Russian-American Art Club to hear the songs and dances of czarist days. American actresses married European aristocrats and flaunted them at garden parties. However, as the writer concluded admiringly, “von Sternberg’s gag has been von Sternberg.”11
Over There
How Ya Gonna Keep ‘em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?
—Song by Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis, 1918
BY THE TIME THE war ended with the armistice of November 1918, von Sternberg had left the Army War College and was attached to the Medical Corps in Washington, D.C. He wasn’t demobilized until 1919, and then only after William Brady intervened. He found the film industry much changed. In 1916 Brady had forced Lewis Selznick out of World and switched to stage-bound melodramas that exploited his Broadway connections. These proved so unpopular that he sold his interest back to Selznick in 1918, having lost millions for his backers and instilled a caution about investing in the cinema that persists on Wall Street today.
With World nearly defunct, von Sternberg looked for other work in New York but had little success. Some of the French artists and technicians from Fort Lee were back in Paris, but Émile Chautard remained. He hired von Sternberg as his assistant on the 1919 adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s detective story The Mystery of the Yellow Room and let him direct a few scenes. In August 1920 he worked for two weeks as assistant on Twisted Souls, a country house murder melodrama directed by George Kelson, a former World director who frequently worked as assistant to Harley Knoles. Stage magician Howard Thurston appeared in the film as an upright Western spiritualist who unmasks the methods of fake mediums from India. Von Sternberg also received credit (as “Jo Sternberg”) as assistant to Wallace Worsley (later director of The Hunchback of Notre Dame) on The Highest Bidder, released in 1921. It marked his first meeting with actor Lionel Atwill, his alter ego in The Devil Is a Woman.
With the industry migrating west, von Sternberg turned to Hollywood, which was flourishing as the public developed a taste for spacious action films. Unwilling to pay for a sleeping berth on the train, he sat up for the entire five-day journey, sustained by sandwiches. But Los Angeles proved no paradise. After New York, with its teeming crowds, public transport, and easy access, the emptiness disquieted him. He saw “only a barren village, [and] after a week of walking along empty streets lined with eucalyptus trees, not having seen a single soul connected with films, I made my way back again.”
War had shattered the cinemas of Germany and France, allowing the U.S. industry, fat on three years free of competition, to devour most continental theater chains, production facilities, and talent. Any European director or performer of conspicuous ability quickly received an invitation from Hollywood. All the same, von Sternberg felt a greater affinity with European methods than American ones, and he crossed the Atlantic on a cattle boat in 1921. He went straight to Vienna, visiting the city six times that year. On each occasion he lived at Gartnerstrasse 9, listing his profession as “film director.” (The apartment apparently belonged to a relative, since he also stayed there in 1925.) He looked up his old teacher Karl Adolph, who had won a late reputation for his writing. No doubt pleased to be described by his ex-pupil as “an old-fashioned man who knows [the Viennese] better than any man alive today,”1 Adolph authorized him to make an English version of his 1914 Tochter, a series of stories about working-class life that reflected his years spent as a housepainter. On May 24 von Sternberg called on Arthur Schnitzler, but overcome with nerves, he couldn’t stop talking. Schnitzler had to remind his visitor that he had come to hear the thoughts of the author of Reigen and Traumnovelle, not vice versa. “But,” von Sternberg said, “he told me he had never listened to such a cultured and interesting talk.” For the rest of his life, an inscribed photograph of Schnitzler hung in his office. Of his boldly sexual plays and tales, he said, Schnitzler “was the first one to give me artistic courage.”
From Austria he went to England, where he bought a Triumph motorcycle and crashed it, breaking a kneecap. Looking for work, he gravitated to the Alliance Film Corporation, formed by advertising entrepreneur Sir David Higham. Its fourth production, an adaptation of the opera The Bohemian Girl, was being directed by Harley Knoles, who remembered von Sternberg from World. Knoles hired him as second unit director and sent him to Hungary to shoot background footage. He also worked on 1922’s Love and a Whirlwind, codirected by D. Duncan MacRae and American Harold Shaw and featuring Clive Brook, who later became a favorite von Sternberg actor. No additional work followed, however, and after a period of “aimlessly flounder[ing]” in England, he rode his bike to Italy, determined “to see every church.”
In 1922 a publisher called the International Editor issued von Sternberg’s translation of Adolph’s Tochter as Daughters of Vienna, “freely adapted from the Viennese.” Von Sternberg had translated Adolph’s text literally, changing little except to remove elements that might confuse English readers. In later years he disparaged this attempt at literature. On a copy signed in Carmel, California, in 1930 he wrote, “Curious how a man’s sins crop up in unexpected places.” Two editions were supposedly issued: a regular printing, probably of 500 copies, and a luxury printing of 250 copies signed by von Sternberg, Adolph, and Karl Borschke, who contributed the postage stamp–sized drawings that headed each chapter. But the history of this little book, von Sternberg’s only extended piece of writing before the 1965 publication of Fun in a Chinese Laundry, bristles with inconsistencies. The International Editor, despite claims of having offices in London, New York, and Vienna, apparently never published anything else. Nor has any copy of the limited, signed edition ever appeared for sale. The printer, Frisch and Co., published art books and luxury editions of Schnitzler—who, one might speculate, had some part in what appears to have been a “vanity” project.
Out There
I can’t talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it’s a horror to look back on. I can’t imagine how I did it. When I got away from it, I couldn’t even refer to the place by name. “Out there,” I called it.
—Dorothy Parker
FOR MORE THAN FORTY years, French director Robert Florey served as an unofficial consul to Europeans visiting Hollywood. He and von Sternberg became friendly when the latter, close to his thirtieth birthday, made a second stab at California. This time he lodged in a bungalow near the corner of Vine Street and Hollywood Boulevard—only two blocks, he later noted wryly, from where a star sunk in the pavement commemorates his work. His accommodations were spartan—a single room with a Murphy bed that served as a bureau by day and folded down into a bed at night. He ate alone at nearby Musso and Frank’s, an old-fashioned restaurant with high-backed wooden booths, where he could linger for hours. He was never without a book, usually pocket editions of works by philosophers and historians. Thin and quiet, he exuded an air of brooding melancholy, emphasized by his black shirts, floppy hairdo, and heavy moustache.
In his ancient car, he made the rounds of the many small studios, soon to be absorbed by evolving “majors” such as Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). He may have worked for minor director Lawrence Windom, but it’s not known on what film. He did encounter Hugo Ballin, a former art director at World. Ballin’s wife Mabel had acted there, and in the hopes of reviving her career, Ballin had formed his own company to film Thackeray’s Napoleonic novel Vanity Fair, with Mabel as its scheming heroine Becky Sharp. Von Sternberg served as his assistant, after which he looked for work at Grand-Asher, the low-budget studio of Harry Asher, where Roy William Neill was about to direct By Divine Right. Mildred Harris, ex-wife of Charlie Chaplin, played a stenographer stalked by her lecherous employer. Like most Asher productions, this one hung by a shoestring. Its high point, a train wreck, wasn’t even original but was assembled from miniatures and stock footage. At their interview, Neill, reasonably, asked what the newcomer von Sternberg knew of local conditions. Von Sternberg claims that he went to the window and whistled piercingly. By doing so, he told a startled Neill, one could summon a dozen men with intimate local knowledge