Read So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life Online
Authors: Frank Mankiewicz,Joel L. Swerdlow
So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (3 page)
I wanted people who picked up the book to feel they were having breakfast with Frank, but believing we still needed an overall storytelling principle, I suggested he select a portion of Leopold Bloom’s meanderings in
Ulysses
and write a parallel narrative about his own life. Frank, when still a freshman in college, had fallen in love with Joyce and throughout his life had read
Ulysses
so many times he could recite huge portions by heart. I thought he could show off a little.
“To even try such a thing would be silly,” he said. “No one would understand it, including me.”
Frank was, it eventually occurred to me, using our conversations to write his own obituary—inventing a new literary form, the self-shaped obituary. He laughed when I told him this, saying he was only having fun and “telling stories from a life that had been interesting.”
To press the point, I evoked James Joyce. “Write your own obituary, get a new lease of life,” I said to him, paraphrasing from
Ulysses
.
“Maybe I am writing my own obituary,” Frank responded. “What would be wrong with that?”
Frank worked hard on this book, doing far more than “telling stories.” After a breakfast, for example, I would e-mail questions, asking him to elaborate upon or explain something we had just discussed; a few hours later, a long answer would come, which I might challenge, and subsequent exchanges would spill over into our next breakfast and were eventually crafted into the stories that follow.
“Our model should be an essay by Woody Allen,” Frank announced one morning. “He pretends to analyze some newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls, which were an account of an ancient pre-Christian society, which worshipped strange gods. One such god had the head of a lion, and the body of a lion, but not the same lion.” Here, Frank laughed, adding, “That’s what we’re doing. We’re doing different kinds of books, which we’ll eventually put together.”
Our book, I began to believe, could be built around his “Rosebud,” a notion that has evolved out of the movie
Citizen Kane,
whose screenplay was written by Herman Mankiewicz, Frank’s father.
Citizen Kane
begins with, and is built around, a mystery: What did Kane mean when he said, as his last dying word, “Rosebud”?
“Rosebud” now has its own
Wikipedia
entry, and “finding a Rosebud” has become part of the language. “To find a Rosebud” about someone means to find a hitherto unknown or ignored fact from his or her earlier life—or, indeed, any part of his or her life—that unlocks a great and meaningful mystery about the person.
“Everyone has a ‘Rosebud,’ and I want to find yours,” I said to Frank, adding, “Maybe it was those family dinners in Hollywood, with people like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Maybe you’ve never left that family dinner table.”
“You’re making a big mistake if you think those dinners were anything more than interesting dinners,” he replied. “And forget ‘Rosebud.’ Pop just made it up as a storytelling device. He really did have a new bicycle stolen when he was ten years old. He got it as a birthday present and rode it to the library that first day, and it was stolen. His parents never did get him another bike, and he was simply transferring that story and some of those feelings to Kane. He was writing a movie. People do not ‘have’ Rosebuds. There is no such thing as ‘a Rosebud.’”
Inability to find a “Rosebud” led me to intellectualize Frank’s life, to focus on the characteristics and experiences—such as growing up without television and working with old-style political bosses—that will disappear, presumably forever, when people like him die. A general rule of American life, and perhaps of all modern societies, moreover, is that the larger such changes are, the more quickly we forget what they meant to the lives and worldviews of most people.
Frank agreed with this and also responded favorably when I said there was something fundamental and uniquely American about him: a spoken and unspoken optimism that transcended his view of his own life; he was unshakably certain that as a society and a country we are, despite setbacks and stupidities, moving in the right direction. He was optimistic as a kid in the 1920s and 1930s, and he was optimistic during what turned out to be our final breakfast together.
Such optimism has always been a defining American trait, sustained through challenges to our ideals and nurtured by natural resources and the fact that—maybe not by coincidence—America’s life span has coincided with the existence of modern science and technology. But this optimism may be disappearing, thanks, in part, to growing materialism and to electronic “news” media that increasingly redefine “normal” into the troubling and the unsolvable.
“Could you be among the last generation of Americans to know only such optimism?” I asked Frank. I can’t remember if I tried to force him to admit it was his “Rosebud,” but it doesn’t matter. Maybe it isn’t strictly a Rosebud, but it is Frank’s defining trait, and much about it remains mysterious.
“Maybe future generations won’t be just as optimistic,” he responded. “But I think not. It’ll be a different kind of optimism attuned to different circumstances. But it will endure.”
So here it is, the memoir–preliminary obituary. It invites readers to join him for breakfast, sip coffee, and sit around with one of the most amazing people and storytellers Hollywood and Washington, D.C., ever produced.
I can imagine a time far in the future, when someone stumbles around a dusty, dimly lit antique or junk store and encounters a stack of old print books. As he thumbs through Frank’s stories, something will catch that person’s eye, and late that night, the book carefully dusted off, the reader will find Frank’s stories inspirational, informative, and funny, but in my imagination, the reader in the future feels the closest kinship with Frank’s optimism. That person who stumbles upon this book sighs and says, “Mankiewicz lived in a different world, but he was just like us.”
I stand in silence. School groups and families walk by, click pictures on cell phones, chat, and keep moving—barely breaking stride. I don’t notice them and certainly do not look at them. My eyes are on the grave.
I am at Arlington National Cemetery. It is a few minutes past the gates opening at eight
A.M.
on Robert F. Kennedy’s birthday, November 20, which brings me here every year. A gray sky is drizzling. Workers prepare the ground in nearby Section 60 for men and women recently killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Robert Kennedy’s grave is a simple white cross on a grass-covered hillside. Nearby trees have lost about half their leaves to the autumn weather. Not one leaf remains on the grass, which is cut low and even.
The growing crowds probably see me, if they see me at all, as someone with his head bowed—an older man wearing a sport jacket and a bow tie. Balding, thin, all-white hair, slight paunch. No need to notice and certainly no reason to look twice. “If you only knew,” parts of me want to say. “If you only knew.”
The scene is right out of an early James Bond novel: Bond arrives on a small Caribbean island on an assassination mission. He pays a courtesy call on the British ambassador, whose invitation to dinner Bond cannot refuse. Bond finds the other two guests unbearably boring and feels relieved when they leave early. The ambassador offers Bond a cigar and smokes one himself as he and Bond sit in the drawing room and exchange polite small talk. A butler serves whiskey, then disappears. It is 9:30
P.M.
, too early for Bond to leave gracefully. The couple still on his mind, Bond makes an offhand comment about the apparent dullness of their marriage, which prompts the ambassador to begin a story about love, deceit, and intrigue. The story starts softly, takes some unexpected turns, and begins to describe some extraordinary occurrences. Bond finds himself leaning forward to hear better. When the story ends, the two men finish their whiskeys and walk to Bond’s car. “If you ever invite those people to dinner,” Bond tells the ambassador, “please include me.” The ambassador is surprised. “But those were the people here for dinner with us tonight,” he says.
Of course, I’m no James Bond. And I’m certainly not here because I want to talk to strangers—or anyone, for that matter. But everyone, and perhaps especially we “older” people, can feel bad when people look through us.
On this day, every year beginning in 1968, I have come to Arlington National Cemetery by myself. Lately, I’ve asked a friend to drive me here because I’d canceled my driver’s license and sold my car. “Best do that before something bad happens,” I had thought. “Better quit when you’re ahead of the house.” I’d been driving for nearly seventy years without an accident and had suffered nothing worse than a few parking tickets but did not want to press my luck.
For decades, I would encounter Kennedy family members and old friends from the Kennedy years, who also came as early as possible on the morning of RFK’s birthday. Often, I’d chat with Ted Kennedy.
During these visits, I often noticed another man standing alone, hat in hand. The man was Tom Brown, who had been a supporter of Robert F. Kennedy and has no claim to great fame other than loyalty and remembering. For decades, Tom and I had exchanged silent nods. Then, in the past few years, we’d started to talk. We did not know each other beyond first names and saw each other once a year, early in the morning of November 20. By now, we’re friends.
I greeted Tom Brown, who was waiting for me on the pathway leading to the Kennedy graves. Then I stood in front of the simple white cross on a grass-covered hillside.
* * *
When one leaves the Robert Kennedy grave, facing right away is the back of a large, tall tombstone that had been in place long before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That’s my favorite. I love seeing it every time I come here. It reads “Michael Musmanno.” And then, listed under the name: “16 books, Justice on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Trial Judge at the Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal.” The front of the stone is not visible from the pathway, so you must step over the low chain fence and walk around to read,
There is an eternal justice and an eternal order, there is a wise, merciful and omnipotent God. My friends, have no fear of the night or death. It is the forerunner of dawn, a glowing resplendent dawn, whose iridescent rays will write across the pink sky in unmistakable language—man does live again.
— The final words of Michael A. Musmanno in his debate with Clarence Darrow, 1932
He lucked out. He’s in the right place. Musmanno will never be forgotten.
* * *
From the cemetery, I stop at my favorite diner. Inside is a jukebox, a selection pad in every booth, and movie posters. By our booth are life-size posters of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. Monroe died at age thirty-six; Dean at twenty-four—both remembered and romanticized because they died young.
The grill man chatted with waitresses, waiters, and customers as he flipped home fries. On the menu, eggs Benedict costs $8.95, and eggs Benedict with spinach costs only $8.50. It makes no sense, until you realize no one would order eggs Benedict with spinach, and anyway, no one bothers to look at the menu.
I chose this diner in large part because it had no Wi-Fi, no television, and no screens. No one plugs anything in. We could talk here without the latest “breaking news.”
* * *
I used to be a chain-smoker, rarely without a cigarette. Three packs a day, unfiltered; curtailed eventually to three packs a day, filtered. During the 1968 Kennedy campaign, news accounts had described me as “a one-man smoke-filled room.” Then, in the late 1970s, after nearly five decades of smoking, I quit. I rarely talked about it, never reminiscing about the pleasures of tobacco and never mentioning how I’d like just one more cigarette.
Now I guess I’m a chain coffee drinker. I might always have been, but it became obvious after the cigarettes disappeared. If I’m talking, I’m told, and realize my coffee has cooled or the cup is empty, I often stop in mid-sentence, break eye contact, and look around until I catch the attention of someone who can bring a fresh, hot refill. The coffee arrives, and soon my cup is almost empty again, though it seems to any observer that I’ve barely lifted it to my lips.
* * *
Fred Snodgrass. I’ll be like Fred Snodgrass.
For a while in his youth, Fred Snodgrass was an outfielder for the New York Giants and as a ballplayer relatively undistinguished. Snodgrass played nine years, maybe, in the major leagues. But in 1912, when he was twenty-four years old—God help him—he dropped a routine fly ball in the tenth inning of a World Series game, which eventually cost his team the game and the Series. He retired from baseball a few years later, went back to California, became a banker, thrived, prospered, was a major philanthropist, and served as the mayor of Oxnard for many years. He was married to the same woman for sixty-five years, and he had two daughters and countless grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And when he died in 1974, sixty-two years later, the headline on his
New York Times
obituary read, “Fred Snodgrass, 86, Dead; Ball Player Muffed 1912 Fly.”
That’s how obituaries are done, and that’s the way it’ll be for me. I could win two Nobel Prizes, a Pulitzer, be appointed to the Supreme Court, and receive an Academy Award during the rest of my life, but the headline on my
Times
obituary would read, “Frank Mankiewicz, 106, Was Kennedy Aide.”
You know, that would be okay—just fine with me.
* * *
I first met Robert Kennedy because I spoke Spanish, and I spoke Spanish because the U.S. Army taught me that before it sent me to France, Belgium, and Germany to fight Hitler’s army. This makes complete sense if you are familiar with military bureaucracy.
It started in Hollywood and Beverly Hills.