My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

  One Bad Fall Day

  I was already back in school for the fall term. The family's lease on the Mount Kisco house didn't expire until later. One Saturday night I was having dinner with a couple of classmates at a diner in the tiny town of Exeter. I remember it was very cold outside. I was also smoking a cigarette, which was absolutely verboten at the school. There was a rap at the diner window. I turned and saw the dean staring in straight at me. Shit, I thought. I'm going to get thrown out. The dean gestured for me to join him outside. I started for the door, trying to think of an excuse, any excuse. Once outside: “Dean Kessler, I know this looks…”

  “Your mother is dead,” he interrupted. I blinked. “I know it may seem cruel to just say it like that, but I've been through this before and I've found it to be the best way.”

  My head started to swim. A reservation had been made for me on the next train to Boston. I would be met at the station by a female psychiatrist who would then accompany me on a plane to New York. Did I need company on the train? It could be easily arranged. I shook my head.

  The next days were and are a blur to me now. I remember what seemed like an endless reception of the great and the near great coming by the apartment to pay their respects. Mother's psychiatrist, the eminent Dr. Lawrence Kubie, was there. Did I want to talk to him, get things off my chest? No, that's okay. Don't worry about it, I'll be all right. I barely remember her funeral. It was at Kensico Cemetery in Westchester. I couldn't even tell you who attended.

  How did Mother die? This was the initial story I was told, tragic, but fit for public consumption: Dad and Bennett Cerf had been out to dinner. Mother wasn't feeling well. When they returned, they found her dead, an empty bottle of pills on her bedside table. She had clearly forgotten she'd already taken a few and in her altered state accidentally took some more—a terrible accident. That's what was printed in the newspapers, so it had to be true. Here's what I found out later, piece by piece: Dad and Mother had a whopper of a fight. He drove back to New York. Later on he called her repeatedly with no answer. Fearing the worst, he called my cousin Josie and asked her to drive up to Mount Kisco with him for the night. Mother would be so delighted to see her. When they came into the house, they called out to her. Silence. Dad said he'd look around downstairs and asked Josie to check the bedroom. Josie found her, dead. Bennett Cerf, a kind and distinguished man who clearly knew the truth, was in no way involved. I always felt sorry that Bennett felt he had to help Dad make the discovery more publicly palatable by saying he was there. It was a true act of friendship, but it was a lie. Mother apparently left a suicide note (that's what the Mount Kisco police said at first), but after a reported phone call from Dad's friend, Governor Averill Harriman, the note miraculously disappeared. The local authorities said they must have made a mistake. I never read the note or found out what was in it. Be that as it may, my overwhelming feeling at the time was truly one of relief for Mother. She led such a tortured life. Thank God she was finally at peace. That's why, at the time, I never cried. I tried to, but I couldn't.

  More than a decade later I was asleep in my house in Malibu. It was early, early in the morning. I'd fallen asleep with the television on. I heard something that half woke me. My head started to pulsate. My eyes popped open. The sound I heard was Mother's voice. I was suddenly staring straight into her face on the screen, which was televising The Keys of the Kingdom. I was transfixed, stunned. Then tears began to roll down my cheeks. I must have cried for more than half an hour. It felt good to finally get it all out. It was the very least I owed her and myself.

  Mother's suicide happened at the start of my senior year at Exeter. Fortunately, I had already been given an A rating by Yale University in my junior year, which basically meant that if you didn't really screw up before graduation, you were in. On my Preliminary SAT achievement tests I had scored an 800 in English, which was the highest score one could get. I sent a letter to Dad, who was shooting Suddenly, Last Summer in England, and told him. He cabled me back: “Ain't you lucky they didn't ask you to spell achievement?” I had misspelled it in my letter. Dad always liked to have the last word.

  As the 1950s ended, I entered Yale. Dad told me how proud “Pop” would have been of me and that being educated at schools like St. Bernard's, Exeter, and Yale was everything he envisioned for me when we left California. But there was still one thing I wanted to do more than get a first-class education, and I begged him to help me. I wanted to work, in any capacity, on a movie. Dad agreed to do it, with the following caveat: He'd get me on a film made by people he'd never worked with. There would be no past relationships for me to fall back on if things went wrong. He also (correctly) told me that there would be some on the film who'd be hoping I screwed up, who'd say the only reason I was working on it was because I was Joe Mankiewicz's kid. He wrote a letter to Doc Merman at Fox, head of the physical production department at the time. Dad was an independent company with no ties to Fox anymore, but he knew and liked Doc. I still have the letter he sent. As luck would have it, Fox was shooting a western called The Comancheros at the start of the summer. It was starring John Wayne, would be directed by the legendary Michael Curtiz, and would be shot almost entirely on location near Moab, Utah.

  Snapshots from 1950s Films

  No Way Out (1950)

  An extraordinary film for its time, dealing brutally with race. The first film ever made by a major studio in which contemporary black people were seen in their own apartments and homes, sitting down to meals, leading lives as ordinary and complex as their white counterparts. It was Sidney Poitier's first part—the leading role. There were no black leading men at the time in Hollywood, only “specialty” stars such as Paul Robeson or Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, singers and dancers. Hattie McDaniel had won a supporting actress Oscar for Gone with the Wind, but she played a slave and had to sit in the back of the auditorium. Sidney was washing dishes in New York at the time. He had, I believe, briefly appeared in off-off-Broadway theater, but dishwashing was how he earned a living. He was one in a group of young black actors who read for the part, and Dad cast him immediately. During his Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech at the Academy Awards decades later, Sidney remarked on the oddity of his straight away playing the lead in a major Hollywood film: “I arrived in Hollywood at twenty-two in a time different than today's, a time in which the odds against my standing here tonight would not have fallen in my favor. Back then, no route had been established for where I wanted to go, no pathway left in evidence for me to trace, no custom for me to follow.”

  Darryl Zanuck was quite socially committed for a major studio head. Fox had made Gentleman's Agreement about anti-Semitism and Pinky about a black girl “passing,” but the latter part was played by the super-white Jeanne Crain. Casting a black actress in that role would have been out of the question at the time. Racism was the elephant in the room for Hollywood. This was a time when the few black baseball players who existed had to stay at separate hotels from their white teammates, when Sammy Davis Jr. could sell out the Copacabana in New York but blacks weren't allowed to sit at the tables. Explicit racial slurs were frequent in the script, which Dad cowrote with Lesser Samuels. “Coon,” “Sambo,” “jig,” and “Niggertown” were just a few. Sidney plays a young black doctor in a hospital prison ward who treats a viciously racist Richard Widmark and his brother. The brother dies, and Widmark erroneously blames Sidney for his death. Widmark later told me that his dialogue was so raw and evil that he actually felt compelled to apologize to Sidney after many scenes: “I'd played bad guys before, but this was the biggest lowlife creep I'd ever seen.”

  There's a race riot in the film, something unthinkable to have put on the screen at the time and something the moviegoing public wasn't prepared to look at. Both Dad and Zanuck realized the film wouldn't be shown in many states—indeed, it was never exhibited south of the Mason-Dixon Line—but they went ahead and made it. Right-wing publications damned it as hysterical “Commie” propaganda, but Ebony maga
zine, the most influential black publication in the country, praised it as the first honest film ever made about contemporary black life. Ossie Davis was also in the cast and gave a wonderful performance. His wife, the hugely talented Ruby Dee, joined Sidney in making her screen debut.

  After the film finished shooting, Dad asked to see Sidney. He gave him an office address in New York and told him to go there and say he was sent by Joe Mankiewicz. The office belonged to Zoltan Korda of the famous British film family. Dad knew Korda was about to make Cry, the Beloved Country and thought Sidney would be perfect for the lead role. He asked him to fly Sidney to London and test him. He was confident he'd get the part. Korda did exactly that. Sidney starred in the film, which was wonderfully received internationally, and the rest, as they say, is history. I recently sat on a panel at the Motion Picture Academy with Sidney, Martin Landau, and others, celebrating a new print of Dad's film Suddenly, Last Summer. When Sidney was introduced, he got a standing ovation from a packed house in the main theater. He thanked the audience, then noted: “Were it not for Joe Mankiewicz, there's a good chance I wouldn't even be on this stage tonight.” No Way Out represented the best that was inside Dad, the kind of courage he showed fighting against the loyalty oath at the Directors Guild. At times like that, I was so proud to be his son.

  At the end of No Way Out, Widmark lures Sidney to a house to kill him, but is himself accidentally shot in the dark. His leg is gashed wide open, the blood flowing freely. Sidney applies a tourniquet and delivers the last line of the film: “Don't cry, white boy. You're going to live.” Thirty years after the film's release, I attended a wake for William Holden at Stefanie Powers's house. Sidney and Widmark were both there, fast friends, having made at least one other film together. The three of us were talking at the bar. Widmark took a handful of peanuts and tossed them down his throat. He gagged, horribly. They'd gone down the wrong way. He coughed violently as Sidney pounded him on the back. His eyes glassed over. Suddenly, the obstruction cleared. Sidney smiled and said: “Don't cry, white boy. You're going to live.”

  Julius Caesar (1953)

  Generally regarded as one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare ever put on the screen. Marlon Brando played Mark Antony. He had never performed Shakespeare before, not even in acting class. This daring piece of casting resulted in an Oscar nomination and his actually winning the British Academy Award. Dad was particularly proud of that, since in his opinion the Brits would rather have committed mass suicide than given an American actor their Oscar for performing Shakespeare in the 1950s. Almost thirty years later I was having lunch with Marlon in London while we were doing Superman. I asked him how different things were making films now than earlier in his career. “In those days you knew whose set you were on,” he replied. “It was Kazan's set, your father's set. Today, sometimes I work with directors who actually ask me if I think they're doing a good job.”

  It's crucial, as I found out later, for a director to be able to control his or her set, especially when things start to get out of control, as they often do. Marlon told me about the day they were filming Caesar's entrance into the Colosseum, when he meets the soothsayer who gives him a warning. Dad was up on a crane, shooting down at the actors. The problem was that they were all waiting for a “day player” who had two lines. He'd ducked out to relieve himself and hadn't come back yet. Marlon: “This was a pretty amazing cast standing there, waiting: James Mason, John Gielgud, me, Deborah Kerr, Greer Garson, Louis Calhern, and Edmond O'Brien. Being actors with nothing to do, we started kidding around, making pee jokes. Gielgud ‘confessed' that he'd peed in his pants twenty minutes ago, sacrificing himself for his art. I asked Deborah when she peed, did she have to take off her whole fucking toga? It started getting boisterous. Joe was looking down from the crane, the ever-present pipe in his mouth, silently fuming. Suddenly, the guy came running back onto the set, totally out of breath. He looked up at Joe apologetically: ‘I am so sorry, Mr. Mankiewicz. No one told me they'd be ready this soon.' Joe nodded. The guy took his place. We were still stifling laughs about pissing when the buzzer sounded. Everyone put on their game face. ‘Rolling!' ‘Speed!' It was totally quiet. Joe took the pipe out of his mouth and stared down at the guy: ‘You don't have nearly the talent, young man, to keep this company waiting twenty minutes.' We all snapped to, straightened up like a bunch of schoolkids. We were doing Shakespeare. It was an important scene. Joe had just taken his set back.”

  Guys and Dolls (1955)

  The only film Dad ever made that was the top grosser of the year. He always said, “I'm so happy I worked when I did, because every film I'm best known for would never get a green light today.” He loved that musical—it lived and breathed New York to him. Another daring piece of casting with Marlon. Dad cabled him in Europe: “How'd you like to play Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls?” Marlon cabled back: “Very nervous. Have never done a musical before.” Dad cabled back: “Don't worry about it. Neither have I.” Frank Sinatra was cast as Nathan Detroit. Jean Simmons as Sister Sarah. Dad retained many players from the stage version, notably Vivian Blaine and Stubby Kaye.

  It was a wonderful concept for a film. There were no exterior scenes. Everything happened in stylized interiors. Dad thought of it as a fable and shot it that way. The choreography by Michael Kidd was brilliant. Dad wanted the actors to sing for themselves. He hated the usual practice of dubbing in other voices when they burst into song. This was obviously no problem for Sinatra, and Jean Simmons turned out to have a lovely voice. Brando did the best he could, his singing usually pieced together from multiple recording takes, sometimes line by line. He was fine with the ballads but suffered more in the driving “Luck Be a Lady.” Sinatra had desperately wanted to play Sky Masterson. In Las Vegas, where he performed many nights, commuting by private plane from the set, he was Sky Masterson and made a point of including “Luck Be a Lady” in his act. I was on the set often during summer vacation. I still have a picture of me behind the camera, squinting through the barrel, with Dad's inscription: “Son, didn't I tell you you peaked too soon? With my love, Dad.”

  Enchanting in the movie, enchanting in real life, at the time of Guys and Dolls, Jean Simmons was married to Stewart Granger, the swashbuckling star of Scaramouche and King Solomon's Mines. He was devastatingly handsome but somewhat of a prick and treated her badly. I was to run into him later in life. Jean and Dad had a huge affair during the shooting of the film. Granger must have known but thought, what the hell, I'm not working that much anymore and she always comes home to me. Twenty years later I found myself a frequent guest at Jean's home. Divorced from Granger, she had married the writer-director Richard Brooks (Blackboard Jungle, In Cold Blood) after costarring with Burt Lancaster in his film version of Elmer Gantry. Richard was a tough, no-nonsense guy, extremely talented and prickly. I was introduced to him by Gene Kelly, who was a good friend of his and a sort of self-appointed godfather to me. The mutual attraction was tennis. Gene and I played all the time. I wound up playing at the Brookses' house on a regular basis and was often invited to watch movies in their screening room at night.

  I was totally besotted with Jean. She was so beautiful, sweet, and caring. I winced privately when Richard barked at her every time she made a mistake on the tennis court while playing doubles. She wasn't that good, but she was doing the best she could. She seemed to have an affinity for men who didn't treat her well, although Richard was a big improvement over Granger in intellect and talent.

  One night when Richard was shooting on location, Jean asked me up to the house for a screening. After the film ended and the guests were leaving, she silently signaled me to stay behind. I did. She made me a drink and then gently placed her hand on my crotch. I turned scarlet. She looked into my eyes: “Oh, dear. I'm asking you to do something you don't want to.” Didn't want to? I was terrified. For Christ's sake, this was Jean Simmons and the wife of Richard Brooks. We had a drink and I left. I sensed a real loneliness in her and couldn't understand why. She was so e
nchanting in every way. Perhaps it was because of the reciprocal radar I had with troubled or unhappy women (especially actresses), but one thing eventually did lead to another.

  One night later she asked me to escort her to a formal dinner for Princess Margaret of England who was making a state visit and stopping in Los Angeles. It was almost a command performance for every celebrated Brit in Hollywood. Richard was still on location. I rented white tie and tails and escorted her. We sat at a table with people I knew: Leslie and Evie Bricusse, Tony Newley and Joan Collins, Michael Caine, and others. During the meal I got up to go to the men's room. As I was about to enter, I saw Gene Kelly following me.

  “Cut it out, Tom,” came the warning.

  “Cut what out?”

  “You know what I'm talking about.”

  “Gene, you don't think that Jean and I…”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Gene, if there was anything going on, do you think I'd be dumb enough to bring her to a public event like this?”

  “You bet. Dumb enough and young enough. So cut it out before you get in over your head, if you're not there already.”

  Gene was right, God bless him. Everything out of bounds with Jean ended that night. She died recently at eighty. I never would have included any of this in a public memoir were she still alive. But she was the most ethereal, vulnerable woman I ever met. My feelings for her ran very deep. I felt I needed to mention her.

  Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

  One of the few pictures Dad made when he did not write the screenplay. Gore Vidal adapted the script from the Tennessee Williams play. It starred Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift, and dealt with, among other things, mental illness, homosexuality, pedophilia, and cannibalism. The producer was Sam Spiegel ( The African Queen, On the Waterfront, Lawrence of Arabia), who liked to pop up occasionally on the set without warning. Dad called him “Suddenly Sam Spiegel.”