Ernst Lubitsch (far right) and the rest of the people making To Be or Not to Be try to restrain their laughter at the least likely Hamlet in theatrical history.
There’s a revolution on in the world. Is laughter to depart? Is gracious and graceful living, wit and the jocund interplay, the amusing warfare of man and woman all to vanish? Must I weep for the world that was and not be permitted to re-create it? Devoutly I hope not. For then I should not desire to make more films. I should be content to die.”
—ernst lubitsch, july 1943
In March 1941, Ernst decided to return to the security of the studios—and a steady paycheck—by signing a three-year contract at 20th Century-Fox. He planned to report to the lot by mid to late summer, as soon as he had his second United Artists picture out of the way. It wouldn’t be that simple.
To Be or Not to Be began life as the second commitment under Lubitsch’s partnership with Sol Lesser. When Ernst Lubitsch Productions was dissolved, United Artists gave the picture to Walter Wanger, but that producer’s recent films had been largely unsuccessful, leaving him unable to finance his portion of the $1 million movie. The production was passed on to Alexander Korda.
Ernst and Korda had been acquaintances since the late 1920s, when Alex had arrived in Hollywood and promptly served as the butt of one of Lubitsch’s practical jokes. During a Sunday afternoon stroll, Lubitsch and a writer friend named Heinrich Fraenkel came upon Korda’s house. Knocking, they found the door open and nobody home. Mischievously, Lubitsch decided to fake a burglary. Ashtrays, books, anything movable was stuffed under the couch. The carpet was yanked up and furniture was shoved around, after which Lubitsch and Fraenkel quickly left.
When they arrived back at Lubitsch’s house, they enlisted an actress friend to call Korda, who had arrived home by then. Pretending to be a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, she told Korda that a burglary had just been reported at that address. An appalled Korda confirmed that, yes, he had been robbed. The reporter asked him for a recapitulation of his career, and a list of things that had been stolen.
Five minutes later, another Lubitsch friend called, and then another, each one pretending to be a reporter, each asking exactly the same questions: his previous career, how he liked it in Hollywood, whether American women were prettier than European women, and, by the way, what had been stolen?
By the third call, Korda’s dramatic imagination had kicked in, and he was reporting that his wife’s pearl necklace had been stolen, even though Lubitsch and Fraenkel had never come near it. Lubitsch snatched the telephone, barked “Man, just have a peep under the sofa,” in rough Berlin slang, and hung up.
Korda’s initial stint in Hollywood had been a failure, but, in England, he struck gold with The Private Life of Henry VIII, the momentum of which carried him through a slate of expensive pictures that almost invariably failed. As a British subject, Korda had returned to America with the sanction of the British government, but since most of Korda’s films were financed by the Bank of England, he had to keep the British Foreign Exchange Control Board happy; the principal, and most of the resulting profits of films like The Thief of Baghdad, That Hamilton Woman, and The Jungle Book, were earmarked to be returned to England.
The Jungle Book had run over budget, necessitating additional financing. The banks chose not to indulge Korda and refused to finance anything beyond the Kipling project, which put the Lubitsch venture in sudden jeopardy. Although Korda had invested some $100,000 in start-up costs on the new Lubitsch picture, he lacked sufficient liquidity to continue.
However, as Korda was a co-owner of United Artists, the company, for reasons both legal and psychological, was forced to pick up his commitment with Lubitsch. All this finagling over financing meant that Ernst had to put his commitment to 20th Century-Fox off for nearly a year.
The original story for To Be or Not to Be derived largely from Lubitsch himself, although he worked in collaboration with Melchior Lengyel, who reported that “Writing for Lubitsch is just kibitzing.” Ernst’s first impulse seems to have been to structure the picture as a comeback vehicle for Maurice Chevalier, who had returned to Europe shortly after The Merry Widow. The resulting pictures had received scant distribution in the U.S. Director Robert Florey remembered Chevalier in Paris hoping for the call from Lubitsch that would bring him back to Hollywood. The call never came.
Ernst Lubitsch (far right) and the rest of the people making To Be or Not to Be try to restrain their laughter at the least likely Hamlet in theatrical history.
Beyond that, however, Ernst was consciously going to try something different. “I was tired of the two established, recognized recipes,” he would write in The New York Times of March 29, 1942. “Drama with comedy relief and comedy with dramatic relief. I had made up my mind to make a picture with no attempt to relieve anybody from anything at any time.”
The scriptwriter, Edwin Justus Mayer, had previously collaborated with him on Desire. Mayer began his creative life as another intellectual New York playwright who had the bad luck to write a scathingly contemptuous piece about movies, the medium in which he would spend the better part of his working life. In an October 1923 issue of The New York Times, Mayer referred to Hollywood as “The abode of prosperous failure . . . the retreat of intellectual beachcombers . . . the first refuge of a scoundrel . . . the capital of defeat . . . an outlet of stereotyped forms and sentimental postures.”
At the time, Mayer could afford those lofty sentiments, for his play about Benvenuto Cellini, The Firebrand, was about to open and be acclaimed as one of the ten best plays of the 1924-25 season. Brooks Atkinson would call him “a writer of originality and taste”; George Jean Nathan said he was “a writer of dignity . . . who tickles the ear with a skillful and fanciful pen.”
But Mayer’s later plays, such as Children of Darkness, although praised for their mordant humor, were financial failures, and by 1927 he was scavenging for jobs alongside the rest of Hollywood’s intellectual beachcombers. As usual, Lubitsch chose his collaborator well.
“Eddie Mayer was a far more sophisticated writer and man than Raphaelson,” remembered Gottfried Reinhardt. “Mayer was among the intellectuals, part of the clique around Herman Mankiewicz: Hecht and MacArthur, S. N. Behrman, Louis Weitzenkorn and Mayer. In Europe it would have been a coffeehouse atmosphere. They all had wit. In Germany you had nobody in films and hardly anybody in the theater like that, except Brecht, who had a political horizon, which made him much too serious for a man like Lubitsch.”
Mayer’s script for To Be or Not to Be shares with The Firebrand and Children of Darkness a sense of black comedy, of each character’s absurdity, with characterizations defined via sardonic asides. All three scripts revolve around monstrous egos, but there is a difference. Mayer’s plays are almost brilliantly written, but they’re metallic, lacking in humanity, cold. To Be or Not to Be is warm, and no matter how absurd “that great, great Polish actor” Josef Tura may be, there is something very needy, very recognizably human in his actorish vanity. That was the true Lubitsch touch.
• • •
Lubitsch’s contract with United Artists for To Be or Not to Be was signed on August 5, 1941. With the proviso that Lubitsch could work for Fox under his preexisting contract with them so long as it would not substantially interfere with work on To Be or Not to Be, the contract guaranteed that he “shall not be subject to the supervision or control of any office or employee of any producer except Alexander Korda or any Executive Producer who may succeed Alexander Korda.”
Again, Lubitsch was working for less than his usual salary, this time getting $60,000 up front, with another $50,000 payable out of the net profits over the next five years, and 25 percent of any net after $130,000 in profits. (He and Melchior Lengyel received $10,500 for the original story in October 1941, with Lengyel getting $7,000 of that and sole story credit. Edwin Justus Mayer received $2,500 a week to write the shooting script.)
Lubitsch had writer approval, cast approval, and his usual final cut. Clause 24 of Lubitsch’s contract states that “The director shall have complete and final control over the production of said photoplay . . . and shall have complete and final control over the cutting and editing.” U.A. would only be allowed to interfere with the form of the picture if censorship boards demanded changes as a condition for release.
Eager to work for a great director, Jack Benny came on board for $125,000 plus 10 percent of the distributor’s world gross in excess of $1,250,000. Before the deal was signed, an obviously embarrassed Lubitsch asked Benny to make a test in Nazi regalia to see if he could play one of the scenes where Josef Tura goes undercover. Benny didn’t mind the test and passed with flying colors.
While the money was good, it wasn’t why Benny was eager to make the movie. Benny had told Lubitsch over a year before, long before the script was even written, that he’d do the film. “If you want me for a picture, I want to be in it,” he had told Lubitsch. “It was always impossible for comedians like me or Hope to get a good director for a movie,” Benny remembered in 1973. “That’s why we made lousy movies—and here was Ernst Lubitsch for God’s sake, calling to ask if I’d do a picture with him. Who cares what the script is!” Benny said that Lubitsch was “the greatest comedy director that ever lived,” and the only other director to whom he would have given an automatic “yes” was Leo McCarey.
Although Ernst played around with the idea of Miriam Hopkins opposite Benny, she and the comedian had an uneasy relationship. Moreover, as soon as Hopkins heard of Lubitsch’s interest, she began pushing to have her part built up. Benny began campaigning for Carole Lombard, but Korda passed the buck to Lubitsch, and Lubitsch passed it right back to Korda. Finally, Korda and Benny went out one night in New York, with Korda getting very drunk. After some minor cajoling by Benny, Korda wired U.A. to hire Lombard.
Ernst had been good friends with Carole Lombard since her earliest days at Paramount. Although he had never cast her in one of his own pictures, and had even stated, upon becoming production head at Paramount, that the studio’s only long-range female assets were Claudette Colbert and Marlene Dietrich, they remained close. Lombard once told the director Sidney Salkow that she had attempted to persuade Lubitsch to direct her in a film entitled Love for Breakfast. He wasn’t convinced. “I don’t think it’s going to be a success,” Lubitsch said.
Desperate, Lombard countered with the only thing at her disposal. “If it turns out to be a stinker, you can have your way with me.” Ernst’s face broke into a smile at the thought, but Lombard reached over the desk and snatched the cigar from his mouth. “And if it’s a hit,” she said, “I’ll shove this black thing up your ass.”
• • •
Although Lombard’s husband, Clark Gable, was unenthusiastic about both the script of To Be or Not to Be and Lubitsch (whom Gable supposedly referred to as “the horny Hun”), Lombard signed on anyway, for $75,000 in cash, with an additional $75,000 to be paid out of 4.0837 percent of the producer’s profits. The only unusual clause in Lombard’s contract was one specifying that Irene design her wardrobe, “if Irene is reasonably available.” Irene was; Irene did.
United Artists agreed to undertake production of the film themselves, something they had traditionally worked very hard to avoid. Then as now, film production can easily turn into a financial bloodbath, while film distribution is a virtual license to print money.
On August 26, U.A. formed Romaine Film Corporation and secured a loan from the Bank of America for $1,200,000. Production began on November 6, and was completed in forty-two days, although the last work day for Carole Lombard was New Year’s Eve, when she did a day’s work posing for stills shot by Robert Coburn.
Initially, the production was hampered by Jack Benny’s nervousness. Benny was an innately modest man with a string of so-so movies behind him that were rarely as bad as he pretended they were. “I made twenty-two [movies],” he admitted at the end of his life. “And most of ’em were good.” Nevertheless, he was mystified as to why Lubitsch had expressly chosen him for the part of Josef Tura.
“You think you are a comedian,” responded Lubitsch. “You are not a comedian. You are not even a clown. You are fooling the public for thirty years. You are fooling even yourself. A clown—he is a performer what is doing funny things. A comedian—he is a performer what is saying funny things. But you, Jack, you are an actor, you are an actor playing the part of a comedian and this you are doing very well. But do not worry, I keep your secret to myself.”
Although Benny had never thought of it that way, he had to admit that Lubitsch was right. The painstakingly developed character of a cheap, vain, petty, mean man who played the violin badly was not at all like the real Benny . . . except for the part about the violin.
Although Benny loved the part of Josef Tura and loved Lubitsch (“He’d have done anything for Lubitsch,” remembered Benny’s daughter, Joan. “He thought he was the best”), he was extremely uncertain all through production. “Jack was an innocent,” recalled Robert Stack, who had the difficult job of playing Carole Lombard’s young lover, in spite of the fact he had known her since he was a child. “He’d never done a movie that worked. He’d always ask me, ‘Is it funny?’ and I’d say, ‘Jesus, don’t ask me.’ ‘But you’re an actor,’ he’d say. Basically, he was scared to death.”
Benny did not seem bothered by Lubitsch’s habit of acting out every comedy scene, not from the point of view of a director but that of an actor, a “corny comedian,” in Benny’s words. “Lubitsch was about the only director who ever really directed me,” Benny explained to Milt Josefsberg, one of his writers. “In practically all of my earlier pictures the directors would say, ‘Jack, you know so much more about comedy than I do, play the scene the way you feel it.’ The only trouble was that I knew lots about radio comedy, a little about stage comedy, and nothing about movies.”
As if the problems of the picture’s financing and its worried star were not omens enough, there were more harbingers of trouble. On the day Lubitsch was shooting a scene of storm troopers marching down the street, a visitor on the set, a woman who had just come out of occupied Poland, fainted dead away. Behind the scenes, there was only one outbreak of hostilities. Miklos Rozsa, musical director for the Korda operation, had originally been scheduled to score the picture, but he was appalled by the script’s satirical take on the Nazis and flatly refused to participate. Korda and Lubitsch assigned the musical score to Werner Heymann.
During one scene, Stack was having trouble, which Lubitsch’s sense of precision could not allow. Putting his hands behind his back, he walked back and forth for a bit, then walked into the set. “Bobby, try this,” he said, and played Stack’s part himself.
“He exaggerated the key to the scene,” remembered Stack. “He caricatured it and I saw it at once and it became easy. He didn’t play it naturalistically, he made it larger, so I’d get the sense of it. After that, it flew like a bird.”
Stack found that the basis of Lubitsch’s gift was his ability to take and maintain control. “He was a Renaissance man. He could do it all. He was an actor, a writer, a cameraman, an art director. He did not allocate responsibility. You must remember, that didn’t happen in those days. Everybody was in a box. The writer did what he did, the art director did what he did. For instance, I worked with Frank Borzage on The Mortal Storm. Borzage didn’t do anything. He’d set up the shot, make sure it was composed, tamp down his pipe, turn his back and smoke and let the actors do the scene. He pretty much let them take over. But he cast the film perfectly. Now, if less gifted people try that, they won’t get away with it.
“But there was no ego working with Lubitsch. He never manifested any himself and he obviously loved actors. He could be a little rough, yes. Jack was not an actor per se, and sometimes [Lubitsch] made him do a lot of takes. Specifically, the scene where Jack comes home and finds me in his bed asleep and does a series of double takes, he made Jack do at least thirty takes on that scene.”
Despite Lubitsch’s demands, the picture was made in an atmosphere of affection and warmth. Even if Carole Lombard was not scheduled to work, she would drive into Hollywood from her ranch in the San Fernando Valley to sit on the set and watch Lubitsch work. “Everyone was in awe of him,” remembered Jack Benny, “[but] we did nothing but laugh.” Stills of the production, whether of script conferences or just the cast and crew waiting between shots, show virtually everybody laughing uproariously.
Although the script was sacrosanct, Lubitsch dreamed up a few additional laughs on the set. The film offers a running gag involving Sig Rumann’s officious Nazi (the immortal Concentration Camp Ehrhardt) screaming for his assistant Schultz. At the end of the picture, a distraught Ehrhardt goes behind a closed door to commit suicide. There is a shot, and the camera holds on the door for a few seconds, only to have the silence broken by Ehrhardt again screaming for “Schultz!,” a topper added on the set.
The director was no more given to compromising quality than before. At one point, Lubitsch asked Benny to take a look at the rough edit of a scene they had just completed. Although Benny was unsure of his expertise in film comedy, he told Lubitsch that he thought it could be better. Lubitsch promptly interrupted the shooting schedule to redo the scene. “Everything had to be just so,” remembered Benny.
As the production wrapped just before Christmas, Carole Lombard delighted Benny by promising to guest on his radio show as soon as she returned from a bond-selling tour in mid-January. Beyond that, she was planning to spend some time tending to her marriage, which was currently going through a rocky phase.
“I think the marriage would have survived,” says Robert Stack, who knew both partners well. “I know they had a fight before she left on the bond-selling trip. But I don’t think any [other] woman was going to do for [Clark Gable] what Carole did. She became one of the guys, completely adjusted to him, learned to shoot, go out in duck-blinds, all that.”
As Lubitsch began to edit the picture in the early part of January, United Artists began to make throat-clearing noises about the title. The Shakespearean reference contained in the title To Be or Not to Be was, they felt, too highbrow, possibly misleading, and this was, after all, a commercial venture. Lubitsch, undoubtedly with tongue planted deeply in his cheek, suggested as an alternative The Censor Forbids, which promptly drew angry cables from Benny and Lombard.
“IN THE INTEREST OF A PICTURE IN WHICH I AM AN INVESTOR AS WELL AS A PARTICIPANT,” wired Lombard to U.A. president Grad Sears on January 13, “I FEEL THAT MY INVESTMENT IS JEOPARDIZED BY THE PROPOSED TITLE CHANGE. I CONSIDER THE TITLE ‘THE CENSOR FORBIDS’ SUGGESTIVE AND DEFINITELY QUESTION ITS GOOD TASTE. IT IN NO WAY CONVEYS THE SPIRIT OF THE PICTURE AND IS UNBECOMING TO AN ORGANIZATION AS IMPORTANT AS UNITED ARTISTS. SO STRONGLY DO I FEEL ABOUT THIS THAT HAD THE PICTURE BEEN OFFERED TO ME UNDER [THAT] TITLE, I DEFINITELY WOULD NOT HAVE ACCEPTED THE ENGAGEMENT NOR WOULD I HAVE INVESTED IN THE VENTURE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT NO CHANGE BE MADE FROM THE ORIGINAL TITLE . . . WHICH IN MY OPINION FITS THE PICTURE, THE STORY AND THE SITUATION. WILL YOU PLEASE ADVISE ME.”
Jack Benny’s protests were no less virulent: “I PROTEST MOST EMPHATICALLY AGAINST CHANGING THE TITLE . . . WHICH I CONSIDER HIGHLY SUGGESTIVE AND CONTRARY TO THE SPIRIT OF MY EMPLOYMENT CONTRACT. I HAVE TRIED FOR YEARS TO BUILD UP A REPUTATION FOR CLEAN HUMOR OVER THE RADIO AND THE RELEASE FOR ANY PICTURE THAT COUPLES MY NAME WITH A TITLE OF THIS KIND CANNOT BUT DO ME IRREPARABLE DAMAGE . . . I EARNESTLY URGE YOU TO RECONSIDER AND TO GIVE THIS PICTURE A TITLE WHICH HONESTLY REFLECTS ITS TONE OF WHOLESOME HUMOR. I HAVE NEVER HAD TO STOOP TO SENSATIONALISM TO ATTRACT AN AUDIENCE. PLEASE ADVISE.”
Grad Sears sent beseeching letters to both Lombard and Benny insisting that The Censor Forbids had been Lubitsch’s idea, but that he was willing to discuss any proposed title change, although he was “absolutely certain that the title To Be or Not to Be is not box office.”
That same day, Lubitsch wired Sears that he wanted to withdraw his alternate title, “I FEEL THAT INASMUCH AS BOTH [Lombard and Benny] ARE INVESTORS AND PARTICIPANTS WE HAVE TO CONSIDER THEM PARTICULARLY AS IT WAS ONLY THROUGH THEIR MARVELOUS COOPERATION THAT WE COULD BRING IN THE PICTURE FOR THAT PRICE . . . THEY NOT ONLY DISLIKE THE TITLE BUT ARE AFRAID THAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF EXHIBITORS IN ADVERTISING WILL USE THIS TITLE FOR UNDIGNIFIED SEXUAL EXPLOITATION AND I CANNOT DENY THAT SUCH A POSSIBILITY EXISTS. BENNY’S ADVERTISING OF OUR PICTURE OVER RADIO IS OF TREMENDOUS VALUE AND . . . HE FLATLY REFUSES TO MENTION ‘THE CENSOR FORBIDS’ IN HIS BROADCASTS . . . I HAVE NEVER WEAKENED ON ‘TO BE OR NOT TO BE’ DESPITE RESISTANCE BY SALES DEPARTMENT BECAUSE I KNOW THAT ANYTHING UNUSUAL ALWAYS MEETS WITH RESISTANCE. THIS TITLE NOT ONLY FITS THE PICTURE BUT I FIRMLY BELIEVE THAT THE STRENGTH OF SEVERAL SCENES IN PICTURE WOULD BE ENHANCED BY ORIGINAL TITLE.
“IF FOR INSTANCE PAUL MUNI WOULD APPEAR IN ‘THE DICTATOR’ AUDIENCE WOULD ENTER THE THEATER WITH ENTIRELY DIFFERENT EXPECTATIONS AS IF CHARLIE CHAPLIN APPEARS UNDER THE SAME TITLE, AND IF JACK BENNY APPEARS IN ‘TO BE OR NOT TO BE’ I DON’T BELIEVE THAT ANYBODY WOULD GET THE IMPRESSION HE WANTS TO RIVAL JACK BARRYMORE OR JOHN GIELGUD BUT AM SURE THAT AUDIENCES EVERYWHERE ANTICIPATE A LOT OF FUN ESPECIALLY AS HE IS ABLE TO EXPLAIN THAT BEFOREHAND TO GREATEST LISTENING AUDIENCE IN THIS COUNTRY. REGARDS.”
Lubitsch’s alternate title was indeed awful, so awful it couldn’t have been an accident. Faced with the rather obviously orchestrated wrath of the picture’s stars, and Benny’s threat to withhold valuable plugs on his radio show, U.A. had no choice but to capitulate and leave To Be or Not to Be as the title.
But the picture’s troubles weren’t over yet. As the picture was being scored, Lubitsch was outraged to discover that Werner Heymann had “Mickey Moused” a highly dramatic scene, that is, had musically mimicked the physical action of the actors, thereby cheapening the scene. Miklos Rozsa was called to the studio and confronted by a furious Lubitsch, who told him that he, Rozsa, was the musical director on the picture, his supervision had been lacking, and what exactly did he intend to do about it?
It was ten in the morning, the musicians were waiting on the recording stage, and there wasn’t money in the budget to go so far as five minutes past six that night. Rozsa looked at the scene, timed it, went back to his office, called for copyists and orchestrators, and began writing music. By four o’clock, the scene was written and recorded, all three minutes of it. Lubitsch was happy, and Werner Heymann gave Rozsa a boxer puppy as thanks for bailing him out of trouble.
• • •
On January 16, 1942, Carole Lombard and her mother got on a plane in Indianapolis for a multiple-stop flight that was supposed to end seventeen hours later in Los Angeles. But a few minutes after 7 P.M., the plane slammed into Olcott Mountain, a few miles west of Las Vegas, instantly killing all twenty-two people on board.
It had been such a near thing; the plane impacted only 120 feet from the top of the mountain. The flight had been originally scheduled to go from Albuquerque to Boulder, but the Boulder airport was a daylight-only field. Since night would have fallen by the time they got to Boulder, pilot Wayne Williams made the decision to head for Las Vegas. A later inquiry determined that Williams had strayed off course, probably in an attempt to make up lost time and get to Los Angeles on schedule.
Lubitsch’s ex-stepson Eddie was by then a meteorologist working for TWA airlines and a good friend of the pilot. Wayne Williams was widely regarded as a superb pilot, so the accident caused consternation among his friends. Gradually, they came around to the idea that the 120-foot shortfall might have occurred because Williams had been in the back of the plane talking to Lombard. In any case, the FAA raised the minimum altitude for planes in the area by a full 1,000 feet.
In addition to his grief, Clark Gable’s reaction was complicated by a full measure of guilt. “If Clark didn’t have a death wish after that, it was certainly close,” said Robert Stack. “His attitude became ‘I don’t care if I die.’ He had terrible guilt. Much later, he married Kay [Spreckels], and she was a great deal like Carole.”
Lombard’s death necessitated some slight reediting in To Be or Not to Be to cover the deletion of a particularly unfortunate line: “What can happen in a plane?” That added another $35,000 to the budget. The total cost of To Be or Not to Be came to $1,022,000.
The death of a star before the release of a picture has traditionally been considered a harbinger of financial disaster, although for every The Misfits, there is a Son of the Sheik. Certainly, U.A. seemed more than slightly confused. The company archives are rife with correspondence over whether or not Lombard’s death invalidated the contractual provision by which one-half of 1 percent of her percentage of the picture was to be donated to the Motion Picture Relief Fund.
The film was released on March 6, 1942, but two weeks before that, U.A. had already made plans to dissolve the Romaine Film Corporation, which actually happened on June 30, as the picture was still playing around the country. Not only that, but they adopted the “cost recovery basis” for figuring the financial returns, meaning they deducted their costs from the gross in an amount sufficient to reimburse their negative cost before even reporting any income.
Not surprisingly, they declared a loss on the film, in spite of the fact that their own records showed a worldwide gross of $2.1 million, which would, under “conventional” motion picture accounting methods, have produced a profit somewhere over $300,000. Lubitsch was not paid the remaining $50,000 due him until late in 1943, and not until he wrote a slightly plaintive letter to U.A.’s Arthur Kelly, who had mentioned signing a dividend check for him when the two men ran into each other one night at New York’s “21.” “Were you kidding or was it serious?” asked Lubitsch. Before he died, Lubitsch collected another $27,000 in small chunks, while Lombard’s estate only got $57,307 of the $75,000 in profits she was contractually entitled to.
Eventually, the Internal Revenue Service took United Artists to tax court over their manipulation of the Romaine Film Corporation. U.A. had to admit that they had indeed paid Lubitsch his $50,000 share of the profits, not to mention $58,000 to Benny for his share of the profits, all of which made their contention that there were no profits slightly suspect.
In tax court, U.A. argued that the entire picture had been a salvage operation, that Lombard’s death had raised serious doubts in the company’s mind as to the possibility of success, and that the theme of the picture was a humorous treatment of Nazis. “During the early portion of 1942,” the company stated in a brief, “due to the success of Germany in the war, the Nazis were not humorous characters and the producers of the picture had serious doubts as to the reception, in view of the world situation, a picture kidding the Nazis would receive.”
For a company with a reputation for financial maladroitness, it was a pretty fair piece of sharp dealing, but the government charged that the Romaine Film Corporation owed taxes totaling at least $74,067.21, a figure that, after some serious negotiating and much interoffice correspondence among lawyers and accountants, was reduced to $21,746.41. It was not until February 1949 that the case would be decided, with the court determining that United Artists owed the government $11,200, along with a 25 percent penalty.
• • •
Variety said that To Be or Not to Be was “typically Lubitsch . . . one of his best productions in a number of years” and “an excellent box-office attraction.” The National Board of Review Magazine liked the film, but against their better judgment, calling it “an . . . incongruous mixture . . . which many people will protest against, warmly and sincerely . . . There’s no escaping what, to use the gentlest terms for it, must be called a lapse of taste in the picture. There have been, and will be, harsher words for it.”
Like, for instance, those chosen by The New York Morning Telegraph, which said that Lubitsch had devised “a sly approach, and a cute idea, and if it were laid in any place but Warsaw, it would have been among the best things Lubitsch has ever done.” The man who was often derided for concentrating on the trivialities of the boudoir was now being slammed for assigning himself a morbid, serious subject and setting, especially by the reliably dreary Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who called it “a callous comedy . . . a shocking confusion of realism and romance . . . Frankly, this corner is unable even remotely to comprehend the humor . . . in such a juxtaposition of fancy and fact. Where is the point of contact between an utterly artificial plot and the anguish of a nation which is one of the great tragedies of our time? . . . You might almost think Mr. Lubitsch had the attitude of ‘anything for a laugh.’ ”
“It was tragic,” remembered Robert Stack. “The press just did a terrible number on Lubitsch, and the arrogance he supposedly had in making fun of the Polish situation. But he was a Jew from the Old Country himself! It was the best satire and put-down of Nazism that’s ever been done, but they weren’t hip enough to pick up on what he was doing.”
The press weren’t the only ones. At the preview of To Be or Not to Be at the Village Theater in Westwood, on came the scene in which Concentration Camp Ehrhardt offers a scabrous one-liner about Josef Tura: “What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland.” The line was met with dead silence.
After the preview, Lubitsch, Vivian, Charlie Brackett, Billy Wilder, Alexander Korda, Henry Blanke, and Walter Reisch went to a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard for a post-mortem. After much throat-clearing and many noncommittal sounds, Vivian finally suggested eliminating the line. Everybody else immediately concurred. Walter Reisch remembered that Ernst was “aghast . . . to be accused of lack of taste made his face waxen and the long cigar tremble in his mouth.”
Despite the virtually unanimous opinion of his closest friends, the line stayed in the picture. After To Be or Not to Be was released, Ernst was genuinely wounded by the adverse comments and sprang to his own defense with an article in The New York Times. “I admit,” he wrote, “that I have not resorted to the methods usually employed . . . to depict Nazi terror. No actual torture chamber is photographed, no flogging is shown, no close-ups of excited Nazis using their whips and rolling their eyes in lust. My Nazis are different; they passed that stage long ago. Brutality, flogging and torture have become their daily routine. They talk about it the same way as a salesman referring to the sale of a handbag. Their humor is built around concentration camps, around the sufferings of their victims.”
Although Lubitsch always prided himself on the decorousness of his films, the true genesis of To Be or Not to Be, its daring analogy between the rape of a nation with the aesthetic rape of a playwright, was unknowingly inspired by the savagely misanthropic W. C. Fields.
Over a year later, as Ernst was awaiting the release of his next picture, the wounds had healed sufficiently so that Lubitsch could talk about the original idea for his most daring film. He explained to a reporter that he used to have a hard and fast rule regarding jokes about blindness. Blindness, Lubitsch believed, was the most terrible affliction that could be visited upon man and was therefore off-limits. But, he explained, one day at Paramount he had seen a movie with a blind man (Fields’ It’s a Gift) “with comedy all about this blind man. I laughed and I laughed. Then I realized there can be no rules. It must depend on how it is done.
“It seemed to me that the only way to get people to hear about the miseries of Poland was to make a comedy. Audiences would feel sympathy and admiration for people who could still laugh in their tragedy.” Then, as always, he indicated that he knew the true worth of what he had created, despite the carpings of his contemporaries. “What is the only picture that is still remembered from the last war? It’s not Griffith’s Hearts of the World, or any of those sad ones. It’s Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms.”
• • •
To Be or Not to Be opens with the words “An Ernst Lubitsch Production,” with Lubitsch’s handwritten signature in place of type. It’s the story of the feckless theatrical troupe headed by Josef and Maria Tura, the Lunt and Fontanne of Warsaw. They are, of course, genial egomaniacs—Maria tells her distraught husband that she’d kiss him but it would spoil her makeup—and she is carrying on a heavy flirtation with a handsome young bomber pilot (Robert Stack) who leaves for their trysts by conspicuously stomping out of the theater whenever Tura goes into his “To be or not to be” soliloquy. It’s the one thing that shakes Tura’s preening self-regard, inducing a state bordering on nervous collapse.
In Maria’s dressing room, the lovestruck pilot moons. “This is the first time I ever met an actress,” he exclaims.
“Lieutenant, this is the first time I ever met a man who could drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes,” she responds.
Even the small-part actors have caught the Turas’ virus of pompousness. “It’ll get a laugh,” says one about a piece of business, but the director explodes. “I don’t want a laugh there.” A philosophical spear-carrier who yearns to play Shylock (the wonderful Felix Bressart, serving as Lubitsch’s mouthpiece) interjects himself into the argument. “A laugh,” he says, “is nothing to be sneezed at.”
However, in August 1939, even genial egomaniacs cannot ignore the real world. An anti-Nazi play they have been rehearsing is forbidden to open, so they hurriedly substitute Hamlet. And that too has a shortened run, as Warsaw is occupied by Nazi troops.
Back in England, Professor Siletsky, a Nazi masquerading as a Polish patriot, leaves for home with a list of the members of the Polish underground; the Turas and their bedraggled troupe are enlisted to kill the traitor and keep the renegades of Poland alive.
To Be or Not to Be begins as backstage farce, turns into wartime melodrama, then begins intermingling the strands until, finally, it returns to farce at the end. Through it all, Lubitsch never drops a thread in this, the most intricate, least foolproof script he ever attempted.
Lubitsch adopts the same central theme that enabled him to break through to the emotionally nurturing characters in The Shop Around the Corner: a cohesive but endangered community, a small band of brothers whose primary allegiance is to each other. Tura and company may be bad actors, but they are very good friends, freely risking their lives for each other and for their country, and all through using the tools of their trade: makeup, spotlights, curtains. In a word, artifice.
As usual, Lubitsch casts actors who bring very specific characterizations with them: Benny’s invariably aggrieved vanity, Lombard’s glistening earthiness and her airy, surprising line readings (she says “Bye!” with a lilt, like a tinkling bell), Lionel Atwill’s fustian hamming.
Lubitsch carefully constructs his film so that the laughs derive far more from character than they do from situations. But the situations—Benny’s immortal “So, they call me Concentration Camp Erhardt!” pas de deux with Sig Rumann—intensify the traits of the characters; vanity flares up at the most inopportune moments, as when Tura, masquerading as a Nazi, can’t resist fishing for compliments (unsuccessfully) for “that great, great actor Josef Tura.” Emotional imperatives, no matter how greatly they increase the potential for disaster, are too strong to deny.
This, and the large glistening patch of blood on the coat of the dying Siletsky, make To Be or Not to Be oddly realistic despite the preponderance of studio sets. Josef and Maria find in war the glory that had always been denied them in the theater. To Be or Not to Be is consistently hilarious, but Lubitsch’s sense of commitment, of engagement, is matched by his characters’; they become moving because they put aside their petty individual grievances for the collective good. Through their absurd but authentic bravery, they find a grandeur, a nobility they never could have achieved through their acting.
At its comic heart, with lines like “What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland,” To Be or Not to Be is black comedy, and, as James Harvey has pointed out, its coarseness, its moments of low vaudeville, are “not slapdash and inadvertent but aggressive and purposeful, aimed at all forms and degrees of power worship . . . The Nazis in this film are like ordinary people. They are also monsters. Evil is clearly named; but it is also brought closer to familiar feelings and situations than people expected it to be in such a film.”
The critical trouble Lubitsch encountered derived from the simple fact that black comedy wouldn’t be invented for twenty more years. While other directors—good ones—like George Stevens (The More the Merrier) or Leo McCarey (Once Upon a Honeymoon) were playing the war safe, sappy, and, ultimately, sentimental, Lubitsch dared to satirize oppressor and victim alike.
Whatever the critics thought about To Be or Not to Be, it didn’t affect the mutual admiration between Lubitsch and Jack Benny. In the first week of November 1942, Ernst directed a week of retakes and a few added scenes on Benny’s vehicle The Meanest Man in the World. Although Lubitsch was far beyond doing uncredited retakes even as a favor to Darryl Zanuck, he willingly undertook the job because of his affection for Benny. His handling of the scenes between Benny and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson provided the charming if brief little film with its sole reason for existence. In later years, Benny admitted that he only really liked three of his movies -Charley’s Aunt, George Washington Slept Here, The Meanest Man in the World. And, he would say, he only loved one-To Be or Not to Be.
• • •
Ernst finally reported to 20th Century-Fox in February 1942, nearly a year after he had signed his original three-year deal. Fox was the domain of two men: Darryl Zanuck and, behind the scenes, Joseph Schenck. Writer/ director Philip Dunne called Darryl Zanuck “the Knute Rockne of studio heads, always driving, always encouraging . . . always trying to make the picture better, to move it faster.” A little bull of a man with a sharp, needling sense of humor, Zanuck viewed women the way Caesar viewed Gaul; the producer once described a tender love scene as being one where the hero “rams his tongue down her throat.”
The men who worked for Zanuck remember him with phrases like “the executive par excellence.” Elia Kazan, a dominating man without much stomach for other dominating men, said in his memoirs that “Everyone who worked for him respected him. So did I.” Joseph Silver, the son of Zanuck’s barber, who eventually became head of postproduction at Fox, said that “If you were part of his team, he was very loyal. He was very rough, but never with little people . . . producers, directors, he could be very rough [with], but he never, ever yelled at underlings.”
Everybody agreed that Zanuck’s great gift was in editing. “He truly knew all about film editing,” remembered Silver. “He had a [photographic] memory. He looked at every foot of dailies that [were] shot . . . He did the final editing on every show.” Zanuck was something of a nocturnal creature and wouldn’t watch rushes till late at night, usually starting about 11 P.M., with a resulting flood of (invariably pointed) notes and memos landing in studio mailboxes the next day.
One of Zanuck’s most admirable qualities was the fact that he would listen. Joe Silver’s father was usually invited to screenings of rough cuts, so Zanuck could get the opinion of someone who wasn’t in the industry and had no vested interest in a given picture’s success or failure. “He would accept ideas from anybody, including the cop at the front gate,” said producer David Brown, who was his story editor for years, “and he would always admit it when he was wrong. A strong man like Otto Preminger could even talk him out of something, but if a director was indecisive or didn’t know what he wanted, Darryl would walk all over him.”
Zanuck’s great liability was the fact that Fox was light on stars. After Shirley Temple hit puberty and saw her career disappear, about all Zanuck could offer were Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Betty Grable, or Don Ameche, most of whom would have been lucky to get second leads at Metro. This meant that the script, the story, had to be the star of a Zanuck picture. For Zanuck, stars were incidental, and he would rather have a good story with a mediocre cast than a yeoman effort on flawed content.
If he liked and respected you, Zanuck could be an admirable mensch. If a few writers had done good work, Zanuck would instruct them to borrow some skiing clothes from the wardrobe department and fly up to Sun Valley for a story conference for a week. As there was rarely more than a single story conference during the week, it was Zanuck’s way of saying thank you.
“One time,” remembered composer David Raksin, “I did something absolutely contrary to his wishes and I thought it was the end of my career. I was scoring a Western for him and he wanted the aftermath of a Indian massacre to be scored with ‘Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.’ I thought what he wanted was vulgar.”
Raksin scored the film his own way. At the studio screening, Zanuck asked him why he hadn’t used “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” Raksin explained and Zanuck said that he wanted the scene rescored, which meant the picture would miss its scheduled release date.
“I was going out the door when Zanuck stopped me and ostentatiously said, so the other people in the room could hear it, ‘Don’t worry about this. When I make a mistake, it costs the studio a half million dollars.’ ”
While Zanuck made the pictures, Joe Schenck, chairman of the board, worked behind the scenes. Zanuck set policy but Schenck made sure that the policy could be enforced. “Schneck was the money man,” remembered David Brown, “but he was not only the catalyst. He put things together. I don’t think he ever read a script; Darryl would never ask his opinion on an individual picture, but he would ask his opinion on deals. He was a godfather, an elder statesman, a problem solver when costs got out of line. Uncle Joe was totally loyal, a crony loyalty. You could go to him with a problem and he’d solve it.
“Every highly visible person in Hollywood has an invisible partner who is never a threat creatively but makes it happen financially. That was Uncle Joe.”
A gifted filmmaker in his own right, Schenck was one of the few moguls who was loved for his decency rather than feared for his power. In the silent days, he had fallen in love with and eventually married the actress Norma Talmadge. In order to keep Norma’s mother, Peg, happy, Schenck assigned Constance Talmadge, the flighty but delightful sister nicknamed Dutch, to Anita Loos and her husband, John Emerson. Their assignment was to keep Dutch busy and construct a series of comedies that would be a distaff version of the breezy, exuberant, successful Douglas Fairbanks films.
One day Schenck called Loos and Emerson in to his office and said, “When I put Dutch into your hands, it was only to satisfy Peg. I never expected to make money on the deal. But the pictures have turned out to be gold mines, so I want you two to have a little bonus.” He handed them a check for $50,000.
Universally remembered as a quiet, gentle man, Schenck lavished attention and gifts on his butler’s daughter, who was treated as if she were his own child. Although, by the time Lubitsch went to work at Fox, Schenck had been divorced from Norma Talmadge for ten years, Schenck’s enormous Spanish stucco mansion in Beverly Hills was dominated by a full-length portrait of the actress that hung in the living room. But Schenck was a pragmatist; whatever his lingering feelings for Talmadge, he was well-known for his enjoyment of the services of the more compliant Fox starlets.
So it was that Lubitsch found himself at a studio bound on one side by a serene old capo and on the other by a nervous, energetic firecracker. Because of Zanuck’s overwhelming certitude and ego-driven dominance, 20th Century-Fox didn’t make a habit of giving directors the kind of latitude they had at, say, Paramount. Long-term directors at Fox were competent professionals like Walter Lang or, on a higher level, Henry Hathaway or Henry King. In Lubitsch’s well-chosen phrase, they were script-shooters, but with unfailing picture sense. In most cases, the director’s job ended when shooting did, with Zanuck taking over the postproduction process.
“Zanuck looked on [the director] as a necessary evil,” remembered Philip Dunne. Not only was the director forbidden from working on the final editing, he was rarely involved in developing the script. Yet, according to Dunne, “Zanuck really understood people who worked for him. He knew which ones had to be cajoled, and which ones had to be bullied. I saw him treat Mike Curtiz like a slave. But he wouldn’t do that with Nunnally Johnson and he wouldn’t do that with me, or certainly not with Lubitsch. He had the great executive knack of knowing how to get the best out of each person.” Zanuck, then, was a secure enough man to give a berth to a powerhouse director if he respected him. John Ford, say, or Joseph L. Mankiewicz . . . or Ernst Lubitsch.
With all the sturm und drang over To Be or Not to Be, Lubitsch was forced to begin his tenure at Fox from a standing start, spending several months just looking for a story. A project with Ginger Rogers called A Self-Made Cinderella didn’t get made; Fox bought the hit Broadway play Margin for Error for him, but he shied away and it was made by Otto Preminger, who had also directed it on the stage.
Then Lubitsch hit upon the idea of making a drama centered on the lives of New York’s oldest mercantile families, but that mutated into something else entirely once he discovered a 1934 play by Laszlo Bus-Feketé entitled Birthday. Lubitsch and Sam Raphaelson, once more brought on board to script, changed the title to Heaven Can Wait.
As before, the strengths of the play were maintained, the weaknesses banished. Bus-Feketé opened Birthday at the main character’s fifteenth birthday, and the characterization of Grandpa is about the same, as are the fearsome Strables, although in the play they are named Gyurkovics. But there is a harshness to the main character that Lubitsch felt obliged to soften; in the play, he sleeps with his wife’s younger sister and, after his wife dies, marries her.
In retrospect, Lubitsch would claim that, after twenty years in America, he felt comfortable enough with the country and its people to approach an American subject, a point of view that conveniently overlooked Three Women, not to mention That Uncertain Feeling, made only a few years before. But those films didn’t have to be set in America, while Heaven Can Wait did, if only for the central character of Henry Van Cleve, who mixes lecherous calculation and ingenuousness in a way that is peculiarly American.
The writing of Heaven Can Wait occupied Lubitsch and Raphaelson for several months, all of it done in exquisite comfort at Ernst’s house at 268 Bel Air Road, with Sam remembering that he often put down his pipe for one of Lubitsch’s favorite Upmann cigars.
Raphaelson was once again persona grata at Lubitsch’s house, because Vivian was no longer living there. On April 22, 1942, Lubitsch and Vivian had separated, with Ernst leaving the house to take up residence at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for a short time. It was typical of the oddly formal, impersonal nature of their relationship that Lubitsch had originally planned to move out a day earlier, but stayed because Vivian had planned a dinner party.
“I don’t like to dramatize anything like this,” he explained to reporters. “It would only build up the scene.” Vivian filed for divorce on May 19, 1943, charging cruelty.
During the trial the following month, Vivian testified that Lubitsch would “sleep all day Sunday” and offered her no companionship. “I was forced to spend my life almost completely by myself. I seldom saw Mr. Lubitsch except when we went out with other people, and when we would come home he would not speak to me. I was really living like a stranger in my own house.” She also said that Lubitsch objected to her friends. “It got so about all we were saying to each other was ‘Good night.’ ”
Vivian had a point and Lubitsch knew it. “When I am working at the studio, I forget everything,” he had told Louella Parsons the year before. “I’ve worked right through the dinner hour without even realizing it.” As Ernst’s niece Ruth Hall would say, “I don’t think he was a marrying man; I think she wanted to make him a real husband and he liked to be with his cronies.” On the other hand, Vivian had known what she was getting when she married him.
It was all reasonably cordial, but there was no reason it shouldn’t have been. Under the terms of the final divorce decree of August 4, 1944, Vivian received a lump sum of $28,500, a percentage of her ex-husband’s earnings (probate records indicate a monthly alimony of $3,709.22), plus $150 a month for Nicola.
According to Nicola, Lubitsch promised her that she would never have any other mother but Vivian, that he would never remarry. Nicola also avers that her father always carried a torch for Vivian, which is possible, if only because of the generous settlement and the fact that Lubitsch made her a beneficiary in his will. Yet, after Lubitsch’s health began to fail, friends of Lubitsch’s did their utmost to keep Vivian away from him because, as Mary Loos put it, “They didn’t like each other very much.”
• • •
One day Lubitsch and Raphaelson were having lunch at the Fox commissary when they ran into Darryl Zanuck. “How’s it going, Ernst?” inquired Zanuck. “Veil, I tell you,” said Ernst, “slow but good.” “That’s fine,” replied Zanuck. “The only thing I’d rather hear than that is-very slow and great!”
During the writing of Heaven Can Wait, Lubitsch was fascinated by the idea of depicting “an age that has vanished, when it was possible to live for the charm of living.” The key to the humor of Henry Van Cleve, the central character in Heaven Can Wait, was that, sexually speaking, he was “fifteen years ahead of his time, all the time.” The central comic idea was that 1920s callous sexual misdemeanor is 1935s convention. When the script was done, Ernst and Sam both thought it was faultless.I
After the script of Heaven Can Wait was completed, Lubitsch took time out to prepare a propaganda film for Lieutenant Colonel Frank Capra entitled Know Your Enemy: Germany. The film was shot in one week in October 1942, on the back lot at Fox. It was completed and previewed, but never released, and Lubitsch’s script appears not to have survived. Other internal documents have, however, and reveal that Lubitsch made his movie in seven days on a succession of revamped and standing sets, for a cost of $37,692.85.
Lubitsch’s idea was to trace the rise of modern Germany through one Karl Schmidt, who was to be shown at various ages. According to the trade papers, Know Your Enemy: Germany opened with Wagnerian music and involved some fairly static philosophical discussions. In any case, the Army rejected the film and it was never distributed.
Two years later, the project was reactivated, rewritten, and assigned to Gottfried Reinhardt, Anthony Veiller, and William L. Shirer. The final result, titled Here Is Germany, wasn’t released until 1945, and retained the character of Karl Schmidt. Although some of Lubitsch’s footage was cannibalized for the new film, most of the picture was cobbled together from a wide variety of German films, from costume dramas to old newsreels, in the by-now standard style of the Why We Fight films.
• • •
Following the divorce from Vivian, Lubitsch made tentative moves toward the social circle she had alienated. Since Willy Wyler had gone off to war, leaving a large gap in the Wyler house in Bel Air, Lubitsch began inviting Wyler’s wife, Talli, to accompany him and a few other friends on regular trips to a newsreel theater on Hollywood Boulevard, where they would bring themselves up to date on the latest war news.
He also volunteered as an air-raid warden for his neighborhood. One night he was making the rounds during a blackout. Noticing a light on at Walter Reisch’s house, Ernst yelled out, “Valter, Valter, there’s a light on in the second floor.” Reisch responded by yelling out “Right avay, Ernst.” Next door, Laurence Olivier leaned out of the window. “My God,” he bellowed, “are the fucking Germans here already?”
Lubitsch was unambivalent about the war between his native country and his adopted one. “That war people didn’t have any difficulty about,” remembered Talli Wyler. “Especially if you were European or Jewish, you weren’t torn. You knew exactly how you felt.” Although a congenital nonjoiner, Ernst allowed his name to be used as a sponsor for both Russian War Relief and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, groups largely made up of liberals like Donald Ogden Stewart, Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Hellman, John Huston, and Thomas Mann.
As they spent more and more time together, Talli Wyler found that Lubitsch was a good listener, “unlike Chaplin. He was always on, to the point where I found it exhausting.” Although most wives of famous and powerful men grow used to being treated politely but rather blankly as “the wife,” Lubitsch, she remembered, “had that particular sparkle, that twinkle, that told you that you and he were relating as people.
“With Ernst you always got a sense that he was sitting back watching what was happening, pulling a little string here and a little string there. He loved gossip, who was sleeping with who. And if somebody wasn’t sleeping with somebody, he would do his best to promote it. Irna, his cook, would fix a dessert I’ve never had since, some sort of essence of berries, pressed and made into sort of a jelly. It was fabulous. He was a very good friend when Willy was away.”
Not everybody pulled together in the war. Herman Mankiewicz, a friend of Ernst’s since the Paramount days, had become an isolationist in the mold of Lindbergh, but with a strong tinge of the anti-Semitic Jew. He blamed Communists for leading America into a war he believed America could not win. “All the doctors, lawyers, and professional men in Germany were Jews,” Mankiewicz told Eleanor Boardman, “and they were getting too strong a hold.” One day at a party at Ernst’s house, Mankiewicz went into one of his diatribes; Ernst grew so angry he ordered Mankiewicz to leave.
At night, Lubitsch often went to The Blue Danube, a Hungarian restaurant opened by Mia and Joe May after their movie careers bottomed out. The Danube became a popular meeting place for the German and Hungarian colonies. And, of course, he remained highly attentive to his friends. In 1942, when Billy Wilder was about to start his initial directing job on The Major and the Minor, the younger man came to his mentor and confessed that not only was he terrified, he was also beset by a nervous diarrhea.
Lubitsch put an arm around Wilder. “I have directed fifty pictures,” he said, “and I’m still crapping in my pants on the first day.” On the first day of production for The Major and the Minor, Lubitsch showed up on the set with every German director in Hollywood (including Dupont, Dieterle, and Koster, with the Hungarian Michael Curtiz in on a pass) to wish Wilder bon voyage in his new venture.
And Lubitsch returned to his bachelor ways. “He was a chaser,” remembered Gottfried Reinhardt. “He was constantly interested in these sort of sexpots. None of them very young or attractive. He had a carelessness about sex. Ernst Lubitsch had only one interest: films. Then he rode horseback and he got massages and he went fucking. He did these things secondarily. There was really nothing in his life but the movies.”
• • •
While Lubitsch and Raphaelson were thrilled with their script for Heaven Can Wait, Zanuck wasn’t entirely sure. He was evidently nonplussed by the amiable lethargy of the lead character, for, in Lubitsch’s words, “The hero was a man only interested in good living with no aim of accomplishing anything, or of doing anything noble.”
When he was asked why he wanted to make “such a pointless picture,” Lubitsch answered by saying that he wanted to introduce the audience to some people, and that if the people should find them likable, then the picture would be a success.
Lubitsch and Raphaelson had written the script with either Fredric March or Rex Harrison in mind, but, once it was finished, Zanuck asked the director if, as a personal favor, he would test Don Ameche for the part of Henry Van Cleve.
A few days later, Lubitsch invited Raphaelson to look at the test, “because I think we’re in trouble.” Raphaelson was amazed; Lubitsch had managed to pull a scene of remarkable depth and subtlety out of the actor. Lubitsch glumly agreed. “Isn’t that the vorst luck in the world? Vat are we going to do, the guy is good. Ve’re in a spot!” Ameche got the job.
On February 1, the first day of production, Lubitsch gathered the actors around him. Pointing to the script, he said “These are the facts. I beg you don’t change anything, because this is the way I would like it.” As always, he was single-minded in achieving what he wanted, which affected some actors more than others. “Gene Tierney couldn’t quite come to one scene,” remembered Don Ameche, “and he just kept at her and at her until he broke her completely down. When, shortly after, she straightened herself around, he rolled the camera and got exactly what he wanted. He knew how to do it. He didn’t do it unless he had to, but he was a man totally dedicated to his art.”
To Ameche he was “dedicated”; to Tierney he was “a tyrant.” Tierney was seraphically beautiful but deeply closeted emotionally, and invariably seemed to be acting in a glazed trance. Around the Fox lot, she had a reputation for responding to any emotional scenes by going slightly over the top in a cloying, sentimental way. In trying to spark some emotional immediacy out of her, Lubitsch had terrified the actress. The day after their contretemps, Tierney sought him out and explained that “I’m willing to do my best, but I just can’t go on working on this picture if you’re going to keep shouting at me.”
“I’m paid to shout at you,” he retorted.
“Yes, and I’m paid to take it—but not enough.” They laughed, and Lubitsch modulated his approach for the rest of the shooting.
The young actor Dick Moore, making an uneasy transition from child stardom, was playing the adolescent Henry Van Cleve, and found Lubitsch to be “a dear, dear man. I remember being on the set with him and Signe Hasso for a scene where I’m supposed to take a cigar out of my pocket. I took the cigar out of my trouser pocket when it should have been in the breast pocket. I caught a look between Lubitsch and Hasso at my inexperience at putting a cigar in my pants pocket. I knew I had done something to cause their amusement and I was mortified.” Moore also noted Lubitsch’s habit of wearing old sweaters smelling vaguely of mothballs, something Vivian would assuredly never have permitted.
Moore sensed that Lubitsch saw the character as much looser than he was able to play him, but that was probably due more to Moore’s increasing sense of emotional constriction than to any shortcomings in his performance; as past history showed, if Lubitsch was dissatisfied with an actor, he would quickly recast the part.
One of the few problems of the production involved Louis Calhern. His first shot involved him coming down a winding staircase, leaning over the bannister, and calling to Spring Byington. But Calhern had a very difficult time finding his key light, for the Technicolor cameras demanded such a high degree of illumination that the entire set was hot, not just the area illuminated by the key light.
“We must have shot it ten or fifteen times and Calhern was very angry with himself,” remembered Dick Moore, “but Lubitsch never displayed any impatience with anybody. He had infallible courtesy, never raised his voice, and was always very gay. Ebullient, in a quiet sort of way. He knew exactly what he wanted. It was a chess game and he knew every move he was going to make. He gave it an improvisational feel, but it wasn’t improvisational at all.”
As always, Lubitsch entertained himself by playing the piano while the crew was setting up the next shot. One day, Moore asked him how he found time to keep in practice. “Oh, Dickie, I’ve always loved music,” he replied. “But you know Hollywood is a funny business, a funny town. We never know what’s going to happen. I always like to keep up with my music because someday I may have to play in a cafe.”
Another day on the set he sidled up to Moore and said “Someday you may want to become a director. This Technicolor is interesting, perfect for this kind of picture, wonderful for musicals and comedy. But permit me to give you a word of advice: never shoot a drama or a mystery in Technicolor.”
“So,” says Dick Moore, “I look now at films like The Maltese Falcon and the rest of the wonderful dramas that [Ted] Turner is [colorizing and] fucking up, and Lubitsch was absolutely right; it’s fifty years later and he’s still right.”
As he completed production of Heaven Can Wait, Lubitsch seemed to be in fine fettle. He was still never without his omnipresent cigar, and eating and drinking as he pleased (“must I handicap myself?”), but he tried to maintain an even keel by exercising, in particular walking. “I cherish the illusion,” he told Hedda Hopper that July, “that I feel as young as I did that day in 1922 when I stepped off the train in Los Angeles, thanking my stars for a woman named Mary Pickford.”
Taking a paternal pride in his twenty-one years of working in American studios, Lubitsch played the Grand Seigneur and again emphasized the view that movies were a thing of the moment. “Fundamentals don’t change. Only externals change. Styles in acting, styles in writing, styles even in photography and lighting. A picture made ten years ago looks hammy today, no matter how great it was then.”
Lubitsch should have known better, but it was evidently the way he truly felt. “A movie,” he once told Sam Raphaelson, “any movie, good or bad, ends up in a tin can in a warehouse; in ten years it’s dust. You’re smart that you stick with the theater, Sam. What college teaches movies? But drama is literature. Your plays are published. Someday a student gets around to you—you have a fighting chance.”
But Lubitsch was also careful to hew to the no-one-here-but-us-hard-working-carpenters line that even the best directors of the era put out. He had seen firsthand how the system had crushed Rex Ingram, Maurice Tourneur, Josef von Sternberg, and Erich von Stroheim, with, it is true, considerable assists from all of those brilliant but iconoclastic, self-destructive men. He had no wish to set himself up for a fall by proclaiming himself an artist.
• • •
The gentle nostalgic tone of Heaven Can Wait is set by the music under the credits: “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” Henry Van Cleve, having just died, presents himself “where so many people had told him to go.” He tells His Excellency (Laird Cregar, with an amusingly malevolent gleam in his eye), that he had just finished his dinner. “A good one, I hope,” says His Excellency. “Excellent,” says Henry. “I ate everything the doctor forbade.”
The mood is elegant, serene but regretful. “There are several people up there I would love to see,” Henry says, “particularly one—a very dear one. But I haven’t a chance.” His Excellency asks for some specific credential that would entitle Van Cleve entrance to his domain. A heinous crime, perhaps?
“Crime—crime . . . well I’m afraid I can’t think of any. But I can safely say that my whole life has been one continuous misdemeanor.” Henry goes on to tell his story, which tends to involve more lecherous intent than penetrating accomplishment. Henry is initiated by a French maid who takes a look at her young charge and instinctively understands that here is a man whose sexual expressiveness is yearning to breathe free. As she puts it, “His soul his bigger than his pants.”
Young Henry is morose; he feels he has to marry a local girl simply because he has kissed her. Rushing to enlighten him, Mademoiselle (Signe Hasso) tells him that it is not necessary to marry everybody you kiss. “Kiss is like candy,” she says. “You eat candy for the beautiful taste—and this is enough reason to eat candy.” With his social and sexual boundaries newly enlarged, young Henry is promised even more valuable knowledge at his first French lesson.
The years go by in the house at 921 Fifth Avenue. Henry is entranced by the gorgeous Martha (Gene Tierney), unaccountably sprung from the grotesque loins of “one of the great meat-packers of our time,” the entirely dreadful, nouveau-riche Mr. and Mrs. E. F. Strable, played to hideous perfection by the porcine Eugene Pallette and Marjorie Main. In spite of her parents and the attentions of his prosaic cousin Albert (Allyn Joslyn, whom Lubitsch had loved in the Broadway production of Arsenic and Old Lace), Henry elopes with Martha.
After ten years of marriage and one child, Martha leaves—a messy business about an expensive bracelet given to somebody besides Martha—and goes back to Kansas. Henry and his beloved Grandpa follow her and win her back. As always, Henry is the sincere romantic; as always, Grandpa is the pragmatist. “Come on, sweep her off her feet,” he snaps, “or we’ll miss the next train.”
And so Henry Van Cleve turns fifty, and we find him still dressing in the formal fashions of his youth and wearing pince-nez glasses. The times are passing him by. He clumsily tries to con a showgirl his son is seeing, so as to prove her unworthy. But she doesn’t want romance, just money. He coughs up $25,000, only to find out that his son had grown bored with the girl anyway.
Abashed, a little embarrassed, he asks his wife if she thinks he’s getting too heavy. “As a matter of fact, I like it,” she replies. “Let me tell you something. Nearly fifteen years ago, when you and Grandfather brought me back from Kansas, I still didn’t feel that you really belonged to me—and only to me. I can’t put my finger on anything definite. But still, whenever I wasn’t with you, I was always uncertain and nervous about my little Casanova. And one day I noticed that you began to have a little—well, just a little tummy. Then I knew I was safe. From that moment on, you were really mine. You had settled down.”
At their twenty-fifth wedding anniverary, Martha tells Henry that she has had to see a doctor. But all she wants to do is dance. As she and Henry gently waltz in the empty entrance hall of their home, the camera pulls up and away as we watch a loving, committed husband and his wife dance together for the last time.
As a widower, Henry reverts. He comes in late, he cadges money from relatives. Women call the house asking for “Pookie.” His son is a work-oriented sobersides and seems frankly alarmed.
Henry’s sprightliness is stifled only by his age. In 1942, Henry is seventy and weakening. He wakes up and tells his nurse about a dream he just had. The door opened and a man stepped out of a rowboat and said he was going to take Henry on a long trip from which he would not come back. Henry responds by saying “If I ever take a trip like that, it’ll be in a deluxe cabin and not in a dinky little rowboat that doesn’t even have a bar.” He throws him out.
But the man comes back with a luxury liner floating on an ocean of whiskey and soda. Instead of smokestacks there are cigars. In a lifeboat there is a beautiful blonde wearing a Merry Widow costume. The man plays the “Merry Widow Waltz” on the accordion, and Henry and the girl are about to dance . . . when he wakes up.
The nursing shift changes; outside in the hallway we see the new nurse come on duty and check her appearance in a mirror. She is a luscious blonde. She goes in Henry’s bedroom. The camera holds, holds, then, as we begin to hear the “Merry Widow Waltz” played on an accordion, the camera slowly pulls back and down as we return to Henry and His Excellency.
“Who could ask for a more beautiful death?” asks Van Cleve. Although Henry is prepared for the worst, His Excellency has to inform him that, “Sorry, Mr. Van Cleve, we don’t cater to your class of people.” As he walks him to the elevator, he suggests that Henry get some character references from some young ladies that might be in the other place. Or Grandfather. “And,” he adds, “There is someone else . . . She will plead for you.”
“Do you think so?”
“You know she will.” As Lubitsch’s last masterpiece concludes, His Excellency sends Henry Van Cleve, not down, but up.
• • •
From its opening scene, there is no question that Heaven Can Wait is the work of a master in such total command of his craft that he doesn’t have to flaunt it. The mood is loving, relaxed, richly nostalgic, and assured. Lubitsch even includes flashbacks within flashbacks and never loses narrative lucidity and logic.
And because the film’s framework is that of a dead man’s reminiscences, and because the story of any long life is full of friends and family peeling off into the grave, Heaven Can Wait is grounded by an omnipresent sense of mortality underlying Henry’s scampish infidelities.
Henry Van Cleve is a benign sexual Bad Seed, whose bedroom instincts arouse only outraged middle-class propriety on the part of his family. His antic genes derive from his grandfather (the foxy Charles Coburn), who admits that he had them but, to his devout regret, never acted on them.
Yet, while Henry thinks he always gets his way, throughout the film women tend to control him. His subterfuges are obvious, his infidelities, either actual or attempted—the film goes a little vague about specifics—are rather charmingly pokey. He is an early example of the species Boy/Man and Lubitsch is equally fond of both aspects, a partiality he passes on to most of the female characters.
Lubitsch obviously knows that Henry is a problematic character; he polishes him up by contrasting him with a procession of males who are either sexless sticks, like cousin Albert, or charmless grotesques, like the Strabels. Likewise, Lubitsch makes Henry empathetic by directing all the older actors in the film to perform in a theatrical, declamatory style, while asking for—and getting—quiet, naturalistic underplaying from Ameche and Tierney.
With the exception of the far more flamboyant Trouble in Paradise, Lubitsch’s sense of decor has never been seen to finer advantage; he defines character largely through art direction; the dignified, subtly designed and decorated house at 921 Fifth Avenue lends its dignity to the lives it contains, and contrasts sharply with the Strabels’ Kansas house, a nightmare of overstuffed Edwardian bric-a-brac, brocades, and statuary, not unlike the interiors of German films circa 1915.
Yet, even characters who are little more than narrative necessities are granted a humanity and believability, as when the Strabels, after some brief posturing, quietly help their daughter, Martha, up to her room after she has left Henry. Throughout the film, Lubitsch belittles only priggishness and unsightly vanity; an old woman displaying her varicose-veined legs to His Excellency prompts him to instantly hit the trap door, consigning her to a screaming Hell.
For his first film in Technicolor, Lubitsch utilizes a very restrained palette, especially compared to Fox’s penchant for glaring, heavily contrasting colors. His most lavish stroke is outfitting Tierney in various shades of blue or lavender.
While Don Ameche lacks the kinetic, purring sexuality of a Rex Harrison, his courtly, elegantly voiced performance hits every note that Lubitsch and the script demand (Ameche would call Lubitsch the only actor’s director he ever worked with, as well as the only genius); it is the performance that will earn him a spot in Actor’s Heaven.
Heaven Can Wait was praised by a large cross-section of critics, but the most sensitive notice was from James Agee, who wrote that, while it was not up to Lubitsch’s best (he preferred the silent Lubitsch), “It has a good deal of the dry sparkle, the shrewd business, and the exquisite timing . . . It brought back a time when people really made good movies . . . the sets, costumes and props are something for history . . . [and] the period work, in these respects—as in Lubitsch’s modulations in styles of posture and movement—was about the prettiest and the most quietly witty I had ever seen.” Even D. W. Griffith put aside his old jealousy to pay tribute when he told Ezra Goodman that “I liked the way Lubitsch used color in Heaven Can Wait. And the way he used sound, too.”
As Andrew Sarris has observed of Heaven Can Wait, “the timing of every shot, every gesture, every movement was so impeccably precise and economically expressive that an entire classical tradition unfolded . . . Contemporary sloppiness of construction brought on by the blind worship of ‘energy’ as an end to itself make it almost too easy to appreciate Lubitsch’s uncanny sense of the stylized limits of a civilized taste. Almost any old movie looks classical today: Lubitsch’s movies are nothing short of sublime.”
Heaven Can Wait encapsulates the values Lubitsch’s late work embodies: elegance, charm, beauty, impudent wit moving hand in hand with spiritual transcendence, and, above all, the idea that the gift of laughter entitles the bearer to their own special morality, their own particular goodness, and their own valid pass to the Elysian fields.
Surely that gentle playboy Henry Van Cleve is Lubitsch’s ideal image of himself, and the beautiful, forgiving Martha is the mate he was never lucky enough to find. To die in the arms of a beautiful blonde with the “Merry Widow Waltz” welling up around you is not a bad way to check out, although Lubitsch had no way of knowing that he would in fact go Henry Van Cleve one better. If Heaven Can Wait isn’t quite Lubitsch’s last will and testament, it’s his best will and testament.
• • •
The success of Heaven Can Wait (its domestic return to Fox was $2.37 million against a production cost of $1.1. million, a very economical budget for a Technicolor film) temporarily displaced whatever free-flowing anxiety Lubitsch had about pleasing his new boss. One day at lunch in the executive dining room, Zanuck was pontificating about art. “I’ve seen the Louvre fifty times and I studied the Mona Lisa fifty times,” he proclaimed, “and I have yet to see what’s so great about the Mona Lisa.”
Lubitsch puffed on his cigar, his eyes darting around the room to see if anybody was going to contradict Zanuck. No one did. “There are three pictures I would like to have,” he began. “One, I would like to have the Mona Lisa; two, I would like to have a picture of Darryl Zanuck looking at the Mona Lisa; three, I would like to have a picture of the Mona Lisa looking at Darryl Zanuck.”
The laughter at the table was minimal, but Lubitsch turned to the columnist Leonard Lyons, who had enjoyed the deflation of the mogul’s pretensions, and said “I give a dinner for you. Thursday. 8:15. Black tie.”
At the dinner, Lyons noticed that each of the water glasses had a different set of initials on it. Lubitsch explained that a friend had once given him the glasses, each of which carried the initials of one of his closest friends. But such was the casualty rate in Hollywood, that he could no longer remember the names of all twelve people. “In fact, I even forget who gave me the twelve glasses.”
Jeanette MacDonald, sitting across the table, jogged his memory. “I gave them to you, Ernst.”
The subdued sadness of the aging Berliner was coming closer to the surface. That night, Lubitsch accompanied Lyons home. As they drove past the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Lubitsch said “It happens to us all here. We arrive from all over the world, carrying a small bag and check into this hotel. Then, if our movies are good, we buy paintings and move into a house. The house is too big for one person so we marry. Then comes the divorce, and we take a small bag and check into the Beverly Wilshire, buy paintings, move into a house, it’s too big . . . around and around and around.”
• • •
As a followup to Heaven Can Wait, Lubitsch felt secure enough in his adopted country to tackle a contemporary subject. The project was entitled All Out Arlene, about the WACS. He made a short tour of WAC camps to gather some background, and even went to Washington to talk to Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby, the WAC commander. It was obvious that Lubitsch’s taste in women hadn’t changed.
“You expect to find two cannons and a man behind the desk with a revolver,” Lubitsch reported. “Instead, behind the desk is the most beautiful little girl, the most polite and charming little blonde girl I ever see. That could only happen in this country.
“Here they show you what we are fighting for. In other countries, they show you what they are fighting with.”
Lubitsch’s writers on the project were Henry and Phoebe Ephron, two young transplants from Broadway. They noted his elegant dress, his habit of pacing while writing, and his specific way of approaching a script. The original story by Hi Phillips was basically See Here, Private Hargrove with the genders switched. “It’s not a masterpiece,” he told them. “It’s not even good. It’s like starting with one sentence, but I’ve done that often. Also, I like the title.”
Lubitsch told the Ephrons to write with Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert in mind, to ignore the book’s plot and concentrate on the central situation: “An engaged couple are in the Army. She is a lieutenant and he is a private. Their love affair has been interrupted by the war. The rest is up to us.”
The Ephrons came up with the idea of emphasizing another male character in the book in order to make the script’s central situation a triangle. Lubitsch liked the idea and, at the end of their first script session, Lubitsch had stopped calling them “Mr. Ephron” or “Mrs. Ephron” and begun calling them Henry and Phoebe.
Three weeks later, Lubitsch was impatient to go from script notes direct to screenplay. The Ephrons protested that they didn’t have an ending. “There’ll be a third act,” Lubitsch told them. “There might even be two third acts. Even three. We can make a choice.”
“Who does Arlene end up with?” asked Henry Ephron.
“I don’t know.”
The Ephrons went back to their offices awash in dreamy happiness at working for a man who, as Henry Ephron put it, was “a gentleman and a creative human being.”
• • •
He had always loved to dance. But, he would lament, he was always behind in learning the latest steps. By the time he had mastered the two-step, everybody else had moved on to the Charleston. Adding the Charleston, everybody else was doing the Black Bottom. By the early 1940s, he had achieved competence in the rumba, only to find that the new rage was the conga.
On the night of September 1, 1943, Lubitsch was attending a tent party at the home of Sonja Henie and having, as he usually did, a fine time, when he suddenly collapsed. Dr. Joel Pressman, the husband of Claudette Colbert, got him home and, together with Otto, decided to let him take it easy overnight and see how he felt the next morning.
On the morning of September 2, Otto phoned Ernst’s friend Mary Loos and said they were going to take him to the hospital. “Who’s going with him?” Loos wanted to know. “I don’t know,” replied Otto. Loos thought he should have some company so she drove over to the house where she found him alone, except for Otto and the housekeeper. Lubitsch, she remembered, looked “green, as if he wasn’t going to make it.”
Otto drove Loos’s car while she accompanied Lubitsch in the ambulance. Once admitted, he was sedated, but when he came to he wanted to know what he was doing in the hospital. Loos explained that he had had a little heart trouble, but was going to be just fine. She compared it to a wound that had to be left alone until it healed. In fact, he had had a massive heart attack.
Word quickly spread around town. Sam Raphaelson’s secretary called Lubitsch’s house and found Steffie Trondle in a state combining hysteria and efficiency, talking about coffins and choosing pallbearers. The next day, Lubitsch’s illness had made the papers; back at the hospital, Ernst was concerned over whether or not Zanuck had called. Loos said, yes, of course, even though he hadn’t. After Lubitsch drifted off to sleep, she called Harry Brand, director of publicity at Fox, to explain to him that Lubitsch needed the reassurance of a telegram from his boss. The wire arrived quickly.
As far as the doctors were concerned, this was Lubitsch’s first cardiac episode, but the possibility exists that there had been a precedent. During the year that he had been production head at Paramount, Ernst had been forced to take a plane to a preview of a Mae West picture. A very nervous flyer at the best of times, Lubitsch blanched when, during a bit of turbulence, the pilot’s cabin door flew open and two men ran down the aisle and opened the exit. “We don’t know what you’re going to do, but we’re getting the hell out of here,” they yelled just before they jumped.
It was, of course, a practical joke, but Jesse Lasky, Jr., reported that Lubitsch actually had a minor heart attack on the spot and lost consciousness. If Lasky’s story is true, it was a very expensive joke.
On the second day after his heart attack, Dr. Morris Nathanson, who would become his cardiologist, was trying to cheer him up. “You mustn’t worry,” said the doctor. “Lots of people have had this ailment and recovered. Why, you wouldn’t believe it, but one of my patients is the composer, Jerome Kern.” Lubitsch opened his eyes and gave the doctor a quizzical, sharp look. “And what did he write afterward?”
Sam Raphaelson also visited and found a very pale Lubitsch under doctor’s orders to refrain from any and all unnecessary movements, up to and including the use of his hands. Raphaelson tried to reassure him, pointing out that Broadway producer John Golden had made a roaring comeback after a stroke. “I know, I know,” muttered the shaken man. “But when I die, this is what I’ll die of.”
At the studio, Henry and Phoebe Ephron were stunned by the news of Lubitsch’s collapse. At the writer’s table at Fox, F. Hugh Herbert snarled, “Well, well, how are the writers who gave Lubitsch a heart attack?” George Seaton tried to soften the remark by telling them it wasn’t their fault, that “it was one of the two beautiful sisters,” a reference to an aspiring young actress whom Lubitsch had been seeing. She was, of course, blonde.
Lubitsch remained in the hospital for an endless seven weeks. By the first week in November he was home, surrounded by two nurses and Steffie Trondle to boot. He was allowed to take rides and little walks. Doctor Nathanson had told him that there was a good chance for a full recovery, but that he would not be able to return to the studio till after the first of the year.
With the initial danger past, Lubitsch began to fret over the enforced inactivity. For one thing, he didn’t really feel sick, but Nathanson explained that he had to spend the next several months building up a reserve to draw on in the future. Even reading was beyond him, as the medication made it hard for him to concentrate. The whirl of life that he had always taken pride in being able to regulate had slowed to where he was a motionless centerpiece for what he called “a kind of rococo salon.”
After every visitor, one of the nurses would take his pulse; the only one who raised it to alarming heights was Miriam Hopkins, although Lubitsch assured Sam Raphaelson that it was only because of the stress of trying to follow her rapid speech pattern. He would later say that the only thing that could save him from a pulse rate of 125 after a visit from Hopkins was a visit from the quiet Charles Brackett, who could send Ernst’s pulse plunging to around 68. For stimulation, he was limited to gossip. “If only I were an Englishman I could recover twice as fast,” he complained.
After three weeks at home, he called the Ephrons and told them to come to his house. The young writers were impressed by his fine art collection. Unlike many in Hollywood, Lubitsch had no art adviser and bought paintings on his own. By this time he had developed a rather good eye. (Once, after returning from New York, he dropped into a friend’s house and presented them with a Lautrec etching, saying only “Here’s something I got in a gallery.”)
Lubitsch told the Ephrons that “There are supposed to be more El Grecos in Bel Air than there are in the Louvre.” He pointed to a small mahogany box on a bookshelf. “My cigars. I’m not allowed to smoke them anymore. But, I have some good news for you. Zanuck loves the pages you wrote and wants to put All Out Arlene back in work.”
That was all well and good, but during the two months since Lubitsch’s heart attack, the Ephrons had been assigned to B-picture producer Bryan (Brynie) Foy, who wanted them to write Rip Goes to War, a remake of To the Shores of Tripoli, with John Payne’s part being taken by a dog.
Lubitsch groaned. “You want to get off it?” he asked. “Tell me, children, can you write bad? You write a fifteen-page scene of the family that owns Rip. They are deciding whether to send the poor dog to war or what. You have uncles, aunts, cousins, the boy who owns the dog, the mother, the father, a few neighbors—you write dialogue for everybody. No close-ups, no fade-ins, no cut-tos, no fade-outs—just dialogue. If there’s one thing Brynie hates, its dialogue.”
The scene took a day and a half to write, and quickly got the Ephrons booted off Rip Goes to War; they sent a dozen roses to Lubitsch’s house. But Zanuck assigned Otto Preminger to pick up All Out Arlene, and the Ephrons found him unbearable. “Every morning,” wrote Henry Ephron in his memoirs, “he was on the phone for an hour trying to buy a used car, or sell the one he’d just bought, quarreling with his cook over Saturday night’s menu or arguing with his tailor . . . His manner of working was madness. If one of us came up with an amusing line, he would never laugh. He would simply nod his head and say ‘That’s funny.’ But he never smiled, he never chuckled, and there was never any encouraging laughter . . . Where was that wonderful, free Lubitsch laugh that filled you with enthusiasm and made you try harder and be even funnier?”
Preminger asked for other writers; the Ephrons moved on to other scripts and more amiable coworkers; All Out Arlene was never made.
Lubitsch began to resume physical activity slowly. Lonely in the big, empty house, he wrote to his niece Ruth and asked her to come for a visit. But she was afraid to fly and begged off; she spent the rest of her life regretting her decision, for he had never denied her or her husband anything.
It was too much change too fast and it was all for the worse; the divorce meant that his adored Nicola wasn’t around most of the time, and now the roaring vitality he had always taken for granted was removed with a sudden hammer-blow. Although Lubitsch would recover a certain amount of momentum, he would never have the emotional security of good health again, would always be noticeably more subdued. His friends missed the full measure of his bustling energy, but those qualities were replaced by a certain contemplative gentleness that seemed to be a new arrival.
Walking with his nurse in a park one day, he passed a large flower, which, blown by the wind, seemed to nod at him. Twenty minutes later, they were back at the same spot, and the flower once more was nodding in the breeze. “Thank you veiy much,” said Lubitsch, bowing slightly. “I saw you the first time, too.”
I. “It was not achieved without a lengthy wrong turn in the narrative that was unprecedented for the two men. The first draft script, completed August 24, 1942, featured a twenty-two-page sequence showing Henry Van Cleve marrying a second time. The young gold digger is named Pearl, and, in addition to her acquisitiveness, she brings into the Van Cleve house an obnoxious pair of siblings. The sequence dwells rather too heavily on Henry’s naïveté and resultant humiliation. It all ends in a fistfight, and leads into the scene of a chastened Henry asking his son about the possibility of having an older woman come read to him. In addition to being out of character for Henry—up to this point, he has evinced no interest in being married to anyone but Martha, his fascination with other women having nothing to do with marriage—the sequence is very long and drags the film down. The scene never made it in to the film.