Calling on actors he knew or had already worked with, Otto precast the show, but he was required by Equity rules to hold open call auditions. Biff McGuire, one of the auditioners, recalled that “there was a line of actors winding from the lobby of the Empire Theatre upstairs to where Otto was seated. He would look at the picture of the actor standing in front of him but not at the actor. I was determined to get him to look up at me. I said, ‘I am required only to give my name, rank, and serial number.’ I know I took a terrible chance—I was certainly familiar with his reputation for yelling— but he enjoyed the humor of it. ‘What is it?’ he said, looking up and laughing. He had a wonderful humor with a cutting edge. He remembered me, and cast me as a replacement lead in his next show.”52
“I was lucky,” Preminger said in a pre-opening interview with the New York Post on January 16, 1951. “Anne Revere wanted to do a play and she liked this one. And [theater veterans] Hiram Sherman and Ernest Truex, the people I first visualized, were also interested. Everything just fell into place. I wanted to present a comedy that has something to say. People right now need to laugh, and we made them laugh in Wilmington and Philadelphia, but New York is the last and highest court.” New York, however, did not laugh. The show received blistering notices: “vulgar” and “tedious” were the adjectives most frequently used to describe the play while “heavy-handed” seemed the label of choice about Preminger’s direction.
“As of tonight we are through with the multiplication tables and are taking up differential calculus,” the four coproducers wired the cast.53 They closed the show after the second performance. Two days later, The Thirteenth Letter opened to indifferent notices. Preminger’s interpretation may be less corrosive or politically pointed than Clouzot’s—on its release in wartime France Le Corbeau had created the kind of scandal the French delight in—but it is solid work nonetheless. Preminger directs in a style as severe as the setting. The characters work in a hospital with empty rooms and corridors and live in sparsely furnished houses that seem infested with cobwebs. In the virtuoso opening shot, a man with a cane, the impotent Dr. Laurent, his back to the camera, stands on a barge as it moves toward the small town he is returning to. The composition ripples with premonitions of the character’s isolation from the city he is approaching as well as of his dark influence over it. The film is beautifully cast. The aging roué Charles Boyer, no longer the heartthrob he had been in the 1930s and 1940s, turns Paul Laurent, gripped by terror at the prospect of losing his allure, into a moving figure. And Linda Darnell, at the end of her tenure as siren-in-residence at Fox, is equally touching as the crippled woman struggling to seduce Michael Rennie’s frigid gynecologist. Preminger, for good reason, trusted Darnell in the role, and on the set there were no flare-ups between them.
Despite a failed play and film, Preminger was in a buoyant mood. His relationship with Mary was blossoming, and he and his theatrical partners were ready to begin production on a new comedy they had great confidence in. Before Kesselring’s play had even begun its tryout tour, Preminger and his coproducers had already worked out a schedule for their next show. They set the first rehearsal for the Monday after Four Twelves Are 48 was to open on Broadway. They booked theaters in Wilmington and Boston for the pre-Broadway tour. And they set a Broadway opening at the Henry Miller Theatre on March 8, 1951. The play called The Moon Is Blue, was a frothy comedy about sex; yet this boulevard divertissement was to prove the single most important property in Otto Preminger’s career.
SIX
The Declaration of Independence
F. Hugh Herbert, the author of The Moon Is Blue, was Viennese by birth but had been raised in England. He and Preminger, neighbors in Bel-Air, had met when they were both under contract at Fox. The two became good friends who took frequent walks in the hills and canyons near their homes. In the summer of 1950, at the point when Preminger had extracted release time from Fox and was actively seeking film and theater properties, Herbert on one of their jaunts around Bel-Air mentioned a play he had just written about a would-be young actress, a virgin, who flirts with an all-American young bachelor and an older continental rake. No doubt reminded of the Viennese naughty-but-nice romantic comedies he had presented at the Theater in der Josefstadt whenever he had needed a quick box-office fix, Preminger was enticed.
Since 1926 Herbert had been writing frolicsome screenplays with such semi-risqué titles as The Demi-Bride, Adam and Evil, Tea for Three (all 1927), The Cardboard Lover (1928), He Knew Women (1930), The Secret Bride (1935), and As Good as Married(1937). But like Preminger, Herbert also had a keen interest in the theater. He made his Broadway debut in 1940 with Quiet Please, an unsavory comedy about a film star who teaches her straying husband a lesson about fidelity by having an affair with a gas station attendant. In 1943 Herbert had a commercial hit with Kiss and Tell. The queasy premise: in order to protect her secretly married brother a fifteen-year-old must pretend she is pregnant. “Although my father wrote material that had a ‘sexy’ touch, he was anything but a roué,” Diana Herbert remarked. “He was not a sophisticated man, but an innocent really, and he wrote about innocence. When he wrote about roustabouts, that was his dream of what he might have wanted to be. He and Otto shared an Old World sensibility. They were both formal and very proper. Otto was so austere that when we saw him my sister and I practically curtsied; we felt we had to.”1
When he put Herbert’s comedy into rehearsal in January 1951, Preminger had a lot at stake. He knew he couldn’t afford a second theatrical flop after Four Twelves Are 48, and since The Moon Is Blue was another slight piece about sexual mores, a bout of insecurity might have been understandable. But Otto had no such twinges, and throughout rehearsals, as his romance with Mary Gardner continued to thrive, he was in an upbeat mood. His major concern was a third act he felt needed reworking. He
Two Old World fuddy-duddies, Preminger and F. Hugh Herbert, the author of The Moon Is Blue, confer with their Broadway leading lady, Barbara Bel Geddes.
wanted the author to “rewrite it no matter what the reviews said or how well the audiences liked it out of town.”2 Herbert agreed, but he may have been unnerved by the fact that the conversation took place as Otto lay in a large bathtub filled with soapsuds. “My father told me that he tried to keep a straight face, but it was hard for him because he was so proper,” Diana Herbert recalled. “He told me that Otto would often hold court in his tub, and it would always disconcert my father.”3
Act Three aside, Otto believed in the play and in a cast he felt was made to order for it. As the professional virgin Patty O’Neill he chose the winsome and appealing Barbara Bel Geddes. To play Don Gresham, the eligible bachelor who picks up Patty on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, he selected an expert light comedian, Barry Nelson. And as Gre-sham’s upstairs neighbor David Slater, a middle-aged sybarite with a prize-winning manner, he tapped Donald Cook, a veteran of drawing room comedy. “I was punctual, I knew my lines, I knew I could do the part, Otto knew I could do it, and there wasn’t a moment’s trouble,” Nelson recalled. “The play was a joy to work on, and Otto was a pleasure to work with.”4 When Biff McGuire replaced Barry Nelson, Preminger directed him in four intense days. “Otto was sometimes hard to decipher,” McGuire recalled.
But he knew what he wanted. “More champagne, less beer,” he would say—and that is what he got. His staging was very natural; he didn’t force anything. He directed us so that we got all the laughter that was involved, and I was surprised at how much there was. But sometimes I thought he was playing the role of the director rather than really being one. He did something that would embarrass the cast. He had an assistant, Max Slater, whom he had known in Vienna and whose real name was Schultz (Max changed his name to Slater, after the character named David Slater in the play). Max had a smile Otto enjoyed. He would call Max to the stage and say, “Smile, smile at Otto.” Max would come out, dutifully smile, then leave the stage.5
During rehearsals, Preminger, through numerous
press releases, tried to create a naughty image for the show. “We have to get a bishop to condemn us,” Preminger said, according to Biff McGuire.
When The Moon Is Blue opened in Wilmington to a delighted reception, Preminger remained convinced that a rewritten third act was still mandatory. During the Boston tryout the cast performed the original third act each night, while during the day they rehearsed the new third act in bits and pieces as Herbert was reworking it. When the show opened at the Henry Miller on schedule on March 8, 1951, with a revised final act, it received a warm welcome. Detailing the play-by-play choreography for a tryst that never occurs—the dangling question throughout the evening is whether Patty will lose her virginity—Hugh Herbert’s slight comedy became Otto Preminger’s one major success in the American theater.
Taking advantage of his new contract with Fox, which allowed him to remain in New York for six months during the height of the theater season, Otto settled into an apartment in a converted mansion at 40 East Sixty-eighth Street. He saw virtually every show that opened on Broadway and he would often travel to see shows out of town. After the theater, often in the company of Mary Gardner and sometimes with Mary’s son Sandy along as well, he was a frequent patron at the Stork Club and El Morocco. Emboldened by the success of The Moon Is Blue, he announced that his next venture would be The Greatest Story Ever Told, featuring a cast of one hundred. “None of the actors will receive billing,” Preminger promised, “and because of the nature of the story they will not be identified with the parts they play Our plan is to take the show on the road for six months, and then into New York,” he told the New York Herald Tribune on February 12, 1951. He promised other productions: The Devil’s General, by Carl Zuckmayer; From Left Field, a play about baseball in a small town, a most unlikely choice for a man who had no interest whatever in either watching or participating in sports; and The Chameleon Complex, another light sexual rondelay in the Moon Is Blue vein. With producer Ben Marden, Preminger operated the Playhouse Theatre and booked its attractions. Over the summer as he scouted stock productions for possible tenants for the Playhouse, he was elated to have the job of casting and booking the second and third national companies of The Moon Is Blue and of directing Chicago and London productions as well. (The Moon Is Blue would run for 924 performances on Broadway and for a year in Chicago and London.)
When Otto had to return to Hollywood after six months, he managed to duck any commitments to Zanuck. He had already decided that a film of The Moon Is Blue would be his first independent production, for a company called Carlyle that he was setting up with Hugh Herbert. From a number of angles The Moon Is Blue was a shrewd choice. Since he was not planning to open up the play Otto could produce on a low budget. And he was counting on a censorship brouhaha to give the project notoriety. He did not want to rush into production, however, but would make the film only when the Broadway and touring companies had run their course.
After an abbreviated visit to Hollywood, Preminger returned eagerly to New York and to Mary, quickly adding two more plays to his portfolio of promises: another light comedy, The Brass Ring, and The Koenig Masterpiece, a drama by novelist Herman Wouk. Of all the shows during this period that Preminger had announced, Wouk’s was the only one that he staged. He began rehearsals at the Playhouse Theatre at 2 p.m. on December 4, 1951. That morning, he and Mary were wed in a brief civil ceremony, after which Otto dashed to the theater with his bride. Mary’s honeymoon was watching her new husband rehearse Wouk’s play (which had been given a new title, A Modern Primitive). “Otto was beaming and delighted, and Mary, blonde, very beautiful, and very charming, was in a bridal state of bliss,” recalled Paula Laurence, who had a principal role in the play “They both had an aura of radiant joy. Otto would take all of us out to extravagant lunches at which Mary was worshipful. Otto told stories and she laughed and applauded, as did the rest of us. At that moment they were clearly happy with each other. Otto was in a benign mood and remained so throughout rehearsals. Maybe he should have gotten married more often!”
As it turned out, Otto needed to be patient because Wouk’s promising play about a painter who embezzles money and flees to Mexico required major renovations. “Wouk was shy and serious,” as Paula Laurence remembered. “There was no friction between him and Otto at rehearsals, at least in front of us; I don’t think Otto would have allowed it. But I knew that Otto was asking for rewrites and Wouk was not doing them. Wouk had a good reason for resisting, however. He could say, in good faith, ‘I don’t want to rewrite because I haven’t yet seen what I have written.’ ” The problem was that the leading actor, Murvyn Vye, couldn’t remember his lines.
Otto was enormously patient with Murvyn, trying to get a performance out of this bewildered man [Laurence said]. He thought Murvyn would get the lines eventually and he would not fire him. Because he remained focused on Murvyn, however, the rest of us didn’t get much attention. At one rehearsal Otto turned to me and said, “Paula, you’re so charming in life and so boring in this scene.” All of us shrieked with laughter. I was playing a journalist who had come down to interview the artist, and I was boring because Murvyn would scramble the lines and I had no idea what he was talking about.
The show opened for a pre-Broadway run in Hartford, Connecticut, right after Christmas, and closed almost immediately. “We barely opened in Hartford, and some of us felt that we never really did open,” Laurence recalled. “Over the years I was to hear mean, scandalous things about Otto, fierce stories that were almost hard to believe. But I was a witness to the fact that there was a decent person there. And with that Viennese charm, which was like a show, a performance, though I wouldn’t say it wasn’t sincere on his part, and his well-known skill as a lover, he was certainly a ‘character’ and so regarded in the New York theater.”6
Diana Douglas, who played the artist’s mistress, had a different reaction to Preminger. Douglas felt that Vye was insecure because he knew he had been Preminger’s second choice for the role, tapped after Anthony Quinn had turned it down.
Knowing he was second choice didn’t help his confidence. Otto picked on him unmercifully during rehearsals, which only made him falter more. Otto would scream at poor Murvyn, the veins standing out on his forehead, literally foaming at the mouth. I had never seen such terrifying rage in anyone. He had Murvyn trembling and incoherent. It was sickening. I am sorry now that I was too chicken to challenge Otto directly over his cruelty toward a fellow human being, but I was craven and determined not to jeopardize my job.7
As Douglas reported, Vye “had what we found out later was a complete nervous breakdown. … he was carted away to spend the next four months in a sanitarium.”8 Before Preminger closed the show Saturday night, he asked if Diana would ask her husband, Kirk Douglas, to take over the role. The actress refused to honor the request.
Two weeks after closing A Modern Primitive, Otto received a call from his friend Billy Wilder asking him to play the commandant of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp in Stalag 17. Preminger, newly married and still busy superintending The Moon Is Blue, said no, but Wilder insisted he read the script. After he did, Otto changed his mind. Wilder offered him $45,000 for three weeks’ work. Wilder and Preminger had much in common. Six months younger than Otto, Billy Wilder was born Jewish in Vienna and like Otto had enrolled as a law student at the University of Vienna. Unlike Otto, however, he quit after one year in order to pursue a career as a journalist. As a quite young man he moved to Berlin, where he continued to write for newspapers and where, as he was to admit, he also became a taxi dancer (in other words, a gigolo) at a hotel. In 1933 Wilder fled from Germany to Hollywood, where he arrived with none of the entrée or welcome that had been extended to Preminger. A crude, bitter man, over the years Wilder was to make as many enemies as Preminger, but despite a long downhill slide after 1960 his work was to be far more appreciated. In collaboration with Charles Brackett, Wilder wrote a series of highly regarded comedies, including Midnight (1939), Ninotchka (1939), and Ball of Fire (1
941). In 1944 he cowrote and directed a canonical film noir, Double Indemnity. The next year he won Academy Awards for writing and directing The Lost Weekend, a portrait of an alcoholic. And with Brackett he won another Academy Award in 1950 for the screenplay for Sunset Boulevard, the best film ever made about Hollywood. Wilder had just received ecstatic reviews for Ace in the Hole (1951), a smug melodrama about a cynical journalist that failed commercially. Over the years the friendship between Wilder and Preminger was marked by fiery episodes—they weren’t on speaking terms for the last decade of Otto’s life—but when Wilder called Preminger in early 1952 to offer him a role, they were in a period of accord.
Wilder’s script for Stalag 17, cowritten with Edwin Blum, transformed a sentimental play about a German camp for Allied prisoners of war that Wilder had seen on Broadway in the spring of 1951. Wilder and Blum turned the material into a hard-boiled comedy about a group of prisoners who wrongly accuse the mercenary protagonist, a prisoner who operates a thriving black market business and runs bets on rat races, of being the camp informer. To enhance the biting tone he wanted, Wilder invented the character Otto plays, the witty, acidulous camp commandant. Happily married (Otto was living with Mary and his stepson Sandy in Anatol Litvak’s palatial pink house on the beach in Malibu), Otto reported to work in an ebullient mood and from the first day made it clear that he was there to take direction rather than to give it.
His well-being was shattered during the first week of shooting, however, when his beloved father died of cancer at seventy-five. Dr. Preminger had never spoken about the cancer that had caused him to waste away quickly and he had refused to submit to any surgery that might have prolonged his life. Otto was aggrieved. But his profound sense of loss was tempered by pride in the way his father had adjusted to life in America. Sixty-one when he had fled from Austria, Markus had felt that qualifying as a lawyer in an unfamiliar language was out of the question, so he decided, as Otto reported, “to invest the modest amount of money he had brought with him in the stock market.” After studying the American market and the financial histories of major corporations, Markus had proceeded to make sound investments. And as Otto boasted, Markus was “wealthier when he died than when he arrived here. In the meantime, he had lived well for over fourteen years, buying a house for himself and one for my brother as well.”9
Otto Preminger Page 21