So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (10 page)

*   *   *

Herman Mankiewicz died of kidney failure early in 1953, when I was twenty-eight. I have seen a printout of my father’s obituary in
The New York Times
, which I like; it calls him a “playwright” and a “newspaperman.” Pop would have really, really loved that.

“Where were you when your father passed away?” asked a well-meaning friend.

In response, I might have discussed how that news arrived, or any number of details. Instead, I said clearly, “My father did not ‘pass away.’”

I continued, “Nor did he ‘pass’ or ‘depart this earth.’ He died. People do not ‘pass away.’ They
die
.”

My father died, in fact, the same day Stalin died. You would never say, “Joseph Stalin passed away in 1953.” He died. Stalin and my father, the same day. When we heard that piece of news, in fact, my brother said, “Well, we split a doubleheader.”

One does not say Hitler “passed away” in the bunker in April 1945. Did John Dillinger “pass away,” or did Bonnie and Clyde “pass on” in a hail of gunfire? People now may say “killed” when violence is involved, but more and more they say “passed” instead of “died.” It’s as though “die,” “dying,” and “death” have become words people are afraid to use, or feel awkward about using.

Thus began a running joke between a friend and me. “Is he still with us?” one of us asks, and the other will respond with something like “No he kicked the bucket.”

“You mean he has left this world?”

“Yes, he’s enjoying the rest he so justly deserves.”

“Gone.”

“Went on.”

“In a better place.”

“No longer with us.”

“Moved on.”

“Gone to his just reward.”

“Gone where we all must go.”

“Is now on the other side.”

“Shuffled off this mortal coil.”

“Has departed this earth,” I said once as we sat down to lunch.

“‘Good morning’ would be more appropriate,” my friend responded. “Don’t make me wish you’d passed on.”

At moments like this, I might call forth something like “fled to his home up above in the sky,” taken from
Ulysses
.

*   *   *

Another of my linguistic peeves is the way “gender” has replaced “sex,” as in “gender gap,” “gender discrimination,” or even “same-gender marriage.” I argue we now use “gender”—a purely grammatical term—in place of “sex” for the same delicate reason we began, in Victorian times, to use the terms “dark meat” and “light meat” of fowl so polite people would not have to say the words “leg” and “breast” in public.

Do we suppose, before he passed away in the bunker, Adolf Hitler had gender with Eva Braun?

*   *   *

In fact, the 1953
New York Times
obituary of Herman Mankiewicz presented a bit of a mystery. It says Joseph Goebbels, one of Adolf Hitler’s closest confidants and head of Nazi propaganda, had ordered in 1935 that “films written by Mr. Mankiewicz could not be shown in Nazi Germany unless his name was removed from the screen credits” because Mankiewicz had written an anti-Hitler movie titled
The Mad Dog of Europe
.

Until I read Pop’s obit, I had never heard this about Goebbels.
Never
heard it mentioned, but I remember lots of talk about Goebbels’s menace. In any event, Joseph Goebbels is a good enemy to have. It says something really, really nice about my father.

The obituary seems strange also because Hollywood studios did not begin to issue movies with a strong anti-Nazi message until 1943. Even Charlie Chaplin’s
Great Dictator,
which Chaplin starred in and produced, was not released until more than a year after fighting in Europe began.

Stories in
Variety
and other Hollywood newspapers document that Herman Mankiewicz was indeed trying to raise money for
The Mad Dog of Europe
in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. In the Library of Congress, I found a copy of the
Mad Dog
screenplay, which lists Lynn Root, a fellow screenwriter and friend of Pop’s, as co-author.

The screenplay, with the alternative titles
The Brown Terror
and
Terror over Europe,
begins with what it describes as “a voice reading the following in earnest and impressive tones: ‘This picture is produced in the interest of Democracy, an ideal which has inspired the noblest ideals of man.’” And then, flashed on the screen in capital letters is what the screenplay calls the “Foreword.” Its humor is pure Herman Mankiewicz: “THE INCIDENTS AND CHARACTERS IN THIS PICTURE ARE OF COURSE FICTITIOUS. IT IS OBVIOUSLY ABSURD TO ASK ANYONE TO BELIEVE THEY COULD HAPPEN IN THIS ENLIGHTENED DAY AND AGE.”

The screenplay, written less than nine months after Hitler became Germany’s chancellor, is remarkable for its accurate description of how the abuse and murder of people deemed to be Jewish had already started and would soon lead to deportation and mass extermination. It also offers detailed use of newsreel footage—for example, of Nazi street violence in the 1920s—that anticipates my father’s use of newsreels in his screenplay for
Citizen Kane
.

Documents and trade press coverage chronicle how the Production Code Authority, Hollywood’s self-imposed watchdog, pressured studios not to fund
The Mad Dog of Europe
. To explain this policy, Joseph I. Breen, head of the authority, wrote to a studio of the
Mad Dog
movie in 1936, “It is to be remembered that there is strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.” Reading this official pronouncement, one can see why no anti-Nazi movies were made until the mid-1940s.

8

In Which Pearl Harbor Knocks Me Out of America First, James Joyce Enters My Life, as a World War II Infantryman I Learn Spanish, a Mess Sergeant Quotes Gilbert and Sullivan While Serving Broken Ping-Pong Balls, During the Battle of the Bulge I Receive Dry Socks from General Eisenhower, I Fall in Love with a Red Cross Volunteer, and Begin to Worry America Might Have Jumped the Shark

Why and when people change their minds—not about small things, such as whether to have meat or fish for dinner, but about much larger issues that involve judgments and decisions citizens in a democracy must make—is hard to determine. The first step is to escape what the poet William Blake calls “mind-forg’d manacles,” all the certainties that come from our upbringing and formative experiences, leaving us confident in our opinions and closed to new ideas and to new ways of looking at things.

Little is known about how people change their minds. It’s always what one wants the other person to do; we praise the person who—readily or reluctantly—admits previous bigotry but demonstrates he has learned how wrong he was. But what stands out is how infrequently we ourselves change our minds.

Historians of science tell us that new ideas catch on not when people change their minds but when the older generation, raised on and educated about older ideas, dies out. Florence Nightingale, for example, was famous for promoting cleanliness in hospitals but died in 1910 still convinced vapors from the earth, not germs, cause infectious diseases.

Although examples of a country’s changing its collective mind are rare, U.S. reaction to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor is a textbook study. A seventeen-year-old isolationist ready to volunteer for combat after the Japanese attack, I was at the heart of this change.

I was born in 1924 and thus would reach draft age in 1942, so ever since I began high school, or at least since the war began in 1939, most of the guys in my generation knew we’d be soldiers before long. I had seen myself as a character in early war movies or war novels; they all involved firing at the enemy, being fired on, and even hand-to-hand bayonet fights. It all seemed very scary and might have contributed to strong childhood feelings against going to war. There were also newsreels of ongoing combat in China and Europe, which didn’t help.

A few months before Pearl Harbor, I started to support America First, which was the leading isolationist organization. I know history now teaches that America Firsters wanted appeasement, an accommodation with Adolf Hitler, but not as I saw them. They wanted an isolated peace, not war. In any event, I’m not sure if I formally joined or not. But I was quite sympathetic. They weren’t that bad. Charles Lindbergh certainly was anti-Semitic. He actually liked the Nazis. But a lot of the isolationist senators were really my liberal heroes; they were Midwesterners like William E. Borah of Idaho and George Norris of Nebraska. Republicans. And in California, we had Hiram Johnson. I was very impressed with them. They were staunch liberals on things like civil liberties. They were tough, and they were principled; John F. Kennedy, in fact, later chose Norris’s earlier efforts to keep us out of World War I as one of his “profiles in courage.” They would mount filibusters to keep the United States away from the war and slow FDR’s deals with Great Britain. That fall, 1941, I enrolled at UCLA and had to take compulsory Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). We trained with Springfield rifles. Thirty-aught-six. From World War I, called 30.06, for the diameter of the barrel.

During the Battle of Britain, when England stood alone under Churchill, I had not at all been concerned about what would happen if England fell, because I never thought it was possible. I’m now sure it was, but I was sixteen years old, with great confidence our side was going to win. I was all for helping the British, short of war. They were a democracy like us.

I always knew Britain would defeat Germany, just as I always “knew” we’d beat Germany and Japan. It was the natural order of things, although I certainly wasn’t predicting how or when this would happen.

*   *   *

I wasn’t opposed to colonialism. In fact, in late 1942, when Winston Churchill said, “I did not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” I admired him. I thought they should keep India and everything else they had because the English were just like us.

I’m not sure I ever
saw
much from Pearl Harbor. Maybe in the newsreels at the movies a week or two afterward. I heard news about it on the radio and saw wirephotos in the newspapers right away. Pearl Harbor angered the American people because it killed a couple of thousand Americans. Just like 9/11. But 9/11 got Americans so upset, in part, because the Twin Towers came down and we saw it on television. Over and over again. The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred years before anyone had a television.

It was a Sunday, of course. I remember I was driving home, I don’t know from where, when I heard on the radio—all of our cars had radios—that Pearl Harbor had been attacked by the Japanese. I knew that Pearl Harbor was in Hawaii, which was owned by the United States. Roosevelt was pushing America toward war, and we all knew that eventually Japan or Germany would give him a reason to get into it. I did not think an attack on Hawaii was an attack on the United States. I thought it was just another news item. Japan was bombing China and lots of other places. It never occurred to me that this would mean war. When I got home, I talked about it with my parents, but it wasn’t until at least the next day that I realized how big it was.

Hollywood—the movie colony—at that time was pretty much divided between extremes of Left and Right. On the right, you had folks like Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela, Adolphe Menjou, and George Murphy (at least until he went to the Senate, where he moderated—for reelection purposes). And the Left was much more heavily populated—and literate. Almost without exception, led by Communist front organizations, like the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and some others with good names, the Left was devotedly pro–Soviet Union and hence converted from isolationism to fervently pro-Allied and interventionist on the day Germany invaded Russia, so swiftly it was almost more laughable than serious. We, largely unorganized (until the Americans for Democratic Action, or ADA) pro-FDR and Democratic Party liberals, were drawn to most of the goals of the Left, but our occasional criticism of the Soviet Union—or even indistinguishable attacks on “dictatorship” or “totalitarian societies”—would bring down on us cries of “Trotskyist” or “proto-Fascist” and denunciations from various Left actors, actresses, or playwrights; Lillian Hellman was a frequent participant. But the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 caused some real damage and disaffection to the Left, many of whose adherents had difficulty following people like Representative Vito Marcantonio into favoring every slight twist or turn of the Communist Party line.

When Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, it was kind of funny, in a sad way, because my lefty friends who had become so isolationist after the Nazi-Soviet Pact suddenly became interventionists. Nunnally Johnson, a first-rate screenwriter who wrote
The Grapes of Wrath
and other great movies, was a close friend of my father’s and came over to our house that day. He was a very strong supporter of intervention to help the Allies and said to Pop, “Well, Mank, I guess Jack Lawson was out at Douglas Aircraft today putting all those bolts back in the airplanes that he’d been taking out for the last two years.” (John Howard Lawson was a screenwriter who was an active and open leader of the Communist Party.) My parents thought Nunnally’s comments were funny, and so did I. A lot of America Firsters had hoped Hitler and Stalin would beat each other up. But I didn’t believe it was likely.

For me, a key moment had occurred during the summer of 1941 in Los Angeles, when I attended a rally at which Norman Thomas, the longtime chairman and presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, spoke against our joining Great Britain in the war against Hitler. Thomas warned, “If mainstream America were mobilized, it would never be demobilized.” I shared Thomas’s position and admired his theoretical argument: While we should do everything we could to stop Hitler short of joining the armed conflict, if mainstream America were mobilized for war, it would never be demobilized. “You take some car dealer from the Midwest and make him a colonel or you turn insurance agents into generals,” said Thomas, “when the war is over, they will never want to go back to selling cars or writing insurance.”