Wolf Mankewitz
Antiques dealer, best-selling author, playwright, screenwriter and entrepreneur – Wolf Mankewitz, who has died aged 73, was a man of many parts.
But his twin loves – of literature and turning a profit on a deal – were forged in his childhood memories of his dad selling books from a barrow in Brick Lane.
In the 1950s and 60s, Mankewitz would gain fame and fortune as the writer of the hit musical Expresso Bongo, the best-selling novel Make Me An Offer and the science fiction thriller movie The Day The Earth Caught Fire. But as a boy, money was always hard to come by.
His parents were Russian Jews, just one couple out of the thousands of immigrants who poured into Whitechapel in the late 1800s and early 20th century, escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe.
Like many others, his dad struggled to make a living. But what he did have was industry and the thing he knew well was books. And it was a book on his father’s stall that persuaded a young Wolf where his destiny lay. He picked up a copy of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and was hooked – he decided to be a writer.
His parents were determined their son should get the chances they had not had. And when Wolf won a scholarship to Cambridge University his father sold all the stock from his barrow to pay his way.
The £90 allowed Wolf to take up his course. But seeing the sacrifices his parents had to make made him determined never to suffer such privations again. For the rest of his life he would combine the vocation of writer with a buying-and-selling dealer’s brain that owed a lot to his father’s example.
Graduating from Cambridge at the precociously early age of 19, his first move was to set himself up as an antiques dealer. It quickly made him a good living, especially as he could combine it with his love of writing.
His expert knowledge of Wedgewood china allowed him to pen the book Wedgewood, an informed guide to judging and buying pieces.
But as the 1950s drew on, Wolf was to find fame not as a dealer, but as a successful writer. The best authors always write about what they know, they say, and he next turned to a fictionalised account of the antiques trade.
The very title of Make Me An Offer paints a picture of the deal-making stall traders Mankewitz would have been surrounded by as a boy, and it described the wrinkles, tricks and occasional dodgy dealings of the trade.
Writing of his roots
Many cinemagoers of the time will remember the movie of his hit story A Kid For Two Farthings, a poignant tale of a lad who is conned into buying a one-horned goat on the pretext that it is a unicorn.
And The Bespoke Overcoat again drew on his roots, telling the tale of an East End Jewish tailor.
He found notoriety, too, disrupting an edition of famed 1960s satire programme That Was The Week That Was with a verbal attack on critic Bernard Levin, who had had the temerity to attack his work. Mankewitz hammered home his point by having a tiny coffin – tailormade for the diminutive critic – delivered to his Daily Express office.
It was a colourful life – toward the end of it he became the honorary Panamian Consul to Dublin!
But as far as he travelled, his hallmark was always the eye for a deal, a razor sharp eye developed at his street trader dad’s barrow in the Whitechapel of the 1920s and 30s.