Moving Pictures (41 page)

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.”