chapter four

Hollywood was a wonderful place when I first went there . . . it was a bright dream about a beautiful democracy in a world under the shadow of tyranny. I suppose there were fakes and phonies, but I can’t help thinking there was an innocence which has now vanished. Once Hollywood forgot the dreams and got down to reality it failed.

—dimitri tiomkin

Nineteen twenty-nine was not the best time to run a movie studio. By the end of the year, 8,700 theaters had been wired for sound, an enormous capital investment. Even more important, performers, technicians, and movie technique itself were all being called into question by the advent of sound.

The studio heads were not fools. They correctly sensed that they were entering uncharted waters. True, most silent stars made the transition to sound, but the new stars, the ones who were created by talkies, would never have been as successful in silent films. Actors like Cagney, Gable, Tracy, actresses like Lombard, Hepburn, Davis, were of the people and for the people. No more could stars be worshipped as semi-deities because of their ethereal removal from everyday life. Dialogue made actors real, and the kind of dialogue that audiences fell in love with was tough, slangy, colloquial.

Aside from the obvious changes in style, talkies demanded more from the technicians. While talkies didn’t require as many setups—in the beginning the camera was enclosed in a soundproof booth, to prevent the sound of the mechanism from being audible on the sound track—there was no mobility for the microphone, which meant there was no mobility for the camera.

Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall, and Miriam Hopkins—the hushed, erotic eternal triangle of Trouble in Paradise.

The only way to get a a sense of movement into a film was to use three cameras (long shot, medium shot, and close-up) for most scenes. It was a system that prefigured the methods used to film TV sitcoms. Although Lubitsch would resort to it, using three cameras demanded a broad, flat, sterile lighting that disturbed him.

“On silent pictures we only used to use one camera and that kept the cameraman busy,” he wrote while in production on his first talkie. “Now, on the talkies, we have to use three or four cameras always, and sometimes more. It is entirely the wrong system. They tell us that by using so many cameras we are saving the company time and money. Well, if we are, those of us who have been making silent pictures the other way these last twenty years ought to be in jail. Just think of the money we must have wasted by concentrating on one angle of a scene at a time—and making it good!”

Sound also complicated inferences and metaphors, the virtual building blocks of Lubitsch’s art. “There are incidents that can be introduced into a silent film which with words in a talking picture would be extremely delicate. You can’t talk about a chair and mean a woman. It all gives one a great headache. You can’t have the man say, to help the story pass the censor, ‘Gee, I’m glad I’m going to marry you after a while.’ ”

In short, sound affected both content and style, and in ways that imperiled what Ernst Lubitsch did, what Ernst Lubitsch was.

“It is much more difficult . . . to find a leading lady,” he complained to New York reporters in April 1929, his first visit to New York in two years. “Those who are attractive often have poor voices and those who can act and have good voices are not so pleasing in their appearance. The screen now demands a girl who looks well, can act well, and speak well.”

Yet, there was much about sound that represented pure opportunity as well. Lubitsch had always felt that much of his directorial success came from his sensitivity to music. Music, he believed, was the art upon which the other arts depended. His own pictures had often been structured in musical terms: allegretto, diminuendo, and largo, up to a dramatic or comic crescendo. Sound was a chance to overtly use music to set the rhythm of a scene, of an entire film; to put an entirely new spin on familiar thematic material.

It was also a chance to bring the audience in on the joke; with sound, Ernst would become, explicitly, a magician. Like any good magician, he would first announce that he was about to do something patently impossible, then, smoothly, casually, gracefully, do it.

While in New York, Lubitsch stopped at the Little Carnegie Theater to see Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. A young film enthusiast named Herman Weinberg recognized Ernst and began praising the film. They went next door to the Russian Tea Room and Weinberg went into effusions over the film. “Who will ever surpass it?” exclaimed Weinberg.

“Are you through?” asked Lubitsch.

“You didn’t like it?”

“I don’t like it? I don’t like it? Of course I don’t like it. It’s a wonderful tour de force but it’ll get the cinema nowhere. One can’t learn from it—it’s too individual a style of expression. It has pathological interest as a study of hysteria.”

When Weinberg brought up the performance of Maria Falconetti, Lubitsch said that it was conceived on the wrong plane. “I didn’t believe her. She wasn’t the Joan who rallied the routed French soldiers and defeated the English. We don’t even get a glimpse of that part of her. We see only a despairing Joan.”

Lubitsch invited Weinberg to a screening of Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia. During the screening, Lubitsch reacted negatively to a sequence showing the operation for the removal of a bullet. “Schrecklich! Why must he photograph the whole damn thing? He knows you can’t show it! And who wants to see it? Is it necessary? Meschenskind! Das is aber unmöglich!” The film’s climax, where the Mongols rise up against the British, was greeted with an approving “Ach! Terrific!”

Ernst’s refusal to climb aboard the critical bandwagon that was applauding the austere Dreyer confirmed to Weinberg the singularity of his intelligence. In later years, Weinberg would become one of Lubitsch’s fiercest acolytes and the author of The Lubitsch Touch, an elegant, enthusiastic, if factually improvisatory appreciation.

•  •  •

Maurice Chevalier was born in the working-class quarter of Paris known as Ménilmontant, on the right bank, west and north of Notre Dame. His upbringing made him the French equivalent of a Cockney, with the innately mocking manner and lack of concern for the future of the poor Parisian. He rose to fame as the partner and lover of the cabaret star Mistinguett, later going on to star alone at the Folies-Bergère and Casino de Paris.

The first move to sign Chevalier to a movie contract had been made by Irving Thalberg, but the deal came to nothing. A few weeks later, Jesse Lasky succeeded where Thalberg had failed. Thalberg and Lasky’s ardor to sign the performer is a tribute to their confidence in their own judgment. Already nearly forty, Chevalier was not classically handsome and did not fit into any known category of leading man. Still, it was obvious that talkies were going to demand something different, although nobody seemed quite sure about the dimensions of the difference. The moguls guessed right about Chevalier; they guessed wrong about Harry Richman and Sophie Tucker, two other legendary cabaret entertainers they signed at the same time.

Despite his persona of carefree insouciance, Chevalier was prodigiously cheap and invariably withdrawn, a compulsive worrier, a neurotic man who saved all of his charm and most of his energy for the stage. “He would come on the set slouching,” remembered Rouben Mamoulian, “sit in a corner looking as unhappy and worried as a homeless orphan . . . We started the camera . . . and then a complete transformation took place—there he was: happy, debonaire, truly filled with that joy of living . . . Then, as I said ‘cut,’ the light went out of him. He walked back to his corner like a tired man, looking hopelessly miserable, as before.”

Frankly scared about his entry into a new medium, he went around to the reigning stars at the Paramount lot to get advice, the most valuable of which came from Emil Jannings.

“Forget there is a camera,” rumbled the actor in a German accent Chevalier found difficult to penetrate. “Forget wrinkles and double chins and profiles. The movies need more true personalities. Less empty beauty. Forget everything except playing sincerely.”

Chevalier’s first film at Paramount, Innocents of Paris, was only so-so, but the actor had been heartened by the reaction of the canny Adolphe Menjou, who told him “I won’t kid you, Maurice, the picture’s not the greatest. But you are going to be the greatest French success America will ever see.”

A few weeks later, Chevalier was stopped in a hallway at the studio by what he remembered as “a small round figure . . . He looked a little like a droll, cigar-smoking cherub.” Ernst Lubitsch told Chevalier that “I am walking around with a film musical in my head, Maurice. Now I will put it on paper. I have found my hero.” So far, so good. But Chevalier became alarmed when Lubitsch explained that his hero was to be a prince.

“You see me as a prince?” asked the bewildered Chevalier. “I’m sorry, I’m flattered, but that’s impossible. A fisherman, yes, I could play, or any other kind of man from a simple background. It’s what I am and it’s in the way I talk and the way I walk and everything I like and understand. But an aristocrat? Believe me, in a royal uniform I would make the most ludicrous-looking prince on the screen.”

Lubitsch convinced Chevalier to pose for some costume stills, which Chevalier did, grumbling the whole time. The next day, Lubitsch charged down the hallway from his office to grab Chevalier, shouting “Splendid, Maurice, marvelous. You are a prince!”

Chevalier found Lubitsch to be “a man of strong, positive opinions delivered in a deceptively mild fashion,” but, from the first day of production on The Love Parade, they got along famously. Lubitsch loved the gleam in the actor’s eye, the way he could make even a straight line sound risqué, while Chevalier’s morose personality could be jollied along by Lubitsch more effectively than anybody else.

“I found him an almost magic man to work with,” wrote Chevalier in his memoirs. “He was supposed to be a very difficult director with American actors, but for me he seemed the easiest person in the world to understand. Just from the expression in his eye I could see what he wanted and somehow always produce it. And that bond of creative respect and sympathy seemed to affect the rest of the company as well.”

But there would never be any particular affection between Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. People who worked on pictures with the two actors remember MacDonald with phrases like “a lovely lady,” Chevalier with phrases like “he was all right, but he was a Frenchman.”

Jeanette MacDonald was born in 1903 in Philadelphia; by the late 1920s she was starring in musicals for the Shuberts. In 1928, she had tested with Paramount for a film role opposite Richard Dix. She didn’t get the part, but Ernst saw the test. Although he had been on the verge of signing Bebe Daniels for the lead in The Love Parade, he quickly reevaluated his options. “If she can sing and dance,” he said, “I’d give her the part.” She could; he did.

Ernst found that Jeanette was not only beautiful, eager, and hardworking with a joyous spirit he loved, but she possessed a stunning figure that he would always take special care to showcase, paying particular attention to her wardrobe. Since Lubitsch hated zippers, MacDonald always had to be buttoned into her costumes. At the beginning of the production of The Love Parade, Lubitsch called her “Mac,” but she threatened to call him “Lu.” He then started calling her “Donald,” but stopped that when she threatened to call him “Itsch.” Finally, he settled on “Jeanette,” except when he slipped and called her “Mac.”

In time, MacDonald would become one of Lubitsch’s closest friends, at least partially because she could take a joke (Chevalier couldn’t). During one of their musicals, Lubitsch directed MacDonald to walk across a room while singing, timing the end of the song to her arrival at a fireplace, where she was to let out a cry of anguish. MacDonald played the scene superbly, but the climactic shriek was more one of outrage than of anguish because Lubitsch had placed on the mantel a story from Variety announcing that the studio had just signed up Evelyn Laye, one of MacDonald’s soprano rivals.

Chevalier seems to have been frankly jealous of the way MacDonald’s winning personality compelled everyone to take her at face value. As late as 1964, after the actress had long been retired by a heart condition, he was telling interviewers that “She is a very sweet and talented girl, about twelve years younger than I am, although she always professed to being even younger than that . . . I never thought she had much of a sense of humor. When we worked together she always objected to anyone telling a risqué story.”

•  •  •

In the early part of the twentieth century, musicals tended to fall into one of two camps: revue or operetta. Operetta featured sentimental stories, Mittel-Europa settings, songs with long, flowing melodic lines, traditional harmonies, and an overall mood of quiet melancholia. In operetta, music took precedence over words. The performers had to have large voices and perform with a good deal of dramatic fervor.

Revues, on the other hand, evolved out of vaudeville and minstrel shows. The music derived from ragtime or Tin Pan Alley, and usually had a healthy element of satire that was brought to bear on contemporary American life. The songs were partly sung, partly spoken, in a casual, humorous manner.

Ernst, an inveterate theatergoer, was intimately acquainted with both American and European performance styles. With the rare exception of a towering work like Showboat, American musicals utilized thumbnail plots that stopped when the music started. In particular, operettas used songs, as the musical historian Deena Rosenberg has written, “mostly . . . to heighten emotional moments or to create atmosphere.” The revolutionary principles of Jerome Kern, who, as early as 1917, said that “the musical numbers should carry on the action of the play and should be representative of the personalities of the characters who sing them,” were to take more than twenty years before they became accepted practice.

It was Lubitsch’s idea to crossbreed these two hardy strains, to give the same emphasis to the lyrics as the music, to see if self-consciously satirical elements could be introduced into the operetta without consigning the audience’s emotional interest in the characters to the ashcan.

Also tossed into the mix was Ernst’s fondness for Viennese and Hungarian musicals from the Strauss-Kalman-Huszka cycle of composers. The librettos of these works had specific if limited aims: entertainment, amusement, enchantment. The story line of the Viennese/Hungarian operettas was invariably simple but usually touching, often funny, sometimes witty, occasionally inane. “But,” said the critic Andrew Farkas, “the music was meant to carry the story and it was always melodious, sweet, caressing, or else the piece failed. If the plot was clever, or funny, or amusing—so much the better.” And because Lubitsch was involving himself with operetta at the precise historical point at which it was beginning to decline, traces of parody couldn’t help but season Lubitsch’s invariable irony.

In retrospect, this was a risky experiment—a goulash, as it were—but, Paramount reasoned, if anybody could do it, Lubitsch could. He was given the go-ahead to make The Love Parade. Production began in June 1929.

Since sound was, at that point, virtually impossible to edit, and the script mandated a counterpoint duet between Chevalier/MacDonald and Lupino Lane/Lillian Roth that was supposed to be taking place in two separate parts of a palace, Ernst’s fertile mind had to devise some way to make it work. The solution was simple, if cumbersome. The two sets were adjacent to each other, with the musicians—this was before the era of prerecording and lip-synching to the playback—just off-camera. Two soundproof booths, each containing a camera, were aimed at the couples. Lubitsch perched nervously on a stool between the booths, letting the technicians worry about the sound quality while he watched the performances and their timing with his customary sharp-eyed intensity. It worked; one sound track, one song, two locations, four voices. Lubitsch’s first talkie wrapped production early in August.

•  •  •

We are deep in operetta country at the very beginning of The Love Parade, as Lupino Lane, setting out a full dinner service, sings “A little brandy, ooh la la,” then finishes with a fine flourish by pulling the tablecloth out from under the setting he has so carefully laid out.

The moment has nothing to do with the plot or the characters; it is, rather, Lubitsch demonstrating with a flourish what he is about to do: make something very common seem very elevated, confer romance and aristocratic elegance on a medium newly hamstrung by plebian technical considerations. In short, spin gold from straw.

There is a loud argument going on behind closed doors. Chevalier opens the door, looks at the camera, and says “She’s very jealous.” It seems that the lady in question has found a garter that does not belong to her. It is a bad moment for the lady’s husband to arrive, but that is what happens. It is one scandal too many for the military attaché from Sylvania; he is recalled home. There, he meets the queen, who is very happily unmarried.

At this point in the film, Lubitsch has already established the upstairs/ downstairs duality of love as Chevalier’s servant, Lupino Lane, romances MacDonald’s maid, Lillian Roth. When Chevalier sings in the drawing room, the butler picks up the refrain in the garden and even the dog barks out a verse as they all say farewell to Paris.

Back in Sylvania, Old Europe is trying to promote itself as best it can; a sight-seeing car emblazoned with “See Sylvania First” is filled with bored tourists who only perk up when the guide points out a castle that is reputed to be worth $110 million dollars. Huzzahs, uproar, much craning of heads.

The queen’s attempted disciplining of her errant attaché rapidly turns into love, which quickly turns into marriage. But the relationship gets off on the wrong foot almost immediately; first, during the ceremony itself, he bridles at the phrase “obedient and docile husband.” Then, on his wedding night, Chevalier is distracted by the incessant boom of celebratory cannons. He finds that he is nothing but a kept man, without status.

A trained soldier, he launches into a rear-guard action. He upstages the queen in front of her subjects at the ballet, arriving late and receiving the ovation that is rightfully hers. He taunts her by appreciatively ogling ballerinas through binoculars. When she pretends indifference to his presence, he makes a move to leave, but she asks him to stay for propriety’s sake.

“Beg me to stay,” he says. “Don’t ask me. Beg me.”

Finally, back at the palace, the arrogant queen capitulates to the rampant, charmingly swinish male.

“Where shall we live in Paris” she meekly asks.

“We?”

“Wherever you go, I’ll follow. You can’t get rid of me.”

With the issue of command at last decided, there’s no sense in leaving Sylvania after all, especially when she addresses him as “My king.” Chevalier closes the curtains of the bedroom so that the marriage can be put right.

With The Love Parade, Lubitsch casts off the lingering, heavy malaise that had affected his final silent movie. He is once again on his toes, moving lightly, nimbly, breathing new life into material that was old hat even in 1929. In Ethan Mordden’s phrase, The Love Parade “[reduces] every event to its center, dressy, unblushing, velvet with bite.”

And Lubitsch hits on the idea of using offstage space; for an all-important first dinner between the attaché and the queen, whom her advisors desperately want married, we never see the dinner itself, only the reactions of a series of onlookers and eavesdroppers. In an exhilarating precursor of The Merry Widow, a refrain of Victor Schertzinger’s lovely melody “Dream Lover” is picked up by a chorus of lovers in a garden. And, most amusingly, just as a nervous Chevalier confronts his wedding day and confesses to a horror of cross-eyed people, who should promptly show up to announce the impending ceremony but—Ben Turpin!

Yet the servant subplot, while well done and not exactly filler, slows the picture’s pace; 110 minutes is really too long for a screen operetta, even one as delightful as The Love Parade. (The silent version of the film, released to those theaters not yet wired for sound, seems to have run at least a half-hour less. The songs, of course, were missing, but as a result many scenes had to be restaged so that the audience would still be seeing a complete movie.)

While the typical Lubitsch sexuality and the mixture of two brilliant new personalities catapulted The Love Parade to fame, it also earned it a reputation it can’t quite sustain today. Its lighter-than-air quality appealed mightily to no less than Jean Cocteau, who called it “a Lubitsch miracle, a mélange of Andersen fable and the brio of Strauss, not forgetting that extraordinary domestic couple right out of an opera-bouffe of Mozart.”

Certainly, the film is an astonishing achievement for a movie shot in the summer of 1929; never does the viewer have to make allowances for any early-talkie primitiveness. The Love Parade could just as easily have been made in the summer of 1934, and, considering the paralytic style of most early talkies, that is high praise indeed.

The earliest screen musicals—the Marx Brothers’ The Cocoanuts or the Goldwyn/Ziegfeld Whoopee! are particularly grim examples—did little but transpose the dreary conventions of the middle-brow Broadway show. Songs were not episodes in the action, they were interludes, pauses, and they contributed nothing to the movement of the story. As to the plots, simplistic boy-meets-girl premises were nothing but a shallow pretext for the stringing together of clunky production numbers.

Nor were those numbers ever direct, witty comments on the action, the story. With one film, Lubitsch changed all that, lifting the musical to a much higher level . . . his level. For one brief moment, it seemed that there would not have to be an impregnable, massive wall between the visual grace of silent films and an equivalent dynamism of sound.

Menjou’s and Lubitsch’s instincts about Chevalier were correct. When The Love Parade was previewed, Chevalier was on the boards in Paris. Lubitsch sent him a cable that ended “You are sitting on top of the world, Maurice.”

When the film was released in November, the reviews hailed Lubitsch’s achievement. The New York Times called it “finely directed,” and said that “It is a real moving picture in the literal sense of the words,” while Photoplay called it “sparkling as burgundy, and almost as intoxicating.” James Shelley Hamilton in Cinema commented that the film was “excellent, gay entertainment, and a very sizeable step forward in the evolution of musical comedy on the screen.” Rob Wagner’s Script said that “Of course, Lubitsch had magnificent paints, but he always chooses his colors with intelligence.”

Even before The Love Parade was released, Ernst and Chevalier were back in the studio in October, reunited for three sequences in the all-star revue Paramount on Parade. The most delightful is “The Origin of the Apache,” in which Chevalier and the delectable Evelyn Brent begin the sequence in full evening dress, then become involved in an argument over another woman. Enraged, they begin to push and slap each other—on the musical beat, of course—then to rip off their clothes. As they are about to get to their underwear, the camera cuts to pieces of clothing flying through the air. But when the camera cuts back to Chevalier and Brent, they are again fully clothed and ready to go out for a night on the town.

Lubitsch had conquered sound the same way he had conquered silence, with clarity and a symmetrical grace . . . and by making it look very easy. He seemed to have everything, a flourishing career accompanied by critical praise and an equivalent standing among his peers. In 1930, he made Film Daily’s fifth annual list of the ten best directors for the fifth time, the only director to do so. He even had a happy domestic life. But that was about to be taken from him, and by someone he never would have suspected.

•  •  •

Patsy Ruth Miller, a frequent guest at Lubitsch’s house in those days, remembered Hans Kräly as “at the house all the time. [Lubitsch] and Hans were so close.” It was a strange pairing; despite their obviously similar sensibilities, Kräly was the direct physical and emotional antithesis of Lubitsch: tall, blond, and brutally handsome, not to mention quiet and withdrawn, so much so that only a few of Lubitsch’s circle knew that Kräly had a wife in Berlin.

“His face was hewn out of stone like an unfinished Rodin,” remembered Andrew Marton. “He had fallen arches and walked in a very funny way. Lubitsch ran—like a quicksilver ball. Even when he walked, you never saw his feet moving—just a blur . . . He had this twinkle, and Kräly was this solemn man carved out of stone.”

Kräly was also one of the few people in Lubitsch’s circle who would drink to excess. Once, at one of the Sunday afternoon parties, Kräly was lying down on a bench in the family room, unable to stand. When he asked Otto, the butler, for another drink, the saturnine servant replied in German, “Just please remain lying there, sir, and I’ll pour it into you.”

Despite the differences between Ernst and Kräly—or, perhaps, because of them—the relationship between Leni and the writer segued from friendship to passion.

“I liked Leni,” remembered Patsy Ruth Miller. “We always got along, but she was not scintillating. She was a good hostess, her parties were pleasant, but she wasn’t very colorful. And she made a mistake.”

“She used to play a lot of tennis with Kräly,” said Lupita Tovar Kohner. “You could feel that there was a close relationship there. But Lubitsch didn’t see it. And I was so green that I was no judge. But later on, Paul [Kohner] told me that everybody knew about the affair.”

In the latter part of May 1930, the normally quiet household was rocked by a series of explosive arguments. Eddie’s bedroom was directly across the hall from his parents, and he heard the unfamiliar sound of Ernst’s voice raised in anger.

On June 5, 1930, Lubitsch and Leni legally separated. Ernst came running down the steps with a packed suitcase in his hand. Eddie, standing at the foot of the steps, began to cry. Tommy, the chauffeur, tried to quiet the frightened child. “Don’t worry, Eddie. He’ll be back in a day or two.”

Five days later, Leni filed for divorce under a suit charging cruel and inhuman treatment; obviously, a deal had been struck to minimize public humiliation. According to the divorce complaint, Lubitsch scolded and nagged her, insulted her friends in her home, and on many occasions would not speak to her at all.

Lubitsch was predictably furious when he found out that his friends had known about the affair. “Kohner, you never said a word!” the humiliated director said.

“How could I?” replied Kohner.

On June 12, when Eddie graduated from elementary school, Ernst sent him a letter of congratulations, telling him that even though they were living separately, they would remain the best of friends “forever.” Lubitsch closed the letter with an admonition that Eddie should be good to his mother and give her a lot of pleasure. It was signed “Papa.” The letter was intercepted by Leni, and Eddie would not discover it among her effects until 1990.

Over the next few months, Ernst would send Tommy over to 616 Beverly Drive to pick up Eddie and Heinz for a visit. Lubitsch would take the boys out to lunch or dinner, sit and talk with them, try to console the deeply unhappy Eddie.

Lubitsch took the separation very hard; he invited his sister Marga to come to Hollywood and keep him company. He was, he told her, terribly lonely. But the series of flights necessary to get from Germany to Hollywood and the fact that she didn’t speak English very well scared her. She told Ernst she couldn’t make the trip; some family members believe that, in a quiet, unspoken way, he never forgave her.

In August, Paramount announced that a large part of its production would be transferred to their Astoria studio in Queens, on Long Island, largely because of Astoria’s proximity to the New York actors and playwrights that seemed necessary to talkie production. Ernst was appointed Astoria’s supervising producer, with authority over stories, and on the way back east he took with him Ernest Vajda, who had worked on The Love Parade, and the young writer Samson Raphaelson.

A few months later, he was back in Hollywood. On Saturday, October 4, two months after the interlocutory divorce decree was granted, the situation exploded publicly. At an Embassy Club ball given by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Kräly attended with Leni, while Lubitsch was accompanied by actress Ona Munson.

At eleven o’clock, as he and Munson danced past Kräly and his ex-wife, Lubitsch suddenly left Munson, grabbed Kräly by the arm, and slapped him. A surprised Kräly stepped back, which gave Leni the opportunity to step forward and slap Lubitsch. At that point, Lubitsch’s friends pulled him away from the scene to calm him down. An enraged Leni followed, screaming at Lubitsch until she too was pulled away.

Lupita Tower, who was in Lubitsch’s party and was dancing with Paul Kohner across the room, remembered that “The whole room exploded. And they were all speaking German, which I didn’t understand at that time. After Paul dragged him back to the table, Lubitsch left.”

Lubitsch claimed that the scuffle had been the culmination of a campaign of whispers and snickers carried on by Leni and Kräly that included encounters at Malibu and at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The final straw at the Embassy Club had come when Lubitsch had noticed Leni and Kräly laughing about his dancing—the much larger Kräly had been dancing stooped over, pretending he was as short as his former friend.

The next day, Lupita Tower got a call from Leni, who told her that “If any reporters come asking questions, you know nothing.” “As a matter of fact, I knew nothing,” remembered Lupita.

Leni was deeply concerned about her image; that December, after Photoplay magazine ran a brief item about the fight, she responded with a letter to the magazine written on Christmas Eve regarding “this most unpleasant Embassy affair.” Her main concern was the unflattering photo of her the magazine had run. “Would you please, in the meantime, accept a few pictures which were taken about three months ago. Maybe you could use those someday and give the world a different view of me.”

The entire affair was regrettable and some of Lubitsch’s friends thought it could easily have been avoided, even if Leni and Kräly were lovers. Charles Rosher, for one, thought that Lubitsch had turned irrationally jealous and believed more was going on than actually was, while Andrew Marton held to the unlikely view that Lubitsch had known about the affair all the time. But Lubitsch was a man, not a blithe, carefree character from one of his own movies.

Despite Leni’s pleadings to her friends for privacy, she started talking to reporters and, for several months, didn’t stop. She claimed that Lubitsch was still jealous of her and did not want other men paying attention to her. “No man or woman had anything to do with our divorce,” she said. “If there had been a man, he had plenty of opportunity to so charge when the divorce was filed. He is just jealous.”

Lubitsch remained defiant, sure he had done the right thing. “They continually taunt me,” said Lubitsch, attempting to explain the incident. “This was the third time. They mimic me when I dance. They laugh at me. They make certain remarks that aren’t in the dictionary as they passed me.”

Kräly pretended innocence and said he had no idea what it was all about. When Leni announced that she expected to marry Kräly, Lubitsch exploded. “I shall send them a marvelous wedding present. I hope they are married a hundred years. He deserves it.”

It would appear that Lubitsch was intent on punishing himself; a few days later he went to the opera, where Kräly and Leni were also in attendance. Although they brushed past each other a few times, only glares were exchanged. At that point, someone must have taken him aside, or his own instinct for dignified self-preservation must have finally manifested itself, for on October 9 he left for New York.

“They can have Hollywood all to themselves,” he said of Kräly and Leni. “All I ask is peace—and as long as they give it to me there will be no trouble.” Lubitsch had made up his mind to cut his losses, while Hollywood had made up its mind about who was to blame.

“Lubitsch would never have done to her what she did to him,” believes Patsy Ruth Miller. “He liked to tease me, kid about my having boyfriends and all that, but there was always a certain old-fashioned respect for women in his attitude. I think he very much wanted to be a family man.”

Although Lubitsch was the wounded party, he acted according to his best principles, undertaking to pay off the mortgage on 616 Beverly Drive and signing it over to Leni. (Since by June 10, 1930, there was only $2,288.58 left on the mortgage, Lubitsch must have been making double payments for some time.)

On Christmas Day 1930, a devastated Lubitsch was obviously still longing for his stepchildren, for he sent them a telegram in German wishing them a Happy Christmas “and everything good for the New Year.”

The divorce became final in June 1931. Most of the couple’s friends followed Lubitsch, but Mary Philbin remained loyal to Leni. Although everybody expected Leni and Kräly to marry, the relationship was based primarily on passion and quickly burned out.

About a year after the divorce, she sold the house on Beverly Drive because it was too expensive to maintain. On October 6, 1932, she eloped with Evan Lewis, a pilot for Transcontinental and Western Air Express. She promptly used part of her divorce settlement to buy Lewis his own airplane and used much of the rest, according to her son Eddie, “to invest in some of the lousiest property in Southern California.”

In October 1933, Leni, through her lawyer, Milton Cohen, evidently made a rather bizarre overture to Lubitsch regarding her oldest child, Heinz, who was not even the director’s favorite. On October 26, Lubitsch responded that, as much as he liked the boy, he was in no position to adopt the child because he was already considering adopting Hans, the son of his brother, Richard, who had recently died.

Thereafter, there was no contact between Lubitsch and Leni. She had a long and basically happy marriage with Lewis that only ended with her death in 1960. Over the years, she sold off most of the expensive jewelry that Lubitsch had bought so that she could maintain a standard of living beyond the reach of airline pilots. She did confess to her son Eddie on several occasions that losing Lubitsch “was the dumbest thing I ever did in my life.”

The real loser in the messy triangle was Kräly; before the imbroglio, Kräly had been credited as writer on twenty-three films in the seven years since his arrival in Hollywood. Afterward, until his death in 1950, he was credited on precisely seven, with his last credit coming in 1943, on a Universal penny-dreadful called The Mad Ghoul.

“Leni was the death of Kräly,” remembered Lupita Tovar Kohner. “Years later, Kräly was down and out. I remember he had a blond girlfriend, and they came to see us. On account of Leni, this man had become a nothing.”

It is possible that Lubitsch expressly demanded Kräly’s blackball, although such vindictiveness would have been out of character. It is more likely that the small community of the film industry decided that Kräly’s violation of the trust of one of its most admired and respected men made him unworthy of employment.

After the initial attempts to maintain contact with Leni’s sons, Ernst stopped calling. Aside from the fact that their existence could not help but remind him of what he had lost and how he had lost it, Lubitsch was inherently tough-minded and could make a clean break if he felt it necessary. As he had told his sister, “We Lubitschs are not sentimental people.”

About four years after the divorce, Eddie wrote his former stepfather a letter. There was no response. Some time after that, his brother, Heinz, tried to contact Lubitsch personally. He found out the address of Lubitsch’s new house in Bel Air and waited by the driveway for hours. Finally, Lubitsch’s car drove out. It slowed down only slightly, just long enough for Ernst to recognize who was waiting to talk to him. The car sped up and drove away.

•  •  •

Lubitsch’s emotional response to Leni’s betrayal was covert. He referred to her only obliquely and never to what she had done. His practical response was to bury himself in his work. In 1932 alone, he produced and directed The Man I Killed, One Hour with You, and Trouble in Paradise, and supervised If I Had a Million, a backbreaking pace for a director who had previously contented himself with a leisurely regimen of one film per year. The pace becomes even more grueling when the long hours demanded by the studios in those pre-union days are taken into account. For instance: on Friday, June 21, 1929, while shooting The Love Parade, Lubitsch and his crew worked from nine in the morning till one the following morning. Work for Lubitsch was no longer merely a method of self-expression; it had become a means of escape.

Monte Carlo, produced at a cost of $726,465 and released on September 4, 1930, continued the innovations begun by The Love Parade. As critic Kenneth White wrote with stunned pleasure in The Hound and Horn, in Winter 1931, “objects about the players, an engine rushing through the countryside, the figure in a clocktower, became . . . instruments of musical and amusing comment. Sounds and music . . . perform the same function for the ear that the camera does for the eye. An auditory breadth and inclusiveness is achieved that could not possibly be obtained in any other representational art.”

Every song in Monte Carlo either delineates character or advances the plot; songs not only arise naturally from the action, they are the action.

The film opens brilliantly, and without dialogue. It is a royal wedding, all pomp and circumstance, but as the celebrants troop into the church, the skies open up and a torrential rain begins, an ominous occurrence in light of a prominently displayed sign: “Happy Is the Bride the Sun Shines On.” Claud Allister, the archetypal silly-ass Englishman, is the prospective groom, but he’s interrupted by a maid as he’s about to enter the church.

He rushes back to his room to find an abandoned wedding dress lying on the bed. He stumbles haphazardly around the room before uttering the film’s first dialogue: “Papa! Papa!!”

Lubitsch has fun with his characters. As Allister sings a paean to himself (“I’m a simple-hearted soul . . .”) the chorus responds, “He’s a simp, he’s a simp, he’s a simple-hearted soul . . .”

The runaway bride (Jeanette MacDonald, in her underwear) is heading for Monte Carlo on a train. She’s taken her last ten thousand francs and is hoping to parlay it into a stake so large she will never again have to contemplate marrying someone she doesn’t love. As she hurtles toward freedom, the chugging of the train wheels begins to set a beat, accented by the whistle, and MacDonald swings into “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” with peasants in the countryside picking up her refrain and forming a chorus. For all the number’s reputation, it’s surprisingly brief. Lubitsch contents himself with one verse and one chorus; he could milk it, but doesn’t.

In Monte Carlo, MacDonald is spotted by Count Rudolph (Jack Buchanan), and they play yes-I-will-no-you-won’t for six reels. Along the way, Ernst throws in a small homage to von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives, as MacDonald spots a hunchback outside the casino. When she rubs his hump for luck, he turns and says “Fifty francs please, madame.”

There is a particularly charming duet (“Give Me a Moment, Please”) done while Buchanan and MacDonald talk on the phone, but Monte Carlo suffers from its leading man’s lack of sexuality (presumably, Claud Allister was cast to make Jack Buchanan look more masculine). The casting throws the film off its needed erotic center. There is, after all, never any doubt that Chevalier knows what to do with a woman in bed; Jack Buchanan is thin, reedy, not uncharming, but essentially asexual, which renders all of Lubitsch’s intimations of immorality rather moot. Buchanan lessens the genially erotic texture that make Lubitsch’s operettas more than Romberg or Offenbach retreads.

Monte Carlo is more than good for an early talkie, but it’s not quite good enough to make it a major Lubitsch film. It doesn’t seem primitive so much as old-fashioned, as opposed to the classic timelessness of the best Lubitsch musicals. It lacks lilt.

Monte Carlo served at least one valuable purpose in introducing Ernst to the work of the lyricist Leo Robin. Robin’s witty words would illuminate four more Lubitsch films, and he would remain the director’s first choice on every musical project.

Since Robin was headquartered in New York, hiring him entailed extra trouble and expense. One day Robin asked Lubitsch why he chose him when there were superb lyricists in Hollywood. “I work with you because you do not make performers out of my characters,” Lubitsch told him. “He felt,” Robin said, “that with my style of integrating the lyrics with the book and everything, the character remained the same, instead of suddenly becoming a performer and walking out of the picture . . . Pictures [generally] weren’t written that way, [but] I wrote it as if it were a show, with all the songs integrated.”

•  •  •

By February 1931, Lubitsch had shifted his base of operations to the Astoria, New York, studios, and was in production on The Smiling Lieutenant. Quickly, he shot his version of Oscar Straus’s operetta A Waltz Dream, which had been previously made in Germany in 1926 under its original title by Ludwig Berger. The film was not made under the most pleasing conditions; Lubitsch was still brooding over Leni’s betrayal, while Chevalier was still grieving over the death of his mother some months earlier, and thereafter went through the motions with what even he recognized as a mechanical display of technique, what the performer called “smiles and cute winks of the eye.”

“I was busy on the set,” said Lubitsch, “but out of the corner of my eye I would see him sitting quietly in a corner; grave and serious. He never talked much or laughed with any of the others.”

In addition, Lubitsch had to act as referee between Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins, both of whom were determined that only the right sides of their faces would be photographed. Since the women were antagonists in the film, Lubitsch decided to encourage their dislike of each other.

As always, Lubitsch favored the blonde, invariably placing Hopkins on the left side of the frame so her favorite side would be photographed. The result was that “she was as pleased as a kitten with a new ball of yarn.” Colbert didn’t hold a grudge; she would always call Lubitsch her favorite director and say that he seemed to spend his entire day entertaining actors.

The Smiling Lieutenant opens promisingly as a bill collector for military uniforms rings fruitlessly outside an apartment door. Giving up, he walks down a long flight of stairs. A beautiful girl walks up the same flight of stairs, knocks twice, and the door opens immediately. Cut to a lamp over the door. As the light fades around it, the gaslight slowly comes on, then, as daylight arrives again, slowly goes out. The door opens and the girl, radiating a pleasurable languor, happily takes her leave.

Lubitsch cuts to an exhausted Chevalier, sitting in a rumpled robe and pajamas. He launches into “A Soldier’s Work Is Never Done” (“we’re the boudoir brigadiers”), with the actor rolling his eyes rather more than is absolutely necessary.

The plot kicks in when Miriam Hopkins, the lonely daughter of the king of a tiny Mittel-Europa country, imagines that the title character slights her during a royal trip to Vienna. Dislike, as it often does in the movies, turns to love. The lieutenant is far more interested in Claudette Colbert, the unpretentious, shyly sexual leader of an all-girl orchestra wonderfully named “The Viennese Swallows,” but loyalty to their homeland’s best interests demands sacrifices from all good soldiers.

Miriam Hopkins’ character wants nobody but the lieutenant. She’s so desperate she throws out the ultimate threat: if she doesn’t get the man she wants, she’ll marry an American. Her father, the king (George Barbier), looks crestfallen. Faced with such a dire possibility, he capitulates.

The Smiling Lieutenant offers some sparkling badinage between Chevalier and Colbert:

“So . . . you play the piano?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Some day we may have a duet.”

“I love chamber music!”

“We could have tea tomorrow afternoon.”

“Why not breakfast tomorrow morning?”

“No. First tea, then dinner . . . then . . . maybe . . . breakfast.”

Fade out.

Fade in to a valet flipping eggs.

In another brilliant sequence, alternate verses of the same song are done by cross-cutting from Chevalier and Colbert (vital, with brass and woodwinds) and Hopkins (sweet, passive, heavy on violins). Colbert sings in a faintly tremulous voice, but manages to hold a tune, and the Astoria studio’s less than spacious confines are only slightly evident.

Despite the Viennese Weltschmerz and the brilliance of individual moments, The Smiling Lieutenant fails to coalesce. Ludwig Berger’s version of the same material is ponderous, but Lubitsch goes too far in the other direction. The Smiling Lieutenant is too ooh-la-la by half, especially in comparison to the moving, welcome gravity of The Student Prince, or the romantic conviction that was evident in The Merry Widow three years later.

The primary problem is that the wrong girl gets the man. The always-wonderful Colbert, in a sisterhood-is-powerful moment, sings “Jazz Up Your Lingerie” to Hopkins, who plays a shrill, unsympathetic pill quite convincingly. The advice takes; Hopkins next appears in very sheer finery.

Ultimately, Colbert gives up her man because “girls who start with breakfast don’t usually stay for supper.” It’s an oddly moralistic ending for a cheerfully amoral film.

Two months after Lubitsch finished shooting The Smiling Lieutenant in March, Paramount decided to close the Astoria studio; the East Coast studio had been an expensive satellite, and the financial condition of Paramount would not allow its continued operation. Lubitsch trooped back to Hollywood, returning to New York in May for the film’s premiere.

In Hollywood, Lubitsch found a studio in decline. Paramount had aggressively pursued a theater chain (between September 1929 and May 1930 alone, they acquired some 500 theaters), and they had by far the largest group of theaters in the country. (Loew’s vaunted chain numbered less than 200, but they were the right 200, half of them in and around New York, the other half strictly first-run houses in large eastern cities.)

When business was good, so were the profits, for Paramount had three profit centers: theaters, distribution, and production. In 1930, Paramount had profits of $25 million, more than any studio in Hollywood, even MGM, whose profits were $14.6 million.

But the following year, as the Depression deepened, theater attendance dropped off and Paramount suddenly found that, while they were property rich, they were growing cash poor. In 1931, Paramount profits shrank precipitously to $8.7 million, and the studio responded with a 33 percent cut in feature budgets and salary reductions. It didn’t help. In 1932, theater grosses dropped by $25 million, and in 1933, the overly mortgaged studio was hit with a loss of more than $20 million. Paramount could no longer generate enough cash to pay off its mortgage holders and was thrown into bankruptcy.

For the next two and a half years, fifty-three different law firms, banks, committees, and consultants sliced, slashed, and patched at Paramount and its subsidiaries. The studio’s largest asset was real estate, whose book value was some $150 million. The theaters were mortgaged for $58 million and there were $25 million in outstanding debentures, not to mention $13 million in debts to eleven different banks and $6 million owed to real estate firms. As Fortune magazine wryly observed, “The question of whether the company was solvent depended largely on the accuracy of the real-estate valuation. But it was an academic question in view of the fact that the company could not find enough cash to pay its bills.”

Then, as if he wasn’t sufficiently besieged already, Lubitsch was saddened by the sudden death of his older brother Richard. Ever the bohemian, Richard had been the center of a political roundtable in Cologne, an intimate of the intellectuals. Politically liberal, he was an ardent anti-Nazi. “He always opened his mouth,” sighed his niece Evie. “If he would have lived to the Hitler period he would have disappeared [into a concentration camp].”

But Richard’s end was considerably more pleasant than that; he had a sudden, fatal heart attack during a visit to a brothel. The family was, as the saying goes, shocked and appalled, but the location of Richard’s death didn’t faze his brother in the least. “Kings and princes die in whorehouses,” he told his niece. “Why should we be ashamed?”

•  •  •

Lubitsch liked Miriam Hopkins; he may have been the only person in show business who did. Certainly, she was the right physical type to attract him, but it would seem that Hopkins managed to simultaneously entice him and keep him at arm’s length.

There seems to have been an element of calculation in her behavior; Joel McCrea once wondered aloud about how “all those powerful men always wanted the women that rejected them . . . [Gregory] La Cava and Ginger [Rogers], Lubitsch and Miriam Hopkins.” The photographer John Engstead referred to her as “that old . . . bitch. You should have seen how cute she was with Ernst Lubitsch. And Lubitsch never saw through [her].” His casting of Hopkins in Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living, after the springboard of The Smiling Lieutenant, gave her career a propulsive boost that carried her very close to the top rank of stars.

Still, if Lubitsch liked you, it was virtually guaranteed that he would occasionally tweak you. A year or so after The Smiling Lieutenant, Hopkins embarked on what she imagined to be a top-secret affair with King Vidor, who was directing her in The Stranger’s Return. Lubitsch wanted Hopkins for the female lead in his adaptation of Noël Coward’s Design for Living and sent her a script.

One night, after a tryst, Hopkins asked Vidor to read the script with her. They were both enchanted, at least until they got to the last page. There they found a scribbled note in Ernst’s handwriting: “King—Any little changes you would like, I will be happy to make them. Ernst.”

If the relationship between Lubitsch and Miriam Hopkins ever deviated from the strictly professional, she must not have been averse to sharing, for Ernst’s relationship with Ona Munson, the actress who is best known today for her portrayal of Belle Watling, the good-hearted madame in Gone With the Wind, had become quite serious. Both newly divorced (Munson from the actor/director Edward Buzzell), the two would be on-and-off companions for the next several years. Intimate friends with whom Lubitsch and Munson spent time never doubted that he loved her. “When he looked at her,” remembered Dorshka Raphaelson, the wife of writer Samson Raphaelson, “you could see a great glow of happiness in his eyes.”

By 1932, Munson was spending weekends with Lubitsch at his Santa Monica beachhouse. One afternoon, Munson heard a knock, not at the door but on the window. A deep contralto voice asked if anybody was home. It was Greta Garbo, with her friend and lover Mercedes d’Acosta. They had been walking on the beach, passing the houses of Marion Davies, Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer, when they came to Lubitsch’s place. “That’s Ernst Lubitsch’s house,” Garbo said. “He is the only great director out here. I would like you to meet him.”

Lubitsch had been in the kitchen making drinks, but let out a great yell of happiness when he saw who his visitor was. “Mein Gott, Mein Gott, Mein Gott,” he cried. “Greta, Greta, sit down and never go avay.” He pushed her onto the sofa and plopped himself down beside her, holding her hand.

“Greta, why don’t you tell those idiots in your studio to let us do a picture together. Gott, how I would love to direct a picture for you.” Garbo brushed it aside, saying “You tell them. I am far too tired to have a conversation with any studio executive.”

The two agreed that studio executives were fools, more to be scorned than pitied. “How vonderful Greta and I would be together,” Lubitsch said. “We vould make a vonderful picture.” Garbo sighed, and, according to d’Acosta, allowed Lubitsch to give her an affectionate kiss of farewell.

Despite the long weekends in Santa Monica and their sincere affection for each other, the Lubitsch/Munson relationship was never smooth. For one thing, Lubitsch may have been gun-shy after the debacle with Leni. For another, the affair lacked the element of sexual fantasia that Lubitsch thrived on. Munson was American, petite, and brunette, not one of the European blondes that could be relied upon to excite him.

There seems little question that Munson genuinely cared for Lubitsch, but his reciprocation did not seem to give her the necessary amount of nurturing. Mercedes d’Acosta, who became good friends with Munson in later years, remarked on her “very sad” eyes that “touched me very deeply.”

The relationship, and Lubitsch’s possessive friends, made the papers. On February 29, 1932, Julia Shawell of the New York Evening Graphic led her column with a blind item that could only be decoded one way.

“Let’s call the director Othello and admit he’s very much in love with Desdemona . . . It seems there’s an Iago on the scene, a Russian artist, who told Othello that Desdemona had made some remarks that wounded Othello’s feelings deeply.

“Desdemona never made the crack that Iago repeated. What is more she is still crazy about him and is actually sick over her loss . . . Noted for his great sense of humor on and off the screen, Othello this morning is a sad, sad figure.”

Whatever story was whispered in his ear, Ernst took it to heart, for the next time Munson met with Dorshka Raphaelson at the Chateau Elysée, an apartment hotel in Hollywood, she began to cry. His German friends, she told Dorshka, thought she had only gotten involved with him to further her career. “Do they think so little of him that I couldn’t love him for himself?” she asked Raphaelson.

Perhaps because monogamy didn’t seem to be working out, Lubitsch embarked on a more Continental attitude toward women than he had previously allowed himself. “Like a sailor,” remembered Jean Negulesco, “he had an official mistress in every port.” Negulesco, a second-unit director who had been taken under Lubitsch’s wing, got a call one day while working at Universal. “Call Mr. Lubitsch the moment you come in . . . urgent.”

A worried Negulesco called back and was told by a distressed Lubitsch that his mistress in New York was arriving for a visit, and his Viennese mistress had caught wind of it. Murder was in the air. “You have to come to dinner, make love to the New York mistress,” implored Lubitsch.

Negulesco arrived and was doing just fine with the New York mistress—Lubitsch and he shared similar taste in women—when he felt a kick under the table. A surprised Negulesco looked up to see Lubitsch leaning over, whispering “Not so much!”

Some of Ernst’s involvements were more redolent of subtle, humorous humiliation than subtle, humorous sophistication. Lubitsch told the composer Dimitri Tiomkin about one such disaster. It seemed that at a party in New York, Ernst found himself dancing with a young, very beautiful woman. He told her that he’d like to see her again, and mentioned the hotel where he was staying. A few days later, on a Sunday afternoon, the phone rang. It was the girl, asking if it would be all right if she came up.

Lubitsch hurried into his bedroom, put on his best silk robe. The girl arrived. He helped her out of her fur coat and watched as she excused herself to freshen up in the bathroom. That was just fine, for he had laid out a selection of the finest perfumes on the off-chance a lady guest might wish to use them.

He waited.

A long time.

Finally, the bathroom door opened and she came out, radiant and smelling delicious. She picked up her fur coat and put it on, explaining that there had been a women’s convention in the hotel, and she hadn’t been able to get into the ladies’ room. “I thought you wouldn’t mind,” she said as she swept out the door.

Lubitch was never as interested in the brains or even the good looks of a prospective female partner as he was in her emotional coloring. “Charm is the most important thing in the world to a woman,” he once told the wife of Photoplay editor James Quirk. “It is a composite quality, impossible to analyze. It takes a little part of so many things to produce charm.”

Leni’s betrayal meant that he would rarely grow too dependent on any one woman; once a relationship was over, Ernst was perfectly capable of offering avuncular advice. In later years, a former mistress who would go on to a medium-successful acting career married a wealthy man-about-town. “I want you to be a good girl,” Lubitsch told her. “You’ve had your fun, you’ve been around a lot. Make this work.”

•  •  •

As his romantic life solidified around one primary mistress surrounded by more transient relationships, Lubitsch’s professional associations remained remarkably stable.

At home, serving as a combination butler/chauffeur/man Friday, was Otto Werner, a tough, phlegmatic man whose discretion and loyalty were beyond question. The secretary/amanuensis was Steffie Trondle, who gave Lubitsch an overbearing devotion that absorbed most of the oxygen in the room. Because of her dominating officiousness, she was more or less disliked by most of Lubitsch’s friends (“a homely, pushy little woman who waited on him hand and foot and drove him nuts” was the way one described her).

Lubitsch would occasionally sigh, “Oh, if I could only get rid of Trondle,” but he never did. He did not treat her with any particular lavishness, never paying her more than forty dollars a week, but in all probability he was as dependent on her as she was on him.

At the studio there was assistant director Eric Locke, a graduate in philosophy who also served as Lubitsch’s business manager. Solid, tough-looking, with an interesting scar on his left cheek, Locke was the sort of man who carried cigarettes in one hand and a copy of Goethe in the other. Lubitsch trusted him sufficiently to give Locke the responsibility of shooting second-unit footage whenever it was required, either in America or Europe.

Surrounding these three members of his personal staff was the extended family at Paramount, such as Joe Youngerman, who began at the studio as a laborer in 1926, and would eventually rise to be assistant to studio chief Henry Ginsberg until 1950, when he left to run the Directors Guild. Youngerman worked for Lubitsch as both prop man and assistant director, and remembered him as “running a happy set. His rehearsals tended to run a little bit longer than other directors, but once he started shooting he was as fast as any director on the lot.

“He had a hell of a good sense of humor. He always had a cigar in his mouth, you know, but when he looked through the camera, he would lay the cigar down. To horse around, we always used to salt the cigar tip. Then he would pick it up and put it in his mouth and smack his lips and get this look on his face, but he never said a word about it. He knew what was going on, but he never said a word. He didn’t mind being the butt of the joke.”

To his crew, Lubitsch was completely approachable, putting on no airs, but Youngerman recalled that being the case with most directors, even DeMille, “who was a terror on the set. One time I told DeMille, ‘You know, I think you’d make better pictures if you did the long shots and Lubitsch did the close-ups.’ And he said, ‘Maybe that’s so,’ and laughed it off.”

Lubitsch would usually invite selected members of the crew to previews of his pictures. After one preview, Lubitsch approached Youngerman and asked what he thought of the picture. Youngerman replied that he thought it was wonderful, but he suggested a few minor changes that he thought would make a big difference. Lubitsch listened and walked away.

A few days later, Lubitsch walked onto a set where Youngerman was working with Wesley Ruggles, sidled up to him and said, “Joe, you’re crazy.” The next day, the visit and the admonition were repeated. This went on regularly for the next several weeks until one day Lubitsch arrived, walked up to Youngerman, and, with an embarrassed shake of his head, said “Joe, you were right.”

•  •  •

Of all Lubitsch’s collaborators, the most significant were the writers. At first, Lubitsch attempted to replace Hans Kräly with a variety of talents, all solid professionals but none with the right bouquet. He even worked on two stories with Vicki Baum, the Viennese author of Grand Hotel. Although Baum was frankly uncomfortable with the scripting process, Lubitsch attempted to soothe her. “Don’t worry. You write a short novel, in German, of course. I’ll do the rest . . . You understand what’s expected of you: another Grand Hotel. Lots of character woven into one plot, one pattern, one piece of fabric.”

Lubitsch and Baum decided to place the action in a department store instead of a hotel. Paramount seemed pleased with the result, and, while mulling it over, extended Baum’s contract for another six months. Ernst and Baum promptly went to work on a story for Maurice Chevalier, with music by Oscar Straus.

Baum adored Lubitsch (“the most loyal of friends,” she wrote in her memoirs. “If you threw out a little line that gave him an idea for one of his famous ‘touches’ . . . you could actually see a tiny red flame kindle behind the black of the pupils”), but the Chevalier story was shelved, as was the department store idea. Paramount tried to cancel the remainder of Baum’s $2,500 a week contract, but an angry Lubitsch forced them to honor the deal.

Replacing Kräly was made easier than it might have been by the fortuitous presence of Samson Raphaelson, “Rafe” to everybody but Lubitsch, who usually called him “Sem.”

Raphaelson was born on March 30, 1896, on the lower East Side of New York. Given a classic Yiddish upbringing by his grandparents, he had no particular interest in being a writer. Raphaelson grew up loathing the people that surrounded him, immigrants and children of immigrants who freely and happily contemplated lives of factory jobs or waiting on tables. He dreamed of cars, servants, country estates, sleeping in late. “I had the makings of a nice little Fascist,” he remembered drily.

“I had only one passion,” he would recall in 1948, “to escape poverty. I had another passion—not to work hard.” Since the most easily managed literary form seemed to be the short story, by the time he was nineteen Raphaelson had begun tinkering with fiction. After a short run as a police reporter for The New York Times, he began to work in the advertising business by day and to write by night.

Between 1922 and 1924, Raphaelson worked in the ad agency, read H. L. Mencken, The Nation, and The New Republic, and dedicated himself to the proposition that he was not a genius. He was existing, he remembered “in a nirvana of self-confessed mediocrity.”

In January 1922, Everybody’s Magazine published his story “The Day of Atonement.” The story had been percolating for several years, ever since Raphaelson, then a senior at the University of Illinois, had seen Al Jolson in Robinson Crusoe, Jr. Raphaelson had instantly responded to the religious fervor implicit in Jolson’s singing style, and constructed a story centering on the dramatic conflict between Old World roots and the temptations of assimilation.

Goaded by his secretary, Raphaelson adapted “The Day of Atonement” into a play. On September 14, 1925, Raphaelson’s adaptation of his story opened on Broadway with George Jessel in the title role. It was called The Jazz Singer and had a very successful run of thirty-eight weeks, with the movie rights going to Warner Bros.

“I’m not ashamed of the play, but the movie embarrasses me,” Raphaelson told Bill Moyers near the end of his life, and that was in spite of his admiration for Al Jolson.

But then, most movies embarrassed Raphaelson; as he would frankly tell Robert Carringer in 1973, “Pictures meant nothing to me. They were just like going to the circus. If I went to the circus I wouldn’t envy Mr. Barnum, I’d say let him have his millions . . . And if someone would have to write a scenario for the tightrope walker—I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t want to be the one who did that. So that movies couldn’t have meant less to me.”

While the play and movie adaptation had put a good deal of money into Raphaelson’s pocket—the movie rights alone brought fifty thousand dollars—the stock market crash of 1929 removed all of it and more. With a family to support (in 1928 Raphaelson married the former Dorshka Wegman, a performer in the Ziegfeld Follies; they had their first child a year later), there seemed only one obvious answer to the problem of making a living.

So it was that Samson Raphaelson made himself available to Hollywood, and would continue to do so for the next twenty-five years. Like Ben Hecht, like dozens of other writers, Raphaelson regarded screenwriting as a craft, a job of work that would finance a comfortable life for him and his family, sustaining him while he did what he regarded as his real work, his plays.

Raphaelson completed his first couple of assignments for Paramount without undue problems, but was dissatisfied. He was getting $750 a week from Paramount and had gone to B. P. Schulberg, head of the studio, to tell him “If you give me a $750 assignment, I’m not going to be any good. Give me a $2,500 assignment. You’ll be saving a lot of money.”

Schulberg had been courteous and said “I’ll keep that in mind.” Three days later he sent for Raphaelson and introduced him to Lubitsch. Raphaelson needed no background. “I admired him beyond any director whose work I had seen,” he remembered in 1971. “I had seen The Love Parade . . . I was enchanted with it. High comedy. Style. It was a Lubitsch picture.”

Although Raphaelson had totally forgotten about Lubitsch’s interest in The Jazz Singer, Lubitsch had not forgotten about him. Ernst was considering material that called for the same kind of strongly emotional bonds between generations as The Jazz Singer.

Lubitsch immediately began telling Raphaelson the story of a European play called The Man I Killed. Within two minutes, Raphaelson broke in to criticize it. “As he went along, I had a feeling that this guy and I would get along. We both hollered, talked loud, and waved our hands. That was it. I was assigned to Lubitsch.”

The two men quickly fell into step, complementing each other. “Lubitsch was concentratedly gentle,” remembered Helen Vreeland Smith, Raphaelson’s secretary. “But Rafe could be scathing and sarcastic. I remember that when I got married, it was on a Saturday, and Rafe got furious with me because I wouldn’t run an errand for him that morning.”

Raphaelson was particularly enchanted one day during the writing of The Man I Killed, as Lubitsch was acting out a scene in a graveyard. The scene called for a person on either side of a grave, and Lubitsch created the mood, even imitated the sound of a bird singing. When the time came to switch characters, he was living the moment so intensely that he began jumping over the grave, back and forth, hopping over a mound of fresh earth that existed only in his imagination.

Although The Man I Killed was written first (during October, November, and early December 1930), it was actually shot after The Smiling Lieutenant. Their collaborator on The Man I Killed was Ernest Vajda. According to Raphaelson, Vajda never presented a line or an idea. He would say “Our problem is . . .” and paraphrase what Lubitsch had been saying.

Without a break, as soon as The Man I Killed was written, the same three men collaborated on the script for The Smiling Lieutenant. On that picture, Raphaelson was no longer the insecure neophyte, and Lubitsch felt that Raphaelson was entitled to first script credit, which Vajda actively resisted.

“I only think it’s right,” Lubitsch told Vajda. “You got first credit on the other one.”

“You do that and I don’t work for you anymore,” retorted Vajda.

“That’s the chance I’ll have to take,” said Lubitsch. He gave Vajda the credit he wanted, but, except for a brief stint on The Merry Widow a few years later, never worked with him again.

Raphaelson, as well as many others, felt a slight queasiness about The Man I Killed. “I felt his whole attack on that picture was wrong. I came home and worried about it and then would go back and fight it out with him. He said, ‘I know, I know. You stay with it this way and you’ll see. It’ll work out.’

“It didn’t. It came out just as morbid and unattractive as I thought it would.”

In spite of the indifferent results of their first collaboration, Raphaelson and Lubitsch quickly formed a professional bond that would never be broken. Over the next seventeen years, the two men would write nine pictures together, invariably following the same routine. They always worked in the same room, Monday through Friday, from nine to noon and two to six. In between the two sessions came lunch, a walk, and perhaps a catnap.

The script was not written so much as talked, with a secretary taking it all down. If the work was being done at Lubitsch’s home rather than the studio, the writer would usually be invited to stay for dinner, in which case the only off-limits subject would be the script.

As the two men talked, it would usually fall to Lubitsch to outline a given scene. He was insistent on excellence—“Let’s open different, better than anybody ever opened a goddamn picture,” he once exulted.

Raphaelson never caught the director thinking formulaically, looking for hooks for his fabled “touches.” “He wouldn’t say, ‘How can ve use a door in this scene?’ ” Raphaelson told Herman Weinberg. “He would face the problem and say, ‘Vat do ve do here? How do ve lick dis? How do ve say it vit style? How do ve say it different? How do ve say it different and good? Different and true?’ ”

On those occasions when the two men would hit a dead end they could not evade, Lubitsch would suggest “Ve write it dull, like in life—just like people talk in real life—real dull—and see if ve get any ideas from dat.” The process of creating a scene the wrong way would often point them toward the right way.

Raphaelson would do the actual writing—or, in his case, dictating. Verbally improvising, Raphaelson would dictate the scene, the secretary would take it down and type it up. The two men would then pore over the pages, adjusting, adding, subtracting, whatever. Brick by brick the script was built; there were no rewrites, no blue pages, no desperate on-the-set revisions. The first script was the only script.

“Lubitsch did need a writer,” remembered Sam Raphaelson, “but he wasn’t afraid of a good writer, which Hitchcock, I suspect, was, for very complex and obscure reasons. Lubitsch welcomed a good writer. That man had a sense of good writing second to none. If Shakespeare had been alive at his time, Lubitsch would have happily embraced him. And Shakespeare would have been a little better than he was . . . Lubitsch never cheapened you.”

The partnership produced that odd, comforting feeling of a collaboration so intense it’s virtually a symbiosis. As Raphaelson told Bill Moyers, “He wrote some of my best lines and I contributed more than a few of those silent things known as Lubitsch touches.”

(Gottfried Reinhardt, son of Max, and a Lubitsch assistant, wasn’t as sure as Raphaelson. “Lubitsch was 60 percent responsible for virtually every script he made,” according to Reinhardt. “He needed writers for questions of linguistic style, for idiom. His accent always remained atrocious. Up to his last days, he would not say ‘hundred’ as in English, but hundert as in German.”)

Once the script was finished, Raphaelson would usually head back east, but even when he didn’t, he went on a movie set less than half a dozen times in his life, and then only because Lubitsch needed to change a line of dialogue. “There was nothing to learn by watching a three-minute scene being shot over and over,” he would say.

“I’ve worked with directors before and since,” Raphaelson recalled in 1959. “I worked with Hitchcock, I worked with Cukor . . . I worked with Frank Lloyd . . . Lubitsch towered above anybody, creatively, that I met in Hollywood; director, producer, and I would say writer, if you limited it to the screen. He was a man of enormous taste. He was a very creative man. I would nominate him and bet on it . . . that he was the greatest craftsman who ever lived . . . in the sense of knowing the most brilliant and original way to use the medium.”

To a class of students in playwrighting, Raphaelson would exclaim that Lubitsch was “a very great craftsman. He was not a writer, but he was probably as good a half-writer as ever lived. Working with him, I learned enough technique to last a lifetime—too much technique. I became fascinated with the how and, for three years, lost all contact with the what.”

Raphaelson gave Ernst a sympathetic collaborator, with a mind that could slip into lockstep with his own. Both of them believed implicitly in writing good acting parts, but Lubitsch pushed Raphaelson’s writing far beyond the conventionalities it tended to live by. Left to his own devices, Raphaelson stopped at the point where Lubitsch began.

“I loved the guy,” Raphaelson said. “He wasn’t a warm man, no, but what I’d call a glowing man. He’d been trained in the tough world of German films and politics and he knew those tactics but he never used them.”

In the beginning of their collaboration, it had never occurred to Raphaelson that he could be a writer of comedy. But as he would throw out ideas with a demurral like, “Here’s an exaggeration, a kind of cheap belly laugh stuff that we ought to get, but with authenticity,” Lubitsch would listen and respond with “What’s the matter with that?”

“He made me realize,” remembered Raphaelson, “that I’d been throwing away a lot of good material because I hadn’t stayed with it and studied it and given character to it without losing it. That I was too ‘earnest and sincere’ and lost sparkle through it.”

The two men even began socializing occasionally, Raphaelson accompanied by his beautiful, intelligent wife, Dorshka, Lubitsch by the actress Ona Munson. The two couples would often attend the Mayfair dance on Saturday nights at the Ritz Hotel. “He was a lovely dancer,” remembered Dorshka Raphaelson, “and he and Ona were a darling couple. He had wonderful, sparkling dark eyes, and he was very mischievous and teased me a lot. ‘You should be a good wife for Sam,’ he would say. ‘Take his shoes off when he gets home, bring him his slippers, light his pipe for him.’ He would laugh as he said it. Rafe said that Lubitsch was bored by wives, but I don’t think he was bored by me.”

Yet, for all of their obvious sympatico, the two men never achieved a true intimacy as friends. When they worked together, their Christmas gifts to each other were strictly nominal tokens—boxes of candy, or baskets of fruit and nuts. In this period, Ernst’s closest friends were Europeans like Paul Kohner and Henry Blanke, men as consumed by their work as Lubitsch.

“He always had a new project that he was moving toward after he completed the old project,” remembered a good friend. “His life was an uninterrupted ribbon of film. He didn’t talk about himself, he talked about people and situations.” In other words, possible screen material. Friends, then, were mortar between the bricks. A man with the strong theatrical orientation of Sam Raphaelson didn’t have the compulsive interest in the movie business shared by most of Ernst’s friends.

Once, when Rafe and Dorshka arrived in Hollywood on a Sunday afternoon to begin work on a picture, Lubitsch called and invited them over after dinner. Upon their arrival, Lubitsch shook their hands and, saying “Now I tell you the story,” sat Raphaelson down while Dorshka listened “like a good housewife.” There was no small talk, no How-was-your-trip? preliminaries.

“I think I am possessed only of a fascination for the work I have chosen to do,” Ernst wrote in 1938. “I am so engrossed by the production of a film that I literally think of nothing else. I have no hobby, no outside interests and want none.”

•  •  •

In September 1931, nearly a year after he and Raphaelson wrote the script, Lubitsch finally began shooting The Man I Killed, finishing it forty-three days later. Although he had hoped to use Emil Jannings in the role of the German father, Jannings’ unsuccessful tussles with English had forced him to beat a hasty retreat back to Germany, where he would become a primary cultural jewel in the propaganda films of the Third Reich. Lubitsch replaced Jannings with Hollywood’s all-purpose cranky old man, Lionel Barrymore.

The film opens with heavy music, and the image of a tolling bell clues the audience in that this is going to be a drama. The opening five minutes amplify hopes. In a rapid, impressionistic montage, Lubitsch shows a victory parade watched by a man with one leg, celebratory cannons scaring a bed-ridden patient in a veterans hospital, and, savagely, sabres dangling from officers’ waists cluttering the aisle of a church. As the soldiers rise at the end of the service, the camera cranes down to a close-up of the desperately clasped hands of Paul (Phillips Holmes). “Father help me,” he says. “I can’t get away from his eyes.”

We flashback from the eyes of Paul to the eyes of the man he killed in combat. He finds letters on the body and discovers that, like him, he was also a musician.

Back in present time, he makes his way to the cemetery to place flowers on the grave, where he meets the man’s mother and fiancée. Lacking the courage to tell them he’s responsible for the man’s death, he lets them think that he and the dead man served together, whereupon they insist he come home with them and tell them about their beloved’s time in the service.

The rest is easy to anticipate. The father (Lionel Barrymore) virtually adopts him, while the fiancée (Nancy Carroll) falls in love with him, all of which only increases his sense of guilt and unworthiness. Ultimately, he admits his responsibility for the son’s death, whereupon Nancy Carroll refuses to let him return their lives to the darkness where they have been for the past three years. Barrymore gives Holmes his son’s violin, and he and Nancy Carroll swing into a gentle duet, as the healing power of time and music hold gentle sway over all.

Lubitsch manages to accomplish some nice things in the film; there is a sense of European village life, as the shopkeepers rush from door to door telling each other to watch the young couple in love, and there are some moments of tart, observational truth as well. An eavesdropping old woman leaning out of a window darts out of the frame then comes back with a pillow to make her leaning more comfortable.

But Phillips Holmes is a moist actor (and, apparently, a vain one; Dorothy Coonan Wellman remembered the actor dyeing his hair orange, so it would photograph blonder) who was, for the most part, relegated to “sensitive” parts, and Lubitsch allows him to act in a hand-wringing, overwrought style. In addition, Holmes is supposed to be French, Lionel Barrymore German. Neither is remotely convincing.

The Man I Killed is a pocket drama, and a schematic, unorganic one at that. The heavy, barnstorming performances are out of synch with the material, which needs to be underplayed. For the only time in his American career, Lubitsch was attempting to be Significant, and it destroys the picture.

In the Yiddish theater, there was a moment in every play that was known as the “tablecloth speech,” so called because it covered everything; there are several tablecloth speeches in The Man I Killed. Lionel Barrymore gets one (“We’re too old to fight but we aren’t too old to hate”); even Nancy Carroll gets one, which is unfortunate because not only does she move like a truckdriver, she acts like one.

Lubitsch makes The Man I Killed into a Stanley Kramer-style thesis film, and the sticky ending gives us a glimpse of what Lubitsch might have done with The Jazz Singer, draining the story of Jewish assimilation of all of its—and Jolson’s—energetic show-biz vulgarity, which is to say, its very reason for being.

In attempting such a weighty subject, Lubitsch felt compelled to drop most of his characteristic sprightliness, his humor, his nimble way with actors. Part of the problem may have been an inability to establish a rapport with Nancy Carroll; Lubitsch told Miriam Hopkins that “she doesn’t understand what I want her to do . . . she doesn’t want direction . . . I said to her . . . ‘If you would just put yourself in my arms’ [hands]. And she said, ‘That I should do that with you, [a] German?’ ”

The end result is one of his worst films. The reviews were respectful, the box office dire; Paramount began scrambling to try to recoup at least some of the weighty negative cost of $889,154.

“The thousands who have seen and been moved by The Man I Killed,” said an ad in The New York Times on February 9, 1932, “have taken such a personal interest in its success that they have actually insisted on a new title for the picture . . . one more worthy of the greatness of its drama and magnificent love story!

“In deference to these many requests, The Man I Killed is renamed Broken Lullaby.” It didn’t help. The Man I Killed/Broken Lullaby was the biggest failure Lubitsch had had since the debacle of Eternal Love.

•  •  •

In 1932, after a courtship of nearly four years, Paul Kohner and Lupita Tovar were engaged. It seemed an odd match; Kohner was well known around town as a lover of beautiful women, while Tovar came from such a strict Latin environment that Kohner was the first man she had ever gone out with. The marriage was to be performed in Berlin, where Kohner would run the European office of Universal Pictures.

Just before they were to leave, Lubitsch sidled up to Tovar and said, “I think you’re making a mistake. I give this marriage six months.”

An astonished Lupita could only gasp, “Mr. Lubitsch!”

“Yes,” he continued. “Paul is European, you’re Mexican. He’s Jewish, you’re Catholic. Do you speak German?”

“No.”

“Does he speak Spanish?”

“No.”

“Well, how do you expect it to work? You’re from two entirely different cultures. And you’re still a little girl.” Lubitsch reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. “I tell you, if you get in trouble, don’t forget the number here. You call me.”

After Kohner and Tovar had been married a short time, Lubitsch was making a brief return to Berlin when he attended a party thrown by Erich Pommer in his honor. He came over to the new Mrs. Kohner and, without preamble, said “Still happy?”

“But I’ve only been married a month . . .”

“Doesn’t make any difference. Are you happy?”

“Very.”

“You sure? You’re not telling me a story?”

Despite his surface sophistication, Lubitsch’s understanding of the complicated transaction known as marriage was essentially superficial. The Kohners would be married for fifty-six years. “I never stopped to think about the difference,” remembered Lupita Tovar Kohner. “I was very much in love and apparently so was Paul. Those differences were never a problem. I learned German and he learned Spanish, and when we met, he could hardly speak English. We respected each other. If I had to do it all over again, I would.”

Lupita Kohner smiled as she thought of her marriage. “We grew old,” she said, “and we were still holding hands.”

•  •  •

According to Sam Raphaelson, it was Paramount that nudged Lubitsch into a supervisory function, so that he could get more done each year and make more money as well. Variety, on the other hand, reported that Lubitsch’s contract called for him to occasionally supervise the work of other directors without receiving any additional salary.

Since Lubitsch was heavily involved with The Man I Killed, Paramount decided that Lubitsch should only “supervise” the production of One Hour with You. Lubitsch’s contract was due to expire on March 7, 1932, and Paramount had scheduled Chevalier for two pictures: One Hour with You would begin production on October 26, 1931, and a second picture, to be directed by Lubitsch, was due to begin January 25, 1932. In essence, Paramount was squeezing as much work as possible out of Lubitsch before his contract expired.

George Cukor was assigned to One Hour with You on September 28. On October 22, Lubitsch completed shooting The Man I Killed, promptly sat down and took a look at the proposed script for One Hour with You, and just as promptly threw it out. A worried Lubitsch got the start date for One Hour with You pushed back to November, and quickly began work on a new script with Raphaelson.

Lubitsch and Raphaelson rewrote the old script for The Marriage Circle. As each sequence was completed, Lubitsch would invite Cukor (whose name he mispronounced “Kookor” instead of “Quekor”) to hear the scene. “Cukor would applaud,” remembered Raphaelson, “and very courteously thank him and say ‘Great’ and go. That was Cukor’s total contribution to the script.”

On November 12, the picture began shooting without a completed script (in fact, the film’s script would not be finished until December 24, only two weeks before the picture was completed).

But while the Lubitsch touch could be present in the script, Lubitsch pictures could not be mass-produced. After two days of production, Lubitsch asked Raphaelson to come and look at the rushes, in itself an unusual occurrence. The scene Cukor was working on was near the beginning of the picture, when Chevalier comes out of the bedroom and explains to the audience that their lascivious thoughts are absurd, that the lady waiting for him is his wife.

“I sit there and I see Chevalier going up into the room . . . the door shuts, then he opens the door, takes a cigarette from his pocket, lights it, and having lighted the cigarette and dropped the match into an ashtray on the little hall table, then [emphasis Raphaelson’s] he says, ‘I know what you think, ladies and gentleman . . .’ ”

The result, according to Raphaelson, was the slaughtering of the scene’s tempo for the sake of some casual stage business. “He was adding some goddamn obscure directorial touch to it,” remembered Raphaelson. In a deposition taken for a resulting court case (Cukor v. Paramount, New York Supreme Court), Lubitsch said that Cukor’s work lacked “the Continental flavor which was so essential to this type of picture. We felt also that the dialogue was not pointed in the right way and was not spoken as effectively as it should be. We particularly noticed that all of the actors over-acted their parts and in the silent parts were even grimacing.”

Even Maurice Chevalier, hardly a team player, agreed, saying that “I was being directed much too broadly by Cukor and without any of the subtlety with which Lubitsch had directed me in The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant.”

On the third day of production, Lubitsch began supervising camera placements and “conferring” with Cukor about the picture. The next day, Lubitsch reshot the offending scene, then with a profusion of “George, do you mind, I . . .” segued into rehearsing the actors before every scene. Beginning November 20, Lubitsch took the production over completely. For the next six weeks, Cukor sat quietly on the set, drawing his salary, confining most of his conversation to expressions of approval after each Lubitsch-directed scene.

In succeeding years, Cukor was always rather circumspect about this professional and personal humiliation, tending to ascribe the problem to the fact that, with Lubitsch, “everything was so carefully calculated in advance . . . everything was down pat, perfect. He knew exactly what was to be said and done. I’m not that rigid. In places I allow improvisation. I feel my way more.”

One Hour with You was completed on January 7, 1932, at a very pricey cost of $1.1 million, although that figure also included a French-language version. Lubitsch took sole charge of the postproduction process. When the film was previewed on February 9, the credits read “An Ernst Lubitsch Production” and “Directed by George Cukor.” Lubitsch waited for Cukor to come forth and refuse to take credit for a film that he had not in fact directed. A highly favorable review in The Hollywood Reporter of February 10, which gave credit to Cukor, finally got Lubitsch’s back up.

The next day Lubitsch fired off an angry letter to B. P. Schulberg: “. . . after careful consideration, I came to the conclusion that it would be advisable for me to ask you to take my name entirely off the picture.

“From all I have heard so far the picture stands a chance to be rated as the best directed Chevalier picture, surpassing all my previous efforts . . . the spectator and the critics not familiar with the inside story will probably attribute the better direction to the help of George Cukor.

“As long as it is not possible for me to get full credit for my hard work on this picture, I think that at least I should not get any damage out of it. I believe that if my name is not mentioned in connection with the picture at all, I would at least be protected against any possible damage.

“I am confident that you will understand my point of view and will cooperate with me in this matter.”

Lubitsch’s fake noblesse oblige was a masterful bluff. Schulberg was hardly likely to snub one of his most valued directors—and one whose contract was about to expire—in favor of an untried talent like Cukor, no matter how promising. He promptly called Cukor in and asked him to take his name off the picture. Cukor refused. Schulberg responded by ordering his name removed from the picture, and Paramount sent out a “corrected billing” press sheet to exhibitors: “UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS GEORGE CUKOR’S NAME TO BE MENTIONED IN ANY WAY IN CONNECTION WITH ONE HOUR WITH YOU.”

In the last week of February, Cukor filed suit to block the scheduled premiere of One Hour with You on March 23, 1932. Depositions were taken, and much dirty laundry was about to be publicly aired when a deal was cut. Paramount agreed to let Cukor out of his contract so he could go to work for his friend David Selznick at RKO. In return, Lubitsch got the credit to which he was entitled. The final credits read “Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.” On another line, “Assisted by George Cukor.”

Film historian Barry Sabath, after a painstaking perusal of Cukor’s affadavits, estimates that Cukor’s contribution to the finished film consists largely of single close-ups without dialogue, or shots of feet going up stairs, the sort of afterthought material that is often left to second units or assistant directors. For better or worse, then, One Hour with You is a Lubitsch film. George Cukor’s own summation of the entire unfortunate affair seems eminently fair. “With the best intentions in the world,” he told the critic and novelist Gavin Lambert, “I couldn’t do a Lubitsch picture. Lubitsch was what they really wanted and what they should have had [from the beginning].”

•  •  •

One Hour with You opens in a park, with various couples necking. The only man not to panic when a flashlight falls on him is Chevalier. “You can’t make love anywhere,” says the policeman.

“But, officer, he can,” says Jeanette MacDonald.

Enraptured by the compliment, Chevalier lights up: “Darling!”

Some of the piquancy is reduced when Chevalier addresses the camera a little later and informs us that “We really are married.” The Marriage Circle plot is, for the most part, followed. Roland Young gets the Menjou part, but he lacks Menjou’s delicious imperviousness, which is, after all, the essence of the joke.

The film even adopts rhyming dialogue briefly, which is unfortunate, as the meter is the same one later used by Dr. Seuss. While One Hour with You offers two good songs in “Oh, That Mitzi” and the title number, a few other songs are not as charming, and the rhymed dialogue quickly grows irritating. Mostly, it’s a soufflé that obstinately refuses to rise, which, considering the difficulties of its production, is not too surprising.

The film does feature one priceless moment, when Charlie Ruggles, outfitted as some sort of Renaissance prince, arrives at a party to find it is not of the costume variety. Calling his valet, he asks why he told him it was a costume party.

“Ah, Monsieur, I did so want to see you in tights,” replies the suddenly ardent servant.

•  •  •

Since Paramount did not hold an option, Lubitsch’s services were definitely up for grabs as of the first week of March 1932. Paramount wanted to re-sign him, and discussed either eliminating his supervisory duties altogether or expanding them by giving him his own unit. Columbia and United Artists also expressed interest, but when Lubitsch arrived in New York on February 16, he announced that he was seriously interested in producing some Broadway shows in association with producer Walter Wanger, the composer Dimitri Tiomkin, and Tiomkin’s wife, Albertina Rasch.

Lubitsch may have been bluffing; he also may have been entirely serious. He genuinely adored the theater, but it is a highly speculative business and Lubitsch, aside from taking money seriously, was far less sure of himself in the theater than he was in the cinema. Lubitsch once told Hedda Hopper that “[For] twenty years I wanted to [direct on the stage] but I never had the nerve to stick my neck out.” The tentative thoughts about returning to his first love were closed out when Paramount made a preemptive strike that must have appealed to Ernst’s considerable need for security and continuity.

Under the old contract, Lubitsch had been receiving $125,000 a picture for an average of two pictures a year. Under the new contract, he was to be paid a weekly salary that came to $225,000 a year for the same two pictures. It was a slight pay cut, but the difference in salary was offset by a provision that allowed Lubitsch to make one picture on loan-out.

Besides signing a new contract and seeing all the latest shows in New York, Lubitsch also shot a new ending for One Hour with You at the Astoria studio. On March 28, he returned to Hollywood to be met by Jeanette MacDonald. He told waiting reporters that he had no plans to marry Ona Munson, that they were “just good friends.”

When One Hour with You was released on March 25, it was greeted by the usual critical encomiums. The New York Times said that it was “an excellent production, with Lubitsch and Chevalier at the top of their form,” while the Los Angeles Times wrote that “The Lubitsch touch, which has become more than a legend, is omnipresent in this production.”

•  •  •

One day early in 1932, Lubitsch arrived at the Raphaelsons’ house for lunch and told Rafe the story of their next film. It derived from a play called The Honest Finder by Laszlo Aladar. “No use reading the play, Sem. It’s bad. We work with this material, you see.” Later, Raphaelson did get a copy of the play but never bothered to read it.

Raphaelson was unaware of the fact that the central character of what became Trouble in Paradise was based on the famous Hungarian swindler and thief Georges Manolescu, whose 1907 Memoirs resulted in at least two silent Elms, one, in 1929, starring Ivan Mosjoukine, who was attempting to reestablish his European career after an unsuccessful sojourn with Universal.^I

With his passion for all things Hungarian, Lubitsch probably knew of Manolescu, whose name, in the film, was slightly altered to Gaston Monescu. Trouble in Paradise continued Lubitsch’s habit of latching on to an obscure, inferior play, usually Hungarian, and playing Pygmalion to its dog-eared Galatea. Although these works were nearly always structurally flawed (“You could have a play that fell apart and still have a success in Budapest,” remembered Raphaelson), they invariably had an intriguing central situation and romantic characters. That was all Lubitsch needed. Psychologically, it made more sense to him to fix what was broken than to build from the ground up.

(In the fifteen years remaining to him, Lubitsch would produce only one entirely original script. Proving that he was a gifted creator as well as an interpreter, To Be or Not to Be was one of his greatest films.)

The central idea for the film was for a satirical treatment of a whodunit. Since neither Lubitsch or Raphaelson had ever done a whodunit or had any particular interest in the form, they called in a friendly contract hack named Grover Jones, who had matriculated in silent slapstick comedies. They promptly found that, as Raphaelson remembered, “We didn’t need his savvy. He didn’t know what the hell we were doing in our style, what we were after. We were so far away from him that he was cheerfully bewildered.”

Jones sat there amiably spinning anecdotes at lunch while Lubitsch and Raphaelson wrote the script, and was rewarded with an “adaptation” credit. Some parts were written for specific actors such as Edward Everett Horton and Charlie Ruggles. The hushed, murmuring Herbert Marshall seems to have come in later in the casting process. Lubitsch must have been amused by Marshall’s way with women; while very much married, Marshall managed affairs with both Kay Francis and Miriam Hopkins, as well as a serious relationship with Gloria Swanson, all within the space of a few years.

As always, Lubitsch and “Sem” slaved over the script. “We spent-oh, maybe three days, getting that opening shot,” remembered Raphaelson. “He wouldn’t be content unless we got a brilliant opening shot. We wanted to introduce Venice . . . Now, pictorially, the conventional way of saying that is to open on a long shot of Venice, medium shot of wherever you want to be, and close shot on the canal and the house, and then you go inside the house or hotel or whatever it is. That’s [the] conventional way.

“Now, Lubitsch would sit and say, ‘How do we do that, without doing that?’ ”

What Lubitsch and Raphaelson finally came up with was the famous opening where the singer of a glorious operatic air turns out to be a trash collector. Even in glorious, romantic Venice, someone has to pick up the garbage but, this being Venice-and Lubitsch-they must do it with panache. This sardonic undercutting of the ordinary is perhaps the quintessential “Lubitsch touch,” but the director was careful not to overdo a good thing.

“Other times, he started [writing the script] right away,” Raphaelson told Barry Sabath. “He didn’t want to get a brilliant opening shot. Here, he felt he wanted it. He wanted to open with laughter and with style-and style, of course, is the essence of Lubitsch.”

When the script was finished on July 15, 1932, Paramount notified Ernst that “the following players are available and should be considered: Adrienne Ames, Phillips Holmes, Charles Starrett, Irving Pichel, Cary Grant.” He promptly ignored all those possibilities and cast the picture his own way.

Ernst began shooting The Honest Finder the last week in July and finished in the first part of September. There were the usual minor complications, courtesy of the frantic Miriam Hopkins. In one scene, Hopkins ruthlessly upstaged Kay Francis by slowly turning the chair in which she was sitting until her profile had magically become her entire face. A furious Francis complained to Lubitsch, who assured her the problem would be solved in the next take. It was, by the simple expedient of nailing Hopkins’ chair to the floor.

After the expenses of his last several pictures, Lubitsch cut back: Trouble in Paradise cost only $519,706. It was not until early October, nearly a month after the film finished production, that the film was finally titled Trouble in Paradise, which won out over temporary titles like The Golden Widow, Thieves and Lovers, and A Very Private Scandal. As was usually the case, Lubitsch came up with the title (the only tide Raphaelson ever contributed to their collaborations was The Smiling Lieutenant).

Trouble in Paradise is the essence of middle-period Lubitsch. After the delectable opening, we see a man climb over a palazzo balcony, down a tree, and steal away into the night. There has been a jewel robbery.

Later, in another part of the hotel, Gaston (Herbert Marshall) is preparing for a tryst with Lily (Miriam Hopkins). “It must be the most marvelous supper,” he tells the waiter. “We may not eat it, but it must be marvelous . . . You see that moon? I want to see that moon in the champagne.”

“Yes, Baron,” replies the waiter, writing down on the bill “Moon in champagne.”

Gaston and Lily are a couple of blithe crooks—he committed the jewel robbery at the beginning of the film—and the success of their courtship is determined by a can-you-top-this demonstration of professional skill. Lubitsch and Raphaelson then introduce us to Colet and Company, successful French parfumiers. Company director Adolph Giron (C. Aubrey Smith) is saying that in times like these, salaries need to be cut. Madame Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), demurs, saying that business bores her.

Lubitsch brings these two plot strands together by having Gaston steal Madame Colet’s jewel-encrusted purse at the opera, then returning it when she offers a reward large enough to enable Gaston and Lily to return to Venice for their anniversary. Gaston returns the purse, offers Madame some makeup advice, turns on his considerable charm, and soon is offered the job of Madame Colet’s secretary, the perfect job for a man intending to steal someone blind.

But Gaston and Mariette begin to fall in love, and Lily and Mariette begin to fence knowingly over access to Gaston. Of course Mariette pursues him; of course, he lets her catch him. Ultimately, Gaston must choose between two women that he loves, one of whom is determined to rob the other as compensation for having her lover seduced.

The determining moment is Gaston’s confession to Madame Colet. She has already been told of her secretary’s true identity, and she is opening the safe to see if it can be true when he tells her that Adolph Giron has been embezzling money from the firm for years. She blanches and refuses to allow him to call the police. The scandal! The indignity!!

“You have to be in the social register to keep out of jail,” Gaston says with a touch of bitterness. “But when a man starts at the bottom and works his way up—a self-made crook—then you say, ‘Call the police! Put him behind bars! Lock him up!’ ”

So they part, he to be with Lily, whose larcenous heart is unsullied by false social poses. “Do you know what you’re missing?” he asks Mariette at the door. She nods dreamily.

“No,” he says, helpfully reaching into his pocket and pulling out a pearl necklace. “That’s what you’re missing . . . Your gift to her.”

Mariette smiles and says graciously, “With the compliments of Colet and Company.” In the cab, Gaston gives Lily the pearls. She pulls out Mariette’s jeweled purse and drops the pearls in, then looks anxiously for something else. Gaston hands her the roll of money from Mariette’s safe and they embrace. Love and larceny not only coexist, they positively bask in each other’s company.

Lubitsch orchestrates his film with matchless grace and style to the nth degree, using all manner of optical devices—dissolves, wipes—even near-recitatives to move the film along on its toes. And, his professional luck was holding; Trouble in Paradise was released just a year and a half ahead of the imposition of the Production Code, which would have made a story centering on sexual swapping and resolutely unpunished crime impossible.

More heavily scored than most 1932 films, Lubitsch directs Trouble in Paradise as if it were an art deco musical, with the dialogue in place of lyrics and the characters as the elegant score. Miriam Hopkins runs at her usual frantic pace, but Herbert Marshall and the languid, knowing Kay Francis become the film’s shimmering, tranquil erotic center.

Lubitsch never tries to make the characters conventionally warm or likable. At one point, Lily tells Madame Colet that her mother is dead. “That’s the trouble with mothers,” Colet responds. “First you get to like them. Then they die.” Gaston orders “deep red roses” for Mariette as a parting gift, but has them put on her tab. The characters’ heartlessness is part of their charm. They may lie, but never to each other; unlike Giron, they’re not hypocrites.

Trouble in Paradise is perhaps Lubitsch’s clearest statement yet on the tenuous nature of romantic relationships, and on the necessity of variation and some gentle mutual deceit to stave off lethargy and boredom. It’s a dazzling Möbius strip of erotic allusion, genial irony and dégagé visual lyricism and elegance. There’s self-consciousness in the characters—their arch sophistication is always poised on the precipice of parody, yet never quite tumbles in—but there is no self-righteousness. Gaston may be cheerfully amoral, but he never mocks the pretensions and the vanities of the rich while he’s stealing from them, because what he really wants is to live like them. It’s nice work if you can get it.

At the same time, Lubitsch creates a world that, underneath the glowing surfaces of Hans Dreier’s furniture and sets, is recognizably real. People steal while pretending to be honest, they fret more over a lost handbag than over the starving people they pass on the way to work. These ironies are never stated directly, but they’re there nonetheless.

The rate of consumption of Madame Colet and her friends is so spectacular—and so casual—that Lubitsch’s clear implication is that they deserve to be robbed. What sets Madame Colet apart is that she seems to realize it. That a man like Gaston Monescu is doing the robbing is merely poetic justice. Although without work or training, his industriousness marks him as their (im)moral superior. Equally ruthless, but swifter, more elegant, he is one of them.

•  •  •

The elegance that cascades off the screen in the Lubitsch films of the Paramount era, and their very specific texture, is partially the result of two men besides Ernst: the designer Hans Dreier and the costumer Travis Banton. Ernst had learned the importance of homogeneity in a theatrical presentation from Max Reinhardt, and had even hired Ernst Stern, Reinhardt’s designer at the Deutsches Theater, to design several of his most visually inventive films. To achieve the look he wanted in his American films, it isn’t surprising that Lubitsch would once again turn to his countrymen.

Hans Dreier was born in Bremen in 1885, and served with the Lancers during World War I. After the war, he joined UFA as an assistant designer, amassing thirty credits in the next four years for such designers as Erno Metzner and Paul Leni, later a brilliant director and intimate friend of Lubitsch’s.

In 1924, Lubitsch brought Dreier to Paramount to design Forbidden Paradise, and the designer quickly demonstrated his great gift for subtle atmospherics. Although he rose to be the head of the Paramount art department by 1932—and would hold that position until his retirement in 1950-unlike his counterparts at RKO or MGM, Dreier continued to design specific films, among them most of the von Sternberg classics and many of Lubitsch’s major efforts, including Trouble in Paradise.

Dreier’s work consistently reflects a refined European sensibility and a belief in aesthetic unity. His designs for Trouble in Paradise are a stunning amalgam of art deco and Bauhaus and, in fact, Dreier used some of his own Bauhaus furniture on the sets. Personally, Dreier was charming, and he maintained the man/animal bond formed during his military service by owning a horse ranch in suburban Northridge. He had, however, a different face at work.

“Hans Dreier,” remembered Boris Leven, “was a tall man, whose posture was ramrod-straight, a real military bearing . . . And he ran the Art Department at Paramount—where I began my movie career in 1933—as a kind of military hierarchy. You’d spend so many years as a private-a draftsman; then you’d become a corporal—an assistant art director; and so on.”

“[He was] a good teacher,” said Robert Clatworthy, who trained under Dreier and went on to design Psycho and win an Oscar for Ship of Fools. “Not only of work but of conduct—of discipline and responsibility . . . He really ran the department . . . it was punctuality, discipline. He was a taskmaster.”

For Lubitsch, a set was much more than a backdrop before which the actors said their lines; a set was the frame for the picture, and it needed to reflect the subtext of the movie, what it was about. For Lubitsch, sets were a metaphor for the characters that inhabited them. Dreier responded by devising a rich, opulent, luminous surface that became the Paramount house style throughout the decade. As John Baxter wrote, “if Metro’s films had polish, Paramount films had a glow. The best of them seem gilded . . . as rich and brocaded as a Renaissance tapestry.”

Travis Banton was head costume designer at Paramount from 1928 to 1938. A heavy drinker, Banton’s idea of a good time was to board a streetcar and ride all the way to the end of the line and back again, while Edith Head, his frantic assistant, would follow in an auto, desperately trying to ascertain which car he was in so she could lure him back to the office.

One of the main advantages Banton had was the quality of the actresses he had to dress. Paramount stars like Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, and Miriam Hopkins had fabulous bodies. Over at Metro, the equally gifted Adrian had to engage in deceptions with oddly shaped women like Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, and Joan Crawford. Crawford, for instance, had a large head, big shoulders, a large chest and rib cage, but was actually rather skinny from the waist down. Her asymmetrical body meant that she usually had to be photographed in medium shots and close-ups, which, of course, worked to her dramatic advantage.

For all of his brilliance, Banton did not do hats; on Lubitsch’s production of Desire, a bunch of Lily Daché hats were brought to the set and Dietrich simply tried them on to see what she liked, without any particular discussion from anybody else.

Of the Paramount directors, only von Sternberg would involve himself heavily in the choice of costumes. In the early 1930s, the choice was largely up to the actress; much of the time, an actress would show up on the set wearing something the director had never seen. But as the decade wore on, the informality gradually dissipated; highly impressionistic costume sketches gave way to very specific drawings, and everybody at the studio tended to get more involved with costumes, which irritated pros like Banton.

In 1938, earning $1,000 a week, Banton’s contract came up for renewal. Paramount, just getting out from under the sagging box office of Marlene Dietrich (temporary) and Mae West (permanent), was emphasizing new stars like Dorothy Lamour and Shirley Ross, people in whom Banton was frankly uninterested. He asked for $1,500 a week, was refused, and, after a brief fling with free-lancing, went over to Fox.

Filling out the Lubitsch frame were the miraculous character actors who remained a constant even when the stars varied; the gracious, serene, befuddled Charlie Ruggles and the nervous ditherer Edward Everett Horton. Horton discovered that Lubitsch always had the actor in mind when he was writing the part. Horton particularly liked the fact that Ernst insisted that the actors rehearse for an entire week on the sets before beginning photography. “No matter what you thought or what you wanted to do, Mr. Lubitsch had gone over it in his mind and had come to a conclusion,” remembered Horton. “Just as soon as you could put yourself en rapport with him, you were very happy.

“He knew . . . actors very well,” concluded Horton, “and he wanted something from them that even they didn’t know they had. He was a genius, you see.”

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I. Mosjoukine’s only American film, Edward Sloman’s Surrender, keeps threatening to become first-rate but never quite does; the star’s American career was undoubtedly hampered by the fact that he bore a startling resemblance to the slapstick comedian Larry Semon.