Otto Preminger

by Foster Hirsch

  Some European Jews went to China and to Australia, but it was the United States—New York in particular—that had the greatest attraction. How to get there in 1938, after the Anschluss, was going to be a problem, however. American immigration laws had quotas.The fact that my father and I had been born in Romania was an obstacle: Romania had a small quota in 1938, and it was already overfilled by the time we would have applied. In fact, I was thrown out of Zurich: the immigration quota was full. There was also a visitor’s visa, but if the consul interviewing you thought you would want to remain in the United States he wouldn’t give you a visa. I was turned down because I was considered a possible immigrant. From Zurich we went to Paris. My wife and daughter had no problem getting an immigrant visa, and along with my parents were able to leave Paris for the United States, but I was forced to stay behind.23

  In Paris, Julius Steger, who had been instrumental in urging Joe Schenck to hire Otto, once again became a Preminger benefactor. At a party given by Steger, Ingo met

  a guy called Mascovitch who said he could help me when I told him I couldn’t get a visa. He told me to go to Nice and see a man named Szabo who ran a travel office. “He has special connections. He will get you a visitor’s visa within twenty-four hours.” Of course I went to Nice immediately to see this Mr. Szabo, who was young, charming, and good-looking. Yes, he could help, but of course he needed money. Desperate, I gave him what he wanted. “You have to become a resident of Nice: get a driver’s license and rent an apartment.” Two days later I had both. “I need a few more dollars,” he told me. Again, I gave it to him. “Go to the American consulate, there’s a young lady there who is my girlfriend.” The consul signed the visa form, and I was on the next boat to New York.24

  Once the Premingers were reunited in New York the problem of the temporary visitors’ visas that Ingo and his parents were holding had to be resolved. Otto always claimed that the father (then speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives) and uncle (a U.S. senator) of Tallulah Bankhead were the family saviors because they introduced an emergency bill that granted immigrant status to holders of visitors’ visas regardless of quotas. Ingo, however, disputed this. “It is true that Miss Bankhead’s father proposed a law, but it was never used. What actually happened was that at the expiration of our visitors’ visas my father and I went to Canada for a day, to Windsor, where we applied for and received a visa, and by this means we were able to reenter the United States as full-fledged immigrants.”25

  Through connections, resourcefulness, hair-trigger timing, and the good luck that seemed to favor the family, the tightly knit Preminger clan managed to survive the Holocaust.

  In the spring of 1938, when his parents and Ingo and his family joined him in New York, Otto was at the lowest point in his career. His contract at Twentieth Century-Fox had run its course, and so far he had been unable to find work in the theater. Because he was addicted to the high life, even now when he could scarcely afford it, Otto once again had taken a suite in the St. Regis Hotel. He and Marion continued to be avid hosts as well as party-goers and were seen frequently at Manhattan nightspots like El Morocco and the Stork Club. Although Otto often encountered the equally social Gilbert Miller, his former producer had no job offers. When Preminger was unable to pay his hotel bill, the manager, Colonel Serge Obolensky charmed by Otto and believing in his prospects, allowed him and Marion to remain in the half-filled hotel—so long as they did not use room service. Otto, confident he would succeed, rejected an offer of help from his father, who, as Otto noted, had “a modest amount of money, some of it from a Swiss bank account he had maintained and some of it derived from the sale of jewels my mother had managed to hide on her body during the flight from Vienna.”26

  Zanuck’s blacklisting would not have had an impact on Broadway, but still Otto was having a hard time finding work. Weeks of pavement pounding yielded no possibilities, until, once again, Otto acquired an influential patron: Lee Shubert, the producer and theater owner who had cofounded a theatrical empire with his brothers Sam and J.J. and for over four decades was the single most powerful man in the American theater. Like others before him, the canny and hard-as-nails Lee Shubert saw promise in the now beleaguered young Preminger. He offered Otto an office, rent-free, in the Shubert-owned Sardi building (named for the ground-floor restaurant that is in business to this day) located on West Forty-fourth Street in the heart of the theater district. All that Lee asked in return was a first look at any production Otto would undertake.

  As much as Hollywood, Broadway conducted business according to a clear-cut caste system, and the fact that Otto, who in fact was too broke even to afford a secretary, was in a Shubert building gave him legitimacy. Soon after he moved into his office above Sardi’s, Otto, through his almost nightly socializing, met a stagestruck heiress named Jean Rodney who offered to work for him for free. In association with William Brady, who owned the Playhouse Theatre, Rodney was in the process of forming a group called the Playhouse Company, whose goal was to present a season of plays in rotating repertory. As their inaugural production they selected a revival of a 1923 play by Sutton Vane called Outward Bound, a potboiler that takes place on a mysterious ship filled with passengers who discover that, having died, they are “outward bound” to eternity. Although Rodney was working for Otto, her first choice to direct was Bramwell Fletcher, who also played one of the passengers. It was only after Fletcher stepped down early in rehearsals that Rodney approached Preminger. Otto accepted immediately,

  One of the great challenges of Preminger’s career, directing Laurette Taylor (here with Vincent Price and Bramwell Fletcher) in her return to the stage after a ten-year absence, in Outward Bound.

  even knowing that he would be facing the same problem that had caused Fletcher to depart—Laurette Taylor, a beloved star making a comeback after ten years’ absence from the stage, who was also a troublesome alcoholic. (Although Otto was later to claim that he had insisted on casting Taylor, in fact Rodney and Brady had cast her before they hired him.) Taylor had quarreled with every suggestion Fletcher had made, and when Otto took over she continued to be snappish, distant, and wary.

  Preminger realized that the fate of the show, and probably his career, depended on his overcoming Taylor’s suspicion. He took her to lunch, speaking candidly about the concerns of the producers, and about what he had heard about her from Gilbert Miller and others in the theatrical community. “His frankness brought forth her own,” Taylor’s daughter Marguerite Courtney wrote in her biography of her mother.27 Taylor confided to her director how unhappy she was over the fact that Grace George, a well-known actress and the wife of coproducer William Brady, had been hired as her understudy and was watching her from the balcony at every rehearsal. The actress expressed her fear that the producers had hired her only for the publicity value and that they were planning to replace her with George. When Laurette “admitted [to Preminger] she was bitterly disillusioned, licked,” Otto responded sympathetically. He assured his star that he would dismiss George; that there would be no understudy for her; that she had his full support and confidence. Then, aware that Taylor was always shaky with lines, he asked her to go home and memorize her (short) part as a self-effacing scrubwoman, and told her not to return until she had. Although Preminger’s insistence on early memorization was to earn him the scorn of many Method-trained actors, for Laurette Taylor it proved to be exactly the right approach. After three days at home memorizing her lines, Taylor returned to a company of actors still reading from their scripts. “It was a psychological boost of inestimable importance,” as Courtney noted.28

  “It would have been quite hopeless to approach her with a promise-me-you’ll-be-a-good-girl,” Preminger recalled. “There was a demon in her that would not be boxed like that. It was in part what made her so weird on the stage—surprising you with unexpected phrasing and accent; the fluid, the unexpected, this was the nub of her inspiration. To approach her with a program of being good, of never touching another drop
, was to try and box her demon. She would never allow it. I knew this at once.”29 Sensing their common traits—a high-strung perfectionism and an outspoken manner that could easily rub others the wrong way—Preminger handled Taylor adroitly. During private lunches and dinners he welcomed her suggestions, shared behind-the-scenes production details with her, made her laugh, and above all gave her a feeling of security. To support his unstable star he subdued his own temperament and approached her with deep patience and tact that earned him the respect of the cast.

  On opening night, December 22, 1938, when Laurette Taylor made her entrance in a pork-pie hat, a black alpaca cape with a fur collar, and holding a knitting bag, she was greeted by a prolonged ovation. For ten minutes the audience cheered and stomped and whistled. After the applause finally receded she performed with conviction. The pauses and hesitations with which she embellished the character’s sparse dialogue and the detailed behavior she had worked out—“she knit in a way that was both humble and commanding, humorous and apologetic,” as Marguerite Courtney wrote30 —were wonderfully lifelike.

  During her twenty-two curtain calls, the star made, or attempted to make, three short speeches expressing her gratitude. Taylor’s triumph was also, of course, Preminger’s; and in post-opening interviews the actress gave generous credit to her director. It’s likely that if her return to the stage had not gone well, seven years later she would not have been able to create the role of the mother in Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie—Taylor’s Amanda Wingfield has been widely cited as the single finest performance in the American theater of the twentieth century. Outward Bound became such a box-office success that the producers ran the play until the following November, abandoning their original intention of presenting a season of repertory.

  The show’s success gave Preminger a second chance. His no-nonsense, straightforward treatment of Outward Bound justified Lee Shubert’s faith in him. Now the phone in Preminger’s office in the Sardi building rang frequently; he could at last afford a secretary; and a line of people in the outer office waited patiently to see him. Soon he would even be able to pay Colonel Obolensky his understanding landlord at the St. Regis. On January 30, 1939, President Roosevelt’s birthday, the company was asked to present the play at the National Theatre in a benefit performance for the March of Dimes, to be followed by dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt at the White House. Although meeting powerful figures had been part of his legacy as the son of Dr. Markus Preminger, Otto was not blasé. He had great admiration for FDR, and was thrilled to be meeting the president. Laurette Taylor, also a fervent Roosevelt supporter, was nervous at the prospect of supping with her idol, and her agitation only increased when she discovered that the president had requested her to be seated next to him. While Preminger needed no warming up—he was a voluble guest—Taylor, as the president was quick to spot, was tongue-tied, and in a down-to-earth style he regaled her with stories that soon put her at ease. “Of all the people I have met in my life the two who impressed me most were Franklin Roosevelt and Jawaharlal Nehru,” Preminger recollected. “[Roosevelt] had the gift to make you feel he cared about you and was truly interested in what you had to say… . You felt he would remain your friend for life.”31

  The first offer Otto accepted following Outward Bound was from Cheryl Crawford, who in 1930 had been one of the cofounders of the idealistic Group Theatre, which she had left in 1937 to pursue a career as an independent Broadway producer. Crawford was offering Otto a starring vehicle for Ina Claire, the first lady of drawing-room comedy, at the time a popular genre. Preminger had first begun discussing the project (originally called Generals Need Beds and later changed to the more palatable Yankee Fable) with Crawford in the fall of 1938. From the first, he and Crawford, a severe-looking woman who had none of the social animation Otto appreciated and lived by, were not a good match. The producer was tight-fisted, as stingy with money as with smiles and affability. But Otto persevered because, like everyone else in the theater, he admired Ina Claire and because he thought the comedy, by Lewis Meltzer, had real promise. The star’s role, that of a witty young matron of the Revolutionary War era who influences the course of history by her romantic intrigue with a British general, was enriched by the kind of droll turns of phrase that were Claire’s specialty. For Preminger, who kept his dislike of Crawford to himself, rehearsals were joyful: Claire, disciplined and well prepared, was as effervescent offstage as on and like her director she enjoyed the beau monde.

  The honeymoon came to an abrupt halt, however, when the company went to Boston for a two-week tryout and, to everyone’s surprise, Claire could not remember her lines. She was unable to get through a single performance without substantial help from a prompter. As he had been with Laurette Taylor, Preminger was patient. Every day he would take his star for long walks in the Boston Common during which he would guide her through her entire part, and she would never miss a line. But then onstage at night her concentration would be shot. “I was very sorry for her because she was a very good actress and tried very hard. We had no choice but to close the play” Otto said.32 Trumball Barton, who had a role in the play as a soldier (and later worked for a year as Otto’s secretary), recalled that the director “had a flirtation with Ina Claire. Ina, who thought Otto was rather ridiculous, was somehow under the impression that he didn’t speak English. Maybe that’s why we closed after two weeks out of town.”33

  Preminger’s problems with Laurette Taylor and Ina Claire, however, were as nothing compared to those presented by his next star. Shortly after Yankee Fable folded, coproducers Richard Aldrich and Richard Myers approached Otto to direct John Barrymore, returning to the stage after seventeen years making films, in a slight comedy, My Dear Children, about a renowned stage actor with three hard-to-handle daughters. Anticipating that Barrymore’s Broadway comeback would command as much attention as Laurette Taylor’s and sensing the possibility of a box-office hit, Otto accepted at once and moreover asked to become a coproducer as well. With the last of his Hollywood salary already spent and Outward Bound bringing in only a meager stipend, Otto needed cash, especially as he and Marion continued to live it up at the St. Regis.

  The impetus for Barrymore’s theatrical comeback came from his young wife Elaine, who had met him when as a student she had managed to nab an interview for the Hunter College newspaper. The two had had an instant rapport. Like Barrymore, Elaine was a voracious reader, and an opinionated live wire who gave as good as she got. “I hated Hollywood, and I convinced John to go back to Broadway,” the New York–born Mrs. Barrymore recalled. “We’d been looking for a play for ages. In Los Angeles we met a couple of screenwriters, Catherine Turney and Jerry Horwin, who offered John a comedy they had just written called My Dear Children. John liked it because he saw it was a piece where he could ad-lib and nobody would know the difference. John didn’t memorize lines anymore—in pictures he had been using cardboards. Cathy and Jerry weren’t great writers, and nobody thought it was Shakespeare, but what they had was moderately amusing.”34 (Not incidentally the play also contained a role for Elaine.) When Aldrich and Myers, who “were looking like mad for a play” were dinner guests at the Barrymores’ one night early in 1939, Elaine showed them the script. “They snapped up the rights immediately,” Elaine recalled,

  and in their next breath said they wanted Preminger, who had quite a reputation in New York at the moment because of what he had done for Laurette Taylor, to direct. Otto’s response was as quick as the producers’. They had him fly out to Los Angeles to meet John and me and the coauthors, and it was instant antipathy. I was chilled. I was really against him from the start because in New York I had known Marion Mill, who was so bubbly and so tremendously charming, and Preminger was a notorious womanizer who had hurt her so badly.

  For his part, Preminger sized up Elaine as “a woman of little acting ability”35

  When rehearsals began in New York in March 1939, there was every prospect of fireworks between Preminger, who demanded that hi
s actors be word-perfect early in the rehearsal process, and Barrymore, who had signed on with the express intention of not memorizing his lines and who regarded the script, moreover, the way a jazz artist looked at notes—as a chance to riff. But Preminger treated Barrymore gingerly. “Otto was much too self-serving to yell at John,” Elaine felt,

  and he handled John with deference and respect because John, after all, was a big star and also because Otto was afraid of him. But Otto made up for it with how he treated everyone else: he was dreadful. He treated the authors like dirt, as if they had nothing to do with the play He would sit in the audience shouting directions—he didn’t give a damn whether you felt anything, and he wasn’t interested in drawing us out. He didn’t know how to. He just dictated. He wouldn’t listen to anyone, not even to John. He was so Germanic that I felt he was more a nation than a human being. John, who was afraid of no one except perhaps himself, called Preminger “Otto” while I called him “Dr. Preminger.”36

  During rehearsals Otto several times invited the star and his young wife to the St. Regis. “Oh, but he could be charming then,” Elaine said. “He would lay it on. And Marion was such a darling hostess. He lived at the hotel to impress: he did things in a large way. But he had a brutal streak that was barely concealed by good manners. In a certain sense, things had come too easily to him, and this had given him a smug attitude. His charm was an act and if you were at all sensitive you knew it was an act. Deep down, I was a little afraid of him; he represented a sort of hidden danger.” In one scene, Barrymore had to spank Elaine, who was playing one of his daughters, and during rehearsals Preminger seemed to take a particular delight in showing the actor how to deliver the proper whack. “Otto was a little fresh in his slapping when he had me over his knee,” Elaine recalled.