John needed direction to fit into the rest of the play and this Otto couldn’t give him. John knew what Preminger was not giving him, but he was never sharp with him: John only acted up in performance, not during rehearsals. He even thought that Preminger was basically a good director, just not for this kind of trifle, which required someone who could handle nothingness. The show needed a champagne touch not in Otto’s line, and I felt Otto really had very little humor and no gift for this kind of comedy. If directed improperly, the show fell apart, which is what happened. But John recognized Preminger’s talent and intelligence and he saw, as even I did, that Preminger loved the theater. But they didn’t become buddies and go out drinking. They were such different personalities. I had the feeling that Preminger didn’t much like John.37
Otto and his coproducers, confident of the market value of Barrymore’s name and determined to avoid the taint of the scathing notices they expected to receive in New York, planned a lengthy pre-Broadway tour confined for the most part to cities outside the theatrical loop. Hence the anomaly of My Dear Children opening in Princeton, New Jersey, in the presence of Albert Einstein. “People stood and cheered, delighted with Barrymore’s broad mockery of himself,” as Preminger recalled. In his curtain speech the actor acknowledged his director, thanked the cast and the backstage crew, and then pretended to forget the names of his producers. “Has someone got a program?” he asked. The audience laughed, but according to Preminger the coproducers “were not amused. They were both able men but they were unfortunately somewhat afraid of Barrymore and it gave him perverse pleasure to torment people who were intimidated by him.”38
Elaine Barrymore recollected the Princeton opening in a very different light. “John was letter-perfect but it was a dull and empty performance,” she said. “John was aware that Einstein was in the audience and he tried too hard; he was afraid of missing lines. He would have been better off forgetting a few lines but getting a little life into the play Einstein greeted John like he was a world leader: they were instant friends. That night no one paid any attention to Preminger.”39
Barrymore’s good behavior was short-lived. As the tour moved on from Princeton to other theatrical backwaters, the actor began to improvise with increasing recklessness. Each night he would disrupt the play in a different way and at different points, addressing the audience with peppery asides. His send-ups—of himself and of the show—became an expected part of the performance: the spectacle audiences had paid to see. “The audience adored the little ad-libs,” Elaine recalled. “When he would tell someone off, or growl to a latecomer, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ or say seductively to a matinee lady, ‘You’re a little late, darling,’ the spectators were thrilled. When John was on good behavior, when he was doing the ad-libs in the right way, the show was entertaining and he was really irresistible.”40 But there were nights when alcohol had overtaken him, and what the audience saw was not a star in expert control of his “misbehavior” but a drunkard stumbling
John Barrymore as a ham actor in the notorious My Dear Children, taking delight in spanking one of his three daughters (played by Elaine Barrymore, John’s young wife).
through a performance that was painful to observe. On these nights the actor’s self-contempt was palpable.
Preminger stayed on with the show through the early weeks of the tour, giving notes after each performance. “Later on, he realized there was no point,” Elaine said. When Preminger left, however, Barrymore began to deteriorate. “John began to drink more, and we had so many fights,” Elaine recalled. “In Detroit and Dayton we weren’t talking at all, except onstage, but he still spoke to my mother. Mama would put in a good word for me, and when she was in the audience John would ad-lib to her.”41 At a luncheon given in his honor in Joliet, Illinois, John kicked his wife, a headline-making incident quickly followed by the news that Barrymore wanted to divorce Elaine and have her removed from the show. Otto flew in from New York and was met at the airport by Barrymore and a towering male nurse who had been hired to keep the star from drinking. But, as Otto noted, “Each of them had a bottle sticking out of his coat pocket.”42 That night Preminger, stunned, watched a performance in which the actor proceeded to dismantle the show. As the director observed, “Most of the time [Barrymore] sat, sagging, on a bench placed center stage. He remained there whether he was supposed to be onstage or not, sometimes asleep.”43
The director traveled with the cast by train to St. Louis, the next stop on the tour. During the night, Elaine and her stout mother, Mrs. Jacob, climbed onto Otto’s Pullman bed and sat on his chest, urging and then threatening him not to fire Elaine. “Mrs. Jacob said she would tell the newspaper that Barrymore had repeatedly tried to rape her. ‘Who would believe you, Mrs. Jacob?’ ” Otto, in vintage put-down mode, inquired, before ordering the frantic women off his chest. The midnight visit did not save Elaine’s job. She would be paid for the run of the show but would leave the cast after playing out the week in St. Louis. During the week Otto rehearsed a new actress, Doris Dudley, in the role. Preminger told Barrymore he was dismayed by the opening night performance in St. Louis and that the actor was going to have to shape up “or else;” chastened, the star asked his director to return the following night. “Impeccable,” Otto responded. “Jack, why can’t you do this every night?” For many years afterward Preminger enjoyed quoting Barrymore’s answer: “B-o-r-e-d, my dear boy, bored.”44
At the end of the St. Louis run, Preminger and Elaine returned (separately) to New York. Otto became alarmed by reports from Chicago, where the star reportedly was spending his nights in a whorehouse. “Otto really adored and respected the theater and the fact that the tour was a mess wasn’t easy for him, as it wasn’t easy for Aldrich and Myers either,” Elaine said. “They stuck it through, however, because the show was making money on John’s name.”45 To be sure, Barrymore’s misconduct was proving good for business, and advance sales for the Broadway engagement swelled after each account of a new mishap on the road. Dorothy McGuire, a genteel young woman who played one of Barrymore’s daughters and would go on to a major film career, did not want to make her Broadway debut under these circumstances and resigned at the end of the tour, a decision that earned her Preminger’s lifelong respect.
On January 30, 1940, opening night in New York, Barrymore was up to speed and, on the whole, reviews were positive. “Although he has recklessly played the fool for a number of years [Barrymore] is nobody’s fool in My Dear Children, but a superbly gifted actor on a tired holiday,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times. On opening night Elaine paid a visit backstage.
John was thoroughly sober, but he told me to “get the hell out of here.” Diana [John’s daughter] stretched her arms across the door. But he invited me to the cast party at El Morocco, where Preminger tried to prevent me from entering. John embraced me, and asked if he could go back with me to the Hotel Navarro, where I was staying—John was staying in Long Island with the company manager. John promised he’d be good. The next day the newspapers flooded the hotel: it was pandemonium. John announced to the reporters: “Since when is it illegal in the state of New York for a man to sleep with his wife?” We were back together, and he wanted me back in the show. With John, it was all-encompassing, and when it was going right it was delirious.46
Elaine was back, and she remained in the show for the rest of the run.
Barrymore continued his unsteady course. On sober nights, tweaking his image he served skillfully carved portions of ham on wry and the show was exactly the kind of shipshape commercial enterprise that Preminger had directed it to be. On sodden nights, however, Barrymore and the play were in ruins. Although business warranted a longer run, Barrymore, at last irreversibly bored, closed the show after 117 performances. Two years later, he died. “John was so terribly unhappy,” Elaine Barrymore said.
Over twenty years after My Dear Children closed, Elaine had an appointment to see Preminger about a part in an upcoming play “I dreaded the mee
ting and I knew nothing would come of it. What had happened between us was much too overloaded. When I entered his office he looked me up and down and said, ‘You’re getting fat.’ But when he spoke of his young wife and showed me photos of his two young children, you could feel he was human. His feelings for his new family were genuine, and I couldn’t help liking him after all.”47 (Elaine Barrymore, who died in New York in 2003 at eighty-nine, never remarried. Photos of her husband, the man she had never stopped loving, lined the walls of her modest studio apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street.)
While Barrymore had been cutting up on the road, Otto was in New York reading through dozens of scripts. The one that he decided on as his next project was Margin for Error, a play by Clare Boothe set in the New York office of the German consul, a Nazi. Otto had no trouble persuading his partners, Aldrich and Myers, to coproduce. He felt the script needed work, however. He generally liked Act I, in which Boothe sets up the Nazi consul as the kind of character everyone in the show has a motive for killing; and at the end of the act, under mysterious circumstances, the odious German is bumped off. Act II is an investigation of the murder conducted by a Jewish policeman (were there ever any?). When the crime is finally solved, to everyone’s relief the killer is not prosecuted. Otto felt that the second act needed extensive surgery. Boothe agreed to work with him and while Aldrich and Myers were often on the road ministering to John Barrymore, she met with the director every afternoon in his suite at the St. Regis.
At first the collaboration was amicable, with the playwright following a number of Otto’s suggestions. Most days Boothe’s husband, Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Life, joined them for dinner. But relations between Preminger and the writer were destined to turn sour. Trumball Barton, who was Otto’s secretary at the time, remembered Boothe as being “very grand, and just like Otto she wanted to do things her own way. She really didn’t like Otto very much, but then she didn’t like anybody very much.”
As he took his morning bath, Otto would dictate daily script changes to Barton.
He always called me “Trambull,” and I always called him “Dr. Preminger.” In his bath he would also give me his orders for the day. He was always very clear about what he wanted. With Otto there was never, never, any doubt or hesitation, just the way it was with Clare Boothe: that’s why trouble started. When she wouldn’t budge about a point in the script where he was sure he was right and she was wrong, Otto began to yell. I dismissed his temper—a lot of that was a put-on, he’d lose it to make a theatrical impact, and he would cope by laughing at his temper. He paid me five dollars a week, but he would take me to dinners and sometimes to shows, and through him I met Miss Garbo. Oh, he could be charming: devastatingly so. Bending low, he’d kiss my mother’s hand. He was colorful. And Marion was very exotic. She’d come swanning out of their bedroom dressed in an expensive robe, and she often wore a sailor’s coat. But he was a terrible man with the women, a devil really, and so seductive in that Continental way he had. He was crazy about women, but he wasn’t crazy about Boothe: who could be?48
Despite the changes Boothe had made, when rehearsals started Otto remained dissatisfied with Act II. Publicly he was polite to the playwright, hoping to persuade her to agree to further alterations. But he began to lash out at some of the cast. “He took a violent turn against a young actress,” as Trumball Barton recalled. “He would just yell and scream at her in front of the entire company. I supposed at the time that she had turned him down. He also screamed at Sam Levene [who played the Jewish policeman], but when Levene yelled back, Otto backed down.” Levene also made Preminger laugh—a sure recipe for putting paid to an Otto tantrum. “They became friends,” Barton noted.49
During the second week of rehearsals, the actor playing the German consul, whom Otto had known in Vienna, suddenly departed. “Dear Otto, I’m going home to rejoin Adolf. Love, Rudolf Forster,” he informed his director.50
Preminger quickly read a number of actors for the role, but, as he noted, “There seemed to be a shortage of Nazis in New York at the time.”51 When Clare Boothe suggested that Otto himself play the part, a resounding “No!” was his initial response. He hadn’t acted since he was nineteen and he no longer thought of himself as a performer. Boothe persisted, assuring him that no one else in New York could possibly be as effective in the role. Preminger relented, no doubt realizing the publicity value of his doing double duty. “It is not precisely without precedent that a director should also act a part, but by no means common,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported on October 22,1939. “A product of the finest theatres of Europe … Otto Ludwig Preminger is satisfied with no halfway measures. [For the role] he had his hair [sic] clipped in the best Prussian tradition, went to a make-up expert to take up such matters as putting a scar on his face, and bought a monocle.”
Preminger informed Boothe that he would play the consul on Broadway only if he received good notices in the out-of-town tryouts. As it happened, he got raves, while for good reason reviewers were less sanguine about the play itself. When Preminger attempted to address persistent second-act problems, Boothe no longer even pretended to listen. “Oh, there were rows,” Barton recalled. “And this time Otto was not putting on an act. He was really mad. He yelled at her, but it did no good.”52 “I told her what I thought of her unprofessional arrogant behavior,” Preminger said. “But she had apparently given up on her play”53
As My Dear Children was wending its way across the country in advance of its scheduled Broadway opening in January 1940, Margin for Error, directed by and starring Otto Preminger, opened in New York on November 2, 1939. Second-act knots were still in place, but Preminger’s acting was praised. “Barring a certain monotony of attack, Mr. Preminger plays an excellent, bald-headed, wrinkle-necked villain. His [German consul] is the
Preminger in his Broadway acting debut in Margin for Error as the Nazi consul, a shiny-domed villain.
most odious character on any New York stage at the moment,” Brooks Atkinson observed in his New York Times review.
As a piece of theater carpentry Margin for Error has even less merit than My Dear Children. Because Clare Boothe’s thematic stakes, however, are much higher than the harmless trifle concocted for John Barrymore, her failure is much greater. Boothe wrote the play as an anti-isolationist battle cry; and when it was presented in 1939, before America had entered the war, her work had a certain propaganda value. But Boothe’s thin, smart-aleck writing, her drawing room quips, and her sub-vaudevillian treatment of the Jewish policeman (Yiddish shtick clumsily conceived by a Gentile) are grotesquely mismatched to the gravity of her subject. Margin for Error is arrogantly trivial.
Nonetheless, for Preminger, the play was good news. His vivid, comic-opera Nazi turned him into a bona fide Broadway celebrity, a new status that gave him a platform from which to make serious comments about events in Europe. And in interviews after the opening he spoke with a rhetorical power nowhere to be found in Boothe’s manufactured playmaking. “The Nazis are a sardonic jest of cosmic proportions, the Gargantuan gag of the ages, and the incredibly cruel joke is on the world,” he announced in a November 29, 1939, interview in the New York Post. “The great tragedy of Germany is that German youth is being turned into a giant band of nihilists,” he continued. “Superficially, we regard 1939 as the start of the war, but actually, there has been war on the continent since 1914… . One thing is certain … Europe is committing suicide.”
A week after Margin for Error opened, Preminger was offered a teaching position at the Yale School of Drama. And in addition to performing eight shows a week and overseeing Barrymore in My Dear Children, Otto began to commute twice a week to Yale to lecture on directing and acting. His social life continued at a robust pace as well, and he remained a frequent patron, sometimes with Marion, sometimes solo, at most of Manhattan’s elite nightspots.
Preminger was certainly busy, but in artistic heft his résumé came up short. My Dear Children was the swan song of a fallen star;
Outward Bound and Margin for Error were claptrap. Shows like these could not sustain the illusion of “young European genius” that was still attached to Preminger’s name. Where were the brilliantly reimagined classic dramas? Where were the pathbreaking new plays directed with a rigor that would justify Preminger’s wünderkind label? Where, in short, was evidence of “genius”? What Preminger’s track record so far clearly enough indicated was that, as he had proven in Hollywood, he could conform to the rules of the game. There was no question of his competence and his ability to handle difficult personalities. But there was also no hint that he was more than a journeyman laborer in the commercial theater. His next four plays would only reinforce that impression.
After Margin for Error closed on Broadway (its 264-performance run, judged by the standards of the day, represented a moderate success), Preminger re-created his role on the strawhat circuit in the summer of 1940. The tour was less an artistic comedown than a financial necessity. While on the road Otto looked for a show to produce and direct on Broadway the following season. Was it merely by chance that he chose a script about bad behavior in Hollywood? Beverly Hills, cowritten by Lynn Starling and Howard J. Green, presents the movie colony as a Darwinian organism composed of petty, greedy, oversexed scavengers. Darryl Zanuck’s name is taken in vain, along with those of Elsa Maxwell, Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, and many others. Otto enjoyed rehearsals because of two of his actresses. Ilka Chase, a specialist in playing catty characters, had the leading role, that of an ambitious wife who schemes to land a screenwriting job for her namby-pamby husband. Trumball Barton claimed that “Otto was having a heavy affair with Ilka, who was oh so wicked, and quite, quite charming.”54 The other actress Otto fell for, but in a different way, was the delightful Doro Merande, who was to have a long career playing snippy spinsters and gossips. Merande, who in Beverly Hills played a long-suffering nurse to two Hollywood brats, touched Otto’s funny bone; onstage and off she made him laugh and over the years he was to cast her in many small, juicy roles.
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