Read So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life Online
Authors: Frank Mankiewicz,Joel L. Swerdlow
* * *
For the early and classic Marx Brothers movies,
Animal Crackers, Duck Soup, Monkey Business,
all produced in the early to mid-1930s, my father was often credited as “supervisor” and sometimes as having written the screenplay. “Supervisor” was a title strange to movies then, and since, but probably meant he was in charge of actually making the movie, perhaps deciding which part of the vaudeville act the brothers had perfected would be appropriate at that moment in the movie. Did it really matter, for instance, if the moment when Groucho, seeing a victim of an auto accident in the street, runs to the man’s side, holds his wrist in a doctor-like way, looks puzzled, and pronounces, “Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped,” came early or late in a movie? That, in addition to writing the line, might have been the job of the supervisor. At any rate, Pop got writing credit for these movies, as well as for
Horse Feathers,
in which Groucho is the president of a college with a football team and not much else. A typical Herman Mankiewicz line: When the president’s snooty secretary announces, “The Dean is furious. He’s waxing wroth,” Groucho thinks for a moment and replies, “Is wroth out there, too? Tell Wroth to wax the Dean for a while.”
Harpo once, getting close to being serious, asked Herman Mankiewicz on the set, “What is my motivation here?” Harpo himself is the source of the reply. “Your motivation?” he told me my father said. “You’re a Jewish comic who picks up spit and pretends it’s a quarter—just read the lines.”
The obvious question can be impossible to resist: “When Harpo came over for dinner, did he talk?” Of course Harpo talked. The “silent” business was fake, just for the stage and the movies.
Harpo, whose name was Adolph and later changed to Arthur, welcomed the opportunity to be a regular American, I think, just an ordinary New York Jewish guy. For some reason, the one thing that I remember most vividly about Harpo in a movie was when he had to tell Groucho that someone’s name was Beatrice. And he did it of course as he always did—plaintively, pretending to be a bee and then twisting something. A voluble fellow in private life, Harpo was a frequent guest at our Seders. Pop was no believer; he scorned all religions, including his own, but something called upon him to preside every year over a reasonably accurate and even conservative Seder, the Passover feast celebrating deliverance from Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the vanquishing of our enemies.
Pop would read the required portions, although interjecting a Hebrew (or maybe Yiddish) word,
oser,
after the point in the text where we anticipate we’ll be “next year in Jerusalem.” The first time I heard it, I asked him what
oser
meant, and he replied—so that even at the tender age of, perhaps, nine I would never forget—“It means ‘the hell you say’ or ‘so’s your old man’ or ‘in a pig’s eye,’ or even ‘tell it to the marines.’” But Harpo was an enthusiast. Several years he would grab the ceremonial lamb shank and, using it as a drum major might use a lengthier baton, begin a march around the table, in which we all joined, singing Passover songs.
* * *
I can understand why Pop was not proud of movies like
Duck Soup
. Fascism is rising in Europe, the economy is in depression, and he’s writing “Keep it under your hat; better yet, keep it under my hat.” But then again, millions of people, with every type of problem possible, actually paused and sat for a moment and enjoyed a good laugh. He helped to give them that gift, which is not a small thing.
Sure, a lot of people paid their fifty cents, or whatever it was, to see
Duck Soup
. My aunt Naomi, one of my mother’s younger sisters, lived in New York and was a great teacher of reading. Even if a young kid was having trouble, she got him or her excited about reading. I don’t know how she did it. Naomi was simultaneously a Zionist and a Communist. I had never known a Communist, but she was authentic. She lived in New York, and then she went and lived in what was called Palestine for a while. But she didn’t like it, so she came back to New York, where she taught in one of the private schools. She would come out and stay with us for periods of time, and my father regularly supported her, although I don’t think he agreed with her about anything. He sent her, I think, a hundred bucks a month. She used to say, “A third of the nation is ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-fed, and they’re paying Herman Mankiewicz thousands of dollars a week to write something to make them laugh?”
* * *
I recently sat up late and re-watched some of the Marx Brothers movies.
Horse Feathers
opens with a college graduation ceremony. A tall, formal-looking man wearing an academic robe stands at the lectern and introduces “the man who is going to guide the destiny of this great institution.” The camera then moves three seats to show Groucho, on the speakers’ platform, puffing on a cigar, suit jacket off and slung over his arm, shaving.
Groucho finishes shaving, walks to the lectern, and begins his address: “Members of the faculty, faculty members, students of Huxley College and Huxley students. Well, I thought my razor was dull until I heard his speech … which reminds me of a story that is so dirty I’m ashamed to think of it myself. As I look out over your eager faces I can readily understand why this college is flat on its back. The last college I presided over, things were slightly different, I was flat on my back.”
Then, to the dean of faculty, Groucho says, “Why don’t you go home to your wife? Better yet, I’ll go home to your wife, and other than the improvement she won’t be able to tell the difference.”
It is impossible to know which of this Pop wrote. He himself probably did not know. It was all part of a team effort, overlapping collaboration, built upon the Marx Brothers’ improvisation. But writing comedy is supposed to be the most difficult writing of all.
There were offices. Writers had offices. If they were collaborating, they’d have an office together. And I’m sure the Marx Brothers had an office, or maybe they were all sitting around. There’s a cartoon I have from
The Hollywood Reporter
. It is of my father sitting in a director’s chair—the canvas kind of chair that has his name on the back—with a notebook. And I gather it’s on the set of one of the Marx Brothers movies. So maybe it was all done right on the set.
* * *
F. Scott Fitzgerald seemed like a nice guy. People called him Scotty. Not full of himself. Apparently, he thought he could write movies as an art form, as literature. My father felt just the opposite. But working on movies embarrassed them both. To them, real literature was novels and plays, even poems.
The F. Scott Fitzgerald of my memories—the late 1930s—is well documented. Drunk much of the time. Humiliated as a studio hack. His semi-secret love affair with the newspaper gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Death in 1940, at age forty-four, halfway through his novel
The Last Tycoon,
about, as he liked to tell people, Hollywood.
It is easy to imagine Pop, like Fitzgerald, a heavy drinker and serious thinker, humiliated by movie studios, inviting the novelist home for dinner. “Mankiewicz,” Fitzgerald wrote in a 1938 letter to his book editor, Maxwell Perkins, back in New York City, is “a ruined man who hasn’t written ten feet of continuity in two years.… He is a nice fellow that everybody likes and has been brilliant, but he is being hired because everyone is sorry for his wife.”
* * *
My senior year in high school ended in June of 1941. For dates with special girls, we’d go to the Palladium, known for groups like Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra. Dancing. Orchid and gardenia corsages. If you wanted to make a better or a stronger impression on your date, it would be an orchid—especially for events like proms. Saturday night seeing Jimmie Lunceford or Kid Ory at the Beverly Tavern? A simple gardenia corsage.
I didn’t keep in touch with any of the girls from those days, but I still think about them. Those Friday and Saturday nights still feel very recent. We used to go ice-skating. It was a good way to hold hands. And we went to movies. Neck at the movies? No. But you could put your arm around her and get a response that suggested there could be necking afterward up on Mulholland Drive. It was high in the hills, with city lights on both sides. The San Fernando Valley on one side and the city of Los Angeles on the other. There were lots of little nooks and crannies off the road.
On the way back to my date’s home, we’d often stop at a place called the Nut Kettle. They had peanuts in the burgers. A Nutburger was a big deal. It was just a little drive-in along Sunset Boulevard, but the burgers were really, really good. The image of a Nutburger stimulates memories: The menus were very old and greasy. A line at the bottom of the menu read, “In our opinion, Cleanliness is away far and above mere Godliness.”
I have loved radio since I was a kid, and I presided over the founding of NPR’s
Morning Edition
when serving as president of National Public Radio, as it was then called. I grew up in the pretelevision, pre-Internet era when radio was the nation’s only electronic source of news, and NPR today has many of its roots in my experiences with live radio broadcasts from the 1930s and 1940s.
In the winter of 1939–1940, my father began to write the scripts for a weekly dramatic radio series, broadcast live on CBS, to be performed by a company of actors headed by Orson Welles and shepherded and directed by John Houseman. Here were virtually all the actors, none of whom had ever appeared on film, who would soon afterward appear in
Citizen Kane
.
It was the year after the famous, or infamous,
War of the Worlds
broadcast, which had been done from New York City. Now Welles had his first contract to do a movie—not yet selected—so the radio program moved to Hollywood. For the regular Sunday night program on CBS, Pop would labor during the week to adapt a work of literature—always in the public domain; neither the sponsor nor the network wanted to worry about copyrights—to one hour (with time out for commercials for Campbell’s soup). He’d do a script based on, say,
Vanity Fair
or
David Copperfield,
something like that. He had probably already read the books sometime in his life, and he’d reread or skim enough to take out a radio story.
Then, on Sunday morning around nine or ten, the troupe would descend on our duplex apartment for rehearsals, led by Welles but commanded by Houseman, who was the de facto producer of Welles’s work. Welles was then in his early twenties. He looked even younger and was not yet obese but was getting heavy. My mother would bring them coffee and supervise breakfast. She made a dozen eggs, scrambled, just for Welles, and an entire package of bacon, again just for him. Everyone else had a few strips of bacon and two or three eggs.
The cast would fill up the living room. And it was always the same. They’d rehearse and then run through the whole show. The show was live. They had no tape then. Maybe they made an electrical transcription. Like a record. But I don’t think so, because there is now nothing left of those programs.
Their rehearsal would last all day. Welles or Houseman might suggest a particular inflection or accent, and the actors would pick it up right away. And then around six o’clock, they would go over to a movie theater, where the play would be performed in front of a live audience and broadcast nationally—a regular program on Sunday evening, by far the night with the largest radio audience.
What would happen if my father hadn’t come up with a good script? It never happened, because he had to. It was Houseman’s job to make sure the script was done. Houseman might call him on the phone or come over several times a week. They became close friends, and later Houseman developed a friendship with me that lasted years thereafter—until his death.
During rehearsals and during the live broadcast, each actor would let the pages flutter to the floor, one by one. It was one of the grand rituals of live radio—there was no other kind—that actors would stand at lecterns to read their lines and then let the pages fall to the floor rather than have the microphones pick up the rustle of shuffled paper.
This was what we now call a “live broadcast” and “live radio.” Then we just called it a “radio broadcast.” Around this same time, I heard of one of the most brilliant uses of radio in American history. In the fall of the 1940 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to debate the Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie; it was, and still is, a sometimes-honored tradition that front-runners refuse to give their opponents the exposure such a debate would provide. So, when FDR purchased twenty minutes of national radio time to deliver a political address, Willkie purchased the next twenty minutes—creating a forty-minute “debate.” FDR’s solution was brilliant. He cut his speech to nineteen minutes and paid for a full minute of dead-air time. Millions of Americans thought something was wrong with their radios, twirled the dials, even gave up and turned their radios off—missing Willkie’s address.
I was at home when my father returned from the desert after completing the
Kane
screenplay. He didn’t say anything about the work he’d been doing. He was talking about the Roosevelt-Willkie presidential race, how France had fallen to Hitler and England could be next, and how Cincinnati was running away with the National League pennant. A movie? He never took anything about a movie seriously. That’s why he never went to the Academy Award ceremonies. He stayed home the year of
Kane,
and we all listened on the radio. He was, of course, happy when he won. He and my mother started to dance around the living room, but it did not change his opinion of movies or the movie industry. We had gone to see
Kane
as a family on opening night, but he was silent as we walked out afterward and he never said a word about it.