While Preminger is interested in Lois Gould’s characters, as he is in all his characters, he does not regard them with his usual evenhandedness, and his disapproval is reflected in the way the characters dress and the rooms they live in. The family doctor (James Coco), for instance, another “good friend,” has an even more garish wardrobe than Julie does: loud pink shirts with mismatching ties and a jacket of bilious red. And, like Julie’s, his taste in interior décor—walls covered with floor-to-ceiling frosted glass mirrors, gaudy lamps that seem poised to attack, a zebra-striped phone—would surely please Victoria Gotti. The déclassé taste—Bronx baroque run amok—expresses Preminger’s overstated comment on the doctor’s vulgarity.
Two scenes continue a macabre fascination with the decay of the flesh that Preminger injected into Skidoo. At a rooftop party to celebrate the publication of a children’s book written by Richard, the ever-hot-to-trot Julie, always spurned by her husband, has a fantasy flash in which she sees a famous author (played by Burgess Meredith) dancing in the nude. The scene, which turns the flabby physique of the far-from-young Burgess Meredith into a spectacle to laugh at, casts doubts about Preminger’s point of view and his control of the material. “Burgess wanted to do that scene,” as Hope recalled. “Otto would never have forced him to do it, and besides nobody could have coerced Burgess, who was very stubborn, into doing anything he didn’t want to. But it was a very bad scene and should not have been in the film.”72 A later scene, when the sartorially challenged doctor jabbers on the phone as Julie is on her knees before him performing fellatio, cruelly and for no thematic purpose exposes James Coco’s overweight torso.
Countering these missteps, however, are many scenes organized with a formal rigor securely in the Preminger mode. Throughout, group shots of the “friends,” gathered to celebrate Richard’s book, or later commingling at the hospital, at first to donate blood and then on a death watch, are potent. In long takes from a detached perspective, Preminger presents a visual field packed with information—the intersecting betrayals and grievances among the characters that viewers are allowed to discover for themselves.
Directing a comedy of Manhattan manners of a kind that Woody Allen was to claim as his own in a series of ensemble films beginning with Annie Hall in 1977, Preminger for the third time was clearly not on native grounds. His precarious direction teeters between comedy-of-manners satire and melodrama, between irony and playing it straight. To Otto, a secular European Jew, Elaine May’s brand of American Jewish comedy must have seemed a foreign idiom. Her material needed an insider’s touch and an insider’s affection that Preminger simply did not have.
For Such Good Friends he received some of the worst reviews of his career. “In what world do movie directors live that they ask us to feel sorry for a well-heeled young married woman in a well-staffed house who is hard put to answer a doorbell or get to a party on time?” asked Pauline Kael in her review in the December 23 New Yorker. “The screenplay by Elaine May (under a pseudonym, which is no excuse) is full of that bitchiness which in movies is passed off as Manhattan chic. You’re supposed to enjoy it while feeling how depraved it is. The rancid fake smart atmosphere suggests that Otto Preminger is eager to do porno pictures but wants the prestige of a modern-woman’s sensibility picture. He might as well go all the way; he has become too crude to do anything else.” An even more scathing notice came from Otto’s nemesis, Rex Reed, writing in the New York Daily News on December 22, 1971. “I would like to keep thousands of sane people away from this vile and rotten piece of junk by describing in detail the unprecedented vulgarity and filth that goes on in it,” he declaimed. “But this is both a family newspaper and a season of good cheer. Just take my word for it. Such Good Friends is the worst movie of 1971. To make it… Paramount must have a death wish. To release it during Christmas week is an insult to world peace.”
“Nobody sets out to make a bad film,” Hope said. “I wanted all of Otto’s films to be good, but they weren’t. Such Good Friends seems worse to me now than it did back then, but still it’s a lot better than Skidoo or Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. Otto and I were disappointed in all the late films.”73
“I knew from watching the rushes of Skidoo and the two following films that they would be disasters,” Erik said.
Looking back, I feel it was around the time that I started working with him that Otto started dealing with the Alzheimer’s disease that was to claim his mind. One day [on Skidoo] in front of the cast he treated Hope appallingly. I was stunned. He was anything but your typical husband, but he loved Hope as much as he could love anyone. I thought then that he was losing his grip. The disease begins ten to twelve years before symptoms are manifested. At first, its victims cover up and use their routines to keep going, as Otto did. But a spark is missing, and an inability to think outside the box.74
“That Otto had Alzheimer’s is Erik’s diagnosis,” Hope said. “No doctor ever said so.”75
EIGHTEEN
Endgames
In February 1972, two months after Such Good Friends opened to blasé business, Paramount did not renew Preminger’s “ironclad” contract. Otto had to vacate his office with its oversized marble desk, its Eames chairs, and its expensive modern art; but he continued to behave in a kingly fashion. Near the end of February, he and Hope flew to London to prepare for the European premiere of Such Good Friends. As in his heyday, with his usual ebullience he greeted the press in a suite at the Dorchester. After returning to New York to oversee further American openings of the film, the Premingers flew to Paris where, at the Plaza Athénée, Otto worked on the campaign for the Paris premiere, behaving all the while as if he were selling a huge hit.
After Paris, Otto and Hope went to Monte Carlo. “Otto loved gambling in the casino, dining at the Hôtel de Paris, and seeing opera and ballet at the magnificent theater,” Hope recalled. “He allowed himself to lose five thousand dollars a year and stopped when he reached that point. It was on this visit that Otto decided he would build a house on the Riviera, and he bought a piece of property that I believe was the last lot on Cap Ferrat that had a sweeping ocean view. It was close to Monte Carlo, and at night the lights were unbelievably beautiful. We could see all the way to Italy.
“We didn’t need a second house or a house abroad,” Hope said,
because we did our traveling when we were on location, and whenever we had to be in Los Angeles, usually over summers, we always rented houses. But Otto had talked about owning a house on the French Riviera—a lot of Middle European people in his parents’ generation had used Cannes as a winter resort, and since he had been a boy he had had a vision of a place in the south of France. He loved the Mediterranean, and we stayed often at the Hôtel du Cap d’Antibes. When he bought the Cap Ferrat property, though, Otto had no idea how much trouble was in store. It took over two years to get the house built—we bought the property in the winter of 1972 and the house wasn’t finished until the summer of 1974. Otto wanted to build in a simple modern style, all white marble, which did not fit in and upset the neighbors, who had houses in traditional styles. But Otto didn’t care. He had screaming fights with the architect, an M. Cauchon, a protégé of the man who had designed Brasília, and with the contractors, who were taking forever. When Otto had a last, huge fight with M. Cauchon, I took over all the negotiations.1
Preminger ’s house in Cap Ferrat.
For Preminger, aside from the spectacular location, the setting had a certain political significance. Part of the allure of Cap Ferrat was that it was not in Austria, where Ingo and Kate had a longtime vacation home in Bad Ischl. “ ‘Why don’t you have a house in a good place, like the south of France?’ I heard my father ask Ingo more than once,” Vicky Preminger recalled. “The two brothers, who had an intense love-hate relationship, would fight all the time over this. My father hated Austria and felt people there were still Nazis, while Ingo felt a connection to Austria.”2 “My father never forgave my uncle for having a house in Austria, which, t
o Otto, was an awful thing,” Mark Preminger said. “Ingo, however, perceived himself as being Austrian, but my father, on the other hand, never forgot that on The Cardinal his sound technicians stood up at attention during a Nazi children’s march. Whenever Ingo would speak to him in German, my father would answer in English. My father never spoke German—not a word.”3
“Our white-marble house looked like the Museum of Modern Art sitting on a cliff,” Vicky said.
Inside, too, with Eames chairs in Matisse blue and abstract paintings, it was severely modern. All the neighbors were up in arms. One, a Viennese dowager, very grand, was constantly suing us. Her house, in a traditional Mediterranean style, was filled with knick-knacks and clutter, the kind of décor my father couldn’t tolerate. I remember once going with him to her house, when she was complaining about something or other. “Have you ever seen anything so ugly?” she asked haughtily, pointing to our house. My father paused and looked all around her house before answering, “Yes!” She was incensed.4
“My father really loved the house and the location, and it was an idea of his that eventually he would retire in the south of France,” as Mark recalled.5 But Hope knew, “early on,” that Otto would never be able to retire in Cap Ferrat or anywhere else.
He was just not a country person—he would have died of boredom if we’d ever had a house in Westchester or the Hamptons, and I saw that he got quickly bored in Cap Ferrat too. He certainly always enjoyed gambling in Monte Carlo; he liked the ocean; and as in New York he had his favorite dining places—we both loved the Colombe d’Or and the Château de la Chèvre d’Or. But he’d get fidgety. “I’m driving to Nice to window-shop,” he’d say, and he’d come back laden with presents for all of us. One time he bought boxes of ashtrays at Christofle.
Because Otto was “a terrible driver,” Hope was worried whenever he’d drive on the tortuous and often narrow lanes of the Grand Corniche.6 As Vicky observed, “Behind the wheel of a car he had no idea what he was doing, and that was especially true when he was in the south of France.”7
As he supervised construction of the house, Preminger faced an uncertain period in his professional life. His schedule was becoming far less hectic than it had ever been, and the interval between films was longer than at any earlier time. Nonetheless, Preminger regularly announced new projects. At the top of his list, announced while he was shooting Such Good Friends in the summer of 1971, was Open Question, which was to be his first made-for-television movie. “It’s about a couple, like the Rosenbergs, accused of passing atomic secrets to the enemy,” Preminger told two dozen journalists he had invited to his office at 711 on July 29. “I’ll be the narrator—or reporter—interviewing the participants in the trial. I will appear as myself, as a reporter and a commentator on the trial and on public opinions about the trial. You might say I will be a sort of Greek chorus. I got my friend Louis Nizer to write the script. We want the show to capture the fears of the United States in the early 1950s, the McCarthy era. The ‘message’ will be against capital punishment.”8 Despite repeated attempts, by other writers besides Louis Nizer, the structure failed to jell; shortly after he returned from Monte Carlo in March 1972, Preminger terminated the project.
Soon after, he announced that he would produce and direct The Man with the Golden Arm as a Broadway musical. At a time when the musical theater was expanding its subject matter, a dark show about drug addiction featuring a moody, jazz-based score might have worked. To succeed, however, it would have required a director like Hal Prince or Bob Fosse who was more familiar with musical theater tradition than Preminger and not afraid to defy it. After a flurry of announcements about the musical—silence.
Otto’s next realized project would not come until the fall of 1973, when he would produce and direct a play Full Circle, on Broadway, and his next film would not begin shooting until May 1974. But Preminger carried on as if he had just opened Exodus. He continued to supervise construction of his house in Cap Ferrat and to run his office at 711 with the panache he had always had. Also conforming to business as usual were the contrasting responses he evoked from his employees.
“I began working for Otto, as his executive assistant, when Such Good Friends started preproduction in the late spring of 1971, and I stayed for two years, until the time he was starting to produce Full Circle” Leslie Jay said.
The office staff at that period consisted of Bud Rosenthal, story editor and casting director; Nat Rudich; Blanche Berger, Otto’s accountant; Erik; and me. And Otto always had an intern. One was Tony Gittelson, a smart, nice New York kid; another was Ken Kaufman. Both were friends of Bud. Erik had his own office, and after Friends wrapped he was there all the time. It was Nat who told me how to handle Otto—I felt it was Nat’s job to make it up to everyone Otto had insulted, or who hated him. I was never scared of Otto; at Columbia I had worked for Bud Rosenthal, who had a tough reputation and who had been difficult, and I had had no problem with him. Erik was also not afraid of his father, though of course he was aware of his father’s wrath. Although I never heard him, I can’t imagine Otto didn’t yell at Erik, and at Hope and the twins, too; he must have, it was built into him. When I started, Erik was working on a screenplay and then he left to work with Elaine May on Heartbreak Kid. He had to get away from Otto, but then he returned.
My goal was not to be yelled at. Every morning at 8:30 I checked Otto’s desk. He was extremely orderly and he hated dirty blotters, so I changed the blotter daily. When we would send out press material and letters, never more than a page, they had to be lined up just so—he was a stickler for the pages lining up exactly. He also dressed meticulously, always with a jacket and tie. Otto was a true gentleman; there was never any suggestion of a casting couch. He had tons of phone calls and appointments every day. Every Israeli who came to New York came to see him; his office was their first stop. And he always had lunch out. Eve Preminger came by a lot, and so did Ingo. Hope and the twins came to the office, too. I sat at a white desk with, in those days, a typewriter. I typed script changes on Friends and went with Otto regularly to see dailies at Paramount. We looked at different shots and Otto would discuss which ones worked. In one shot Dyan’s bra was showing, and Otto asked me if I saw it; I did. We heard in the office how difficult she was on the set, and a few times Otto asked me to have flowers sent to her.
After he was finished shooting Such Good Friends, he was in the office every day from nine to six. He always put in a full workday. Nat said he was more difficult when he didn’t have a project, but after Friends opened he never mentioned that the film wasn’t a success and he never took it out on me. If he took it out on anyone it was probably Nat. After Friends he worked on the Nizer project, Open Question. He was very tough on the writers. Philip Friedman worked on it first, then Lionel Chetwyn. Otto hated everything Lionel wrote—he ripped it apart and yelled at him. I did feel that his Alzheimer’s was starting; he wouldn’t remember me on the street, and Nat would have to remind him who I was.
During her time at 711, Leslie Jay discovered a lump in her breast. “Otto was very upset and insisted I go to Hope’s gynecologist. When it was found to be malignant, Otto was very concerned. After my operation I went back to work pretty fast, but Otto wanted me to take as much time as needed, and more. You know, finally it doesn’t really matter how much he screamed, or what people said about him: Otto had a heart. There is simply no doubt about it: Otto had a heart.”9
When Leslie Jay left in the spring of 1973, Arlene Leuzzi replaced her.
I was there about a year, from the time of Full Circle until he began preproduction on Rosebud in the spring of 1974. I was hired as his administrative assistant–secretary, although I did not do secretarial stuff. Then I became a reader, along with three aspiring young people, who also did errands and were unpaid. Nat was still there—so nice, and he was not a doormat, as I know people claimed. I heard him yell back. “Otto, you’re off base,” he would say. There was a mutual respect between Nat and Otto, a rapport. Nat
understood him. After a blowup he’d tell us not to be upset. The accountant, Blanche Berger, was a very mean old lady who lived her entire life through Otto and thought he walked on water; she always called him “Otto Preminger,” and he treated her in a very kindly way. Blanche was terrified of Hope, however, and I felt there was a competition between them for Otto’s affection. Blanche would do things to force Otto to be mad at other people—she didn’t want him to like other people as much as he liked her. She watched every penny. You would have to justify getting more paper clips, but the pettiness came from her, not from Otto.
Erik, always there in his own office, was terrific: talented, motivated, and so kind I wondered how he had Otto’s genes. I loved Erik: everybody in the office did. He and Otto, I felt, were “overly” father and son, trying so hard to be father and son but they weren’t there yet. They frequently said to each other, “I love you.” It was very endearing, and you couldn’t help but be touched. I never once heard Otto yell at Erik. In fact, when Erik was there Otto was noticeably calmer. A number of times with Erik I saw him struggle to keep his temper in check: his head would turn red but he wouldn’t blow up.When I first started, Otto was pleasant. He told jokes, he acknowledged appreciation, and I liked him. I liked him a lot. But I knew from day one that I simply did not have the subservient temperament he needed. In time I began to feel that working for him was a daily wearing down. Every once in a while he’d throw you a bone but it had a second piece to it. The reader-interns, Ted Gershuny and Ken Kaufman, were in awe of him and would sit straight up when he walked in. They were aspiring Otto Premingers and I was not. Otto used a lot of medication, bottles and bottles of uppers and downers, Dexedrine and Valium. They were in huge prescription bottles in his name that we would steal handfuls of pills from. I felt that the drugs created the mood swings; within a few hours’ time there would be enormous changes in his personality that I couldn’t cope with. For example, Otto ordered the same lunch every day, from the Carnegie Deli; I served it to him on china with cloth napkins, on a tray I rolled in. Once, when the cole slaw was on the same plate as the sandwich, he screamed, “You are not to put the cole slaw on the same plate.” He took the china plate and hurled it into the garbage. “Now, order it again!”
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