My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

Sammy immediately started to sing and dance for them. He might as well have been at the Copa. When he finished, everyone in the service station gave him an ovation. As he returned to the limo I lowered the window and threw a handful of loose change out into the street. “Congratulations, Sam. You just made the Arco Hall of Fame.” Everyone in the car laughed loudly. Sammy, bless him, didn't think it was quite that funny.

  I always thought the main reason Jack didn't marry Nancy Sinatra was that his career had barely started. His house was action central for young Hollywood, and he was eager and ambitious. Clearly, Nancy would want children and a relatively normal, if privileged family life. Jack didn't want kids. He adored Nancy, but he had places to go where he hadn't been yet. Liza was another matter entirely. Their marriage always seemed to me to have been a happy, convenient partnership of sorts. They were both constantly on the go. Her career had exploded. He was starting to direct features. They caromed from coast to coast like out-of-control pool balls: New York, L.A., Studio 54, Halston, Europe, premieres, Vegas, the whole spectrum of “being there.” They were sometimes together, but progressively more often by themselves or with an escort. Their careers were taking on different arcs. Jack's movies were indifferently received, and for good reason. Let's face it, neither Norwood nor The Love Machine is taught in film schools these days. For a creative guy with his talent and acumen, I couldn't believe the kind of material he picked out for himself. Liza seemed unstoppable, the toast of (fill in the blank). When she filmed New York, New York with Robert De Niro for Martin Scorsese, things started to take an ominous turn.

  In the seventies, between the Bond films, The Eagle Has Landed, Superman, and Superman II, I was practically commuting from London to L.A. Most of “happening” Hollywood was into cocaine by then. Marijuana was almost passé. I didn't do coke much. It made me incredibly hostile for some reason. Someone would say, “Hey, Mank, how are you?” I'd say, “What the fuck do you mean by that?” My friends begged me to stick with my Jack Daniel's, and I took their advice. During the filming of New York, New York, I remember one large party in particular where there were lines of blow on almost every table. Famous noses were scarfing them up. As I looked around the room I spotted someone I knew—Sergeant Rudy Diaz of the LAPD. Rudy'd been attached to many cop films as a technical advisor. I'd worked with him twice. Somehow his name had wound up on the guest list. He looked at me, smiled, then took a seat at the coke table. As the famous noses introduced themselves, Rudy took out his badge and identified himself. The instant look of sheer terror around the table was palpable. Rudy: “Lucky for you guys I'm Homicide, not Vice. How all you people can have so much talent and be so fucking stupid at the same time is just incredible.”

  Shortly afterward I was in Calgary, Canada, where we were shooting the Smallville sequences from Superman. Liza was doing a new Kander and Ebb musical called The Act. Surprise, surprise, it was being directed by Marty Scorsese. I had heard and read rumors that he and Liza were having an affair. I checked in regularly with Jack by phone, but he never brought it up. I never asked, feeling that if he wanted to talk about it, he would. The phone rang in my Calgary hotel room very late one night. It was Liza. She was in San Francisco where the show had opened to less-than-sparkling reviews. She wanted to know if I'd stop by San Francisco on my way back to L.A. and give whatever thoughts I had on how to help it. They were next headed for the L.A. Music Center and then on to Broadway. I told her I would. “Does Marty know I'm doing this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do Kander and Ebb?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about Jack?”

  “No, he's seen it, he's busy at home. We'll get a car to pick you up at the airport and a suite in our hotel.”

  I had to let Jack know I was coming. He was my friend. I told him over the phone. He seemed fine with it. He said he couldn't make it himself but whatever ideas I had would be more than welcome.

  I arrived in San Francisco and saw the show. Boy, were there problems. Not the least of them was that Marty, one of the master film directors of our age, didn't seem to be ideally cut out for staging a Broadway musical. While he was giving notes to the rest of the cast and crew, Liza and I returned to her dressing room. She sat at her mirror and matter-of-factly told me that Jack had decided to come up after all. He was taking a late flight and would be there any minute. Then we got to the show: “What do you think it needs most?”

  “I think you should close it.”

  “Don't say that.”

  “Liza, that's my honest opinion. There's so much work to be done and you're opening in L.A. in less than two weeks. Shut it down, rework it till everyone's happy, and put it on when it's ready.”

  She stared up at me, grabbed my forearm, and squeezed hard. “Don't tell Marty that. Whatever you say, don't tell him that. Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Jack arrived. We all went to dinner at Ernie's. There were so many levels of tension around that table I could barely count them. The show was in real trouble. Jack must have made suggestions previously that were rejected. The opening conversation was painful: “Gee, it's cold up here for this time of year, isn't it.” “How's Superman coming, how's that kid, Chris Reeve?” “Have the steak, it's the best in town.” Everything but “How about those Dodgers?”

  Then a silence. Marty looked over at me. “You think I should close it, don't you.” Liza had obviously told him my opinion after making me promise not to.

  “Yes, but on the other hand, I haven't directed Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.” It was the most uncomfortable dinner I'd ever been at. I could have kicked myself for having seen the show in the first place. I returned to Canada and then to New York for more shooting on Superman. Sometime before the L.A. opening, Marty left the show. Gower Champion took over directing in L.A. and then on to Broadway, where it received very mixed reviews. Everyone loved Liza (what else was new?), but it closed after a short run.

  Jack and Liza's marriage deteriorated quickly. He began drinking heavily, finally destroying his liver. The grin was still there, the snappy remark, but there was a deep sadness too. His career had a brief resurgence when he put together the brilliant history/compilation of the movie musical That's Entertainment, still the bible for any enthusiast of the genre. It was released as a feature and was deservedly a big hit. He finally needed a liver transplant if he was going to stay alive, but couldn't get a new one because of his advancing age. He became somewhat of a hermit, not even seeing close friends that often. A few times when I called him in the morning he was already obviously drunk. I felt so sorry for him. Shortly before he died, Dick Donner and I went over to the house to see him. Jack was in bed, barely “there,” but God, did we laugh a lot. We reminisced about the good old days, the women, the projects that flew and those that didn't. It was the Three Musketeers having a final reunion. As Dick and I were leaving, Nancy Sinatra arrived. She had been so loyal and loving to him during those days. It would be Oscar time soon. Nancy told me she asked Jack what screener he wanted to see. She suggested a film starring Michael Douglas called The Wonder Boys. “They just left,” he replied. He died several days later.

  The Sweet Ride

  My first feature as a screenwriter. I was barely twenty-five years old. Fox had picked up the option on my original screenplay, loved the dialogue, and had a fairly low-budget picture they wanted to make about young people living at the beach. I was a young person living at the beach. Sure sounded like perfect casting. It was based on a pretty good novel by William Murray (who later wrote several wonderful books about horse racing and the track). The problem was (with the picture too) it tried to touch all the bases at once: drama, comedy, porn, dropouts, surfing, true love, a touch of perversion, and the general malaise of 1960s young people. Frankie Avalon and Annette it definitely wasn't. My director was a Canadian, Harvey Hart, who was filming Fox's hit TV series Peyton Place at the time. Harvey was delightful to work with, patient and contributive to me.

  The producer
was Joe Pasternak, a legend for his longevity as much as the quality of his films, many of them musicals: from Deanna Durbin in the thirties to Mario Lanza, Kathryn Grayson, Fernando Lamas, and even Elvis, they seemed to be his specialty. He'd recently made a hit, Where the Boys Are, about young love on spring break, and seemed well suited for our film. Unfortunately, Joe had recently suffered a massive stroke and had progressive Parkinson's disease to boot. His face and hands trembled, his voice was halting and gravelly, and he shuffled rather than walked. By all rights he should have been home under a nurse's care. We shot the film on a practical location, a house on a cliff past Malibu, and I think he was physically able to visit the set only a couple of times. The Sweet Ride was, I believe, Joe's 105th film. It was also his last. At a later Masquers Dinner honoring him and his career I was a speaker and pointed out that producing just one screenplay of mine had put this legend out of business.

  The male star was Tony Franciosa, an extremely intense and talented actor with a hair-trigger temper that always bubbled underneath an apparently cheerful surface. He'd been nominated for an Oscar for his supporting performance in A Hatful of Rain. Tony became a good friend and stayed down at my beach house with me from time to time. He'd been involved with several strong women in his life, among them Anna Magnani and Shelley Winters, whom he married. His temper was his worst enemy. Near the start of Don Rickles's career, everyone was flocking to see this outrageous new insult-comic who didn't mind taking on members of his audience, no matter who they were. Don was playing a club called the Slate Brothers on La Cienega Boulevard at the time, and one night Tony and Shelley Winters were in the audience. When the time came for celebrity introductions, Don pointed out Shelley Winters, the multiple Oscar-winning actress, and asked her to rise, which she did to loud applause. He then introduced the up-and-coming young star Anthony Franciosa and asked Tony to rise. As the applause died down, Don said: “Tony, could you remain standing for just a minute more? I want everyone in the room to get a look at the only guy who'd marry a broad who looked like that.” Tony's eyes flashed instantly. He vaulted two tables filled with seated customers, trying to get to Don before being tackled by a gaggle of waiters and bouncers while Rickles beat a hasty retreat. Several years later, on a TV series called Fame Is the Name of the Game, Tony (a true professional) was late one morning. The production manager ragged him about it. Tony asked him to stop. He didn't. Tony decked him, knocked him flat with one punch. The secret was watching the eyes. If you watched Tony's eyes, you could always tell when you were about to cross into potentially dangerous territory.

  The Sweet Ride “introduced” Jacqueline Bisset through a lucky accident (as happens so often in the movie business), and by the time the film was through shooting, before it was ever released, through a series of unforeseen circumstances, she was almost guaranteed to become a movie star. I've never seen anything happen quite like it in more than forty years since.

  We couldn't get the kind of female lead we wanted for our film because the budget was so low that we simply didn't have the money for the Yvette Mimieuxs of the world. We read several “unknowns” without success. One night, Harvey Hart and I went to a screening of Stanley Donen's Two for the Road at Fox. At the beginning of the film, while hitchhiking his way across France, Albert Finney runs into a bus filled with British schoolgirls and is immediately smitten by a brunette with an absolutely magical look to her. She instantly contracts chicken pox and is left behind to recover while Finney “settles” for Audrey Hepburn and the story actually begins. Both Harvey Hart and I found her look as magical as Finney did in the film. We checked up on her. It turned out she was already under contract to Fox. I called Stanley Donen (whom I knew through Gene Kelly) in England and asked if she could act. His reply: “I have no idea. But she's a knockout, isn't she?”

  We flew Jackie over, tested her, and found her to be more than acceptable for the part. Outside of being wildly attractive, she was also fun and hard working. I've known her on and off ever since and worked with her again some ten years later while doing a rewrite on The Deep in the Caribbean. At first Fox was worried that because of her given name and especially the spelling of her last name, the American audience would think she was French. This resulted in a classy move on the part of the Fox publicity department. In promotional materials to the press (but not on the poster, thank God) it said: “Introducing Jacqueline Bisset—rhymes with Kiss It.”

  While we were shooting, Frank Sinatra was at Fox and had a problem: Mia Farrow was meant to play his wife in a film called The Detective. But she was shooting Rosemary's Baby, which was going wildly over schedule and seemed like it would never end. Someone told Frank about this gorgeous English girl who was shooting a surfing movie at the studio. He looked at some rushes and hired her. Some weeks later (we were still shooting), Peter Yates was looking for a young woman to play Steve McQueen's girlfriend in his new film, Bullitt. He was told about Jackie, saw the rushes, and hired her as well. So before The Sweet Ride had ever been released, Jackie was already cast opposite Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen in her next two films. Not a bad way to break into Hollywood. As I said, I've never heard of anything quite like it before or since.

  One interesting postscript to Jackie. These days, I teach a course in filmmaking to graduate students and use Two for the Road to illustrate inventive ways of flashing forward and backward, the film taking place simultaneously in five different time periods of a marriage. Every time I see Jackie and hear her voice at the start I realize she's been “looped” by another actress. That's not her real voice. I guess Stanley didn't even trust her with five or six lines.

  The film opened to decidedly mixed reviews. As I mentioned earlier, it tried to touch all the bases at once and wound up confusing the audience no matter what kind of film they expected to see. A good lesson for the future. At any rate, I had my first feature under my belt and guess what? Now I was headed for Broadway.

  Georgy!

  In 1947, when asked whether he believed the rumor that Hitler was still alive and living in South America, George S. Kaufman replied: “I have no idea. But if Hitler is still alive, I hope he's out of town with a musical.”

  Looking back, I'm still somewhat hazy about the details of how Georgy! came together. Columbia Studios wanted to do a Broadway musical of their surprise hit movie Georgy Girl. Not a bad idea. I'd written Emmy-winning musical specials, had a feature under my belt, and was as young as the untried composer, George Fischoff, and the lyricist, Carole Bayer, later Carole Bayer Sager, a major talent who collaborated with so many different and wonderful composers from Peter Allen to Burt Bacharach (also one of her husbands). There were two “pros” involved as well. Fred Coe, the producer, had a string of stage hits from Two for the Seesaw, The Miracle Worker, and Wait Until Dark to A Thousand Clowns. And the director would be my friend Peter Hunt, with whom I'd worked at the Williamstown Summer Theater. Peter had just won the Tony for directing 1776, his first Broadway show. The cast was talented, if unknown. Georgy was played by a wonderful, tiny, and charming girl, Dilys Watling, who wound up being nominated for the Best Musical Actress Tony along with Katharine Hepburn (good luck with that, Dilys). John Castle, an excellent and versatile British stage and film actor, took the male lead, Joss. The secondary female lead was played by Melissa Hart, who'd done mainly television but was also Tony nominated for Best Supporting Musical Actress.

  We opened in Boston to encouraging audience reaction and somewhat less encouraging reviews. All of the out-of-town clichés in the Busby Berkeley musical films turned out to be true: songs were replaced, scenes were rewritten, new choreography inserted, and everyone who was invited up to see the show knew exactly how to “fix” it. The first act is great—the second needs a lot of work. Or: all your problems are in the first act—the second just flies by, leave it alone. Or: her wardrobe. They just don't relate to her in those mousy colors. She practically disappears. And so on, and so on. Then we went down to our last stop before New York, the Sch
ubert Theater in New Haven, the city where I'd been to Yale and where at the time I'd watched so many shows pass through on their way to New York and Broadway.

  I was happy as a clam. I liked the show a lot. Sure, it needed some nips and tucks, but those would come. I was having an affair with one of the dancers. She was delightful and supportive, and her legs went on forever. I ran into André Previn (whom I knew from L.A.) one day. He'd written the music for Coco, a musical starring Katharine Hepburn that was following us into the Schubert. He'd seen our show the night before and was jealous of the wonderful shape we were in.

  Unfortunately, Fred Coe's outlook wasn't quite as rosy. Fred drank heavily and had a curious warning sign when he did: for some reason he never wore stays in his shirt collars and the more he drank, the more the lapels seemed to rise, almost involuntarily. If Fred approached you with a vertical “Captain Hornblower” collar, you knew you were in for a broadside. Either the new song stunk or the set (by the multiple Tony-winning design legend Jo Mielziner) was “a goddamn erector set,” or—worst of all—why didn't my Tony-winning writer friend Peter Stone come aboard to “punch up” the book? Before I could object, Peter had already been invited up (without anyone consulting me). I was in no position to argue. He and I were friends. We had a great relationship. There was never even a suggestion he would seek any form of credit—this was between us—and some of the gags he added did get laughs. But this one-time experience was so professionally deflating for me. Indeed, I have never been rewritten by anyone before or since for the rest of my entire career.

  Our tiny musical with no stars opened in the cavernous Winter Garden Theater, at least twice the size of the house we should have played. But Mame was closing there after a run of six or seven years, and it was the only theater available. Opening night I followed the tradition of the time and reserved a table at Sardi's to wait for the reviews. My date was my friend and sometimes girlfriend Carol Lynley. At first, only one or two acquaintances joined us, and somewhat reluctantly. Then—the Daily News hit the stands. The review was a rave! Suddenly, my table started filling up. Extra chairs were added. Everyone ordered drinks, especially champagne. I remember David Frost (very popular at the time) suddenly appearing magically in the seat next to me, effusive and congratulatory. The Mirror and the Herald Tribune were next—both were positive. My table was now “action central.” Then—dum de dum-dum—came the New York Times, the one review that could make or break a show like ours with no stars and a tiny advance sale. Clive Barnes killed us. He wasn't too tough on the actors or the book, but the last line of his review said: “I left the theater humming the title song from the movie.” That was more than enough to kill us, just that one last line.