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“Do you have a hobby?”

“Yes. Chinese philately.”

“Why that?”

“I wanted a subject I could not exhaust.”

—Conversation between Josef von Sternberg and the author

“ONIONS?”

The waiter stared at the man who’d made this request.

We were in the Emerald Room of the Australia Hotel, the most prestigious hotel in Sydney, if not the most modern. Six meters above our heads dangled a huge Italian chandelier. In every direction, tables covered in linen, ironed glossy with starch, extended to infinity. Out of sight a fountain played, while marble nymphs observed us covertly from a jungle of potted ferns.

The table settings, like the décor, belonged to the age of Queen Victoria. Each plate, bowl, dish, cup, and saucer bore the hotel’s emblem. The flatware, scratched to dullness by generations of use, had the heaviness of tools—soup spoons like shovels, knives as hefty as trowels. We might be dining in 1967, but we were eating in the style of 1889, when French tragedienne Sarah Bernhardt officially opened the hotel. The register with her signature was displayed in the lobby.

“Yes. Onions,” repeated the short man with the gray beard. He didn’t raise his head, so he didn’t see what we saw: a portly, middle-aged waiter of European origin, judging from his voice, in confusion.

“You mean … an onion salad?” the man suggested hopefully.

I suppressed a wince. Even in my brief acquaintance with Josef von Sternberg, I’d learned not to question his orders, nor try to anticipate or interpret them.

The third person at our table was David Stratton, director of the Sydney Film Festival; he was responsible for inviting von Sternberg to Sydney and knew him better.

“Mr. von Sternberg would like some onions,” he explained. “Just onions. That’s all.”

As the waiter retreated, I mentally wound back our conversation to the moment, minutes before, when von Sternberg had cleared his throat and remarked, “You must excuse me. I have a slight cold. Back home in California, I would eat onions and garlic, which cure such things.” (He didn’t add “it’s believed” or “in my opinion.” Von Sternberg presented all statements as incontrovertible fact.)

His right hand—the one usually clenched around the handle of his cane—worried at the remains of a bread roll, which he’d reduced to crumbs without eating any of it. Like his low, uninflected voice and the avoidance of eye contact, the fidgeting was another symptom of a nervous temperament rigidly controlled by an effort of will.

“Jules Furthman,” I said, guiding the conversation back to films. “You worked with him more than any other person.”

This was an understatement. From The Drag Net in 1928 to Jet Pilot in 1957, his name appeared on almost every von Sternberg film, though in so many forms—credited with writing the screenplay, adaptation, or original story, or even as producer—that their relationship eluded definition.

“I wondered,” I went on, “what was your working method?”

“We had no method,” von Sternberg said. “I simply told him what I wanted done, and he did it.”

The waiter materialized at his elbow.

“Your onions, sir.”

He deposited two large brown onions by von Sternberg’s twitching right hand. The slightest of nods indicated his acceptance.

“Um … well,” I continued, “when you say you ‘told Furthman what to do.’ …”

But it was no use. For the rest of the meal, von Sternberg responded to my tentative inquiries with an evasion or a lie. If he could be obdurate about onions, he was, on the subject of his work, adamantine. But at least he was responding. Even as noted a critic as Peter Bogdanovich was fobbed off with a succession of “I don’t remember”s and “I don’t know”s. Some journalists got not even that much—just a silent stare and a snapped, “Next.”

The waiter cracked before I did. Standing by the wall, he watched for a few minutes and, when it became obvious von Sternberg had no immediate plans for the onions, returned to wrap them in a napkin. It was bad enough to know they were there, let alone to have to look at them.

Lunch over, von Sternberg rose, took his cane in one hand and the bundled onions in the other, and then, unexpectedly, said to me, “I have some papers in my room that might interest you.”

I exchanged a glance with David. What was the etiquette here?

“Er … well, thanks,” I began.

“If you come with me now,” he said firmly, “I can give them to you.”

David lifted his hands and bowed his head in acceptance—about all he could do in the circumstances.

An ancient elevator, its linen-fold paneling varnished brown as gravy, took us to the top floor. Leading me along meandering corridors, he unlocked the door of his suite—and we stepped into jungle madness. Skulls as yellow as old ivory grinned from the corners of the room; idols yawned, their torsos gashed with marks of the stone axes that had shaped them. Leaning against overstuffed armchairs were clubs embedded with sharks’ teeth. A throne of black wood, topped with more skulls, sat empty, its seat hollowed and polished by generations of chiefs’ backsides. It was impossible not to be reminded of “Hot Voodoo,” the dance sequence of Blonde Venus, made thirty-five years earlier: A gorilla lumbers onto a nightclub stage, to be unmasked as Marlene Dietrich in disguise. As she emerges from the ape suit, dreamily swaying—a nymph shrugging off its chrysalis—a chorus line of beautiful black women circle her, each carrying a fausse-African shield decorated with a gaping, fanged mouth that evokes the most extreme of male terrors, the vagina dentata—a “vagina that bites.”

More artifacts jammed the bedroom. Additional skulls stared through the door. Each idol, mask, and club had, I realized, a twin.

“Duplicates?”

“Of course.” Was there the ghost of a smile? “One for my collection, and one to sell.”

He handed me a sheaf of papers—the text of an article in some obscure magazine. As we shook hands at the door I saw, over his shoulder on the coffee table, the bundle containing his onions.

Did he spend the next half hour taking his ease on that throne, munching an onion like an apple as he surveyed his hoard? Or did he, the moment the door closed, toss the onions in the wastepaper basket, no longer useful as props in the prank he had played on us? Either way, the mythology of Josef von Sternberg was richer by another anecdote, and the obscurity with which he surrounded himself was one level more profound.