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 but none with his filmmaking skill. Either impressed or desperate, Neill hired him as both assistant director and script editor.
Directors 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.
