Otto Preminger

by Foster Hirsch

  Despite warnings from Castiglioni and others of his entourage, Reinhardt was incapable of forsaking the grand style. Like an imperial potentate or rajah of inestimable wealth, Reinhardt continued to hold court in Leopoldskron, his lakeside castle in Salzburg, where dozens of chandeliers sparkled, expensive wines flowed from decanters of silver, over fifty servants catered to the wishes of guests, and two dozen gardeners tended to the formal grounds. And as the maestro of the Theater in der Josefstadt he continued to offer productions of unparalleled opulence. But over the last year, growing bored with Vienna and looking for new territory, Reinhardt had become an increasingly absentee artistic director. In the summer of 1929 he had been lured to Hollywood, where studio moguls gushed over his genius. He allowed himself to believe that they were really interested in turning The Miracle into an American-style epic, but he returned empty-handed at the beginning of the 1929–30 season. Reinhardt had been so often absent from the city that he had entrusted the daily operation of the theater to an assistant, Emil Geyer, a workmanlike functionary with no artistic passion.

  In short, Reinhardt’s theater needed a new leader, a position Castiglioni believed should be Otto’s. In Castiglioni, Otto had a crucial champion, but despite Castiglioni’s persuasive powers Reinhardt was not inclined to hire him, no doubt having already recognized that he and the young Preminger were not kindred spirits. For all his fabled hospitality at Leopoldskron, the Professor at heart was introspective and deeply private, where Otto was full of chat and bonhomie. Reinhardt was a practical man of the theater but also a theoretician, while Otto, though a passionate lifelong reader, was immune to theory. Reinhardt wrote elaborate notes opposite each page of his script that often detoured on philosophical and intellectual tangents; Otto’s scripts were clean and he hardly wrote a letter in his life. Reinhardt was a slow starter; Otto worked quickly. In hesitating about Otto, Reinhardt was surely influenced by his wife, Helene Thimig, who disliked Otto’s seductive Viennese style and was not convinced of the young man’s talent as either an actor or a director. But Castiglioni, who remained president of the corporation that owned the Theater in der Josefstadt, kept pushing Otto and ultimately prevailed: in the summer of 1930 Reinhardt hired Preminger, although in exactly what capacity was not clear. Reinhardt was still the theater’s titular director, with Geyer assuming the duties of day-to-day operation.

  Otto’s premature baldness, the “calamity” that had put paid to his fledgling acting career, along with his imposing bearing, were decided assets in his new role as a Reinhardt executive. As he oversaw actors’ contracts, organized Reinhardt’s scripts, conducted seminars at the Reinhardt School at Schönbrunn Castle, and ran interference with technicians, designers, and performers, the young Preminger became, in effect, the Josefstadt’s principal troubleshooter. Dealing with often irascible guest stars, including Peter Lorre, Lili Darvas, Elisabeth Bergner, Oskar Karlweis, and Alexander Moissi, Preminger, as he could, became a resourceful diplomat. And as he was busy quelling the divalike tantrums of egocentric stars, he had no time for any of his own.

  Although he had been hired as an executive, Preminger of course had his eye on directing. It didn’t take him long to land an assignment. Appropriately, the new doctor of law directed a courtroom drama, Voruntersuchung (Preliminary Inquiry), written by a lawyer from Berlin, Max Alsberg, in collaboration with dramatist Otto Ernst Hesse. The play a crackling legal melodrama, first and last Preminger’s favorite genre, opened on January 20, 1931, only a few months after Otto had returned to the Josefstadt. It was a notable house debut for the new director. Throughout his career, courtroom scenes were to draw forth Preminger’s keenest work, and in Preliminary Inquiry he handled the courtroom atmosphere—outbursts from wrangling lawyers and recalcitrant witnesses, interruptions of an imperious judge—with verve and an insider’s knowing touch. Opening night he took twenty-one curtain calls with his cast and the elated coauthors.

  Soon after Preliminary Inquiry, a wealthy industrialist from Graz, Heinrich Haas, who, as Preminger recalled, “had an interest in the studios in Vienna,”56 approached the rising young homme du théâtre with an offer to direct a film called Die Grosse Liebe (The Great Love). Otto felt unprepared. He knew nothing about the technique of filmmaking and, moreover, he didn’t have the same passion for the medium as he had for the theater. The plays of Shakespeare and Shaw meant far more to him than the silent film masterworks made by F. W Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, or Fritz Lang in Germany, or by D. W Griffith in America. He accepted the assignment nonetheless, because he recognized an opportunity, because the film was to be made over the summer when he would be freed from his duties at the theater, and because he was attracted to the material Haas was offering him. The screenplay by Siegfried Bernfeld and Arthur Berger was based on a true story about an Austrian soldier returning home from Russia ten years after the end of the Great War who is reunited with a woman who thinks he is her son. Otto liked the ambiguity of the situation and of the characters.

  As the “son,” he chose a Josefstadt actor, Attila Hörbiger (who, along with his actress wife, Paula Wessely, was to become an ardent Nazi). A Germanic John Garfield, the actor projected a brooding, rough-edged, enigmatic quality just right for the role, a damaged man with a past the film never reveals. Significantly, Preminger introduces the character with his back to the camera as he is looking out a fogged-up train window. As the “mother,” Preminger cast Hansi Niese, “a Viennese comedy star, like an Ethel Merman,” as Preminger recalled.57

  Preminger dismissed Die Grosse Liebe as a juvenile folly. “I would rather forget it,” he said.’58 Ingo called it “unspeakable.”59 But these assessments are too harsh. While an occasionally stilted passage reveals the director’s inexperience, there is also evidence of Preminger’s good judgment about how and when to move the camera; how to build tension through crosscutting; and how to elicit from theater-trained actors a style of intimate naturalism suited to talking pictures. The film opened at the Emperor Theater in Vienna on December 21, 1931, to strong reviews and business.

  Although infernally busy in his new job of jack-of-all-trades at the Josefstadt and with his responsibilities as a first-time film director, Preminger did not forgo a private life. His professional advancement, in fact, only enhanced his status as a man-about-town. However, one day in the spring of 1931, his carefree bachelor’s life was threatened when a young woman with a legal problem appeared at his office. A vivacious Hungarian (think Zsa Zsa Gabor), Marion Mill was a would-be actress who had recently performed in a nightclub revue as the Sachertorte Girl. “I appeared posed on an enormous chocolate cake on a plate which revolved to music,” she recalled in her revealingly titled memoir, All I Want Is Everything.60 When she came calling, Marion was facing a lawsuit of ten thousand schillings because the nightclub owner was accusing her of breach of contract; to help her out of her legal bind, an actress friend recommended Otto Preminger, a doctor of law as well as a theater impresario. When Marion entered his office, Otto was struck by the young woman’s imposing height, her cascading dark hair, and her inviting smile and laugh. As Eve Preminger recalled, “Marion had flair,”61 and indeed she did. She also had a hyperactive imagination. Marion Mill was a fabulist, particularly about her past. “She was possessed by a spirit of wishfulness that converted the modest house in which she was born into a castle and her middle-class family into rich nobility,” as Otto later observed. “Her name was Deutsch but she claimed to be a Baroness Deuth, using Mill as her stage name because her family did not want their aristocratic friends to know that she was an actress.” 62 According to Otto’s niece Kathy Preminger, the “Hungarian Baroness” came from an all-but-impoverished Jewish family. 63

  The attraction between the young woman “with flair” and the young man who oozed executive as well as sexual authority was immediate. Otto invited her for lunch. “I sat down and changed my life,” Marion recalled. “All that I had experienced before I met Otto counted for nothing. I was fascinated by his learning,
which surpassed that of any man I had known. He knew all of Goethe, and all of Shakespeare and all the Roman Law by heart, and could quote them at length. He was the most widely-read man I had ever known. He was what few learned men are, exceedingly witty.” 64 Marion made Otto laugh, a skill he always appreciated; in this case it was also an aphrodisiac. After Otto succeeded in extricating Marion from her legal problems, the couple began dating regularly. Marion at first neglected to tell Otto that she was already married, though estranged from her husband, and that she also had an ardent beau. Otto didn’t think she had any talent as an actress but nonetheless, to improve her chances in auditions, agreed to tutor her in German, which she spoke with a Hungarian accent. Marion claimed that Otto found time to coach her “at least one hour every afternoon.” 65

  In the summer of 1932, Otto asked Marion to marry him; Marion, delighted by Otto as both mentor and lover, readily accepted. They were wed in a plain ceremony in Town Hall on the bride’s birthday, August 3, only thirty minutes after her divorce from her first husband had been finalized. Following the ceremony Otto had to rush back to the theater for rehearsals of a play Marion said was called Bigamy (“This did not seem too good an augury for the marriage,” she noted).66 The irony is indeed delicious, but the truth of the matter was that Marion was off by a year: Bigamy had opened the previous August. The play Otto would have been rehearsing the day of their marriage was Derr Kuss vor dem Spiegel (The Kiss Before the Mirror). Nonetheless her new husband was guilty of a kind of bigamy: Otto’s hasty departure from his nuptials to the theater indicated that for the theatrical wünderkind, career came first.

  Until his marriage Otto had continued to live at home. After his marriage he and Marion moved into a small apartment that, with almost oedipal defiance, Otto furnished in a style of severe modernism—not a touch of his parents’ Biedermeier taste was anywhere to be found. Soon after they were married, Otto informed his wife that she could not pursue a theatrical

  Marion Mill, Otto’s first wife, a charming fantasist.

  career. But Marion readily found a way of earning applause. “Her talent as a party giver helped Otto perhaps more than he realized,” Eve Preminger noted. 67 To be sure, the Premingers’ elaborate soirées, which always included Castiglioni and other members of the Josefstadt board of directors, were an asset to the up-and-coming impresario. And Marion’s entrances on opening nights at the theater—twinkling and flirting at Otto’s side she was more vividly Viennese than the natives—also gave a boost to her new husband.

  Otto’s second directorial assignment at the theater, Reporter, a translation of the blockbuster American comedy The Front Page, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, which had opened on Broadway in 1929, continued his lucky streak. The material, about newspaper reporters who speak in a staccato American vernacular, would not seem to have been in Preminger’s line, but his production had the necessary snap and was a big success. Reinhardt and his advisers took note. By the beginning of 1932, with a growing sense of foreboding about the Nazis, and still with an eye on Hollywood,

  Reinhardt withdrew from active management of his theaters in Berlin. Shortly thereafter he announced that the 1932-33 season would be his last in Vienna. Castiglioni, whose fortune had continued to shrink in the deepening world Depression, remained chairman of the group that owned the Josefstadt and urged Reinhardt to appoint Otto as his successor, pointing out the commercial and popular success of Preliminary Inquiry and Reporter. Reinhardt, too, had by this time come to appreciate Preminger’s abilities both onstage and off. But Madame Reinhardt was still opposed and there was an anti-Otto faction among the maestro’s staff. In the end, Castiglioni again won out. “[My appointment] caused quite a sensation in Vienna’s theatrical circles,” Preminger recalled.68

  As Preminger was beginning to prepare the next season, Reinhardt approached him with a proposal: Reinhardt wanted to direct four large-scale, all-star productions that would open at the Theater in der Josefstadt before going on European tours. Otto rejected the offer. Helene Thimig, fiercely protective of her husband, stormed into Preminger’s office. “She was shocked,” Otto recalled. “She and the Professor had thought I would be grateful to have these four Reinhardt productions in the theatre.” 69 But Otto, who had won Castiglioni’s support in part because the banker was convinced that the young man had the financial prudence Reinhardt lacked, considered Reinhardt’s proposal to be unsound. Although it isn’t possible now to cite chapter and verse of what took place during the meeting, it’s likely that Otto lost his temper with his former boss’s wife, who had the kind of haughty, exigent quality he resented, especially in women. Madame Reinhardt, who may well have tried to threaten or intimidate her husband’s immovable successor, left the office enraged. “Helene did not approve of me, because I was too outspoken,” Preminger admitted. “I never became a member of the close circle [that formed around the Professor].”70 “Otto did not like Reinhardt’s wife—she had a very grand style he didn’t approve of— and I’m sure he told her off during that meeting,” Ingo said. “The temper ran away from him, but Otto was very shrewd in how he used that temper: ten minutes later he could be charming. Nobody else in the family was like that: this was not a family trait. It was part of that executive Germanic style that Otto mastered, even as a young man in Vienna, and this included the lack of respect for other people. That he lost, or used, his temper against Madame Reinhardt—that showed Otto’s fearlessness.”71

  Although Otto would not risk the theater’s finances to support Reinhardt, he suggested a likely angel, Eleonora von Mendelsohn, a young actress in the company that Reinhardt was then forming who came from one of the country’s wealthiest families. After Reinhardt did indeed secure the backing of Eleonora, Preminger agreed to present the Reinhardt season at the Josefstadt as an outside attraction and temporarily moved his own programs to another house. “The four plays and the following tour were a disaster and Eleonora von Mendelsohn lost a small fortune on the venture,” Preminger reported.72

  “Whether it was luck, instinct, or talent [or, perhaps, the kind of financial common sense that led him to reject his mentor’s overambitious project], at the end of my first season as head of the Josefstadt the theatre was showing a profit,” Otto noted.73 Preminger’s success in rescuing the theater caught the attention of the directors of the Burgtheater. And at the end of his first season Otto was summoned to the office, located in the former Imperial Palace, of the Austrian minister of art and education, who, as head of the Austrian State Theater Administration, was responsible for the opera companies as well as the Burgtheater. The minister offered Otto, then only twenty-eight, the post of director-manager of the State Theater, which at the time was coasting on its illustrious history and in danger of becoming trapped there, frozen in time. The job was his, the minister assured him, if he would honor one small request: Would he convert to Catholicism? Like his father faced with a similar request twenty years earlier, Otto needed no time to consider his answer: No, he replied, in a courteous tone, he would not convert. Otto was not a practicing or observant Jew—religious belief of any kind was never to be of any importance to him—but like his father he was determined to respect the fact of his having been born Jewish. “The Minister made polite conversation for a few more minutes. Then I left and never heard of the contract again. My refusal to convert most likely saved my life,” Preminger reflected.74

  For three seasons, Otto ran the Josefstadt by keeping his eye on the bottom line. Unlike Reinhardt, Otto was by no means a theatrical visionary. The Josefstadt seasons under his management contained no revelatory productions of new plays, no ingenious interpretations of classic plays, and no superspectacles in the Reinhardt mold. Instead, as he balanced revivals of Austrian and world classics with popular contemporary dramas, comedies, and musicals, artistic and economic prudence was the custom of the house. On the whole, Preminger’s standards in acting and production were higher than his literary judgment. Otto certainly knew and loved the great clas
sic repertoire, but he also had a perhaps typically Viennese taste for theatrical bonbons, for strictly boulevard fare in the form of light romantic comedies with a naughty twist. Precisely the qualities he demonstrated right from the start in his management of the Josefstadt—his ability to balance the budget, to compromise when necessary, and to cater to popular taste without forsaking artistic standards—were to earn him a place for decades on the Hollywood A-list. (And it was exactly the absence of these traits in Max Reinhardt that was to ensure the Professor’s failure in the American film capital.)

  From Preliminary Inquiry in January 1931 to his final production at the theater, in October 1935, Preminger directed twenty-six shows. Most were ephemera by Austrian and Hungarian authors tailoring their wares for the local market. Among the strictly bread-and-butter works Preminger directed were Der Kuss vor dem Spiegel (The Kiss Before the Mirror), by Ladislaus Fodor; Eine Himmlische Frau (A Heavenly Woman), by Johannes von Vaszary; Ende Schlecht, Alles Gut (Bad End, Everything Fine), by Siegfried Geyer; Der König mit dem Regenschirin (The King with the Umbrella), by Ralph Benatzky; and Skandal in Konzerthaus (Scandal in the Concert House), by Karl Farkas. Absent from the list, surprisingly, was any play by George Bernard Shaw, Preminger’s favorite playwright. Also missing were any works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, or Chekhov. Preminger himself did not direct the plays with the most exalted literary pedigrees. During his tenure Schiller’s Maria Stuart, Goethe’s Faust, and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author were directed by others. For his own projects Preminger focused on shows that had been recent hits on Broadway or London’s West End. His well-received production of Sidney Kingsley’s hospital melodrama, Men in White, for instance, opened at the Josefstadt on November 9, 1934, only a year after it had been a huge success for the Group Theatre in New York.