Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  It was the night of October 11, 1951. Joe was in a screening room across town at Fox when the phone rang. It was Herman, with a gleeful question: “What do you have in common with Andrew Johnson?” Then, not waiting for a reply: “You’re being impeached, my boy!” Joe was stunned, and Herman told him, “Did you know, for Christ’s sake, there’s a fucking recall action on against you? Johnny Farrow said some guy just drove up on a motorcycle to his house to get him to sign the petition.”

  The next night, All About Eve opened to rapturous reviews at the Roxy in New York City. But Joe wasn’t there. Instead he was at Chasen’s in Hollywood, fighting for his professional life. He had summoned to the restaurant, in addition to his lawyer, Martin Gang, many of his friends and supporters, including some of the most prominent industry directors, including the four most recent Best Director Oscar winners before Joe (Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Elia Kazan, and John Huston). Gang started the meeting by emphasizing the severity DeMille’s recall action posed—if it was successful, Joe’s career was over. Gang suggested a legal order to halt the spread and counting of the ballots, and a petition for a general meeting of the members to inform everyone of Joe’s position on these events.

  The next ten days were a flurry of activity—secret meetings, phone calls, impassioned righteousness on all sides. Joe’s friends worked around the clock calling directors to urge them not to sign, and the recall vote itself soon seemed likely to fail. Gang filed a complaint in Superior Court, claiming he had enough evidence from interviews he and George Stevens had conducted at the Guild office to “blow DeMille right out of the water.” At the next board meeting, where its members were intending to determine how voting would take place at the membership meeting the following Sunday, DeMille offered an olive branch: he would drop the recall if Joe would perform “an act of contrition,” perhaps a written declaration that Joe could write and give to Louella Parsons or Hedda Hopper, “who can read this to the American people…that you are sorry for what you have done.” Joe was characteristically aghast: “Oh hell, you can stuff your act of contrition.” Frank Capra suggested that the board give Joe a unanimous vote of confidence, and the entire board agreed. But DeMille refused to stop the recall, and finally Capra had had enough. Like Jimmy Stewart looking down at his hand after shaking hands with Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life, Capra finally turned on DeMille and resigned from the Guild’s board of directors.

  The stage was set. The next night, October 22, 1950, several hundred members of the Guild gathered at the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel for what one would later call the most tumultuous meeting in Hollywood history and what Joe would say was the most dramatic evening of his life. Joe drove to the meeting with Elia Kazan, who had just finished filming A Streetcar Named Desire, but as they pulled up outside the hotel, Kazan turned to Joe with a sheepish look on his face. He told Joe that he couldn’t attend the meeting. DeMille knew about Kazan’s Communist Party membership, he explained, and he would no doubt use it, and anything else he could, against Joe. With that, the men shook hands, and Joe went inside alone.

  The ballroom was packed. Joe called the meeting to order and began with a speech that was quiet and calm, primarily a recital of the facts as he saw them, outlining the events leading up to the meeting and refuting the accusations of the recall committee. Cleverly, he never used the word “I” but rather said “Mankiewicz” throughout the speech, and with the exception of one reference to DeMille, never referred to a board member by name. He ended with an attack on the “Politburo quality” of the recall ballot, and when he was finished received a standing ovation.

  Then DeMille took the stage. He began quite artfully, as he acknowledged that Joe had no connection to communism, and insisted that the board acted democratically. But then he turned to Joe’s supporters. In an attempt to appear reasonable, DeMille admitted his fault in this debacle, that the Guild “could have avoided this laundering of rather soiled linen tonight,” and suggested that the ballots be destroyed. But he couldn’t leave it at that. He criticized Joe for refusing to sign the joint statement drafted by the recall committee and suggested that if Joe stayed in office his left-wing backers would take over the Guild.

  What followed was a barrage of more talk and counter-talk, criticism and grandstanding worthy of one of the “socially responsible” films of the period. John Huston declaimed that many of Joe’s admirers were “in uniform when you [DeMille] were wrapping yourself in the flag.” George Stevens read from a report he had made on the secrecy of the whole recall movement: “He would just have been smeared and out…quick, overnight, or in 36 hours, if you please.” One of DeMille’s allies, Leo McCarey, tried to defend the action by saying, “Everybody was moving pretty fast, and it was a fire, and maybe we used the wrong nozzle.” Joe saw an opening and fired back: “But I am the only one that got wet!” Still, DeMille would not yield, continuing to refer to several directors’ alleged susceptibility to Communism, and then, misreading his audience for perhaps the final time, he adapted a vaguely Jewish accent and read the names of “Mr. Villy Vyler…Mr. Fleddie Zinnemann…” as well as a list of the Communist organizations they were affiliated with. He was met with a torrent of hissing and booing.

  The tide turned, at last. Wyler rose in his own defense and said that the next time someone questioned his loyalty to his country, he would “kick hell out of him. I don’t care how old he is or how big.” Fritz Lang, the German director who had escaped the Nazis to come to Hollywood in the 1930s, said, “Mr. DeMille, do you know this is the first time since I’m in America that I’m afraid, because I have an accent?” Finally, after midnight, John Ford raised his hand. When he got up to speak, Joe knew that the members of the Guild would lean whichever way Ford did.

  The director, wearing his customary eye patch, surveyed the room slowly, then spoke like a character from one of his movies: “My name is John Ford. I am a director of Westerns…I am one of the founders of this Guild…I would like to state that I have been on Mr. Mankiewicz’s side of the fight all through it.” Then he turned to DeMille. “I admire you,’’ Ford told him, “but I don’t like you, and I don’t like a thing you stand for.”

  The room was buzzing. “I have been sick and tired and ashamed of this whole goddamned thing,” Ford continued. “I don’t care which side it is. If they intend to break up the Guild, goddamn it, they have pretty much done it tonight.” Ford said that seeing “the two blackest Republicans I know, Joseph Mankiewicz and C. B. DeMille, [feuding] over Communism is getting laughable to me,” and he closed by calling for the resignation of the entire board. “Let’s turn the guild over to the Polack [Joe], and go home,” Ford pleaded. “Tomorrow, let’s go back and make movies.” This produced thunderous applause. At 2:20 a.m., the meeting adjourned, with DeMille trudging from the hall, disgraced but defiant, and Joe getting handshakes and hearty slaps on the back from well-wishers and friends.

  It was over.

  Joe Mankiewicz was vindicated. The awards were safe. The reputation was safe. He had commandeered a challenging situation and made it all come out okay. Everything was in place. He had proven to the world that he was a good man. It was time to get out.

  Skip Notes

  *1 The guild is known today known as the Directors Guild of America.

  *2 In 1940, he claimed later, his vote for Republican Wendell Willkie over Franklin D. Roosevelt had gotten him summarily ejected from a Hollywood party at the house of Edwin Knopf, brother to a well-known publisher.

  *3 Technically, Joe was himself Jewish, though to the end of his life he disliked being lumped together with a group he had no part in choosing. As Alex puts it, “He couldn’t brook anyone not having a choice as to who they were, beyond the unavoidable ones like sex and skin color,” which may account for why he addressed issues of race and gender so boldly in some of his films.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  HOORAY FOR THE BU
LLDOG

  And then, last week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane.

  —Citizen Kane

  Her husband’s funeral had been earlier that day, and Sara was tired. None of it had gone the way one would have liked. To begin with, there’d been that awful rabbi, a kind man, sweet and well-meaning but so, well, dumb, who had asked her, “Would you care to view the body?” She looked at the man sternly: “Do you mean would I like to see my husband?” And the body…Don had been sent back to the house the night before to select a suit, but he’d accidentally picked out one of his own, which didn’t fit Herman all that well. At least he wore the tie Sara had picked out, the pink one Johanna had given him the year he’d won the Academy Award, on which she had hand-painted a big gold Oscar. Herman had beamed with pride, wearing it to lunches, parties, everywhere. He adored that tie and Sara knew he would have been happy to be buried in something Johanna made.

  After the funeral, there’d been a gathering back at the house. Close friends, family, and more people even than the gathering the night before, which had also gone on much too late—eleven or twelve o’clock before people got the hint that Sara needed to rest and they should all get out. Joe and Rosa had flown in from New York with the boys, and they were all staying at Sara’s house. Friends kept coming and going, the house seeming to breathe with people paying their respects.

  Finally, it was over, and she’d come upstairs to her little bedroom to sleep. But not long after she’d climbed into bed she heard noises, the unmistakable muffled noise of an argument from Joe and Rosa’s room. Yelling, quarreling, a shrillness, then the lower rumble. Then the slam of the front door; Joe leaving the house, and the starting up of his car, and the roar of the automobile speeding away. For a moment, peace. Sara exhaled. Why in the world, she wondered, had the two of them left Los Angeles if all their problems had simply followed along to New York?

  Then, incredibly, the door opened, and Rosa came in. Her eyes were swollen and she reeked of liquor, and she climbed into Sara’s bed with her. She nestled close, hugged Sara and told her how wonderful Herman was, and how much she was going to miss him. Her hot breath wafted over Sara like a perfume of unhappiness. Joe, Rosa was telling Sara, is a miserable man, but Herman…Herman, she said through her tears, he was the great one. Sara got out of bed and put on a robe, and for what seemed like hours Rosa complained and cried and sobbed out her misery, how horrid Joe is, how awful, how much she hates herself and wishes she were dead, and how great Herman was, how lucky Sara was to have him.

  The last three years were a blur now, all the stays in the hospital, all the tests and poking and prodding, Herman losing so much weight from the uremia that ultimately took his life that by the final months he looked almost as old as he felt, his cheeks hollow, his eyes deep set, the twinkle now so rare. Not that the wit was ever gone. Those final few days in the hospital, he’d been in top form—when Joe told Herman that he’d gotten their sister Erna a job in Rome coaching some local actors, someone asked, “In what?” and Herman answered, “Italian, of course.” There were jokes, and tears, and papers, so many legal documents for Herman to sign, loans that needed to be underwritten, and Herman took to saying that he was preparing to go meet his co-maker, referring to the loans he now always needed cosigned. Joe invariably did the honors. Sara had left the two brothers alone for a while those last few days. When she’d come back to the room, they’d both seemed fine, and what went on she never knew, though it was probably in there that Herman made Joe promise to look after Johanna, and Joe said of course he would, he’d pay for Josie’s college and get her a trip to Europe afterward too, he’d see to that. Joe had told Sara all of this, and he never gave her any indication to doubt him.

  And their final moments. Sara, feeling flush and happy after a rare midday visit to a beauty salon for a facial, returned and leaned in to kiss Herman and before she knew what was happening, she was kissing his face all over, this marvelous, wonderful, infuriating man to whom she’d devoted her life, and he kissed her back, nibbling, the two of them necking like teenagers in front of the nurse. The next day, Sara blushed when Herman told her in front of the same nurse, “Hey, that was some love scene we played last night.” He smiled at her, and she knew that no matter what, he wanted her, even as he faded.

  His strength, though, never seemed to leave him, not completely, for even after he’d fallen into his final coma, Sara leaned in close to try to rouse him. “Herman,” she’d call, hoping he’d regain consciousness, but he’d lift his arms and fight her, push her away, as if, she said later, whatever he was doing, wherever he was going, he didn’t want to be interrupted….

  When the news finally came, Sara had not been in the room. Herman had been covered with an oxygen tent by then—“where I couldn’t get at him,” she said later—and the breaths became more labored and difficult before stopping altogether—and Frank’s wife Holly saw Sara in the hallway moments later, literally shaking her fist at the heavens, furious, exhausted, and ready to collapse.

  Now, five days later, Sara sat on the edge of her chaise lounge, watching her drunken, crazy Austrian sister-in-law, having requisitioned her bed, mope and wail about the sorry state of her marriage and curse the day that Joe had ever come into her life. Finally the thought flashed through Goma’s exhausted mind like an arrow fired from a quiver of sanity: “What the hell am I doing comforting this woman when I am the one who just buried my husband?”

  The next morning came a final astonishment. Rosa’s plane back East left at ten, but she was still upstairs in her room when Joe marched downstairs, telling Sara that Rosa had to catch this flight. Sara was doubtful—you didn’t see her last night, she had a rough night, I’m not sure she’s going to make it. They were at Sara’s breakfast table, picking at scones, and then Rosa sailed down, bright and cheerful, dressed in a tailored suit and a beautiful hat—“an absolute vision of beauty and health,” Sara said. Rosa downed a quick glass of orange juice, kissed Joe goodbye as if nothing had happened the night before, and left the house to go catch her plane.

  Sara wondered who these people were. How in the world did they function?

  * * *

  —

  Joe knew what it was. A certain class of people, like his sister-in-law, would have called Rosa some kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde character. She could be so kind to the kids, look after the house, be a damn good housewife when she put her mind to it—it was no effort at all for her to pose for those pictures for Look magazine, all of them playing cards, the boys in their matching plaid bathrobes. Not that the four of them would have played cards together in a million years; but the picture certainly looked convincing. Rosa was the model of domestic solidity, and damn if she didn’t keep the house running smoothly. She was good with the servants, had that domineering Austrian presence, knew when to be curt with them, when to let things slide. It was a fine home. Or at least it would’ve been, Joe thought, if they’d never had to deal with Rosa’s other side. Joe called it “eight o’clock, curtain.” It was regular as clockwork, she slipped into those moods at night, when it was time for the curtain to go up on some performance somewhere—without her.

  Joe told Tom years later that one of his favorite moments in his brother’s masterpiece was when Susan Alexander Kane is prowling around that big mansion and asks Kane what time it is in New York.

  KANE

  Half past eleven.

  SUSAN

  At night?

  KANE

  Yes. The bulldog’s just gone to press.

  SUSAN

  Hurray for the bulldog!…Half past eleven. The shows have just let out. People are going to night clubs and restaurants. Of course, we’re different! We live in a palace—at the end of the world.

  It’s not that Joe had trapped Rosa in the same kind of gilded cage Charles Foster Kane had put Susan Alexander Kane in, but Rosa certainly felt Joe had taken her a
way from what she loved. Of course that was unfair. Hadn’t he supported all her efforts to get into the Hollywood game? Hadn’t he pushed for her to be cast in The Keys of the Kingdom? Wasn’t Nunnally Johnson running all over town telling people Joe said that his marriage was doomed if Rosa didn’t get the part? Then there was the nightmare of Boston. Rosa had finally gotten a part in a play by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman. The play—bearing the ironic title Bravo!—was headed to Broadway, and Rosa prayed it would reignite her career. The rehearsals, or so Joe had been told, had gone well—then Joe showed up in Boston to watch a performance, one of the final previews before the show moved to New York. He didn’t think it was half bad, and Rosa was good, affecting even. Afterwards, they’d gone to a party in the hotel suite of one of the show’s producers, and as soon as Joe entered he felt a chill. Not that Joe expected them to ask him for notes (though he had a few), but what accounted for the damn cold shoulder? Just because he was a Hollywood guy didn’t mean he didn’t understand the theater. It took until the following morning, when the producer told Rosa’s agent that Ms. Stradner was being replaced and wouldn’t be accompanying the play to New York, that Joe understood their reticence to seek his counsel. “As you know, it can never be the play at fault,” Joe said later. “The director has to be replaced, or the actors.”

  Since then, there’d been very little talk of comebacks or theater, or practically anything that would get the woman out of the house. And so, every night, long about the time that imagined curtain was rising on some performance in the alternate life Rosa lived in, in whatever neurotic hemisphere she took comfort in, with whatever alcohol she could find, Rosa would start to steep in the juice of her own misery, and the temper would flare. Joe would give as good as he got—Joe’s agent and confidant Robbie Lantz called the arguments the two of them enacted “murderous fights”—but in Joe’s mind, a man could only take so much. Though he refused to admit his part in the tango—a dance he loved so much he’d later feature it in The Barefoot Contessa, and which, of course, it takes two to perform—he did agree that with the general atmosphere becoming so “Macbethish,” it was frequently impossible to stay home; he had to get away, get some air, some food, some intimacy and understanding in another pair of arms….