To fill out a season, or to boost sales, Otto was not above reviving an old warhorse such as Wilhelm Mayer-Förster ’s perennial Alt-Heidelberg (Old Heidelberg), the play that was the basis of the popular Sigmund Romberg operetta, The Student Prince. He was also not too proud to cater to local popular taste by offering an occasional risqué farce or a historical pageant of dubious literary merit. In this vein his most opulent production was Makart, a biographical drama about the nineteenth-century Viennese painter Hans Makart, whose lush style was emblematic of Ringstrasse Vienna. Before the production opened, Makart’s heirs threatened to sue Preminger for defaming them and their famous relative. While Preminger in his Hollywood years would have transformed the contretemps into a crusade for artistic freedom and pumped up the show into a cause célèbre, this time, as a pragmatic impresario, he compromised, agreeing to make some script changes that would smooth over the painter’s sexual and moral lapses. A payment of an undisclosed sum to the Makart family bought their silence and allowed the play to open on schedule.
Preminger’s most assured work was in the vein of scrupulous realism, of exactly the kind demanded in films. His lifelike scene in an operating room in Men in White, for instance, was widely praised. His most notable work was his handling of a tense courtroom drama, Sensationsprozess (Libel!), a translation of a West End hit by Edward Wooll. As in Die Grosse Liebe, ambiguity of character and motive drives the story—Is a prominent member of the House of Commons who he claims to be, or is he an impostor?
“Otto was especially good in casting,” as Ingo observed,75 and among the performers he hired, a number, including Lili Darvas, Lilia Skala, Harry Horner (who became a production designer on Broadway and in Hollywood), Oskar Karlweis, Albert Bassermann, and Luise Rainer, were to achieve recognition far beyond Austria. Shortly after being directed by Preminger in Men in White, Luise Rainer was to win back-to-back Academy Awards, for The Great Ziegfeld in 1936 and The Good Earth in 1937. Rainers Hollywood career foundered because her imperious manner offended her boss, MGM chieftain Louis B. Mayer; Preminger, however, admired her self-assurance. And Rainer recalled that working with Preminger she had “not a hint of trouble. Yes, there was talk of Preminger being excitable and inconsiderate … [but] I personally never experienced anything of the kind.”76
Ingo Preminger, who saw all of the productions during his brother’s management of the Theater in der Josefstadt, offered a balanced appraisal.
Otto’s work there was very good, very solid. He operated a good, shrewd, commercial theater. Otto had a terrific way of pushing through things; he had a way of convincing people he could do what he said he was planning to do, and then he would come through on his promises, always. And he was a master of publicity: a publicity genius, really. During the few years that he ran the theater he was extremely productive and he kept it on a firm financial footing after Reinhardt’s extravagance and neglect. And remember, by the time he left he was only twenty-nine. All in all, it was an amazing achievement.77
Preminger left the Josefstadt because, once again, and not for the last time, he was in the right place at the right time. At least since the first decade of the twentieth century, when theater had become big business in America, it had been common practice for theatrical managers to scout European theaters for shows, actors, and directors. With the rise of silent films as a full-length narrative medium in the postwar period, film scouts from Hollywood also began to make regular pilgrimages abroad. Vienna, a major cultural nexus in addition to its reputation as a tourists’ mecca, was a favorite stopover on the itineraries of American headhunters. Among the most frequent American visitors was Gilbert Miller, a producer, director, and theater owner who maintained a notable presence on Broadway and in the West End for over fifty years. Each time he was in Vienna, Miller made it a point to attend performances at the jewel-box theater Reinhardt had refurbished. When he saw Otto’s production of Libel! in the fall of 1934, Miller decided to present the play in New York. He also resolved to hire its young director to re-create his crisp, naturalistic staging. In addition, when he met Otto backstage—Miller had a serviceable, if rudimentary, command of spoken German—he was charmed. Miller’s wife Kitty was the daughter of Jules Bache, one of the richest stockbrokers in America, and Miller shared with Otto a delight in the company and the rituals of high society. (Another devotee of the well-to-do, Cecil Beaton, had this to say about the Gilbert Millers: “I don’t know if it might be possible to write a symposium of all the laughs that there have been at the expense of Gilbert and Kitty during the last forty years. They are a continual source of gossip, of rows, apologies and outrageous behavior of all sorts. Perhaps a play could be made. Kitty, rich, worldly to the point of madness, insatiable, full of energy, never tired, never secure … [and] hideous beyond recall. Gilbert, a cad, a beast, with certain disarming qualities of charm, brashness.”78)
Tight-fisted, Miller did not offer Otto a contract, extending instead a vague invitation to direct Libel! on Broadway in the fall of 1935. Enticed even so, Otto started at once to learn English. But he might not have gotten to New York at all if another American scout, this one from Hollywood, had not taken an interest in his work. In April 1935, about six months after Miller’s visit, as Otto was rehearsing a boulevard farce, Der König mit dem Regenschirm (The King with an Umbrella), he received a summons from an American film producer, Joseph Schenck, to a five o’clock meeting at the Imperial Hotel. No, the busy director replied, he would still be in rehearsal at five and could not possibly accommodate the request. A secretary returned a few minutes later with the announcement that Mr. Schenck would be “pleased” to see Dr. Preminger at any time during the evening, at Otto’s convenience. As it turned out, at least according to Preminger’s testimony (and why not believe him, since the story presents him behaving entirely true to form?), it was not “convenient” to present himself at the Imperial until ten o’clock.79
Born in Rybinsk, Russia, in 1876, Schenck, along with his brother Nicholas, born in 1880, had achieved a position of eminence in the still-young American film industry. Early in their careers—they started out as owners of amusement arcades—they had come into contact with theater owner and studio mogul Marcus Loew; Nicholas had maneuvered his way into becoming Loew’s second in command, and when Loew died suddenly in 1927 Nicholas had been heir apparent. He became president of Loew’s, Inc., in 1927, and was to remain on the job until 1955. In effect, Nicholas Schenck ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Joe had also flourished. After he married the actress Norma Talmadge, he became the producer of her films as well as those of her sisters Natalie and Constance. Joe also produced the films of Natalie’s husband, Buster Keaton. In 1924 Joe had become the president of United Artists, and in 1933 had founded a new company called Twentieth Century. Two years later (and only several months before he waited for Otto at the Imperial Hotel), Joe had taken over William Fox’s ailing
Darryl F. Zanuck (left) and Joseph Schenck, the cofounders in 1935 of a new studio, Twentieth Century-Fox.
studio and with a partner, Darryl F. Zanuck, had set up a new entity, Twentieth Century-Fox. At the new studio, Zanuck was in charge of all film production while Joe Schenck handled the finances. Because he and Zanuck intended to compete with established studios like Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Schenck was on the lookout for new talent.
Unlike Gilbert Miller, Joe Schenck was not a theatergoer, and he became aware of Preminger only because of a friend of his, Julius Steger. Steger, an Austrian who had been a partner of William Fox, had amassed a sizable fortune in America, where Schenck had met him, and had now returned to Vienna, where he had become a client of Dr. Markus Preminger. Steger knew Otto socially and had watched, with an admiration he communicated to Schenck, the young man’s ascending career in the Viennese theater. “It was Julius Steger who introduced Otto to Schenck,” Ingo said. “Steger told Schenck, ‘There’s a good guy here in Vienna named Otto: you should hire him.’ ”80
When Otto entered Joe Schenck�
�s suite at the Imperial, at ten o’clock that evening in April 1935, he encountered a man with a nose that resembled an oversized boiled potato—many people were to claim Schenck was the ugliest person they had ever seen. But Schenck had great warmth, and such was the force of his personality that in a matter of minutes his ugliness seemed magically to be transformed into a quality that was almost its opposite. Otto at that point spoke no English; Schenck, a Jew from Russia, spoke no German. Julius Steger translated. But it hardly mattered. Schenck could recognize that he and Otto spoke the same “language,” and within a half-hour he offered Otto an invitation to come to work at the newly hatched Twentieth Century-Fox in Los Angeles. On the spot, Otto accepted. As Ingo recalled, “When Schenck gave Otto a deal on a piece of paper, he didn’t know Otto or his work at all; he was simply taking Julius Steger’s word for Otto. It was to Steger that Otto owed his great good fortune.” 81
Schenck did not specify the salary Otto was to receive, nor did he mention what he was hiring Otto to do. On his own, without first consulting with Zanuck, who was solely responsible for all creative decisions, Schenck could not have offered Preminger a directing job. It’s likely, since Steger had informed him of Preminger’s prudential management of the Josefstadt, that Schenck was inviting Otto to come onboard for his administrative rather than artistic ability. The vagueness of Schenck’s offer, later to cause Preminger some distress, did not deter him at the time, nor should it have. Otto knew he had been handed the chance of a lifetime.
Schenck asked Otto to wind up his affairs in Vienna and to cable him when he would be ready to leave for America. In the event, Preminger needed six months. He had to give adequate notice to the Theater in der Josefstadt as well as his parents; and, not least, he had to begin in earnest to learn the language of the country he would be moving to. When he told his wife they would be moving to America—to Hollywood!—Marion was ecstatic. For her, the movie colony was a new social domain waiting to be conquered. And besides, though she wouldn’t, and perhaps couldn’t, admit it to Otto, in Hollywood she might be able to resume the acting career her husband had forbidden her to pursue in Vienna. But Otto informed Marion that he would be going to America on his own and would send for her after he was settled. It was a curious decision, even in light of the fact that the Premingers had a sophisticated European idea of marriage. Otto later claimed Marion “wanted to spend a few weeks with her family in Hungary before joining me.”82 But Marion, no doubt for once speaking the truth, recalled in her memoir that Preminger insisted on going himself and that he had been on his own for “several months” before he sent for her.83
Markus and Josefa, who like other wealthy Austrian Jews identified far more with being Austrian than with being Jewish and had not confronted— or had not allowed themselves to confront—the implications of rising anti-Semitism, implored their older son not to leave. Although Otto warned his parents that he was certain Hitler’s rise to power in Germany would have dark consequences for Austria, he did not, as he was later to wish he had, insist on taking them with him. Throughout Preminger’s rise to prominence, Vienna had suffered periods of political and economic turbulence, but in October 1935, unlike in Berlin, it was still possible to maintain an illusion that a place at the table would continue to be made for Jews. The elder Premingers held onto this belief, which their departing son could not dislodge.
Certainly anti-Semitism, which had always been part of Austrian culture, had been on the rise for more than a decade before Hitler was to annex Austria in 1938. Most Austrian Jews belonged to the Social Democrats, the leaders of Red Vienna, because the other two major parties, the Christian Social Party (the Blacks) and the Pan-German Nationalists (the Blues), were tarred with overt anti-Semitism. But Red Vienna, which had held a dominant position in the postwar period, lost control of the masses on July 15, 1927, in a mob uprising quelled by rightist militia. “That Friday started an ominous chain of events that in little more than a decade would lead to Hitler’s triumph in Vienna and ultimately to the horrors and ashes of World War II,” as Paul Hofmann observes. 84 With the virtual elimination of the Social Democratic Party in 1927, Austrian Jews had no party or leader to protect them against a swelling tide of hatred.
In 1932, when a Christian Social cabinet member named Engelbert Dollfuss, nicknamed “Millimetternich” because of his height of five feet, became federal chancellor, he confronted enormous challenges in keeping Austria from economic and political ruin. On March 7, 1933, in a desperate measure to ensure his ability to govern, he suspended the National Assembly, which had become virtually paralyzed by political schisms. And he won the support of Mussolini, not yet in league with Hitler, against the Nazis. Fearful of the increasingly inflammatory displays of Nazi agitators, Dollfuss declared the Nazi Party illegal. On May 1, 1934, he enacted a new constitution that, in effect, banned all political parties. On July 25 the “illegal” Nazis responded with a putsch led by a core group of 144 brownshirts against the tottering government. The putsch was unsuccessful, and Mussolini sent military support to ensure the defeat of the insurgents. But the Nazis assassinated the scrappy, diminutive chancellor who had turned them into outlaws.
That same evening, on July 25, the Austrian president, Wilhelm Miklas, appointed Kurt von Schuschnigg, Dollfuss’s minister of justice and education, as the new chancellor. With the Nazis repelled, at least for the moment, and with von Schuschnigg providing an illusion of stability, Austrian Jews like the Premingers were lulled into thinking peace had been maintained. But the reality, of course, was that the tiger was at the gates. An Austro-Fascist like Dollfuss, von Schuschnigg lacked his predecessor’s populist appeal as well as his relish for a fight. And as history would tragically prove, neither he nor Austria had the resources or the will to resist a Nazi takeover.
The Preminger family may have been complacent because of their history of good fortune. Even in his last months in Vienna, Otto’s luck held. Civil war had been stilled for the moment. And his management of the Theater in der Josefstadt ended on a high note. Although his tenure at the theater ended officially in July 1935, Otto’s successor, a playwright named Ernst Lothar, offered him a farewell production of his own choosing, to be staged in the fall. Otto not surprisingly selected an American play The First Legion, by Emmett Lavery in which a priest regains his faith after a crippled boy who believes in miracles is healed. Preminger’s choice of material, perhaps intended as a placatory gesture toward the staunchly Catholic regime that was governing the country, was another example of his executive cunning. The opening night audience, which included the archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, who was to collaborate with Hitler, and Chancellor von Schuschnigg, making a rare public appearance, was filled with Catholic dignitaries representing both church and state. To forestall a possible riot by Nazi sympathizers, who despite the ban were increasing at an alarming rate in both number and aggressiveness, the theater was guarded by police, while inside the house officers in plain clothes kept a watch on the crowd. “We received a threat that a bomb would explode during the performance,” Preminger recalled. 85 That night the theater resembled an armed camp, but the only demonstration was that of the audience at the curtain call, when the Jewish director of a drama about a priest’s renewal of faith joined his cast onstage to acknowledge tumultuous applause. As Preminger boasted, “ The First Legion was one of the most successful plays ever presented in Vienna and had one of the longest runs in theatrical history there.”86
While the omens for Austria’s future may have been malignant, Preminger himself could look forward to a double victory. Over the summer, when he learned that Otto would be coming to America at the expense of the munificent Joe Schenck, Gilbert Miller finally hired the young man to direct Libel! on Broadway. Miller’s confidence in a director who barely spoke English was extraordinary—and so certain was he of Preminger’s ability that, in advance of his director’s arrival in New York in late October, Miller arranged for the show to open on December 20 at the H
enry Miller Theatre (named for Miller’s father, a prominent actor).
On October 16, only six days after the opening night of The First Legion, Otto was at the train station in Vienna, set to begin the first leg of his journey to the New World. Seeing him off were his parents, still not reconciled to his departure; his brother Ingo; Marion, perhaps a bit unsettled because Otto was leaving without her; and some well-wishers from the Josefstadt, including the budding Nazi, Attila Hörbiger, the actor who had appeared more often than any other in Preminger’s productions. Thickset and looking older than his twenty-nine years, Otto was a young prince whose crown had remained remarkably untarnished. Nothing so far in his young and already crowded life had made him feel that the world offered him anything other than opportunities for proving he was a winner—a conquistador.
Unlike many Jewish émigrés forced to flee for their lives from Nazi persecution, Otto Preminger departed on his own terms and by his own choice. To be sure, he left with bitter feelings about Austria and Austrians that he was never to renounce, and with the conviction that catastrophe was about to engulf the country. But in October 1935, rather than skulking away under cover of night like a desperate refugee, Otto was accorded a hero’s farewell. Certainly both Otto and his father would have been justified in the belief that they led charmed lives. Markus had defended a dying Empire and yet attained far greater wealth after the Empire had been dismantled; Otto had risen swiftly to a position of cultural power during a period when his country was on a collision course with political annihilation. As he was saying good-bye to his family on the day of his departure for America, why should the young man have suffered a moment of self-doubt or anticipated anything but a triumphant future?
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