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 profound.
—Hugh Wheeler, A Little Night Music
SO LOW WAS VON STERNBERG’S opinion of the man who helped him make his first feature that he doesn’t even mention his name in Fun in a Chinese Laundry. Instead, he simply calls the man “Kipps,” after his best-known acting role. Five years his junior, Arthur George Brest, a brash Scot who preferred to be billed as “George K. Arthur,” was a man on the make. In 1921, while living in London, he had learned that U.S. director Harold Shaw planned to film H. G. Wells’s novel Kipps, about a maladroit shop assistant who inherits a fortune but stumbles when he tries to enter high society. A number of candidates for the part were sent to meet Wells, one of whom was Arthur. The actor “accidentally” knocked over a valuable vase in the writer’s home, in effect turning a get-acquainted visit into an audition. “My bewildered embarrassment and contrite (though mute) apologies worked the miracle,” he explained.1
After Kipps, Arthur snared small parts in two movies with D. W. Griffith star Mae Marsh. He also pursued Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks when they visited London. Arthur became so convinced of his own eventual stardom that he abandoned his new wife and sailed for the United States in December 1922. It has been suggested that Arthur and von Sternberg met on that transatlantic crossing, but the latter had actually returned two months earlier. It’s possible, however, that they knew each other in London, since Kipps director Shaw also directed Love and a Whirlwind, on which von Sternberg was an assistant. By the time Vanity’s Price came out, they were sufficiently friendly for Arthur to show von Sternberg a screenplay he’d written, Just Plain Bugs, and ask him to direct it—starring himself, naturally. Arthur even claimed to have raised $6,000—supplied, he whispered, by Chaplin.
At this point, their stories diverge. Von Sternberg says he offered to write a better script as a showcase for their talents, but Arthur says the script already existed. He also denies claiming that Chaplin was involved. According to Arthur:
We … divided up the necessary capital into sixteen shares. I had five and a half shares, von Sternberg four and my sister Doris Lloyd two. We were short of the rest of the money—about £400—and you can guess what luck I had trying to persuade the film people, who are used to films costing at least $25,000, to put money into a picture which was only going to cost so little. However, we started, borrowing a studio and using old scenery, which we “dressed up” ourselves. Eventually things got so bad that we were able to make only four hundred feet of film at a time as we raised the money.2
Von Sternberg calculated that by staging most of the action outdoors, he could shoot for three weeks on Arthur’s $6,000. “I had in mind a visual poem,” he wrote. “Instead of flat lighting, shadows. In the place of pasty masks, faces in relief, plastic and deep-eyed. Instead of scenery which meant nothing, an emotionalized background that would transfer itself into my foreground. Instead of saccharine characters, sober figures moving in rhythm…. And dominating all this was an imposing piece of machinery: the hero of the film was to be a dredge.”
As a first step, he rowed out to the dredge perched on a barge in San Pedro harbor and persuaded the operators to let him shoot there. Meanwhile, a cast and crew were rounded up. Cinematographer Eddie Gheller, though moderately experienced, probably acted mainly as the camera operator, given von Sternberg’s intimate knowledge of film lighting. The assistant director, credited variously as “Peter” or “George Ruric,” was George Carrol Sims; later, as “Paul Cain,” he would write for crime pulps such as Black Mask, as well as scripting two distinctive thrillers: Edgar Ulmer’s The Black Cat, with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and Grand Central Murder.
Von Sternberg and Arthur always
