Читать книгу Von Sternberg - John Baxter - Страница 10

Allah be praised for always providing new women.

—Dr. Omar (Victor Mature), in The Shanghai Gesture

YOUNG JONAS LOOKED FORWARD to weekends at the Prater all the more because of the ordeal of his weekdays. He hated the yeshiva, which, beginning at age six, he was forced to attend after regular classes to learn Hebrew. He particularly resented the teacher, a “bearded monster” named Antcherl, on whom he partly modeled Professor Rath in The Blue Angel.

Fortunately, this misery lasted only a year. Though not exactly prospering in the United States, Moses found enough work to send for his family, but not enough to pay their fares, which Serafin borrowed from relatives. In December 1901, with seven-year-old Jonas, little Siegfried, and baby Hermine, she embarked for New York. Because the Austro-Hungarian empire had only one outlet to the sea, the Adriatic port of Trieste, the family had to travel by train to Hamburg, Germany. Until the ship sailed, they took a room in a boardinghouse, the walls of which crawled with red-brown bugs. By comparison, the fourteen-day transatlantic voyage was uneventful, and after screening at Ellis Island, they joined Moses in the Yorkville district of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Although, as in Vienna, they had to climb many flights of stairs to reach their new apartment, it offered the relative luxury of hot water, a bathtub, and a dumbwaiter to bring goods from the ground floor.

Moses took menial jobs, including working at the Coney Island amusement park, where he controlled the flow of water that carried boats through the Tunnel of Love. Meanwhile, in 1904, sister Mole (pronounced “Molly,” but listed in the 1910 census as “Amelia”) was added to the family. Education being free, Jonas enrolled in the local grade school and struggled with English. He soon forgot his German and rarely spoke it for the rest of his life; in fact, when he went to Berlin in 1929 to make The Blue Angel, negotiations were conducted in English. According to Carl Zuckmayer, the film’s principal screenwriter, multilingual playwright Karl Vollmoeller sat in on discussions with von Sternberg, Emil Jannings, Erich Pommer, and himself “as a kind of interpreter, since none of us spoke correct English at the time and von Sternberg did not like to remember his German descent.”¹ Von Sternberg’s rejection of his German connections became more pronounced with age. He lied to Cahiers du Cinema in 1963, claiming, “I had never been in Germany before [I made Der Blaue Engel]. I knew nothing about Germany. I was an American director who had come from Hollywood to make the film.”²

Migrants pouring into New York made it the world’s second-largest city after London. But few of today’s residents would recognize it. The Bronx, recently annexed by overflowing Manhattan, remained mostly farmland. Coney Island was still an island, separated from Brooklyn by Coney Island Creek. Oystermen harvested in Jamaica Bay, and fishermen’s shanties lined the shores of Manhattan. With the subway not yet completed, horse-drawn streetcars provided public transport, augmented by elevated railroads such as the one that ran down Sixth Avenue. Horses were so common that doomsayers foresaw their accumulated manure blocking entire streets. (Instead, it dried and blew about, spreading intestinal and respiratory diseases.) Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central had yet to be built. Once they were, pedestrians on Park Avenue choked on coal smoke and cinders until the New York Central was electrified in 1912.

Von Sternberg detested this thrusting, greedy metropolis. He would set his first film as a director, The Salvation Hunters, in a dockland polluted by industry, where a dredge monotonously claws up mud and deposits it on a scow. As a boy he saw many such dredges at work as Manhattan created new land by dumping garbage and deepened the Hudson and East rivers to accommodate larger ships carrying yet more immigrants. Father and son agreed on the deficiencies of New York, and in 1904, Moses sent the family back to Vienna while he remained in the United States.

Serafin was pregnant, and a third son, Heinrich, was born the following year. Their new home in Vienna, the middle story of a freestanding house, was an improvement over the Blumauergasse tenement. A carpenter’s workshop occupied the street level, while in the loft above them, housemaids aired and dried washing. The family scratched along on odd jobs and charity from Serafin’s family. Young Jonas found an after-school job grazing circus horses in the Prater, but it lasted only for the summer. During the winter of 1905 he was forced to endure the humiliation of lining up with other poor children for a free overcoat from the city—on which, to make everyone aware of its largesse, the council had embroidered its coat of arms. He unpicked this badge of poverty. In 1960, when the mayor of Vienna proposed to present von Sternberg with a medal, he “described the decoration that had honored me when I was cold.” The mayor promised to end the practice immediately.

At eleven, Jonas enrolled in a local gymnasium, a form of high school inferior to the more demanding lyceum. One of his teachers was Karl Adolph, a former housepainter who later earned a modest reputation as a writer, publishing collections of stories about working-class life in the Austrian capital. Adolph’s stories concentrated on the peasant girls, drawn to the city from all over the empire by employment as maids or laundresses, who offered rich pickings to the city’s bachelors.

Between eleven and fourteen, von Sternberg’s adolescent preoccupation with sex developed into a lifelong interest. Obscene graffiti gave him a knowledge of anatomy, which improved when he gathered in a cellar with some other boys to watch a girl on a swing show herself naked under her skirt. He had a few brushes with homosexuality. A teacher invited him to his apartment, ostensibly to help with his studies but actually to make advances, and an older boy pursued him with poems and even flowers. Jonas claimed to be indifferent, as he was to the men who pressed themselves against him on crowded streetcars.

Because his work deals so frequently but often obliquely with sex, this has invited speculation about von Sternberg’s sexuality. Superficially, he was almost obsessively heterosexual. Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, overheard her mother saying, “Of course, Jo, being a Jew, never stops—they always want to do it, all the time! Especially if they are small and have a thing for tall, blue-eyed Christians!”³ Dissenting opinions come mostly from those who disliked him. Sergei Eisenstein, initially an admirer and then a jealous rival, suggested that von Sternberg was, like himself, homosexual, with a taste for well-built young men, but this sounds more like bile than a serious claim.⁴ Screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas, a friend of von Sternberg’s first wife, Riza Royce (and thus no champion of Josef’s), commented tartly that the marriage may not have been consummated because, “according to Riza, Josef von Sternberg’s equipment was faulty.”⁵ Obviously it functioned well enough, since he married three times and fathered a son. Less easy to ignore are the indications of masochism, particularly in relation to Marlene Dietrich, his star and lover for almost a decade. If not for reasons of sexual gratification, why would he have stood by, stoically, as a succession of men and women occupied her bed and claimed her affections? To clarify their relationship, in almost every film he made after she entered his life, he included the character of a frustrated, impotent, or abandoned lover, costumed and made up to resemble himself. Only one scene in his work is directly traceable to a childhood sexual experience. While swimming in the Alte Donau, a dammed-off branch of the Danube, he blundered into a group of nude women, who warned him off in the impolite local German. He replicated that moment in one of his most sensual sequences, the opening of Blonde Venus, where Herbert Marshall and hiking friends encounter Dietrich and her companions naked in a forest pool.

At thirteen, Jonas did fall in love with a girl. He praised her “graceful posture [and] proud stride,” her “lithe and alluring” body and “long swinging braids,” and wrote of “trembling for hours on a street waiting to catch a distant glimpse.” He was desolate when he saw her kissing a more forward friend. It is inviting to compare her with Dietrich’s character in Dishonored, who fools rival spy Victor McLaglen with an imitation of a country maiden—dirndl, braids, and all. Despite describing his early sexual stirrings as a “song of the flesh [in the midst of which] we were as innocent as are newly born kittens” and claiming, “I sought only companionship and affection,” he had already cast himself as the passive partner, squirming while more confident rivals swept away the object of his desire. Revealingly, he said of this first love, “she permitted me to worship her, and in turn she worshipped herself”—a capsule description of his male protagonists’ relationship with women. “There was no guilt in me, no stealth and no fear,” he wrote—adding, ominously, “though these chimeras developed with time.”