Joe

On March 4, 1961, the most famous actress in the world slipped into a coma. Elizabeth Taylor had been sick on and off since she'd arrived in London to lead the cast of Cleopatra. Her latest illness turned into a serious case of pneumonia. She and her husband, Eddie Fisher, were staying at a historic London hotel, the Dorchester. Eddie called an ambulance. It seemed like it took a long time for the ambulance to arrive, though it was only a few minutes. Eddie is reading from his own memoir. Been there, done that. They strapped Elizabeth on a stretcher and took her downstairs to the ambulance. As we raced through the streets of London, at about 100 miles an hour, the doctor stuck a rubber tube down Elizabeth's throat. As they pulled up to the London clinic, reporters were everywhere. I pushed them out of the way. I tried to stop them from taking pictures. It was absurd. My wife was dying and I was protecting her from the media. They rushed her directly into the operating room. Somebody, I have no idea who, brought me into a little waiting room and left me there. The first person to arrive at the hospital was Joe Mankiewicz. Joe Mankiewicz is my dad's uncle, so he's my great uncle. Joe was one of the top writer directors in Hollywood. He was in London to begin work on Cleopatra, but instead of making a movie, Joe was sitting in a hospital waiting room with Eddie Fisher. Soon a doctor appeared and told Eddie that Elizabeth's condition was critical. They needed his signature to operate. Without the operation, she would be dead within an hour. I knew what I had to do. I just didn't know how to do it. I was nearly hysterical. I was sure she was dying. Mankiewicz said firmly, go ahead and sign it, Eddie. Eddie paced during the surgery. I imagined my uncle smoking his pipe nearby, trying to hide his own anxiety. Mankiewicz stayed with me through the night, constantly reassuring me that Elizabeth would be fine. Finally the doctor walked into the waiting room. I was ready for him to tell me she was dead. Instead, he told me she had survived the operation. Eddie collapsed into his chair. Liz was alive, but not out of the woods. She was still in critical condition. Fans gathered outside. Cleopatra's producer, Walter Wanger, was glued to the radio because the hospital issued updates on Liz every 15 minutes. Wangers had baskets of mail arrived for Elizabeth. Here live 60,000 of your friends out in the train. We're originally lives, and outside in the street there were people praying and singing. The doctors watched Elizabeth closely over the next couple of days. When her breathing slowed again, they ordered a special ventilator from a county 60 miles away. They had arrived under police escort. My uncle had been working on Cleopatra for just a month. Now his leading lady was fighting for her life. I suspect Joe thought it can't get any worse than this. Whatever he thought, he had no idea what was coming. From Turner Classic Movies, I'm your host, Ben Mankiewicz. This is Season 6 of The Plot Thickens, a podcast about the movies and the people who make them. This season, Cleopatra, how an epic production pushed my uncle Joe Mankiewicz to his breaking point. This is Episode 2, Joe. The weeks leading up to Elizabeth's operation were a whirlwind for Joe Mankiewicz. On January 26, 1961, he signed a contract with 20th Century Fox, a contract that made him a millionaire at 52 years old. It also made him the director of Cleopatra. You win some, you lose some. The day the deal was done, Joe wrote in his diary in all capital letters, Dertag. It means the day. Joe was fluent in German. Dertag is a popular German toast given before battle. So in Joe's mind, he was going to war. One of his first calls was to his assistant, Adelaide Wallace. And I said, when do they want to start? He told me some weird thing like May or June. And he went to England and couldn't understand how they ever got the idea in the beginning to do it in England. Joe flew from New York to London on February 1st to Wednesday. That night, he had drinks at the hotel bar at Claregis with Walter Wanger and with the man who had made him rich, the head of 20th Century Fox, Spiros Kuros. He was a round, little, bald-headed Greek guy. That's Scott Eiman. He wrote a book on the history of 20th Century Fox. Spiros Kuros had a thick Greek accent and often rubbed the worry beads he kept in his pocket. 1961 was a tough time to be running a major motion picture studio. During the 1950s, movies lost roughly half their audience to television. TV was free and you didn't have to leave your house. Eiman says Spiros was betting on Cleopatra to lure audiences back to theaters. Spiros, with the water basically at his chin, decides to roll the dice and go for a make or break production that would show the industry and the public at large that Fox was still in the game. It was basically a guy in Vegas down to his last $20,000 betting everything on the last roll of the dice. The following day, Joe went to a theater to screen the Cleopatra footage Ruben Memuyen had shot. Memuyen was the director who had just resigned. The screening didn't take long because there was barely any footage, somewhere between seven and 12 minutes, depending on who you're talking to. This is my Uncle Joe in 1972. I had no idea what I was going to do with Cleopatra. I couldn't do anything that had been shot. It's a little hard to hear at the end, but Joe says he couldn't use anything that had been shot. Next, Joe went to London's Pinewood Studios to look at the massive sets John DeCure had designed for Cleopatra. John DeCure couldn't even tell me what the sets were for. He had one that was for underwater shooting. I said, what was Ruben going to do here? What was the sport, John? He said, he was an underwater ballet. One of the things he shot was a kind of a mating dance between two horses, a stallion and a mare, with two doubles. One was supposed to be Cleopatra, the riding of the mare, and one was the athlete riding a stallion. That night, Joe wrote in his diary that the sets were, quote, blood curdling. Joe didn't blame John DeCure. He knew DeCure was a talented set designer, but it was all a mess. On top of all that, the original script was, in Joe's words, dreadful, an opera without music, which sounds exactly like something Joe would say. After two weeks in London, Joe decided there was only one way to solve this, but he had to convince Spiros Scuros. I said, Spiros, we're going to have to get up for a complete new start on this. I told Mr. Scuros, and he took it with extremely good grace. It is hard to believe Scuros took it with good grace. He'd already spent at least $5 million on Cleopatra. But either way, he gave in to Joe. I think the second director has been on this film. And days later, Fox set up a press conference for Joe to talk about the new plan. It isn't like having a general replaced in the midst of a losing battle. I'm starting a film called Cleopatra, and we're starting to scratch. Starting all over again. Yes, we're starting all over again. Joe got what he wanted, a clean slate. But he and Scuros disagreed about how to handle the script. Joe wanted time to rewrite it. Scuros wanted him to start shooting immediately, which meant Joe would have to write and direct at the same time. Here's Joe's agent and good friend, Robbie Lance. Now Joe somehow in his bones must have known from the first day that he had sold out to the devil. None of this was right. Joe secondly knew, and in his blood, that you don't begin a picture without the script. Joe knew this because he'd been making movies for more than 30 years. He understood the stakes. At one point, he sent a telegram to Scuros. Spiros, I have taken the most gigantic, the most difficult, and in many ways the most frightening undertaking of my career, he wrote. I am only too well aware that it involves not only the creation of a great film, but also the very existence of a great studio. Talk about pressure. We'll be back after the break. In 1929, decades before Cleopatra, Joe Mancovitz was fresh out of college and working in Europe. He graduated early, he was only 19. But my cousin Nick Davis says he was depressed. He completely ran out of money, he didn't know what he was doing. Joe wrote a letter to his brother, Herman, my grandfather, who was working as a screenwriter in Hollywood at the time. And Herman sent a telegram to Joe that said, for Christ's sake, come to Hollywood. And so Joe did. Herman was 11 years older than Joe. Nick wrote a book about Herman and Joe called Competing with Idiots. Joe worshipped Herman because Herman was larger than life, a fantastic, swirling, wonderful figure of warmth and brilliance and powerful, violent outbursts. He was the only person who stood up to their father, who was domineering and terrifying. Their father was Franz Mancovitz. He died before I was born, but I've heard a lot about Franz over the years. He was my great grandfather. I'm now the custodian, in fact, of a large portrait of Franz that hung above the fireplace in Joe's study. He looks stern in the painting, more like disapproving, which I guess is true to life. Franz was tough on his kids, but he was the toughest on Herman. Sidney Stern wrote a biography called The Brothers Mancovitz. The father that Herman had for the first few years of his life was a relatively recent immigrant who was very frustrated with his lot in life. He was educated and smart and drank too much. When Herman got a 92 on a test, Franz would ask, what happened to the other eight points? He was very hard on Herman, always. By the time Herman left home, Franz was working regularly and was a little less bitter. There is no doubt Joe experienced a different version of their father. Joe was a beneficiary, we would say, now of benign neglect. His father was gone, his father didn't pay that much attention to him. Another feature of his childhood was that to save money, the family was always moving around New York, sometimes one step ahead of the rent collector. Joe withdrew. Years later, he wrote a description of his childhood. I was a midget in a family of giants, all highly articulate, opinionated, extroverted, argumentative, and given to much bellowing. Every time I hear that description, it reminds me of me. My brother Josh, my only sibling, is 12 years older than I am. As a young kid, I was incredibly shy. My mom and dad were so smart and opinionated, and so was my brother. I hardly said a word at home. Anyway, I hear that and I immediately identify with Joe. At an early age, Joe became an observer, watching the adult world. Sometimes he was terrified by it, like the time his mother, in a rage, threw Franz's books all around the apartment. This is Joe in a 1983 documentary called All About Manchewitz. Arguments went on and thundered over my head, and I would have a coat with them. And I lived with a great many fantasies, a tremendous number of fantasies as a child. And one of them, I imagined, was that it had to be a psychiatrist and solving everybody's problems. Joe was an amateur therapist. At college, he imagined he would become a psychiatrist, but he was so bad in science that his physics teacher gave him an F minus. But he remained a student not only of humans, but of psychiatry. He loved psychiatrists, and psychiatrists loved him back because he spoke their language in a very Freudian way. Joe's father Franz eventually got his PhD and became a professor. He wanted, even expected, his sons to become teachers too. Everything Herman and Joe did professionally, they felt fell short of what their father envisioned. When Herman invited Joe to come to Hollywood in 1929, Herman was on top of the world. He was writing scripts for Paramount Pictures. He was good at it, and he was making a lot of money. Herman was, as we know, the first of the great Eastern writers to come out to Hollywood and make a fortune. Herman thought he'd struck gold, so he sent word back to a friend, another writer, in New York. And that's when he sent back the famous telegram to Ben Hect. There are millions to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around. Herman believed he could write circles around the schmucks in Hollywood, and he often did. However, his writing talent was eventually surpassed by his love for alcohol and gambling. Producer Sam Marks was a contemporary of Herman's and Joe's. Herman's reputation at times was of a wild drinker, a wild gambler, and a guy who came around to write in the script only when he had nothing else to bet on. In 1929, Herman owed Paramount a script. He leveraged that to help his little brother. Herman convinced Paramount to give Joe a job, which was at a very low level, maybe $65 a week, in exchange for his promise to stay sober enough to finish a screenplay he had promised them. Joe took a train called the Apache from New York to Los Angeles. They soon realized it was running late, so he wired ahead to Herman. I sent my brother a telegram saying, horses eaten by wolves, gold safe, however. Joe. And he thought that was terribly funny, and with my passport to Hollywood, he met me at the train. He said, I'm taking you to a very big party tonight. Joe wore one of Herman's dinner jackets to the party and used shoe polish to make his brown shoes black. Joe walked into a room to find stars like Gary Cooper, Clara Bow, and Kay Francis. I mean, it was like being alone in a candy store and always watching. What did I look at? But how do I dare go to anyone to talk to? Joe was starstruck, but once work started, he was eager to learn. He makes a great impression. He takes all the work seriously. He loves to make believe. He loves the costumes. He loves the wardrobe. He loves the wardrobe girls. He loves the sets being carted back and forth on the lot. He loves everything about it. I remember when we used to shoot movies, we would start at five o'clock in the afternoon. We used the old silent stages and we hung them with carpets. With many carpets, we could find and keep our traffic noise. And we started shooting because that's when the traffic would go less. And the shooting days went from five o'clock in the afternoon to about four thirty or five the following morning. As Nick said, my uncle loved those early days in Hollywood. And for the most part, Hollywood loved Joe back. He was good looking. He was appealing and dare I say this, of a great uncle, sexy. He had a magnetism about him. People wanted to be with him. Women were certainly attracted to him. And he had a lot of friends. He was fun to be around. His most salient characteristic was his intelligence. And the second I would say was his wit. Joe's first job in Hollywood was writing title cards for silent films, but that didn't last long. Title card writers were being phased out as silent movies changed to sound. Producers needed writers who could create lines for the actors to actually say. Joe decided to prove his worth by writing six versions of a single script and sending them all to his boss. His boss hated Joe's stories, but liked the dialogue. He was in. Then, in 1931, Joe co-wrote a movie called Skippy. This kid ain't big enough to fight me. We gotta get someone his own weight. What's your weight, kid? Fifty-five pounds. What are you weight, Sidney? A hundred and thirty pounds. What? It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Greenplay. Joe had been in Hollywood for two years. He was only twenty-two. I mean, it's sort of a meteoric rise and it has nothing to do with the fact that he's Herman's brother. It's just because he's good. He's smart. He's industrious. He's really terrific at the game. He plays the politics of Hollywood very well. Joe's success failed to impress his father, Franz, back home in New York. Franz had so little regard for Hollywood and for the movies and just thought the movies were ridiculous and absurd and beneath him and probably beneath his sons, too. Joe spent the next three years writing as many screenplays as he could. My cousin Alex Mankewitz is Joe's daughter. She says her dad was able to write so much because he was taking Benzedrine, an enormously popular amphetamine in showbiz, often provided by the Hollywood studios. They basically said, we've got this amazing new drug and dad was young and fit and he took it and he said, I didn't write two pages that day. I wrote twenty pages and I didn't play one set of tennis. I played five sets of tennis and this was just amazing. It was so amazing, Joe would keep Benzedrine around for years to come. It wasn't long before Joe realized the only way to protect his writing was to direct as well. He didn't like how other directors messed with his scripts. He moved to a competing studio, Metro Goldwyn-Mair and after five years in the business, Joe requested a meeting with MGM's powerful studio boss, Louis B. Maier. I said, Mr. Maier, please, I want to direct when I write. And he said, absolutely, I have a question, I have great plans for you. And he said, why you like producing? Because remember, if your goal is the right thing, you have to learn to crawl before you walk. Maier made Joe a producer. Tough to swallow as producers were often the laughing stock of writers' rooms back then. They were the suits, the money people. But good producers had real skill and were critical to making sure a movie stayed on track and on budget. Snob. What do you mean snob? You're the worst kind there is, an intellectual snob. You made up your mind awfully young, it seems to me. Well, 30 is about time to make up your mind. Joe produced 17 movies at MGM, many of them classics, including the Philadelphia story with Catherine Hepburn, Carrie Grant, and Jimmy Stewart. You're quite a girl, aren't you? You think? Yeah, I know. Thank you, Professor. I don't think I'm exceptional. You are, then. I know in a number like me, you ought to get around more. Joe was a good producer, but biographer Sidney Stern says he was miserable. That is absolutely not what Joe wanted to do. Joe was a creative person. He wanted to write and secondarily to direct. But he did the best he could by being as creative a producer as he could be. I wrote an enormous amount when I was a producer. One of the things that made me very unhappy was the fact that I did as much writing. And I'm still introduced as the producer. Joe McAwits, I'm still referred to too often as the producer. Joe may have been unhappy, but producing advanced his career. In 1943, when he was 34 years old, Joe left MGM for 20th Century Fox, a rival studio, run by Daryl F. Zanick, who was willing to let Joe direct. Zanick gave Joe a bungalow on the Fox lot and paid him $175,000 a year. In 1946, Joe directed his first movie, Dragon Wick. Three films later, he directed The Ghost in Mrs. Muir, starring a British stage actor named Rex Harrison. Joe and Rex became friends. Many actors, not just Rex Harrison, liked how Joe ran a set. As a director, he didn't like marching around in a job purse and a megaphone, insisting that it's his way or the highway. And he wouldn't say action. He would say kind of action or whenever you're ready. And they loved him for it. Like, the actors and actresses who worked for Joe McAwits to a person absolutely loved him, gave him so much credit. Joe's interest in psychology meant he could dig deep with actors on why a character would behave a certain way. This was like catnip for actors. Plus, according to my cousin Tom, Joe's youngest son, his dad was fun on set. He had a great sense of humor, never about himself. But a great sense of humor, he was very funny. He had that McAwits wit. And more people laughed on his sets. I mean, there was a lot of, they were kidding and jokes going on and so on. Directing suited Joe, but he still wanted to write, wanted to do both. That finally happened on a letter to three wives. He'd worked on the script for nine weeks, sequestered in a rented house in Malibu. Joe wrote in longhand on yellow legal paths. He would eventually switch to notebooks. His close friend, the actor Hume Cronin, says Joe took his writing very seriously. I think that Joe is so in love with language and so beguiled by his own happy, turn of phrase that he overwrites almost everything. If there is a criticism of Joe as a writer, it's that he sometimes made his scripts too literary. He loved voiceover narration and flashbacks. His films were often described as stagey, too much like a play. And his oldest son, Chris, said Joe was not a visual filmmaker. This is unfortunately an aspect of my father's directing style and great director though he was. I say jokingly that my father's idea of action was somebody coming in and slamming the door when he comes into a room. But Joe's movies were sophisticated. Biographer Sidney Stern describes them as high comedies. It's a genre that's not really done much anymore, but that was his humor. He used humor in every way as a rapier as well as an observation and for attention as well. A letter to Three Wives opened at Radio City Music Hall in January of 1949 to rave reviews. The winner is Joseph L. Manquitz for a letter to Three Wives. Joe won two Oscars that night, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director. This is something for which nobody in all honesty can be prepared. I am not prepared. This is a great honor and I am deeply appreciative. After the big night, Joe said, all of those years cotton picking under this damn sun, my coming to Fox, my analysis, my growing up, I guess things are working out. That is what passed as optimism for Joe Manquitz. That's why I don't understand all these plays about love, star... The same year he won those Oscars for a letter to Three Wives, Joe wrote and directed All About Eve, starring Betty Davis. Lord, honey, be a playwright with guts. Write me one about a nice, normal woman who just shoots her husband. All About Eve is arguably Joe Manquitz's masterpiece. It is a film set in the theater world about an aging star played by Betty Davis, Margot Channing, who hires as a sort of personal assistant, a woman named Eve Harrington. And Eve Harrington, weadles her way into Margot Channing's life, trying to take from Margot everything that is hers, both professionally and personally. Margot, this is Eve Harrington. How do you do, my dear? Who? Brother. Hello, Miss Channing. My husband? Hello, Miss Harrington. Betty Davis had been queen of the Warner Brothers lot for better than a decade. She left the studio because she committed an unpardonable sin in Hollywood. She was a woman who had the audacity to turn 40. Davis needed a role like Margot Channing. But when word got out about the casting, directors and producers, all men, called Joe and warned him that Betty Davis would be difficult. Here's Joe from a 1983 documentary. Edmund Goulding called me and said, boy, you're out of your mind. This woman will annihilate you. She will grind you to a fine powder and blow you away. She will come on the set with a large yellow pad and sharp pencils, and she will write. And having written, she was indirect. But Davis had nothing to rewrite. She loved the script and she especially loved the note Joe gave her about her character, Margot. He said Margot was, quote, the kind of dame who would treat her mink coat like a poncho. You knew when you came in that the audition was over that Eve was your understudy, playing that childish little game of cat and mouse. Not mouse, never mouse. If anything, right. Years later in an AMC documentary, Betty Davis said all about Eve changed her life. It was the greatest break at that point in my career that ever happened. There's no question about it. As I told Mankiewicz, he resurrected me from the dead. Joe Mankiewicz was a rarity in Hollywood, a man able to write well for women. My uncle often talked about why he liked writing female characters like the ones in All About Eve. Anybody will ever write a film or a book about a remarkable woman in which everything will be known. I think you do it about a man, but you can't do it about a woman. And that's why the female roles, writing females, directing females, is always been incredibly more exciting, entry more rewarding, and entry easier than men. He really saw the situation of women as, he would not like this word, but as an oppressed group. They were equals of men, but they did not have the opportunities, and so they had to find ways of negotiating the world for themselves, and he understood that. Another feature of a Joe Mankiewicz film, women often get the best lines. Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night. Joe's wit is always on display in his screenplays. He couldn't help but write witty, quotable dialogue. Nice speech, Eve, but I wouldn't worry too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your heart ought to be. All About Eve became an immediate hit. It earned a record-breaking 14 Oscar nominations, and a year after winning twice for a letter to three wives, Joe won two more Academy Awards. Again for Best Director and Best Screenplay. That hadn't happened before and hasn't happened since. I'll wager it will never happen again. If you were to draw a graph of my uncle's career from his arrival in Hollywood in 1929 to the 1950s, it would show a solid upward climb. He started out writing title cards for silent movies. Two decades later, he was a four-time Oscar-winning filmmaker who could choose the movies he wanted to make. There is a second graph I could draw of Joe's life in Hollywood, but this one would look different with extreme peaks and valleys. That's what a chart of Joe's relationships with women would look like. That's coming up after the break. The End Not only did Joe know how to write and direct women, he was intent on seducing them. It didn't matter if they were married, and it certainly didn't matter if he was. Joe was quite a ladies' man, both as a bachelor and his ladies' man-ness never really stopped. He definitely had a lot of affairs with a lot of star actresses that was appealing to him. And they were younger. It goes without saying that they were less intelligent, because not many people were as smart as Joe was. But he loved being in this pigmalion role of molding both the actress and the person. The list of names is a who's who of Hollywood actresses in the 1930s and 40s. Loretta Young, Linda Darnell, Jean Tierney, Judy Garland. During an interview with a biographer in 1972, Joe talked about his reputation. I mean, is this part of the legend that Joe Michaels fucked every leading lady in every movie? I'm sure you heard that over and over. Not every, but the most. There were many, apparently. This was an accepted bit of social legend that I never bothered to correct much, because it was very flattering, but not nearly as true as the legend has it. Let's be clear here. It was true enough. Joe had plenty of affairs. While he was married to his first wife, he began an affair with Joan Crawford. She was a powerful MGM star, and Joe was a young writer working on a screenplay. So he went to her house with a huge white living room and sat on the couch to read her his screenplay. She came swooping down in some outfit. And so he was terrified. And then as time went on, she began to get into the jokes and the power of the screenplay. And when he gave his line, I started fire by rubbing two Boy Scouts together. She threw up her hands. That was so funny. And one of her red nails flew off, and that so disconcerted him because he'd never seen fake nails that he was stunned at first. Joan Crawford admitted to a biographer that she'd been in love with Joe. This is Joe's oldest son, my cousin, Chris Mancoitz. She confessed not only to her affair with my father, a long affair with my father, but said, which I will again give you an example of how interestingly manipulative he was, that his way of getting girls in the sack was not to say, Oh, Jesus, have you got great tits or do I love your legs? He would talk to them about their mothers, about psychiatry, and about how difficult it must be to have grown up with your mother. And she said it was just so wonderful that a man in those days was treating you other than as a piece of meat. I mean, that he would seem to be interested in who you really were and what your real feelings were. In 1937, Joe divorced. He soon began dating an Austrian actress named Rosa Strodner. She was beautiful. She had beautiful skin and beautiful carriage, evidently very elegant. And she was more femme fatale than Anshanou. She was this danger about her. Rosa had been a stage actress in Vienna, which drew Joe in. He loved the theater. Rosa wanted to become a Hollywood star. Her career did not take off. She started with one somewhat decent role and it went downhill from there. At some point, they moved in together and when she was so unstable, Joe tried to leave her. Sometimes Rosa would throw things and become physically violent. When Joe threatened to leave, Rosa attempted suicide. And in response, instead of heating the red flags, Joe married her. Big mistake. The marriage came in 1939. A year later, my cousin Chris was born. Two years after that, Tom. After Tom's birth, Rosa's mental health deteriorated. She went into a state described as catatonic. I believe now we would imagine it might have been a very severe postpartum depression. And Joe did the best thing he could think of, which was send her to managers clinic. This was considered the best psychiatric help west of the Mississippi. Rosa was 30 years old when she went to the clinic. She spent nine months there. When she returned home, she stayed medicated and she drank on top of her meds. Both Tom and Chris were just kids. Here's Tom. She was very sick. She was schizophrenic. I mean, in the sense that with a couple of drinks, which was usually the trigger, she became a totally different human being. And one that was at times violent and could be cruel. And yet she was a loving, wonderful mother. She was under psychiatric care on and off for the rest of her life. And I don't think it was what we would call good psychiatric care. It was very Freudian. It was very adjust yourself to your lot in life. Joe and Rosa's marriage wasn't always bad. They were known to be great party hosts. They loved word games and charades. Joe's friend, Robbie Lance, said Rosa had a strong sense of social justice and that influenced Joe. She had enormous character and enormous strengths and an enormous amount of what the Germans called civil courage. Civil courage is a kind of personal individual guts. She was also a smart editor for Joe. She was always the person who saw all of his work first, the scripts. And we always knew that when Joe said, well, Eddie has finished typing, I'm now going to show her to Rosa. But when things were bad, which was often Joe escaped off to movie sets and movie actresses, here's Tom again. We knew where it was common knowledge that he had many, many affairs while he was married to Mother and we were kids, many affairs. And it must have been very punishing to Mother because she must have known. At one point during his marriage, Joe became involved with Judy Garland, who was one of MGM's most carefully managed stars. Many of you know she played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Joe and Judy fell hard for each other. They met regularly at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. They even went to parties together. Judy Garland was sort of the ultimate example of an affair with Joe. She was an extreme version of what he was drawn to, which was widely revered and very damaged. She was both of those things in extreme. He saw her as a strativarius-like instrument who was being brutalized by the system and by the studio, given drugs for her to keep her performing and so forth, and tried to help her. Sidney Stern says he and Judy stayed in touch for the rest of their lives. Joe fell in love with these women. He genuinely loved them. He wasn't going to leave his wife, but he was very romantic. Joe's marriage to Rosa lasted 19 years. It survived the affairs and a move from Hollywood back to New York. It lasted through their sons at boarding school, and Joe's rise to become one of the best filmmakers in Hollywood. Then, on a Saturday, September 27, 1958, Rosa Stradner was alone at their home outside New York City. She overdosed on sedatives. She was 45 years old. When she committed suicide, he was utterly lost and devastated and shocked. It was shocking to me to see his reaction, because I would have thought it would be great relief. But he was stunned and confused. My uncle was private about many things, and whatever grief he felt, he was private about that too. But we have some clues as to how he was feeling. After the funeral, Joe acted rashly, which was definitely not like him. For starters, he sold his apartment in New York. On a spur of the moment, when I bought a Jaguar, that was weird. Then he went off to Europe for about six weeks to recover, leaving his sons, which I thought was not the kindest thing for a father to do, but it was about Joe healing, apparently. And he kept a diary. Joe's diary entries from when he sailed to Europe reflect his melancholy. On November 20th, that was Joe's first day at sea, he wrote, I find myself curiously unable to relax properly. None, literally not one of the passengers, seemed to provide any area of mutual conversation, much less intimacy. Three days later, he wrote, we sit around like a group of removed appendixes, some sun today, and greeted it as if it were Winston Churchill. On the same day, he also wrote this, should the ship sink, I can think of no one aboard this dreary vessel who will leave the world emptier. Joe returned home just before the Christmas holidays, which he spent with his sons. He seemed less depressed by then. He played bridge and listened to football on the radio. On December 20th, he wrote, where to live, what to work on. Eight months after Rosa's death, Joe walked on to a London set to direct Suddenly Last Summer, based on the play by Tennessee Williams. The film starred Montgomery Clift, Catherine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth's third husband, Mike Todd, had been killed in a plane crash just months before Rosa died. Joe and Elizabeth were both grieving, both trying to find some way forward. Joe was basically an emotional fortress. Elizabeth, an open wound. She was taking pills, drinking, and rushed into marriage with Eddie Fisher. The two got off to what sounds like a rocky start. Elizabeth Taylor described it at an award ceremony for my uncle. The first thing we shot, you know, I was 29 years old. And not bad looking. No, really. And I wasn't fat or anything. I was in pretty good shape. And Joe kind of looked at me in this dreadful outfit and said, are you planning on losing any weight? And I said, well, I hadn't actually sort of, thought about it. And he said, I think maybe you should do a little toning up or something. And he's holding my arm up. And he said, because this part, and he went flabble, flabble, looks like a bag of dead mice. Certainly not one of Joe's finer moments. But I think he's going to be able to do it. Certainly not one of Joe's finer moments. But at other times, Joe was more gentle, like the way he handled Elizabeth showing up late to set. I think she was late a couple of times. And it's bad when you're late to a film shoot that's got, you know, people standing around waiting, all of whom are getting paid. And one morning she showed up, I think at 11.30, and it was nine o'clock call, and the set was completely empty. And she walked around and she saw on the camera, there was a note tacked to the camera. And the note said, dear Elizabeth, we were all here at nine, so sorry to have missed you. Love, Joe. She was never late again. After all, I'm insane. It's a sort of thing an insane woman would do. Liz played Catherine, a troubled woman, getting some seriously outdated therapy. The script would have been challenging for any actor. Liz's character gives a long speech at the end, and Joe knew it would be difficult to pull off. After four takes, Joe suggested they take a break. Liz hadn't nailed it yet, and he wanted her to rest. Shortly after, a crew member took Joe behind the set to find Elizabeth on the ground sobbing from exhaustion. She was convinced she was letting everyone down. Joe made a suggestion, one he knew would make her angry. He said, let's wrap for the day and go at it fresh tomorrow. Elizabeth turned to him in a fury and said, tomorrow my ass. She got up and they shot the fifth take. That was the print. Police, people ran out of buildings back up the way, the way cousin Sebastian... He was lying naked on the broken stone. And then she won't believe. Nobody, nobody, nobody could believe it. Suddenly last summer came out in 1959 to mixed reviews. Elizabeth Taylor and Catherine Hepburn were nominated for the best actress Oscar. Elizabeth won the Golden Globe. She thought Joe had drawn out the best performance of her career. It was wonderful doing the film and it was great working with him. And we really got to know each other very well and became enormously good and close friends. Author Nancy Schoenberger wrote a book about Elizabeth Taylor's love life. She knew she was the kind of actress who needed a good director to bring a good performance out of her. He definitely respected her as an actress and he knew how to bring out her talent. So Elizabeth Taylor knew exactly who she wanted to direct Cleopatra after Reuben Mamoulian left. Especially after she learned how Joe showed up for her and Eddie during those stressful weeks in March of 1961 when Liz fell into a coma and needed surgery. Not only did they put her on a ventilator, they had to cool her body down because her temperature was so high. Joe was absolutely wonderful. He sat when I was in this coma. He sat in my room evidently day after day. He just sat there. As a matter of fact, I think Joe is perhaps the only man I know who has seen me start naked, unconscious, lying on a slab of ice. Eventually Elizabeth came off the ventilator and was breathing on her own. One night in her hospital room, Eddie saw a hopeful sign. I knew for certain she was going to be fine when she started demanding chili from Chasens and Don Perignon Champagne. She could barely speak and she was drinking champagne. Meanwhile, the press had mistakenly reported Liz's death, the fact that always amused her. Reading the tabloids saying, Liz's dead, that people had saved for me. And that was a strange feeling because they were the best reviews I've ever had. Liz's recovery was good news, but Cleopatra remained on hold. Liz needed time to get healthy again. Liz and Eddie and her toy poodle flew to California to rest. Joe went back to New York. The sets in London were packed up. The crew was told to stand by. Once again, everyone involved with Cleopatra was waiting for Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth's life had all the twists and turns of a great soap opera plot, but it was bigger and more complicated and it was real. My uncle Joe was about to find out how real. Coming up on the plot thickens, Joe writes in his diary, the situation cannot be cured. Taylor deeply wants disaster, particularly to herself. Where is Anthony? Where is Mark Anthony? And Joe casts a new Mark Anthony. Anthony the Great, the Divine Anthony! Which upends the production, along with Elizabeth Taylor's love life. The 988 suicide and crisis life line is for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone in crisis. Speak with a trained listener called 988. For more information, visit 988lifeline.org. Angela Carone is our director of podcasts. Story editor is Rob Rosenthal. Yako Friedman is our senior producer. Script writing by Yako Friedman, Natalia Winkelman and Angela Carone. Research and fact checking by the indispensable James Sheridan. Audio editing and sound design by Mike Volgaris. Mixing by Glenn Matullo. Production support from Liz Winter, Allison Fire, Matthew Ownby, Julie Baton, Emma Morris, Jordan Chips, Nicole Hill, and David Corwin in patches. Thanks to our legal team, John Renau and Kristen Hassel. The following TCM staffers help us get the word out about our podcast. So thank you to Alina Novick, Katie Daniels, David Byrne, Guyana Bosch, Caroline Wigmore, Michelle Height, and Stephanie Tames. Our executive producer is Charlie Tabish. And a special thank you to the Archivists at the American Film Institute, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, and Boston University. We could not make these podcasts without the work of Archivists around the country. Special thanks to my family, especially my cousins, Alex Mankiewicz and Nick Davis. I regret that I never got to interview my cousins Tom and Chris Mankiewicz. They died before we started production. Thomas Avery of Tune Welders composed our theme music. I'm your host, Ben Mankiewicz. Thanks for listening. See you next time.