My Life as a Mankiewicz Read Online Free PDF

did here.”
    Mother in the 1940s
    Despite her illness, Mother was an extremely intelligent woman and capable of great warmth. She had a unique ear for languages and spoke English and later Italian fluently, without a trace of accent. She was of tremendous help to Dad as an in-house critic of his screenplays. He routinely solicited her opinion and acted on it. Their relationship was doubtless eroding, but I was too young to understand that. The house on Mapleton was the last time they shared a bedroom. The abortive attempt to return to the stage must have been a crushing disappointment to her. There is correspondence from both writer Edna Ferber and director George S. Kaufman commenting on what a marvelous performance she gave and how she “handled the situation with such great dignity,” but no reason is given for her replacement out of town. I can only assume her mental illness must have flared up one night and it scared the hell out of them.
    Dad in the 1940s
    Dad was, simply put, a serial philanderer. He'd had many affairs while writing and producing at MGM, most notably with Loretta Young, Judy Garland, and Joan Crawford. Louis B. Mayer, self-appointed father to all at Metro, was extremely upset about Garland in particular because of her young age. But Dad and Judy either couldn't or wouldn't let go of each other. Their relationship included Judy becoming pregnant by him and having an abortion (I can't prove this, but I know it's true). Their affair continued well after he was married to Mother and Judy had married Vincente Minnelli. In the seventies I was best man at Liza Minnelli's wedding to Jack Haley Jr. in the same little Santa Barbara church where Judy had married Vincente. Liza and I were close at that time—she was literally bursting with humor and talent. She knew all about her mother's long affair with Dad and kidded that we could have been half brother and sister. She also told me that whenever Judy sang “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe,” it was silently dedicated to him. More about both Judy and Liza later.
    Joan Crawford also lasted quite a while. Apparently (according to Dad), she stood over my baby crib one night, while mother was in Menninger's, looked down at me, then turned to him and said, “That should be mine.”
    Louis B. Mayer had always wanted to create a new Irving Thalberg for himself at MGM, and he selected Dad to fill that role. By the time he was thirty, Joseph L. Mankiewicz had already produced more than twenty films—among them, Million Dollar Legs , Fritz Lang's Fury, Manhattan Melodrama (John Dillinger went to see it the night he was shot leaving the theater), and The Philadelphia Story. He also “fixed” most of the screenplays and had been Oscar nominated for screenwriting. But Dad wanted to direct, to direct what he wrote, and Mayer refused, telling him, “You have to learn to crawl before you can walk.” By letting Dad direct he would lose the most promising producer he had on the lot. Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox had no such limitations in mind, however. With the implicit understanding that he would become a director, Dad moved to Fox in the mid-forties.
    Major Studios in the 1940s
    At that time, with a few notable exceptions (Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, etc.), virtually every actor, writer, producer, director, cameraman, and editor was under contract to a major studio. These weren't merely work centers—they were more like self-contained sovereign states. They even had their own baseball teams. The commissaries served gourmet food of all kinds, available twenty-four hours a day. The more important filmmakers had their own bungalows, often with a bedroom. There were steam rooms, barber shops, and mail delivery, and each studio had an extensive back lot with its own Western Street, Jungleland, Big City Streets, and more.
    The 20th Century Fox lot sprawled over most of what is today called Century City, a major