Chapter One ROSEBUD Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn''t get or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn''t have explained anything. I don''t think any word can explain a man''s life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, a missing piece. --Citizen Kane As a young boy, Herman Mankiewicz found himself in trouble nearly every day, and for one infraction or another, he often found himself virtually imprisoned in his room to think about what he had done. It was practically an afternoon ritual. But as he later told a psychoanalyst in Hollywood, what remained most vivid about those enforced solitary confinements was not the thought he gave to his alleged misdeeds or any shame over having committed these dastardly acts, or even the deep and profound rage at his father (or, less frequently, mother) for the enforced exile, though the anger was severe indeed and would remain with him forever, but the exquisite feelings he felt in being alone, the sights he saw and the smells and sounds that surrounded him outside his window in New York City. Most of all what he remembered was a powerful, almost primal urge to share those feelings with the whole world.

He thought that if he were somehow able to convert his actual, entire experience--the orange tint of the afternoon sun on the bricks on the building opposite his window, the sound of a breeze, the snapping sound of the lines of laundry in the tenement courtyard--into something the whole world could also feel, life would be worth living. Anything else would be a misery. To share this life, he thought, to get the world to see through his eyes--that was all he wanted in the world, but to his young mind it was also quite obviously an impossibility. How could one will the entire world to see what he saw? The situation made him deeply depressed. So while Herman Mankiewicz later said that there was no better time to be born in New York City than 1897, he was equally convinced in the first few years of his life that he would rather have been anywhere else in the world. As well as a deep and urgent need to get the world to share his vision, the feeling of being in not quite the right spot was one that he would grow, painfully familiar with throughout his life. But what Herman didn''t know, at least not in so many words, was that the trait was an inherited one, passed from generation to generation like blue eyes in a Norwegian family or red hair in a Scottish one, the not-quite-belonging trait, Mankiewiczian to the core. It was what Herman woke to every morning of his young life in New York City.

New York at the turn of the twentieth century was not so different from New York today, or at any point between then and now: the center of the world for those living there, a colorful, swirling, mad, loud, impossible, smelly place riven by wild class divisions and unacceptable cruelty jutting up against magnificent examples of the most graceful humanity imaginable; and for those elsewhere, a spot to be avoided, or at best tolerated if one had to pass through. The almost permanently discomfited expression on the face of Herman''s dad, Professor Franz Mankiewicz, always suggested to Herman that he too wished to be elsewhere. He wished to be elsewhere than in New York in the first few years of Herman''s life, wished to be other than a schoolteacher, wished to be married to a woman other than Herman''s mother, wished to be born in a different century, a different country, into different skin. Franz''s discomfort had as much to do with the world as it did with himself. Like many dogmatic personalities, he was often bewildered by the realm outside his head. Raised in Frankfurt by a domineering father himself, Franz had inhaled a Teutonic sense of self-discipline and order, and the world''s inability to follow along never ceased to amaze and infuriate him. As a schoolteacher, he was beloved by the students, who cared as passionately as he did about his subjects. Those who didn''t he heaped with contempt, as well as a profound and deep inability to understand their lassitude or lack of interest.

This discomfort--what Herman and Joe used to love to make fun of when they were out in Hollywood in the 1930s and Franz would come for one of his infrequent visits--was plainly etched on Franz''s face, and while hundreds of students passed through Franz Mankiewicz''s classrooms over the years, he had only one first son. One first son on whom he could pin all his hopes and dreams--one son to disappoint and enrage him. Young Herman learned early on that he had become a magnet for his father''s displeasure. It wasn''t just that Herman was a continual disappointment to his father--he was, of course; Herman all his life would tell of bringing home a 97 on an exam only to be barked at: "Where are the other three points?" (It was the "where" that got Herman going. "Where? They fell out of my pants, I dropped them in the gutter, I stuffed them up my nose .") If Herman responded by saying that nobody else in class got more than a 90, Pop would say, "The boy who got 90, maybe it was harder for him to do that than for you to get 97. It''s not good unless it''s your best." To Franz, Herman later said, bragging about being smart was no different than bragging about "having blue eyes.

It''s just a characteristic. It''s what you do with it that matters." On those rare occasions when Herman did meet the high standards his father had set for him, Franz never praised him. It''s hard to imagine it even crossed his mind to do so. Looking at pictures of the man when I was growing up, or, more menacingly, the portrait of the stern face that stared down from its pride of place hanging above my grandmother''s mantel in Brentwood, it was almost impossible to imagine that Franz Mankiewicz was ever young. In picture after picture, the frown, the worry, the concern of age weigh heavily on every single feature. He was married at the age of twenty-four, but could he ever have walked with a bounce in his step, or sung in the bathtub, or had a moment of genuine passion with his wife, or anyone else for that matter, that didn''t involve yelling? As a young immigrant in New York, the highly educated Franz had become a reporter for one of the three hundred German language papers in the city. He was effective, smart, and hardworking, with a fierceness for life that inspired in those around him a genuine feeling of respect.

For his firstborn, though, that feeling was closer to fear. "Pop was a tremendously industrious, brilliant, vital man," Herman said later. "A father like that could make you very ambitious or very despairing. You could end up by saying, ''Stick it, I''ll never live up to that and I''m not going to try.'' That''s what eventually happened to me." To Herman, Franz was the hot and unrelenting sun around which he rotated and which threw all of Herman''s most unpleasant features into relief, for Franz and everyone else to see; thus exposed, Herman would be met with the fiercest disapproval, judgment, and discipline. Above all, discipline. Like most German immigrant fathers, Franz didn''t spare the cane, and his regular beatings of Herman became part of family lore.

It got so when Herman saw his father with a look in his eyes, he would merely go to Franz and bend over, even when he had no idea what particular sin he''d committed. While Herman later spun it into an amusing anecdote, and more than that, wove it into the fabric of his existence, behind the funny story was an undeniable truth: Herman Mankiewicz had come to loathe his father. Indeed, though he knew it wasn''t true, he later felt that he had almost no memory of feeling anything but hatred for the man. So dominant was the feeling, and so thorough was his assumption that children hated their parents, it became the source of one of the Hermanic witticisms that was passed down in the family as if it were Talmudic logic. The example given was always spinach, that most detested of vegetables. "I hate spinach," the young child would say, only to be told by Herman, "No, you don''t hate spinach. You despise spinach. You hate your parents.

" That story was told frequently when I was growing up, just about whenever my older brother Timmy or I said we hated something, like spinach or sweet and sour pork. My problem, early on, was I didn''t get the joke. It took me years to understand that it was based on the strange truth that Herman assumed, profoundly and deeply, that you did hate your parents, that everyone did, and as a result that trait got baked into the family DNA, as much as the humor. In fact, only if you admitted you hated your parents would you fall into line, in line with all the Mankiewiczes of course, but most of all in line with Herman. And nothing was better than to be like Herman. For from the beginning of my own life, I knew one thing: Herman J. Mankiewicz, Mom''s dead father, the "Gopa" we never knew (to the "Goma" we did, the "poor Sara" of so many long-suffering years in Hollywood), was the funniest man who ever lived. Uncle Frank told funny stories, Uncle Don was funny responding to others, but their father--Herman--he was nonpareil.

Two quick examples, the kind you find in books about Hollywood''s earliest batch of screenwriters from back East and their notorious self-loathing. First: a studio head fires Herman, tells him that not only will Herman never work at the studio again but the man assures him he''ll make sure Herman never works at any studio in town. Herman looks at the man and says, "Promises, promises." Second: watching Orson Welles walk by on the studio lot: "There but for the grace of God, goes God." Of course Herman was far from the first to transform pain into comedy, but what seems to have given Herman his greatest satisfa.