to a subtle and sophisticated performance that made people respond to her for the first time as a serious actress. Time wrote of her performance: “Miss Darnell, who can be a temptress without even trying, has never shown so strikingly that she can be an actress as well.”

  The fact is, Joe fleshed out the anxieties of his female characters with a sensitivity far ahead of his time. The movie begins with all three wives confronting their fear of being replaced by another woman after they get a letter from friend Addie Ross saying, “I’ve run off with one of your husbands.” Addie Ross’s voice (Celeste Holm: delicious, never seen) was soft, insistent, and even mildly threatening—but at the same time richly sympathetic as it kicked off the plot. The story was divided into thirds, using Joe’s signature flashbacks to tell the stories of three women’s fears, which went far beyond infidelity, abandonment, and betrayal to the core social anxieties women felt about rising in the middle class after World War II, with mobility eased by economic and social change. Unlike many films of the time, Joe elevates women’s fears to the level of public discourse—advocating they be taken seriously. Joe’s social awareness was undeniable: all three of the movie “wives” must negotiate tensions between private and public lives in ways that were fascinating and germane to movie audiences of the late ’40s.

  Jeanne Crain, Ann Sothern, and Linda Darnell in A Letter to Three Wives

  Joe directs Linda Darnell in A Letter to Three Wives, 1948

  First, he tells the story of a country girl Deborah (Jeanne Crain), who, when she sheds her service uniform, is suddenly on unequal terrain with her wealthy suburbanite husband (Jeffrey Lynn). The story of a wartime union bridging social divides may feel familiar to a modern audience but was novel at the time. As an outsider worried she won’t be accepted by her husband’s friends, Deborah feels she has reverted to “a caterpillar while her husband remains a butterfly.”

  Unfortunately, Deborah’s somewhat overlong speeches aren’t helped by Jeanne Crain, who Joe felt brought little life to the role. And to Joe’s dismay Jeffrey Lynn was hardly better as her husband. Joe was furious that Zanuck had foisted these two Fox contract actors on him, thus weakening the first part of the film. What was the point of “creative freedom” if Zanuck could throw bad actors into the mix? Joe had flaws on the technical side of directing but he could get great performances out of his actors! For the first time, Joe started mentioning to friends the idea of having his own production company, without execs like Zanuck who could shoot him in the foot.

  The second wife, Lora Mae, played by Darnell, is a poor young woman who defies her smitten yet boorish wealthy boss (Paul Douglas), refusing to go to bed with him without a ring on her finger. The sexual frankness of the segment is unshocking but everywhere apparent, and as the plot unfolds, Darnell tames her brutish boss expertly, forcing him to act gallantly time and time again, until he finally laments, “You win, I’ll marry you.”*5 In fact, Joe turns the caricature of the gold digger on its head, suggesting Lora Mae is not selfishly marrying up, but envisioning a better life for her mother as well. Moreover, Lora Mae’s psychological complexity is deepened when she worries later that her aggressiveness in courtship had been excessive—and Darnell’s own combination of strength and vulnerability makes the sequence affecting and believable in a way that went beyond usual melodramas.

  So too the third wife, Rita Phipps (Ann Sothern), departing from the one-dimensional characterization so familiar to moviegoers of the time, is a thoughtful portrait of a woman who struggles with maintaining a home and a family while holding down a job that requires her to work late into the night. This tension comes to a head when she forgets her husband’s birthday, only to be reminded when Addie sends a birthday present.*6 As for Rita’s husband George, Kirk Douglas brings the movie to rip-roaring cynical life when he attacks the mores of the day. A forerunner of Joe’s more famous cinematic mouthpiece Addison DeWitt, George gave Joe the delightful opportunity to take shots at soap operas and advertising. As Franz’s son, and Herman’s brother, Joe had nothing but disdain for radio soap operas that he felt diminished the intelligence of its listeners, and advertisements that incited fear in consumers. Writing for a radio soap opera, Rita holds a dinner party and invites her producer, who insists they listen to two hours of radio instead of eating dinner. At the end of the night, George, bursting with contempt, finally, blurts out Joe’s opinion of the industry:

  The purpose of radio writing, as far as I can see, is to prove to the masses that a deodorant can bring happiness, a mouthwash guarantee success, and a laxative attract romance. “Don’t think,” says the radio, “and we’ll pay you for it.” Can’t spell cat? Too bad. “But a yacht and a million dollars to the gentleman for being in our audience tonight.” “Worry,” says the radio. “Will your best friends not tell you? Will you lose your teeth? Will your cigarettes give you cancer? Will your body function after you’re 35? If you don’t use our product, you’ll lose your husband, your job, and die! Use our product and we’ll make you rich, we’ll make you famous!”

  The scene crackles not just because of Douglas’s comic delivery, but because of the reaction shots of the producer and her husband, and Sothern’s mix of exasperation and sympathy as her husband’s fury surges. It’s expertly written, yes, but more than that, as they’ve said in Hollywood story conferences for nearly a century, it works. The scene is tight and fun and funny, and each reaction shot builds on the previous one. Joe was getting the hang of directi
ng, of telling a story in pictures as well as words.

  The success of the film emboldened Joe, though it also threw his difficult personal life into relief. That he was now deep in a marriage that pleased neither participant was clear, but the irony was, he now had proof that his interest in the female psyche was paying off professionally. As he turned his attention to his next script, he had acquired his favorite themes and techniques. Women would be front and center, and voice-overs would help drive the story. While Celeste Holm would return, the rest of the cast would be new. The pieces were coming into place—the complex neuroses of the female characters, a few male characters to try to help the poor females, and somewhere off to the side, of the action but not in the action, a charismatic and nasty man dripping with bile, self-loathing, and contempt for much of the world he occupied…

  Joe was ready for Eve.

  Skip Notes

  *1 To my cousins and me, these were right up there with “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

  *2 As with many famed witticisms, there is no actual record of how it was first said, and I’ve seen this particular remark phrased in at least half a dozen ways. While it is often cited as “Imagine—the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass,” it’s likely Herman avoided the acting that phrasing required and opted instead for the familiar Mankiewiczian trope invoking writing.

  *3 My other grandfather, Frank Davis, once apologized to Herman for having rewritten him on a picture for RKO called Fighting Father Dunne, and Herman said, “Frank, that’s great. You write me out of it, then you get someone else to write you out of it.”

  *4 Miller took pity on Joe, who had looked through the wrong end of the viewfinder on his first day on the set, and gave Joe a somewhat sneaky strategy for dealing with cameramen. He told Joe to choose a spot for the camera but not tell his cameraman, instead asking them where they thought it should go. If they agreed with Joe, so much the better. If not, Joe was instructed to say, “Yes, that’s what I was thinking too” and so preserve his authority and directorial control.

  *5 The line is the comic climax to a terrific scene, as Douglas’s frustration mounts throughout, a train rattling ever closer to Darnell’s house until he seizes her for an almost simian kiss as the train noise crescendoes.

  *6 Joe would repeat the gesture, to even greater effect, when Eve remembers Bill Sampson’s birthday in All About Eve.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EVE

  Nice speech, Eve. But I wouldn’t worry too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.

  —All About Eve

  Herman sat in the jail cell. He was stone cold sober now—it’s amazing how a car accident and a scuffle with the police had the power to clarify the mind almost instantaneously—but then again, he didn’t really think he’d had all that much to drink. Now, he alternated between reliving the events of the evening, and seeing, with almost crystal clarity, how it would all play out. The future and the past were having a meeting in the present, and the present was a six-by-eight cell in the Los Angeles County jail.

  He’d had a few drinks at Romanoff’s, but probably not more than three. Four, tops. Then he’d driven up Benedict Canyon Drive toward home, and the next thing he knew he’d hit Lee Gershwin’s car. Lee, wife of Ira, “the wrong Gershwin,” had been in her little station wagon with her maid and her secretary. Mrs. Gershwin ended up with a nasty case of dashboard knees and a mean cut on her forehead, but the details were still a little fuzzy. Had she been driving? Why the hell was she driving? What was the point of having a secretary and a maid if neither of them could drive you places and prevent your car from being drifted into by a man with a lot on his mind?

  That was hardly the worst of it. For in a life filled with self-inflicted wounds, this one, however accidental, was surely the finest example: the crash had happened right outside the large Benedict Canyon home belonging to Marion Davies, or more legally speaking, to William Randolph Hearst. The old man kept the house strictly for Marion’s use. At the time of the crash, as Herman and the Gershwin party were trying to sort things out, with Herman apologizing and limping around the two cars and Mrs. Gershwin near a state of shock, Hearst happened to be on the estate playing cards with a publishing crony of his, William Curley, publisher of The New York Journal-American, whom he sent out to investigate. When he got back, Curley told the Chief he wasn’t going to believe it. That the coauthor of Citizen Kane was now in Hearst’s total power was delicious, a dessert too good for the Chief to pass up. By the time the Beverly Hills Police arrived on the scene, so too had the Hearst papers. As a result, the whole world, or so it seemed to Herman, would now know of his inability to walk a straight line.

  Herman had argued bitterly with the cop administering the test—the man was an incompetent, and the line between the two cones he’d set up was almost criminally close to a white traffic line that was already painted on the ground—on which line did the officer want one to walk?—but all of Herman’s arguing had done more harm than good, he knew that; he saw the man scribbling away in his notebook, who knows what kind of dark character assassination was going on in there—and then of course the indignity of being put in the back of the black-and-white, and hustled off to the jail for fingerprinting.

  The rest was practically preordained. The Hearst press would delight in the story, flogging it day after day, releasing new sordid details—Mrs. Gershwin’s injuries would multiply, grow more serious—how had the woman even survived? Before he knew what had happened, Herman would find himself promoted in the minds of his accusers from a middle-aged, flat-footed writer into Cary Grant, who, with a tank, had just drunkenly plowed into a baby carriage occupied by the Dionne quintuplets.

  There’d be a trial, of course. Herman would be mortified by having to call character witnesses—he’d even summon Orson Welles, the big monkey would enjoy that—and in the end Herman and his lawyer Jerry Geisler (the same man who got Bugsy Siegel off, Herman would point out, “so we have hopes”) would argue that the reason Herman failed the drunk test was not because he was drunk but because his left leg, ever since the crash in New Mexico, was now permanently shorter than the right. Dramatically, and with great Claudette Colbert style, Herman would hike his garment up from his left leg to display his shapely gam to the jury and convince them of the utter impossibility of his ever putting one foot directly in front of the other. Nothing quite like a hairless spindly limb to influence a jury of one’s peers.

  Herman didn’t know quite how, but as he sat in the jail cell he was confident that this great public issue (“on which no Hearst paper would take no stand,” he could practically hear Citizen Kane’s faux narration intone), would in the end blow over. And he was right. The trial would end with a hung jury, and Mrs. Gershwin, who originally sought more than $50,000 in damages from Herman, settled for a little more than $3,000. Herman himself would bellow out to Prince Mike as he left Romanoff’s, “Call Mrs. Gershwin and tell her to stay the hell off the street for the next twenty minutes. Herman Mankiewicz is on his way home.”

  But now, as he sat in the cell waiting to be let out on bail, nothing struck him as particularly funny. He was tired, exhausted to his bones. His hair hurt. He felt as if it was an effort to keep his face from sliding off his skull.

  And he realized quite simply and suddenly that he couldn’t go on. It was nothing drastic, there would be no pills, no locking himself in the room over the garage and putting a single bullet into his brain—where would he find a gun, for one thing—not only that, he hated guns, what kind of message would that send to the boys, or Johanna for goodness sake, that their father, an avowed lifelong pacifist, decided to end it all by going out and purchasing a revolver at a gun shop in Encino…No, there’d be nothing dramatic, and God knows he would be happy to stay around as long as he possibly could, he wanted to see how it was all going to come out—whom would Don m
arry? His oldest son was still only twenty, and it would be years before Herman would become a father-in-law—but he was haunted by the growing certainty that he wouldn’t be around at the end of this picture. What would happen to Don? To Frank? To say nothing of Johanna, she had years and years ahead of her….He wanted to cry, but he couldn’t. He knew he’d be lucky to last another five years, maybe ten, before the liver or the heart or the kidneys, whatever combination of organs that needed to be pumping and working to keep Herman Mankiewicz alive, gave out and he was left only with ambition and desire and rage, the cocktail that had kept him going, but which now seemed to be a watery recipe for nothing but a terminally diluted life.

  * * *

  —

  In 1971, the author Gary Carey drove up to Pound Ridge, New York, to interview the eminent director Joseph L. Mankiewicz for a book they were collaborating on, More About All About Eve. Carey thought to begin the process by asking Joe about the spark for his most celebrated film, presumably when he first read the short story on which the film was based, “The Wisdom of Eve,” by Mary Orr. But Joe demurred. The story was valuable, of course, and had sparked Joe’s imagination, but really, the germination of All About Eve had come much earlier. Joe had been fascinated by the outsized personalities who demanded to be the center of attention for decades. Whether in theater, on screen, or in life, Joe had always been drawn to dramatic characters. He told Carey, in only a slight exaggeration, “I often wonder why serious students of the human psyche look to anything but theatre-folk for most of the answers they seek.” Joe was passionately interested in acting, in actresses, and in what he called “the quirks and frailties, the needs and talents of the performing personality.” When Carey asked him about Mary Orr, Joe talked instead, for more than an hour, about the theater. The theater, he insisted, was why he created Eve.