Otto Preminger

by Foster Hirsch

  Interior of the Theater in der Josefstadt, Max Reinhardt s headquarters in Vienna.

  Based in Berlin since early in the century, Reinhardt had established a world-renowned reputation as director and theater executive. A man for all theatrical seasons, he had won acclaim for spectacles as well as chamber dramas, and he had proven to be as skillful with Shakespeare as with contemporary dramas and comedies. He had even been a pioneer in Berlin cabaret. As a director of actors he was without peer in the international theater. With the able assistance of his brother Edmund and a protective staff, he presided over a theatrical empire that was to remain unrivaled until the Shubert brothers gained dominance over the American theater in the 1920s.

  Max Reinhardt, Otto’s first mentor, theatrical impresario second to none.

  Reinhardt’s announcement that he would be returning to Vienna was good news for the city’s stagnant cultural life, and for the ambitious seventeen-year-old Otto Preminger it had the call of destiny. Otto wrote a letter to Reinhardt requesting an audition. “For six weeks I went three times a day to the post office to ask if there was a letter for me,” he recalled. “Then I gave up. About a month later I went back—just in case.”44 Waiting for him was a letter from a Reinhardt associate, Dr. Stefan Hock, giving him a date for an audition Otto had now missed by two days. Under cover of being ill, Otto skipped classes as he hovered near the stage door hoping to encounter Dr. Hock entering or leaving. When he finally spotted him, he showed him the letter and beseeched Dr. Hock for another audition. Otto must have made a vivid impression because on the spot Dr. Hock took the eager young man directly in to Reinhardt, surrounded as usual by a phalanx of associates. His nerves on edge but in control of himself, Otto passed the audition—no doubt his strong voice and presence caught Reinhardt’s eye. As Otto was able to boast for the rest of his life, he had then and there become “the first apprentice actor of the Viennese Reinhardt Company”45

  Flushed with a sense of triumph and the belief that he would be spending many hours at the Josefstadt, Otto announced to his father that for him the theater was no longer an avocation. He wanted Markus to understand that his interest in the theater was not a youthful lark or an excuse to miss classes, but a way of life, the only way of life he wanted. For Dr. Preminger, who had risen from poverty to the highest levels in the socially approved profession of law, his son’s announcement must surely have come as a thunderbolt. Although he had assumed that his intelligent sons would follow his example and become lawyers, Markus accepted Otto’s decision to apprentice with Reinhardt. Yet it is typical of Markus’s wisdom as a father, and Otto’s obedience as a son, that they worked out a compromise. For reasons of both practicality and social standing, Markus demanded that Otto do the right thing for a young man of his class: finish gymnasium and complete the study of law at the University of Vienna. If at the end of his studies Otto were still intent on pursuing a career as an actor, Markus would give his blessing. Not for a moment did Otto consider defying his father. But it is unlikely that the self-confident young man gave any weight to the practical aspect of their plan. In his own mind Otto was convinced that he would succeed in the theater and that he would never need to depend on the law as a means of earning his living.

  As a law student at the University of Vienna Otto was absent even more than he had been during his gymnasium years. Since law students, however, were required only to show up for six exams over a period of four years, truancy was hardly a hanging offense. A student who passed all the exams could conceivably earn the title of doctor of law without ever having set foot in a law class. The format couldn’t have been more convenient for Otto. Markus hired tutors to help his son master the intricacies of Austrian law; and Otto was a diligent student of a subject in which, in fact, he had a great deal of interest.

  But his primary commitment was to his new position as a Reinhardt apprentice. Observing the maestro at close hand, the young acolyte received nonpareil on-the-job training. Like all great directors, Reinhardt, in effect, was a lay analyst with keen instincts about how to meet the individual needs of each of his actors. As required, he could become friend, confidant, surrogate father, older brother, or “lover” in a strictly figurative sense—Reinhardt was not predatory. Quite unlike directors who were to be trained in the American Method, Reinhardt would perform scenes for his actors, and his imagination was so fertile that often he played the same action several different ways.

  When the theater opened, on April 1, 1924, Otto Preminger appeared as a furniture mover in Reinhardt’s commedia dell’arte staging of Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters. His next, more substantial appearance was as Stephano, one of Portia’s servants, in the master’s production of The Merchant of Venice, which opened on May 26. (Also in the cast, as the Prince of Morocco, one of Portia’s suitors, was Wilhelm Dieterle, who, like Otto, was to achieve fame as a director in Hollywood.) In the fall of 1924 Otto had two other small roles. He appeared as a swain, Marc Cèrizolles, in the translation of a French farce, Schöne Frauen (Beautiful Lady), by Etienne Rey (Notable in the cast was Mady Christians, who was to commit suicide after having been blacklisted during the McCarthy era in Hollywood, and Nora Gregor, who was to star in Jean Renoir’s masterpiece, The Rules of the Game, and to marry Prince Starhemsky an Austrian aristocrat with pronounced Nazi sympathies.) At the end of October Otto was relegated to the role of ein junger Mann (a young man) in a translation of a Russian play by Leonid Andreyev, Du Sollst Nicht Töten (The Dead Shall Awaken).

  Reinhardt may have had reservations about Otto’s acting but he quickly detected the young man’s abilities as an administrator. He appointed Otto as an assistant in the Reinhardt acting school that opened in the theater at Schönbrunn, the former summer palace of the emperor. And he also chose Otto as one of his two dozen assistants at the Salzburg Festival, which Reinhardt had founded in 1920. For the 1924 festival, to Otto’s frustration, Reinhardt appointed him to be a chorus leader in a procession of nuns in The Miracle, probably the most celebrated of the maestro’s superspectacles. In the monumental pantomime it was Otto’s job, dressed as a nun, to lead about five hundred society matrons, also masquerading as nuns. Otto in drag superintending a mob of unruly theatrical amateurs: the situation was ripe for an Otto tantrum, but none was ever reported. Otto was unhappy nevertheless. He wanted to act, and even as a theatrical novice he was already a young man in a terrific hurry. Following the summer in Salzburg, Otto was no longer content to occupy the place of a subordinate and he decided to leave the Reinhardt fold. “After a year with the professor, watching and learning, I decided my career would advance better if I joined a company where I would have the opportunity to play important parts,” he said.46

  Otto, in 1924, was a Reinhardt employee, but his penetrating eyes and relaxed yet commanding posture mark him as a born leader.

  A more self-effacing person would have stayed on, basking in the reflected glory of Reinhardt’s reputation and eager to learn more from the world’s foremost director. A more patient fellow would surely have bided his time, content with the insignificant roles and assuming larger roles would eventually follow. But this wasn’t Otto. “My brother was tremendously ambitious,” Ingo said, recalling Otto’s early departure from Reinhardt. “He had great energy, and even then, so early on, he was a first-rate executive. He was also, even then, excitable. There was always yelling, but he also had a good sense of humor that helped to curb the damage inflicted by one of his outbursts.”47 As Willi Frischauer succinctly phrased it, “The top was Otto Preminger’s natural habitat.”48 And as it happened, Preminger’s departure from Reinhardt at the end of the 1924–25 season turned out to be a cunning career move.

  It was the custom for the managers of the many government-supported regional theaters throughout the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which every large and mid-sized city boasted a repertory theater along with an opera house, to hold auditions in Vienna and Berlin. Assuming that in the provinces he would have a better chanc
e than in Vienna for securing bigger roles, Otto decided, in the spring of 1925, before leaving for Salzburg for the summer, to audition for a number of German-speaking theaters. His status as a Reinhardt apprentice gave him an edge over much of his competition, and indeed the managing director who hired him, Leopold Karma, had himself served a brief apprenticeship with Reinhardt in Berlin. Karma’s German-speaking theater, however, was in Prague, the capital of the new country of Czechoslovakia, governed by men Otto’s father had prosecuted during the war. To indemnify himself against his father’s enemies, Otto adopted the stage name of Pretori. Nonetheless, he fared little better than he had in Vienna. “I remember I played [only] two parts there,” he said. “One was a role in a German farce called Frei Frankfurt, which was about the Rothschild family”49 He attributed his lackluster profile to the fact that, at nineteen, he was already beginning to go bald. But it could also have been that he was an actor of limited resources, as his later screen performances were to confirm.

  Quickly bored with Karma’s theater and with Prague, in the spring of 1926 Otto successfully auditioned for a place in the company of the Schauspielhaus in Zurich. Here he played young leading roles, often wearing a wig. But at this time Otto made the shrewd self-assessment that his days as a leading man were numbered. In the following spring, still restless, he tried out for a theater closer to home, in the German-speaking Czech city of Aussig an der Elbe, where he “decided not to act anymore, only to direct.”50

  Preminger, losing his hair at an early age, decided to retire from acting.

  Soon after he joined the Aussig theater, Otto began an affair with a young singer in the company who also happened to be the lover of the manager, Alfred Huttig. Losing his hair and already growing stout, Otto no longer looked like a matinee idol, but he exuded, as he would for the rest of his life, a primal sexual force. “The word along Broadway when Otto first came over from Europe was that he was a good lover,” recalled Paula Laurence, a Broadway actress of the time. “It hardly mattered that he was not movie-star handsome; because he was so charming to women, in that delectable Viennese manner he cultivated, and because he had such a relish for life, Otto really had terrific sex appeal. He also had a great sense of entitlement, and no apparent guilt—you sensed that he felt that sexual pleasure belonged to him.”51

  As a young man in Aussig an der Elbe wooing and winning his boss’s mistress, Otto was already a bona fide ladies’ man, gallant in courtship and an ardent lover. Knowing that Huttig knew of the affair and charged with that inborn fearlessness his father had instilled in him, Otto asked if he could direct The Chalk Circle, one of the scheduled plays of the season. The cuckolded manager gave him the assignment.

  At the end of the season, in the early summer of 1928, Otto terminated his affair with the singer and decided to return to Vienna, where, almost as if he were setting himself in competition with the great Reinhardt, he ventured into theater management. With a partner, an actor named Rolf Jahn, he organized a company of players in an intimate, chamber-sized theater called Die Komödie (which, like the Theater in der Josefstadt, is still in operation). Jahn was married to a wealthy woman, Marita Streelen, a countess more beautiful than talented who was willing to fund the enterprise in exchange for playing leading roles. She gave a pallid performance in the company’s opening production, Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which Preminger dismissed as “a miserable failure.”52 That afternoon, as Preminger claimed, he had taken and failed the last of his law school exams.

  From the beginning the executive setup at Die Komödie, in which all decisions had to be agreed to by the three directors, played havoc with Preminger’s already fully formed autocratic temperament. And surely Preminger would not have remained silent about Countess Streelen’s lack of talent. In the early months of his partnership with the Jahns, a young actress in a small role in a touring production of an American import called Broadway impressed Otto, who made a point of seeing every play and musical in town. He liked the performer’s raw sexuality and recommended Marlene Dietrich to his partners as a possible recruit for their new company. No doubt sensing the young woman from Berlin would threaten her place as the first lady of Die Komödie, Marita Streelen nixed her. Infuriated, Preminger announced that his partnership with the countess would be over at the end of the season.

  Throughout the spring of 1929, as it became increasingly clear to him that he would not be able to work well with his partners, he had begun to cultivate potential new ones. An actor of his acquaintance, Jacob Feldhammer, had a sister married to a stagestruck industrialist. With his support, Otto along with the Feldhammers converted a large suburban theater, a former opera house, into a repertory house ostentatiously named Neues Wiener Schauspielhaus (New Vienna Playhouse). Otto promoted the new theater, and himself, vigorously. Not untruthfully, he presented himself as an artistic manager with a “Reinhardt background”53 and heralded his enterprise as an experimental people’s theater. In an attempt to attract young people and workers who could not afford to attend the Burgtheater or the Opera, he scaled tickets at record-low prices. And running a privately funded theater, he promised to present the kind of material, lesser-known classics and challenging contemporary plays, unlikely to be available anywhere else in the city. True to his word, he directed a production of Wedekind’s sexually provocative Lulu, and from Berlin he imported Roar China, pro-Communist agitprop.

  The undertaking revealed Otto’s pleasure in discovering new talent and his catholic tastes. But the theater foundered on what were already potential pitfalls to his success—his unruly temper and disdain for collaboration. He became impatient with Feldhammer for his tendency to choose plays solely on the basis of whether they contained juicy roles for himself; and he was disgruntled with Feldhammer’s sister for demanding a voice in the selection of material. Nor did Preminger endear himself to his actors, who, according to one of them, Gerhard Hinze, were growing “angrier and angrier” at Preminger’s treatment.54 Following Reinhardt’s example, Otto would demonstrate how he wanted a scene to be played; but unlike Reinhardt, who was sensitive to the egos of his performers, Preminger could be brusque. “Imitate me!” seemed to be Preminger’s directorial method, an approach that, along with his expectations of instant results, often caused tempers to flare during rehearsals. By the end of the season, yielding to his partners’ demands as well as to commercial necessity, Otto presented a light comedy called The Sachertorte, which was a big box-office hit but a far cry from his original manifesto for the theater. In June 1930 Otto resigned.

  In two seasons, 1928-29 and 1929-30, with the kind of momentum that Ingo described as “Otto’s way”55 the young man, not yet twenty-five, had cofounded and served as artistic director of two new theater companies. And on a second try he had managed to pass his final law exam. This entitled him to call himself Dr. Preminger, a possibility he was quick to take advantage of in status-conscious Vienna. It was an astonishing record, proof positive of the wünderkind label later to be claimed for him in Broadway and Hollywood press releases. His achievement is especially noteworthy when set against the backdrop of a city beleaguered by unemployment, widespread food rationing, and the deep psychic scars of military defeat. If Vienna at the time had to adjust to a diminished identity, a scaled-down sense of its historical and cultural importance, downsizing was not part of Otto’s agenda. Clearly, the young Dr. Preminger could persuade people to back him and to share his passion for the stage. Just as clearly, he had an equally prodigious talent for colliding with colleagues.

  Since his return to Vienna in the summer of 1928, like a good son Otto had lived at home in the family’s opulent Ringstrasse apartment. The extroverted young man of the theater frequently socialized with a network of mostly Jewish millionaires who were his father’s clients. One of these was Reinhardt’s patron, the banker Camillo Castiglioni, fat, diminutive, charming, and witty, who in fact had seen and admired some of Otto’s productions at Die Komödie and the Neues Wiener Schauspielhaus. As Castiglioni
informed Otto, the Theater in der Josefstadt had begun to develop a number of problems, not least the fact that Castiglioni himself, reeling from the effects of the New York Stock Exchange crash in October 1929, could no longer provide the funding Reinhardt was accustomed to. In the past Reinhardt’s extravagance had been contained by his practical brother Edmund, the administrator and chief executive of all the Reinhardt theaters; but after Edmund died (in July 1929) and with Castiglioni becoming financially strapped, both Reinhardt and the Theater in der Josefstadt were headed for a fall, as the banker told Otto in March 1930.