off Fairfax. Sagor claims that Riza was expected to feed them, and even to hold dinner parties, on a budget of $10 a week. This doesn’t square with the 1930 census, which shows the couple maintaining a live-in housekeeper. Nor does it explain a later newspaper report that the house on Drexel was new and built to their specifications. But Sagor clearly hated von Sternberg and resented the relationship. She was also far from impartial on the question of money. Once Riza married, Sagor presented von Sternberg with a bill for his wife’s room and board during her time as Sagor’s houseguest. He refused to pay, igniting a feud that smoldered for decades.
Fortunately for von Sternberg’s career, Adeline “Ad” Schulberg was an admirer. Wife of B. P. Schulberg, West Coast production head of Famous Players–Lasky (FPL), and sister of the studio’s production manager, Sam Jaffe, Adeline had been lobbying her husband to hire von Sternberg ever since The Salvation Hunters. Now Schulberg acquiesced—though only in part. His cable offered work only as an assistant director. Chastened, von Sternberg bent his neck and took the job.
Ben Schulberg wasn’t a typical executive. A British visitor described “a strong-looking relaxed man, who resembled an amiable efficient crocodile smoking a large cigar.”6 In his early thirties, Schulberg was aligned with East Coast leftist culture rather than the gold-rush mentality of California. FPL/Paramount introduced von Sternberg to the pleasures of studio filmmaking. He even accumulated a retinue, beginning with a pretty script girl, Alice White. “After two weeks,” recalled White, “he told me I was an excellent script girl, but that I didn’t have the temperament for this business. For $18 a week, he wanted temperament! So I got temperamental!” She left to work for Chaplin, then went to First National, where she started acting and became a famous “jazz baby.”
FPL/Paramount ran two studios—one in Los Angeles, managed by Schulberg, and another in Astoria, Queens, where Walter Wanger was in charge. Paramount enjoyed none of MGM’s prestige, although it was eager to acquire some. In hiring Schulberg, Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor hoped for an equivalent of MGM’s Irving Thalberg—someone able to conceive an entire slate of films, not just a single production, and manage a regiment of egotistical, chronically misbehaving creative people.
Toward the end of the 1920s, studios started developing distinctive individual styles. MGM, under head designer Cedric Gibbons, aimed for a hard-edged gleam, typified by its Scandinavian and American roster of talent. At Paramount, the influence was German and Austrian, with technicians recruited from UFA in Berlin and Sascha-Film in Vienna. Instead of high gloss, its films opted for soft focus and the new styles of performance and design pioneered by Reinhardt at the Kammerspiele in Vienna, which had no proscenium and no curtain. Effects were achieved with light alone, or by hanging translucent scrims onto which shadow effects were projected. Von Sternberg came under the influence of senior art director Hans Dreier, imported from UFA in 1923. Although von Sternberg liked to say he “dictated” the look of his films, dictation is not creation. He needed talented individuals to realize his conceptions, and none was more gifted than Dreier, who worked on all von Sternberg’s Paramount productions. Dreier weaned him from the realism of von Stroheim and replaced it with the veiled sensuality typified by The Docks of New York. His contribution to the von Sternberg style was crucial. (It goes without saying that he receives no mention in Fun in a Chinese Laundry.)
Before taking over at FPL, Schulberg had his own company, Preferred. Its most precious asset was Clara Bow, whom he had discovered, put under personal contract, and made both a star and his mistress before bringing her to FPL in 1925. Bow was a petite five feet three inches tall, pinchably plump, and flagrantly sexual. With her brunette curls reddened with henna, she embodied the “flapper,” the liberated modern woman typified by novels such as Flaming Youth and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. Her first Paramount film was It, inspired, remotely, by Elinor Glyn’s sensational book that suggested only the elusive “It”—shorthand for sex appeal—conferred satisfaction and happiness. When director Clarence Badger became ill during production, someone was needed to cover for him, and although von Sternberg always denied that he worked on It, he almost certainly shot a day or two. It was his first job at Paramount, and the fact that there were no tantrums, from either him or the stars, reassured Schulberg.
Riza continued to fret over her failure as an actress. Increasingly she listened to Sagor and Blanca Holmes (wife of Stuart Holmes), who became a celebrated astrologer and counseled everyone from Maria Montez to Marilyn Monroe. Holmes decreed that Riza’s problems would be solved by a nose job. In October, without consulting her husband, she had it surgically straightened. Furious, he refused to pay for the operation and ordered her out of the house. Fleeing to the Dupont Hotel, Riza, still bandaged from her surgery, wasted no time in informing the Los Angeles Times that she would divorce him.7
At this moment, paradoxically, Schulberg asked von Sternberg to work on a film of Owen Johnson’s novel Children of Divorce. Set on the French Riviera, it follows two cousins, Kitty and Jean, who clash over Ted, heir to a fortune—all three of them children of divorce. This sets the stage for a melodrama of love and renunciation.
During the shooting of It, Clara Bow spotted lanky newcomer Gary Cooper. He became both her lover and her costar in Children of Divorce, with Esther Ralston as the third participant in the love triangle. Shooting began in November 1926 under Victor Fleming, who had shared Bow’s bed before Cooper. They had even planned marriage, but Bow knew her limitations. “I couldn’t live up to his subtlety,” she said.8 Cooper made fewer intellectual demands. “He’s hung like a horse,” Clara confided to another young actress, Hedda Hopper, “and can go all night!”9
Furious at the Cooper-Bow romance, Fleming quit Children of Divorce and consoled himself with Alice White. The film passed to veteran director Frank Lloyd, who was unable to discipline the two flagrantly lustful stars. Also, Pasadena and Del Monte in rainy midwinter hardly resembled the Côte d’Azur. Viewing the result after Christmas, Schulberg decided the film needed some European sophistication, and he turned to von Sternberg. Suppressing his memory of how Louis and Hope Lighton had connived to butcher The Exquisite Sinner, he worked with them to rewrite and restage Children of Divorce. The actors, having gone on to new films, were available only at night, so shooting took place after hours. As all the sets had already been struck, von Sternberg and cinematographer Victor Milner filmed everything in a tent, timing shots between rainstorms. This gave von Sternberg complete command of lighting, particularly during Bow’s death scene (suicide by poison) in Ralston’s arms. Shadows and texture imposed a poignant atmosphere not present in Bow’s acting. “She was dying,” recalled Ralston, “and I was kneeling beside her, weeping. She was chewing gum. She had this great wad of gum in her face when they said, ‘All right, Clara, get the gum out. We’re going to shoot the scene.’ She took the gum out, put it back of her ear, and died. Well, that struck me as so funny, I howled, and they had to wait for me to stop laughing before I could cry again.”10
Children of Divorce showed that von Sternberg could be a company man and work as part of a team. He was rewarded by Schulberg with the film that would launch his reputation. He also reconciled with Riza, who withdrew her divorce petition, propping up the troubled marriage for at least one more year.
The City of Dreadful Night
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
—Carl Sandburg, Chicago
ONCE THE 1920 VOLSTEAD Act made it illegal to sell alcohol in the United States,
