Ironically, then, if Preminger on native grounds was dismissed as an impostor, to the French the Austrian-American director’s approach to French material seemed revelatory. Not distracted by (and looking beyond) the assorted accents of the cast, Parisian critics credited Preminger with wise insights about the national psyche. Nearly three decades after its release, the film continued to exert the same hold, as an article by Jean-François Rauget in 1986 in Cahiers du cinéma revealed. “The genius of Preminger completely bursts with the discovery of a musicality in the movements of the bodies and the characters’ consciousness. The film is some sort of abstract painting where the mixture of black and white with vivid colors, of a rocky and liquid nature with the psychological insignificance of the characters, brings forth a particular sensuality which Godard will remember for Le mépris.”
If, on the one hand, Bonjour Tristesse is indeed far sturdier than the original American reception suggests, and, on the other, not quite the incandescent achievement that many Gallic cinephiles have claimed it to be, it definitely casts a spell. In spite or perhaps precisely because of her flaws, if you love Jean Seberg, then you must also love the film. Her performance, like Preminger’s direction, is by turns problematic and sublime. In a strange way Jean’s fragility as an actress—her constricted movements, her masked expression, her untrained yet distinctive voice, shivery and enchanting—mirrors Preminger’s own inconsistency, his sometimes imperfect mastery of his own gifts. Seberg’s stiffness on-screen echoes the occasionally stilted quality of Preminger’s direction. No wonder he could not give up on her.
Seberg’s near-delirious unevenness is displayed right at the beginning. On a dance floor in an underground Paris club her body language is self-conscious. Then, in a following shot, scrutinizing herself in a mirror as her eyes fill with tears of self-condemnation, she eloquently limns the despair of an already jaded young woman trapped in la ronde. Ultimately her performance as a remote beauty with a capacity for casual destructiveness is bewitching.
A good part of the film’s visual enchantment derives from Preminger’s recurrent use of dissolves between black-and-white and color. For scenes set in Paris in the present, with a melancholy Cécile brooding about her responsibility for the death of her father’s fiancée as she moves aimlessly from one social event to the next, Preminger and Périnal use a slightly grainy black-and-white. For contrast, they shoot Cécile’s memories of last summer on the Riviera in sumptuous color. “I suggested the dissolves, which provided fluidity, but it was Otto who added the brilliant touch of setting off black-and-white against color,” Arthur Laurents recalled.55 In the first dissolve to the past, as color gradually saturates the black-and-white image, the effect is stunning—the cinematic equivalent of a coup de théâtre. Much of the action takes place in a villa (the home of Pierre Lazareff, a publisher) perched spectacularly on a hilltop in Le Levandou overlooking the Mediterranean. As rendered by Georges Périnal’s cinematography, the landscape—a pine forest next to the villa, the turquoise sea, rust-colored rocks along the shore—shimmers in a sparkling light.
Can a viewer drawn to the color and the bejeweled settings overlook the fact that Preminger’s three leads are not remotely French? Yes, since in all other ways David Niven and Deborah Kerr are ideally cast, while Seberg is a case unto herself. Skeptical viewers can perhaps regard Niven and Kerr as English vacationers on the Riviera and Seberg, who sometimes sounds as if she is translating her lines from another language, as a cosmopolitan young woman who has traveled widely with her father. With his usual aplomb, Niven plays a confirmed roué. Seberg mirrors Niven’s insouciant tone—it’s clear that their entente, often visually underlined by the matching outfits they wear, could not possibly include anyone else. As embodied by Deborah Kerr, brittle, genteel Anne is an outsider who could never understand or accept the rules of their game.
Once again, Preminger takes a dispassionate view of neurotic, well-to-do characters. Nonetheless, while the film recalls the pattern set by Laura, it also anticipates Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and Antonioni’s L’Avventura
Anne (Deborah Kerr) looks uneasily at Cécile (Jean Seberg), the worldly young woman who will defeat her, in Bonjour Tristesse.
(1961), which also explore the alienation of the European upper bourgeoisie. The Italian films are far more ambitious than Bonjour Tristesse, but it was Preminger who first sensed the subject’s potential.
The director’s preference for wide-angle group shots gilds his chronicle of the easy life with a friezelike formality. It’s significant that when Cécile begins to feel threatened by Anne, Preminger places Cécile outside the group, hovering uncomfortably at the edge of the frame or isolated in a frame of her own. Because Preminger uses close-ups rarely, they carry a particular charge. In an early scene in a Parisian nightclub he cuts between close-ups of Cécile dancing absently with a new beau and a singer, the world-weary Juliette Greco, performing the title song; the editing enforces a comparison between Cécile, confronting her tristesse, and the melancholy torch singer. For the climactic moment in which Cécile has contrived to have Anne overhear Raymond flirting with a former paramour, Preminger keeps the camera tight on Anne with no countershot to “the lovers.” “I’ve always liked scenes where there’s no dialogue—they’re often, in film, more powerful,” recalled Deborah Kerr. “When Anne overhears the off-screen conversation, she has this awful realization that Raymond is unfaithful, and you see its impact without my saying anything. I thought it was terrific that my character’s big moment is conveyed without dialogue—just that close-up.”56
The film ends on a close-up of Jean (shot on the last day of filming, October 9, 1957, at Shepperton Studios, where the actress’s career had been launched with worldwide fanfare in January) that is a tour de force. Preminger wanted Seberg to be impassive, stripped of any readable expression, as she removes her makeup looking into a mirror. It is one of the beguiling paradoxes of this uneven, captivating film that, frozen-faced, her eyes filling with tears as Cécile faces a hollow future, Jean Seberg is intensely expressive. A cool, stylish beauty with ultra-chic, trendsetting short hair and wearing a smart black Givenchy cocktail dress, Jean Seberg in the last shot she was to make with her mentor looks like the real thing, a movie star who can also act.
In August 1958, eight months after Bonjour Tristesse bombed in America, François Moreuil persuaded Preminger to sell his contract with Jean to Columbia. “We simply had to get her out from under Otto’s thumb,” Moreuil, a lawyer, maintained.57 Preminger, however, reserved the right to use Jean in one film a year. “Otto did not think at the time, or later, that Jean had been that bad in Saint Joan,” as Hope recalled, “and he certainly would have used her again if he had had a part for her. But as it turned out he didn’t.”
Witnesses have testified to Preminger’s hard treatment of the unprepared young woman he had plucked from obscurity. He was, indeed, a demanding, impatient, and often wrathful mentor whose bullying tactics demolished her confidence. But no matter how many times he fulminated against her laziness and lack of focus, he also refused to give up on her. And on October 9, 1957, when she worked for him for the last time, she was a far stronger actress than she had been on January 7, when, in an apparent daze, she had shot the scene of Joan entering the court of the Dauphin. Otto Preminger made Jean Seberg famous, and perhaps only Jean could have told if her trial by fire had been worth it.
Without Preminger’s belief that she could portray Sagan’s character,
Seberg’s improbable second career in European films would not have happened. Jean-Luc Godard, admiring the aura, “the sense of being” that Preminger had created for Jean in Bonjour Tristesse, cast her in Breathless, where her wonderfully relaxed performance as an American Circe who loves and betrays a French hood transformed her from a Hollywood has-been into a leading figure of the French New Wave. Preminger must be given full credit for delivering “Jean Seberg” to Jean-Luc Godard, but he cannot be held accountable for her later desp
air, her descent into drugs and radical black politics, and, at forty, looking preternaturally aged, her suicide.
“Otto was really thrilled by Jean’s success in Breathless,” as Hope recalled. “He thought she was terrific in the film, and he was as proud of her as if she had been his daughter.”58 And after the film turned her into an international star, Preminger, vindicated at last, boasted, “I was right about Jean Seberg after all, wasn’t I?”59
TEN
Censored!
In the first six months of 1958, after the successive failures of Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse, Otto Preminger’s career as a pioneering independent filmmaker seemed to have stalled. Rather than a bullish producer who had won landmark victories for free speech, he was now perceived, in an industry with a notoriously short memory, as a European egghead who turned out stillborn art-house pictures.
Adding to the bad news was This Is Goggle, a play he put into rehearsal at the same time that Bonjour Tristesse was beginning its first-run engagements. “I recommended the novel to Otto,” Sandy Gardner said. “It was a charming book, filled with local color, about an eccentric New York kid. Otto, who loved New York, was drawn to the New York atmosphere as well as to the story’s father-son relationship, told from the point of view of the son.”1 The material did indeed stir Otto’s paternal instincts—throughout his long estrangement from Mary he had continued to maintain a fatherly attitude toward Sandy; he wanted to claim his paternity of Erik; and at fifty-three, he might have wanted another son (or daughter) as well.
To play Goggle’s parents Preminger hired two solid actors, James Daly and Kim Hunter, the original Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. And for Goggle he chose an appealing child actor, London-born Michael Ray, making his stage debut after impressive film credits including leading roles in The Divided Heart, The Brave One, and The Tin Star. “I think Otto knew early on that the show wasn’t going to work or that he wouldn’t be able to make it work,” Kim Hunter recalled.
The focus of the show was the boy, Goggle, but I thought Otto wasn’t saying the right things to the young actor—he wasn’t saying what the boy needed to hear to help him play the part. I knew Otto’s rep, of course, but I wasn’t intimidated—I never am—and I told him how I thought he should approach the boy. He not only didn’t scream, he was delighted to know, to get it right. (When Jim and I called him on his reputation for being a bastard, he replied, “I’m only that when people aren’t doing what they’re supposed to.”)2
Preminger was also even-tempered with his scenic designer, Boris Aronson. “Boris and Otto got along royally,” as Lisa (Mrs. Boris) Aronson recalled. “Boris didn’t like to design realistically; he always wanted to try something stylized or off-center, and Otto went right along with him on that. But they didn’t trust the simplicity of the material, and so they tried to make it visually interesting. They made the mistake of dressing it up, and the show was overdesigned and overdirected. Otto did not delude himself. He knew it wasn’t working.”3
Preminger did not seem “concentrated,” according to Kim Hunter. “He was focused on his next film, on Jean Seberg, on whatever, but certainly not on us. He didn’t talk about motivation or psychology. He was present, but he didn’t offer much of anything. All in all, it was a strange experience that does not appear in my bio.”4
Preminger had good reason to be distracted. “In early January, as he was starting to rehearse, Otto asked me to go to the Playhouse Theatre with him,” Sandy recalled. “He was going to be negotiating for the lease of the theater, where Goggle was scheduled to open. [After tryouts in Princeton and Washington, D.C., the play was to open on Broadway on February 17, 1958; in the event, This Is Goggle opened at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton on January 23 and shuttered there on February 1.] He became very fatherly to me, and when he put his arm around me I realized that something was up. He said my mother would be suing for divorce.”5 Mr. and Mrs. Otto Preminger, alienated from each other for many years, had lived apart since April 20, 1957. By early 1958, Preminger was regularly seeing Hope Bryce, and Mary had for some time been involved with Michael Rennie. “It’s my belief that the trouble really started when my mother started spending a lot of time with Rennie,” Sandy speculated. “Like my mother, he was a painter and they had a lot in common. For Otto it was a status thing: he felt that Rennie was only a contract player while he was a producer-director. He felt it was inappropriate for my mother to see Rennie, but she didn’t think so. She was quite independent, and Otto did not appreciate that.”6
Preminger had tried to negotiate a divorce settlement with Mary the preceding November, urging her, for the sake of peace, to accept the financial terms he was prepared to offer. But Mary was not inclined to. She wanted a lot more than Otto was willing to part with, and to get what she felt she was owed she was ready for a long, down-and-dirty battle. She wanted a healthy chunk of Otto’s yearly income, which she estimated at $200,000, and she was demanding equitable division of all community property, which, under California law, she was entitled to share with her husband on a fifty-fifty basis. When she failed to receive financial satisfaction, she went public. In newspaper interviews she accused Otto of making “threatening phone calls,” of removing “valuable art objects and financial records to New York to preclude enforcement of court orders,” and of intimacy with three women, two London models and Hope Bryce, her former friend and roommate.7
On February 15, Otto “confided” to gossip columnist Louella Parsons that while it had been his intention to settle everything on a friendly basis, after Mary had drawn Hope into the proceedings he was now promising “a fight to the finish.”8 In an interview in the Los Angeles Times on March 6, he claimed that Mary had deserted him on October 23, 1956. He also denied the adultery charges and accused Mary of having been intimate with Michael Rennie for the past three years, providing evidence given to him by a private detective he had hired of trysts at the Malibu house that Mary was claiming as community property, two hotels, an apartment in New York, and one in Miami. He asked that all community property be awarded solely to him. To Mary’s request of $3,000 a month, he made a counteroffer of $500; and rebutting Mary’s claim that he earned $200,000 a year, he said the most money he had ever made in a year had been $93,000. He dismissed Mary’s claim that she had a financial interest in The Moon Is Blue, while admitting that she had “some interest” in The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell and Bonjour Tristesse, “which was not earning enough to cover production costs.”9
The battle dragged on for months, with Mary repeatedly presenting an image of her estranged husband intended to cause him acute embarrassment. “His temper was so bad that he would beat his head on the floor and throw himself about the room,” she said. “When he went into a rage, he would pound the wall and the furniture and he’d throw books and brushes at me, yelling and using bad language. He did not try to control himself in private or public. He stayed out nights and was constantly dating other women.”10 One of the women with whom Mary accused Otto of committing adultery was a former stripper in a Parisian boîte who sold her story of an alleged encounter with the director to two scandal sheets, Confidential and Whisper. Despite the escalating ugliness, Otto at the last moment withdrew his cross-complaint about Mary’s affair with Michael Rennie, and he did not appear in court on March 10, 1958, when the divorce was granted. Mary was awarded a default decree and alimony of $171,000 to be distributed over a ten-year period, even if the former Mrs. Preminger were to remarry. In addition, Mary was awarded the house at 19300 Pacific Coast Highway, valued at $50,000; a New York apartment; and a 1955 Cadillac.
“It had been such a bitter and prolonged divorce—and so unnerving,” Sandy recalled.
Detectives were sent to the beach to watch the house. And I was forced to testify against Otto; I didn’t want to, and my mom didn’t want me to, but the attorney wanted me to. It was disturbing, even though Mary had been divorced before and I guess in some way I was used to it. It turned out the economic rewards of
the marriage didn’t amount to much. Otto’s power managed to buy off our attorney, Arthur Crowley called “the attorney to the stars,” who sided with Otto and didn’t do a good job for my mother. But that’s the way the business worked: that was part of the corruption of Hollywood. My mother and I remained at 19300 Pacific Coast Highway for twenty-four years. Otto had put down $3,000 at my mother’s request and we sold it for $400,000. The new owner remodeled and a year later sold it for one and a half million. The house is still standing, but I haven’t been back since 1985.11
To Sandy Gardner, far more significant than the “economic rewards” of his mother’s marriage was Otto’s abrupt disappearance from his life. After the divorce he never saw Otto, for whom he had warm feelings he had thought were reciprocal, or any of the Preminger family again. “I used to wonder: did Otto have to divorce me too? During the divorce my mother spoke negatively about Otto; she resented the fact that he didn’t take her work seriously and that he was to be the only one in the family with a career. But in later years she would speak about how much she admired him and how much she had learned from him. She still loved him.”12 (Mary was to remain single until her death, at eighty, on August 29, 1998.)
“The Premingers had drawn together against us, and I’m sure harsh things were said at the time of the divorce and later,” Sandy surmised.13 Indeed they were. In a most ungentlemanly fashion, Otto in his memoir dismissed Mary in a few bare sentences. “I married Mary Gardner on the fourth of December, 1951. We were divorced in 1958. A forgettable marriage.”14 “I didn’t like Mary Gardner, and the less said the better,” Ingo Preminger stated, allowing no space for further discussion.15 “Until he found Hope, it was hard to judge Otto’s taste in women,” Eve Preminger said. “Mary was tall and thin, vapid, boring, and dumb. She had a two-year-old mind. Horrible things had gone on between them and long after their breakup she told me how sexy and romantic Otto was in Stalag 17. It was absurd. She was an absence: she wasn’t even pretty”16
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