Читать книгу Von Sternberg - John Baxter - Страница 17

I don’t think Josef von Sternberg is working anywhere. I think he’s a genuine genius again.

—Walter Winchell, 1926

WITH UNITED ARTISTS BACKING it, The Salvation Hunters looked like the salvation of everyone involved. Georgia Hale became Chaplin’s mistress, then his leading lady in The Gold Rush. George Arthur won some acting roles, including in a couple of von Sternberg films, and he later became a successful producer of short features, but von Sternberg never mentioned him in interviews. As he would do with increasing frequency, he wrote a collaborator out of his life.

The director himself was feted. The New Yorker took pleasure in writing up his exploits as a case of a smart East Coast Jew putting one over on dumb West Coast goyim. “Joseph Sternberg drifted from the East Side, via Broadway, to Hollywood, a well-frayed shoestring pinned carefully in an inner pocket. He returns Josef von Sternberg, the ‘von’ having blossomed under the beneficence of the Californian sun. Out of experiences with butterfly movie companies, he wrought The Salvation Hunters, one of the most discussed of the current reticent dramas. Forty-seven hundred dollars was Mr. von Sternberg’s producing capital, garnered in reluctant fives, tens and twenties by a native salesmanship which would see nothing incongruous in attempting to peddle grand pianos from a pushcart.”¹

Not to be outdone by Chaplin, Pickford signed von Sternberg to a two-film contract. As part of the publicity buildup, he was photographed chatting with baseball star “Babe” Ruth (one struggles to imagine on what topic) and strolling on the lawns of “Pickfair” with Doug and Mary. “I believe him to have those qualities of freshness and originality for which we have long been seeking,” trilled Pickford. “He is a master technician and has a sense of drama possessed by few.”² But her offer was a poisoned chalice. Habitually, she vacillated between aspiring to be considered a serious actress and clinging to her position as “America’s Sweetheart.” Von Sternberg, after a research visit to Pennsylvania, submitted the outline of another von Stroheim–influenced melodrama called Backwash, in which Pickford would play a blind girl living in the squalor of industrial Pittsburgh. Most of the film would be subjective camera, with the action, including a cameo for Chaplin, taking place in her mind. As in The Salvation Hunters, he foresaw images of poverty, dirt, and urban ugliness.

After reading it, Pickford hurriedly backpedaled, according to von Sternberg. “My star-to-be,” he wrote acidly, “asked me to wait ten weeks, to accustom herself to the idea while she made a ‘normal’ film with a ‘normal’ director”—in this case, Marshall Neilan. After that, their contract lapsed by mutual consent. Subsequently, Pickford professed to find him ridiculous. “He proved to be a complete boiled egg,” she scoffed. “The business of ‘von’ Sternberg, and carrying a cane, and that little moustache! I’m so glad I didn’t do the film.” Her rejection, however, is suspect. Playing a blind girl would have been nothing new for her. She had already done so in A Good Little Devil, one of her earliest stage successes. Von Sternberg also told Sergei Eisenstein that she took Backwash sufficiently seriously to prepare for the role by spending time in a home for the blind, studying their behavior. It’s more likely she pulled out once The Salvation Hunters proved to be a flop. It played for less than a week in New York and only sporadically elsewhere, losing most of the Pickford-Fairbanks investment. She didn’t mind displaying her acting skills in an atypical role, but only if it was also a commercial success.

The Salvation Hunters put its director on the map, however, and the big studios made offers, if only to ensure that competitors didn’t grab a potential moneymaker. B. P. Schulberg, West Coast production manager of Famous Players–Lasky (soon to be renamed Paramount Publix) was interested, but von Sternberg elected to sign an eight-film contract with MGM. The decision was ill-advised. The richest of the big companies, MGM was also the most rigid, with a factory ethic to which every employee was subordinated. To von Sternberg, however, one fact counted more than any other: Erich von Stroheim was on its payroll, which made the offer irresistible. In only a short time he realized his error. That he had become just another cog in Louis B. Mayer’s machine was emphasized when he was ordered to line up with every other director and technician to be photographed for a promotional film celebrating the studio’s concentration of talent. He stands glowering at the camera, smoldering cigarette in hand. But predictably, he is at the shoulder of his hero, who, in duster and floppy driving cap, looks like he’s on his way to a spin in the country.

While waiting for his first assignment, von Sternberg drove to the studio every day with Robert Florey, who had become his assistant. After telling his secretary not to disturb him, he would drape a red shawl around his shoulders, as men did in the coffee shops of Vienna, and play Florey at chess. Periodically, he completed odd jobs for Mayer. These included directing a screen test for the Moscow-based Jewish Habima Theatre Company, whose forty members arrived in the United States in December 1926. They would tour for two years until the group fragmented, some remaining in the United States, and others moving to Tel Aviv to become the nucleus of the National Theatre of Israel. The test, the producer told von Sternberg, was a courtesy and a gift to the company, which was too distinguished to lower itself to make a film, least of all in Hollywood. No admirer of expressionist acting, in which emotions are externalized, often in exaggerated gestures or shouts, von Sternberg was secretly pleased when the performers, flinging themselves around the soundstage and shouting “Prostitute!” demonstrated that they had no movie potential whatsoever. Knowing nothing of acting technique, he distrusted those who did. In The Docks of New York, Olga Baclanova played her role as she had learned to do in Russia. “Just because you were at the Moscow Art Theatre,” he told her, “don’t think that you understand everything.” He bullied her, as he did many performers, to the point of tears, which resulted in the unrehearsed effect he desired. Years later, meeting in Europe, she told him, “I only began to make pictures when you started to yell at me.”

Irving Thalberg, head of production at MGM, finally assigned him a British novel by Alden Brooks, published in 1924 as The Enchanted Land and in the United States as Escape. Brooks, a survivor of the Somme, based it on the war experiences of his friend, painter Matthew Smith, who was hospitalized for a year with shrapnel wounds and shell shock. The book’s main character, Dominique Prad, a frustrated artist, almost dies on the battlefield. Convalescing, he swears he will “never do anything else in future but live life, beautiful life, to the full, as it should be led.” Back in Paris, he reluctantly takes over the family silk-weaving factory, which supports a gaggle of parasitic relatives and rapacious prospective in-laws. After attempting suicide, he’s placed in a rural “rest home,” from which he flees, pursued by his fiancée’s father and a posse of police. Meeting a gypsy girl, Silda, he joins her band in the woods, where he settles down to a life of art.

Expedience rather than appropriateness dictated the choice of this subject for von Sternberg. King Vidor’s The Big Parade, a romance between a wounded American soldier and a French peasant, had been the decade’s biggest hit for MGM. Thalberg wanted something similar and assigned the same actress, Renée Adorée, to the film. Von Sternberg worked on the scenario with Alice D. G. Miller, daughter of the better-known Alice Duer Miller. The younger Miller began her career with D. W. Griffith, whose sentimental tastes were evident in her writing for films such as Slave of Desire, So This Is Marriage, and Lady of the Night. We know nothing of how Escape was adapted, but much can be inferred from its incongruous new title, The Exquisite Sinner. Opposite Adorée, Conrad Nagel, a favorite of Louis B. Mayer, played Dominique. Von Sternberg found a small role for George K. Arthur. A young model from Montana named Myrna Loy, who had posed for photographer Harry Waxman, was lightly draped in netting and plastered with white greasepaint to play a “living statue” in an artist’s studio—her Hollywood debut.

With Florey as “technical adviser,” von Sternberg tried to instill some French atmosphere into the film. Although they visited Quebec to scout locations, MGM insisted on recycling a chateau set left over from 1923’s In the Palace of the King. The rest was shot in a village mocked up on the back lot. Von Sternberg did his best to personalize the sets, pasting up posters and daubing walls with graffiti. Determined to show he was his own man, he had a large sign painted with the words “Please BE SILENT Behind Camera.” (As a joke, the actors posed for a photograph with von Sternberg and the sign, fingers to lips. He did not appear amused.) On location, he arrived wearing another pawnshop find, a bulky fur-lined overcoat that had belonged to a Shakespearean actor. However, he reserved his special performance for the first day of shooting. Florey was a witness:

Thirty gendarmes were supposed to march into a Breton village…. At 8.45 von Sternberg arrived on the set. All the actors were lined up. He passed before them in review, inspecting them from head to foot, their sergeant-major waiting at a respectful distance. When he arrived at the twenty-first gendarme, von Sternberg stopped, hypnotising the poor man. Then he turned to the technicians and shouted angrily, “What do you take me for? For [Fred] Niblo or [King] Vidor? Who do you think I am?” Enraged, he began rapping on the camera with his cane, to the alarm of Max Fabian, the cameraman. “Get me the head of production. I will not permit you to mock me” etc. [His producers] arrived at the gallop, and von Sternberg exposed the reason for his protest. “A button is missing from the tunic of this gendarme. I will not endure an insult of this sort! “³

Having just endured three months of such behavior from von Stroheim on The Merry Widow, MGM bridled at getting it from a near unknown. All the same, such antics might have been tolerated if the completed film had been good, but opinions on The Exquisite Sinner were divided. Somewhat puzzlingly, given von Sternberg’s solemnity, Florey called it “full of interest, and … the humour of which von Sternberg was a master.”⁴ On surer ground, he praised the luminous photography, with its shadows and silhouette scenes. Even John Grierson acknowledged the beauty of the sequence in which Dominique marries Silda in the forest. The New Yorker described it as “harsh and beautiful and sincere.”⁵ But preview audiences found the film obscure. A studio assessor agreed. While conceding that “Mr. von Sternberg has a photographic talent all his own,” he complained, “in vain we are looking in the picture for the theme of the story—the longing of a man for freedom.” Rewritten intertitles didn’t help, so producers Hunt Stromberg and Eddie Mannix were directed to find a solution. Ideas were solicited from staff members. In August the studio accepted a proposal from husband-and-wife team Hope Loring and Louis Lighton, who had fabricated a screenplay from a flimsy short story called “It” by Elinor Glyn. They suggested remaking The Exquisite Sinner as a screwball comedy. “Ninety-nine people out of a hundred want MONEY!” they wrote. “And these ninety-nine would feel that any man who runs away from money—just because he wants to PAINT—is crazy! THEREFOR we suggest the following angle—FARCE COMEDY—on the story.”

Phil Rosen shot the new version, eliminating most if not all of von Sternberg’s footage. Florey remained as assistant director, fuming as Rosen discarded Adorée’s authentic costume of head scarf, earrings, and simple dress for a Breton bonnet, laced bodice of the sort worn by Swiss milkmaids, flowered apron, and wooden clogs. Silda became “Marcelle,” and Dominique was renamed “Edmond Durand.” The studio reader, who rated the new version “pretty good,” warned, “we mustn’t look … for the spiritual significance of the original [story]. The story is told on the screen in a brisk and logical manner which unifies the plot and holds the attention of the audience.” But new previews didn’t confirm this judgment. Despite more retakes, and retitling as Heaven on Earth, the film remained a flop.

While the studio hacked at The Exquisite Sinner, von Sternberg was assigned a melodrama of the Parisian underworld, The Masked Bride. Gaby, a onetime thief but now a dancer in a Montmartre café, meets Grover, an American millionaire. They fall in love, but before they can be married, Antoine, her former partner in both dancing and burglary, forces her to steal a necklace from Grover, threatening to kill her lover if she doesn’t. Both are caught, but Grover, realizing that Gaby did it for love, marries her anyway. The studio assigned two actors from von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow to the film: Mae Murray as Gaby, and Roy D’Arcy as the Prefect of Police. In addition, Ben Carré, one of the old French contingent at World, designed the production. But news of the mutilation of The Exquisite Sinner stretched von Sternberg’s patience too far. After two weeks he ordered cinematographer Oliver Marsh to turn the camera to the ceiling and film the rafters as an expression of contempt, and he left the set. Shortly after, MGM terminated his contract.

On August 12, 1925, von Sternberg went public in the Los Angeles Times. “I was given very little choice in the selection of my story, or the cast,” he complained, “or opportunity to aid in writing the scenario, titling, editing, or even in methods of direction…. I am glad that the break has been made, and think it is a fine thing for me.” Christy Cabanne finished The Masked Bride. Von Sternberg disowned the film, and he never forgave MGM. Throughout his tenure at Paramount in the 1930s, a board in his outer office listed past projects, with comments on their fate. After “Opus # 1. The Salvation Hunters” came “Opus # 2—The Exquisite Sinner,” with the note “(Sabotaged by Thalberg).”

With time on his hands, von Sternberg continued writing. His one fiction success was a short story, “The Waxen Galatea.” Published in 1925 in the trade magazine The Director, it describes a repressed young man whose sexual ideal is represented by a shop-window mannequin made of wax. Finding a woman who resembles the dummy, he falls in love with her, only to despair when she chooses a rival. Embittered, he returns to the abstract love of the inanimate figure, forever perfect, forever faithful. The story has significant resonance with von Sternberg’s private life. All three of his wives were younger, unassertive women he could dominate, and in Marlene Dietrich he found a performer willing to let herself be molded to his ideal.

A by-product of Chaplin’s patronage was the opportunity to socialize with the star and his cronies, who gathered for breakfast at Henry’s, a Hollywood Boulevard café not far from the studio. Another customer was an actress with a formidable profile named Riza Royce. She had arrived in Los Angeles in August on a contract from B. P. Schulberg, having graduated from the Ziegfeld Follies to some minor success in Broadway comedies. But Royce was making little headway, despite efforts by her friend, screenwriter Frederica Sagor, who provided room and board until the actress found more work. It’s hard to imagine the reticent von Sternberg picking up a girl, but he bought Royce a cup of coffee and a doughnut and invited her to join Chaplin’s table. She soon became a fixture there, and in his life.