Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  Joe’s final contract film for Fox, the last he would make with Zanuck before being free to go out on his own, foreshadowed his need for independence. In 5 Fingers, an entertaining spy caper after Hitchcock, James Mason stars as the central spy character, a valet to the British ambassador to Ankara who sells top secret allied files to Nazis. Joe’s smart dialogue hooks up beautifully with Mason’s British cynicism. As a charming, conscious social climber, unsuspected by the embassy, Mason expertly masks his cold ambition in a way that is reminiscent of Eve. And just as with Eve, Joe could channel into the character that part of him he claimed he despised—his drive to beat everyone to the finish line at any cost. It works beautifully, anchored by a charismatic and chilly performance from Mason. Joe deserves credit for bringing it out of him, and for directing some of the best action sequences of his career in the film.*6

  For his next project, Joe went to the source: Shakespeare. Having been offered a deal to go back to M-G-M, Joe first recoiled at the thought of reteaming with Mayer, but in the end, the prospect of tackling one of the Bard’s most fearsome and cold assessments of ambition proved irresistible. With Julius Caesar, Joe could explore ambition and its attendant risks, of self-destruction and the corrosion of the soul. Conservative in his dramaturgy as always, Joe left the original text intact save a few minor excisions, but the risk this time was in the casting. Here, notwithstanding James Mason’s excellent Brutus, Joe made the decision that makes the movie still worth watching—he chose Marlon Brando to play Marc Antony. Later, Joe recalled that when he first asked the method hero to tackle one of Shakespeare’s toughest roles, Brando had only muttered, “Oh, my God,” and made no other comment for weeks. But finally, Joe was summoned to Brando’s apartment, “a filthy pad on Fifty-seventh Street that bore the remnants of many broads.” There, where Brando kept live possums, the actor played Joe his early practice tapes and began to forge an alliance; in the end, Joe got Brando to perform an Antony that both made sense to 1950s audiences and captured the essential complexities in the character. Brando enjoyed working with Joe and for decades afterwards repeated a favorite story from the shoot: of the time a day player, not knowing a particular scene was ready to be shot, had snuck away to relieve himself. For a full twenty minutes, with Joe stewing up on a crane, the cast, led by Brando, Deborah Kerr, and John Gielgud, made pee-pee jokes. Finally, the day player returned, apologized profusely, and the cast settled down from their punning hijinks. With everyone waiting for Joe to call action, he did nothing for a moment, then took the pipe out of his mouth, looked down imperiously, and said, “You don’t have nearly the talent, young man, to keep this company waiting twenty minutes.” According to Brando, “We all snapped to, straightened up like a bunch of school kids…Joe had just taken his set back.”

  Louis Calhern, Marlon Brando, and Greer Garson in Julius Caesar

  Defying expectations—and the mockery of comics who were sure he would make a hash of the Bard—Brando received an Academy Award nomination and generally glowing reviews; New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called Antony’s oration over Caesar’s body “brilliant” and “electrifying.” Although the location and action sequences were marred by budgetary constraints, the movie was a solid success, and Joe was proud that he had brought Shakespeare back to Hollywood, where he had been declared unfit for the screen ever since Max Reinhardt’s disastrous A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1935, with Mickey Rooney as an ingratiating Puck.*7

  The first independent project Joe undertook was The Barefoot Contessa, perhaps the “quintessential Joe Mankiewicz” movie. All the trademark signs are there: the use of flashbacks, a focus on women’s psychology, and even a Joe stand-in who eviscerates Hollywood. Trying to balance entertainment and didacticism, the screenplay showed unusual sensitivity toward women as Joe explored the crushing difficulties actresses face as the object of male fantasies. He also used the film to deride the superficiality and destructiveness of the upper-echelon “international set.” But because Joe combines cultural criticism with tragedy rather than comedy (and because Humphrey Bogart, for all his gifts, was no George Sanders), the commentary comes across as far more heavy-handed than in Eve, and the film’s reputation as preachy beyond belief, “with an astonishing lack of subtlety and aesthetic judgment,” is hard to defend. Joe self-deprecatingly referred to it as an unknown film years later and acknowledged that he hadn’t entirely settled on what the movie should have been, but what’s curious is his explanation: “It was almost a good film but there were too many stories; I was angry at too many things.”

  Joe on the set of the Roman Forum, Julius Caesar, early 1950s

  “Angry at too many things” would make a fitting subtitle for this period of Joe’s life. Like many successful men, the fact that he’d built a successful career (and family, at least for public consumption) did not soothe the savage breast. For Joe, making The Barefoot Contessa, which purported to show how so many different men abused and exploited a poor helpless girl from nowhere while one man alone saw the ruin but failed to stop it from happening, proved another fatal step in the long parade to ruin that he and Rosa were leading. In fact, the film’s ending, with the successful writer-director (Bogart) mourning the unstable actress’s tragic death, would prove prophetic.

  Humphrey Bogart with Joe on the set of The Barefoot Contessa, 1954

  Joe had brought his own fragile and insecure Rosa to Rome with him while he made the picture. (He’d also brought along Tom, while Chris stayed home in New York to finish eighth grade.) The fighting between Rosa and Joe was intense in Rome, made more so by Joe’s bizarre decision to also bring to Rome—to help take care of Tom—Rosa’s mother, Gross.*8 From the moment Gross got off the plane from Austria the two women were at each other’s throats. For Tom, the experience provided not just a distorted insight into women and their mothers—“they hate each other worse than if they’d actually once been lovers”—but one of his early exposures to life on a film set, because to help Tom escape his battling mother and grandmother, Joe brought the boy to work with him almost every day. There, in a cavernous building at Rome’s famed film studio Cinecittà one morning, while technicians moved lights around on a vineyard set, Humphrey Bogart spotted eleven-year-old Tom Mankiewicz. “Are you cold?” Bogart asked young Tom; Tom nodded. Bogart poured the young boy a thimble full of scotch, which Tom all but inhaled. A half hour later, the conversation repeated itself, with the same results. When a few moments later Joe saw Tom weaving around the faux vineyard, he confronted Bogart: “He’s drunk. It has to be you, you prick.”

  Humphrey Bogart with Rosemary Matthews (later Mankiewicz) during The Barefoot Contessa, Rome, 1954

  That’s the last thing Joe needed. Bogey apologized, sort of: it wouldn’t happen again, but anyway, what was the big deal? Everyone out here drank, or probably everyone….Not Joe, which Bogey knew, but the problems of drunks in the movie business was not in any way special to the Mankiewicz family. Joe had found himself thinking more and more of Herman on this picture, though his biggest concern was with Ava Gardner. Joe was having a lot of trouble with her. He was failing her, he could sense it. He was known for getting such great performances out of women—he’d gotten a “good luck” note from Bette Davis on the first day of shooting the movie; she remembered; she knew—but somehow he wasn’t reaching Ava Gardner. She wouldn’t fuck him, but that didn’t matter—no one on Eve did either—he simply wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be doing: providing her with the safety and security she needed. He hadn’t realized how nervous and sensitive she really was till they’d started. In Joe’s view, Ava Gardner was the dame who’d landed Sinatra, so why was she acting like some kind of gawky, insecure fourteen-year-old? When she walks into that vineyard, she should be throwing her chest out and puffing around like the greatest gift to man, knowing that every man in the theater is hungry to rip off that blouse, throw her down in the grapes, and take her.*9 Instead, she sl
inks, and imitates confidence. The camera was catching it, and Joe knew it.

  Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa (1954)

  But Joe’s problems with his leading lady, who seemed to be pulling away from him as the production went along, paled next to the problems he was having back at the apartment with Rosa, where night after night, life was a nightmare. Bringing Rosa’s mother to Rome had hardly been conducive to domestic tranquility, as Tom described vividly: “Mother yelling, Gross yelling back, then dropping to her knees, making the sign of the cross and praying loudly in German to God and Jesus while I put an oxygen mask over my mouth from a tank that sat at my bedside.” With Joe worn out from working fourteen-hour days and frequently having to call in doctors, one of whom once had to administer an adrenaline shot straight into young Tom’s heart, it’s no wonder Tom later characterized the whole experience as “a true horror movie.”

  Joe’s next film was a musical, his first and last. Having always idealized New York and theater, with Guys and Dolls, he’d be able to combine them again, this time not in an original script about those who practiced it but an adaptation of the popular Tony Award–winning musical based on Damon Runyan’s stories of small-time hustlers in Times Square. Many in Hollywood were surprised that Joe intended to leave weightier topics behind to do the film, but our old friend, producer Sam Goldwyn, now seventy-two years old, had secured the rights to the property and wanted the best director in Hollywood, so Joe came on board.

  Goldwyn also wanted Marlon Brando, fresh off the heels of On the Waterfront and now the world’s biggest box office star, to play the lead Sky Masterson. As unlikely as Brando may have been in a toga declaiming Shakespeare, he seemed even less fit to play the lead in a light musical comedy, and at first he turned it down. The actor changed his mind after Joe wired him: “Understand you’re apprehensive because you’ve never done a musical comedy. You have nothing repeat nothing to worry about. Because neither have I. Love, Joe.”

  Marlon Brando, Guys and Dolls

  Ultimately, Brando might have wished he had stuck to his guns. The movie lacks the verve of the stage musical, and Joe found filming musical numbers very different from filming dialogue. He’d never much cared where to place the camera—he saw the medium as essentially an extension of live theater and didn’t want his camerawork to interfere, a strategy which for the most part had served him well. As a result, Guys and Dolls is unevenly directed, with the bold Technicolor sets almost doing battle with the staginess of Joe’s camera placement. The cast, as always in a Joe Mankiewicz movie, does well, though for all his charm Brando sometimes has trouble with the music. But Sinatra made a fantastically raffish Nathan Detroit. Though the singer had coveted the role of Sky Masterson, when he got the second lead, he insisted the producers add more songs to his role, remaining quietly contemptuous of Brando, once telling Joe, “When Mumbles is through rehearsing, I’ll come out of my trailer.” Joe does give some wit to the dialogue and draws some attention away from Brando’s singing by expanding and deepening the Sky Masterson–Sarah Brown love story with psychological dimension. It feels, in a way it rarely does in stage productions, that somehow Sky has truly learned something and grown up during the course of the film—he is in fact now the equal of his bride. A fantasy, to be sure, but Joe’s work in the film shows he could still stir emotions about love and marriage, no matter his and Rosa’s travails.

  Joe on the set of Guys and Dolls, 1955

  Joe’s films of this period were rounded out by almost the antithesis of Guys and Dolls: The Quiet American. Joe had tried social conscience on film before—with No Way Out in 1950, the film he shot in between a A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve, a melodrama about a black doctor who treats a white gangster and his brother after a gun battle. (When the gangster dies, the gangster’s brother blames the doctor and targets him with his gang, leading to race riots.) The attack on racism in the film is, for its time, fairly serious, and Sidney Poitier gives a calm, steady performance that would soon make him the first bankable African-American star, for which he would forever be grateful to Joe.*10 But now, seven years later, in The Quiet American, Joe tackled an even more controversial and complicated subject. Based on Graham Greene’s political novel, The Quiet American openly questioned whether there was a satisfying alternative to colonialism in Vietnam. As always, Joe got terrific performances from his actors, one of whom, Audie Murphy, as the self-confident and brave American of the title, was hardly an actor at all (the United States’ most decorated soldier in World War II, Murphy was famously wooden and unemotive on screen) and admitted later that without Joe’s guidance, he would have been utterly at sea. Michael Redgrave, too, gives a passionate performance, but the film as a whole is typical of Joe’s work during this period: not all that suspenseful as a thriller, if smarter than most; more comic than most dramas, but not wildly dramatic, and with not quite enough action to keep audiences from restlessness. Yet the film is so well observed that after seeing it Jean-Luc Godard wrote that Joe was “the most intelligent man in all contemporary cinema.”

  Joe in a Saigon temple during the filming of The Quiet American

  Joe with Audie Murphy and Michael Redgrave on the set of The Quiet American, 1957

  In fact, the film is remarkable for its subject matter alone. Few directors would have dared tackle such a subject, especially so soon after the blacklist had seemed to stamp out the very idea of dissent. And while Joe diluted the more aggressive attacks on American policy in Greene’s novel, he still effectively communicated something discerning about the West’s early involvement in Vietnam—even casting the heroic Murphy in the title role was a subtle stroke, as if to underscore the damage that was coming. It’s impossible to watch now, after the devastating effect of the Vietnam War, without seeing Joe for the first time as not just angry, but prescient. The movie seems to sense that self-interest guided all Western states’ endeavors in Vietnam, and clearly predicts that the path will lead to ruin. Courageous movies on controversial subjects tend to come in waves in Hollywood—a few years earlier, No Way Out had followed on the heels of Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, about alcoholism, William Wyler’s The Best Years of our Lives, about the problems facing World War II vets, and Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement, which took on anti-Semitism. But the mid-1950s was not really a time for political statements in Hollywood—in many ways one of the most interesting things about the film is that it was made at all.

  Chris, my mom’s friend Anne Adler, Tom, cousin Myra Fox, Joe, and Josie, c. 1958

  The question remains: Why do Joe’s movies of the 1950s zig and zag both in tone and style? It’s possible that, having broken free of the studio system, he was testing the limits of his autonomy and avidly pursuing his interests. But partly, like a bird that has lived so long inside the cage that it doesn’t know how to fly when the doors are finally opened, Joe needed something to chafe against. Herman was gone. Franz was gone. (Even Zanuck was gone.) It’s possible Joe didn’t quite know what he stood for when his prime antagonists were out of the picture.*11 But there’s almost a desperation in Joe’s rooting around for subject matters in these years—as if he would do anything, including making a movie halfway around the world in Vietnam, to avoid confronting what was happening at home. Perhaps it was too painful to try another “way we live now” film.

  Joe Mankiewicz, film director, was by now a popular man-about-town: he and Rosa were entertaining far more in New York than they had in Hollywood and were falling in with exactly the kinds of people—editors, authors, Governor Averell Harriman—that Joe had wanted to be with. But the life wasn’t adding up. He’d stopped psychoanalysis when he arrived in New York, preferring a fresh start, but the unease he felt every morning as he got out of bed, usually alone in his own room, with Rosa in hers across the hall, spoke to something greater than just midlife malaise. Joe had only to look at his own hands to see that there wa
s an imbalance in his life; he was developing psoriasis, and though it would be years before he had to wear delicate white gloves on film sets to control and cover the malady, his hands had taken to itching rather severely. As Joe confided to friends, it was all very psychosomatic.

  * * *

  —

  Joe wasn’t the only Mankiewicz driving hard to succeed in the ’50s. With Herman gone, his teenage daughter Johanna was working herself into a frenzy of accomplishment, and one early triumph even found its way into the press. With the entire tenth grade math class at the exclusive Westlake School for Girls stumped by a geometry problem, she remembered that her grandfather, of whom she had only dim memories, had been a friend of Albert Einstein’s in New York. So she wrote the famous scientist at Princeton asking for help with the problem. Four days later, the mail brought a reply from Einstein: a simple diagram, not giving the answer directly but showing the young girl how to solve it. When the incident, aided by a press agent friend of Sara’s, became national news, a wire photo of my mother standing holding a small chalkboard with a diagram of two circles was splashed across the front page of newspapers across the country, captioned: “When Johanna took the answer back to school, it turned out her teacher knew the solution all the time, if only Johanna had asked. Here, she copies the Doctor’s answer on the blackboard.”