My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

  From his point of view, Zanuck had a logical point to make by insisting on one film instead of two. The real potential box office gold lay in the Taylor-Burton relationship. The whole world was waiting to see them on the screen together. Richard appeared for only approximately ten minutes in the first half. If they released a Caesar and Cleopatra first, what would happen if Richard and Elizabeth broke up before Antony and Cleopatra came out? What if they went back to their respective spouses? Who'd want to see them then? Fox would suffer a tremendous financial loss from which it might never recover. What was that line from The Barefoot Contessa again? “Gentlemen, it's a wonderful art we're doing business in.”

  The opening of Cleopatra in New York was broadcast on The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson was in his studio. Bert Parks interviewed the celebrities as they poured in. Dad arrived, suffering in silence. He knew that because of the notoriety of everything that had gone on, most critics had already written their reviews. Bert Parks intercepted him: “And here's Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the multiple Oscar-winning director. Mr. Mankiewicz, I hear we're in for a truly magnificent film tonight.”

  Dad stared, then said, “You must know something I don't.”

  Parks blinked. “Ah…exactly how long did it take you to make this film?”

  Dad: “I can't remember ever having been on anything else.”

  He walked past a totally nonplussed Parks. Carson and the studio audience exploded with laughter. Johnny told me later it was one of his favorite moments ever in the decades he did The Tonight Show. He always included it on his anniversary broadcasts.

  The film received mixed reviews, though oddly enough, a total rave from Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. Years later, it finally broke even on the books as a result of television sales. In the nineties, Roddy McDowall, Martin Landau, and I went to see Bill Mechanic, then president of the studio, in a vain attempt to have the remaining footage reassembled and released in the form Dad intended. Mechanic was in favor of it, but the missing footage was spread out all over the world, some of it without sound. The largest batch was in the possession of two projectionists in London who'd stolen it from the lab at the time it had been processed. They were willing to sell it but wouldn't show it first, and Mechanic was adamant about Fox not paying a ransom for stolen material. For the rest of his life, Dad had a framed New Yorker cartoon hanging in his bathroom. It depicts two suburban women commuters at a train station, staring at a Cleopatra billboard featuring Elizabeth and Richard in a sexy pose. One woman is saying to the other, “What really annoys me is I know I'm going to see it.”

  There were important consequences to the film in terms of our family. Dad would soon marry Rosemary and move to a beautiful, peaceful Pound Ridge estate in Westchester County. My brother Chris fell in love with one of Cleopatra's handmaidens on the film. Her name was Bruna Caruso. They went back to New York, where they were married and she became a top model. Before their divorce, they had a son, my nephew, Jason. As for me, Yale was over. Now it was time to go to work.

  The Best Man

  After graduating from Yale, I headed to Los Angeles. I suppose if Dad were still living there I'd have probably gone to New York. I needed the space to try to do things on my own. I'd met two young producers, Stuart Millar and Larry Turman, through my aunt Sara, who knew Stuart's family. They were about to make a film of Gore Vidal's hit play The Best Man and were looking for an assistant who could help out in multiple areas. My previous work on film crews and experience in summer stock sufficed to qualify me, and I was hired. I got $125 a week. I took a room at the Montecito Hotel on Franklin Avenue—at the time, the poor man's Chateau Marmont. So poor, in fact, that they didn't have the money to fill the hotel pool, which remained empty all year. Sometimes the residents held improvised cocktail parties on the dry cement after climbing down the ladder. The hotel was filled with up-and-coming (they hoped) actors from New York who were playing one- or two-day parts in television shows. No room service, but there was a kitchenette area and a Hughes market on the corner. I spent a lot of time defrosting frozen meals. A housekeeper went over your carpet with a vacuum cleaner on a daily basis.

  The Best Man shot at Columbia Studios, which was then on nearby Gower Street. What a heady experience it was, and what talented people to work with. The cast included Henry Fonda, Cliff Robertson, Margaret Leighton, Kevin McCarthy, Shelley Berman, Edie Adams, and Lee Tracy, who received an Oscar nomination for playing Vidal's version of Harry Truman. Larry Turman would go on to produce many successful films, including The Graduate. The director was Franklin Schaffner, an Emmy winner from television, making his second film (The Stripper was his first). He went on to make Patton, The Planet of the Apes, Nicholas and Alexandra, and more. The cameraman was a young Haskell Wexler, later to photograph The Loved One and In the Heat of the Night and win an Oscar for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The assistant editor to Bob Swink was Hal Ashby. Endlessly cheerful, he was determined to direct one day. I sympathized, but wasn't sure he had much of a chance. Later on, after seeing Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Coming Home, and Being There, I decided I was wrong. In 1976 Hal directed Bound for Glory and Haskell Wexler won yet another Oscar for photographing it. What a talented group to start a creative learning curve with.

  Gore Vidal came to L.A. for the shoot. He was already a celebrated novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He had script approval. Nothing could be changed without his okay. I remember one day when we were shooting at the Ambassador Hotel. The film was behind schedule. Stuart, Larry, and Frank were trying to find ways to catch up. It was decided that a short two-page scene featuring Ann Southern was unnecessary, but we needed Gore's approval. I was deputized to go to the Beverly Hills Hotel to get it personally. I found Gore lying by the pool, caked in suntan lotion. I explained the situation. The scene was fun, but incidental to the plot and perhaps expendable. Gore raised his wrist: “You see this watch, Tom? It's a Patek Phillipe, the most expensive timepiece in the world. What do you say we open the back of it and remove the smallest little thing we can find, something that looks totally unnecessary. You know what then? I might as well be wearing a turd on my wrist.” I went back downtown and reported: the answer was no.

  I made friends easily, and Columbia was a fertile place to find them in 1963. Alan Pakula and Bob Mulligan had just made To Kill a Mockingbird and were on the lot, working with Steve McQueen and Lee Remick. Screen Gems had big hits on television. Stanley Kramer was starting Ship of Fools with an all-star cast on the stage next door. In my spare time I wrote an original screenplay. It was about the suicide of a young actress. The script dealt with the last ninety minutes of her life, between the time she takes the pills and the time she dies, with flashbacks (every writing Mankiewicz loves flashbacks). The original title was rather unwieldy: Everything the Traffic Will Allow. I later shortened it to Please. It was optioned five separate times, and never made, but the dialogue apparently was impressive enough to get me hired as a writer.

  My First Paid Writing Job

  By the mid-sixties, the last dramatic hour anthology show left on television was Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre. It was produced by Dick Berg, the father of Scott, the author, and Jeff, later chairman of the powerful ICM (International Creative Management) talent agency, and was shot at Universal Studios. Universal had optioned my original screenplay. A young associate producer named Ron Roth had read it. He loved the dialogue. Emmy-winning television director Stuart Rosenberg (later to make Cool Hand Luke, The Amityville Horror, and The Pope of Greenwich Village) was desperate for a rewrite on the show, which was about to start shooting. Ron gave Stuart my script, and suddenly I was hired. The pay was only $500, but at this stage of a nonexistent career, why quibble? The sponsor of the show was almost totally in control of content in those days. A representative of Chrysler came to a script meeting with notes. I was asked to change the line “You've been avoiding me” to “You've been dodging me” because they made the Dodge automobile. I remember obs
erving out loud that I supposed no one was ever going to “ford” a stream on that show. The man from Chrysler didn't smile.

  The hour teleplay was titled Runaway Boy. It starred Robert Wagner and Carol Lynley. Carol and I went out a lot during the sixties. We were somewhat of an “item.” One day I walked into a casting session. Surprise, surprise, the assistant to the casting director was John Badham, my friend from Williamstown. Shortly afterward, John started directing television at Universal, and then his first feature, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, with Richard Pryor, James Earl Jones, and Billy Dee Williams. It was the first of many terrific films to come.

  I was still rewriting while the show was shooting. I remember one day at Paradise Cove, north of Malibu. I sat in the back of a limousine on the pier, my typewriter perched on a folded jump seat. I banged out new dialogue for the scenes and handed the pages out the window to the assistant director. Geez Louise, I thought, this was a tough job. But boy, what a lot of fun. When I got home at night, it felt great to know I'd finally made a real contribution to a piece of film. There's a wonderful sense of achievement in writing if you're the child of a famous parent. Someone may give you a job as their assistant to curry favor, or even make you an associate producer, but no one shoots a script they don't think is good enough to make. No one in the movie business is willing to commit financial suicide, it's that simple.

  The night the show aired I watched it alone. I'd written so much of it I'd received cowriting credit. Dad was always billed onscreen as “Joseph L. Mankiewicz”; his brother as “Herman J. Mankiewicz.” So there I was: “Thomas F. Mankiewicz.” But it looked so incredibly pretentious to me, the “Thomas” and the middle initial. That was the first and last time I would see it. On the literally hundreds of onscreen credits I've received since then, a simple “Tom Mankiewicz” did very nicely, thank you.

  Malibu in the 1960s

  I was at a party in 1964. Roddy McDowall was there and announced that he was leaving for England to do a film and would be gone for some time. He'd rented a house in the Malibu Colony on the beach for $500 a month (that's right, $500) and still had six months left on his lease. Did anyone want to take it over from him? Being a month-to-month renter, I jumped at the chance. Malibu in the sixties was a starkly different community than it is now, more like a small town than a chic extension of L.A. Today, the Pacific Coast Highway across from the Colony and the Old Malibu Road features shopping centers, “in” restaurants, movie theaters, and Pepperdine University. Then, there was nothing on the other side of the road. Zero. If you needed something, there was one of everything. If your kitchen sink was clogged, you didn't call a plumber. You called the plumber. There was one market (the Colony), one pharmacy, one gas station, and one vet for your ailing dog or cat. You had to dial the operator to call Beverly Hills. Because of their circumstances, the year-round residents developed a small-town camaraderie. If you didn't have enough cash to cover your groceries at the market, it was a case of “We'll get you next time, Mank.” Most people had dogs of various shapes and sizes. When I wrote on my patio, I always kept treats for them for when they'd climb up my steps for their daily visits: Bo, the black lab, carrying in his mouth his Frisbee, which you had to throw for him, preferably out into the ocean so he could swim out to retrieve it. Homer, the bassett hound, who always left two rivets in the sand when he passed by from his oversized ears. You could ride on the beach back then. A little horse shit didn't bother anybody. I bought a cheap but beautiful quarter horse, boarded her on a ranch across the highway, and rode her several times a week.

  In the summers, many of the residents rented out their houses for hefty sums. I never did (not that a house with minimal furniture and no heat would fetch a big price). But in the years I lived there, passing through were the eclectic likes of Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim, Tuesday Weld, Terry Southern, Larry Hagman, Rod Steiger, Herb Alpert, Jerry Moss, Jack Warden, Norman Jewison, Christian Marquand, John Frankenheimer, Deborah Kerr and Peter Viertel, Merle Oberon, the Mamas and the Papas, Angela Lansbury, and the Byrds. You could have dinner at the home of Paul Ziffren, powerful attorney, Democratic National Committee member, and chairman of the L.A. Olympics, and eat with the likes of Henry Kissinger, Lew Wasserman, and Norton Simon. Or you could walk through the sand with Larry Hagman, who would be dressed in a caftan and carrying a Hopi Indian flag, and share a truly fine joint. Larry never spoke on Sundays. When a prominent geologist at UCLA predicted the arrival of the “big one” on a specific day at a specific time, a group of us dressed up in black tie and gowns, sipped champagne, and sat on the beach waiting to be cracked off into the ocean. There were many famous and infamous residents of Malibu, but the most important one to me then was Tuesday Weld.

  Tuesday Weld

  The enfant terrible of Hollywood. Impudent, funny, devastatingly attractive, wildly talented, and totally nuts. I was instantly fixated on her. Tuesday was (and is) uncommonly bright in spite of not having any formal education. She could trade one-liners with anyone but was incapable of finding north on a map. She was also the only actress I've met in fifty years who desperately tried to avoid becoming a star. I mean it. When Samantha Eggar was fired (she was later rehired) on The Collector, Tuesday was William Wyler's choice to replace her. But after a long meeting during which she disagreed with the legendary director on absolutely everything, he decided to look elsewhere. She turned down the part of Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde on the grounds that she'd just had a child and didn't want to go to Texas. When Joshua Logan offered her the female lead in Paint Your Wagon opposite Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, Tuesday asked him when shooting would begin. He told her September. “Oh, damn, I can't do it,” she told him. “September and October are the two best months of the year at the beach.”

  Josh knew that we were close and called me: “What is she, fucking nuts?”

  “No comment, Josh.”

  One night several of us were sitting around her house. Carol Lynley had costarred in The Cardinal for Otto Preminger. It had just opened, and she was prominently billed on the marquee of the Fox Wilshire Theater. I told her it must feel great to drive by and see your name in lights. She agreed.

  “That's the only thing I hate,” said Tuesday. “I love to work, but I hate to see my name.”

  Tuesday lived alone when I met her. Her only companion was her dachshund, Luther, the last remaining Nazi in the world. Luther had a black spot on the top of his head from where she'd accidentally dropped hot bacon grease on him. It looked exactly like a yarmulke. If you didn't pay enough attention to Luther when he wanted you to, he would pretend to be blind, bump into the couch, fall over, and wait for you to come over and pet him. He and Tuesday were a perfectly suited pair.

  She was eager to sop up the formal knowledge she'd missed out on growing up as a child actress. She started learning one new, unusual word a day. She'd find it in the dictionary and then use it constantly until it was printed inside her as part of her vocabulary. One day she said to me, “I bet you don't know what an atavism is.”

  I did. “It's a throwback. Right now you could call Barry Goldwater an atavistic politician.”

  That night we went to a dinner party at Larry Turman's house. Gore Vidal was among the guests. I introduced them. Tuesday opened with: “You, Mr. Vidal, are an atavism.”

  Gore smiled. “I hope, Miss Weld, you don't mean that in its pejorative sense, the difference between us being that I know what pejorative means.” Tuesday roared with laughter. Gore never left her for the rest of the evening.

  There was a party at Tuesday's house one night. It grew larger as crashers arrived, having heard about it on the Malibu grapevine. Around midnight she said to me, “Get all these people out of here, okay?”

  “Jesus, there's got to be eighty people here. How the hell do I do that?”

  She turned, walked upstairs, then reappeared at the top of the landing, holding a gun. “Hey!” she yelled. Everyone looked up. There she was, an angry Tuesday Weld wit
h a loaded revolver in her hand. Your worst nightmare. “Get out!!” Eighty people immediately rocketed for a three-foot-wide doorway, elbowing each other out of the way. It was a perfect Tuesday solution.

  Tragedy struck in 1965. She was shooting The Cincinnati Kid for director Norman Jewison and had been invited onto producer Martin Ransohoff's yacht off Catalina for the weekend. A huge fire started just over the brush-clogged hills leading to Malibu and rapidly rolled down toward the coast. It was darkness at noon. The smoke completely blocked out the sun. Truly terrifying. In those days there was no such thing as a helicopter water drop. There was nothing in front of the raging fire except for the brave fire fighters who clustered around their engines, trying to make a stand on the highway. The sparks and embers jumped the road, picking off individual houses, sparing others. After several interminable hours, it died down as the flames met the ocean, and the fire fighters tried to mop up. The Colony was largely spared. Not so the Old Malibu Road, where Tuesday lived. I drove up to take a look. Her house had totally burned to the ground. Ironically, the two houses on either side were largely intact. My heart sank. I drove back to my house and called her in Catalina: “There's been a terrible fire going on here. I'd get back right away.” Her daughter, Natasha (from a brief marriage to a writer, Claude Harz), was in school. Arrangements were made for her to stay with someone until Tuesday could pick her up the next day. I couldn't bring myself to tell her what had happened. Not right then. She'd find out soon enough.

  The next morning I parked in front of what used to be her house. It was still faintly smoking. After two hours she still hadn't showed, so I reluctantly drove back to my place. When I entered, there she was, sitting in my living room with an overnight bag on the couch next to her. That was all she had left now. “It's all gone, isn't it.”

  “Yes, how do you know?”