So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (4 page)

I was two years old in early 1926, when my father, Herman Mankiewicz, left Manhattan and literary life. He was the first drama critic for
The New Yorker
as well as a drama critic for
The New York Times
. He must have been very talented because he succeeded despite an open disdain for authority.

Moving to Hollywood, Pop began to write “titles,” screens with dialogue or plot explanations, for silent movies. Transition to sound movies came in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Many people resisted sound as a distraction and unnecessary, but my father was among the small group—now nearly all forgotten—who invented what we now call a screenplay.

He never mentioned the shift from writing storyboards to full scripts. In fact, my father never took any aspect of Hollywood writing seriously. The whole thing was just a big joke to him. Once, when a movie studio employer wanted to punish him for something, the man ordered him to rewrite the ending of a movie starring Rin Tin Tin, the German shepherd, then the most famous dog in the movies and thus in the world. Those days, writers were still employees of studios and had to do what they were told. My father turned in a script whose climax showed the heroic dog picking up an abandoned baby and carrying it
into
a burning building.

Pop felt almost ashamed of his work on movies, and I don’t think he ever actually went to see a movie, including those he had written, except for
Citizen Kane
.

My father never talked about movies. He just did not find them interesting. Does a bricklayer come home and talk to his family about changes in the mortar? I seem to have inherited, or absorbed, much of his attitude. As a kid, I enjoyed movies but then basically stopped watching them. To this day, I have not seen superhit, classic movies like
The Godfather,
which was released in 1972. I only watched movies when friendships or political connections required it; for example, Warren Beatty’s anti–Vietnam War work led me to see
Bonnie and Clyde
(years after its release in 1967). And Robert Kennedy stayed at the home of the movie director John Frankenheimer when campaigning in Los Angeles not because RFK admired his movies, which included the award-winning political thrillers
The Manchurian Candidate
(1962) and
Seven Days in May
(1964)—he’d never seen either—but because Frankenheimer and I were tennis buddies from the 1950s. Indeed, it was only after my younger son, Ben, became the weekend host of Turner Classic Movies that I made an effort to watch a lot of movies, including those done by my father and his brother, Joe.

*   *   *

To one activity, however, Herman Mankiewicz was dedicated. He was the chairman of the Southern California branch of the Columbia Alumni Association. He had assumed the office almost voluntarily, because there were very few Columbia alumni in Los Angeles, but Pop was a devoted alum and followed closely the fortunes of the Columbia Lions football team. The team in the 1933 season had been exceptionally successful, winning eight games and losing only to Princeton. When Princeton turned down an invitation to play the Pacific Coast champion, Stanford, in the Rose Bowl, Columbia, aided by fierce publicity from the nationally syndicated New York sportswriters, was invited and eagerly accepted. The Rose Bowl game, as the only postseason game in the country, created, more or less, the national champion, so Pop began to focus on New Year’s Day 1934.

He insisted that somehow Coach Lou Little and the team be met by a lion when they arrived in Pasadena for the game, and so my brother Don and I (then aged eleven and nine) turned our attention to where a lion might be available. Luckily, Don had heard of a local suburban establishment called Gay’s Lion Farm, where the movie studios could rent exotic animals as needed. And the lion farm was the home, we learned, of Leo the Lion, the fierce symbol of MGM, whose growl preceded all that studio’s movies.

Getting a lion to take to the train station proved to be a problem. First of all, Southern California was in the midst of a historic rainstorm, up to six inches having drenched the county in three days, the week before the game. Local fire departments were needed on New Year’s Day to pump the stadium so the football field would be in playable condition. A further complication was that Mr. Gay told us he, regrettably, had no lions available at Gay’s Lion Farm (other than Leo, of course, who was far too old, and stately, to be trotted out to greet a mere football team). But Mr. Gay did tell us he had a
mountain
lion, called that in California—elsewhere a “cougar” or a “puma.” Mr. Gay added he hoped the rain would abate, because the mountain lion hated the water. The alumni association signed up for the cougar.

The day of the game dawned and continued, off and on, with heavy rain, reducing the crowd for the Rose Bowl game to an all-time low—in part because of the rain and in large part because the game was widely believed to be severely one-sided; powerful Stanford was favored over these pale easterners by eighteen points, and the gamblers had set the odds on the game at eight to one. So it was no great surprise when the Columbia team arrived at the Pasadena train station the day before the game and was met by a rather small group, consisting entirely of Pop, Don, and me, dragging on a leash a very recalcitrant, soaked mountain lion. “That’s a good-looking bunch of backs,” my father remarked to Coach Little as the boys emerged from the train. “Backs, hell,” the coach replied, “that’s the whole team!”

Coach Little was right, only seventeen team members played in the entire game, which—astoundingly—resulted in a 7–0 victory for Columbia, called the greatest upset in Rose Bowl history. The alumni association had done its job.

*   *   *

Before my father went to Hollywood, he’d been part of the famous Algonquin Round Table, authors, playwrights, and journalists—including some people who qualified as all three—who met often, informally, for lunch at a large round table in New York’s Algonquin Hotel dining room to exchange quips, news, anecdotes, gossip, and comic insults. Members included a Who’s Who of literary life. Among my father’s favorite put-downs was one he attributed to the author Edna Ferber, who arrived one day a few minutes later than most of the usual crowd wearing a rather severely tailored suit. “Why, hello, Edna, you look just like a man,” Noël Coward, an openly gay playwright, said in greeting her. “So do you, Noël,” was her retort. And Dorothy Parker once told the group, “If all the Vassar girls at a Yale football weekend were laid end to end … I wouldn’t be surprised.”

These gatherings began in 1919 and lasted for about twelve years, their end apocryphally certified in 1932 when Ferber showed up for lunch one day and found a family from Kansas sitting at the table.

As I grew up in Beverly Hills, our family dinner table was a sort of Algonquin West, a must-stop for East Coast literary figures who found themselves in California. There they were, matching wits with my father, in conversation often interlaced with fond and ribald memories of his pre-Hollywood days. I don’t remember Don and I ever having dinner alone with my parents. Either he and I ate in the breakfast room because they were out or they were entertaining later in the evening. Or we ate at the dining room table with the guests.

The dining room table was big, easily accommodating ten. It was long, always with nice silverware and wineglasses. If it got to be more people than about six, dinner was served formally; otherwise, servants would fill the plates in the kitchen and bring them in. My mother never spent much time in the kitchen at all. She was always a guest, and she always had a little buzzer under the rug by her end of the table. She’d hit the buzzer with her foot to show that the course was over; the “help” could come in and clear the dishes, bring the soup or whatever. And the buzzer, of course, was audible in the kitchen but not in the dining room.

Relatives, friends, and work colleagues were guests. Most special were old friends and pals from New York. The latter group seems to have included only writers of one kind or another, reporters, playwrights, publishers of classy books. Visitors from New York included S. J. Perelman, Bennett Cerf, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, even F. Scott Fitzgerald—a fairly steady stream. Arthur Kober, Robert Benchley, now and then a Marx brother, usually Harpo, and often, of course, my father’s old friend Ben Hecht. But never, never, so far as I can recall, movie people, except for other transplanted New Yorkers.

My father presided over all the conversation. He’d give speeches, interesting, humorous, sometimes abusive speeches. He’d like to have a victim at the table, somebody whom he could denounce. He’d say, “You and your friends say this or that, but…”

It was political things, almost always. My father didn’t care about personal matters. I think he didn’t know any guest well enough to argue about such things. He was interested, as all of our guests were, in current events. In fact, if you just walked into those dinners and listened to the conversations, you would think that my father was a newspaper columnist writing about politics; they never talked about Hollywood or the movies. As I look back, though, one thing really sticks out: They all had great senses of humor.

George S. Kaufman, with whom Pop had written a Broadway play,
The Good Fellow,
which, alas, lasted exactly one week, was a regular whenever he came to Los Angeles and a consummate bridge player. My father fancied himself a bridge player as well, and I remember once, in an evening foursome with Kaufman and Pop as partners, Kaufman asked my father, “Mank, tell me when you learned to play bridge. And don’t say ‘this afternoon’; I want to know what time this afternoon.”

Marc Connelly was famous for a number of hit Broadway plays, most notably
The Green Pastures,
a dramatic version of the four Gospels, with what was called an all-Negro cast. He and Pop had collaborated on another play,
The Wild Man of Borneo,
which reached Broadway—and promptly expired. Both Kaufman and Connelly would sit at our dinner table and trade wildly funny impressions of Broadway and journalism.

I at first looked forward to S. J. Perelman’s coming, because I thought his writing made him the funniest man alive, or perhaps who had ever lived. He was the only disappointment. Like a few other humorists—of whom Art Buchwald was a conspicuous example—he was funny only when “on.” As a dinner guest, Perelman seemed almost impossibly dull and wanted only to talk about the dangers Hitler posed to America. As Pop said after he’d gone, “For that, we could as easily have invited Walter Lippmann”; Lippmann, from the 1920s until the 1970s, was America’s most profound and respected political columnist.

*   *   *

My father was just a young, struggling newspaperman when my parents gave me the middle name Fabian—after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, who in the third century
B.C.
achieved fame for diplomacy rather than warfare; far more recently, the Fabian Society, founded in the late nineteenth century by prominent British socialists, was named for Fabius Maximus because they so admired him.

For our family, the Depression mostly meant that the pool guy came once a week instead of twice. A joke at home was about one of my classmates’ short story about a poor family. “The mother was poor, the father was poor, even the butler and the gardener were poor.”

Mary Astor lived across the street. Oscar Hammerstein and his wife and kids and, later, Dinah Shore and George Montgomery lived next door. John Gilbert was up on the other side. John Barrymore lived up the street and behind our house, and I used to take my bike up there and ride down the hill. Jean-Pierre Aumont and Maria Montez lived at the corner across the street. We used to throw oranges on their lawn. It was a classy neighborhood and rather insular.

Many of these names that meant so much then, and some until recently, are now no longer recognized by most people. John Gilbert, for example, was a rival of Rudolph Valentino’s as Hollywood’s hottest lover. Known for scenes in which he kissed women a lot while the caption on-screen read, “I love you,” he failed to make the transition to talkies because of his high, whiny voice. Gilbert’s real-life romantic partners had included Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. He was married four times and died from alcohol abuse in 1936 at age thirty-eight.

When my mother and a group of her friends wanted to start a private school for their kids, they simply picked up the telephone and called the country’s leading educational authority, John Dewey. My mother and some of the other new Hollywood mothers with children approaching school age had heard bad things about the local public schools and, like all liberals, good things about John Dewey, who had swept American society with his ideas of “progressive” education. Dewey argued that schools, particularly in the early grades, should focus on nurturing children so they would become, in Dewey’s words, “free spirits able to pass judgments pertinently and discriminatingly” on the problems of human living. So they asked Dewey to come out to Los Angeles and put a school together. Alas, Mr. Dewey was nearly seventy and thought such a task—three thousand miles from home—was beyond his physical capability, but he offered to help these nice ladies. Dewey had, it seems, some ex-students and even protégés in Los Angeles, and he volunteered to see if, together, they could come up with a faculty and a new school for “the group.”

Dewey and his acolytes were as good as their word, and in short order a principal and four or five teachers were in place—one for each of the first four grades and, with some doubling up, one each for art, music, wood shop, and physical education. A site just a few blocks from the Hollywood Bowl was located and bought, and for the first six years of school—I skipped a grade—I attended the Progressive School of Los Angeles. The sign out front gave the school’s name, followed by the words, “A John Dewey School,” and then, in smaller but still striking type, “Learn by Doing.” The Progressive School was a good base for my education, and I attended—sometimes with as few as three or four other kids in a class. Teacher-student relationships were friendly and a bit informal, and I seem to recall no grades were given out. But, surprisingly, considering all the scorn heaped on “progressive” education, we learned the three Rs in rather formal style. In first grade, there were some fifty simple arithmetic problems handed out at the start of each school day, and you couldn’t advance until you got them all correct and within the allotted time—maybe five minutes. If you did get them right, you went on to the second set, and the rules were the same, until you had passed all ten of these quizzes, each harder and more complex than the previous one. We also built a model of the Boulder Dam, now called the Hoover Dam, and of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.