over, von Sternberg rose, took his cane in one hand and the bundled onions in the other, and then, unexpectedly, said to me, “I have some papers in my room that might interest you.”
I exchanged a glance with David. What was the etiquette here?
“Er … well, thanks,” I began.
“If you come with me now,” he said firmly, “I can give them to you.”
David lifted his hands and bowed his head in acceptance—about all he could do in the circumstances.
An ancient elevator, its linen-fold paneling varnished brown as gravy, took us to the top floor. Leading me along meandering corridors, he unlocked the door of his suite—and we stepped into jungle madness. Skulls as yellow as old ivory grinned from the corners of the room; idols yawned, their torsos gashed with marks of the stone axes that had shaped them. Leaning against overstuffed armchairs were clubs embedded with sharks’ teeth. A throne of black wood, topped with more skulls, sat empty, its seat hollowed and polished by generations of chiefs’ backsides. It was impossible not to be reminded of “Hot Voodoo,” the dance sequence of Blonde Venus, made thirty-five years earlier: A gorilla lumbers onto a nightclub stage, to be unmasked as Marlene Dietrich in disguise. As she emerges from the ape suit, dreamily swaying—a nymph shrugging off its chrysalis—a chorus line of beautiful black women circle her, each carrying a fausse-African shield decorated with a gaping, fanged mouth that evokes the most extreme of male terrors, the vagina dentata—a “vagina that bites.”
More artifacts jammed the bedroom. Additional skulls stared through the door. Each idol, mask, and club had, I realized, a twin.
“Duplicates?”
“Of course.” Was there the ghost of a smile? “One for my collection, and one to sell.”
He handed me a sheaf of papers—the text of an article in some obscure magazine. As we shook hands at the door I saw, over his shoulder on the coffee table, the bundle containing his onions.
Did he spend the next half hour taking his ease on that throne, munching an onion like an apple as he surveyed his hoard? Or did he, the moment the door closed, toss the onions in the wastepaper basket, no longer useful as props in the prank he had played on us? Either way, the mythology of Josef von Sternberg was richer by another anecdote, and the obscurity with which he surrounded himself was one level more profound.
Vienna
I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm.
—Graham Greene, screenplay for The Third Man
EVEN IF WE KNEW nothing about Josef von Sternberg, an unhappy childhood could be inferred from his films. Fathers, if they appear at all, are tyrants. Mothers sacrifice everything for their children, who repay them with petulance or indifference. His men both fear and welcome the lash of contempt that their women wield, and women alone retain their individuality. Summarizing his life, von Sternberg wrote, “Fear always was first, to be dispelled by aggression, always followed by guilt.”1 His contemporary, Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, agreed about his psychological burdens. “He had a most pronounced inferiority complex…. Snobbery could not hide von Sternberg’s trauma about his own inadequacy.”2 In middle age he would write a screenplay called The Seven Bad Years, about “the adult insistence to follow the pattern inflicted on a child in its first seven helpless years, from which a man could extricate himself were he to recognize that an irresponsible child was leading him into trouble.”
He was born Jonas Sternberg on May 29, 1894, in Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father, Moses Sternberg, came from a family of woodworkers but had been inducted into the Austrian army. His mother, Serafin Singer, was the daughter of an instructor who gave classes in German, the “official” language, to recruits; coming from all corners of the imperial domain, these new soldiers might speak any one of a dozen tongues or dialects. Jonas’s parents were unmarried when he was conceived, which scandalized both families. According to his memoirs, Moses and Serafin were “disinherited” when they ignored parental objections to their relationship. Whether there was much to inherit, in fortune or in pedigree, isn’t clear, although even a remote aristocratic connection would account for the readiness with which he later permitted the honorific “von” to be inserted into his name.
No photographs of Moses survive, so we know only what von Sternberg tells us: that he was “handsome and intelligent, … a marvel at anything mechanical, never idle [and] made friends easily.” Moses had apparently written a book on mathematics as a young man, but he was also physically powerful and often beat both his wife and his children. With grudging pride, von Sternberg cites less damning proof of his father’s strength, such as the ability to lift a man by his heels and hold him out at arm’s length. After being pelted with snowballs by other recruits, Moses, according to his son, “demolished” them. As an Orthodox Jew, Moses could have anticipated their hostility. Discrimination riddled the Austrian army, as it did the French, which was even then railroading Alfred Dreyfus to Devil’s Island on a false charge of espionage. The Austro-Hungarian officer class consisted almost entirely of Judenfressers—“Jew-eaters,” as anti-Semites were called. When Jewish officers showed an embarrassing superiority in the saber duels that provided those dashing facial scars, their gentile comrades promulgated the 1894 Waidhofen Manifesto, which proclaimed that Jews, being ethnically subhuman, were born without honor. Accordingly, they could not be insulted and thus were barred from demanding satisfaction in a duel.
Following his marriage, Moses left the army and rented an apartment at Blumauergasse 25 in Wien II, a district consisting of nineteenth-century tenements. The building still stands, a bleak corner block in a lower-class district (with four floors rather than five, as von Sternberg recalled). Jonas grew up by the light of kerosene lamps, with no piped gas or electricity, and never had enough to eat. Relatives of his mother supported them—a pattern that continued through his adolescence, instilling a lifelong frugality.
Sanitation was primitive. Not surprisingly, vermin proliferated. Hunting fleas and other bugs was the usual preliminary to sleep, and von Sternberg took an intense interest when the maids in nearby apartments (who didn’t bother to draw the curtains or lower the blinds) stripped at night to shake their underclothes over dishes of water, drowning the fleas that tumbled out.
Historian Sidney Bolkosky describes fin de siècle Vienna as a battleground of warring extremes: “home to the highest rates of suicide, prostitution, unwed mothers, intrigue, diplomacy of all sorts. Its values included liberal humanism and arch conservatism, patriarchal primacy and, perhaps more significant, misogyny. It was home, too, to Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, and to Adolf Hitler; home, in short to emancipated Jews and to Anti-Semitism.”3 Despite this, von Sternberg retained a romantic affection for the city. “I was born with the fragrance of chestnut blossoms in my nostrils,” he wrote, “the perfume of the old trees that stretched in stately procession to the Danube, not far distant. And the first sounds I heard were mingled with the melodies that floated into my crib from the hurdy-gurdies, calliopes and wondrously decorated mechanical music boxes that serenaded the gallantly uniformed soldiers strolling in the Prater and their servant-girl companions.”
In November 1897 Moses, who had struggled to find work, joined the flood of Europeans seeking a better life in the United States. Three-year-old Jonas, his younger brother Siegfried, and Serafin, pregnant with daughter Hermine, known as Minna, remained behind. For the next four years he lived in
