a gaggle of parasitic relatives and rapacious prospective in-laws. After attempting suicide, he’s placed in a rural “rest home,” from which he flees, pursued by his fiancée’s father and a posse of police. Meeting a gypsy girl, Silda, he joins her band in the woods, where he settles down to a life of art.
Expedience rather than appropriateness dictated the choice of this subject for von Sternberg. King Vidor’s The Big Parade, a romance between a wounded American soldier and a French peasant, had been the decade’s biggest hit for MGM. Thalberg wanted something similar and assigned the same actress, Renée Adorée, to the film. Von Sternberg worked on the scenario with Alice D. G. Miller, daughter of the better-known Alice Duer Miller. The younger Miller began her career with D. W. Griffith, whose sentimental tastes were evident in her writing for films such as Slave of Desire, So This Is Marriage, and Lady of the Night. We know nothing of how Escape was adapted, but much can be inferred from its incongruous new title, The Exquisite Sinner. Opposite Adorée, Conrad Nagel, a favorite of Louis B. Mayer, played Dominique. Von Sternberg found a small role for George K. Arthur. A young model from Montana named Myrna Loy, who had posed for photographer Harry Waxman, was lightly draped in netting and plastered with white greasepaint to play a “living statue” in an artist’s studio—her Hollywood debut.
With Florey as “technical adviser,” von Sternberg tried to instill some French atmosphere into the film. Although they visited Quebec to scout locations, MGM insisted on recycling a chateau set left over from 1923’s In the Palace of the King. The rest was shot in a village mocked up on the back lot. Von Sternberg did his best to personalize the sets, pasting up posters and daubing walls with graffiti. Determined to show he was his own man, he had a large sign painted with the words “Please BE SILENT Behind Camera.” (As a joke, the actors posed for a photograph with von Sternberg and the sign, fingers to lips. He did not appear amused.) On location, he arrived wearing another pawnshop find, a bulky fur-lined overcoat that had belonged to a Shakespearean actor. However, he reserved his special performance for the first day of shooting. Florey was a witness:
Thirty gendarmes were supposed to march into a Breton village…. At 8.45 von Sternberg arrived on the set. All the actors were lined up. He passed before them in review, inspecting them from head to foot, their sergeant-major waiting at a respectful distance. When he arrived at the twenty-first gendarme, von Sternberg stopped, hypnotising the poor man. Then he turned to the technicians and shouted angrily, “What do you take me for? For [Fred] Niblo or [King] Vidor? Who do you think I am?” Enraged, he began rapping on the camera with his cane, to the alarm of Max Fabian, the cameraman. “Get me the head of production. I will not permit you to mock me” etc. [His producers] arrived at the gallop, and von Sternberg exposed the reason for his protest. “A button is missing from the tunic of this gendarme. I will not endure an insult of this sort! “3
Having just endured three months of such behavior from von Stroheim on The Merry Widow, MGM bridled at getting it from a near unknown. All the same, such antics might have been tolerated if the completed film had been good, but opinions on The Exquisite Sinner were divided. Somewhat puzzlingly, given von Sternberg’s solemnity, Florey called it “full of interest, and … the humour of which von Sternberg was a master.”4 On surer ground, he praised the luminous photography, with its shadows and silhouette scenes. Even John Grierson acknowledged the beauty of the sequence in which Dominique marries Silda in the forest. The New Yorker described it as “harsh and beautiful and sincere.”5 But preview audiences found the film obscure. A studio assessor agreed. While conceding that “Mr. von Sternberg has a photographic talent all his own,” he complained, “in vain we are looking in the picture for the theme of the story—the longing of a man for freedom.” Rewritten intertitles didn’t help, so producers Hunt Stromberg and Eddie Mannix were directed to find a solution. Ideas were solicited from staff members. In August the studio accepted a proposal from husband-and-wife team Hope Loring and Louis Lighton, who had fabricated a screenplay from a flimsy short story called “It” by Elinor Glyn. They suggested remaking The Exquisite Sinner as a screwball comedy. “Ninety-nine people out of a hundred want MONEY!” they wrote. “And these ninety-nine would feel that any man who runs away from money—just because he wants to PAINT—is crazy! THEREFOR we suggest the following angle—FARCE COMEDY—on the story.”
Phil Rosen shot the new version, eliminating most if not all of von Sternberg’s footage. Florey remained as assistant director, fuming as Rosen discarded Adorée’s authentic costume of head scarf, earrings, and simple dress for a Breton bonnet, laced bodice of the sort worn by Swiss milkmaids, flowered apron, and wooden clogs. Silda became “Marcelle,” and Dominique was renamed “Edmond Durand.” The studio reader, who rated the new version “pretty good,” warned, “we mustn’t look … for the spiritual significance of the original [story]. The story is told on the screen in a brisk and logical manner which unifies the plot and holds the attention of the audience.” But new previews didn’t confirm this judgment. Despite more retakes, and retitling as Heaven on Earth, the film remained a flop.
While the studio hacked at The Exquisite Sinner, von Sternberg was assigned a melodrama of the Parisian underworld, The Masked Bride. Gaby, a onetime thief but now a dancer in a Montmartre café, meets Grover, an American millionaire. They fall in love, but before they can be married, Antoine, her former partner in both dancing and burglary, forces her to steal a necklace from Grover, threatening to kill her lover if she doesn’t. Both are caught, but Grover, realizing that Gaby did it for love, marries her anyway. The studio assigned two actors from von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow to the film: Mae Murray as Gaby, and Roy D’Arcy as the Prefect of Police. In addition, Ben Carré, one of the old French contingent at World, designed the production. But news of the mutilation of The Exquisite Sinner stretched von Sternberg’s patience too far. After two weeks he ordered cinematographer Oliver Marsh to turn the camera to the ceiling and film the rafters as an expression of contempt, and he left the set. Shortly after, MGM terminated his contract.
On August 12, 1925, von Sternberg went public in the Los Angeles Times. “I was given very little choice in the selection of my story, or the cast,” he complained, “or opportunity to aid in writing the scenario, titling, editing, or even in methods of direction…. I am glad that the break has been made, and think it is a fine thing for me.” Christy Cabanne finished The Masked Bride. Von Sternberg disowned the film, and he never forgave MGM. Throughout his tenure at Paramount in the 1930s, a board in his outer office listed past projects, with comments on their fate. After “Opus # 1. The Salvation Hunters” came “Opus # 2—The Exquisite Sinner,” with the note “(Sabotaged by Thalberg).”
With time on his hands, von Sternberg continued writing. His one fiction success was a short story, “The Waxen Galatea.” Published in 1925 in the trade magazine The Director, it describes a repressed young man whose sexual ideal is represented by a shop-window mannequin made of wax. Finding a woman who resembles the dummy, he falls in love with her, only to despair when she chooses a rival. Embittered, he returns to the abstract love of the inanimate figure, forever perfect, forever faithful. The story has significant resonance with von Sternberg’s private life. All three of his wives were younger, unassertive women he could dominate, and in Marlene Dietrich he found a performer willing to let herself be molded to his ideal.
A by-product of Chaplin’s patronage was the opportunity to socialize with the star and his cronies, who gathered for breakfast at Henry’s, a Hollywood Boulevard café not far from the studio. Another customer was an actress with a formidable profile named Riza Royce. She had arrived in Los Angeles in August on a contract from B. P. Schulberg, having graduated from the Ziegfeld Follies to some minor success in Broadway comedies. But Royce was making little headway, despite efforts by her friend, screenwriter Frederica Sagor, who provided room and board until the actress found more work. It’s hard to imagine the reticent von Sternberg
