Beverly Hills opened to poisonous notices on November 7, 1940. The show expired after twenty-eight performances, but Preminger already had another project in place for the same season. As he prepared his new show, he continued to teach at Yale for a second year; he also became a popular lecturer at women’s clubs, where his savoir faire (lots of hand kissing and courteous phrases uttered in his spicy accent), his quick-wittedness, and his erudition were appreciated. Cue for Passion by Edward Chodorov and H. S. Kraft was a whodunit littered, like Beverly Hills, with particularly ornery characters. The premise: a tart-tongued columnist tries to disguise as a suicide the murder of her disagreeable husband, a celebrated novelist. Rehearsals went suspiciously well. Then on December 16, 1940, three days before the play was scheduled to open at the Royale Theatre, Otto received a bombshell from a lawyer, Louis Nizer.
I was calling to tell Otto that he could not proceed with the production. The two principal characters, a columnist and a Nobel Prize–winning novelist, were not named but in the way they were described it was about as difficult to guess who they were as it would have been to answer the question, who fought the Spanish-American War? Clearly the characters were based on Dorothy Thompson, the only famous female columnist in those days, and her husband at the time, Sinclair Lewis. Dorothy was a friend and at that time also a client and she was outraged that she and Sinclair Lewis should be identified in a murder mystery. She pleaded with me to get an injunction.55
When Nizer called, Preminger was “flabbergasted” and asked if there was any way to avoid the injunction. Nizer suggested as the only possible remedy “changing the play so that it is the same play without the identification, even indirectly, of the two principal characters.” Otto, as Nizer remembered, was “delighted” at the idea. When they met for the first time that night the two men took an immediate liking to each other as they
Directing Frank Albertson and Grace Macdonald in The More the Merrier.
worked till dawn scrubbing the play of any obvious references to Thompson or Lewis. The hastily revised play opened on schedule, on December 19, 1940, received middling reviews, and closed twelve days later. But Preminger and Nizer had started a friendship that endured for the rest of their lives.
Throughout the spring of 1941, Preminger issued a stream of press releases about upcoming projects, all of them to sink without a ripple. In the summer he was back on the summer stock circuit, this time appearing as Professor Metz with Moss Hart in the beloved comedy by Hart and George S. Kaufman, The Man Who Came to Dinner. That summer Otto for the last time also reprised his signature role in Margin for Error. By the end of the summer Preminger had two shows lined up for the new season.
The More the Merrier, a murder melodrama laced with farce, was about a Colorado newspaper tycoon who wants to be elected governor as a first step toward running for the presidency—until a corpse is discovered in his mansion. It opened on September 15 and closed after sixteen performances.
Preminger thought he could reverse his string of bad luck with his next play, In Time to Come, an ambitious drama about President Wilson’s fight for peace cowritten by Howard Koch and John Huston. But when the show opened on December 28, 1941, a scant three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had led to America’s belated entry into World War II, its implicitly antiwar sentiment was mistimed. In Time to Come closed after forty performances.
As always seemed to be the case, whenever he needed a break Otto got one. Nunnally Johnson, a Hollywood writer impressed by Preminger’s performance in Margin for Error, called to ask if he would be interested in playing another Nazi, in a film called The Pied Piper that Johnson was writing and producing. Based on a novel by Nevil Shute, the story was set in France in June 1940 on the eve of the advancing German occupation. Otto accepted on the spot. He certainly needed the money, but far more important was the fact that the film was to be made by Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio that he had been banished from. A fainter-hearted man might have had some qualms about revisiting the scene of his “crime,” but not Otto. Even though Darryl Zanuck was not running the studio—after Pearl Harbor he had joined the Army and was in London overseeing training films—when Otto reported to Twentieth Century-Fox in the early spring of 1942 he was not expecting to remain in Hollywood. He rented a small furnished apartment, a bachelor’s pad, while Marion stayed on in New York at the St. Regis.
On the set, Otto, who knew he was being watched, was a model citizen, following Irving Pichel’s direction without a single grimace or raised eyebrow. He also knew his reemergence at Fox was newsworthy, and he agreed to every request for an interview. “I think these Nazi roles do something to help defeat the Germans, because the more the people dislike my Nazi portrayals the harder they will work against the real enemy,” Otto offered, adding that “for a gentle soul like me, playing heavies is a form of release.”56
In The Pied Piper a British fuddy-duddy (Monty Woolley), “too old to be employed in the war,” as he says, is forced to lead a group of dispossessed children across Nazi-infested France to safety in England. Prevented by German soldiers from entering the boat that will carry them across the Channel, they are taken to the large office of a Major Diessen, the ranking Nazi: Otto, seated at a desk beneath a large swastika, his bald pate gleaming, his nostrils flaring, his lips curled disdainfully. However, in this sentimental Hollywood confection designed to soothe rather than agitate wartime American audiences, it turns out that the Nazi has a heart. “Could my niece find refuge in America?” Major Diessen, a concerned uncle, asks. “In America,
Another Preminger Nazi, this one with a heart: Major Diessen in The Pied Piper.
I don’t believe they’d turn down any child, even a German one,” the pied piper answers, endorsing the films idealized version of the American Way. The Nazi’s about-face is absurdly abrupt, and Otto isn’t a resourceful enough actor to be able to make it convincing.
After collecting a sizable salary for his work, Preminger was preparing to return to New York when he received a call from his agent, Ned Marin, informing him that Fox wanted him to reprise his role of Karl Baumen in the upcoming film of Margin for Error. Marin assured him of star billing and a generous paycheck, but Otto hesitated. Taking on another Nazi role, he realized, would be useful only for the short haul; and as he would often quip in the coming years, explaining his retirement from acting, “How many Nazis can you play?” What he wanted, and what he sensed might be attainable, was the chance to return to directing. Ernst Lubitsch was set to direct, and in an April 15 letter to his friend, the prominent Hollywood agent Paul Kohner, Otto asked Kohner to offer his services as an artistic adviser on the film. “Since I played the role 300 times and know how each scene works, I could be of help to Lubitsch.”57 After Lubitsch, having second thoughts about the script, withdrew, Otto moved into high gear. He went directly to Charles Feldman, the head of the agency Marin worked for, demanding to know why he couldn’t be trusted to direct material that he had handled successfully on Broadway. Feldman dismissed the idea, reminding Preminger that Zanuck’s decree against him as a director was still in force. Feldman tried to impress on Preminger the fact that he was lucky to have been offered any kind of Hollywood job. Otto, not in a grateful mood, refused to back off. He took his case to the top: to William Goetz, Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law, who was running Fox in Zanuck’s absence. Before his meeting with Goetz, Charles Feldman warned Preminger that there was no chance he would be hired as a director and that he should be content with an acting job. But bowing and scraping was hardly Otto’s style. He sensed that Goetz was malleable, and he also calculated that in any showdown with Goetz, Preminger rather than Goetz would be the likely victor. When Goetz spurned his offer to direct, Otto persisted, presenting Goetz with a creative counteroffer: he would direct the film for free, and if at the end of the first week Goetz was unhappy with the dailies, Preminger would step down as director but stay on to play the role of the German consul. Operating in cutthroat mode, Otto was co
unting on his hunch that Goetz might hire him, a known enemy of Zanuck, as a way of declaring his independence from Zanuck. (Before his departure for the Army, Zanuck had treated Goetz condescendingly.)
Goetz took the bait. And when he called the morning after the meeting to tell Otto that he was accepting his offer, Otto knew his fortunes had changed. After eight disappointing years in America, during which he had been banned from Hollywood and seen his prospects in the theater dwindle, Preminger realized he had finally won the opportunity to turn himself into a Hollywood insider, a full-blown American success.
THREE
Seizing the Day
“It was awful,” Preminger said about the screenplay of Margin for Error that Fox was planning to film.1 He was certain that if he shot the script he had been handed his second chance in Hollywood would fizzle. At his own expense and without the knowledge of the film’s inexperienced producer, Ralph Dietrich, Otto hired a writer to help rework the entire script. Lucky Otto found a novice named Samuel Fuller, at the moment on leave from the Army, who was to write and direct a series of idiosyncratic low-budget films that were to earn him the admiration first of French and then of American cinephiles. Fuller, with his omnipresent cigar and guttural voice, was a quirky tough guy who shared Darryl Zanuck’s taste for hard-boiled pulp fiction. The screenwriter and his employer would appear to have had nothing in common except their hair-trigger tempers. Yet they worked together in the summer of 1942 without a hint of friction.
“I remember Fuller in uniform used to come to the little apartment I had on El Camino Drive,” Preminger recalled. “I remember seeing him from the window arriving in his car carrying a huge typewriter. I didn’t pay him much.”2 Preminger and Fuller realized the material needed a new framework—onstage in 1939 Margin for Error had been a call to arms; in 1942 it had to be recast as a morale booster for a country at war with an evil empire. The cowriters decided to present the story as a flashback set before America’s entry into the war, narrated by the Jewish policeman, representing
Directing Margin for Error (with unidentified man).
in word and deed the spirit of American democracy. In either version, however, the disproportion between history and fable was in bad taste.
It isn’t clear whether Ralph Dietrich or William Goetz ever became aware of Preminger’s covert operation. Once shooting started, on September 28, 1942, Goetz, like Zanuck, viewed the dailies each night; but he revealed nothing to Preminger about his assessment of their quality. As agreed, at the end of the first week Goetz summoned Otto to his office to render his decision. Otto knew this was a make-or-break meeting. If Goetz gave him the go-ahead, he had a chance at a Hollywood career as a filmmaker. If Goetz was displeased and took him off the picture, word would spread quickly, and he was likely to be washed up: the European “genius” twice fired by studio chieftains. Uncharacteristically, Otto was worried. Although he felt the first weeks shooting had gone well, walking into the meeting he thought he was going to be axed. Goetz, however, announced he was pleased with Otto’s dailies; moreover, he offered Preminger a seven-year contract calling on his services as both director and actor. An emboldened Preminger, taking full measure of the temporary studio czar and realizing he had won him over, asked for, and received, a clause that gave him producing rights as well. “I felt it was very difficult for a director to get along if he didn’t produce his own film. This contract, with certain changes, was the contract I worked under (except that I always got more and more money) until I left Fox to become an independent producer.”3
“Five years ago Otto Preminger left Fox under the kind of cloud which hovers only over directors whose pictures have not been fringed with gold,” Virginia Wright wrote in an article in the Los Angeles Daily News on October 12, 1942. “Today Otto Preminger is holder of a Fox contract that acknowledges his talents as actor/producer/director. Goetz offered him a contract before Error was completed, and Otto Preminger added a clause that he be allowed to present The Seventh Cross on Broadway.”
Contract in hand, Preminger completed production on schedule, on November 5. Although the original budget was $321,753, the final budget was a little higher, $379,489—the increased expenditure was standard operating practice at the studio and no reflection on Preminger’s efficiency. When the film was released on February 10, 1943, reviews were dismissive. “The timing has been bad with Margin for Error,” Howard Barnes wrote in
Otto’s Nazi consul in Margin for Error ‘fixes his unhappy wife (Joan Bennett) with a sadistic leer.
the New York Herald Tribune. “Three years ago, the anti-Nazi accents of a tricky murder mystery made it something of a stage event. At this point it is remote and even a bit ridiculous… . Both in his acting and staging, Otto Preminger holds the piece to a ponderous pace.”
Preminger’s direction, to be sure, is lackluster. His static approach fails to reconceive the stage-bound material in cinematic terms, and as a director of actors he seems all but helpless. He was unable to wean Joan Bennett, who plays the consul’s wife, from zombielike paralysis, or to smooth the coarse edges of Milton Berle’s strictly Borscht Belt approach to the policeman-narrator. And in directing himself he was equally uninspired: his Nazi is a dead-eyed, one-trick pony barking his lines in a monotone.
In a career spiked with good fortune and good timing, Preminger’s receiving a pass from William Goetz after seven days’ shooting on Margin for Error may well have been his luckiest moment. His by-the-numbers direction had earned him not only a go-ahead on the film but a lucrative seven-year contract as well. Why? Preminger himself surmised that in hiring him Goetz was punishing Zanuck, who had treated Goetz as a mere caretaker, a second-rate interloper. That may have been true, but it may also have been possible that Goetz was not a shrewd critic; unlike Zanuck, Goetz had no creative instincts or ambitions, and he may genuinely have felt that Otto’s first-week dailies represented solid work. Like Zanuck, in fact, he may have regarded the absence of temperament in Preminger’s direction as proof of Otto’s willingness to adhere to the style expected of a contract director. Although stillborn and deservedly forgotten, Margin for Error is a crucial work in Preminger’s career: it’s the movie that got him back into the business.
After finishing the film, Otto summoned Marion from the St. Regis. He moved out of his apartment on El Camino and with Marion relocated to a baronial house at 333 Bel-Air Road, located in a colony of other German-speaking refugees doing well in Hollywood. His immediate neighbors were Ernst Lubitsch and writer Walter Reisch. Among the expatriates there was a round of dressy dinners and cocktail parties and, on Sunday afternoons, informal coffee klatches most often hosted by Reisch. “Marion took a passionate interest in these events and returned our social obligations with imaginative flair,” Preminger recalled.4 Otto encouraged his wife’s party giving at least in part because he did not want her to pursue an acting career. “He said I had no talent, and that I established no connection with the audience,” Marion was to recall in her autobiography. “I accepted his judgment, even though I could not believe this was true. Today, when I am the most booked woman lecturer in the United States, and have been called by all the women’s organizations of the country, ‘The Platform Sensation of America,’ I know how wrong he was.”5
Marion’s parties were also compensation for another agreement the couple had struck: Otto was free to go out with other women so long as Marion could retain the name of Mrs. Otto Preminger and the appearance of having a stable marriage. Since Otto conducted his affairs with discretion, the arrangement was to endure for some years after his reinstatement in Hollywood. Otto professed to be bored by the unending social rituals, but his skill and Marion’s in working a room was a great help in reclaiming his place in the film community.
“I began to learn about Hollywood protocol, which is stricter than protocol
Otto with his wife Marion on the town in Hollywood, early 1940s.
in Washington,” Marion observed. “Directors outrank writers
and artists. Producers outrank directors. Executives form an unchallenged aristocracy. Stars may be sprinkled through all three ranks, but always with strict regard to their box office value and to the importance of their lovers.”6
The still-standing house at 333 Bel-Air Road from which the Premingers launched their comeback emanates prestige. Behind a gate a formal garden slopes down to a Tudor-style mansion. An oversized wood-carved front door confronts the visitor with mock-medieval grandeur. As Marion reported, the entrance hall led to “a little salon which I furnished in French Empire pieces which formerly had belonged to the Archduke Francis Ferdinand who was murdered at Sarajevo.” In the salon hung a painting of the school of Boucher that “showed a lady in a white crinoline swinging in a rose bower and losing her slipper which an adoring cavalier stood ready to catch.” Next came a salon in which everything was gray, “including the piano. It looked divine, and a part of the room—as so many pianos do not.” The sole painting in the gray salon was “a small exquisite Renoir … a nude woman seated on a red carpet.” Two large Cocteau paintings “let into mirrors” encircled “the only dining-room in America with two tables—one for the host, one for the hostess,” Marion boasted. “On gala occasions the tables had gold lamé cloths, and the napkins were of gold satin, and each was decorated with a tiny yellow orchid. One must have two butlers to serve dinner in this fashion, and a major domo in the center of the room to direct them,” as Marion pointed out. The walls of the adjoining bar were decorated with murals depicting scenes from the life of the hostess. “The dinners and luncheons I gave became talked about and were always written up in the press,” claimed Mrs. Otto Preminger, on her way to becoming Hollywood’s premier “hostess with the mostess.”
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