THE BROTHERS MANKIEWICZ

Herman (1897-1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1993) were titans of the golden age of Hollywood, who wrote, produced and directed over one hundred and fifty movies, including two icons of Hollywood history. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the groundbreaking picture's only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture and went on to achieve a cult status that inspired books, a Broadway musical, a 2019 London theatrical adaptation and countless female impersonators.

Despite triumphs as diverse as the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business and Cleopatra, Pride of the Yankees and Guys and Dolls, the witty, intellectual brothers spent their Hollywood years deeply discontented and yearning for what they did not have – a career in the New York theater. Herman, formerly an Algonquin Round Table habitué, New York Times and New Yorker theater critic and George S. Kaufman collaborator, never reconciled himself to screenwriting. He gambled away his prodigious earnings, got himself fired from all the major studios and drank himself to death at fifty-five. While Herman drifted downward, Joe rose to become a critical and financial success as a writer, producer and director, though his constant philandering with prominent stars like Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Gene Tierney and Linda Darnell distressed his emotionally fragile wife, and she eventually committed suicide. He wrecked his own health using uppers and downers in order to direct Cleopatra by day and finish writing it at night, only to be very publicly fired by Darryl F. Zanuck, an experience from which he never fully recovered.

For this first dual portrait, The Brothers Mankiewicz draws on interviews, letters, diaries and other documents still in private hands to provide a uniquely intimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the lives, loves, work and relationship between these complex men, and a fascinating exploration of an incredibly diverse, complex, and surprising terrain.

SYDNEY LADENSOHN STERN, a New York-based freelance writer, has contributed to the New York Times and many other publications. She is the author of Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry (Contemporary, 1990) which was a Book of the Month Club and Fortune Book Club Featured Alternate, and the biography Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique (Birch Lane, 1997).