Herman J. Mankiewicz

• Born: November 7, 1897
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: March 5, 1953
• Place of death: Hollywood, California

Biography

Herman Jacob Mankiewicz was born November 7, 1897, in New York City, where his father, Franz, edited a German-language newspaper. He graduated from Columbia University in 1919 and served in the United States Marine Corps in Germany following the armistice ending World War I. Mankiewicz married Shulamith Sara Aronson in 1920. Their son, Don, is a screenwriter.

In the 1920’s, Mankiewicz worked as a writer for the Red Cross Press Service, as a publicist for dancer Isadora Duncan, and as the Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. After serving as assistant drama editor at The New York Times under George S. Kaufman, Mankiewicz went to Hollywood in 1926 and received his first credit as a screenwriter on The Road to Mandalay, written with Tod Browning. After establishing himself in Hollywood, Mankiewicz wrote his friend Ben Hecht, “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” For many, Mankiewicz epitomized the cliché of the cynical Easterner who goes West to get rich by prostituting his talent.

Many of Mankiewicz’s early screenplays after the advent of sound were adaptations of successful plays, as with The Royal Family of Broadway and Dinner at Eight, both from plays by Kaufman and Edna Ferber. He used his newspaper background for such original screenplays as My Dear Miss Aldrich. In addition to his work as a screenwriter in the 1930’s, Mankiewicz produced four films, including three with the Marx Brothers: Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup. He also produced Million Dollar Legs, from a story by his younger brother, Joseph, who was also a successful producer before becoming an acclaimed writer-director after World War II.

Mankiewicz also worked without credit as a script doctor on many films, including The Wizard of Oz. Nothing in Mankiewicz’s credits, however, compare to the film for which he is best known. When RKO hired Orson Welles, the wunderkind of radio and theater, to direct his first film, Welles chose Mankiewicz to write the screenplay. Inspired by the life of legendary newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane looks at the corrupting power of wealth. Because Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland broke many of the rules about the way films should look and sound and because the screenplay, credited to both Mankiewicz and Welles, has a flashback structure previously used only once in Hollywood, Citizen Kane presented a challenge to the perceptions about what American movies could do. The film, in part because of Hearst’s campaign against it, was a box-office disappointment, and it did not begin influencing other filmmakers until much later. It won a single Academy Award—for best original screenplay.

After working with Welles, Mankiewicz returned to comparatively mundane assignments. He loved baseball and wrote Pride of the Yankees, about Lou Gehrig, and The Pride of St. Louis, his final film, about Dizzy Dean. Mankiewicz died of a pulmonary edema on March 5, 1953. Prominent film critic Pauline Kael created a controversy among critics and film scholars with her 1971 book Raising Kane, in which she argued that Mankiewicz’s contribution had been severely slighted. Citizen Kane regularly tops critics’ lists as the greatest film ever made.