“It’s all right,” Mankiewicz once said, after puking in the middle of a formal dinner. “The white wine came up with the fish.”
Herman Mankiewicz is generally acknowledged to be the creator and master of the pithy, rapid-fire dialogue that characterized 1930s comedy and 1940s film noir and is best known for cowriting Citizen Kane (1941), for which he won an Academy Award. A noted member of the Algonquin Round Table, Mank began his career as the drama critic for the New York Times and the New Yorker. Brought to Hollywood by Paramount and put in charge of writer recruitment, Mank was responsible for bringing out a number of East Coast literary talents. He had an often unseen hand in an extraordinary number of what are now considered classic films. Mank’s uncredited script contributions include three Marx Brothers comedies, Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup (1933), as well as The Wizard of Oz (1939). In 1942 he received his second Oscar nomination, for the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees, but spent the rest of his career fighting to overcome his alcoholism, gambling debts, and obstinate personality.
HERMAN J. MANKIEWICZ WAS less than a mile from his house. What could possibly go wrong? It was the afternoon of March 11, 1943, and he’d stopped by Romanoff’s for a drink or two. Driving the short distance home would be a cakewalk.
But then Mank stayed longer than he intended and drank more than he should have. It was quite dark by the time he found himself driving along North Beverly Drive in Benedict Canyon. Carelessly, he drifted into the oncoming lane and slammed virtually head-on into another car. No one was seriously hurt. The police knew Mank was drunk, and he knew there was a night in jail ahead of him, but all in all, it could have been worse.
Unfortunately, Mank had a knack for worse. He always had. Impossible to intimidate, Mank rankled under all forms of authority. Upon hearing Columbia studio head Harry Cohn’s boast that he could feel how good a movie was by the sensation in his rear, Mank had quipped, “Imagine, the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass.” He was fired. Louis B. Mayer once advanced Mank money to pay back some gambling debts, but Mank just gambled the loan away—and on the MGM lot, no less. He was fired. While working on the Marx Brothers film Monkey Business, Harpo Marx asked Mank for an early look at the script—”I want to find out what my character is.” Mank replied sourly, “You’re a middle-aged Jew who picks up spit because he thinks it’s a quarter.” He was soon fired. Picking fights in bars, passing out in hotels and waking up with obscene writing all over his body (Ben Hecht’s signature prank)—if there was a secret compartment beneath rock bottom, Mank would find it. As a friend once observed, “To know Mank was to like him. Not to know him was to love him.”
As a friend once observed, “To know Mank was to like him. Not to know him was to love him.”
The Beverly Drive accident would prove to be another such disaster. It wasn’t just that he’d drunkenly crashed his car. It was that he’d drunkenly crashed it outside Marion Davies’s Beverly Hills house. A house paid for by Davies’s lover, William Randolph Hearst. A house that Hearst was—at that very moment—inside. Once upon a time, Mank and Hearst had been quite friendly. There had been many invitations to San Simeon, Hearst’s castle up the coast. But while Hearst was trying to keep his mistress, Davies, sober, Mank had been trying to do the opposite. And so, eventually, Mank was banned from all of their parties and from ever seeing Davies again.
It was a feud that, even on the scale of Hollywood spats, soon went nuclear. Mank set out for revenge by writing Citizen Kane, a most unflattering biopic based on the newspaper mogul. He used privileged information in stunning ways—like, say, building the entire film around Hearst’s nickname for Davies’s clitoris, Rosebud. Cowriter and director Orson Welles later mixed in elements of his own life, toning down and subtly misdirecting Mank’s poison arrow. But he failed to properly notice the one part that would ensure return fire.
Hearst didn’t much care about being hated or mocked, but the Citizen Kane character Susan Alexander (generally believed to be a brutally unforgiving portrait of Davies) was where the rubber hit the road. When How Green Was My Valley upstaged the considerably better Citizen Kane at the 1942 Oscars, there were more-than-slight suspicions that Hearst had used his considerable influence to turn voters against Welles as an act of revenge.
But to get back at Mank was more difficult. After all, Mank had friends. He was an insider. There were rules, codes, lines not to be crossed. And then there was the dotted yellow line—and the Beverly Drive car crash. Now this was legitimate news—and as such, it deserved a place on the front page of every Hearst newspaper across the country. There were quotes from police officers describing Mank as “insulting, sarcastic, impolite.” There were descriptions of him kicking the bars of his cell until his shoes were finally taken away. There were photomontages. It was Hearst at his muckraking best.
“I was promoted,” Mank said, “from a middle-aged, flat-footed writer into Cary Grant, who, with a tank, had just drunkenly plowed into a baby carriage occupied by the Dionne quintuplets, the Duchess of Kent, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the favorite niece of the Pope.” He should have just walked home.