Alfred A. Knopf, 2021
By Kevin Brianton, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe University
The unspoken presence in Nick Davis’s dual biography of Herman and Joseph Mankiewicz is a similar book by Sydney Stern, who published an extensive and well-received dual biography in 2019. Writing a book that covers the same ground only two years after such an impressive work is crazy brave. However, Nick Davis has some grounds to revisit the area. He is writer Herman Mankiewicz’s grandson and great-nephew to the director Joseph Mankiewicz. He is part of their story. Davis conducted many original interviews with people close to the family over 18 years, beginning in the 1970s, so there is a clear promise of different and exciting insights. It seems readily apparent that the two writers worked separately and arrived at their conclusions independently. In any event, Stern is not mentioned in the select bibliography. This approach represents a lost opportunity, as it would have been good to see how Davis responded to Stern’s various claims. What was true, what was false, what was overemphasized, and what had been missed? No biography is definitive. Instead, Davis appears to have consciously decided to avoid commenting on Stern’s work.
This lapse is disappointing, but his efforts as a historian are more concerning. The flaws in his approach can be seen in the coverage of one of the critical incidents in Joseph Mankiewicz’s life. His dispute with Cecil B. DeMille over mandatory loyalty oaths during the Red Scare period is the stuff of Hollywood legends. It resulted in a highly publicized meeting where directors eventually voted to dismiss the board. John Ford said that he made westerns at the meeting. Among a host of stinging accusations, Mankiewicz accused DeMille of making anti-Semitic slurs during his speech to the meeting.
For such a momentous meeting, his account contains a lot of errors. Some are minor and should have been picked up by any self-respecting copy editor. Davis writes that a committee meeting was held on 11 October 1951 (233), just before the climactic meeting of 22 October 1950, (234). Getting a date wrong is a minor error in a long book, but it does not augur well for the rest of the account. Davis mainly quotes secondary sources and dated ones at that. He bases his chapter on the meeting on Kenneth Geist’s biography of Mankiewicz, People Will Talk, published in 1978. Davis goes so far as to describe it as one of the pillars of the entire work. He also looks at a newspaper article written in 1998 by Greg Mitchell, summarising a section in his 1991 book. It also includes a piece by James Ulmer for the Directors Guild of America. Ulmer’s commentary has appeared in various versions on the Directors Guild of America website over the years. These accounts accuse DeMille of a host of offenses.
In researching the meeting, Davis did not access the Joseph Mankiewicz papers, which have been publicly available since 2014. He could have examined the meeting’s stenographic transcript at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, which directly refutes many of these accusations. After reading the transcript, the acclaimed film historian Kevin Brownlow updated his documentary on DeMille because he could see that Mankiewicz had made dubious claims. Even then, he could have looked at Scott Eyman’s biography of Cecil B. DeMille, written in 2010, which debates and dismisses many of these claims. He could have looked at my specialist study released in 2016. To add to matters, Davis did not even deal with Geist’s criticisms of Mankiewicz for his actions at the meeting. He concludes Joe Mankiewicz is simply a ‘good man.’
The director, George Stevens, was also heavily involved with the meeting. Another recent family account of George Stevens, written by his son George Stevens Jr., repeated these accusations. At least, he also admitted that historians raised some doubts. Stevens Jr. eventually acknowledged he was ‘printing the legend’. Davis has no such qualms. The story Davis tells is basically that developed by Joseph Mankiewicz in the late 1970s and early 1980s when memories were blurred with bitterness. It became a Hollywood legend, but it is now discredited.
The flaws in this section underpin a problem with the research throughout the book. Davis says that most of the interviews were conducted from the early 1970s for a period of about 18 years, meaning he must have completed the oral history section before the year 2000. His select bibliography appears impressive, with close to 100 works cited. Yet, Davis references only three books that were released after 2010. One is a memoir by his relative Tom Mankiewicz in 2012; the second is Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration, released in 2013; the third Richard Sandomir’s book on creating the Pride of the Yankees, published in 2017. The secondary research seems to have ground to a halt more than a decade before the book’s publication, and recent discoveries are just not mentioned. It is not just Stern that has been ignored but also many other important writers. The book represents a lost opportunity to fuse his valuable interviews with contemporary research.
Putting aside these concerns about his research, Davis is far stronger at family dynamics. His interviews have yielded a lot of valuable information. We gain an insight into the private lives of these two men as they dealt with their issues and the machinations of Hollywood. His recollections and family interviews explain these key figures in Hollywood. Even so, his flawed approach to research has resulted in a highly uneven book of doubtful quality.
Cinema history 