chapter three

I loved Lubitsch, mainly for his tremendous desire to make something funny with class . . . It was strange-he really should have been a Frenchman.

—edgar g. ulmer

Although she always claimed to have been born Gladys Marie Smith in 1893, Mary Pickford was actually born Gladys Louise Smith in 1892, a small but not untypical evasion of reality. Entering movies with the Biograph Company in April 1909, Pickford’s ease, natural charm, and innate star quality propelled her to the top of her profession by 1915. Although an extremely gifted, versatile actress, Pickford’s early poverty had indelibly marked her, and she was afraid to stray far from the tight vise of public expectations, which, in the heavily indicative scorecard of the box office, meant playing winsome adolescents. This in spite of the fact that by 1923 Pickford was over thirty, the only female movie mogul, and had a background of considerable color that included two marriages and numerous lovers.

It was at this point that she decided she wanted to do an adult role, a real adult role, with no fantasy sequences or dual roles as a sop to her public. At the same time, she had been looking at some of the German films that had reached America in the wake of the critical success of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It seemed to her and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, an inveterate enthusiast about virtually everything, that the best of them were directed by Ernst Lubitsch. After some fairly simple negotiations, Mary signed Lubitsch to a contract, the announcement of which prompted a sizable wave of anti-German sentiment left over from World War 1. The film was to be an adaptation of Faust.

Lubitsch signs the contract-with Mary Pickford (right) for his first American picture, while Mary’s mother, Charlotte, displays her Irish charm.

Accompanied by his wife, Leni, and Henry Blanke, Lubitsch left Germany on December 2, 1922, from the port of Bremerhaven. (Leni’s boys were left with her parents; they would follow their mother and stepfather to America a year later, when it became clear that Ernst’s career mandated that the family stay in America.) The Lubitsch family was there to see their boy off; according to a story related by Hans Kräly, the seventy-year-old Simon was “close to tears at the idea that his son was traveling to California, to a world full of Indians, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, and any number of other wild animals.” When the time came to say good-bye, Ernst’s sister Marga broke down in heavy sobs. “Don’t cry, Greta,” Ernst said. “We Lubitschs are not sentimental.” He would return to his homeland only twice more, in 1927 and 1932.

As it turned out, Ernst left Germany at a good time. In January 1923 the German government hesitated with their reparations payments for World War I and the French promptly occupied the Ruhr Valley. From January to August of 1923, the exchange rate for one American dollar rose from 10,000 marks to 4.6 million.

By 1926, UFA was forced to accept a partnership with Universal, Paramount, and MGM. In return for a large infusion of capital, UFA had to form a releasing organization with the three American companies, with the resulting combine (Parafamet) distributing ten films from each of the partners. Paramount and MGM could each choose ten UFA films of their choice for American distribution, and UFA had to fill 75 percent of its theaters with Parafamet product. All this led even the liberal German film journal Lichthild-Bühne to sound a xenophobic note with a headline reading “Americanization of UFA?” As the first German to emigrate to Hollywood after World War I, Ernst was the point man in a brain drain that, over the next ten years, would decimate German film.

Nathan Burkan, the attorney for Charlie Chaplin, Pickford’s partner in United Artists, quietly met Ernst in New York in an effort to defuse any bad press. Lubitsch’s appearance did not jibe with the image of a director who had “humanized history.” He wore egg-top trousers and banana yellow boots, and had several gold teeth in the front of his mouth. He looked like a middle-class Jewish burgher.

After considerable struggle, Burkan outfitted him with a new wardrobe and had his own dentist replace the gold teeth with porcelain ones. Lubitsch, his wife, and Blanke took a train to Chicago, where they were met by Douglas Fairbanks’ brother Robert, who accompanied them on the train to California. Another passenger on the train was Western star William S. Hart, whose singular, endearingly horse-faced presence must have made Lubitsch feel like a Berlin version of Frank Baum’s Dorothy; he was definitely not in Germany anymore.

Robert Florey, later a director, then doing foreign publicity for Pickford and Fairbanks, met Ernst at the train. “It happened to be the most disagreeable night I have seen in California,” Lubitsch remembered. “It was cold and foggy and dark . . . I was cold in body and spirit. I was homesick and miserable in every way.” Florey took Lubitsch and Blanke to the Ambassador Hotel where they were met by relays of protesting American veterans of World War I.

“They didn’t start anything,” remembered Henry Blanke in 1976, “they just demonstrated and protested on the street, outside, against Lubitsch working in America. We didn’t go near it. What a welcome.” According to Florey, Lubitsch talked of nothing but the sets for Faust, and was anxious to get to the studio so he could begin work with Sven Gade, the art director.

By daylight, the town seemed not merely hospitable but enticing. What particularly impressed Lubitsch were the houses; some Tudor, some Moorish, some in the Mission style. All of them struck him as simultaneously quaint and artistic. Then there was the quality of the California light, white and clear, lending a brilliant phosphorescent brightness to the blue bowl of sky. It seemed to Ernst as though he could reach out and touch the mountains that divided Hollywood from the San Fernando Valley.

Louella Parsons called, wanting to know if Lubitsch “had been in the trenches during the war.” When it was explained that he had been a civilian noncombatant, suspicion lessened, but there was no question that they were not about to be welcomed with open arms. By late December-Henry Blanke celebrated his twenty-first birthday that month—Lubitsch was ensconced at the Pickford-Fairbanks studio fighting for his life. As Mary Pickford remembered, “poor Ernst Lubitsch arrived not knowing what kind of demon I was.”

Pickford and Ernst were officially introduced by Edward Knoblock, a successful playwright and friend of the Fairbankses who was working on their scripts and who also spoke fluent German. Lubitsch took Pickford’s hand, then threw it away as if it was a dead thing. “My God,” he told Knoblock in German, “she is cold. Yeah, she is cold. How can she be an actress and be so cold?”

Pickford rather tactlessly informed Lubitsch that Faust was being canceled because of an explosively negative reaction from her mother, Charlotte, who absolutely forbade her daughter playing the part of Marguerite, an unwed mother who kills her baby. Instead, she was substituting Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, an adaptation of a hoary novel from 1898. Lubitsch was aghast. Two days after the change was announced, Pickford noticed Lubitsch walking through the wheatfield where Douglas Fairbanks had built his enormous castle set for Robin Hood. He was talking to himself and gesticulating. “There goes trouble,” she told her mother.

Later that day, Lubitsch told Pickford he didn’t want to direct Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall. “Der are too many qveens and not enough qveens,” he said by way of explanation, meaning that the story, which involved Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, was so grand that there was no room for Dorothy Vernon. According to her own recollections, Pickford was disappointed (“It was [like] a blow to the face . . .”) but she could understand his point of view and suggested that they try to find another story. Lubitsch went out and button-holed Knoblock. “My God, now I know she is cold. She took it standing up. She is cold. She can’t act.”

“Well,” said Knoblock, “wait until you get her before the cameras and then you’ll see.”

Despite some disagreement within the Pickford unit, everyone finally settled on a script tentatively titled The Street Singer, adapted by Knoblock from a minor French play called Don César de Bazan. Just before production began, there was an argument when Lubitsch found out that Mary, not he, would have the final authority in any disagreement. “I told him that I would never interfere with him on the set, never gainsay him,” said Pickford. “But if it comes to an issue, I have to put the money up. I will be glad to arbitrate it, bring in a person we both respect, but you are not the person of last appeal.”

For Lubitsch, this was a nightmare, worse than dealing with Pola Negri. However temperamental she might have been, Negri was only a hired hand, and hired hands can always be finessed. Now Lubitsch was the hired hand. Despite Edward Knoblock’s assurances that Pickford would not be unreasonable, that Lubitsch was being foolish to make such an issue out of something that would probably never even happen, Ernst lost his temper and tore all the buttons off his clothing, then pounced on Knoblock’s papers, throwing them in the air.

Most of this atypical behavior was nothing more than displaced nerves, for Lubitsch later confessed to a newly arrived Victor Seastrom that he was continually on edge during his first few months in Hollywood. Seastrom, whose career in Hollywood had been made possible by enthusiastic testimonials from Lubitsch and Chaplin, found Ernst to be “small, typically Jewish, very lively and very interesting.”

Despite these obvious intimations of a fatal misalliance, shooting of The Street Singer (as it was known during production) began on March 5, 1923, and lurched on until May 31. Pickford would claim that the battles became so pitched that the only way the film was finished was by her acquiescing to Lubitsch’s authority.

Simple things like Lubitsch’s thick German accent seemed to offend Pickford’s decorousness. Preparing a setup, Lubitsch would turn to cameraman Charles Rosher and say, “All right, upset your camera,” which was good for a few giggles. In a scene involving Holbrook Blinn and a dagger, Lubitsch gave Blinn the line reading “You should say to her, ‘Rosita, ver is da dagger mit da yools.’ ” Blinn promptly turned to Mary with the cameras running and said, “Rosita, ver is da dagger mit da yools?” resulting in helpless laughter from the actors and confusion from Lubitsch.

At one point, Ernst rushed up to Edward Knoblock and shouted “Vere iss dem dajer mid vass he iss geshtickt?” Knoblock worked the sentence over in his mind and realized that Lubitsch was asking about a prop dagger with which the hero was to be stabbed. “Another time,” Knoblock wrote, “when Lubitsch and I had a difference about the interpretation of a scene, he lost his temper and started rushing off the set, but turned to face me and by way of annihilating farewell exclaimed, ‘How do you do?’ ”

There is humor in these stories, but there is also an ugly edge, of actors and writers who should know better having sport with a stranger in a strange land. As far as Pickford was concerned, Lubitsch was personally vulgar—“He ate German fried potatoes three times a day,” a habit which was probably what led to an incident where Lubitsch left greasy fingerprints all over Mary’s newly painted dove-gray dressing room—and he was a director of props, not actresses.

For his part, Lubitsch believed that he was simply trying to cure Mary of her reliance on “the Pickford tricks,” and bring her into his (screen) world of alternating bursts of lighthearted sexual cajolery and dramatic intensity, the coin of the Lubitsch realm. If he seemed more overbearing than absolutely necessary, it might have been because he spoke almost no English and something was being lost in translation.

Despite the misalliance between director and star, Lubitsch did not have to alter his carefully thought-out methods of production. By this time, he prided himself on delineating character and plot through action that would obviate the need for many titles. To Germans like Lubitsch and Blanke, used to the inferential in theater as well as cinema, many American pictures were wildly over-titled. Taking screen time to say “The wedding took place in the cool shadow of the cathedral” struck them as redundant, since the establishing shot would show the audience that the wedding was in a cathedral.

“A photoplay today often is nothing else but the narration of a story told in subtitles and interrupted by a series of moving pictures,” Ernst would write in a 1924 book entitled The Truth About the Movies. “In some cases this goes so far that not only the telling of the plot but also the characterization is done almost totally by means of subtitles and the motion pictures serve merely as illustrations.”

This pedantic laziness, whereby the movie was not so much watched as read, struck Lubitsch as an abomination. “What we must strive for as the ideal to be attained is the title-less motion picture . . . It is the task of the scenarist to invent little pieces of business that are so characteristic and give so deep an insight into his creatures, that their personalities clearly and organically unfold before the eyes of the audience so that the latter feel that the actions of these people are contingent upon their characters, that there exists some kind of a logical fate, and that nothing is left to mere accident, or coincidence of irrelative [sic] happenings. A good scenario should contain the smallest details of business and leave nothing to chance direction or the whim of the moment.”

It was as succinct a statement of Lubitsch’s theory of filmmaking as he would ever make. Nor was it idle puffery, as he would prove very shortly.

• • •

Besides making his films more of a visual and less of a reading experience, Lubitsch imposed his distinctive, methodical sense of rhythm on the filmmaking process itself, setting a brisk but not hurried pace.

“I think over my medium shot when I am making my long shot,” he explained, “and I am ready for what I want when it comes to a close-up. I don’t want to get the actors fatigued, and only when it appears absolutely necessary do I insist upon going over the scene three or four times. A player may have just the expression you want, but on the fourth or fifth attempt he is too sure of himself.” (Lubitsch would find multiple takes “absolutely necessary” a good deal of the time.)

Despite the emotional unease of working in a totally alien environment, the Pickford studio was not entirely a negative adjustment; Ernst adored the bounty of equipment, sets, and even electricity. “They loaded the guns,” he would report with delight. “I fired them. I felt as though someone had supplied me with an entire collection of Aladdin’s lamps.”

Despite the troubled production, Pickford felt that the results were worth it. Her correspondence at the time reveals her to be quite enamored of Lubitsch and their collaboration, so much so that she tried to arrange a production deal for him at United Artists. On June 12, 1923, she, Chaplin, and Fairbanks had a meeting in which they discussed cofinancing a series of Lubitsch pictures for United Artists. After some conversation, Fairbanks and Chaplin backed out because of the heavy expenses for which they were already obligated.

On June 13, two full weeks after The Street Singer had been completed, Pickford wrote Cap O’Brien, her attorney, that “Lubitsch would be a great asset to our company if he could do spectacles. Personally, I still believe he is the greatest director in the world and would be willing to back him if I could afford it.” Six days later, after O’Brien had gently urged her to title the film Rosita (“it is soft and sweet, and if it typifies the character, it ought to be a valuable title”), she reiterated to O’Brien that “I am very pleased with Rosita and think it will be well received.”

Although United Artists president Hiram Abrams had offered to raise half the money for the proposed Lubitsch unit from eastern banks, Pickford ruled that out because it would give Abrams more of a rooting interest in Lubitsch’s productions than in those of the original partners. Lubitsch also wanted to continue with United Artists, and direct Mary in another picture in the early part of 1924, followed by one or two pictures for U.A. without Pickford. But Lubitsch wanted guarantees of financing.

“He wants to know if it is possible to get the money,” continued Pickford, “as he has several very fine offers out here, but all of them for very long-term contracts . . . he is like a little boy and always anxious to get things settled.” Pickford closed by telling O’Brien that a proposed salary for Lubitsch of $3,500 a week was “exorbitant,” that $2,500 to $3,000 was more like it.

As always with United Artists, the company’s refusal to cosign loans or guarantee outside financing doomed the venture. Since, technically, Lubitsch had directed Rosita on loan-out from Famous Players-Lasky, he began angling for his release so he could accept more lucrative terms elsewhere.

(Jesse Lasky insisted that Lubitsch had never been on the Famous Players-Lasky payroll, but rather on the roster of the Hamilton Theatrical Corporation, a subsidiary that had been formed to make pictures for Famous Players release in Germany, using German talent. It was an odd distinction to make; it is possible that Lasky was none too certain of how American audiences would take to a German director on their shores, and was constructing an out, just in case.)

The industry buzz on Rosita was obviously excellent, but Lubitsch was not happy. According to Henry Blanke, Lubitsch was fully prepared to go back to Germany. “After Rosita, he went to see Jesse Lasky at the old Vine Street studio,” remembered Blanke. According to this version, Lubitsch told Lasky that he wanted to go back to Germany, where his contract gave him complete control over virtually every aspect of his films. “He didn’t want to work in the factory system anymore,” said Blanke. But Lasky was no longer interested in importing films from Germany and wasn’t about to commit himself to letting a still-untested Lubitsch handle their contract stars. The two men agreed to disagree; in mid-June 1923, Lasky settled Lubitsch’s contract.

Rosita premiered September 14, 1923, at New York’s Lyric Theater and was received with excellent reviews; The New York Times called it “exquisite,” Vanity Fair referred to it as “that distinguished and lovely film,” and Photoplay said that “there is no actress today who could portray the gay, graceful, coquettish little street singer of Seville . . . as she does,” while Lubitsch again showed “why [he] holds his place among the leading directors of the world.” The invariably hard-nosed Variety said that Ernst had brought out “a Mary Pickford different and greater than at any time in her screen career,” and Moving Picture World said that Lubitsch “fully lives up to his reputation as being one of the world’s leading directors.”

• • •

The physical production of Rosita is stunning: huge, vaulted sets, lavish outdoor constructions of old Seville, populated by thousands of extras. As with the first American films of Murnau and Lang, Lubitsch turned a basically intimate story into something of a visual opera.

Although Rosita is a fairly weighty nine reels long, it moves at a far steadier pace than the Pickford films that bookend it. In addition, Lubitsch endows the film with a texture derived largely from a procession of carefully chosen, jaggedly baroque faces, giving Rosita a more specific sense of realistic humanity than most other Pickford films. The compositions are precise, formal—there is only one tracking shot and one pan right in the entire picture—without being academic. It is among the most physically beautiful of all silent films.

The premise of the film is simplicity itself: Rosita is a street singer, the idol of the mobs. The king sees her and wishes to make her his mistress, in spite of his wife’s disapproval, in spite of Rosita’s love for the penniless nobleman Don Diego (George Walsh), in spite of the fact that she sings satirical songs about royalty.

While Rosita is a recognizable halfway point between Lubitsch’s historical spectaculars and the later, sly sexual comedies, he does not entirely neglect the familiar Pickford turf. There’s a delightful scene when a hungry Rosita, a poor girl in a palace, is trying to fight off hunger pangs while alone in a room with a large bowl of fruit. The camera holds on a static shot of the fruit on top of a table, while Pickford passes in back of it, giving it surreptitious glances. After a few practice cruises, her arm darts out and grabs an apple; another pass, and a banana.

But all of Lubitsch’s skill can’t hide the fact that Pickford’s performance is external and obviously unfelt, with the actress uncomfortable with the Mediterranean gestures and displays of temperament. When Rosita believes her lover to be dead and plans to kill the king in revenge, instead of playing the scene for cold fury Pickford flares her eyes and contorts her mouth with the evil avidity of a vampire. Negri could have gotten away with the moment; Pickford, never.

Rosita is a very good film but it is a very good film in spite of its star performance rather than because of it. It was an experiment Pickford would never repeat. Years later, mired in alcoholism and casting about for reasons for the simultaneous departures of her career and her marriage to Fairbanks, Pickford began to develop something of an idée fixe about Rosita. She would say of Lubitsch that “He tried to be as moral as possible, and I tried to be slightly naughty. I’ve always felt the results were pretty terrible. I didn’t like myself as Rosita. I think it was my fault, not Lubitsch’s. We just didn’t seem to get together, but I was very proud of the fact that I was able to bring him to the country with no bad effects.”

Despite the good reviews and the picture’s own self-evident quality, Pickford’s memories hardened, and she became convinced that Rosita was a terrible film (“It’s the worst picture I ever did, it’s the worst picture I ever saw”) and a failure to boot. Both Mitchell Leisen and Henry Blanke agreed with her. Yet, it grossed $940,872 in the United States, Canada, and South America alone, $35,000 more than the following year’s Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, which she preferred to think of as a successful recovery from the Lubitsch debacle.

Lubitsch had a more benevolent view of Rosita. “1 have made better, more significant pictures than Rosita,” he told Hedda Hopper in 1943, “but never one that I have loved more. Because with that I associate the finest thing that ever happened to me—the opportunity to come to America, to become a citizen. Besides that good fortune, all else pales.”

Publicly, he would never have anything but praise for Mary Pickford (“the most practical artist I have ever met. She can dictate policies, handle finances, bargain with supporting players, attend to booking problems, and still keep her mind on acting. It is no wonder that she held her place at the top longer than any personality in motion pictures”). In private, he would roll his eyes and humorously point out the vast, unbridgeable gap between what the woman was and what she played.

• • •

The Los Angeles that Lubitsch had arrived in was undergoing one of the most remarkable transformations in American history. Only ten years before, the population had been a modest 319,198, but during the 1920s the population would surge past a million. By 1930, the residential base was 1,470,516. Between 1920 and 1930, 2 million Americans migrated to California, 1.5 million of them settling in Southern California. The four most prosperous residential districts of the city then were West Adams Heights, Wilshire, Hollywood, and Beverly Hills. Los Angeles was conspicuously proud of its two symphony orchestras, its art museums, public library, three universities, and a good community theater.

From the firmly contained outlines of Berlin, Lubitsch had arrived in a city where twenty-two major office buildings would be erected in 1924 alone, with $87 million committed for high-rise construction the following year. The gridlock of the next half-century was already in evidence; by the end of 1924, 310,000 automobiles, more than the total registered in the state of New York, were entering Los Angeles every day.

The people in these cars were predominantly white. A 1926 census revealed 45,000 Hispanics, 33,000 blacks, and 30,000 Asians. Everyone else, more than 90 percent of the population, were whites of European descent, including a vigorous Jewish population of less than 100,000.

“This steady speedy growth,” observed Bruce Bliven in the New Republic of July 1927, “creates an easy optimism, a lazy prosperity which dominates people’s lives. Anything seems possible; the future is yours, and the past?—there isn’t any.”

The industries that were fueling this firestorm growth were oil, maritime trade, agriculture, banking, and movies, the biggest of them all. The film industry had made Hollywood, in the words of historian Kevin Starr, “a place energized by dreams.” By 1926, the movies had become, according to their own, probably overly effusive estimate, the fourth largest industry in the world—35,000 people were earning $1.25 million working in films. In 1927, the Hollywood studios would spend the heroic figure of $103 million to make movies, a 25 percent increase over the previous year.

Among the least regarded of these studios was Warner Bros.

Warner Bros, had been founded in 1904 as the Duquesne Amusement & Supply Company. The brothers had arrived in Hollywood in 1915, but had not officially incorporated until 1923. The company was ruled by an uneasy triumvirate of siblings: Jack and Sam Warner ran the production end of the business in Hollywood, while Harry ran the New York office. As surely as scissors cut paper, in the movie business, New York rules Hollywood. Although they were brothers, ceding final authority to Harry was always particularly galling to Jack Warner.

“My father had a great commercial sense,” remembered Jack Warner, Jr., who was born in 1916 and whose earliest memory of the studio is of Mai St. Clair directing a Rin Tin Tin picture. “But Harry was a little out of his time. He saw movies as a great medium of education, a spreading of the doctrine of brotherhood. They had been making two-reelers with Al St. John and Monte Banks, and in just a few years Harry got enough money together to make good pictures. Since Harry wanted to make classics, they called the series ‘Classics of the Screen.’ ”

It seemed like a perfect marriage; Warners was a studio hungry for prestige, while Lubitsch was an obviously prestigious director with, apparently, a commercial sense as well. According to both Henry Blanke and Hal Wallis, Warners enticed the very available Lubitsch by sending Irene Rich, a beautiful actress then having an affair with Jack Warner, to the front door of Lubitsch’s rented house.

She rang the bell. When Lubitsch came to the door, she said “Harry Warner is coming in a few minutes to talk to you about an offer,” whereupon she turned and left. Harry had his full attention, for Ernst was enchanted at such unorthodox business methods. The deal, as outlined in a rather laboriously written twenty-page contract, mandated six pictures spread over three years. Lubitsch was to be paid $60,000 per film, plus one-third of the net profits “so long as Warner derives any income, profits or other compensation, directly or indirectly, during the life of each of said photoplays.”

But the contract’s most remarkable provisions were front-loaded in clause number two, to wit: “Lubitsch shall have the sole, complete and absolute charge of the production of each such photoplay, except . . . in matters involving money . . . and that the story shall be selected by Warner and approved of by Lubitsch . . . Such sole charge shall include . . . the sole direction, control and supervision, as well as the hire and discharge of the scenario writer, the cast . . . the assistant directors, cameraman, working staff and force, sole charge of all properties, costumes, accessories, settings and equipment necessary for such production, sole charge of the picturization of the scenario from the editing of the scenario to the assemblage and completion of the sample positive print, sole charge and control of the assembling, titling and cutting of each such photoplay . . . and the absolute right of selection of locations where the same shall be filmed . . .”

“Warner agrees that . . . there shall be no interference of any kind whatsoever from any source, with Lubitsch, with respect to any matter or thing connected with the production, cutting and final completion of such photoplays.”

Should any changes in a film be deemed necessary because of censorship, Lubitsch would make them himself. The deal was exclusive, with the proviso that Lubitsch could direct one picture per year for Mary Pickford so long as the loan-out did not interfere with his productions for Warner Bros.

It was a remarkable contract; in essence, he was given his own production unit. Once the story and budget were agreed to, Lubitsch had final cut, a largely unheard of right for a filmmaker working with somebody else’s money then or now. He had earned all this before the industry had a chance to see if his European reputation would transfer. On August 7, five weeks before Rosita opened, Lubitsch signed with Warner Bros.

• • •

The brothers Warner divided the labor equitably; Jack was mostly in charge of the pictures themselves, Sam (“a very warm, friendly man,” according to his nephew) was mostly in charge of the technological end—the cameras, the personnel, the back lot. Harry was mostly in charge of the finances. As long as everything stayed that way, the management of the Warner studio ran smoothly, but Harry eventually left New York to go to California and the friction began. “When bankers start putting on sport jackets, watch out,” said Jack Warner, Jr. wryly.

“Jack was more in the public eye,” remembered Patsy Ruth Miller, a Warners star of the mid-1920s. “Harry was the businessman in the background. Jack was not a terribly polished man; their background was not high society. He was rather bawdy at times, but he decided what was made.”

It was Harry Warner who was responsible for signing Lubitsch, for he had a predisposition toward European talent. “Harry went to Europe a lot,” remembered Jack Warner, Jr., “and he would see people over there. Actors, directors, or art directors. He’d sign them up and send them to the studio. William Dieterle was signed that way, as was Michael Curtiz. The last of that group was Errol Flynn.

“When Harry went after Lubitsch, Warner Brothers was a new studio and he wanted to give it some class. Lubitsch was the first real class that my father’s company had; until then, they weren’t far removed from Poverty Row.”

Not far at all. Although the Warner Bros, financial ledgers indicate a well-run company that was consistently grossing nearly twice its outlay, the brothers were interested in expanding as rapidly as possible. Byron Haskin, a cameraman at the studio, remembered production stopping fairly frequently in order to impress potential investors.

“We would get every camera out of the vaults, set it up on a phony set, and grab a few of the extra people around. Anybody was the director, anybody was the cameraman . . . nothing was actually happening; no film in the cameras or anything. Then [Harry] would take them walking through and Jack would tell them, ‘Well, here’s Monte Blue, and here’s Marie Prevost.’ ”

As the final stop on the tour, John Barrymore would be pressed into service to take the eager marks into the office. There, they would meet Freddie the office boy, who was renowned for the heroic proportions of his male organ, and for his willingness to display it. “We used to lay nineteen nickles on top of it,” remembered Haskin. “That would generally be the convincer.”

Once Ernst, along with Henry Blanke and Hans Kräly, moved onto the lot, his main tormenter seems to have been Darryl Zanuck, at the time a lowly writer of Rin Tin Tin pictures. Zanuck shared an office with director Roy Del Ruth, and when they weren’t drilling holes in the wall to peer at their neighbor, writer Bess Meredyth, they were installing fake phones in Lubitsch’s office. The phones would ring, but were otherwise props.

Lubitsch and Blanke were still quite insecure about their English, and Zanuck would get an odd, adolescent charge out of ringing Lubitsch’s fake phone every few minutes. When Lubitsch or Blanke finally got up the nerve to answer the phone, there would be nothing on the other end. Result: strangled hilarity from the Zanuck/Del Ruth quarters. Taken all in all, Warners offered a slightly different ambiance than the decorous Pickford lot.

Since Harry had signed Lubitsch, something had to be done with him, but Jack didn’t have to like it. Jack liked movies to move, have plenty of snap-crackle-pop, and everybody knew that foreign directors were arty and slow. Jack figured all directors wanted to do was spend his money, always a bad sign. Even if a director was snappy and fast, it didn’t mean that Jack would like him, only that he would dislike him less.

Beyond hard practicalities, Warner Bros, was a psychological minefield. Without knowing it, Lubitsch had walked into the middle of a long-simmering sibling rivalry. All the Warner brothers had great respect for their father, Benjamin Warner, the family patriarch. Jack especially wanted to retain his respect. But Jack was a man whose habits were far more of Hollywood than of Krasnashiltz, Poland, where his father had been born. Inevitably, one of Jack’s girlfriends got under his skin and coerced him into divorcing his wife, something his generation of Jewish men rarely did, unless they were movie moguls, in which case they all did.

“Harry became a kind of representation of my grandfather after he died,” said Jack Warner, Jr. “He was the elder statesman. My father would open up to me about his feelings for Harry, which were absolutely wrong. Jack had a basic desire to be the top boss and he resented the New York office, that is to say Harry.”

While Harry was essentially quiet, Jack was social, although not with those that might be thought to constitute his peer group. He never socialized with other Warner executives, or other moguls like Louis B. Mayer or Harry Cohn. “For the most part, his friends were people who weren’t even in the industry,” remembered his son. “He loved being with people like the Aga Khan, or King Farouk. His greatest thrill was to be with the Duke of Windsor in the South of France. Once the two of them were walking in a rose garden when they both had to go to the bathroom. So my father and the Duke of Windsor watered the roses at the same time. That was the highlight of his social existence.”

Although Jack Warner was enormously seductive when he wanted to be (“He could be the most charming, delightful, warm, happy, interesting man in the world,” said his son), more often his personality was, according to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., that of “a sinister clown.” He was capable of an astonishing cruelty.

“Years later,” remembered Jack Warner, Jr., “there was a man named Steve Trilling, who devoted his life to my father. One day he came to work to find he had been fired. Just like that. And he went home and soon he had a heart attack and died. My father did things like that. There was a lack of humanity in him.”

The newly struck partnership between director and producer could never have been successful, for, more than anything else, Jack Warner loved the very thing that Ernst Lubitsch could not abide: conflict.

• • •

The first project that Warners floated for Lubitsch to direct was certainly more in keeping with his European past than Warners’ American present: Deburau, taken from a David Belasco play written by Sacha Guitry. While the famous French pantomimist was certainly a good idea for a movie, the story’s realization would have to wait for Marcel Carné’s immortal Children of Paradise.

Jack’s estimation of Lubitsch as Harry’s folly, as a dangerous highbrow, only began to be modified when Lubitsch made the acquaintance of their father. Ben Warner lived around the corner from the Warner Bros, studio in a modest bungalow on Bronson. He would come to the Sunset Boulevard lot every day to schmooze, except there wasn’t really anybody to schmooze with, for Ben Warner was only fluent in Polish and Yiddish. “None of the brothers spoke Yiddish,” remembered Jack Warner, Jr. “For one thing, they weren’t religious; they could forget they were Jewish.”

Lubitsch and Ben Warner struck up a friendship, based, at least in part, on the fact that each spoke only broken English. Jack Warner, glad that his father had somebody to talk to, began to think that maybe this Lubitsch fellow wasn’t so highbrow after all. Maybe he was even a Landsmann, a compatriot.

On January 1, 1924, Lubitsch and Nathan Burkan, who had become his attorney as well as Chaplin’s, formed Boulevard Pictures, a holding company to which he assigned his contract with Warners, presumably for tax reasons. Ernst was now free to remedy the mistakes he felt he had made with Rosita. “In my first picture I had to make all kinds of concessions to what they told me the American people wanted,” he told Harry Carr of Motion Picture Classic. “This one I am going to make to please Lubitsch.”

On the Warner lot, Lubitsch quickly began gathering a nucleus of family around him. As before, Henry Blanke was his assistant, or, as Blanke’s widow preferred to remember it, “his dog. My husband worked for him for a dollar a week and a pack of cigarettes.” Actually, Blanke remembered his salary as $50 a week, not bad for the period. (According to an affadavit filed with immigration authorities, Blanke was earning at least $100 a week, even better.)

Whatever he was being paid, there is no question that Blanke was earning his money. At night, he would work translating various memos and correspondence into German, so Lubitsch could deal with the minutia of his job. Harry Warner, who also worked nights and on weekends, saw Blanke habitually hunched over his desk long after quitting time and personally authorized a $25 a week raise. “The stingiest man in the world gave me a raise out of his own pocket,” remembered Blanke. “I was very proud.”

Lubitsch had brought Kräly and Blanke with him, but he had not brought a cameraman. As production neared on his first picture for Warner Bros., an adaptation of Lothar Schmidt’s play Only a Dream that had been retitled The Marriage Circle, the studio assigned him contract cinematographer Charles Van Enger. The cameraman walked on the set his first day on the picture to find that the set had been built too wide and too low, so a long shot was impossible. “This set is all wet,” he muttered, which led a puzzled Lubitsch to say, “Sharley, I don’t see any water.”

Van Enger suggested moving one side wall closer to the center of the set, so it could be properly photographed. After that display of simple competence, Lubitsch and Van Enger developed a good working relationship throughout the length of production, September and October of 1923.

“He would come in the morning,” Van Enger told historian Richard Koszarski, “no script, he knew exactly where everybody was going to be, he knew exactly what camera angle he wanted, and not once did he ever look through the camera, as long as I was with him.”

Van Enger developed the habit of photographing Lubitsch directing the actors, acting out the scene the way he wanted them to play it. “I would have them print it and the next day after the rushes I would run it for him. He thought that was so funny and if I didn’t do it, he’d raise hell. He’d say, ‘Sharley, where’s my scenes?’ ”

It didn’t take long for Lubitsch to clash with his new boss. A few days before production got under way, Lubitsch asked for real marble on the steps of a set.

“He gets marble paper,” snapped Jack Warner.

It had probably been a bluff on Lubitsch’s part to see just how much bounty the studio could supply. In Germany, a film company had almost no prop department it could turn to; most furniture for a movie had to be rented. But in Hollywood, “a completely different world,” according to Henry Blanke, the well-supplied studios had everything a director could possibly need to make a picture . . . except, possibly, marble.

For the actors of The Marriage Circle, used to the hurry-up-and-print-it regimen favored by Jack Warner, Lubitsch was something entirely different; the director found that he had to work his actors harder to get the results he needed. “He made me do simple scenes,” complained Marie Prevost, “just coming in and out of rooms fifteen or twenty times. At first it seemed as though there wasn’t any sense to it at all. Then it began to dawn upon me what the art of acting was all about, and it seemed intolerably and impossibly difficult. Then I began to see it as he saw it . . . He deals in subtleties that I never dreamed of before.”

Shooting locations in Beverly Hills one day, Lubitsch came face to face with Pola Negri, from whom he had been estranged since Die Flamme. “I saw what was coming,” remembered Charles Van Enger, “so I started the camera and they looked at each other, then they ran and put their arms around one another and they kissed . . . and they started to talk.”

The next day, Lubitsch and Van Enger watched the scene of the reunion in silence. “Sharley, would you get me that print?” he asked. Van Enger went into the projection room and cut the scene out. “Now get me the negative,” Lubitsch said.

“He took them out and put them on the ground and put a match to it and stood there until that film was all burned up. He was afraid his wife would see it.”

• • •

To hear them tell it, even though they were partners in United Artists, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford had little in common besides their mutual adoration of Douglas Fairbanks. Actually, they were psychological twins, sharing, besides their diminutive stature, a passion for the dollar caused by identical backgrounds of youthful poverty and deprivation, followed by incessant theatrical touring, culminating in enormous, unforeseen success in motion pictures that they both sought to consolidate by compulsive addiction to work. Finally, both Chaplin and Pickford chafed at the public’s complete identification—and confusion—of them with the characters they played.

So it was that in the fall of 1922, Charlie Chaplin decided to scratch a long-standing itch and direct a movie in which he would not appear. Moreover, to firmly establish his credentials as an independent creative artist, it would be a drama.

That summer, Chaplin had had a brief affair with Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a flamboyant party girl who had sliced through five wealthy husbands like a sexual scythe. According to Chaplin’s biographer David Robinson, the term “gold digger” was coined just for her. Joyce regaled Chaplin with tales of her past conquests, including a liaison with a wealthy Parisian publisher who was an acquaintance of Chaplin’s. At the same time, she would disingenuously claim that she was just a simple country girl at heart, that all she really wanted was a home with a white picket fence and a passel of chubby babies.

Stimulated by such an obvious confusion of identity, Chaplin wrote a story about Marie, a placid country girl who becomes the mistress of a wealthy Parisian man-about-town. Torn between the life of luxury he represents and the emotional commitment she feels for a struggling artist, Marie’s decision is made for her when the artist commits suicide. Chastened, humbled, she returns to the country and the simple life.

Despite the relatively conventional melodramatics of the plot, Chaplin determined that, in acting and direction, the keynote of the film he would call A Woman of Paris would be a quiet, unindicative irony.

For the leading roles, Chaplin chose Edna Purviance, his leading lady and longtime mistress, and Adolphe Menjou, whom Peggy Hopkins Joyce had once pointed out in a restaurant as having much of the style of her Parisian publisher.

Production began in November 1922, and continued for seven months, with Chaplin repeating one line over and over to his actors: “Don’t sell it! Remember, they’re peeking at you.” Despite the distraction of Chaplin’s concurrent affair with Pola Negri, the film turned out to be a deserved critical smash, with Chaplin’s storytelling skills being compared to those of Hardy, de Maupassant, and Ibsen. Although it was not a financial disaster (it grossed $634,000 domestically against a cost of $351,000), Chaplin, used to the multimillion-dollar grosses of the Tramp films, pretended it was.

Lubitsch shared in the critical enthusiasm for A Woman of Paris, telling a reporter for The New York Times that “I like it because I feel that an intelligent man speaks to me and nobody’s intelligence is insulted in the picture.”

For Hollywood’s creative community, A Woman of Paris tied in perfectly with what they were thinking and feeling. What the Russian theorist Vladimir Mayakovsky called the film’s “organization of simple little facts” leading to the “greatest emotional saturation” signaled a new storytelling and cultural sophistication that was being echoed in the stories of Scott Fitzgerald, and the unindicative stoicism of Hemingway.

All this was a function of the new affluence of the 1920s, and the sense of liberation that came with that affluence. At long last, the Victorian era seemed to be dead. In London, there was Noël Coward; in Paris, Sacha Guitry. And in Hollywood, there was Chaplin . . . and Lubitsch.

They had become good friends, and Chaplin had shown Ernst a rough cut of A Woman of Paris before it was released. Henry Blanke, in retrospect, would say that viewing the film “influenced Lubitsch’s entire life from then on . . . from being very spectacular [with] big crowds . . . he became very simple, and discovered wonderful American actors that he picked himself.”

But that seems a gross overstatement. Sexuality and playfulness had been present in Lubitsch’s films for years. Chaplin’s film is surprisingly serious—he subtitled it A Drama of Fate, and he’s not kidding—and the film’s only insouciance derives from the incomparably ironic and sly Adolphe Menjou. Moreover, Chaplin’s dramatic construction was always direct to the point of bluntness, while Lubitsch was a master of the oblique storytelling that Howard Hawks would later term “three-cushion.”

While it is A Woman of Paris that has always been taken as the primary inspiration for Lubitsch’s American comedies, if Lubitsch was borrowing from anybody in The Marriage Circle and the films that followed, it was Cecil B. DeMille and the astonishingly nimble series of marital comedies he made beginning in 1918.

The DeMille films are playfully sardonic about the implicit boredom of marriage, as well as virtually everything else. Humor, a sense of life’s innate absurdity, lightens each and every character. DeMille, creating a genre that might be termed the comedy of divorce before he journeyed to his particular promised land of grandiloquent spectacles, passed the torch to Lubitsch, who was just springing himself from the prison in which DeMille was to be so content.

In DeMille’s Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), the screen image dissolves from the spit-shined shoes of a lover to the scuffed, untied shoes of the husband, from the lover’s immaculate necktie and jawline to the open neck and flabby jowls of the husband. It’s a sequence that could be dropped intact into any of the quiet, pointed comedies Lubitsch began making in 1924. Maliciously witty moments like this make these films the deftest work of DeMille’s career.

Nor is DeMille being unnecessarily dragged down by his Victorian heritage; true, most of the women in DeMille’s marital comedies are passive, decorative objects. But in Old Wives for New, Florence Vidor’s character runs a fashionable dress shop. Moreover, DeMille suggests that a pallid lack of fire is a good part of the reason men and women get bored with each other.

This is not to say that DeMille takes it the extra step that Lubitsch delighted in. With the exception of Kay Francis in Trouble in Paradise, Lubitsch’s women are never captains of industry, but they’re smart, they’re knowing; they usually understand exactly what to do and why. DeMille’s tendency toward paternalism is amplified in a movie like Why Change Your Wife?, where Gloria Swanson and Bebe Daniels fight over the inert Thomas Meighan. For DeMille’s patriarchal sensibility, men are the priapic suns around which women worshipfully cluster.

Primarily, Chaplin’s film gave Lubitsch an all-important attitude: dry, sardonic, emotionally cool, with the actors invariably giving quiet, uninflected performances. To some degree, the composed tone of A Woman of Paris would be present in the rest of the pictures Lubitsch would make.

Also contributing to Ernst’s swerve into intimacy was the comparative ease and subtlety of that kind of filmmaking, at least compared to the arduous bread-and-circuses that had been occupying him for the last three or four years. As Henry Blanke said, “How many more thousand people can you show?”

“We are groping slowly on the screen for some definite form of screen art,” Lubitsch told an interviewer in December 1923, shortly after he had seen the film and become friends with Chaplin. “Something that will mean to the movies what the technical school of Ibsen meant to the drama—and we are groping slowly . . .

“Chaplin’s Woman of Paris is a great step forward . . . It did not, like many plays I see, insult my intelligence. So often in pictures one is not allowed to think by the director. But—ah!—in A Woman of Paris we had a picture that, as you Americans say, left something to the imagination.”

Ernst and Chaplin remained good friends; when Chaplin suffered a nervous breakdown during his divorce proceedings from Lita Grey, Lubitsch, probably at the suggestion of Nathan Burkan, went to his hotel to try to calm him down. Lubitsch’s stepson Eddie, who accompanied him, remembered a harried, white-faced Chaplin pacing endlessly back and forth in his hotel room.

• • •

The Marriage Circle, adapted by Lubitsch and Paul Bern from Only a Dream, a play by Lothar Schmidt that dated from 1909, endured a false start when production began in September 1923. For the part of Doctor Braun, Lubitsch had originally cast the dutiful but inescapably bland Warner Baxter. After eight days of production, Lubitsch turned to Henry Blanke and said, “He looks like a detective.” Baxter was dismissed and Lubitsch chose Warner’s contract player Monte Blue to replace him. The picture was completed in October and released the following February.

Lubitsch wastes no time in creating the proper, saucy rhythm for The Marriage Circle, effortlessly setting up the duality of one perfectly happy marriage contrasted with another couple in a perpetual state of steely indifference salted with loathing.

“The day starts late but gloriously in the home of Professor Josef Stock,” announces a title that precedes a desultory Adolphe Menjou getting dressed, only to discover that there are holes in his socks. Menjou reacts with what even then was his trademarked frozen sang-froid, a dead nonexpression, but without the customary lightness in the eyes and around the mouth.

His wife, Mizzi Stock, is a slovenly housekeeper, among many other things. When Stock ignores her, the irritating jazz baby responds with an outraged “Keep up with your cruelty and someday I’ll leave you.” Mizzi convinces herself that she’s in love with the husband of an old friend, Dr. Braun, who is actually very much in love with his wife, but can’t very well resist when a beautiful little piece of fluff like Mizzi launches herself into his lap. Professor Stock, nobody’s fool, hires a detective to follow his wife and gather incriminating evidence so he can obtain the divorce for which he devoutly wishes.

Then come the complications: Dr. Braun’s partner is secretly in love with Braun’s wife, Charlotte (the stately, impersonal Florence Vidor). She, in turn, suspects her husband of having an affair, but with the wrong woman. Charlotte begins an affair of her own while simultaneously seeking comfort from the woman who is in fact trying her level best to seduce her husband: Mizzi. The Marriage Circle indeed.

The complications are rigorously worked out, and a garden party sequence, where Mizzi lures Dr. Braun into the garden and tosses away her scarf, carries with it the perceptible thrill of a forbidden affair. Lubitsch had discovered that in an atmosphere of hushed whispers and discretion, a mere kiss carries as much erotic charge as penetration.

Ultimately, everyone gets what they think they want. Professor Stock gets his freedom—an admiring appraisal of Dr. Braun’s servant girl as Stock makes his exit implies that it will be put to wide-ranging use—his ex-wife gets somebody new to wrap around her little finger, and Dr. Braun gets his wife back.

The casting of Adolphe Menjou is an obvious nod to A Woman of Paris, although the actor much preferred Chaplin as a director. “All I had to do to make Lubitsch happy was to step before the camera and mimic every gesture he gave me,” Menjou grumbled in his memoirs. Also deriving from the Chaplin picture is the reflexively Continental setting, in this case Vienna, although there is no particular attempt to convincingly replicate a European milieu. Indeed, Lubitsch derives much of the comic tension in the film from the contrast between Menjou’s innate elegance and the comparative coarseness of other actors like Marie Prevost and Monte Blue, who gets by because his character is essentially defined by his continually flustered state.

The subject matter of The Marriage Circle is only a slight extension of the marital comedies Ernst had made in Germany years before. What is clearly different is the pace. Before, he had charged up the actors to maintain the energy level of farce, but here he takes his time, holding reaction shots for several beats. The editing takes its cue from Menjou’s cold stares, and the stylistic alteration from only three years before is startling.

The Marriage Circle is full of scenes with a sense of unspoken formality, of a mutually antagonistic marital Mexican standoff that has been going on for years. In this move-counter-move rhythm, Lubitsch is anticipating the tit-for-tat routines of Laurel and Hardy, but, instead of escalating physical destruction, Lubitsch freezes the emotional temperature. Unlike real people, these characters never lose their control, which is the essence of their absurdity, the center of their wit.

Photoplay marveled at the film’s aesthetic economy. “The picture starts, the characters themselves reveal the story, which runs smoothly along to its logical ending. There is no straining for effects . . . it’s all very simple, very human and immensely entertaining.”

Before, the audience could only see Lubitsch’s characters move; beginning with The Marriage Circle, we can see them think. Before, there were large sets and hundreds of extras, and, when there weren’t, there was much brisk hurly-burly. Now, Lubitsch strips everything down to the essentials: a few actors, a car, a garden, a dining room, a staircase. Lubitsch’s German films, even the fine ones, tend to be brass bands, compelling, funny, but unavoidably loud; beginning with The Marriage Circle, Ernst became the composer of the cinema’s finest, most quietly elegant chamber music.

In 1927, the trade paper Film Daily asked the ten men who had been voted the Best Directors of the past year to choose their favorite of their own films. Lubitsch chose The Marriage Circle because, as he explained, “In this production I was experimenting . . . My desire was to create a story that would reflect life as it is lived by thousands of married couples—just everyday people that we meet all around us.

“In back of the idea was a desire to create a new form—a different technique . . . I mean the processes employed in developing a story along natural, human lines, with the characters all flesh and blood people who were just a little bit bad and not too good . . . Our heroes and heroines in pictures are so often too good . . . Nothing particularly thrilling happened. But there was suspense—interest—comedy—human beings reacting to given situations as they do in life.

“I call it my picture of no regrets. If I had to do it all over again, of course, there are many little places where I could improve it. Just touches here and there. But I doubt if I would change the story structure. And the cast. Well, there is not one single change I would make if I had to do it again.”

• • •

Lubitsch acclimated himself to Hollywood very quickly. After renting on Alpine Drive in Beverly Hills for nearly a year, he felt sufficiently secure in his new country to build a house, located at 616 Beverly Drive and costing nearly $40,000. Lubitsch’s only show business neighbor was Pola Negri, who lived two doors to the south. (A few years later, Jack Benny would buy the house catty-corner across the street.)

Although an impressive, mini-Tara-like structure from the outside, 616 Beverly Drive was actually comparatively modest inside. The entry way to the house was on the side, which led to a big family room with a fireplace. A few years later, Lubitsch would add a room on top of the family room to serve as his office/study.

Technically, it was only a three-bedroom house, but it had a very deep lot with a large swimming pool in the back yard. There were six servants—a downstairs maid, an upstairs maid, a personal maid for Leni, a chauffeur, and two gardeners. Attached to the garage was a two-bedroom bungalow that was used as a home for the two main servants. Behind the far end of the pool were two bathhouses.

Ernst’s contented existence was marred only by the death of his father on February 15, 1924, the day before the release of The Marriage Circle. Simon Lubitsch was buried beside his wife at Weissensee Cemetery, not far from a memorial to the Jewish soldiers who fought and died in World War I. Busy with his new life in his new country, and unable to return in time for the funeral, Lubitsch chose to stay in America.

By the end of 1924, Ernst Lubitsch had a life that included virtually all the plush stylings that would be increasingly evident in his movies. All that was missing was the veiled hostility and the infidelity. They would come later.

• • •

Between April and June 1924, Lubitsch shot Three Women, from a script he wrote with Hans Kräly based on a novel entitled Lilli’s Marriage by one Iolanthe Marees. Although the setting is explicitly American, there is much open recourse to alcohol, this in spite of Prohibition.

Pauline Frederick is Mabel, a worried woman of a certain age who gets on a scale, finds she weighs 135, and is greatly dismayed. Planning a tryst with an attractive man, she carefully cuts out the daylight in the room and turns on artificial, indirect lights, while Charles Van Enger’s camera switches to a subtle soft focus to replicate the effect Mabel is seeking.

Lubitsch’s sense of character is revealingly deadly. Lew Cody’s Edmund is idly plinking the piano and notices a figurine. He immediately turns it over to check the mark, establishing the acquisitiveness and vulgarity beneath the sophisticated surface.

Mabel’s daughter, Jeanne (the indistinct May McAvoy), is attending college at Berkeley and feeling neglected. Eager to see her mother, she arrives home just in time to interrupt the planned mutual seduction. Mabel would rather not spend time with her, so on Jeanne’s way out of the house, Jeanne meets Edmund and goes out with him. One thing, as it often does, leads to another and they end up getting married.

Behind his new wife’s back, Edmund is having an affair with Harriet (Marie Prevost); we know that because he keeps a separate set of clothes at her apartment. Mabel finds out and demands that he divorce her daughter. He suggests it would be much more appropriate if he blackmails Mabel for having an affair with him first, as her letters prove. His manner is quiet, suave; why be so upset? They can still be “friends.” They tussle over a gun, she shoots him. At the trial, she admits her guilt and the affair. She is acquitted and Jeanne is reunited with her college sweetheart. Everybody’s happy.

Three Women begins as a textured, highly unconventional domestic drama, acutely but lovingly observed, then gradually loses its edge until it becomes a predictable society drama in which a self-absorbed parent redeems herself through self-sacrifice. Since Marie Prevost has little screen time and exists mainly as a plot function rather than as a character, it might have been better to title the film Two Women.

• • •

In mid-July Ernst went on loan-out to Paramount to work on Forbidden Paradise, a reunion with Pola Negri, whose American career had gotten off to a rocky start. An adaptation of a Lajos Biro/Melchior Lengyel play loosely based on the legendary Catherine the Great, Forbidden Paradise was slightly hampered by Negri’s insistence on casting her current lover, the dashing but inexpressive Rod La Rocque, as her leading man.

The actress’s displays of temperament continued unabated. During a scene in which Negri was to run down a winding stairway, she began to protest, saying that her dress, a brocaded negligee with a sable train, was unwieldy and dangerous.

“Nonsense,” Lubitsch soothed her. “You’ll manage perfectly.”

“If it catches on the railing I’ll break my neck.”

“What’s wrong with you? We did much more dangerous stunts in Berlin.”

“I was younger then.”

“Three years younger.” Furious, Lubitsch marched her into a dressing room, snatched the negligee off her, and stepped into it. Dressed in the negligee, puffing on his cigar, Lubitsch dashed down the stairs and back again, conclusively proving that the costume was not dangerous and that it looked better on Negri.

For Negri, this was just like old times, “fighting on a set again and both enjoying it enormously.” But Lubitsch’s tolerance for temperament had decreased as his own importance had increased; he would never work with Negri again.

In spite of the uproar on the set, Forbidden Paradise is a consistent delight. Although the architecture subtly indicates Russia, and Negri’s character is referred to as “The Czarina,” Lubitsch updates the setting to encompass a mythical country complete with automobiles.

Lubitsch creates a triangle of a sexually voracious queen, her blasé chancellor (Adolphe Menjou, of course), and an ardent, jejune young officer worried about a rebellion (Rod La Rocque). Both the Czarina and her Chancellor are in on the joke, and think even discussing revolution is a waste of energy, but La Rocque’s Alexei is a big, clumsy puppy, a straight arrow who doesn’t get it. The Czarina has to work very hard to seduce him; at one point, she brings a footstool over to stand on because Alexei is both too tall and too dim to realize it would help if he’d bend a little.

After the Czarina and Alexei become lovers, Lubitsch stages a banquet, with a long table full of officers, all wearing precisely the same medal that the Czarina has just presented to Alexei.

Lubitsch’s taste for aphoristic counterpoint was never sharper. The Chancellor, the ultimate fixer, goes to rebel headquarters. The leader confronts the hated minion of the Czarina. A close-up of his burly hand grabbing his sword pommel is matched by a cut of Menjou reaching into his pocket and pulling out . . . his checkbook. The soldier’s hand relaxes, and his fingers begin idly drumming as he awaits his payoff. So much for revolution.

Negri is atypically quiet and sly, but her luxurious, beddy quality is intact and, in keeping with the tone of his leading actors, Lubitsch underplays his set pieces. There is a brilliant sequence when Negri, mistakenly believing the revolution has begun, rushes through the abandoned palace, and Lubitsch unleashes a series of stunning sets by the great Hans Dreier that are vaguely reminiscent of the baroque designs of The Mountain Cat.

In a love scene, Alexei and the lady-in-waiting (Pauline Starke) who is his true love, embrace by a lily pond. Lubitsch cuts to a shot looking up at them through the water. A fish darts through the frame and the ripples of the water disrupt the pastoral composition as, simultaneously, the lovers are interrupted.

In the end, the Czarina is confronted with the problem of what to do with Alexei. Since she can’t corrupt him, and she likes him too much to kill him, she decides to let him live. He and his lady-in-waiting go off together, and the Chancellor helpfully shows in a French Ambassador. Some time later, he comes out wearing the very familiar medal. As the Chancellor congratulates the Ambassador on his speed and proficiency, the film fades out.

• • •

Clara Bow’s obvious star quality had been languishing in a series of quickies being produced by B. P. Schulberg. Ernst met her on the Warners lot, where she was making something called Eve’s Lover, and invited her to test for his next picture, Kiss Me Again. During the test, the always insecure Bow noticed Ernst smacking his lips, thought he was making fun of her, and smacked right back at him. Lubitsch turned red, called her “a damned fresh kid,” but gave her the job anyway.

The film began shooting in January 1925, finished in late March, and was released in August. Lubitsch and Bow became friends; Clara later referred to Lubitsch, who would lend her a hand during a particularly traumatic time at Paramount, as a “godsend.” Unfortunately, no prints of Kiss Me Again are known to survive, making the delectable combination of Lubitsch and Clara Bow apparently lost to the ages.

• • •

After the false start of Rosita, Lubitsch had definitely found his rhythm. When he began production on Lady Windermere’s Fan in September 1925, it was the fifth picture he had made since leaving Pickford two years before. A gifted young talent named Harold Grieve was chosen to handle the all-important art direction.

“Lubitsch was a very good person,” recalled Grieve. “If he trusted you, and if he liked you, he’d let you do your job. I would bring him my sketches, he’d approve them, and that was that.” Grieve’s serene, uncluttered designs lent the source material welcome undertones of dramatic gravity; he and Lubitsch would collaborate again on So This Is Paris.

After a few days of working with Clive Brook in the role of Darlington, Lubitsch realized that he had repeated the same mistake he had made with Warner Baxter. Lubitsch instructed Brook to click his heels and snap his head. Brook refused, explaining that was never done in England. Neither man would budge. “Lubitsch being German, Clive English, and the war pretty recent didn’t help the situation,” remembered Irene Rich.

Brook left the picture; to replace him, Ronald Colman was quickly borrowed from Sam Goldwyn. In addition to money, Goldwyn demanded a credit line: “Ronald Colman through the courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn.” This caused Lubitsch no end of irritation; for most of the shoot, he would give Colman directions such as “Mr. Colman, you walk across the room, courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn, you stop by the table, you pick up the book, courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn, and then you look into the eyes of Miss McAvoy . . . by courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn.” Since there is no point in the finished picture wherein Ronald Colman clicks his heels and snaps his head, it’s entirely possible that Lubitsch was trying to antagonize Clive Brook into leaving on his own.

Lubitsch wanted to use Warners contract star May McAvoy in the film, but the actress hated the part as written, and promptly headed for Catalina Island with her mother. After a few days, Warners tracked her down and Lubitsch called. “McAwoy” (“He always pronounced it McAwoy,” remembered the actress), “what are you doing over there?”

“I don’t want to do it,” she reiterated. “It isn’t me.”

“If you don’t come over here now, I’m coming over to get you. Nobody else can play the part but you.” (What Lubitsch undoubtedly meant was that nobody at Warners could play the part but her, for McAvoy was a pleasant but bland actress.)

At any rate, the timeworn flattery worked. “I didn’t want any trouble with Lubitsch because he was a doll and I loved him, so I did it,” said McAvoy. Because the actress was just under five feet in height, whenever McAvoy was in a scene with Colman or Bert Lytell, she was photographed standing on a built-up runway.

Except for a brief flare-up of hostilities brought about by Irene Rich’s scene-stealing, the shoot for Lady Windermere’s Fan went smoothly. Lubitsch insisted that the actors speak the dialogue written in the script, so that the emotion and expression would come naturally from the scene’s content. He also had Irene Rich dye her hair red; although the film was in black and white, he theorized that it would make her feel more sophisticated and mature, perhaps even wicked.

To shoot the racetrack scenes correctly (in England, the race horses run in the opposite direction from those in America), Lubitsch took his wife and a second unit for a few days of filming in Toronto. Then he and Leni went to New York for ten days, socializing with Blanche Sweet and her husband, Marshall Neilan, and visiting Texas Guinan’s nightclub when they weren’t seeing the shows on Broadway.

While in New York, he did some retakes of Irene Rich’s close-ups at the old Vitagraph studio. One observer noticed that most directors would have directed Rich through her close-ups by saying something like “You are watching the races—you turn and watch the people—smile. Good heavens! It’s your own daughter—turn away.”

But Lubitsch talked Rich through the scene up to the point where she was to see her daughter. “Now!” he said, and snapped his fingers, causing Rich to stiffen her body. The close-up took nine takes before Lubitsch was satisfied.

After New York, the Lubitschs stopped off in Washington, D.C., where he spent a half-hour with that noted movie fan, Calvin Coolidge. Truly, Simon Lubitsch’s son had arrived. When they returned to Los Angeles after being gone for five weeks, Lubitsch announced that he considered Washington “the most beautiful city, architecturally, of any city in the United States.”

• • •

For Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lubitsch early on decided that none of Oscar Wilde’s witty epigrams would be used as titles; in fact, only two lines of the play’s dialogue were directly transposed. “Playing with words is fascinating to the writer and afterward to the reader, but on the screen it is impossible,” Ernst told The New York Times. “Would much charm remain to long excerpts from Wilde’s play if the audience had to ponder laboriously over the scintillating sentences on the screen?” Rather, the director chose to find visual counterparts for Wilde’s dialogue.

By denuding the material of its verbal wit, Lubitsch strips it to its narrative base—a mother with a scandalous past and the daughter who thinks she’s dead, both coming to an understanding through the stirrings of maternal feeling and selfless love. It’s well-directed, but it’s also nominal silent film material amounting to little more than well-dressed tailor’s dummies exchanging significant glances over teacups.

There are flashes, just not enough of them. Lubitsch brings off another stunningly designed, furtive meeting in a formal garden; at another point in the story, May McAvoy is considering jimmying her husband’s desk drawer. She thinks better of it and exits frame left. The camera holds on the desk for several seconds. Suddenly, McAvoy darts in from frame right to carry on her investigations.

Lubitsch’s gamble almost worked, but the film seems more serious than the play because it isn’t punctuated by Wilde’s frivolous bon mots cuing the audience that this is a stylized comedy.

What distinction the film has relates to Lubitsch’s use of scenery and space. The decor is remarkably simple. Shining floors, a few columns, some draperies, a great staircase, and large doors are really all that is used to indicate a manorial house. The comparatively simple, inferential sets produce a sense of depth and uncluttered spaciousness, clean playing areas for the action.

The critics were not all that impressed; Photoplay called the film “smart” but the influential English film reviewer Iris Barry didn’t care for it, and The New York Times said that the film “shrinks in importance beside the original effort.”

• • •

Lubitsch’s Warner Bros, films were made quickly, efficiently, and on budget, but not quickly, efficiently, or cheaply enough for Jack Warner. The pay structure was decent for the period. On Three Women, character actress Mary Carr got $1,000 for a week’s work, while Lew Cody received $1,562.50 a week and May McAvoy $1,750 a week. The ubiquitous Hans Kräly got $7,500 for work on that script (for which he was credited) as well as for some quiet work on The Marriage Circle (for which Paul Bern was credited), all drawn at the rate of $250 a week. The highest-priced player was Pauline Frederick, who was pulling $2,000 a week. As was common in the period, the free-lancing Frederick had to furnish her own wardrobe while May McAvoy, a Warners contract player, did not. Other, less specific actors had to struggle. Pierre Gendron was only paid $200 a week for working in the same film and had to supply his own wardrobe on top of that.

Jack Warner’s expressions of disappointment with the returns on Lubitsch’s pictures finally caused Ernst to lose his temper. In January 1926, he offered to buy out his contract after completing Reveillon, which would soon be retitled So This Is Paris. The conciliatory Harry Warner tried to smooth the matter over, “NOT INTERESTED SEPARATING UNTIL EXPIRATION CONTRACT DON’T ACT HASTY . . . WILL DISCUSS SAME WHEN I RETURN . . .” Harry wired Lubitsch from Europe.

In a concurrent wire to Jack, Harry laid out their strategy: “LUBITSCH MUST MAKE MORE THRILLING PICTURE AND NOT WORRY SO MUCH ABOUT STORY HIS PICTURES ARE OVER PEOPLE’S HEADS HERE KISS ME AGAIN TAKEN OFF WHEREVER PLAYED AFTER THREE DAYS SHOW HIM THIS SCHLESINGER REPORTS SAME STORY WEAKNESS GERMANY AND CENTRAL EUROPE STOP DON’T LET HIM KILL HIMSELF BEFORE MAKING BIG PICTURE . . .”

A later cable amplified on Harry’s feelings: “DON’T DISCUSS PARTING WITH HIM HE’S LOOKING FOR OUT . . . DON’T START BIG PICTURE WITH HIM UNTIL I RETURN WILL THEN HANDLE HIM PERSONALLY JUST LET HIM MAKE PICTURE TO FINISH THIS YEAR . . .”

Harry wired Lubitsch that “UNNECESSARY GET EXCITED BECAUSE SOMEONE INTERESTED MUTUALLY WITH YOU CALLS YOUR ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY OBSERVE . . . YOU HAVE PICKED YOUR OWN STORIES AND MADE YOUR OWN PICTURES WITHOUT INTERFERENCE BUT MADE THEM TOO SUBTLE THE WORLD WANTS THRILL AND EXCITEMENT STOP AS DISCUSSED WITH YOU WE WANT YOU TO MAKE STILL BIGGER PICTURE HEREAFTER BUT YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO WHAT THE WORLD WANTS TO PROTECT YOUR OWN REPUTATION STOP WE ARE THOROUGHLY SATISFIED WITH YOU AND PICTURES AND WHEN I RETURN WILL ENDEAVOUR TO MAKE VERY LONG TERM CONTRACT WITH YOU TO START AT EXPIRATION OF PRESENT CONTRACT . . .”

On January 27, Lubitsch replied to Harry that “AGREE WITH YOU THAT EUROPEAN MARKET EXPECTS ONLY BIG PICTURES FROM ME STOP IT IS VERY UNFORTUNATE FOR ME THAT FOR PAST THREE YEARS I HAD NEITHER MEANS NOR CHANCE TO MAKE BIG PICTURES AND YOU HAVE NO ONE BUT YOURSELF TO BLAME THAT MY TALENTS ARE WASTED THUSLY STOP SITUATION HAS REACHED POINT WHERE BOTH OF US ARE EQUALLY DISSATISFIED AND I TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO SUGGEST THAT FOR OUR MUTUAL BENEFIT WE SEPARATE AFTER NEXT PICTURE . . .”

Harry decided not to get in a trans-Atlantic argument, and told Jack to “TELL LUBITSCH NOT TO ACT LIKE BABY CAN’T ONE CALL HIS ATTENTION HIS PICTURES GREAT BUT SUBTLE HE HAS PICKED STORIES NEVER WANTED MAKE WHAT WE ASKED HIM . . .”

But Lubitsch was antagonized and had no intention of either being placated or of going back to the more commercially obvious spectaculars that were clearly what Harry and Jack wanted, “YOU ARE MISTAKEN WHEN YOU THINK MY PROPOSAL CAUSED BY EXCITEMENT,” he wired Harry on January 29. “IT WAS RESULT OF CAREFUL DELIBERATION STOP YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN COMPLAINING OF BEING UNABLE TO MAKE MONEY WITH MY PICTURES AND MY OWN EARNINGS CERTAINLY FAR BELOW AMOUNT I COULD GET EVERYWHERE ELSE STOP AM VERY SKEPTICAL REGARDING YOUR PLANS OF BIGGER PICTURES BECAUSE THEY REQUIRE DIFFERENT FACILITIES AND ACTING MATERIAL FROM WHAT YOU HAVE STOP FULLY REALIZE WHAT WORLD EXPECT FROM ME AND THEREFORE REPEAT PROPOSAL OF SEPARATING AFTER NEXT PICTURE BEST REGARDS . . .”

Lubitsch would never have been acting so aggressively had he not had other offers; United Artists’ Joe Schenck had offered him a contract with a large salary plus a percentage. While Lubitsch’s contract with Warners allowed him to make one loan-out picture at U.A., it had to star Mary Pickford. Before Ernst could accept Schenck’s lucrative offer, he had to cut himself loose from Harry and Jack.

An obviously worried Jack Warner wired his brother that “LUBITSCH INCENSED MADE VERY LITTLE MONEY THIS YEAR STATES MUST MAKE BIG PICTURE AFTER NEXT . . .” Jack asked Harry to authorize a payment that would reimburse Lubitsch for the percentages he wasn’t getting, “TOLD HIM HE WOULD MAKE MONEY . . . THIS SERIOUS HIS REASON SMALL DIRECTORS MAKING TWICE MONEY HE MAKING AND HE GREAT LUBITSCH . . .”

Lubitsch had effectively rattled Warners’ cage; although they had been protesting about the returns from his films, they were clearly not anxious to lose him. After consulting with the company lawyers, Jack decided not to permit any alterations of their original contract or to purchase Lubitsch’s percentages. He also began to think that Lubitsch might be playing both ends against the middle, “UNDER NO CONDITION CABLE LUBITSCH HANDLE EVERYTHING THROUGH ME,” he wired Harry on February 12. “DID YOU EVER DISCUSS WITH [attorney Nathan] BURKAN OR LUBITSCH THAT HE COULD DIRECT OTHER THAN PICTURE WITH PICKFORD PERSONALLY APPEARING THIS IMPORTANT . . .”

Jack went back to the lawyers to find out what exactly Lubitsch’s obligations were under his contract. The answer came back that, because of his loan-out to Paramount for Forbidden Paradise, he owed them three pictures for 1926 alone, with an option for a picture in 1927 as well.

Lubitsch’s desperation was growing, so he played his final card, “WILLING PURCHASE CONTRACT MYSELF,” he wired Harry on February 23. “WILL TRADE IN MY INTEREST IN ALL MY WARNER PRODUCTIONS WIRE YOUR TERMS . . .”

How much truth was on either side in this battle between bruised ego and strong wills? Lubitsch’s series of pictures for Warner Bros, had been profitable, but not by much. Records for The Marriage Circle specify a negative cost of $212,000, a world gross of $427,000; Three Women had cost $329,000 and grossed $438,000; Kiss Me Again cost $224,000 and grossed $394,000; Lady Windermere’s Fan had cost $320,000 and grossed $398,000; So This Is Paris, his last picture for the studio, would cost $253,000 and gross $310,000. Warner’s distribution fee was only 7.5 percent in America and 15 percent in Europe, but the math was incontrovertible. Warner Bros, didn’t need to cook the books; there wasn’t a whole lot of net to go around. Besides that, the grosses were in a steady decline. As film editor Rudi Fehr, a close associate of Jack Warner, would recall, “Lubitsch had a following, but they weren’t coal-miners, they weren’t steelworkers.” In short, the mass audience was not interested.

Jack and Harry Warner had undoubtedly assumed that Lubitsch would pull a much larger audience in Europe than he had, but the European returns on his Warner productions were never more than $90,000 apiece; the knowing attitudes about the heavy chains of matrimony that struck Americans as so delicious probably struck many Europeans as business as usual. While Lubitsch’s pictures outdrew other Warner productions in Europe, they also cost more.

Lubitsch’s complaints about the impossibility of doing a big spectacle because of the unprepossessing Warners actors and facilities were more than a bit disingenuous. The brothers were already making costume pictures with John Barrymore—some of them good ones—that were the costliest items on the Warners production roster (Beau Brummel cost $343,000, The Sea Beast $503,000, and Don Juan $546,000). If Lubitsch’s movies were different than they had been in Europe, it was because Lubitsch wanted them that way.

The underlying disgruntlement exhibited by the Warner brothers was spreading throughout Hollywood, for the fact of the matter was that few of the imported European directors and stars were adding much to the net profits of their employers. Even The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which had received more press attention than any of its contemporary American competition, had failed to attract audiences outside of New York City.

As early as February 1923, The New York Times was noting that the European invasion had produced films that “didn’t go as they should—according to box-office standards. It seemed apparent that the Continental stories and methods of story-telling were not acceptable to American movie fans.”

Of course, the moguls were conveniently overlooking the fact that the émigrés had been intended for prestige as much as anything else. The rave reviews were nice, but after a few years, the thrill of employing “The Griffith of Europe” had clearly worn off.

In the midst of all the contractual sniping, So This Is Paris was shot from March 25 to mid-May 1926. Lubitsch was paid an additional $10,000 for the script, with Warners stipulating that if he wished to use any other writers he’d have to pay for them himself. Obviously, Warners had developed a dislike for Kräly’s work, but it was to no avail. Kräly duly received credit for the script; Lubitsch simply took the studio’s money and signed it over to Kräly.

Warners did their best to make Lubitsch happy, probably against their better judgment. When no likely candidates were found on the lot for the part of Georgette, the script’s Other Woman, they got Lilyan Tashman on loan-out for $750 a week, with a four-week minimum. They again hired Harold Grieve as art director, buying his services from Marshall Neilan for $475 a week with a five-week minimum, and hired free-lance writer, editor, and gadfly Rob Wagner to tide the picture for a lump sum of $1,500.

“There was no kidding on the set,” remembered costar Patsy Ruth Miller. In those days at Warner Brothers, the average picture would take four weeks to shoot, but a Lubitsch production would run between six and eight. He did not shoot a lot of takes, and tried to edit the film in the camera as much as possible. After rehearsals were done to his satisfaction, Lubitsch would announce to cast and crew alike, “This is the picture,” meaning that the camera was about to roll.

“If he got what he wanted, he didn’t try to cover himself with another take,” remembered Patsy Ruth Miller. “Some directors aren’t all that sure of themselves.

“The whole film was visualized in his head, so he wasn’t very flexible. He didn’t want you going off the beaten track with a gesture if it wasn’t what he had in mind.” Miller noted that the crew liked and respected him, and Lubitsch never raised his voice. “What particularly endeared him to me was the fact that he loved America. Some of the foreign directors, like Victor Seastrom, were so scornful. Not a warm personality. But Ernst loved America, loved the American people.”

Lubitsch felt comfortable with Miller and let down his guard of impersonal geniality when he told her that “You must take care of your money. You must save your money. You must always have enough money.”

Confused, the young actress asked why.

“Because then you don’t have to be nice to anybody you don’t like.”

Despite the growing acrimony with Jack and Harry Warner, Ernst didn’t let his dissatisfaction tempt him toward carelessness; when Myrna Loy, playing a maid, knocked on a door in the conventional overhand way, Lubitsch sprang from his chair. “No, no, this way,” he said, turning his palm upward to demonstrate. “Turn your hand over and rap lightly with your knuckles. It is more gentle waking her up that way.”

While Lubitsch and the brothers Warner were jousting over money and the kinds of pictures that Ernst should be making, the machinery of production ground on and Warners continued to purchase material designated for the increasingly unhappy director.

Case in point: Samson Raphaelson’s play The Jazz Singer. According to Charles Van Enger, he brought the show to the attention of the Warners and Lubitsch, despite the indifferent reviews the play had received when it opened in September 1925 (“a shrewd and well-planned excursion into the theatre . . . so written that even the slowest of wits can understand it”-The New York Times). Harry, Jack, and Lubitsch, had gone to see it, but only Lubitsch agreed with Van Enger that it was good screen material.

Back on the West Coast, Lubitsch, having finished So This Is Paris, was fretting about not having a story. Indeed, worry about finding material would become a continual refrain for the rest of his life. Van Enger again mentioned The Jazz Singer, and Lubitsch decided to take advantage of the clause in his contract that said Warner Brothers had to buy any story he desired.

On May 20, 1926, Ernst cabled the Author’s League in New York about two plays: The Jazz Singer and Garden of Eden. He had been unable to find out who owned the first and he didn’t have the address of Avery Hopwood, who owned the latter. He asked to be wired collect if the rights were available and for how much.

A livid Jack Warner called Van Enger into his office and told him story selection was “none of your goddamn business.” As Van Enger’s contract was nearly up, and he had been receiving overtures from First National for far more money than the $350 a week he was drawing from Warners, he could afford to be equally belligerent. He promptly quit. The deal for The Jazz Singer came together very quickly; on June 4, Warners bought the play for $50,000 and made plans to hire George Jessel, who had made it a hit on Broadway, to star in the film. (The Garden of Eden was turned into a charming, echt-Lubitsch movie by Lewis Milestone in 1928, but for United Artists.)

Jack Warner’s sour intransigence had gotten on Lubitsch’s nerves, and it is probable that the contretemps over The Jazz Singer was the last straw. By the time the picture went into production in June 1927, Lubitsch was no longer at Warner Brothers. Like his cameraman, Lubitsch too had been getting good offers; like his cameraman, he determined to take one of them.

• • •

During the latter part of June 1926, when he was supposed to be working on the script for his next film, Lubitsch was in St. Vincent’s Hospital for some minor surgery when he sent his assistant Eric Locke to collect $5,000 due him under his contract. Warners responded by saying that he was not contractually entitled to any compensation whatever when he was incapacitated and unable to work.

At the same time, Warners took Locke off the payroll, and Jack forbade his presence on the lot. If all that wasn’t enough to get Lubitsch’s attention, Jack then told him Warners was planning on using one of their staff scenarists for the next film rather than hiring an expensive free-lancer like Hans Kräly. When Lubitsch emerged from the hospital in the first week in July, he demanded that Warners rehire Locke, as they were obligated to under his contract. Furthermore, failure to rehire Kräly, he charged, would not only cause a delay in his next picture, tentatively titled Husbands for Rent, but would be considered a contractual violation.

On July 6, Lubitsch informed Jack Warner that he wanted to talk, and it was during this conversation that both men realized no reconciliation was possible. All that was left was to negotiate the terms of the divorce.

• • •

While in production with So This Is Paris, Lubitsch took time out to answer a call for help from Mary Pickford, who was betwixt and between about her production of Sparrows, which everyone agreed was running far overlength. “Thanks a thousand times for your prompt and generous co-operation in cutting Sparrows,” she wrote Lubitsch on May 29 from her hotel in Lucerne, Switzerland. “As you undoubtedly know they wanted to cut the barrel sequence which to my way of thinking would have been a serious mistake. Evidently you agreed with me as you have made other cuts. I can’t tell you how very much I appreciate your kindness.”

Pickford went on to tell Lubitsch of her and Douglas Fairbanks’ plan to meet Max Reinhardt in Venice in a few weeks. Reinhardt, she said, had expressed an interest in making his motion picture debut with them (Obviously, Pickford had never heard of Venetian Nights and Isle of the Blessed, which was lucky for Reinhardt.) Pickford told Lubitsch that she was willing to postpone Lubitsch’s commitment to her until October or November. “Douglas, you and I should do something fine together–nicht wahr?”

When she and Fairbanks returned from their European sojourn in the first week in September, Lubitsch sent a large basket of flowers to welcome them home, and Pickford responded with a dinner invitation and a thank-you note, once again thanking him profusely for his editing help.

• • •

Perhaps the wrangling with Warners over contracts and suitable actors was demoralizing to Lubitsch. Certainly, So This Is Paris is the least of his films for the studio. When it was released on July 31, 1926, even the censors couldn’t get too worked up over it. The always rabid Pennsylvania Board of Censors made only minor changes; the title “After seeing you as a sheik—I have gained back my lost confidence” was altered to “After seeing you as a sheik—well—” Another title (“Mme. Suzanne Girard was ‘simply crazy’ over those hot Arabian romances—the books our wives read when we are away”) had the last nine words cut, while two other titles (“Here’s to love and liberty” and “If your husband gets suspicious, tell him it was the iceman”) were eliminated entirely. That was all.

Most of the fun to be had from the film derives from André Beranger’s portrayal of the neurotic fop dancer Maurice, whose hilarious apache number (“Dance of the Forbidden Fruit”) derives from Nijinsky by way of Ruth St. Denis; Delsarte gestures and outstretched arms at the top of which perch absurdly wiggling hands.

For the rest, it’s another go-round with Monte Blue as a doctor married to a congenitally foolish woman both of them being afflicted by a wandering eye.

There is some dexterous farcical byplay involving Blue’s cane, which implicates him in an affair, and a hilarious, Freudian moment when he dreams that the incriminating cane is being shoved down his throat.

It’s a comedy of genial marital deceit, slightly hampered by a secondstring cast unable to suggest any emotional reserves deeper than their characters, who, as written, are virtually silhouettes. Since neither the actors nor the characters have anything at risk, there is little corresponding sense of audience involvement. At one point, the mechanics that Lubitsch resorted to in order to get a semblance of panache become transparent, as Monte Blue replicates one of Lubitsch’s own acting mannerisms, a barking laugh with the head sliding in increments off to the side and down.^I

Again, there is no particular reason for the picture to be set in Paris other than the veneer of Continental sophistication that the setting implies—censors would be noticeably more lenient if a movie was set in Paris than they would if it took place in Grand Rapids. Harold Grieve’s sets are so subtle you have to see the film several times to notice how perfectly they set off the characters and mood of the film. At the same time, Lubitsch is more than capable of undercutting the quiet authenticity. When Monte Blue runs afoul of a policeman, Lubitsch has in place an actor who seems the simulacrum of the movie cliché of a tough Irish cop.

For the climax, Lubitsch executes an elaborate ballroom sequence done with the impressionistic, multiple superimpositions that would later be virtually patented by Slavko Vorkapich. The scene reasserts Lubitsch’s mastery of large sets and multitudes of extras, and amounts to one of the silent cinema’s most audacious leaps toward the musical. But the sequence, grand though it may be, feels suspiciously like a contrived, tour-de-force set piece; indeed, it may have been Lubitsch’s sole reason to make the picture.

The reviewers noticed. “The ultra touch of the German director seems to wear pretty thin here,” said Photoplay. “So This Is Paris turns out to be the weakest of Lubitsch efforts to date . . . the cast is weaker than usual.”

• • •

With the completion of So This Is Paris, contract negotiations quickly moved from cat and mouse to hardball. Harry Warner notified Lubitsch that Warner Bros, was exercising their option for an extra Lubitsch picture (the one he had agreed to make in return for being loaned out for Forbidden Paradise), to start no later than March 1, 1927. It was a transparent negotiating ploy; Warners knew that Lubitsch was never going to make another picture for them, but the option upped the ante; if Lubitsch was going elsewhere, somebody was damn well going to have to compensate Warners for the loss of that final picture.

Negotiations between Harry Warner (for Warner Bros.), Nicholas Schenck (for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), and B. P. Schulberg (for Paramount) stretched on until very late at night on August 18, 1926. Finally, the deal was arranged. MGM and Paramount would pay Warners $150,000 for Lubitsch’s contract. In addition, Lubitsch would return $30,000 that Warners had already advanced him for his next, unmade picture. Lubitsch would also give up all his percentages in the pictures he had made for Warners. For each picture he would make under the new contract, Lubitsch would receive $125,000, more than doubling his take from Warners.

In 1923, Harry and Jack Warner had needed Ernst to give their shoestring operation some credibility. But, by the end of 1926, the premiere of John Barrymore’s Don Juan, accompanied by a Vitaphone sound track, had driven the price of Warners stock from $8 a share to $65. Lubitsch had served his purpose and gotten them the critical attention Harry wanted, albeit without the profits Jack lusted after.

On August 18, Warners issued a statement saying that “the reason for disposing of the Lubitsch unit is solely due to the fact of the success that the Vitaphone attained at the opening 10 days ago in New York City of the production Don Juan. Warner Bros, in the future will concentrate their efforts exclusively on motion picture productions which will lend themselves to the synchronization method of the Vitaphone.”

Ernst asked Henry Blanke if he wanted to accompany him to Paramount, but Harry Warner had already made it clear that Blanke was welcome to stay at Warners. Blanke explained to his friend and mentor that if he continued to tag along after Lubitsch he would never be able to mount a career of his own. Lubitsch agreed; Blanke would work for Lubitsch only once more, early in 1928 on The Patriot, but the two men remained close for as long as Lubitsch lived.

Now that they were out from a situation they regarded as a painful burden, Harry Warner wrote a letter to his brother Abe in New York about the buyout of Lubitsch’s contract. “It is a lucky star that this is off our hands,” he wrote, “because I think it is the worst lemon we have on our hands, so thank the Lord this is over.”^II

In three short years, Lubitsch had attained a level of critical prestige shared only by the premiere directors in Hollywood. “Speaking of great directors . . .” wrote Herbert Howe in Photoplay magazine in June 1926, “King Vidor stands unchallenged in the lists today, save possibly by Lubitsch.” Iris Barry, writing in the London Spectator, named Lubitsch one of seven “producers of genius” (the others were Lang, Grune, Wiene, Chaplin, Griffith, and Seastrom).

With Lubitsch’s suggestive, inferential style at its height, other directors struggled to attain the same level of subtlety; some succeeded. When Clarence Brown made Smouldering Fires, a beautifully directed, psychologically penetrating drama about a marriage between a young man and an older woman that is considerably better than Ernst’s similar Three Women, producer John Considine, who arrived at the theater after the credits had rolled, simply assumed that Lubitsch had made it. When Considine stayed through to the beginning of the next show and saw who the director actually was, Brown was promptly signed to a contract that jumped his pay from $12,500 a picture to $3,000 a week.

For his part, Ernst had become fully acclimated to America, and the specific demands of its audiences. Yet he refused to play reciprocal pattycake. “The people of Europe are more serious fundamentally than those in America,” Lubitsch told The New York Times in September 1927. “Americans go to a theatre solely to be entertained; the European, subconsciously perhaps, expects a little lesson with his entertainment . . . A story must be complete and logical to achieve success in Europe, while here the story can be perfectly illogical so long as it amuses.”

Lubitsch was describing a double-edged blade of differing sensibilities, but one that particularly suited his effervescent, albeit rigorously logical temperament. He was not the only one. “In America,” Emil Jannings was explaining to a reporter, “I have found the art of the motion picture at its best. Producers go to any limit to make fine pictures. Salaries are better here for both extras and stars. Living conditions are better. People really live in the United States. In Europe . . . the men who make pictures . . . are either artistic and unbusinesslike or they are too businesslike and forsake the artistic side. Here, these two characteristics are combined to advantage.

“I have learned American ways. I have learned filming schedules must be lived up to. I have learned that authors, directors and American actors are artists.”

• • •

Not all of the new arrivals in Hollywood were in search of fame and fortune. Some just wanted to get away from their parents. Walter Laemmle, a nephew of Carl Laemmle, abandoned his father’s Munich antiques business and arrived in America in January 1924 at the ripe age of twenty-one, eager to see America and the world of movies.

“I wanted to get away from home, see a little bit of the world,” he remembered. “In Germany at that time, it was so controlled. Now, if a child wants to move out and get an apartment, he just does it. But then, a son could not move out of his father’s house. It was very rigid.”

Laemmle’s first impression of America was immutably formed when he was driven down Broadway and saw the huge display set up for DeMille’s The Ten Commandments at the Cohan Theater. The displays were entire stories high, with neon lighting that made midnight as bright as three in the afternoon. There was nothing like this in Munich.

Laemmle arrived in Hollywood and was given a job as a second assistant director at Uncle Carl’s Universal, often working with Edward Sloman. Since Walter’s brother Ernst had already embarked on an indifferent career as a director of Westerns, they lived together in Hollywood. Walter’s salary of $25 a week wasn’t enough to afford a car, so he learned to stand on the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga every morning and hitch a ride over the hills to Universal in the San Fernando Valley. “Anybody would pick you up,” he explained, “there were no holdups, no murders, no robberies.”

Carl Laemmle ran Universal as if it was a warm, benign, slightly eccentric extended family. His nickname of “Uncle Carl” was as much metaphor as it was literal description. There was a billboard by the studio entrance, and every Monday Uncle Carl would have a new inspirational bromide put up for display: “Be Kind to Others–[signed,] Carl Laemmle.”

Uncle Carl was widely known as the softest touch in the business, as was proved by his habit of employing a wide selection of relatives, spawning the line “Uncle Carl Laemmle has a very large faemmle.” Within that circle, though, he expected—and usually got—respect. Once, when Ernst Laemmle got into an argument with his uncle and wrote him an insolent letter, Carl responded with a curt telegram: “You may wire your resignation collect.” But Ernst Laemmle never did, and Uncle Carl never insisted.

At Universal, Walter Laemmle quickly fell in with Paul Kohner, an aspiring producer, who introduced him to Lubitsch. “We spent fifty-two Sundays a year at Lubitsch’s, including Christmas and New Year’s. We usually came in the afternoon. Kohner, my brother, myself, maybe [Henry] Blanke, would have lunch together, then go to Lubitsch’s about three or four o’clock in the afternoon until after dark. It was automatic.”

Although the guest list at these gatherings ranged from major stars and directors to bit actors and assistant directors, Lubitsch was utterly unconcerned with the caste system that was even then forming in Hollywood. “The atmosphere was very easygoing,” recalled Walter Laemmle. “Lubitsch and his wife never pretended to be something they were not. You could talk to him anytime about anything. You were not in awe of him. Not once can I say that I had the feeling that he was pulling rank, and we were all younger than he was. They were very good friends to us and that’s all that counted.”

Soon, the group of émigrés seized on a name for themselves: “The Foreign Legion.” It was an ironic admission of their isolation, with a touch of satirical masochism about their supposedly horrid surroundings, which they all knew were idyllic. The feeling of manning a lonely outpost in hostile territory was confirmed by even so doughty a presence as Fritz Lang; when he visited Hollywood for the first time in November 1924, he said that seeing Lubitsch again “was like greeting a brother.” Although Lang was never the most social of men, he was glad to spend his Sundays while he was in town at Lubitsch’s house.

If Lubitsch and the rest of the Foreign Legion were crazy about America, then America was returning the favor. In Hollywood, a group of young directors were overtly copying the Lubitsch manner. Among the Lubitsch acolytes were Monta Bell, Harry d’Arrast, Mai St. Clair, and the ill-fated Paul Bern, who graduated from cowriting The Marriage Circle to directing a pleasant Adolphe Menjou/Raymond Griffith comedy called Open All Night. Stills of Lubitsch visiting Bern’s set show the actors and Bern gazing at the German director with open admiration. The talent was beginning to give birth to the legend, and the legend was defined by the fragrant but imprecise phrase “The Lubitsch Touch.”

In time, the phrase became a convenient but misleading hook, as if that said all there was to say, a highly insufficient means of approaching the vast differences in style and meaning between the Lubitsch films of the mid-1920s and Lubitsch films of the early 1940s. As Andrew Sarris observed, “To speak of Lubitsch in terms of his ‘touch’ is to reduce feelings to flourishes.”

Lubitsch himself tried to slip away from the phrase. “If there is such a thing, I do not know what it is,” he would say. “It exists only in people’s minds. If I were conscious of it, I would be afraid I might lose it.”

To a large extent, the fabled touch was a byproduct of Ernst’s method of production as much as it was his particular sensibility. Lubitsch would freely admit that the picture was worked out in his mind to such an extent that, once the script was done, “I’ve finished the picture. All I have to do is photograph it . . . As you write the script, you cut the film, you build the sets, you light your players, you design their wardrobe, you set the tempo, you delineate the characters . . . For me, it is virtually all done in the script.”

By the time a script was finished, Ernst almost never referred to it, having long since committed it to memory. Shooting a film rarely took more than eight weeks. “When you shoot scene number 150 today and scene number 149 two weeks from now, you must know exactly what emotion each player is to register.”

It was a method that would be carried on by Hitchcock, whose precise mise-en-scène would also be forced to labor under a misleading, shallow sobriquet, “The Master of Suspense.” Unlike Hitchcock, however, for whom actual production was a drab necessity after the creative work of the writing and storyboarding, Lubitsch exuded vitality on the set. Harry Carr, a journalist and screenwriter, compared Ernst on the set to “a bullterrier trying to break loose to run after a tomcat.”

Between shots, while the lights were being rearranged, Ernst would pace back and forth, anxious, nervous. Sometimes he’d let off steam by going over to a piano and banging out some jazz. During close-ups, he would sit in his director’s chair with his face expressing the same emotions as the actors. “In his intensity,” wrote Carr, “he leans forward from his chair, often with his hands gripped on the arms. The more intense the scene, the more pronounced his ‘lean.’ ”

And, always, there was the perfectionism that only his humor and joie de vivre kept from becoming onerous. During the making of The Marriage Circle, Lubitsch made Florence Vidor unlock a bureau sixteen times before he was satisfied, and he shot more than thirty takes of a kiss between Vidor and Creighton Hale. In the cutting room, he worked quickly. “You would imagine that he was mad at the film,” wrote Herbert Howe. “He tears at it until you can almost hear him growl.”

What he was after was action that spoke, that communicated the meaning of the dramatic or comic moment to the viewer in a way that rendered titles superfluous.

Lubitsch once fabricated a metaphor for the effect he tried to create. There was, it seems, a girl on the ground and a cat on a roof. The girl, Lubitsch said, should merely hold out her hand and coo “I’ve got some catnip,” rather than yelling and screaming for the cat to come down. “The former,” explained Lubitsch, “would catch the attention . . . whereas the latter would drive him away.” Always, Lubitsch meant to entice, tantalize.

To break it down into its component parts, the Lubitsch touch involved sex as frivolous pastime, with the female often being the aggressor. Josef von Sternberg would acidly characterize the Lubitsch style’s “often amusing contrivance . . . No matter what happened, one would always have a twinkle in the eye . . . if the wife was caught in bed with a neighbor, his hat would be brushed off, and when escorted to the door, he would be asked to call again.”

Added to these behavioral reversals was metaphor and symbolism; objects would be detailed and used as counterpoints to the emotional developments of the characters that used them: Monte Blue’s cane in So This Is Paris, the shuffling of place cards in One Hour With You, the hat in Ninotchka, closed doors in any number of films. Mainly, the Lubitsch touch had to be sensed, not just seen. It was a whiff of perfume, a teasing glance of interest from a woman who is supposed to be happily married.

All this couldn’t help but appeal to a generation of critics and audiences who came of age after World War I, and were eager to bury the embalmed public pieties of Edwardian artists who, by and large, still controlled the artistic vocabulary of the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Lubitsch’s films were like his characters: erotic but well-mannered, enticing but never rude.

Yet, Ernst was also careful to hedge his bets ever so slightly; the films usually take place in conveniently Continental environments, so an American audience would not be threatened and could, if they wished, ascribe the character’s actions to very different European mores. Not only that, but he usually structured his scripts of this period to include two couples; one woman is willing to initiate sex while the other might seriously think about it but ultimately decides to settle for the security of monogamy.

In spite of this careful construction, not everybody was buying. In 1927, F. W. Murnau, once a cohort of Lubitsch’s during the Reinhardt days, now a director whose legend was approaching Lubitsch’s, said that Lubitsch had only been playing, “flirting with his great gifts.”

Far more concerted and damaging was the attack launched by Jim Tully, the hobo novelist who wrote Beggars of Life. Tully had a brief vogue during which he pretended to despise the Hollywood that bought his books, gave him lucrative magazine assignments and even acting jobs. In December 1926, he published a scathing article about Lubitsch in Vanity Fair. To begin with, he said that Mary Pickford certainly didn’t need a director like Lubitsch, and that “one of her most successful directors is possessed of a mentality little above a child’s” (an obvious slam at the playful Marshall Neilan).

“Lubitsch [seems] content to become a director of frothy films for sophisticated chambermaids and cinema critics,” Tully wrote. He reported a conversation he had with Lubitsch in which he had inquired why the director was satisfied to direct comedy when he could have made another Passion.

“Molière was content to do comedy,” replied Lubitsch. “Chaplin is a genius—he does comedy.”

“Chaplin is merely a clever mimic,” replied Tully, “hardly to be compared with Molière.”

Lubitsch pointed to A Woman of Paris, which Tully slammed as a very ordinary story. “But the treatment, the treatment,” Lubitsch said. Tully continued his attack. “Leaving Chaplin out of it . . . you remind me of a man who is capable of writing a great novel and is content to idle away his time with clever short stories.”

Lubitsch finally responded by crying “Oh, let me alone!”

“Instead of being a great artist,” Tully wrote, “he is merely a merchant like his father. But with this difference . . . his father did not deal in second-hand goods.”

Tully’s attack crudely predated the Marxist film criticism of the 1930s, in which the most important issue was social correctness, weighty themes supposedly being synonomous with weighty aesthetic success. By these standards, Maxwell Anderson was the greatest of all American playwrights, Sergei Eisenstein the greatest of all directors, and King Vidor’s greatest achievement was Our Daily Bread.

In an article written for American Cinematographer in November 1929, Lubitsch defended himself from these theories when he defined his conception of art as “great yet not obviously great. For when art begins to be apparent, to show itself as a definite, studied effort to be artistic, it ceases to be art, for true art needs no label . . . That is the key to my objection to [Carl] Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc. That picture had brilliant moments, but it was so studied, so obviously calculated to make people gasp and to say, ‘See, that is art,’ that it overreached itself.”

• • •

The question of who got first crack at Lubitsch under the MGM-Paramount deal seems to have been determined by who could come up with a suitable property first. As usual, MGM’s Irving Thalberg had the edge.

In the wake of the success of Erich von Stroheim’s 1925 film The Merry Widow (a clear profit of $758,000), Thalberg had offered von Stroheim another operetta, Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince. But Von Stroheim had felt constrained working under Thalberg’s close supervision and instead signed a deal with independent producer Pat Powers to make The Wedding March, from an original Von Stroheim story similar to the Romberg property.

Thalberg’s second choice was Lubitsch, who called in Hans Kräly to work out a script. Although the picture might have worked equally well for MGM’s reigning star John Gilbert, Ramon Novarro was just coming off a considerable success in Ben-Hur, and the Romberg operetta seemed appropriate for his more boyish, less sexual charm. Opposite Novarro, Thalberg cast his own girlfriend, Norma Shearer.

Lubitsch enlisted the services of Ali Hubert to design the costumes. With an eye for authentic detail worthy of von Stroheim, Lubitsch cabled Hubert his specific requirements: “Buy priests’ caps, ribbons and caps in many colors. You need these for 250 students who would be in school in Heidelberg. Need 20 uniforms of officers of various levels, others who are armored soldiers. Parade uniforms, helmets with feathers, six artillery soldiers and one officer. Parade uniforms for military band, six ministers of state, chamberlains, six lackeys, six footmen, three officers of a small town, a sergeant, a customs inspector, three policemen of Heidelberg, 300 hats in the old high hat style, 100 hats of students of various classes, sabres or swords of the students, equipment for duels of the students, 400 beer mugs and accessories for the students’ rooms. Advertisement signs, restaurant signs, albums of pictures of Heidelberg.”

Then, almost as an afterthought, Lubitsch added, “Tell me what it will cost before you buy.” Hubert arrived in Hollywood with thirty-two trunks of clothes and accessories.

Studio production work began in December 1926. With Henry Blanke staying behind at Warners, Ernst had need of a new assistant. As combination assistant/film editor he hired Andrew Marton, a friend of Lubitsch’s confidant Charles Puffy. Marton would go on to a long and successful career, mostly as a second-unit director.

Norma Shearer, a nervous actress at the best of times, grew increasingly uneasy at Ernst’s habit of acting out a scene as a matrix for the actor’s performance. At times, Lubitsch would feign anger while directing, then, walking back to his chair, he would wink at Andrew Marton. After a week of production, Shearer threw a tantrum and sent out a call for help to Thalberg, her soon-to-be fiancé. Thalberg listened to Lubitsch, then Shearer, then calmly told his girlfriend that “everyone has a lot to learn from Mr. Lubitsch.”

For location shots of Heidelberg that Lubitsch initially planned to use, he decided to make it a working vacation, with the emphasis on the latter. He packed Leni and the boys up, grabbed a cameraman to shoot some exteriors, and sailed to Germany. To wish them bon voyage, a group of friends gathered and presented them with an autograph album. Sidney Franklin wished them a splendid trip, while “Conrad” (Veidt? Nagel?) suggested that they “bring your butler a black tie!” Others, like Pola Negri, Maurice Tourneur, Lew Cody, Carey Wilson, Ramon Novarro, Eleanor Glyn, and Paul Bern contented themselves with signatures.

In Berlin, Ernst’s return was greeted with much press fanfare and even an honorary retrospective screening of Madame DuBarry on May 25 at the UFA-Palast, with Ernst in attendance. In his room on the second floor of the Adlon Hotel, Lubitsch entertained a small army of newspapermen, photographers, and newsreel cameramen. “It’s almost as crazy here as it is in America,” he commented. “I would never have believed that you could almost outdo the American press here.”

Ernst was overjoyed at returning to his native soil, and seeing so many old friends, but he also admitted to a feeling of displacement. “I’m almost out of place here in this hotel,” he told one reporter. “I’m like a stranger, and yet my entire existence is rooted in this city. All I need now is for the porter to tell me which tourist attractions I should visit.”

To questions regarding the evolution of the German film industry, Lubitsch begged off, saying that he simply wasn’t sufficiently familiar with recent German movies, with the exception of Murnau’s The Last Laugh and Dupont’s Variety, which he singled out for praise.

Just before he left for Heidelberg, Lubitsch took a sentimental journey to the house at 82 Lothringer Strasse where he had been born, and the house at 183 Schönhäuser Allee. “I want to see if the iron fence that I played in front of is still there,” he said nostalgically. Then it was off to Heidelberg.

Walter Laemmle had returned to Munich from Hollywood, and was surprised to get a call from Lubitsch inviting him to come to Heidelberg as Lubitsch’s guest. Laemmle and his sister spent a week in Heidelberg, eating lunch and dinner with Lubitsch every day, all on MGM’s tab.

Lubitsch found that the trip to Europe was pleasant, but slightly disorienting. It seemed to him now that he was of America far more than of Germany, a mysterious but immutable alteration that had taken place in less than five years. He felt perceptibly out of place in his own native land, a feeling intensified on his next and final return to Europe in 1932, when he attended a party in Paris. He was talking in German with the host, when an American woman came up and asked “Who’s the funny little Dutchman?” Lubitsch spoke German the rest of the night, so as not to embarrass her.

On July 15, the group began their voyage back to America on the SS Hamburg. It had been a pleasurable but pointless trip; Andrew Marton remembered that none of the material shot in Heidelberg was used in the final print and that the only locations that were used were a few scenes shot in Laurel Canyon. The film opened in New York on September 21.

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (surviving prints usually carry the simplified main title In Old Heidelberg) makes full use of Lubitschean irony from the very beginning, as the principality of Karlsburg prepares to welcome back its crown prince with much imperial hullaballoo. Thousands gather to pay tribute, the railroad car majestically slows down with much attendant steam, the car doors open, uniformed flunkeys step out and stand on either side of the door. There is a beat, another beat, and out troops the child prince in a sailor suit, his mouth stuporously agape.

This is Karl Heinrich, a totally isolated anchorite who wants only to be normal, to roughhouse with the other boys. Instead, he has to settle for aged factotums who gingerly toss a beach ball back and forth so as not to aggravate their arthritis.

Even after he grows up and is magically transformed from Phillipe de Lacey to Ramon Novarro, he is a passive onlooker in a palace drowning in manners and stultifying formality. Squeaking through his college boards, he is sent with his beloved tutor, Dr. Jüttner, to Heidelberg. “Do you know what it means to go to Heidelberg?” inquires the doctor. He leans over and whispers into Karl Heinrich’s ear. The prince’s quizzical look changes to awe, then delight, then glee.

The rest of the script is familiar; Karl Heinrich’s arrival in Heidelberg; his romance with Kathi, the beautiful barmaid; his acceptance by the other students, and the attendant flowering in the wonderful world of convivial, vibrant youth; his return to Karlsburg to fulfill his royal destiny, leaving Kathi—and happiness—irrevocably behind.

Out of this Lubitsch spins a convincing, moving, distinguished picture. He skillfully photographs Norma Shearer’s oddly aquiline, pinched features, and she gives a relaxed, animated, and charming performance, particularly when she unself-consciously demonstrates the softness of the mattress in the prince’s room.

Lubitsch allows the romanticism to come through untrammeled by cynicism, using his visual epigrams to make character rather than narrative points, as in a beautiful dissolve from the cold, austere tomb of the old king to the country cemetery and the flower-bedecked grave of Dr. Jüttner.

The film’s centerpiece is the first love scene. Karl is pursuing Kathi through the beer garden. She is trying to escape, but not too hard, and Lubitsch moves with them in a lengthy lateral tracking shot. Finally, behind a tree, Karl catches her, but the camera continues on ahead to observe an empty space animated, after a few seconds, by a barking dachshund. In a few moments, Kathi bursts into the frame, closely followed by Karl Heinrich, wanting more.

They move to a hillside covered with flowers under twinkling stars. As they lay upon the grass and gaze into each other’s eyes, the wind starts up, and the hill comes alive as the flowers pulsate in the breeze. They kiss, the wind dies down, and she runs off. As he lays back on the hill, deeply satisfied, a shooting star creases the night sky.

It’s a heady, undeniably effective, metaphorically erotic sequence that is a clear precursor to the much-maligned scene of Rosie’s deflowering in David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970). Rumor has always had it that Thalberg was unsatisfied with Lubitsch’s version of the scene and had it reshot by John M. Stahl, but Andrew Marton asserted that Stahl had nothing to do with the film and that it’s entirely Lubitsch’s. As it happened, Lubitsch was also unsatisfied with the first version of the love scene and reshot it himself.

“The set was already struck,” remembered Andrew Marton, “so the meadow had to be rebuilt, and we ended up with a completely different set.” Despite the scene’s luscious romanticism, Marton remembered that “It was a scene that Lubitsch still hated after he re-did it. There were other problems with the meadow scene besides the set—the chemistry was not the way Lubitsch imagined it. He never thought that Ramon Novarro or Norma Shearer was the right casting for the film, but the studio insisted and he was stuck with them. Lubitsch did marvelously with them, actually, but not to his exacting standards.”

At the film’s end, with the twin burdens of an arranged marriage and kingship on the horizon, Karl Heinrich returns to Heidelberg to revisit the rapture that might keep him warm in the long, empty years ahead. But the reality is not his Gemütlichkeit fantasy, of exuberant old friends welcoming him home, of Kathi’s arms opened wide.

Now the beer garden is bedraggled, scraggly, and abandoned. His old drinking companions are as stiffly inhibited as the acolytes at the castle, and the hillside where he and Kathi first made love is covered only with grass and a dormant tree. And Kathi? Kathi tells him that “You’ll marry and I’ll marry—and we’ll both be very happy.” As they embrace for the final time, they both know her words to be wishful thinking.

Back home in Karlsburg, it is Karl Heinrich’s wedding day. He rides in the ceremonial coach with his new bride, whom we never see. An old couple looking on agrees that “It must be wonderful to be a king.” Lubitsch, as he fades out on Karl Heinrich’s empty, contemplative face, thinks otherwise.

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg is one of Lubitsch’s most purely romantic films; perhaps because of the nudgings of Thalberg, perhaps because of an emotional response to the story, Lubitsch doesn’t bend the material to his wishes, but, rather, gives himself to it wholeheartedly. As a result, John Mescall’s camera, while capturing a particularly glistening light, is also slightly more anonymous than usual, less attuned to the individual visual bon mot. As a corollary to the Romberg melodies with which pit orchestras accompanied the film, Lubitsch orchestrates a mellifluously moving camera to accompany lovers embracing on a hillside under cascading stars.

When the film was released in September 1927, Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times said that “In this new offering, Mr. Lubitsch lives up to all that has been written about him. He may be a stylist, but he . . . does not choose to repeat on any of his past bright camera ideas,” while Welford Beaton in The Film Spectator wrote that the film was “A monument to the versatility of Ernst Lubitsch. Old Heidelberg reveals a Lubitsch who is deeply human. I have chuckled with the other Lubitsch, but with this new one I felt something at my throat that gave him a place in my heart that he never had before.”

The film opened in London in February 1928 at the Tivoli Strand, where the program announced with palpable surprise that “Lubitsch has adhered faithfully to the original story of the play, and made no attempt to graft on to it an artificial and inappropriate happy ending.”

Despite the good reviews, the high cost ($1.2 million) of The Student Prince mitigated against financial success. The film lost $307,000.

•  •  •

While Lubitsch had been seduced by the sensual physical environment of Southern California and the technical expertise of the Hollywood studios, he quickly developed an attitude implying that, while he worked in Hollywood, he was not of Hollywood.

Lubitsch realized that America was not for all tastes. When he saw The Crowd, King Vidor’s masterpiece of impotence and alienation, he told a German friend that “Americans will not understand this film. Europeans will not understand this film. Only Europeans who have lived in America will understand this film.”

The essential problem of Hollywood was the little things, and the symbolic relationship they had to much bigger things. A successful writer in New York might satisfy himself with suits bought off the rack at Saks. But in the social circles of Hollywood, that writer would admire the way someone was dressed and ask who their tailor was. They’d tell him, and the difference would usually be about fifty dollars a suit. To accompany the more expensive suit, they would need new shirts, maybe ten-dollar shirts instead of five-dollar shirts. But what difference did it make? They were making $1,000 a week and paying virtually no taxes.

Then came the rest: cashmere socks, a half-dozen pairs, then the house with the pool, purchased instead of merely rented. Before they knew it they were all living fully up to their income, if not beyond, and looking slightly overdressed in the bargain.

Lubitsch was not immune to these dangers, but he was conscious of the irony. At one point, he even bought a couple of horses and enjoyed riding through the Hollywood foothills before breakfast, often accompanied by John Loder, the newly arrived English actor. “In spite of his short legs [he rode a gray with a back as broad as a big drum] he got along famously,” remembered Loder, “and would gallop fearlessly over the roughest country.”

But, once they were off the back lot, Lubitsch and his confreres quickly realized that Los Angeles was, and would remain for years, an intellectual Gobi Desert, at least compared to New York, London, or Berlin. It would take talkies and the importation of writers like Hammett, Hellman, and Faulkner, and actors like Edward G. Robinson and Charles Boyer, before Hollywood responded with small gathering places like the bookstores of Louis Epstein and Stanley Rose on Hollywood Boulevard.

There was certainly no equivalent of the cafe set that was such a permanent part of life in European capitals. For a convivial personality like Lubitsch’s, the loss was considerable. So, he formed his own. All over Hollywood, émigrés were doing the same thing. The Scandinavian colony—Victor Seastrom, Karl Dane, Lars Hanson, Nils Asther, Greta Garbo, Mauritz Stiller, Sven Gade, and Benjamin Christiansen—tended to congregate at Seastrom’s house at 425 Palisade Avenue in Santa Monica. And the German colony, the Foreign Legion, was headquartered at Lubitsch’s, 616 Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills.

With the Foreign Legion, the preferred language was that of their native country, which could occasionally cause amusement. When Conrad Veidt arrived in Hollywood to make The Beloved Rogue, Lubitsch took him to a boxing match. The fighters were lackadaisical and the crowd got restless. “Fight, fight!” they began screaming, which caused a flattered Veidt to stand up and make a gracious bow to his adoring fans. “See, you’re famous here already,” cracked Lubitsch.

Likewise, the preferred cuisine at Ernst’s house would always remain German. Steak tartare was a favorite, but Ernst also loved classic German dishes like sausages, sauerbraten, potato dumplings, Wiener schnitzel, cabbage, Hungarian goulash, and kidney stew. Although the American custom for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas has always been turkey, Lubitsch would substitute goose.

Some of the customs he observed were purely American. Lubitsch was particularly fond of fireworks and every July 4 had a large display in front of his house, much of which he would light himself. One year, a palm tree in front of the house caught fire, and the fire department had to be called. Ernst ran into the house for his wallet to give the firemen some money.

Ernst always made time for his stepsons, Edmund and Heinz, assiduously attending the PTA meetings at their school. When the circus was in town, he would invariably take them; if he and Leni were going away to Catalina Island or Santa Barbara for any length of time, the boys would accompany them. Once, when the two boys were at a camp on Catalina, Ernst and Leni chartered a 110-foot-long converted minesweeper and made a surprise visit. The splendor of their parents’ transportation greatly increased the boys’ status among their peers.

Sunday mornings were a special time, for Ernst would rise early, collect the newspaper from the front door, and come into the boys’ bedroom to read them the comics, taking a lot of time over their favorite, The Katzenjammer Kids.

Eddie took the comic strip very much to heart. Once, he planted a stink bomb under a massage table that went off just as Ernst was getting his rubdown. A furious Lubitsch careened all over the house looking for the culprit. Eddie, frightened by his stepfather’s rare display of anger, climbed out of his bedroom window and onto the roof of the house. When Lubitsch saw the boy clinging to the roof, his anger immediately dissipated. “Come on back, Eddie,” he pleaded. “You won’t be scolded; you won’t be harmed.” The boy came down and Lubitsch was true to his word.

In fact, Lubitsch never laid any but an affectionate hand on either of the boys. One of the few things with which he was impatient were breaches of decorum, as when Eddie, invited to accompany his parents to a party at Adolphe Menjou’s house, threw up all over the dinner table. Lubitsch was greatly embarrassed and perturbed, but Menjou, as nonchalant and gracious offscreen as on, calmed Ernst down and comforted the mortified child.

Sunday afternoons were for brunch and swimming parties, all of it fine with the boys, except for the fact that Paul Kohner and the actress Mary Philbin, who were very much in love at the time, would sit in Eddie’s swing holding hands for hours at a time. This meant the swing was off-limits to the children, which tickled Ernst no end.

He took his sons on the set of Douglas Fairbanks’ Don Q, Son of Zorro, and Fairbanks put on a demonstration for the boys by taking his bullwhip and lashing out at Eddie. So expert was Fairbanks with the whip that there was no discomfort whatever as the whip wrapped around him; he could barely feel it. Once, Ernst invited Eddie and his friends to the Paramount lot where he arranged a screening of The White Hell of Pitz Palu; another time he took them to the Warner Bros, lot where radio station KFWB was broadcasting and the announcer put the boys on the air live.

Ernst was particularly concerned about the boys because they rode their bikes to the public schools they attended: El Rodeo grammar school followed by Beverly Hills High, with a year at Culver Military Academy in between. “My mother liked the uniforms,” remembered Edmund Lewis glumly. “I guess it was the German in her.”

Ernst gave them strict, fatherly instructions not to get into any strangers’ cars. His own disinterest in religion was reflected in a distinct lack of household ecumenical spirit; once in a while Leni would take the boys to the local Presbyterian church on Santa Monica Boulevard.

When he was in production on a film, the usually jovial Lubitsch might become quiet and far more reserved at home than he normally was. One of the few times his stepson ever saw him upset was at the Brown Derby. Lubitsch had ordered one of his favorite dishes, steak with bearnaise sauce, but the steak arrived sans sauce. Lubitsch berated the waiter by yelling, “Where is my sauce bearnaise, I have no sauce bearnaise.” (He seems to have been particularly sensitive in culinary matters; another event that aroused his ire occurred at home when he decided to have some leftovers for dinner, then went into the kitchen to find the help eating filet mignon.)

Although he was, as Edmund Lewis remembered, “a wonderful father,” he preferred it if the intimacy went in only one direction. His stepsons never knew, for instance, that Ernst had a brother of his own because he never spoke of his family.

“He was crazy about those boys,” concluded Joan Marsh Morrill, the daughter of cameraman Charles Rosher and a frequent playmate of the Lubitsch children in those years. “As far as he was concerned, they were his boys, even though he hadn’t sired them. Ernst gave great love.”

•  •  •

In the homey living room of the expansive Bel Air house with an orchard in the back yard, where she has lived since 1936, Lupita Tovar Kohner, the widow of Paul Kohner, remembered Sunday afternoons at 616 Beverly Drive with a girlish excitement. “I met my husband at the end of 1928, and at the beginning of 1929, he took me on a Sunday afternoon to the house on Beverly Drive for a swim and coffee. I remember how excited I was when Garbo came in. She was very animated, talking. Then, suddenly, she would be gone. She came alone, always. Joe May would usually be there, Oscar Straus. There was very little shoptalk. They talked about everything. I remember they talked a lot about music; they all went to the Hollywood Bowl.”

Lupita Kohner remembered Lubitsch’s dancing eyes; the naive young girl from Mexico City found herself in awe of Lubitsch. Throughout the next eighteen years of their friendship, she could never bring herself to call him “Ernst,” as the others did. To her, he was always “Mr. Lubitsch.”

“He was a teaser,” she remembered. “He would go up to somebody and say, ‘Everything all right between you and your wife?’

“ ‘Of course. Why?’

“ ‘Oh, just asked. Just wondering.’ He’d make them a little worried, you know?”

Many of Lubitsch’s friends felt that Lubitsch developed both professionally and personally in America in a way he never would have in Europe. “He was an artist,” said his niece, Evie Bettelheim-Bentley, “and in Hollywood he could do what he wanted and make a lot of money besides. Not that money was the important thing to him; he was never poor, so if you’re never poor, money doesn’t have that fascination. But I think everything was too small in Europe for him. In Hollywood, he had so much more of a free hand to do what he wanted to do. He could never have gone back to Europe.”

“Partly,” said Gottfried Reinhardt, “[his happiness] was because of his collaborators. The atmosphere of creative Hollywood was infinitely more sophisticated than the atmosphere of films in Germany. Films in Germany were déclassé. Today, people unearth the old pictures of Lang and Pabst and Dupont, but in those days it was like pop literature. The actors were basically doing it for the money.”

Lubitsch became increasingly social. To celebrate the New Year, Ernst and Leni would begin on New Year’s Eve with a buffet for about fifty guests. On New Year’s Day, it was open house, with friends dropping in for a drink, lunch, or dinner as they preferred. Regular social gatherings were eclectic; at some parties, there were far more Hungarians (including Vilma Banky, Charles Puffy, Lya de Putti, and Victor Varconi) than there were Germans.

And he grew adept at the game-playing aspects of life in the movie colony. When he and Leni would go to a party and be early or on time, Lubitsch would instruct his chauffeur to drive around for ten minutes so they would arrive late . . . but not too late.

•  •  •

Most of Lubitsch’s friends liked Leni. “Lubitsch’s wife was a charming young woman,” remembered the actress Camilla Horn. “Ernst was very generous with her and was happy when she flirted like hell with other men. She understood how to do that.” Like most men, Andrew Marton noticed her sensuality. “Leni . . . was a very, very pretty woman, and very sexy. As a matter of fact, when I was just getting to know them I felt vibrations, and I felt her looks.”

Charles Rosher’s daughter Joan was invited to the house nearly every weekend she was in town. “Leni was a very nice, lovely woman who really loved her children,” she remembered. On Sundays, the chauffeur would drop Joan off at the Lubitsch house around noon, where she and the boys would have lunch. After that, the children would play in and around the pool; sometimes they’d play catch on the front lawn. In the afternoon, the adult guests would arrive, but Leni always made sure to send out to a bakery farther down Beverly Drive for some apricot tarts that were the children’s favorite.

But others weren’t as easily enthralled by Leni. Henry Blanke couldn’t stand her, and told friends that she once tried to back him into a closet for a necking session. There were rumors that she was a kleptomaniac. “Once,” remembered Lupita Tovar Kohner, “I went swimming at Beverly Drive. I had five dollars in my purse. When I was in the pool, I saw her going into the cabana and coming out. I wondered why.

“Anyway, we were staying for dinner. I went to get dressed, and when I got my lipstick out of my purse my five dollars was gone. And I knew I had had it. It bothered me. When Paul took me home and I told him what had happened, he said that I had imagined having had it. I said ‘Five dollars is a big amount of money; I didn’t imagine it.’

“Little things would happen at dinner parties where Leni was. Things disappeared. People would talk, but they couldn’t say she had done it. She didn’t need the things. She just liked to take.”

Leni could be extremely temperamental, even in front of reporters, although Lubitsch never seemed to mind. His nickname for her was “Baby.” “In a wave of perfume, a blonde and lovely woman entered,” wrote Eleanor Green in the January 1926 Motion Picture. “[She] spoke coldly and indifferently to Mr. Lubitsch and went into another room . . . all of a sudden the atmosphere changed. Mr. Lubitsch became sparkling, he became gay, he radiated animation . . . Mr. Lubitsch greeted her not as a wife, but as a prima donna, a queen, a movie star. And she in turn acted like a prima donna, a queen and a movie star.”

Leni liked Hollywood, liked being the wife of Ernst Lubitsch and receiving wires from the likes of Norma Shearer (“Very best wishes to you both. Bon Voyage”) and anniversary congratulations from Fairbanks and Pickford (“May you celebrate a hundred more”), or having the Los Angeles papers print the guest list for the Lubitsch Sunday afternoons. (One Sunday the invitees included the Fred Niblos, the Clarence Browns, the Sidney Franklins, the Conrad Nagels, the Rob Wagners, the Charles Rays, the Edwin Schallerts, Florence Lawrence and her daughter, John Considine, Marjorie Bennett, Carmel Myers, John Barrymore, Josef von Sternberg, Paul Bern, Hans Kräly, Pola Negri, Prince Troubetskoy, the Charles Puffys, the Joseph Schencks, Walter Laemmle, Mary Philbin, Paul Kohner, Jack Warner, Harry Warner, Constance Talmadge, William Collier, Carol Moos, the Motley Flints, Carey Wilson, Eric Locke, Mae Murray, Hope Loring, B. Leighton, Minna Wallis, Charles Rosher, the Charles Eytons, and someone named Mary Hibben.)

Leni gave interviews to the Los Angeles press in which she claimed to have been “well known on the German opera stage” before her marriage, and she was regularly featured on women’s pages sportingly modeling the latest in fashion, or posed in front of the Montmartre restaurant with friends like Florence Vidor, Bessie Love, and Corinne Griffith. Some of the photos were picked up and published by newspapers in Berlin, providing a surprise for those who remembered Leni, and not from the opera. She was a member in good standing of the 1920s version of the Ladies Who Lunch.

At one point, the papers began printing items saying that Warner Brothers had given Leni an acting contract, and there are stills showing Leni being given a screen test on the set of The Marriage Circle. Whether there was actually film in the camera or not, the last thing Ernst Lubitsch wanted was an actress for a wife. Leni’s “contract” and screen test were solely designed to attract some publicity and assuage her ego; the only screen exposure Leni would ever get was a brief shot of her legs in Eternal Love.

Despite the misgivings of some of his friends, Leni and Ernst seemed to have a successful, thriving marriage. They developed a joke between themselves about Hollywood. When they had first arrived in Hollywood, Leni had told Ernst, “I don’t think we will meet anyone here from Köpenick” (a small German town). It was the rough equivalent of coming to New York and saying, “Well, we’re not going to meet anyone from Peoria.”

But the first day on the Pickford lot, a boy had rushed up to Lubitsch and introduced himself. It seemed they had worked together before. “Don’t you remember me?” he asked. “I’m from Köpenick.” It became a private joke, as well as a metaphor for the entire immigrant experience in Hollywood. Here, they were from all over the world . . . even Köpenick.

•  •  •

After finishing up So This Is Paris, Lubitsch entrained for New York, where he went to dinner at a Russian restaurant with a friend. There, the friend told him about the proprietor, one General Lodijenski, who had fought in World War I, but lost an important battle and fled west shortly afterwards, opening a restaurant called the Double Eagle on Sunset Boulevard, which was successful until it was bombed.

Several months later, Lubitsch was at MGM working on The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg when he noticed an extra in the costume of a Russian general. “I know you from somewhere,” said Lubitsch. “I met you in New York,” the extra replied. “I am General Lodijenski.” His restaurant’s closing had forced Lodijenski into extra work. “Funny, isn’t it,” he said, “that I should be playing a walk-on bit as a Russian general.”

Mulling the encounter over, Lubitsch began to see it as a perfect scenario for Emil Jannings, whose gift for portraying tragic, masochistic characters had long since been established. Lubitsch worked up a story whereby a Russian general who has lost a decisive battle is reduced to working in movies. Hired to portray the commanding officer of the battle he actually lost, he goes berserk. Demented, believing that this time he will win the battle, he gives the command to fight but dies of a stroke on the set.

Lubitsch told the story to Jannings, who expressed interest. A few weeks later, Lubitsch ran into the writer Lajos Biró, who mentioned that Jannings was not only a brilliant actor but had good story ideas as well. Biro then proceeded to tell Lubitsch about the script he was working on, at that point entitled The General. It was the same story Lubitsch had told Jannings.

The script was written and given to Josef von Sternberg to direct. Sternberg made some brilliant changes, perhaps the most important being to frame the main story as a flashback, giving the narrative a quality of retrospection, with implications of loss from the beginning. But the general drift of the story, now called The Last Command, was the same. (Lodijenski was given a part in the film and can be observed as a thick-set, middle-aged man with short hair.)

Shortly after The Last Command was released, Paramount found itself being sued for plagiarism. The story, the claimant said, had been stolen from him. Paramount’s lawyers summoned Biro and Jannings. Biró passed the buck to Jannings, Jannings passed the buck to Lubitsch; Lubitsch told the lawyers that since everybody had claimed the story as their own and ignored him, he was not about to take credit for it now. Not being able to offer a counter-claimant as the author of The General, né The Last Command, Paramount swallowed their pride and settled.

•  •  •

Lubitsch must still have been brooding about the lost opportunity of The Jazz Singer, because as soon as he showed up on the Paramount lot, virtually the first property the studio tossed at him was Abie’s Irish Rose, another to-assimilate-or-not-to-assimilate comedy-drama that had run for years on Broadway in spite of the critics’ best efforts at assassination.

As it turned out, the property ended up being filmed by the dutiful Victor Fleming; Lubitsch would have to wait another fifteen years before confronting the comedy and drama of Jewishness, and then only obliquely, in To Be or Not to Be. Instead, Lubitsch and Kräly turned their attentions to The Patriot, a 1927 play by Alfred Neumann. It was a return to the large-scale spectaculars of Lubitsch’s late German period, and a massive, lavish production that was a calculated swipe at the pennypinching of Jack Warner.

The Patriot is now a lost film, but it centered on Czar Paul I (Emil Jannings), the son of Catherine the Great, a pathetic, oddly childlike monster, a Russian Caligula. Ernst, of course, was well aware of Jannings’ penchant for thundering bravado and knew just how to handle him.

Janning’s introductory shot as Paul was staged in a vast palace hall filled with pomp and courtiers. On the first take, Lubitsch let Jannings play the scene as Jannings wanted, crouching and shambling á la Quasimodo.

“Very effective,” he said. “But I’ve got an idea. Let’s try it once more and maybe this time you shouldn’t crouch so much.”

“You think so?” asked Jannings.

On the second take, Jannings stooped a little less, played it a little more naturalistically. “How did you like it, Ernst?”

“You know, I think it’s better.”

“You think so?”

“Let’s try it again. We don’t have to use it, but this time, come in more majestically.” This time Jannings didn’t tip the character’s hand and came in imperially, ramrod-straight, just what Ernst had wanted all along.

Ernst had to be equally diplomatic with his cameraman, the great but argumentative Bert Glennon. One day on the set, Glennon snapped at Lubitsch, “Ernst, I don’t think you know what you want.” Lubitsch simply looked at him and said, “Bert, you’re right; I don’t.”

“That’s all there was to that,” recalled William Clothier, an assistant cameraman on the picture. “Glennon would fight with anybody and Lubitsch just wasn’t going to have any.”

In his memoirs, Jannings said that he considered The Patriot to have featured his “greatest artistic performance in Hollywood” and the film to be “the most European film ever to have been made in America.” Although Jannings was writing in 1951, long after his seduction by the Nazis and the Götterdämmerung that followed, he was not shy about his residual National Socialist sympathies; contempt for the English and, by extension, Americans, seeped through his memories: “This Czar, half wild animal, half timid despot, could only be made believable by the most detailed art of characterization . . . this type of psychological experiment was not one that was native to the Anglo Saxon character. The English have an expression for this type of experiment; they call it highbrow, by which they mean both arrogant as well as around the bend. Highbrow is everything that doesn’t fit into the normal conversation of 5 o’clock tea.”

Neil Hamilton, playing the male ingenue opposite Florence Vidor, compared Lubitsch to Griffith and preferred Lubitsch. “Both achieve the results differently. Griffith through an exact mapping out of each move and the submergence of the player’s personality in a mathematical effect, and Lubitsch through a bringing out of the ‘drama’ peculiar to each personality. Lubitsch is much more the actor’s director.”

For one of the few times in his professional life, Lubitsch was intrigued by a brunette, the beautiful, serene Florence Vidor. “She is the essence of refinement,” he raved, characterizing her in a way that defines and encapsulates the Lubitsch world view: “Under the right circumstances, her type might defy the rules of chastity, but never the rules of decorum.” He then proceeded to pay her the highest compliment in his vocabulary by calling her “a brunette with a blonde soul.”

Stills from The Patriot indicate the production’s immense scale and make one all the more desperate to see what was obviously intended as a return to the great historical epics of eight and ten years before. Some random shots of huge crowds and revolutions were cannibalized six years later in von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress. When Lubitsch, then running Paramount, chided von Sternberg about his lavishness, von Sternberg pointed out that the lavishness was Lubitsch’s, not his.

The Patriot was sufficiently popular and well-reviewed (“hardly a flaw to be found in the entire picture” wrote the critic for The New York Times) to earn Lubitsch a nod in Film Daily’s annual poll of the ten best directors of 1928-29 (the others were George Fitzmaurice, Frank Borzage, Cecil B. DeMille, F. W. Murnau, William Wellman, Clarence Brown, Raoul Walsh, Lloyd Bacon, and Frank Lloyd).

•  •  •

Ernst finally got around to his commitment to Joe Schenck at United Artists. In the five years since taking over as chairman of the board, Schenck had revitalized the top-heavy, product-short (only eight pictures in 1926) company by the simple expedient of forming the Art Cinema Corporation, getting outside financing (the four principal owners of the company were adamantly opposed to financing any pictures but their own), and stepping up production. Art Cinema would supply the last few pictures starring Valentino, triumphs for Norma Talmadge and Buster Keaton, as well as cofinancing The Iron Mask and The Gaucho for Douglas Fairbanks.

Ernst and Hans Kräly went to work preparing a script for The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, to star John Barrymore. Shortly before production was to begin, Joe Schenck sold the property to MGM as a vehicle for Norma Shearer. A disgruntled Lubitsch quickly took up a property entitled Avalanche, which during production was changed to King of the Mountain, and finally limped into film history as Eternal Love. “The picture was made only to honor commitments,” recalled Andrew Marton. “Nobody entered into it with any enthusiasm-Lubitsch didn’t, Barrymore didn’t, and Camilla Horn didn’t.”

During production, Barrymore—normally an amusing, extremely intelligent man, albeit a thorough alcoholic—was in a vile mood, obsessed by the thought that his fiancée Dolores Costello was flirting with other men. On location in Canada’s Banff National Park and Lake Louise, Barrymore used a double for a hazardous scene in which he crossed a glacier, while costar Camilla Horn played it herself. “They couldn’t care less,” Barrymore said to Horn about his lack of team spirit. “As long as they get their shot in the camera, we can go and drop dead!”

When she and the double nearly walked into an abyss, Camilla Horn was terrified. Afterward, she was shaking from residual fear. “Lubitsch puffed on his cigar,” she remembered. “He and his cameraman had wrapped the scene; they were totally satisfied. Lubitsch winked at me and said, ‘Fear becomes you, Camilla. I’ll make a note of that.’ ”

Although he was an experienced rider, the icy mountainous terrain seems to have spooked Lubitsch, and he exhibited a disinclination to get involved with horses and burros. But that method of transportation was the only way to get to some of the locations. Soon, in a long line of horses crossing a glacier or mountain, Lubitsch could always be spotted by following the trail of cigar smoke to its source.

The locations were probably more trouble than they were worth. It took two hours to travel to the locations every morning and two hours to come home every night; figuring an hour for lunch meant that Lubitsch and company had working days of only three to four hours.

During the four weeks of location work, Barrymore managed to stay sober, but once they returned to the studio, his eyes grew irritated at the gypsum that was used to simulate snow and his mood grew ever more restive. “It was not always easy to work with him,” remembered Camilla Horn, “particularly when he had been drinking. He stumbled around, forgot his lines, and crossed his beautiful eyes. He often fell asleep in his dressing room and . . . occasionally didn’t appear on the set.”

Anxious to be off on his honeymoon, ignoring the $150,000 (plus a percentage) he was being paid, Barrymore insisted on a forced-march regimen that impelled the cast and crew to work overtime for three weeks to finish the picture ahead of schedule.

“I wouldn’t characterize [Barrymore] as difficult,” said Andrew Marton. “You just had to get him in between total inebriation and total soberness . . . When he was sober, he was fine—but unfortunately he was dull when he hadn’t had anything to drink. When he was a little tipsy, his eyes became sparkling, and he began to look like a Mephistopheles.”

“Barrymore had an odd relationship with soap and water,” remembered his leading lady. “Once when he was supposed to stroke my cheek, I looked at the dirt under his fingernails and became quite distressed. Lubitsch, the dear man, noticed this, took a closer look at his male lead and interrupted the shooting for some reason or another. He took Barrymore aside and pointed out his faux pas [Lubitsch’s favorite word], Barrymore disappeared without a word, then reappeared grinning broadly on the set, and showed Lubitsch his clean hands, as a servant would show his master.”

Since Barrymore was in no mood for frivolity, Lubitsch reserved his best practical jokes for Camilla Horn. Once, Lubitsch suggested that Horn seemed a little heavy, and a good massage might tighten up her body. She thought that sounded like a good idea.

The next morning, the masseur arrived, a stunning male paragon who almost took the actress’s breath away. After the rubdown began, the masseur began stroking and kneading Horn’s breasts. “I didn’t do a thing, but thought ‘Someone has put him up to this; Lubitsch is behind this.’ In the meantime, he was massaging me in another quite sensitive area and I responded. In the end, he took me in his arms and kissed me. I found it wonderful and I was ready.”

The next day, Lubitsch teasingly inquired as to the shine in her eyes and asked if she was satisfied with the skills of the masseur. “He was excellent, a real expert,” she replied. “But it’s too bad that your wife has raised his price so high. He told me that your Leni has paid him more than I was prepared to give.” Lubitsch twisted his cigar in his mouth, took a drag, then murmured in Berlin dialect, “What a bum,” leaving Horn to wonder if he was referring to her or the masseur.

Production dragged on. “[Barrymore] never did walk like a mountaineer,” remembered Andrew Marton. “He couldn’t hold the rifle right. And he insisted on this Peter Pan horror of a hat. Lubitsch trimmed as much as he could from Barrymore’s head when he framed the shots . . . It didn’t jell, and Lubitsch knew it. We all knew it, but we just had to get through it. And you can feel it when you watch the film. It was as they say in Germany, ‘ohne Liebe gemacht’—made without love. It was a child not conceived in love.”

Eternal Love is one of those misbegotten efforts that blight even the most distinguished careers. Set in 1806 Switzerland, it involves a mountaineer (Barrymore) who refuses to disarm (“My gun is my life. Who dares to take it from me?”), even though that primary characteristic turns out to have nothing to do with the plot.

Lubitsch seems helplessly unable to give the material any inflection. It’s a conventional romantic melodrama that he could have knocked off easily ten years before, but Lubitsch had matured as an artist since then, and seems to realize that the material is unworkable. He concentrates on the locations, the verisimilitude gained by shooting in the Canadian Rockies, and indulges in a great deal of elaborate moving camera work—typical of the late 1920s, when Hollywood went dolly-happy in the wake of Murnau’s Sunrise, but atypical for Lubitsch, who here tried to conceal the banality of the story through visual splendor.

The film runs barely eighty minutes, and the ending is noticeably hurried and confusing, possibly a result of Barrymore’s rush to pull the plug. Had it been made three years earlier, at the height of the silent era, Eternal Love would still have been an embarrassment; released as late as May 1929, after sound had already started to displace talkies, Lubitsch at least had the small consolation of knowing that few would see what in fact was his worst film.

When Eternal Love was released it did a fast fade. The domestic gross was a mere $525,000, little more than such famous contemporary U.A. flops as The Rescue (a gross of $650,000 against a cost of $800,000), DuBarry, and One Romantic Night, pictures that damaged the starring careers of Norma Talmadge and Lillian Gish by grossing, again respectively, only $435,000 and $400,000.

All those other pictures were talkies, and their failures were instructive. Clearly, making a talkie demanded something more than taking the exotic love stories or adventures that were the staples of silent movies, casting actors that had also been staples, adding dialogue, and expecting the public to line up. The prestigious director Rex Ingram had proved that by making Three Passions, a part-talkie, but thematically another one of his emotionally florid melodramas, only to see it limp to a pathetic gross of $249,000, against a cost of $540,000.

The rules of the game had suddenly changed. Lubitsch chose to deal with the situation by avoiding the problem entirely. Rather than solve knotty questions of tone, context, or the level of realism demanded by sound, he resolved to use the new technology to explore alternatives that would dodge the question of reality altogether. He decided to turn to the kind of movie that silent films had dealt with only in passing, his very own beloved Mittel-Europa staple, the operetta. In so doing, he invented a new kind of movie altogether: the musical.

---

I. Interestingly, though, the film, which seems slightly flat on the TV screen, improves noticeably when projected on a large screen, a common occurrence with Lubitsch’s work. What seems pinched and small when scaled down seems absolutely appropriate when seen as originally intended, completely vindicating Lubitsch’s unerring sense of gestural and psychological proportion.

II. The Jazz Singer would be directed by Alan Crosland, with Sam Warner ramrodding the difficult production of the first part-talkie feature, which irrevocably altered the motion picture industry. But on October 5, 1927, the day before the premiere, a mastoid infection that had been spreading through his system killed Sam. Jack and Harry Warner settled down to a duel of wits and wills that would last thirty more years.

Finally, in May 1956, Jack orchestrated the sale of the brothers’ 800,000 shares of Warner Bros, to Boston banker Serge Semenenko, ostensibly sending both Jack and his brother into prosperous retirement. He then promptly bought back his own shares for what he had been paid. The sweetheart deal locked Harry and Abe out of the company and left Jack in sole charge. On July 25, 1958, Harry Warner died at his home in Bel Air. At last, Jack had what he had always wanted; not only had he outwitted his brother, he had outlived him.