Thinking little of the author or her novel (“I couldn’t have cared less about that story”), Laurents nonetheless accepted Otto’s offer to write a screenplay. “This was before I had written the libretto for West Side Story and I needed the money. I was recommended by Anatol Litvak, a friend of Otto’s for whom I had written Anastasia, but I think the real reason Otto hired me was because he knew I had lived in Paris in the early 1950s and had known all these degenerate people Sagan writes about.” Laurents was surprised, but also relieved, that as he wrote he had little contact with Preminger. “He really just left me on my own, with one basic instruction, that we are to be removed from the characters, who don’t have passionate emotions. Otto thought that kind of distance was ‘high style.’ From beginning to end he was terribly nice to me, and I found him amusing, cultured, and not too much of a director. He was never an ogre to me, but I’ve been called an ogre too, and I’m not.” Laurents wrote the script quickly—“it took two minutes”—and Preminger approved it without asking for any significant changes. He invited Laurents to be on the set throughout filming. “I declined. The only set I was on often was Rope, because Hitchcock needed a lot of dialogue in the background. Much later, I got asked to leave the set of The Turning Point.”
Laurents was indifferent not only because he felt no commitment to the story or characters but also because he disagreed with Preminger’s casting. “Why had Otto cast English actors like David Niven and Deborah Kerr to play French characters? And then, in the midst of this chic atmosphere, there is Jean Seberg—Miss Iowa.” Laurents had met Jean in Preminger’s suite at the Plaza Athénée when Otto had hired him.
She was lovely, but I felt she was “performing” as an innocent young American girl. When I suggested she order profiteroles for dessert, she said, “I’m so young I break out.” I was told that Otto liked to watch her take a bath. He turned on her when he found out she was sleeping with a French lawyer [François Moreuil, twenty-three,whom she was to marry on September 5, 1958]. He had thought she was a virgin, and he felt betrayed. He wanted to think of her as his virgin. European men don’t understand American women. Jean was posing, acting American innocence, and Otto had fallen hook, line, and sinker for this cornfield approach. He was besotted. An intelligent, cultured man, Otto had fallen for a hooker, Gypsy Rose Lee, and now for a “virgin,” and they are flip sides of the same coin. After I turned in the script, I saw Saint Joan and I immediately cabled Otto: “Jean will sink me, you, and the picture.” Preminger’s response was that Jean will be a “triumph.” I bet Otto five dollars that she wouldn’t be.34
Believing in Jean and confident that, unlike Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse had the ingredients to become a commercial as well as critical success, Preminger set up production offices in Paris and Cannes in early June 1957, almost two months before he was to begin shooting. One of his first staff appointments was Hope Bryce, a former model who was personally acquainted with many prominent designers and had once roomed with another model, Otto’s wife Mary. “I was hired as costume coordinator and given complete charge of the wardrobe department and the budget,” Hope recalled. “I worked with Givenchy on wardrobe and designed three of the dresses.” Over the summer, the elegant, reserved young woman, separated from her first husband, and Otto, by now long estranged from Mary and no longer seeing Dorothy Dandridge, “unexpectedly fell in love,” as Hope said. Although she had met Otto casually, when she and her first husband had socialized with Otto and Mary, she had had “no idea” that they would have a future. But as Hope, living in a garret at the top of the Plaza Athénée, spent time after hours with Otto, who was staying in “a magnificent apartment on the Île Saint-Louis filled with Vuillard paintings,” she became “enthralled” by the filmmaker’s energy and erudition. Although it might seem that Otto also satisfied a desire for the kind of strong male figure she had not had growing up—her father had died before her birth and she had been raised by her mother—Hope “never for one moment thought of Otto as a father figure.”
That summer, Hope had ample opportunity to observe Preminger’s “contradictions” and his “tantrums,” which neither intimidated her nor dampened her affection. “Otto was certainly variegated,” she said. When the French crew struck because they wanted wine at lunch, “we all thought Otto would explode. But no, when he knew he was expected to explode, he wouldn’t. He agreed to the request, and the French went back to work. No one liked to see Otto go into a rage, and cast and crew wondered who was going to be ‘it’ today,” she recalled.35 Hope herself, despite her closeness to the director, was not immune. “She sometimes got the same kind of rollicking as we all did,” said British production manager Martin Schute, who was to work for the director on three other films and to become “an expert in Otto Preminger-ship.” “If Hope saw some danger flying in the air, she would tip me off because she knew I could cure it.”36
As on Saint Joan, the coiled relationship between Preminger and Jean Seberg became the inevitable focus of the shoot. “When Otto’s assistant, Max Slater, ran lines with Jean, often you could see she wasn’t thinking about what the character was saying,” Hope Bryce observed.
Her eyes would look blank, and when Otto saw that vacant look, he’d start to scream, telling her she had to concentrate. He would only get angry when he felt she wasn’t trying hard enough. He saw the performance was in Jean, but he had to work hard to get it out of her. When Otto would yell, Jean’s chin would jut out and she’d start to cry, but I felt that she seemed able to act only when she got mad or was upset. I didn’t think Otto really intimidated her, though, and certainly Jean never talked back. But I did notice that the other actors were upset to see Jean upset.37
Deborah Kerr, playing Anne, Cécile’s prim rival who disapproves of la dolce vita, was dismayed.
I couldn’t stand it, when he was absolutely ranting and raving at poor little Jean Seberg. I said, “Please, Otto, do you have to shout at the poor little girl like that? She seems to be taking it all right but I’m not. I cannot work with this kind of atmosphere. I’m terribly sorry, but I just can’t.” The battering she received finished me, but it didn’t her. I used to be a bit frightened for Otto. I thought he was going to have a heart attack, with his eyes popping and his face purple. But the next minute, it was gone. Completely gone. And this man who could be such a bully on the set, and who could destroy people, would then be a charming, witty companion at dinner who knew the best wines and caviar.38
It wasn’t easy for Kerr to stand up to Otto (“She was very shy,” Hope said), but the actress felt she had to. Like everyone else, Preminger had great respect for Kerr and after she berated him he backed off, for the moment.
Geoffrey Horne, cast as Cécile’s boyfriend Philippe, “felt sorry” for Jean because Otto “yelled at her so much she was a basket case. But she did get through it somehow.” The actor remembered Seberg speaking up only once, when she got momentarily confused in a scene on a rowboat and called, “Cut!” which is not an actor’s prerogative, and was certainly a hanging offense on a Preminger set.
Otto went berserk; he seemed to get pleasure in going nuts, and it was not an act. I never saw him be affectionate with Jean. He was not really a father figure for her, and though there were rumors, which I did not believe, he certainly was not her lover either. I would have known if he had been her lover. He was an Old Testament God figure who was never inappropriate with the beautiful women who were on the set. He had some notion that Jean and I would become a couple, and that that would make the movie sexier. I was a naughty boy then and Jean and I flirted a bit, but Jean had a French boyfriend.39
Everyone admired Jean’s seeming ability to survive Otto’s explosions, but there was mixed reaction about her work. According to Deborah Kerr, Jean was “amazing in the role.”40 But Martin Schute felt that Jean “wasn’t particularly talented, and that was part of the problem. Otto wanted so much for Jean to be a star, which would validate his having chosen her for Saint Joan. But she was really
a child at the time, more into her French boyfriend and reading press clippings about herself while Otto reckoned she should be concentrating entirely on her work.”41 Geoffrey Horne felt Jean’s acting was akin to her personality: “immature.”
I liked her, we all did, but there was something a little fraudulent about her, a conflict between the American girl she was and the European girl she was trying to be. She would walk into the makeup room in panties to show she was liberated, but it was fake. She was trying so hard to be sophisticated. She always had a mask, a disguise, which kept you from seeing her troubles and pain. But you could see it in her body and in her acting: she was stiff and awkward. There was no ease about her. She was pretty in close-ups, but not when she moved.42
Horne also received his share of the Preminger “treatment.” Trained by Lee Strasberg, Horne (who for decades has taught at the Strasberg Institute in New York) clashed with Preminger over interpretation. “I thought my role was a character part,” Horne said.
I knew I looked like a leading man—my looks got me lucky so young—but I felt like a character actor. I was good in neurotic parts, as unhappy, troubled, sensitive boys, which is how I saw Philippe. But Otto didn’t want that. He told me to stand there and do the part. “Be what you were the day I met you, and gave you the role,” he said. I had been very confident that day, because I had just returned from filming my part in The Bridge on the River Kwai. But I had a problem playing the kind of straight part he wanted, and Otto didn’t make me feel confident, the way Elia Kazan did at the Actors Studio when he would put his arm around me and make me feel I could do anything. David Lean [the director of The Bridge on the River Kwai] too had made me feel good, but Otto didn’t do that. He didn’t really seem to have any sense about actors as people. I don’t remember him directing for acting at all. “Stand here, move there,” he’d bark.43
With his two stars, David Niven and Deborah Kerr, Preminger observed a hands-off policy. “Otto didn’t have to say anything to Deborah Kerr: she was wonderful in the role, and she was generous, beautiful, and sexy, too,” as Horne said.44 Preminger also didn’t have to say much to Niven; as Raymond, Cécile’s sybaritic father, he was playing the same kind of role he had performed so deftly in The Moon Is Blue. Preminger and Niven were buddies who fraternized after working hours in Paris and on the Riviera. But one time Preminger blasted the actor in an incident that became famous, although nobody seems to remember it in exactly the same way. Niven’s biographer, Sheridan Morley set the scene on the Champs-Élysées, with Preminger berating the star for tardiness (Niven had been misinformed about the schedule) in a voice that could be heard “across several boulevards.” Niven managed to defuse the tirade by telling Preminger that he had “a terrible handicap. Whenever anyone shouts at me I forget all my lines.”45 Deborah Kerr recalled the blowup as taking place in the Bois de Boulogne, with Niven flummoxing his director by whispering, in a voice that could barely be heard, “Otto, don’t shout.” “David had his typical quizzical look—he had such a humorous face—and we all roared with laughter, including Otto, who just couldn’t hear what Niven was saying.”46 Martin Schute, who also set the scene in the Bois de Boulogne, recalled that the actor shouted back with a matching volume. “Eventually the terrific roar calmed down, and when it had, Otto turned to me and said, ‘It will be good for the newspapers.’ Otto never held any grudges.”47 Geoffrey Horne claimed the fracas took place in Cannes. “Niven had gone to Nice to gamble, because there had been a change in the schedule he hadn’t been told of.
When he showed up, late, with Otto looking purple, David said to him, ‘Otto, where the hell have you been?’ It was so funny and charming, and Otto laughed along with the rest of us.”48
Niven charmed Preminger and the cast, but was unpopular with the crew. “He was really a terrible mean bugger,” Martin Schute recalled. “He was impossible on the set and was often rude and nasty to his wife, Fjordis. ‘I don’t want your dirty wine in my glass,’ he said to her once at dinner. He wanted to walk away with his wardrobe, but I charged him and he argued like hell.”49 Rita Moriarty still in charge of Otto’s London office, recalled that “David always tried to be one of the boys with the crew, but it struck me as phony.” Her reservations about the actor may have been colored by an unnerving incident. “Though married, David, like Otto, was one for the ladies,” Moriarty said.
He had let Otto talk him into a “date” in London, where David was given Otto’s London chauffeur. David tipped the driver heavily, and then nobody knew where he was when it was time for him to return to France for shooting. Otto, frantic, called from Cannes to tell me I had to find him; but the chauffeur was getting well paid not to say where David was. I said I didn’t know, and then I spoke up and told Otto he had had no right to let David go off like that during a shoot. Otto knew he was wrong and perhaps as a result he started screaming at me over the phone. I could hear him pounding his desk, pounding it furiously for minutes on end. He was stammering with rage. I yelled right back at him.50
Despite the flare-ups, Bonjour Tristesse was a lucky shoot. The locations—Paris, Cannes, Le Levandou, Antibes—were heaven-sent. The weather for the entire filming, which lasted from late July to early October, was delicious. As always with Otto, the accommodations were strictly first class, as were the food and drink. At night, the day’s contretemps completely forgotten (by Otto if not always by those he had berated), Preminger was a world-class host, welcoming to all. And yet, despite the apparent extravagance, Preminger as always remained within the budget he had set. “Bonjour Tristesse was not a small movie,” Martin Schute recalled. “It was a major production of a best seller—at the time, Sagan was the sun, the moon, and the stars—and I had told Otto before filming that his projected budget of one and a half million was much too low. We had a terrific row. But I was naive, because Otto could do what others couldn’t. He brought the film in exactly as he had budgeted it—not a penny more.”51
Having survived another round with Preminger, Jean Seberg after five months in France returned to Marshalltown in mid-October accompanied by her French fiancé, François Moreuil. More than ever she felt like an outsider, and her high school friends as well as her family regarded her with suspicion: was she, they wondered, a young woman who knew too much? She had had an extraordinary year of great good fortune mixed with brutalizing disappointment; under enormous pressure, she had persevered. But when she returned to Marshalltown, she was unemployed. Preminger had not mentioned any upcoming project and she had nothing to look forward to except the opening in January of her new film, for which she might have wondered if she would receive another barrage of withering notices. At nineteen, was she already played out? François tried to lift her spirits as she made plans to move to New York to take acting lessons.
Preminger opened Bonjour Tristesse on January 15, 1958, without any of the fanfare he had lavished on his earlier independent productions. In a rare miscalculation, he booked the film into the inappropriately mammoth Capitol Theatre on Broadway, a movie palace with a huge, wide screen and over four thousand seats. “The theater could easily have seated the entire cast of Ben Hur,” as Arthur Laurents recalled. (“I met Otto at ‘21’ right after I had seen the film at the Moorish palace and I asked for my five dollars, because I didn’t think Jean was any better in Bonjour Tristesse than she had been in Saint Joan. Otto laughed, but I don’t remember whether or not he paid me.”)52 Geoffrey Horne also saw the film at the Capitol. “During a matinee opening week there were twenty-five people and acres of empty seats. I was on my way to a class with Lee Strasberg which was held above the theater.”53
For both Preminger and Jean Seberg the reviews were unsparing. In the New York Herald Tribune William Zinsser wrote that “Mlle. Sagan’s book is uniquely French, rueful and passionate, it is jaded in its view of sex, if not downright arch. But as directed by Otto Preminger it is as self-conscious as a game of charades played in an English country home. In the pivotal role, Jean Seberg is about as
far from a French nymph as milk is from Pernod.” In the New York Times Bosley Crowther wrote, “As a literary effort, it was somewhat astonishing but thin. The same must be said for the movie that Otto Preminger has made from it—with the astonishment excited for the most part by the ineptness with which it has been done.” In his notice in the Saturday Review, Arthur Knight concluded that Preminger “apparently has not succeeded in convincing Miss Seberg that she is an actress.” The New Yorker’s suggestion for her was “a good solid, and possibly therapeutic, paddling.”54
Critical redemption arrived in March 1958, when, paradoxically, the film that American reviewers dismissed because it lacked a Gallic touch opened in France to a rapturous response. French critics saluted Preminger for his atmospheric handling of sun-baked settings and his treatment of characters with too much money and leisure time. Georges Périnal’s Cinema-Scope lensing was hailed for its plein-air magnificence. And this time most Parisian critics were intoxicated by Jean Seberg. Christened “the new divine of the cinema,” she appeared on the March cover of Cahiers du cinéma. Inside, in the most important review of her career, the young cinephile François Truffaut wrote about her performance and her screen presence with the kind of rhapsody that seems to be the exclusive province of besotted French critics. His ecstasy based on a misconception (he called the film “a love poem to [Jean Seberg] orchestrated by her fiancé”), Truffaut concluded that only a lover would be able “to obtain such perfection.” “This kind of sex appeal hasn’t been seen on the screen. It is designed, controlled to the nth degree by her director. When Jean Seberg is on the screen, which is all the time, you can’t look at anything else.”
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