such as Ballin and Neill aroused only his scorn—which, in his determination to have everyone hate him, he made no attempt to hide. In 1931 the New Yorker remarked, “The accepted thing for the man who has risen is to appreciate the niceties of noblesse oblige. One may be haughty to associates of lesser days, but one should be kind. On the contrary, von Sternberg is likely to make cutting remarks. He ferrets out little weaknesses and comments on them. He opens himself to the accusation that he attempts to pay back old scores, and nurses grievances born of early hardships.”1
His model of what a filmmaker could and should be remained Erich von Stroheim, even though, in 1924, the two men probably hadn’t met. When von Stroheim was making Blind Husbands and Foolish Wives, von Sternberg was in Europe, and by the time he returned, von Stroheim was on location with Greed. Nevertheless, he called him “unique and inimitable,” an artist who “invested his films … with an intensity that bristled and proclaimed him.”
During 1924, nobody in the movie business talked about much except Greed, which von Stroheim had been shooting for months in the Sierra Nevada and Death Valley. Halfway through, the company sold out to Louis B. Mayer’s Metro Pictures, creating the foundations for MGM. The cinema of epic personal vision collided head-on with the studio product, oriented entirely on profit. The result was a foregone conclusion. Thalberg ordered Greed reduced to two hours from the original nine. Before the cuts began, von Stroheim screened the full version for critics and friends. Von Sternberg called it “a powerful and singular demonstration of how a director can influence his performers.” It inspired him to begin the screenplay that would become his first feature, The Salvation Hunters. “We were all influenced by Greed,” he said.
Also in 1924, von Sternberg met Viennese producer Max Reinhardt, who was visiting German playwright Karl (“Peter”) Vollmoeller in Hollywood, where the writer lived for part of the year. Reinhardt trailed glory. He directed theater companies in both Germany and Austria, including the intimate Kammerspiele in Vienna, where new styles of performance and design were being developed. His productions afforded writers such as Vollmoeller and Hugo von Hofmannstahl almost unlimited opportunity for experimentation, and his acting school produced Europe’s most gifted performers.
Given models of upward mobility such as von Stroheim and Reinhardt (born Maximilian Goldmann), it isn’t surprising that Josef Sternberg emerged from By Divine Right with a “von” in his name, signifying a descent from aristocracy. He credited this ennobling to actor Elliott Dexter, who had a hand in the production and supposedly wanted to “even up” the length of the names as they appeared in the credits. Since Sternberg, normally punctilious about the tiniest detail, was uncritical of this addition, it’s likely that he connived at it. (Director Neill would not have objected, since his own name was adapted from the cumbersome “Roland William Neill de Gostrie.”) European aristocracy contained almost no acknowledged Jews, and none with a genealogy so precisely documented as to rate the honorific “von,” but Dexter neither knew nor cared. Those who did recognize the counterfeit—Dietrich among them—laughed it off as “just Hollywood.”2
By aggrandizing himself, von Sternberg may have hoped to end rumors that he was not named Sternberg at all, nor was he Viennese. “It was generally believed,” said Jesse Lasky Jr., “that he was actually Joe Stern from Brooklyn, and the rest arrogant fabrication.”3 Sternberg professed to be stung by this charge. In 1963 he told an interviewer, “I once offered $50,000 to anyone who could produce any proof that my name is Joe Stern; I’ve never had to pay it.” However, speaking of the period around 1926, he acknowledged, “At that time I was known as Joe Stern.”4 This was certainly the name he used in 1929 when he worked briefly at Paramount’s British studios, supervising the construction of its sound recording facilities. At various times he was credited as “Joe,” “Josef,” or, as on The Highest Bidder in 1921, “Jo Sternberg.” Adopting “von” may have been the conclusion of the process of refining his name as he had his appearance. Once the decision was made, he adhered to it ferociously. Successive secretaries would inform callers that there was no “Mr. Sternberg” and that his family name began not with an “S” but with a “v.”
The accusation that he was “a pants presser from Brooklyn” was not so easily corrected. He did begin his working life in the garment trade, though not as a tailor. However, the image of the new California moviemakers as jumped-up graduates of New York’s sweatshops (which many were) appealed to the gentile businessmen now looking with interest at the West Coast film industry. Joseph Kennedy, sometime lover of Dietrich and father of future president John Kennedy, jeered, “Look at that bunch of pants-pressers in Hollywood, making themselves millionaires. I could take the whole business away from them.”5 Not one to make idle threats, Kennedy bought control of the Film Booking Office (FBO) studio, which underwrote the next film on which von Sternberg worked. Within a few years Kennedy owned a substantial segment of the U.S. film industry.
FBO subsisted on westerns, animal films, and dramas based on front-page news. One such revelation concerned Paris-based quack surgeon Serge Voronoff, who claimed that he could restore youth and prolong life by transplanting or injecting into his patients tissue from the testicles of monkeys that he raised in a private zoo on the Côte d’Azur. In 1923 Gertrude Atherton’s novel Black Oxen imagined a socialite rejuvenated by this pseudoscience, and the following year Frank Lloyd filmed it. On its coattails, Paul Bern, future MGM producer and ill-fated husband of Jean Harlow, wrote a similar screenplay called Vanity’s Price. Anna Q. Nilsson played aging actress Vanna du Maurier, restored to beauty by “Steinach glandular therapy” at the cost of mental instability and outbursts of murderous rage.
Von Sternberg asked Neill for a job as his assistant, suggesting a salary of $150 a week. His credentials were, he pointed out, impeccable. Not only had he been born in the city where some of the story took place; he had also met Serge Voronoff in Paris. Whether or not Neill believed him, von Sternberg was hired at $100 a week. All went well until, three weeks into the thirty-day shoot, studio head Pat Powers invited von Sternberg to take over direction. Neill, he said, was about to be fired for insulting him. When von Sternberg hesitated, Powers suggested that any loyalty to his former director would be misplaced, since Neill had called him “worthless.” Loyalty didn’t come into it, von Sternberg replied. He simply despised the story.
Neill quit, leaving a love scene and Vanna’s surgery still to be shot. Von Sternberg agreed to finish the film in return for a $50 raise and a new set for the hospital sequence constructed to his specifications and inspired, he later claimed, by Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Circular, it had steeply raked seats, allowing students to look down on the operation—a design replicated in the terraced cabaret of Morocco and the gambling pit of The Shanghai Gesture. In this case, von Sternberg “instructed one of his actors to show disgust. Another had been told to lean over toward the man next to him and leer, as though some obscene remark had passed between them. A third looked amused.”6 New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall, while dismissing Vanity’s Price as piffle, found this scene memorable. “The operating room in Vienna is shown, with visiting surgeons studying the operation on Vanna through field glasses. One surgeon shakes his head, knowing that the woman’s vanity is bound to suffer by the effect the Steinach treatment will have on her mentality.”7 On the strength of reviews like Hall’s, FBO elevated Vanity’s Price to its list of “Gold Medal Specials,” released under its Gothic Films banner. Powers offered von Sternberg a contract, but he turned it down. He’d had a better offer from an unexpected source.
Photographing a Thought
Charlotte: Oh, Henrik, stop playing that gloomy music. Henrik: It isn’t gloomy. It’s