My Life as a Mankiewicz (43 page)

He said, “I'm so scared of getting up there. Can I say this? This could apply to me too.”

I said, “Sure.” I mean, it's William Holden. I guess if it had been William Schwartz, I would have said, “Bill, you know, just do the best you can.” He was that scared of speaking. I listened to my speech, which he delivered better than I could, he was such a wonderful actor—not that he didn't love Chuck, which he did. I scrambled in my head to figure out some extra things, and I got away with a speech. But Bill was really remarkable.

Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick had a housekeeping deal at Warner Brothers, but he was almost exclusively in England. Jimmy Harris, a good friend of mine, started with Stanley in New York. Jimmy had made his money in the shmata trade and provided early seed money when they did
The Killing
, their first movie together. Later, they did
Paths of Glory
and
Lolita.
Then, Jimmy went off to direct, but he was still Stanley's closest friend. At Stanley's funeral, I understand when Jimmy got up to speak, it was just heartbreaking. They were so close. At Warners, John Calley was deputized to handle Stanley Kubrick because Stanley had very little patience by then. He was getting more and more eccentric. Calley was a big executive at Warners and a producer. A smart, literate guy. Stanley loved him. So when Stanley wanted to do another picture for Warners, John Calley was the designated hitter. Stanley would talk to Calley, Calley would talk to Warners, they'd give their answer to Calley, and Calley got Stanley everything.

Stanley was an odd duck in so many ways. He was an out-and-out dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker. A
huge
baseball fan. In those days, you got the scores a day later in the
Paris Herald Tribune.
Stanley would call New York while the Yankees game was on—he'd figure out when it might be the bottom of the seventh or later—and stay on the line. He had huge phone bills. A friend would announce, “Mickey Mantle's up, Stanley. There are two men on.” Later, he got a UPI ticker so he could get the scores in real time.

Stanley wouldn't fly. I saw him when he came to Los Angeles for the opening of
2001: A Space Odyssey.
He had driven to Southampton, got on the
Queen Mary
, sailed to New York, got on the train, traveled across the country, arrived in Los Angeles. It took him eight or nine days to get from London to L.A. By then, they already had polar flights. I was sitting with him and Jimmy Harris, and I said, “Boy, Stanley, if they don't like this picture, it's a long trip home.”

He said, “You bet.”

When Stanley directed
Barry Lyndon
, which may be the most beautiful movie ever made, he would drive all the way to the west coast of England and get on the ferry to go across the Irish Sea to shoot in Ireland. Everybody else flew it in twenty minutes.
Full Metal Jacket
shot in England. Half of it takes place in Vietnam. They imported the palm trees.

There is the fraternity of directors, and when I talk about directors, I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about the Kubricks and the Joe Mankiewiczs. Ken Adam, who designed the Bonds,
Dr. Strangelove
, and
Barry Lyndon
, designed
Sleuth
for dad with that wonderful little house that they were in. One day, Ken said to Dad, “You know who wants to meet you, Stanley Kubrick.”

Dad said, “Well, I'd like to meet Stanley Kubrick.” So Ken decided to set up a dinner at his house in Montpelier Square. He had a sunken basement dining room. You could look down into the room from street level. To make it less stilted, since Kubrick was meeting Mankiewicz, Ken and his wife, Letizia, asked me and Malcolm McDowell, who had just done
Clockwork Orange
with Stanley, to the occasion. After dinner—it was about ten o'clock—Malcolm and I decided to go hit the clubs. It was great in London at that time. So we went out to Tramps. We got back to Montpelier Square, where Malcolm had his car, at two in the morning. We looked through the window, and there were Dad and Stanley Kubrick, still talking, just the two of them. We'd left them four hours earlier. Dad was puffing his pipe. They were talking. It was a heartwarming thing to see. I don't know when it broke up. They were two people who were so concerned with the quality of film; not necessarily the gross of the film, the appeal of the film, but the quality of the film.

Stanley's wife, Christiane, appears at the end of
Paths of Glory.
She is the German prisoner of war that's brought out in front of the troops to sing a song and she's terrified. As she starts to sing, all the grizzled faces start to tear up, and they sing along with her. It's an incredible ending to this movie. It wasn't the original ending. Jimmy Harris told me this: Stanley started dating her—she was a German girl—in Munich when they were shooting. It all took place in France, but it was about corruption in the French command, and the French wouldn't let them shoot there. The picture was not shown in France for ten years. Stanley said to Jimmy one day, “Got a great idea for the end of the movie. A German prisoner arrives.”

And Jimmy said, “And who would that be, Stanley?”

He said, “Well, Christiane.”

Jimmy said Stanley was about three days behind shooting, and when he was less than a day and a half behind, they'd shoot the ending. Jimmy said, “You never saw anybody go up and down the trenches so fast.” But it was a great ending, and she remained Mrs. Kubrick for forty years. She stayed married to him forever.

The crazy actor who was in
Paths of Glory
with the big bug eyes was Timothy Carey. He was a method actor. Huge overactor. Carey, who was nuts, doesn't show up one day. They're shooting on a tight schedule because they don't have a lot of money to do it. Kubrick and Harris are going crazy. They get a call from the police. Carey has been found bound and gagged in the woods behind a house in the outskirts of Munich. He says, “Oh, Jesus, thank God they found me. I got kidnapped and they robbed me.” Jimmy thought, this is really weird. He's a huge guy. Who's going to kidnap and rob him? Carey's back working. Jimmy goes over to the house where he was found, and the residents finally confess that Carey gave them a hundred bucks to call the police and bind and gag him themselves. He'd been on a toot for two days, and he knew he'd get fired. That's why you love to work. That stuff doesn't happen in offices. It only happens on a set. That's why I love it so much.

David Merrick

In the late seventies the producer David Merrick announced his intentions to make a movie of his Broadway hit
Promises, Promises
, which was, in turn, a musical version of the famous Billy Wilder film
The Apartment.
How my name came up in connection with the project I'm not exactly sure, except that my stock as a writer was quite high at the time and I had written the book for a Broadway musical
(Georgy!)
earlier in my career. At any rate, Merrick's assistant, Alan Delinn, had mentioned to Jack Haley Jr., a close friend, that David would be interested in meeting me. Frankly, I was not particularly interested in doing
Promises, Promises
, but it was a chance to meet David Merrick, and who knows, maybe after a meeting I will talk myself into it.

The meeting started pleasantly enough. Merrick smiled at me and said, “What do you think?”

And I said, “Well, I have one concern about the project, which is, when
The Apartment
first came out, it was a little scandalous for a guy to rent out his apartment to his boss. But then, in the wake of the sexual revolution and the era of ‘free love,' is it quite so shocking anymore, and is that something that should be addressed?”

Merrick looked right past me to Alan Delinn and said, “Why am I here? Who is this man? What am I doing here? Why am I talking to this person?”

Alan said, “David, you asked to see him.”

Merrick said, “I don't recall.” And he just got up and walked out. That was my meeting with David Merrick.

Sometime later, I was at a Tony-watching party at Leslie Bricusse's house and David Merrick was one of the guests. Merrick had produced both
Stop the World—I Want to Get Off
and
The Roar of the Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd
for Leslie and Tony Newley, and they were in discussion with him about a revival of one of them. Tony and David Merrick, famously, did not get along during both shows. While we were watching the Tonys, and everyone had had a few drinks, David Merrick smiled and looked over at Tony and said, “You know, we had our fights, we had our disagreements, but like a good marriage, we also had our happy times. We had a lot of happy times.”

Tony looked back at Merrick and said, “Frankly, David, I can't remember one.”

Robert Mitchum

I first met Robert Mitchum when I was doing the Bond movies and flying from Los Angeles to London on a regular basis. He was flying over this particular day to begin a film called
Farewell, My Lovely.
We were introduced by Tom Stout, who was the all-powerful head of public relations for TWA at the time. He later went on and founded the incredibly successful Hoffman Travel Service. Indeed, everyone in Hollywood used to joke that TWA stood for Tom's World Airlines. Mitchum and I hit it off immediately. We had a few drinks in the Ambassador Lounge, and I could see that I had to pace myself alcohol-wise, since his capacity seemed to be nearly inexhaustible.

Once aboard and up in the air, we went up to the little lounge that existed in those days on the 747. We had another drink, and Mitchum noticed two young Arab teenagers, approximately thirteen years old, playing cards. He asked them if we could all play and did they know how to play poker. “Yes,” they replied and the four of us started playing poker. Within half an hour, these two kids were absolutely cleaning us out. The stewardess arrived and told us that dinner was being served downstairs, so we went back to our seats. A very well-dressed Arab gentleman came up to Mitchum and said, “Mr. Mitchum, my sons tell me they were playing poker with you. We are an observant Muslim family, and they are not allowed to gamble. And I understand they won some money from you, and I am here to give it back to you.”

Mitchum looked up and said, “No, listen, the kids won it fair and square, a bet's a bet; tell them to keep the money.”

The man looked back at him and said, “You don't understand, Mr. Mitchum, my children are watching me right now, and I told them I was going to give you the money back. So here it is.”

Mitchum took the money, looked down, and looked back up again and said, “Well, as long as you're giving it back, it was three hundred dollars not two hundred fifty.”

Mitchum had a wonderful disdain for the art of acting, which he practiced so well. “Acting can't be all that complicated,” he told me, “when you consider one of the biggest stars who ever lived was Rin Tin Tin.”

The last time I saw Mitchum was in Montecito, when we were shooting
Delirious.
Early in the morning, I had a cup of coffee with John Candy at a little drugstore that was opening early for us. We exited the coffee shop—it was about six in the morning—and coming down the street were Robert Mitchum and Richard Widmark. Both lived up there. Richard Widmark looked like a silver-haired devil, and Mitchum was in a caftan muumuu carrying a purse. John, Richard, and Robert were so impressed meeting one another. I said to Mitchum, “Bob, is anybody giving you any shit about the muumuu and the purse?”

He looked at me and said, “Not so far.”

Mitchum had a very loyal assistant who had been with him most of his life, and her job was to take any offers that he had and count the number of pages that he was in. He wouldn't read the scripts anymore. He just wanted to know if it was going to be a good project, how many pages was he in, and how long would it take. He won the Emmy for
War and Remembrance
, playing an admiral. After the award show, breathless TV people asked him, “What was it that attracted you to the part, Mr. Mitchum?”

He said, “The director asked me to play it.” That was it. He was a very simple guy.

8

The 1980s

Calling Dr. Mankiewicz

I felt the urge to direct because I couldn't stomach what was being done with what I wrote.

—Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The Doctor Will See You Now

I really got to know Dad as a human being in slow stages by always stopping by on my way to Europe, on my way back from Europe. That was seven or eight movies. We'd already had the experience of working in the same studio when he was doing
Sleuth
and I was doing
Live and Let Die.
And I would go back every Christmas. I wanted to find out many things, because he could be so closed. I don't mean hostile, but closed. One night in early 1980, I was visiting, and he said, “You know, Tom, I've got all kinds of stuff.” He used to save everything, notes and pictures in file cabinets. He had decided, I guess an elegant way to put it, to make Mother a nonperson. He said, “I have lots of pictures of your mother if you'd like them.” I realized half of it was being generous and half of it was she wasn't part of his life anymore. He'd been with Rosemary now eighteen years. She was his wife, they had a child. He was looking forward to many more years with Rosemary. Mother was buried in Kensico Cemetery in Westchester.

Dad asked me to pay for the upkeep on Mother's grave. I said, “Okay, fine.” My brother Chris couldn't afford anything, so I paid for the upkeep on her grave for fifteen years. All these years later, I said to Chris, “I'm going to need your permission, but what if I should die? I can't keep this grave forever, what's going to happen twenty, thirty years from now? Also, Mother's so lonely. She's there all by herself. Dad will obviously be buried with Rosemary. The Mankiewiczes are spread out all over the place. Chris, with your permission, I'd like to cremate her body and have the ashes sent to L.A., and we can scatter them at sea or do anything you want with them.” So that's what we did. Chris has the remainder of Mother's ashes because he is hoping to get to Europe at some point and scatter some there.

In stages, my relationship with my father became much, much better. While we weren't equal professionally—he was the four-time Oscar winner and a legend—we became equal in the sense that I didn't need anything from him and he didn't need anything from me. We were just father and son. We could have a different kind of dialogue. Being the “son or the daughter of” is a tremendous advantage, but there are compensating disadvantages like, number one, are you ever going to measure up? Number two, when you first start, snotty reviewers will say, well, Tom Mankiewicz is clearly no Joe Mankiewicz. Also, as I've said, you have that group of people who are rooting against you in the beginning because you're Joe Mankiewicz's kid and if you were Joe Schwartz's kid, you wouldn't even be there, they think.

I concentrated heavily on writing. The most important moment in my life was when I was finished rewriting
Diamonds Are Forever
and there was no question I was writing the next one. They were making the deal already. Cubby and Harry knew who my father was, but they didn't know him socially. They were about to make another fucking James Bond film, and they figured, out of all the writers, I was the one that they wanted to have write it. That was an inner satisfaction. That's when you stopped being Joe Mankiewicz's kid and you became Tom Mankiewicz. As I've said, nobody makes your script because you're Joe Mankiewicz's kid; they make it because they want to make the film. Writing is very important in that way. Nobody is going to let you direct a film because you're somebody's son, either. When Jane Fonda first started acting, she was in a movie called
Tall Story
with Tony Perkins. Everybody said she got the part because she was Hank Fonda's daughter, and she wasn't that good in it. She learned how to act. You watch her in
Klute
, and this is a real serious actress. She's a wonderful actress. She overcame being Henry Fonda's daughter. Conversely, one of Gregory Peck's children killed himself. Ray Stark had a son who threw himself off a balcony.

Being the “son or daughter of” is an added burden, if you let it be. But on the whole, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages if you can perform. If you can do it, you do have an in. When I wrote that original called
Please
, which got optioned five times by different studios and was never made, the fact that it said Tom Mankiewicz may have caused somebody to pick it up and read it, where, if it had said Tom Schwartz, they might not have. That's how I got my rewrite on
Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre
for $500, because they said, “Get Joe's kid, he writes terrific dialogue.” The original title, as I mentioned, was
Everything the Traffic Will Allow
, which is from “There's No Business Like Show Business,” and it was about the last ninety minutes of a young actress's life in between the time she takes pills and the time she dies, with flashbacks. (Our family is full of flashbacks:
Citizen Kane, Letter to Three Wives, All About Eve, The Barefoot Contessa
, all flashbacks.) It was based on Bridget Hayward and later Tuesday Weld, who was one of the first people that I was crazy about after coming out to L.A., and who was in a lot of trouble. At one point, Carroll Baker, who was a big star after
The Carpetbaggers
, was going to do it. Shirley MacLaine was going to do it. People were always optioning this thing. But in the meantime, it was a wonderful exhibition of my work, or at least my dialogue.

In the early 1980s, Aaron Spelling called me one day and asked, “Tommy, what was that script, the suicide script?”

I said, “Oh, Jesus, Aaron, back then it was called
Please.”

He said, “I remember reading that thing fifteen years ago. God, it was good. Why don't we make it?”

I said, “Aaron, let me pull it out.”

So I read it, and it wasn't any good. The dialogue was very flashy. It was immature. It didn't really hold. But the part for the actress was so good. I would have had to start rewriting it, and I thought, no, I'm just gonna let a sleeping dog lie.

I told Aaron. He said, “It isn't as good as we remember from fifteen years ago?”

I said, “No, it's not.”

It's the Real Thing

In 1982 Columbia and Coca-Cola were forming a new studio called TriStar, a subsidiary of Columbia. Sean Connery's lawyer and one of the producers of
Never Say Never Again
, Jack Schwartzman, was involved. The job of studio head was offered to Leonard Goldberg. Leonard had so many things going on that he suggested me. This was a no-lose proposition. TriStar had five commitments including
Places in the Heart
, which Bob Benton was going to make,
Tootsie
, which Sidney Pollack was going to make, and
The Natural
, which Barry Levinson was going to make. These things were already lined up. They needed somebody to run the studio. Bob Benton was asked, “What do you think of Tom Mankiewicz?” and Benton said, “He would be ideal. The guy's produced. He's directed. He's written. It would be such a help to have a studio head that creative. What is he famous for? Fixing pictures. He also knows people, and everybody likes him, and he's not a suit.” So I got a call, would I be interested? My agent at the time was cool on it because he thought he could make more money off me if I stayed in movies than if I was an executive. He'd make one deal and that's the end of it. You sort of lost a client.

I met with Robert Goizueta, the head of Coca-Cola. We went to a dinner at the Bistro. Ray Stark was there because he was a big stockholder in Columbia. Ray had passed on me and said, “This is not such a good idea.” I thought, boy, this is a complete change of life. I sat down with my assistant/associate producer/confidant Annie Stevens and said, “What do we want to do? We would have to go to Century City every morning. It's probably more like a seven-day-a-week job than a five-day-a-week job because things happen all the time. We'd probably have to get to work a little earlier because it's already nine o'clock in New York when it's six o'clock in L.A. We'll have to go to previews around the country. If I do something wonderful to fix a movie, they'll say, ‘Boy, can that Barry Levinson make a good movie.' And if I do something terrible, they'll blame it on me and say, ‘What a lousy studio head, he didn't make any money. How could he green-light that?'” So I was really making a negative case. I said, “On the other hand, it's awfully tough to fire a studio head for at least the first two or three years, and we can always go back to what we're doing.” Annie was like a full partner. She was my alter ego and somebody who could really take the mickey out of me, as the British would say.

We decided we didn't want to do it. Most executives know nothing. There was a quote of writer-director Richard Brooks, “A fired executive trying to make a motion picture is like a turtle on his back in the sun. They all know everything except how to make one.” To be with the president of Coca-Cola and Ray Stark, I mean, talk about a fish out of water. I'm fairly glib. I thought, this is not my crowd, either. The job is seven days a week and you are serving everybody else. If Barry Levinson or Bob Benton or Sidney Pollack has a problem, they pick up the phone and call you. And you've got to solve it. Son of a bitch, if Dick Donner has a problem, he picks up the phone and calls you, and if it's two in the morning, it's two in the morning. He's really pissed about something and you've got to do something about it. If you're creative, it's difficult to be on that side of the line, fixing all these problems for all these people. Whereas, when you're fixing your own movie, you're diving into an individual project with a director, and actors, and locations, and it is your project too. You're in it. You're creatively contributing to it.

But that was one brush with the executives, and it was there for the taking. No question about it. I would have gone on to produce Oscar telecasts after that. Jack Haley Jr. directed several Oscar telecasts. I helped him out. They were nightmares. But in those days, it was much more freewheeling. People were drinking. Henry Mancini, one of the great guys in the world, always led the orchestra in those days in the pit. When there was a commercial break, Hank would jump onto the stage and he and Jack and I would smoke a joint backstage. It was absolutely insane. I'm sure it's much worse today.

This Is War

In 1982 Leonard Goldberg was producing a movie called
War Games
with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. Dabney Coleman was in it, and Marty Brest was the director. He later did
Beverly Hills Cop.
This was his first movie, and they were shooting in Seattle. Leonard said to me, “You know, there are some problems with the script, but Marty thinks it's wonderful. How did I ever get into this?” Three days' rushes came in, and Leonard didn't like them at all. Marty Brest was not that adept with a camera. Even in
Beverly Hills Cop
, they had a television director, Don Medford, on the set with him at all times. Leonard said, “Marty, I think we've got to reshoot some of this. I'm flying up to Seattle tomorrow. If you think these rushes need a little work, let's sit down and see what we can redo. If you think they're great, we may have a problem.”

Leonard got to Seattle, and Marty Brest said, “I think they're great.”

Leonard said, “Then we have a problem.”

Marty Brest said, “You can't fire me. I quit.”

Leonard said, “All right, you can quit.” Later on, Leonard said, “He'll learn. Never quit because, if you get fired, you get paid. That's a good lesson for him to learn.”

So he hired John Badham, who had directed
Saturday Night Fever
and
Dracula.
John was an old friend of mine from Yale. As I've mentioned, when I was rewriting the
Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre
episode, John was working in the casting department at Universal, and they finally gave him a shot to direct episodic television. His very first movie was with Richard Pryor about black ballplayers called
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings.
It was a wonderful little film. He now took over
War Games
, and Leonard and John said to me, “It just needs three or four scenes, and you'll see where they are.”

We all agreed on the scenes. Nobody was supposed to know that I was on the picture. Leonard and I were walking on the MGM back lot, and here comes Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick on a bicycle built for two, heading to the set. They stopped to say hello to Leonard, and Leonard introduced me to them. Ally Sheedy said, “By the way, Leonard, we know who's writing those scenes; we loved those scenes.” I'm just standing there. She said, “Matthew and I figured it out.”

Leonard asked, “Who's writing them?”

She said, “Neil Simon.”

Leonard said, “Close.” And they went off.

By the way, it was a very good script. The movie came out, and it was a big hit. I was sitting at a table with Ally Sheedy at a party four months later. I said, “By the way, I didn't congratulate you on your performance in
War Games.
You were wonderful.”

She said, “Oh, thank you.”

And I said, “I particularly liked the scene on the beach the night before you think the world's going to end, when you say you were going to be on local television doing calisthenics the next day. It's just a lousy little show, but it really did mean something. It was so touching and sweet.”

Ally said, “Yeah, it was a wonderful scene.”

I said, “I wrote that scene.”

She said, “You were the one.”

A Tablet, a Pencil, and Thou

Dad used to write in longhand on a yellow pad. And I started that way. If you were to ask me to write a screenplay today, the first thing I'd do is get into bed with no clothes on with a yellow legal tablet and pencil and write. It's womblike. When I was doing
Superman
in London, one of the reasons I always had a suite was that I would write in the bedroom. I had so many chicken scratchings on the pages with arrows and so on, nobody could ever decipher it. Not even Annie. I would write the scene in longhand, and then I would play it to myself and I would make changes. Then I would go in and type it up. Then I'd look at it and make more changes, then I'd give it to Annie. She would type it, put it in the computer. I could never do that. I can write letters on a computer, e-mail, but I can't write a screenplay on a computer. I'm the last guy in the world to still be typing on an IBM Selectric. That's as high-tech as I got. It's still the same process. It's three times. Longhand, typing with changes, and then the clean copy.