Proof of Guilt: Barbara Graham and the Politics of Executing Women in America

7. I Want to Live! [Contains Image Plates]

103 7 I Want to Live! in the fall of 1957 Hollywood producer Walter Wanger invited director Robert Wise to lunch at the famed Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles to discuss making a movie about Barbara Graham. The lunch capped off a year that began when Ed Montgomery wrote to Wanger, asking if he might be interested in the Graham story. Montgomery had put together an outline to familiarize Wanger with the case. Wanger responded enthusiastically. He had been searching for an anti-death-penalty film, he wrote Montgomery in December 1956:“There is a very exciting and important picture in the Graham material.”¹ Within weeks Wanger flew to meet Montgomery in San Francisco. He emerged from the meeting as a passionate Graham partisan, convinced that she had been the victim of a colossal frameup . He“determined that Barbara’s shabby treatment be thoroughly dramatized,” Wise wrote later. Wanger arranged the Brown Derby lunch to convince Wise to direct the as-yet untitled film. He gave Wise a three-page synopsis and told him that Don Mankiewicz was rewriting his first screenplay draft with his uncle Joseph. Actor Susan Hayward had signed on to play Graham. Wise read the synopsis and declared it “horrifying 104 I WANT TO LIVE! and fascinating. . . . This is a real-life horror story if I ever saw one. Let’s go.”² Wanger, Wise, and Hayward were not minor players in Hollywood . All three were major leaguers, A-list talents. Walter Wanger was a pioneering, prolific producer whose films included Stagecoach, Foreign Correspondent, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He was well-respected for his ability to pull together all of the elements that went into successful films: scripts, talent, money, studio, and technical support. Robert Wise had started his career in the early 1940s with Orson Welles. He worked as an editor on Citizen Kane and as an assistant director on The Magnificent Ambersons. He directed the science-fiction thriller The Day the Earth Stood Still and would go on to direct the Oscar-winning films West Side Story and The Sound of Music. Susan Hayward came to Hollywood in 1937 to screen test for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind—a coveted part that eventually went to Vivien Leigh. Wanger had rescued Hayward from B-level films and prodded her toward roles as tough, but tragic characters. In Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman she played a successful singer turned alcoholic. In With a Song in My Heart she played singer Jane Froman, who was disabled in a plane crash. In I’ll Cry Tomorrow she played Lillian Roth, another ravaged, alcoholic singer. By 1957 she had garnered four Oscar nominations but no wins.³ Though Don Mankiewicz mostly wrote for magazines and television in the 1950s, he held a sterling pedigree as the son and nephew of famous screenwriters. His father, Herman Mankiewicz, wrote Citizen Kane, Dinner at Eight, and Pride of the Yankees, and was an uncredited writer on The Wizard of Oz.His uncle,Joseph Mankiewicz, one of Wanger’s oldest friends, wrote All About Eve. In 1956 Joseph Mankiewicz began a partnership with Wanger in Figaro Productions, an independent company that produced films for United Artists,the studio that would distribute the Barbara Graham movie.4 I WANT TO LIVE! 105 Coincidentally, Don Mankiewicz had been loosely acquainted with Mable Monahan, a fact that had enhanced his interest in the film. The media depicted her as an infirm, elderly woman, but that was not how Mankiewicz recalled her: “She might have been sweet in other configurations, but I knew her in Gardena and she was a mean poker player.”The infirm characterization, he said,“didn’t fit.”5 Walter Wanger’s personal and professional experiences would seem to render him ill-suited for a film challenging the same system that afforded him wealth and fame. He came from a well-off, closeknit family. He spent part of his childhood in Europe and from an early age steeped himself in the arts—especially museums, symphonies , and plays. He attended Dartmouth College and during World War I made newsreels for the Committee on Public Information, a propaganda agency of the U.S. government created by President Woodrow Wilson to promote the war. He entered the Hollywood film industry in the 1920s, and over the next forty years he worked...