The Brothers Mankiewicz cover art

The Brothers Mankiewicz

Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics

Preview
Subscribe now Free with 30-day trial
Offer ends on 14 April, 2026 at 23:59.
Prime logo
Pay ₹5/month for 2 months and ₹199/month after 2 months, Cancel anytime. Offer ends on 14 April 2026 at 23:59. Take this offer!
1 credit a month to use on any title to download and keep.
Listen to anything from the Plus Catalogue—thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and audiobooks.
Download titles to your library and listen offline.
1 credit a month to use on any title to download and keep
Listen to anything from the Plus Catalogue—thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and audiobooks
Download titles to your library and listen offline
₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

The Brothers Mankiewicz

Written by: Sydney Ladensohn Stern
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
Subscribe now Free with 30-day trial

Pay ₹5/month for 2 months and ₹199/month after 2 months, Cancel anytime. Offer ends on 14 April 2026 at 23:59.

₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for ₹1,256.00

Buy Now for ₹1,256.00

LIMITED TIME OFFER | Get 2 Months for ₹5/month

About this listen

Herman J. (1897–1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the 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.

Despite triumphs as diverse as Monkey Business and Cleopatra, and 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 New York theater. Herman, formerly an Algonquin Round Table habitué, New York Times and New Yorker theater critic, and playwright-collaborator with George S. Kaufman, never reconciled himself to screenwriting. He gambled away his prodigious earnings, was 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, and Gene Tierney distressed his emotionally fragile wife who 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 Joe never fully recovered.

For this first dual portrait of the Mankiewicz brothers, Sydney Ladensohn Stern 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.
Art Direction & Production Entertainment & Celebrity Entertainment & Performing Arts Film & TV Popular Culture Social Sciences
No reviews yet