My Life as a Mankiewicz (6 page)

Opening night was a genuine success. The English lyrics by songwriter Howard Dietz were solid and easily flowing with only a few forced, wince- inducing rhymes. The cast was superb. It included the great tenor Richard Tucker, the popular and beautiful coloratura Patrice Munsel, and Robert Merrill, the reigning lyric baritone of his day, forever famous in New York for his full-throated version of the National Anthem at Yankee Stadium. All forms of theater have their own particular conventions, as Dad quickly found out when he was led onto the stage and joined the cast for a standing ovation. He looked down into the orchestra pit and gestured for the conductor, Alberto Erede, to join them.

“Alberto!” he called out. “Come up, Alberto!” Erede didn't budge.

Merrill leaned in and yelled into Dad's ear: “He answers to Maestro!”

Dad yelled, “Maestro!” gesturing again. Erede came up at once.

Dad's production of
La Bohème
lasted for more than a decade at the Met. It had wonderful, modern, and inventive directorial touches. Merrill tried to get him to direct a production of
Otello
in which he was to play Iago, but Dad decided to quit opera while he was ahead. Next stop, Broadway? It never happened. Despite his near worship for the theater, only a few faint attempts materialized. According to Moss Hart, when he visited his dear friend and coplaywright George S. Kaufman, who was terminally ill in the hospital, Kaufman looked at him and said, “Don't worry, I'm not going to die until Joe Mankiewicz writes his first play.”

When Moss Hart was directing the classic musical
My Fair Lady
, he gave a young actress what I consider to be the ultimate piece of direction. She played one of the maids who greeted Julie Andrews when she returned triumphantly from the ball and sang “I Could Have Danced All Night.” They were out of town, putting the number on its feet for the first time. Moss told the maids, “You can fuss about her as the music begins, then gradually make your way out through the side doors, leaving Julie alone to sing.”

One of the maids was a through-and-through Method actress, the Actors Studio being all the rage then. “But I wouldn't leave,” she told Moss. “I'd want to hear all about it. I'd have no motivation to go.”

Moss said he understood her point, but Miss Andrews was going to be alone onstage for the number, so she'd better find her motivation.

“I don't think I can,” the actress replied.

“I forget,” said Moss. “How much are we paying you a week?”

“One hundred fifty dollars,” came the reply.

“Ahhhh,” he said. “There's your motivation!”

Prep School

Chris was already attending Lawrenceville. My grades at St. Bernard's were excellent and the school's reputation as a prep school feeder immaculate, so I pretty much had my pick and settled on Philip's Exeter Academy. It was the classic New England prep school nestled in a small New Hampshire town. Unlike some young teens who are apprehensive leaving home, I welcomed the prospect eagerly, with a real sense of relief. Exeter became my safe place where I could make new friends and develop myself in private, at my own speed.

Exeter was a happy, creative, and constructive time for me. As I mentioned earlier, my cousin Josie was attending Wellesley College and I could go down to Boston (it was only one hour by train) to see her. The work was challenging enough to make it interesting. I sucked at math or any kind of science but was a star in English, French, Latin, and History. I joined the school Dramatic Club and costarred in a production of Gore Vidal's
Visit to a Small Planet.
Gore, himself an Exeter graduate, actually came up to see the production and was quite complimentary to me. He couldn't have known at the time, but he would be adapting Tennessee Williams's
Suddenly, Last Summer
for Dad in a few years, and I would be the “production associate” (glorified gofer) on his screen version of his hit Broadway play
The Best
Man
in 1963. It was the first film I worked on after college. I also wrote for
The Pean
, the school yearbook. The editor was Peter Benchley (who wrote
Jaws)
, then a couple of years ahead of me. I came full circle with Peter while doing a major rewrite on the screenplay of his second novel,
The Deep
, filmed some twenty years later in the Caribbean.

Mother rarely came up, so I was surprised when she called one day and said she was coming to Boston to spend the weekend with me. We went to the theater on Saturday night. It was a play heading for Broadway, starring Louis Jourdan (of
Gigi).
After the performance, the three of us had dinner. I didn't know she even knew him. Then we went up to his suite. After some strained small talk, the situation seemed pretty clear to me: they were interested in each other. I excused myself politely and went to my room. On Sunday, Mother and I saw the sights in Boston and she put me on the train back to Exeter. No mention of Louis. Looking back on it now and considering Dad's record of serial infidelity, I suppose a little turnabout was fair play.

Westchester

We started renting a house out of town every summer. Once in Long Island, then repeatedly in Westchester County, where Dad was eventually to spend the final decades of his life. Our favorite place was Mount Kisco. Our best friends up there were Bennett Cerf (Random House publisher and permanent panelist on
What's My Line)
, his wife, Phyllis (later married to New York mayor Robert Wagner), and their son, Chris, who was my age. The area was and continues to be (along with Bedford, Katonah, and Pound Ridge) a rustic haven catering to the wealthy.

Mother wasn't doing well. She took a great many prescription pills, sedatives mainly, in an attempt to control her illness. I met my first steady girlfriend in Mount Kisco. Her name was Freddy Espy. It was puppy love run amok. Endless teenage necking without consummation. She was a talented artist and sent me countless letters at school filled with hearts of all sizes and idealized depictions of herself as a love-smitten pixie. Freddy would later marry the celebrated George Plimpton Jr. (author of
Paper Lion)
, the editor of the
Paris Review
and a wonderfully literate and amusing man with whom I would later spend delightful evenings in New York and L.A.

One Bad Fall Day

I was already back in school for the fall term. The family's lease on the Mount Kisco house didn't expire until later. One Saturday night I was having dinner with a couple of classmates at a diner in the tiny town of Exeter. I remember it was very cold outside. I was also smoking a cigarette, which was absolutely verboten at the school. There was a rap at the diner window. I turned and saw the dean staring in straight at me. Shit, I thought. I'm going to get thrown out. The dean gestured for me to join him outside. I started for the door, trying to think of an excuse, any excuse. Once outside: “Dean Kessler, I know this looks…”

“Your mother is dead,” he interrupted. I blinked. “I know it may seem cruel to just say it like that, but I've been through this before and I've found it to be the best way.”

My head started to swim. A reservation had been made for me on the next train to Boston. I would be met at the station by a female psychiatrist who would then accompany me on a plane to New York. Did I need company on the train? It could be easily arranged. I shook my head.

The next days were and are a blur to me now. I remember what seemed like an endless reception of the great and the near great coming by the apartment to pay their respects. Mother's psychiatrist, the eminent Dr. Lawrence Kubie, was there. Did I want to talk to him, get things off my chest? No, that's okay. Don't worry about it, I'll be all right. I barely remember her funeral. It was at Kensico Cemetery in Westchester. I couldn't even tell you who attended.

How did Mother die? This was the initial story I was told, tragic, but fit for public consumption: Dad and Bennett Cerf had been out to dinner. Mother wasn't feeling well. When they returned, they found her dead, an empty bottle of pills on her bedside table. She had clearly forgotten she'd already taken a few and in her altered state accidentally took some more—a terrible accident. That's what was printed in the newspapers, so it had to be true. Here's what I found out later, piece by piece: Dad and Mother had a whopper of a fight. He drove back to New York. Later on he called her repeatedly with no answer. Fearing the worst, he called my cousin Josie and asked her to drive up to Mount Kisco with him for the night. Mother would be so delighted to see her. When they came into the house, they called out to her. Silence. Dad said he'd look around downstairs and asked Josie to check the bedroom. Josie found her, dead. Bennett Cerf, a kind and distinguished man who clearly knew the truth, was in no way involved. I always felt sorry that Bennett felt he had to help Dad make the discovery more publicly palatable by saying he was there. It was a true act of friendship, but it was a lie. Mother apparently left a suicide note (that's what the Mount Kisco police said at first), but after a reported phone call from Dad's friend, Governor Averill Harriman, the note miraculously disappeared. The local authorities said they must have made a mistake. I never read the note or found out what was in it. Be that as it may, my overwhelming feeling at the time was truly one of relief for Mother. She led such a tortured life. Thank God she was finally at peace. That's why, at the time, I never cried. I tried to, but I couldn't.

More than a decade later I was asleep in my house in Malibu. It was early, early in the morning. I'd fallen asleep with the television on. I heard something that half woke me. My head started to pulsate. My eyes popped open. The sound I heard was Mother's voice. I was suddenly staring straight into her face on the screen, which was televising
The Keys of the Kingdom.
I was transfixed, stunned. Then tears began to roll down my cheeks. I must have cried for more than half an hour. It felt good to finally get it all out. It was the very least I owed her and myself.

Mother's suicide happened at the start of my senior year at Exeter. Fortunately, I had already been given an A rating by Yale University in my junior year, which basically meant that if you didn't really screw up before graduation, you were in. On my Preliminary SAT achievement tests I had scored an 800 in English, which was the highest score one could get. I sent a letter to Dad, who was shooting
Suddenly, Last Summer
in England, and told him. He cabled me back: “Ain't you lucky they didn't ask you to spell achievement?” I had misspelled it in my letter. Dad always liked to have the last word.

As the 1950s ended, I entered Yale. Dad told me how proud “Pop” would have been of me and that being educated at schools like St. Bernard's, Exeter, and Yale was everything he envisioned for me when we left California. But there was still one thing I wanted to do more than get a first-class education, and I begged him to help me. I wanted to work, in any capacity, on a movie. Dad agreed to do it, with the following caveat: He'd get me on a film made by people he'd never worked with. There would be no past relationships for me to fall back on if things went wrong. He also (correctly) told me that there would be some on the film who'd be hoping I screwed up, who'd say the only reason I was working on it was because I was Joe Mankiewicz's kid. He wrote a letter to Doc Merman at Fox, head of the physical production department at the time. Dad was an independent company with no ties to Fox anymore, but he knew and liked Doc. I still have the letter he sent. As luck would have it, Fox was shooting a western called
The Comancheros
at the start of the summer. It was starring John Wayne, would be directed by the legendary Michael Curtiz, and would be shot almost entirely on location near Moab, Utah.

Snapshots from 1950s Films

No Way Out
(1950)

An extraordinary film for its time, dealing brutally with race. The first film ever made by a major studio in which contemporary black people were seen in their own apartments and homes, sitting down to meals, leading lives as ordinary and complex as their white counterparts. It was Sidney Poitier's first part—the leading role. There were no black leading men at the time in Hollywood, only “specialty” stars such as Paul Robeson or Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, singers and dancers. Hattie McDaniel had won a supporting actress Oscar for
Gone with the Wind
, but she played a slave and had to sit in the back of the auditorium. Sidney was washing dishes in New York at the time. He had, I believe, briefly appeared in off-off-Broadway theater, but dishwashing was how he earned a living. He was one in a group of young black actors who read for the part, and Dad cast him immediately. During his Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech at the Academy Awards decades later, Sidney remarked on the oddity of his straight away playing the lead in a major Hollywood film: “I arrived in Hollywood at twenty-two in a time different than today's, a time in which the odds against my standing here tonight would not have fallen in my favor. Back then, no route had been established for where I wanted to go, no pathway left in evidence for me to trace, no custom for me to follow.”

Darryl Zanuck was quite socially committed for a major studio head. Fox had made
Gentleman's Agreement
about anti-Semitism and
Pinky
about a black girl “passing,” but the latter part was played by the super-white Jeanne Crain. Casting a black actress in that role would have been out of the question at the time. Racism was the elephant in the room for Hollywood. This was a time when the few black baseball players who existed had to stay at separate hotels from their white teammates, when Sammy Davis Jr. could sell out the Copacabana in New York but blacks weren't allowed to sit at the tables. Explicit racial slurs were frequent in the script, which Dad cowrote with Lesser Samuels. “Coon,” “Sambo,” “jig,” and “Niggertown” were just a few. Sidney plays a young black doctor in a hospital prison ward who treats a viciously racist Richard Widmark and his brother. The brother dies, and Widmark erroneously blames Sidney for his death. Widmark later told me that his dialogue was so raw and evil that he actually felt compelled to apologize to Sidney after many scenes: “I'd played bad guys before, but this was the biggest lowlife creep I'd ever seen.”