“Today is your last day,” Blanche told me one day when Otto was out of town scouting for Rosebud in Tehran. He had never said good-bye. It was sad that after I had been there for a year he couldn’t tell me that I would be gone. I had never been treated that way by anyone. After I was fired, Erik called me to work for him, which I did part time. I told him, “I can’t believe your father would have let Blanche fire me.” “My father is a complicated man,” he said.
After having worked for him, I thought less of Otto’s talents as a filmmaker. I could never bring myself to see Rosebud and I can’t even watch Laura without gritting my teeth.10
Still with no film project in development, in the fall of 1973 Preminger decided to return to the theater. He would produce and direct Full Circle, the only play by the Austrian novelist Erich Maria Remarque, which the writer’s widow, the actress Paulette Goddard, had sent to him. The play’s setting, Berlin at the end of World War II as the Red Army is entering the city, and its ironic story about a German anti-Nazi who becomes a victim of Communism, enticed Otto at once. To help him prepare an English-language edition he enlisted playwright and screenwriter Peter Stone, who in 1956 had worked with Remarque on the original German version, called The Last Station. “Erich had asked me in 1956 to do the next draft in English,” Stone recalled,
but he didn’t like what I did and withdrew it. After Erich died, Paulette was looking for any shred of income from him, and she sent the play—the German version, which is the only one she had—to Otto because he had been a friend of Erich’s. When Otto came to me he said, “There’s a catch: Paulette insists it be by Erich and adapted by you.” I didn’t care. As we worked on the script, Otto, who had a good story sense, was bearable. When he felt it was ready to go, he got the cast he wanted: Bibi Andersson, a big catch, a terrific actress and a member of Ingmar Bergman’s repertory company, and Mr. Spock, Leonard Nimoy. He also got the best designer, Robin Wagner, and his coproducer was Roger Stevens, who ran the Kennedy Center in Washington, which as a result was where we played our out-of-town tryout.
Once rehearsals started, Stone no longer found Preminger to be “bearable.” “He pushed everyone to their limits until they said, ‘Stop!’ At that point, he would stop, because that’s as far as he knew he could go,” Stone said. “Roger Stevens was angry because Preminger refused to make a single change in the script, and then Stevens got mad at me, too, when I couldn’t convince Otto to allow any changes during rehearsals and out of town.”11 “There were also some big blowups with Leonard Nimoy,” as the play’s associate producer Bud Rosenthal remembered, “but unlike those with Dyan Cannon, they were not irreparable. On the last day of rehearsals in New York, however, before we left for Washington where the show was scheduled to run for a month [Full Circle opened in Washington on October 6, 1973], we got a call in the office telling us that Leonard was leaving. I spoke to both of them, and Leonard agreed to stay. In Washington, both Otto and Leonard, who was very active in Democratic politics and had a steady stream of visitors backstage, were in their element and that helped.”12
Preminger also had problems with his leading lady. “Bibi was confused by Preminger’s direction,” Peter Stone said, “and she had the benefit of some after-hours coaching from another director, Milos Forman, with whom she was living at the Watergate Hotel. Forman was not working at the time and in bed with back spasms, and he would redirect Bibi. Then at 3 or 4 a.m. she would call her mentor, Ingmar Bergman, in Sweden. She was in thrall to Bergman, as all his actors were. Otto never knew about the outside direction his star was getting.”
Adding to his trouble was the widow Remarque, “a dragon lady nobody liked,” according to Stone. “Paulette was a Jewish girl who had married Chaplin and who had had a strange and difficult life. She was very complicated, and was looking out for herself only”13 As Arlene Leuzzi remembered, “Otto’s phone never stopped ringing, and he always took his calls (he loved to talk on the phone, which he used as a way of entertaining his staff), but my instructions were that if Paulette Goddard called he was not in. Otto was not a gossip; he never talked about colleagues, and he never said anything derogatory about anyone—except Paulette. I suspect, though, that he did call her back at times.”14 “Paulette watched every rehearsal and wanted to direct the actors,” Hope said. “Otto lost his temper once—‘take your script and shove it!’ he told her—and she went off in a huff to Switzerland, where she had lived with Remarque. But she was there for the opening dressed in a full-length white lynx coat. She wanted to hold on to her glamour and feared it was leaving her; Otto had compassion for that, but he found her impossible to work with.”15
The show opened at the ANTA Theatre on November 12, 1973, to a mixed response. Richard Watts in the New York Post hailed Preminger’s “skillful direction.” In Women’s Wear Daily Martin Gottfried called it “a disgrace to professional theatre.” Full Circle closed after twenty-one performances. Rather than evoking an aura of postwar Berlin, Preminger’s stiff-jointed production seemed airless—“it was a melodrama that didn’t shed light on anything,” according to Peter Stone.
It could have been good, but what we ended up with wasn’t. One of the critics said it was like a B-movie thriller from the 1940s, and that wasn’t far off. It would have made a better movie, something like Decision Before Dawn. And at times Otto seemed to be directing it as if it were a movie, almost with a viewfinder. Otto wanted so much to get back to the theater, but at this point he wasn’t a good theater director. We thought he was just forgetful and exhausted, but the truth was that he was entering into senility and wasn’t connecting. Otto had an amazing lack of interest in the public opinion about his work. He liked the show, he believed in it, and the indifferent reception really didn’t seem to phase him. He also didn’t care about his personal reputation. He was creating a legend—but you can’t invent too far from your own nature.16
While he was in Washington with Full Circle, Preminger, on October 7, bought the rights to Rosebud, a French best seller by Paul Bonnecarrère (for the English-language edition, Joan Hemingway, Ernest’s granddaughter, had a coauthor credit). The story of a kidnapping by Palestinian terrorists featuring an international cast of characters, a sprawling episodic structure, and a dusting of political timeliness, Rosebud was a return, for Preminger, to familiar territory. Divorced from Paramount, Otto approached his Exodus partners at United Artists, who agreed to back him but did so without much enthusiasm.
From the beginning Otto intended the project as a gift to Erik, who would write the screenplay. “We’re going to work differently on this,” Preminger told Bud Rosenthal, who in the fall of 1973 had replaced the loyal but understandably weary Nat Rudich and who would receive associate producer credit on the film. “Otto was going to be involved so closely with Erik, that he didn’t want me to participate on a daily basis,” Bud Rosenthal said. “Otto was being very protective of Erik. He loved his son, and it was my sense that he had some feelings of guilt. I wasn’t the enemy, and Otto wasn’t treating me that way; rather, he wanted me to be able to maintain objectivity and distance. So after he and Erik had written about fifty pages, he brought them to me and it took me three days to make notes.”17
“When I read the book I saw it as an interesting way of looking at the Arab/Israeli conflict,” Erik recalled. “As in the book, I wanted to show the point of view of both sides, as well as to present the power of the media at a moment of international crisis.” A schism developed early on, however, between Erik’s conception of the story and his father’s. “Otto felt that the audience had to care about the five girls who were kidnapped by the Arabs, and Hope felt you had to love the girls. But I didn’t think that was important at all.”18 With Erik on one side against his father and stepmother on the other, the making of Rosebud turned into a tense family drama, and in a way the completed film could be regarded as the most expensive home movie ever made.
After he first entered his father’s life, Erik had been quite friendly with Hop
e. “When he met Hope in Paris, he really liked her,” Barbara Preminger said. “And I felt those feelings were returned. The twins were quite fond of him too, and Erik spent time with them—he made a point of spending time with them.”19 “At first we all appreciated Erik enormously,” Hope said. “But after a while he began to ignore the kids. Still, I tried very hard to like him— Otto had such a strong sense of family that I felt I had to like him, for Otto’s sake.” By the time that Erik began to write the Rosebud screenplay, however, Hope’s feelings for her stepson had darkened considerably.
Otto felt so sorry that he hadn’t known Erik as he was growing up that he tried to devote special time to him—Saturday was Erik’s day with Otto—and of course that was fine; that’s what Otto should have done for his son. But when Erik was given the Rosebud opportunity—Otto risked his career to give Erik this chance because United Artists was not happy with this picture from the start—I felt Erik behaved badly. He would go out at night, and Otto couldn’t get pages out of him. Erik would sit in our living room and talk about what he was going to do. I began to feel that Erik didn’t care enough that Otto was doing so much for him.20
“I didn’t feel at this time that Erik was a good influence on my father,” Mark recalled. “He separated him from other people, and he’d supply my father with alcohol, and at this point in his life my father had begun to drink heavily”21
It was apparent to Tony Gittelson, at eighteen the youngest of the interns in Preminger’s office at the time Rosebud was being written, that Otto had made
a mistake, as a father. Erik, who was a gracious man—we all liked him very much—was not ready to write such a big screenplay, and his father shouldn’t have asked him to do it. It was an enormous act of love: here was Otto Preminger placing what was likely to be his last big movie in his son’s hands. He was trying very hard to be a father to Erik, we all saw that; when he would kiss Erik on the cheek, it was very touching. But the work wasn’t coming out right. In the big bullpen in New York, when we were proofing script pages, we were laughing: frankly, it was lousy. Erik later said, sweetly, “I heard you guys laughing.”22
The setup could not have been easy for Erik, who had to contend with his own uncertainty about his writing skills, a growing estrangement from Hope and the twins, and most troubling of all, his father’s disapproval, sometimes expressed in thundering rage. As Erik recalled, “One day when I was in my office meditating—anything to survive—Otto burst in carrying new pages I had just given him, screaming, his head and face a bright red. He disliked them, as he had disliked everything I had written. I walked out. Later that day he gave me expensive cologne, his way of apologizing.”23
Before he approved a final draft, and with a number of characters still undeveloped, including the master terrorist who orchestrates the kidnapping as well as the kidnap victims themselves, Otto scheduled shooting to begin in the south of France in early June. Periodically from February to May, often with Erik and his favorite production manager Eva Monley he racked up a record number of reconnaissance expeditions to the four countries in which the story takes place. “I did the surveys with Otto in Corsica, France, and Germany, but I didn’t go to Israel,” Monley recalled. “Frankly, I thought I was going to go completely crackers because Otto just kept hounding me. He kept thinking I was the girl I had been in 1959, but I had learned a lot since then and somehow he didn’t seem to trust me. We couldn’t see eye to eye, and I knew I had to quit. Martin [Schute] said I couldn’t quit until I replaced myself. I handed over a good guy, Wolfgang Glattes. ‘Did you have to give me a German?’ Otto asked.”24
“Eva Monley was a nervous wreck at the time she asked me to take up her job,” Glattes recalled.
Actually, Graham Cottle was to be production manager, but Eva said that Otto desperately needed an assistant director, and that I was the one for it. I went to see Otto in Paris, where he was at the Plaza Athénée. He invited me to go out walking with him and it was as if God had returned to France and was holding court. In Paris, everyone knew him on the street—people would call out to him and he would always respond in a friendly way. I accepted the job because I could see that Otto had a good sense of humor and a good heart, and I never changed my initial opinion, not for a minute. We opened production offices in Nice and Juan-les-Pins, and preproduction stretched out over four months. During that time I went with Otto to Berlin, Hamburg, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Paris, the south of France. We went to every location two or three times. “Each time you get a different viewpoint about how to set up the shots,” he told me.
Calm, affable, and in bearing and demeanor clearly no pushover, Glattes seemed to know from the first how to handle his boss, and as they traveled together, Preminger to an unusual degree came to depend on him.
Along with finding locations, Preminger’s other primary concern was in casting the Rosebud, the pleasure yacht from which the five young women are abducted. The Rosebud was as hard to cast as the ship in Exodus had been. A number of deals fell through before a suitable boat became available, for a limited amount of time only. “We had to start at the end of May, a little earlier than Otto had planned, because that’s when the boat, a major expense, would be available to us,” Wolfgang Glattes said. “We were locked into a certain time frame because of that boat.”25
Otto invited three interns to join the production. Tony Gittelson, who had been at 711 in the summer of 1973, was “thrilled” when Preminger asked him to come along on the Rosebud shoot. “ ‘Pay your own way over, and I can find you a hotel room,’ he told me. At eighteen, I would be traveling around Europe with a famous director—and in fact with this on my résumé I got into Harvard. Otto even made me dialogue coach on the film; as it developed the dialogue was one of the big problems!”26 Preminger also asked Ken Kaufman, another 711 veteran. As Kaufman pointed out, “Otto always had observers—it was the European system. ‘I can give them graduate school,’ he boasted. He was proud that he was great with young people, and he loved them, or so he claimed.”27 The third student in the Preminger “graduate school” was Ted Gershuny who was planning to write a book about the making of the film. “Otto, who never did anything privately, gave Ted Gershuny total access,” Kaufman said. “That was typical of Otto,” Bud Rosenthal agreed. “He was fearless, and he didn’t feel vulnerable. Despite all the signs right from the beginning, he really didn’t know that it was a troubled project. I asked Ted to keep me out of the book because I knew it was going to be a rough road.”28
“Otto was not so generous to these young men,” Glattes said. “There was no salary or per diem, and they worked sixteen hours a day.” But working with Otto Preminger in exotic locations in the summer of 1974 provided the interns with the experience of a lifetime. (The three interns and Glattes struck up a friendship that endures to the present.)
During four months of frequent scouting trips, Preminger, always with Glattes at his side, had lined up locations in Corsica, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Juan-les-Pins, Haifa, Tel Aviv, and the Israeli desert. He had also found his Rosebud yacht along with another hard-to-nail prop, a flight simulator on which one of the hostages is taken, blindfolded, by her abductors. He had his production team, including his three interns, in place. And because he had landed Robert Mitchum for the leading role, an international spy who leads the hunt for the kidnappers, the financing from United Artists was ensured. What he still did not have when he began filming in Juan-les-Pins on May 19, 1974, was a completed script.
“It was the only time in his career that Otto started shooting without a finished script,” Hope recalled, “and it was the only time Otto was worried about a picture while it was being made.”29 “From the first morning, as he was setting up shots of the five women arriving at the yacht, Otto wanted me to remain within three meters of him at all times,” Glattes recalled. “I saw I was to be a kind of security blanket. No other director I ever worked for was like this. I couldn’t direct the extras because I had to be right next to Otto. I had to be there
to answer every question.”30
Preminger knew at once that the dialogue for the young women wasn’t working. It was stilted, the actresses seemed to have no idea how to approach their ill-defined characters, and Preminger seemed to have no idea how to help them. He continued shooting, but decided he needed a writer to help Erik punch up the dialogue. He called Marjorie Kellogg, “a good friend of Erik’s from Junie Moon, and from Otto’s point of view she wouldn’t have been threatening,” Bud Rosenthal said. “But Marjorie also wasn’t right for the project. It needed a writer who could give it the cynical bite the novel had, someone who would have been congenial to Otto’s iconoclastic approach.”31
“Otto called me and said his son was in trouble with the script, and though I didn’t want to go, I flew to Nice to help Erik get through without losing face,” Marjorie Kellogg said.
Playing Mama, I worked with Erik twelve to fifteen hours a day and he began to learn how to write a screenplay. Sometimes we were writing on the set, a half a scene ahead. In some scenes we started five minutes ahead of shooting. I was there for about four weeks, in the south of France, just enough time to get it finished. I had a good relationship with Erik, but his relationship with Otto at that point was not too hot, and I didn’t want to get in the middle of it. I didn’t understand the relationship between them: I felt Erik had always been Otto’s whipping boy and that he didn’t have the strength to handle his father. He was always getting put down by his father and to me he seemed squashed. I didn’t want to stay around longer than I needed to.32
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