TEACH ME TO GAMBLE! Father was so intelligent in some ways, the equal, perhaps the superior, of Irving Thalberg as Hollywood’s resident intellectual. But so crazy-dumb in other ways. Didn’t he know that he was teaching me not to gamble, at least for the obscene stakes he had a passion for losing? Didn’t he know that I would become as obsessed with the size of his losses as he was—for totally opposite reasons, his emotional compass pointing 180 degrees away from mine?
The point-counterpoint of gambling is that while it may be wildly self-destructive, it can also inspire the taking of creative chances. And while Father’s (and Von Sternberg’s) Crime and Punishment was hardly in a class with Dostoevsky’s original, it suggested the same drive that had propelled the Russian novelist to psychological depths as yet unfathomed, and that prodded my father to bet on hands still unproven. I am thinking not only of Underworld, where he gambled and won, but of Wings. In Jesse Lasky, Jr.’s account of his own and his father’s Hollywood careers, there is a curious omission: my father. Young Jesse has been one of my good friends; I know him as a charming and talented man. But he manages to describe the ordeal of producing Wings as if it were entirely the product of his father’s courage and creativity. From the starting gate to the backstretch and down to the wire, B.P. doesn’t get a single call. In an odd postscript to the saga, young Jesse has my father asking the director Bill Wellman after Wings is finished who the tall, handsome, shyly appealing guy is who makes a memorable little gesture before flying off into the wild blue yonder for his final dogfight. And in Jesse’s myopic version, Bill Wellman’s answer is, “Hell, if you don’t know—I don’t, either!”
Sons are understandably vulnerable to fabulous fathers and so that’s how it must have been told in the Lasky domain. But the story doesn’t wash. B.P. had already cast Gary Cooper opposite his prize discovery of the Twenties, Clara Bow, both in It and in Children of Divorce, and had fought for Coop against the directors who insisted he was “wooden” and “couldn’t act.” In those days, thank God, producers didn’t protect themselves by having test audiences twist dials to indicate their reactions—cool—warmer—getting hot—as the film played on. Father used a more direct approach. In Wings, Gary Cooper was still a featured player, with a role subordinate to Richard Aden’s and Buddy Rogers’s. But Father was quick to notice that none of the Paramount stars stirred the hearts of the front-office secretaries—and other parts of their anatomy—like Gary Cooper.
Long before the stardom that came to him in the Thirties, and the superstardom that swept him on from the Forties to the Sixties, Coop was the secret dream and in many cases the literal love of the entire studio secretarial pool. All typing stopped, all eyes turned to devour what Father’s main secretary described as “the most beautiful hunk of man who ever walked down this hall!” My father’s second secretary, the pleasingly plump, happy-dispositioned Jean Baer, carried on a semi-secret (or as secret as those things could be in the studio fishbowl) affair with Gary for years. He was never a flamboyant swordsman like Errol Flynn or (though this may come as a surprise to outsiders) Freddie March. But, for all his quiet speech and diffident ways, Coop might have been the Babe Ruth of the Hollywood boudoir league. It was whispered down the studio corridors that he had the endowments of Hercules and the staying powers of Job. It was local gossip that during his romance (as we used to call it) with Lupe Velez, the Mexican pepper pot was so jealous of her prized possession that she would meet him at the door when he came home from the studio, unbutton his fly, and, spirited primitive that she was, sniff suspiciously for the scent of rival perfumes.
Anyway, in every meaning of Miss Glyn’s provocative two-letter word, Cooper had It, and Father was one of the first to recognize it and to guide him from supporting to starring roles. At least that’s the way the Cooper legend spun its golden threads through the Schulberg household. And in his memoirs in Life, Coop—like Gary Grant and the rare few among a legion of ingrates—acknowledged his debt to B.P. as the first producer to recognize his potential and give him his break.
Wings was an embattled picture, both on the screen where the vicious dogfights between the American and German fighter planes of World War I were reenacted for the first time, and behind the scenes where a running battle was fought between the West Coast studio (where Jesse Lasky loyally supported B.P.) and the ever-threatening New York office of Adolph Zukor. Father had wanted to do an air picture for a long time. The seed may have been planted when we were coming home from New York through the Panama Canal and the news was radioed to our ship, the President Van Buren, that Lindbergh had landed safely in Paris. The Van Buren went berserk. Passengers who had never spoken to each other kissed and hugged, and nearly everyone on board got gloriously drunk. Father had been so carried away with the historic 33-hour flight of our Lone Eagle that he had wound up in the wrong stateroom with a young homeymooner who had lost track of her bridegroom in the shipboard excitement.
From the moment that the single-prop one-seater Spirit of St. Louis touched down at Le Bourget, America became instantly air-minded. People treasured envelopes that arrived by airmail, and sporting types offered great sums to aviators who would fly them from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles in an open cockpit. After Harding, Teapot Dome, splitting headaches from bathtub gin, the cynicism of the American press, and the nihilism embraced by the so-called “lost generation,” America seemed to be born again in the individual triumph of the modest, diffident (Cooperlike) hero of the skies. When Lindbergh came to Hollywood that year, world-famous movie stars crowded around him like kids, begging for his autograph. My parents took me to the reception for him at the Ambassador Hotel and his autograph in my precious red-leather book gave me vicarious celebrity when I showed it off at school. Of course Father wanted to make a picture of what everybody was hailing as “the greatest single exploit in the history of the world.”
But Lindy, our blue-eyed young god, was positively un-American in his determination not to cash in on his overnight fame. Willing to be feted by Doug Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Marion Davies, and the rest of our local peerage, he was unapproachable on the subject of turning over his life story to the whims of the movie moguls.
One of Father’s writer friends was John Monk Saunders, who had lost a leg after being shot down by a Von Richtofen fighter-pilot in an air-duel over St.-Mihiel. Saunders, married to the beauteous Fay Wray (later of King Kong fame), was one of those literate, colorful romantics spawned by the Great War. With gusto he told us about his adventures in the days when fliers jousted with each other through the clouds with all the dash and aplomb of knights of old. Father, who loved to play his hunches, told Saunders that if he wrote the story, Paramount would buy it. Thus the first motion picture of the world’s first battles in the air was launched. The story—two fellows in love with the same girl—was the plot Hollywood war-films seemed unable to avoid. But B.P. felt a simple story line would allow for more footage of the dogfights that had never been seen before.
Jesse Lasky backed B.P. on the crucial decision to add Wings to the Paramount production schedule for the coming year. “We will make the first epic of the air, the Big Parade of the Lafayette Escadrille,” Lasky announced with the same ebullience with which he had backed C. B. DeMille when they had rented that old barn in the wilds of uninhabited Hollywood to make The Squaw Man almost fifteen years earlier.
With that kind of encouragement, Father assigned his favorite writing team to the project, Buddy Leighton and his talented wife Hope Loring. As the only producer at that time who had served his apprenticeship as a screenwriter, B.P. had a built-in appreciation of the writer’s contribution to the finished film. He drummed into me that unless the writer’s structure is sound, the plot has its own logic and power, and its characters are believable, intriguing, and vital, the combined cinematic genius of John Ford, King Vidor, and Lewis Milestone couldn’t bring the script to life. In time Buddy Leighton would become a producer, as most good writers became producers or directors in self-defense, in protest against their well-paid serfdom. But just as I learned, at 525 Lorraine and at the Studio, the answer to that frequent question, “What do producers do? ”, I also saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears how much more the writers were doing than the public would ever know.
I had already learned that not all actors and actresses were the bastards and bitches Father liked to call them. Gary Cooper was always nice to me on the set (nice to everybody, it seemed to me), and Cary Grant parked his Model A roadster in our driveway to deliver one of my favorite dogs, a young Airedale called “Gent.” Richard Arlen, who would play one of the leading roles in Wings, took me boating with his bride-to-be, Jobyna Ralston, who had a supporting role in that picture but was never to achieve the stardom of her sister Esther.
But my admiration was reserved for the Buddy Leightons and the Hope Lorings. Sometimes, fighting panic, I would show them and other writers who came to the house some of my groping efforts at short stories and poems. It was their praise and Father’s I hoped to earn. In turn I’d be allowed to read their scripts and sometimes even be asked for comments. I never spoke up at the story conferences. But sometimes Father would ask me what I thought of their scripts, or of a particular scene or character. I was learning to read with a pencil in my hand—to make notes in the margin. To this day I am unable to read a novel without a pencil in hand for marginal comments. I can still see Father reading a script in the library with a pencil in one hand and a highball within reach of the other. That is how I thought reading was done.
While Wings was in the works, a brash young second-unit and special-effects director intercepted Father in the long corridor between the reception desk and his office. That’s where underlings he couldn’t crowd into his daily schedule would be able to steal a minute moving along at his shoulder as he hurried on to the protective presence of his secretaries. (When the Hungarian playwright Ernst Vajda—pronounced Voida—was imported to Paramount, and in turn brought his brother Victor, they would lurk in this corridor and pounce on Father for impromptu story conferences whenever he appeared. Father’s only defense was to add to his bathroom repertoire a little number entitled “Oh, you can’t avoid a Voida in the hall… !”)
An active member of this corridor army was the impetuous and then-unknown William Wellman, called “Wild Bill” because he was thought to be slightly crazed as a result of a steel plate in his head.
“B.P.,” Wild Bill ran up to him one day, “you’ve got to let me direct Wings.”
“That’s asking the impossible,” Father told him. “In the first place we haven’t got a green light from New York to make the picture yet. And if we do sell them on it, it will be our first picture costing over a million. Can you imagine the look on Zukor’s face if we tell him we’re putting all that money in the hands of an unknown director?”
“Fuck ’im!” said Wild Bill, who had brought back from France not only a wild temperament but a World War vocabulary. I was in the Lafayette Escadrille. I know what it is to be in one of those fuckin’ dogfights! In fact, I’ve got a fuckin’ plate in my head to prove it!”
“And when I tell Mr. Zukor I’ve chosen you to direct Wings he’ll say we both have plates in our heads,” Father told him.
“Fuck ’im! I thought you were the boss of the studio!”
“I am,” Father said, “but it’s like the Army, Bill. Jesse Lasky is the Chief of Staff, and Mr. Zukor is the President, the Commander-in-Chief. What I can do—if we get the go-ahead we’re working on—is to put you in charge of all the aerial photography. Even if it’s called second unit it will be a good credit. After all, two-thirds of this picture will be in the air. In fact, right now the whole thing’s in the air.”
“Fuck second unit,” Wellman said. “If anybody directs Wings, it’s Wellman. That picture is mine. My own life story. I’ll tear this joint apart if I don’t get the chance.”
Day after day Bill Wellman would be waiting in that front-office corridor to pounce on Father and pump the same message into him until “Wellman—Wings, Wellman—Wings …” began to throb in B.P.’s brain like an overplayed radio commercial. Finally the green light flashed from the New York office! Lasky had convinced Zukor, who in turn had convinced his Board of Directors to let B.P. put Wings into production. Now came the vital question. Whom would you assign to direct it? Vic Fleming was a big name on the lot. And James Cruze. Or should they try to borrow King Vidor from MGM?
B.P. heard himself saying, “I think we should use Bill Wellman.”
“Bill who?”
And then Father, whose own resistance finally had given way to his gambling instinct, his flair for the dramatic, and his feeling for the underdog, ran through the now-familiar lexicon of Wellman’s virtues. “I’ve got to play my hunch. Every once in a while a director comes along who’s born to make a certain picture. Bill fought in those air-battles we’ll be staging in Wings. He’ll be able to show Buddy [Rogers] and Dick [Arlen] and Coop how it felt to climb into those fighter planes and how they acted between missions when they were afraid that every night they had on the ground might be their last. Bill knows what it’s like to be shot down by a Von Richtofen ace—he has a steel plate in his head!”
If the Schulberg household had had its own Hollywood Smithsonian, that celebrated steel plate would have been one of our principal exhibits. For Father loved to tell that story. A slender cigar-wielding St. George fighting the dragons of New York, he could tell it four or five times in succession, usually to guests at his bar, but sometimes only to Sonya and me for want of a fresher audience. Although his obsessive repetition may sound boring, it was like a passionate pilgrim’s sharing a stirring episode from the Crusades with his family.
And so it came to pass that Adolph Zukor, the little man with the overall power, called my father and said in his quiet voice, “Ben, so you still want to use Wellman? If it’s all right with Jesse, I don’t care—I think everybody who stays out there in Hollywood too long gets a little meshugah. New York never heard of Wellman. New York feels you’re taking a terrible gamble. You’re putting a million dollars of our money in the hands of a boy who’s never handled an epic before, who’s only made two C pictures in his whole life.”
“Mr. Zukor,” Father said, “if Wellman doesn’t do a great job with this picture—if he doesn’t make it the picture of the year—you can have my resignation. So help me God, if Wellman’s a flop with Wings, I’ll quit.”
“You won’t have to quit,” Zukor warned, “you’ll be fired first.”
“It’s a deal, Mr. Zukor,” Father said, always excited by high stakes. “And this is one bet both sides can win.”
Wild Bill Wellman threw himself into Wings with all the zeal he had promised. The picture was dedicated “to those young warriors of the sky whose wings are folded about them forever,” and the realism of the air-battles impressed the critics and amazed the public. In a creative transition between silence and sound, subtitles were still used in place of audible dialogue, but when the fighter planes took off the audience could hear the roar of the engines, and when one of the aviators was shot down they could hear the haunting whine of his fatal descent. Because these sounds came from a screen that had been silent for thirty years, they had more effect than they would ever have again.
All over the world Wings was hailed as a cinematic milestone, and with that one big chance Wild Bill Wellman was up there with the big boys like Ford and Cruze, Fleming and Vidor. He would go on to Nothing Sacred, The Ox-Bow Incident, an impressive list of well-directed hits. Wings won the first Academy Award for best picture of the year, and that spring at the white-tie dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel the bibulous Wild Bill threw his arms around my father. “B.P., I just want you to know, I’ll never forget what you did for me. I owe everything to you. If you ever want me for anything, just holler. I’ll work for you for nothing!”
There would be other nights of triumph for Father before the fire burned to ash, but never again would he sit down to a table and draw a royal flush. For in addition to Wings, the first Best Actor award went to his foreign import, the rotund and unforgettable Emil Jannings, for The Way of All Flesh. One night in the studio projection room a year or so before, we had seen a brilliant German film called The Last Laugh, starring Jannings as the self-important, elegantly uniformed doorman of the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. What was unique about the film was that it was not interrupted by a single subtitle. Yet without a word to prompt or distract us, we knew at every moment what Jannings’s imperious doorman was thinking and feeling. He ruled over his domain between the curb and the revolving door as if he were the commander-in-chief of the entire world. When he opened the door of a limousine and bowed to arriving guests, it was a gesture not of servility but of the gracious hospitality of an overlord. When he escorted people to his grand revolving door, he was inviting them into his palace. And when he went home to his dingy room in a tenement, he enjoyed another kind of adulation. To the tenement dwellers his arrival was the highlight of their day. They adored the magnificence of his uniform and the overbearing benevolence with which he wore it. Here was a symbol of the power they would never have and could only taste vicariously through their proximity to this great man.
Then, one day, the hotel manager sees Jannings stumble under a heavy trunk he is carrying into the lobby. Deciding that the world’s greatest doorman is too old for the job, he assigns him an easier job as an attendant in the lavatory. But Jannings has to exchange his fieldmarshal’s uniform for a shapeless white smock. We see the pride of the man seeping out of him like air from a huge balloon. Before our eyes Jannings becomes just another fat, stooped, defeated old man. We suffer with him as he goes back to face his former subjects in the tenement. Seeing him without his uniform, they feel deprived of the grandeur that has given meaning to their meaningless lives. So they turn on him, taunt him—a deposed king dragged to the guillotine. He goes back to the hotel to die in the lavatory; no longer is there any reason to go on living.
And that—an unexpected subtitle informed us—is how the story really ended. But since Hollywood loves its happy endings, this picture would give us one: A millionaire who dies in the hotel wills his fortune to the doorman. And so we have Jannings at the second fade-out, once more a swaggering, self-important figure, with a lovely lady on his arm, obsequiously helped into his limousine in front of the Adlon Hotel by a new uniformed doorman who will never be quite so grand as the original.
When the lights came on, instead of the usual postscreening chatter, there was a long, thoughtful silence. Here was genius at work. With subtle shadings of self-deprecating humor (poignantly directed by F. W. Murnau), Jannings had done for drama what Chaplin had done for comedy.
The film had a profound impact on the Schulbergs. I saw in it the kind of mood I had been working for in my short story, “Ugly.” I related to it much more than to the romantic, surefire happy endings Hollywood was grinding out. I was proud of Father for saying that evening that he would like to sign Jannings and bring him over for a series of pictures in the European mode. Despite the support of Lasky, who reigned from his palatial beach house at Santa Monica, again there was opposition from New York. The Last Laugh might be a work of art, Zukor and his principal Wall Street backer Otto Kahn acknowledged, but this was the picture business and who the hell ever heard of Emil Jannings in Oshkosh?
This was the kind of argument B.P. warmed to. Even if a Jannings picture only broke even in the States, he assured Mr. Zukor, it would more than get its money back in Europe where Jannings was a box-office name and where audiences would be curious to see how Hollywood treated him. Ordered to hold the picture to a modest budget, Father was allowed to proceed. The result was The Way of All Flesh, for which the Paramount writers Jules Furthman and Lajos Biro were advised to study the dramatic elements of The Last Laugh (and of another Jannings tragedy, Variety) and adapt them to an American setting.
Father asked me, half-teasingly, half-seriously, if I approved of the scenario. I told him the part was perfect for Jannings: a smalltown bank teller, a model family man slavishly loyal to the bank he has served for twenty years. Everything about him speaks of punctuality and responsibility—up on the ring of seven, breakfast and paternal encouragement to the children at seven-thirty, at his post in the bank precisely at the same time every morning—the personification of bourgeois dependability and pride. He loves his boss, he loves his bank, he loves his job, he loves his wife and kids, he loves his life. In the overall scheme his job may be a minor one but he is bloated with self-importance.
One day his manager calls him in to say the bank must deliver a packet of thousand-dollar security notes to the main branch in Chicago, a job that calls for the utmost in reliability. That’s why Jannings has been chosen for the assignment. He is reluctant to interrupt the daily routine to which he is addicted. But as a good soldier he conscientiously takes his seat on the train to Chicago.
Joining him in the compartment is Phyllis Haver, as provocative a little blonde as ever strutted down the aisle of a Pullman car. (Father had recruited her from the ranks of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties.) Jannings cannot resist posing as a bank manager rather than a lowly teller. Champagne flows. His first taste of the high life. When he wakes up in the bedroom of a roadhouse and searches frantically for his precious bank notes, they are gone.
Jannings can never return to face the music. He becomes a derelict, stripped of all pride, a trembling hulk so different from the self-righteous Mr. Perfect at the beginning as to be almost unrecognizable. On Christmas Eve—in these pessimistic “European” pictures it is always Christmas Eve—Jannings can’t resist coming home to see his family. He stares in the window and watches his wife and children trimming the Christmas tree. There is a picture of him lovingly framed on the mantle. (Oh yes, a man was found on the railroad tracks with Jannings’s identification papers, and Jannings is believed to be dead.)
We see the broad, stooped back of Jannings, suffering. In a reverse angle, we see a close-up of his crushed, unshaven face at the window, suffering. There have been some pretty good sufferers in the movies down the years but I can’t think of a single star who could suffer in the same league with Emil Jannings. We previewed the picture in San Francisco, where B.P. was testing it before a more sophisticated audience than the same old small-towners on whom still-unreleased pictures were usually sneaked in Glendale, Long Beach, and San Bernardino.
The San Francisco audience had anticipated the Hollywood happy ending that The Last Laugh had both ridiculed and exploited. But when Emil Jannings turned away from that fatherless Christmas scene, and went on drifting down the road like a porpoise-bodied, uncomedic Chaplin, there was a standing ovation.
When it opened in New York, the Times review could not have been more glowing if Father had written it himself: “A great artistic triumph … rivals both The Last Laugh and Variety … a marvel of simplicity… a poignant character study that bristles with carefully thought-out details … Jannings excels his previous screen contributions … never falters in his delineation …”
So it had come as no surprise to us that Jannings won the first Best Actor award that championship season. Ben and Ad came home late from that celebration at the Hollywood Roosevelt. After the presentations there had been dancing and drinking. I could hear Father’s infectious laughter as he poured himself a nightcap that Mother was urging him not to take. In the morning, like the first chirps of the songbirds heralding the dawn, we would hear the familiar sound of Father’s throwing up in the bathroom. There was always something reassuring about that sound. It meant that Father was safely home, sobering up, and getting ready to go back to work. The ritual of regurgitation would be followed by song. From my yellow bed with its ornately carved headboard I could sing along with his hangover anthem:
“Haitch—Hay—Dubble—Rrr—I… G-A-N spells Harrigan …”
Father had a lot to sing about that morning, because not only had Wings, Underworld, and The Way of All Flesh strengthened his (and Lasky’s) hand, but Jannings was now an American marquee name.
The next two pictures he made with Jannings would always remain with me. In The Last Command, Jannings played a White Russian refugee general who has drifted to Hollywood where he is surviving as an extra. Typecast as a Czarist commander in a movie about the Soviet Revolution, his mind flashes back to his actual participation in the fighting that destroyed his life. On the Hollywood set, a replica of the battlefield from which he once had fled for his life, reality collides with make-believe until the general cracks under the pressure, forgets he is only acting out a minor role in a movie, and, once again the powerful White Russian commander of the past, runs amuck trying to rally his forces. Through the swirling snow (salt spread by the prop men and whirled about by a wind machine), he hurls himself against the barbed wire and collapses in the artificial snow where he dies of a heart attack.
I was on the set that day and the effect was unforgettable, a dream performance of a dream situation in a dream setting that was strangely believable, fusing fact with fiction in the style of Pirandello. There was not only a play within a play, but an outer play as well, as Emil Jannings and the director Von Sternberg could not bear each other, each one too egocentric and overbearing for the other. If Von Sternberg treated his actors like puppets, Jannings treated his directors like pawns. Jannings would throw tantrums equal to anything he created before the cameras, and Von Sternberg would pointedly ignore him: Von had perfected a cold disdain for actors who displeased him. Unable to get his way, or even a reaction from his haughty director, Jannings would stalk off to his dressing room to sulk. Sometimes he would storm into Father’s office to protest Von Sternberg’s maddening indifference. “Now we’ve got a German George Bancroft,” Father would say, “another big baby whose wife pampers him and who doesn’t know how lucky he is that we pick the right stories for him, the best writers, the best supporting cast, and put him in the hands of a Joe von Sternberg.”
Von Sternberg told us he would never work with Jannings again, but when the advent of sound drove Jannings with his thick Teutonic accent back to his homeland, whom did he send for to direct him in The Blue Angel? Von Sternberg. And of course Joe accepted the job, making film history with the German bit-player he chose for the role of the leggy music-hall performer who leads Jannings, a dignified professor, down the road to self-abasement. On the wings of The Blue Angel Von Sternberg would return to Paramount with the protégée he seemed to have created out of common middle-class German clay—Marlene Dietrich. In Morocco, Shanghai Express, The Scarlet Empress, The Devil Is a Woman, the pudgy Fraulein was transformed into the tantalizing European sex symbol who was to become an ageless superstar.
Marlene literally used to sit at the feet of Von Sternberg in those days when directors behaved and dressed like field marshals. When they would come to the house Joe would do all the talking—a verbose intellectual with a genuine feeling for art and a habit of talking in philosophical abstractions that challenged you to follow them. Indeed, like a fox of the mind he seemed to delight in disappearing through the intellectual underbrush, throwing his yapping pursuers off the scent.
Not as flamboyant as Von Stroheim, in his own self-contained way he was just as outrageous, pulling his superiority around him like the heavy long overcoat he affected even in sunny California. He was an intellectual bully to whom all actors were fools and all producers idiots.
Most of the famous employees who came to 525 Lorraine played up to me, a few out of genuine fondness for children, others to make an impression on Father. But Von Sternberg made no concession to me whatsoever. He never bothered to ask me how I was doing in school, what I was writing, or who I thought would win the big game on Saturday.
At his best, he was one of the few motion-picture directors able to bridge the gap between Hollywood practicality and the art form as it had been developing in Europe. At his worst, he was arrogant and self-indulgent. This may be the voice of a father’s son, but I always felt that after he left Paramount and parted company with B.P. in the mid-Thirties, the great promise of his career began to deteriorate. Of course he would have denied this with all his vehemence and sarcasm, insisting that front-office guidance—or interference—was destructive to his art.
In truth, it would be difficult to know how to assign the blame for the version of Crime and Punishment Joe directed for B.P., with Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov, Marian Marsh as Sonya. For it was not only miscast, but misdirected as well. Von Sternberg was a connoisseur of modern painting and sculpture and although he had made marvelous films with Bancroft, Jannings, and Dietrich, he was increasingly interested in the camera as a medium of abstract art. He had come to films as an experimenter and he was always more interested in his photographic effects than in the story he had to tell, or the characters his films could explore. Snobbish, impatient, unreasonable—dedicated artist inextricably intertwined with the poseur—his contempt for his inferiors (which seemed to include everyone in the world with the possible exception of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, and Klee) left an indelible impression on me. He wore his long woolen overcoat like a suit of armor and what had once been a sensitive Jewish face was fixed in an imperious sneer. He was the giant-artist Gulliver pinned to earth by a throng of money-minded Lilliputians, and the disdainful look in the eye, the set of the mouth, the very droop of the mustache contrived to put us all in our places, from marquee name to studio chieftain to stammering teenager.
What he could not succeed in doing in his films (after The Blue Angel), he tried to project in the architecture of his own home. Built of concrete and great walls of glass, it was shaped in the form of an enormous S encircled by a moat. This Von Sternberg creation seemed the ideal monument to himself. “Don’t talk to me, don’t touch me, stay out,” it warned Hollywood. Unless you were Charlie Chaplin, or Arnold Schoenberg or Thomas Mann, the drawbridge was raised against you at the Sternberg schloss.
What stands out in my mind about Marlene when she came to our house with Joe was her manner of dressing. She was the first woman I ever saw who wore pants—later when they became fashionable we called them slacks. In fact, she was wearing an entire suit and tie. It may have been that the silent Marlene we knew in our house was content to let her bizarre wardrobe speak for her because she was new to America and had still to perfect her English, although even the most articulate would have an uphill battle when Josef von Sternberg was holding the floor.
By coincidence Marlene came to America on the Bremen, where she became friends with my late wife Geraldine Brooks’s parents, Jimmy and Bianca. Their memories of her in those early years are quite different from mine. Although Jimmy was head of the Brooks Costume Company and lived his life among Broadway stars, he was charmingly stagestruck. With his snapping blue eyes, his flirtatious and irresistible smile, this incorrigibly happy-go-lucky extrovert immediately ingratiated himself with Marlene. Not yet the self-assured superstar she was to become by the end of the decade, she welcomed the attention of the gregarious Jimmy and his stylish little wife, Bianca. They dined together, took their constitutional walks around the decks together, played the ship’s games together. Jimmy nicknamed her Dutchy, which she enjoyed—it sounded breezy and American. Even when she had achieved her new status as the world’s sexiest grandmother, Marlene continued to send letters to them signed “Dutchy.”
On that Bremen crossing, Dutchy presented Bianca with a bunch of violets every day. Bianca was touched by their new friend’s thoughtfulness, although she wondered if Dutchy wasn’t revealing a touch of guilt because her behavior with Jimmy had been provoking shipboard gossip. One afternoon Dutchy invited Bianca to her cabin, offered her a glass of champagne, and showed her a book—on lesbian lovemaking. Bianca liked to think of herself as an F. Scott Fitzgerald jazz baby but the flapper exterior concealed the morality of a West End Avenue matron. With this, her first real pass from a member of her own sex, she reverted to her upper-class German-Jewish background. Her shock only amused the sexually ecumenical Marlene. “In Europe it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman,” Marlene explained. “We make love with anyone we find attractive.”
Jimmy was so amused to learn that it was Bianca that Marlene was trying to lure to her cabin, and not him, that they remained lifelong friends. The first time they all went to a Broadway opening together, Marlene appeared in white tie and tails, complete with silk opera hat—courtesy of the Brooks Costume Company—a costume that became an overnight sensation and was to become her theatrical trademark. Actually she favored men’s clothes because they were cheaper to rent than elegant gowns. Later, Brooks did make many of the slinky, see-through, spangled costumes she introduced as her Vegas “uniform.”
Today most movie stars choose to dress down in jeans and T-shirts, but in those days, top names like Crawford, Swanson, and Dietrich were conscious of giving performances every time they appeared in public and they dressed the part. The masculine but sexy look was Marlene’s contribution to our folk-film culture. Once she emerged from behind the father figure of Von Sternberg, she blossomed into a new kind of femme fatale able to parody her own sexuality without losing its powers. Giftedly, wickedly on the make, Marlene was able to recreate herself as an American fantasy of how a sexy European woman looks, sounds, and acts. A strange continuity moves through my life, for when I first met Geraldine Brooks, as her baby-sitter, she was a stagestruck six-year-old who would manage to extend her bedtime by perching on a bar stool, tilting her father’s top hat on her head, crossing her little knees, and singing a song her “Aunt Dutchy” had taught her: “Fah-ling een luff a-gane—never vant-ed to—vot am I to do?—caan’t help eet. …”
While Marlene rode her rising wave of sensual self-mockery and Joe von Sternberg retreated to London and then Japan in search of his elusive cinematic muse, Father’s other German star, Emil Jannings, decided that having to speak English in the new talkies was too much of a challenge. So he came to say goodbye with fervent avowal of love for all the Schulbergs and an open invitation for us to be his houseguests whenever we came to Germany. After all, Emil insisted, he was a landsman, or at least half-landsman, having been born in Brooklyn of a Jewish mother who took him to Europe when he was still a child.
Yet, when Hitler and his Brown Shirts came to power and Jannings’s professional status if not his life was endangered, he went to court and became a certified member of the Master Race by declaring that he had been born out of wedlock to an Aryan maid in the Jannings household. Which prompted Father to say, “I’ve known a lot of bastards in this business, but this is the first time I ever heard of anyone going to court to make it official.”