So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (9 page)

Think about it. Having your hatred unrequited may breed even more resentment and hostility than if the hatred is returned. Apply it to the world today. Al-Qaeda and many other Muslim fundamentalists, after all, had unrequited hatred for us well before 9/11. They’ve hated us since the Crusades. We didn’t hate them. We didn’t even know anything about them. Now we hate them back, even if we aren’t quite sure who they are, which may actually be a good thing. Once you start thinking about it, you can see more and more examples. For instance, the Irish and the British. The Irish hate the British, but the British don’t hate back. No, they really don’t give a damn. Have you ever heard an American whose family comes from England talk about the Irish the way some Irish-Americans talk about the Brits?

Once, I was bound for Ecuador from Peru with a group of Peace Corps volunteers, and we were held up for hours at the border because we had a map showing as part of Peru a portion of Ecuador that had been in dispute since the 1930s. Finally, the Ecuadoran officials confiscated our map and let us go. You ask a Peruvian about that and he’ll say, “What? The Ecuadoreans are still fighting about that? I thought that was over. We don’t hate Ecuador.” Many don’t even know Ecuador exists. If they hate any country, I’d guess they hate Chile, out of jealousy. But Chile doesn’t hate them. You can also apply it to today’s politics. Liberal Democrats hated George Bush. But he didn’t really hate back. Neither did Karl Rove or anybody else; they just
outmaneuvered
the liberals. People who call themselves movement conservatives hate President Obama, mostly because he’s black—have you seen their faces? But he does not hate them back. Sometimes I wish he’d hate them a little more. And Richard Nixon? He may be a historic exception to the rule of unrequited hatred; he hated back the liberals who hated him. He seems especially to have hated Jews.

Strange as it may sound, less unrequited and more requited hatred might be better. It’s something to think about. It might motivate more people to resolve their differences. I’m not saying “we need more hatred in the world,” but just think that if lines were more clearly drawn on a lot of disputes, if feelings went both ways, then it’s more likely that issues would be addressed and resolved.

*   *   *

Language is the door I keep opening to explain today’s politics. The Democrats lost a major political battle, maybe for a generation or two, when they accepted the transition of “grow” from an action to a very transitive verb. What does “to grow the economy” mean other than something intended to divert attention away from economic issues like the unemployment rate and basic inequality? Sure, it can be important for the economy to “grow,” but such growth can have little meaning, or even signify something ultimately negative, if those other variables are not addressed.

But to return to my childhood dinner table: The Mankiewicz dinner table arguments often focused on Zionism. At the center of these, usually, was Pop’s best friend, the playwright Ben Hecht, to whom in 1927 Herman Mankiewicz had sent the soon famous telegram, saying about Hollywood, “There are millions to be made out here, and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” Hecht took my father’s advice, came to Hollywood, and won the first Academy Award for his first screenplay, and despite his failure to keep the secret Pop had entrusted to him, he was acknowledged by the time of his death at the age of seventy in 1964—and remains so acclaimed to this day—as the greatest screenwriter in Hollywood history. Ben Hecht’s career is well recorded elsewhere, as a prizewinning Chicago newspaperman (he would have shunned the stylish title of “journalist”), a premier New York playwright (
The Front Page
is still a classic), a screenwriter, and an author of celebrated books, but my memory of him comes from those immediate postwar years when he and my father would engage in titanic arguments (hurling insults and epithets would be a fair description) at countless late-night dinners or afternoon poolside contests, all technically about politics, history, religion, or philosophy, but really—each and every one of them—over Zionism, of which Hecht was a passionate lately come believer and zealot and my father was a longtime opponent and dedicated foe.

Hecht had become, by 1940, a follower of Peter Bergson, an early and militant Zionist sent to the United States to drum up support for the creation of a Jewish state, a project then not supported by many American Jews. Bergson was an inspirational speaker and an organizer and partisan of the right wing in American (and world) Zionism, the two wings of proponents of a Jewish state being adherents, roughly speaking, of either the moderate, socialist labor group led by David Ben-Gurion or the militant faction led by the Hatzohar of Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Irgun of Menachem Begin, later to merge. Enchanted by Bergson and the militancy and violence of the Irgun and the emerging battle between the Irgun and the British government, which had a League of Nations mandate over what was then Palestine, Hecht became an extremist intellectual leader of Begin’s terrorist faction, conducting what amounted to guerrilla warfare against Britain’s forces in Palestine and after World War II throughout the world.

At one point in 1947, setting off a furious argument that lasted almost all night in our living room, Hecht had signed an ad in the
New York Post,
which proclaimed, among other things, that “the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts” whenever a British soldier is killed.

That ad was more than enough for Pop. While certainly no Anglophile, he nevertheless was convinced violence—especially national violence—never accomplished anything worthwhile, and he dreaded the confluence of Jewish political influence in the United States and a future Jewish state in the Middle East. Raised by German-Polish-Russian (depending on which country occupied his parents’ village) socialists, he believed Judaism to be a religion only, one loathed by many and nearly exterminated by Germany but a religion and not a nationality. “You’re proving Hitler right,” he stormed at Hecht one night. “You will end by making me an alien in my own country!”

These were arguments, of course, between friends—close friends—and amazingly the friendship outlasted these differences. Hecht would write in his autobiographical
A Child of the Century
(1954) that he remembered most fondly my father’s “hilarious and troublesome meditations.” They laughed together as they argued.

The issue widely debated at the time—just what was Judaism?—lay at the heart of the struggle within what came to be called “the Jewish community,” a more polite term than just “Jews.” It was, after all, Hitler who talked of “Jewish nationality” and the “Jewish race,” while most Americans, at least, thought of Jews as practitioners of a religion, perhaps a different, slightly strange religion. But Zionists, of all factions and stances, saw in the Holocaust an opportunity to change the dialogue, perhaps forever. As knowledge of the Holocaust spread, and later as visual evidence of the Nazi horror became available, the whole question of a Jewish homeland was admitted to polite discussion, and the idea of a “Jewish race” was no longer the possession of the extreme anti-Semitic and often racist right wing.

Truth to tell, the idea of Jewish fighters began to take on a romantic lure for Jews and concerned gentiles. At least on the left, the political Jewish culture was almost always of the intellect—writers, philosophers, artists, even comedians—hardly the heroic guerrilla fighters involved in an increasingly armed battle with the British army in what had been Palestine. But that was the Zionist movement evoked by Hecht’s language, even by today’s standards violent and provocative but to many Jews a welcome shift from the almost docile acceptance of the German terror that ten years of history had conveyed. And thus, the expulsion—often forcefully, often fatally—of Palestinians from a homeland they had made home, without statehood, for centuries, went barely noticed in America, least of all among Jews, and the triumph of the socialist Ben-Gurion and some easily publicized generals, capped by President Truman’s almost instantaneous recognition of the new state, was almost universally hailed, save for by a small remnant of reluctant Jews, like Pop, who preached until his death five years later that Israel was an “unnatural” state, the only country in the world organized by religion, thus making every Jew living outside Israel—he thought ominously—liable to the charge of “dual loyalty.”

So Pop always considered himself a Jew and a member not of a race or a nation, or even a culture, but of a religion, “just,” as he would frequently explain to me, “like Catholics or Presbyterians, and no one is proposing a separate country for Baptists or Methodists.”

It was that possibility that prompted the arguments with Hecht as these good friends became more heated and more—if that were possible—extreme in their statements. As a witness to almost all of these encounters—many in our living room and later on occasional visits to the temporary Hecht home in Oceanside, a few hours’ drive away—I began to form my own opinions, and over the sixty or so years since I have seen, more or less, the arguments and questions my father had used against Ben Hecht move to defensible and legitimate and what some people now dismissively call, of all things, “anti-Semitic.”

Perhaps for this reason, the fact that such arguments occurred is now mostly overlooked by history, but then they seemed important, at the center of who is defining who we Jews were. And my father seemed to regard them as different from arguments about other topics. Usually, he went on to other concerns, but after Hecht would leave, both men a little drunk but still close friends, perhaps a bit exhausted by the fury of their arguments, Pop would often settle back and ask me, as close auditor of most of these clashes, what I thought and in particular how I had scored the argument. Looking back, I learned something important from those arguments between my father and Ben Hecht. You can argue about anything and say just about anything so long as you laugh. The laughter is what people carry away with them. It is what they remember.

*   *   *

“Was there anti-Semitism when you were growing up?” I have been asked.

Beverly Hills High in the 1930s was really much like other upper-middle-class American high schools. Football, dances, honor societies, anti-Semitism—all the popular elements of an American high school at the time. Anti-Semitism was just a part of life. For a few years at Beverly High, I was the only kid in my class out of school on Yom Kippur. And I didn’t even seek dates for some traditional dances like the junior prom, because they were held at a club that barred Jews. Today, I wouldn’t be surprised if Simchat Torah has become a municipal holiday in Beverly Hills. But back then, we thought of anti-Semitism as institutional rather than directed at us as individuals—just something that was a part of life, like the palm trees. Hollywood was sort of segregated by religion. Writers and directors were mostly Jewish; actors seldom were. That’s why Bernard Schwartz became Tony Curtis, Issur Danielovitch Demsky became Kirk Douglas, and Jacob Julius Garfinkle became John Garfield. Many nonactors also changed their names, often claiming it was for the sake of simplification. Perhaps the best-known name change—and the best-known response—belonged to Sam Spiegel, a vigorous producer. Sam changed his name from Sam Spiegel to S. P. Eagle, a daring piece of work. He followed this with a movie called
The Stranger
. My father, seeing Spiegel one day at a studio, called out, “Sam, I just saw, and liked, your movie
The S. T. Ranger
.” But “Mankiewicz” never became something like “Mank,” my father said, “because for too long too many people had died in too many holocausts, big and small.”

My family passed around the standard jokes, such as Groucho’s asking for admission to the Los Angeles Country Club, not for himself, but for his son. “After all,” Marx was supposed to have urged, “he loves to swim, and he’s only half-Jewish—could he go in the pool just up to his navel?” I made the Knights, the boys’ honor society, in my last semester at Beverly High, and I think in retrospect I must have been the first Jewish member, but I didn’t think of myself as some kind of pioneer; I was just happy to wear their Maltese Cross pin on a special black sweater, and even think about “pinning” some girl.

7

In Which I Discuss the Death of My Father and His Obituary Triggers a Search for Why He Was Hated by the Nazi Leader Joseph Goebbels

A romantic—Hollywood-worthy—story about my father would read: Herman Mankiewicz, formerly a rising literary star of the Algonquin Round Table,
The New Yorker,
and
The New York Times,
sees in the success of
Kane
that selling out in Hollywood has not destroyed his talent. Further urged into action by emotions accompanying America’s entry into World War II, he taps into his more serious self—not forsaking his humor, but better harnessing it. Thus came his nomination for another Academy Award in screenwriting for
The Pride of the Yankees,
the Lou Gehrig story, the very next year.

But it’s just not true. Pop did write the Lou Gehrig movie, but not with those motivations—just another movie.

The Pride of the Yankees
does have one of the funniest romantic marriage proposal scenes in movie history—when Lou Gehrig, played by Gary Cooper, proposes in the middle of the night to Teresa Wright in her parents’ living room, with an Irish cop standing by and joining in. One critic called it “unforgettable.”

But while the made-up story about Pop’s revival is not true, a few years after the war ended, he did write a few articles and short stories for
The New Yorker
—the first time he had done such “serious” writing since he left Manhattan. This writing was all unsolicited and must have surprised the
New Yorker
people. In due course, he received rejection letters, in response to which he sent a letter to the
New Yorker
editor informing him, “Someone has stolen your letterhead and is faking your signature on rejection letters.”