Competing with Idiots

by Nick Davis

  Alex held her breath, cautiously hopeful. Her whole life, she had tried to reconcile his searing self-criticism—he should have written a good book, or two; he should have written a play; the movies were no good, nowhere near good enough—with the fact that he had been feted and celebrated all over the world. Of course, like all the Mankiewicz offspring, she knew about Franz and the impossible standard he had upheld—she’d heard firsthand about Joe coming home to Harlem having gotten a 97 on a test, and Pop grilling him about the goddamn three points—and so she knew where it had all come from, but she’d long thought it was ridiculous. Of course, she hadn’t argued with him about it—he could be a “steamroller” when he felt opposed. But Alex had quietly, strenuously disagreed with her father’s objections to his own work. “I should have written one good book, dammit.” It was madness.

  Now here he was, a little out of breath, though from the epiphany or the autumn air she couldn’t tell, finally softening. Yes, he saw, it was absurd to carry on. The work had been fine. He sat there in his dear old red cardigan, shaking his head from side to side. Alex said, “It was all over in about an hour.”

  The next morning, a new man. It was like an enormous weight had been lifted. Joe went to his study and for the first time in years, began to write. He began taking notes for his autobiography. And he started to go through mounds of mail that needed tending to, answering letters that had been staring at him from his desk for more than a decade. In the final few months of his life, Alex says, it was like he was having a reconciliation—with himself, his accomplishments, the specter of his father.

  The work had been good. And it was more than the work. He was just a man, not a perfect creature, not by any measure…But the same human being who had carried inside him such a hunger to be loved, and to love, to see his mother laugh at his bathrobe performances…“Flee with me to my hacienda.” She had loved him, and Pop had too, in his own strange fashion. Pop had wanted to be a poet. Why did we all forget that? He’d come to America and left two sisters in Germany, and he’d thought he’d make his name in the field of poetry. What kind of craziness was that? He was only seventeen years old, trying to build a life in a country where he barely spoke the language. But he drove himself, when the poetry dream vanished—such lunacy, he must have hated himself for ever indulging the dream—to become a leading academic. A thinker. A respected professor who barely had time for his children. That man had a soul too, ended up terrifying his son, the poor boy had to hide in the closet. We’re all just human beings, where in the hell is it written we have to make it all so damn complicated?

  Joe sat at the typewriter. It was a beautiful old Underwood; he’d been given it when he first got to Hollywood. The ribbons were sometimes tricky, but Joe didn’t mind much. He liked the smudge of the ink on his forefingers and thumbs, and he didn’t even really care when he’d find splotches on his pages at the end of a day. He rubbed his hands together, an unconscious habit he’d picked up from Herman, the papery sound of two palms being rubbed back and forth. It always put him in a good mood to hear the sound and think of Herman again, the way he’d stood up to Pop. Good God, what courage.

  The warmth was real. The closeness, the deep and honest compassion…There were so many stories left to tell.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Herman’s older son Don carved out a successful career as a writer for film and television, writing and creating shows like Ironside and Marcus Welby, M.D. (the doctor’s name, or so Don told impressionable nephews, was a loose rearrangement of the phrase “make us be well”).

  *2 This sentence makes brief work of a colossally talented man. Frank Mankiewicz deserves his own biography; in fact, when he passed away in 2014 at the age of ninety, Ben and Josh joked that he had been working on his autobiography, entitled “I Wasn’t Listening Then and I Can’t Hear You Now,” a title which hints at the classic Mankiewiczian traits of humor, intelligence, and the inability to get close to people.

  *3 By the late 2010s, Josh was well-known enough to be lampooned by comedian Bill Hader, who delighted in imitating Josh’s response to a murder suspect who had a curiously passive response to finding the body of his dead wife: “Most people would call 911. But you didn’t do that, did you?” The line—“but you didn’t do that, did you?”—was spread widely on Twitter, where few if any recognized the curious echoes across Mankiewicz family history.

  *4 Something else I shared with Alex: when I was eight, my mother inscribed a copy of her novel to me with words—“To Nicky, from one writer to another. All my love, Mommy”—that I found shocking and almost horrifying. Her labeling me a “writer” served, when combined with her untimely death a year later, as an unintentional recipe for decades of anxiety and self-doubt (and it may well be part of the reason for this book’s nearly two-decade gestation).

  *5 Still, he was proud of having made the first Western to introduce a new level of reality to the movies: “It was the first film to show horseshit in the streets.”

  *6 In fact, mortality was clearly much on Joe’s mind. “Does a clock give a damn what kind [of time] it measures? No. But we do—we special ones. We slow down for the good—we sip it, second by second, like a great wine—and we speed up the bad. You little people—you chumps—swallow time like a hamburger.”

  *7 He also seemed increasingly haunted by the specter of Herman, even though in most people’s minds his late brother’s accomplishments paled next to his own. In the late 1980s, the town of Wilkes-Barre approached Joe with the idea of holding a film festival to celebrate the two brothers. Joe shut it down immediately; the idea of sharing a bill with Herman was intolerable.

  *8 Neither the French consulate nor my own memory has been able to locate the precise content of these remarks. Though my father admits his own memory may be faulty, he contributes one choice, telling witticism Joe made about the honor he was getting: “This award,” Dad remembers Joe saying, “is more real to me than any of you.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to so many for so much, in part because this book took so long, but more because help came from such an absurd number of sources.

  The first thanks go to my dear late uncle, Frank Mankiewicz, who got the ball rolling without realizing it—because in the beginning was the word, and the word was a newspaper interview in 2002 in which I made Herman sound so much like the Foster Brooks of Hollywood’s Golden Age that Uncle Frank called me the day the article appeared to chide me, gently, and suggest there was a lot more than “the white wine came up with the fish” to know about his father. Thank you, Uncle Frank, for that and so much more.

  The next chronological thanks go to Susan Lacey, who, when she ran PBS’s nonpareil biography series American Masters, was intrigued enough to commission a proposal for a documentary about Herman and Joe, and she provided enough funds for me to conduct interviews with some of their descendants and friends. Susan’s enthusiasm for the project never dimmed, even as the odds of a film documentary became longer, the price of movie clips proving to date an all-but-intractable obstacle.

  At a Christmas party that December, I mentioned the possible documentary to my friend the agent Bill Clegg. “That’s a book,” he said, and I assumed he meant a kind of companion book to the film. Eighteen years later, there is still no film, but at least we have redefined “companion.” Agents are frequently described as tireless and indefatigable, and Bill is both those things, and he is also shrewd and funny; his shepherding of this book and its author through this long process has been incredible to behold.

  Anyone writing a book about these two brothers is standing on the shoulders of two giants: Richard Meryman, whose Mank, published in 1977, helped reinvigorate Herman’s reputation as a writer and larger-than-life wit; and Ken Geist, whose biography of Joe, Pictures Will Talk, was published the following year and remains the definitive portrait of Joe at his crankiest. I was lucky enough
to get to know Ken before his death, and he was generous enough to share not only an extremely off-color story about my mother (for another book perhaps) but also all the original audio interviews he had conducted for Pictures Will Talk. Dick Meryman was similarly generous before he passed away in 2015, maybe because he was also a dear family friend, so beloved when I was growing up that Mom called him “The Man.” He was kind, gentle, and extremely enthusiastic about this project, and he also shared boxes of all the transcripts he had conducted for Mank, as well as a trove of old reel-to-reel interviews. I am forever indebted to Dick, and his wife Liz, for sharing these treasures with me.

  Attention must also be paid to Dick’s sister-in-law Whitney Hansen, and the entire Hansen family, for encouragement and love during the years of this book’s germination and, maybe more important, in the decades that preceded it when it was, quite obviously, growing without my knowledge, during which time Whitney was more than a surrogate mother, and her son Brooks far more than a non-brother brother. The Hansen family’s impact on me, and this book, is incalculable.

  Inspiration comes in many forms, often from friends like Melissa Marks and Vicente Caride, and David Dishy and Stefanie Roth; sometimes from the gang in On Thin Ice, who provided memories that have lasted a lifetime; sometimes from companions who don’t know they’re providing it, which I hope allows me to list JT and MM. It would also be wrong not to acknowledge David Fincher, whose gorgeous meditation on Herman at Victorville hit home theaters as this book was being copyedited and is indisputably a deep and lasting contribution to Mankiewicziana.

  Others must be thanked for their myriad direct and indirect contributions to the manuscript: Maddy Cohen, for two summers helping me in a hundred little and big ways, not the least of which was sorting through the story of The Philadelphia Story; Dan Wilhelm, for a gentle read when the book still didn’t know what it was; Meredith Coleman, for Mad Dog of Europe; Michael Gately, for inestimable help with sourcing; Sam Millstein, for silent film titles; Peter Kaufman, for pitching the seventh inning; Al Tapper and Bobby Haas, for patronage on other projects that permitted this one to grow; Michael Kantor, for modeling menschiness among so many other things; Andrew Solomon, for friendship always and in particular a meaningful week in 2012 when his generosity allowed my family to take in the sights of London while I wrote at his house and in whatever they call coffee shops over there; and Jerry Weisfogel and Matonah Rubin, for wisdom and guidance way beyond the call of duty.

  Thanks too to two large-hearted writers who helped early on. Erik Simon provided research assistance and infused his Midwestern amiability into the book. Before that, Larry Maslon helped with the initial proposal, and, oh yes, the title.

  My gratitude extends to many who will probably forever be unaware of their contributions to this book, but who spoke to me from Ken Geist’s and Dick Meryman’s tapes and transcripts. The full list of those consulted for this book is here:

  Emanuel Aaronson, Rita Alexander, Brooks Atkinson, Richard Barr, Anne Baxter, Nathaniel Benchley, Robert Benton, B. A. Bergman, Irving Berlin, Abraham Bienstock, Judge and Mrs. John Biggs, Albert Boni, Richard Brooks, Lewis Buckman, Bernhard F. Burgunder, Val Burton, John Byram, James M. Cain, Michael Caine, Bent Cardan, Kitty Carlisle, Ruth Chase, William Chase, Shirley Potash Clurman, Joseph J. Cohn, Marc Connelly, Mr. and Mrs. Sheldon Coons, Joseph Cotten, Robert Coughlan, Joan Crawford, Hume Cronyn, George Cukor, Nat Curtis, Frank Davis, Isabelle Davis, Johanna Mankiewicz Davis, Ossie Davis, John De Cuir, Howard Dietz, Kirk Douglas, Rebecca Drucker, Philip Dunne, Peggy Cummins Dunnett, William Eckhardt, Florence Eldridge, C.O. Erickson, Chester Erskine, William Fadiman, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Henry Fonda, John Fox, Mattie Fox, Dr. Saul Fox, Sidney Freeman, Martin Gang, Sidney Ganis, Louis Gensler, Sir John Gielgud, Gail Gifford, Max Gordon, Marius Goring, Cary Grant, Edith Mayer Goetz, John Green, Nancy Green, Gerald Greene, John Groth, Alice Guinzburg, Mel Gussow, Dr. Frederick J. Hacker, Francis Hackett, Jack Haley, Adrienne Hall, Maurice Hall, Jed Harris, Rex Harrison, Helen Hayes, Rose Hecht, Jo Hennessey, Dr. Maurice Herzmark, Jack Hildyard, Celeste Holm, Brooke Hayward Hopper, William Hornbeck, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Hornblow, Jr. , John Houseman, Kenneth Hyman, Paul Jacobs, Mildred and Sam Jaffe, George Jessel, Nunnally Johnson, Pauline Kael, Bronislau Kaper, Joe Kastner, Alfred Katz, Danny Kaye, Elia Kazan, Edwin Knopf, Mildred Knopf, Arthur Kober, Milton Krasner, Fritz Lang, Jennings Lang, Martin Landau, Robert Lantz, Charles Lederer, Sammy Leve, Charles Levy, Robert G. Levy, Rachel Linden, Clinton M. Long, Simon Long, Mary Anita Loos, Joseph Losey, Roddy McDowall, Barbara McLean, John Lee Mahin, Harold Mankawitz, Frank Mankiewicz, Sara Mankiewicz, Tom Mankiewicz, Fredric March, Lester Markel, Rear Admiral G. Markey, USNR (Ret.), Samuel Marx, Pamela Mason, Phil McAniff, Roddy McDowall, “Doc” Merman, Gary Merrill, Lewis Milestone, Mike Mindlin, Oswald Morris, Henry Myers, David Newman, George Oppenheimer, Murdock Pemberton, Nat Perrin, Ralph R. Perry, Ada Persoff, Tommy Phipps, Robert Pirosch, Vincent Price, Eileen Pringle, Sidney Poitier, Otto Preminger, Dr. and Mrs. Marcus H. Rabwin, Decla Dunning Radin, Sir Michael Redgrave, Gottfried Reinhardt, Walter Reisch, Alan Rivkin, Edward G. Robinson, Jill Robinson, Yosal Rogat, Lin Root, Welles Root, Arthur Ross, Harry Ruby, Joseph Ruttenberg, Morrie Ryskind, Richard Sale, George Schaefer, Dore Schary, Stanley Scheuer, Joseph Schoenfeld, Ad Schulberg, Bud Schulberg, Stuart Schulberg, Sigrid Schultz, Si Seadler, George Seaton, George Seldes, Danny Selznick, Irene Mayer Selznick, Sonia Shaplin, Arthur Sheekman, Madeline Sherwood, Sol C. Siegel, Estherlea Silverman, Jonathan Silverman, Murray Silverman, Jean Simmons, Pearl Sindel, Walter Slezak, Bella Spewack, Mrs. Dorothy Steiner, Erna Mankiewicz Stenbuck, George Stevens, Donald Ogden Stewart, Ann Marlow Strauss, Howard Strickling, Frank Sullivan, Blanche Sweet, Jessica Tandy, Norman Taurog, Irma May Templar, Marian Spitzer Thompson, Judy Tolmach, Regis Toomey, Marietta Tree, Mr. and Mrs. Hawley Truax, Henry Tuck, King Vidor, Adelaide Thorp Wallace, Richard Watts, J. Watson Webb, Arnold Weissberger, Orson Welles, William Wellman, Lyle Wheeler, Katharine White, Billy Wilder, Richard Wilson, Robert Wise, Abel Wolman, Gordon Wolman, Peggy Wood, William Wright, Collier Young, Frederick Young, Arthur L. Zerbey, and Sam Zolotow.

  These people never knew I was listening as they sat for their interviews in the early 1970s, but I was privileged and honored to be a time-traveling fly on the wall during those remarkable sessions.

  My special thanks to Joe’s late agent, Robbie Lantz, for a memorable interview one afternoon in the Autumn of 2002.

  At Knopf, thanks go to the incredible team of Kathy Zuckerman, Amy Hagedorn, Marc Jaffee, and Jenny Carrow.

  Professional thanks also go to all those who passed through the halls of Nick Davis Productions during the long years of this book’s gestation, especially those whose work intersected with the project, foremost among them Stephanie Esposito, Vanessa Longley-Cooke, and the incomparable Leyla Brittan, who didn’t know what she was signing up for but helped expertly with pictures, captions, research, and much else; and also the trusted long-time colleagues, too numerous to mention, whose excellent work allowed me sometimes to disappear into the book while they held down the fort, in particular my two secret weapons, Mark Rosenberg and Josh Freed.

  It goes without saying, but my thanks go most especially to my Great Uncle Joe and my Gopa Herman (though of course I never called him that), and all those members of their families, living or not, not limited to the following people who spoke with me either on or off the record, whether they even knew it was for the book, and whether Geist or Meryman had spoken with them first: Alex Mankiewicz, Tom Mankiewicz, Chris Mankiewicz, Max Reynal, and Rosemary Mankiewicz; and Don Mankiewicz, Carol Mankiewicz, Ilene Korsen Mankiewicz, Holly Jolley Mankiewicz, Lee Mankiewicz, Jack Mankiewicz, Molly Mankiewicz, and Katie Mankiewicz.

  Special mention goes to my beloved first cousins. I share a profound bond with them all, and they are each remarkable people whose tender intelligence and wit have inspired and sustained me, each in different ways
, heroes and companions all: John Mankiewicz and Jane Mankiewicz, and Ben Mankiewicz and Josh Mankiewicz.

  Five-plus decades of gratitude to my father, Peter Davis, who has been helpful in more ways than he knows, the biggest fan on the block, and always keenly ready to forgive any missing three points. My in-laws, Fred and Leatrice Mendelsohn, in addition to giving me the greatest gift of all, provided years of warmth and encouragement and steadfast love, and I miss them every day.

  And my brother, Tim, after a childhood of our competing in ways both loud and quiet, has proven time and again that he is not the idiot, but a rock, and the best big brother anyone could ever have.

  I listed Mom earlier, among those interviews I was lucky enough to get from Ken Geist and Dick Meryman, but I think maybe I’m allowed to thank her again. Thank you, Mom.

  As for my editor, Vicky Wilson, she may well be the perfect combination of patient and terrifying, and she has my eternal gratitude.

  Finally, I thank the family I have created with the woman whose loving warmth, sly wisdom, and calm genius are the foundation of my life. My wife, Jane, sees things so deeply and clearly it’s staggering; whenever we talk, I often get the feeling that she’s expressing thoughts that I might arrive at if you gave me a year or two, and she is kind enough not to complain when I then act as if the ideas were mine all along. She is my miracle. Our daughters, Lily and Grace, are equally brilliant and beautiful and astonishing. Without these three, nothing means a thing.