to another young actress, Hedda Hopper, “and can go all night!”9
Furious at the Cooper-Bow romance, Fleming quit Children of Divorce and consoled himself with Alice White. The film passed to veteran director Frank Lloyd, who was unable to discipline the two flagrantly lustful stars. Also, Pasadena and Del Monte in rainy midwinter hardly resembled the Côte d’Azur. Viewing the result after Christmas, Schulberg decided the film needed some European sophistication, and he turned to von Sternberg. Suppressing his memory of how Louis and Hope Lighton had connived to butcher The Exquisite Sinner, he worked with them to rewrite and restage Children of Divorce. The actors, having gone on to new films, were available only at night, so shooting took place after hours. As all the sets had already been struck, von Sternberg and cinematographer Victor Milner filmed everything in a tent, timing shots between rainstorms. This gave von Sternberg complete command of lighting, particularly during Bow’s death scene (suicide by poison) in Ralston’s arms. Shadows and texture imposed a poignant atmosphere not present in Bow’s acting. “She was dying,” recalled Ralston, “and I was kneeling beside her, weeping. She was chewing gum. She had this great wad of gum in her face when they said, ‘All right, Clara, get the gum out. We’re going to shoot the scene.’ She took the gum out, put it back of her ear, and died. Well, that struck me as so funny, I howled, and they had to wait for me to stop laughing before I could cry again.”10
Children of Divorce showed that von Sternberg could be a company man and work as part of a team. He was rewarded by Schulberg with the film that would launch his reputation. He also reconciled with Riza, who withdrew her divorce petition, propping up the troubled marriage for at least one more year.
The City of Dreadful Night
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
—Carl Sandburg, Chicago
ONCE THE 1920 VOLSTEAD Act made it illegal to sell alcohol in the United States, criminals amalgamated into gangs to manufacture, smuggle, and distribute liquor. By 1927 they effectively ruled many cities, particularly Chicago, thumbing their noses at the forces of law and order—which, Ben Hecht wrote, “did not advance on the villains with drawn guns, but with their palms out, like bellboys.” Hecht came to Hollywood in 1927, encouraged by Herman Mankiewicz, who sent him a now-legendary telegram that concluded, “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots…. Dont let this get around.” Once he arrived, “Manky” briefed Hecht on the “rules.” “In a novel,” wrote Hecht, “a hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for a finish. In a movie this is not allowed. The hero, as well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants, cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants. But you have to shoot him in the end.”1
Gloomily pondering these clichés, Hecht had an idea. “The thing to do was to skip the heroes and heroines, and to write a movie containing only villains and bawds. I would not have to tell any lies then.” In public, Paramount crowed about the result, an eighteen-page treatment called Underworld. Privately, studio executives wondered what to do with a document—dismissed by von Sternberg as “some almost illegible notes”2—that was less film outline than a prose poem in imitation of Carl Sandburg, laureate of Hecht’s home city, Chicago. The first intertitle typified what Hecht conceded were its “moody Sandburgian sentences”: “A great city in the dead of night … streets lonely … moon clouded … buildings as empty as the cave dwellings of a forgotten age.”
Though Hecht and others called Underworld the first gangster film, the film has no real gangs. It ignores Prohibition and the $100 million-a-year bootlegging industry. The leading character, “Bull” Weed (George Bancroft), is, in Leo Goldsmith’s phrase, “a boisterous but loveable psychopath” who works alone, looting banks and jewelry stores as much for the pleasure of it as for profit. The eternal scofflaw, he even leaves a calling card in the form of a silver dollar, which he bends in half, a metaphor of his contempt for society. Weed would be at home in any era, from antiquity to the American frontier. His educated friend “Rolls Royce” compares him to “Attila, the Hun, at the gates of Rome,” and believes he was “born two thousand years too late.”
Afterward, Hecht took sole credit for Underworld, which he described as “grounded in the truth [that] nice people—the audience—loved criminals, [and] doted on reading about their love problems as well as their sadism…. There were no lies in it—except for a half-dozen sentimental touches introduced by its director, Joe von Sternberg.” In reality, various directors and writers struggled to find a film in Hecht’s outline, and failed. Schulberg initially assigned the treatment to Art Rosson, who was working on a script with Robert N. Lee when a young producer, Howard Hawks, suggested that von Sternberg might be useful in creating the visual impression of a great city in the dead of night. On January 6, 1927, the Los Angeles Times announced that von Sternberg would work on Underworld—not as director, but as cinematographer.
“So here’s what happened,” director Monte Brice told Kevin Brownlow. “They’re working on the script. Von Sternberg is hanging around; he’s going to be on the picture, but nothing has been decided. He’s sitting around reading a book that thick. It’s got nothing to do with a picture—it’s just a book. Every once in a while someone would come up and he’d lift his head and give them an answer. And it was usually a pretty good answer, to a problem that was going on over the other side of the room. All of a sudden this big switch. Art Rosson is out entirely, and von Sternberg is the director.”3
Rosson was out, according to Hawks, because “he went up to San Francisco … to go to the prison there, and unfortunately got tight, so they had to fire him.”4 Rosson’s drinking wasn’t unjustified, since his wife Lu had become Hawks’s lover. The teetotal von Sternberg inherited Underworld, with Henry Hathaway as his assistant. He took instant charge not only of directing but also of script, lighting, design, and even costumes; behavior that trampled Hollywood’s collaborative production style—“the genius of the system.”
Scorning Hecht’s poetic text, he ordered a new screenplay from Jules Furthman, who had recently joined Paramount. As the son of a Chicago judge, Furthman was at least as qualified as Hecht to write about crime in that city. Moreover, he had been composing screen stories since 1918 and had even directed three features in the early 1920s. He would go on to cowrite Mutiny on the Bounty, Only Angels Have Wings, and The Big Sleep, as well as almost every von Sternberg film. For Underworld, however, he ceded credit for the adaptation to his brother Charles, perhaps as a means of squeezing an additional payment out of Paramount. Lee shared screen credit for the work he did before Rosson’s departure.
Jules Furthman, who became von Sternberg’s most consistent collaborator, never worked alone. He invariably came on board to adapt an existing novel or screen story or rescue an ailing script. Frank Capra called him “Hollywood’s most sought after story ‘doctor,’ … in demand not for his inventive originality, but for his encyclopedic memory of past authors and their story plots. Filmmakers would tell him their story hang-ups; nine times out of ten, without recourse to research, Furthman would say: ‘Oh, that plot was used by Shakespeare’—or Chekhov, De Maupassant, Sheridan, Goethe, Kipling, Stevenson, Conrad, Cooper, or one of a host of other authors.”5
Furthman lived in then-remote Culver City, where he had moved with his wife when neighbors complained about the cries of their mentally handicapped son. In a community that barely read and had little interest in art, he amassed a library of rare books and collections of coins, orchids, and art. He owned works by Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi, and his seven greenhouses