Read Online My Life as a Mankiewicz by Tom Mankiewicz - Free Book Online Page B

was the initial story I was told, tragic, but fit for public consumption: Dad and Bennett Cerf had been out to dinner. Mother wasn't feeling well. When they returned, they found her dead, an empty bottle of pills on her bedside table. She had clearly forgotten she'd already taken a few and in her altered state accidentally took some more—a terrible accident. That's what was printed in the newspapers, so it had to be true. Here's what I found out later, piece by piece: Dad and Mother had a whopper of a fight. He drove back to New York. Later on he called her repeatedly with no answer. Fearing the worst, he called my cousin Josie and asked her to drive up to Mount Kisco with him for the night. Mother would be so delighted to see her. When they came into the house, they called out to her. Silence. Dad said he'd look around downstairs and asked Josie to check the bedroom. Josie found her, dead. Bennett Cerf, a kind and distinguished man who clearly knew the truth, was in no way involved. I always felt sorry that Bennett felt he had to help Dad make the discovery more publicly palatable by saying he was there. It was a true act of friendship, but it was a lie. Mother apparently left a suicide note (that's what the Mount Kisco police said at first), but after a reported phone call from Dad's friend, Governor Averill Harriman, the note miraculously disappeared. The local authorities said they must have made a mistake. I never read the note or found out what was in it. Be that as it may, my overwhelming feeling at the time was truly one of relief for Mother. She led such a tortured life. Thank God she was finally at peace. That's why, at the time, I never cried. I tried to, but I couldn't.
    More than a decade later I was asleep in my house in Malibu. It was early, early in the morning. I'd fallen asleep with the television on. I heard something that half woke me. My head started to pulsate. My eyes popped open. The sound I heard was Mother's voice. I was suddenly staring straight into her face on the screen, which was televising The Keys of the Kingdom. I was transfixed, stunned. Then tears began to roll down my cheeks. I must have cried for more than half an hour. It felt good to finally get it all out. It was the very least I owed her and myself.
    Mother's suicide happened at the start of my senior year at Exeter. Fortunately, I had already been given an A rating by Yale University in my junior year, which basically meant that if you didn't really screw up before graduation, you were in. On my Preliminary SAT achievement tests I had scored an 800 in English, which was the highest score one could get. I sent a letter to Dad, who was shooting Suddenly, Last Summer in England, and told him. He cabled me back: “Ain't you lucky they didn't ask you to spell achievement?” I had misspelled it in my letter. Dad always liked to have the last word.
    As the 1950s ended, I entered Yale. Dad told me how proud “Pop” would have been of me and that being educated at schools like St. Bernard's, Exeter, and Yale was everything he envisioned for me when we left California. But there was still one thing I wanted to do more than get a first-class education, and I begged him to help me. I wanted to work, in any capacity, on a movie. Dad agreed to do it, with the following caveat: He'd get me on a film made by people he'd never worked with. There would be no past relationships for me to fall back on if things went wrong. He also (correctly) told me that there would be some on the film who'd be hoping I screwed up, who'd say the only reason I was working on it was because I was Joe Mankiewicz's kid. He wrote a letter to Doc Merman at Fox, head of the physical production department at the time. Dad was an independent company with no ties to Fox anymore, but he knew and liked Doc. I still have the letter he sent. As luck would have it, Fox was shooting a western called The Comancheros at the start of the summer. It was starring John