So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (16 page)
Read So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life Online
Authors: Frank Mankiewicz,Joel L. Swerdlow
Bradbury’s short story “The Fireman” was published just as television began to permeate America’s homes. Its title was changed to “Fahrenheit 451” (the temperature at which books burn) when Bradbury enlarged it into a novel (1953) and Hollywood later transformed it into a hit movie (1966). For more than half a century, it has been part of America’s cultural core: Just about anyone who graduates from high school has read (or at least been assigned to read) the novel
Fahrenheit 451
.
In 1992, Bradbury gave an interview in which he described the story as “preventive fiction.” To him, it was a work of fiction predicting a future so the prediction would help prevent that future from actually coming true.
It was a wonderful concept and a nice goal. And it’s still a process that seems under way, with “certification” at the center. Of course, one can’t take too simplistic a view of certification. It’s an idea, and like all ideas it is more applicable in some instances and less applicable in others. But as a general rule, it holds true. We now have a societal bias, growing stronger as newer and newer screen-using technologies engage children whose parents and grandparents were
themselves
raised on television.
High-definition television broadcasts of live performances of the New York Metropolitan Opera, for instance, are attracting increasingly large audiences. Critics and members of the public, especially young people, polling tells us, increasingly say they prefer to sit in a movie theater rather than attend the opera in person, because watching on the screen is a much more powerful, enjoyable experience. Facial close-ups, surround sound, and other techniques and technologies borrowed from television and the movies can make even the best seats at a live opera seem disappointing.
I imagine that without thinking about it or realizing it, people are now starting to think a “real” opera is what they see in a movie theater. It’s their choice. “Live” opera will come to mean the broadcast of a performance in real time.
“Real time”—now, that’s a retronym, just like “real life.” There never used to be such a thing as “real” life; there was just “life.” Now we’ll have to invent a whole new word for what it means to go to see an
actual
opera. Baseball is going through the same thing; to “watch” a game is to look at a live broadcast on television; to “see” a game can be ambiguous. But we “go to” a game at the ballpark. What is happening to language now that people “go to” a movie theater to “see” a “live” opera? It isn’t, of course, live people but filmed images carried through cable and generated onto a screen. The Met, of course, started live radio broadcasts in the 1940s, and these continue, but listening on the radio made people want to buy a ticket and actually attend an opera. Now listening on the radio makes people want to go to the movie theater and “see” the opera.
The gold standard to describe an important or memorable experience now is to say—and sense—when something happens it was “just like in the movies” or “just like on television” or “just like in a video game.” Whenever there’s been a major traumatic event—a plane crash or a shooting—you read and see on the news people describing it with one of those comparisons.
The expression “gold standard” has survived the end of the gold standard. There must be a word for such expressions that have outlived their direct contact with reality.
* * *
Studies show that newborn babies, given a chance to look at a flickering, silent television screen or to look at their mothers, will almost always choose the screen. There is, one can assume, something in the wiring of the human brain that connects with an electronic screen.
A CBS executive told me, years ago, of an in-house experiment the network conducted. In a maternity ward, they put a TV set at one end of the room, turned off. When it was turned on to a blank screen, every awake baby turned its head to look at the screen.
Some good movies stick around, and so do some stars. My wife and I saw
To Have and Have Not
recently, on Turner Classic Movies. It was ostensibly based on an Ernest Hemingway book but had little to do with anything Hemingway actually wrote. To me, most impressive was that Lauren Bacall was only nineteen years old when the movie was made. She was very much a pal of mine.
“Pal” has largely disappeared from contemporary usage. But I often use the word in a way that (to me, at least) evokes more innocent times when people hung out with their pals. Lauren Bacall really was a pal.
Betty Bacall. Betty. That’s what her friends called her. It was her real first name. When everyone was in his prime, my father, Nunnally Johnson, Humphrey Bogart, and, I think, one other person used to meet on Saturdays at Romanoff’s for lunch. They’d stay there talking and drinking until around four or five in the afternoon, and the wives would organize a car pool to pick them up and drive them home—like today’s designated driver. Betty was married to Bogart then, and I got to know her when I came home from the war. A few years later, when I ran for a seat in the state assembly, she helped me campaign, and we’d get together afterward—whenever she was in California.
During my years as a Hollywood lawyer, my cases could be interesting, if you looked at them from a particular perspective. For example, I obtained the actor Steve McQueen’s acquittal on the same day in different courts in the same courthouse for two traffic citations, issued within hours of each other, one for speeding and one for driving too slowly on the freeway. A movie studio had hired my law firm because a conviction on either ticket would have cost McQueen his driver’s license and thus force the studio to send a car and driver for him every day for the prime-time television show he was then filming,
Wanted: Dead or Alive
.
Another client was a studio-described “British sexpot,” celebrated in the U.K. as another Marilyn Monroe. Her name was Diana Dors, real name Diana Fluck, who had achieved stardom in Britain and signed a fairly lavish two-picture deal with RKO, the first with George Gobel, then a popular TV comedian. It got bad reviews, hardly any revenue. A newspaper strike in New York was partially responsible because there were no reviews, and the only published newspaper was a non-newspaper, the
National Enquirer
(now often called simply “the
Enquirer”
), which ran a story that Diana Dors removed her blouse and danced topless in South Africa.
It turned out the story was totally false; she had never been in South Africa. The author of the “news item” admitted as much to me and, to avoid a lawsuit, put it in writing and apologized. But RKO, eager to end the contract with her, had canceled the contract based on its “morals clause” before it learned the story was false. We offered to withhold any litigation if RKO’s payment of the contract sum to her nearly doubled. The studio complied, and Ms. Dors returned to England and her hometown, Maidenhead.
Some clients had good senses of humor. James Mason, for instance, was a fine English actor, a client of my firm’s, and, even more important, a personal friend. Maybe even more important, he had a one-of-a-kind humor. He and his wife, Pamela—herself a comedienne of stage and screen in Britain—and their daughter, Portland (unclear whether named for the city in Oregon or the city in Maine, or even for the wife of the radio comedian Fred Allen), lived in an old house above Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, famed as having once belonged to the silent-film comedy star Buster Keaton. Mason was a tennis player, and on his private court he would gather a group of players (luckily, myself included) for a full day of tennis every Sunday. After the Masons sold the house, and with it the tennis court, the game migrated to the home of Ginger Rogers, added a few players, and subtracted a few (I stayed).
But it was while James Mason still owned the old Keaton property that his humor—in my view, at least—reached its zenith. A recent and celebrated auction of Rembrandt’s
Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer
had been in the news, and one Sunday morning, before the actual tennis had begun, I asked James how the sale of his house was progressing—if at all. I had heard that the superrich Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis was a possible buyer, and I wondered if that potential sale was still in the works. “No, I don’t think so,” Mason said, and then, after a pause, “Onassis was here one day last week, examining the rooms and the garden, but I didn’t think he was too serious. I think it was more a case of Aristotle contemplating the home of Buster.”
At Ginger Rogers’s Sunday tennis, the game was serious and played fiercely, to win. One day, I was assigned for a teammate (always doubles), not my usual partner, the director John Frankenheimer (six foot seven, with a huge serve), but a considerably older woman, smallish, with a white baseball cap, named—I was told—Mrs. Roark. As our match progressed, it was clear Mrs. Roark was no ordinary Sunday player. She never laughed, barely smiled when I came through with an occasional strong serve or an overhead smash, and thought nothing of ordering me around the court to positions where she judged our opponents would be hitting. Her own game was incredibly steady and strong, and she was obviously extremely determined to win. When we had pulled out our set and someone mentioned she had reverted to her “Wimbledon form of fifty years ago,” I realized just who my partner had been: the outstanding female tennis player of the twentieth century, judged by some as the greatest of all time—Helen Wills Moody, married (I suddenly remembered) to a polo-playing socialite named Aidan Roark.
Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela Rogers, was one of the more prominent far rightists in Hollywood, and she always attended our post-tennis suppers with all the players, usually contributing at least one extreme conservative assertion, almost always not quite true. One night I especially recall as Lela told the group, in a loud commanding voice, how much money Ginger had made the previous year and the enormous sum “the government” had taken in taxes. “Isn’t that true, Ginger?” she inquired, audibly, the length of the table. Ginger looked up and replied, “It beats working at the dime store, Mama.”
* * *
One day, a senior partner in my law firm announced he needed someone—anyone—who spoke Spanish. A major Mexican movie producer was coming in to discuss a deal with a major studio. Much money was at stake, but the producer-client spoke no English. At the law firm, apparently no one, not even at the clerical level, spoke Spanish. So I volunteered and found, to my surprise, I remembered much of my twenty-year-old army language course. The client’s work on movies formerly involved the perennial Mexican stars Maria Felix and Pedro Armendariz—names now mostly forgotten, but then once a part of my life, vivid to me from my army days.
* * *
My “appreciation” of my uncle Joseph Mankiewicz, my father’s brother, written for
The Washington Post
decades after I left my Hollywood law practice and moved to public policy and politics, reveals perhaps that a remaining affection for movies—and perhaps a deep involvement with them—was woven into my genes.
I wrote this a day after Uncle Joe died. No first draft. And, to be sure, no research:
The headline of
The Washington Post
’s obituary began “Joseph Mankiewicz—Movie Producer,” and Joe would have edited that in a hurry. “Producer,” in his mind, belonged (if at all) at the end of his list of credits, after—way after—“director and writer.” But at least it said “movie” and not “film” or—God help us—“cinema.”
“We’re making movies here,” he would proclaim to anyone who would listen (that is to say, anyone in the room, or maybe even in the next room). “We’re part of the movie industry, and not some art called ‘film.’” Film, he reminded me more than once, was the stuff manufactured by Eastman-Kodak from which movies could be made. “Why we have something called the American Film Institute,” he would complain, “I have no idea.”
“Producer” was another problem. Joe had the classic ’30s and ’40s view of producers as only slightly more admirable than theater owners. (The latter, he once said—publicly, alas—should have nothing to say about the selection of movies but should spend their time picking used chewing gum off the seat bottoms in theaters.) In the ’30s, when Joe asked to direct movies for MGM, where he was under contract, Louis B. Mayer told him he must remain a producer with the words, “You have to learn to crawl before you learn to walk.” That was, Joe thought, the perfect description of a producer.
But he learned to crawl very well, and very fast. His credits as a producer—all between the ages of 27 and 32—included “Fury,” a powerful story about striking mine workers, the anti-Nazi “Three Comrades,” “The Philadelphia Story” and “Woman of the Year.” It may have been from a crawling position, but there is a Joe Mankiewicz stamp on all of them.
There were no car chases in Joe’s movies and, except for some off-screen psychic horror in “Suddenly Last Summer,” no violence. He seems to have been the last creator of movies in which people talked to each other, literally, and in which the story moved along through the mechanism of language.
When he called me to tell me of his “Cleopatra” assignment, he shared his surprise that Fox’s Spyros Skouras had agreed—at once—to his “preposterous” asking price. But then he asked me: “How do you make an epic, a spectacle? I’ve never made a movie like this; hell, I’ve never seen a movie like this. Where do you put the ‘cast of thousands’?”
In conversation—even in argument—he was never unintentionally ungrammatical and never stooped to cliché. There is a throw-away stage direction in “All About Eve” in which Bette Davis’s character—alone on the phone—realizes from her husband’s conversation that she has forgotten his birthday, but he is sure that’s why she’s calling. “And who remembered it?” he asks lovingly, to which Joe Mankiewicz added in the script’s margin, “Margo knows damn well it wasn’t she.” That “she” was perfect, and so is the “damn well,” and the line wasn’t even intended to be spoken.