On July 22, 1980, as he was crossing Fifth Avenue at Fifty-fifth Street in lunch-hour traffic, Preminger was struck down by a taxicab. “He had been hit from the back and was thrown onto the hood of the cab,” recalled Lewis Chambers, an agent with an office at 663 Fifth Avenue who witnessed the incident.
The fact that he was able to get up at all was through sheer force of will. When his body hit the pavement, the impact was ferocious. Outwardly he only suffered a tiny cut on the back of the head, and he wasn’t bleeding. But when he was lying on his back on the street I was sure he was dead. His eyes rolled back; his right hand was shaking. It was beastly hot, and I thought this man will be dead any second. From a distance I didn’t know who it was, but when I knelt down I recognized Otto Preminger and I felt obligated to stay. He got up, with my assistance and that of someone else, who knew him, and we pleaded with him to stay for medical attention, or to wait for the ambulance that had been called. “Why did you do this to me?” he asked the taxi driver. “Who stole my necktie?” he asked when he discovered it was missing. He walked off with the other gentleman. I later found out that they went to have lunch at La Caravelle. A few days later Louis Nizer’s office called to ask if I’d be willing to testify; I was, because Preminger had not been responsible; he had not run into the traffic. A week or so later the Nizer office called back to say that the taxi insurance company had settled.1
“After he was struck by the taxi, Otto was still able to walk to and from the office,” Hope said. “But he was getting frail. I had sensed that on location in Africa for The Human Factor, when I noticed that he had trouble getting up a small hill. We found out later that year he had Parkinson’s, which caused him to dodder. One night during the winter after the accident he got lost coming home from the office and turned up freezing cold in the snow. I was terrified. We went to doctors, but they couldn’t find anything.”2
Refusing to announce retirement, Preminger continued to go to his office at 711 on a daily basis, and still continued, periodically, to issue press releases about future plans. “I was hired to do Otto’s next picture,” Val Robins said,
and waiting for that to fall into place I decided to make myself useful. At first we were busy doing promotion and tours for The Human Factor, and then, when no other film was forthcoming, and it became clear that there would be no other film, I thought a legacy can’t be allowed to die. I helped Otto to amalgamate his six or seven different companies into Otto Preminger Films, one entity, with Hope as president, and Otto appointed me to keep it going. I knew I wanted to make a documentary about him. [Anatomy of a Director, Robins’s documentary, was released in 1990.] I worked with Otto for the last five years of his life, and he became like a father to me. Yes, he was a difficult man, but a unique human being, and I loved him.3
Val Robins ran Otto Preminger Films from 1986 until the summer of 2005; since then, Otto’s daughter Victoria has been president and treasurer. Hope is chairman, and Mark is vice-president and secretary.
In November 1980, as an in-house project at the Loft Theatre, where he would continue to teach through 1981, Preminger directed one last play The Killer Thing, a drama by William Packard about a supposed mass murderer who hides out in the tarpaper shack of a hermit. “I had twenty or thirty scripts every week,” Elaine Gold recalled. “I’d read a few pages at the beginning and at the end to judge whether it was fit to send to any of my directors. This one, by a poet and Harvard graduate, scared me, and I sent it to my three directors, Joe Ferrer, Joe Stein, and Otto. If anybody had the nerve to do it, it would have been Otto. He liked it right away, and put it together so fast. He saw it as a major motion picture. I thought it was twenty years ahead of its time.”4
John Martello, who played the hermit and is now the executive director of the Players Club in New York, recalled,
Otto cast me on the spot, by instinct. He was exactly the opposite of a Method director, and in some ways it was refreshing. He had a unique way of rehearsing—only what had been memorized. “You will go home and learn some lines,” he told us. When all the lines had been memorized, he said we were ready to open. When he started to scream at me in an early rehearsal, I don’t know why but I started to laugh. And then he started to laugh, and we got along just fine after that. He walked very slowly, and at each rehearsal he would make an entrance walking to a thronelike chair. The second he was seated he expected us to begin rehearsing. If there was any real direction it was about movement and placement—he directed us as if we were making a film. His comments were about blocking, not about acting values or theme or character. He talked about the future, about his Hugo Black project in particular. And he thought our project would lead to a major Broadway production and then a film. At the time I thought the reason Ingo came around was because of plans Otto had for the film. He told me that for the film he wanted James Cagney for my part: he was thinking in those terms. He still had a sense of who he was, very much so: he was Otto Preminger. I never got any feeling that he was near the end. I got to work with a legend, and I’ll always be grateful for that.5
Directing The Killer Thing at the Loft on Twelfth Street and University Place in Greenwich Village was Preminger’s last job. “After the play Otto was so frustrated about not being able to get another deal together,” Hope recalled.
He became increasingly frail. Doctors told me the bash on his head in the taxi accident had given him a concussion, and with the Parkinson’s his hands started shaking more and he began to lose strength in his legs. From about the end of 1981 on, he didn’t look well and he got more and more distant. He would stare into space. Gradually he began to lose his ambition to get a deal—I think he knew he couldn’t do it. Doctors didn’t think any antidepressant would help. But for the last six years of his life we thought a miracle would happen. I so wanted him to have a rage attack, an “Otto attack,” as we called it. I kept wishing, “If only he would yell at somebody, at anybody, at the kids, at me.” I didn’t care who it was, but he didn’t. Instead, he just sat there, and in the last four or five years there were no rages at all. His long-term memory was good; sometimes he thought he was in Vienna at the Josefstadt Theater giving notes to his actors. But his short-term memory got weaker and weaker. He knew the people who were around him every day, but sometimes he’d call Mark “Ingo” and then say, “I mean Mark.” But he did begin to lose his memory, and his conversation became very simple. I know people said he had Alzheimer’s, but our doctors never made the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. I would admit it if they had. People also said he was an alcoholic, and he wasn’t. He enjoyed drinking, but he was never a falling-down drunk. As he got older, he did not drink more, but he wasn’t able to hold it as well. Erik kept pouring liquor when he was with him, maybe he felt it was easier to talk to him that way.
As Otto grew ever more feeble, Hope investigated a nursing home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but decided she would “never be able to send” her husband there or “to any nursing home.” “Otto didn’t want nurses in the house because he still wanted independence, and he wouldn’t eat anything I hadn’t cooked,” Hope said. Throughout her husband’s long decline, Hope would leave Otto’s side only infrequently, to meet a friend for lunch, perhaps, or to get her hair done, or to sit in the back of the St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. “I was raised Episcopalian, but didn’t go to church when I was married to Otto, who believed in God but not in the ritual. He knew it brought me great peace, though. I needed my religion to get through Otto’s dying, and after his death I went back to the church.”6
“As my father began his gradual deterioration, my mother became his caretaker,” Mark recalled. “During the last four years, when he really couldn’t be left alone, she almost never left the house, except once in a while when Louise, our housekeeper, was there. It was a role reversal: now she was taking care of him, and she made that transition so gracefully. She never once complained, or resented it. During those last four difficult years her devotion went above and beyond.”7
Hope was disappointed that “only a few stalwarts came to visit. Erik came only infrequently. I felt Otto was somewhat forgotten when he was no longer in the limelight. There weren’t many calls; of the Hollywood group, Burgess Meredith was the most loyal. Otto wasn’t aware of what was happening, and that was a blessing. He didn’t like to discuss human weakness, his own or anyone else’s, but he would have been so hurt.”8
Those who paid visits to Otto Preminger on East Sixty-fourth Street in his last years found a man radically diminished by illness. Traces of “Otto the Terrible,” the fearsome independent filmmaker who had rowed with censors, studio czars, actors, and crew, grew ever fainter as the great lion was transformed into a lamb, becalmed, detached, and finally absent. “Hope was a friend of mine and when I heard Otto was ill I went to see him,” Patricia Neal recalled. “When he came down the stairs, Hope said to him, ‘You remember Pat Neal, don’t you?’ But he barely did. He was concerned with his hearing aids. ‘Hope, I’m having trouble with these,’ he said; and the hearing aids got more attention than I did. It saddened me to see him this way, but I could tell on this visit something I already knew: Hope loved him, really and truly.”9
Peter Bogdanovich had several encounters with Preminger during the final years.
In the summer of 1980, when I knew he was having trouble getting a picture, I met Otto at “21,” where I was having dinner with Frank Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn, and Ben Gazzara. Otto came over to our table to say hello, but I sensed he felt awkward, as if he somehow wasn’t sure he had permission to be there. He was not his usual blustery self. Frank was nice to him, but not all that interested in talking to him. Otto seemed a little foggy or distracted. A few years later I visited him on East Sixty-fourth at a time when I wasn’t in great shape myself. He was wearing slippers and a ratty cardigan, and he shuffled. He hardly remembered anything about pictures, but he kept smiling and I did feel he was happy to see me. He seemed so much smaller, and the house looked rundown. When he walked me to the door I had the thought I wouldn’t see him again.10
Moments of the old Otto would sometimes reappear, however, as in Eva Monley’s last visit with him.
Otto and I hadn’t ended well, when I left on Rosebud. Because Hope had asked me, I became involved, briefly, with the African locations for The Human Factor. I had to go to meetings with people who were owed money, and I couldn’t deal with it—something was wrong. When I visited him at home a year or two later, he was lying in bed and really seemed quite ill. But when I walked into his room, he called out my name in a loud voice, and the way he said “Eva!” I could tell that he liked me. And I could also tell that beneath all that bluster Otto was a softie.11
“The last two years Otto started having little ministrokes and he would fall,” Hope said. “And then the last year he was in a wheelchair. Toward the end I had a big burly woman from Jamaica who could pick Otto up from the floor when he fell. And then we found out he had colon cancer, which wasn’t painful and we hadn’t known about it. The specialist we went to told us he wouldn’t live more than two years, but he died three weeks later.”12
Otto Preminger died, at eighty-one, on April 23, 1986. In a twenty-page will signed on November 17, 1983, and in force at the time of his death, Otto left the vast majority of his estate—the amount was listed as “more than $500,000,” a category indicating that the estate could have been worth much more than that—to his widow. Hope received one-half of the estate outright, while the remaining half, after the payment of debts, was put in trust for her. At the time of his death Preminger’s three children received no money, and they will receive none until Hope’s demise, at which point the remainder of the trust is to be divided equally among Erik, Mark, and Victoria. When Erik protested the will, the already festering ill feelings between him and the rest of the family resulted in a rupture, and other than legal communications he has had no contact with any other Preminger since his father’s death.
Despite the peculiar terms of his will, Otto Preminger was a family man through and through, deeply devoted to all the members of his family, who, in turn, retain loving memories of him. To do that, each of them has had to come to terms with his “Otto attacks.” “Otto had tantrums, and nobody could deny it,” Hope said.
But he was not a cruel man, he really wasn’t. He was an impatient man who couldn’t bear it when he felt people hadn’t tried. But when he would start to scream, the crew would see me wince, which happened more than I care to remember. He enjoyed getting it off his chest, but he didn’t realize the effect his tantrums had on others; he just wasn’t tuned in to what the screaming could do to people. I wonder if he had seen a tape of himself turning red how he would have reacted. I used to wish, for everybody’s sake, that Otto wouldn’t scream—it would have been so much easier if he hadn’t. But without the rages he would not have been Otto. I was seldom “it,” but I was sometimes, and when I was he yelled at me just as loudly as he yelled at others. On The Cardinal I quit three times, and got rehired each time, and I was “it” a few times on Skidoo as well. He didn’t give it much thought that he had enemies, and he always professed not to care if he got bad reviews. Otto enjoyed playing up the persona he had created, a persona that could not have worked in this era. But he paid a price for it during his lifetime, and as I am well aware, and it hurts me, he has continued to pay a price for it since his death.
At home he did not rage, and he was not tyrannical. He was a loving husband and father. He was my best friend and I was crazy about him. I was very fortunate to have had this life with Otto.13
“Yes, my father yelled, especially at airports, rarely at us,” Vicky Preminger said.
And then, after he screamed, the anger disappeared and he never held a grudge. I’m not one of these bitter children of a famous parent. I had a wonderful childhood. My father was a doting parent, really a pushover, who spoiled my brother and me terribly, and yet we had a totally normal childhood. And today, my brother and I are stable, normal people. My father gave us our sense of self, which is the sense that he had. He was very secure and never cared what other people thought of him.
Although we are twins, my brother doesn’t look like me at all. You’d never know we are related. We get along, but we’re totally opposite. Mark has my mother’s temperament—they’re both pacifists. People say I’m like my father. I’m good at managing my time, and I have his coloring.
My father had great energy. He would get up at 4 a.m. because he was so interested in what he was reading, and he’d tell me with such excitement about a book he was reading that he thought would make a good film. He had terrific optimism, and until he got very ill in the last two or three years of his life he always believed he was going to get the next project made. He lived in the moment— he would never chat about the past, about Vienna or Max Reinhardt or about my grandparents. And he could handle the future. And how he loved to eat: at “21,” at La Caravelle, every Sunday night with Louis Nizer at Trader Vic’s in the Plaza Hotel. What pleasure a tin of caviar would give him. I’m proud to be the daughter of Otto Preminger.14
“He was a different person at home than his public reputation, but we did see some of the temper at times,” Mark said.
With my sister he had a more volatile relationship than with me. He did not approve of our riding horses and would blow up at that. He couldn’t control the excessiveness of his explosions, and as he got older he had even a little less control. It was not really upsetting to see it, however, because we accepted the flare-ups as part of who he was. Sometimes he played up to “Otto the Ogre.” I think he sometimes enjoyed the effect his explosions had. Sometimes the blowups were self-serving, and for a purpose. As an example: I remember once when I drove up from college [Johns Hopkins], I went directly to his office to visit him, and when I got there I was told he was at lunch at La Caravelle. I went to the restaurant just to say hello, but he told me to pull up a chair and to join him and his guests. The maître d’, however, came over to say I wasn’t dressed properly. My father would have none of that. He raised his voice, the maître d’ backed off, and I stayed for lunch. My father would always defend his family: there I was, I would have lunch with him, and that was that.
He was a terrific father whose love for us kids was unequivocal. He didn’t push us, but gave us pure emotional support. If you came home with a bad grade he was accepting. My sister, who is much brighter than I am, had two majors at Smith. She went to law school and is now a very successful lawyer. I was always very goal-oriented, as Otto was, and I knew at eight I wanted to be a doctor. From the start my father supported me completely—he never pushed me to take after him. He had a very secure ego and he didn’t see what I did as in any way a reflection of him. At home he never boasted, or told stories to make himself seem bigger, and he never reflected on the past. I hadn’t been aware of any of the incidents I read about in his autobiography.
He wasn’t like the fathers of any of my friends—he wasn’t interested in baseball, or in an “American way of life.” But he loved the fact that he was an American and not an Austrian. He admired the American legal system and was enamored of its procedures. He truly believed in the Constitution, and in the country’s founding principles. If people, who see what they want to, want to see the ogre and the bully, then they will. He was a controversial figure, as all of us were well aware, and he lived his life the way he wanted to. There is nothing not to be proud of15
Although he did not have the same experience as the twins of having grown up with Otto as his father, Erik agreed that offstage, “Otto Preminger” was banished. Arriving late, Erik claimed “a unique relationship” with Otto. “I worked alongside him, unlike Mark and Vicky, and that was important because that work was his life. He was fulfilled by it. Of course he expressed interest in what the kids were doing, but it wasn’t the same interest as he had for his work. But there is no question about it: he loved each of us. We were his family, and to him family really counted. And in the final reckoning, it was more important than anything else.”16
At this writing, more than twenty years after Preminger’s death, Hope lives in New York, where for many years she has served on the boards of numerous charitable organizations and is an active member of her church. Mark, who lives with his wife Michelle, a doctor, and their two children, Evan and Kimberly in New Jersey, is a noted cardiologist. Victoria, who lives in Los Angeles, is a lawyer, an active horsewoman, and president of Otto Preminger Films. Remarried, Erik lives in Northern California. “I have a life with no glamour but great comfort,” he said. “I’m not writing, but doing consulting and entrepreneurial work. When I was in the Army I showed great aptitude with computers, and I have opened my own editing studios.”17
Otto Preminger’s historical importance as a producer who defied the Production Code Administration and broke the blacklist and as a pioneer independent filmmaker who set a business model that continues to be followed is secure. Opinion about his artistic legacy, however, remains divided. Obituaries, setting a precedent that more or less endures to the present, routinely cited his personality more than his films and placed his achievements as a producer above his directing. “He had become nearly as famous for his curmudgeonry as for his art,” the notice in the Los Angeles Times on April 24, 1986, attested. Alvin Krebs in the April 24 New York Times noted that “Preminger’s tempestuous personality often obscured the fact that he was one of the most competent independent producer-directors of his time.” As David Ansen commented in Newsweek on May 5, 1986, “Preminger was canny enough to realize that his public image as a Prussian autocrat would help more than hinder him in the carnival world of Hollywood.”
But Ansen acknowledged that Otto “made much more than headlines; he created a climate in which Hollywood could join the adult world, and he conjured a handful of movies that will always be watched with gratitude and pleasure.” Roger Ebert in the April 24 Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “The line on Otto Preminger was that he was the greatest producer and the worst director in Hollywood history. Both statements contained a measure of truth.”
“Almost all the obituaries failed to conceal an attitude of cool detachment bordering on contempt,” Andrew Sarris wrote in the Village Voice on May 27, 1986.
In New York, Otto Preminger was never even remotely a culture hero. He was despised most by the people with whom he was socially and politically most in rapport… . He was never given any credit for moral sincerity. Laura was for Preminger what Citizen Kane was for Orson Welles, an ego buster for people who like to revel in the decline and fall of just about everyone but themselves. For a long time he was the only major director I knew socially. He was aware that I was one of his few local defenders. I always liked Preminger, but I’m not sure that I would ever have wanted to work for him. He was far more intelligent than most people thought, and much of his mock-Teutonic bombast was for show, but there was still something insidiously domineering in his personality that made me a bit uncomfortable. I have underestimated his career considerably. Since Laura, the only film he has made that seems utterly beyond revisionist redemption is Rosebud. So many of the films have become such esteemed cult favorites here and abroad that a massive revaluation seems in order on both the thematic and stylistic fronts… . He cared very deeply for his characters by not judging them. And in the end he was one of those rare directors who made a dramatic difference on the screen.
Over twenty years after his death, “Otto Preminger” may still be better remembered than any of his films. He has appeared as a character (played by John Savident) in Jean Seberg, a failed 1983 musical (music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Christopher Adler, book by Julian Barry) that opened at the National Theatre in London on November 15; and in a mediocre 1999 television movie, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, starring Halle Berry, in which he was played by Klaus Maria Brandauer.
Preminger’s critical standing, at least in America, where the prevailing
opinion is to regard him as a director of topical or “scandalous” films of merely ephemeral interest who late in his career supplied redundant evidence of a loss of power, is far lower than it should be. On the whole, both during his lifetime and ever since, French critics have been more perceptive in recognizing Preminger’s authoritative signature. A master of long takes (who regarded every cut as an interruption), and of complexly composed long shots and sinuous camera movement, Preminger was an exacting stylist who imposed on himself the same prohibitions against overstatement that he wielded against actors intent on doing too much acting.
One of the engaging paradoxes of Preminger’s career is that he was a famously hotheaded man who at his best made beautifully restrained films.
In his work, Preminger sought and often enough attained a measure of control that he could not, or did not want to, attain over his temper. Objectivity, detachment, lucidity, mésure, evenhandedness—these qualities, which provide the stylistic as well as thematic underpinning to many of his strongest films, are decidedly not the characteristics those scorched by an outrageous tirade would have assigned to the man himself. At his most assured, in Laura, Angel Face, Carmen Jones, Anatomy of a Murder, Porgy and Bess, Exodus, Advise and Consent, The Cardinal, Bunny Lake Is Missing, and, remarkably enough, The Human Factor, he was a supremely fluent metteur-en-scène who made thoughtful, challenging films on a broad range of subjects that continue to matter.
Otto Preminger, perhaps a victim still of the intimidating, domineering, Prussian persona he created and may have played all too well, remains one of the most underrated of the masters of American filmmaking. All of his films, the clinkers as well as the triumphs, the ones that now look like back numbers as well as the ones that, in retrospect, seem to have been remarkably ahead of their time, deserve the same kind of fair-minded appraisal with which the director himself regarded his characters.
“Otto, who believed in the intelligence of the audience and made truly sophisticated movies, has been consistently underappreciated while his fellow Austrian Billy Wilder has been deified,” Peter Bogdanovich said.
Wilder needed yes-men, but Otto was too self-sufficient, and too arrogant, I suppose, to need anybody. He seemed not at all to be bothered by the opinions of others, and he certainly seemed able to slough off bad reviews. People believed the cold image, which wasn’t really the man, who was in fact warm and paternal and encouraging. He made three certified masterpieces—Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Advise and Consent— which rank among the best of all American pictures, and Exodus holds up as the best of all the big-budget, all-star epics.18
As Preminger’s longtime friend, the legendary New York agent Robert Lantz, said, “Otto was larger than life. He was extreme in almost every way: colorful, large of spirit, loyal, and generous. When crossed he could be a rambunctious Hun. He regretted Vienna, as I regret and reject my native city of Berlin. These days, when almost everybody is so boring, how I miss him. He played ‘Otto Preminger’ with such vigor and vim, such outsized energy. Perhaps above all—and it is by no means common to those who are rich and successful—he knew the art of living.”19