My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

  Skitch became undersecretary of state for Europe. During a brief period, I was going to do a movie about the Loch Ness Monster. It was a charming script. The producers didn't have a lot of money. George Bush Sr. was president. Skitch was named ambassador to England. He was ambassador to the Court of St. James. I couldn't believe it. So I would go over on location scouts, then go to Winthrop House. He was the only ambassador that didn't have a penny to his name. He lived on the government allowance in this huge house. I would hang out, and the marines would drive me home. He would give parties because it was all on the government nickel. Everybody was so impressed I was the roommate of the ambassador. When Clinton was elected, they replaced him, but he was so loved in England, Lehman Brothers hired him as a partner for Europe because he knew everybody in government in every country. For the first time in his life, he was earning a buck. He's gone through my life and I think about him all the time. Every time I see Jessie Royce Landis, I think of Skitch's father, the major general. At the time of Vietnam, I was terrified of being drafted. I remember General Seitz saying to me one night, “You don't think too much of the army, do you, Manky?”

  I said, “Well, General, it certainly wouldn't be my profession.”

  He said, “Well, let me tell you something, I don't think the army's going to think too much of you, either. So if you're ever called up, get in touch with me and I'll help you get out.”

  This man was Patton's lead tank commander in World War II. Seitz's tank battalion arrived first on some cliffs that overlook Aachen, a German city that was the first city taken. They were almost out of fuel. They sent a message back to Patton saying, “We're here, but if we take the tanks into town, we're going to run out of fuel. We're going to be sitting ducks. We have no fuel left to negotiate a battle with.” They had plenty of ammunition. When they started lobbing shells into this town, which was a fairly big city, the Germans left. Retreated. And they captured Aachen. General Seitz said to me, “If the Germans had only known if they just came up the hill to get us, we couldn't go anywhere. If they had bazookas or antitank weapons of any kind, they could have just crippled us. We had nothing to fight with.” When he was made chief of staff of the Allied Forces in southern Europe, the first meeting between the British, French, Germans, and Americans was at Aachen. He said, “I checked into the hotel. I couldn't believe this city that I had destroyed was completely rebuilt and spanking new and wonderful. I remember walking into the Four Seasons, signing in, and thinking, God, if they knew who I was, they'd take me out and hang me in the public square.”

  Lew Wasserman

  Lew was a wonderful man to me. I used to see him and his wife, Edie, socially at their house, later on, after I, sort of, became somebody. We would run into each other at a couple of places. I'd see him at Natalie Wood's. He was the most powerful man in Hollywood by far at the time. He ran Universal, had run MCA (Music Corporation of America). Lew was second to Jule Styne when the company started in Chicago. It was very mob connected because to play in clubs in those days, you had to be mob connected. If you were representing musical acts, you had to play ball.

  If you asked Lew to your house for dinner, you had better ask him for the time you were sitting down. In other words, if you're going to eat at eight, but you say, “Please come at seven,” he expects to eat at seven. He didn't have a lot of small talk. He'd talk at the dinner table. Natalie Wood knew if she was going to eat at eight, she asked Lew for eight, and he would come at five minutes to eight and we'd sit down. Sometimes he'd stay late. But he hated that hour of chit-chat before because people were always hitting on him for something. I got to know him better when I was doing Diamonds Are Forever at Universal, where we had rented stages. I got my first really snazzy car that I was leasing, a twelve-cylinder Jaguar. I drove up to Universal one day, and Lew was in front of me at the guard gate talking to the guard. He was in his twelve-cylinder Jag. It was about ten in the morning. I yelled out, “Hey, Lew, nice car!” He looked back at me and he lifted his sleeve and tapped his watch. He was usually there at six in the morning because it was nine o'clock in New York and he was doing business.

  I had lunch at only two restaurants for twelve years. When I was at Warners, it was the Café Francais. I had the same table every day in the corner. Writer Frank Pierson had his table nearby. It was French country food, and I had the same thing every day, coq au vin. One day I was sitting there with some people. They were looking at the menus, and I said to the waitress, “And you know what I want.”

  She said, “Monsieur, there is no coq au vin today.”

  You might as well have told me Santa Claus was dead. I said, “There's no coq au vin?”

  And she said, “Monsieur, be brave.” Annie, my assistant, was there. Ever since then, whenever we were in a pickle, Annie would say, “Monsieur, be brave.”

  When I moved to Universal, which is not that far away, a new restaurant had opened on Lankershim Boulevard called Café Barzac. It was packed. I knew how to worm my way into a restaurant, and I had the corner table every day. I was in my office in my bungalow. It was about 11:00 A.M. Lew Wasserman's secretary called. She said, “Mr. Mankiewicz, Mr. Wasserman is having a very important business lunch today, and he wanted to go to Barzac and they're completely booked. But we understand you have a table in the corner.”

  I said, “Yes.”

  She said, “Can Mr. Wasserman have your table today?”

  I said, “I will never let him forget this. Yes, he can have my table.”

  So Lew sat there with people from Matsushita and did a lot of negotiating in my booth. He called me to thank me. He said, “That's a nice table. Food's not bad, either.” He'd never eaten there.

  When word came out that Lew had cancer, MCA stock shot up to like 55. Everybody thought, he's gonna die, and then they're going to take it apart and the pieces will be sold. The pieces are worth a fortune. Then came the word that he'd been successfully treated, and the stock sank again. Lew said to me, “Do you have any idea what it's like when people think you're going to die and the value of your company goes up, and then they find out you're getting better and it goes down? It's the most humiliating thing. I may not have that long. This is the kind of cancer that comes back. So I decided if anybody's going to sell MCA, I'm going to sell it. I don't want the stock price to go up or down based on whether or not there's an ambulance in my driveway.”

  There was going to be yet another Writers Guild strike in 2002. One night shortly before he died, Lew said, “Are you guys going to strike? You shouldn't, you know. It's all different now. You have a twelve-month-a-year launching pad for new series. There's no fall season you can threaten them with anymore. Four companies own everything now. We used to have eight studios. Today, Time Warner owns TNN, CNN, TNT. Viacom owns Paramount, CBS, Nickelodeon, the Discovery Channel. Disney owns ESPN, ABC, ESPN1, and ESPN2. Fox owns Fox Sports Net 2 and 3 and Fox News. These four companies own everything. If I had to solve this strike today, I don't even know where I'd start.” One of the reasons it was so difficult to solve was that you didn't have that structure anymore. He was one of the people who built that negotiating structure. Now it's so nebulous. It's how much do you get of streaming off the Internet? The writers can say, “Well, we were out for another two or three weeks so that, on the streaming of original content, you're going to make $5.23.” They're going to steal from you anyway. But Lew was a titan.

  Natalie Wood

  Jack Haley Jr.'s house was where I met so many people who were so seminal in my life. One of them was Alan Pakula. We became friends, and he was so kind to me. I would spend a lot of holidays at his house, because I didn't have any family in L.A. He did a couple of pictures with Natalie Wood. I met Natalie through Alan, and we became really fast friends. And really close. She was divorced from R.J. Wagner at the time. He was the guest star of the Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre episode I rewrote. R.J. and I had become friends independently, and he actually hired me to write a screenplay for him, which ne
ver worked out.

  Natalie was fiercely loyal to her friends. I was so desperate to keep her as a friend. Natalie was the one woman whom I swore to God, under no circumstances was I ever going to have an affair with. She knew it. She was so valuable to me and such a great friend. We would take sauna baths together, and we necked a couple of times. But all I knew was that everybody who'd ever had an affair with Natalie had lost her, meaning was no longer around, with the exception of Arthur Loew. It was instant simpatico. Right away, we just took to each other. Gavin Lambert wrote a book about her, and in it he described our friendship as a “fierce friendship.” Every time I'd been with somebody, I'd lost them. I didn't want it to happen with her.

  Natalie was doing a movie called The Great Race with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. Dorothy Provine was also in the movie, and I was having a short, happy thing with Dorothy. Apparently, Natalie was cruel to her, and she wasn't a cruel person at all. Dorothy said, “I think she's jealous. I think she's saying, ‘I'm better looking than she is. What the fuck is he doing with her?’” Natalie was a fierce she-bear with her friends.

  I really hung on to that friendship; it was amazing to have a friend who was that beautiful, smart as a penny, and really quick. I didn't have anybody like that in my life, and I thought, I'm just going to fuck this up. We're going to have an affair; it's not going to work out. She was four years older than I was. She had just done Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which would be a huge hit, and she was the only actor that had a piece of it, too, so she was doing very well. She couldn't not work. She'd been working since she was four years old, since Miracle on 34th Street. We used to go to the movies. She got so excited when the movie was starting. She was a great movie fan. She would say, “Let's go see Claude Lelouch's film,” and I'd say, “Okay.” We'd bring our Academy cards because you could get in free in those days. She'd say, “Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges,” the famous line from Treasure of the Sierra Madre. She would just show up at the theater, and the manager would come running out, “Oh, Ms. Wood, please come in.”

  In 1969 she married a British talent agent named Richard Gregson, who was a wonderful guy; I liked Richard. They had a tumultuous marriage and they had Natasha, who's now an actress. Everything that Natalie wanted in life was to have a child. She quit acting to have that child. I saw her in the hospital. She used to love Mel Brooks' 2000 Year Old Man. She'd memorized the whole album. There's a piece in there where Carl Reiner says to him, “When you were back in prehistoric times, two thousand years ago—” and Mel says, “We lived in caves.” “So, you didn't have countries with a national anthem.” Mel says, “No, every cave had a national anthem.” And Carl Reiner says, “Do you remember the national anthem of your cave?” Mel says, “Yeah. Let ‘em all go to hell except Cave Seventy-Six.” I walked into Natalie's hospital room, and there she was with the baby. She looked at me and sang, “Let ‘em all go to hell except Cave Seventy-Six.”

  Richard, in an act of pure self-destruction, had an affair with Natalie's secretary when Natalie was out of town a couple of times. Natalie found out about it, and one night Richard came back from being out of town to find all of his belongings in the driveway. The door was locked and there was a security guard. And that was that. Richard was devastated. I was appointed an ambassador to come over to see if she would see him. I rang the doorbell, “It's Mank.” Natalie was sitting on a couch in the living room. She looked up at me and said, “If this is about Richard, you can turn around and walk right out the fucking door. If it's not, please come in.”

  I was in London a lot because of the Bonds, and Richard was in London and I used to see him. When Natalie was in London on a movie, she called me and we had lunch. She said, “If you're going to continue to see Richard, you can't see me anymore.”

  I said, “Natalie, listen, whatever happened between you guys—I love you; you're my friend, but you can't start ordering me as to who to see and who I can't have lunch with or have dinner with.”

  She burst into tears. She said, “You're right. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.” She was very complicated.

  Natalie is having some construction done on her house. This is before she remarried R.J. She is going to spend a month in Leslie Bricusse's house, which is in Beverly Hills, some five or six miles away from her home. Natalie has two Australian shepherds, Penny and Cricket. Two days after arriving at Leslie Bricusse's, Cricket runs away. Natalie is beside herself. She puts ads in the newspaper and has a service out looking for the dog. Nobody can find Cricket. Natalie is miserable. A couple of nights later, Natalie and I are going to dinner at some friend's house. We will be driving by Natalie's house. On the way home, she says to me, “Let's stop by my house if you don't mind. I just have a feeling…”

  I say, “Natalie, Cricket would have no way of knowing how to get to your house. It's six, seven miles away through Bel Air and Sunset Boulevard. She's never been out of the house before.”

  Natalie insists. I think she is just going to get her heart broken again. We drive up to the house where the construction is going on. It is the middle of the night. We get out of the car. There is silence. Natalie yells, “Cricket, Cricket!” More silence. She hangs her head. I open the car door for her to get back in, when suddenly, bursting through the hedge by the side of the driveway, is Cricket! Neither of us can believe it. Cricket is jumping up and down, we are in tears. It is a scene out of Lassie Come Home. I still cannot understand how that dog could walk seven miles through territories she had never been through before and wind up at her own house.

  Natalie had an interior decorator's card. When I bought my home in the early seventies, she said to me, “Listen, don't pay retail for anything. I've got a decorator's card.” She beat her little buns up and down Robertson Boulevard for me. We would go in a store and she would say, “No, don't take those towels. Here are the towels.” This was the essence of Natalie. She said, “We're going to have a big housewarming party for you.” I had a lot of friends; I thought it was a nice idea. She showed me the guest list, and there were people like Laurence Olivier and Henry Fonda. Natalie said, “Oh, they're not going to come. But when I invite them, they're going to send a gift.” I got a set of twelve crystal glasses from Laurence Olivier! She invited studio heads that I'd never worked for. She said, “They'll send something, believe me,” because it was signed “Natalie Wood” and everybody wanted her. That's how her little mind worked. Son of a bitch, a gift showed up from Lew Wasserman. They were all really good gifts. She said, “That's how you get the loot.”

  One night we were sitting in her living room, talking. She turned around and started to cry. I asked, “What the hell is it?”

  She said, “I met him again, and I'm in love again.” It was R.J. They had been divorced years ago. She saw him at John Foreman's party, he took her home, and she just dissolved into tears, she loved him so much. And they remarried.

  What supposedly happened did happen, and this is what it was. If you knew Natalie Wood, you would understand it. Christopher Walken was doing a movie with Natalie, Brainstorm, and Natalie and R.J. invited Walken out on their boat. In those days, R.J. would drink a little, Walken (as Mel Brooks calls it) smoked different barks from different trees, and Natalie would imbibe. Walken and R.J. got into an argument about acting. The radio was playing music. When there was anything uncomfortable or at a certain time of the evening, even if there was a big party, you'd suddenly turn around and Natalie would be gone. You wouldn't see her again. R.J. and Chris Walken were keeping up this argument. Natalie went to their stateroom and disappeared, which, for R.J., would be totally normal. She was just going to sleep. The Zodiac boat was banging against the side of the big boat, the Splendor, named for Splendor in the Grass. I spent many a trip on the Splendor. Natalie put on a navy pea jacket to go outside and pull the Zodiac up to tie it. She was scared of dark water—when she was doing Splendor in the Grass and had to swim, Charlie Maguire was holding her up. She slipped, and the minute the pea jacket hit the water, she went rig
ht under. She couldn't swim very well. Natalie was 105 pounds, fighting weight. They would not have heard anything because the radio was going, and as I said, it was not unlike Natalie to disappear. That was really common with her. She might not have had time to yell if she went into the water that fast. It was at night, the water was cold, and that pea jacket just filled up, and suddenly, it weighed as much as she did. Apparently, she had had quite a few drinks. Didn't take much to fill her up. I'm sure she was under the influence of alcohol when she slipped. She was, we would say, drunk. I know for a fact that it wasn't suicide. Two things: number one, she had been drinking; number two, she was going to play Anastasia at the Music Center heading for New York, and she was looking forward to it like crazy. It was going to be her debut on the stage; she was so excited about it. Bobby Fryer was producing it. That was all she was looking forward to.

  Natalie dies at night, and I don't hear about it until six o'clock in the morning when Margot Kidder, who had been up early and heard the news on the radio, calls. I am devastated. I get a call from Roddy McDowall, a very close friend of Natalie's, saying that R.J. Wagner will be returning home in a couple of hours. He thinks it would be a good idea if I was there along with him, Paul Ziffren, their friend and attorney, and Guy McElwaine, her agent and longtime friend, to provide some comfort. I get over to the house and join the others, and we wait for R.J., who finally arrives. They have tried to keep the news from the two little girls—Natasha, who is six, and Courtney, who is two—but they already know somehow. R.J. walks in, ashen, moving like a zombie. He recognizes the four of us standing there, nods, walks into the living room, and looks up at the staircase, where the two little girls are staring back at him. There is an endless silence, and then Natasha says, “I guess you'll have to be both the mommy and the daddy from now on.”