Competing with Idiots

Herman and Joe Mankiewicz: A Dual Portrait

By: Nick Davis

Narrated by: Nick Davis

A fascinating, complex dual biography of Hollywood's most dazzling—and famous—brothers, and a dark, riveting portrait of competition, love, and enmity that ultimately undid them both.

One most famous for having written Citizen Kane (with Orson Welles, as most recently portrayed in David Fincher's acclaimed Netflix film Mank); the other, All About Eve; one who only wrote screenplays but believed himself to be a serious playwright, slowly dying of alcoholism and disappointment; the other a four-time Academy Award-winning director, auteur, sorcerer, and seducer of leading ladies, one of Hollywood's most literate and intelligent filmmakers.

Herman Mankiewicz brought us the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup and W. C. Fields' Million Dollar Legs, wrote screenplays for Dinner at Eight and Pride of the Yankees, and cowrote Citizen Kane (Pauline Kael proclaimed that the script was mostly Herman's) and 89 others.... Talented, witty (Alexander Woollcott thought him "the funniest man who ever lived"), huge-hearted, wildly immature, a figure of renown and success.

Herman went to Hollywood in 1926, was almost immediately successful (his telegram to Hecht back east: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around."), becoming one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood....

Joe, 11 years younger, focused, organized, a disciplined writer, with a far more distinguished career, surpassing his worshipped older brother...producing The Philadelphia Story, writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve, both of which won him Oscars for writing and directing (All About Eve received a record 14 Oscar nominations), before seeing his career upended by the spectacular fiasco of Cleopatra....

In this large, moving portrait, meticulously woven together by the grandson of Herman, great-nephew of Joe, we see the lives of these two men—their dreams and desires, their fears and feuds, struggling to free themselves from their dark past; and the driving forces that kept them bound to a system they loved and hated.

©2021 Nick Davis (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

“[Davis’s] perspective gives the book an intimacy that raises the emotional stakes, especially when it comes to dysfunctional family dynamics . . . He sharply depicts the brothers’ complex relationship—how they helped each other but were also driven by a fierce and bitter rivalry.”—The Washington Post

“A tasty combination of film history, family album and psychological study . . . intimate . . . a tragic story told with disarming brio.”—Los Angeles Times

“No Hollywood figures have burned into memory more than the Mankiewiczs, dissolute and inspired Herman, driven and beglittered Joe. From a uniquely intimate viewpoint, Nick Davis gives us their story, and the larger story of their—and his—family. A wonderful book both for lovers of Hollywood lore and history and for anyone who ponders the many ways family heritage—and sibling rivalry—stress and shape our sensibilities.”—Adam Gopnik