Preminger also had trouble with the model Iman, making her acting debut as Castle’s wife. “Iman really wanted the part, and she offered to do it for nothing when she saw Otto in New York,” Val Robins said. “Somehow Otto, who liked her personally, believed he could get a performance out of her.”78 “Nicol will be very good with the girl,” Preminger told a reporter during the London shoot. “She is very black. He is very white. Both are very tall. It is my choice, my intuition. It’s the only way I can work.”79 But on the set Iman’s East African speech patterns, and her evident struggles with saying her lines fluently, began to irritate him, and he started in. Iman shouted back, however. “Otto knew as we were shooting that Iman was giving a terrible performance—she couldn’t even speak the language,” Val Robins said. “And from her point of view, Iman believes Otto ruined her chances for an acting career.”
Richard Attenborough, playing (beautifully) an uptight security officer who investigates the leak, proved a terrific trouper, as he had been on Rosebud. “He did the role as a favor to Otto,” Robins recalled, “and though he was about to direct Gandhi and making our film was not one of his happiest experiences, he was a delight, so calm and even at all times. Otto was tremendously grateful to him.”
After Robins flew the company to Nairobi, she discovered there was no money. “I would never have flown a crew to Africa if the accountant hadn’t told me it was all right,” Robins said.
The crew—there were about forty-five, including our caterers— told me the checks were bouncing. I asked them to consider continuing to work, but they decided not to. They struck. They were paid their per diems, and they became tourists. To pay his crew Otto sold another painting. In a way the delay was good because we had sent Nicol Williamson to Africa early to get a tan, and he burned his lips so we couldn’t have started on time anyway. Once we were ready to start, we finished in Nairobi in five days. But we did owe money.
The Nairobi Hotel, where the Human Factor company had been in residence from July 18 to August 9, sued Preminger for paying $21,783 in worthless checks and for walking out on the remaining $10,021. “It was horrific to Otto that not everyone was paid until some time afterward,” Robins said.80
News of Preminger’s financial difficulties generated publicity of a kind the filmmaker had never had to deal with before. Privately mortified but in public continuing to play Otto the indomitable, on August 22 he called a press conference in London, held not at the Dorchester but at the far less imposing Sheraton Park Tower in Knightsbridge. Otto revealed the identities of the three Saudi financiers who had failed to fulfill the contract they had signed with him on March 20 to ante up $7.5 million. To keep the production going he said he had begun to finance the film himself, and at the time of the conference claimed to have spent $2.5 million of his own money. Preminger estimated that he would be able to reduce the total production cost to “about $5.5 million.”
When The Human Factor wrapped two days later, Preminger’s financial problems were far from over. The next day an article in the Hollywood Reporter asserted that “in a desperate bid to cover the costs of his trouble-torn production, Preminger was negotiating the sale of several paintings, including a Picasso, to pay off cast and crew. But Equity has served a writ for $180,000 on Preminger’s Wheel Productions Company for cast salaries, and a second $100,000 for fees for Attenborough and others. An irate driver for the crew claims he is owed over $5,000 and has started his own legal action.” In all, as the trade paper claimed, twenty actors had sued for money owed. Preminger’s “problems,” as the Reporter speculated, “must put his next production, Blood on Wheels, due to be filmed in Canada and China next year, in some jeopardy.”
In Los Angeles in mid-December to publicize the film’s opening for Academy Award consideration, Otto tried to strike a philosophical pose. “It’s the first time I’ve ever made a film without a studio, and I ended up spending my own money, but I can’t complain,” he said. “I had complete autonomy to make the movie, and now MGM is distributing it through United Artists in the U.S. and Canada, Rank is releasing in England, and there are other distributors in other parts the world.”81
“I sold my beautiful home in the South of France, and two of my beautiful Matisses,” Preminger announced ruefully a few weeks later. “I think the movie will make money, then I’ll buy my two Matisses back, and two more besides,” he said.82 By early 1980, when The Human Factor was released across the country, Otto was able to pay off most of his creditors, and he set up a special bank account from which all proceeds from the film would be used to honor the remaining creditors. But his financial problems with the film were to linger for several years. The modest profits were not sufficient to pay off all the creditors, and the expected sale to television never happened. In a British court, on January 28, 1984, the remaining creditors sued him. The case was finally settled three days later when the parties reached “a private settlement.”83
Otto Preminger’s final film had a warm reception from most critics. “The film must be accounted a triumph for the director,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in the March 29 Saturday Review. “It is his finest in twenty years, unfolding with emphatic pace and force at the same time, with the controlled understatement that makes every gesture and inflection so much more telling.” “One of the best Preminger films in years,” agreed Vincent Canby in the New York Times on February 8. “It is so good in so many ways that I think it’s possible to say that … its weaknesses are more those of Mr. Greene than of Mr. Preminger and Mr. Stoppard.” “A lucidly impressive return to form for the 73-year-old director,” noted David Ansen in the February 11 Newsweek. “It’s not really a thriller at all, but an understated, uncompromising dissection of an event: an anatomy of the murder of a soul.” Only a poison-pen review from Rex Reed broke the chorus of praise. “Under Preminger’s decrepit direction, it turns out to be not only the dullest espionage movie ever made, but the dullest movie ever made—period,” he wrote in the February 8 New York Daily News. “The Human Factor is Preminger’s first film in five years. With any luck, it will be his last.” (“My father never questioned himself or his abilities, but despite what he said he did have a fragile ego about critics, and in particular he thought Rex Reed was unfair,” Mark recalled.) 84
While Preminger’s ordeal in completing the film had been widely reported, the mostly affirmative reviews were by no means a sympathy vote. By any measure his handling of The Human Factor demonstrates a serene command of the medium. The formality that had been an element of Preminger’s style from the beginning—his work had never exuded a youthful, jaunty spirit—attains, in this valedictory project, the assurance of an old master, an elder statesman certain of his gifts who has no need of showing off. Preminger’s approach was never more lean, even, in a sense, more “barren,” than here. Long passages of dialogue, as in Castle’s climactic confession scene in which he tells his wife he has been a double agent, are played in long takes in front of a detached, unmoving camera. As it pursues its own cool and rigorous course, The Human Factor is a kind of zero degree cinema, almost avant-garde in its austerity.
Reversing his procedure on Rosebud, where character is sacrificed for narrative momentum, Preminger approaches Graham Greene’s spy story primarily as a character study, “an anatomy of the murder of a soul,” in David Ansen’s fine phrase. The settings reflect the blank façade with which Castle confronts the world. The modest house that Castle and his family live in reveals nothing about the inhabitants. The Secret Service pursues its masked endeavors in anonymous, brightly lighted offices. Castle and a few colleagues attend a cheerless strip club where they watch the show with glazed expressions. In the finale Castle is relocated to a shabby apartment in Moscow. Some reviewers cited the set—“Moscow” is a painted backdrop glimpsed through a smudged window—as evidence of Preminger’s financial crisis. But the film doesn’t need to take us to Moscow. It isn’t the place that matters but the irony of Castle’s discovery once he is in Moscow that the agenc
y had all along had a mole in Russia and so he had been releasing
Maurice Castle (Nicol Williamson), a burnt-out case, and a Russian agent (Boris Isarov), in a decrepit apartment in “Moscow” in the last scene of Preminger’s final film, The Human Factor.
information to the Russians that they already had. In the last shot, as abrupt as the ending of Rosebud, Castle’s phone connection to his wife in London is terminated, presumably forever.
As he must, Nicol Williamson carries the film, and without any of the surface tics of “great acting” that Preminger had no patience for. His pinched manner of speaking, his collapsed body language and hangdog expression suggest a character burdened by wounds he cannot reveal: Castle is a defeated man with something to hide. Most reviewers as well as Preminger thought Iman’s performance was amateurish. But no, the director’s instinctive sense that she could play the role proved to be correct. Iman is indeed a cold fish, but a hot-blooded actress would have broken the frame; Iman’s minimalism—she suggests just enough feeling to convey her character’s plight—is to the point. Also to the point is top-billed John Gielgud in a cameo as an intelligence agency higher-up with a sublimely opaque expression.
If Rosebud was Otto’s gift to Erik, The Human Factor was his gift to himself. No wonder he sacrificed so much to ensure the film’s completion. For his own sense of honor he had no choice but to finish the film, to prove that he could.
NINETEEN
After the Fall
On July 22, 1980, as he was crossing Fifth Avenue at Fifty-fifth Street in lunch-hour traffic, Preminger was struck down by a taxicab. “He had been hit from the back and was thrown onto the hood of the cab,” recalled Lewis Chambers, an agent with an office at 663 Fifth Avenue who witnessed the incident.
The fact that he was able to get up at all was through sheer force of will. When his body hit the pavement, the impact was ferocious. Outwardly he only suffered a tiny cut on the back of the head, and he wasn’t bleeding. But when he was lying on his back on the street I was sure he was dead. His eyes rolled back; his right hand was shaking. It was beastly hot, and I thought this man will be dead any second. From a distance I didn’t know who it was, but when I knelt down I recognized Otto Preminger and I felt obligated to stay. He got up, with my assistance and that of someone else, who knew him, and we pleaded with him to stay for medical attention, or to wait for the ambulance that had been called. “Why did you do this to me?” he asked the taxi driver. “Who stole my necktie?” he asked when he discovered it was missing. He walked off with the other gentleman. I later found out that they went to have lunch at La Caravelle. A few days later Louis Nizer’s office called to ask if I’d be willing to testify; I was, because Preminger had not been responsible; he had not run into the traffic. A week or so later the Nizer office called back to say that the taxi insurance company had settled.1
“After he was struck by the taxi, Otto was still able to walk to and from the office,” Hope said. “But he was getting frail. I had sensed that on location in Africa for The Human Factor, when I noticed that he had trouble getting up a small hill. We found out later that year he had Parkinson’s, which caused him to dodder. One night during the winter after the accident he got lost coming home from the office and turned up freezing cold in the snow. I was terrified. We went to doctors, but they couldn’t find anything.”2
Refusing to announce retirement, Preminger continued to go to his office at 711 on a daily basis, and still continued, periodically, to issue press releases about future plans. “I was hired to do Otto’s next picture,” Val Robins said,
and waiting for that to fall into place I decided to make myself useful. At first we were busy doing promotion and tours for The Human Factor, and then, when no other film was forthcoming, and it became clear that there would be no other film, I thought a legacy can’t be allowed to die. I helped Otto to amalgamate his six or seven different companies into Otto Preminger Films, one entity, with Hope as president, and Otto appointed me to keep it going. I knew I wanted to make a documentary about him. [Anatomy of a Director, Robins’s documentary, was released in 1990.] I worked with Otto for the last five years of his life, and he became like a father to me. Yes, he was a difficult man, but a unique human being, and I loved him.3
Val Robins ran Otto Preminger Films from 1986 until the summer of 2005; since then, Otto’s daughter Victoria has been president and treasurer. Hope is chairman, and Mark is vice-president and secretary.
In November 1980, as an in-house project at the Loft Theatre, where he would continue to teach through 1981, Preminger directed one last play The Killer Thing, a drama by William Packard about a supposed mass murderer who hides out in the tarpaper shack of a hermit. “I had twenty or thirty scripts every week,” Elaine Gold recalled. “I’d read a few pages at the beginning and at the end to judge whether it was fit to send to any of my directors. This one, by a poet and Harvard graduate, scared me, and I sent it to my three directors, Joe Ferrer, Joe Stein, and Otto. If anybody had the nerve to do it, it would have been Otto. He liked it right away, and put it together so fast. He saw it as a major motion picture. I thought it was twenty years ahead of its time.”4
John Martello, who played the hermit and is now the executive director of the Players Club in New York, recalled,
Otto cast me on the spot, by instinct. He was exactly the opposite of a Method director, and in some ways it was refreshing. He had a unique way of rehearsing—only what had been memorized. “You will go home and learn some lines,” he told us. When all the lines had been memorized, he said we were ready to open. When he started to scream at me in an early rehearsal, I don’t know why but I started to laugh. And then he started to laugh, and we got along just fine after that. He walked very slowly, and at each rehearsal he would make an entrance walking to a thronelike chair. The second he was seated he expected us to begin rehearsing. If there was any real direction it was about movement and placement—he directed us as if we were making a film. His comments were about blocking, not about acting values or theme or character. He talked about the future, about his Hugo Black project in particular. And he thought our project would lead to a major Broadway production and then a film. At the time I thought the reason Ingo came around was because of plans Otto had for the film. He told me that for the film he wanted James Cagney for my part: he was thinking in those terms. He still had a sense of who he was, very much so: he was Otto Preminger. I never got any feeling that he was near the end. I got to work with a legend, and I’ll always be grateful for that.5
Directing The Killer Thing at the Loft on Twelfth Street and University Place in Greenwich Village was Preminger’s last job. “After the play Otto was so frustrated about not being able to get another deal together,” Hope recalled.
He became increasingly frail. Doctors told me the bash on his head in the taxi accident had given him a concussion, and with the Parkinson’s his hands started shaking more and he began to lose strength in his legs. From about the end of 1981 on, he didn’t look well and he got more and more distant. He would stare into space. Gradually he began to lose his ambition to get a deal—I think he knew he couldn’t do it. Doctors didn’t think any antidepressant would help. But for the last six years of his life we thought a miracle would happen. I so wanted him to have a rage attack, an “Otto attack,” as we called it. I kept wishing, “If only he would yell at somebody, at anybody, at the kids, at me.” I didn’t care who it was, but he didn’t. Instead, he just sat there, and in the last four or five years there were no rages at all. His long-term memory was good; sometimes he thought he was in Vienna at the Josefstadt Theater giving notes to his actors. But his short-term memory got weaker and weaker. He knew the people who were around him every day, but sometimes he’d call Mark “Ingo” and then say, “I mean Mark.” But he did begin to lose his memory, and his conversation became very simple. I know people said he had Alzheimer’s, but our doctors never made the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. I would admit it if they had. People al
so said he was an alcoholic, and he wasn’t. He enjoyed drinking, but he was never a falling-down drunk. As he got older, he did not drink more, but he wasn’t able to hold it as well. Erik kept pouring liquor when he was with him, maybe he felt it was easier to talk to him that way.
As Otto grew ever more feeble, Hope investigated a nursing home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but decided she would “never be able to send” her husband there or “to any nursing home.” “Otto didn’t want nurses in the house because he still wanted independence, and he wouldn’t eat anything I hadn’t cooked,” Hope said. Throughout her husband’s long decline, Hope would leave Otto’s side only infrequently, to meet a friend for lunch, perhaps, or to get her hair done, or to sit in the back of the St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. “I was raised Episcopalian, but didn’t go to church when I was married to Otto, who believed in God but not in the ritual. He knew it brought me great peace, though. I needed my religion to get through Otto’s dying, and after his death I went back to the church.”6
“As my father began his gradual deterioration, my mother became his caretaker,” Mark recalled. “During the last four years, when he really couldn’t be left alone, she almost never left the house, except once in a while when Louise, our housekeeper, was there. It was a role reversal: now she was taking care of him, and she made that transition so gracefully. She never once complained, or resented it. During those last four difficult years her devotion went above and beyond.”7
Hope was disappointed that “only a few stalwarts came to visit. Erik came only infrequently. I felt Otto was somewhat forgotten when he was no longer in the limelight. There weren’t many calls; of the Hollywood group, Burgess Meredith was the most loyal. Otto wasn’t aware of what was happening, and that was a blessing. He didn’t like to discuss human weakness, his own or anyone else’s, but he would have been so hurt.”8
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