Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  *12 History forced Joe into a reversal of his standard Joe–Herman dynamic; here it is the younger man who is the uncontrollable alcoholic and the older who is cold and ambitious.

  *13 And reiterations and reverberations and redundancies.

  *14 Interestingly, my mother appears in none of the printed photos taken at the wedding and party afterwards. I did find her in the original contact sheets, though, peeking through in one image of Joe and Rosemary as they read congratulatory telegrams after the ceremony.

  *15 Not for the first time. Don had already had two children: Jane, born in 1950, and John, born in 1954; and Frank’s son Josh had been born in 1955.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  LEGACY

  A fellow will remember things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me…One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in—and on it, there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on—and she was carrying a white parasol—and I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all—but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl…

  —Citizen Kane

  One Sunday morning in April 2018, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel theater in downtown Los Angeles, the Turner Classic Movies festival hosted a panel called “Growing Up Mankiewicz.” Many of the 120 or so assorted guests had come because of their devotion to TCM’s movie host, Ben Mankiewicz, though Ben, Herman’s grandson and Frank’s son, wouldn’t host this event but serve as a panelist, alongside his brother Josh and his cousins John, also Herman’s grandson and Don’s son, and Alex, Joe’s only daughter.

  The theme of the event, and indeed the question that haunted the lives of the descendants of Franz Mankiewicz, was simple: What kind of pressure does it put on a person to grow up in such a family? For an hour, the panelists circled the question, sometimes trying to answer directly, sometimes skirting it with charming, self-conscious evasiveness. The burden, as Ben put it, required them to be merely the funniest, smartest, most clever people in any room. By John’s account, the pressure to succeed was “stealth,” passed from generation to generation like a gene that mutates from “the missing three points” to “how come you don’t have a show on HBO?” John, a TV writer with credits ranging from Miami Vice to House of Cards, told of an interesting birthday present he’d once received from his screenwriter father Don,*1 who gave him three picture frames: the first displayed Herman’s nomination certificate for Best Screenplay for The Pride of the Yankees; the second held an Oscar nomination Don had received for Best Screenplay for writing the 1958 Susan Hayward movie I Want To Live! The third picture frame, of course, was blank.

  Growing up Mankiewicz: Josh, moderator Illeana Douglas, Ben, John, and Alex Mankiewicz

  Josh and Ben had taken a different path to avoid comparisons with their legendary ancestors. Their father Frank had himself taken Herman’s warnings to heart and escaped Hollywood altogether, eschewing entertainment for politics and public service, going to law school, serving as regional director of the peace corps in Latin America, and becoming Robert Kennedy’s press secretary (famously sharing the news of the senator’s assassination with the world in June 1968) before serving in the ill-fated McGovern presidential campaign and then becoming the head of National Public Radio and later a lobbyist in Washington, D.C.*2 So Josh and Ben had been raised far from the movie business, and while both went into journalism, the long arm of Hollywood brought them back to entertainment anyway. After beginning as a political reporter, Josh became a popular correspondent on NBC’s long-running Dateline program, where he made a “happy career out of interviewing murder suspects and raising a skeptical eyebrow.”*3 Ben, twelve years Josh’s junior, worked his way up through local news before finding himself at the intersection of journalism and entertainment in the TCM job, where it became his pleasant task to introduce old movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood and serve as kind of keeper of the flame, not just of the family’s legacy but the entire industry’s.

  Joe and Rosemary with Alex, c. 1967

  So it seemed that the harder one tried to deny it—destiny, the pressure to succeed, writing, being a Mankiewicz and explaining the missing three points—the less likely it was one could escape. A tale from Joe’s daughter Alex, who made a life for herself as a graphic artist on Australia’s Eastern Shore, a scant 7,500 miles from Hollywood, made it clear. When she was in college in the 1980s, with little or no idea what she wanted to do with her life, she was shocked to pick up a copy of a book called Hollywood Dynasties, read a chapter on her family, and find in it the simple declaration from her father: “My daughter is in college. She’s going to be a writer, she just doesn’t know what kind yet.”*4 There was no escaping any of it.

  * * *

  —

  Joe’s marriage to Rosemary brought, at least to his personal life, a calm that had hitherto been utterly unknown. They settled an hour from the city, first in Pound Ridge and then in Bedford, New York, where they would live for the remainder of Joe’s life, until his death in 1993. And not long after they’d moved there, Rosemary had become pregnant. Like Herman, Joe, a father again at the age of fifty-seven, found himself delighted and invigorated by his baby girl, Alexandra, and, also like Herman’s, Joe’s daughter would grow up in the twilight of her father’s career.

  Joe was sick of moviemaking. He had taken to referring to himself as the oldest whore on the beat, but he was tired of turning tricks. It was too damn complicated, and the new generation ascendant in Hollywood had no use for Joe’s kind of movie. And given the problems he’d faced on Cleopatra, he never wanted to begin a film again until absolutely everything was in place: the script, a production plan, maybe even the knowledge of what country the movie would be shot in. Moviemaking was no longer really possible like this; now the trains were constantly leaving the station before the seats were bolted down for the passengers—but Joe insisted, so his next few projects ended up taking longer than they should have, and he never had much affection for them. The Honey Pot he knew was a cranky and overlong, if amusing and intelligent adaptation of Ben Johnson’s Volpone. And then came what Joe called “Joe Mankiewicz’s goddamn Western,” There Was a Crooked Man…, which he himself deemed almost unwatchable to an interviewer a decade after he finished it.*5

  It would be nice to say, though, that Joe had mellowed, that despite the professional setbacks, his domestic tranquility brought him, for the first time, a kind of peace. It would be nice, but it would be wrong. The films, especially The Honey Pot, reveal a snobbishness that frequently curdles into genuine contempt for other people. Fox, the film’s arrogant schemer, played with condescension by Rex Harrison, gives sneering voice to many of Joe’s most cherished opinions about the utter banality of modern life: television is for the “witless and undemanding,” and he excoriates the “little people” for their abuse of that precious commodity, time itself: “How little you people value time…Like everything else, you’ll choose what’s more, not what’s better.”*6

  Joe and Alex on the Martha’s Vineyard ferry, c. 1971

  Of course he could not get away from his own unconscious mind, but it doesn’t take a Dr. Hacker to see the hostility in Joe’s giving the shallow character whom he’s talking to about time—the one who, when he asks her, “Do you know what the hell I am talking about?” says, “Honestly, no”—the name Sara, the name of his brother’s widow.

  Unfair? Maybe. But then was it unfair of Joe to have sent word to my mother, when she returned from her honeymoon in October 1959, that the charge accounts at the department stores Joe had set up for her had been cancelled? Now that she was married, Joe decided he would no longer pay for her shopping sprees. Josie Davis, newlywed, wasn’t some kind of mad shopper, she had spent maybe $200 on the accounts—but the curt note from Joe’s secretary left her with the guilty feeling th
at he felt she’d been taking advantage of him. Later, when she thought about all those IOUs of Herman’s Joe had showed her, it occurred to her that while she didn’t think Joe wanted her to repay him for her father’s debts, the trust between them had eroded so much that she couldn’t be sure.

  Mom and me, c. 1970

  “He always thought you’d be a star”: Johanna Davis, c. 1973

  In the years after her marriage, with Mom and Dad settling in Greenwich Village, it is easy to imagine an alternate life where her kindly uncle Joe, who had cared for her so thoughtfully after her father’s death, would have been a continuing presence in her life. But it was not to be. Instead there was a quiet but firm, growing estrangement, and while my mom was never entirely clear what had caused it—Rosa’s suicide? Joe’s guilt over his behavior that afternoon? Josie’s marriage to the alleged “thin” man? Joe’s to Rosemary?—there was an undeniable rift, during which no real contact was had. Joe had invited Mom and Dad to the opening of Cleopatra in 1963, as well as his wedding, but there was no regular communication at all. The split was such that until Alex was born in April 1966, Mom didn’t even know Rosemary was pregnant.

  In the opening newsreel sequence of Citizen Kane, a short cartoon depicts the growing of the Kane empire: a series of radio towers that rise over various American cities demonstrating the reach of Charles Foster Kane’s media domain. My mother always imagined Herman’s steady descent as being like the second half of the animation, where Kane’s empire collapses and the radio signals whimper and flicker out. And the same was true of Joe’s career, in deeper eclipse as the years went on, and, as Mom thought about it, the same was true of the gossamer-thin connections between members of the family, little animated ripples that no longer made it from one person to the other.

  In the early seventies, Mom spent an evening with her cousin Tom. By then the cold war with Joe was more than a decade old, though Mom had had the satisfaction at least of seeing Joe send my father a fawning congratulatory note after one of Dad’s documentaries aired to acclaim on CBS. While it may not have made up for the “thin” comment, it was a certain kind of eating crow, which pleased her. She asked Tom, gently, “Does he ever, you know, mention me…?”

  Tom said, “Yes, he asks how you are now and then.”

  “What do you think his feeling is about me, why this total lack of interest?”

  Tom hesitated, then told the truth: “Well, I think you kind of failed him. He sees you as having failed him.”

  Mom was stunned. She had failed him? How?

  Tom said, “Well, he always thought you’d be a star.”

  Mom looked at Tom, and considered Joe, living his life in Bedford—all those movies but so few friends, and to have pushed away the few people who actually cared about him. She told Tom, “I kind of feel like I am a star. I’ve had two children, and a happy marriage, and I’m writing a novel.”

  But to Joe, that wasn’t being a star. Being a star meant succeeding at the highest levels—of show business, academia, whatever field it was—displaying to the world an intelligence and brilliance that it hadn’t seen before. Domestic concerns were secondary.

  * * *

  —

  In 1971, Tom and Joe Mankiewicz both found themselves working in London at Pinewood studios. Tom was working on the James Bond movie Live and Let Die, and Joe was directing Sleuth, an adaptation of the play by Anthony Shaffer starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, and father and son frequently shared a car to and from the studios. With Tom making good money and a name for himself in Hollywood, he said he didn’t need anything from his father anymore and claimed that the two of them had settled into a good relationship. Still, it’s hard to imagine that things were free and easy between them, given Joe’s attitude toward Hollywood and that his son was now working on the very kind of picture Joe blamed for everything that was wrong with the industry. In fact, as Tom pointed out, while the entire set of Sleuth fit in one soundstage in Pinewood, the Bond movie consumed seven such massive stages. Joe wandered onto one of them one afternoon while on a break, looked around at the huge sets, the submarines and men with machine guns, a massive lagoon, an underground cave, an inflatable version of the actor Yaphet Kotto bobbing up and down near the roof, and he said, “My God, what the hell do you people do in here all day long?”

  Shortly afterwards, one evening as they were walking back to Joe’s hotel—Joe liked to walk in the evenings and had the car drop him off a few blocks away—Joe said quietly, “Tom, if this one works out, I think I may just hang it up.” Tom objected: “No, Dad, you’re just tired,” but Joe was firm. And sure enough, the success of Sleuth gave Joe what he most seemed to want: a good one to go out on. The film was like the anti-Cleopatra, a non-spectacle with a cast of two, a tightly constructed thriller, full of reversals and double crosses, concerning—what else?—a younger man scheming to undercut an older man and take everything that is most precious from him. While the film may be a little long—it is, after all, a Joseph L. Mankiewicz film—it is also entertaining and suspenseful, regardless of such curious directorial touches as cutting to Olivier’s collection of miniature figurines whenever things get tense. Joe was nominated yet again for an Academy Award for Best Director, and as he told Ken Geist, referring to his “oldest whore on the beat” theory, “Suddenly you get hot, and the wrinkles go out of your face, and you are a young beauty again.” For Joe, it was, again, a success, and that seemed to sustain him. Why risk putting himself out there? It would have to be something extraordinary to cause him to take the chance.

  Joe directs Laurence Olivier on the set of Sleuth.

  It never came.

  * * *

  —

  It was an epic case of writer’s block. That’s how Alex describes it, what hit Joe in the years after Sleuth, and how others in the family thought of it. Uncle Joe can’t write anymore; he isn’t writing. Nothing’s happening. There were a number of false starts on various projects in the seventies, and some movies that he was offered to direct, foremost among them All the President’s Men, on which project he met a number of times with Robert Redford, who had bought the film rights to the best-selling book, each time asking more and more questions that were so baffling to Redford that he finally moved on to Alan J. Pakula. Joe met with Paul Newman, who lived in nearby Westport, on a few different projects. He toyed with an adaptation of Macbeth to star Marlon Brando and Maggie Smith, though he must have known it was a long shot, Shakespeare having fallen even further out of favor with audiences in the years since Julius Caesar. Most frustratingly, for years, Joe wrestled to adapt a film out of Jane, a novel by Dee Wells about a young woman who has an affair with three men and doesn’t know whose baby she’s pregnant with, a ripe possibility for one of Joe’s multiple-flashback, multiple-point-of-view scripts. And there were meetings, so many meetings, one with a Hollywood producer who offered Joe the chance to direct a hot new literary property, though he worried Joe would find the material beneath him. When Joe said, “Try me,” the man produced the latest airport novel by Jacqueline Susann, and was surprised when Joe didn’t bat an eyelash. Joe said he was still game, but in this case, it would have to be what was known as a “step deal,” which would give the producer the right to terminate the deal after prenegotiated specified steps, like a first draft. The producer said, fine, what’s the first step? Joe said, “The first step is how much will you pay me just to read that piece of shit?”

  His contempt for Hollywood never softened. The rage deepened, and the feeling of having been used and abused by an entire industry took hold. As a result, as the years passed Joe knew as well as anyone that the chances of his ever making another movie again were slim. Still, even though in Tom’s mind Joe was pretending—there was no way he was going to direct another film—he never stopped working, or trying to write. He had ideas for plays and books—one grand idea no less than a history of the actress, w
hich he would trace all the way from Renaissance theater through Sheridan down to the present day—and so every morning found him at his desk in the office in Bedford, sitting down with a notebook or at the typewriter.

  But nothing came. For the longest time, absolutely nothing. Joe was never someone who had easily tossed off anything, but this was profound, and crippling. Over the years, Joe and Rosemary had developed a delightful ritual at Christmas; he was usually too consumed and busy to do any real shopping, so she would buy and wrap the gifts for herself, and then Joe would compose marvelous, witty Mankiewiczian Christmas cards to affix to the presents, weaving cryptic hints about what was inside. Even these simple ditties were now, painfully, beyond his reach. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Every day, the same routine—and every day the same result: nothing.

  * * *

  —

  Years later, after Joe had died and Alex was in her mid-twenties, she started thinking about her lineage, and she realized that while she knew quite a lot about Franz, his standards and ideals, the source of all misery—the domineering patriarch who insisted on perfection and would accept nothing less—she knew very little of the original Johanna Mankiewicz, Franz’s wife. Who was she? What was she like? Can she really have been such a cipher? Sara had insisted that Herman and Joe inherited their wit from her, and Heaven knows there isn’t a mound of evidence that it came from Franz, so if a lightning bolt of drollness hadn’t come out of the blue sky to strike Herman and Joe and their descendants, then surely Johanna cannot have been the simple hausfrau that Joe and Herman spoke of, or didn’t speak of.