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.”
26
AS MUCH DRAMA AS STERNBERG, DIETRICH, AND JANNINGS GENERATED on the screen, in the studio, and in their private lives, it often seemed as if the world-famous lived less dramatic lives than the servants with whom Sonya and I spent so much of our time.
Our nurse Wilma had been our substitute mother while Ad occupied herself with her Godmothers’ League, her birth-control clinic, her Friday Morning Club, and Hollywood’s first progressive school.
While Mother was busy with her life, Father with his, and I lived my intense existence with Maurice at school and on the tennis courts, there were two lonely souls in our household: Sonya, of whose presence Father seemed almost totally unaware, and Wilma, who was never able to make the adjustment from New York to Hollywood. Back east she had had family and friends, but here among the palm trees, the orange blossoms, and the wide-open spaces of early Hollywood she felt painfully uprooted and homesick. I had outgrown Wilma. And Windsor Square was so quiet that little Sonya could play safely with Marjorie Lesser and the daughters of other movie producers without Wilma’s having to take her to a park. Besides, with separate rooms for the three children, and Ad’s youngest brother Sam now in residence, there was no longer room for Wilma in the main house, so an apartment had been set up for her over the garage. The work on it was done by the studio carpenters and electricians, and probably charged to studio overhead, a form of corruption that Hollywood had winked at from the beginning.
I don’t know exactly how it began—I was too much concerned with my own problems of growing up at the time—but somehow Wilma became involved with one of the studio electricians, a big, ruddy-faced, healthy-looking fellow whose name was George. Wilma had always been a stay-at-home: Even on her days off she hadn’t seemed to know what to do with herself in Los Angeles. Her problem (I would learn later) was her color, that lovely light coffee-color that I had always found so appealing. Too light to feel comfortable among black people, she was still too dark for the whites.
When she developed a relationship with the big electrician, I felt a twinge of ambiguous jealousy I wasn’t able to put into words. I long ago had outgrown Wilma and hardly had time to talk to her with all our activities. But children, like cats, seem to be born conservatives. They want to keep their world exactly as they discovered it. I wanted Wilma to go on living in her apartment over the garage. I didn’t want her going off with any man.
One day when I came home from school I heard Mother talking to her in the library. I lingered in the hallway, at first not meaning to eavesdrop but then held by their conversation. They were talking about George, or rather, Mother was talking and Wilma was listening.
“Wilma, I know
he says he loves you, and he wants to marry you,” Mother was saying, “but your parents are giving you the right advice. Even if you tell him you’re—” there was a discreet pause—“what your background is, and he says it doesn’t matter, believe me in time it will. Especially if you have children. And they turn out to be—well, the color of your sister. Or your father. It might not matter to people of intelligence and education. But is it fair to the children themselves? They could go through hell, raised out here in a white neighborhood. And sooner or later, it’s bound to affect your relationship with George.”
There was a soft protest from Wilma—always so gentle and passive—and then I heard quiet crying. I peered in. Wilma had her head on Mother’s shoulder. It looked like one of those four-handkerchief scenes from an Eddie Goulding movie. Except that there weren’t any colored people in the movies unless they were dancing and singing as in King Vidor’s Hallelujah!, or in there for watermelon jokes like Stepin Fetchit (born Lincoln Peary).
Wilma must have accepted Mother’s well-meaning if negative advice. For I became aware of the fact that George wasn’t calling on her anymore. She was totally “ours” again. When I came home from school I would often see her on the little balcony over the garage, slowly rocking back and forth, nodding at me with a smile of gentle resignation. She would sometimes call down to me and I would go up and tell her how school was going, or about some new movie I had seen. She seemed quieter than ever, and then she slipped into some mysterious sort of illness. She was steadily losing weight. It was as if the light was slowly flickering out of her. And then one day I heard that Wilma was very ill and that she was leaving us, going back to New York where her family could take care of her.