The bedrooms were also designed as stage sets. In the master bedroom were exquisitely bound rare books, two Rodin watercolors of dancers, and a royalty-sized bed made of leather with two matching leather chairs. In one corner was a table from a medieval church sacristy (an odd point of pride for a woman rumored to have been born Jewish) on which were placed lamps of seventeenth-century globes. All the textiles in the room were of the finest silk made to match the leather, “the color of old parchment.” The house had twenty “perfumed” telephones. Marion’s private phone emitted a gardenia scent while the other nineteen phones released the less rarefied aroma of pine. Despite the mise-en-scène, Marion claimed that she was not happy in the house, nor was she able to reverse the neighborhood rumor that 333 “had a curse on it.”7
In offering these descriptions of her House Beautiful (“it was all mine, and expressed my personality”) Marion, according to Otto, was up to her usual embroidery. “Not a single room or piece of furniture [in her account] is recognizable,” he asserted. “She speaks of white carpets. They did not exist. She says we had twenty telephones. We had four. She describes a painting by Renoir hanging over the piano. We had a piano but never owned a Renoir.”8 Marion’s imaginative house tour nonetheless revealed the fact that, as Mrs. Otto Preminger, she was a far more accomplished performer than her husband ever gave her credit for. And at this turning point in Otto’s career, when he was still chafing under Zanuck’s fatwa, Marion with her vivacity and her almost childlike desire to be admired was a valuable partner.
After finishing Margin for Error and before getting another directing assignment at Fox, Otto was hired by Sam Goldwyn to appear as—what else?—a Nazi in a 1943 Bob Hope comedy called They Got Me Covered. Otto was not eager but recognized that an alliance with Goldwyn might be further ammunition against the day when Zanuck returned from military duty. Preminger made a point of befriending Goldwyn and, on the set, accepted direction from David Butler without a fuss. Like Margin for Error and The Pied Piper, They Got Me Covered, set in wartime Washington, is a light treatment of a grave topic. A reporter (Bob Hope, playing his usual cowardly, bumbling, fast-talking role) uncovers a ring of Axis spies in Washington hatching plans to blow up the city. Although in historical retrospect a story of enemies working secretly in the nation’s capital on a terrorist agenda might seem to have been proscribed subject matter for a comedy, evidently this was not the case at the time. The war taking place when the film was made is used as a backdrop for a divertissement in which Hope’s American ingenuity triumphs over a nest of Nazi vipers. Otto, of course, is cast as the head Nazi, named Otto Fauscheim. At thirty-nine but looking much closer to fifty-nine, Preminger rolls out his by-now signature Nazi persona, this time in a purely light comedy version. He is given no close-ups or one-shots, yet he is the dominant focus in the group scenes. In this Bob Hope romp, Otto comes off as a good sport, but it is clear that he knows how to intimidate everyone within the sound of his voice.
For the Jewish moguls who ran the film industry, references to the Holocaust, like most issues of Jewish concern and self-identity were off-limits. Otto Preminger, however, a Jew from a country overtaken by Hitler and a man with a strong social conscience, felt some responsibility to address the subject, and in the summer of 1943 he began to prepare a script that he hoped would refute the industry’s silence. Ambassador Dodd’s Diary, as Preminger explained, is the story of “an American family who goes to Germany at the beginning of the Hitler regime. It is the story of that family’s reactions to the Nazis; it’s the story of the rise of the Nazi party, as seen through the eyes of an American family. It will be the first time that all the prominent members of the Nazi party will be presented on the screen.”9 To ensure authenticity Preminger began working with Martha Dodd, the daughter of the former ambassador. Otto regarded the project as a socially responsible work that would also give him the kind of validation he knew he could not attain by being associated with entertainments like Margin for Error or They Got Me Covered.
Preminger’s commitment to the project was sharpened because that summer he was applying for his American citizenship. Unlike many émigrés who grumbled about their new homeland, decrying American taste, manners, and morals, Preminger from the instant of his arrival had been an American enthusiast, a patriot and a booster. He had a profound respect for his new country’s democratic government and its guarantee of free speech. And in return for being a vocal supporter of the American Way, Preminger, unlike a number of émigrés in the film community, was to remain untouched in the witch hunt for Communists that Senator Joseph McCarthy was to conduct later in the decade. On August 27, 1943, one of the proudest days of his life, Otto Preminger became an American citizen. Throughout the ceremony, with Marion at his side, he beamed. That night, on the sweeping grounds of 333 Bel-Air Road, the Premingers hosted one of their most bountiful parties.
Otto hoped to get Ambassador Dodd’s Diary into production before Zanuck returned from armed service, but to his regret he could not persuade Goetz, or anyone else at Fox, to finance the film. Nonetheless, with Goetz’s encouragement Otto regularly read books and plays and scripts on file in the story department hoping to find possible properties he could develop before Zanuck came back. Two stories caught his attention. One was an original screenplay by Arthur Kober and Michael Uris called Army Wives, with a contemporary wartime setting; the other a suspense novel called Laura, by Vera Caspary set in the kind of New York beau monde Otto had become familiar with during his time at the St. Regis. Goetz quickly gave his approval to both projects.
Preminger was intrigued by the basic premise of Vera Caspary’s story: after presumably having been found dead in her apartment, Laura reappears and becomes a prime suspect in a murder case. “That was the good part of the novel,” Otto said, claiming that “everything else, including the characters, was newly created for the film.”10 Untrue. The major characters—the detective who investigates the “murder” of the bewitching young woman and who becomes obsessed with her portrait; Laura’s older, epicene mentor who wants to control her and is enraged when she threatens to marry a young man—are fully etched in the novel. Also richly depicted is an atmosphere of sexual perversity among the upper crust.
Preminger’s reluctance to give proper credit to Caspary may have stemmed from personal antipathy—from the time they first met in New York in the late 1930s their relationship had been rancorous. At that time, Caspary’s agent, Monica McCall, offered the first draft of a play called Ring Twice for Laura to Preminger, then shopping for theater projects. Preminger responded to the poisoned high-society setting and to the twist of the heroine’s surprising reappearance, but felt the working out of the story required major revision. He offered to collaborate with the playwright. “He provided all of his Middle European charm, along with an elegant lunch of blini and caviar,” as Vera Caspary recalled. But the two could not agree on how to shape the material. “He wanted to make it a conventional detective story; I saw it as a psychological drama about people involved in a murder. We fell
Vera Caspary, author of the novel Laura and no friend to Otto.
out over this and [writer] George Sklar worked with me instead. Marlene Dietrich expressed an interest in playing the title character. This beautiful woman came closer to the independent girl who earned her living and pampered her lovers than anyone who has yet played the part,” Caspary recalled. “We wanted her to tour with it. And we were bombarded with rejections. There were no Broadway takers.”11
After the play script failed to sell, Caspary wrote two novels, Ring Twice for Laura and Laura, which McCall sent to film studios. Only two showed any interest: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which wanted to turn it into a B mystery “if they could buy the story cheaply enough,”12 and Fox, which in the end bought the play and the two novels for $30,000. It was at this point that Preminger reentered the Laura saga. Remembering their original disagreement, Preminger, as he was developing a screenplay with three writers, Jay Dratler, Samuel Hof
fenstein, and Betty Reinhardt, did not welcome any contributions from Caspary. He felt he knew the smart Manhattan milieu at least as well as she, and he was certain he knew far more than she did about what was needed to turn the material into a film. Early decisions suggest his confidence was well founded. In Laura, the basic source from which Preminger and his writers were working, Caspary’s conceit had been to tell her tale with multiple narrators, each of whom has only a partial perspective. Preminger vetoed the device as too literary for the popular suspense film he was envisioning. Point of view, he realized, would have to be simplified and aligned with the Hollywood convention in which objective, “invisible,” third-person narration is always preferable to first-person. And Preminger sensed, correctly, that the most important character was not the mysterious Laura but her mentor, Waldo Lydecker, the imperious, obsessive, decadent dandy who sponsors her rise to prominence in New York society. A homosexual fearful of losing Laura to a heterosexual rival, it is Waldo who has murdered the wrong woman (a weekend guest in Laura’s apartment) and who attempts in the end to kill Laura. Working closely with his writers, Otto turned Waldo into the lead.
When he completed a first draft, Preminger invited Vera Caspary to the studio. “It was not a peaceful visit,” she remembered. She objected to the way Preminger had worked out the ending, in which Waldo hides the gun he plans to kill Laura with in a baroque standing clock in Laura’s apartment.
In the novel Waldo’s gun is hidden in his cane, [Caspary observed]. This is not merely a murder story device… but a symbol (Freudian) of Waldo’s impotence and destructiveness, actually the theme of the novel. Preminger argued that a gun that could destroy a woman’s face could not possibly have been contained in a walking stick and he said no one would get the symbolism. “Would a man as elegant and self-conscious as Waldo Lydecker, himself an authority on murder … be so dumb as to carry a shotgun through the streets of New York on his way to a murder?” Preminger argued.13
In this case Caspary was right: the phallic symbolism of the gun concealed in the impotent man’s walking stick is revelatory, whereas the ending Preminger proposed is merely a narrative device.
Caspary also felt that Preminger misread her heroine. “ ‘In the book, Laura has no character and no sex,’ Preminger said to me. I howled. ‘Then why did she have to pay a gigolo?’ he asked. I could have been struck down by an inch of celluloid. ‘Laura gives everything with her love. Perhaps you don’t know anything about love, Mr. Preminger?’ I said, and made a haughty exit.”14
Just after finishing the first-draft screenplay, Otto received word that Zanuck was about to return to work. At his own request Zanuck had been on leave from the studio since April 29, 1942; on May 31, 1943, again at his own request, he asked to be released back to civilian duty and was planning to report to Fox at the end of July. Goetz resigned, but would remain at the studio over the summer to finish up several projects. Goetz had taken the job knowing it was to be only on an interim basis, but as Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law and astute in the ways of front office politics, he did not think of himself as either a caretaker or a mere functionary. His hiring of Preminger behind Zanuck’s back was one indication that he was determined to be his own man; his complete refurbishing of Zanuck’s office, from which every trace of Zanuck’s favored green had been removed, was another. Goetz in fact was an able superintendent, a businessman who focused on contracts and internal organization while leaving creative decisions to others. Under his watch, Twentieth Century-Fox did not lose money. (After he left Fox, Goetz, backed by his father-in-law, founded International Pictures, which would merge with Universal, as Twentieth Century had combined with Fox.)
On his return Zanuck lost no time reclaiming his power. His first order of business was to condemn the entire slate of films Goetz had overseen in his absence. The Goetz-era films, he contended, “would make the public vomit… if we make the mistake of showing them.”15 With Goetz gone and Zanuck reinstated, Preminger suddenly was on shaky ground. When the mogul ordered him to his beachfront house in Santa Monica, Otto knew he would be facing an adversary far cagier and far more ruthless than Goetz. As he was driving along Wilshire Boulevard to the showdown with Zanuck, Otto tried to prepare himself for the worst. He was certain he was going to be banned once again, his hopes for Laura and for a major career smashed by a vengeful czar’s need to reassert his omnipotence. Arriving at Zanuck’s house, Otto was escorted by a butler out to the pool, where Zanuck sat with his back turned to his anxious visitor. Without getting up from his low-lying lounge chair, he issued a decree. “I see you are working on a few things. I don’t think much of them except for one, Laura. I’ve read it and it isn’t bad. You can produce it but as long as I am at Fox you will never direct. Good-bye.”16 Speaking to his host’s back Preminger claimed to have uttered his own “good-bye” in a tone as deadpan as Zanuck’s. Leaving quickly, Otto was immensely relieved. He would still be on the studio payroll, after all, and he would have a producer’s credit on a film he was sure would be successful.
Although it makes a compelling narrative, one that Preminger always relished telling, the poolside meeting with Zanuck cannot have transpired exactly as Preminger claimed. Yes, Zanuck did grant Preminger permission to produce Laura, but at the same time he also gave Preminger the green light on his other project, Army Wives. And on this minor film he was allowing Preminger to direct as well as produce. Far from having to fight his way back to directing, then, Otto was “forgiven” almost as soon as Zanuck had returned to the studio. He would produce as well as direct Army Wives, and at the same time he would continue working on the screenplay of Laura, which he would produce but not direct. As both producer and director, Otto Preminger was back in business.
Both assignments were for the B unit, run by Byrnie Foy as diffident a boss as his predecessor Sol Wurtzel. Like Wurtzel, Foy didn’t bother to read scripts and had no desire to be a hands-on creative producer in the DFZ mold. Foy was a company functionary with his eye on the bottom line. Assignment to the B’s did not diminish Otto’s enthusiasm, however: he had two projects to engage him, and after all he had managed to contradict the Cassandras. Zanuck had rescinded his ban against him.
He prepared and filmed Army Wives first. As he recalled, it was “a small story I had acquired before Laura; then it stuck with me and I had to do it, a minor film.”17 He had no illusions about the importance of the material. Yet the setting, a U.S. Army camp, and the story’s homespun patriotism— the film is a morale booster for a country at war that celebrates the sacrifices made by women as they send their husbands off to the front—appealed to Otto, a newly naturalized American citizen. He regarded the film as an expression of gratitude to his new country.
Jeanne Crain as a spoiled young woman who has a lot to learn in Preminger’s wartime morale booster, In the Meantime, Darling.
Otto had no firsthand experience with the subject—as Willi Frischauer asked, “What did Preminger know of life in the American army? He had never worn a uniform except the Nazi insignia on stage and screen.”18 But he responded to the heroine, Maggie Preston, a spoiled young newlywed from a wealthy family who learns to overcome a bad case of noblesse oblige and by the end is ready to participate in the common cause. The film was a showcase for Jeanne Crain, an actress the studio was grooming for A-list stardom. To her foreign director, Crain’s wholesome, beauty queen veneer (her other vehicle the same year was Home in Indiana) had an exotic appeal. Otto handled her gently, appreciating her serene temperament, her lack of inner fire—exactly the quality that was to drive Elia Kazan to distraction in 1950 when he directed Crain as a light-skinned Negro in Pinky. While his relations with his star were unblemished (he was to work with Crain, happily, on two later films), he had a significant blowup with the actor who played Crain’s father, gravel-voiced, portly Eugene Pallette, one of Fox’s stable of reliable character actors. Preminger claimed Pallette was “an admirer of Hitler and convinced that Germany would win the war.” As if that weren
’t enough, Pallette refused to sit down at the same table with a black actor in a scene set in a kitchen. “You’re out of your mind,” he hissed at Preminger. “I won’t sit next to a nigger.” Infuriated, Preminger canceled production for the day, and informed Zanuck, who fired the actor, most of whose scenes had already been shot. “We wrote him out of what was left,” Preminger recalled.19
Preminger began shooting Army Wives on December 20, 1943, and wrapped on March 7, 1944—a longer-than-usual schedule for a modestly budgeted (about $450,000) B movie. Given a new, meaningless title, In the Meantime, Darling, the film opened on September 22, 1944, a month before Laura. The film is conservative Hollywood propaganda, which, in effect, defines the “proper” roles for women and men during wartime, and it would be silly to make too much of it. But it is directed with a far greater fluency than Preminger’s previous films. And it is suffused with good will.
Perhaps because little was at stake, Preminger found producing and directing In the Meantime, Darling easy on his nerves. Producing Laura, in contrast, was filled with hurdles. His first obstacle was Byrnie Foy who hadn’t read the script but was prepared to table it on the recommendation of his chief reader, who had reported, “This is not suspense; it’s not a thriller. There is not one scene with the police. It has got to be completely rewritten.” Otto cajoled Foy into reading the screenplay. “After all, I get $1500 a week, and your reader gets only $50,” Preminger argued. The next day Foy informed Otto that after reading the script he was prepared to support his reader’s opinion: the material was not worthy and they would be shelving it. Otto of course would not retreat. Moreover, assessing his opponent closely as he always did, Preminger was convinced he could clobber Foy. He insisted that Foy send the script to Zanuck; Foy countered that he wouldn’t do that because he was certain Zanuck would reject anything Otto would submit. He urged Preminger to play it safe, to bide his time, to collect his paychecks, and “maybe we’ll even pick up your option.”20 Foy’s plea confirmed his decency—in his own way he was trying to protect Otto—as well as his second-rateness. It also revealed his critical misreading of both Preminger and Darryl Zanuck.
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