Otto Preminger

by Foster Hirsch

  Why did Otto, who could be insistent in pursuit of what he wanted, withdraw his offer of fatherhood so readily, with a beneficent smile, abundant good wishes, and an enormous floral bouquet? It’s possible that, at thirty-nine and on the cusp of a rejuvenated career, he was not entirely prepared to become a parent. By his own design, after all, his marriage to Marion was childless. He also may not have wanted to hurt Marion by presenting to her a son he had conceived with another woman. And then he may simply have recognized that since Gypsy was as stubborn as he was, her intentions were unshakable and under the circumstances a civil retreat was his best available option.

  FOUR

  On the Job (1)

  Preminger expected that acclaim for Laura would promote him to the Fox pantheon, but as he quickly discovered, his status remained that of a contract director whose professional fate was subject to the will of Darryl Zanuck. For his next assignment, instead of the kind of plum he was certainly justified in expecting, Zanuck accorded him a dubious honor. He would replace Ernst Lubitsch, who had recently suffered a heart attack, on A Royal Scandal, a remake of Lubitsch’s own 1924 silent Forbidden Paradise, starring Pola Negri as Catherine the Great. Otto was safely out of the B unit, it’s true, but he was being forced to step into a project where he would be following another director’s blueprint. Before his heart attack, Lubitsch had already cast the film (starring Tallulah Bankhead) and spent several months on preproduction.

  The kind of team spirit that the assignment demanded of Preminger was part of the routine for a studio employee, and it was a lucky quirk of Otto’s paradoxical temperament that despite his independence he was able to bend to the “genius” of the system. It was never easy for Otto, a born bully, to follow orders, but he could force himself to be compliant if that is what he had to do to survive. In many ways, however, the administrative as well as artistic conservatism of studio filmmaking practice was congenial to him. The film factory’s need for punctuality, discipline, and financial prudence matched his personality to a T. And Otto was also temperamentally suited to the highly regularized approach of the so-called classical Hollywood style, defined by objective, centered compositions, “invisible” continuity editing, and unobtrusive camera work. For Preminger, having to remain within the parameters of the studio-imposed style was no hardship—he was not an artistic renegade determined to dismantle the system’s visual codes. Quite the opposite, having to conform to studio practice helped him to refine his own essentially mainstream sensibility.

  As Willi Frischauer speculated, “In Zanuck’s eyes one foreign director was as good as another. Lubitsch, Preminger—what was the difference? Preminger, currently unemployed, was assigned.”1 According to Otto, however, Zanuck turned to him at Lubitsch’s instigation. The claim is credible. Preminger and Lubitsch were neighbors on Bel-Air Road, and along with Walter Reisch, the Berlin-born director William Wyler, producer Alexander Korda (then married to the actress Merle Oberon), and Max Reinhardt’s son

  Marlene Dietrich on the set of Angel (1937) with the famously affable Ernst Lubitsch. In any contest with Lubitsch, whether judged on friendliness or artistry, Otto seemed destined to lose.

  Gottfried, also a producer, they formed a close-knit group alert to job opportunities for one another. At his best in such social gatherings, Otto charmed his landsmen. “Otto was very generous,” Lubitsch’s daughter Nicola said. “I remember that he took my father and me downtown to see Rosalinda, the American version of Die Fledermaus. We were driven in a big limousine, and he took us to a big dinner beforehand. I thought he was avuncular.” (Nicola recalled Otto’s fellow Viennese Billy Wilder, a frequent guest at the Reisches’ Sunday afternoon get-togethers, as “not a nice man: vulgar. My mother didn’t want him for dinner. He had terrible table manners, unlike my father, who had no vulgarity whatsoever. My father was not the ill-spoken Jew that Herman Weinberg depicted in his book on my father. Otto had no vulgarity either. He and Reisch, who looked like a ferret and was very warm, were both wonderful hosts.”)2

  This was not the first time that Preminger had been asked to step in for Lubitsch. Immediately following Lubitsch’s heart attack, Zanuck had asked Otto to work on a comic script Lubitsch had been preparing with Henry and Phoebe Ephron called All Out Arlene. From the results of that collaboration, however, Zanuck might have taken heed that Preminger was not a promising Lubitsch surrogate. The Ephrons found Otto “unbearable.” They complained that he spent too much time on the phone “quarreling with his cook over Saturday night’s menu or arguing with his tailor,” and unlike Lubitsch, Otto did not laugh at their jokes. “Where was that wonderful, free Lubitsch laugh that filled you with enthusiasm and made you try harder and be even funnier?” Phoebe Ephron asked.3 As displeased with the Ephrons as they were with him, Otto had the writers replaced. But the new, Preminger-supervised script of All Out Arlene was shelved.

  To be sure, Preminger and Lubitsch had different styles personally and professionally. Where Lubitsch smiled and laughed, on the job and off, Preminger’s good humor tended to fade in working situations. “Although my father was terribly spoiled [like Preminger, Lubitsch came from a well-to-do family] and his own father was very choleric, he never raised his voice,” Nicola Lubitsch recalled. “He was moody, and he certainly didn’t like being challenged; once he didn’t speak to me for two weeks when I had questioned him. But he never screamed.”4 Lubitsch was renowned for his light touch— the ineffable grace notes he bestowed on his comedies of sexual peccadilloes that, in other hands, might have become coarse-grained. Preminger’s more literal, essentially realist style was decidedly heavier, tending to the ponderous. Preminger didn’t have Lubitsch’s whimsical point of view or his bemused slant on sexual misbehavior. Otto Preminger could not have made any of Lubitsch’s sparkling comedies of seduction and masquerade—and Ernst Lubitsch could not have made Laura.

  The subject of A Royal Scandal— the Empress Catherine seduces a naive young officer who is protecting her from a palace revolt—was vintage Lubitsch. Of much less moment to Lubitsch than the political furor cooking in the wings was the Empress’s boudoir deportment; for Preminger, however, the political background was more enticing than l’amour and la ronde. Moreover, in a fundamental way Otto misunderstood Lubitsch’s approach to comedy. “The characters would do anything for a laugh,” he contended, “whether it was in keeping with what they represented or not… . the Empress of Russia behaved like no Empress of Russia ever would behave in order to produce laughs.”5 “Seldom has anybody missed the essence of the joke—any joke with such certitude,” Lubitsch’s biographer Scott Eyman commented.6 As he began directing the film Preminger felt “the era of ‘the Lubitsch touch’ was coming to an end. It was a change that Zanuck was not yet prepared to understand. Of course, Lubitsch was a first-rate filmmaker, but in his films the humor was based on situations and not on character. … A big change had slowly taken place. Audiences wanted more than the chance to laugh. They wanted to see characters on the screen who behaved consistently”7 As an analysis of either Lubitsch or a supposed change in film comedy, this is preposterous—and if this is how he really felt about Lubitsch’s work, Otto should not have taken the job.

  “Lubitsch will rehearse the master scenes each day with Preminger and the actors and thereafter Preminger will take over as the sequence goes before the camera,” the New York Times reported on July 10, 1944. Clearly, Preminger would be working with his hands tied. He may well have wondered if this was his “reward” for Laura.

  The inevitable clash between director and producer occurred in late July just before the first day of rehearsals. Flushed with excitement, Lubitsch announced that Garbo was interested in playing Catherine. Along with everyone else, Preminger had enormous admiration for Garbo, but he also was deeply indebted to the already cast Tallulah Bankhead, who had tried to help Otto get his family out of Nazi Austria. He made it clear that he would not “participate in anything that would hurt her” and assured Lubitsch that he would ha
ve to withdraw if Tallulah were replaced. “Lubitsch refused to listen to me. He insisted there would be some way to get around the situation. He took me to see Zanuck.”8 But Zanuck was not convinced that Garbo was a stronger box-office lure than Tallulah, who had just appeared in a major hit, Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, whereas Garbo’s last film, in 1941, had been a flop called Two-faced Woman.

  Preminger, of course, won the first round—Garbo was never to make a comeback. But he felt that an aggrieved Lubitsch began to treat Tallulah

  Otto (left) looks at Tallulah Bankhead, a good friend, on the set of A Royal Scandal.

  with disdain. “He behaved rudely whenever he met her,” Otto claimed.9 Insulted, Tallulah threatened to quit, but Otto, who admired her bawdy humor, her liberal politics, and her talent, talked her out of it. He also had to deal with her terror of the camera. When the actress insisted that she could only be photographed from one side, Preminger and his cameraman Arthur Miller appeased her by placing a light on the camera (Miller called it “the Bankhead”) just above the lens that would compensate for Bankhead’s lopsided profile. A further bond between director and star was formed because of the hearty dislike they both developed for Anne Baxter, cast as a lady-in-waiting and the Empress’s romantic rival. A phony both on-screen and off, Baxter assumed a grand manner that rubbed them the wrong way. When Baxter asked if her grandfather, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, a conservative Republican and a noted anti-Semite, could visit the set, liberal Democrats Otto and Tallulah were incensed. With his star’s collusion, Otto devised a ruse. When Wright came to watch, Otto only pretended to shoot a scene between Bankhead and Baxter. He discovered “picayune problems” and stopped shooting ten times. Wright grew bored, as he was meant to, and left, as Otto flashed him a smile that had all the charm of a surgeons incision. Tallulah winked at her director. “I’ll never understand those stories about Otto, because he was awfully sweet to me,” she told the New York Times twenty years later, on December 6, 1964.

  “Tallulah wasn’t right for the role,” recalled costar Vincent Price, by now a Preminger veteran. “If she had had Lubitsch directing, maybe she could have been. But not with Otto. It was difficult for all of us making the film because Otto really didn’t have a huge sense of humor, at least not in the way the material needed. Whereas Lubitsch had this particular humor the script needed. He could take three doors and make you roar with laughter just with people walking in and out of the doors.”10

  Is it any surprise that the film was not well reviewed? “One for the jaybirds,” sniffed Otis L. Guernsey Jr. in the New York Herald Tribune on March 27, 1945. “Ernst Lubitsch, who produced, should blush,” Bosley Crowther grumbled in the March 27 New York Times. The box office was wan: $1.5 million against a cost of $1.7 million. For Tallulah, the tepid response spelled doom; for Otto, the lackluster film was merely an assignment he could, and did, shrug off with his customary sangfroid. “Someone said I was quite brave to accept the assignment,” he recalled. “I don’t worry about these things. I am not brave. It is part of my philosophy not to worry about what other people think of me. … I directed the film my way and if people felt that Lubitsch would have done it better, that is their opinion.”11

  Lubitsch certainly would have done it better. For a boulevard comedy about sexual mischief Preminger’s approach was much too stodgy. And he seemed to have no ideas about how to give the talky script cinematic momentum. For example, after a scene in which courtiers have gabbed about the Empress, setting the stage for a shimmering entrance (perhaps Catherine might appear in deep focus, then walk forward through a series of doors), Preminger settles for introducing his star in a static long shot in which she is seated at her desk in the right corner of the frame. He allows Tallulah’s distinctive voice to carry the show, and she doesn’t betray his confidence. Her famed basso with its lascivious ripples and her distinctively clipped rhythm whip the piece into shape. Barking orders, casting sidelong glances at handsome young attendants and barbed looks at the dreaded Anne Baxter, Tallulah’s Catherine is a take-charge woman. As Lubitsch intended, Tallulah’s Empress understands that the art of seduction demands a royal performance. (Although she had many of the characteristics of Bette Davis, Bankhead lacked Davis’s brio as a movie star. Perhaps it was her too deep voice, her sexual ambiguity, her strangely ungiving eyes, the whiff of the stage that always hovered over her screen acting, which blocked her from attaining film star status. For all the rhetorical force of her performance, A Royal Scandal proved to be the end of the line for Tallulah as a film personality. There was to be only one other movie twenty years later, a cheap horror show called Die, Die, My Darling)

  Zanuck was grateful to Preminger for having completed the project on schedule. The relationship between Otto and his employer seemed now to be fully healed. Otto ate with Zanuck frequently in the executive dining room.

  A lady-in-waiting (Anne Baxter) is reprimanded by Catherine the Great (Tallulah Bankhead) in A Royal Scandal. Baxter’s high-flown manner irritated Tallulah and Otto.

  He and Marion received invitations to the Santa Monica beach house. He had immediate access to Zanuck by phone and in his office. And the Zanucks were frequent guests at 333, where, as another frequent guest, composer David Raksin, recalled, “Zanuck appreciated Marion as a Viennese babe who gave great parties, and he also saw that she knew how to cope with Otto.”12

  As a favor to his friend Gregory Ratoff, who was directing, Otto appeared in a cameo in a musical fantasy with a score by Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin called Where Do We Go from Here? (1944). Playing a comically autocratic Hessian officer in an episode set in the Revolutionary War, once again Otto was being a good citizen. But where was the payoff? When would he get the compensation due him as the director of Laura? “Freedom of choice was in rather short supply at Twentieth Century-Fox under Darryl Zanuck,” he grumbled. “I had to turn out a string of films following rules and obeying orders not unlike a foreman in a sausage factory”13

  Preminger did not like to repeat himself, but as he became an increasingly sophisticated decoder of Hollywood rituals he recognized that repetition was one of the pillars of the system. If you had a big hit with a particular kind of film, you were obligated to return to the scene of the killing. And so Preminger presented the boss with a story conceived in the Laura mold, a psychological suspense film with the potent noir title of Fallen Angel. Zanuck gave him an enthusiastic go-ahead.

  In Fallen Angel an archetypal noir drifter, a con man and a womanizer, ends up by chance in a small California town, where he romances a sultry waitress and a well-to-do spinster. When the waitress is killed, the drifter becomes the prime suspect. As in Laura, appearances are deceiving and sex is twisted. To adapt the source material, a novel by Marty Holland, Preminger hired Harry Kleiner, a student of his at Yale in 1939. “Not one of my pupils succeeded,” Otto recollected in 1945. “This irked me, so I looked up Harry Kleiner, one of my best pupils, when I was in New York last year for the opening of Laura. I read a play he was working on, liked it, and brought him to Hollywood to do the script. His work on Fallen Angel vindicated me as a teacher.”14 As always, Preminger worked closely with the writer, supervising every line, and by the time the script was finished and ready to go into production he had committed it to memory.

  After approving the script Zanuck gave Otto the task of convincing Alice Faye, the studio’s top musical star of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to play the role of the spinster. Faye was a strong-willed young woman who had often stood up to Zanuck. At the moment Zanuck and Faye were feuding again, but the mogul was eager to bring Faye back to the studio—she hadn’t worked in over two years—because she had a large and loyal following. Zanuck was hoping that Faye’s appearance in a straight role, her first, would boost the film’s box-office appeal. “I knew Alice had turned down sixteen or seventeen stories, and I also didn’t think she’d want the part [of June, a repressed, organ-playing spinster],” Preminger said. “It was different from anything she had ever done
. It wasn’t glamorous, or the part of a pretty girl, or a very young one. But I knew it was real and down to earth, more like Alice’s own personality than the other roles she had played.”15 To his surprise Faye said yes.

  The obvious choice for the role of Stella, the doomed, come-hither waitress, was the studio’s resident sexpot, raven-haired Linda Darnell. For Eric, the brooding drifter, Preminger was certain that Dana Andrews, his sad-eyed leading man in Laura, would be ideal. Shooting started on May I and finished on June 26. Remarkably, Preminger exceeded the original budget of $1,055,136 by less than $20,000—a rare achievement. He enjoyed working with Faye, who may have been truculent with Zanuck but not with him. Otto regarded Andrews as “a director’s delight. He always knows his lines, arrives on time [the two essential criteria for survival on a Preminger set], and knows what he wants to do with a part.”16 The film’s composer David Raksin recalled Andrews as “a man’s man, a great guy really, and so easy to work with. At Fox he was one of Otto’s favorites.”17

  If Faye and Andrews were Preminger-proof, Linda Darnell was not. Eager to prove that she could do more than decorate the set, Darnell worked at the studio coffee shop to prepare for her role. But off the set she had already begun what was to be a lifelong battle with alcohol. “She was so scared she was almost always drunk,” recalled Celeste Holm, who was under contract to the studio at the same time.18 In either preventing or defending herself against an Otto tirade, Darnell proved to be helpless. “My impression was that Linda was learning her profession as she went along,” David Raksin noted. “I realized she was there not because she was a schooled actress—she was not—but because she was beautiful. That meant there would be a more or less sophisticated competition for her in the studio, which apparently developed. Little girls like that were sort of fair game. She tried very hard, but she couldn’t give Otto what he wanted on the first take, and he got very impatient. She would tremble, then he would scream.”19