Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  In the picture, my mother’s blond hair looks as if it took an hour to put into place, parted almost violently on the right side, the flip perfect around her ear as she looks back at us over her shoulder. Her face is open and young, but she does not look particularly lively or fun. She looks determined. Achievement, clearly, is everything to this young woman, it has been drilled into her from an early age, and she knows that success will come naturally to one so gifted who works so hard. Achievement, success, competition…

  Mom showing Einstein a thing or two

  Visiting Herman for what would prove to be one of the last times in the hospital, she had felt she needed to teach him something. At fifteen, she sensed her father hadn’t long to live. There had been too many visits, too many hospitals, and now it was painful; his cheeks too sunken and his eyes too hollow. And so, not for the first or last time, my mother lied. She told her father, quite out of nowhere, that she had been nominated for student body president. She saw her father’s face light up with pride. “Wonderful! You’re sure to win.” My mother let it sit a moment before providing what she knew would be the hammer: “I turned it down.” Herman was crestfallen. In truth, she had made the whole thing up. “I just wanted to prove to him,” she told Dick Meryman years later, “that achievements—being best—didn’t mean so much.” On the tape, you can hear her take a drag from a cigarette before admitting, “Needless to say, it is not my most cherished memory.”

  But whatever point she’d tried to impart to her dying father, Johanna Mankiewicz continued to blaze a trail of success academically, graduating from high school at the age of sixteen and heading off to Wellesley to complete her education—courtesy of Uncle Joe, who was happy to have her on the East Coast. He’d received great reports from Sara and others in California on her progress, but still he worried every time he saw her. Was she getting maybe a little plump? Were the hausfrau genes too strong in her? What kind of man would she marry? Would she be a writer? He assumed so, but the few stories and school papers he read seemed pedestrian, half-baked. What would Herman have thought? Joe thought often about his final meeting with Herman at the hospital. Underneath a drawing of my mother’s he’d pinned to the wall above his bed, Herman had begged Joe to make sure Johanna was able to go to college. At first Joe told his big brother that he would get well, stop being dramatic, but Herman persisted, and Joe promised. They had talked briefly about business and family, and Herman told Joe at one point, “You know, I never had a bad steak in my life. Some were better, and some were worse, but I never had a bad one.” Later Joe said that he never felt closer to Herman than in that hospital room. It was as if all the jealousies and family conflicts had faded away and they were just two brothers, born of the same parents, two men, sharing a goodbye. “It was the first time,” Joe said, “I ever felt he was listening to me.” For someone who idolized his older brother growing up, to have come so far, and seen his brother fall so far, was practically overwhelming to Joe. “I came closer to loving Herman than at any time in my life.”

  Johanna Mankiewicz’s senior page in her Westlake yearbook

  * * *

  —

  So here it is, five years later, Johanna has finished college, Joe has done his duty there, and Joe and Rosa are fighting again. It is a whopper of a fight. They are at the house they have rented for the summer in Mount Kisco, which they are keeping straight to the end of October. A beautiful house, a lovely spot for entertaining, and the Cerfs had come to dinner, but it was not a good evening, in fact a very bad one, Rosa had made her misery quite clear…That horrible hour before dinner, which Joe always felt was the worst—right after work has ended and before dinner; that’s why the cavemen invented theater, to keep their minds off their troubles at that time of day, gathering around the fire to ward off evil spirits—but Rosa had carried it over into dinner, and long after the Cerfs had left the house, she’d kept it up, and worse, with threats and recriminations, and I can’t take it anymore, and all the kind of goddamn terrifying theatrics that Joe had been putting up with for more than a decade and a half. Finally, Joe was the one who couldn’t take it anymore. He drove back to New York on his own.

  In the morning, Joe woke up in their big Park Avenue apartment alone. The boys were off at school now—Chris at Columbia, Tom at Exeter—and it was Saturday so the housekeeper wasn’t in yet, and Joe went to his study to try to work, but it was no use. There was a mound of Figaro business Joe had to tend to and they had an audit coming up—turns out running a production company isn’t nearly as much fun as directing movies—and worse than that, he had to think of what to write next. The theater was a nightmare—Joe was trying to write a play, but it wasn’t working. The play was called Jefferson Selleck, an adaptation of a novel about a frustrated middle-aged husband, but it was coming slowly. He knew the joke that was going around—George S. Kaufman lay deathly ill in his hospital bed, but he told Moss Hart, “Don’t worry, I won’t die until Joe Mankiewicz has a play on Broadway.”

  But dammit, he couldn’t concentrate now. He’d called Mount Kisco first thing and there’d been no answer. That in itself wasn’t too much cause for alarm—Rosa never liked answering the phone. But now it was midmorning, and she still wasn’t answering. Neither was the caretaker, though likely he was out and about pruning trees or some such. But Rosa…

  Joe was lonely, and scared. He needed to hear a voice that would accept him. He needed an unchallenging partner. So he called his niece. Josie would come with him upstate.

  At that point in his life, it must have seemed perfectly natural to Joe to keep calling his niece until he finally got through to her, perfectly natural to ask her to come over to the apartment. Perfectly natural, to call the caretaker in Mount Kisco once Mom had reached him, and hear from the caretaker that nothing was wrong, Mrs. Mankiewicz was sleeping. Perfectly natural to tell my mother that didn’t seem right and suggest they drive upstate and check on her.

  Joe closed the car door and walked up the path toward the front door to the house. There was no pipe in his mouth—Joe never liked to drive and smoke at the same time. On the drive up, he’d made polite conversation, to keep it light, to focus on her, her new job at Time, the shopping, the boyfriends, the friends of hers he’d met, asking after them, what they were doing in their own post-college lives…and he’d talked to her about the upcoming Tennessee Williams movie he was planning. Later, Josie would tell him how much she liked the movie, and the play it had been based on, such a combination of tension, sexual ambiguity, and drama…

  The feeling inside the house, my mother later said, was normal: still but not too still. So perhaps, as with the morning phone calls, Joe’s next move felt perfectly normal to him too: he said he would look in the kitchen and asked his twenty-one-year-old niece to go upstairs and check the bedroom.

  Was it all, as Chris would contend, an orchestration? Did Joe know to a moral certainty that his wife was dead up there?*12

  My mother certainly came to feel Joe knew, though in later years, she also developed a kind of sympathy for him, telling Ken Geist in 1973 that she found Joe “desperately insecure.” He needed adulation, she said, and the fanciness of the Park Avenue apartment was part of that: fingerbowls with dinner, leaving “your order with the maid and then she brings you the egg the way you want it in the morning and pulls the drapes;” it was all part of Joe’s need to control things and orchestrate things because he was so terrified of life itself. He could deal with actors and actresses beautifully because it was all make-believe and there were no real stakes, but once you got Joe offstage or -screen and made him deal with actual human beings and the interplay between them, that, according to my mother, was intolerable for Joe. He asked his niece to go upstairs, she felt, because that’s how the scene played out best in his mind, with her discovery of the body, and him getting to play the role of the comforting uncle, as well as the grieving husband. Anything else was, literally, unimaginab
le. (Of course, there is a simpler explanation for his behavior: namely, that Joe sensed what was in that bedroom and asked his niece to go up first because he wasn’t prepared to see his wife’s dead body.)

  Afterwards, Joe behaved the way a well-behaved male character in a Joseph L. Mankiewicz movie would: he held his niece tight in his arms in the hallway outside the bedroom, patted her hair gently, soothed her and told her it was all right: how horrible, how utterly horrible, he was so sorry, so inexpressibly sorry…But my mother’s unease over the way the afternoon had played out was only underscored when she remembered, later, that as she and Joe pulled up to the house, Bennett Cerf’s limousine was already parked in the driveway. Joe had known, he’d have to have known Rosa was already dead.

  By the time Chris arrived at the apartment later that night back in the city, there was his father, wearing an expression full of misery, repeating again and again, “Oh dear, oh dear.” Of course there were matters to tend to: Rosa was a Catholic, and an official verdict of suicide would have precluded a proper burial, and Joe wanted the fact of the suicide kept out of the papers, and so, despite the Mount Kisco police having seen what was from all indications a terse suicide note addressed to Joe—what can it have said?*13—strings were pulled, calls were made, Governor Harriman was involved—and all of this was happening in what my mother described as a fairly “party atmosphere” back in the Park Avenue apartment that evening. Joe was seeing to details and Averell Harriman was waving the magic wand the rich and powerful possess to keep the whole thing out of the papers. Chris stared at his father sullenly, thinking, “You fucking phony,” and now, finally, it is dawn, and Chris is heading back to Columbia to try to get some sleep, and the current family psychiatrist, Dr. Kubie,*14 perhaps seeing a chance for a quick consultation, joins him in the elevator. On the way down, Kubie says, “Tell me, Chris, how do you feel about all this? Tell me your feelings.” It would be hard to blame Chris if he felt put off by this question, asked during an early-morning elevator ride of a son whose mother has just been found dead of a suicide. But Chris, unfazed, answers: “You know, Dr. Kubie, it’ll sound perhaps a little wrong, but I feel great relief, almost happiness, that her agony is over.” The man looks at Chris and says, “That’s the first honest sentiment I’ve heard here tonight.”

  “The first honest sentiment I’ve heard here tonight”: Chris Mankiewicz, c. 1957–58

  After the funeral, my mother remembered seeing Joe make an almost involuntary decision, which she called “the only time I ever saw Uncle Joe betray true emotion.” The family and a few mourners—not many, Rosa didn’t know very many people outside Joe’s circle, and Joe didn’t want a large crowd—had driven out to the burial site, and according to custom, three people with shovels had dug in their spades and thrown dirt on the coffin. Joe was one of them. He took the shovel and stuck it into the earth symbolically then returned to join the rest of the group at some folding chairs. Mom remembered that he came back and sat down and then stood back up almost immediately. He clapped his hands together and said, “Enough. Let’s go.”

  Mom found it heartbreaking. It was as if Joe, in clapping his hands together, was sealing off that painful period of his life forever. “He was putting an end to it: it was over. Her death, her life, it was all over, and he’d had enough. He couldn’t sit there another minute.”

  In later years, Rosa would come to be almost as invisible a presence in Joe’s life as his first, long-forgotten wife Elizabeth Young. Over the years he would send Tom or Chris whatever keepsakes he would come across of their mother, and after he’d remarried he certainly didn’t keep any pictures of her around.*15 She was removed from his life, almost as if she could be removed from his life story.*16 Finally, in the mid-1970s, Tom Mankiewicz was visiting his father on his way to London for one of the James Bond movies. They were having drinks before dinner with Rosemary, Joe’s third and final wife, when Joe turned to her and said, “Would you excuse us for a moment?” Rosemary stood and left the room, as Tom’s heart raced. He thought, “Okay, something big is about to happen here.” What could it be? A shocking revelation? An expression of remorse? A too-late but welcome apology for being a distant father?

  It was none of these. Instead, Joe Mankiewicz said, “It’s about your mother.” Oh my God. Tom took a breath. Joe went on: “I’ve been paying for her grave every year…and I was wondering if this was something you might want to take over?” Tom was stupefied. “Pay for Mother’s grave?” Joe nodded. It wasn’t very much money, about $2,500 a year, and Tom agreed to do it. He took on the task and continued it until his own death.

  And so, after nineteen years of marriage and another decade and a half of paying for the upkeep of her grave, Joe Mankiewicz had divested himself of Rosa Stradner for good.

  * * *

  —

  But after her death, Joe could no more outrun the horrors of his life with Rosa than he could the resentments he’d long harbored toward Herman and Franz. Once Rosa was in fact gone and buried, he had returned to work with a vengeance, with one more movie to make before the 1950s ended, and it was probably the best of them. Suddenly, Last Summer was a brutal stew of neurosis, psychosis, misplaced sexual longing, and rage—an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s southern gothic mystery-melodrama. In it, a wealthy widow, Mrs. Venable (Katharine Hepburn) tries to bribe a young psychosurgeon Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) working at a cash-starved mental hospital into lobotomizing her distressed niece, Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor). In the wake of Rosa’s suicide, Joe must have found the prospect of guiding these gifted actresses through two such psychologically complicated roles irresistible.

  Something else that may have appealed to Joe was that for the first time since Darryl Zanuck, he would be working with a strong producer, Sam Spiegel, coming off a string of hits, including The Bridge on the River Kwai and The African Queen. Although it meant that the film would not be a Figaro production, Joe appreciated the chance to focus on directing and welcomed Spiegel’s strong hand, though he did take to referring to the producer as “Suddenly Sam Spiegel” for his habit of showing up on the set unannounced. Too, because the source material for the film was a one-act play with heavy “homosexual content,” it had to be both expanded and sanitized for the screen, a job that fell to the project’s screenwriter, Gore Vidal. Again Joe welcomed another strong hand to play against, and he and Vidal worked well together, meeting in the Figaro offices in New York and “opening up the play,” which had all taken place in the ornate Venable home in New Orleans, to include other locations and make from the one-act a legitimately cinematic experience. Despite cleansing the script almost entirely of intimations of homosexuality, the film still packed an emotional wallop: under the steady guidance of the persistently compassionate Dr. Cukrowicz (even the name must have appealed to Joe), Mrs. Venable gradually reveals that her sensitive young son Sebastian died “suddenly, last summer” in Spain, in the company of his cousin Catherine. Mrs. Venable has had the cousin institutionalized upon her return to the United States; the poor girl’s incoherent, hysterical accounts of what happened seemed too shocking to believe, and upset Sebastian’s mother too much, thoroughly contradicting her “official version” of how Sebastian died. The movie focused on the varying emotional responses the two women had to Sebastian’s death.

  Joe had good reason to be proud of the performance he helped Elizabeth Taylor achieve in the difficult role of Catherine Holly. She was a young woman traumatized both by witnessing her cousin’s death and by being locked up in mental institutions.*17 Ultimately, working with Dr. Cukrowicz, she overcomes her memory block and tells the story of Sebastian’s seduction of a group of boys, who then chase him in a frenzy, pounding on musical instruments like some kind of Dionysian rite, finally killing Sebastian and cannibalizing his flesh. That Taylor made this extraordinary story believable was no small feat, and Joe would proudly say that “it was the best screen performance Eliza
beth Taylor ever gave.” In addition to Joe’s usual way with actresses (whether we believe Tom’s contention that his father and Taylor were having an affair during the filming), Joe helped her performance during this critical monologue through a smart lighting scheme he devised with the film’s cinematographer, Jack Hildyard (hired by Spiegel, another sign that Joe was helped by a strong producer). As Catherine recounts the horrors of the previous summer and repressed memories come flooding back to her, the film alternates between light and dark close-ups of Taylor, with her face gradually moving to the edge of the frame to allow the powerful flashback to take over the screen.

  Joe also helped tame Taylor’s legendarily disruptive behavior on film sets. When she arrived at 11:30 a.m. on her first day of shooting, more than two hours late, she found the set completely empty and a note taped to the camera: “Dear Elizabeth, We were all here at nine. So sorry to have missed you. Love, Joe.” She was never late again.

  Katharine Hepburn presented different challenges. Joe had known the actress for decades, and at first, he enjoyed directing her in the quasi-Oedipal role, that of an older woman made to feel young and adored, both by her son and society: “We were a famous couple. People didn’t speak of Sebastian and his mother, or Mrs. Venable and her son. They said, ‘Violet and Sebastian.’ ” Joe helped draw a remarkable performance out of Hepburn; her almost preternatural longing as she says these lines reveals the deep depression she has fallen into since her son’s death. When she insists that she now believes her son’s testament that he “saw God” the day they witnessed flesh-eating birds devour newly hatched sea turtles, we get a window into the kind of raw pain and despair that Hollywood films of the 1950s rarely trafficked in—this was a woman in true agony. The grief was nearly overwhelming.