Word: mank
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...MANK by Richard Meryman...
...Columnist Alexander Woollcott called Herman Mankiewicz the funniest man in New York, a town that then included Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker and other luminaries of the Algonquin Round Table. As a screenwriter in the Hollywood of the '30s and '40s, "Mank" continued to shoot from the quip. Dining at the home of a pretentious gourmet, he suddenly rushed to the bathroom. "Don't worry," he assured his host later, "the white wine came up with the fish." When movie attendance dropped, he offered a unique solution: "Show the movies in the streets, and drive...
...Richard Meryman's delightful biography shows, Mank's wit had an undertow of bitterness and desperation. "I am the most serious man in the world," he said, "even when I'm joking." The son of a German immigrant who believed in Prussian discipline, Mankiewicz was ceaselessly downgraded by his father. The old man, a professor of languages, seemed jealous and resentful of Herman's precocity. Early on, the boy became convinced that he was a failure and spent the rest of his life trying to prove himself right...
...Algonquin Round Table, for example, could have given him wide recognition. Instead, he used its worst aspects: sincere feelings were despised, hard work was derided, and sobriety was practically outlawed. Mank, a promising second-string drama critic on the New York Times, became a full-time lush...
...wrote or collaborated on a score of scripts and had an uncredited influence on the structure and content of many other major films. But Hollywood also evoked the worst in him. During the Depression, Mankiewicz and his colleagues were earning $1,250 a week. Mank gambled it away, with as much disdain as if he had stolen it from his children's Monopoly set. "Hollywood money," explained his friend Charles MacArthur, "is something you throw off the ends of trains...