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What decadent rubbish is this?

—Madame Arkadina in Anton Chekhov’s The Sea Gull

VON STERNBERG’S ACCOUNT OF the next episode in his career was laconic. “During a period when I was confronted with failure,” he wrote, “[Charles Chaplin] asked me to direct a film for him. This was quite a distinction, as he had never honoured another director in this fashion, but it only resulted in an unpleasant experience for me.”

The film, variously known as Sea Gulls (its official title in the Chaplin studio records) or The Sea Gull, was retitled by von Sternberg The Woman Who Loved Once and then, definitively, A Woman of the Sea by Chaplin, to remind people that leading lady Edna Purviance had starred in his own A Woman of Paris. Purviance was one of many old girlfriends Chaplin left behind as he strove single-mindedly for success. Evidently feeling guilty about abandoning her, he kept her on salary all her life and tried to restart her career from time to time.

Innocent and winning as she appeared in The Immigrant and other Chaplin films, Purviance was not a natural actress. “I suffered untold agonies,” she wrote. “Eyes seemed to be everywhere. I was simply frightened to death.” Von Sternberg claimed she found relief in alcohol—corroborated by an incident on New Year’s Day, 1924. At a party at Purviance’s house, attended by her fiancé Courtland Dines and her actress friend Mabel Normand, Dines was shot and wounded by Horace Greer, Normand’s chauffeur. Police found quantities of then-illegal liquor in the house, and Greer was charged with attempted murder. His attorney described the party as a “Roman saturnalia” and his client—though admittedly an ex-con—as the “only clean soul in the midst of a bunch of drunks.” With A Woman of Paris still in the theaters, the case caused comment, and some exhibitors pulled the film. A scandal appeared imminent. However, the April 1924 trial showed every indication of strings being discreetly pulled, probably by Chaplin. Greer declined to testify about the party, supposedly out of respect for Normand, and the jury returned a speedy acquittal.

Following this incident, Purviance’s nervousness increased. She didn’t work for more than a year and in August 1925 left for a long rest in Europe. She stopped off in New York to see Chaplin, where he was dallying with his latest lover, Louise Brooks. He told her that if any European film project caught her interest, he might be willing to invest in it. That November, Chaplin spent some time 300 miles north of Los Angeles near Monterey, where his friend Harry Crocker owned the stretch of coast near Carmel that is now Seventeen Mile Drive and Pebble Beach golf course. He returned to Los Angeles with the idea of setting a future production there. When Purviance arrived back in December 1925, he offered to star her in such a film and proposed von Sternberg as the director and writer.

To von Sternberg, the promise of Chaplin’s near-limitless resources and prestige seemed the answer to every prayer. But people still argue over the part played by Chaplin in the conception and eventual destruction of what became A Woman of the Sea. One of the few movie professionals with firsthand knowledge of the project was John Grierson, an aggressive young Scot in California on a three-year Rockefeller research fellowship to study the psychology of propaganda. A few years later, back in Britain, he would put his findings to work by launching what he christened the “Documentary Film movement.”

Taken under Chaplin’s wing, Grierson saw The Salvation Hunters and met von Sternberg, whose character didn’t measure up to the Scot’s harsh standards. “It struck me that sensibility of his peculiarly intensive and introspective sort was not a very healthy equipment for a hard world,” he wrote. “A director of this instinct is bound to have a solitary and (as commerce goes) an unsuccessful life of it. Von Sternberg, I think, was weak.”¹ In Grierson’s recollection of The Sea Gull, “the story was Chaplin’s, and humanist to a degree; with fishermen that toiled, and sweated, and lived and loved as proletarians do.”² Chaplin, he said, admired Charles Dickens and had detected a similar sympathy for ordinary people in The Salvation Hunters. A Dickensian spirit was intended to pervade the film—a point that, Grierson insists, was made clear to von Sternberg before work began. If this is correct, von Sternberg either failed to grasp Chaplin’s wishes or ignored them—more likely the latter, since it wouldn’t be the last time he acted so autocratically.

Harry Crocker showed von Sternberg around Monterey. The net-draped docks, clapboard shacks, and wind-contorted, salt-silvered cypresses of the rocky coastline suggested obvious locations for a drama. Within a few weeks, he had composed a scenario about two sisters from a fishing family. Joan, the Purviance character, is lovable and playful—ideal wife material. In contrast, the glamorous Magdalen, though courted for years by solid but dull fisherman Peter, still hungers for adventure, and she gets it when a novelist visits Monterey. Both sisters are smitten, but it’s Magdalen he takes back to the city with him. Joan and Peter marry and remain in Monterey, where, in the words of the closing intertitle, “the sea—made of all the useless tears that have been shed—grows neither less or more.”

This was no Dickensian fable of simple fisherfolk, as Chaplin would have known if he had read the scenario. However, he apparently did not. Perhaps he was too busy filming The Circus, or von Sternberg may have “forgotten” to show him a copy before the unit left to start shooting in March 1926. Even if Chaplin had read it, he might have assumed, in light of The Salvation Hunters and the Backwash story for Pickford, that von Sternberg would automatically adopt a naturalistic, earthy style.

Von Sternberg used cameraman Eddie Gheller from The Salvation Hunters, but for the interiors he brought in Paul Ivano, who had worked on Greed. George Sims, as “Peter Ruric,” signed on as assistant director, as did Riza Royce, von Sternberg’s first verifiable mistress and eventual wife. For the interiors, shot at the Chaplin studios, Chaplin’s longtime designer Charles D. “Danny” Hall, borrowed from Universal to work on The Circus, provided the sets. Aside from Purviance, the performers, though optimistically described as “discoveries,” were all experienced character actors for whom this film represented a career best. Eve Southern, who played the hot-eyed Magdalen (and had debuted as a near-naked temple dancer in Griffith’s Intolerance), never progressed beyond supporting roles, some of them in von Sternberg’s films. She played one of Gary Cooper’s lovers in Morocco and a gypsy fortune-teller in The King Steps Out. Gayne Whitman had his greatest success after sound, when his theatrical voice put him in demand for voice-overs and narrations.

Everything started smoothly enough. The fifty or so still photographs—all that remain of the film, aside from some notebooks kept by Ivano and a list of intertitles—show a film in von Sternberg’s heightened visual style. There is even a shot in which Peter drapes one of his signature fishing nets over Joan in a symbolic attempt to keep her at home. On June 19, 1926, the Los Angeles Times noted completion of the film, which had by then been renamed The Woman Who Loved Once—a move that the journalist, in the first sign of hostility toward the production, labeled “conventionalism.” Von Sternberg quickly reverted to the original title.

As soon as shooting ended, Purviance left Los Angeles on a three-month trip through the Pacific Northwest and Canada. According to Robert Florey, von Sternberg wanted to reshoot some sequences, but Chaplin felt he had already spent too much money. As to what Chaplin thought of the film, we have only the evidence of Grierson, who was invited to watch it with him. Chaplin, he says, was astonished at how little it reflected his Dickensian aspirations. At the first sight of Purviance as Joan, he exclaimed, “That’s not a fisherman’s wife!” Chaplin returned the film to von Sternberg, described how he thought the story should have been interpreted, and told him to reshoot parts of it. Von Sternberg did so, according to Grierson, but Chaplin was still unsatisfied and declined to release it. Chaplin’s studio records show no retakes, however, which would have been difficult to do, since Purviance wasn’t available. Nor does von Sternberg mention reshooting. But Florey writes of seeing “two versions” of the film.³ Florey and Grierson also agree that von Sternberg defied Chaplin’s ban on public screenings and invited a number of friends and reviewers to see it in a Beverly Hills theater. “This put Chaplin into a fury,” says Florey, “particularly when the critics confirmed his opinion.”⁴ It was never shown again in public. In 1933 Chaplin destroyed all prints, clearing the way for A Woman of the Sea to be written off as a total loss for tax purposes. In 1991, in another exercise in tax reduction, his widow authorized the destruction of the last printed materials.

Chaplin never adequately explained the reasons for his dissatisfaction with the film. Maybe, as Grierson claims, he simply expected a very different version. Alternatively, it could have been pique at von Sternberg’s holding a screening. A more plausible explanation emerged in a 1966 Chaplin interview. A Woman of the Sea, he said, “depressed” him. Anything to do with Purviance had that effect. In 1947 he gave her a walk-on in Monsieur Verdoux. “She … was not bad,” he wrote, “but all the while her presence affected me with a depressing nostalgia, for she was associated with my early success—those days when everything was the future.” Von Sternberg too blamed Purviance, but more directly. “She … had become unbelievably timid,” he wrote, “and unable to act in even the simplest scene without great difficulty, When the camera turned, [she] trembled like the leaf of an aspen. The only remedy for this condition was alcohol, which had caused it, and this was unsuitable. I called for kettledrums, and the timpani distracted her long enough for her to play a part.”

Was Purviance so obviously an alcoholic that her performance made the film unreleasable? Von Sternberg is the only person to suggest so, but the film’s shot lists provide some corroboration. As David Robinson notes in his biography of Chaplin, “For the most part [von Sternberg] was shooting with considerable economy, generally printing the second or third take of a shot. Scenes that demanded work of the slightest complication from Edna, however, seem often to have required nine, ten or more takes.”⁵ More than ten years later, on I, Claudius, von Sternberg fell into an identical pattern of brief takes for most performers but dozens for scenes featuring the fractious and finally undirectable Charles Laughton.

After Chaplin destroyed the film, Grierson became both the primary source of information and the least reliable. Since documentary —and, in particular, Soviet agitprop—celebrated the nobility of labor, a film that exploited fishermen in a story of what Noël Coward called “high life and low loins” may have offended his political beliefs. In 1929, when Grierson made his only film as a director, Drifters, he chose a portrait of North Sea herring fishermen that might almost be, in its bleak rejection of pictorialism, a repudiation of A Woman of the Sea. In 1932, surveying Hollywood cinema, he attacked the film again, accusing von Sternberg of emphasizing “net patterns, sea patterns, and hair in the wind” and playing “with the symbolism of the sea until the fishermen and fish were forgotten.”⁶ He called it “the most beautiful picture ever produced in Hollywood, and the least human.”⁷

Von Sternberg insists that he didn’t resent the suppression of his work and that he and Chaplin remained friendly. He claims they “spent many idle hours with each other, before, during, and after the making of this film, but not once was this work of mine discussed, nor have I ever broached the subject of its fate to him.” Sergei Eisenstein, however, claims that Chaplin confided to him of von Sternberg, “I’ve never met a more disagreeable layabout in all my life.”⁸