The Brothers Mankiewicz

Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics

Sydney Ladensohn Stern

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781617032677
• eBook ISBN:
  9781617032684
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Winner of the 2020 Peter C. Rollins Book Award
Longlisted for the 2020 Moving Image Book Award by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation
Named a 2019 Richard Wall Memorial Award Finalist by the Theatre Library Association Herman J. (1897–1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture's only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture. Despite triumphs as diverse as Monkey Business and Cleopatra, and Pride of the Yankees and Guys and Dolls, the witty, intellectual brothers spent their Hollywood years deeply discontented and yearning for what they did not have—a career in New York theater. Herman, formerly an Algonquin Round Table habitué, New York Times and New Yorker theater critic, and playwright-collaborator with George S. Kaufman, never reconciled himself to screenwriting. He gambled away his prodigious earnings, was fired from all the major studios, and drank himself to death at fifty-five. While Herman drifted downward, Joe rose to become a critical and financial success as a writer, producer, and director, though his constant philandering with prominent stars like Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Gene Tierney distressed his emotionally fragile wife who eventually committed suicide. He wrecked his own health using uppers and downers in order to direct Cleopatra by day and finish writing it at night, only to be very publicly fired by Darryl F. Zanuck, an experience from which Joe never fully recovered. For this award-winning dual portrait of the Mankiewicz brothers, Sydney Ladensohn Stern draws on interviews, letters, diaries, and other documents still in private hands to provide a uniquely intimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the lives, loves, work, and relationship between these complex men.

THE MANKIEWICZ BROTHERS HOLLYWOOD

CHAPTER 7

In Pursuit of a Lump Sum

MGM BEGAN PRODUCTION OF THE ROAD TO MANDALAY IN APRIL 1926, but Walter Wanger, a handsome, cultured, longtime New York friend of Herman’s, had become Paramount’s general manager of production, and he convinced Herman to work for Paramount. Sara and the boys spent the summer at the New Jersey shore while Herman started work in Los Angeles, at $400 a week, plus $5,000 bonuses for every scenario Paramount used, with a guarantee of no less than four a year. He returned in the fall to fetch his family, and as they made their way west on the train, Herman and Sara enjoyed elegant dinners in their private compartment while Don, six, and Frank, four, rode in a separate car with a nanny. A studio limousine met them in Pasadena—it was considered déclassé to ride all the way downtown to Union Station.

Sara loved Los Angeles from the start and moved them through a series of apartments and houses until she found the right home. Once they lived next door to actor Edmund Lowe, who kept his pet canary supplied with marijuana seeds. Another house resembled a castle, complete with a spiral staircase leading to a turret Herman used as an office. Eventually they rented 1105 Tower Road, a large Mediterranean-style house in Beverly Hills, with a portecochère, a free-form swimming pool, and an office for Herman over the three-car garage. A huge screened sleeping porch topped a latticed area where Sara installed a ping pong table. The owner was a Canadian woman whose guardians were unable to agree on a rental price, so they rented at a nominal rate for years until the woman died. Then they bought it from her estate.

Emulating many Hollywood couples, they took separate bedrooms. Sara decorated hers to resemble a glamorous Paramount set—large and white, with a fireplace and a huge walk-in closet. Herman’s was smaller, darker, and smoky from his Camels. He cared more about his library, which they housed in the downstairs study, but he too began savoring his newfound riches. He bought new clothes, golf clubs (though he didn’t play golf), and director Ernst Lubitsch’s Cadillac convertible limousine. They hired a series of couples, many of them German, though the first was an Irish chauffeur with a wife who cooked. Sara supplemented the couples with a series of “Frauleins” to take care of the children. With Sara’s Chrysler and Herman’s Buick two-seater, their fleet of three cars was excessive for that era (even in Beverly Hills), but Herman’s Buick didn’t last long. Always a terrible driver, when he saw a policeman and could not resist yelling, “Look! No hands!” he ran into a telephone pole.

With Don and Frank, Los Angeles.

They became sought-after guests, with dazzling new friends and neighbors. Greta Garbo, who lived with their neighbor, actor John Gilbert, swam in the nude, played fierce tennis with Herman, and laughed uproariously at his jokes even when she didn’t understand them. If he was at a party, George Gershwin usually sat down at the piano and played for the rest of the evening. Mary Astor, Oscar Hammerstein, and John Barrymore lived nearby, as did David and Irene Mayer Selznick and agent Leland Hayward and his wife, Margaret Sullavan, who became lifelong friends. They gave costume parties and entertained friends from back east like Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who brought his daughter Scottie and, later, Sheilah Graham, who devoted an entire column to a dinner party that featured fried chicken for the Selznicks, Haywards, and Harpo Marxes, plus Irving Berlin, Sidney Howard, and of course, Fitzgerald.

Herman and Sara had no idea they would be there for the rest of their lives. They also were unaware that revolution was just around the corner. Talkies were about to sweep the nation, and as the silent-movie era sputtered to a close, there would be winners like Herman, whose intelligence and wit were invaluable once spoken dialogue was required, and losers, mostly actors who were better seen than heard. Because Herman did not regard movie work as his real life, he delighted in what he imagined was his temporary sojourn in the lap of luxury. All he had to do was what came naturally.

Writing scenarios was easy—he already entertained friends with elaborate fantasies that went far beyond wisecracks. “He could improvise in a way that just held you spellbound,” Nunnally Johnson recalled years later. The intertitles or titles, the onscreen captions that conveyed dialogue or explained the action, were actually very important, because they could make or break a movie. That was why top title writers were so highly paid. To Herman, they were as easy as captioning comic strips; coining clever ones was just an extension of what the epigrammatic Herman did for fun every day.

At Paramount, the most sophisticated of the major studios, Herman reported to Benjamin (B. P.) Schulberg, a literate former newspaperman who had started his career as F.P.A.’s copy boy, and Schulberg treated Herman like a star. Instead of a tiny office in the writers’ warren, Herman had a secretary and a spacious office suite in the administration building. Working only a few hours a day, Herman spent the rest of his employer’s time reading newspapers, both trade and general; collecting and disseminating Hollywood gossip; placing bets with bookies and friends; wandering around the Paramount lot; playing and gambling with other writers; and punctuating long lunches with witticisms that were repeated all over town.

Naturally, there was a trade-off to be made in exchange for the enormous salary and luxurious perquisites. Like theater, moviemaking was a collaborative process, but the difference in status between screenwriter and playwright was profound. Theater evolved from Sophocles and Shakespeare. Theatrical backers, producers, directors, or actors might ask—or even insist—that a playwright make changes. But a play’s script remained the playwright’s, and the playwright remained a respected member of the creative team.

Movies grew out of peep shows and vaudeville. They started as commerce and developed into art. Studio chiefs respected literature and theater and had no objection to producing art—as long as the art made money. Most of them had started as theater owners and ran their studios like the factories that they were: studios existed to supply products that would pull audiences into their theaters. Screenwriters were studio employees, cogs in the picture-manufacturing machines. Their scripts were studio property. Studio executives could do whatever they chose with them and routinely did. As Herman put it, “When the producer says to you, ‘Now in Reel Three the fellow shouldn’t kiss the girl, he should kiss the cow,’” that fellow was going to kiss the cow and there wasn’t a thing the writer could do about it.

In the beginning Herman was more amused than indignant, since he viewed himself as a playwright and critic, temporarily slumming for the money. His collaborations with Kaufman and Connelly were his real work, and both plays were moving toward fruition. “If this play fails, I’ll never speak to you again,” Kaufman warned Herman before he left for the coast, the first of many threats Kaufman made to collaborators. But once The Good Fellow went into production, Herman realized his job on the other side of the country was more than an inconvenience—it directly affected the production. Herman had strong opinions about what the play needed, but when they started summer previews in Long Branch, New Jersey, he could only wait anxiously on the sidelines.

The response was not encouraging, so Kaufman worked on revisions and tried again in Atlantic City. Its audiences also were not amused. When Kaufman complained about their lack of merriment to actress Ruth Gordon, who was also trying out a play there, she grumbled that her audiences were laughing, but the play was a tragedy. “Let’s switch audiences,” Kaufman suggested.

In October 1926 Kaufman took it to Broadway anyway, with John E. Hazzard, a musical comedy performer and playwright, in the lead. Herman considered Hazzard a poor choice to begin with, and because he frequently forgot his lines, he threw off the other actors as well. Their subject also seemed to be a dud. Satire about lodges bored New Yorkers and offended lodge members. Critics generally liked Hazzard, so they blamed the script for the play’s shortcomings. They closed after only seven performances, but Kaufman never did stop speaking to Herman. Instead, he offered help with We, the People.

Even with capable actors and a first-class producer, Herman and Marc Connelly’s The Wild Man of Borneo also floundered. After a brief 1926 tryout in Boston, they shelved it and tried again in Washington, D.C., the following year. They planned a September opening on Broadway, but Herman wired Connelly:

AFTER STUDYING THE PLAY CAREFULLY … I DON’T THINK IT IS IN ANY SHAPE TO GO INTO REHEARSAL…. I THINK IT IS UNDERWRITTEN THROUGHOUT AND THOMPSON’S ROLE IN PARTICULAR IS DANGEROUSLY LEFT TO THE AUDIENCE’S IMAGINATION RATHER THAN OBJECTIVELY AND STRENUOUSLY PRESENTED STOP I MEAN THAT YOU AND I KNOW HE IS A BOISTEROUS LIAR FULL OF GUSTO BUT THE AUDIENCE HAS LITTLE BEYOND OUR WORD FOR IT STOP I ASSUME YOU HAVE BEEN IN REHEARSAL SINCE MONDAY WHICH MEANS REHEARSALS COULD BE CALLED OFF WITHOUT DAMAGE AND RENEWED IN ANOTHER WEEK OR TEN DAYS STOP IF YOU AGREE I WILL DEVOTE ALL MY TIME FOR NEXT WEEK TO SUPPLYING THE COMEDY AND CHARACTER LINES I THINK ARE MISSING FROM THOMPSON’S ROLE STOP PLEASE UNDERSTAND I AM WILLING TO YIELD TO YOUR GREATER EXPERIENCE IF YOU THINK I AM WRONG BUT I FELT I SHOULD SPEAK OPENLY.

Connelly disagreed, so they opened September 13. Herman wired, “YOU HAVE WORKED LONG AND FAITHFULLY AND IF IT WERE HUMANLY POSSIBLE I’D WANT THE WILD MAN TO BE A HIT TONIGHT MORE FOR YOUR SAKE THAN FOR MINE STOP AS IT IS YOU GET AT LEAST A FIFTY BREAK IN MY HOPES STOP ONCE AGAIN MY SINCERE THANKS.” (He also wired Pop, “BEST WISHES FOR MY SUCCESS TONIGHT.”)

Afterward, Sam Zolotow from the Times wired, “CONFIDENTIAL FIRST TWO ACTS BAD STOP THIRD ACT SWELL STOP AUDIENCE APPLAUDED ONLY THIRD ACT STOP SHOW IS FLOP NO USE KIDDING YOURSELF STOP.” They closed after fifteen performances.

So that was that. Herman had worked with two masters of the theater and failed both times. He framed Zolotow’s wire alongside one from Kaufman, printed “R.I.P.” between the two, entitled it “The Lamentable Condition of the American Theatre,” hung it in his office, and moved on.

Despite those disappointments, Pop continued to urge Herman to return to more worthy pursuits, though he seemed inspired to pursue the good life himself, with a small cabin in Mt. Tremper, a Catskill Mountains hamlet in upstate New York. It lacked basic amenities like indoor plumbing, and Hanna and Joe both hated it. But Pop loved it and even embarked on cockeyed moneymaking schemes like raising chickens. Unfortunately, he bought twenty-five roosters and one hen instead of the reverse, so they eventually had to eat them. Worse, Hanna had to do all the slaughtering because Pop couldn’t bear to watch.

Joe, who venerated Herman’s occupation as much as Pop disdained it, strove to retain his eminent brother’s attention. Stuck in the cabin with his parents during Easter vacation 1927, the eighteen-year-old college junior reported: My dear Brother and Gossip,

As I write this, I am seated at a most quaint old writing table in the right wing of the Willhouse, a most quaint old tavern situated in a most quaint old nook of the upper Catskill mountains … the house guests number among them the mater and the pater and the two darling childhood friends Lord and Lady Neustaeder of Boro Park [Brooklyn]. You can imagine my feeling of intense gratitude at their kindness in bringing with them their twelve year old son as my playmate! And after the evening meal—a splendid repast of botrost, gugumber salat, bodadoes and more wegetables—Lady Neustaeder in the fat Jewish glory of her sesqui-centennial marriage anniversary, dispatched Willie to my chamber to help me with my home study!

… I wonder will they miss Willie and if they do, will they think to look in the cistern.

By Christmas, Joe was in a better mood, thanking Herman and Sara for sending their mother a Christmas box of fruit and their father a check. “He needed it and it came just at the right time—which, by the way, is all the time.”

Even before theatrical failures dimmed his dreams of escape, Herman had decided he could bring New York to Hollywood by importing some of his friends. If Ben Hecht couldn’t write him a good script, Herman told Schulberg, then Schulberg could tear up Herman’s two-year contract and fire them both. His boss could hardly refuse a bet like that, so Herman wired, “Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures. All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.”

Hecht, who later claimed that Herman’s telegram arrived just in time to avert a financial disaster so severe that he had taken to his bed with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, hurried west to enroll in what he called the Herman Mankiewicz School of Screenwriting. As the Master told him:

Herman and Ben Hecht create a spoof-film for B. P. Schulberg for Christmas. The waiter’s recommendation is an enema.

I want to point out to you that in a novel a hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for a finish. In a movie this is not allowed. The hero, as well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants. But you have to shoot him in the end. When he falls with a bullet in his forehead, it is advisable that he clutch at the Gobelin tapestry on the library wall and bring it down over his head like a symbolic shroud. Also, covered by such a tapestry, the actor does not have to hold his breath while he is being photographed as a dead man.

Herman’s apt pupil went a step further. Dispensing altogether with a hero, Hecht wrote Underworld in a week, creating a new genre, the gangster story, and earning the industry’s first Academy Award for screen-writing. Schulberg gave Hecht a $10,000 bonus, but before he could enjoy it, Herman snatched it away to pay some of his own gambling debts. He took so long to repay it that Hecht dragged him into their boss’s office, where Herman talked Schulberg into giving him a $500-a-week raise, payable to Hecht. That simultaneously repaid Hecht and made Herman the studio’s highest-paid writer, at least for a while.

None of them imagined Ben Hecht would become so prolific that he could make enough money in Hollywood in half a year to live in New York the rest of the time and write what he wanted. But he clearly was so valuable that Schulberg sent Herman back to New York to find more like him. In April 1927 Herman wrote Sara that he had lined up a number of writers, including S. N. Behrman, Oliver H. P. Garrett, and Nunnally Johnson, who became one of Herman’s best friends. Although most were newspapermen like Herman, he impressed them. “I was about twenty-three or twenty-four when I first saw him and so was he, but he was four times as sophisticated as I was,” Johnson recalled. By May, Herman had eight writers working on a five-week deadline to write an acceptable story for Paramount.

In the fall Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer, whose spoken dialogue and singing by Al Jolson changed the world of movies forever. Because the industry needed time to develop the sound technology, and theaters had to acquire equipment to project it, the changeover took a few years. But with sound, plots became more complicated and dialogue more important. So back went Herman, on another hunting expedition, always happy to visit his New York haunts, especially on a Paramount expense account. “I’ve got to find five writers to bring back,” he told Wells Root, Time’s theater and film critic, when they ran into each other at the “21” Club. Root went.

The recruiting trips became known as the Herman Mankiewicz Fresh Air Fund for Writers or, more modestly, the Paramount Fresh Air Fund for New York Newspapermen, and Schulberg made Herman head of Paramount’s scenario department. The influx of so many former newspapermen brought a wisecracking, irreverent, flippant sensibility to film that replaced sentimental melodrama in setting the tone of many of Hollywood’s most successful films. The boomtown atmosphere also attracted wr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Herman
• The Mankiewicz Brothers of Hollywood
• Joe
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Family Tree
• Notes
• Filmography
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Photo Credits
• About the Author