do, since Purviance wasn’t available. Nor does von Sternberg mention reshooting. But Florey writes of seeing “two versions” of the film.3 Florey and Grierson also agree that von Sternberg defied Chaplin’s ban on public screenings and invited a number of friends and reviewers to see it in a Beverly Hills theater. “This put Chaplin into a fury,” says Florey, “particularly when the critics confirmed his opinion.”4 It was never shown again in public. In 1933 Chaplin destroyed all prints, clearing the way for A Woman of the Sea to be written off as a total loss for tax purposes. In 1991, in another exercise in tax reduction, his widow authorized the destruction of the last printed materials.
Chaplin never adequately explained the reasons for his dissatisfaction with the film. Maybe, as Grierson claims, he simply expected a very different version. Alternatively, it could have been pique at von Sternberg’s holding a screening. A more plausible explanation emerged in a 1966 Chaplin interview. A Woman of the Sea, he said, “depressed” him. Anything to do with Purviance had that effect. In 1947 he gave her a walk-on in Monsieur Verdoux. “She … was not bad,” he wrote, “but all the while her presence affected me with a depressing nostalgia, for she was associated with my early success—those days when everything was the future.” Von Sternberg too blamed Purviance, but more directly. “She … had become unbelievably timid,” he wrote, “and unable to act in even the simplest scene without great difficulty, When the camera turned, [she] trembled like the leaf of an aspen. The only remedy for this condition was alcohol, which had caused it, and this was unsuitable. I called for kettledrums, and the timpani distracted her long enough for her to play a part.”
Was Purviance so obviously an alcoholic that her performance made the film unreleasable? Von Sternberg is the only person to suggest so, but the film’s shot lists provide some corroboration. As David Robinson notes in his biography of Chaplin, “For the most part [von Sternberg] was shooting with considerable economy, generally printing the second or third take of a shot. Scenes that demanded work of the slightest complication from Edna, however, seem often to have required nine, ten or more takes.”5 More than ten years later, on I, Claudius, von Sternberg fell into an identical pattern of brief takes for most performers but dozens for scenes featuring the fractious and finally undirectable Charles Laughton.
After Chaplin destroyed the film, Grierson became both the primary source of information and the least reliable. Since documentary —and, in particular, Soviet agitprop—celebrated the nobility of labor, a film that exploited fishermen in a story of what Noël Coward called “high life and low loins” may have offended his political beliefs. In 1929, when Grierson made his only film as a director, Drifters, he chose a portrait of North Sea herring fishermen that might almost be, in its bleak rejection of pictorialism, a repudiation of A Woman of the Sea. In 1932, surveying Hollywood cinema, he attacked the film again, accusing von Sternberg of emphasizing “net patterns, sea patterns, and hair in the wind” and playing “with the symbolism of the sea until the fishermen and fish were forgotten.”6 He called it “the most beautiful picture ever produced in Hollywood, and the least human.”7
Von Sternberg insists that he didn’t resent the suppression of his work and that he and Chaplin remained friendly. He claims they “spent many idle hours with each other, before, during, and after the making of this film, but not once was this work of mine discussed, nor have I ever broached the subject of its fate to him.” Sergei Eisenstein, however, claims that Chaplin confided to him of von Sternberg, “I’ve never met a more disagreeable layabout in all my life.”8
The Ascent of Paramount
American husbands are the best in the world; no other husbands are so generous to their wives, or can be so easily divorced.
—Elinor Glyn
OF A WOMAN OF THE SEA, von Sternberg wrote that it “nearly ended” his career. Offers of directing work dried up. Following the double debacle of the aborted MGM contract and the shelved Chaplin project, nobody would trust him with a film of his own.
On July 6, 1926, Riza Royce phoned her friend Frederica Sagor and asked, “How would you like to stand up for me today? Von Sternberg and I are getting married.”1
Sagor, who had never met the groom and barely knew his name, joined the couple at the West Hollywood sheriff’s office—“a dirty, tiny store with two roll-top desks and two swivel chairs—one for the sheriff and the other for the only working judge [in the district]. A toilet in the back was in plain view. The only other furnishings were a battered broom and a large cardboard box serving as a wastebasket.”2
Sagor thought von Sternberg and Royce “mentally, spiritually, and physically unsuited” and called their union “a curious, if temporary alliance—a marriage convenient for both participants. It lent an aura of security and respectability to an up-and-coming director who felt himself in an atmosphere he did not fully understand or belong in, but in which he was determined to be noticed. For the bride, it was an immediate and happy solution to her financial situation and a heaven-made opportunity to reach her ambition, to achieve stardom, with a talented young husband to further her career.”3
Immediately after the wedding, von Sternberg took his new wife on a three-month honeymoon to Europe. As described to Sagor by Riza, it was no idyll. “On the train trip from LA to New York,” wrote Sagor, “the honeymooners did not splurge on a compartment, but had separate beds. Von Sternberg ordered his bride to the upper berth, while he slumbered below. In New York, to keep expenses down, they stayed in the small Bronx apartment of his mother, sleeping on a broken-down sofa-bed in the living room.”4
Before they sailed, von Sternberg asked Riza to give her winter coat to his mother, promising to buy her another in Europe. Riza complained that he never did, and she shivered across Austria and Germany, but since it was high summer, this seems exaggerated. In Vienna, two weeks after arriving, von Sternberg gave an interview to reporter Georg Herzberg, explaining expansively, “I want to show my young wife Europe and—civilization.” He claimed to be “in negotiation with a big German company,” which Herzberg assumed to be the near-monopolistic Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft, Europe’s largest studio, sited at Neubabelsberg in Potsdam, outside Berlin, and known everywhere as UFA.
In Berlin, Riza discovered the true reason for their visit to Germany. After seeing The Salvation Hunters, Max Reinhardt had suggested that he might find von Sternberg some work in Berlin or even make him director of a theater company. Reinhardt’s innovative production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author had been hugely successful on tour, so von Sternberg proposed that they film it, with him directing and Reinhardt playing the key part of the producer. Although Reinhardt and Vollmoeller were cordial, von Sternberg soon realized it had only been talk. He did make some useful contacts, however, including actor Emil Jannings, but after a few weeks of what a colleague called “sniffing around,” he and Riza returned to Los Angeles. There, according to Sagor, von Sternberg took out his disappointment on his wife, losing no opportunity to belittle and berate her. “Riza was made to understand her inferiority, ignorance, and stupidity,” Sagor wrote. “[Von Sternberg] did not believe she had film possibilities, and would do nothing to advance her career.”5
The
