“When I first met Tryon on the set in Rome, I noticed his knees were shaking,” recalled Ossie Davis, cast as a black priest from Georgia who comes to the Vatican asking for help against the Ku Klux Klan.
I said to Tom, “I’m going to tell Mr. Preminger you are not well.” With an alarmed tone Tom said, “No, please, no.” I saw that for Tom it was a form of torture being in Otto’s presence and his discomfort was exponentially increased because he was simply unable to confront Otto, who reacted fiercely when he saw any sign of weakness. He really could not abide it when people were intimidated by him— he got upset when he saw others were upset by him! The more he pushed Tom, the more the performance was not happening. There was a raving monster side to Otto that I thought, had I been more closely associated with him, I could have tamed. I always believed he would listen to me.20
Preminger’s impatience with Tryon spilled over into his treatment of other actors, and the filmmaker had more explosions on The Cardinal than on any other film. As Bill Hayes noted in his diary, Tryon was by no means the only “President of the Club,” the name Hayes gave to anyone who was the recipient of a public dressing-down. “I had that honor, too,” Hayes admitted. “ ‘You look perfect for the part, why don’t you just say the words and not add anything to them?’ he yelled at me once. He made Cameron Prud’homme [playing Stephen’s father] so nervous that he kept forgetting his lines and after a while he couldn’t say anything.” (In postproduction Carroll O’Connor dubbed Prud’homme’s voice.) John Saxon, cast as the Jewish fiancé of Stephen’s rebellious sister, also served as “President of the Club.” “I have an ear for accents, and I worked hard developing a subtle Yiddish lilt for my character,” Saxon remembered. “I had rehearsed with Max Slater, Preminger’s dialect coach, who thought the accent was appropriate. But after I played my first scene, Preminger called out, ‘Who do you know who talks like that?’ To myself I thought that he did, but I didn’t say it. I had rehearsed it for three weeks and I couldn’t start without the accent, but Preminger said, and I will never forget it, ‘Kill the Jew!’ He threatened to fire me if I didn’t eliminate the accent on the spot.”21
Perhaps as a form of self-protection, Hayes and Saxon became astute students of their director’s behavior. “Because he knew the script cold and wanted to hear the words spoken as he heard them in his mind, he needed to hear specific words read in a most specific way,” Bill Hayes observed.
Now if an actor happened to coincide with Otto in the conception of a character saying those words in that scene, then Otto’s beaming smile would shine brighter than the lights on the set. If, however, the actor’s idea happened to differ from Otto’s idea, the opposite occurred. A grimace of pain would destroy his personality, his voice would take on an edge of growing hostility. Hitler in a tantrum could not have conveyed a more frightening demeanor than Preminger as he set out to demean or castigate a wrongly motivated actor. It was his chess game, after all, and all the players were his pawns.22
“I could see that Otto was tremendously intelligent,” John Saxon said, “but the moment he hired you he began to act as if you were going to ruin his movie. Yet, in the way that he created difficulties he was ruining his own movie. All of us, except John Huston [playing Stephen’s spiritual adviser], the only one he never tangled with, were under suspicion of sabotage. But I began to feel that it was his alter ego that was committing the sabotage. He had a fear that we were going to disappoint him, but there was something in himself he didn’t quite tolerate.”23
As always with the variegated director, however, yelling was by no means his only means of communicating with his actors (“Otto daily ran the gamut from sunny warm spring to thunderous stormy winter,” as Hayes wrote). And fear or anger were by no means the only responses of the actors to Preminger. “I survived because I wasn’t afraid of him, and he knew it,” Carol Lynley said. “Otto really did not have a mean bone in his body, but he liked to play his reputation as a legendary ogre—when I said nice things about him in an interview he told me I was ruining his reputation—and I think he paid a price for that.” Everyone noticed that Preminger treated Maggie McNamara, his Moon Is Blue star, who had fallen into professional obscurity and had suffered through several breakdowns, with great kindness. To give her a job, he had cast her in a small role as Stephen’s spinsterish, anti-Semitic sister. “He told me we must be very careful with her,” Carol Lynley said. “He treated her like gold.”24
“Amazingly, Otto understood my part as a black man would, without any condescension or patronization,” Ossie Davis noted.
There is a tendency among some whites, embarrassed by racism, to become more passionate on the subject than blacks, to become blacker than you. Otto was never that. On matters of race, he was direct and clear and compassionate. Over the years I often thought about why Otto didn’t go after me the way he attacked others. I think it was because he was always looking for a spark in whomever he met, some fire, and as a performer and as a person I satisfied his need for that spark. The rapport between us was cemented in my first shot, a close-up in which I was reacting to Stephen Fermoyle’s elevation to bishop. I gave Otto a luminous reaction, the quality he wanted from Tom but had to get from me. Now, Otto hadn’t spoken to me about that look, but to me it was the actor appreciating what the moment was about. I’m not a religious man but it was not too difficult to reach into my own memory, and I responded, as my character, a deeply religious man, would have. I think Otto truly appreciated those moments when some of us treated the craft with the respect and the mastery he demanded.25
Preminger also did not “go after” John Huston and Raf Vallone, because, as Carol Lynley observed, “He knew they’d yell right back and match him in volume.” Huston, who was making his acting debut, conducted himself like a hired hand with good manners. Under the circumstances, however, he was far too polite. Because of his stature, more than anyone else on the set he was in a position to defend Tom Tryon against Preminger’s tirades, but to his discredit he said and did nothing—unlike Raf Vallone, who behaved with compassion. When Tryon forgot his lines during lengthy walking scenes, Vallone (playing Stephen’s mentor in Rome) would cue him, and several times with a few quiet words to Preminger he even managed to stifle an explosion.
When the production was about to relocate from Boston to Vienna in early March, Preminger, anxious about returning to the city where he had grown up, began to let up a little on Tryon. A preview of problems he would face in Vienna occurred during the end of the Boston shoot when he received a wire from a spokesman for St. Stephen’s canceling permission for filming because it was Lent. “Otto attributed this attempted blockade to the far-reaching power of Cardinal Spellman,” Bill Hayes wrote in his diary. “He fired back a cable which said he had a contract that gave him the right to film in Vienna, Lent or no Lent, and that if the Church representatives there tried to prevent him on any occasion from shooting his film he was prepared to sue the Catholic Church for many millions of dollars. Contract in hand, Otto shot in Vienna according to his prepared schedule.”
Preminger had inserted the Viennese episode into The Cardinal in order to chastise his former countrymen for having welcomed Hitler’s takeover in 1938, but his attitude toward Vienna was ambivalent. Along with animosity—“Otto hated going back,” Hope said26 —he approached the city with nostalgia as well as admiration for its architectural and cultural riches.
“At the time of Preminger’s arrival in 1963, Vienna had finally recovered from the war but still had no night life to speak of,” claimed Wolfgang Odelga, a Vienna native Otto hired as his transportation manager. “Otto and his film crew brought some color and spark and a touch of Hollywood glamour to Vienna, and the city gave him a royal reception.” Otto and Hope occupied the grand suite at the Hotel Imperial, which overeager publicists claimed to be the one Hitler had commandeered when he swept into the city with his hordes in 1938. But the hotel had been rebuilt since the war, and along with everything else the Hitler suite
had been demolished.
Nonetheless, with its high ceilings, imperial furnishings, and sweeping views of the Ringstrasse, the suite looked like fit quarters indeed for a conqueror. “Each day we all stood in front of the hotel until Otto came down— everybody had to stand by and wait for him, and then we drove off to the location,” Odelga recollected. “Every morning a black Chrysler was waiting for him. Otto wanted the biggest car, but it had to be an American car. He didn’t want a Mercedes: that was out of the question! He was a terror in a reasonable way”27 “There was no doubt that Otto Preminger was the star,” Wolfgang’s wife Hilde, who was the Viennese location manager, pointed out. “He had the biggest suite by far, while poor Tom Tryon had just a normal room.”
“Preminger was the only producer-director I have worked with who insisted that all his cast and crew must be put up in the best hotels,” Hilde said.
So, following his orders, we booked everyone into the Imperial or across the street at the somewhat less expensive [but still first-class] Bristol. Otto set up a suite of offices right in the Imperial, which was highly unusual. He was the only director I’ve ever worked with who, two months in advance, said, “I want my characters here, my camera there, the catering over there,” and once he was here, he changed nothing. He insisted there was to be a legal paper for each location. We paid for police when we blocked off streets and removed cars. I respected him for his efficiency, and though he could be rude—from Otto Preminger you cannot learn: you must already know—he was fair to people who did their jobs.28
Soon after Preminger’s arrival, Viennese journalists began to grumble about how the city was to be portrayed—as a stronghold of Nazis-in-waiting eager for the return of the native, the Führer himself. They also expressed concern about Preminger’s allegedly unflattering treatment of Vienna’s Cardinal Innitzer, who had tried to befriend Hitler, and the filmmaker’s plans to stage a Nazi march that would erupt into a riot in the streets around St. Stephen’s.
In “casting” Vienna as a city steeped in Nazi brutality, Preminger, to be sure, was exercising his genius for provocation, and when reports of complaints filtered into his makeshift office at the Imperial he did what he certainly had intended to do from the moment he had arrived: he called a press conference. At the Imperial Hotel on March 20, 1963, he defended “the right of the press to point out anything about himself and his pictures, but
Many Viennese were upset by Preminger’s presentation in The Cardinal of the city’s Cardinal Innitzer (Josef Meinrad) as a Nazi collaborator.
at the same time he denounced prejudgment; assured the press that the film’s treatment of Cardinal Innitzer would be historically accurate; and answered objections to his casting of the notably worldly actor, Curt Jurgens, in the role of the notably ascetic Cardinal. Preminger made it clear,” according to Willi Frischauer, “that in matters of casting and interpretation, he would not be dictated to.”29 “This response to Jurgens as the Cardinal is nonsense,” Preminger argued. “We would never be able to cast murderers, or saints. If a man behaved like a cardinal he would be a cardinal not an actor.”30 In the event, when Jurgens proved unavailable—he refused to leave a hit play in Paris—Preminger quickly recast the role with a leading Viennese actor, Josef Meinrad, who barely knew English and had to memorize his lines phonetically.
Viennese officials insulted by Preminger’s intention to tar the city with its Nazi past put up a number of obstacles. Otto could not persuade St. Stephen’s officials to allow him to fly a swastika from one of the church’s spires. The education minister, a Dr. Drimmel, would not permit him to shoot a scene in the National Library. In spurning Otto, the education minister voiced a widespread local sentiment: “At long last the grass has grown over the evils of 1938, and now there comes this camel and gobbles it up!”31
Otto’s belief that anti-Semitism continued to thrive in Austria was borne out during the shooting. As Martin Schute recalled, “For a scene with the Hitler Youth crowd, the second assistant director put a note on the bottom of the call sheet to bring your own swastika armband, and a number of people did.”32 “We had to get police permission to sing the ‘Horst Wessel’ song,” Hope said, “because after the war it had been outlawed. Our second assistant director had been a brownshirt and some of the elderly members of the crew leaped to their feet when they heard the song.”33
“Although Otto remained wary of the Viennese, he also enjoyed and appreciated the attention and the great respect they gave him,” Martin Schute noted. “He liked Viennese formality, which is how he had been raised. He was amused to be addressed as Herr Doktor Preminger and he expected us to smile at it. Otto complained to me about the Viennese, but we had a lot of cooperation, and really it was so much easier than in Israel with Exodus, where we had been up against the Israelis.
“Otto grumbled a lot, but he really did have a soft spot for the place and even for some of the people,” Schute observed. “This was where he had grown up, and he spoke warmly to us about his childhood memories. He boasted about his father’s prominence and about his own apprenticeship with Max Reinhardt. When he was shown his father’s table at the Café Landtmann, where we shot two scenes, he was very moved.”34 “Otto took such pride in showing me the Theater in der Josefstadt, where he had had his first big success as a young man,” as Hope recalled, “and his eyes filled with tears when he showed me the plaque on the lobby wall where his name is listed along with all those who have been at the head of the theater. At the theater he met some actors he had worked with so many years before and he was so touched. He also loved showing me the National Library where he had so often played hooky from school.”35
Joining the cast in Vienna was Viennese-born Romy Schneider, high-strung and arrogant and in despair over the end of her affair with Alain Delon. (Schneider was another Preminger star who was to commit suicide.) “She was a toughie,” Eva Monley said, “and her presence added to a set that was already loaded with tension.”36 In a recent interview the actress had been quoted as referring to her fellow Viennese as teppen (Viennese slang for “idiots”), and when Otto introduced her at a press conference he ordered the journalist who had included her insult in his interview to apologize to her. When he refused to do that, Schneider began to shriek, “Get lost! Get out of my sight or I’ll kill you!” Working herself into a fit, she spat at the journalist and raised her hand to strike him when Otto forcibly restrained her. Schneider, cursing in English and German, stormed out of the room as Otto, always able to summon an almost preternatural calm in such moments, carried on as if nothing had happened.37
“Romy really was an awful person,” Martin Schute said, “but she did make two people happy. Leon Shamroy the bull who growled at everybody else, went nutty over her beauty, and I have to admit that she was good with Tom.”38 As Tryon recalled, filming a ball scene with Schneider was the only
With Romy Schneider visiting the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna during the making of The Cardinal. The theater was unchanged from the time thirty years earlier when Preminger had been its artistic director.
time during the production that he actually enjoyed himself. “I was in fish and soup and Romy was in a beautiful Donald Brooks gown. Otto called us over to the camera and said, ‘Now in this scene I want you should …’ and he looked at us and smiled. ‘You know what to do,’ he said. So we went and we danced and we talked and we had a great time. It was terrific. And you can see the difference in the scene—it was the only moment in the film where I look relaxed.”39
Over Easter, the production moved from Vienna to Rome. “Otto, as always, expected the impossible,” Martin Schute said.
“What do you mean the customs aren’t open on Good Friday?” he asked when I told him. “Open them!” He wanted the film ready to go at exactly the time he wanted it—no matter what. In Rome, we shot outside the Vatican, and in a church in Fiuggi, about fifty miles outside Rome. Everything was laid out smoothly because of a Vatican lawyer who played one cardinal off against
another, a well-known legal practice, and was indispensable to us. Dino De Laurentiis was also very helpful to us in Rome.40
As Otto was pleased to report, the Vatican “cooperated fully in spite of opposition from the New York branch of the Church. The Vatican officials made no attempt to control the script—nor did they ask for an advance copy, which I would never have given no matter what. So you see there is more freedom and autonomy in the Church than you might think.”41
During the Rome setups Tom Tryon was absent for ten days. “Dressing room gossipers explained Tom’s vacation as a rest cure from Otto’s relentless denunciations,” Bill Hayes wrote in his diary. When he returned, Tom was noticeably fatigued. As Hayes recorded, “At the end of the final day of shooting, when I got into a car with Tom to be driven back to the Grand Hotel, over an hour away, Tom opened his trusty briefcase, extracted some little paper cups and then a fifth of Cutty Sark. He drank several ounces, smiled benignly, drank several more ounces, and went directly to sleep. Max Slater and the driver and I had to carry Tom up to his room.”
After Rome, Otto moved the production to the last stop, the Columbia lot in Hollywood, where the scenes originally to be shot on location in Georgia were filmed. For this section Tryon had to face a grueling physical ordeal as his character is stripped and beaten by the Ku Klux Klan. The exhausted actor, no doubt feeling he as well as Stephen Fermoyle was undergoing a kind of purgatory, forced himself to endure the scene without complaining, and Preminger was easy on him.
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