DOCTOR: Very little meat, no fancy sauces, no champagne, wine, whiskey. All that is out of the question. I repeat, no excitement . . . You’ll live to be 100.
HENRY: Doctor, promise me one thing. If, after living 30 years like that, I should still be alive and 100, bury me anyway!
—a deleted scene from heaven can wait
Lubitsch’s marriage to Vivian had displaced the Foreign Legion, while his heart attack and lengthy recuperation had prevented any further reunions. At the same time, Hollywood was undergoing a remarkable transformation as mysteriously inevitable as the darkening and deepening of Lubitsch’s own films. The quiet, sleepy little company town, where the studios were never very far from orange groves that scented the air, had become a metropolitan city; traffic was noticeably heavier, and the red streetcars that Universal apprentices like Ernst Laemmle and William Wyler used to take were becoming scarce.
Walter Laemmle had returned to Munich in 1926, been arrested by the Gestapo shortly after Kristallnacht, and finally came to America for good in 1938. “Paul [Kohner] was still here,” remembered Laemmle, “my brother was still here and Henry Blanke was still here, but that world of the Foreign Legion had drifted apart. Times had changed. We had all grown up. It was a different life now.”
Many of the European intellectual elite—Aldous Huxley, Salka Viertel, Vicki Baum, and Thomas Mann—settled in and around Santa Monica, or Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades. For people used to spending time in Spain or Italy, Southern California was an acceptable substitute, and the rents in the Palisades and environs were far more reasonable than in Beverly Hills or Bel Air.
In addition, the atmosphere was more casual than in those ostentatious enclaves. The actor Leo Carillo thought nothing of riding his horse into a neighbor’s house, sweeping up a friend he had not seen in what he thought was too long a time, and taking the captive back to his house for a friendly visit. Dolores Del Rio also lived in the neighborhood and would get furious with her mother for taking her cast-off shoes to the market to swap for eggs.
Salka Viertel’s Sunday salon quickly became the left-wing literary equivalent of Sunday afternoon at Ernst’s, with regular guests including Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Christopher Isherwood, Charlie Chaplin, and Hanns Eisler. Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika noted in her diary that “All of [the Germans and Austrians] are working hard, all of them are learning English furiously, and all of them have exactly two topics in which they are interested—film and politics.”
For a writer like S. N. Behrman, the Hollywood of this period was “a kind of Athens. It was as crowded with artists as Renaissance Florence. It was a golden era.” Of course, it all depended on your point of view. One night, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and his friend Hume Cronyn were flying into Los Angeles. They beheld the city exploding with lights—except for one dead, dark spot in the middle of all the glitter. Cronyn idly wondered what the dark spot was.
“The public library,” snarled Mankiewicz.
The German colony’s Sunday afternoon Kaffeeklatches had moved up Bel Air Road to the home of Walter Reisch, who, after the success of Ninotchka, went on to a long career as a writer/producer, primarily at Fox. Ernst became a regular guest during these Sunday gatherings. Although to a visitor from Germany like Lilli Palmer they seemed to be “a village full of professionals in desperate search of an audience,” to the members themselves it was a welcome return to normal. Since there was a war on, they even managed to overlook the traditional dislike between Germans and Austrians. “You know,” said the Austrian Lisl (Mrs. Walter) Reisch, “if a German comedian comes to Austria, nobody laughs.”
The environment was equally ambiguous for Jean Gabin, then in the midst of an affair with Marlene Dietrich. One Sunday afternoon, Gabin accompanied Dietrich to the Reischs and the subject turned to opera, which usually put Gabin to sleep. “I don’t like opera,” he said. “It’s stupid. Nobody sings when he’s dying.” Lubitsch responded by saying “A swan doesn’t dance when its dying but that doesn’t invalidate ballet.” Gabin, yet another grumpy Frenchman, stalked out of the party.
Although the Reischs had been having a Sunday open house long before they moved to Bel Air, their home in the 300 block of Bel Air Road was centrally located for the European contingent. Lubitsch lived at 268 Bel Air Road; the corner house of the 300 block was Otto Preminger’ s, and directly across from him were the Reischs. On the facing corner was the home of Alexander Korda and Merle Oberon, while around the corner on Copa de Oro was the home of Willy and Talli Wyler.
This close feeling of community resulted in a lot of jobs being passed around, but not always the requisite amount of money. When Walter Reisch did an uncredited rewrite on Sam Spiegel’s Tales of Manhattan, Spiegel didn’t pay him, but rather gave him an expensive record player that, after playing one side, turned the record over so that it could play the other side. It was a machine that demanded much fascinated study by the émigrés, but unfortunately this marvelous invention was accompanied by a grinding of industrial gears more appropriate to the harvesting of wheat.
Technically, the Sunday afternoons at the Reischs started at 3 P.M. with coffee and cake, some drinks, and maybe a bite to eat later. Although Lubitsch owned two cars (a 1941 Buick sedan and a 1941 Super Deluxe Ford Tudor sedan), he would usually walk over between 11 and noon, with Nicola in tow. The early arrival and the presence of his daughter meant he could leave a little early; “Ernst enjoyed meeting people,” remembered Lisl Reisch, “but not too often; he liked parties, but not too big.” While Lubitsch and Walter Reisch talked, Lisl Reisch would entertain Nicola. “I used to be a dancer and I would show Nicola some steps; she was pretty good at some things, so we had something in common.”
On those Sunday afternoons, there were no stars, no particular agenda, and the mood was completely relaxed. Even Garbo would occasionally drop in, with her hair in becoming curls. At 6 P.M. the party would halt while everybody listened to Walter Winchell on the radio. Afterwards, Gottfried Reinhardt or Helmut Dantine might start a chess game while, in another corner, Bronislau Kaper might play the piano. The topic of conversation was rarely the movies, usually the war. Sometimes Marlene Dietrich would come with a stack of her records under her arm. “But,” remembered Lisl Reich, “when I would go into the kitchen she would turn off the records so I wouldn’t miss a note of her singing.”
Lisl Reich found that Lubitsch adored her Austrian cooking: Wiener schnitzel, veal in sauce, mushrooms in sauce, sour cream, dumplings, chocolate cake, all undoubtedly delicious but a disastrous diet for a recovering heart patient. He especially adored Lubitschkoch, a pudding dessert of eggs, wine sauce, and steamed walnuts that Lisl named after him because he loved it so. The only problem with Lubitschkoch was that it required a double boiler, which, on top of all the other cooking Lisl did, meant that another pair of hands was mandatory. That was where Dietrich (“an excellent cook, a top cook, and a dear, great friend”) came in.
On those occasions when Walter Reisch was out of town, Lubitsch would send Otto Werner to fetch Lisl, and they would have dinner at his house followed by a night at a concert (Ernst was especially fond of Vladimir Horowitz). Once again, Ernst’s great gift for friendship came to the fore, his particular ability to have friends love him and care for him, perhaps because they perceived the vulnerability and loneliness that he ordinarily masked from lovers and people at the studio.
“He was so special,” remembered Lisl Reich. “What made him specials My daughter is named Maria Francesca; Ernst gave her that name. We simply had to call her Maria, he said. Upstairs, in his house, he had an electric kitchen installed. A stove, an oven, a refrigerator. When my daughter was born, he suddenly decided he didn’t need the kitchen anymore and gave it all to us. We installed it in a big linen closet we had. We called it the Lubitsch kitchen.”
As far as any meaningful professional activity, Ernst was forced to bide his time, waiting for the go-ahead from Dr. Nathanson. He began casting around for likely diversions. For a while, a very good friend of his and the friend’s mistress stayed with Ernst as houseguests. The friend had only recently left his wife, and the rumor around town was that he had become a practicing masochist at the hands of his coldly beautiful girlfriend. Lubitsch heard the talk and told a few friends that he had spent a good deal of time “looking for the vhip. I vunder vere he keeps it?”
Increasingly, he came to rely on two beautiful young women. One was Nicola. Once, at a dinner party, he proudly introduced his daughter to the guests. She mentioned a children’s party she had attended at Jack Warner’s house. Knowing her father liked paintings, she described Warner’s Impressionist collection. Mr. Warner, Lubitsch explained, is a wealthy man.
“Daddy, you’re as rich as Jack Warner,” she said, but Lubitsch demurred.
The little girl persisted, and Lubitsch pointed out that some very great men had very little money. Like, for instance, Mr. Einstein.
“Who’s he?”
“He’s a scientist, a great, great scientist.”
“What did he do?”
“He discovered the theory of relativity.”
“What’s that?”
A long stare. “All right then. I am as rich as Jack Warner.”
The other was Mary Loos, the niece of Anita Loos. Loos had had a successful public relations firm in New York, then came back to Los Angeles and went to work for Howard Strickling at MGM. Besides tending to her publicity chores, Loos began writing fiction on the side. Because of her Aunt Anita, she was privy to a social circle that other MGM publicists weren’t.
Lubitsch had originally met Mary at a party at Jules Stein’s house. He was still married at the time and was accompanied by Vivian. Loos immediately noticed the trademark Lubitsch sprightliness. “He was a sparrow,” she remembered, “eyes darting around, taking everything in. He walked with his toes out, with a quick shuffle. The trigger of his charm was his attitude toward life. I used to say that he looked like a bird, checking everything out.”
That first night, Loos told him that “I know you’re just a little German boy from Berlin, but sometimes you act like a Spanish grandee.” He was impressed—and flattered—by the simile. After his divorce from Vivian, Lubitsch called Loos up and asked her to dinner. Unbeknownst to Lubitsch, she was living with her father, a successful doctor. When Otto drove up to a big, beautiful canyon house with a long winding driveway, Ernst was taken aback.
Loos quickly became Ernst’s confidante, an intellectually compatible companion with whom he could gossip and exchange jokes and ideas without having to worry about sex corrupting the sympatico relationship. “He took out lots of beautiful women,” remembered Loos, “but when it came time to go out to the Goldwyns or the Mayers, I’d get invited. It was very flattering to me, and I was very fortunate to have that relationship in my life. I learned a lot.”
(One day at MGM, Loos returned from lunch to find an amazed phone operator. “There are three messages for you,” the operator deadpanned. “Mamoulian called; Lubitsch called; God called.”)
At gatherings of the high and mighty, Loos noticed that the moguls tended to fawn over Lubitsch rather than the other way around. “He was the center of attention; he never just sat back and chatted. He was there. He had magic, imagination, wit, charisma.”
Mainly, Lubitsch and Loos had a great bond of laughter, and she was enchanted by the essential duality of his character: the ardent romantic and the knowing cynic, which made it possible for him to capture both the sentimentality and absurdity of love, the ridiculous, endearing vanity of human nature. When Sam Spiegel, worried about a possible wave of anti-German feeling in the wake of World War II, changed his name to the thunderingly patriotic S. P. Eagle, Lubitsch laughed for weeks. Nor did he have much respect for the way business was usually done in Hollywood, once telling Loos that “every time Molnár writes a play, eight Hollywood Hungarians are employed to steal the plot.”
“We’d have the greatest time just sitting in nightclubs watching people,” remembered Loos. Once, at a nightclub, Lubitsch and Loos eyed the slinky French star Simone Simon come waltzing by on the arm of Robert Hakim. Despite her demure image, Simon was a lusty girl, well-known for her sexual exploits with Darryl Zanuck, among others. “Robert was dancing cheek to cheek. Simone looked like a beautiful peach blossom and everybody knew what a tramp she was. Ernst watched them go by and then said, ‘I vunder if he’s had a Vasserman?’ [a test for venereal disease]. I just fell on the floor laughing.”
Loos found that Lubitsch delighted in practical jokes. When a couple of friends left for a European cruise, Ernst sent them a long cable with explicit instructions about where to go, what to do, and whom to see. The only problem was that most of the telegram was made up of deliberately garbled words that reduced the instructions to gibberish. The couple spent their vacation worrying about how they would break the news to Lubitsch that they hadn’t been able to do any of the things he’d wanted them to do.
Loos found that the quietly attentive and effusive Lubitsch could be guarded in his opinions about other filmmakers, or the talents of his friends. He refused to read any of Loos’s early attempts at scriptwriting or fiction because he wasn’t sure she was a good writer; if she wasn’t, he didn’t want to risk embarrassing her, not to mention himself.
When it came to directors, Lubitsch was franker about his likes than his dislikes. He liked Hitchcock’s work and attended several of the Englishman’s dinner parties. At one, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, a prig known to the genial rounders led by John Barrymore and Gene Fowler as “Sir Seldom Hardprick,” was expounding on the subject of English cooking, which Lubitsch abhorred.
“Well, it all depends on one’s taste,” offered Hardwicke. “For instance, in women, there are women who are perfumed and made-up and their clothes expensively designed for them—and there are other women, wholesome and artless and healthy and simple . . .” “Who vants dat?” interjected Lubitsch, breaking up Hardwicke’s threnody and the party.
At another party, Hitchcock brought out his private stock of cigars, and gave some to Lubitsch. Lubitsch lit up the prime leaf, savored it, and finally said, “Alfred, for this cigar, I’m going to give you a secret dissolve!”
He also “revered” Willy Wyler, and, surprisingly for a man with such a respect for budgets and shooting schedules, had enormous respect for Erich von Stroheim, whose wanton expenditures of money and time had rendered him unemployable as anything but an actor.
Loos protested that von Stroheim’s temperament and perfectionism led him to absurd excess. “That’s the way it should be,” Lubitsch maintained. “All the rest of us make the equivalent of novellas, or short stories. The story moves from the beginning to the end, in one direction. Von Stroheim is the only filmmaker who really wrote a novel when he directed. A maid doesn’t just come in with a tray of fish; you see where the maid comes from, and where she got the fish!”
Loos was a good audience, but she knew her friend; since Lubitsch loved to schmooze, she wasn’t offended by his habit of taking her to a party and then rushing off to a corner to talk to the men. Since Willy Wyler would often be at the same parties—usually sitting at a card table playing gin—Loos and the beautiful, bright Talli Wyler would end up having a heart-to-heart.
Although Loos was a very attractive woman, Lubitsch took care to see that the relationship stayed on the level of doting uncle and favorite niece, never diverging into the realm of the sexual. At the same time, he carefully chose gifts that would complement and please her. When she got her first important job, as a story editor for Hunt Stromberg, Lubitsch sent her a leather desk set from Tiffany’s; for her birthday, it would be ruby and gold earrings.
Seeing their obviously intimate mutual understanding, friends occasionally thought that both people were missing an opportunity for happiness. Once, Loos and her best friend, Margo, later the wife of Eddie Albert, were at Lubitsch’s house after having returned from a trip to Mexico. They were having a very good time, feeling cozy and at home, literally sitting at Ernst’s feet, when he reached over and lovingly patted Loos’s head. Later, the wife of Lewis Milestone took Loos aside.
“Why don’t you marry him?” she asked.
“Kendall, we’re not in love,” replied Loos. “It’s not that sort of thing. We’re just good friends.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Milestone, “I’ve just been good friends with my husband for years!”
“If he’d ever asked me [to have a relationship] I’d have felt self-conscious,” remembered Loos, gesturing. “He only came up to here on me.”
Despite the attentiveness of his friends, there was a lost, wandering quality in Lubitsch at this time. Jeanette MacDonald would call Mary Loos and inquire “Do you want him for Thanksgiving or do you want him for Christmas?” For several years, the two women divided the responsibility for Lubitsch’s holidays between them. Nobody wanted him to be sitting home alone.
• • •
Lubitsch finally reported back to the Fox lot on January 19, 1944. As his doctors had forbidden him to undergo the physical sturm und drang of directing, Zanuck agreed to keep him on the payroll as a producer for three films; if his health allowed, he could direct the last of the three. In April, Fox bid on the rights to Franz Werfel’s hit play Jacobowsky and the Colonel, which Lubitsch would both star in and produce, but the studio was outbid by Columbia, who would wait thirteen years to make the picture, and with Danny Kaye in the role Lubitsch had wanted to play.
The first project under the new contract was to be a remake of Ernst’s silent success Forbidden Paradise, to be retitled A Royal Scandal. Vincent Price went in to meet Lubitsch and be appraised for a part in the film. “He was enchanting,” remembered Price, “and proved to me his genius by telling me the story in its entirety, as a great storyteller should, with the characters all completely realized, not as a movie but as a tale, dialogue at a minimum, character in every gesture. I was completely won over to a small part for a big director.”
The director assigned to work under Lubitsch’s supervision—probably with Lubitsch’s approval—was Otto Preminger, who was also a new member of the Sunday afternoon social circle and a graduate of the Reinhardt apprenticeship program. Although Preminger would evolve into an egomaniac with an almost complete lack of directorial personality, he was shrewd and tough, and he could be a loyal friend to people like David Raksin, who, after a rocky start, scored Laura for him.
“He protected me from the politics at Fox, which were Byzantine,” remembered Raksin, “although they weren’t worse than they were at MGM. MGM had a system in which they exhausted all the creative people to make sure they were not in danger of doing anything worth doing. They wore you out fighting the system.”
“[Preminger] was not an outstanding director,” remembered actor Leon Askin, who saw both his stage and film productions, “but what I call a ‘window dresser.’ Despite his successes as an actor, he was no actor. He was, however, a great showman and a fine producer.”
Most people who worked with Preminger disliked him, and not without reason—he had a capacity for rage that astonished people who witnessed it. He specialized in humiliating then breaking actors or crew members who failed to meet standards he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—articulate. On the other hand, he was careful about who he screamed at. “Otto wouldn’t scream at anybody who would scream right back,” said Philip Dunne.
Socially, Preminger could be enormously charming, and there was a side to his character that he preferred to keep hidden. He was, for instance, financially generous to actors he respected who had fallen on hard times.
With Lubitsch peering anxiously over his shoulder, Preminger managed to restrain whatever “creative” impulses he might have had by taking Lubitsch’s completed script and shooting it more or less verbatim. “Whatever changes I made were very small,” he said nearly thirty years later.
But, as Vincent Price observed, “Otto had the sense of humor of a guillotine. [Lubitsch] had to sit on the soundstage every day to watch a humorless Otto Preminger murder the comedy. He made it very pedestrian. When Lubitsch had told me the story I was hysterical. Tallulah [Bankhead] was good, but she should have been better.”
Lubitsch would sit on the set radiating impatience, regularly springing from his chair to confer with Preminger or the actors; the frustration must have been considerable, and probably resulted in far more aggravation and stress than if he had actually directed the picture. He had cut back on his smoking; on the set of A Royal Scandal, he usually had a cigar stuck in his mouth, but it was rarely lit.
Despite Preminger’s later claims of intimate friendship, according to Vincent Price and others, Lubitsch merely “tolerated” the younger director. If Ernst had overtly negative feelings about Preminger, he managed to keep them largely concealed, or else Preminger was simply oblivious. He would later recall that he and Lubitsch regularly looked at rushes together and would discuss them. “He was very easy, actually; he was the only producer with whom I had no conflict. He was also a man who really knew, unlike, say Milton Sperling or Sam Goldwyn.”
Yet, subtly, there were vast differences between the two men, and not just in the level of their talent. “Lubitsch had a wonderful gift for taking a situation and making it funny,” said Preminger, “but—and this is where our main difference lay—he did it by distorting character. In A Royal Scandal he had scenes where the empress of Russia didn’t act like an empress. Now, even in a comedy, an empress should stay an empress.” Seldom has anybody missed the essence of the joke—any joke—with such complete certitude.
(Interestingly, George Cukor revealed himself to be every bit as much a hidebound realist. In Cukor’s opinion, Lubitsch cast obviously mid-American actors like George Barbier as European kings because of an essential insensitivity to English, and would never have countenanced an equivalent casting in Germany, where he was more sensitive to nuances of dialect. But, as Sam Raphaelson would say, “We just laughed our heads off at kings. Neither Lubitsch nor I ever met a king. We were just having fun.”)
• • •
The film is billed as “Ernst Lubitsch’s A Royal Scandal,” and, although there is no question of the genuinely amusing shape of its witty script, Lubitsch’s lack of direct control is evident. The film features more obvious editing than other Lubitsch movies of this period, with extraneous reaction shots that serve no function other than to disguise a cut between two competing medium shots. The performances tend to lack Lubitsch’s sense of precise ensemble, as well as of size and gesture. Although Lubitsch works in lines that refer to such displays of skill in the saddle as “riding three days and three nights,” neither the actors nor the directors seem able to summon the expertise needed to properly arch an eyebrow to accompany a punch line.
The story, while yet another rehash of the Catherine the Great legend, offers possibilities. For one thing, it reverses the usual Lubitsch formula; in most of Ernst’s movies the leading characters are in on the joke; they’re cheerfully amoral, know it, enjoy it, and never apologize for it. As written, A Royal Scandal is the story of the corruption of a priggish naif.
Preminger paces the dialogue very fast, á la Howard Hawks, which is not necessarily a bad idea, but it does tend to emphasize the artificiality of the material. For all the verbal speed of the dialogue, Preminger’s timing is a sometime thing and the scenes tend to drag. Because the film is a throwback to the Lubitsch of the silent days, without human beings to really be involved with, and lacks charismatic performances on the part of either the actors or director, one is left to idly scan the sets and wonder why the film wasn’t made in Technicolor.
The only serious problem that might be laid at the feet of Lubitsch rather than Preminger is that of the leading man, the uncharismatic—and noticeably short—William Eythe. Beautiful, sexy women jockeying to win a dreary, idealistic reformer like Eythe’s Alexei isn’t funny so much as it is incomprehensible. He’s ardent but dull. When Alexei is emboldened by his sexual conquest of Catherine, believing that this gives him free rein to mold a new Russian empire, he says “There’s going to be a pig in every family.” He’s promptly shot down by a grumpy drunk who mutters, “That’s nothing new; there always is.” He doesn’t get it, of course.
Lubitsch had originally offered the part to Charles Boyer, which would have entailed some kind of rewrite, for Boyer was too old and too knowing an actor to convincingly play the part. For the jokes to be truly effective, Alexei needs to be gorgeous and dim, the equivalent of a dumb blonde. Tyrone Power could have acted it; Cornel Wilde could have been it. Scanning the always-thin list of Fox contract actors, even Glenn Langan might have played it.
A Royal Scandal is an authentic Lubitsch movie, but one for which deductions totalling about 15 percent have to be made; the essential misalliance between the director and the material muffles the movie, turning what could have been something delightful into something mediocre. The box office response was suitably tepid, a domestic gross of about $1.5 million against a cost of $1.7 million, a modest flop that put an end to Tallulah Bankhead’s always uneasy movie stardom.
A few months later, the pattern was to be repeated on Dragonwyck. According to the recollections of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the Anya Seton novel was purchased expressly for Ernst to produce, “and he asked me to write the screenplay and direct it.” Mankiewicz had long wanted to become a director—that was the main reason he left a lucrative producer’s job at MGM to work at Fox—so the chance to make his debut under the aegis of the man who had been his “friend, guide, and preceptor” since the Paramount days was eagerly seized by Mankiewicz. “I’d do the Santa Monica phone book if he asked me to,” Mankiewicz remembered in 1991.
But Mankiewicz found that Lubitsch’s illness had made him “stubborn and touchy.” His mood wasn’t helped by Darryl Zanuck’s suggestions, which were far more subtly invasive than they ever would be on the pictures Lubitsch directed. In April 1944, Zanuck was planning Dragonwyck to star Gene Tierney, Gregory Peck, and John Hodiak. To the picture’s loss, Peck and Hodiak would be replaced by the obvious villainy of Vincent Price and the stiffness of Glenn Langan.
In line with the prospective casting of Peck, which would have added a romantic element missing from the finished film, Zanuck heavily hinted to Ernst in April that “Every woman I have talked to who has read the book regrets that somehow Miranda did not end up with Nicholas . . . If you are still speaking to me, I will be available.”
By December, with the script approaching its final stages, Zanuck had some serious qualms about the climax, which involved a large-scale fire, feeling it was too similar to the finishes of such recent pictures as The Phantom of the Opera and Fox’s own Hangover Square. A month later, on January 2, 1945, Zanuck was still worried: “The audience [should] sense rather than be told something . . . a certain B-picture flavor has crept in . . . entirely over-written and over-emphasized.”
Zanuck’s suggestion that Lubitsch’s efforts were worthy of a B movie must have infuriated the proud man. On top of that, his relationship with Joseph Mankiewicz was also souring, and would get worse once the picture reached the production stage. “We differed about some of the direction,” Mankiewicz remembered, “mostly about where I put the camera.
“Lubitsch . . . felt that door handles were important. If you want to show some interesting body language for a character, don’t have the door handle where it would normally be. Have it higher or lower, that way we can see what is going through their minds as they try to open a door. If the character [knows] that a handsome man is waiting for her on the other side, we’ll see by the way she turns the handle. It’s all in the imagination.”
Standing on the set one day watching Mankiewicz work, Lubitsch turned to Gene Tierney and said, “What have I done? How could I give our picture to this novice? He knows nothing.” While Mankiewicz’s visual sense would never be more than nominal, it seems unlikely, as Tierney believed, that Lubitsch was afraid of Mankiewicz succeeding. Rather, Ernst’s illness, his frustration over his body’s inability to heal itself after two years, was affecting him so strongly that he couldn’t see that Mankiewicz in fact had the makings of a very fine director.
Vincent Price recalls one example of the differing sensibilities and sensitivities of the two men. One day Lubitsch and Price were watching the rushes of a scene in which Price, as Nicholas, the evil master of the house, takes Gene Tierney into his bedroom to berate her. Suddenly, Lubitsch threw up his arms and said, “It will have to be reshot!”
“Was it something I did, Ernst?” inquired Price.
Lubitsch explained that when a gentleman is upbraiding his wife in their bedroom, he would close the door so the servants wouldn’t hear. Mankiewicz had left the door open. Lubitsch proceeded to write a scathing memo to Mankiewicz, who acknowledged the essential correctness of his point.
Toward the end of the picture, communication broke down completely, although it was carefully kept behind closed doors. Then Zanuck added to Lubitsch’s frustration by cutting his favorite scene out of the picture, one in which the evil Vincent Price explains his philosophy of life standing by a beautiful but deadly oleander plant. Lubitsch was so angered by Zanuck’s insensitivity that he had his name removed from the film, thoroughly mystifying its director. The film’s one-sheets had already been printed, so brown stickers were pasted over Lubitsch’s name.
“Lubitsch was right,” remembered Vincent Price. “[The] picture missed its promised perfection somewhat because of this stupid cut. But Joe Mankiewicz was a better student of Lubitsch than Preminger.”
Aptly summarized by Robert Carringer as “An American Jane Eyre but with Rochester as a real villain,” Dragonwyck lumbers toward its preordained conclusion. Gene Tierney is the obviously innocent heroine, Vincent Price is the obviously evil heavy, and Glenn Langan, the nominal male lead, is too weak to balance either. The fact that Lubitsch was involving himself with such trite material betrays his desperation to work.
Although, at a budget of $1.9 million, Dragonwyck was expensive for a black-and-white picture, it grossed $2.57 million domestically, slightly out-earning Ernst’s own Heaven Can Wait, which must have galled him even further.
As if the course of his life and work since September 1, 1943, wasn’t irritation enough, as Dragonwyck was in production in the early part of 1945, Ernst’s sister Elsa moved out of her daughter Evie’s apartment. The two women had never been on particularly good terms, and Evie and her husband were both working very hard to start up an insurance business, which left little time to entertain Elsa. Ernst took the news as a sign that Evie and her husband wanted to get rid of Elsa, which was not the case. Nevertheless, relations between Evie and her uncle would remain strained.
Then, in April, Elsa died suddenly of heart failure. Whatever his feelings, Ernst kept them private. His own heart condition forbade him making the cross-country trip to New York to attend the funeral. His niece noticed that he never even asked where his sister had been buried. “It was over for him,” remembered his niece. “Not in a bad sense; he just thought that when a person died, that was that. That’s how he was.”
• • •
Lubitsch had produced the first two films of his three-picture deal; the last, which was to mark his return to direction, awaited his doctor’s permission. While he waited, Ernst set to work preparing a script for Cluny Brown, a successful novel by Margery Sharp published in 1944. The Fox story department had spotted the book while it was still in galley form, and Darryl Zanuck thought it would be a good vehicle for Lubitsch’s return to direction.
In addition to the requisite quota of social satire, the book must have appealed to Lubitsch because its title character and he shared an epiphany; at the end of the novel, Cluny Brown says farewell to her native England and all the people in it, the better to “[open] her heart to the United States”—just as Ernst had done more than twenty years before.
James Hilton (Lost Horizon, Random Harvest) prepared three treatments and a shooting script by December 1944, but Lubitsch threw most of Hilton’s work out, bringing the central characters together more quickly and severely downplaying Hilton’s farcical treatment of the climax.
While he was working on the script with Sam Hoffenstein and Elizabeth Reinhardt, Lubitsch asked to see the recently completed but un-released Anna and the King of Siam. He came out calling it a “beautiful, wonderful” film, although, unbeknownst to him, the projectionist had accidentally skipped a reel. A few days later, Lubitsch was passing by when he overheard a conversation about the scene in which Linda Darnell dies.
A clearly concerned Lubitsch said “I have never gone to sleep in a movie in my life, and that scene was not there. The picture I saw was perfect as it was.” Ray Klune, production manager for Fox studios, made some inquiries and found out what had happened. The more he thought about Lubitsch’s reaction, the more he wondered if Darnell really had to die. As it turned out, the reel that Lubitsch had never missed was seriously shortened, but the death scene was retained; late in life, Klune believed the studio erred by not following Lubitsch’s lead and deleting the entire reel.
Lubitsch had a first-draft script for Cluny Brown ready by May, and Zanuck’s reaction was highly favorable. His invariably specific, often multitudinous suggestions were here kept to less than half a dozen: one line change, suggestions for the names of hotels featured in the script, and a minor suggestion for the playing of an initial embrace.
Finally, in November 1945, Ernst’s doctors gave him the go-ahead to direct. A month later, he began production on Cluny Brown. Zanuck was now paying Lubitsch $12,500 a month, or $150,000 a year. It was slightly more than Zanuck was paying John Ford ($141,000) but not a lot compared to the $31,000 a month (or $375,000 a year) that Zanuck would pay Preston Sturges beginning in March 1947.
The first days of production seem to have been slightly edgy. Jennifer Jones reported to Fox having just finished David O. Selznick’s operatically overwrought Duel in the Sun, which, due to reshoots and the tinkering of censors, wouldn’t be released until six months after Cluny Brown was already in the theaters. Although Jones had made The Song of Bernadette at Fox a few years before, Zanuck had been away at war at the time and the studio had been run by William Goetz. Since Goetz was no longer at the studio, the nervous Jones had announced she would communicate with the Fox front office solely through production manager Ray Klune, who had ramrodded Gone With the Wind, among others, for her lover David Selznick.
One day, when Klune arrived on the set for a conference with Jones, Lubitsch said, “If the star wants to talk to you and it deals with story or direction, would you tell me?” The remark, humorous but with an underlying point, was vintage Lubitsch. For his part, Ernst was also nervous. “I feel,” he said, “like a dancer who broke a leg and wondered if he’d ever dance again—until he finds out that he can.”
Art directors Lyle Wheeler and J. Russell Spencer beautifully redressed the French town built for The Song of Bernadette to look English. Each day Lubitsch worked was carefully monitored. On February 11, 1946, he collapsed on the soundstage, but after two days of bed rest was back on the set. The picture was completed after sixty days of production. Except for that one spell, Lubitsch completed the picture without any problems, and he and Charles Boyer got along famously.
Boyer and his wife, Pat, attended the preview in Westwood, which was a roaring success. But, as Boyer would later observe, that was about the only time the picture played to a full house. It was not that Cluny Brown was a rank failure when it was released in June 1946—it ended up returning $1.64 million, almost exactly what it cost—it was just that Boyer’s box-office appeal was waning, and Jennifer Jones’s had not yet ascended. Without some particularly combustible quality in the picture itself, Cluny Brown struck audiences as mild, satisfactory entertainment but no more.
• • •
After the credits, which end with a caricature of Lubitsch holding a megaphone, we are introduced to England in the year 1938, characterized as a land of blithe snobs and inbred fools. Mostly, the English are impervious, not through stalwart will, but innate stupidity. Take the case of Adam Belinski, a Czech author in flight from the Nazis. A poet, a philosopher, Belinski, exclaims an ardent admirer, is “fighting for a better world.” “What for?” replies Sir Henry Carmel (Reginald Owen), the Bertie Woosterish lord of the manor.
Belinski is the sort of bemused, courtly man who gazes at a stopped-up sink and murmurs, “an analog of human frustration.” But the sink isn’t stopped up for long, because of Cluny Brown, a plumber’s niece.
Belinski and Cluny both find themselves at Sir Henry’s country home, Belinski as a guest, Brown as a maid: a woman who doesn’t know her place and a man who doesn’t have one. The castaways commiserate about their fates and their inability to do what it is they really enjoy. “I wish I could roll up my sleeves,” says Cluny “and roll down my stockings and unloosen the joint. Bang! Bang! Bang!”
The flamboyant double entendre gives way to the giggly caricature, as Cluny becomes enamoured of Mr. Wilson, the village chemist, played by Richard Haydn in all his quince-faced, glottal-voiced splendor. Mr. Wilson lives with his mother, who never speaks, just clears her throat incessantly but indicatively. Wilson is a brilliant comic caricature, but he is nobody’s idea of a good catch. Cluny’s attraction is not to him but to the idea of a home, of domesticity . . . even an enervated, aberrant domesticity.
Belinski is a benign, graceful creature of the air, a philosopher, a prince, able to coast through any situation. He is, however, no do-gooder; his achievements—which we have to take on faith—seem incidental to the simple sybaritic pleasure he takes in his own company, his own accomplishments. And, while he loves walks in the country, there is a limit; the nightingale outside his window, for instance, is slowly driving him insane.
Fortunately for Belinski, Cluny’s engagement to Wilson is submarined when the plumbing in his house gets stopped up. She makes the mistake of interrupting a dinner party to clear the blockage by her favored method of vigorously banging on the joint. It is an unforgivable breach of decorum. Soon thereafter, Cluny leaves with Belinski. As the train pulls out, he tells her that he was going to write a tract entitled “Morality vs. Expediency,” but has now decided to write a best-seller, to make enough money for both of them to live comfortably.
And what if there are three of us? Cluny inquires. Lubitsch dissolves to a coda, played without dialogue. The camera dollies up to a Fifth Avenue bookstore, where a window showcases Belinski’s novel, The Nightingale Murders. Belinski and Cluny, looking the very essence of chic, pass by and are admiring the display, when she suddenly grows faint. Dissolve to the same window with another book display: The Nightingale Strikes Again. It’s a snappy finish, ending the picture in fine style.
Structured as a gentle comedy of mores rather than manners, Cluny Brown is slightly lacking in energy, not in the direction or acting, but in the script; the obliviousness of the English is never really germane to the story; neither is Adam’s anti-Nazi past. In fact, there is nothing driving any of the characters except the desire to be themselves. All this accounts for a certain air of being amiably becalmed, and there is a slight but perceptible sense that Lubitsch is harboring his energies; the film’s location shots are limited to the back lot, and even then, process backgrounds are relied upon far more than usual.
Yet Cluny Brown is clearly the work of a serene, centered man. In its lack of a driving narrative engine, in its quiet charm, it’s the most European, Renoiresque, of Lubitsch’s American movies. Charles Boyer offers the polish and charm that never failed him, while Jennifer Jones’s undertones of neurotic sexuality lend the character a needed subtext. Wisely, she doesn’t attempt an accent and is quite winning, although she lacks sufficient technique to completely obliterate the stylized mechanics needed for a Lubitsch performance. As always, Jones is better at conveying fear, worry, and hurt than she is simple high spirits.
Lubitsch’s style, once very busy and given to self-conscious, sprightly comments, is now simplicity itself, watching the characters in the frame with an accomplished ease. Visual metaphor, the basis of the Lubitsch Touch, has disappeared, because the director’s attitudes are now so fully embodied in the characters that no camera embellishments are necessary.
Adam Belinski is one of Lubitsch’s most endearing characters. He may be one of Hitler’s worst enemies, a great liberal, but he is not averse to enjoying life’s pleasures on someone else’s tab. A taste for luxury, Lubitsch well knew, is not the worst thing in the world. Like Lubitsch, Belinski has an instinctive feel for a person’s weaknesses; his habit of opening the door to Wilson’s drug store so that the bell rings, then quickly walking away, is perfectly calculated to drive an anal-retentive crazy.
But it is Belinski’s courtliness, his spiritual freedom, that seems most moving, most liberating. He’s a close cousin to Gaston Monescu, who rights what wrongs he can en route to his own definition of happiness. As always, Lubitsch’s answer to the problems of a homicidal world lies in personal fulfillment-not on the world’s terms, but those of the individual.
In America, the critics responded to Cluny Brown as they usually did with Lubitsch. The New York Times said that “Ernst Lubitsch has come up with a delectable and sprightly lampoon . . . among the year’s most delightful comedies,” while the Herald-Tribune said that the film was “first-rate,” and the pleasurably vulgar Variety called it “Whammo entertainment.”
The English, however, were not amused. The Sunday Express bellowed that the gentle little satire was like “kippers fried in cream, an anchovy laid across a strawberry ice . . . complete and awful wrongheadedness . . . Cars are too big, riding clothes too unridden-in; even when a quiet dinner party by candlelight is attempted, the ancestral dining hall is still flooded with the flat glare of a score of studio arc lights.”
The New Statesman went considerably further and made perceptible anti-German (if not anti-Semitic) inferences that the mere names of writers Hoffenstein and Reinhardt were sufficient to convey its lack of authentic Englishness.
For the old guard of Hollywood’s English colony, who read the Times every day and thus took these things very seriously, all this was mortifying. C. Aubrey Smith was sufficiently cowed to issue a formal apology for having appeared in the film and suggested that J. Arthur Rank might take a calculated revenge by “making an inaccurate film set in America,” although that rather begged the question of why Rank was needed when the Messrs. Warner, Mayer et al had already made literally hundreds of inaccurate pictures about America.
• • •
Despite his pretense of a successful recovery, Ernst’s condition had not really stabilized. Around the time of Cluny Brown, there was yet another heart seizure, this time at a party for an official of the Nuremberg trials that was being held at Otto Preminger’s house at 333 Bel Air Road.
As the jurist was discussing the case for the rapt audience, Lubitsch beckoned Walter Reisch to his chair. Reisch immediately saw that Lubitsch was in physical distress, and quietly told him he’d meet him by the kitchen entrance. Reisch went out to the front yard where he grabbed the first car he found that had the keys in it and drove it around to the back, where he found Lubitsch doubled over, both hands pressing against his chest.
Reisch slowly drove the block to Lubitsch’s house, but going up the driveway seemed to aggravate the pain. Reisch and the housekeeper (Otto had the night off) managed to get him inside where he lay on an antique wooden bench. While the housekeeper called Dr. Nathanson, Reisch untied Lubitsch’s shoes and loosened his collar, but couldn’t manage to get him upright to pull off a wool sweater. Lubitsch lay there muttering “Es ist aus mit mir, es ist aus mit mir” (“I’m done for”).
In fact, after Dr. Nathanson arrived and examined his patient, Ernst’s condition had improved to the point where he didn’t even need to be hospitalized. If only, Nathanson told Reisch, the patient Lubitsch would stop being the director Lubitsch.
• • •
One Sunday afternoon at the Reischs, Lubitsch, sitting with Nicola, announced that he had invited “the man who had saved my life.” When a slim, medium-sized man came walking into the house, Lupita Tovar Kohner responded with a cheery “My goodness, Max, how are you?”
Dr. Maximilian Edel was born in 1906 in Vienna, and began the practice of medicine there. But when his wife died despite his best professional efforts, Edel turned his back on medicine and became a sculptor. When he and his second wife, also an artist, came to California as refugees, the actor Alexander Granach introduced him to the Kohners. Impressed with his work, Paul Kohner persuaded his client Walter Huston to commission a bust from Edel. The bust turned out so well that it was used at Huston’s memorial service after his sudden death in 1950.
Once his new home helped restore his emotional equilibrium, Edel returned to his first love, medicine, which alienated his second wife, who prided herself on being the wife of an artist.
In the late summer of 1946, as Cluny Brown was making its way around the theaters of America, Lubitsch’s condition had become complicated to such an extent that Morris Nathanson, who had developed a heart condition of his own, could not give his patient the necessary care. He called in Edel, even though Edel had no interest in cardiology. “I didn’t want to experience all that sadness, so many deaths,” is the way Edel would put it.
Lubitsch’s friends always assumed that the phrase “the man that saved my life” referred to Edel’s ministrations to the director’s heart. But the truth was considerably darker than that. Shortly after the completion of Cluny Brown, probably just after the coronary episode at Preminger’s house, Lubitsch had become a drug addict.
The increasing attacks of angina had stoked Lubitsch’s anxiety, which was now lurching over into a crippling fear. Demerol alleviated much of Ernst’s sensitivity to the primary symptom of his failing heart, as well as his reaction to it. “The angina attacks and Lubitsch’s increasing drug dependency had been successfully kept from Darryl Zanuck. “Nathanson explained the situation to me,” recalled Maximilian Edel. “Lubitsch had bribed his nurse to give him extra Demerol shots for the angina.”
Soon, the Demerol began to affect Lubitsch’s emotional equilibrium. He had mentioned to Mary Loos that he needed help finding a nurse for Nicola, whereupon Loos volunteered to locate one through her father’s clinic. The next time Loos went to visit him, she found him eating lunch upstairs at a card table. Without warning, he turned on her. “You’re trying to take my daughter away from me,” he charged. “Everybody is trying to run things. I don’t like the fact that you’ve interfered with my life.”
Loos, aghast at the sudden change in him, left the house and went some months without seeing him. In talking with other mutual friends, it turned out that virtually all of them had also been verbally attacked. When Loos decided to marry the writer Richard Sale, she sent an announcement to Lubitsch, who sent a beautiful floral arrangement. She stopped by his house to thank him and realized that on account of the Demerol-induced outbursts, he had become isolated, a virtual anchorite in his house.
“What you have to do is live with him,” Dr. Nathanson told Edel. “Work during the daytime, then go to his house for thirty nights.”
Which is what Edel did. For thirty nights he stayed at 268 Bel Air Road, talking to the desperate, distraught man, occasionally holding him while he sobbed in the night. “He would wake up and cry. I didn’t really have to restrain him. Well, almost. I held him lovingly, not restrainingly. He would cry, beg, sob. ‘I go through so much pain. Please.’ I was inspired by him. It was a big challenge.”
Over and over Edel would explain the importance of Lubitsch not allowing his existence to be dependent on something illegal, illicit. Edel did not bother telling his patient that he would not have survived long with a Demerol addiction (the drug invites liver toxicity), because the hazy, enveloping warmth the drug provides obliterates any conventional fear of consequences.
During those long nights, Lubitsch opened up to Edel as much as he ever did with anybody. He told Edel about his brother Richard’s death and confessed that he was terrified of dying the same way. “He was very sexual,” said Edel. “The fear was not so much the condition he had; the fear was this image of his brother dying [during sex]. It was a great trauma for him. And it came true.”
Through the thirty-day period, Lubitsch’s condition improved, his thirst for the Demerol lessened; when the angina would flare up, Lubitsch would take nitroglycerin. But the fact of the matter was that there was little the medicine of that day could do but treat Lubitsch’s symptoms.
For Lubitsch had progressive coronary artery disease. “Today, we probably would have done a bypass after the first heart attack,” said Max Edel, “and maybe a second one after the second heart attack. But in those days it was impossible to diagnose which arteries were clogged. We didn’t have the angiograms, the arteriography, the tools that visualize the condition. He was on borrowed time.”
Nor did Edel ever consider prescribing an enforced retirement for his patient, for even the most cursory acquaintance could tell that such an order would have been pointless. “If he had retired, what would he have done with himself?” asked Mary Loos. “He certainly wouldn’t have traveled. He could always have dictated something, but he couldn’t really write in the sense of sitting down and doing a book. Film was his life.”
“If I had said to him ‘You could live longer if you retire,’ I am sure he would have said ‘Forget it,’ ” said Max Edel. “I had the same experience with Bruno Walter, who couldn’t get from a parking lot to an office without suffering angina.
“Instead of thinking, ‘Making a movie would kill Lubitsch,’ or ‘Conducting will kill Walter,’ I think it was the other way around. The [filmmaking] kept him alive. Had Lubitsch retired after his first heart attack, he might not have lasted as long as he did.”
So it was that Lubitsch became close friends with the man that saved his life. The older man demonstrated enormous generosity to Edel, occasionally offering fatherly advice. “Max, don’t tell people that you’re a sculptor,” he said one day. “They’ll think that you have more interest in sculpture than in medicine.”
“He was interested that I should be successful,” remembered Edel, “that I should not lose patients. And he was right.” What struck Edel most strongly about his patient was his enthusiasm, the intensity that flamed from his black eyes, the way he carried his head slightly ahead of his body, not out of aggression, but out of avid curiosity as to what might be discovered around the next corner.
“He was a fiery man. When he described his feelings about visiting Russia, and going through the customs difficulty on the way out, the description was such that I wanted to stop him because he was as excited as he had been at the moment. He reproduced the situation exactly, including his reactions. In every situation he talked about, he relived its intensity.”
One day Lubitsch phoned Edel with a dinner invitation for the coming Friday. Since Edel had a date lined up (“She was a violinist. I had a vision of a Nude with Violin”) he declined, whereupon Lubitsch said, “Oh, that’s too bad. Thomas Mann and his daughter are coming.” Edel canceled his date.
“I was the only one there besides Ernst, Thomas and Erika Mann. Of course it was fascinating. Mann had just finished Doctor Faustus and told us all about it.”
At Lubitsch’s Christmas party in 1946, Lubitsch sat Edel next to Sinclair Lewis because of Edel’s admiration for Arrowsmith. “To be able to talk to Sinclair Lewis,” beamed Edel nearly fifty years later. “That to me was great generosity.”
Through the Sunday afternoon gatherings at the Reischs, Edel was introduced to the elite of the European émigrés; in time he became the personal physician for Igor Stravinsky and Bruno Walter, among many others. Lubitsch’s addiction, and Edel’s part in banishing it, remained well-kept secrets. Even so, occasionally Edel would be approached by people like Oscar Levant and Ben Hecht, members of Hollywood’s addict community, for prescriptions for illegal drugs, primarily morphine.
And the prospective Nude with Violin? “I never saw the girl again.”
• • •
Early in January 1947, as word began to circulate through the inner circle that Lubitsch was himself again, Mary Loos got the idea of throwing a surprise birthday party for him. She, Richard Sale, and Talli Wyler rented out the smaller party room at the Bel-Air Hotel and invited Ernst, accompanied by Max Edel, to come to the hotel for a drink. When he arrived, he saw all of his old friends—the Reischs, the Wylers—and some of his new ones, including Rex Harrison. The birthday cake sported an enormous cigar made out of icing. The evening was a complete success; a few days later, Lubitsch sent Loos a set of fine crystal with a note: “Thank you for giving me back my friends.”
It seemed that he had turned a corner. Fox announced that they had signed him to an unprecedented fifteen-year contract, although, given the reality of his physical condition, it was more a gesture of respect than anything else. Shortly thereafter, as was already something of a custom for major talents who had either been scandalously overlooked or were about to die, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted Lubitsch a special Oscar. At the presentation ceremony, Mervyn LeRoy spoke of “a dark stranger with a rather stern face, a big black cigar, and the merriest pair of eyes under the sun.
“He had an adult mind and a hatred of saying things the obvious way. Because of these qualities and a God-given genius, he advanced the technique of screen comedy as no one else has ever done.
“Suddenly, the pratfall and the double take were left behind and the sources of deep inner laughter were tapped. The housebroken camera learned to stop at a closed door instead of peeping gawkily through the keyhole.
“A master of innuendo had arrived.”
The severe episode of pulmonary edema that followed the Oscar ceremony was another sharp warning, but Lubitsch chose to pretend it had never happened. Again, the studio was not informed, for Lubitsch was about to make another movie, and he still could not bring himself to feel entirely comfortable at Fox for what were almost certainly highly subjective reasons.
“Ernst’s life had been so bound up in Paramount,” remembered Philip Dunne. “That’s where he was at home and well known. Lubitsch was the heart and soul of Paramount, the leader of the people who really cared about good movies. Sure, they had DeMille, but that was soft porn masquerading as religion.”
Lubitsch began to take part in one of the Fox social customs. Every afternoon at 4:30, a group gathered in the office of producer Fred Kohlmar, who had the office next to Ernst’s. Kohlmar, Philip Dunne, Mary Loos, and her husband, Richard Sale, would all gather around Lubitsch for what Dunne remembered as “tea and mutual sympathy . . . Ernst was the center of our little group . . . we all admired him, and—what to me was more important—grew personally fond of him.
“Nobody sat at his feet. Far from it. He was just one of the group. The English secretary who made the tea was also part of the group. So many of the directors were pompous. John Stahl would always talk about his ‘genius’ and [Michael] Curtiz was the worst of all. But Ernst’s humor had sparkle. He had a wonderful gift—the same one Don Stewart and Bob Benchley had. They could make you think you were as funny as they were. It was so spontaneous and infectious that you began to get into the spirit of it. Ernst had the capacity of elevating any conversation so it charmed.”
One day in the Fox executive dining room, Lubitsch was having lunch with Ray Klune, Nunnally Johnson, and a few others. Since there was an unwritten rule forbidding the discussion of your own movies, the conversation usually slid over to politics and sports. A comparison of Babe Ruth with a current slugger was under way when someone mentioned that Ruth was slow and never could run.
“What did you say?” Lubitsch asked. “I thought that was why Ruth was great.”
Not at all, it was explained. Ruth could simply hit the ball so far that he didn’t really have to run at all, just trot around the bases.
Lubitsch, now thoroughly confused, said, “But doesn’t ‘home run’ mean he’s got to run?” Despite the best attempts of the men at the table, the intricacies of baseball stubbornly refused to be comprehensible. “This game is much more difficult than motion pictures!” Lubitsch said by way of ending the conversation.
He was trying so hard to stay alive that he was down to two cigars a day.
• • •
In the spring of 1947 Ernst was invited to attend a showing of Trouble in Paradise being presented by the Great Films Society at Rexford School in Beverly Hills. He brought Creighton Hale along with him, and introduced him as “one of my favorite actors.”
After the screening he and Larry Swindell, one of the members of the society, went to a restaurant on the corner of Sunset and LaBrea for a cup of coffee. He began expounding on his films and career to Swindell, whose precociousness astounded him. Perhaps because of the context of the evening, he talked more about his older films. He was buoyed by the enthusiastic audience response to Trouble in Paradise, but not exuberant; Lubitsch knew that it was a consensus classic and he felt no need to defend it.
On the other hand, Design for Living had, he felt, gotten an undeserved bad press because Ben Hecht had rewritten Noël Coward’s dialogue, and Gary Cooper and Fredric March weren’t Coward and Alfred Lunt. He told Swindell that he had only been interested in the basic premise of the story. He believed that Cooper and March were both excellent and that Edward Everett Horton was the greatest comic actor in movies.
His two favorite actresses, he said, were Carole Lombard and Miriam Hopkins. Hopkins, he admitted, was an excessive actress, which he liked because it was much easier to bring an excessive talent down than bring a recessive talent up. He confessed that he didn’t particularly like to direct actors, that his method of working with them was to have them do what they wanted to do, then make them do less.
He told Swindell that he thought Gene Tierney’s career had been terribly mishandled, and that he had wanted to direct Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s beautiful film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which he had just seen at a studio screening prior to general release. (Internal Fox memos indicate Lubitsch had never been considered for the film, but that John Stahl had been. Zanuck had originally wanted to star either Norma Shearer, because he thought she still had one good picture in her, or Claudette Colbert.)
“You couldn’t have guessed he was about to die,” remembered Swindell, who would go on to write a fine series of star biographies, including one about Carole Lombard. “He was very outgoing and inclined to talk that night. A one-minute question would get a five-minute answer. I noticed that he had a cigar all the time but it was never lit.”
With his friends, Lubitsch began discussing a variation of the comic idea he had hit upon in Heaven Can Wait, that of a couple who hate each other so much they can communicate only through an intermediary. It would, he told friends, be very funny if the intermediary was a dog.
Billy Wilder invited Ernst to see a rough cut of The Emperor Waltz, which, although shot between June and September of 1946, wouldn’t be released until the summer of 1948. Lubitsch seemed to be enjoying the picture until Wilder began using a pair of dogs as metaphors for the lovers played by Bing Crosby (a democratic terrier) and Joan Fontaine (an overbred standard poodle).
The premise was very Lubitschean, but Wilder, in an atypically nonastringent mood, let the film decline into the flatfooted orthodoxy of a Crosby vehicle with mediocre songs. All Ernst could see was Wilder’s close variation on his comic idea. Furious, he leaned over to Mary Loos and started whispering “That’s my story, that’s my story! The son of a bitch has taken my story!!”
Mostly though, he was preoccupied by plans for the future. “That night after the screening of Trouble in Paradise, Lubitsch had let Swindell in on his plans. He had, he said in a joking way, accepted a challenge from Darryl Zanuck. The challenge would be to see if he could make Betty Grable into an actress.
• • •
This Is the Moment, to be retitled That Lady in Ermine, dated from a 1919 German operetta that had been adapted by Frederick Lonsdale and Cyrus Wood and opened on Broadway in October 1922. Lubitsch had been mulling over a film version since early 1943, initially as a vehicle for Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. By 1944, Jeanette MacDonald had replaced Dunne as the star of the movie in his mind, but age and changing audience taste had conspired to render her rather obviously on the downhill slide, and a doubtful commercial proposition.
For Zanuck, who felt that it would be a good idea to try to broaden Betty Grable’s audience before she wore out her welcome, it seemed an obvious idea to pair her with one of the premier talents of his directorial staff. Zanuck promoted her to Lubitsch and, in addition, dangled the prospect of a return to musicals. Ernst seems to have been doubtful, but the thought of making his first musical since The Merry Widow appealed to him, as did the possibility of smoothing over the pallid response to Cluny Brown.
There is a surviving continuity by Ladislas Fodor that is undated, and possibly derives from the Irene Dunne phase of the project. What is certain is that on February 18, 1947, Lubitsch handed in his treatment for the film, ten pages of straight narrative with no indication of musical numbers. Zanuck was immediately enthralled, penciling a note on the inside front cover: “Phone—tell Ernst great—will see him Tuesday.”
At the meeting, Zanuck asked for explanations of the flashbacks, and wanted more of a sense of how the film would open. “In Heaven Can Wait you managed to combine farce and a tear,” Zanuck noted. “Is it possible here with [the] love story?” As always, the producer’s notes tended toward psychological realism, and he asked Lubitsch to keep in mind that the story needed a firmer foundation and had to play as at least halfhonest.
Still, Zanuck thought the material was promising enough to proceed to a full screenplay. One last time, Lubitsch called on Sam Raphaelson, who was not enthusiastic about the material or the star. Besides that, Raphaelson was at his farm in Pennsylvania, working on a play.
Dorshka Raphaelson thought a reasonable compromise might be to invite Lubitsch to the farm to work on the project, and Lubitsch thought it was a good idea. But when Max Edel learned that Ernst would have to climb up and down steps, he forbade the trip.
Again, Lubitsch asked Raphaelson to head west, this time dangling a salary of $5,000 a week. Raphaelson relented. Raphaelson and his wife arrived in Hollywood on a Sunday morning and were at 268 Bel Air Road by the same afternoon. They shook hands—Lubitsch was not physically effusive and did not hug men—and Raphaelson and Dorshka stayed for dinner.
Unlike the writing of Heaven Can Wait, the script for That Lady in Ermine, was written in Lubitsch’s office on the Fox lot, “to impress Zanuck,” according to Raphaelson. It was a huge, airy, square room with light green walls, black-and-white paintings in wood frames, a grand piano in a corner, and deep leather furniture.
As the two men began work, Zanuck began to have second thoughts. That Lady in Ermine was obviously going to be an expensive picture, and a physically arduous one as well, if only because musicals entail long shooting schedules. Maybe, he reasoned, it would be safer and less stressful for Lubitsch if he did something else instead.
Zanuck pressured Sol Siegel, who had been assigned to produce a story then entitled A Letter to Four Wives, to offer the story to Lubitsch. Ernst, who had perused the material once before, still wasn’t interested and went back to working on That Lady in Ermine, while Siegel elected to hire Joe Mankiewicz as the writer/director for A Letter to Four Wives. (Later, the prolix screenplay was reduced by the simple expedient of cutting out one of the wives, resulting in the minor classic A Letter to Three Wives.)
The script for That Lady in Ermine was written in March, April, and May of 1947. Ernst confided to Raphaelson that he had had two seizures in the past year. “And you can see, Sam, I’m taking good care of myself. I’m in great shape, I didn’t smoke this morning—I chewed on that cigar. Did you notice?” Raphaelson had noticed. He had also noticed that Ernst’s lusty appetite had been gelded to the point where a Lubitsch lunch consisted of little more than consommé and boiled chicken. He resolved not to give & his old friend a hard time, even though, for the first time, “[Lubitsch] was K repeating his mannerisms. The whole concept was an imitation of former Lubitsch pictures.”
Because of his friend’s physical condition, Raphaelson felt constrained. “I couldn’t fight with him over scenes, characters, and dialogue in the healthy, vigorous way we had developed as the years brought us to closer understanding. I felt, ‘Oh, the hell with it—I’ll take the money. He’ll make a picture; it’ll be all right. The studio will like it. I won’t be ashamed of it, and that’s that.” But Raphaelson could not avoid acknowledging Lubitsch’s loss of vitality. The day began later, the breaks for lunch were longer. Lubitsch was gentling himself.
• • •
The special Academy Award on March 13 naturally provided opportunities for a few retrospective interviews. In American Cinematographer, Lubitsch again stressed his appreciation for the classical style of camerawork. “The camera, to my mind, has been gready misused in regard to moving shots. The moving shot is only good if you are not conscious of mechanical movement, just as a comedian is funny only when he doesn’t convey the idea that he is trying to be funny.” He also bewailed the fact that “too many directors know all too little” about just what a camera can do.
The Los Angeles Times’ Philip Scheuer also visited. When he was asked why he was planning a musical after so many years, Lubitsch shrugged. “One gets tired, one changes. When one has a personal style it is like one’s handwriting—he can’t get away from it. I had done so many musicals . . . that I felt the need of a different approach. But I had none. So . . . I returned to an earlier metier, comedy of the sophisticated sort.”
Now, in one of the last interviews he would ever give, Lubitsch told Scheuer his favorite pictures were (drama) The Patriot, (musical) The Love Parade, (comedy) Trouble in Paradise, (satire) Ninotchka, and The Shop Around the Corner, which he called “the best picture I ever made in my life.”
Again, he returned to the old canard about trivial material that had first been spread by Jim Tully more than twenty years before, and a certain defensiveness crept in. Form, he declared, is more important than content. Most people’s judgments of content are “adolescent.”
“As soon as someone tackles a big theme with a message we take him seriously and call it art. We appreciate a painting of the crucifixion . . . whereas a simple Cézanne depiction of a vase and an apple may be far more enduring as art.
“I believe—and I am not comparing myself to Cézanne—in taking a lesser theme and then treating it without compromise. Leaving my own pictures out of it, there hasn’t been a better picture of Americana than Preston Sturges’s Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. It had no pretensions, yet, despite the fact that people went around kicking each other’s posteriors, it was truer artistically than most pictures made in America.”
The retrospective mood was amplified a few months later when, on July 10, Lubitsch sent a long letter to the critic and enthusiast Herman G. Weinberg as an addendum to an index to his films prepared by Theodore Huff. Of the historical period, Lubitsch expressed a fondness for Carmen, Madame DuBarry, and Anne Boleyn; of the American silents, his favorites were The Marriage Circle, Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Patriot, and Kiss Me Again.
“As to pure style I think I have done nothing better or as good as Trouble in Paradise . . . as to satire, I believe I probably was never sharper than in Ninotchka . . . as for human comedy I think I never was as good as in Shop Around the Corner. Never did I make a picture in which the atmosphere and the characters were truer than in this picture.”
In closing, he responded to Theodore Huff’s gentle ascribings of occasional mediocrity by saying, “I agree . . . wholeheartedly that I made sometimes pictures which were not up to my standard, but then it can only be said about a mediocrity that all his works live up to his standard.”
The wisdom was inarguable, but what was also inarguable was the fact that in the photograph that accompanied the Los Angeles Times article, Lubitsch looked haggard and greatly aged. The delicacy of his physical condition was appallingly apparent, but Lubitsch pretended that everything was fine. After all, he had a picture to make.
• • •
The first-draft script for The Lady in Ermine was completed on June 3, and Zanuck’s fertile mind immediately began riffling through the casting possibilities. If the picture was to go into production soon, Zanuck wanted Betty Grable and Cornel Wilde; if it could be held off till February, the alternatives were Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney. Either way, Zanuck wanted the movie to be in Technicolor.
Clearly, Tierney would have been preferable, even though her singing would have had to have been dubbed, and Harrison would have been ideal, but between Lubitsch’s horror at the prospect of sitting around for eight months, and Zanuck’s wanting to chart some new ground for a star whose musical-comedy welcome was about to wear out, production was scheduled for the latter part of 1947.
That meant Betty Grable, an idea greeted with ironically raised eyebrows throughout Hollywood. Even Nicola was appalled. “Not Betty Grable!” she exclaimed to her father, who responded by complaining to Vivian that “I cannot work if your daughter contradicts me!” Mary Loos, who was a friend of Zanuck’s as well as of Lubitsch’s, says that Zanuck’s patience during Lubitsch’s long siege of ill health and the relative failure of Cluny Brown made Lubitsch feel that he had no choice but to acquiesce to Grable’s casting. “He made the picture because she was good box office,” said Loos.
To turn the cheerfully vulgar, slightly cheap (she always seemed to be chewing gum even when she wasn’t) charm of Grable into a Lubitsch heroine was not going to be easy, but he managed to salvage something out of the casting process when he dodged the glassy, pallid, uncharming Cornel Wilde, persuading Zanuck to hire the free-lancing Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., instead.
“He asked me to have lunch with him and collaborate on the production,” recalled Fairbanks. “I stuttered with pleasure.”
Although Fairbanks had been cast in Design for Living before contracting pneumonia, he hadn’t known Lubitsch that well. Quickly, however, they came to a relaxed friendship. “He was full of future plans; we discussed doing something later on. He would occasionally joke about my stepmother [Mary Pickford], to the effect that she looked so dainty but was really so tough.” Fairbanks asked him to look over the script of the actor’s next picture, The Fighting O’Flynn, which Fairbanks was also producing, and Lubitsch made some helpful and appropriate suggestions.
Beneath the surface geniality and high spirits, Ernst clearly knew that his heart was failing, for he confided to Fairbanks that “This will be my best epitaph.” As it turned out, neither That Lady in Ermine nor The Fighting O’Flynn were to be remotely worthy of his efforts.
With the script and cast for the new picture both set, Lubitsch filled the days and nights before the start of production socializing with his friends. In September, along with Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch, Mary Loos, and Max Edel, he attended a screening of Vittorio De Sica’s harshly realistic Shoeshine. After the film, he sat frozen, too deeply moved to take part in the voluble conversation that followed. He vowed to write De Sica to tell him of how deeply his movie had affected him as soon as he could find an Italian translator.
• • •
Ernst began his attempt to turn Betty Grable into an actress on October 20, 1947, with the largest budget he had ever had: $2.4 million. For the first several weeks of the production, everything went well. “You had to be ready for anything,” Walter Abel recalled in 1979. “His improvising on the set was, oh, magnificent improvisation.” During rehearsals, Lubitsch took particular joy in acting Abel’s part, until the slightly irritated actor inquired, “Mr. Lubitsch, I am going to play this part, am I not?” Douglas Fairbanks remembered that Lubitsch had “such vitality; he was tripping over himself with ideas. During rehearsal he’d laugh with pleasure and sometimes he’d even ruin his own takes. And yes, he loved acting all the parts; he was very good, actually.”
Lubitsch’s buoyance was at least partially attributable to a new relationship with the actress Natalie Schafer. The tart, intelligent Schafer impressed Ernst’s friends as a good, solid match for him. Schafer had been married to Louis Calhern, until she became fed up with Calhern’s alcoholism. When Calhern married Ilka Chase, Schafer sent her some dresses with a note: “Ilka Dear: Use these quickly.” In addition to her wit, she was an unusual choice for Lubitsch in that she was older (she was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1900) than most of his women.
During the first several weeks of filming, members of the crew would take the ever-hovering Steffie Trondle aside and tell her she was worrying too much, that Lubitsch was in better health than he had been during Cluny Brown. And, so long as they were working on the soundstage, that seemed to be the case. But as soon as the production moved to the back lot, for exteriors by a riverbed, Lubitsch began to get tired. One day he became chilled and Trondle insisted on taking him home at 4 P.M. Lubitsch was so exhausted that he even mentioned to Trondle the possibility of Otto Preminger finishing the scene for him, but the next morning he had thought better of it.
Still, he felt well enough to spend several nights at the restaurant L’Aiglon, listening to the Hungarian violins that he loved so much. In addition to Schafer, there was a new, more casual relationship in his life. Although he didn’t take it seriously, it perked him up sufficiently so that he went to the tailor’s for a new suit.
On Saturday, November 29, Lubitsch was photographing the long shots for a scene in which Cesar Romero, disguised as a gypsy fiddler, plays for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Both Fairbanks and Romero thought that Lubitsch seemed in good spirits and good health. Max Edel dropped by the set and was introduced to Betty Grable. Lubitsch invited him to dinner, but Edel had other plans and begged off.
Since Edel was busy, and Natalie Schafer was in New York, Lubitsch decided to go out on a date with his latest casual amour. She was neither an actress nor a prostitute, but typically attractive to Lubitsch in that she was blonde and full of fun; he thought enough of her to wear his new suit. Ever the personal romantic, he told Otto that just touching her gave him an electric thrill.
He told Steffie Trondle to begin Christmas shopping on Monday, and had her ask Foster’s, in Westwood, to stay open late one night the following week so he could come in and personally pick out a few gifts. On Sunday, he arose earlier than usual and briskly made plans for the day. That afternoon, he had a date to be at the Wyler’s house to attend a screening of Le Diable au Corps; Marlene Dietrich had told him that its star, Gérard Philipe, would make a perfect Octavian for the film of Der Rosenkavalier he someday aspired to make. The Wylers had invited the A list: Preminger, Wilder, Edmund Goulding, and Dietrich, among others. Lubitsch jokingly said that he would attend on the condition that he would not have to look at Marlene’s Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he was tired of seeing displayed.
Walter Reisch called. Lubitsch was in fine fettle, pleased with his actors, pleased with Zanuck’s reaction to the rushes, pleased even with his health. Reisch closed by telling him that Marlene and he would come fetch him personally. Just before noon, Lubitsch called Natalie Schafer in New York, and told her that as soon as the picture was finished he would be traveling east to visit her.
After lunch, he welcomed the woman he had had dinner with the night before. Shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon, Lubitsch retired to his den with her. They made love. A few minutes later, he felt the familiar tightness in his chest. The constricting pain began to encircle him, possess him. He excused himself and went into the bathroom, probably to get to his angina medicine. Then, a sudden, tearing explosion inside his chest overwhelmed and obliterated all that was Ernst Lubitsch.
Otto, summoned by the terrified woman, picked Lubitsch up and placed him on the couch fifteen feet away, beside his bookshelves. Otto first called Max Edel, telling him that “Lubitsch is very bad.” Edel instructed him to call an ambulance and told him he was on the way. Otto then dialed Mary Loos, but by this time he could tell that there was nothing any ambulance squad would be able to do.
“The old boy just died,” he told her. “I think you better come.” She stuttered out something about coming over right away. Otto replied that he would have to “take the lady out of the house” but he would be right back. Mary immediately called her father, Dr. Clifford Loos. They arrived about ten minutes later to find Steffie Trondle in the driveway having hysterics, refusing to go in and see Lubitsch.
Loos and her father found that they had been beaten by the Beverly Hills Pulmotor Squad, who had unsuccessfully tried to revive Lubitsch. He was lying where Otto had put him, on the sofa in the library, covered with one of the fake leopard throws that were common in Hollywood at that time. Loos looked around the room, taking it all in. She noticed that Ernst’s Academy Award was serving as a jewelry tree: his watch was hanging on the Oscar. Then she looked down at Lubitsch’s body; there was a slight, comfortable smile on his face.
There was nothing for Dr. Loos to do but officially declare Ernst Lubitsch dead as of 2:45 P.M., November 30, 1947.
At 3:15, Walter Reisch and Marlene Dietrich arrived at the house to pick up Lubitsch for the party. A stunned Dietrich stood by Lubitsch’s body, trying to assimilate what had happened. Max Edel finally arrived, and assured everybody that Ernst had almost no time to know what was happening.
Beyond his personal grief, Edel’s professional reaction was one of frustration and disappointment. He called Morris Nathanson to inform him of the situation and asked him if he wanted to come over. “What’s the use?” asked Nathanson. Edel was struck by his mentor’s detachment. Talking to Mary Loos and Otto Werner, he realized what had happened. A full stomach slightly lowers the heart’s capacity, and, in Lubitsch’s case, there wasn’t any to spare. Add the exertion of lovemaking and, in Edel’s words, “He overdid.”
Reisch and Dietrich went back to Reisch’s house. Reisch made plans to cancel the afternoon party, but Dietrich wouldn’t hear of it. “Let everybody come and remember him,” she said, and that was what happened. That Sunday, about fifty people arrived at the Reischs’ to mourn their friend, “the biggest party we ever had,” according to Lisl Reisch.
The hearse arrived at 4:30 to transport the body to the Delmer Smith Mortuary on Washington Boulevard. For the last time, Ernst Lubitsch left the house at 268 Bel Air Road that he had built and loved so much. It was certified that Lubitsch had died of a coronary thrombosis lasting one hour, due to coronary sclerosis lasting four years. There was no autopsy.
That night, Lubitsch’s friends walked from Reisch’s house down the block to the house at 268 Bel Air; the news began filtering out to Lubitsch’s friends and coworkers. Back in New York, Dorshka Raphaelson was stunned. “I never thought of him dying,” she would say. “I just thought he’d live forever with a heart problem.”
“There was an enormous sense of loss,” remembered Talli Wyler. “There just wasn’t anybody else like him; you felt that something irreplaceable was gone. At the time, we all thought he was so old. Now, I think, ‘My God, how young!’ ”
During the informal wake at Lubitsch’s house, Mary Loos and Talli Wyler were sitting by the door to the study when they were appalled to hear Otto Preminger on the phone to Darryl Zanuck. Lubitsch, Preminger was saying, had told him that if anything happened to him, he wanted Preminger to take the picture over.
Both women knew Preminger had to be lying; for one thing, Lubitsch never discussed the possibility of dying with anybody but Morris Nathanson and Max Edel. For another, his disappointment with the results of A Royal Scandal would hardly impel him to give Preminger a second chance at failing with a Lubitsch production. But Preminger was an avid careerist and he saw That Lady in Ermine as an opportunity. “He was an opportunist when it made sense to him to be so,” said David Raksin. “Otto believed that in a dog-eat-dog world, you better get the first bite.”
• • •
On Monday, December 1, Daily Variety’s banner headline was hilariously blunt but indisputably accurate: LUBITSCH DROPS DEAD. The funeral arrangements were made jointly by Walter Reisch, Mary Loos, Steffie Trondle, and Talli Wyler. Services were the following Thursday at Forest Lawn’s Church of the Recessional. That day the trade papers prominently displayed full-page ads paying tribute to Ernst from, among others, the Directors Guild.
At Forest Lawn, Ernst was laid out in the new suit he had worn to dinner the previous Saturday night. Mary Loos attended with Eva Gabor and Margo. Neither of her friends had ever seen a dead body before, let alone that of someone they loved. They were frankly terrified. Loos suggested that they just walk by the open casket and not look. Even so, she kept a firm hold on both their elbows just in case. Also inconspicuously attending were Leni Lubitsch Lewis and her son Eddie. Looking at her ex-husband for the last time, Leni broke down and cried. She did not introduce herself to Vivian or Nicola.
Honorary pallbearers were Rex Cole, Max Edel, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., William Goetz, Frederick Hollander, Arthur Hornblow, Sam Katz, Al Kaufman, Fred Kohlmar, Paul Kohner, Henry Koster, Sol Lesser, Ernest Lindley, Leo McCarey, Rouben Mamoulian, Thomas Mann, Gene Markey, Rudolph Marx, Edward Mayer, Louis B. Mayer, Lothar Mendes, Lewis Milestone, William Perlberg, Otto Preminger, Joe Schenck, Lew Schreiber, Charles Schwartz, Mendel Silberberg, Ben Thau, Charles Vidor, Walter Wanger, Franz Waxman, William Wyler, and Darryl F. Zanuck.
Among the flower arrangements was a small heart of red carnations sent by Nicola. Officiating was the powerful Los Angeles rabbi Edgar Magnin (whom Lubitsch had not cared for). Lubitsch, he said, “gave something to the world that will not perish. He brought beauty, interest, color, and romance to many, many people. He had the seed of genius in him. May God take him under his wings and give him perfect peace.”
Jeanette MacDonald sang “Beyond the Blue Horizon” and “Waltz in A-Major,” one of the songs Ernst had composed for Nicola. Mary Loos thought she sang beautifully, although she was sure that if he could have heard it, Lubitsch’s response would have been “Why didn’t she sing that well in the pictured”
Charles Brackett delivered the eulogy, saying that “with his artistic touch, Ernst Lubitsch helped bring a raw, gawky stumbling medium and taught it how to carry itself as becomes a personage of the world, how to wear it like a boutonniere, and how to imply droll, wonderful things without saying them at all.
“Every picture he made bore his imprint—male, deft, and unsentimental and joyous. He was no wild, impractical poet clashing with the businessmen who make picture history, but he was an unmitigated artist, blessedly incapable of meeting a standard of taste which wasn’t his own.”
Finally, Brackett tried to put an upbeat spin on the grim occasion by picturing Lubitsch approaching the gates of heaven and pausing reluctantly to toss away his cigar before entering. “Now,” he said, “there will be some delightful Trouble in Paradise.”
Mary Loos felt that the entire affair was a nightmare; all that pulled her through it was the thought of Lubitsch listening, eyes flashing as if to say, “Are they kidding?”
After the ceremony, Henry Blanke, Mervyn LeRoy, Gene Raymond, Gottfried Reinhardt, Richard Sale, Walter Reisch, Billy Wilder, and Otto Werner carried Lubitsch to the hearse. The proceedings nearly took a Mack Sennett turn when the pallbearers, unused to heavy lifting, almost dropped the coffin on their way out of the church. The situation was saved by Richard Sale, who wedged his knee underneath the casket until the mortuary attendants came to the rescue.
After the graveside ceremony, Billy Wilder and William Wyler walked down the slope to the waiting cars in a deep silence. “Well, no more Lubitsch,” sighed Wilder. “Worse than that,” replied Wyler. “No more Lubitsch movies.”
• • •
The grave of Ernst Lubitsch is on a steep, wooded hillside, and is marked by a simple stone. Beneath his name and dates of birth and death is one phrase: “Beloved Daddy.”