With his Daisy Kenyon stars, Dana Andrews, Joan Crawford, and Henry Fonda. Andrews didn’t want to be in the film.
Weeks before filming was to begin, at Crawford’s request Preminger met with her for daily conferences in which they went over the script page by page, working out the blocking and motivation of each scene. “They got on very, very well,” Ruth Warrick observed. “Joan was a thorough professional, a good screen actress who was probably too disciplined. And when she didn’t want to be difficult, she wasn’t. Otto had enormous respect for the very concentrated way she worked and also for her great dedication to being a movie star.
“With Otto and Joan, we had two tyrants on the set,” as Warrick commented,
and that may have kept both of them in line. I think each of them sensed the potential ferocity of the other. Quite unlike Otto, Joan was very secretive. You could never quite tell what she was thinking, although you felt she had an underlying anger at the world. Quite like Otto, however, she was used to being in command. She demanded deference, and she insisted on protocol because she came from such desperately low circumstances. She was polite to the men in the company, as you would be to a maid, but she didn’t acknowledge I was alive; we were like boxers across the room, and I was just as glad because I didn’t want to tangle with her.2
In Daisy Kenyon, a woman’s film saturated with male as well as female neuroses, an unfaithful husband (Dana Andrews) is more attentive to his daughters (Peggy Ann Garner and Connie Marshall) than to his wife (Ruth Warrick), standing next to her protective father (Nicholas Joy).
Crawford had an exceptional clause in her contract: because she was suffering from change of life and experiencing hot flashes, the temperature on the set had to remain at fifty degrees. “She was always in tennis shorts and a thin blouse because she was so hot, while I had to wear a fur coat to keep warm,” Warrick recalled. “Otto said not one word about the temperature.” (As Warrick commented, “A subject of talk every morning was Joan’s mistreatment of her children, whom she had adopted when she was menopausal and an alcoholic; she couldn’t have children of her own because she had had so many abortions. She wanted the publicity of photo ops with her children. I actually heard her say to her children, ‘You must say, “I love you, Mommie dearest.” ’ ”)3
Because all the actors were as reliable and hardworking as Crawford— like the star, Dana Andrews (as the lawyer), Henry Fonda (as the former soldier), and Warrick knew their lines, arrived on time, and followed instructions—Preminger was on cruise control throughout the shooting. “It was all as serene as a mill pond,” Warrick remembered.
I was surprised, because Otto already had quite a reputation for yelling. He had two styles, actually, the courtly and the tyrannical, but I felt he really preferred the courtly one. When he was in his courtly mode, in a most dignified manner he would announce to the cast, “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?” “Ladies and gentlemen, will you please join me in the commissary for luncheon?” Otto also was known as a ladies’ man. But he was a gentleman and he was gallant to me, almost the way Orson [Welles] had been on Citizen Kane [in which Warrick played Emily Norton, Kane’s first wife]. Like Orson, Otto respected actors, and he was very patient with me.
Nonetheless, I have to say he carried himself like an army officer, and behaved like a general moving the troops. There were no fishing expeditions with Otto. No one, including Joan, ever argued with him; we all trusted his intelligence. But I think we all sensed he could cut you down to size.4
The trouble-free production, shot from June 6 to August 12, 1947, wrapped two days ahead of schedule with the final budget less than one hundred dollars over the original budget of $1,852,000. On the first day of shooting, as a thank-you for all the time he had spent with her working through the script, Crawford had presented Preminger with a set of garden furniture for 333 Bel-Air Road. On the final day she presented him with gold cuff links. Flattered, Otto later learned that “she always gave her director cuff links at the conclusion of shooting. Once at a party there were four of us wearing identical sets.”5
Preminger and his first-rate cinematographer Leon Shamroy give the romantic melodrama a moody film noir undertow. Low-angle ceiling shots seem to trap the characters, and doors and windows enclose them in frames within the frame. Eve Preminger, who was visiting her uncle while he was shooting, said the sets were dark “to hide Joan Crawford’s wrinkles.”6 That may well be true. But the four principal characters suffer from the kind of emotional wounds that Preminger had explored in his psychological thrillers, and the pools of darkness that seem to be lying in wait ready to
Magazine illustrator Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford) has an ambiguous, undeclared attraction to one of her models (Martha Stewart).
engulf each of them are thematically apt. Grieving over the death of his wife in a car accident five years ago, the vet is plagued by nightmares. The lawyer’s brittle, unloved wife is a sexual hysteric who beats her daughters. In less obvious ways the lawyer and Daisy are also unstable. The lawyer’s treatment of his wife is sadistic, and to win Daisy he’s prepared to give up his children. And Daisy, too old to be as indecisive as she is about her romantic choices, befriends a fetching female model who becomes her roommate.
Daisy Kenyon was a project Preminger himself initiated, and at the time he was more engaged by it than by any of his other post-Laura films. As the years passed, however, he claimed that the film was simply an “assignment” about which he remembered nothing. (Similarly dismissive was the film’s composer, the busy David Raksin. “I don’t recall a goddamn thing about it. I was trying to get it done on time; the way we worked it’s a miracle we
Fond brothers, Otto and Ingo, in 1947, when Ingo and his family moved from New York to Los Angeles.
remember anything. All I remember is that I had about four hours of sleep a night. I had to write to deadline, and I could.”)7 To be sure, Daisy Kenyon is no more than a well-wrought commodity that demonstrates yet again Preminger’s ability to play by the rules. Rather than trying to reinvent or to deconstruct a 1940s woman’s film, Preminger treats the material with respect, and his irony-free approach, along with the restrained performances he draws from his cast of pros, honors the genre.
As Variety proclaimed, the film is “high powered melodrama surefire for the femme market. It is a True Confessions yarn with a Vogue sheen. Producer-director Otto Preminger hasn’t missed a trick in endowing 20th-Fox’s version of the successful Elizabeth Janeway novel with glittering box office accoutrements.”8
In the fall of 1947, as Otto was in postproduction on Daisy Kenyon, Ingo moved his family and the elder Premingers to Los Angeles from New York, where they had remained since their arrival from Austria in 1938. After Otto’s film career had been reignited in 1942 he had continued to visit New York regularly and to remain a loving son, brother, brother-in-law, and uncle. But since he lived like a bachelor even before his marriage to Marion had begun to deteriorate, it had fallen to the solidly married Ingo to take care of Markus and Josefa. (Wed in 1936, Ingo and Kate remained a devoted couple until Ingo’s death in 2006.) Although Ingo had a law degree from the University of Vienna, he never worked as a lawyer in America. Until he moved the family to Los Angeles, Ingo had “bought and sold job lots, which was a very good business during the war. Merchandise was hard to get, and I struck up friendships with manufacturers and sold to people who couldn’t get any merchandise. After the war I saw there was no future in it.”9 Notably lacking his brother’s talent (“I have no artistic gifts,” he claimed), Ingo was a steady paterfamilias able to adjust quickly to life in a new country. It was simply not the Preminger style to grumble or to reflect nostalgically on the past—for Markus Preminger’s two sons, the present was the only tense that mattered.
The elder Premingers had also managed to adjust. “My grandparents had smaller living quarters in the United States, in New York as well as Los Angeles, than what they had been used to in Austria,” Eve Preminger r
ecalled.
For one thing, they no longer had the same number of servants. Here, my grandmother had to cook instead of directing the servants to cook. I gather they still had money but they had to accept a change of status, which they did quite gracefully. It was harder for me to adjust than it was for them. During the war, when I was five, six, and seven, people did not distinguish between Germans and Austrians who had escaped from Hitler, and being a Nazi. I hid my parents because of their accents; but since I was so little I couldn’t hide them that much. Having a German accent was a problem at that time, a real problem. Otto played Nazis in films, and I remember I would stand up in school and say he wasn’t really that way10
Eve, who had looked forward to Otto’s visits during the time her family was in New York, recalled him as “a doting uncle who would take me to lunch at the Stork Club.” In the summer of 1945, “when my mother was going to give birth, Otto offered to take me back with him to Hollywood. I went out to Los Angeles with Otto on the Super Chief — and Otto saw to it that I had a fabulous month. He built a swimming pool for me, he bought a dog and had a doghouse built, and he hired Miss College America, who had been on the cover of Life, to be my companion. Meals were served in a formal style, quite unlike at my parents’ home. A butler would serve you, and then remove the plate.”11 Preminger’s extravagance was second nature, but his gift giving was in no sense a substitute for affection: Otto adored his eldest niece, and all the presents were supplements to rather than surrogates for his feelings for her.
Otto’s niece Eve with her beloved uncle.
Eve’s glowing reports to her parents of her summer with Otto may have influenced her father to relocate to Los Angeles two years later. Also influencing Ingo’s decision was his brother’s professional prominence. As Ingo said, “Hollywood is a snobbish place, and when I first arrived there, Otto was an important director. That gave me cachet.” Because he was skilled in meeting and greeting, Ingo decided to become an agent. And with the help of his established older brother—“I owe Otto more than he owes me,” Ingo said— he quickly began to sign up clients, his famous brother among them. Otto gave Ingo access to industry figures, but Ingo had the temperament necessary to sustain a career as an agent. “I made an honest impression, and people trusted me,” he admitted.12 And there was one other factor: unlike his brother, Ingo did not yell. “My father always made a point of being calm,” Eve said.13 And in a way having a famously hot-tempered brother worked to Ingo’s advantage. “Many people began to say that I was the nice Preminger,” he said.14 Ingo may not have screamed as part of his way of conducting business, but blessed with the strong sense of self he inherited from his father, he was also no pushover. With his sharp wit and sarcastic quips ever at the ready, Ingo was every bit as capable as his brother of putting malingerers in their place.
Ingo’s first job was with the Nat Goldstone Agency on Sunset Boulevard. “When my father went to work for Nat Goldstone, he told him it would be for a year and that after that year he would open his own agency,” Jim Preminger, now also an agent, recalled. “And that is exactly what he did, when nobody thought he could or would. Otto introduced Ingo to a lot of people, including Ring Lardner Jr. and Dalton Trumbo, who became his clients; and then, near the end of his life, I also repped Lardner.”15 “Agenting is such a good business,” Ingo said. “Unlike in my previous line, you didn’t have to buy the product; you acquire actors as clients and get 10 percent or more. How can you do better than that?”16
As Ingo and his family were settling into their new life in Los Angeles in the fall of 1947, Forever Amber (on October 10) and Daisy Kenyon (on November 27) opened to good business and reviews. Otto was at the top of his game as a trusty contract director. On his next assignment, however, he stumbled. Once again he was called on to replace Ernst Lubitsch, in uncertain health since he had been unable to complete A Royal Scandal in 1945. In 1946, Lubitsch had successfully directed Cluny Brown, but shortly after that film’s release he had suffered another heart seizure—at a party Otto was hosting at 333 Bel-Air Road for one of the leading jurists of the Nuremberg trials. Nonetheless, during the following spring and summer Lubitsch felt well enough to begin working with his favorite screenwriter, Samson Raphaelson, on adapting the kind of frothy operetta that had enjoyed a vogue in Hollywood in the 1930s but by 1947 had become a back number. For the project that he was calling That Lady in Ermine, a fable about a countess who saves her small (mythical) country when she seduces the Hungarian colonel in charge of the occupation, Lubitsch cast Betty Grable, Fox’s top wartime musical comedy star. “Daddy? How could you? Why Betty Grable?” Lubitsch’s daughter Nicola remembered asking her father in consternation. “He didn’t like being challenged and he was upset that his own daughter questioned him. But I thought, and still think so many years later: How could he ever have chosen her? She couldn’t sing or dance or act. I felt his career must have been in trouble, and that hers must have been also. Had he been forced to accept her? I thought she was just awful, so common and ordinary”17
If Nicola Lubitsch could not see Betty Grable in the role, neither could the star herself. “It’s very witty, but is it me?” Grable remarked to Darryl Zanuck after she read the script. “And, more to the point, will my fans buy it?” Zanuck told her to have confidence in Lubitsch and assured her that the change of venue (“not a footlight in sight”) would be a wise career move.18
Once Grable began working with Lubitsch in early November, the director’s delight in his own material charmed her and helped to still her doubts. Like Preminger a former Reinhardt actor, Lubitsch “loved acting all the parts,” recalled costar Douglas Fairbanks Jr., cast as the invading Hungarian. “He was very good, actually. He had such vitality; he was tripping over himself with ideas. During rehearsal he’d laugh with pleasure and sometimes he’d even ruin his own takes.”19
For the first two weeks of shooting Lubitsch was a buoyant presence. On Saturday, November 29, seemingly in good health, he spent the day setting up master shots for a scene with Fairbanks and Cesar Romero. On Sunday, along with Otto, Billy Wilder, and Marlene Dietrich, Lubitsch was to attend a screening of a new film, Le diable au corps, at the home of the William Wylers. Before the screening, however, following a tryst with a woman he was seeing casually, Lubitsch suffered a massive seizure. His terrified date called Otto, who rushed across the street to find that his friend was near death. Otto phoned Lubitsch’s doctor, on whose advice he then called for an ambulance; but by the time help arrived Lubitsch had died. To avert a scandal, and before friends and the police arrived, Otto took the hysterical young woman to his own house.
Later that night, during an informal wake, Mrs. William Wyler reported that she overheard a phone call Otto made to Darryl Zanuck in which Preminger claimed that Lubitsch had asked him to complete the film if anything should happen to him. Preminger was “an avid careerist and saw That Lady in Ermine as an opportunity,” as Lubitsch’s biographer Scott Eyman maintained.20 But at this point in his career, with Forever Amber and Daisy Kenyon bringing in a lot of money for the studio, Otto surely did not need the reflected glory of completing the work of another director. In addition, he had not enjoyed making A Royal Scandal, and he certainly would not have relished the “opportunity” of working with Betty Grable. Preminger was always to claim that it was Zanuck who had asked him to finish the film, and it is only fair and probably accurate to take Otto at his word. Besides, Scott Eyman’s demonizing portrait of Preminger as an insensitive “careerist” angling for preferment at a moment of tragedy is out of character. Taking on Lubitsch’s film was for Preminger an act of friendship and a professional obligation, another example of his being a cooperative employee.
On December 5, 1947, only five days after Lubitsch’s death, he was compelled to resume shooting. However, once Otto took over, the mood on the set changed. Lubitsch had laughed at the jokes he had written and loved performing all the roles; Otto, in contrast, thought the script was “uninteresting.”21 The sh
oot was no longer fun. Between Preminger and his two leading players there was a total absence of rapport. Early on, after Otto blew up at an electrician, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. walked off the set and refused to return unless the director apologized. “Douglas could not and would not tolerate rudeness of any kind,” Vera (Mrs. Douglas) Fairbanks recalled. “He was not a saint—he could be severe—but he could not be rude; politeness was inherent in his nature, and he could not bear to see rude behavior in others. He could not have continued unless Preminger apologized.”22 Otto did as Fairbanks demanded, but the actor continued to be unhappy. When Fairbanks mentioned a point of interpretation he had discussed with Lubitsch, Preminger was offended. “Mr. Lubitsch is dead. I am the director of this picture,” he said.23 “We did not get along,” Fairbanks succinctly remembered.24
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in a scene from That Lady in Ermine. He didn’t get along with Preminger or his costar Betty Grable (depicted in the painting).
Where Lubitsch had treated Betty Grable with a fetching whimsy and showered her with reassurance, Preminger was brusque. Grable felt he was “too heavy-handed in his approach to the story”25 and, justifiably, she was dismayed when Preminger eliminated some of the musical numbers Lubitsch had shot. The company’s esprit de corps was further undermined by a rising tension between the two stars, who seemed to be acting out a real-life version of The Prince and the Showgirl minus the sexual attraction. According to her biographer, Tom McGee, Grable “thought Fairbanks acted more regally than the King of England. She felt that Fairbanks denigrated her fame, regarding her as a chorus girl who got lucky”26 Well? “Douglas did not think Grable was a mental giant, but he would never have been less than polite to her,” Vera Fairbanks said.27
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