City of Nets (37 page)

“I didn't make any cuts in that scene,” Preminger said.

“Do you mean to tell me I don't know my own script?” Zanuck shouted, turning to a revolving bookcase that contained all the scripts in production.

“Look at it!” Preminger shouted back. “You'll see that I have not cut a word.”

“He began to suspect he was mistaken, which made him even wilder,” Preminger recalled. “He ordered me out of his office.” Zanuck's aide warned Preminger that he could save himself only by an immediate letter of apology to the producer. Preminger refused. Then he began learning for the first time how the Hollywood studios really worked. There were no further summonses to Zanuck's office, nor any invitations to the executive dining room.
Kidnapped
was assigned to someone else, and failed.

Since Preminger had a contract, he simply sat in his office and waited. One day he arrived to find that his name had been removed from the door, and the lock changed. He stayed at home, still being paid, but he wanted to work. He called Joe Schenck, who had told him to consider himself as Schenck's own son. Schenck's secretary said he was busy. Preminger called every day for several weeks, but Schenck was always busy. Preminger hired an agent to get him a job at any other studio, doing anything. Nobody wanted to risk offending Darryl Zanuck.

When Preminger's contract expired, he went to New York and found himself several plays to direct. One of them was Clare Boothe Luce's
Margin for Error,
and as she watched Preminger directing, she said to herself, according to Preminger's friend Willi Frischauer, “There's a Nazi for you.” So when the German playing the villainous Nazi consul decided in the midst of rehearsals to return to Germany, Mrs. Luce proposed that Preminger replace him. There was something lugubrious about a Jew playing a Nazi in 1939, but Preminger delighted in his monocle, his saber scar and shaven head. He was such a success that when Fox decided to film the play—now that Zanuck was off at war—the studio asked Preminger to play the same role. Preminger boldly asked Bill Goetz to let him direct the movie, as he had directed the play. Goetz nervously refused. Preminger even more boldly offered to direct the film without pay. He added that if his first week's rushes were not satisfactory, he would accept dismissal and serve only as an actor. Goetz nervously agreed. And that was how, when Zanuck returned from the army, he found Preminger, whom he had exiled from Hollywood, back under contract at Zanuck's own studio.

One of the remarkable qualities about Zanuck, who was a very remarkable man, was that he had great confidence in his own ability to judge things on their merits, and to . . . not admit a mistake but correct a mistake, in his own seigneurial way. He summoned Preminger, whom he had not seen or spoken to for more than five years, to his mansion. A butler led the way to the garden. “Zanuck was sitting in swimming trunks beside his pool,” Preminger recalled. “His back was to me. He glanced around briefly and then gave me the back of his head again. He picked up a piece of paper and said: ‘I see you are working on a few things. I don't think much of them except for one,
Laura.
I've read it and it isn't bad. You can produce it but as long as I am at Fox you will never direct. Goodbye.' ‘Goodbye,' I said to his back and left.”

Everything in Preminger's life was a struggle, Preminger against the rest of the world. He worked on
Laura
with three different screenwriters, including the poet Samuel Hoffenstein, and the final script offended Vera Caspary, who had written the original novel. The supervising producer, Bryan Foy, didn't like it either. Foy didn't actually read scripts; he had an assistant named David who did that. “David read the
Laura
script and says it's lousy,” Foy said. Preminger gave a Hollywood answer: “David is making seventy-five dollars a week and I'm making fifteen hundred. He doesn't like it but I do. Maybe you'd better read it yourself.” Foy did read it, or pretended to, and announced the next day: “David's right. The script stinks.” Preminger asked him to send it to Zanuck for a verdict. “Zanuck hates you,” Foy said. “All you need is for him to read this lousy script. He'll fire you.”

Laura
was all a series of gimmicks, true enough. The beautiful heroine was reported to have been murdered, and the young detective assigned to the case became infatuated with the portrait of the dead girl on the wall of her apartment (and there was that song by David Raskin and Johnny Mercer: “Laura is the face in the misty light . . . the laugh that floats on a summer night . . .”). And then there she was, not dead at all, and now a suspect in the murder of the friend who had been found dead in her apartment. And the demon in this dance of death was the waspish newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker, who loved Laura not wisely and not well. Preminger always bore a grudge against such people, critics and columnists, so it must have seemed a great idea to have the homicidal villain be one of them, and one with odd sexual proclivities.
Laura
was to become one of the most celebrated examples of that odd and semi-European genre of the mid-1940's subsequently known as
film noir.

Zanuck read the script, called both Preminger and Foy into his office, heard out Foy's criticisms, and then removed not Preminger but Foy from the project. But several directors declined the script, either because they didn't like it or because they didn't want to get caught in the continuing crossfire between Preminger and Zanuck. Yet the two enemies were already engaged in casting. Zanuck wanted John Hodiak as the young detective; Preminger persuaded him to gamble on a relatively untried newcomer, Dana Andrews. The title role, which was actually of secondary importance, was apparently turned down by Jennifer Jones, and then Zanuck talked a rather reluctant Gene Tierney into taking it. (“I have never felt my own performance was much more than adequate,” she said later, with becoming modesty.)

For the essential part of Waldo Lydecker, Preminger was determined to hire Clifton Webb, who had never made a movie but was then playing in Noel Coward's
Blithe Spirit
at the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles. Zanuck was dubious. His casting director, Rufus LeMaire, claimed that he had seen a test that M-G-M had made of Webb. “He doesn't walk, he flies,” LeMaire sneered. Preminger asked to see the test, and LeMaire promised to produce it, but apparently no such test existed. Webb had been under contract to M-G-M for eighteen months without ever going before a camera. Preminger got Zanuck's approval to test Webb himself, but Webb refused to be tested. “My dear boy,” he said, according to Preminger, “if your Mr. Zanuck wants to see if I can act let him come to the theater. I don't know your Miss Tierney. . . .” Zanuck was indignant. “I don't want to see him on the stage playing Noel Coward. I want to see him on film playing the part of Waldo Lydecker.” Preminger worked out an odd solution. On his own authority, he took a film crew to the Biltmore and filmed Webb delivering a monologue from
Blithe Spirit.
Then he showed the film to Zanuck, who was still indignant, and Zanuck said, “You're a son of a bitch, but you're right. He's very good.”

By this time, Rouben Mamoulian had been signed up to direct
Laura,
and Mamoulian had lots of ideas of his own about sets and costumes and how the actors should act. He also asked Preminger, the producer, not to come near the set. “He said I made him nervous,” Preminger recalled. Preminger acquiesced but insisted that the rushes be sent to Zanuck. Zanuck hated them. In the crowded executive dining room at Fox, Zanuck suddenly said to Preminger, “What do you think? Shall I take Mamoulian off the picture?” Preminger's answer was unequivocal: “Yes.” So Zanuck finally gave him control of
Laura,
and he made the picture as he pleased, and nobody liked that either. The standard procedure, according to Preminger, was for a rough cut of a finished film to be shown in Zanuck's projection room, with Zanuck and the director in the front row and “a dozen of Zanuck's yes-men” arrayed behind them. “They didn't pay much attention to the picture,” Preminger recalled. “They had developed the art of reading the back of Zanuck's neck to perfection. They were able to anticipate whether he liked the film or not and adjusted their reaction accordingly.” On this occasion, Zanuck didn't even ask their opinions but just said gruffly to Preminger, “Well, we missed the boat on this one. Be at my office tomorrow at eleven.”

As usual, Zanuck had a theory on how the picture should be fixed. He walked up and down his office, chewing his cigar, waving his polo mallet, dictating to a secretary his plan for a new ending. The first half of the film was narrated by Lydecker, the second half by the detective. Zanuck wanted a conclusion narrated by Laura herself. Preminger's reaction was to scowl, as only Preminger could scowl. “If you don't like it, I'll get another director,” Zanuck snapped. Preminger professed his willingness to obey orders, if only “to save what I could.”

So Zanuck's new ending was reluctantly filmed, and then the whole movie was brought back to Zanuck's projection room. This time, in addition to the yes-men, there was a newcomer sitting in the back of the room, Walter Winchell, accompanied by what Preminger described only as “a young lady.” Winchell was an old friend of Zanuck's and also a very powerful Hearst columnist and radio newscaster (“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North and South America . . . let's go to press”). Winchell and the girl ignored the back of Zanuck's neck. They enjoyed the movie. They laughed at the right spots. “Zanuck seemed amazed,” Preminger recalled. “He turned around several times and looked at them. When the screening was over, Winchell walked up to Zanuck and said in his staccato manner: ‘Big time! Big time! Congratulations, Darryl. Except for the ending. I didn't get it. Didn't get it.' ”

Once again, Zanuck demonstrated his ability to change course. “Would you like to put your old ending back?” he asked Preminger. “Yes,” said Preminger. And so it was done. And it was about then that Clifton Webb, whose ill-suppressed hysteria was essential to the malevolent fascination of
Laura,
suffered a nervous breakdown. He checked himself into a sanitarium in New England. “He came out of it rested and restored,” Miss Tierney said, “but the main effect of his analysis was to encourage him to be rude to his mother.”

 

After the emotional triumph of
The Great Dictator,
which also grossed more money than any film that its creator had ever made, Charlie Chaplin floated from one possibility to another. At a dinner with Igor Stravinsky, the composer suggested that they try a collaboration, and Chaplin began improvising. The film would be set in a nightclub. The floor show would be the crucifixion of Christ. Most of the customers ignore it. A group of businessmen at one table go on talking excitedly about a big deal. At another table, a woman says, “I can't understand why people come here. It's depressing.” “It's good entertainment,” says her husband. “The place was bankrupt until they put on this show. Now they are out of the red.” A drunk starts to shout: “Look, they're crucifying him! And nobody cares!” Stravinsky, who was then undergoing some kind of religious crisis—this was the period in which he wrote his great
Mass
—looked appalled. “That's sacrilegious!” he declared. “Is it?” Chaplin protested. “I never intended it to be.”

At a lunch with Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Sinclair Lewis, he heard the two of them extol Paul Vincent Carroll's
Shadow and Substance,
in which Hardwicke had recently starred. Lewis said the character of Bridget was a modern Joan of Arc. Chaplin was interested, partly because he was also interested in a would-be actress named Joan Barry. She told him that she had seen the play on Broadway, and she asked to read some of Bridget's scenes from the script that Hardwicke had sent to Chaplin. Chaplin was surprised and impressed by her “excellent reading.” He put her under contract at $250 per week and sent her to Max Reinhardt's acting school. He also bought the film rights to
Shadow and Substance
for $25,000 and set to work writing a screenplay. He soon began to have doubts about Miss Barry, however, about both her talent and her stability.

Then Orson Welles came to Chaplin's house one day with a new idea. He wanted to make a series of documentaries, and he was fascinated by the case of a French murderer named Henri Désiré Landru, a respectable Parisian
père de famille
who rented a villa near Rambouillet in 1914 and began advertising for women interested in matrimony. Landru was a bald and black-bearded man of nearly fifty, but throughout the five desperate years of World War I, he recorded in his account books that he had made love, of one sort or another, to 283 lonely and prosperous matrons. He was guillotined in 1922, protesting his innocence to the end, for having murdered ten of them. Welles, who had not yet encountered Rita Hayworth, wondered whether Chaplin would be interested in this misogynistic tale. Chaplin was very much interested—his first break from comedy—and asked to see the script. There wasn't any script yet, Welles said smoothly, just the record of Landru's trial. “I thought you might like to help with the writing,” Welles said. Chaplin was annoyed at such a demeaning offer and immediately rejected it, but a few days later he began to think that the story of Landru would make “a wonderful comedy.” He telephoned Welles and bought all rights to the idea for five thousand dollars. “Now I put aside
Shadow and Substance
and began writing
Monsieur Verdoux,
” Chaplin said. “I had been working three months on it when Joan Barry blew into Beverly Hills. My butler informed me that she had telephoned. I said that under no circumstances would I see her.”

For most of his life up to that point, Chaplin had had the worst of luck with women. He wasn't really interested in them. He regarded them as toys, to be taken to bed and then put aside whenever he had serious work to do. “I must find a woman who understands that creative art absorbs every bit of a man,” he once said. “When I am working, I withdraw absolutely from those I love. I have no energy, no love to give them.” He also wanted those he loved to be very young, which usually meant that they had suspicious mothers. Late in 1917, at a party in Sam Goldwyn's house on the beach, Chaplin met someone he recalled as “a very silly young girl” named Mildred Harris. She was eighteen and he was twenty-nine. In about a year, she thought she was pregnant, and so they got married. The pregnancy was a false alarm, but then the new Mrs. Chaplin really got pregnant and gave birth to a malformed son, who died in three days. “We were irreconcilably mismated,” Chaplin said later, recalling that when he proposed divorce to his young wife, who could rarely be found at home, she said, “All I want is enough money to look after my mother.”