Read My Life as a Mankiewicz for Free Online

exactly he wanted out of a certain scene. The director replied, “Give me some of those great Lubitsch touches.”
    They were lunching in the Fox commissary one day when a young man approached the table and stuck out his hand: “Mr. Lubitsch, I just got my first job as a director this morning and I wanted to shake your hand for luck.”
    â€œCertainly,” said Lubitsch, taking it. “When do you start shooting?”
    â€œIn ten days.”
    He left. Lubitsch turned to Dad: “That young man is directing his first film and he has ten days to prepare. I need six months. It should be the other way around.”
    Dragonwyck starred Vincent Price, Gene Tierney, and Walter Huston. It was a melodramatic, gothic nineteenth-century romance in which Price played a Dutch aristocrat, “the patroon” in a huge, upstate New York manor house. Vincent later told me about the first day of shooting: “It was the most curious piece of direction I ever received. Joe, God bless him, was so psyched up on his first day. He kept reminding me how to carry myself as a nobleman. ‘Erect, always erect,’ he repeated endlessly. My first shot was simply to walk down a long staircase. We rolled, someone yelled ‘speed,’ and Joe said: ‘All right then, Vincent. Nice erection!’”
    Harry Morgan was also in the film. Some forty years later I was directing him in Dragnet with Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks. Harry had done the TV series with Jack Webb and was playing Danny's boss. One day he asked me, “Is this your first feature as a director?” I nodded. “How about that? I was in your father's first feature, Dragonwyck.” As it was sinking in, Harry added: “I wouldn't make too much of that. I was in everyone's first feature.”
    Dad was so hyped at finally directing that one day he asked his cameraman, Artie Miller, for his viewfinder, “just because as a director I thought I should.” He raised it to his eye: “I couldn't see a fucking thing.” Miller took the viewfinder from him, turned it around, and handed it back. Dad had been looking through the wrong end. This mistake became a memorable moment four years later in All About Eve when, just before the famous party sequence, Gary Merrill says to Bette Davis, “I was just telling Eve about the time I looked through the wrong end of a viewfinder.” She replies, “Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke.”
    The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)
    The first of four films he would do with Rex Harrison. The female lead was once again Gene Tierney, whom Dad recalled as “in many ways, the most beautiful woman I ever saw.” Need I say more?
    The film was later made as a TV series starring my dear friend Hope Lange. Mrs. Muir's little daughter in the film was played by a very young Natalie Wood, later to become one of the best friends I ever had. Natalie's Russian mother (we called her “Mud”) was fiercely ambitious for her daughter. The first day Natalie was to work, Dad was behind schedule and couldn't get to her. He called her and “Mud” over and told them she'd work tomorrow, then gave Natalie an overnight assignment to keep her busy. “Learn how to spell Mankiewicz,” he said. “Once you can spell Mankiewicz, you can go to work.”
    The next morning, an eager little Natalie arrived. “Mud” ushered her up to Dad. Natalie took a deep breath and said, “M-A-N-K-I-E-W-I-T-Z.”
    â€œAlmost,” Dad replied. “You only got one letter wrong.”
    Natalie turned bright red. Her mother scowled at her. Dad remembered: “I suddenly realized that it wasn't Natalie's fault, that this horrible woman had drummed the wrong spelling into her and was now blaming the child.”
    Years later Dad flew to L.A. from New York to visit his longtime agent, Burt Allenberg, who was dying in the hospital. As he walked