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The family 5 unless I gave you my grandmother’s first name, I’d have had to have said, “Shoot.” Dad One of the most brilliant, complex, intensely literate, and conflicted human beings ever to inhabit the planet. Someone who began life as the kid brother and wound up the Don Corleone of his family. Every security and insecurity of his personality can be found in the characters of his best screenplays, as can many of the emotions he was somehow unable to express freely in real life. He was both the protagonist and the victim of a long, punishing marriage to a beautiful, warm, but deeply troubled woman, Rosa Stradner, an Austrian actress. She was his second wife, and mother to me and my older brother Chris. Dad’s first marriage, which lasted only a matter of months, was to a woman I would later know as Elizabeth Reynal, a Philadelphia socialite, wife of the noted publisher Eugene Reynal. She had a son by Dad, Eric, who became a successful investment banker and lives in the United Kingdom, and with whom I have a very cordial relationship. Several years after Mother committed suicide, Dad married Rosemary Matthews, an Englishwoman who first went to work for him in Rome in the early fifties while he was directing The Barefoot Contessa. That’s when I first met her, at age ten or eleven. They remained close friends and occasional coworkers (and almost certainly more) through the decade before Mother died, and had a daughter, Alexandra. I’m convinced that Rosemary’s love and devotion to Dad added a decade or more to his life. Much more about Dad later. All about Dad. Mother The single most important influence in my life, although certainly not in the way she intended. She had a mental condition, a form of schizophrenia usually triggered by alcohol, and her health degenerated over the years until her untimely death in 1958. Beautiful and intelligent, a talented actress, she was haunted by a disease that made her absolutely terrifying at times, especially to a child. She and my Austrian grandmother, whom we affectionately called “Gross” (short for Grossmutter), fled Austria and the Nazis in the midthirties . My grandfather and an uncle, Fritz, stayed behind to fight for their country. No one ever found out what happened to the old man. Fritz My Life as a Mankiewicz 6 became an SS officer and was executed against a wall in Aachen, Germany, by Allied troops. I never knew I had an Uncle Fritz until I was about ten. Dad didn’t think it was a particularly good idea to have a precocious little motormouth running around Los Angeles in the forties talking about his uncle the SS officer. Mother was immediately signed to a contract by MGM. She performed in only two films: The Last Gangster, with Jimmy Stewart and Edward G. Robinson, and more famously, The Keys of the Kingdom, with Gregory Peck, the film that launched his stardom. He played a priest who arrives in China as a young man and stays on for the rest of his life. Mother played a nun who is his constant companion throughout the film. I’m sure (from her) she had an affair with Greg on that movie, but when I got to know him later on in life and even dropped a couple of hints, I realized he was far too classy to comment on it. Dad produced The Keys of the Kingdom, which was released in 1944. He and Mother had fallen in love, married in 1939, and had their first child, my brother Chris, in 1940, followed by me in 1942. But her mental problems were surfacing, and upon completion of the film, she decided to quit acting and concentrate on herself and her family. Actresses never really quit, you know. Over the years, Mother always thought about returning to it, and she even tried once in the late forties. I remember when Natalie Wood “retired” after she gave birth to her daughter , Natasha. We would go to the movies together from time to time, and as the lights lowered in the theater and the screen lit up, I’d look over at her. It was like sitting next to a racehorse nervously prancing in the gate, waiting for it to open, but saddened by the fact that she wasn’t going to be running that day. Natalie’s return to the screen was inevitable. Mother was cast...

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