He didn’t realize it at the time, and no one told him, but Preminger’s plan contained a probably fatal flaw. Whereas many naturally talented, unknown seventeen-year-olds could play a seventeen-year-old as conceived by Hollywood screenwriters, how many could persuasively embody the exceptional teenager Shaw had written, a young woman of extraordinary, perhaps even supernatural, gifts? Communing with the voices of Michael and Margaret that come to her through the bells in the church of her native Domrémy, this divinely inspired teenager possessed powers that would alter the course of history. Moreover, the illiterate young woman is both a poet
With a group of unknown young women hoping to play Saint Joan, in September 1956.
and dialectician who speaks in the long, rolling sentences of a Shavian orator. Surely the odds of finding, anywhere in the world, an inexperienced, unprofessional teenager blessed with the technical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual capacity to portray Shaw’s great heroine—one of the most demanding roles in world theater—were close to zero. Probably only a miracle, of the kind that the messianic heroine herself would be capable of, could have delivered such a person.
But in the spring and summer of 1956, as he began to publicize his search for Joan, Otto was optimistic. And so were the over 18,000 applicants who mailed in their entry forms by the August 23 deadline. Preminger and his staff narrowed the field to around three thousand young women, each of whom the producer was planning personally to audition on a thirty-seven-day tour budgeted at $150,000, during which he would fly over 30,000 miles visiting nineteen cities in the United States, Canada, and Europe. His marathon began in London at the end of August.
Before he held the first of 250 auditions scheduled in London, where the film was to be shot starting in January 1957, Preminger set up an office at 144 Piccadilly in a suite in a mansion that belonged to producer Alexander Korda. To head his London base of operations Otto hired an Englishwoman, Rita Moriarty who had worked in New York for the producer Alexander Cohen. “I specialize in difficult people,” Moriarty recalled. “I’m interested in them to see if I can handle them. I had been warned that Preminger was dreadful to work for—he really had a terrible reputation. When I met him—he was at the Dorchester Hotel in Cecil Beaton’s suite—I liked him without being mad about him. We got along well but not that wonderfully well. I had to fight for my salary. But I knew I was valuable to him because he needed a British anchor in his office, and since I had worked in England and Otto hadn’t I had the upper hand.” As Moriarty began to help Preminger hire his crew, she tried to point out that his criteria were wrong. “Foolishly, Otto was impressed by people who had the right address and who knew the Queen. But that’s not what you need for a crew. You need cockneys who work hard. He hired too many effete ones. Otto wasn’t knowledgeable about the British, but I also saw that it was larger than that: he just didn’t understand people. He was interested in them, but he didn’t understand them.”4
During the London auditions, held in the ballroom of a great house on Park Lane, Rita Moriarty sat on one side of Preminger while on the other was Lionel Larner, his twenty-two-year-old London casting director who pre-interviewed all the candidates. As Larner recalled, “The auditioners were to read a single speech, ‘Give me that writing.’ One girl came in and said, ‘I’m not going to read because I am going to play Saint Joan, my voices told me.’ ‘You misunderstood your voices,’ Preminger answered.” After London, Larner traveled with Preminger to coordinate auditions in Edinburgh; their bond strengthened when Larner made Otto laugh. “ ‘You are the only member of my crew who is not married,’ Otto said to me. ‘Will you let me pick a wife for you? After all, I am the man who is going to select Saint Joan.’ ‘Let me see her performance first,’ I said. He was tickled. Otto loved wit.”5
After Edinburgh Preminger held auditions in Manchester, Dublin, Glasgow, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. Returning to America, he auditioned 268 candidates in New York. By the time he reached Los Angeles, he realized that there were far fewer potential Joans than he had expected. “I thought I could find at least 50. But I won’t test that many. I began to realize if looking for an unknown were so easy, a star would be easier to find.”6
For the American auditions Sandy Gardner accompanied Preminger. “It was exhausting, and very fast,” Sandy recalled. “Some of the ones Otto looked at had sent in nude shots in which they were spread out on leopard skins. They didn’t understand the nature of the part. The girls were given a single long speech and it was my job to escort each girl into the ballroom of a hotel, where the auditions were usually held. The girls would get a cue from me when to begin.”7
Midway through his American tour, at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago on September 15, 1956, Preminger thought he might have found his Joan. “Something clicked,” he recalled, when Jean Seberg, a seventeen-year-old from Marshalltown, Iowa, entered the audition room. (Like all the others, Jean’s interview was filmed.) When an off-screen Preminger asked, “Do you want to be an actress?” Jean, with an affecting clarity and directness, answered: “Very badly.” “Why haven’t you worn a cross?” Preminger inquired. “My family is too poor to afford one,” Jean replied, bowing her head. But after Preminger responded with a doubtful “Really?” she giggled. “Because I knew all the other girls would be wearing them,” she admitted. Surprised by her statement, Preminger laughed.8 When Jean performed the audition scene, he was impressed by her delivery, free of the theatrical curlicues he had no patience for. The young woman’s charm and sincerity touched him, and he liked her smile, her all-American vigor, and the confident way she carried herself. He was certain Jean would be among the finalists he would test in New York in mid-October.
“I saw Jean’s audition in Chicago,” Sandy said. “Up to that point, Otto had really been impressed by only one other actress, Kelli Blaine, whom we had seen earlier in New York. Kelli was tough, with a gap between her front teeth like David Letterman. She was not beautiful, but she looked the part: she was right for the part. Still, in Chicago, I put my vote in for Jean, who was damn good too. But Otto didn’t think my opinion was worth much.”9
Preminger called Jean’s startled parents to ask them to allow their daughter to come to New York two weeks before the scheduled screen test so that he could work with her. At his first meeting with Jean at the Ambassador Hotel in New York, Otto started to worry. Had someone been coaching his discovery? She no longer seemed to be as spontaneous as she had been in Chicago. Disappointed, he began to bark at the frightened novice. “His anger bore a double edge,” as Jean’s biographer, David Richards, observed. “On the one hand, he genuinely appreciated her untutored freshness, a quality he was determined to preserve on film, and he was distressed to see it endangered. On the other hand, his ego was at stake. The actress he chose for Saint Joan would be his creation, and his alone. Meddling would be forbidden.”10 Preminger’s evident disapproval stung Jean, who was certain she no longer had any chance of getting the role.
Jean Seberg waiting with a production assistant and an unidentified woman to hear if she has been chosen to play Saint Joan.
After auditioning over three thousand candidates, Otto in the end made only three screen tests: Jean’s, Kelli Blaine’s, and one of a woman from Stockholm, Doreen Denning. For the test he asked Jean if she’d be willing to have her long hair cut short—a sign that despite his disappointment in her during rehearsals she remained the front-runner. Jean, of course, complied. The androgynous short haircut highlighted her fine bone structure, her clear, sensitive eyes, and a tremulous sex appeal waiting to be released. As he prepared Jean for the test, Preminger’s temper flared as he asked her to repeat scenes many times until he got exactly the gestures and intonations he wanted. “What’s the matter? Don’t you have the guts to go on?” he yelled when he had driven Jean to the breaking point. “I’ll rehearse until you drop dead,” Jean answered.11 He was testing her limits, a usual Preminger strategy, and he was impressed by the young woman’s stamina. “Kelli Blaine was e
ven stronger than Jean,” Otto’s stepson observed, “but I think Otto chose Jean because in the end he felt he could manipulate her more easily”12
On Friday, October 19, Otto informed Jean Seberg that she was his Saint Joan. Two days later Preminger, in his most expansive, master showman style and beaming like a new father, introduced his discovery to the press corps he had summoned at noon to the executive suite of the United Artists offices in New York. That night, he presented his choice on The Ed Sullivan Show, where, before an estimated sixty million viewers, Jean reenacted her audition scene. Her beauty, her charm, her vivacity could not disguise the irreducible fact that Jean Seberg was an amateur. Indeed, in her entry form she had listed as her entire résumé “many local plays and winner at the State University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, for an exerpt [sic] from Shaw’s Saint Joan.” (Attached to Jean’s application had been a letter of support from a local booster, J. W. Fisher, president of the Fisher Governor Company, manufacturers of gas regulators, diaphragm control valves, liquid level controllers, and pump governors. “A young lady of our community … is within the age requirements, having graduated from High School. This summer she is playing summer stock at Cape May, New Jersey. She is blonde, and most attractive. Her voice carries the proper authority and she has talent.”)13
A few days after her appearance on Ed Sullivan, Jean was taken by limousine to Boston, where she underwent a secret operation to remove moles from her face and throat. Returning to Marshalltown, she was greeted with a welcome befitting a world leader. She remained at home until November 13, her eighteenth birthday, when she left Marshalltown to begin her journey to London. On her arrival Preminger sequestered her in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel, where he hoped, in a few short weeks, to transform Jean of Iowa into Joan of Arc. In preparation for the first read-through with the entire cast, scheduled for December 14, Preminger arranged for Jean to be given elocution lessons designed to transform her flat Midwestern twang into a more refined mid-Atlantic diction and to be tutored in French (which, as preparation for performing Shaw, seemed rather beside the point). In nearby Rotten Row Jean was taught how to ride a horse, to wear armor, and to draw a sword.
While Jean was studying, Preminger lined up the rest of his cast. (The only actor he had signed before Jean was Richard Widmark, who was to play the Dauphin.) Lionel Larner “rushed around seeing all the plays. I kept files and lists and then brought in the cream of the London theater to see Otto,” Larner recalled.
He had an idea that English actors would play the English characters, and Irish actors would play French characters. The actors would come to see him dressed in Turnball and Asser shirts, and Otto thought they were all gay. “You don’t understand, Mr. Preminger, they have to be properly dressed at the Dorchester,” I told him. I began to ask actors to “look ordinary.” Preminger would say to important actors, “You’re not right,” and I told him he couldn’t dismiss them like that, he had to spend more time with each of them.
Preminger “wanted to go with strength,” Larner said, “but he didn’t seem to realize that Jean would be dwarfed by playing opposite British knights like John Gielgud. We all felt that she wouldn’t be able to stand up to the top-drawer actors he was signing up. When he showed me Jean’s Chicago audition and asked my opinion, I told him Jean’s American accent seemed wrong, but I quickly added, ‘I have to bow my head to your superior knowledge of these things.’ ”
Larner saw Jean regularly as she was preparing for the first read-through with the cast. “Jean grew up very fast. When she first came over, she wore a shapeless dress, then there was an amazing transformation. With her hair cut and her moles removed, she was incandescently beautiful, and she became an instant celebrity. And when she appeared for the press in a black Givenchy dress, no one else in the world looked like her. Otto bought her jewelry and took her dining with the Oliviers. Her ego was such that she thought the Oliviers were dining with her.” Inevitably there were rumors that Preminger was romantically involved with his discovery. “Nonsense,” Larner said. “She was a schoolgirl to him. He liked young people—and he really believed in giving young people a break. He wanted to use the newest, freshest actor, and he believed in Jean’s freshness. There was no affair: period.”14
On the first read-through, held at Alexander Korda’s office, Preminger had a set-to with Paul Scofield, cast as Brother Martin. Scofield walked out. With Larner’s assistance Preminger quickly replaced him with Kenneth Haigh, who had been acclaimed for his recent performance in Look Back in Anger. After the fracas with Scofield, the three-week rehearsal period that followed was, for Preminger, the most pleasurable part of the project. He was thrilled to be working on one of the great plays he had memorized in his youth.
The script that he and his cast were reading, however, was an edited version of Shaw’s long play which had a running time of three hours. After over two years of negotiating with Shaw’s estate, Otto and his scenarist Graham Greene had been given an extraordinary concession: they could change up to 25 percent of Shaw’s dialogue. In the event they altered only 5 percent, but to reduce the play to a manageable 110 minutes they had had to make cuts and changes. They had trimmed lengthy set speeches, removed much of Shaw’s political discourse, expanded the action to include a coronation scene and preparations for battle, and decided to open the film with a portion of Shaw’s epilogue. Purists and die-hard Shavians, as Otto was aware, would cry foul, but for the filmmaker, and never more so than in the three-week read-through with his cast, the play remained the thing. Despite the changes he and Greene had made, it was Preminger’s intention to honor, not to mutilate, the work of a playwright he revered.
While Otto was in London with his cast, at Shepperton Studios twenty full sets were being constructed. When the sets were ready after December 20, Preminger relocated the company to Shepperton for full-dress rehearsals. On January 8, 1957, at 8:30 a.m., he began shooting. In addition to the camera that was shooting Saint Joan, a second unit was on the spot filming a short promotional, “The Making of a Movie.” The international press corps Preminger had assembled watched the double filming.
Recorded for the promotional film, Jean’s first take of the scene in which Joan, encased in armor, makes her entrance at the Dauphin’s court, reveals her terror. Jean doesn’t seem to have any point of view about her character; her voice is constricted with tension; her gestures are tentative and inescapably contemporary. Poor Jean Seberg looks as if she would rather be in Marshalltown than where she was, on exhibit before the critical, expectant gaze of the international press and two cameras. Under the circumstances that Preminger had set up with an almost perverse disregard for the well-being of his young discovery, how could Jean have felt other than crushed? “It’s my belief that Otto wanted Jean to feel and actually to be overwhelmed,” Lionel Larner observed. “That was how he saw the part: that Joan was enclosed by representatives of the powerful institutions of church and state. That was why he cast powerful actors opposite her: it conformed to his idea of a birdlike Joan of Arc. Of course such an interpretation could not work out.”15
Preminger could not and would not admit it, but he must have sensed from the start that Jean was out of her league. A director with a different temperament might have admitted he had made a mistake and replaced Jean with a more experienced performer. But Otto was not capable of such a course of action, and besides he still believed in Jean and was convinced that, despite the odds, he could force his vision of the character onto her. For his sake, to vindicate his choice of her and to justify the hullabaloo he had created in his worldwide search, Jean Seberg had to succeed. As Rita Moriarty claimed, “Otto was conceited enough to think he could extract a
Preminger rehearses the trial scene in Saint Joan with Felix Aylmer, Anton Walbrook, Jean Seberg, and Kenneth Haigh.
performance from her.”16 To the increasing dismay of onlookers, however, he seemed incapable of creating an environment in which Jean might be able to flourish.
As he
became more frustrated, Otto would frequently demonstrate how he wanted Jean to play a scene. In “The Making of a Movie,” there’s an eerie moment when Otto enacts, with precisely the kind of theatrical artifice his casting of Jean was meant to defy, how he wants the character to crack up at the end of a tense scene. “If Jean didn’t get it right away, he would give her traffic directions, ‘Go from here to there, and keep in line with the camera,’ ” Rita Moriarty recalled.17 Larner observed that in the cathedral scene, when Preminger couldn’t get Jean to cry, he bellowed, “You are ruining my picture!”18 “You’re not thinking the part!” was a line he often uttered in one of his rants. But he didn’t seem to realize that his mistreatment was preventing Jean from doing any thinking at all. “What she was supposed to be thinking was increasingly mysterious to her,” as David Richards noted. “Forced to repeat some takes ten or twenty times, she felt the spontaneity draining from her. Her face froze and her body stiffened.”19 As Richards commented, Preminger “had not discovered an actress; he had engaged a puppet. If the character was distraught, Jean could be rendered distraught.”20
Cast and crew were all sympathetic to Jean. “You couldn’t not like her,” Kenneth Haigh said, surely speaking for all.21 Nonetheless, though some of the most respected actors in the British theater of the time witnessed Preminger’s mishandling of Jean, no one, not even John Gielgud, who had great sympathy for her, had the nerve to stand up to the director. “Having chosen her but then decided it was a mistake, Preminger was utterly horrible to her on the set,” Gielgud observed. “She didn’t know anything about phrasing or pacing or climax—all the things the part needed—but she was desperately eager to learn and also desperately insecure about everything.” When Gielgud at the end of shooting presented Jean with a cup and saucer that had belonged to his great-aunt, the legendary actress Ellen Terry, Jean “simply broke down in tears,” Gielgud recalled.22
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