The real problem—and the reason why, in addition to its evident faults of scripting, performance, and direction, Rosebud remains beyond critical rehabilitation—is that the kidnappers are identified as Palestinian terrorists, and therefore the film raises significant issues that it radically shortchanges. It’s as if the burden of assembling the vast narrative distracted Preminger from paying much attention to the pressing ideological concerns behind the plot. Far too little time is devoted to considering the political convictions that motivated the kidnapping. And yet, to rise above the charge of exploitation or to transcend the category it tumbles into, that of an ephemeral political thriller, the film needed to place the origins and ramifications of a terrorist act in a much more probing context. Still it must be noted that no one else at the time was willing to take on the subjects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the international threat posed by Arab and Islamist terrorism. And in some of its details the film is prescient. Sloat issuing his mad utterances from secret desert caverns eerily anticipates Osama bin Laden. And the blunt, powerful ending, in which another terrorist group hijacks a plane in retaliation for the capture of the kidnappers, makes the appallingly timely point that terrorism may be uncontainable.
“After Rosebud, it was very hard with Otto,” Erik said.
I didn’t stay on for the editing, I just couldn’t. I bought a book, The Return of Moriarty, to adapt into a screenplay, and I worked on it out of my home. I would see Otto, but it wasn’t easy. When Rosebud opened in Los Angeles, I was in New York; when it opened in New York, I was in Los Angeles. The film’s failure affected our personal relations. I think my father blamed me in part for the way it turned out, and I blamed him. We were both right. It might have been smarter not to have made the film, but I can’t say now, so many years later, that I wished I had done something else. 65
(In 1980, five years after the film had come and gone in ignominy, Ted Gershuny published an account of its making called Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture: The Anatomy of an All-Star, Big-Budget, Multimillion-Dollar Disaster. “To one man I owe the existence of this book,” Gershuny stated in his acknowledgments. “I watched him as closely as possible for almost a year. Whatever emotion I saw in him, I never saw fear. I wish to thank Otto Preminger. Who hid nothing.” Gershuny’s prevailing theme is that from the beginning the project was on a collision course with artistic and financial disaster and that everyone, including the bemused director, whom Gershuny presents as often addled and only fitfully in command, knew it. “Ted’s book should be a mandatory text in every film production class,” Erik said. “The book tells the truth. Hope, who is absolutely loyal to Otto, and who has never said a critical thing about Otto’s filmmaking, felt the book was a terrible betrayal. But everybody knew that the book was being written as we shot.”66 “Gershuny was not on our team, he was on Erik’s team,” Hope responded. “The book’s chaotic form reflects the chaos of the content. But Otto was not as indecisive or as disorganized as Gershuny makes him out to be here. Rosebud is not a good film, and I felt then and continue to feel now that Otto ruined his reputation by doing the film for Erik. Certainly, as the book presents it, this is not the way a film should be made; I would argue, however, that this was not the way Rosebud was made. The book is misleading.” 67)
“Would you like to work for me?” Preminger asked Ken Kaufman after Rosebud wrapped. “You’ll stay with me in London and go back to New York with me.” Although he knew that he had caught Preminger “beyond the tail end of his career—by 1975, he was just hanging on, grasping at straws,” Kaufman accepted the offer. He knew he had the essential requirement of working for Otto: he understood him. “Otto had fired me during filming in Paris, with thousands of Parisians watching. ‘What are you doing?’ he had said, when he saw me standing around; he thought I should be busy every second. ‘Go home, I never want to see you again.’ But I knew he didn’t want me to go home, he just wanted to make a point.”
After returning from London with Preminger, Kaufman quickly settled into an office routine.
Otto would call first thing every morning. “What’s going on?” You could not say “Nothing.” You had to come up with something just to get him thinking. He walked to work every day from East Sixty-fourth (and he never passed a beggar without giving money). There were a lot of visitors and hangers-on, and many, many calls. He spent a lot of time each day on the speakerphone. Lunches would be at “21,” Giovanni’s, Romeo Salta, or La Côte Basque. At most, he’d drink one glass of wine at lunch. In the afternoon I sat around with him, and we often talked about the news of the day. He would bring out brandy, and when he started to drink he would get red in the face and start to sweat. My job, I saw quickly, was to keep him on an even keel, to get his mind going and to keep him happy so he wouldn’t get into a horrible mood. A lot of the job was hand-holding, and he appreciated it. Otto was so charming and persuasive, and so wearing. Working for him was 24/7. 68
Preminger at seventy, with no thought of retiring, continued to pursue and announce projects as he always had. He glanced through publishers’ galleys and kept up with current events, sifting them for kernels of a movie scenario. “Read this book, and write a synopsis,” he’d tell Kaufman frequently. “After I’d write a synopsis, he would attack it.” The most significant project to be developed during Kaufman’s tenure, and the one that got closest to getting produced, was a two-hour television movie based on the life and landmark legal decisions of Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black. “This will be the first dramatic treatment of the high court,” Preminger announced in Variety on June 19, 1975, only three months after he had overseen the domestic and international openings of Rosebud. “Justice Black fascinated me because he started out as an archconservative and became one of the most liberal and noteworthy justices in the annals of the court.”
To prepare a script he hired Howard Koch, the cowriter of Casablanca. When he was dissatisfied with Koch’s work, he hired Max Lerner to rewrite. “There was no doubt in Otto’s mind that he would make this movie,” Kaufman observed. “ ‘We must shoot in the Supreme Court,’ he said. ‘You’re not allowed to do that,’ I told him. ‘That’s ridiculous! Get me Chief Justice Berger on the phone.’ Within thirty seconds Berger was on the phone. ‘Mr. Berger, I would like to come to see you,’ Otto said, with the greatest charm. Max Lerner, Otto, and I took a shuttle to a 9:30 Monday morning meeting where we were told, decisively, ‘You can’t shoot here.’ I think Otto wanted to prove to me he could get to Berger.” 69
Perhaps frustrated by not being able to film the story “where it happened,” Preminger abandoned the project. In February 1976 he hired Eleanor Perry to write a screenplay of a Graham Greene novel, A Burnt-Out Case. In June he announced that Ring Lardner Jr. would adapt Blood on Wheels, the story of Dr. Norman Bethune, a Canadian surgeon who became Mao Tse-tung’s best friend. In September he acquired the rights to The Story of My Life, by Moshe Dayan, and three months later with his screenwriter J. P Miller he traveled to Israel for a ten-day scouting expedition and to meet with General Dayan, who was to be technical adviser on the film. The visitors also met with a number of prominent government officials, attended the Knesset, and appeared at lunches and dinners where they were the guests of honor. It may have seemed like old times, but the film was never made.
One project started during the post-Rosebud era that did come to fruition was one Preminger was not really committed to: writing a memoir. “Otto knew he wasn’t a writer and he really did not want to do the book,” as Hope recalled.70 And as Mark observed, “My father left no papers because he didn’t write; he didn’t take notes, he didn’t write memos or letters. He talked, in person and on the phone. And so he did not ‘write’ his autobiography: he taped it, and he had a lot of trouble with it.”71 “I would sit there on Saturday mornings as Otto dictated the book to June Callwood, a Canadian writer who did not want to have her name on the book,” Kaufman said. “I couldn’t help noticing that he was always the hero of all th
e stories he told June.”72 With a jacket designed by Saul Bass—on the front is a photo of the back of Otto’s famous bald, ovoid head; on the back is a photo of Otto, face front, smiling pleasantly, his knowing, incisive, bemused blue eyes lighting up for the camera—Doubleday published Preminger: An Autobiography in April 1977. “Otto’s book is unreadable,” Ingo claimed. Reviews were more tolerant, but lukewarm. “He is clearly a resourceful and clever man, even if he is the first to say so,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in the New York Times on April 26, 1977. “Preminger shows no interest in the art or technique of filmmaking except to insist and demonstrate that he has always been in total charge of his productions,” Kenneth Turan wrote in American Film in May 1977. “No one can accuse Mr. Preminger of being dull in this account of his progress up every ladder that has ever been set before him,” he added.
The book is indeed egocentric (isn’t that to be expected of an autobiography?) and insistently self-congratulatory. As a memoirist Preminger is defensive, disorganized, sketchy, sometimes fast and loose with facts and chronology, and far from candid—there is no mention of his affair with Dorothy Dandridge, for instance. Yet throughout, in clever turns of phrase and many astute asides about the temperament of co-workers and the craft of filmmaking, there are generous samplings of Preminger’s wit and perspicacity.
By the summer of 1977, Ken Kaufman felt it was long past the time for him to move on. “I’d sit in the office on Saturdays as Otto read a book,” Kaufman said.
It got oppressive. I began to feel I shouldn’t be there because it wasn’t doing anything for my career. Otto had started appearing on cable access shows instead of Mike Douglas, and he couldn’t seem to tell the difference. I thought he was beginning to make a fool of himself. And at the end of my tenure, he was starting to lose his memory, and to dodder. Momentarily, he would have no memory, then this would be followed by moments of great lucidity. I was his memory. He had me around to remind him. He was out of touch with the modern era, and didn’t know it, and I was beginning to feel I was out of touch too. He had no clue, no clue at all, that time had passed him by; he never acted as if “I’m a declining director off my game.” And nobody, certainly not Hope, who never had one critical thing to say about Otto or his work, would tell him.
When Kaufman began to date one of the interns at 711, Otto was displeased.
He had a strict rule: no fooling around in the office. The first year Pam and I kept our relationship a secret, but after Otto found out that we were living together, it was never the same. Pam got another job, and then we were married. Otto sensed independence in me that he didn’t like. He really did take great pleasure in discovering young people and in promoting them; but then he felt he had ownership rights. He was totally demanding, petulant, and childlike— and nobody ever called him on his cruelty. I don’t think he could get away with it now. I had to move on. I had to think of my own career.
(Kaufman is a successful television producer.)
Nearly thirty years after he had been a Preminger employee, Ken Kaufman in a voice choked with feeling said, “I loved Otto, and I hated him.”73
In 1978, as he continued in press releases to tout his projects on Moshe Dayan and Dr. Norman Bethune, Preminger signed with a lecture bureau that billed him as “America’s greatest director.” “With the same candor that has characterized his life, Otto Preminger—director, actor, producer, writer—exposes himself along with an impressive line-up of show business people in his unique lecture series,” the catalog announced. “Preminger reveals the funny, outrageous, and often exasperating moments of his career, and his association with the eccentric, the gracious, the wealthy, the egomaniacal… . This program is a unique chance to talk with Otto Preminger. It’s not just a lecture—it’s a dialogue between Preminger and the audience. If you ask the right questions you could hear some pretty shocking answers. He makes no bones about naming enemies or exalting his friends.”
About the same time Otto also began to teach at the Loft Theatre School, run by Elaine Gold, in Greenwich Village. “Joe [José] Ferrer, who was teaching for us, got us to Otto,” Gold recalled.
He taught acting and some directing—scene study. He was with us for three years, until he got ill. He got a hundred dollars a week, the same as Joe. “If Joe is getting it, why shouldn’t I?” he asked. He was a good teacher, and he could spot talent right away. He was not articulate in making comments, though, and toward the end there would be long pauses. Although names would elude him, he never rambled on. He made short shrift of the people he felt didn’t work hard, but the students liked him. He was always courtly with the women. We picked him up at his town house to drive him down to the classes, and he was always exactly on time, and always beautifully dressed—sharp and crisp. I thought of myself as the chauffeur, and I always felt Otto turned our old Chevy into a Dusenberg. One day he brought along with him another European gentleman in a vest—“My brother Ingo.” When I asked Ingo what he did, he said, “I’m a producer.” Otto laughed. “A producer he calls himself: he produced one lousy film.” Otto wasn’t joking.
He always introduced me as “Ellen”—it was never Elaine— “Gold, who runs the best acting school in the country, but she’s too fat.” He always made me laugh. Although he called me by my first name, his very bearing demanded “Mr. Preminger.” I’m surprised I didn’t say “Dr.” He seemed to like what we were doing, and frankly I was surprised when he didn’t leave any money to the Loft.74
As he kept busy teaching and on the lecture circuit, against all the odds Preminger was able to put through a deal for another film. Early in 1978, prepublication, he acquired the rights to a novel by Graham Greene called The Human Factor, an ironic wrong-man story with an interracial romance that seems to have been made to order for an Otto Preminger film. After a leak is discovered in the African section of the British Secret Service, an agent named Davis is targeted and then eliminated. But it is Davis’s partner Castle, a burnt-out bloke with no political convictions, who has been passing secrets to the Russians because a Communist had helped him and his new black wife escape from Kenya.
Preminger asked Greene, who had adapted Saint Joan for him in 1956, to write the screenplay, but the novelist was not well at the time, and claiming “he was too close to the material,” turned him down.75 The director then hired a leading British playwright, Tom Stoppard, who quickly wrote a script that Preminger just as quickly accepted. When for the first time in his career Otto was not able to find backing from a major studio, through business contacts in London he reached a group of Saudi Arabian financiers who promised to deliver his projected budget of $7.5 million. On that expectation Otto assembled a cast of British players including John Gielgud, Nicol Williamson, Derek Jacobi, Robert Morley, Ann Todd, and his good friend Richard Attenborough; hired a British crew; and began to search for locations in London and Kenya.
“When Otto came over to London for preproduction in the spring of 1979, I knew his executive producer and asked to be introduced,” Val Robins said.
Otto hired me to help out the production manager, who it turned out wasn’t suited to him. He fired her, and I became the production manager as well as the associate producer. From the beginning the project was fraught with problems, and for me it was an initiation by fire. Otto was frustrated and disappointed that after all his years in the business no one was supporting him and that he had had to find outside financing. But he knew he would complete the film no matter what. All the cast and crew realized that this might be the last Otto Preminger film, and we felt, watching him work, that we were looking at a brilliant filmmaker even then. He knew exactly what he wanted. He cut as he went along, and he rarely made a lot of takes, and then only because an actor had fluffed his lines. He was precise, quick, and punctual, and he was not, as some have claimed, suffering from Alzheimer’s. But he did keep to his reputation for firing people: we went through first assistant directors as if they were going out of style, and I was fired twice, but fortunat
ely rehired three times.
During the first six weeks of shooting in London, from the end of May to early July, Preminger’s main challenge was monitoring his temperamental star, Nicol Williamson, who according to Robins had been “fired from his previous film and was uninsurable.”76 “Nicol was surly to everyone but Otto, whom he respected,” Hope said.
But he was rude and nasty to me. After the first wardrobe people quit, Otto hired me, and Nicol, who thought he was God’s gift— “Is my stomach flat enough?” he’d ask, looking into a mirror— expected me to hand-wash all his Turnbull and Asser shirts. He warned me that his shirts were not to have a single wrinkle, and he would not leave his hotel room until I sent his shoes to be cleaned in the hotel barbershop. “I will not do this until I am properly taken care of,” he said. He was a mean drunk who beat up all his former wives, but he did not drink on the job.77
As Val Robins recalled,
Near the end of the London shoot the money Otto was expecting had not come through yet—Otto sold a painting in order to pay the company—and at a company meeting Nicol said it was all my fault they didn’t have financing. The cast and crew had to find somebody to blame, and I was it. I accepted that role. “You’re not to blame Otto Preminger,” I told them. Nicol told Otto that they must continue; he couldn’t afford a disaster because he had been fired from his previous film. A few days later, over an incident involving petty cash, Nicol actually struck me. I said nothing to Otto, who would have been horrified.
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