So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (7 page)
Read So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life Online
Authors: Frank Mankiewicz,Joel L. Swerdlow
The articles, I thought, would end, once and for all, the largely ephemeral “controversy” over who had in fact “written”
Citizen Kane,
but facts had not dissuaded Welles’s proponents, and they did not seem to do so, even after Kael’s thorough and clear conclusion that only Herman Mankiewicz had—indeed, could have—conceived and then written
Citizen Kane
.
The
New Yorker
articles report correctly that Welles’s contract with RKO required him—in order to be paid at all—to produce, direct, be the leading actor in, and write a feature film, namely
Citizen Kane
. Pauline Kael suggests that perhaps Welles had underestimated Mankiewicz’s desire to be credited for what he evidently saw as his one great achievement in movie writing—a profession to be sneered at almost all the time. Pop complained when Welles began to call himself the author of the screenplay, and even took the matter before the Screen Writers Guild, which advised, if a formal arbitration were requested, it would rule in favor of sole credit for my father. Whereupon Welles made the terms of his contract known to Pop and literally pleaded for at least joint screen credit, “so I can get paid at all.” My father finally agreed to share the credit, with his own name first, and Welles agreed. Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson told Pop he should make Welles pay for yielding even joint screen credit (Johnson suggested ten thousand dollars); I hope Pop agreed.
William Randolph Hearst, needless to say, didn’t care about screen credit. He fought hard to keep
Citizen Kane
from being shown at all. He offered RKO a complete reimbursement of its investment in the film (nearly one million dollars) for the destruction of the negative and all the prints, and only the courage of RKO’s chief, George Schaefer—who turned down the deal—saved
Kane
from turning into mandolin picks, the fate of much old celluloid film. Hearst then told the heads of all the movie theater chains—at that time, meaning almost all movie theaters—his newspapers would refuse to carry ads or news of the movie. He followed through; for years, until antitrust proceedings and the decline of the Hearst empire, the motion picture consistently voted the best of all time showed only in independent art houses, never at a Fox theater, or Warner Bros. or RKO, or any of the other chains. As a result,
Citizen Kane,
despite its relatively low cost and high acclaim, was a “loser” for its producers. Television ratings finally carried the film into profit. Even now, after seventy years, my brother and I receive monthly checks, totaling less than a thousand dollars per year, from the Screen Writers Guild, as
Kane
continues to show in European theaters.
Hearst also knew quite well who had written the film. One day late in 1942, my father, returning from the studio, had a slight fender bender with a car driven by a family friend, Leonore “Lee” Gershwin, the wife of Ira Gershwin, the songwriting brother of the composer George Gershwin. Pop and Lee Gershwin exchanged insurance data and went on their ways. But the exchange was ultimately reported to the Beverly Hills police, who, of course, filed no charges. But the police record must have been seen by a reporter for the Hearst-owned
Los Angeles Examiner,
and it must have come to the attention of “the Chief,” as Hearst was, I believe, called throughout his empire. The result, such was Hearst’s influence, was a full-scale trial of Herman Mankiewicz for drunk driving and the collision between Pop’s “large” Studebaker (actually, a sport coupe) and Mrs. Gershwin’s “small roadster.” The
Examiner
covered the trial luridly, and daily, driving
Time
magazine to report, in an item I will never forget, that in the Hearst paper the Mankiewicz trial received “more coverage than the battle of Stalingrad.” It ended, of course, in an acquittal for Pop.
The trial occurred while I was in basic training at Camp Roberts. The post exchange (or PX to every soldier) was at the opposite end of the mile-long parade ground from the barracks where I was lodged, and the PX carried, every day, five copies of the Hearst evening paper from Los Angeles. So, for the duration of the trial, which, I recall, was at least two weeks, I had little more than three-quarters of an hour between the end of the day’s training and the formal ceremony of retreat to deposit my gear, including my rifle, at the barracks, race the length of the parade ground to the PX, buy all five copies of the Hearst paper, throw them in the trash, run back, change into my class A uniform, and make it to the retreat formation. I made it, every day, and rejoiced at the verdict of acquittal, which meant I could now relax a little as I took a shower and tied my tie, along with all the other soldiers. Pop had assured me, early on, he’d be acquitted; there was, he said, no evidence. And he didn’t think Hearst would go so far as to bribe the jurors.
* * *
A word here about screen credits. Under the old studio system in Hollywood, in which my father had spent most of his career, when writers, directors, and even stars were all under long-term contracts to one of the studios, it was common for more than one writer to be called on to help write a screenplay, if only for a scene or two. A writer, after all, might be working on a pirate movie one week and a Western the next, perhaps to be followed by a stint tightening the ending on a drawing room comedy. The result, when a script was finished, might well be a determination by a faceless studio executive that the contribution of two or more writers had risen to the level of deserving screen credit, even though they had certainly not “collaborated” and more likely had never even met. There were exceptions, of course. Established teams—Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, or Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond come to mind—always worked together, and the screen credit reflected a joint product. So for my father to “share” a credit might have seemed, in some ways, perfectly natural.
And what the script “controversy” shrouds, in fact, is that the movie
Citizen Kane
is Welles’s masterpiece. His acting performance is magnificent, especially when one remembers he was twenty-five years old at the time, his direction is near letter-perfect, eliciting superb performances from his troupe of supporting players—Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, George Coulouris, Ray Collins, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead—all of whom lacked much, if any, on-screen experience, and his production touches, such as Bernard Herrmann’s music and Gregg Toland’s innovative photography, were all of Academy Award, if not permanent award-winning, quality. It’s
his
movie, marred only by a non-controversy over the script a few of his admirers and relatives choose to keep alive.
Why, then, the persistent argument that Welles was co-author? It is, I think, a piece of postmodernism before its time: the malleability of “truth” to meet whatever needs we have. In this case, it is the need to see Orson Welles as one of the first great auteurs of movies, or rather “film.” If Welles did not co-author
Kane
—indeed, if Welles could not write well at all—he would lose his auteur status; therefore he must be the co-author of
Kane
. We need to believe a creative genius like Orson Welles can do it all and surmount every challenge at the same time. Alas for Peter Bogdanovich and Welles’s daughter, Jack Houseman and Rita Alexander agree—“not one word.”
Stacked on my desk as I began this work were eight binders, each about three inches thick: my oral history interviews from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Notations on the stiff brown cover of each binder say the interviews were conducted in Washington, D.C., and in my home in Bethesda, Maryland, on various dates from June through December 1969. Interview topics proceed chronologically and end abruptly, with no opportunity for me to offer reflections. These interviews languish, unread, except perhaps by a few scattered scholars. Until recently, I kept them restricted because I didn’t want to hurt people; I didn’t want my statements made public while anyone mentioned was still alive.
I told the truth as best I could and ultimately decided the only way to do that was not to worry what anyone would think.
Mark Twain, after all, once warned that “only dead men can tell the truth in this world,” and he made sure his autobiography wasn’t published until after he died, and he ordered many sections be kept secret for at least one hundred years. He said memoirs are like love letters—they only tell the truth if outsiders read them when you are dead and beyond caring.
It’s been a long time since I thought about those interviews, and I don’t think there’s anything worthy of such drama.
* * *
One example: At the beginning of the first oral history interview, I describe an opposition leader who has taken refuge in a hotel in his country, Nicaragua, governed at the time by the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, who relied on violence, torture, and U.S. support to stay in power. Somoza’s security forces are threatening to drag the man out of the hotel and maybe kill him; he has called Senator Kennedy to ask for some kind of public statement of concern, anything to attract media attention and keep him alive.
I’m sorry to say now I have little memory of this life-and-death drama. If it’s in the oral histories, it happened, but I really can’t add much. That story sounds dramatic, and I’m sure it was. But for me, the whole thing must have taken at most fifteen minutes. Then I was onto something else, maybe something just as compelling or maybe just routine business in the Senate. That’s how it was working with Robert Kennedy. Things were happening all the time; they moved quickly. I answered maybe 150 telephone calls a day. If I worked ten hours a day, that’s an average of one call every four minutes. Of course, a lot were quick, several-word conversations simply to answer a question.
Oral historians capture contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, facts and feelings but are limited because questions are formulated and answered (obviously) without knowledge of what will happen and change and what will be important to future generations.
In this particular instance, I remember Robert Kennedy was unavailable, so I called Sol Linowitz, then our ambassador to the Organization of American States, and asked him to intervene. “Tell him you spoke to Senator Kennedy, and he shares your opinion,” I told Linowitz. The man was freed.
To judge from what passes for news today, what people want from me in a memoir is not difficult to see; they want
scandal
. How about, “I used to drive Robert Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe’s house at least two or three nights a week. I don’t know how long he stayed. Usually I’d just drop him off and he got home on his own. I imagine he often spent the night.” Or maybe some drunken or drug-driven orgies might be popular.
* * *
I have finished rereading my oral history interviews. They are, by necessity, limited, focusing only on RFK, with little attention paid to me as an individual with my own thoughts and feelings, and are limited by the time period during which they were conducted. Then, of course, neither the person who posed the questions nor I knew, for example, how the war in Vietnam would end; the lasting role of John and Robert Kennedy in America’s politics and mythology; or how the brothers’ quest for social and economic justice would evolve. Robert Kennedy’s 1968 speech on the need to redefine how the United States defines “wealth,” for example, is now popular on YouTube and an idea that several generations of young Americans have encountered in their textbooks. But the oral history interviews do not even mention the campaign trip on which the speech was delivered.
* * *
If I could reach next to my bookcase, I’d see a few sugar packets and note that each describes itself as “natural sugar,” a classic retronym. Maybe I’ll be remembered by “retronym,” a word I created, now recognized by some dictionaries of the English language. A retronym is a word or a phrase used when societal (and scientific) change has made the original word too imprecise, or at least not applicable. Retronyms are all new; usage has brought them all into being. Thus, “live broadcast” is a retronym because all broadcasts used to be live, but now “a broadcast” can (and usually does) mean the event has been taped.
Once we think about them, we keep noticing retronyms all through the language: “hardcover book,” “hand tools,” “manual typewriter,” “live drama,” “live image,” “natural sound,” “whole milk,” “silent movie.” Even “real life.”
Retronyms can be seen as they emerge. “Traditional media.” “Print book.” “Landline,” as in “your voice is breaking up; I’ll call back on a landline.” Retronyms usually capture something related to technology but can be social or economic, as in “two-parent family” or “wild salmon.”
I came up with “retronym” in the 1980s when watching a professional football game and one of the announcers said, “The Rams should do well here because they play their regular-season games on natural turf.” I thought, “Wow! ‘Natural turf’ is what we used to call ‘grass.’” And then, a few days later, a friend told me about her musical son: “I was with him at a party and they wanted him to play. He didn’t have his instrument with him so he borrowed an old acoustic guitar.” An “acoustic guitar” is what we used to call a “guitar”; now new music is played on electric guitars.
“Newspaper.” Soon no one will use that word anymore. It will require a retronym, maybe “print newspaper.” “In the newspaper” will refer to something that only exists online. If people e-mail you a story they’ve read and you look for it in the print newspaper, you may not find it. The “real” newspaper will have become digital. And the “real economy” is something different from the plain old “economy” and much more worthy of concern and respect. Closely related is our need for a word to describe what has happened when the original version of an artistic creation disappears from the public’s consciousness; people said, for example, “I look forward to seeing the movie version of
Les Misérables,
” confident it was a Broadway play transformed into a movie. Gone, or never present, was awareness the play had been based on a book, a “real” book.