My Life as a Mankiewicz (12 page)

Gore Vidal came to L.A. for the shoot. He was already a celebrated novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He had script approval. Nothing could be changed without his okay. I remember one day when we were shooting at the Ambassador Hotel. The film was behind schedule. Stuart, Larry, and Frank were trying to find ways to catch up. It was decided that a short two-page scene featuring Ann Southern was unnecessary, but we needed Gore's approval. I was deputized to go to the Beverly Hills Hotel to get it personally. I found Gore lying by the pool, caked in suntan lotion. I explained the situation. The scene was fun, but incidental to the plot and perhaps expendable. Gore raised his wrist: “You see this watch, Tom? It's a Patek Phillipe, the most expensive timepiece in the world. What do you say we open the back of it and remove the smallest little thing we can find, something that looks totally unnecessary. You know what then? I might as well be wearing a turd on my wrist.” I went back downtown and reported: the answer was no.

I made friends easily, and Columbia was a fertile place to find them in 1963. Alan Pakula and Bob Mulligan had just made
To Kill a Mockingbird
and were on the lot, working with Steve McQueen and Lee Remick. Screen Gems had big hits on television. Stanley Kramer was starting
Ship of Fools
with an all-star cast on the stage next door. In my spare time I wrote an original screenplay. It was about the suicide of a young actress. The script dealt with the last ninety minutes of her life, between the time she takes the pills and the time she dies, with flashbacks (every writing Mankiewicz loves flashbacks). The original title was rather unwieldy:
Everything the Traffic Will Allow.
I later shortened it to
Please.
It was optioned five separate times, and never made, but the dialogue apparently was impressive enough to get me hired as a writer.

My First Paid Writing Job

By the mid-sixties, the last dramatic hour anthology show left on television was
Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre.
It was produced by Dick Berg, the father of Scott, the author, and Jeff, later chairman of the powerful ICM (International Creative Management) talent agency, and was shot at Universal Studios. Universal had optioned my original screenplay. A young associate producer named Ron Roth had read it. He loved the dialogue. Emmy-winning television director Stuart Rosenberg (later to make
Cool Hand Luke, The Amityville Horror
, and
The Pope of Greenwich Village)
was desperate for a rewrite on the show, which was about to start shooting. Ron gave Stuart my script, and suddenly I was hired. The pay was only $500, but at this stage of a nonexistent career, why quibble? The sponsor of the show was almost totally in control of content in those days. A representative of Chrysler came to a script meeting with notes. I was asked to change the line “You've been avoiding me” to “You've been dodging me” because they made the Dodge automobile. I remember observing out loud that I supposed no one was ever going to “ford” a stream on that show. The man from Chrysler didn't smile.

The hour teleplay was titled
Runaway Boy.
It starred Robert Wagner and Carol Lynley. Carol and I went out a lot during the sixties. We were somewhat of an “item.” One day I walked into a casting session. Surprise, surprise, the assistant to the casting director was John Badham, my friend from Williamstown. Shortly afterward, John started directing television at Universal, and then his first feature,
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings
, with Richard Pryor, James Earl Jones, and Billy Dee Williams. It was the first of many terrific films to come.

I was still rewriting while the show was shooting. I remember one day at Paradise Cove, north of Malibu. I sat in the back of a limousine on the pier, my typewriter perched on a folded jump seat. I banged out new dialogue for the scenes and handed the pages out the window to the assistant director. Geez Louise, I thought, this was a tough job. But boy, what a lot of fun. When I got home at night, it felt great to know I'd finally made a real contribution to a piece of film. There's a wonderful sense of achievement in writing if you're the child of a famous parent. Someone may give you a job as their assistant to curry favor, or even make you an associate producer, but
no one
shoots a script they don't think is good enough to make. No one in the movie business is willing to commit financial suicide, it's that simple.

The night the show aired I watched it alone. I'd written so much of it I'd received cowriting credit. Dad was always billed onscreen as “Joseph L. Mankiewicz”; his brother as “Herman J. Mankiewicz.” So there I was: “Thomas F. Mankiewicz.” But it looked so incredibly pretentious to me, the “Thomas” and the middle initial. That was the first and last time I would see it. On the literally hundreds of onscreen credits I've received since then, a simple “Tom Mankiewicz” did very nicely, thank you.

Malibu in the 1960s

I was at a party in 1964. Roddy McDowall was there and announced that he was leaving for England to do a film and would be gone for some time. He'd rented a house in the Malibu Colony on the beach for $500 a month (that's right, $500) and still had six months left on his lease. Did anyone want to take it over from him? Being a month-to-month renter, I jumped at the chance. Malibu in the sixties was a starkly different community than it is now, more like a small town than a chic extension of L.A. Today, the Pacific Coast Highway across from the Colony and the Old Malibu Road features shopping centers, “in” restaurants, movie theaters, and Pepperdine University. Then, there was nothing on the other side of the road. Zero. If you needed something, there was one of everything. If your kitchen sink was clogged, you didn't call a plumber. You called
the
plumber. There was one market (the Colony), one pharmacy, one gas station, and one vet for your ailing dog or cat. You had to dial the operator to call Beverly Hills. Because of their circumstances, the year-round residents developed a small-town camaraderie. If you didn't have enough cash to cover your groceries at the market, it was a case of “We'll get you next time, Mank.” Most people had dogs of various shapes and sizes. When I wrote on my patio, I always kept treats for them for when they'd climb up my steps for their daily visits: Bo, the black lab, carrying in his mouth his Frisbee, which you had to throw for him, preferably out into the ocean so he could swim out to retrieve it. Homer, the bassett hound, who always left two rivets in the sand when he passed by from his oversized ears. You could ride on the beach back then. A little horse shit didn't bother anybody. I bought a cheap but beautiful quarter horse, boarded her on a ranch across the highway, and rode her several times a week.

In the summers, many of the residents rented out their houses for hefty sums. I never did (not that a house with minimal furniture and no heat would fetch a big price). But in the years I lived there, passing through were the eclectic likes of Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim, Tuesday Weld, Terry Southern, Larry Hagman, Rod Steiger, Herb Alpert, Jerry Moss, Jack Warden, Norman Jewison, Christian Marquand, John Frankenheimer, Deborah Kerr and Peter Viertel, Merle Oberon, the Mamas and the Papas, Angela Lansbury, and the Byrds. You could have dinner at the home of Paul Ziffren, powerful attorney, Democratic National Committee member, and chairman of the L.A. Olympics, and eat with the likes of Henry Kissinger, Lew Wasserman, and Norton Simon. Or you could walk through the sand with Larry Hagman, who would be dressed in a caftan and carrying a Hopi Indian flag, and share a truly fine joint. Larry never spoke on Sundays. When a prominent geologist at UCLA predicted the arrival of the “big one” on a specific day at a specific time, a group of us dressed up in black tie and gowns, sipped champagne, and sat on the beach waiting to be cracked off into the ocean. There were many famous and infamous residents of Malibu, but the most important one to me then was Tuesday Weld.

Tuesday Weld

The enfant terrible of Hollywood. Impudent, funny, devastatingly attractive, wildly talented, and totally nuts. I was instantly fixated on her. Tuesday was (and is) uncommonly bright in spite of not having any formal education. She could trade one-liners with anyone but was incapable of finding north on a map. She was also the only actress I've met in fifty years who desperately tried to avoid becoming a star. I mean it. When Samantha Eggar was fired (she was later rehired) on
The Collector
, Tuesday was William Wyler's choice to replace her. But after a long meeting during which she disagreed with the legendary director on absolutely everything, he decided to look elsewhere. She turned down the part of Bonnie in
Bonnie and Clyde
on the grounds that she'd just had a child and didn't want to go to Texas. When Joshua Logan offered her the female lead in
Paint Your Wagon
opposite Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, Tuesday asked him when shooting would begin. He told her September. “Oh, damn, I can't do it,” she told him. “September and October are the two best months of the year at the beach.”

Josh knew that we were close and called me: “What is she, fucking nuts?”

“No comment, Josh.”

One night several of us were sitting around her house. Carol Lynley had costarred in
The Cardinal
for Otto Preminger. It had just opened, and she was prominently billed on the marquee of the Fox Wilshire Theater. I told her it must feel great to drive by and see your name in lights. She agreed.

“That's the only thing I hate,” said Tuesday. “I love to work, but I hate to see my name.”

Tuesday lived alone when I met her. Her only companion was her dachshund, Luther, the last remaining Nazi in the world. Luther had a black spot on the top of his head from where she'd accidentally dropped hot bacon grease on him. It looked exactly like a yarmulke. If you didn't pay enough attention to Luther when he wanted you to, he would pretend to be blind, bump into the couch, fall over, and wait for you to come over and pet him. He and Tuesday were a perfectly suited pair.

She was eager to sop up the formal knowledge she'd missed out on growing up as a child actress. She started learning one new, unusual word a day. She'd find it in the dictionary and then use it constantly until it was printed inside her as part of her vocabulary. One day she said to me, “I bet you don't know what an atavism is.”

I did. “It's a throwback. Right now you could call Barry Goldwater an atavistic politician.”

That night we went to a dinner party at Larry Turman's house. Gore Vidal was among the guests. I introduced them. Tuesday opened with: “You, Mr. Vidal, are an atavism.”

Gore smiled. “I hope, Miss Weld, you don't mean that in its pejorative sense, the difference between us being that I know what pejorative means.” Tuesday roared with laughter. Gore never left her for the rest of the evening.

There was a party at Tuesday's house one night. It grew larger as crashers arrived, having heard about it on the Malibu grapevine. Around midnight she said to me, “Get all these people out of here, okay?”

“Jesus, there's got to be eighty people here. How the hell do I do that?”

She turned, walked upstairs, then reappeared at the top of the landing, holding a gun. “Hey!” she yelled. Everyone looked up. There she was, an angry Tuesday Weld with a loaded revolver in her hand. Your worst nightmare. “Get out!!” Eighty people immediately rocketed for a three-foot-wide doorway, elbowing each other out of the way. It was a perfect Tuesday solution.

Tragedy struck in 1965. She was shooting
The Cincinnati Kid
for director Norman Jewison and had been invited onto producer Martin Ransohoff's yacht off Catalina for the weekend. A huge fire started just over the brush-clogged hills leading to Malibu and rapidly rolled down toward the coast. It was darkness at noon. The smoke completely blocked out the sun. Truly terrifying. In those days there was no such thing as a helicopter water drop. There was nothing in front of the raging fire except for the brave fire fighters who clustered around their engines, trying to make a stand on the highway. The sparks and embers jumped the road, picking off individual houses, sparing others. After several interminable hours, it died down as the flames met the ocean, and the fire fighters tried to mop up. The Colony was largely spared. Not so the Old Malibu Road, where Tuesday lived. I drove up to take a look. Her house had totally burned to the ground. Ironically, the two houses on either side were largely intact. My heart sank. I drove back to my house and called her in Catalina: “There's been a terrible fire going on here. I'd get back right away.” Her daughter, Natasha (from a brief marriage to a writer, Claude Harz), was in school. Arrangements were made for her to stay with someone until Tuesday could pick her up the next day. I couldn't bring myself to tell her what had happened. Not right then. She'd find out soon enough.

The next morning I parked in front of what used to be her house. It was still faintly smoking. After two hours she still hadn't showed, so I reluctantly drove back to my place. When I entered, there she was, sitting in my living room with an overnight bag on the couch next to her. That was all she had left now. “It's all gone, isn't it.”

“Yes, how do you know?”

“The sheriffs told me at the roadblock on the highway. Can Tasha and I stay with you for a while?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks. Okay, I'd better go over to the pharmacy and get some stuff. Oh, can I go through your phone book and copy some numbers? I left my book at home.”

I couldn't believe her attitude, facing such a devastating loss. Here was a young woman who'd made her first suicide attempt at twelve. She'd try again later. But at this particular time she was such a determined pillar of strength for herself and her daughter. Tuesday never knew her father. She had a treasured portrait of him on the wall of her living room. It went up in flames along with the rest.

Tuesday didn't rebuild. I suppose the memory was too bitter. Later on she lived in an apartment just below the Sunset Strip where she attempted suicide. She would have died had Luther not howled incessantly behind the door, causing the building “super” to open it and discover her with no time to spare. Most child actresses have one unfortunate thing in common: a determined, sometimes ruthless mother who pushes and drives them mercilessly so she can live in her daughter's reflected glory. I've met at least half a dozen, but far and away the most unpleasant example was Tuesday's mother. I'd come to visit her in the hospital the day after her suicide attempt. She was lying in bed with various tubes stuck in her. They'd pumped her stomach. She'd been sedated and spoke softly, haltingly. The door opened behind us. Mrs. Weld entered, holding some papers in her hand.