Book review — The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics

This Dostoyevskian title recalls the emotional dynamics of other talented brothers engaged in friendly or hostile competition: Henry and William James, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Isaac and Israel Singer. But Herman Mankiewicz (1897-1953), twelve years older than Joseph (1909-93), was more like a father than a rival. He helped Joe get started as a writer in Hollywood and provided crucial encouragement at the beginning of his career that lasted for forty years. By contrast, their father Franz, born in Berlin, was a critical and overbearing high school teacher who was never satisfied with his sons’ achievements.

Joe described himself — and Herman — as the atheist son of Jewish immigrants. But Herman’s wife was Orthodox. When he asked, “Could you learn to love me?” she replied, “Probably. I learned Hebrew once.” As a lifelong collaborator on scripts, Herman said he was prepared to meet his “co-Maker”. Joe’s third wife was Episcopalian and he made a pro forma conversion at the end of his life so that she could finally be buried next to him.

The humorist SJ Perelman called Herman “a large, Teutonic individual with an abrasive tongue”. An irritated producer described him as “one of the nicest men I’ve ever known but he’d rather argue for eight hours than rewrite one line”. Sydney Stern writes that while Herman worked on the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business (1931) it seemed as if he were part of their crazy movie: “they could be as maniacal in person as they were on screen”.

Herman’s greatest achievement was the screenplay for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), though he admitted that Kane’s longing for his childhood sled Rosebud was an “embarrassing piece of dimestore psychology”. Stern doesn’t note that a famous passage in the script was inspired by Dante’s vision of the young Beatrice: “I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all — but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.” Stern mentions the extraordinary visual and aural inventions of Citizen Kane but doesn’t discuss them.

Herman was drawn for personal reasons to Lou Gehrig’s story in Pride of the Yankees (1942). Like Herman, Gehrig had a German-immigrant background, graduated from Columbia University and competed with Babe Ruth as Herman competed with Joe. Herman’s script made this baseball movie, starring Gary Cooper, an athletic tear-jerker with an intensely sentimental plot and a flawless hero who comes up from poverty to achieve a great career; old-world parents, loyal teammates and devoted wife; poignant farewell speech, courageous response to a fatal disease and tragic death: weeping all around.

Herman was a self-destructive alcoholic — his wife tracked the hidden bottles around the house and watered them down when she found them — and a compulsive gambler on backgammon, cards and horses who lost as much as $4,000 in one night. He gained insights from years of psychoanalysis, but could not overcome his intense self-hatred. Joe believed Herman used his obsessions to lash out at his wife, “his father, the Establishment, Louis B. Mayer, and to protect himself from failure by rendering himself unable to prove he could achieve anything — and in the end, destroying himself”. But more could be said about this key to his character. When gambling, Herman was also thrilled by the risk and excitement, by belief in good luck and the chance to get money for nothing, and by the danger of total loss — especially when he was deeply in debt. Herman needed to punish himself for his father’s lifelong disapproval of prostituting his talent in Hollywood, his own wasted gifts and his failure to create outstanding work in literature and the theater.

In the last decade of Herman’s life Joe reached the top of his profession while his brother fell into bitter obscurity. I interviewed the congenial and expansive Joe in Bedford, New York, in March 1992 ( a year before his death) about his work with Scott Fitzgerald on the 1938 screenplay of Erich Remarque’s novel Three Comrades. He told me that Fitzgerald, still handsome and with considerable style, was an attractive symbol of the vanished 1920s and brought considerable prestige to the MGM studio. He hired Fitzgerald to create the continental atmosphere and enhance the romantic aspects of the story. 

When Joe rewrote his script, Fitzgerald, in a pathetic letter, emphasised his literary reputation and pleaded with him to restore the original version: “You have arbitrarily and carelessly torn it to pieces… Oh, Joe, can’t producers ever be wrong?” Though Fitzgerald was an experienced novelist he was also an apprentice screenwriter. Instead of accepting his own limitations, the collaborative writing system and the power of the studio bosses, he rebelled, begged and was defeated.

Joe explained that Fitzgerald’s anger and bitterness, his stubbornness and desperation, prevented him from seeing the defects in his own work and admitting that the old Hollywood pro was more skillful and experienced than he was. Nevertheless, Joe’s efforts got Fitzgerald his first and only screen credit and enabled him to renew his lucrative contract with MGM when he was broke. At the end of our interview Joe wittily inscribed my copy of Three Comrades: “from the ‘despoiler’ of Scott Fitzgerald’s screenplay.”

Joe’s most popular and profitable film, All About Eve (1950), portrays a conniving young actress who strives to replace a famous older star. It contains Bette Davis’ famous lines, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” Marilyn Monroe is mocked as a “graduate of the Copacabana [Actors Studio] School of Dramatic Arts”. She makes an impressive cameo appearance as a naive starlet and mistress of the wicked George Sanders, and provides a visual and moral contrast to the cunning Anne Baxter. Joe described the tremulous novice as “the loneliest person I had ever known… She was not a loner. She was just plain alone” — clearly frightened of the older and more experienced actors. The film was the peak of Joe’s career and the beginning of Monroe’s astonishing rise to stardom.

Joe’s film company, Figaro, paid Ava Gardner, the star of The Barefoot Contessa (1954), the stupendous weekly salary of $60,000 and an additional $30,000 for her personal whims, including five servants and $400 for roses. Humphrey Bogart intensified Gardner’s insecurity by criticizing her poor acting, but Joe earned Bogart’s respect while making the movie. He discussed the essence of every scene with the actors before filming and gave Bogart careful guidance rather than hard direction. But there was also considerable tension. “Bogie wanted you to be afraid of him a little,” said Joe. “He made perfectly sure that you knew he was going to be an unpredictable man.”

The Barefoot Contessa had many characteristics in common with All About Eve. Both slow and talky stories are told through a series of flashbacks and multiple narrators. Both provide an inside view of the theater and movies, portray the rise and fall of a star, and lose vital cinematic potential by narrating instead of actually showing dramatic scenes. The film — a sort of Star is Stillborn — satirises the glamour of stardom and glory of war, the joyless and impotent wealth of phony international society.

Just as the always cautious studio had eliminated the anti-Nazi theme in Three Comrades, so in the film of The Quiet American (1958) Graham Greene’s caustic account of America’s war in Vietnam was changed to justify the disastrous policy. Greene felt that “the film was made deliberately to attack the book and the author”. Joe agreed that it was “a very bad film I made during a very unhappy time in my life”.

Elizabeth Taylor, the star of Suddenly Last Summer (1959), surpassed Gardner with a salary of $500,000 plus ten per cent of the gross profit. Joe wittily telegraphed the worried producer, “If Elizabeth Taylor is overweight I for one am at a loss to suggest what there should be less of.” The characters and themes of the horrific movie, based on a play by Tennessee Williams, include “a practicing homosexual, a psychotic heroine, a procuress-mother, a cannibalistic orgy, a sadistic nun” and a prefrontal lobotomy.

Cleopatra (1963) was a colossal disaster. During shooting Taylor’s affair with her co-star Richard Burton broke up her marriage to Eddie Fisher (for whom she had converted to Judaism). The movie, shot mainly in Italy, needed 6,00 extras and hundreds of animals. Stern writes that it cost “more than $30 million during 21 months of filming [and involved] four international relocations, three suicide attempts, two life-threatening illnesses, and one gigantic adulterous affair.” Dr. Rexford Kennamer told me that Taylor flew him from Los Angeles to Rome to have her personal physician on hand for emergencies. When the movie spun out of control Darryl Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century Fox, fired Joe, publicly humiliated him, and broke his health and spirit. Joe hated the film, expunged it from his Who’s Who entry and always refused to talk about it.

Sydney Stern’s research is thorough and useful, and she builds and improves upon Richard Meryman’s life of Herman and Kenneth Geist’s life of Joe (both 1978). But her biography contains sinking clichés and awkward compendium sentences. She laboriously trudges through pointless plot summaries of long-forgotten movies that no one today has seen or would ever want to see. Instead of including many trivial details, she would have strengthened her book by focusing on the most important films and ignoring all the duds. 

Two aspects of Joe’s life, political and personal, deserve more attention. During the communist witch hunts in 1950, Joe, president of the Screen Directors Guild, had opposed the loyalty oath that forced its members to swear they were not communists. Joe supported a voluntary but not mandatory oath and deplored the rigged ballot that had been used to extort obedience from its members.

Cecil B. De Mille, a fervent anti-Communist, was in favor of the oath and tried to get rid of Joe. But John Huston made a brilliant speech that persuaded guild members to support Joe and forced De Mille and his backers to resign from the board. De Mille continued to make bitter speeches and pronounced the names of his opponents — Villiam Vyler, Fred Ssinnemann and Billy Vilder — with a strong German accent that emphasised their Jewish names.

Joe had three marriages to Gentile women. The first, to a New York socialite, ended in divorce; the second, to an alcoholic and violent Austrian actress, ended in her suicide; the third, to his young personal assistant, was successful. In the philistine Hollywood milieu Joe was notably witty, cultured and kind, and had many love affairs with famous actresses. During and between his first two marriages he had liaisons with Frances Dee, Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, Judy Garland, Gene Tierney, Linda Darnell and Jean Simmons. He jokingly advised his son to never sleep with a starlet when you can sleep with a star.

But he also recognised the dangers and criticised himself for indulging in so many childish and neurotically emotional relations. Yet all these movie stars adored Joe, were eager to sleep with him, parted on friendly terms and remained fond of him long after the end of the affair. Some even called him “the love of my life”.

Joe believed the director should remain invisible and confessed, “I have no style or technique. My material dictates the style and technique.” Though greatly admired, he was criticised for these very qualities when the auteur theory prevailed, for his “devotion to content over film technique, his lack of a recognisable style and the unevenness of his oeuvre.” Stern covers the last twenty years of Joe’s empty life in only eight pages. He followed Cleopatra with two negligible efforts in 1967 and 1972 and, after a lifetime of writing with full-throated ease, couldn’t concentrate and start new projects, and became irascible and embittered. 

Like Herman, Joe disappointed his father and himself by failing to become a successful New York novelist or playwright. He emphasised his screen adaptations of plays and fiction, felt his life was wasted and dismissed his own considerable achievements: “I’ve done so little original work in my life. I haven’t written a couple of books that I should have. I’ve pissed away what I had.” As Samuel Johnson wrote of disappointed characters in The Vanity of Human Wishes: “They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall.”

The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics by Sydney Ladensohn Stern Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 468 pp., $35