So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (17 page)

If Joe could have been anyone he wanted, rather than a 20th century writer of screenplays, he would have been an 18th century playwright. His library reflected, as did his frames of ordinary reference, his interest in and admiration for early theater. If you had never heard of Addison or Steele or Sheridan, Joe wasn’t going to stop and explain; you could catch up on your own.

Somewhere I read in the past few days a reference to him as a “ladies’ man.” Now, that may have been a reference to some early and widely rumored dalliances—even with one or two of his leading ladies—but there is something much more serious to note here. Joe Mankiewicz was not a ladies’ man, he was a women’s man, and there is a big difference. Throughout his career, he created roles for strong women, for who knew their own identities and who shared—as one commentator noted about Hillary Clinton when she became the new First Lady—“an absence of need.” The characters in Joe’s movies played by Davis, Katharine Hepburn (in “Philadelphia Story”) or even Linda Darnell (in “A Letter to Three Wives”) all convey this independence.

Over the years, Joe Mankiewicz had some interesting things to say about men as well. He once said he wasn’t interested—either as a writer or a director—in the traditional “man’s role,” which he said was to be pitted physically against an adversary with the goal of amassing things. He called it “the least imaginative and interesting form of confrontation … to resolve conflicts by physical action, usually violent.”

Instead, he said in an interview, he was fascinated by the idea of making a movie about a man rebelling against “manliness.” He said he would tell it “by suggestion, by nuance and mood, by … the techniques you’re supposed to eschew in portraying the male.” This being 1972, he was somewhat ahead of his time. “Why the hell,” he asked, “shouldn’t a man burst into tears? Or lose badly? Or be indecisive, or be irrationally afraid of the unknown or unseen, or smell good, or want peace?”

As he went, protesting vigorously, into retirement, he lashed out at the increasing loss of civility and values—not just in movies, but in life. He never lost an appreciation for that civility and those values; he shared them with his family and his close and often lifelong friends; and through an active concern for politics. (I don’t think he ever even considered voting for a Republican.)

Joe Mankiewicz was nominated for Academy Awards in five decades—from the screenplay of “Skippy” in 1931, when he was 22, to the direction of “Sleuth” 42 years later (the only movie, he proudly said, in which the director got the entire cast nominated for Best Actor). He picked up four Oscars along the way. In those decades, the movie business went from industry to—dare we say it, Joe?—art, and he would be one of those artists, unwilling, protesting, but an artist nonetheless.

During World War II the Coast Guard, in one of those grand PR gestures, commandeered Hollywood yachts, including Humphrey Bogart’s, Errol Flynn’s and Joe Mankiewicz’s. In return, the owners received honorary commissions as captains (and best of all, caps). Joe couldn’t wait to tell his father, an austere professor of German literature in New York. When he heard Joe say he was now a captain, his father asked, “You call yourself a captain. But the captains, Joe, do they call you a captain?”

I think they do now.

Hollywood royalty. Show business in the blood. Still, even as I went to school under the GI Bill (UCLA undergraduate; master’s from the Columbia University School of Journalism; law degree from the University of California at Berkeley), my prime passion was politics.

My hero as a boy had been Upton Sinclair. I had not yet read any of his novels;
The Jungle
was then and is now the most famous. But I knew him as a candidate for governor of California. He ran in 1934, when I was nine years old and approaching my tenth birthday. EPIC. That was his campaign theme. End Poverty in California. His basic idea was to establish a system whereby poor people, especially the jobless, could earn a living by producing the basic things that they themselves needed to live. He won the Democratic primary, and we all got very excited. But he lost in the fall to the Republicans. Among other things, they had advertisements on the radio and particularly in the newspapers pulling quotations about sex or religion from one of his novels and then running a headline saying something like “Look at What Upton Sinclair Has Written” or even “Look at What Upton Sinclair Believes.” It worked, at least well enough that the Republican candidate won. But four years later, Culbert Olson, who had been Sinclair’s running mate for lieutenant governor, was elected. He did a pretty good job as governor but in 1942 lost to a strong Republican named Earl Warren, who, of course, went on to become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and author of the decision ending legal race discrimination in the United States. Upton Sinclair wrote anti-Fascist novels, one of which won a Pulitzer Prize during the early years of World War II.

*   *   *

During America’s first post–World War II presidential election (1948), when self-proclaimed “progressives” split from the Democratic Party, I, then twenty-four years old, became an active and enthusiastic part of the political machine (literally) that elected Harry Truman.

The election of 1948 was good for Democrats. Truman was elected in a major upset, the Democratic Party recaptured Congress, and all of this in spite of a split party, with Strom Thurmond running third and capturing some Deep South states electorally and the former vice president Henry Wallace with a few million votes, almost all in normally liberal and Democratic states, endangering but not capsizing Truman’s narrow majority. California had become a major source of trouble for Truman and other liberals, with hundreds of thousands of otherwise reliable votes going to Wallace and his Progressive Party.

This popularity of Wallace was a source of major concern to me and a bunch of my friends and colleagues. I was then in my first postcollege job, as civil rights director for the western branch of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. We were particularly concerned because in the Westside of Los Angeles the Wallace people had won the primary in my assembly district, and thus the perks, which included authority to appoint members of the state and county central committees. By this time, the Communist influence in the Wallace movement was evident, and it led a group of friends and colleagues—we all called and thought of ourselves as anti-Communist leftists, and some of us had been among the founders and earliest members of Americans for Democratic Action, a specifically anti-Communist national group of activist liberals, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Walter Reuther—to start an educational group to see if, at least in the Westside of Los Angeles, we could educate a sufficient number of liberals so as to leave the Wallace-ites out on the fringe.

The result was the formation of the Liberal Center, where for the next few years, starting in early 1951, Paul Jacobs, a good friend and organizer from the oil workers’ union, taught the history of the labor movement, some faculty folks from UCLA taught a few other relevant courses, and Philip Selznick, a professor who went on to become famous for his writings about the behavior of individuals within institutions, and I taught a class on liberalism in America. It was well attended, and Philip and I deepened our friendship, which would continue when we each moved to Berkeley nearly two years later—he to teach as a professor of sociology and I to study at the law school.

Teaching that course—or, better yet, preparing to teach that course—led Philip and me into some long and serious discussions of what would be desirable conditions to exist in a liberal society; in short, what were the basic systems and practices that would mark the kind of community we sought? We wound up somewhere between the New Deal and the British Labour Party, with a good mixture of Norman Thomas and the American Civil Liberties Union. We both came out in many ways as admirers of Alexis de Tocqueville, especially his analysis in
Democracy in America
of the special American genius for voluntarism and shared responsibility—the spirit of teamwork exemplified by volunteer fire departments and community teams building homes and schools.

Paul Jacobs, Philip Selznick, and others like them lived long and productive lives working hard at liberal causes whether they were anti–nuclear war or pro–social justice.

*   *   *

In California in 1950, one feature of elections was the tradition, since repealed, of “cross-filing.” This permitted candidates to enter the primary election campaigns of both political parties (hence, to “cross-file”), regardless of their own affiliations and—more important—whether or not they were presently holders of the office for which they were seeking reelection. This meant virtual assurance of reelection for incumbents because they could run in the “other” political party’s primary election and designate themselves, by occupation, only as “assemblyman” or “state senator” or whatever job they held, without listing their party affiliation. The California State Senate was organized as having one member per county, which gave my home, Los Angeles County, with several million inhabitants, one senator, and Amador County, with a few thousand citizens, also one senator.

In that election year, the Democratic Party was badly split, including the Truman/FDR regulars, the extreme-Left Henry Wallace faction, and even an extreme conservative, racist Strom Thurmond group. In 1948, Truman carried the state, despite strong Wallace-ite and Thurmond-ite dissenters, but the Wallace group—due to the cross-filing law—was able to win a few nominations on the Democratic slate for the state offices. Where I lived, in the Sixtieth Assembly District (Westwood, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu), the nomination for the seat in the state assembly in 1948 had gone, virtually by default, to a Wallace-ite, who then lost, predictably, to Republican Harold Levering, an entrenched right-wing conservative and soon-to-be author of a compulsory loyalty oath for, among others, faculty members at UCLA, which was within his district.

Eager to keep the Democratic Party machinery, at least, within the Democratic Party, some regulars were looking for a candidate to oppose Levering in 1950 and, along the way, at least win the Democratic nomination and lend support for President Truman in that district. They approached me, among others, and I took up the challenge. Perhaps I knew I couldn’t beat Levering in the general election, but as a strong supporter of the liberal, anti-Communist Americans for Democratic Action I had hopes of winning the nomination and joining the leadership of the party, all at the advanced age of twenty-five.

It was a tough race, because I was opposed not only by Levering—on the Democratic ballot only by name and as the incumbent, with no designation as a Republican—but also by the extreme leftist nominee from 1948 and a “conservative Democrat” as well. I learned, early, the perils of political fund-raising, even though we had to raise only ten thousand dollars for the entire (primary and general election) campaign. My father’s lifelong friend, Sam Jaffe, staged a fund-raiser for my campaign at the famed Chasen’s restaurant on the Sunset Strip, which I recall as the low point in campaign financing, perhaps in the entire United States. Only one contributor showed up, the actor Richard Conte, all of whose movies I have since lavishly praised—to this day.

But I campaigned vigorously, at countless “coffees” at homes in the neighborhoods and at all the organized political clubs in the district. I had one great stroke of luck just a week before the primary; the
Los Angeles Times,
a solid bastion of the GOP and a weather vane for conservative voters, in an analysis of the Sixtieth Assembly District candidates, referred to me as a “Socialist candidate”; the newspaper was also, of course, a guide to liberal voters, and what the
Times
thought of as a denunciation might have turned a sizable number of undecided Democrats in my direction. In any event, I won that primary by a few thousand votes, and I became the official Democratic Party leader in the Sixtieth Assembly District, even being consulted by the president of the United States on the appointment of a new postmaster in Malibu. And I ran a respectable race, losing, inevitably, against Levering in November.

I became active as a member of the Democratic Party’s Los Angeles County Central Committee. At one meeting to pick a congressional candidate, we were concerned because it looked as though the GOP candidate was going to be a very popular right-wing guy, kind of a local Joe McCarthy. We had to be very careful about the candidate we picked. We had two possibilities; one was a kind of solid, moderate-liberal professor at UCLA, and the other was an actor with much more of a left-wing background, and we picked the professor as our candidate. We probably should have picked the other guy. His name was Ronald Reagan.

*   *   *

I was only a few years into the practice of law when I picked up a young hitchhiker on the Pacific Coast Highway one afternoon (yes, we did that sort of thing), and after a while he asked me if I was a lawyer.

When I told him I was, he told me a shocking story. He was an Indian—in these more sensitive days, a Native American—and told me his tribe lived on a reservation at Fort McDowell, Arizona, donated to the tribe by President Theodore Roosevelt as a reward for their assistance in the capture of Geronimo. He said there were three major water wells on the reservation, and the nearby city of Phoenix leased all its water from these wells—enough, he said, for the entire city—for a hundred dollars a year, under a lease that had run for years. He said the reservation was run by an elected tribal council, dominated, to no one’s surprise, by employees of the Phoenix Water Department. The lease for the wells was due to expire within a year or so, he told me, and he and some of the other younger tribesmen wanted to stage a recall election to turn out the council and then to negotiate a new contract with Phoenix so the impoverished reservation could get a fair price. I told him it sounded like an outrage my firm might be interested in righting, and I would talk to the partners about it. They thought it was at least worth pursuing and asked me to go to the reservation and talk to these “rebels.” When I spoke to the young man again, he invited me to the reservation. He asked me to come before six
A.M.
, because the guards might keep me out if they suspected my intentions. “Everybody works for the water company,” he warned me, and urged me not to drive a new car or a fancy one. And at the end of our conversation, almost as an afterthought, he asked if I would bring some food—“maybe enough for fifty people or so.”