Vintage Swine

Some Hollywood flack, in a burst of inspiration, dubbed him the Man You Love to Hate. He was a short man, almost squat, with a vulpine smirk that told you, the moment his image flashed upon the screen, that no wife or bank roll must be left unguarded. The clean-­shaven bullethead, the glittering monocle, and the ramrod back (kept rigid by a corset, it was whispered) were as familiar and as dear to the moviegoing public as the Pickford curls or Eugene O’Brien’s pompadour. No matter what the background of the picture was—an English drawing room, a compartment on the Orient Express, the legation quarter of Peiping—he always wore tight-­fitting military tunics, flaunted an ivory cigarette holder, and kissed ladies’ hands profusely, betraying them in the next breath with utter impartiality. For sheer menace, he made even topnotch vipers like Lew Cody, Ivan Lebedeff, and Rockliffe Fellowes seem rank stumblebums by comparison. He was the ace of cads, a man without a single redeeming feature, the embodiment of Prussian Junkerism, and the greatest heavy of the silent film, and his name, of course, was Erich von Stroheim.

I first saw him in a tempestuous drama, presented by Carl La­emmle in 1919, called Blind Husbands, which von Stroheim, with cyclonic energy, had adapted into a photoplay, and directed, from The Pinnacle, a novel he had also written. Actually, I must have seen him three years earlier as the Second Pharisee in the Judean movement of Intolerance, wearing a fright wig and a gaudy toga and heckling the Nazarene, but there was so much Biblical flapdoodle flying around that I was too confused to peg him.

The picture that definitely canonized von Stroheim for me, though, was Foolish Wives, a gripping exposé of the swindlers who were popularly supposed to prey on rich Americans in Monte Carlo. In this 1922 chef-­d’oeuvre, he impersonated a spurious Russian noble named Ladislaw Sergius Von Karamzin, as ornery a skunk as ever flicked a riding crop against a boot. Everything about him seemed to me touched with enchantment: his stiff-­necked swagger, his cynical contempt for the women he misused, and, above all, his dandyism—the monogrammed cigarettes, the dressing gowns with silk lapels, the musk he sprayed himself with to heighten his allure. For six months afterward, I exhibited a maddening tendency to click my heels and murmur “Bitte?” along with a twitch as though a monocle were screwed into my eye. The mannerisms finally abated, but not until the Dean of Brown University had taken me aside and confided that if I wanted to transfer to Heidelberg, the faculty would not stand in my way.

Not long ago, the Museum of Modern Art graciously permitted me to run its copy of Foolish Wives, on condition that if I became overstimulated or mushy, I would not pick the veneer off the chairs or kiss the projectionist. Such fears, it presently turned out, were baseless. The showing roused me to neither vandalism nor affection; in fact, it begot such lassitude that I had to be given artificial respiration and sent home in a wheelbarrow. Ordinarily, I would incline to put the blame on my faulty metabolism, but this time I knew what the trouble was. A certain satanic Schweinhund hadn’t blitzed me as he used to thirty years ago.

Foolish Wives upsets precedent by first investigating the seamy side of Monte Carlo instead of its glamour. We fade in on a milieu brimful of plot—the tenebrous hovel of an aged counterfeiter named Ventucci. A visit from his principal client, Count Karamzin, establishes that the latter is using Ventucci’s green goods to support an opulent villa as a front for his stratagems. During their colloquy, the Count’s jaded appetite is whetted by his host’s nineteen-­year-­old daughter, a poor daft creature fondling a rag doll. The old man stiffens. “She is my only treasure,” he snaps at von Stroheim, unsheathing a stiletto. “If anyone should harm her . . .” Leaving this promissory note to be honored at whatever point von Stroheim has run his gamut, the action shifts to an exclusive hotel near the casino. Here we meet an overripe young matron with a face like a matzoth pancake, all bee-­stung lips and mascara, the wife of an American millionaire called (sic) Howard Hughes, and played by a sluggish Rheinmaedchen identified in the cast of characters only as Miss Dupont. Von Stroheim ogles the lady, who seems complaisant, gets himself presented to her, and, baiting his hook with a sermon about the pitfalls of Monte Carlo, offers to introduce her to his cousins the Princesses Olga and Vera Petchnikoff. He furthermore assures her, brazenly squinting down her bodice, that they—and, of course, he—would be enraptured to act as her social sponsors. Mrs. Hughes, understandably, is bouleversée, and, consenting to accompany him to a water carnival several nights thence, lumbers away to loosen her stays and recover her wits. Whether she has any of either is debatable; both her figure and her deportment are so flabby that one cannot work up much moral indignation against von Stroheim. The man is earning a very hard dollar.

Disclosed next is the Villa Amorosa, the seaside lair of the Count and his confederates, Princess Olga (Maude George) and Princess Vera (Mae Busch). For my money, Mae Busch never possessed the spidery, ghoulish fascination of that consummate she-­devil Jetta Goudal, but she ranked high as a delineator of adventuresses and Eurasian spies. At any rate, the two lady tricksters, far from being von Stroheim’s cousins, live in what appears to be a languid state of concubinage, switching about in negligees and exchanging feline gibes. Over breakfast, the three agree on the modus operandi standard among movie blackmailers, whereby the Princesses are to divert Mr. Hughes while von Stroheim compromises his wife. Ventucci, meanwhile, bustles into focus in the crisp, matter-­of-­fact fashion of a milkman, trailed by his daughter and bringing a satchel of fresh queer just off the press. He gives off ominous rumblings when the Count behaves familiarly with the girl, but nothing more consequential than glowering results. The same is true of the water carnival that evening. Mr. Hughes, a silver-­haired, phlegmatic wowser, whose civilian name escaped me in the credits, betrays mild pique at the sight of his wife paddling around the studio tank and pelting von Stroheim with artificial roses but, after a few heavy sarcasms, relapses into coma. Had the tempo not quickened in the ensuing scene, the picture might have ended right there for me. What with the whir of the projector and the weight of my eyelids, it took every bit of buckram I had, plus frequent pulls at a Benzedrine inhaler, to keep from sliding into the abyss.

Whittled down to essentials, the purport of the scene is that the Count takes Mrs. Hughes on an afternoon excursion, pretends to get lost in a thunderstorm, and steers her to a sinister house of assignation run by a crone called Mother Gervaise. The sole function of this unsavory character, as far as I could tell, was to persuade the young matron to doff her wet shimmy, so that von Stroheim, who has made a great show of turning his back, can stealthily appraise her in a pocket mirror—as neat a sample of voyeurism, I may add, as any ever reported by Wilhelm Stekel. After endless chin music calculated to allay her trepidation, von Stroheim has just maneuvered his sweetmeat into the horizontal when a wild-­eyed anchorite reels in, ululating for shelter. Who this holy man is the picture never explains, but his scowls put a quietus on the high jinks, and Mrs. Hughes regains her hotel next morning shopworn but chaste. Inexplicably enough, the Count does not use the incident to shake down her husband—indeed, he has Princess Vera affirm that Mrs. Hughes spent the night with her—and the whole affair mystifyingly trails off with nobody the wiser, least of all the audience.

Up to now, the element of gambling has been so ruthlessly slighted in the story that the locale might as well have been a Scottish tabernacle or the annual dance festival at Jacob’s Pillow. Suddenly, however, Lady Luck rears her head beside that of Sex. In addition to his other chinoiserie, von Stroheim has been shacking up with a bedraggled maiden named Malishka, a servant at the villa, whom he has glibly promised to wed as soon as the Bolsheviki are deposed. To still her importunities, the Count cooks up a pitiable tale of insolvency and borrows her life savings, which he loses at roulette. Mrs. Hughes, who is also having a flutter at the wheel, observes his despair and lends him her pile of counters—a gesture that abruptly changes his luck. Strong though the temptation is to pocket his winnings, he craftily relinquishes them to his benefactress, and then, a few hours later, lures her to the Villa Amorosa with a plea that his life and honor are at stake. The rendezvous takes place in a tower room. Outside the door, Malishka crouches in a fever of jealousy, and this time generates sparks in a quite literal sense. Infuriated by her lover’s endearments to Mrs. Hughes prior to easing her of ninety thousand francs, the maid locks the pair in and sets fire to the stairs. They take refuge on an exterior balcony, from which they shout appeals for help, but the other guests at the villa are absorbed in being fleeced at baccarat by the Princesses and fail to respond. Hughes, meanwhile, has become increasingly worried about his wife’s absence, pantomiming his solicitude by sitting on the edge of his bed and thoughtfully scratching his chin. Eventually, the Monte Carlo Fire Department, which has been snoozing under the bulldog edition of Le Petit Monégasque, bestirs itself, and, dashing to the scene, spreads a net under the balcony. Von Stroheim gallantly knees his companion aside and jumps first. Mrs. Hughes follows, almost hurtling through the roof of the limousine in which her husband has just driven up. Apart from the indignity of the pompiers’ catching a glimpse of her bloomers, though, she sustains no perceptible damage, and the episode peters out, like all those preceding it, with Morpheus, the patron saint of the scenario, drowsily sharpening his quill for the next sequence.

Low as were the price of film and the salaries of actors in 1922, Mr. Laemmle and his aides must nevertheless have decided at this point in Foolish Wives that the consumer’s patience was finite, and ordered the curtain down. The last reel, therefore, begins with Hughes’s discovery, in his wife’s corsage (while hunting for his pipe or a pair of shoe trees, I got the impression), of the note by which the Count had enticed her to his villa. He seeks out von Stroheim, knocks him down, and exposes his activities to the police. The Princesses are apprehended on the verge of flight, and unmasked as a couple of actresses named Maude George and Mae Busch, and now all that early scaffolding about Ventucci and his fey daughter comes in handy. Von Stroheim, in a stormy Dostoevskian finish, sneaks back to the coiner’s hovel, ravishes the girl, is disemboweled by her father, and winds up being stuffed into a cistern. The concluding shot shows the Hugheses reunited—if two pieces of strudel can be said to be en rapport—lying in bed and reading, from a volume entitled Foolish Wives, the passage “And thus it happened that disillusionment came finally to a foolish wife who found in her husband that nobility she had sought for in—a counterfeit.”

The vehicle creaks and possibly should have been left to molder in the carriage loft, yet it confirmed one opinion I had treasured for three decades. Whatever von Stroheim’s shortcomings were as an artist, he was consistent. When he set out to limn a louse, he put his back into it. He never palliated his villainy, never helped old ladies across the street to show that he was a sweet kid au fond or prated about his Oedipus complex like the Percy boys who portray heavies today. I remember Grover Jones, a scenarist of long experience, once coaching me in Hollywood in the proper method of characterizing the menace in a horse opera. “The minute he pulls in on the Overland Stage,” expounded Jones, “he should dismount and kick the nearest dog.” Von Stroheim not only kicked the dog; he kicked the owner and the S.P.C.A. for good measure. With the things he has on his conscience, I don’t suppose the man ever slept a wink. But after all, nobody needs a whole lot of sleep to keep going. You can always drop off for a jiffy—especially if there’s a projector and a can of old film around.