Tom Mankiewicz - My Life as a Mankiewicz: An Insiders Journey through Hollywood

Acknowledgments

Pat McGilligan, Anne Dean Watkins, Liz Smith (copyeditor), Bailey Johnson, David Cobb, Mack McCormick, the staff of the University Press of Kentucky, Grace Kono-Wells and Vernon Wells of Keystrokes, Ashley Zastrow, Dan Leonard, Andy Erish, Chapman University.

Bob Stevens, Ann Moss, Russell J. Frackman and Abe Somer of Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp, Gail and Jerry Oppenheimer, Stefanie Powers, Jill and R.J. Wagner, Richard and Lauren Donner, Alex Mankiewicz, Sandra Moss, Cedric Castro, the Palm West Hollywood, Connie Morgan, Genie Vasels.

Desly Movius, David Arnoff, Kathy Holt, D.J. Hall, Toby Watson, Judy Diamond, Deborah Hildebrand, Richard Harris, Barbara Margulies, Leslie Bockian, Jerry Henderson, Istvan and Rosa Toth, John Cerney, Bret Gallagher, Jane and Doug Poole, Kel O'Connell, Marilyn Bagley, Dr. Joe and Liz Ruiz, Susan and Joe Coyle, Jonne-Marie and Paul, Steve and Pete.

Leslie Bertram Crane, Meagan Hufnail, Chloe Crane, Anne and Charles Sloan, Deborah Agar, Eric Agar, Ian and Kim Agar, Steve and Karen Wilson, Bill and Marlene Bertram, Michael Bertram, David Bertram, Bob Page.

Christopher Fryer, David Diamond, Suzy Friendly, Niki Dantine, Drs. Tom and Jeri Munn.

The Family

The Mankiewicz family was and is a complex network of literate, competitive achievers. The majority write or have written for a living. While capable of real affection, most of us rarely show it. Rather, we caress with one-liners (usually acerbic and at someone else's expense) or shrewd (we are totally convinced) observations on film, literature, politics, or the state of the world in general.

Pop

My paternal grandfather died before I had a chance to know him. Pop, as he was referred to by the family, was Professor Frank Mankiewicz, a German Jew who immigrated through Ellis Island with his wife, Johanna, at the turn of the twentieth century. They settled briefly in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where my father, Joe, and his older brother, Herman, were born, then moved to New York City, where Pop taught languages at Stuyvesant High School before becoming a distinguished professor at Columbia University. Later on, I actually met two of his former students: Sheldon Leonard, an actor who for years played small-time hoods, and who wound up the successful and wealthy television producer of The Danny Thomas Show and The Andy Griffith Show; and the versatile actor Ross Martin, best known for his costarring role in The Wild, Wild West with Robert Conrad. They both had warm memories of Pop.

There was a darker side to Pop, though, perhaps unintentional, but crucial to the sometimes crippling insecurities in his children and some of their childrenthe pursuit of excellence, taken to an obsession. The original parent who, when presented by his son with an exam on which he'd scored a 96, wanted to know what happened to the other 4 percent. Both Dad and Herman were, in effect, child prodigies. Both graduated from Columbia while still in their teens. Herman had a dazzling pre-Hollywood career: sportswriter, drama critic for the New York World, playwright, one of the legendary wits of the Algonquin Round Table with the likes of Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. His screenwriting career spanned a wide river from the Marx Brothers to the cinematically immortal Citizen Kane. More on Herman later. He died in his fifties, an alcoholic, compulsive gambler, unemployable and deeply in debt. To this day I'm convinced that as the eldest son, he finally cracked under Pop's impossible expectations of excellence and achievement.

At first, Dad was able to fly under that radar without missing a beat. Hell, he was nominated for an Oscar at twenty-one, writing the story for a movie called Skippy starring child actor Jackie Cooper. More than forty-five years later I was providing dialogue for Jackie while rewriting Superman, in which he played Perry White, editor of the Daily Planet. As Jackie said at the time, I guess this is what they mean by coming full circle.

Pop's obsession with excellence, seemingly no less than Ahab's with Moby Dick, ran deeply through the family. I wouldn't presume to know the full effect it had on Herman's children, Don, Frank, and Josie, and their children. I do know what I believe it did to my brother Chris, and to me. I grew up in a family where to be a Mankiewicz really meant that you had to be somebody.

There was a portrait of Pop that sat on the wall directly over my father's leather chair in his study where he wrote his screenplays. It remained in that exact place through four different studies in four different homes. Pop looked to be a stern, implacable person, neither a trace of twinkle in the eye nor a tiny curve of humor at the mouth. His eyes stared straight out, never leaving you. After Dad's funeral, back at the house, various members of the family assembled in the study. Dad's then wife of some thirty years, Rosemary, asked if anyone wanted the painting. Silence. No one did. Don was the only immediate family member who wasn't able to attend the funeral. It was conveniently decided that he should have it. The last I heard, he gave it to one of his sister Josie's sons, who now has it leaning against a wall in a Santa Monica apartment. Requiescat in pace, Pop.

Johanna Mankiewicz

Pop's wife. My grandmother, the mother of Herman, Joe, and their sister, Erna. I never heard her mentioned once in any way in any story ever told by any member of the family. There was no animosity involvedshe was simply a nonperson. Until I was ten or twelve, if you'd threatened to kill me unless I gave you my grandmother's first name, I'd have had to have said, Shoot.

Dad

One of the most brilliant, complex, intensely literate, and conflicted human beings ever to inhabit the planet. Someone who began life as the kid brother and wound up the Don Corleone of his family. Every security and insecurity of his personality can be found in the characters of his best screenplays, as can many of the emotions he was somehow unable to express freely in real life.

He was both the protagonist and the victim of a long, punishing marriage to a beautiful, warm, but deeply troubled woman, Rosa Stradner, an Austrian actress. She was his second wife, and mother to me and my older brother Chris. Dad's first marriage, which lasted only a matter of months, was to a woman I would later know as Elizabeth Reynal, a Philadelphia socialite, wife of the noted publisher Eugene Reynal. She had a son by Dad, Eric, who became a successful investment banker and lives in the United Kingdom, and with whom I have a very cordial relationship.

Several years after Mother committed suicide, Dad married Rosemary Matthews, an Englishwoman who first went to work for him in Rome in the early fifties while he was directing The Barefoot Contessa. That's when I first met her, at age ten or eleven. They remained close friends and occasional coworkers (and almost certainly more) through the decade before Mother died, and had a daughter, Alexandra. I'm convinced that Rosemary's love and devotion to Dad added a decade or more to his life. Much more about Dad later. All about Dad.

Mother

The single most important influence in my life, although certainly not in the way she intended. She had a mental condition, a form of schizophrenia usually triggered by alcohol, and her health degenerated over the years until her untimely death in 1958. Beautiful and intelligent, a talented actress, she was haunted by a disease that made her absolutely terrifying at times, especially to a child.

She and my Austrian grandmother, whom we affectionately called Gross (short for Grossmutter), fled Austria and the Nazis in the mid-thirties. My grandfather and an uncle, Fritz, stayed behind to fight for their country. No one ever found out what happened to the old man. Fritz became an SS officer and was executed against a wall in Aachen, Germany, by Allied troops. I never knew I had an Uncle Fritz until I was about ten. Dad didn't think it was a particularly good idea to have a precocious little motormouth running around Los Angeles in the forties talking about his uncle the SS officer.