An expectant Garbo and her bemused director on the set of Ninotchka.
The so-called happy ending of a high comedy should have a sardonic overtone . . . because there is no such thing as a happy ending for an intelligent writer.
–samson raphaelson
Ernst and Vivian’s honeymoon trip stretched on. There was Vienna, where Ernst’s niece Evie had moved after her father landed a job with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Ernst introduced Vivian to his niece, and they got on quite well. Vivian and Evie would go shopping together and the new wife would talk to Evie about how important it was that a woman work “and not loaf around.” Vivian was impressed by Evie’s command of English and suggested she should think about being a tourist guide. At the end of her stay in Vienna, she gave Evie a letter to take to American Express saying that she could highly recommend her as a guide.
When Ernst and his bride got together with composer Oscar Straus, the meshing of personalities was less satisfactory; Vivian didn’t care for him. Ernst paid a call on a young writer named Walter Reisch, who was working at the Sascha Studio. Lubitsch had seen some of Reisch’s films, liked what he saw, and discussed the possibility of Reisch writing a script of Der Rosenkavalier, which Lubitsch wanted to direct with Jeanette MacDonald, and, possibly, Emil Jannings as the baron.
The two men got on well, and Ernst told him they would talk again in eight weeks, when he returned from Moscow and Leningrad. In mid-April, Lubitsch and his wife arrived in Moscow for what he said was a “purely private” visit. Vivian’s mother was Russian, her father Swiss. Never having seen her mother’s homeland, she was curious. In Moscow, they were feted by Boris Shumyatsky, head of the Soviet Film Industry, but overall the trip was kept rigorously low-key. The Soviet film magazine Kino announced Ernst’s presence on April 17 with a brief item: “Ernst Lubitsch, a well-known German director working in Hollywood for the last fourteen years, is in Moscow now. Our film-goers must know his films Spanish Dancer [the Russian title for Rosita] and The Marriage Circle. Ernst Lubitsch will spend some days in Moscow and then leave for Hollywood where he plans to start shooting a new film right away.”
As they were disembarking at the train station, Ernst and Vivian were spotted by a friend of Gustav von Wangenheim, an old colleague from the Reinhardt days who had acted for Ernst in his two Shakespearean pastiches, Romeo and Juliet in the Snow and Kohlhiesel’s Daughter. Von Wangenheim and his wife, Inge, had been living in Moscow since 1933, and they immediately set out to find Lubitsch.
Ernst was staying at the Hotel Metropol and was overjoyed to see his old friend. Inge von Wangenheim appraised Vivian as “a beautiful American WASP, stiff and quiet, who appeared to have just thawed.” Ernst struck her as “alert, lively, piercing . . . truly nice, without guile or pretension.” The newlyweds accepted an invitation to dinner at von Wangenheim’s house on Kouznetski Most. The spread was bountiful: ham and caviar, food so good it melted even Vivian’s formidable reserve.
The conversation turned to the great Socialist experiment, and Inge von Wangenheim, a committed Communist, went into a long, humorless diatribe. What was happening in Russia, she declared, would be of enormous importance for the entire world, and she failed to understand how a man of culture and experience like Lubitsch could believe that there was anything more important than the effort to build a new world. Certainly, she said, “the dream machine lubricated by dollars” seemed a paltry, insufficient world in which to spend one’s life.
Ernst listened attentively, never interrupting let alone contradicting, black eyes dancing, clearly growing more and more amused. So this was what had replaced the dirt and squalor of czarist Russia from which his father had escaped! He could understand why the lower and working classes preferred life under communism—it held the promise of improvement. But for an artist?
At the end of the evening, Ernst grabbed his old friend by the arm and asked him bluntly, “Now tell me honestly, Gustav: are you happy here?-” The answer was affirmative—von Wangenheim and his wife would only return to Germany in 1945-but Lubitsch was clearly bewildered by his friend’s enthusiasm.
The evening was far from a total loss, however, for in the stentorian, mechanical-minded Inge von Wangenheim, Lubitsch discovered the matrix for the title character of what would become his most famous film: Ninotchka.
• • •
Ernst and Vivian had been forewarned about Russian attitudes toward wealthy American capitalists—it was the peak of a xenophobic period in Russia, so an imperialist Hollywood director would have been regarded as a virtual provocation. Ernst and Vivian took care to dress very plainly and kept a low profile. All this probably explains why the official Russian record is so spotty; the files of the Krasnogorsk Archives for Documentary Films and Photographs feature bountiful coverage of the 1931 Russian visit by DeMille, for instance, but nothing on Lubitsch’s visit five years later.
Despite Ernst’s care, there was trouble; Ernst had his gold watch taken away at the border and only got it back on his return. In what Walter Reisch would remember as nineteen days instead of eight weeks, Lubitsch and Vivian were back in Vienna. He would not discuss what he had seen and done in Russia, telling Reisch only that he was “committed to silence.”
On their return to Hollywood, Lubitsch moved Vivian into the house at 268 Bel Air Road he had built in 1934. Walter Laemmle remembered that “the Bel Air house was much smaller than the Beverly Drive house, which was a big colonial. The Bel Air house didn’t even have a very big back yard.” Still, the house on Bel Air Road had been built to Lubitsch’s specifications and was a clear reflection of his desires.
The man who slaved over every sentence of a script, every shot of a film, had approached his living environment with a perverse casualness. Lubitsch commissioned the design of the house from Walter Willrich, a friend who wasn’t even a professional architect. A hybrid of Mediterranean and Spanish styles, the house had an asymmetrical but not unattractive façade, with a two-story entrance hall, red tile floors, and hand-smoothed white plaster walls.
For the interior, Lubitsch hired his old art director Harold Grieve, who had abandoned art direction in 1927 when union restrictions placed what he considered to be outrageous strictures on his profession. Grieve quickly became a fashionable designer, decorating houses for Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg, John Gilbert, James Stewart, and seven houses for Bing Crosby.
Taking his cue from the roughhewn brick exterior, Grieve furnished the Lubitsch house in what might be called Hollywood rustic: studded leather furniture, iron and tin wall fixtures, lampshades with suede stitching. There were ceramic tiles on the walls and ceilings, exposed beams, and a split-level living room. The lower level offered a bare wood floor, while the upper level was tiled. There was a fireplace, a baby grand piano, and a large armoire that concealed a radio and a lavish record player that was almost a mini-jukebox.
The back windows looked out over the pool and cabana. Lubitsch’s own bedroom was almost spartan, with bare walls, and furnishings limited to a bed, chest of drawers, and daybed. The overall effect was clean, uncluttered, homey, noticeably unostentatious and basically pleasing, a functional proscenium for the personalities that would inhabit it.
Apparently, Vivian was none too thrilled with the house. The layout was awkward—there were far more halls than were necessary and no service staircase—and her bedroom was situated directly over the kitchen.
Very soon, Hollywood was none too thrilled with Vivian. Lubitsch’s friends were quickly shut out. “She ruled his life,” remembered one, claiming it was common knowledge that Vivian’s morning routine involved the servants trooping in to stand by her bed while she gave them their orders for the day. One old acquaintance of Lubitsch’s looked under a desk blotter during an infrequent visit to the house and discovered Vivian’s household budget.
“You never saw such a heavy-handed thing in your life,” remembered the friend. “Chocolates, $50; cigarettes, $40; florist, $200; and liquor and wine way, way, way above what they should have been.”
• • •
The trip to Russia disabused Lubitsch of any romantic feelings he might have had about socialism in any form. Soon after his return, he told Salka Viertel, a screenwriter and good friend of Garbo’s, to take his name off the roster of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, saying it was a tool of the Communists. As an alternative, beginning in October 1939, Ernst became actively involved in a project called the European Film Fund, jointly spearheaded by him and Paul Kohner. Essentially the idea of Charlotte (Mrs. William) Dieterle and Lisl (Mrs. Bruno) Frank, the fund’s committee consisted of Curtis Bernhardt, William Dieterle, Lothar Mendes, Gottfried Reinhardt, Bruno Frank, Erica Mann, Walter Reisch, Salka Viertel, and Conrad Veidt.
Successful émigrés working in Hollywood would tithe between 1 percent and 5 percent of their pay to a central fund. Paul Kohner’s office served as the headquarters, with Kohner as the main muscle. When émigrés arrived in Hollywood with little but their reputations and the clothes they were wearing, the fund would disburse a weekly stipend, sometimes as little as the forty dollars a month Ludwig Marcuse received. Occasionally, individual members of the fund would underwrite what amounted to a scholarship for a specific émigré, as William Dieterle did for Max Reinhardt.
In addition, Kohner functioned as virtually a one-man relief agency. During his daily contacts with the studios as an agent, Kohner would apply pressure on behalf of recently arrived émigrés. For a writer or actor, for instance, he would ask for a six-month or one-year contract at a minimum salary, generally a hundred dollars a week.
“He would regularly place people at MGM, Columbia, Universal,” remembered Lupita Tovar Kohner. “He was such a hard worker, and a marvelous salesman. He could sell you anything, but he worked extra hard on this because for a lot of these people, it was a matter of life and death.” Among the people that he placed at the studios were Alfred Döblin, the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Walter Mehring, a founder of the Dadaist poetry movement.
Most of the Europeans who were already working in Hollywood were willing to help, but they were not always as generous as Kohner thought they could be. “That guy could afford to give me more than five hundred dollars,” he’d say, but his wife would calm him. “Be grateful for the five hundred. Even if they are making a lot of money, people have obligations that go with it.”
Lubitsch would regularly attend the board meetings of the fund, but he rarely approached people for contributions or contracts. “It was awkward for Mr. Lubitsch,” remembered Lupita Kohner. “Some people can approach anybody, as long as it’s for somebody else, but Lubitsch couldn’t.”
When he did choose to help, he often made sure his actions were surreptitious, which led old acquaintances like Ernst Mátray to claim that he didn’t really want to help any of the emigrants. According to Mátray, when Max Reinhardt arrived in Hollywood, Lubitsch’s only response to his mentor’s presence was to ask friends “What does he want here?” Similarly, when Erich Pommer arrived back in Hollywood in 1934, the friendship between him and Lubitsch had cooled. “He was so successful here and my father wasn’t,” said John Pommer. “You must remember that there was a lot of infighting then. Tigers were about.”
But Max Reinhardt’s son disagrees. “Lubitsch was one of those Europeans who were fully cognizant of the fact they had to be firmly established in America,” said Gottfried Reinhardt. “Except for private relationships, he almost never helped during the immigration to get jobs. He had a way of helping through others. For instance, when I produced The Great Waltz, he called me up one day and said ‘I’ve got the conductor for you.’ It was a man called Arthur Gutman, who had conducted at the UFA-Palast in Berlin. Lubitsch would never have hired him himself, but he would call me and recommend him. That was his way.”
At times, Lubitsch would get directly involved. As early as 1933, he was soliciting funds for the United Jewish Appeal, putting a gentle but firm arm on Paramount peers like Cecil B. DeMille. Two-thirds of the money went to the Joint Distribution Committee, expressly for German Jews, while the rest went to the Jewish Agency for Palestine. “It is needless for me to elaborate upon the need for funds in this emergency,” Lubitsch wrote DeMille on July 6. “The condition of the Jews in Germany today is one of distress. At such a time long speeches and lengthy pleas are superfluous.”
Yet, Ernst’s feelings about the great waves of Jewish intelligentsia that came flooding out of Germany after 1933 were deeply ambivalent. For Lubitsch, men like Thomas Mann and Bruno Frank were unreachable heroes who could only remind him of his own lack of a distinguished academic background. Like Max Reinhardt, they made him slightly uncomfortable.
“Funnily enough, there was actually much more common ground between Lubitsch and the Americans than between Lubitsch and the Europeans,” remembered Gottfried Reinhardt. “There was not that gulf. He was very natural; he liked to sit down and play the piano—badly, but with fervor. And he was unreflective, like most Americans. Americans like that [kind of person]. Europeans—not necessarily.”
• • •
Back in Hollywood, it was time to get back to work. Now Lubitsch had everything he wanted: a beautiful young wife, a fine new house, with a built-in gym where his trainer, Terry Hunt, could give him the strenuous massages he liked. And there was Otto Werner, on board as chauffeur—Lubitsch did not drive—who would also become an indispensable right arm at home, just as Steffie Trondle was at the studio.
Basking in his successful middle age, Lubitsch was now smoking at least a dozen cigars every day and favored Viennese cooking, so long as it didn’t include cheese, which he loathed. Jewelry was limited to a watch, drinking to wine and beer. Sports bored him, with the exception of boxing. He favored showers over baths and was quite ticklish. He wore black silk pajamas, but when he wasn’t working he would occasionally get up, have breakfast, and, after a walk, decide to go back to bed.
Although he enjoyed horseback riding, he was no more at home with the natural world than the character he had played in Meyer from Berlin. One night, about the time he met Vivian, he was dining at home and heard strange noises from outside. “Otto, what is that?”
“Those are frogs in the pond, sir.”
Taking that under advisement, Lubitsch listened for a while, then said, “Otto, is this necessary?”
• • •
Lubitsch returned to the Paramount lot, twenty-seven acres in the heart of Hollywood illuminated, at one time or another, by practically every famous name in movie history. By this time, Paramount had assumed the realm of a cozy cocoon for Lubitsch, and for hundreds of others as well. Inside the big iron gate off Bronson Avenue there was a shoeshine stand run by a black man named Oscar Smith, who had arrived on the lot in 1919 through the good offices of Wallace Reid. Besides being the studio’s unofficial jester and mascot, Smith’s stand was Gossip Central and a primary gathering place for some of the highest-priced talent in Hollywood, including Bing Crosby and a young, comparatively low-priced contract writer named Billy Wilder.
In the center of the lot, right in front of the production office, was a pond, filled with goldfish. “It was a country club,” remembered Bob Hope, who arrived at Paramount in time to make The Big Broadcast of 1938 and stayed for the next twenty-one years. “They were all country clubs. There was no hustle-bustle, ‘get it done this week’ attitude. They didn’t even care that much if you were over budget. It wasn’t a national disaster. Really, it was gorgeous; everybody was so relaxed.”
Dorothy Lamour, who came to the studio in 1936, remembered it as “a family. It really was, from the front office on down. One New Year’s Eve, it was raining. I had a date to go out and my hairdresser was washing my hair. I heard some music and I said, ‘Elaine, what’s that?’ She looked out and began wrapping a towel around my head. ‘You’ve got to see this,’ she said.
“Outside, standing in the rain, were all the guys from the set, the grips, the carpenters. They were on a flatbed and they were singing ‘Girl of My Dreams’ to me, on New Year’s Eve! It was that kind of place.”
As with any family, there was always time for a playful joke or two. When illness struck Henry Herzbrun, who had handled the money while Lubitsch had functioned as production chief, Ernst called the writer Claude Binyon and asked him to write a funny telegram he could send Herzbrun to cheer him up. A few days later, Binyon got a call from Herzbrun, who asked him to write a funny telegram so that he could send it to Lubitsch. “I’ll try,” gulped Binyon. The next day, Lubitsch, carrying Binyon’s response to his own joke, ran into the writer. “Claude,” he exclaimed, “he topped us!”
The friendly atmosphere was a necessary corollary to the fact that, for the blue-collar workers at least, the hours were backbreaking. It was a six-day week, with unlimited hours, and Saturday shooting might go to very early Sunday morning.
“It was rough but nice,” remembered Jack Barry, who started out in the mailroom in the 1930s and, by the 1970s, had risen to the rank of production manager. “If you went to work at Paramount, you worked there the rest of your life.”
For his first picture since being deposed by William LeBaron, Lubitsch chose to adapt Angel, a play by Melchior Lengyel that had already been produced in English, courtesy of a script by Guy Bolton and Russell Medcraft. Lubitsch began writing the screenplay for Angel with the successful boulevard playwright Frederick Lonsdale, author of The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, but Lonsdale left the project after three weeks over what The New York Times called censorship problems. A disturbed Lubitsch called on Sam Raphaelson to take over, but Raphaelson was in New York working on a play. Two days after Raphaelson turned the job down, Lubitsch was on the phone saying “I’m coming to New York.” Lubitsch brought his entourage, immensely flattering Raphaelson, who worked days with Lubitsch and nights at the theater, rewriting and rehearsing.
In his reflective old age, Raphaelson once asked himself why he never quite realized that to work with Lubitsch was to be in writer’s heaven. Unlike most writers, Raphaelson was objective enough to realize that he lacked the capacity for self-laceration necessary if his work was going to last beyond that Broadway season.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I wanted to be sole author. [I should have] forgotten my ego and said, ‘I’ll work for you the rest of my life.’ ”
Again, Raphaelson was nervous about the material of Angel; “Whenever you hit a stronger emotion than was called for in usual high comedy,” he remembered, “Lubitsch was in danger of going wrong . . . I didn’t think it was a good picture.”
Gottfried Reinhardt explained the nature of Lubitsch’s limitations, which were becoming increasingly evident. “His interest in films was enormously limited. Basically, he [adapted] Hungarian comedies, and that was the extent of his knowledge. He never read a book in his life, which was another misunderstanding between Hollywood and Lubitsch. If someone has an accent, the average Hollywoodian think’s he’s very cultured. But Lubitsch wasn’t. He had no idea about anything. Politically, he was liberal, but naive.
“Once, I was sitting in the Trocadero with some people and he came through with a dinner jacket on. He passed my table, said hello, and I said ‘Why the jacket, what was the affair?’ It turned out that Hal Roach had invited him to a reception for the son of Mussolini. And he had gone! ‘Ernst,’ I said, ‘are you crazy? How can you go to this Fascist thing?’ When I explained it to him, he was rather embarrassed that he had gone. The most sophisticated director in Hollywood was, politically and erotically, the most naive man you can imagine.”
As Angel began production late in March 1937, Lubitsch and Dietrich crossed swords more than they ever had before. “Ernst wanted [her] to maintain the ladylike front,” Melvyn Douglas told Charles Higham. “There was some conflict between them as he reminded her constantly, ‘This is a lady you’re playing, not a demimondaine.’ ”
Trained to withstand the inordinate number of takes demanded by von Sternberg, Dietrich thought Lubitsch worked a little too fast. One day she asked for an extra take in a scene. “I’m not satisfied with it,” she explained.
“You’re not satisfied with it?” said an incredulous Lubitsch. “Well, you go right ahead and make the scene until you are satisfied with it. I’m going home.” By the end of production, Lubitsch and Dietrich were not speaking.
A reporter for the New York World Telegram visited the set and took down Lubitsch’s instructions verbatim, even reproducing, however crudely, Ernst’s thick Berlin dialect. Although the actors had presumably studied their scripts in order to memorize the dialogue, Lubitsch left nothing to chance or improvisation, and felt compelled to give them the entire backstory of the scene and of their characters.
“Vatch how I do it, Melvyn,” he said to Melvyn Douglas. “Now, I am a romantic young man who iss smitten—absolutely smitten with this voomans. She is driving me crazy. I am in loff with her and I don’t even know who she is. I don’t know if she loffs me. I don’t know if she has a husband even. You see, Melvyn?”
“All right. Ve proceed. I am going to take this voomans in my arms and kiss her passionately.” Lubitsch seized Dietrich, and spoke Douglas’s lines: “ ‘Who are you. I must know.’ Do you follow me, Melvyn?”
Turning to Dietrich, he said, “Now you, Marlene, you are a neglected wife who iss in Paris on a stolen holiday. You loff your husband, but he is paying to you no attention. At this moment he iss off in Geneva settling the Yugoslavia question vile you are starfing for his loff. Do you see the possibilities? . . .
Despite a fine cast, a provocative central situation, and his painstaking directorial attention, Lubitsch’s rhythm was alarmingly off; Angel was to be his most disappointing picture since Eternal Love.
Marlene Dietrich is Maria, the neglected wife of international diplomat Sir Frederick Barker (Herbert Marshall). She encounters Anthony Halton (Melvyn Douglas) at a salon presided over by Laura Hope Crews, apparently doing an Elsa Maxwell imitation. Halton mistakes Maria for the mistress of the house and immediately tries to make her the mistress of his house.
“I’ve found through life the days take care of themselves,” he tells her. “It’s the evenings that are so difficult.” She won’t tell him her name, so he settles on calling her Angel. They agree to meet again in a week. Back at home with her overbooked husband, we see that it is a marriage beset by equal parts ennui (hers) and too many distractions (his). When she asks him what he’d do if she fell in love with somebody else and left him, he replies, “I certainly wouldn’t quarrel. It would be too late.” Snore.
As Melchior Lengyel’s long arm of coincidence would have it, Sir Frederick and Anthony meet at a dinner party, where it turns out they had the same mistress during World War I. Anthony tells Frederick of his infatuation for Angel; back home, Sir Frederick tells Dietrich of his newfound friend and his odd love affair.
Lubitsch devises one masterstroke for a dinner party at which the ardent lover realizes he is trying to cuckold a friend. When Anthony gets up to look at a picture of Barker’s wife, Lubitsch first holds the camera on Barker mixing a drink, then cuts to Dietrich coming down the stairs to face what she knows will be a contretemps between her husband and her lover. Lubitsch withholds the conventional shocked reaction shot, and stimulates anticipation for the confrontation to come.
Played faster, for confusion and duplicity, the story of Angel could have been the premise for a fine screwball comedy. Played with more inflection, with more expressive leading men, or more of a sense of emotional commitment, it could have been a moving, albeit contrived, romantic drama.
But the characters are written and played to reflect little more than polished surfaces. Barker and Halton are supposed to be instant fast friends, but Lubitsch and Raphaelson’s way of indicating male bonding is by having one man refer to the other as “Old Man.” The psychological constriction is palpable, and probably derives from Ernst’s own discomfort with intimacy.
Many of Lubitsch’s “touches”—playing out a scene of Douglas looking for Angel entirely through a reaction shot of an old flower seller—seem strained, touches in search of something meaningful to touch upon. For virtually the only time in his career, Lubitsch here verges on the insulting affectation of style disassociated from content. What with Barker’s servants commenting on the manners and breeding of their overstuffed masters, and the have-it-all sexual politics of the central characters, Angel plays as Lubitsch’s most reactionary movie, which could hardly have been his intention.
In the end, the Barkers confront each other at the Paris salon. He knows she has been unfaithful, but she denies it by saying that Angel is in the next room. He begins to go toward it. “Frederick,” she says, “if you go into that room, I’m afraid our marriage is over. If you find Angel in there, you’ll be happy that I’m not Angel and want to continue our old life. But that would not be satisfactory to me.”
“And if I don’t find Angel?”
“In that case, I think you’ll want to see your lawyer as soon as possible. If you don’t go in at all, you’ll be a little uncertain. You won’t be quite so sure of yourself. And that might be wonderful.”
Barker goes to the door and enters the room. It is empty. Anthony Halton arrives to take Angel away, but is interrupted by Barker. “I’ve met her,” he says. “In the last few moments, I’ve thought more about our married life than in all the years we’ve been together. And all I know is—the train to Venice leaves at ten . . . Well, I’ve said good-bye to Angel and so must you, Maria.” As he walks toward the door, Maria joins him and they leave together.
Frederick, of course, has it both ways, as does Lubitsch. Barker throws his lack of trust in his wife’s face even though she has threatened to leave him if he does, which makes the happy ending seem forced and irritating. Lubitsch seems to mean the ending to be movingly redemptive, but the actors and the director’s attitudes are far too aloof, the resolution nothing but a victory for the status quo.
By any standard, Angel is a failure, but it is nevertheless a key transitional work. For the first time Lubitsch is attempting, however unsuccessfully, to deal with the emotional results of infidelity, and the internal dynamics of his characters. But the mechanism of the story is at odds with the cast and treatment. Ernst was still more comfortable with polished puppets than with real people.
The die had been firmly cast when Lubitsch enlisted the smooth, superficial Frederick Lonsdale to work, however briefly, on the script. Ultimately, the film doesn’t work because Lubitsch and Raphaelson don’t dig deep enough, and they didn’t cast actors who could suggest deep emotional confusion underneath the requisite placid surface.
In spite of the evident uncertainty of Angel, Lubitsch was glad to be back directing. “The official billing on the picture,” he explained, “[is] ‘Marlene Dietrich in an Ernst Lubitsch Production, Angel, directed by Ernst Lubitsch.’ All of the honor is in the first phrase, my agent tells me, but all of the fun is in the second.”
Angel was an aesthetic mistake and, at the very pricey cost of $1.4 million, a commercial blunder as well. As the New York World Telegram wrote, “After the madcap comedy that has been so popular with audiences lately, the suaver nuances of . . . Lubitsch’s brittle little comedy drama may seem quite tame.” It was not a mistake Lubitsch would repeat; the next time he attempted to make a film about real people with real emotions, he would achieve perfection.
• • •
By the mid-1930s, the only competition the Foreign Legion had was the English colony, whose main members were actors like Ronald Colman, Cedric Hardwicke (who would fix a kipper breakfast for his countrymen on Sunday mornings), C. Aubrey Smith, and Boris Karloff, as well as young renegades like David Niven and Errol Flynn. Unlike the Foreign Legion, who tended to be writers and directors, the English were usually actors and banded together at least partly to preserve the most valuable of their attributes: their Englishness. Since few of them were really good actors, they had to count on their national identity to carry them through.
“In those days,” remembered Vincent Price, “the English Colony really ran Hollywood. There was the [old] guard up in the hills and then down by the beach Niven and Flynn, living at the house they called Cirrhosis-by-the-Sea. In between there were middle-range people like Reggie Gardiner, who eventually took to sounding so desperately clipped and stiff-upper-lipped that not even English audiences could ever understand a word he said. The colony . . . had considerable grandeur, especially Ouida Rathbone, who behaved like some manic duchess and used to fill the swimming pool with gardenias every time Basil had a party. The smell was really appalling.”
While the English were basking in an environment hospitable to Anglophilia, the German colony was besieged by dozens of recent arrivals. Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933 was the cause; the wholesale fleeing of hundreds of people from Germany’s literary, film, and theatrical worlds was the effect.
The main difference between the two primary colonies was the fact that the vast majority of the Germans were refugees in need, while the English were in Hollywood by choice or by invitation, and were mostly without the strong emotional need to band together in a new environment.
In varying degrees, the Germans found it difficult to make their way, both practically and psychologically. Actors, writers, and directors who had achieved at least recognition and, in many cases, renown, were once again virtual tyros, forced to justify their existence to often skeptical domestic talent. A sad, metaphorical joke spread quickly through the German colony, about a refugee walking his little dog who meets another refugee on the street. “Nice dog,” says the second refugee. “Ach,” says the owner sadly, “back home he was a Saint Bernard.”
• • •
Billy Wilder was born in Sucha, a small town one hundred miles east of Vienna, in 1906. Although his father had hoped he would be a lawyer, after a year at the University of Vienna Wilder opted for a job as a reporter on Die Stunde and, in Berlin, B.Z. am Mittag. On the side, Wilder moonlighted on movie scripts, including the minor classic People on Sunday. Leaving Berlin after the Reichstag fire (“It seemed the wise thing for a Jew to do”), he made his way to Paris, where a script he wrote attracted the attention of director Joe May. The script was never produced, but the money from its sale got Wilder to Hollywood. After the usual period of adjustment, that is to say total and complete impoverishment, Wilder landed at Paramount, where he once claimed to have made so little of an impression that he was seriously studying the want ads.
It was at that point that Paramount story editor Manny Wolf introduced him to Charles Brackett, a patrician from the Eastern Seaboard. “From now on,” Wolf told them, “you’re a team.” At Wolf’s suggestion, Lubitsch took them on to write Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. It is highly probable that, by matching Lubitsch with some younger talent, Paramount was trying to ease him into a more au courant mode than had been represented by Angel.
At the first meeting, Lubitsch posed the elemental question: “How do the boy and the girl get together?” Wilder immediately suggested that the film open in the men’s department of a department store. “The boy is trying to buy a pajama, but he only sleeps in the tops. He is thrifty so he insists on buying only the tops. The clerk says he must buy the pants, too. It looks like a catastrophe. Then the girl comes into the shop and buys the pants because she sleeps only in the pants.”
Lubitsch was enthralled. Where had this diminutive man with a slanted mind been all his life? It wasn’t until some months later that Wilder confessed that, in fact, he wore only pajama tops to bed, and he’d been carrying the situation around for a long time waiting for an opportunity to use it.
Wilder, whose ambitions to direct would shortly be jump-started by having Mitchell Leisen (“That fag who ruined my scripts”) direct his material, immediately fell into a student/teacher relationship with Lubitsch, who taught him things he would remember the rest of his life.
“His technique was totally subordinated to storytelling,” Wilder would remember, pacing back and forth in his office, occasionally stopping to whack his thigh with a riding crop. “His theory—and mine—is that if you notice direction, you have failed. You have to hide your technique. No dolly shot should be so overwhelming that you say, ‘My God, look at that.’ Look at the story, look at the characters, and make the technique become part of the action.”
Beyond niceties like plot and character, Lubitsch gave Wilder an underlying attitude, an aesthetic belief system: let the audience write the script with the filmmaker. “Don’t spell it out, like they’re a bunch of idiots. Keep it just slightly above their station. He would not say to the audience, ‘Now listen to me, you idiots! Two plus two equals four! And three plus one equals four!! And one plus one plus one plus one equals four!!!’ Big deal.
“No. You give them two plus two and let them add it up. They’ll have fun and they’ll play the game with you.
“Lubitsch would have laughed if you had suggested making a film with no cuts in it, or making a film with just ten setups, like Hitchcock did in Rope. Those are exercises in masturbation and it would never occur to him. The living room should not be shot through a fireplace unless it is from the point of view of Santa Claus and he’s a character in the film.”
Lubitsch also bequeathed to Wilder his affection for obscure source material. “I don’t like taking a big hit and making a movie out of it,” Wilder remembered. “It’s too easy, too uninteresting. I couldn’t fuck it up. I like to work either with original stories or some obscure story that you just use a notion from, nothing very substantial.”
While writing Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, Brackett and Wilder noticed that Lubitsch composed his pictures in segments rather than all in one piece. They also noticed that whenever Jack Barry would stop by to drop off the mail, he would be subjected to a quiz about the picture business or the theater. If he knew the answer, Brackett, Wilder, and Lubitsch would pay him double the cost of the paper or magazines he was delivering. If he didn’t know the answer he got nothing.
Lubitsch valued Barry for his common-man persona and would occasionally ask him to pass on a situation or word in the evolving script that he feared might be too arcane for general understanding, as in the time he asked Barry if he knew what “chapeau” meant.
The writing did not always go completely smoothly; once, working with Brackett and Wilder, the story sessions seemed to be erupting with material they thought was consistently hilarious. But Lubitsch’s new secretary just sat there, impassively taking her shorthand. Gradually, the secretary’s stony nonreactions began to affect the work. After a line that slayed the three men, Lubitsch finally turned on the secretary and asked her point blank, “Don’t you think that’s a funny line?”
“This is the funniest script I’ve ever worked on,” she replied.
“Then why don’t you laugh?”
“Perhaps later, I might laugh. Just now . . .” Lubitsch, assuming some recent tragedy, backed off and began treating her with solemn deference. Two weeks later, in the middle of another story session, the secretary broke into hearty howls of laughter. Lubitsch asked what had happened to change her mood.
For the first time, the secretary smiled. “The dentist removed my braces,” she said.
Lubitsch proved himself a relentless polisher, always saying “Is this the best we can do«? Does it ring the bell«? When it’s right, it rings the bell.” For a scene in which Claudette Colbert, pursued by Gary Cooper, was to dive into the Mediterranean, Lubitsch wanted Colbert to yell something before she dived. Just one word. Nobody could think of the right word. Over and over, Lubitsch would pantomine Colbert’s dive, then look at Brackett and Wilder imploringly, waiting for the mot juste. Long after they had given up and moved on to other scenes, Lubitsch would suddenly go back to it. “Does it ring the bell? Is it the best we can do?” (In fact, they never found the word, an ominous portent of the finished film.)
In the script sessions, Lubitsch would act out each part as he tested the lines, playing not only Cooper and Colbert but David Niven and Herman Bing. Wilder thought Lubitsch did Bing better than Bing did Bing, and his performances invariably reduced the writer to helpless hysterics. Even the reserved, well-bred Brackett would break up.
“If the truth were known,” remembered Wilder, “he was the best writer that ever lived. Most of the ‘Lubitsch touches’ came from him. I remember in Bluebeard, the script had a scene where Gary Cooper walks into a department store in Nice and sees some signs. One of them says ‘Se Habla Espanol,’ another one says ‘English Spoken Here.’ [Lubitsch] took a pencil and wrote underneath that ‘American understood.’ A tiny little joke, but it meant everything.”
Lubitsch sent Eric Locke to Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Paris, and the Riviera to shoot background footage for the process photography, and began production in Hollywood on October 11, 1937, two weeks before Angel was released. And Lubitsch showed he had no hard feelings toward the ambitious young man who had been lying in wait for him at Elsa Maxwell’s party four years before, by casting David Niven in a good-sized part in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife.
“Lubitsch sat,” wrote Niven in his memoirs, “like a little gnome, beside the camera, perched on a small stepladder, giggling and hugging himself at all his own wonderful inventiveness . . . He was patient, understanding, and encouraging; what more could any actor ask?”
Niven confessed that one of the reasons he became such an adept farceur were those few months with the first great director with whom he would work. Niven always treasured something that Lubitsch told him: “Nobody should try to play comedy unless they have a circus going on inside.”
The film wrapped in January at a final cost of $1.3 million and was quickly cut together in time for its New York premiere on March 23. Despite the hilarity and good fellowship that prevailed during the picture’s writing and production, the critical response was muted, and properly so. The New York Times’ Frank Nugent wrote that “it’s not a bad comedy by our current depressed standards [!!!], [but] it has the dickens of a time trying to pass off Gary Cooper as a multi-marrying millionaire.” The New York Sun was similarly strained, calling the picture “slim but funny,” while Variety said that it was “a light and sometimes bright entertainment, but gets a bit tiresome, despite its comparatively moderate running time of 85 minutes.”
It was one, unspecified review that particularly jarred Lubitsch. The critic, although professing to enjoy the picture, wondered whether in these days audiences were kindly disposed toward people who didn’t work.
With a start, Lubitsch suddenly realized that the world had changed around him. He could no longer get away with the delightful irresponsibilities displayed by the characters in Trouble in Paradise. “We must show people living in the real world,” he would tell the New York Sun in November 1939. “No one used to care how characters made their living—if the picture was amusing. Now they do care. They want their stories tied up to life . . . Now [a character] must have a job, or else the fact that he doesn’t work becomes the important thing about him.”
After the opening scene of Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, easily the greatest meet-cute in Hollywood history, the film settles down to a misalliance between Gary Cooper’s dreamily truculent, much-married tycoon and Claudette Colbert’s impoverished aristocrat. The buoyant first half gradually loses its sparkle just about the time their marriage does—on their honeymoon in Venice, they take separate gondolas—and thereafter proceeds in contrived fits and starts.
Part of the problem is that Lubitsch is attempting to accommodate the impulses of screwball comedy without having the necessary rambunctious temperament (at one point, Gary Cooper’s character has a stunningly unlikely nervous breakdown and is confined to a straitjacket). Lubitsch’s element is not savagery but satire, not chaos but control. Great screwball directors like Capra, Hawks, McCarey, and La Cava were either alcoholic wild men or craftsmen who could allow themselves to be far more improvisatory in their methods and attitudes than could Lubitsch. With the exception of To Be or Not to Be, Lubitsch films never subject their characters to gleeful ridicule, let alone the ritual humiliation that is the raison d’être of screwball comedy.
There are Lubitsch films where the internal mechanism peters out before the end title, but Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife was the first Lubitsch film to have no mechanism at all. It is the emptiest movie he ever made.
• • •
All of Lubitsch’s friends were pleased by his obvious pride in Vivian’s & blond beauty, her aloof air, her aristocratic bearing. But virtually the c kindest judgment any of Lubitsch’s friends would be able to summon was Lupita Tovar Kohner, who said that, “She was much more attractive than Leni. But Vivian was a snob. It became an entirely different life. She didn’t like the people that had been his friends before. By the time they married I could speak some German and I remember one of Lubitsch’s friends saying, ‘The lovely days are over.’ Because of all this, we didn’t see them very often. She did have a party for his twenty-fifth anniversary in films. It was very nice, but otherwise . . . I think she kept in touch with the Wylers more than anybody else.”
Well, not really. Margaret Tallichet married William Wyler in 1938 and was quickly introduced into Lubitsch’s circle. She found the Lubitsch marriage strange. “They never seemed suited to each other. I don’t know whether they liked or were interested in the same things. They just always seemed to me like they came from the opposite ends of space. Forget about passion; I never even felt any intimacy there, that ease you can feel between a couple who really like each other.”
Sam Raphaelson, normally a gracious man, said that “she was a calculating bitch. I thought she treated him terribly. Of course, he wanted to be treated terribly. He liked women who treated him badly.” In 1981 Raphaelson would write succinctly that “The lady may have been the choicest of choice womanhood, but in my eyes she was not good enough for him.”
It was apparent to her intimates that Vivian simply hated Hollywood and, presumably, most of the people in it, which was sometimes manifested in an embarrassing way. Once, Ernst invited some friends to come to the house for dinner, followed by a night out at a preview screening. The guests arrived, but Vivian was nowhere in sight, and the house was very quiet. Finally, Vivian came down and sat with them with her hair in a towel. “Aren’t you coming to the preview, Vivian?” inquired one friend. “No,” she replied curtly. The coldness was palpable.
Sam Raphaelson would write that he thought the marriage went dead after about three years, which seems to be remarkably accurate; by 1940, when Ernst and Vivian would attend a party, he did not bother to conceal his interest in other women. “He was unable to keep his eyes off Fay [Wray],” Clifford Odets reported to his diary on October 19, “who he likes and obviously would like to have. This seemed to amuse his wife, who seemed often on the point of making sharp remarks but did not.” Odets didn’t mind Lubitsch’s attentions to his current lover. Later in the night they drew each other aside for a talk about actors and the war. “The quality of his mind did not attract me,” concluded Odets. “His personality . . . witty . . . keen, appetites sharp . . . always did.”
At about the same time, Ernst and Vivian went to a dinner party with the Raphaelsons. Lubitsch and Dorshka were out on the dance floor, and Sam and Vivian began talking. Vivian began praising the American melting pot. “I’m all in favor,” she commented, “of mixing the blood of the aristocrat with the blood of the peasant.”
Raphaelson couldn’t pass up the opportunity. “I know just what you mean, Vivian. You are, of course, referring to Ernst and yourself—he the aristocrat, and you the party of the second part.”
Raphaelson remembered that they both laughed, pretending nothing vicious had been said. Lubitsch came back to the table and the conversation moved on to other things. But Sam Raphaelson was never invited back to the Lubitsch house until after Vivian moved out.
• • •
The consecutive failures of Angel and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife made Lubitsch’s position at Paramount untenable. As always, the studio had given him the casts of his choice and acquiesced to his taste in material. The results had been two expensive—and not very good—pictures. Casting about for possible explanations, Lubitsch decided the fault was not in the movies but in changing times.
“Comedy on the screen can no longer be charming,” he told Philip Scheuer. “People aren’t interested in just charming humor any more. They want to be shocked and surprised in order to laugh. It is the spirit of the age. I could not make a picture today the way I made The Marriage Circle. Such comedy would be too delicate to appeal to the public.”
Lubitsch was right; films like Midnight and My Man Godfrey took the old Lubitsch smoothness and suggestiveness and mixed it with a very American snap, crackle, and pop. If all this wasn’t ominous enough, even the critics were turning on him. Lewis Jacobs’ influential 1939 book The Rise of the American Film noted that recent Lubitsch pictures “show a significant loss of vitality and timeliness . . . his films seem static . . . his most recent films do not show that he is keeping abreast with the swiftly changing times.” Suddenly, Lubitsch seemed in danger of both commercial and aesthetic obsolescence.
In March 1938, the break was made official. After ten years, thirteen influential films, and one of the most mutually productive relationships between a director and a studio in Hollywood history, Lubitsch left Paramount.
There were some initial feelers from Warner Bros., but nothing came of them. Instead, in July, Lubitsch decided to take the plunge into independent production and formed Ernst Lubitsch Productions, Inc., with Myron Selznick, the gifted but self-destructive agent and brother of David O. Selznick. The first production was slated to be a property called The Shop Around the Corner, and Lubitsch enlisted Samson Raphaelson to write the script, personally paying him the modest up-front stipend of $1,000 a week in return for a 5 percent share of the gross after Lubitsch took $50,000 in profits. If the deal to produce the film independently fell through and Lubitsch produced the script with an established company, Raphaelson was to receive a fifth of whatever Lubitsch was paid.
The Shop Around the Corner originated in a Hungarian play entitled Parfumerie that had opened in Budapest on March 31, 1937. Although the script was originally offered to MGM, they passed, and in July 1938, the play was sold to Lubitsch, working through a front to keep the price down. Steffie Trondle translated the play into English, and Lubitsch and Raphaelson began the adaptation.
At the time the script was being written (late 1938-early 1939) the star was to be Dolly Haas, a gifted actress who had starred in the British remake of Griffith’s Broken Blossoms and would later marry artist Al Hirschfeld. According to Lubitsch’s plans, the film was to be released either through United Artists or MGM, although MGM was a very farfetched possibility, if only because they rarely handled the product of outside producers.
It was all highly speculative, but Lubitsch could afford a small gamble; in 1937, Paramount had paid him $260,833, the same salary he had made as production chief. It was $12,000 more than they paid Claudette Colbert, but $110,000 less than Marlene Dietrich, and far more than any other producer/director in the industry. (In 1937, for example, Howard Hawks made $130,000; Henry King, $157,444. Even independent producers like David Selznick-at $203,500-and Sam Goldwyn-at $189,000-took less salary than Lubitsch, although, unlike Lubitsch, they owned their films.)
In the words of film historian Barry Sabath, Parfumerie “provided an excellent blueprint for the script; it is like a good solid first draft. The narrative events of the film are all present in the play to a certain extent, but they await color, nuance, wit and characterization.” Structurally, the play has the female lead already working in the shop at the beginning. Also, the circumstances by which the male lead discovers that he has fallen in love with the woman he can’t stand to work with are different.
Otherwise, Lubitsch and Raphaelson retained the original structure, but made multiple improvements, streamlining lengthy speeches and lucidly polishing the dialogue, as in the heartrending scene in which the great Frank Morgan says of his broken marriage, “Twenty-two years we’ve been married. Twenty-two years I was proud of my wife. Well . . . she didn’t want to grow old with me.” In the original play, the dialogue is: “For thirty-two years I believed in my family, my happiness and my children . . . She doesn’t want to grow old with me.”
Mostly, Lubitsch and Raphaelson added wit and humanity to the characters. Specific additions to the script include the ritualistic morning openings of the shop; the running gags about the music boxes that play “O Chi Tchornya”; Klara procuring her job; the meeting at the cafe; the invented story of how the mysterious correspondent is a fat, unemployed, depressed man; and the final reconciliation of the lovers.
When the script was finished, Lubitsch regarded it as one of the best he had ever been associated with. But it quickly became clear that Myron Selznick couldn’t find the capital to back even one modest production, let alone an entire slate of pictures, probably because of Lubitsch’s recent losing streak at the box office and Selznick’s well-known unreliability. Moreover, Lubitsch didn’t like Dolly Haas’s tests for the part. According to Raphaelson, “Lubitsch lost his nerve, that’s all. She was a European star, not widely known in the U.S., perfect for the part, heaven-sent. But [Lubitsch] got nervous . . . He felt a movie was at best such a gamble that he wanted to play safe at every point where he could get established pros.
“Anyway, he asked me to see the test. At once it was obvious that Dolly was agonizingly self-conscious—she must have sensed Lubitsch’s insecurity—and I told him so. ‘The fact of the test is demoralizing her,’ I said. ’Start the picture. She can’t miss.’ Well, he didn’t.”
Lubitsch’s crisis of confidence was made worse by the fact that there weren’t a lot of free-lance stars around whom he could afford and who could also carry the picture. He began taking the property to other studios, including Paramount, but, as The Hollywood Reporter (January 24, 1940) would say, “He could not get one of the major companies interested . . . principally because they were not interested in Lubitsch.” The perceived failure as production head and the consecutive flops of Angel and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife had cost him dearly.
As all this frustration was getting under way, on October 27, 1938, Vivian gave him the greatest gift of his life, an eight-pound, two-ounce daughter they named Nicola Anne Patricia Lubitsch.
While Ernst and Vivian may have been the biological parents, the child actually owed her existence to Dorshka Raphaelson. Shortly after Vivian and Ernst married, Vivian came to Dorshka’s rented Hollywood house for tea. During the conversation, Dorshka said, more as a statement than a question, “You’re going to have children.”
“Oh, no,” replied Vivian. “Ernst doesn’t like children. He doesn’t want any.”
Dorshka, remembering Ernst’s absolute delight in her infant daughter Naomi years before, couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Get pregnant, Vivian,” she advised. “Have a baby. Pay no attention to him saying that; he’ll be very pleased.”
A month and a day after Nicola’s birth, Lubitsch wrote to Raphaelson that, while Nicola was fine, healthy, and already developing a personality, The Shop Around the Corner, which he called “the best script I have had in a long time in my hands,” seemed to be dead in the water, slowly losing momentum through constant postponement. It began to look like if he wanted to make the movie, he’d have to take a deal—and not necessarily the best deal—at a studio.
• • •
As far back as 1929, Greta Garbo had been vocal in her enthusiasm for the idea of being directed by an artist, as opposed to the craftsmen of various abilities who were employed at MGM. Specifically, she was enthusiastic about working with either Lubitsch or Erich von Stroheim. In 1933, Louis B. Mayer had dangled the possibility of borrowing Ernst from Paramount to direct Queen Christina, which led Garbo to cable on April 1, “PREFER LUBITSCH. ALSO HAPPY FOR [EDMUND] GOULDING.” But Ernst was too deeply involved in preparing Design for Living, which began shooting in the first part of July. The tantalizing partnership had to be put off for a few more years.
The story for Ninotchka had been brought to MGM in 1937 by Gottfried Reinhardt, who was then working as assistant to Sidney Franklin. Melchior Lengyel’s original story was obviously written with Garbo in mind but is highly conventional. Its springboard was a three-sentence memo scrawled in a notebook: “Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad after all.”
In Lengyel’s original story, the three commissars are not comic (they’re played straight), and there is nothing about jewels. Leon, the male lead, becomes a drunkard when a business deal falls through and, at the end, he accompanies Ninotchka to Moscow. The foundation of the finished film is there—a political anal-retentive loosened up by love—but the story is plot-heavy. It reads like a nominal Sidney Franklin production.
Lengyel completed a portion of a shooting script on January 7, 1938. The three delegates have become five but they’re still played straight. Leon is to be played by William Powell. The addition of Powell’s polished but antic humor and sex appeal might have done a great deal to add sparkle to what was, at this point, a slightly flat script.
During the latter part of 1938, Gottfried Reinhardt collaborated on two scripts for the film, one with Jacques Deval, who wrote Tovarich, the other with S. N. Behrman. At this point, the film was scheduled to be directed by George Cukor. Surviving script material from these drafts indicates a lack of real progress; as late as November 30, the commissars are still not being used as comic relief.
While Reinhardt was in New York working with Behrman, he heard that Cukor had backed out of Ninotchka to devote his full energies to Gone With the Wind. It was bad timing, at least for Reinhardt and Behrman, for it seemed that they were turning the corner on the script; in a script dated 12-15-38, scenes at the Eiffel Tower and Leon’s apartment are fleshed out. More important, Behrman and Reinhardt have invented the restaurant scene as the moment where Ninotchka’s glacial reserve finally cracks.
Responding to Cukor’s defection, Garbo, who had de facto director approval, gave MGM two choices: Edmund Goulding or Lubitsch. As far as MGM was concerned, Goulding was out of the question, tired and passé. (That same year Goulding would direct—rather well -Dark Victory, and would go on to make several more major pictures, among them The Razor’s Edge and Nightmare Alley, all combining to suggest that what was passé was Louis B. Mayer’s taste in directors.) MGM’s enthusiasm for Lubitsch was muted, if only because he had lost them a great deal of money on The Merry Widow. Still, he seemed a more felicitous choice than Goulding.
Negotiations were concluded on December 30, 1938. As part of the arrangement, MGM agreed to take over The Shop Around the Corner, for which they paid Lubitsch $62,500 (he had paid $16,500 for the story, and was thus making a tidy profit). In addition, MGM agreed to pay Lubitsch $147,500 in fifty-two weekly installments for the next year of his professional life, during which time he would make two pictures. The main proviso was that Ninotchka would come first, although the studio tried to calm the nervous director by inserting a clause allowing for the cancellation of the Garbo picture which “shall not affect our respective rights and obligations with regard to . . . Shop Around the Corner.” The studio agreed to supply James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan for the picture. MGM had five months from January 14 to determine whether or not Lubitsch actually held the rights to Parfumerie. If the rights were determined to be not completely cleared, the studio had the right to cancel the remainder of the contract and get their $62,500 back.
“The minute Lubitsch took over, I told Behrman we might as well forget the whole thing,” remembered Reinhardt. Lubitsch reported to the lot on February 8, 1939, and, just as Reinhardt had guessed, promptly informed Sidney Franklin that he didn’t like the script. Franklin thought the script was fine, and for a while the project seemed to be verging on dissolution; in March, The Hollywood Reporter announced that MGM was considering William Wyler to direct the picture, but a reconciliation was effected (probably to placate Garbo), and Lubitsch began to work on the script.
By this time, Gottfried Reinhardt had arrived back in Hollywood to find Lubitsch completely in charge and already working with Walter Reisch. “We were in Sidney Franklin’s office and we started arguing about the jewelry business Walter Reisch had brought into the script [the Behrman script involved a nickel mine]. I thought [the jewelry subplot] cheapened it. Well, Lubitsch stopped and asked Franklin if he could take me out and talk to me. Franklin said of course.
“ ‘Gottfried,’ he said, ‘don’t make a mistake. Don’t fight me on this. You’ll lose.’ Lubitsch was a very nice man but he was a very tough man. But he made a very good film.” (When S.N. Behrman made similar noises about the jewelry business, Lubitsch, with unassailable logic, pointed out that “The nice thing about jewels is that they are photogenic.”)
Work resumed on the script, and again Wilder and Brackett were called in to help . . . and to be amazed. “He wasn’t just a gagman,” remembered Wilder, “he was the best creator of toppers. You would come up with a funny bit to end a scene, and he would create a better one. I think he thought up the bit where the picture of Lenin smiles back at Garbo, [but] I can’t be too sure. He would look at our stuff and go ‘Ho-ho, very good,’ and scratch out the next line. He’d read a bit more, go ‘Ho-ho,’ and scratch out another line. What he did was purify, and that was what made him a great writer.’ ”
By April 8, the script was very close to the finished shooting script; dialogue and scenes are largely intact. The script gives credit to Lubitsch as well as Wilder, Brackett, and Walter Reisch, who wrote a memo to MGM saying that all three writers felt Lubitsch was more than entitled to a credit. On April 12, Lubitsch wrote Raphaelson that work on the script was proceeding smoothly and that he certainly would have wanted Raphaelson to work on the project if he hadn’t been busy with a play. He told him that he was disappointed that he hadn’t been able to get more money for the MGM deal, but that the outlook for the Lubitsch/Selznick company had become so dim that he had been forced to compromise.
With the script approaching its final stages, it was time for Lubitsch to convince Garbo that she could do the film. (Although she had actually signed a one-picture contract in December 1938 for $125,000, a steep drop from her mammoth salary of $275,000 for Anna Karenina, Garbo always reserved the right to walk, which accounted for the cancellation clause in MGM’s contract with Lubitsch.)
She drove to MGM for a conference but didn’t want to get out of her car. An obliging Lubitsch got into the passenger seat and sat with her for the next two hours. The actress’s main fears revolved around the drunk scene; she thought it was not right for her and, she admitted, she was also ashamed to act drunk in front of other actors. After much coaxing, she agreed to try the scene, and the film.
Production began on May 31 and continued for fifty-eight days. As always, Garbo’s insecurity manifested itself as paranoia; anybody who wasn’t absolutely necessary to the production was barred from the set. Nevertheless, Billy Wilder would sneak on the soundstage to watch Lubitsch direct surrounded by a skeleton crew. One day Wilder was at least thirty feet away, not making a sound, when everything suddenly got very quiet and two grips put a blackboard in front of him. “Nobody said for me to leave, they just put this here, and I knew that Garbo had felt my presence.”
Lubitsch put the drunk scene off for virtually the entire production, waiting to do it until Garbo felt completely secure with him and the film. “I believe [she] is the most inhibited person I have ever worked with,” Lubitsch said. When she came to him and said she didn’t think she could play the scene, Lubitsch had to put his foot down.
“ ‘Look here, I’ll do anything you want; I’ll change the script, the dialogue, but this can’t be changed. Too much depends on it. You must make up your mind that you’ll have to play it’ . . . When we did get to it she was very—afraid is too strong a word—timid. But finally I got her to relax completely by talking to her and being patient.”
As Garbo started the scene, Lubitsch began modifying it, saying casually as he walked past her, “Very good, but if you could just do . . .” Lubitsch found that Garbo didn’t rely on technique—it is entirely possible she had none—but had to emotionally feel a scene in order to play it.
Although they had known each other for years, Garbo seems to have been uncomfortable working with Lubitsch. Years later, she told Gavin Lambert that she hadn’t enjoyed making the picture, found Lubitsch vulgar and had little rapport with him.
“How strange that I got mixed up in that business, but I did,” she told Cecil Beaton in 1947. She did admit that she thought that Lubitsch was a much better actor than any of the people in the cast. “I remember, one morning, going in, and seeing him, cigar in mouth, with my big leading man, running through a scene on the sofa that I was to do. He was being so funny! But underneath he was a vulgar little man.”
According to Hedda Hopper, Lubitsch was working at a faster tempo than Garbo was accustomed to, leading her to ask him one day, “What next, Mr. Van Dyke?” a reference to “One-Take” Woody Van Dyke, an MGM director famed for his slapdash speed on the set. Garbo’s most frequent director, Clarence Brown, always directed her in whispers, and she had obviously gotten used to it. At one point, Garbo became ruffled by the steady high energy and accented expostulations, and spoke to Lubitsch in German: “Please, when you speak to me, please speak more softly.” A startled Lubitsch modulated his voice.
“Garbo didn’t care for him,” confirmed Gottfried Reinhardt, who produced Two-Faced Woman, her last, disastrous picture. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Salka Viertel who suggested Lubitsch to her for the film. Garbo was strange; many good directors she didn’t like. She liked directors who left her alone, like Clarence Brown. She didn’t care for directors who directed her. She had some kind of somnambulistic instinct for her effect on the camera. Whoever tried to interfere with that she instinctively fought. You couldn’t really direct Garbo. And, if you look at her films, you find that she is always more or less the same, including Ninotchka.”
Yet, like many actresses, Garbo seems to have tailored her reactions—indeed, her personality—to the company in which she found herself. With Reinhardt or Cecil Beaton, she would claim that she had been uncomfortable with Lubitsch. Yet, she told Raymond Daum, who regularly accompanied her on her endless, post-retirement walks through Manhattan, that Lubitsch was “a marvelous little man,” and she told the journalist Sven Broman that Lubitsch treated her “like a loving father.” With her lover Mercedes d’Acosta, she was exuberantly happy.
“Never since I had known her had she been in such good spirits,” wrote d’Acosta of Garbo during the production of Ninotchka. “[It is] the first time I have had a great director since I am in Hollywood,” she told d’Acosta, who called her “a changed person. She used to come for me as usual after shooting, and we walked in the hills. At least I walked, but she more often ran and danced. She laughed constantly and she used to repeat the question ‘Why’ as she did in the picture. She would imitate Lubitsch’s accent and ask over and over again, ‘Vhy? Vhy?’ ”
Sometimes Garbo even acted out scenes from the picture for d’Acosta. “It was fascinating to see how by playing a gay role rather than a sad one her personality changed.”
If Lubitsch sensed Garbo’s periodic unease, he didn’t let on; for him, there was no ambivalence, no vacillating about what he thought of this deeply moody, anomalous creature. “I wouldn’t have done it if Garbo hadn’t been cast for it—and without Garbo I don’t think it would have meant a thing . . . She made age-old gags seem brand-new. She understood perfectly what I wanted, and performed exquisitely.”
Privately, Lubitsch’s mood during the production of Ninotchka was testy. He didn’t trust Metro and Metro was not thrilled with him either. Although Ninotchka would (apparently) renew Garbo’s commercial viability, the start of World War II divested MGM of the European market, which accounted for nearly 40 percent of their revenues. It was a particularly dire situation for a star like Garbo, whose domestic appeal was largely urban. As Gottfried Reinhardt said, “Garbo was a money star only in Europe.”
Lubitsch obviously sensed the emotional misalliance between himself and the studio. On February 7, 1939, the day before he reported to the studio, an MGM memo stated that “[head of the MGM legal department] Floyd Hendrikson is having a helluva time with Lubitsch. The latter is a very suspicious individual and, for some reason or other thinks that Metro signed him up merely to do the Garbo picture and that it will attempt to avoid its obligation to have him do The Shop Around the Corner. The latter apparently is the apple of his directorial eye and he is so anxious to be sure that the title is cleared up that he has hired Louis Swartz to make an independent investigation of the title.”
Exactly a week later, Lubitsch’s ire had grown to the point where MGM was saying that “although we do have until sometime in June to clear the title it would make matters much more pleasant for the studio . . . if this title could be cleared in the near future.” They took their sweet time; as late as April 15, a memo was saying that “Lubitsch is supposed to be working on the Garbo picture but is probably devoting most of his time to worrying about whether or not we intend to go ahead with the other picture which is the one he really wants to do.”
The grumpiness extended even into his private life. In May 1939, when David Selznick invited Ernst to a dinner party for his new discovery Ingrid Bergman, Lubitsch was heard to mutter unkindly, “She’s such a big peasant.” By the end of the evening, however, Ernst had been charmed by Bergman’s glowing, ingenuous femininity. “Don’t let this get you down,” he told her. “We all came to Hollywood for the first time, and it was hard for all of us.” Selznick tried to promote Bergman to Lubitsch; indeed, she would have been wonderful for The Shop Around the Corner, but the part had already been promised to Margaret Sullavan.
Lubitsch’s old, touchy relationship with Norma Shearer sparked again when he attended the wrap party for The Women, which had once been floated as a Lubitsch project. As Rosalind Russell got up to dance with George Cukor, Lubitsch sidled up to her and said, “If you want all your close-ups to stay in the picture, better dance with Norma.” Russell promptly reported the crack to Shearer, who was secure enough to laugh, hold out her arms, and dance with Russell right past Lubitsch. There is no record of who led.
• • •
At a preview of Ninotchka, Lubitsch brought along Charlie Brackett, Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch, and a few studio executives. The film seemed to go well, with laughter in all the right places. After the film ended, Lubitsch swooped down on the filled-out preview cards and took them back to the studio limousine, refusing to let anybody else look at them.
“He had this very serious expression as he was reading,” remembered Billy Wilder, “and you could tell that it was pretty positive. Well, he gets to this one card and he just stares at it for a while and then he breaks into this howl of laughter. He was rocking back and forth on the seat and pounding it with one hand. We were looking at each other and wondering what the hell was so funny. Finally, he hands me the card and this is what it said:
“ ‘Great picture. Funniest film I ever saw. I laughed so hard, I peed in my girlfriend’s hand.’ ”
Although Garbo later claimed that she put off seeing Ninotchka for three years, Lubitsch clearly remembered her attending a preview with him in Long Beach, and of her shocked surprise at hearing people laugh at one of her movies. “She was so excited,” he told the New York Post’s Michel Mok. “She is the only star I ever worked with I did not have to drag away from the mirror.”
The tortuous preproduction process of the film was matched by Metro’s agonizing over the right title. In March 1939, the provisional title was We Want to Be Alone, but by the time the film was in production the title was Give Us This Day, which nobody in the New York office liked. A Kiss from Moscow was offered up as a substitute, but publicity director Howard Dietz pooh-poohed that and suggested Intrigue in Paris.
The list of possibilities also included This Time for Keeps, The Love Axis, Time Out for Love, A Kiss for the Commissar, A Foreign Affair, and A Kiss in the Dark. Finally, Nicholas Schenck, the president of Loew’s, Inc., and a native Russian, ordered that the epochal Lubitsch/Garbo collaboration would be known as Ninotchka.
• • •
Ninotchka is the story of three hapless Russian commissars sent to Paris to sell some jewels to raise money for the state, and of the woman sent to fetch them when they are slowly seduced by the pleasures of the West. For Lubitsch, who could make masterpieces like Trouble in Paradise out of moonbeams and charm, this was a very strong, almost top-heavy premise, but he managed not to be overwhelmed by it.
There are a few Lubitsch touches in the visuals: the transition of the commissars from loyal apparatchiks to sybarites is effortlessly visualized by dissolving from their battered headwarmers on a rack to their shiny bowlers and top hats on the same rack.
And, of course, there is no shortage of verbal wit; Ina Claire refers to her lover, Melvyn Douglas, as “My vulgar boatman,” and Lubitsch takes some free swings from both sides of the political fence. The Russians are portrayed as fetishistic about their drabness, and self-righteous about their alliance with the proletariat. When Ninotchka goes into a restaurant and orders raw beets and carrots, the owner replies, “Madame, this is a restaurant, not a meadow.”
As for the capitalists, a conniving, poor-mouthing middleman is capsized by the knowing remark, “Capitalistic methods—they accumulate millions by taking loss after loss.” And, just to prove that the Production Code held few terrors for Lubitsch, he gets away with an outrageous double entendre, when Ninotchka says to Leon, “I was a sergeant in the third cavalry brigade. Would you like to see my wounds”
As always, nuance is all. When three leggy cigarette girls come striding in to the hotel room, Ninotchka deadpans to the commissars, “Comrades, you must have been smoking a lot.” She does not say “smoking a great deal,” even though her character’s formality might make that a more realistic line. But the blunt, explosive sound of “a lot” is, simply, funnier.
Ninotchka’s world is one of feckless aristocrats, of rich and poor, of sexual struggle symbolized by political roles. It’s a von Stroheim world really, but instead of emphasizing morbidity and tragedy, Lubitsch plays it for laughter and wit. Never before was he so adept at creating recognizable types, then delighting us with variations on our expectations: not merely reverses, but sideways shuffles, sweeps around end, every possible dodging permutation.
Lubitsch is giving Metro an unaccustomed brio-MGM’s idea of a comedy director was Jack Conway—and he manages to endow the film with more visual variety than Metro’s preferred procession of medium shots, usually adopted in order to make reshooting and reediting easier. But Metro is affecting Lubitsch as well. There are vast amounts of white light cascading in from over the top of the sets; the incandescent Paramount glow that seemed to emanate from the characters instead of being applied by a thick brush is sorely missed.
More important, the film runs 110 minutes, much closer to the typically stately MGM idea of pacing than the Paramount ideal of 85 minutes and out. As with The Merry Widow, Lubitsch’s previous MGM film, there is a distinct longueur toward the end of the third act, when the dramatic and sexual tension dissipates and Lubitsch and the writers slog through the film’s Russian sequences, which are nearly as dreary as the environment they portray, before we get to the inevitable reconciliation at the end.
If it did nothing else, Ninotchka would confirm Lubitsch’s gifts with actors. He lures, seduces, Garbo into playing a marvelously delicate, lilting drunk scene, and she appears enchantingly, radiantly relaxed as she was only once before-for George Cukor in Camille. When Leon sends Ninotchka a large bouquet with a jar of goat’s milk inside it, Garbo seems to cry real tears, and the moment is ineffably moving because of the authenticity of emotion; people are moved to tears by silly but appropriate gifts that tell them that someone genuinely knows and understands them. Garbo’s tears are not the tears of a goddess, but those of a woman, and Lubitsch manages to effect this transition while leaving the essential mystery of the actress intact.
There are cavils, however. Several times Lubitsch indulges himself by using a subjective camera from the inside of a safe: Ina Claire has beautiful diction and timing but, to be polite, she seems at least a decade too old for her part. And Melvyn Douglas, while polished and likable, lacks sufficient variety. More important, he lacks sexuality. There was always something redolent of pipe and slippers about Melvyn Douglas, and, while he doesn’t hurt the film, he doesn’t give it the antic, erotic charge that William Powell or Cary Grant would have. (According to Billy Wilder, Lubitsch in fact offered the part to Grant but was turned down.)
Ninotchka marks the beginning of Lubitsch’s richest period, when he would examine with a remarkable, tender humor the ways in which the life of the mind yields to the life of the heart; communism yields, not to capitalism, but to copulation. “No one can be so happy without being punished,” Ninotchka wails at one point, but in the benevolent world of Lubitsch, no one is punished and nothing is punishable except cruelty.
Commercially, Ninotchka returned worldwide rentals to MGM of $2.2 million on a cost of $1.3 million. The tally was all the more impressive because countries as various as Italy, Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and France banned the film because of its satire on communism (France’s ban was lifted on appeal).
Domestically, the picture grossed only $1.1 million; the total profit was a mild $138,000 (a 1952 reissue made another $416,000, most of it from Europe). MGM was obviously concerned about the costs of Ninotchka, for, in a September 16, 1939, memo, they told Ernst that $110,721.10 of his total salary of $147,500 would be charged to the modest production budget of Shop Around the Corner.
Ninotchka’s financial returns were less than those of the year’s biggest hit, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which made $3.5 million, but considerably more than other hits like The Old Maid ($1.4 million), Only Angels Have Wings ($1.1 million), or The Rains Came ($1.65 million).
As far as Louis B. Mayer was concerned, it didn’t seem like the picture was worth all the trouble. “Ninotchka got everything but money,” he groused. “A[n] [Andy] Hardy picture cost $25,000 less than Lubitsch was paid alone. But any good Hardy picture made $500,000 more than Ninotchka made.”
Still, Ninotchka’s commercial and critical response was more than sufficient to refloat the endangered careers of both director and star. Frank Nugent in The New York Times wrote that Ninotchka was “one of the sprightliest comedies of the year, a gay and impertinent and malicious show which never pulls the punch lines . . . and finds the screen’s austere first lady of drama playing in deadpan comedy with the assurance of Buster Keaton.” Howard Barnes of the Herald Tribune chimed in saying that Garbo “floods the production with her timeless . . . beauty, giving a rich and haunting quality to the romantic scenes and a moving intensity to the few passages of straight drama. There is an added verve and color to her personality . . . which makes her even more magically lovely than in the past.” Variety said that “Selection of Ernst Lubitsch to pilot Garbo in her first light performance in pictures proves a bull’s-eye. Deft and amusing touches and switches are there in goodly numbers . . . there’s some bright and eyebrow-lifting dialogue, delivered in typical Lubitsch fashion.”
Despite having been squeezed out of the project, S. N. Behrman was also thrilled with the picture, and with the performance Lubitsch got out of Garbo. Behrman told Lubitsch that she had given a first-rate high-comedy performance and must continue along those lines. Lubitsch replied that he had some ideas for more films with Garbo, but he could not get her on the telephone.
So there would be only the one collaboration; then or now, one can do little more than echo one of the commissars when he first spies the luxury hotel in the City of Light: “Comrades, why should we lie to each other. It’s wonderful!”
• • •
In early September 1939, two months before Ninotchka was released, Vivian was in London with her daughter. She put Nicola, along with her nurse, on board the Athena for the long voyage home. Later, Vivian would claim that she had been unable to obtain passage for herself. Two hundred miles off the coast of Ireland, the ship was struck by a German torpedo. Many of the children on board went down with the ship because at the time of the explosion the adults were in the dining room. Immediately, they were ordered not to go below to their cabins; those that did were met by upsurging water.
In America, it was Labor Day, and the normal radio programming was interrupted for bulletins by, among others, Walter Winchell. When the passenger list was read over the air, MGM executive Sam Katz heard the name “Nicola Lubitsch” and rushed over to Lubitsch’s house to break the news, picking up Walter Reisch on the way.
After he was told, an aghast Lubitsch leaned against the piano in the living room, clinging to a silver-framed picture of his daughter. Katz began working the phones. Five MGM employees were called and ordered to work their phones. The words “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer” opened many doors. For hours, Lubitsch remained standing by the piano, clinging to his daughter’s photograph.
Finally, a call came from the MGM office in New York. Katz offered the phone to Ernst, but, in Reisch’s words, “he was incapable of holding the receiver.” Otto took the call.
The information was courtesy of Lord Beaverbrook. When the explosion vibrated through the ship, Nicola’s nurse had snatched the child with one hand and a life-preserver with the other and rushed topside. Both of them were immediately put in a lifeboat. For ten hours, they drifted; there was no milk on the lifeboat, so Nicola subsisted on chowder, ginger ale, and potatoes. Finally, they were sighted by the yacht Southern Cross, whose propeller wash capsized the lifeboat. Nicola and her nurse were both alive and in fine shape.
Ernst staggered away from the piano and went into his study, locking the door behind him, “without his cigars, without finding any words, without a smile,” according to Walter Reisch.
“Baby stays right here after this,” Lubitsch declared once Nicola was home on September 18. “No more monkey business. She stays here in America, where she’ll be safe.”
After Nicola was back home, Lubitsch became even more obsessive about her, sometimes even having his meals in her nursery. Doting, loving, he was bending over the crib one day when he suddenly turned to Vivian and said, “You know, for all she’s been through she hasn’t much personality.”
Another marriage might have been strengthened by the crisis, but not this one. “One of the reasons Vivian was in England was the [rocky marriage],” said Gottfried Reinhardt. “Everybody blamed her for not being with the child, but that saved the child’s life, because the nurse acted so correctly.”
A few years later, Dorshka Raphaelson was at the train station to pick up her daughter, when Ernst arrived to meet Nicola, who was then about five. The train came in, passengers began moving up the ramp, and Lubitsch turned to Dorshka and said, “This child has been the greatest happiness I have known in my life. Vivien told me you are responsible for us having her.”
His attention was diverted by the sight of his daughter coming toward him. “When she came up the aisle,” remembered Dorshka Raphaelson, “his face just ate up her darlingness and happiness. That’s the one time I saw him when he wasn’t the concentrated working man.”
• • •
It was Vivian who suggested the title for her husband’s next film, but her wording was The Little Shop Around the Corner, which she thought was worth $500. Lubitsch left out Little, and believed that made the title his. Whatever the title, Lubitsch was attracted to the story by its simplicity, its authentic emotions. “I have known just such a little shop in Budapest,” he would explain when the finished film premiered in New York. “The feeling between the boss and those who work for him is pretty much the same the world over, it seems to me. Everyone is afraid of losing his job and everyone knows how little human worries can affect his job. If the boss has a touch of dyspepsia, better be careful not to step on his toes; when things have gone well with him, the whole staff reflects his good humor.”
Lubitsch would claim that James Stewart had popped into his head when he and Raphaelson were writing the script, partially because of his grace as an instinctive actor, but mostly because he was “the antithesis of the old-time matinee idol; he holds his public by his very lack of a handsome face or a suave manner.”
Lubitsch had gotten very lucky with the casting of Stewart, for there were few actors who could pull off the part of Alfred Kralik, and there was only one on the Metro lot.
Lubitsch approached production with a full measure of obsessive care for the external details. Metro’s researcher Henry Noerdlinger, who would later become DeMille’s head researcher, obtained an inventory from a Budapest leather store, which revealed that most of the leather sold in Hungary was from America and that tan suitcases were particularly popular. When Margaret Sullavan asked for his approval for a simple $1.98 dress she had bought for the part, Lubitsch said it was “Too smart for a clerk looking for a job.” He had it altered so it didn’t fit quite so neatly, and left out in the sun until it was slightly faded.
Ernst didn’t wait to see what the public response to Ninotchka would be; by the time it opened in New York on November 9, he had already begun production on The Shop Around the Corner. Working quickly, the film he was making matched up to the film in his mind with an astonishing clarity; the movie was completed in twenty-seven days at a cost of $474,000.
The Shop Around the Corner is the story of Matuschek and Company, leather goods merchants, who are, an opening title tells us, “just around the corner from Andrassy Street—on Balta Street in Budapest, Hungary.” The film begins as the employees’ day begins, with the ritual gathering outside the shop, as everybody waits for Mr. Matuschek to open the store.
They banter, inquire after each other’s children, Alfred Kralik (James Stewart), the head clerk, had dinner the night before with the boss and his wife. The women clerks wonder if the boss’s wife has had her face lifted. “How old did she look last night?” one inquires of Kralik. “Forty” he says. “She’s had her face lifted,” is the decisive response.
The opening scene sets the characters: Frank Morgan’s Matuschek, kindly but preoccupied; Joseph Schildkraut’s Vadas, conceited, conniving, and relentlessly sycophantic; Felix Bressart’s Pirovitch, happy in his life, content in his job, but careful not to stick his head up above the crowd; and William Tracy’s Pepi, a brash and blunt errand boy, unbound by the conventions that bind the others.
Into this comfortable, flourishing family comes Klara, a new clerk who promotes herself into a job even though Matuschek and Company is already overstocked with help. Unbeknownst to either of them, Kralik and Klara have been corresponding, addressing each other as “Dear Friend,” and have fallen in love with what they imagine to be the other person. Face to face, however, because of their differing status, their mutual competitiveness, and because each idealizes the person reflected in their letters, they can’t see each other clearly. Actually, they actively dislike each other.
Lubitsch and Raphaelson masterfully integrate other strands into the story—Matuschek’s indecision about whether or not to sell the store, his fears that his wife is having an affair. And Lubitsch works in moments that surely derive from his days at S. Lubitsch, as when a customer inquires, “How much is that belt in the window, the one that says $2.95?”
Mostly though, it is a film of ambience and intimacy about men and women who are happy to be middle class and trying to stay that way—the clerks’ quiet desperation to please each customer, and to not displease Mr. Matuschek; the way each of the correspondents is slightly afraid to meet the other one for fear of the ideal of perfection being sullied by grim reality.
Before their official meeting can take place, Kralik is fired by Matuschek, who wrongly believes him to be having an affair with his wife. When Matuschek finds that the real culprit is Vadas, the old man attempts suicide but is stopped by Pepi. Kralik, who now knows that Klara is his beloved, is brought back to manage the store.
It is Christmas Eve. A deep, heavy snow is falling, but inside Matuschek and Company are celebrating, for they have had the best sales since Christmas Eve of 1928. Pepi has been promoted to clerk and takes full advantage of his new position to terrorize the new errand boy. Klara still has her defenses up toward Alfred, hiding behind feigned arrogance and a patronizing air, but, as they sit in the darkened store, he calls her his “Dear Friend.” At last, she knows, and the embrace that they have denied themselves for so long finally takes place. In a perfectly paced diminuendo, dreams meld with reality, and harmony is once again restored to Matuschek and Company.
The Shop Around the Corner is immensely ingratiating, but it never condescends to its characters or to us. Part of its strength is its concentrated unity. Lubitsch rigorously excludes everybody outside the immediate family of Matuschek and Company; we never see the home life of Pirovitch, we never see the duplicitous Mrs. Matuschek.
Ernst gives the people at Matuschek and Company the full measure of his respect and affection. Through the dignity with which he treats them, the film becomes a celebration of the ordinary, gently honoring the extraordinary qualities that lie within the most common of us. As Alfred Kralik says, “People seldom go to the trouble of scratching the surface of things to find the inner truth.” The Shop Around the Corner is the most meaningful tribute possible to the owner and employees of the long-vanished Berlin clothing firm of S. Lubitsch.
“The Shop Around the Corner could have been anywhere,” pointed out Samson Raphaelson. “It was a shop in the mood and atmosphere of the early 1900s, and that I remember, you see. I had worked in The [World’s] Fair in Chicago as a salesman . . . as an extra on Saturdays. I knew and felt the whole atmosphere behind the counter, and Lubitsch as a kid had worked as a helper in [his father’s] shop. We just smelled our way through.”
The serenity, the ease, and, above all, the tenderness of the picture are astonishing, especially when contrasted with its 1949 musical remake, In the Good Old Summertime, pointlessly moved to turn-of-the-century Chicago, with the characters’ reality obliterated by their amplification into recognizable musical comedy types. (A 1963 Broadway adaptation, She Loves Me, by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, was considerably better; Broadway musical authority Miles Kreuger calls it “the best musical of the ‘60s.”)
When The Shop Around the Corner was released in January 1940, Variety called it “smart and clever . . . with all the vivaciousness and piquant humor” expected of Lubitsch. Ironically, Ninotchka, which Lubitsch hadn’t particularly wanted to make, was less successful than The Shop Around the Corner, which Louis B. Mayer hadn’t particularly wanted to make.
The film ended up amassing a world gross of $1.3 million and a $380,000 profit, helped along by a delightful trailer in which Lubitsch made an appearance. Frank Morgan, in character, introduces his establishment—“It’s the kind of shop where you get a $3.50 value for $3.48.”—and, via clips from the film, the people that work for him. Suddenly, Lubitsch enters the frame, taps Morgan on the shoulder, and points to his watch. “I thought you were a customer,” says Morgan, who then introduces Lubitsch. The nattily attired director impatiently acknowledges the camera and takes a puff on his cigar. “The man,” says Morgan, “who gave you a Garbo in Ninotchka who could make you laugh now gives you a Morgan who can make you laugh.” Lubitsch snorts and says “I hope!”
Although Raphaelson was in for a share of any profits on The Shop Around the Corner, all he ever saw on top of his $1,000 a week salary was $5,000. “I should have gotten a hell of a lot out of it,” he commented in 1971, “but Leland Hayward had not made a good contract for me. I didn’t read the fine print. Lubitsch hadn’t done the right thing by me. I am sure he didn’t.”
Lubitsch’s two-picture stint at MGM, undertaken because none of the other major studios would have him, began the great, final flourishing of his genius, when he began creating character and story of a sudden, intermingled poignance and vulnerability. Lubitsch’s style had long since been pared down to an unobtrusive classicism that usually avoided fancy angles and seldom utilized any but the most rudimentary editing. Other than a more leisurely cutting scheme, Lubitsch’s style stopped evolving by 1935, but, perhaps as compensation, what suddenly began to evolve was a deep understanding of people, a more humane view of life.
Sam Raphaelson had a pet theory that one’s secret vices have more to do with talent than one’s known virtues. “If you have a tendency toward murder and larceny,” he explained, “it would be advisable to repress that tendency in your life and to grow into a decent person, but don’t repress it in your writing. Let go to the limit—enjoy yourself without the faintest qualm of conscience.”
Long before he had ever met Raphaelson, Ernst had been carrying out that dictum, filling his movies with ironic boulevardiers, the sophisticated drawing room swordsmen that he would have liked to have been. No more.
From now on, Ernst Lubitsch would not make movies about the man he wanted to be, or the social set he quietly wished he had been born into. Now, he would make movies about the people he knew, the man he was. The mysterious chemistry of age would make him less German, more Jewish; he would look beyond the story, through it, and in so doing begin to capture the gentle but palpable wing-beat of life itself.
For nearly twenty years he had divided his male characters into Leading Men and Comic Caricatures. But now, the traits began to blend together. In films like The Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not to Be, and Heaven Can Wait, the leading men are both cordial and crusty, sincere and duplicitous, noble and foolish. Partially this was because of his continued reliance on Raphaelson, partly because Ernst was now a middle-aged father with one failed marriage and one that was none too healthy, living in a world that was shortly to begin savagely tearing at itself. The Lubitsch of 1939 was not the Lubitsch of 1931, as Sam Raphaelson was finding out.
“[In the early days] when I’d say, ‘Look, we’re losing emotion, we don’t care anymore,’ he used to say . . . ‘That’s all right, Sam. We get a big laugh here, we pull back into that mood, we dissolve back and we get that mood.’ But when he found that that did not happen, he began to pay more attention. Lubitsch’s great problem was that he would run empty after a while because he had no lifeline to emotion; his life outside of his work was an increasingly empty one. He had . . . a wretched, meaningless home life. His whole life was his work. He was a sad man to contemplate. I don’t think he realized it, because he was a fully successful man and a very wealthy one. But . . . through our experience together, he began to value emotion.”
“Which of his movies is most like him?” Lubitsch’s niece Ruth Hall considered the question in her small, neat Florida apartment. “The Shop Around the Corner. It’s so European; it contains the most of what he was, all the types, the people that were his friends, the people he loved.”
The lesson of Broken Lullaby had taken a long time to percolate, but Lubitsch had learned that great, lasting truths didn’t have to be revealed on a battlefield or in a church confessional. They could just as easily be discovered in a little leather goods shop, just around the corner from Andrassy Street—on Balta Street, in Budapest, Hungary.
• • •
Although it had been the largesse of studio production that made it possible for Ernst to realize his dream of making The Shop Around the Corner, he still felt the need to attempt independent production. In March 1939, while still working on the script of Ninotchka, Lubitsch formed an alliance with producer Sol Lesser.
“Sol,” remembered Paul Lazarus, Jr., head of advertising and publicity at United Artists, “was one of the merchant princes. He was commercial, but he fancied himself an artist. He really should have been in the clothing business.”
Born in Spokane in 1890, by 1939 Lesser’s film credentials were minor—some Jackie Coogan silents, some George O’Brien B Westerns, and Thunder in the Sun, the feature carved out of Eisenstein’s aborted Que Viva Mexico! An alliance with Lubitsch was a coup for a man widely regarded as a B-movie producer. “You’ve got to understand the Hollywood mentality,” says Lazarus. “All of the moguls and many of the independents like Lesser were people of no education, out of middle Europe. Anything that could give them an aura of culture or improve their social status was very desirable. Making a deal with Lubitsch, who was a mythical character, would lift him onto another plateau.” Not only that, but, as Lesser put it, “Lubitsch was conscientous and dependable as to budget requirements.”
Lubitsch was betting that Lesser would give him the money to make his movies in peace; besides that, he was very much the kind of man Lubitsch liked; a haimish, unpretentious character and an extraordinarily good businessman who negotiated the deals for the purchases of the land on which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the Motion Picture Country Home, would be built.
Lubitsch signed a four-picture contract with Lesser on March 20, 1939. He would receive 50 percent of the stock of Ernst Lubitsch Productions, Inc., even though the vast majority of the firm’s financing was supplied by Lesser. There were only 100 shares of stock, 50 of Class A, 50 of Class B, all priced at $10. The company was to be a frugal operation; budgets were set at about $400,000, “unless some well-known star or stars shall be engaged . . . in which event the cost shall be proportionately increased.”
Either partner had the option of terminating the agreement after the first or second picture, although United Artists had the option of picking up Lubitsch’s option for the second picture. The contract mandated that “Lubitsch shall be in complete charge of the making of the pictures” and that “Each picture shall be advertised as an Ernst Lubitsch production, the name of Ernst Lubitsch to be displayed in letters larger than any other name including the names of the artists participating in such picture, unless such artists shall be stars recognized and advertised as such, in which case the name of Ernst Lubitsch shall be in letters at least as large of as those of the star.”
The implications of the contract were clear: Lesser needed him more than he needed Lesser. Lesser’s own five-year contract with United Artists, signed on May 12, was very clear on the point that the first picture in the deal had to be directed by Lubitsch.
At last, Ernst would achieve his dream and be fully independent, but not without some sacrifice; in return for ownership of the product, and a percentage of the profits, Lubitsch was working for a guarantee of only $30,000 a picture, the smallest salary he had made since leaving Germany.
Still, it was a coup for Lesser and he knew it. The trade papers were soon featuring full-page photos of Lubitsch, with copy announcing “Sol Lesser presents an ERNST LUBITSCH production.” Neither story or stars were mentioned, just the filmmaker. That was enough.
Lubitsch’s initial idea for his first independent production was based on a tale that David Selznick’s story editor had told him. It involved a governess who takes the job of teaching a reputedly difficult twelve-year-old whose mother has died. After she begins her instructions, she discovers that the problem seems to be with the girl’s father, not the girl. Unfortunately, the story editor could remember neither the title nor the author.
Lesser was complaining to his sister-in-law about their dilemma when she recognized the story as a magazine serial written by Rose Franken. After purchasing the story for $25,000, the two partners got on a plane for Los Angeles, with Lubitsch settling down to read the story. After a while, an obviously alarmed Lubitsch turned to Lesser. “This is not a comedy,” he said. “Instead it’s quite a serious drama. That won’t do for me.” He continued reading and discovered that the child turned out to be a psychotic who accuses her father of killing her mother. Appalled, he threw the story aside and told his chagrined partner “We must keep on looking for a story.” Lesser was out $25,000.
Neither Ernst nor Lesser could find a new story that was to their liking, but their dilemma was eased by Alexander Korda, who was looking for a project for his wife, Merle Oberon. MGM, who owed Korda a favor, gave him a picture commitment from Melvyn Douglas as payment. Korda offered Lesser the two stars and a partial script that had been written around the story of Ernst’s 1925 picture Kiss Me Again, for what Lesser remembered as “a fair price.”
Feeling pressure to get the new venture off dead center, Ernst decided to proceed. Lubitsch assigned Walter Reisch the job of adapting the story, while Lesser negotiated a $500,000 loan from the Bank of America.
Just before production got under way on the picture the partners had provisionally titled Divorces but would soon be renamed That Uncertain Feeling, Lubitsch embarked on his first acting chore in years. The vehicle was a “Screen Guild Playhouse” radio show on October 20, 1940. The premise of the show was simplicity itself: Lubitsch is directing a radio show with Basil Rathbone and Claudette Colbert. Enter Jack Benny, desperate to broaden his nonexistent range and improve his dismal reputation. “If you can make Garbo laugh, you can make me cry,” he explains.
Lubitsch’s performance and timing are expert and he gets every laugh that’s in the script. His voice is less booming than stage Germans like Sig Rumann, more jovial, but the accent is similar. Obviously, the actor in him was still fairly close to the surface, but he had avoided indulging it for a very long time.I
Lubitsch’s performance on “Screen Guild Theater” is consistently hilarious and certainly shows that his gusto for acting had not diminished over time. Moreover, it provokes regret that more opportunities for performing did not present themselves over the years, other than occasional appearances in the trailers for some of his movies. “He probably would have been very good,” theorized his friend Mary Loos, “but I think he might have been too involved with his own creativity to step in and do a little vignette for someone else.”
• • •
That Uncertain Feeling was shot quickly and effortlessly between October and December 1940, and released the following April. Burgess Meredith noted Lubitsch’s habit of “just before you [were] going in on a scene of breaking you up [with] a whispered comment. Lubitsch was most amusing, dry . . . He was quietly very witty—always working precisely, softly and swiftly. Between takes . . . he often played the piano quietly in the corner of our soundstage.”
Overall, for Meredith, making the picture was “a haunting experience. He’d act everything out for you, because he loved the part, and he’d act it out so funny, and so definitely, that I would stand there as an audience. The reason that it didn’t bother me . . . [is] that he would act it out in such a way, and so hilariously, that he would give you the idea of what he wanted without expecting you to do it, because first of all he had a horrendous accent, and he would stop in the middle of when he was acting my lines and make some crack about my brother, who I was having trouble with then, or some purely personal thing which in some psychic way he knew I was undergoing. He was a very psychic man.”
There was one amusing, if unexpected sidelight. Merle Oberon, who remembered it as “the happiest picture I ever made,” found Lubitsch’s methods irresistible; she made it a habit to ask him to act out every scene for her. Months later, when her husband, Alexander Korda, arrived from England, she asked his opinion of the picture. “Oh, fine. You played it beautifully, like a little Jewish girl.”
• • •
That Uncertain Feeling returns to Kiss Me Again not just in plot outline but in theme, of not being able to take any sexual relationship for granted, of the necessity of stoking love’s fires with risk, even, if necessary, lubriciousness.
Merle Oberon is Jill, a bored wife plagued by hiccups who goes to a psychiatrist to determine the cause of her malaise.
“Age?” he asks her.
“Twenty-two.”
“I am your doctor, Mrs. Baker.”
“Thank you,” she says, whereupon he writes “24?” on his notepad.
The session continues, with the doctor attempting to get her to breach her own defenses. “Wouldn’t you like to meet you?” he asks.
“No. You see, I’m a little shy.”
It’s no use. At the doctor’s office she meets Alexander Sebastian (Burgess Meredith), a blocked concert pianist who can only play well in a studio or in private. “I’m against anything and anybody,” he snarls. “I hate my fellow man and he hates me.” Later, they go to an art gallery, where Jill asks about the creator of a particularly strong painting. “A woman,” snaps Sebastian. “No man could be so malicious.”
Jill and Sebastian fall in love, but life with a compulsively self-absorbed, would-be artist/egomaniac can be exhausting, and Baker reverts to her nice, dull husband.
The blatantly antisocial Sebastian promises to perk the movie up, but the triangle of Oberon, Douglas, and Meredith simply fails to ignite. Melvyn Douglas has a nice line in squeamish, uneasy smiles, but it is never a good idea to cast a dutiful, slightly dull actor as a dutiful, slightly dull character, and neither of the other two leads is quite strong enough to carry off the deadpan, somewhat saturnine treatment Lubitsch imposes on the material.
In its portrayal of women as cossetted pets good only for frequenting Elizabeth Arden or trading wisecracks about men and marriage, That Uncertain Feeling is vaguely reminiscent of The Women, but it has more damaging internal contradictions. Structurally, Oberon’s Jill Baker is rebelling against being treated dismissively as a mere wife, but, as written and directed, that’s all she is, and Oberon is not a forceful enough actress to transfer her own strength of personality to her character.
Obviously, after the renewal represented by the two MGM films, Lubitsch’s energy was again flagging. He resorts to a variation of Chaplin’s famous inferential direction in A Woman of Paris, in which Adolphe Menjou takes a large man’s handkerchief from a drawer in Edna Purviance’s apartment and we know they are living together. Here, Douglas is on the phone when a girl comes in. He goes over to his desk, shuffles around among some papers, and hands her her purse.
Oberon delivers her punch lines effectively enough, but she lacks the requisite lightness of spirit, and she has no inner life. The film could definitely use more close-ups, and, in an odd lapse for a painstaking craftsman like Lubitsch, there are some mismatched cuts. The photography of the normally superb George Barnes lacks the lustre of either the MGM high-key lighting or the Paramount glow, which is unfortunate because the script needs all the help it can get. Clearly, the enforced restrictions of a modest budget were telling on Lubitsch.
The viewer is forced to cling to little in-jokes, as with a character named Kafka who works for Universal Mattress. Except for a funny running joke about a vase that Sebastian finds offensively hideous, the film plays like a mild, innocuous comedy that could have been directed by any number of second-rank filmmakers.
Appropriately enough, both the reviews and the commercial returns were pallid, with a world gross of $848,000 ($585,000 domestic). Sol Lesser said that the film produced a “reasonable profit,” but he had been hoping for something more. Variety said that “The famed Lubitsch touch is there but the entertainment value isn’t . . . as a whole, it is tiring, very slow . . . and embraces numerous situations that are basically weak.” The mild picture’s mild success would probably have been greater had it not been for World War II closing off most of the European market, a problem of considerable significance for a director like Lubitsch.
Ernst’s share of the $100,000 profit was not enough to compensate him for the added grief of assuming far more risk for far less money. Sol Lesser seems to have become quickly disillusioned; certainly he regarded the picture as a bad lot. In September 1941, when the copyright materials necessary to register That Uncertain Feeling in England were lost at sea, Lesser told U.A. not to bother spending an additional $28.76. “We do not feel it necessary to copyright the story of Uncertain Feeling in England,” he wrote the distributor. “The picture is already in distribution and . . . we feel that the expenditure is unnecessary at this time.”
Even before Lesser’s letter to the U.A. management, he and Ernst had made the decision to go their separate ways. “The marriage wasn’t a happy one,” said Paul Lazarus. “Sol would have let him do almost anything he wanted, but he also wanted the money coming in regularly.” As far as Lesser was concerned, “Ernst required too much of my time, which I could employ to better use.” Also, there was no doubt in his mind that his time could bring “better results from a profit point of view.”
Soon, Lesser would take over production of the Tarzan pictures from MGM and continue the profitable series while occasionally attempting an upscale effort like Our Town, Stage Door Canteen, or The Red House. “But,” says Lazarus, “he always had a couple of Tarzans in the background.” Lubitsch and Lesser maintained a warm social relationship, but, as Lesser’s son Julian points out, Sol Lesser never made another romantic comedy.
“After long and careful consideration,” Lubitsch wrote United Artist’s Arthur Kelly on August 27, 1941, “we both came to the conclusion that with our financial arrangements and limitations we would not be able to make any kind of a picture that would be profitable to us or to the exhibitors. The lack of sufficient funds and the impossibility of casting the [next] picture with important names could only have produced a picture which would have been a great disappointment.”
Lubitsch went on to say that he felt it imperative that his next picture “should be a very important one with a high budget.” Ernst Lubitsch Productions was dissolved in 1943; Lubitsch and Sol Lesser each received a final disbursement of $10,000 and 50 percent of the rights to That Uncertain Feeling.
That Uncertain Feeling was copyrighted by Ernst Lubitsch Productions, but, when the time came to renew the copyright, Lubitsch was long dead, and Lesser wasn’t paying attention. As a result, the film fell into the public domain. Thus, one of Lubitsch’s worst pictures became one of his most frequently seen.
After what must have been a considerable creative and financial disappointment, Lubitsch pulled himself together and regrouped. Even while he was writing the letter to Arthur Kelly, he was working on the script for the “very important” picture. Since everybody in Hollywood was making an anti-Nazi picture, he would too. But unlike all the others, his would be a masterpiece.
I. In 1923, just about the time Lubitsch began directing Rosita, ‘he had done one day’s work playing himself in Rupert Hughes’s Souls for Sale, a drama about Hollywood (most of the film survives, but Lubitsch’s sequence is apparently lost). There were other acting offers over the years; in 1937/38, DeMille had offered him the part of Napoleon in The Buccaneer. Although the resemblance was obviously there, and Lubitsch had expressed interest in the part, he ended up passing. In 1945, he was costumed and made up to appear in a scene in Gregory Ratoff’s Where Do We Go From Here. Although stills exist of Lubitsch on the set, a thorough search of the finished picture fails to disclose Lubitsch anywhere in it.