Bitter Wit

By Gerald Clarke

MANK by Richard Meryman

Morrow; 351 pages; $12.95

In the '20s, Columnist Alexander Woollcott called Herman Mankiewicz the funniest man in New York, a town that then included Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker and other luminaries of the Algonquin Round Table. As a screenwriter in the Hollywood of the '30s and '40s, "Mank" continued to shoot from the quip. Dining at the home of a pretentious gourmet, he suddenly rushed to the bathroom. "Don't worry," he assured his host later, "the white wine came up with the fish." When movie attendance dropped, he offered a unique solution: "Show the movies in the streets, and drive the people back into the theaters."

As Richard Meryman's delightful biography shows, Mank's wit had an undertow of bitterness and desperation. "I am the most serious man in the world," he said, "even when I'm joking." The son of a German immigrant who believed in Prussian discipline, Mankiewicz was ceaselessly downgraded by his father. The old man, a professor of languages, seemed jealous and resentful of Herman's precocity. Early on, the boy became convinced that he was a failure and spent the rest of his life trying to prove himself right.

The Algonquin Round Table, for example, could have given him wide recognition. Instead, he used its worst aspects: sincere feelings were despised, hard work was derided, and sobriety was practically outlawed. Mank, a promising second-string drama critic on the New York Times, became a full-time lush.

He fled to Hollywood where for more than a decade he alternately amused and terrorized studio heads. When talkies came in, he was assigned to recruit writers. The cronies he brought from New York largely established the funny, irreverent film style of the '30s. He wrote or collaborated on a score of scripts and had an uncredited influence on the structure and content of many other major films. But Hollywood also evoked the worst in him. During the Depression, Mankiewicz and his colleagues were earning $1,250 a week. Mank gambled it away, with as much disdain as if he had stolen it from his children's Monopoly set. "Hollywood money," explained his friend Charles MacArthur, "is something you throw off the ends of trains."

Just as his welcome was wearing out in Los Angeles, Mankiewicz was saved by the arrival of another brilliant talker, Orson Welles. The young director suggested a collaboration. The result, a thinly disguised biography of Press Lord William Randolph Hearst, was Citizen Kane. Even before the classic flickered onscreen, Welles and Mank were disputing the writing credits; who contributed what remains a matter of acrimonious debate. After exhaustive research, Meryman convincingly concludes that though the script was a cooperative venture, the controlling interest belongs to Mankiewicz.

Kane brought Mank more work, most notably Pride of the Yankees. But in the decade before his death in 1953 at 55, the boozing increased and the jobs evaporated. His wife Sara would drive around after lunch, searching for his car in the parking lots of Beverly Hills restaurants; when she found it, she would go in and march him away like a truant. He composed a form letter of apology for hostesses of dinner parties he had disgraced.

The wit alone remained unblunted. In vited to a preview of a film about an alcoholic, The Lost Weekend, he declined wryly: "Would you invite Admiral Halsey to play with the boats in your baby's bathtub?" Even when it was directed at someone else, Mank's lance was really pointed toward himself.

--Gerald Clarke

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