Finally yielding under Preminger’s insistence, Foy agreed to send the script to Zanuck. A few days later Zanuck called them to his office (restored to its original green). Cigar and croquet mallet in place, and clearly prepared to play “DFZ” to the hilt, he began by asking Foy his opinion of the script. The unwary subaltern, not quick enough in interpreting the signals and trying to protect his pal (he and Otto played gin rummy together), said it was not a viable property but that Preminger was in no way to blame. As Zanuck began grilling Foy as to why he didn’t like the script, Foy became flustered. “It turned out he really hadn’t read the script to the end,” as Otto recalled, and as he must have suspected all along. Drawing himself up to his full height, Zanuck informed Foy that he thought the script was “potentially terrific,” and that he was upgrading the project to the A unit and would be supervising the film himself. Preminger, he informed Foy, would remain as producer but now would report to him rather than Foy. “It was a great victory,” Otto recalled.21
Once he came on board, Zanuck began to function as a script doctor. “The only chance this picture has of becoming a big-time success is if these characters emerge as real outstanding personalities,” he wrote Preminger in an early memo. “Otherwise it will become nothing more than a blown-up whodunit.”22 Zanuck had sharp insights about how each of the principal characters should be developed. The title character, who he felt in the present version was “flat and uninspired,” should “come into the story like a breath of spring, like something out of this world… . Where the others are Park Avenue cutthroats she should be as fresh as a child.” “There ought to be more of Cagney about the detective [Mark],” he urged. He felt that Waldo should speak with “the biting flavor of the man who came to dinner” and be “likable and charming so that Mark can tolerate having him around.” Zanuck had one (wrong-headed) idea for Waldo that smacked of his pulp-fiction background: the character should be a secret morphine addict with “subtle hints of this secret vice” used to prepare the audience for “the revelation of Waldo as the murderer.”23
Although he worked well with Preminger on the script and even though Preminger at the time was directing In the Meantime, Darling, Zanuck was not willing to appoint Otto as the director of an A-list project. It was Preminger’s bittersweet responsibility as producer of Laura to find a director. Yet no one on the lot appeared to be interested. It may have been that a number of contract directors shied away from the project because of Preminger, whose place in the studio pecking order was not yet clear—he was still widely viewed as the man Zanuck had exiled. Preminger was grateful when Lewis Milestone’s turndown took the form of a generous note to Zanuck: “Preminger probably knows what to do with the script. He should direct it; I won’t.” Finally, Rouben Mamoulian, although he did not particularly care for the characters or the milieu, reluctantly accepted the assignment. “He wanted the money” was Preminger’s unsporting estimation.24
Mamoulian, who could be as high-handed as Otto, also had a troubled history with Zanuck, having clashed with him during the production of The Mark of Zorro in 1940. Born to wealth (his father was a bank president) in Russia in 1898, Mamoulian was raised in Paris and then trained for the stage at the Moscow Art Theater, where he became a protégé of Vakhtangov, a Stanislavski disciple. For the Theatre Guild Mamoulian had directed the original play of Porgy in 1927 and the landmark Gershwin folk opera, Porgy and Bess, in 1935. In March 1943, only a few months before Otto approached him about Laura, he had directed another important Broadway musical, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! In film his track record was equally distinguished. With their fluent use of a mobile camera, Mamoulian’s Applause (1929) and City Streets (1931) had none of the rigor mortis that afflicted most early sound films. His Love Me Tonight (1932), with a sparkling score by Rodgers and Hart, swirling camera movement, and intermittent rhyming dialogue, remains to this day one of the most inventive of all musical films. Mamoulian directed Garbo’s exquisite performance in Queen Christina (1934) and the beautifully designed Becky Sharp (1935), the first three-color Technicolor movie made in Hollywood. For Mamoulian, Laura would seem to have been the right project at the right time.
Once he accepted the job, however, Mamoulian began to misbehave. “Ignoring” his producer, as Preminger bitterly recalled, Mamoulian began to rewrite the script. Although Preminger had no complaint about the two young contract players, Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, whom Zanuck and Mamoulian had hired for the romantic leads, he balked at their choice for Waldo: Laird Cregar, who had just made a splash playing Jack the Ripper in The Lodger (1943). In a private meeting with Zanuck, Otto said, “Look, this whole thing is wrong if you have Laird Cregar. You must have a man who either is unknown or has never played heavies before.”25 Preminger argued that if the audience could immediately identify Waldo as the villain, which he felt they would with Cregar in the role, suspense and ambivalence—exactly the qualities Otto and his writers had striven for— would be sacrificed. Zanuck was not persuaded.
Violating studio protocol and acting daringly, since he was still working in a kind of limbo, Preminger bypassed Zanuck and tentatively offered the part to an actor he knew would be ideal for it: Clifton Webb, then appearing at the Biltmore Theatre in downtown Los Angeles in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. Unlike Cregar, Webb was not a known film personality. He had made a few forgettable appearances in silent pictures of the mid-1920s, but film audiences hadn’t seen him since; he had achieved his success on the stage, mostly in musical comedies and revues. Preminger’s choice of Webb to play Waldo Lydecker was inspired: with a large, pointed nose that seemed to twitch in perpetual disapproval, and a voice lined with upper-crust refinement and world-weariness, the actor, himself a homosexual dandy, was the incarnation of Caspary’s character.
When Otto mentioned Webb at a casting session, however, he encountered stiff resistance. “I was at Metro when Webb made a test there, and he ‘flies,’ you can’t have him on this film,” said Rufus LeMaire, a Fox casting director. To be sure, Webb was unmistakably fey—just the quality Preminger was looking for. Against the advice of his neighbor and friend Ernst Lubitsch, who urged him to climb down from the battlements, Otto persisted. “You have a chance to produce this big picture,” argued Lubitsch. “You have Mamoulian. Why do you fight? Why do you have to be so difficult? You will cut your throat again. They threw you out once; they’ll throw you out again.”26 But fighting was Otto’s way. Even after Zanuck made crude remarks about Webb’s homosexuality Otto persuaded his boss to look at the test that Webb had made at Metro. Yet again fortune smiled on Otto Preminger, because through a friend at Metro he discovered that Webb had never made a test. Armed with this knowledge, he challenged Rufus LeMaire in front of Zanuck. “This test was never made,” Otto thundered. “You just don’t like Clifton Webb, you don’t want him in the part, and you’re sabotaging him, that’s all.”
As Otto observed with admiration, Zanuck “once again proved to be a very interesting man.” He ordered a screen test of Webb and, since Mamoulian was out of town, granted Otto permission to direct it. Zanuck also arranged for Gene Tierney to play opposite Webb in the test. But then Webb, a prima donna (he said he had never heard of “this Miss Tierney”), refused to make the test. The actor did agree, however, to perform a monologue from Blithe Spirit on the Biltmore Theatre stage, and although Zanuck had specifically requested a scene from Laura, Otto decided to override him. Placing Webb onstage in a dramatic half-light, Otto filmed the test carefully; Webb, according to Preminger, “knew what Zanuck’s objection to him might be and avoided all that completely: he didn’t ‘fly.’ ”27 After viewing the test, and with the objectivity and fair-mindedness that had helped to keep him in the room at the top, Zanuck concurred with Preminger that the urbane actor was indeed born to play Waldo Lydecker.
One battle won, Preminger soon faced another. Mamoulian, no fool after all and doubtless suspecting that Otto was lying in wait, had the producer banned from the set. Mamoulian then p
roceeded to misdirect most of the cast. He allowed Judith Anderson, a classically trained stage actress playing a society doyenne, to ham it up rather than trying to rein her in. He did not give Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, relative newcomers with limited strings to their bows, the attention they needed. He and the snippy Clifton Webb were at a standoff because the actor had heard that Mamoulian did not want him in the film. After viewing the rushes in New York, where he was meeting with the Fox business office, Zanuck fired off a blistering telegram to Otto. “This Dana Andrews whom you sponsored is an amateur without any sex appeal, and Clifton Webb is ‘flying.’ Judith Anderson should stay on the stage, and you should have stayed in New York or Vienna, where you belong.”28
When he returned from New York, Zanuck called Preminger and Mamoulian to his office. Mamoulian defended his approach and blamed the script; Preminger argued that the acting needed to be less arch, more casual and contemporary—more like film acting. Having committed every line of the script to memory, Otto proceeded to perform some scenes in the understated style he was lobbying for. Impressed, Zanuck encouraged Mamoulian to direct “in the Preminger style.” Doubtless infuriated by the boss’s suggestion and perhaps already beginning to see the handwriting on the wall, the following day the irascible Mamoulian handed in inferior work. At lunch on Friday, “in front of eighteen people,” as Otto recalled, Zanuck asked him if Mamoulian should be replaced. “I said ‘yes.’ Just like that.” And because Preminger was able to say “ ‘yes’ just like that,” he proved once again that he had the constitution for playing according to the rules of the Hollywood game. On the walk back from the dining room to the administration building Zanuck uttered the single most important sentence Preminger was ever to hear in the course of his sixty-year career: “You can start directing.”29 (Mamoulian was to live for nearly forty-five years after being removed from Laura, but was to direct only two more films, Summer Holiday in 1948 and Silk Stockings in 1957. In 1958 he was fired as the director of Porgy and Bess and replaced by … Otto Preminger. And in 1961 he was removed from Cleopatra and replaced by Joseph Mankiewicz.)
Preminger started from scratch. He hired a new cameraman, Joseph La Shelle, a new designer, and a new portrait of Laura—Mrs. Mamoulian had painted the original one. (As Gene Tierney recollected, “Otto felt that [the portrait] lacked the mystic quality he insisted on having. He sent me instead to pose for Frank Polony, the studio photographer… . Otto had [the photo] enlarged and lightly brushed with paint to create the effect he wanted. So the ‘portrait’ of Laura was, in truth, a blow-up of a photograph.”30 When Otto began rehearsals, except for the deeply grateful Clifton Webb, he faced a resentful company—as a parting shot Mamoulian had told them Preminger was displeased with their work. As Vincent Price, playing a gigolo, recalled in a 1989 interview, his memory no doubt sweetened by the passage of time, “During the six weeks we had worked together with Rouben, we all thought we had been doing well. We loved Rouben and each other—we all got along wonderfully well with Rouben, a very dignified and very lovely man.”31
On the fateful first morning, Judith Anderson confronted Otto. Mispronouncing his name, she said she had heard he was disappointed with her work and she asked him to show her how to play the part. “That is exactly what I am going to do, Miss Anderson, and you will do it exactly like this. Then I will take you to see the rushes tomorrow, and you will be the first one to agree that I was right.” That first day the cast did as he instructed, and when he showed them the results “they were convinced.” “I had no more difficulties,” he maintained.32 “Otto had an idea about the material, and he was right,” Vincent Price said. “The New York society depicted in the film are all darlings, sweet and charming and clever and bright—on the surface. But underneath they’re evil. And Otto understood this in a way that Mamoulian did not. ‘Mamoulian is a nice man, isn’t he Vincent?’ Otto asked me. And I said, ‘Yes, he is a nice man.’ Otto said, ‘I’m not, and most of my friends are these kind of people.’ I think it was true: Otto was very given to the sort of society group of people who basically are really kind of evil people underneath.”33
If the atmosphere with Otto at the helm wasn’t exactly “lovey-dovey,” as Price claimed it had been on Mamoulian’s set, nonetheless a cooperative spirit prevailed. “I think Otto had a crush on Gene, but then who didn’t?” Price observed. “I did five pictures with her and every director went ‘ahahhhh.’ So did the leading men and everybody else. She had a charm very few actresses have. Otto couldn’t really shout at Gene; he couldn’t shout at Clifton because he was inventing Clifton really; and he certainly couldn’t shout at Judith Anderson—one doesn’t shout at Judith Anderson, because one’s likely to get shouted back at. And Dana Andrews was really very easygoing. So once we got used to Otto, we had a pretty easy time.”34 Price himself had goodwill toward Preminger because, having appeared in Outward Bound on Broadway, he remembered with admiration the way Otto had handled Laurette Taylor.
Gene Tierney represented the greatest challenge for Preminger. Although she had starred in some major Fox productions, including Tobacco Road in 1941 and Heaven Can Wait in 1943, she remained unsure of her ability. And as she herself recalled, she was not excited by the role. “The time on camera was less than one would like. And who wants to play a painting?” She also knew that she had been a second choice. “If Jennifer Jones doesn’t want it, why should I?” Tierney recalled inquiring of Darryl Zanuck. “The role is right for you, Gene. You’ll be good in it. And, you’ll see, this one will help your career,” Zanuck had assured her.35 Fortunately, Tierney appreciated Otto’s take-charge approach. “Only [he] had absolute faith in the project,” she said. “He drove himself, and us, so hard… . He was simply tireless. When the rest of the cast seemed ready to drop from exhaustion, Otto would still muster as much vigor as when the day began.” Although to the actress Preminger “looked the part of a fencing instructor at a Prussian military academy” and “could charm and intimidate you at the same time” with his “basset-hound eyes” and “egg-shaped dome,” she thought him “a gentleman. Unlike certain other directors of that period, he had no insecurity and did not feel obligated to attempt the seduction of his leading ladies.”36 Otto, who could be an astute psychoanalyst when he took the time, recognized Tierney’s anxiety (the actress would suffer numerous nervous breakdowns in the coming years) and treated her with special consideration.
Under Mamoulian’s direction, following several weeks of rehearsal and preproduction Laura had started filming on April 27, 1944, with a projected budget of $849,000. After Preminger took over, the film continued to shoot until June 29, and the final budget was just over one million dollars. Working with an initially uneasy cast and a new cinematographer who worked slowly, Otto still was able to finish within the projected timetable. Zanuck took note.
Once principal photography had been completed, Preminger hired David Raksin to compose a score. The first time he watched the dailies Raksin saw
a long scene in Laura’s apartment. When it was over, Zanuck turned to Otto and said, “I’m going to cut the scene down severely.” “Don’t do that, Mr. Zanuck,” I spoke up. “The music I’ll write can take care of the scene, don’t cut it!” Because of what I said, they did not cut the scene. I saw Otto the next day at Alfred Newman’s [Newman was in charge of the music department at Fox], where he told me he was going to use Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” as the theme song and work it around the original music that I would be composing. I told him it would be wrong for the movie. We argued; we both raised our voices. He said the song would be right because “Laura’s a whore.” I said, “According to who?” “Where did you get this fellow?” Otto asked Newman. Al said to Otto, “Listen to Dave.” Otto did, and he gave me the weekend to come up with a song to replace “Sophisticated Lady.” It was very generous of him.
That weekend I watched the movie several times and it inspired me. Coincidentally that Saturday, I received a letter of farewell from a lady
I was in love with. I put the letter on my piano on Sunday evening and “Farewell, buddy” was in my mind as I began to compose. The tune came to me. It sounds corny, but it’s true. The melody of our theme song needed to evoke melancholy, and I had just been given a heavy dose.
When Raksin played the “Laura” theme to Preminger and Newman, they reacted favorably. “There was no further talk about ‘Sophisticated Lady’ ” Raksin said. “Otto saw what the theme did for his movie: the guy who wrote that melody deserved respect, and Otto gave it to me. I worked for him on four later films, and each time he trusted me completely. I did things my way, and he appreciated that.”37
When Preminger showed Zanuck his first cut of Laura, the mogul and his coterie of yes-men sat through the film in silence. Afterward, Zanuck’s pronouncement was devastating: “Well, Byrnie was right. We missed the bus on this one.” A flurry of memos then passed between Zanuck and his minions about how the picture could be saved. Zanuck hired a studio writer to reshape the third act—Zanuck had the notion of telling the story within the framework of a dream. In the new ending, written in less than a week, Laura in a voice-over narration says that “nothing was true, it had all been in Waldo Lydecker’s imagination.” “What they came up with was just unbelievable,” Otto recalled. At a screening of the Zanuck-inspired ending the influential New York newspaper columnist Walter Winchell happened to be present. Winchell, to Otto’s relief, responded volubly throughout the film. “For the first time in the film’s history, at last there was a [moviegoer’s] reaction,” as Otto recalled. Seated in his customary spot in the front row of the screening room Zanuck kept turning around to look at Winchell whenever the columnist laughed. Winchell’s words of praise at the end were as if Otto himself had scripted them: “Big time, Darryl. Big time. But the ending. I didn’t get it. You’ve got to change it.”38
Otto Preminger Page 13