You ring a number and someone says ‘Paramount,’ and I still think of Lubitsch. It’s hard to realize that’s all not there anymore.
—stephen frears
Lubitsch’s will was filed for probate the day after he was buried. Dated March 13, 1945, the will left Vivian fifteen percent of his net estate and $10,000 each to Richard Lubitsch’s widow, Regina, and to Ruth Hall. Steffie Trondle, who had been with him since the last days in Germany, and Otto Werner, who had been with him twenty-two years, also were bequeathed $10,000 apiece. Since neither Regina Lubitsch nor Hans, her son, could be located, the money was provisionally remanded into the general estate account. (Unbeknownst to Lubitsch, Regina had been deported to the Sobibor concentration camp on July 20, 1943, and executed three days later. No trace of Hans Lubitsch was ever found.)
The remainder of the money went into a trust for Nicola, who was to receive portions when she was twenty-one, twenty-five, and thirty, with the remainder of the estate coming to her at the age of thirty-five, with the proviso that “in the event that my daughter . . . shall be adopted by any person or shall legally or in any other manner other than by marriage, change her surname to any other name but ‘Lubitsch ‘. . . my trustees shall pay no income to or for the support of my said daughter . . . until [she] shall reach the age of 21 years.” In the event that Lubitsch’s heirs did not survive him, the estate was to be divided one-third to the United Jewish Welfare Fund of Los Angeles and two-thirds to Regina or Hans Lubitsch, and Ruth Hall.
Although Lubitsch had died with only $20.87 in his pockets, the estate inventory showed cash savings slightly in excess of $112,000, bonds worth more than $300,000, not to mention stocks (including 100 shares of Allied Chemical, 100 shares of Du Pont, 67 shares of the Hollywood Turf Club, and 6 shares of Paramount Pictures) worth slightly less than $80,000. There was also a life insurance policy for $133,762. After the usual bills were paid—$3,085 to Forest Lawn, $175 to one Marjorie Corso for “white net dress ordered and completed at the request of decedent as a Christmas present for his daughter, Nicola Lubitsch”—it was determined that Simon and Anna Lubitsch’s younger son had left an estate valued at $857,212, the rough equivalent of $3 million in 1993 currency.
• • •
The day before the funeral, Fox announced that, instead of Preston Sturges or the far more appropriate Edmund Goulding, both of whom had offered to complete the picture, Otto Preminger would direct the rest of That Lady in Ermine. Preminger finished the picture, all right, and in more ways than one.
“I think Zanuck replaced Lubitsch with Preminger because he had the same accent,” Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., remembered ruefully. The difference between the authoritarian Preminger and the charming, bubbling Lubitsch was implicit in their on-set demeanor. In place of Ernst’s cajoling enthusiasm, Preminger would stand by the camera idly playing with a solid gold yo-yo. Soon after he took the picture over, Preminger set off on one of his infamous tirades, this time at an electrician. Appalled at the behavior and the language, Fairbanks stalked off the set, followed closely by Preminger.
“Otto, you can’t talk to people like that,” said Fairbanks. “You must apologize.”
“Don’t be foolish,” snapped Preminger.
“Then I’m going home.”
Fairbanks got in his car but was stopped at the studio gate and informed that the matter was being taken care of. He returned to the set and found that Preminger had indeed apologized. It might have been better if Fairbanks had kept on driving.
“When Preminger came in he changed everything,” said Walter Abel, who had a good-sized supporting part in the picture. Fairbanks and Abel were deeply concerned, for Lubitsch had rehearsed the entire picture with them and they knew that Preminger’s slant would render parts of the script unplayable, not to mention incoherent. Finally, they approached him with what Abel recalled as “nothing but kindness and delicacy in our minds” and tried to explain exactly what Lubitsch’s intentions and plans had been.
“Mr. Lubitsch is dead,” he told them. “I am the director of this picture.”
“So,” remembered Walter Abel, “there was no more fun in Hollywood, not with that man.”
In addition to shooting the rest of the picture, Preminger reshot some Lubitsch footage, “because it was too subtle,” according to Fairbanks. The first thirteen pages of the script, which Lubitsch had already shot, were cut, as was the ending, effectively deleting a running gag revolving around just what the lady was wearing under her ermine coat.
Even more regrettably, Preminger cut two musical numbers that Lubitsch had already shot, one of which, “It’s Always a Beautiful Day,” had words by Leo Robin and music by Lubitsch himself. The overall effect was to make what might very well have been delightedly witty and lyrical (Raphaelson’s original script, despite his doubts, has some rather nice repartee) severely less so.
One can always sense, and occasionally actually see, what Lubitsch had in mind: in the prominent play given to the gypsy violins Lubitsch loved; in the waggish production number “Ooh, What I’ll Do to That Wild Hungarian”; in the sweeping romanticism of the lyrical “This Is the Moment”; in grace notes like a supposedly brutal conqueror disturbed by the composition of a painting; and, finally, in a woman who leaves her husband because “He didn’t believe in dreams.”
But it is like looking through smudged glass at a conceptually lovely watercolor that has been badly framed. The colors are distorted, and cheap materials have been used.
True, some of the fudging is Lubitsch’s; Colonel Teglash’s bellowing of “Horvath!” is a steal from Concentration Camp Ehrhardt’s screams for “Schultz!” in To Be or Not to Be. Other moments, notably a series of fast-motion shots—the sun slamming into the sky, a series of screens rapidly unfolding in front of an orchestra so they won’t be able to observe the dancers—are welcome bits of rambunctious cartoon humor that lend astringency to the wedding cake material, in addition to constituting a return to the self-conscious little pieces of camera trickery with which Ernst had made his reputation in other, better times.
But the plot is garbled, the result of the recutting and reshooting, and the ending is truncated, lumpy, and painfully abrupt. The lilt, the assured, sprightly Lubitsch rhythm, is absent.
Under the tide That Lady in Ermine, the film was finally released in August 1948, at a brief running time of eighty-nine minutes: Lubitsch was the only director credited. The stuffy Bosley Crowther of The New York Times actually liked the picture, but Variety was much closer to the mark when it said that “[the Lubitsch touch] is not sufficiently sustained to generate topnotch comedy . . . the story is lacking in movement.” The film earned $1.4 million, a million less than it cost.
• • •
After the usual slogging through probate, the bequests Lubitsch had provided for in his will were finally paid out on December 1, 1950. In July 1951, the house at 268 Bel Air Road was sold for $67,100. For an extra $256, the drapes were included. There were still some lingering debts; Salka Viertel owed Lubitsch $250, but the estate determined that as of November 1, 1951, she was insolvent, so the debt was canceled.
By this time, Nicola was receiving $1,250 a month from the trust, with the estate hovering around the half-million-dollar mark (the trust would not be depleted until 1983).
A public auction of Lubitsch’s effects was held on June 8, 1952. Billy Wilder bought a porcelain ashtray and a Mexican cigarette box for $75. Then came the art collection. Charles Vidor bought a Diego Rivera painting for $1,200; Mrs. Laurence Rockefeller bought a Utrillo and a Grandma Moses for $2,950. A Chagall, a Dufy, a Rivera, and three framed movie posters sold for $1,800. There were seven Renoirs, and they, a Boudin and a Grant Wood, among others, went for equally incredible (by contemporary standards) prices. With the exception of Wilder, most of Lubitsch’s friends stayed away from the auction out of residual fondness for his memory and the belongings that had once enveloped them all in an affectionate cocoon.
• • •
The death of an inherently convivial man like Lubitsch left a vast chasm in the lives of all his friends. Mary Loos tried to pull a couple of particularly distraught friends through their grief by telling them that they should keep him alive by trying to think like he had thought whenever they needed support.
Despite his promise to Nicola that he would never remarry, Lubitsch had spoken to Natalie Schafer about their “being together”; when Schafer arrived back in Hollywood she confided to Mary Loos that she thought they might have gotten married.
The Sunday afternoon parties at the Reischs continued for some years until people began to move away (Otto Preminger, Joe Mankiewicz) or got divorced and brought younger girlfriends and wives (virtually everybody else). Toward the end, more alcohol seemed to be consumed than coffee. It just wasn’t the same.
“It got to the point,” remembered Lisl Reisch, “where hardly anybody was around, you know?” Occasionally, Lisl would whip up a batch of Lubitschkoch; before serving it, she would always say “Poor Ernst, wherever you are, this is for you.” Mary Loos’s career would encompass many successful movies and novels, and she would come to believe that Lubitsch “helped me, left an indelible training that he didn’t know. You couldn’t be around him a lot without absorbing something of him. That’s why he’ll never die in the minds of his friends.”
Otto Werner went to work as a gardener for Loos; whenever he would come to mow the lawn, they would reminisce about Lubitsch. Steffie Trondle became private secretary to Jean Negulesco, but her health soon began to deteriorate. “I had always known what a wonderful friend I had in Mr. Lubitsch,” she wrote to Sam Raphaelson, “but I had never realized how closely my life had become linked with his, especially during the last few years, and when he was gone I felt completely lost.”
Steffie died in October 1950. In death, as in life, she stayed close to Lubitsch; she was buried just a few feet away from him. In December 1965, Nicola married Robert G. Goodpaster and bore him two daughters. The marriage ended in divorce, and she resumed using her maiden name.
No one kept the flame of Lubitsch’s sensibility so alive as Billy Wilder, albeit tinged with a sardonic edge that was alien to the older man. Over the years, Wilder would make an occasional romantic comedy in explicit homage to his friend and mentor, but films like Love in the Afternoon and Avanti, despite their many excellences, tended to elude the public.
When Sam and Dorshka Raphaelson went to see Love in the Afternoon, they watched a scene wherein a water truck, dousing the early morning streets of Paris, soaks a pair of young lovers who fail to notice. Raphaelson leaned over to Dorshka and said, “What a mistake! Now, if I were doing that scene with Lubitsch, we would have first shown the truck spraying water moving toward the young lovers. But when the truck gets to them, the water shuts off. After it passes them, then the water starts up again. Now, that’s the Lubitsch Touch!”
In the summer of 1975, Billy Wilder looked wistfully out of a window. “You know,” he said, “if one could write Lubitsch touches, they would still exist, but he took that secret with him to his grave. It’s like Chinese glass-blowing; no such thing exists anymore. Occasionally, I look for an elegant twist and I say to myself, ‘How would Lubitsch have done it?’ And I will come up with something and it will be like Lubitsch, but it won’t be Lubitsch. It’s just not there anymore.”
For Wilder, Lubitsch remained the touchstone; in 1987, when it was announced that Wilder would receive The American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, he reacted with brooding suspicion. “I’m getting it,” he told a friend, “because Lubitsch is dead.”
There were places where Lubitsch continued to be loved outside the memories and imaginations of the people that knew him. There were tributes at the Cinémathèque Francais (The Shop Around the Corner ran for sixty-six weeks in Paris in 1986 and 1987, making it the most successful reissue ever in France), and full-scale American tributes were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968, the Los Angeles County Museum in 1978, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1982, the Pacific Film Archive in 1983, and the Museum of the Moving Image in 1987, while the Berlin Film Festivals of 1968 and 1984 featured major retrospectives.
Of all the retrospective commentators, it was Andrew Sarris who wrote most elegantly about Lubitsch. In 1978, he wrote that Lubitsch “suggests the art of a lilting waltz or bubbling champagne but there is something more as well . . . In Lubitsch’s late films, particularly, a sense of sadness infiltrates the gaiety. Lubitsch himself is getting older, of course, but there is something more than that. The implications of a style grounded in wit and discretion become more explicit. It is as if Lubitsch were mourning the ever imminent demise of a world of manners, and of a cinema in which doors closed decorously.”
For Sarris, Lubitsch would always be the bridge “between humor and horror, a jovial little man with twinkling eyes and a big cigar [who] transcended the times in which he lived to become an artist for the ages. He had begun his career by making jokes. By the time he ended it he had traced the configurations of a vanishing civilization in which people played by the rules to the very edge of eternity. And the neatly clipped style that once seemed so sly and wicked now seems infinitely merciful and loving.”
The centennial of Ernst’s birth in 1992 sparked yet another series of retrospectives around the world, including the Cannes Film Festival. Invited to Berlin to celebrate her father’s one-hundredth birthday, Nicola placed a plaque on the house on Lothringer Strasse where he was born. She and her Aunt Evie made a pilgrimage to the Weissensee Cemetery, the burial site of Simon and Anna Lubitsch. The chains that used to set the graves apart from the surrounding tombs had vanished, and the years had eroded the surface of the tombstones so that the inscriptions were barely legible.
With the passing years, it became increasingly clear that Ernst Lubitsch had accomplished something only vouchsafed the greatest artists: he had created a self-contained universe with a sensibility so singular, behavioral beauties so intense, that it forever altered the world view of those lucky enough to experience it. He believed in his dreams so strongly that millions of others came to believe in them as well, and the fact that the values and style of Lubitsch’s work constituted the finest examples of the discarded heritage of elegant screen comedy made his everlasting, gentle brilliance even more poignant.
• • •
About a week after Lubitsch was buried, Mary Loos wrote to Sam Raphaelson about the funeral, and urged him to write about the man that had made such a difference in their lives, “so people will know a wonderful person.”
It took a while—thirty-four years to be exact—but Sam Raphaelson finally got around to it. He called his memoir “Freundschaft,” German for “friendship,” and, when it was published in The New Yorker of May 11, 1981, it proved to be worth the wait; simultaneously an acute character analysis, a hail and farewell, and Raphaelson’s own acknowledgment of and accommodation to the ironic reality of his career. “To think,” he once said, “that I should be remembered for the bloody movies! It’s simply absurd!”
A few years earlier, in 1973, Raphaelson had sat down with the historian Robert Carringer to discuss his work with Lubitsch. Summing up, he said, “I don’t have any sentimental illusions about him. He was a very complex person, but I do love him and I would love it if he were alive. And I would love it to do at least one thing with him every two years until we are both dead. It would have been a very great pleasure. I have never met anybody like him since. And I’ve never had a relationship like that since; and it’s been a lonely spot in my life that I haven’t.”
Then, speaking for all of Lubitsch’s friends, and all of Lubitsch’s audiences, Samson Raphaelson said, “What an emptiness it might have been if I hadn’t met him.”