My Life as a Mankiewicz Page 3

  When we were about to move to New York in 1951, Dad announced that Timber couldn't come with us. Chris and I were in tears. But Dad was right, of course. Timber was getting on and had been used to running free his entire life. “You can't keep him cooped up in a New York apartment and walk him around the block twice a day,” Dad said. “You guys are going to have longer school hours and go to prep school, I hope. I'll be gone every day. What's he going to do? Lie around in a room twelve floors above a street full of traffic?” We gave Timber to a friend of Dad's at Fox, Otto Lang, who had a ranch in Sun Valley, Idaho. I ran into Otto much later on and he told me how happy his years with Timber were up there, and how much he loved him. So did I, pal.

  The Battle for Hollywood

  Before the release of All About Eve in 1950, and just before our family moved to New York, what my cousin Don later called “the Battle for Hollywood” took place, and Dad was directly in the eye of the storm. It was the time of the “blacklist.” The country was obsessed with the red scare, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was actively investigating the motion picture community, Senator Joseph McCarthy was in full flower, and lives and careers were being destroyed wholesale by the slightest implied “pinko” association. Dad was president of the Screen Directors Guild at the time. Cecil B. DeMille, who wielded great power in Hollywood, was instrumental in getting him elected to that position. Dad had just won two Oscars for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives. DeMille reasoned that a talented and popular young director would reinvigorate the Guild. Most important to DeMille, a virulent right-winger, Dad (later a lifetime liberal) was a registered Republican. While Dad and Mother were on vacation in Europe, DeMille took it on himself to announce that every director in the Guild would be required to sign a loyalty oath to the United States government in order to be able to work in Hollywood. When Dad and Mother returned on the Queen Mary, a gaggle of reporters met Dad on the New York docks. They asked him what he thought of the loyalty oath proposal. Dad was shocked. This was the first he'd ever heard of it, and he was president of the Guild. “I'm against it,” he told them. “I think it's insulting to the membership to question their patriotism and totally unnecessary.” By the time he returned to California, the Guild members had gone ballistic.

  DeMille and the right wing of the Guild asked Dad to reconsider his stance. He refused. The shit hit the fan. The Hearst newspapers played it up big. They already hated the name Mankiewicz because of Herman's having written Citizen Kane. Hearst columnist Louella Parsons had a popular national radio show at the time. On it one night she observed, “Isn't it a pity that Joe Mankiewicz, who Hollywood has nurtured and honored, has turned out to be a ‘fellow traveler.’” At school, Chris and I were called “Commies” by some of the other kids. We were a family under siege. DeMille and his cohorts sent motorcycle riders out at night to Guild members’ homes, asking them to sign a petition calling for Dad's impeachment. Not to sign would be considered un-American. Dad's position seemed hopeless. At one point, he, John Huston, and George Stevens were even locked out of Guild headquarters with no one seeming to be able to find the right key to let them in.

  Dad was running out of time. He placed an ad in Variety asking any director who agreed with him to show up that night in the back room of Chasen's restaurant. Out of several hundred Guild members, only twenty-five came. But what a twenty-five: William Wyler, George Stevens, John Huston, Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and others. Richard Brooks, who was there and at that point had directed only several minor action movies, told me later on: “I looked around that room and said to myself, shit, look at all the Oscars walking around in here. No matter what happens, all these guys are going to continue working and I'll get blacklisted.”

  The showdown occurred at a black-tie meeting of the Directors Guild in the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was not open to the public. Before anyone spoke, they had to identify themselves to the stenographer who was taking down everything that was said. At that time, only directors belonged to the Guild (no assistant directors or production managers, as is the case today) and there was only one female director, the actress Ida Lupino. This resulted, Dad remembered, in every speaker beginning with “Gentlemen, Miss Lupino…” DeMille spoke first, making his case: these were dangerous times; foreign infiltration into the fabric of America was a real danger. He went on to list the names of some who opposed him. Dad was appalled when, for some peculiar reason, DeMille affected a thick foreign accent while naming them: “Villy Vyler, Billy Vilder,” and so on. Rouben Mamoulian (The Mask of Zorro, Blood and Sand) stood up. He told DeMille he'd never been ashamed of his accent before and wasn't going to start now. William Wyler rose angrily and asked DeMille what he was doing during World War II when he, Wyler, was making The Memphis Belle in an American bomber on missions over Germany. The meeting was spiraling out of control.

  Finally, the great John Ford stood up. Dad's stomach churned. Ford's politics were to the right of Attila the Hun, but no director in the history of Hollywood had ever been held in higher esteem. Ford introduced himself to the stenographer: “My name is John Ford. I direct westerns.” Nervous laughter from those assembled. Ford began: he supposed that he and Joe Mankiewicz didn't share one political opinion, that he was much closer in social philosophy to DeMille. But, he went on to say, and directly to DeMille, he didn't like DeMille personally, and especially the way he'd insulted some of his fellow directors in his speech tonight. As for himself, he'd be happy to sign a loyalty oath, but goddamnit, no one was going to force him to do it. “So what do you say?” he asked the crowd. “Why don't we all go home and give the Polack”—Dad—“back his job?”

  Dad won the impeachment vote in a landslide. He never forgot Ford for what he did. DeMille left the meeting a broken man. Later on, to appease the entire Guild, especially the center right led by Frank Capra (himself an immigrant from Sicily), Dad did accept the idea of a loyalty oath, but only on a voluntary basis. He never signed himself, nor did many others. In many ways, this was Dad's finest hour. He stood up for what he believed with the odds heavily stacked against him and at great personal risk to his reputation and career. Later on he told me: “Looking back on it, I wish I hadn't been so dismissive of the oath right there on the New York docks. Maybe I could have returned to L.A. and negotiated a compromise, the kind we finally came up with. But DeMille made that impossible, and when you say what you really feel and you mean it, you have to see it through.”

  Shortly afterward, Dad resigned as president, but not before admitting assistant directors and production managers into the Guild. He was moving to New York and was a filmmaker, not a labor executive. He wanted Chris and me to grow up in an international city bursting with energy. The home of Broadway, the New York Times, the Yankees, Giants, Dodgers, and Wall Street. He wanted us to get an eastern education at the best schools in the country. He was, after all, the son of a distinguished professor. He actually believed that kids shouldn't be allowed to go to school in blue jeans. He used to say about Los Angeles only half in jest: “I don't think that people were physically meant to live here. It's an artificially inseminated desert. When the ‘big one’ hits, it's going to crack off and fall into the ocean. Later on, neon signs will float to the surface and the rest of the world will wonder what everyone did here.”

  Mother in the 1940s

  Despite her illness, Mother was an extremely intelligent woman and capable of great warmth. She had a unique ear for languages and spoke English and later Italian fluently, without a trace of accent. She was of tremendous help to Dad as an in-house critic of his screenplays. He routinely solicited her opinion and acted on it. Their relationship was doubtless eroding, but I was too young to understand that. The house on Mapleton was the last time they shared a bedroom. The abortive attempt to return to the stage must have been a crushing disappointment to her. There is correspondence from both writer Edna Ferber and director George S. Kaufman commenting on what a marvelou
s performance she gave and how she “handled the situation with such great dignity,” but no reason is given for her replacement out of town. I can only assume her mental illness must have flared up one night and it scared the hell out of them.

  Dad in the 1940s

  Dad was, simply put, a serial philanderer. He'd had many affairs while writing and producing at MGM, most notably with Loretta Young, Judy Garland, and Joan Crawford. Louis B. Mayer, self-appointed father to all at Metro, was extremely upset about Garland in particular because of her young age. But Dad and Judy either couldn't or wouldn't let go of each other. Their relationship included Judy becoming pregnant by him and having an abortion (I can't prove this, but I know it's true). Their affair continued well after he was married to Mother and Judy had married Vincente Minnelli. In the seventies I was best man at Liza Minnelli's wedding to Jack Haley Jr. in the same little Santa Barbara church where Judy had married Vincente. Liza and I were close at that time—she was literally bursting with humor and talent. She knew all about her mother's long affair with Dad and kidded that we could have been half brother and sister. She also told me that whenever Judy sang “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe,” it was silently dedicated to him. More about both Judy and Liza later.

  Joan Crawford also lasted quite a while. Apparently (according to Dad), she stood over my baby crib one night, while mother was in Menninger's, looked down at me, then turned to him and said, “That should be mine.”

  Louis B. Mayer had always wanted to create a new Irving Thalberg for himself at MGM, and he selected Dad to fill that role. By the time he was thirty, Joseph L. Mankiewicz had already produced more than twenty films—among them, Million Dollar Legs, Fritz Lang's Fury, Manhattan Melodrama (John Dillinger went to see it the night he was shot leaving the theater), and The Philadelphia Story. He also “fixed” most of the screenplays and had been Oscar nominated for screenwriting. But Dad wanted to direct, to direct what he wrote, and Mayer refused, telling him, “You have to learn to crawl before you can walk.” By letting Dad direct he would lose the most promising producer he had on the lot. Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox had no such limitations in mind, however. With the implicit understanding that he would become a director, Dad moved to Fox in the mid-forties.

  Major Studios in the 1940s

  At that time, with a few notable exceptions (Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, etc.), virtually every actor, writer, producer, director, cameraman, and editor was under contract to a major studio. These weren't merely work centers—they were more like self-contained sovereign states. They even had their own baseball teams. The commissaries served gourmet food of all kinds, available twenty-four hours a day. The more important filmmakers had their own bungalows, often with a bedroom. There were steam rooms, barber shops, and mail delivery, and each studio had an extensive back lot with its own Western Street, Jungleland, Big City Streets, and more.

  The 20th Century Fox lot sprawled over most of what is today called Century City, a major office building and condo community next to Beverly Hills. Dad had a large bungalow surrounded by fake grass and a little picket fence. When I rewrote and directed the two-hour movie-pilot of Hart to Hart, that bungalow was occupied by Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg, then the two most powerful producers in television, with five hours on the air weekly, not counting long-form projects. The bungalow had been enlarged to accommodate both of them, but when I entered Aaron's office and saw the working brick fireplace and adjoining bedroom, waves of memories crashed in.

  According to Dad, the most important man on the lot, the one you wanted on your side, was not Darryl Zanuck but Henry the Bootblack. He shined the shoes of every executive on a daily basis. They were constantly on the phone and talked freely in front of him while he worked. As a result, he knew everything that was going on at Fox: whose contract was being dropped, what project was going to get a green light or be canceled, and who was currently in or out of favor. When one of Fox's films returned to Los Angeles from African locations, the studio brought a group of Watusi warriors with them for additional shooting on the back lot. To prevent them from being culture shocked, they were housed at the studio inside the Jungle set. The commissary catered to their specific food preferences, but they still had one major complaint—no women. Henry the Bootblack was drafted to remedy the situation. He recruited a posse of downtown African American hookers who were bused to Fox several nights a week. As I said, there was absolutely nothing you couldn't get at a major studio in the forties.

  Snapshots from 1940s Films

  Woman of the Year (1942)

  The first pairing of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, produced by Dad and directed by George Stevens. Dad knew Hepburn well from The Philadelphia Story. At that time he and Spencer Tracy were great friends and habitually lunched together in the MGM commissary. Hepburn recalled she knew that and that she was about to work with Tracy even though they'd never met. One day she positioned herself in front of the commissary and “accidentally” ran into them as they were leaving. Dad made the introductions. They chatted briefly, then Tracy excused himself since he was shooting and had to get back to the stage.

  Hepburn watched him leave, turned to Dad, and said, “He's rather short, isn't he.”

  “Don't worry,” Dad replied. “He'll cut you down to size.”

  Dad and Tracy owned a boat together, a 104-foot schooner, the Sartosha. It was moored in Long Beach and was costing them a fortune to maintain, needing daily wash downs for its pristine teak decks and at least a skeleton crew on permanent salary. They tried to sail to Hawaii once, ran into a storm one day out, turned around, went home, and finally sold it. I was putting around Catalina Harbor with Robert Wagner some forty years later in a rubber Zodiac when we saw a beautiful schooner at anchor called the Jomar. We pulled alongside. The captain recognized R.J. and asked us aboard. It turned out he owned Martinson's Coffee (an eastern brand). Their instant coffee was called “Jomar.” In the captain's cabin we looked through the ship's log. Sonofagun. It once had been called the Sartosha, and there were Dad's and Tracy's signatures as cocaptains. I told Dad, and he was thrilled that she was still afloat.

  Dragonwyck (1946)

  The great German director Ernst Lubitsch (Ninotchka, Heaven Can Wait) was somewhat of a mentor to Dad. Our house was always filled with the German-speaking members of Hollywood in the forties since Dad and Mother both spoke the language. Lubitsch was the original director on Dragonwyck but fell ill before the shooting started. Dad had written the screenplay, and Lubitsch went to bat on his behalf with Zanuck, insisting that Dad replace him as director.

  While writing the screenplay, Dad once asked Lubitsch what exactly he wanted out of a certain scene. The director replied, “Give me some of those great Lubitsch touches.”

  They were lunching in the Fox commissary one day when a young man approached the table and stuck out his hand: “Mr. Lubitsch, I just got my first job as a director this morning and I wanted to shake your hand for luck.”

  “Certainly,” said Lubitsch, taking it. “When do you start shooting?”

  “In ten days.”

  He left. Lubitsch turned to Dad: “That young man is directing his first film and he has ten days to prepare. I need six months. It should be the other way around.”

  Dragonwyck starred Vincent Price, Gene Tierney, and Walter Huston. It was a melodramatic, gothic nineteenth-century romance in which Price played a Dutch aristocrat, “the patroon” in a huge, upstate New York manor house. Vincent later told me about the first day of shooting: “It was the most curious piece of direction I ever received. Joe, God bless him, was so psyched up on his first day. He kept reminding me how to carry myself as a nobleman. ‘Erect, always erect,’ he repeated endlessly. My first shot was simply to walk down a long staircase. We rolled, someone yelled ‘speed,’ and Joe said: ‘All right then, Vincent. Nice erection!’”

  Harry Morgan was also in the film. Some forty years later I was directing him in Dragnet with Dan Aykroyd and
Tom Hanks. Harry had done the TV series with Jack Webb and was playing Danny's boss. One day he asked me, “Is this your first feature as a director?” I nodded. “How about that? I was in your father's first feature, Dragonwyck.” As it was sinking in, Harry added: “I wouldn't make too much of that. I was in everyone's first feature.”

  Dad was so hyped at finally directing that one day he asked his cameraman, Artie Miller, for his viewfinder, “just because as a director I thought I should.” He raised it to his eye: “I couldn't see a fucking thing.” Miller took the viewfinder from him, turned it around, and handed it back. Dad had been looking through the wrong end. This mistake became a memorable moment four years later in All About Eve when, just before the famous party sequence, Gary Merrill says to Bette Davis, “I was just telling Eve about the time I looked through the wrong end of a viewfinder.” She replies, “Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke.”

  The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)

  The first of four films he would do with Rex Harrison. The female lead was once again Gene Tierney, whom Dad recalled as “in many ways, the most beautiful woman I ever saw.” Need I say more?

  The film was later made as a TV series starring my dear friend Hope Lange. Mrs. Muir's little daughter in the film was played by a very young Natalie Wood, later to become one of the best friends I ever had. Natalie's Russian mother (we called her “Mud”) was fiercely ambitious for her daughter. The first day Natalie was to work, Dad was behind schedule and couldn't get to her. He called her and “Mud” over and told them she'd work tomorrow, then gave Natalie an overnight assignment to keep her busy. “Learn how to spell Mankiewicz,” he said. “Once you can spell Mankiewicz, you can go to work.”