Defenders and detractors agree on only one point: Preminger was a superb producer who completed his films on or even ahead of schedule and who never went over budget. Of his dependability, efficiency, financial common sense, managerial skill, and salesmanship, there was never any question. His artistic legacy, however, has proven to be as polarizing as his personality, and for the most part the jury is still out. When I called to request an interview, Otto’s younger brother Ingo asked why I wanted to write the book. “I can see eight, nine, ten books about Bergman or Fellini, but a book about Otto? He was a very good producer and he fought important battles against censorship, but there was no great film!”1 I answered that I wanted to write the book because I admired many of his films and felt that they had been seriously underrated.
Part of my attraction to Preminger was in the apparent contradiction between his temperament and the cool tone of his most commanding films. The inner demons that pressed him into conducting his ceremonies of public abuse and humiliation are nowhere to be found in the majestic containment of his most representative work. At a casual glance his corpus might seem to lack a distinctive touch, but on closer inspection the films reveal exactly the kinds of insignia by which directors are anointed auteurs. Beneath the formal veneer of his films and the wide variety of genres in which he worked are the traces of an unexpectedly personal filmmaker, a decidedly stealthy auteur.
Preminger’s long career has three distinct periods: early, when he was a contract director at Fox, from 1935 to 1936 and from 1943 to 1953; middle, from 1953 to 1967, when he hit his stride as an independent; and late, from 1968 to 1979, when he seemed to lose focus. Preminger bashers often concede only one really good film in the canon, Laura, an elegant 1944 film noir glistening with sexual and psychological perversity. But no, the list of the director’s victories must be expanded to include at least nine or ten other films. And waiting for critical resuscitation is an almost equal number of “wounded” and often unjustly vilified projects.
Whenever I mentioned that I was writing a biography of Otto Preminger, I elicited an unvarying response: a gasp, a rolling of eyes, an expression of mock pity or mock terror, as if my subject might rise from his grave to berate or scold me. “Wasn’t he a terrible man?” I was often asked. “No,” I would respond, “he was only difficult.” It was the sheer size and scale of that challenging personality, along with my conviction that his often elegant work has been largely misjudged, which drew me to him as a subject. Inevitably in the course of research and writing, a biographer fuses with his subject; and in completing a book the writer in a sense “wins” the struggle and of course claims the final word. Perhaps foolishly, as I reconstructed his life, I began to feel that, had I known him, I would have been able to “handle” Otto, a man who so evidently required special handling. I know I would have been an appreciative audience for his brand of Germanic wit, and I like to think I could have coaxed some laughter from him for some of my own zingers. A Preminger dressing-down would have been incinerating, of course, but I felt in time that I might have been able to see through, and perhaps even to justify, some of his tantrums. No one I spoke with, either friend or foe, accused him of being dull, and, deceased, Otto Preminger, as he had been in life, was good company.
ONE
A Ring from the Emperor
“One set of documents lists Vienna as my birthplace, but another set, equally valid-looking, places my birth at my great-grandfather’s farm some distance away,” Preminger claimed in his 1977 autobiography1 In fact, however, as Otto’s younger brother Ingo stated in a tone that allowed for no argument, “Otto was born in Wiznitz, which then was in Poland and later in Romania.”2 Preminger also offered two possibilities for his date of birth: one record claimed December 5, 1906, the other “exactly one year earlier.” Although he left the matter hanging (“at my time of life one year more or less makes little difference”),3 Otto Preminger was in fact born on December 5, 1905—in Wiznitz, Poland.
There would have been no reason for Preminger to be coy about his age, but misstating where he was born was an artful subterfuge. “Wiznitz” clearly does not have the same lustrous ring that “Vienna” has—and his attempt to disguise the actual place of his birth revealed class issues endemic to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Premingers were Eastern European Jews, Ostjuden, an ethnic group scorned by many non-Jews, Viennese and Austrians in particular, and by German Jews as well. Eastern Europeans were widely regarded as less refined, less Germanic, than their German-Jewish coreligionists. To the always ambitious Preminger, who throughout his career gilded his persona by presenting himself as a native son of Vienna, the imperial capital, his Polish birth was an inconvenient fact about which the less said the better.
Otto’s father, Markus Preminger, was born in 1877 in Czernovic, Galicia, at a time when it, too, was part of Poland. (Later it was to be claimed by Romania and then by Soviet Russia.) “Whatever country it may have been attached to, at one time or another, Czernovic was German-speaking, and strictly German in temperament,” recalled Ingo, who was born in the city in 1911. “Czernovic was a province of the Austrian Empire, which Germanized these countries: my parents did not speak a word of Polish, and they didn’t feel that they were Polish in any way. Czernovic had a beautiful German university that my father attended.”4
Although Markus’s father was an impoverished Eastern European Talmudic scholar unable to provide for his wife, his son, and his five daughters,
Otto’s father, Markus, as a public prosecutor in Czernovic, Poland: confident, proud, and on the cusp of an extraordinary career defending the interests of the Emperor Franz Josef
he recognized Markus’s inborn drive and was eager for his only son to receive a secular education. When his father died suddenly at a young age, Markus became the sole support of his mother and sisters. He enrolled at the university in Czernovic and, working full time and often going without sleep for days at a time, graduated with highest honors as doctor of law. He was such an extraordinarily gifted student that, on graduation, he received a ring from the emperor on which the initials of Franz Josef are set in tiny diamonds. “A big ring with a lot of jewels, it is not a ring to wear,” Ingo observed. “The person who got this ring, and there were only a few given out, had to pass every test with highest distinction. It was an exceptional honor, and even more so in my father’s case because he was Jewish.”5 (Tangible proof that Markus Preminger triumphed over the circumstances of his birth, the ring from Emperor Franz Josef remains a Preminger family heirloom, kept in a safe-deposit box in the custody of Ingo’s son, James.)
The ring assured Markus a position in the emperor’s legal department. His first job was as a public prosecutor in Czernovic. His tenacity, confidence, and keenness of mind, along with an equally important quality— “My father was a charming man,” Ingo said—propelled Markus Preminger, a self-made ethnic and religious outsider, into a rapidly ascending career. At twenty-six, poised to attain the worldly success his father had never sought, Markus married a woman seven years his junior, Josefa Fraenkel, who came from a prosperous, nonreligious, assimilated Jewish family. “Her father was the owner of a lumberyard, which in those days, in Poland, was quite an important industry,” as Ingo recalled.6 Josefa’s land-rich grandfather owned a large farm where he grew crops and kept herds of horses and cattle. Josefa was an ideal wife for the fast-rising young public prosecutor. Her formal manner, touched with hauteur, and her sense of her own social standing as the daughter of a prominent businessman and now as the wife of a doctor of law who had won a ring from the emperor, refuted the stereotype of Eastern European Jews as vulgar country cousins. “My grandmother, a great beauty, was an incredible snob,” Eve Preminger, Ingo’s oldest daughter, explained. “She was the one born with money. To her father you only spoke in the third person. Markus, who unlike Josefa came from humble beginnings, was the boy who made good and married the beautiful princess.”7
In family photos, regarding the camera warily, the
ir unyielding gazes and tight, faint smiles suggesting they would not have suffered fools gladly and that, if wronged, vengeance would be theirs, Markus and Josefa carry themselves with unshakable pride. Traditional Jewish warmth and menschlichkeit are not the qualities they offer to the camera. If in public Markus
Otto’s parents, Markus and Josefa, on vacation in Badgastein, Austria, August 1936.
and Josefa seemed formidable, their insisted-upon dignity perhaps a stance intended to counteract always simmering anti-Semitism as well as widespread disdain for Ostjuden, within the family they were affectionate parents who provided a stable home life for their two young sons. “My father believed that it was impossible to be too kind or too loving to a child,” Otto recalled. “He never punished me. I don’t think my mother agreed completely with this method but she acted, as always, according to his wishes. I adored him.”8 “He was a very good father,” Ingo agreed. “He spoiled us. He believed children should be spoiled.”9
“I had an affectionate relationship with my mother,” Otto said. “[She was] a wonderful, warm-hearted woman, but she did not really play a large part in the formation of my character. Intellectually my father influenced me more than my mother.”10 “I can’t say anything about my mother’s personality,”
The handsome young Otto (left), with his brother Ingo and his parents, with a come-hither gaze and a princely carriage, radiates self-assurance.
Ingo responded.11 (“Ingo and Otto often ignored nuance,” Eve Preminger said, laughing, when she heard of her father’s unwillingness or inability to characterize his mother, “but then, in the end, they’d go back to it.”)12 Clearly, in the Preminger household Father always knew best. However, Ingo’s son Jim recalled that when he was a youngster, his grandmother Josefa was “a little more formidable as a presence than Markus. Josefa’s own family had been very formal, and my mother has described to me the formality in Josefa’s house when she visited at the time my father was courting her. There were servants, and my mother remembered that Josefa wore gloves. Markus was formal too, in an Old World way. But I sensed beneath the austere presence that he was really a gentle man, benign and fair.”13 “My guess is that Markus was the warmer of the two parents,” Ingo’s younger daughter Kathy speculated. “I’d often go with him to the drugstore, a half mile from our house; he would walk there every day, always dressed in a suit and tie, and wearing a hat and carrying a cane. He would raise his cane to express his displeasure with a careless driver. He was dignified but not arrogant—certainly not arrogant toward the family. He was an indulgent, loving father and I have an image of him frequently hugging Ingo and Otto.”14
Both Markus and Josefa bequeathed their sons a strong sense of self, and a belief that they were expected and entitled to be successful. In a photograph taken in Czernovic the two youngsters radiate astonishing poise. “Yes, we were very sure of ourselves,” Ingo said, “and we overrated each other continually”15 The young Otto, make no mistake about it, is remarkably handsome, his destiny as a renowned ladies’ man already clearly imprinted in his beseeching eyes and commanding carriage. Despite their doubly marked outsider status—they were provincial Ostjuden— the two boys have princely bearing and oh, the potential for disdain and sardonic wit their young faces already display. “Growing up, my relationship with Otto was flawless,” Ingo said. “I loved my brother.”16 “They had a powerful sense of family, I always felt that from my father and uncle,” Jim Preminger said. “They were people who were willing to do anything for other members of the family: they always said that, and they lived by that.”17
Under any circumstances, a man as ambitious as Markus would not have remained indefinitely in a depressed backwater of the Empire, but his exodus from Czernovic was hastened by the cataclysms of a world war. At least since the turn of the century, rumblings for national independence among a number of the subject peoples of the extended Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Serbians, Croatians, Bohemians, Moravians, Galicians, Transylvanians, Hungarians, and Czechs, had been sounding with increasing fervor. Fired at Sarajevo by an enflamed Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, on June 28, 1914, the bullets that killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the throne, and his wife, launched a conflict that within weeks escalated into the Great War. Russia entered the war on the Serbian side, and czarist armies began to invade Eastern Europe. Perilously close to Russia, Czernovic was especially vulnerable. “We became refugees escaping the Russians,” Ingo recalled.18 Like other refugees in flight from the armies of the czar, Dr. Preminger looked to Austria as a haven. Because he had been highly regarded for his work in Czernovic, he was able to secure a job as public prosecutor in Graz, capital of the Austrian province of Styria. Here, in the Graz law courts, Dr. Preminger prosecuted nationalist Serbs and Croats who had been incarcerated as suspected enemies of the Empire. To the earnest young lawyer was granted the extraordinary power, as Otto described it, of “sort[ing] out those prisoners who should stand trial and free[ing] those wrongfully arrested.”19
Dr. Preminger’s responsibilities were both enormous and also, considering the fact that he was a Galician Jew in a position of power in a notoriously anti-Semitic and pro-German Austrian city, potentially dangerous. (“Graz was a cradle of anti-Semitism, far worse than it was in Vienna, which was bad enough,” Ingo recalled.)20 Only a man with a firm belief in his own judgment and fearlessness in deciding the fates of other human beings would have been offered, or have taken, the job—or been as successful at it as Markus proved to be. Both his sons spoke proudly of their father’s work in Graz without ever questioning the implications of Markus’s awesome moral task. If later in life they ever came to suspect their father might have been defending the wrong side, they never said so.
Graz is a city of picture-postcard loveliness—its old quarter remains the best-preserved medieval town in Europe. When the Preminger family relocated from Czernovic to Graz, Otto, nearly nine, was enrolled in a school where instruction in Catholic dogma was mandatory and Jewish history and religion had no place on the syllabus. Ingo, not yet four, remained at home. With his German retaining the trace of a Galician accent and his notable silence during religious instruction and compulsory prayers, Otto was vulnerable to taunts from his mostly Catholic classmates. When he was asked in class one day to identify his religion, Otto, having been taught to do so by his father, answered that he was Jewish. That afternoon on the way home a group of classmates attacked him. Deeply ashamed, and also feeling protective of his father because he felt that in some way the attack had been directed against Markus, Otto explained his cuts and bruises as the result of a fall. But of course the eagle-eyed Dr. Preminger realized what had occurred. “Without mentioning it to me my father went to the school principal to complain,” Otto recalled. “He must have been impressed by my father’s high rank. Though he said there was nothing he could do, I was not attacked again.”21
After a year in Graz, the decisive public prosecutor who had to determine the innocence or guilt of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Serbian and Croatian prisoners, was summoned to Vienna, where he was offered an eminent position, roughly equivalent to that of the attorney general in the United States. Dr. Preminger was to prosecute insurgents who, in their struggles to gain national recognition, were accused of plotting against the monarchy. Because Markus was young, only thirty-six at the time, and a Jew—in the history of the Empire, then as always heavily Roman Catholic, no Jew had ever been appointed as chief prosecutor—the invitation was indeed exceptional. But as he sat for the interview in the baroque office of the minister of justice, Markus was told that the position would be his only if he converted to Catholicism. Although he had forsaken his father’s devoutness, attended synagogue only on the high holy days, and would not give either of his sons a bar mitzvah, Markus nonetheless thought of himself as a Jew. In a gesture of defiance and self-assertion—exactly the kind his famous older son would many times demonstrate in the course of his career—Markus refused. “My fa
ther simply would not renounce his Judaism,” Ingo said, “and he remained a Jew to the end of his life.”22 Remarkably, Markus was awarded the position anyway.
In 1915 Markus relocated his family to Vienna, the city that Otto claimed to have been born in. The family’s first home was on the Strozzigasse, in Vienna’s working-class eighth district, respectable enough but not part of the highly prized inner city. “When we arrived in Vienna, we were not wealthy,” Ingo noted. “My father was working for the emperor, and so he was a government employee. As a result, we started out with modest quarters.”23 (As Paul Hofmann observes in The Viennese, his magisterial history of his native city, “Even today many Viennese will make a point of describing themselves as natives or longtime residents of a certain neighborhood, thereby emitting subtle cultural and social signals that only another Viennese can read.”)24 Otto was enrolled in a Catholic high school located near enough to the family’s apartment for him to be able to walk to classes. “In Vienna, which certainly wasn’t nearly as bad as Graz, you could still be beaten up if you were Jewish,” Ingo recalled. “There had always been anti-Semitism in Austria, but it is not the same brand as in this country, which is social anti-Semitism. In Vienna, there was a very different contempt for Jews, for which the church was responsible. It was the church that taught, over and over, that the Jews killed Jesus Christ. Hatred for Jews was always present, in the capital as well as in the provincial towns and cities.”25 Ingo praised the education he and Otto received in Vienna.
The schooling was unimaginative and quite rigid, which may be the best way to educate children. A ten-year-old child in Vienna knew more than a ten-year-old here, and that was true for France and Germany as well. They believed in drilling, drilling, which builds discipline, a quality Otto and I certainly developed. We had eight years of Latin, six years of Greek, and we also studied French. English wasn’t on the syllabus then, and I didn’t know English until I was eighteen. Religious studies were included, and in addition to being instructed in Catholicism we were also taught Jewish history, and Hebrew. We had to read classic authors; we were encouraged to read the great books, and we used to read night and day. At night, we even read in bed with flashlights.26
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