Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  But as time passed and Tom made his way in the movie business, he became wistful about the change he felt the movie, and his cherished coin, represented. People were interested in his father’s movie not because of the story it told of the woman who tried to remake the world in her own image, or the two men who tried and failed to tame her, or even really the story of the film’s making, the colossally dramatic and messy way things happen in the real world of moviemaking. They were interested because it had two huge movie stars in it.*9

  Cleopatra, Tom knew, had contributed to the sorry state of the modern movie business. Hollywood films, in the years to come, would avoid trying to tell complex stories for large audiences. Yes, there would be the awards-bait movies every autumn, but these films were for smaller audiences now; the failure of Cleopatra had cemented the trend away from intelligence on screen for the masses. “The intimate epic” had not worked; no one wanted the intimate part, the psychology and human nuance Joe had hoped to bring to the screen. The epic side of the equation had won out; comic-book movies, movie star vehicles, and simpler genre films came to predominate. Despite the so-called Easy Rider / Raging Bulls revolution of the 1970s, in the end, no matter how great or talented the filmmakers, the compromises would keep coming, and the larger budgets would always go to simpler fare. As his own career progressed, Tom was happy to embrace these simpler movies—after all, he wrote James Bond and Superman movies, so he was reluctant to bite the hand that fed him*10—but he missed the intelligence of a movie like Cleopatra that Joe had so labored to bring to the screen, and it pained him to see Joe’s kind of picture being shunted aside. The intelligence, the wit, the richness of characterization…movies had become so debased now.

  Rex Harrison and Joe on the reshoots for Cleopatra, early 1963

  Tom went to his grave in 2010 thinking Cleopatra a horribly underestimated film.

  Do what you will, Caesar’s done it first and done it better. Run where you will as fast as you can. You can’t get out. There’s no way out. The shadow of Caesar will cover you and cover the universe for all of time.

  —Cleopatra

  Peter Stone: Your brother, Herman, wrote Citizen Kane. Did he have any influence on you as a screenwriter?

  Joe Mankiewicz: None.

  —Interview, 1989

  In late December of 1962, barely three months after Joe Mankiewicz had been unceremoniously dumped by Fox, Variety readers were surprised to read, under the headline “Zanuck and Mank End Tiff on Cleo,” that Joe had been rehired. An immediate outcry had greeted Zanuck’s decision to fire Joe—with support pouring in from people as disparate as Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Billy Wilder.*11 But more than that: Zanuck quickly realized that the movie was a “monster hanging on [his] shoulder,” and though he had no intention of leaving “picture making totally in the hands of an artist,” there was no one else other than Joe capable of wading into the complex mess of footage shot in the preceding two years and making anything remotely comprehensible out of it. In addition, Zanuck had realized that for continuity’s sake, a number of other scenes needed to be shot, and he was worried that the cast, devoted to Joe, would not deliver their best performances with another director. Finally, at least according to Joe, Zanuck must have calculated that on some level the battle was already lost: there was no way Cleopatra was going to be the triumph Fox had once hoped for, and if Zanuck hired someone else to finish the picture, it would be Zanuck who would be blamed for the whole mess. This way, there was no doubt: it was a Joseph L. Mankiewicz picture, and Joe would be the one to bear the brunt of the blame.

  Joe and Roddy McDowell on the reshoots for Cleopatra, early 1963

  Joe on the reshoots for Cleopatra, early 1963

  Too late, Joe realized Zanuck had outsmarted him. “When he fired me,” Joe said ten years later, “I should have stayed fired. It was a mistake to have shot those retakes, because it implied approval by me.” Even so, Joe made a half-hearted attempt to take his name off the film, but to no avail.

  Joe knew it was doomed, going so far as to joke about the film’s fate on live television. On The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson had deputized Bert Parks to interview Joe live from the premiere in New York. Parks congratulated Joe as he entered the theater, declaring, “A wonderful, wonderful achievement!” Joe looked at Parks warily. “Well,” he said with a hangdog smile, “you must know something I don’t.” But even Joe couldn’t have guessed at the level of vitriol the reviews contained, most memorably one by Judith Crist of the New York Herald Tribune, headlined “A Monumental Mouse,” that decried the film’s script and called the whole thing “an extravagant exercise in tedium.”

  But the truth is, Tom was right. His father’s film is not nearly as bad as its reputation. If talky and overlong, it is also at times genuinely moving, and its first half in particular is filled with that combination of wit and grandeur that Joe had hoped for as he aimed for his oxymoronic “intimate epic.” And the performances are subtle and honest. The magnetic Burton, though Joe felt the best parts of his performance didn’t make it into the finished film, effectively conveys a sexy if impotent and doomed lush, overshadowed first by Caesar and then by Cleopatra.*12 Harrison is a sophisticated and mature Caesar, quite obviously a brilliant man, and his performance alone suggests the heights the film Joe aspired to—something worthy of Shaw. Interestingly, among the leads, given Joe’s typical excellence with actresses and her own performance in Suddenly, Last Summer, Taylor doesn’t quite bring it home, coming off sometimes as more of a shrill and emotional fashion plate than a woman of queenly ambition.

  Worst of all, Joe had been prescient about the script: he simply didn’t have the time to get it right. Skouras’s short-sighted invocation that “we’re paying the girl fifty thousand a week, we got to get something on film” all but ordained that the film would wind up a lopsided epic. Beginning to shoot without a completed script meant that the first half of the movie would always be stronger; the second half never got the attention it needed. And since his editorial skills were always the weakest part of Joe’s writing—even his best movies have speeches that go on too long, points that are made once too often, repetitions and duplications*13 that give truth to Ken Geist’s assertion that as a filmmaker Joe didn’t trust silence—the film’s dragginess in the second half seems almost inevitable.

  * * *

  —

  Thank God they wouldn’t be staying the night in the city. There’d been some talk about it, and because of a couple of interviews Joe had scheduled with the press the next day, it might have been more convenient, but Jesus Christ, was he glad to get the hell out now. The evening had been a torture, start to finish. Zanuck had insisted that the NBC play was a brilliant move, and that getting the Johnny Carson show to do a live remote from the theater would put the movie in thirty million homes—but how many of those homes weren’t totally aware of this monstrosity? Everyone in the damned country knew about the movie, everyone knew about Liz and Dick and their shenanigans, everyone knew it was a disaster. Sitting in the theater while the thing played had proved impossible for Joe, but the lobby was no better as the reviews started to come in. As prepared as Joe felt he had been, as disappointed as he himself was in the film then unspooling in the Rivoli, the critics’ bile was another level deeper, and somehow aggrieved and angry. It was as if they were taking it personally, that the country was so fascinated by Taylor and Burton and so eager to see their love scenes that when in the end those scenes were less than transportingly exhilarating, and the movie surrounding them less than a holy mash-up of Gone with the Wind and Beethoven’s Fifth, someone’s head had to roll. And as Joe knew they would, critics wouldn’t take it out on Liz or Dick, or blame Zanuck or Fox or Spyros Skouras for the misshapen beast before them. It was Joe’s head on the chopping block. Judith Crist was the worst. Standing near the popcorn concession, Joe scanned quickly, taking in phrases bef
ore he could bring himself to read the whole thing straight through: “At best a major disappointment…Mr. Mankiewicz, hitherto one of our most adult and literate screenwriters…the resultant mélange of clichés and pompous banalities is unworthy of him…We were led to anticipate a fresh and sophisticated character-oriented approach…Mr. Mankiewicz’s heart is obviously not in the large-scale action…a strangely static epic…Mr. Mankiewicz frustrates the requirements of the wide screen…The mountain of notoriety has produced a mouse.”

  Rosemary Matthews

  To the end of his life, Joe maintained that he knew that his career was essentially over at the age of fifty-four. The disaster of Cleopatra had been that immense. Joe knew that Fox had nearly gone bankrupt—and not just because of Cleopatra. Zanuck’s own World War II picture The Longest Day hadn’t helped, an almost equally profligate epic, but Cleopatra had been the center of all attention—and so now, Joe knew there was no chance the studio would commit to the Alexandria Quartet, which Joe would later call “the great disappointment of my life.” He was practically numb from fury.

  * * *

  —

  Never again would Joe Mankiewicz throw himself so completely into a production. “After thirty years,” Joe said two and a half angry decades later, “I thought I’d seen all the infighting and dirt.” But it was nothing—nothing—like Cleopatra. The entire experience, he said, left him “with a deep distaste for the making of films.” The regret was total. As Tom said, “I think instinctively he knew it was wrong for him. But it was just too much money to turn down.” As a result, and it was as if the whole family knew it, Joe would never be the same.

  “I did find her in the original contact sheets.” Mom peeks through at Joe and Rosemary’s wedding.

  But one good thing had come out of the whole sordid endeavor, and to any careful onlookers on Cleopatra’s opening night, it would have been observable. At the end of the night, Joe didn’t retreat alone to his new house in Mount Kisco. He drove there with his new wife, Rosemary. As the car sped upstate—to home, a place of comfort and rest—Joe Mankiewicz relaxed.

  Thirty-three-year-old Rosemary Matthews was the efficient and pulled-together daughter of an English archdeacon. With a clipped but gentle accent, she had first impressed Joe when she worked as a dialogue coach for Rossano Brazzi on The Barefoot Contessa, and she had worked off and on for Figaro in various capacities ever since, serving as one of the production’s secretaries on Cleopatra. Joe admired her reserve, her aristocratic good looks, and her common sense. She was “possibly the only Englishwoman,” he said, “with an awareness that coffee is more than just any brown liquid, heated.” And there was a crucial difference between Rosemary and other women Joe had been involved with. She was not an actress. Nor, crucially, was she unstable. In fact, Rosemary, growing up in a solid home, her father a British prelate and her mother a surgeon, was well-educated, reserved, and, by proving herself through almost a decade of devotion and friendship, indispensable. As Hume Cronyn said, at that point in Joe’s life, after the humiliations of Cleopatra, Joe “mistrusted everything about himself and his emotional functioning.”

  In the end, the truth may have been simpler than anything anyone could have imagined. After years of pushing himself, to compete, to be better than everyone else, to be smarter than everyone, more successful than Herman, wittier than Wilder, more sophisticated than Lubitsch, to be wiser and saner than his women, to show them all that he cared about their problems and neuroses, maybe he didn’t want, or need, to challenge himself in every arena. In this one area of his life, at home, for the first time, Joe looked at Rosemary and saw a woman who accepted him, and a future that might be uncomplicated.

  And so on December 14, 1962, before a small crowd in front of a New York City judge, after nearly two years of shooting on Cleopatra, just two weeks before Zanuck rehired him to do the reshoots and finish the editing, and less than six months before the film opened, Joe married again. Three years after orchestrating and virtually directing the wedding of Herman’s daughter, now Joe looked happy, content, even twinkly. Johanna Davis gripped the arm of her husband and watched Joe and Rosemary greet the judge with professional élan. Her uncle seemed not to care, at least for the moment, about Cleopatra, about which Joe had told his niece so many horror stories.

  But it’s likely that Josie’s mind was not on Joe’s career for the mo-ment, or for that matter her own. As she watched Joe and Rosemary take their vows, it’s hard to imagine, no matter her gratitude for all that her uncle had done for her, that she was paying careful attention.*14

  For the beam that seemed to emanate from Johanna Mankiewicz Davis that afternoon had very little to do with Joe and Rosemary and everything to do with what was happening inside her. Should she be more focused on her career? God knows, that’s what Joe would want, if he knew, if she trusted him enough to tell him the good news—but whenever she thought about her father, she was less sure. Of course it was practically legend how little Herman had cared about the Hollywood game, but it was deeper than that. It wasn’t specific to Hollywood, or moviemaking. It had to do with priorities, or what people in other parts of the country called “values.” Herman Mankiewicz, yes, cared so much about achievement and accomplishment, and like all Mankiewiczes, he would forever want to know exactly what had happened to the missing three points. But more than that, as she remembered her father, which she tried to do at least once a day, Josie Davis knew that he would be absolutely thrilled and made wildly, enormously, instantly tearful by the news of what would be arriving next summer, perhaps a month or so after Cleopatra.

  Herman Mankiewicz was about to become a grandfather.*15

  Skip Notes

  *1 For one thing, everyone said he had no neck, although as Mom asked, “Who in our family had a neck?”

  *2 From Vietnam, where Joe got the news of the misguided engagement while he was working on The Quiet American, he “wrote [me] the most wonderful, understanding, supportive [letter], and dealt with my mother in a very helpful way.”

  *3 More than $400,000 in 2021 dollars.

  *4 Joe was dismayed by the sentimentality and feline symbolism of the original script and insisted on rewriting it based on historical sources like Plutarch and Suetonius. Rather than portray Cleopatra as a virginal girl waiting for Caesar to deflower her, as Mamoulian had, Joe wanted his Cleopatra to be an intelligent young queen capable of winning the hearts of two of the world’s greatest warriors. The costumes and scenery would make it an epic: Joe’s script, he hoped, would provide psychological complexity. His intention was to make “an intimate epic.”

  *5 The final budget number is deceptive. Because Fox had so few other films in production, nearly everything that went on in the studio was charged to Cleopatra. “If two people in Tokyo had dinner,” Rosemary Mankiewicz says, “it went on Cleopatra’s cost report.”

  *6 In Tom’s telling: “As wonderful as the Italians are at designing things, they have a natural proclivity for larceny. Once you start saying, ‘All right, I need five hundred Praetorian guard outfits, I need six hundred Nubian slave outfits, I need ten thousand soldier outfits’—this is like an invitation.”

  *7 It was Zanuck who had cut one of the flashbacks in All About Eve, a second viewing, from a different perspective, of Eve’s crucial applause speech at Bill Sampson’s birthday party. The excision made sense and kept the film’s length down, but Joe, a huge fan of revisiting scenes from different angles, always regretted the cut.

  *8 Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra had five acts; Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra had four.

  *9 An unapologetic name dropper, Tom loved to quote his friends Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne on the subject, writers who, like many in the years since Herman’s telegram, had come West for money to support their more “serious” work. After trying for years to wrangle a complicated subject—in this cas
e, the tragic story of the newscaster Jessica Savitch and the perils of celebrity news journalism—into the movie that would eventually become Up Close and Personal in 1996, they remembered a producer interrupting them in a meeting where they’d been describing what the movie was about: it was about journalism, they said, it was about integrity, it was about the demeaning battle for ratings and how it—The producer snorted, cut them off, and explained as if to two children: “The movie is about Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer.”

  *10 Tom explained his decision to focus on lighter genre fare as a way to distinguish himself from his father, for just as Joe felt he couldn’t compete with Herman, and Herman with Franz—“Stick it, I’ll never live up to that and I’m not going to try”—so Tom felt confounded by Joe’s success.

  *11 Wilder cabled Zanuck: “The sooner the bulldozers raze your studio, the better it will be for the industry.” Burton told The New York Times, “What was done was vulgar.” As for Elizabeth Taylor, she had been powerless to prevent Joe from being fired, but she did everything she could to make her preference clear: “Mr. Mankiewicz took Cleopatra over when it was nothing—when it was rubbish…and he certainly should have been given the chance to cut it. It is appalling.”