The director and his cinematographer Arthur Miller gild Whirlpool with many visual pleasures. Mirror shots of the troubled heroine in her well-appointed home—as in Laura the objects of the rich are made to glisten— underline the character’s duality. In a brilliant sequence of noir iconography, under hypnosis and performing the script Korvo has provided, Ann leaves her house and drives to the house of the murdered woman. The camera is placed at odd, transfiguring angles; diagonal shadows cover the walls of Ann’s house and of the hilltop house of the dead woman whose portrait looms over her living room like a malevolent deity. The shot in which Gene Tierney stands before the portrait is an obvious homage to Laura and a rare
Imitating Laura: Gene Tierney in a scene from Whirlpool.
moment of self-quotation in Preminger’s oeuvre. David Raksin’s theme song (“nice, but not great,” as the composer recalled)36 evokes the heroine’s descent into a vortex.
After finishing the thriller (shot from June 6 to July 22, 1949, with Otto’s final budget again several hundred dollars under the original estimate), the director was thrown into a whirlpool of his own as he finalized his divorce from Marion. In court, playing fast and loose with the facts in her usual way, Marion charged her husband with desertion, claiming he had left 333 Bel-Air Road on January 17, 1946, and “never came back.” The truth was that, as she had begun to travel more frequently, it was Marion herself who had hardly been at home. In her 1957 autobiography Marion contradicted her courtroom testimony. “While the lawyers were busy with our case we went on living in the Bel-Air house exactly as if we intended going on that way indefinitely,” she wrote. “We talked over our affairs quietly and so dispassionately that I had the feeling none of it was real. Surely, two people did not plan to terminate a relationship of nearly twenty years with so little emotion. But we did.” Marion added that friends who came for lunch or dinner and “to swim in the pool among the white gardenias did not suspect that all this was the final scene of the last act of a play”37
Although she was wrong about the date of her husband’s departure, Marion was indeed accurate about his desertion. For many years Otto had not been a loving or faithful spouse, and for his abandonment Marion exacted stiff reparations. In an interview in 1958, however, Marion in her highly colored way claimed that she walked out of 333 virtually empty-handed. “I left a closet of clothes and a great art collection.”38 Otto’s recollection was quite different. “Marion got the best lawyers [who] got for her all they could, according to California law. It was expensive but it felt good to be free.”39 Ultimately, the divorce was to cost him the Bel-Air house, for which he admitted he had “overspent.” “I had a lot of financial obligations, and I hadn’t paid my taxes [when] my business manager [early in 1951, when Otto was in New York] called and said, ‘the Government has attached your house.’ I said: ‘Sell it.’ I never saw it again. Never saw that house, which I loved … or its paintings and furniture. I never cared because I felt I must be able to detach myself from material things and live.”40
The divorce was good news for both Otto and Marion. Otto won his freedom and Marion’s life took a completely unexpected turn. “One outgrows things,” Marion said. “The world I knew was suddenly meaningless and without purpose.” Not long after leaving Bel-Air Road, Marion met Dr. Albert Schweitzer. “Since I was a schoolgirl I have been fascinated with the teachings of Dr. Albert Schweitzer,” Marion claimed. “I earned my Dr. of Philosophy degree at the University of Vienna on a thesis written on Dr. Schweitzer.” (Marion did not even graduate from high school, and at the time she was supposedly writing her thesis she was appearing as a chorus girl posed on an enormous replica of a chocolate cake that revolved to music.) She began to spend several months each year at Dr. Schweitzer’s hospital in an African jungle. Here, in a remote outpost in Lambaréné, Gabon, the ex-Mrs. Otto Preminger, former doyenne of New York and Hollywood society, put in long hours as a nurse. “I have dedicated my life to the work of the greatest man who ever lived,” she said in a 1958 interview.41
Whenever she returned to New York from her yearly visit to Africa, Marion sought contributions from rich people she had met during her marriage to Otto. Against his will, Otto also became one of Dr. Schweitzer’s benefactors. In August 1953, Marion took Otto to court, claiming that her ex-husband owed her $48,000 under the terms of their 1949 separation agreement. She accused Otto of living on “a very grand scale” and entertaining “with lavishness” while ducking payments to her. Otto maintained that the 1949 agreement was void because at the time it was executed Marion had concealed that she had obtained a divorce in Mexico, a charge Marion denied. On September 30, 1953, California Supreme Court Justice Edgar J.
Nathan Jr. upheld Marion’s claim that Preminger had failed to live up to his agreement and ordered him to pay his former wife $48,000.42 Marion used her back alimony to buy medical and surgical supplies for Dr. Schweitzer’s clinics. For many years Marion worked tirelessly to raise money for the clinics, and in the 1960s she served as the honorary consul in New York for the Republic of Gabon.
Marion published two books. In her 1957 autobiography, All I Want Is Everything, she “stars” as Mrs. Otto Preminger. “A goulash sadly lacking in paprika,” reported the Library Journals43 “Outstandingly vapid,” huffed Helen Lawrenson in McCall’s.44 However, Marion’s second book, The Sands of Tamanrasset, is another matter altogether. In it she recounts the story of Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), a dissolute Parisian aristocrat who as a hussar in North Africa fell under its spell and experienced a spiritual conversion. Exchanging the high life in Paris for a regime of poverty and prayer, Foucauld established a Christian sanctuary in a remote Saharan location. At the time that Marion’s book was published, in 1965, Foucauld, who was killed by Arab brigands, was being considered for sainthood. Tracing her hero’s evolution from flesh to spirit, Marion seemed to be writing a disguised autobiography that evoked her own journey from Bel-Air to Lam-baréné. Despite some amateurish passages of invented dialogue, the book achieves a depth of feeling that belies Marion’s self-created image as an airhead, the woman with “the million-dollar smile.”
In the last decade of her life, Marion settled on Park Avenue rather than the African jungle. But her marriage in 1962 to a wealthy New York industrialist, Albert Mayer, did not end her good works and she continued to raise money for Schweitzer. Because the name was useful for her social standing as well as her fund-raising endeavors, even after her remarriage Marion continued to identify herself as Mrs. Otto Preminger. In 1960, after he had married for the third time, which meant that there were three women who were called Mrs. Otto Preminger, Otto attempted to prevent Marion from continuing to use his name. Reaching Marion’s secretary, he asked if his former wife could be known as Marion Preminger-Mayer. “The secretary’s reaction was amazing,” Otto recalled. “ ‘You should be ashamed of yourself she said furiously. ‘Do you know of whom you are speaking? You are speaking of a saint!’ ”45
In 1971, Willi Frischauer received a chilly reception when he tried to interview Marion for the biography he was writing about Otto. “I have forgotten [Preminger]. I do not remember he ever existed. I do not want to hear his name,” she said. When Frischauer pointed out that she had written about Otto in her memoirs, she snapped that she “repudiated” the book, which besides was “years ago.” Frischauer continued to challenge her, reminding her that she was still using the Preminger name. “I am Your Excellency now, Consul-General of Gabon!” she snapped before hanging up.46 Marion, who knows at what age, died suddenly of a heart attack in April 1972. “All in all, Marion always meant well,” Otto recalled in his autobiography. “She was a decent human being without any malice.”47 In the end, she was much more than that. As the first Mrs. Otto Preminger, she was a crucial partner in her husband’s rise to Hollywood prominence. After her life with Otto, first as an ambassador-at-large for Dr. Schweitzer and then as the chronicler of Charles de Foucauld, her “spiritual lover,” she
Dana
Andrews plays a police officer with an explosive temper in Premingers psychological thriller, Where the Sidewalk Ends.
became a person of real substance. In her own way, Marion’s strength of will and her determination to accomplish something of value were reflections of the powerful men she was drawn to. To be sure, she was often an artful fabricator, vain and frivolous; yet she was also good-hearted, and in her devotion to Dr. Schweitzer she attained a stature that would not have been available to her as Mrs. Otto Preminger.
As he was negotiating divorce terms with Marion and her lawyers, Otto worked on Where the Sidewalk Ends, which he shot from December 27, 1949, to March 3, 1950. Unlike Laura and Whirlpool, set in a world of wealth Otto knew at first hand, Where the Sidewalk Ends takes place on the mean streets. Preminger may have been in alien territory but surely he identified with the film’s protagonist, Lieutenant Mark Dixon, a police investigator with an ungovernable temper. After Dixon accidentally kills a suspect in a murder case he is investigating, he is charged with the job of finding the killer, and as he attempts to conceal what he did he begins to act and think like a criminal. Falling for the estranged wife of the man he murdered and horrified when her father is arrested for the crime, Dixon is caught in a noir whirlpool. He may be unruly but Dixon is decent, and to save the widow and her innocent father he is willing to sacrifice his life. In the end, however, through the kind of tortuous plotting that stains Preminger’s Fox-period noirs, Dixon survives. As the divided antihero, Preminger cast one of his favorite players, tight-lipped minimalist Dana Andrews.
Preminger and his cinematographer, Joseph La Shelle, transform Times Square (part location, part studio re-creation) into a setting twitching with menace. A place where good things do not happen, the film’s Times Square, something of a dress rehearsal for the famous New York-at-night location shooting of Sweet Smell of Success seven years later, is a neon playground of frenetic movement. In the title sequence, Dixon and his partner listen to dispatches on their car radio as they drive by the flashing lights of the city at night, a cauldron waiting to explode. There is no title music; the only sounds are the buzzing radio and the muffled cacophony of street noises. The settings resemble noir-city prints by Martin Lewis or Reginald Marsh. Dixon works in a bare office with barred windows. The suspect he kills hides out in the kind of rooming house often found in film noir; outside, elevated trains in the deep-focus distance provide a rumbling undercurrent.
On June 28, 1950, a week before the film opened, Otto was offered, and decided to sign, a new contract with Fox. Under his original seven-year contract, the studio had had exclusive claims on his services, but now at his own request his obligations were reduced. He would produce and direct one film a year for four years, and beyond that he was free to work on whatever projects he wanted. In return for release time, Otto’s salary was cut. When Preminger had originally approached his agent, Charles Feldman, to negotiate the contractual terms he would be demanding—release time and half pay—Feldman refused to represent him and warned his client that he would be committing professional suicide. “You’ll wind up directing plays on Broadway again,” he predicted.48 Yet returning to the theater was exactly what Preminger had been itching to do throughout the seven years in which he had been bound to the studio. More crucially, he also wanted time off so that he could set himself up as an independent filmmaker—the industry was about to undergo a seismic change, and unlike his recalcitrant agent, Otto was among the first to recognize it.
In 1947, the federal government had accused the major studios of restraint of trade—in addition to producing and distributing their films, the majors exhibited them in their own theater chains—and invoked an antitrust suit in the form of a consent decree, under the terms of which the studios would gradually have to sell their theaters. Since exhibition would be divorced from production and distribution, the stranglehold the studios had had over the American film industry would begin to be loosened. It was to take about a decade for the process to be completed, but the consent decree signaled the beginning of the end for the old system. Theater owners, freed from the time-honored practice of block booking, could bid for films on a competitive basis. And as Preminger noted, with the new arrangement “independent producers could at last make pictures and have them exhibited. I was one of the first to take advantage of the opportunity”49
Since he had been given a second chance at Fox in 1942, Otto had indeed behaved himself, but privately he often bristled at the kind of compromises that being a studio employee in good standing had required. If he hadn’t been a contract director, for example, he wouldn’t have had to make Forever Amber; he wouldn’t have been forced to use contract players and writers who might not have been the best people for the job; he might have had a wider—and better—choice of material. As he assessed his status in the industry in 1950, Otto was not satisfied. To become “Otto Preminger,” master filmmaker, he knew he needed to strike out on his own. And his new contract, marking an important transition not only for him but also for the business of filmmaking, gave him the chance to do that.
When he re-signed with Fox, however, Preminger was at work for the studio on The Thirteenth Letter and had no independent project lined up. In July and August he worked with Howard Koch on the screenplay, an adaptation of Le Corbeau (The Raven), a 1943 French film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot about an epidemic of poison-pen letters in a rural community. Clouzot’s Corbeau, set in France during the German occupation, is an allegory about the treachery of collaboration with the enemy; Preminger and Koch set the story in French Canada, divesting it of its original political subtext and turning it into a noir vision of male menopause. An aging doctor, Paul Laurent, is driven mad by the fear that he’s losing his potency. When he suspects his wife Cora of having an affair with Dr. Pearson, a young newcomer to the community, Laurent forces her to write anonymous letters attacking his supposed rival. As in other Preminger noirs, sexual repression and perversity are everywhere. Dr. Pearson is a prim gynecologist with an obsessive attachment to clocks. Cora’s older sister Marie, a nurse who long ago was in love with Dr. Laurent, is an embittered spinster. Denise, one of Dr. Pearson’s patients, is an oversexed clubfoot who tries to seduce the aloof doctor. Denise’s sister Rochelle wears thick spectacles and plays with a paddleball. Until the last-act revelation of Dr. Laurent’s guilt, each of the sexual neurotics is implicated as the potential author of the letters. Though it isn’t the major point, the script has echoes of the blacklist
On location in a small town in Quebec for The Thirteenth Letter. From left: Constance Smith, Michael Rennie, Charles Boyer, and Otto, sitting on a step above his actors.
Michael Rennie, mid-1950s, with Mary Gardner, the second Mrs. Otto Preminger.
just beginning to infiltrate the film industry. As Dr. Laurent announces, “In times of hysteria the accusation itself is enough to establish guilt.”
Preminger was determined to shoot all the exteriors on location, and over the summer, together with his art directors Lyle Wheeler and Maurice Ransford, he scouted a number of small towns in Quebec, including St.-Hyacinthe, St.-Denis, St.-Charles, St.-Hilaire, and St.-Mare. He appreciated the odd regional architecture and the landscape, and he planned to shoot in September and October when he could take advantage of the dim light of a Canadian fall and bare trees would enfold the story in a wintry chill. On his return from Quebec, Preminger had to persuade Zanuck that location shooting would give the film a texture that could not be matched in the studio. At the time studio heads typically regarded location shooting as a sure way to swell a film’s budget, but Preminger argued his point so persuasively that Zanuck authorized him to shoot some of the interiors on location as well. Otto knew that he had to prove himself, and he completed principal photography in five packed weeks in September and October, going only sixty dollars above the original $1,109,000 budget.
Far from home in an isolated location, cast and crew developed the kind of camaraderie probably not attainable in studio
shooting. And for Preminger the enforced intimacy had an unexpected dividend. Several times during filming leading man Michael Rennie (who played Dr. Pearson) had a visitor from New York, a tall, striking, but perilously thin young blonde named Mary Gardner, whose attention, as Otto noticed, “gradually switched from [Rennie] to me.”’50 A romance developed quickly. Mary, “a knockout all her life,” as her half-brother Howell Gilbert recalled,51 was a successful fashion model with artistic aspirations. At sixteen she had won a scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute, and with money earned from her modeling career she continued to study painting and sculpture.
After completing principal photography in Quebec on October 20, 1950, Otto returned to Hollywood for postproduction and Mary returned to her modeling career in New York. As soon as he finished editing The Thirteenth Letter, Otto was planning on going to New York as well—before he had begun shooting in Quebec he had acquired the rights to two plays. On a Sunday morning in late August, a week before he was to leave for Canada, he had read a comedy by Joseph Kesselring, the author of Arsenic and Old Lace, about the sex life of Osage Indians. By lunch he knew he wanted to produce and direct Four Twelves Are 48, and the next day he bought the rights. After returning from Quebec in late October, he summoned the author to Los Angeles, and as he supervised editing on his film he also met daily to work with Kesselring. By mid-November, satisfied with the revised script, he flew to New York for a breakfast meeting with his former coproducers Richard Aldrich and Richard Myers. By noon they reached an agreement to produce the play in association with Julius Fleischmann. Within two weeks Preminger had a cast, was ready to begin rehearsals, and had booked two out-of-town theaters for tryouts as well as a theater on Broadway. The show would bow at the 48th Street Theatre on January 17,1951.
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