Yet again, as Preminger noted, Zanuck “proved that his success is deserved, because he’s a very flexible man. He’s not stubborn when it comes to admitting a mistake.” In front of Winchell, Zanuck asked Preminger if he wanted to reinstate the original ending. Zanuck’s final words to Preminger on Laura: “This is your success. I concede.”39
“It should clean up,” Variety accurately predicted after the film opened on October 17, 1944. Reviews were favorable yet tempered (“When the lady herself appears upon the scene, she is a disappointment,” Thomas M. Pryor noted in the New York Times). But business was brisk. At Twentieth Century-Fox and throughout the industry Laura was perceived as an unqualified hit. Otto Preminger, after nearly a decade in America, had finally justified his erstwhile wünderkind reputation. For his immaculate work, he would receive an Academy Award nomination as best director. (Clifton Webb won a best supporting actor nomination; the three writers Otto had worked closely with won a best screenplay nomination; Lyle Wheeler, who would work with Otto many times in the future, was nominated for best art direction/interior decoration [black-and-white]; and Joseph La Shelle won the Academy Award for his ravishing black-and-white noir cinematography.)
After Laura opened, Otto had one final encounter with Vera Caspary— at the Stork Club, where Preminger, as Caspary recalled, was
in triumph over the film’s success … and he stated that I had been wrong on every point. “It wasn’t the same screenplay,” I said. “Remember, I read the version before Sam Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt had done the rewrite. I was not responding to the final version, Otto, and you know that.” Whereupon Otto drew himself up to his full Margin for Error height and said … I was not telling the truth. Two Southern gentlemen began stripping off their coats and [Stork Club owner] Sherman Billingsley rushed to our table. Otto made a Central European bow and said he had meant no insult.
“I still believe it would have been a better picture if the melodrama at the end had been equal to the mood of the beginning, if Waldo’s character had remained consistent, if the weapon had been contained in the cane,” Caspary recalled in 1971, claiming the last word.40
The contemporary reviews didn’t (and after all couldn’t) predict that Laura was to become one of the most beloved and enduring films of the 1940s, a landmark in the emerging genre of film noir. For decades this sleek, elegant suspense film has had a secure place in the affections of filmgoers, and even Preminger detractors, who condemn the work as well as the man, concede that on at least this one occasion he did a commendable job. A small cadre of die-hard antagonists, however, likes to stoke the flames of old rumors that the bulk of this universally admired film represents the work of its original director, Rouben Mamoulian. But no, Laura, as Zanuck himself acknowledged, is Preminger’s success, and in it, for all who care to take a close and fair-minded look, are the essential ingredients that would define the director’s style for the rest of his career.
The film begins, unforgettably, with the kind of flowing camera movement Preminger would always favor. The effete, offscreen voice of Waldo Lydecker, eminent gossip columnist and Manhattan insider, whines about the terrific heat of a New York summer as the camera surveys glass figurines and objets d’art on display in his apartment. The detached camera, an eyewitness with a mind of its own, places the spectator as a privileged observer of a fetish-laden private world. At the end of its tour the camera makes a sudden lunging movement as it “discovers” an alien presence, indeed a bull in the china shop: the detective Mark, a man’s man evidently ill at ease in the feminine mise-en-scène of Waldo’s aerie, come to question Waldo about Laura’s “death.” The initial confrontation between the detective and Waldo, which takes place in Waldo’s mirrored, marbled bathroom as he takes a bath, evocatively sets up the entire film: the two
Rivals for the absent Laura, a woman in a painting: an effete homosexual (Clifton Webb) and an emotionally wounded man’s man (Dana Andrews), in Laura.
Setting up for a smooth Preminger tracking shot in Laura.
men are to become oddly unequal sexual rivals for the absent figure of Laura.
In Preminger’s deliciously perverse salon noir, sexual masquerade is omnipresent. Waldo, who has mistakenly killed a woman he presumed to be Laura, is a pretend heterosexual—the character’s glass figurines and his prissy aura signal the truth of his possible sexual “difference” in an era when the homosexual, who could not be named as such, was invariably represented as effeminate. Flashbacks tell the tale: as he discovered and then sponsored Laura in her successful career as an advertising executive, Waldo took a proprietary rather than sexual interest in his protégée. But when Laura became engaged to Shelby Carpenter, a young rake available to the highest bidder, Waldo felt his ownership rights were threatened. As Shelby,
A deviant couple in heterosexual masquerade, played by Judith Anderson and Vincent Price, in Laura.
Vincent Price is hardly more convincing in heterosexual garb than Clifton Webb. Laura, a single career woman and the pawn in a sexual competition between two “gay” men, may well be suspected of harboring some sexual surprises of her own. Adding to the atmosphere of sexual repression and uncertainty is Judith Anderson as Laura’s aunt, an habitué of the beau monde who becomes Shelby’s sponsor and would-be lover. Anderson, best known as the crypto-lesbian housekeeper obsessed with the title character in Rebecca, projects a more assertive, more “masculine” presence than either Webb or Price.
An impulse that could not speak its name in 1944, as indeed it could not for decades to come in mainstream American films, homosexuality in Laura is covert, disguised. “This is the way very wealthy Manhattanites might be expected to behave” is the film’s assumption about its aberrant, supposed heterosexuals. The desires of the three not-quite-straight characters played by Webb, Price, and Anderson (each of whom, not incidentally, was gay) are
Steeped in noir shadows, the detective (Dana Andrews) grills Laura (Gene Tierney), a supposed murder victim who has become a suspect.
thwarted. And to ensure a conventional happy ending of heterosexual closure for Laura and Mark, the three disruptive figures must be eliminated. Hardly politically correct in contemporary terms, the film’s oblique handling of the characters’ sexuality gives Laura intriguing noir shadings, a wicked aroma that in part accounts for the film’s continuing appeal. Viewers sense that beneath the manicured surface something ambiguous and provocative is going on.
Preminger confines forbidden love to the film’s subtext and directs the actors to perform in a matte style—the somnambulistic mode customary for 1940s psychological thrillers. The restrained performances of Webb, Price, and Anderson add to the mysterious mood, the sense of unspoken desire that hovers over the film. As the hard-boiled detective who falls in love with Laura’s portrait, Dana Andrews appropriately projects a confident masculinity. The sexual as well as social outsider in a nest of society vipers, the detective steals little sidelong, disbelieving glances at the two fey men he must investigate. But in subtle ways Andrews suggests that the detective isn’t quite right either; after all, Mark falls in love with a woman he presumes to be dead. He is bewitched not by a real woman but by a painting. Beneath the character’s stoical veneer Andrews suggests (and only that: Preminger would not have allowed for anything more) traces of the character’s wounds, his potentially coiled inner life.
A catalyst for unhinging other characters, Laura herself, as Gene Tierney realized, is primarily an image in a painting, a figure encased in aloofness who arouses melancholy and desire in others. Gene Tierney can seem mannequinlike, especially in roles requiring her to be animated; but as Laura her ethereal presence is ideal. Her Laura seems indeed like a figure conjured in a dream.
Preminger’s purring direction is wonderfully understated. Working with Joseph La Shelle, he makes spare but potent use of such noir inflections as chiaroscuro lighting, occasional neurotic camera angles, and mirror and ceiling shots that entrap the characters. He permits himself only a
few scenes of full-blown noir virtuosity. As the detective becomes enamored of Laura’s portrait, the mise-en-scène slowly acquires an Expressionist intensification: shadows overtake Laura’s living room, as Mark, transfixed by the portrait, seems to become stranded in a space that grows larger and emptier. In the climax, shadows loom ominously as Waldo, with murder on his mind, climbs the stairs leading up to Laura’s apartment. In the showdown between the killer and his intended victim, Waldo is photographed from a disfiguring low angle. Throughout, David Raksin’s haunting theme song, one of the most memorable in Hollywood history, adds a dose of yearning that warms up Preminger’s cool touch. His stately, contained approach may seem to be impersonal, a refusal of authorial presence, but his work vibrates with autobiographical overtones. The filmmaker knew at first hand, in Vienna and New York, the society world the film is set in, a world governed by strict codes of public behavior. Laura’s decorum reflects the director’s European formality and his inborn sense of etiquette. A less confident filmmaker might have spent the remainder of his career trying to find another Laura, and while Preminger, to be sure, made other psychological thrillers, pictures that perhaps inevitably recalled his first great success, he was to spend far more time on projects of an altogether different stripe.
As they continued to live together at 333 Bel-Air Road, Mr. and Mrs. Otto Preminger became more and more estranged. Otto’s triumph with Laura seemed to spark his always enflamed libido, and he stepped out frequently. But dutifully he appeared by his wife’s side at parties at their home and sometimes at social gatherings elsewhere. And as hosts they continued to be renowned. It was an open secret, however, that they had an arrangement. So long as he promised not to seek a divorce, Otto was free to see other women, and in effect he lived like a bachelor. “His reputation for sexual appetite and prowess which had followed him from Vienna was enhanced when he was seen with some of Hollywood’s prettiest faces and best figures,” as Willi Frischauer noted. Otto would spend weekends away from town in the company of “slim, tall, long-legged” young women, many of them would-be actresses on the make, and some, Frischauer reported, “turned out to be pretty dumb, which is the occupational hazard of an amorous man with a big turnover.”41 He may have been voracious, but Otto was also careful: he knew that scandal could endanger his restarted career, and as much as possible he also wanted to spare Marion, whom in his own way he cared for.
His caution is apparent in his keeping secret the one serious affair he had during this period of sexual restlessness. As he was in preproduction for Laura, at a party early in 1944 he met Gypsy Rose Lee, then in Hollywood filming Belle of the Yukon. Born Rose Louise Hovick in 1914, Gypsy had been appearing onstage, first in vaudeville and then in burlesque, since the age of four. By the time Otto met her, for many years she had been the most famous stripper of the day, a queen of burlesque second to none. Gypsy had the long-legged look Otto favored, but was decidedly not the empty-headed type he was then casually dating. Although she had had no formal education to speak of, Gypsy was well read and interested in a broad range of subjects. With no apparent talent whatsoever—she was no beauty and as an actress she was a hopeless amateur—she had managed to carve out a prominent show business career, sustaining her masquerade with notable skill. Her entire career was a clever con job. “Gypsy found a gimmick: she was the ‘so-called’ intelligent stripper, and I stress ‘so-called,’ ” said Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book of Gypsy, the classic 1959 musical based on Lee’s 1957 memoir. “It was all a tease: she did not have a good body. But she was street-smart, she was amusing, you had to like her. She was fun. She had an over-bite that caused her to speak in a funny way; some people thought it was classy. And indeed, Gypsy herself thought she was classy: when she poured tea, she had her pinkie out. There was about her a certain gaucheness and also a naïveté, and she was allergic to the truth. Her memoir was mostly invention.”42
At first and perhaps even at second or third glance, Dr. Otto Ludwig Preminger of Vienna and Gypsy Rose Lee, the ecdysiast from Seattle, would seem to have been a colossal mismatch. Coming from a hardscrabble background and raised by the ultimate stage mother from hell, Gypsy had an unmistakable common touch. Otto’s privileged background left very different tonal imprints. They met at the home of William Goetz, Otto’s mentor at Fox. Since leaving Fox in the summer of 1943, Goetz had formed and was now the head of International Pictures, and he had hired Gypsy to costar in a Randolph Scott western.
This was not Gypsy’s first crack at movies. After having seen her onstage in the 1936 edition of The Ziegfeld Follies, Darryl Zanuck had offered her a contract. But Will Hays, who was the chairman of the Hollywood self-censorship board, was affronted by the prospect of a stripper appearing on the screens of America and assured Zanuck that no film featuring Gypsy would ever be shown in theaters. Zanuck reached a compromise with Hays: Gypsy would appear under her own name, as Louise Hovick. But without the marquee lure of “Gypsy” her career could not possibly take off; and no doubt when he saw her on-screen Zanuck realized that she would never be able to carry a film. He quickly assigned her to the B unit, where she appeared in five less-than-minor movies before her one-year contract expired.
For Goetz, she was to appear under her stage name, but her second chance at Hollywood prominence also capsized. Released about the same time as Laura, Belle of the Yukon fared poorly at the box office. Gypsy returned to burlesque, and for the rest of her life made only rare guest appearances in unimportant films. In burlesque, Gypsy was a lively presence; on film she was vacant.
While she was shooting Belle of the Yukon, Otto dated Gypsy on the sly. She had recently separated from her husband, Alexander Kirkland, who, according to Arthur Laurents, was “gay. And so, for that matter, was Gypsy, and Gypsy’s mother too, the infamous Mama Rose. Lesbians make the best hookers because they don’t get emotionally involved. They can work a guy over, control him and play him.” Whatever designation might best apply to her, Gypsy was certainly sexually versatile, and at least for a while she was able to hold the attention of the sexually demanding Preminger. Was it only sex that drew them together? “Otto liked to be amused by people, and Gypsy amused him,” Laurents suggested. “But he couldn’t have taken her seriously”43
Preminger, who recalled his Hollywood liaison with Gypsy as fleeting and casual, was “surprised to discover one day that she had returned to New York without saying good-bye to me.”44 He did not see or speak to her again until he was in New York in early December, when he called her to ask why she had departed so abruptly. He discovered she was in New York Hospital, where, on December 11, 1944, she gave birth to their son, Erik. A family man at heart, and instinctively generous, Otto was delighted, and eager to accept his fatherhood both emotionally and financially. But Gypsy spurned his help. “I can support my son myself,” she announced when Otto arrived at her bedside at the hospital. “I want to bring him up to be my son only.” “Her statement was firm but without hostility,” as Preminger recalled.45
Gypsy elicited a vow of silence from Otto: he was not to reveal his paternity to anyone, including their son. As a man of honor Otto observed her request scrupulously—it’s doubtful that he mentioned Erik even to Marion. Gypsy called her son Erik Kirkland, and allowed him to believe that Alexander Kirkland was his father. She did not banish Otto, however, but encouraged him to visit her and Erik, under the guise of being a good friend, whenever he was in New York. For about the first three years of his son’s life, Otto, with pleasure, made ritualistic visits to Gypsy’s overdecorated town-house on East Sixty-third Street. After she remarried in 1947 (her new husband was a Spanish painter, Julio de Diego), Otto’s visits, as he recalled, “became awkward and eventually stopped.”46 Periodically, but to no avail, he would petition Gypsy to tell Erik the truth. He did win one victory over Gypsy’s resistance, however, when he got her to state in her will that he was Erik’s father “so that in case she died before me [the boy] would know whom to turn to.”47 Nonetheless, for ne
arly twenty years Otto disappeared from his son’s life. The two were not to see each other again until 1966, when Otto was sixty and Erik twenty-two. But this time, with Gypsy’s consent, they were to meet finally as father and son.
There were a number of possible explanations for Gypsy’s choice. In her own way Gypsy was a feminist before the fact, determined to claim her
The two sides of Gypsy Rose Lee: as the prim author of a mystery, The G-String Murders, and as a burlesque queen in Belle of the Yukon.
independence from her gay ex-husband, Alexander Kirkland, as well as her transcendently heterosexual lover, Otto Preminger. Her own mother, a demon of cheapness and devouring possessiveness who lived vicariously through the show business careers she enforced on Gypsy and her sister, June Havoc, was hardly a model of maternal nurturing, and Gypsy’s resolve to take control of her son’s life may have been a replay of the way Mama Rose had dominated her own childhood. But her wanting to raise Erik on her own could also have been her way of making sure, without anyone interfering with her, that she would be the wise and nurturing parent she had never had. Too, Gypsy may simply have been unwilling to share her son’s love with anyone else.
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