In what was the decisive battle of his professional life, Preminger once again had the advantages of both good timing and good luck. As Otto had suspected and counted on, after twenty years of exerting an inordinate influence over the moral and visual content of mainstream American films, both the Production Code Administration office and Joe Breen himself—flamboyant, feisty, and personally likable—were ripe for a fall. All they had needed to push them off their pedestal was a David with the courage to sling a strategic stone at the Goliath of an outmoded document of censorship. Dr. Otto Ludwig Preminger of Vienna cast himself in the role, which he played with unstoppable conviction. His motives were a blend of idealism (Preminger’s objection to censorship in both its immediate and long-range consequences was genuine) and financial common sense (he knew in his bones that a public confrontation with the enforcers of the antediluvian Code could be worth its weight in box-office gold). As a spokesman for free speech, a defender of freedom in artistic expression, and an adversary of the straitlaced Code, Otto demonstrated redoubtable stamina and style.
Amid the hullabaloo, the film itself seemed to be almost beside the point, a mere parenthesis. The narrative of the film’s reception in 1953 provides important insights into the moral codes of Eisenhower’s America— only a deeply puritanical society could have regarded this talky innocuous comedy as sophisticated smut, a cause for alarm. The characters do indeed discuss the protocols of seduction with a “modern” insouciance unusual for the era, but the deeply conservative film in no way threatens the social or sexual status quo. “Now of course it all seems so innocent and even sweet, and so very old-fashioned,” Hugh Herbert’s daughter Diana said. “But in those days you did not hear words like ‘virgin’ and ‘seduced’ and ‘pregnant’ on stage or screen. Today you’d have to add strange sex scenes to get the same kind of reaction. In London critics and audiences weren’t as shocked; if anything they were amused by the American reaction. For many years now the primary market for the play has been high schools.”54
Preminger’s direction reinforces the material’s fundamental tameness. When he submitted as part of his defense of the film’s morality the argument that “there is not a moment of passion,” Otto wasn’t kidding. Never for an instant do the characters or, for that matter, the director, lose their cool. Working in a strict minimalist vein of straightforward continuing editing, objective camera movement, and centered compositions, Preminger transfers his hit play into the more durable form of celluloid with unimaginative competence. His approach indemnifies the material against any possible charge of licentiousness, but it also suppresses a liberating comic spirit, precisely the qualities of spontaneity and friskiness that might have been teased out of the show’s premise.
Preminger expands the action to include scenes in the shopping concourse of the Empire State Building; Don Gresham’s office; a taxi; the hallway, elevator, and fire escape in the building where Don lives; and the living room and bathroom of David Slater’s apartment. Throw in some fog and rain briefly glimpsed outside the windows, and that’s about it for scenic amplitude. “Don’t spoil the customers” might have been Preminger’s mantra to his art directors, Nicolai Remisoff and Edward Boyle. As a result the story unfolds in an airless environment, a world apart that is curiously unpopulated. When Don and Patty meet on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, for instance, no one else is there. (In the rhyming scene at the end, however, Preminger in a nice touch includes tourists—the stars of the German version of the film.) However, the film’s two major settings, the apartments of the swinging bachelor and his suave upstairs neighbor, are intelligently designed. Don’s modern bachelor pad, with abstract art on chaste white walls (a décor reflecting Otto’s regard for the International Style), is meaningfully contrasted with the Continental luxury (heavy drapes, museumlike representational paintings, Old World furniture, a decadent bathroom with a marble-lined tub) of Slater’s apartment.
On its own merits, rather than as a specimen in a censorship furor, The Moon Is Blue long ago failed the test of time. Even so, regarded with patience and generosity, it has an antique charm. In the short term the film made Otto money and established his bona fides as a cunning independent filmmaker. But in the long term this ephemeral comedy that happened to light a spark in an age of innocence drove another nail into the director’s always precarious critical standing. Unfairly, Preminger bashers have taken it as a paradigm of the director’s entire portfolio: not-so-good films on currently controversial topics that have no resonance once their “hot” subject matter ages.
As he was starting his career as an independent producer-director, Preminger was also getting adjusted to a new wife and to an unaccustomed role as a stepfather to Sandy. Because of Otto’s six-month annual release from Fox, the Premingers were peripatetic. The new couple, however, had different preferences about where to live. Otto favored New York and wanted to spend as much time there as he could; Mary, who liked Los Angeles, wanted to stay in one place and in a house of her own where she could paint and sculpt. “Otto was a big hotel liver,” as Sandy, now known as Gilbert Gardner, recalled,
and at the beginning of the marriage we were with him in suites at the Carlyle, the St. Regis, and the Ambassador. Later Otto had an apartment at 40 East Sixty-eighth Street; basically, nobody but me lived there. I was studying acting with Stella Adler at the time. The first time Otto brought my mother to Los Angeles, after they were married, he rented a small house overlooking the Bel-Air Hotel. And something happened that worried her. Gregory Ratoff stayed there for five days and played cards the whole time; Sam Spiegel was there much of that time too. It was all part of Otto’s Hollywood buddy system, which my mother didn’t understand.
After a period of moving around, Otto rented Anatol Litvak’s pink palace in Malibu—Litvak had built it in 1936 for Miriam Hopkins, his lady friend at the time. Litvak began to rent out the house in the early 1950s, and after a while that was Otto’s and my mother’s base when they were in Los Angeles. The house had an intercom system that was state-of-the-art. Otto employed a couple who ran the house. In my time Otto gave five or six major parties, sometimes with as many as three hundred people gathered on the huge deck and in the dining room. Cars would be lined up by valets. And there were a huge number of caterers. These were gatherings of people of great worth and value: Chaplin, who became a special friend of mine; Cole Porter—I met him four times, but he never remembered me; Tyrone Power; the Henry Fondas; the David Selznicks; James Stewart. I was kind of shocked by the excess, the ostentatiousness. Rock stars now run their lives in that fashion. This was the Old Hollywood, a very insular way of life.55
At the beginning, as Gardner recalled, my mother and Otto were really fond of each other and Otto was fatherly to me. He wanted me to be a part of his business, and while the marriage lasted I worked in some fashion on all his projects. He spent time with me; he wanted to spend time with me. He would always ask me to go to the theater with him. There was very little of the temper at home. That was reserved for younger actors, for business dealings, and with production people. Mostly, I thought the temper was an act. At home he really was not that way, but he was patriarchal, and he was European. He liked to have his butler take care of his clothes, and he expected his wife to run his household, to arrange dinners in the proper way. Fortunately, Mary was a good party giver. She had the grace and upbringing to be a good hostess.56
With (left to right) French actress Suzanne Dadelle, Mrs. Gary Cooper, Kirk Douglas, and Otto’s stepson Sandy Gardner, New York, December 1955.
From the start, however, the marriage had a shaky foundation. Increasingly preoccupied with the hubbub over The Moon Is Blue, Otto was a longdistance husband, and although Gardner did not know it at the time, from early in the marriage his mother and stepfather were not faithful to each other. In a basic way the marriage was a business arrangement. Otto wanted a hostess for his A-list Hollywood parties, and Mary, who had already weathered three failed marriages, w
anted financial security.
Since he had signed his new contract with Fox, Preminger had managed to avoid making any commitment. But when Darryl Zanuck called Otto when he was in New York preparing for the June opening of The Moon Is Blue, asking him to direct a western with a nifty pulp title, River of No Return, he realized the time had come to pay the piper. Understandably, “after the complete freedom I had enjoyed making The Moon Is Blue as an independent and the almost-freedom Howard Hughes had given me in order to take revenge on an actress,” Otto was reluctant to return to a factory job.57 Because for good reason he had trouble picturing himself out on the open range, he was not thrilled at the prospect of directing a western.
Preminger wasn’t the only one who questioned Zanuck’s assignment. Stanley Rubin, the film’s producer, was also doubtful. “I wanted Richard Fleischer, who had just done such a terrific job on Narrow Margin [a first-rate film noir Rubin had produced the previous year at RKO], but he wasn’t available,” as Rubin recalled. “It was at that point Zanuck mentioned Otto Preminger. I was familiar with his work, of course: I loved Laura and I felt he was talented but not the man for our piece of Americana. At a meeting with Zanuck’s assistant Lou Schreiber, I said Otto was wrong, his skill was in contemporary sophisticated melodrama and comedy. I saw Wild Bill [William] Wellman or Raoul Walsh or Henry King instead. When I found that Preminger had a pay-or-play commitment, I realized I was fighting a losing battle.”
Once Preminger read the screenplay, however, his attitude changed. He liked the story, which Rubin had developed with a series of writers.
A friend of mine, Louis Lantz, [Rubin recalled,] had a great idea. He wanted to steal the premise of Bicycle Thief, in which the hero finds that after his bicycle is stolen he has no way to support himself and his son, and transport it to the American West. When our hero in the West has his horse and gun stolen, he too can’t support or protect himself and his son. Lou wrote a good treatment and first draft, and I hired Frank Fenton for the final draft. Originally, the plan was to make the film on a modest budget; but as we were working on the first draft, Fox got “married” to CinemaScope [the first two Fox films in the new wide-screen process, The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire, had been released in the fall of 1953]. “Your movie lends itself to CinemaScope, and your budget is going to go up,” Zanuck, delightful and stubborn, a boss in the days when there really was a boss, told me.’58
Preminger welcomed the chance to shoot in CinemaScope, and he approved of the stars Zanuck and Rubin had already cast: Robert Mitchum for the horseless hero (Otto had forgiven, or more likely forgotten, their fracas during Angel Face) and Marilyn Monroe for the role of a saloon singer who hooks up with the hero and his son. Zanuck, famously ambivalent about Monroe, had resisted when Rubin pushed for her. “He was suggesting others. He mentioned Anne Bancroft in particular, but Monroe had the combination of qualities—sexiness, beauty, vulnerability—I wanted in the part. She was the only one I wanted,” Rubin said, “and I prevailed.”
When Otto flew in from New York, Rubin took him to lunch at the Fox commissary. “I made the mistake of youth—at thirty-six I was the youngest producer on the lot, and I was honest,” Rubin recalled. “I told Otto he was not the director I was looking for. What did that candor gain me? It put Otto on edge from our first meeting.” But as they began to confer about the songs Monroe would sing and about the production schedule, and after they traveled to Canada to scout locations at Banff and Lake Louise, Rubin grew fond of Preminger. “I felt he really wanted to do the picture, and that it was not just a contractual obligation.” Before production was scheduled to begin in the late spring, Zanuck made a change in the script that neither Rubin nor Preminger agreed with. “It wasn’t anything major, as I recall, but we felt we had to address it with Zanuck,” Rubin said. “I set up a meeting, expecting Otto to join me in the battle, and more likely, to lead it. But his behavior totally surprised me: he did not open his mouth. It was the only time I ever saw Otto fade into the wallpaper. I won the battle, but I won it alone.” It was only afterward that Rubin learned of Preminger’s long-past falling out with Zanuck: “Could Otto have been afraid of starting up again with Zanuck? I did not feel any tension between them, however, and fifty years later I still don’t know why Otto clammed up as he did in that meeting.”59
For his big-budget CinemaScope western Rubin was able to schedule twelve weeks of preproduction, during which Marilyn Monroe rehearsed and recorded her musical numbers, and a forty-five-day shooting schedule. Location scenes in Canada were shot first. At the end of June (only weeks after The Moon Is Blue had opened), Preminger and the cast flew to Calgary from Los Angeles. As a publicity gimmick, the cast traveled eighty miles on a specially commissioned train from Calgary to the Banff Springs Hotel. Crowds lined up along the route to catch a glimpse of Monroe, who as the star of the recently released Niagara and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the upcoming How to Marry a Millionaire was on the verge of becoming the world’s most famous blonde. Traveling with Monroe was her acting coach Natasha Lytess, “passing herself off as a Russian, for reasons of her own,” according to Otto, who was certain that in fact she was “a German.” 60
Under any circumstances, Preminger and the always tardy Monroe, who also seemed unable to memorize lines, could never have gotten along. But Natasha, hovering over Monroe’s every line and gesture, stoked Otto’s temper to the boiling point. Before and after each scene Monroe would be locked in private conference with Lytess, the star’s self-appointed codirector as well as her surrogate mother. According to instructions from Lytess, Monroe would either request or refuse to do another take. Maddeningly, Lytess had convinced Monroe that her reputation as a dramatic actress would rest on her ability to enunciate each syllable of every line of dialogue with exaggerated emphasis. “She rehearsed her lines with such grave ar-tic-yew-lay-shun that her violent lip movements made it impossible to photograph her,” Preminger complained. “I pleaded with her to relax and speak naturally but she paid no attention. She listened only to Natasha.” 61
The circumstance of Otto Preminger taking his marching orders from a pretentious acting guru and a desperately insecure actress surely conforms to at least two of Aristotle’s criteria for tragedy, capable as it is of eliciting both pity and terror. But the harassed director won little support from the crew. “Otto was a complete pain in the ass,” according to Paul Helmick, the assistant director and unit manager. “[He was] vicious, impatient, very crude to people.” 62 When he could no longer tolerate the Marilyn-Natasha onslaught, Preminger called Stanley Rubin in Los Angeles to demand Natasha’s removal. After her coach was dismissed, Monroe called Zanuck to demand her reinstatement and the next day Lytess was back on the set. “Otto had the power to get Natasha off the set, and Marilyn had the power to get her back,” Rubin recalled. 63 Zanuck phoned Otto to commiserate, but also to reinforce the fact that Monroe’s box-office pull was, in effect, paying his $65,000 director’s salary. Flummoxed and humiliated, and realizing he was stuck with Natasha, Otto began to turn his rage onto Monroe. “Deriding her talent as an actress and recalling [her] days as one of Sam Spiegel’s ‘house girls,’ he advised her to return to her ‘former profession,’ ” Monroe’s biographer Barbara Leaming claimed. 64 As Paul Helmick observed, “It was the biggest mismatch I’d ever seen. [Monroe and Preminger] absolutely detested each other.” 65
Preminger survived because his erstwhile adversary, Robert Mitchum, was equally impatient with Monroe. Immune to his costar’s sex appeal—she wasn’t his type—Mitchum more than once called her bluff. “He would slap her sharply on the bottom and snap, ‘Now stop that nonsense! Let’s play it like human beings,’ ” as Preminger recalled.66 Before a number of scenes Mitchum was able to startle Monroe into speaking in her own voice, delightfully slurred and intimate. In the finished film it’s possible to see the shots where Mitchum got to her and the ones where he failed to.
Monroe and Preminger were both soothed by the presence of Tommy Rett
ig, a delightful eleven-year-old cast as Mitchum’s son. “Marilyn loved the boy, and they had a sweet, warm relationship,” Rubin said. “Otto respected Tommy’s professionalism; when Marilyn would go up in her lines, and a scene might have to be shot over twenty times, the boy would be word-perfect every time.” 67 Tommy’s confidence, however, faltered after Natasha repeatedly told him that child actors were in danger of misplacing their talent unless they took lessons and “learned to use their instrument.” Tommy began to forget his lines and then, several times, burst into tears. It didn’t take long for Preminger to locate the source of the boy’s discomfort. Infuriated, he once again demanded Natasha’s banishment. And once again, at Monroe’s insistence, Natasha reappeared. Preminger, however, spoke to the cast and crew about Natasha’s abuse of Tommy and as he gleefully reported, “Everyone in the company [except, of course, Marilyn] cut her dead.” 68
Preminger also had to contend with rainy weather and dangerous stunts on the Bow River. For the most hazardous scenes, stunt doubles stood in for the stars, who worked only on a raft tied securely to the riverbank. Still, Mitchum’s heavy nightly intake of alcohol and Monroe’s perpetual distraction rendered them unsuited for scampering on rocks made slippery by rushing water. Near the end of the location shooting Monroe suffered a serious twist to her leg that kept her off the set for a few days. When she returned to Los Angeles in early September to shoot the interior scenes at Fox, she was on crutches.
Otto Preminger Page 24