The Case of Lena Smith and Blonde Venus. Her presence also encouraged his precocious sexual instincts. After spying on the maids as they undressed, he watched with interest as the same girls, now wearing their Sunday best, strolled on the arms of their soldier lovers. He also noted how prostitutes congregated wherever there were crowds. As characters in his films, virtuous women held little interest. Almost invariably, his heroines are unfaithful, duplicitous, and promiscuous, if not unrepentant courtesans.
Young Jonas shared the streets with geniuses as well as whores. In painting, music, and literature, Vienna represented the cutting edge of artistic experimentation. The group calling itself the Secession had broken with the swirling curlicues of the Franco-Belgian art nouveau and, via artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, entered the territory of sexual imagery and the unconscious pioneered by another Austrian, Sigmund Freud. In their music, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss evoked similar states of mind, while writers such as Arthur Schnitzler wove cynical stories around the soldiers and maids von Sternberg saw “stepping out” on Sundays.
These streams of sensation flowed together in the Prater. An imperial hunting preserve until the emperor presented it to the people of Vienna in 1766, this park became the preferred place for Sunday outings. Food stalls and sideshows appeared, and in 1895, the year after von Sternberg’s birth, a major reconstruction transformed it into a permanent amusement area. Two years later the Riesenrad—literally “big wheel”—was erected, destined to become as much a symbol of Vienna as the Eiffel Tower was of Paris, and familiar to film audiences from Carol Reed’s The Third Man.
Serafin told stories of how, as a girl, she had played Snow White in a circus, but it was the Prater that ignited Jonas’s taste for spectacle. He evokes it directly only in The Case of Lena Smith, but a nostalgia for carnivals is evident from their appearance in Underworld, The Drag Net, Dishonored, The Devil Is a Woman, and The King Steps Out, as well as the cabarets of Morocco and Blonde Venus. In his memoirs, von Sternberg rhapsodizes about the Prater: “[its] pirouetting fleas, sword swallowers, tumbling midgets and men on stilts, contortionists, jugglers and acrobats, wild swings with skirts flaring from them … a forest of balloons, tattooed athletes, muscle-bulging weight lifters, women who were sawed in half … trained dogs and elephants, tightropes that provided footing for a gourmet who feasted on a basketful of local sausages with horseradish that made my mouth water.”
In 1889 British author George du Maurier published Trilby: A Novel. Set in nineteenth-century Paris, it describes how a tone-deaf Irish street waif, Trilby O’Ferrall, becomes a great singer under the influence of a hypnotist. Although the name trilby survives mostly as the term for the soft hat with a creased crown worn by the character in the book, the public imagination was caught by the figure of her malevolent impresario, whom du Maurier invests with all of European society’s xenophobia and anti-Semitism.
[He was] a tall bony individual of any age between thirty and forty-five, of Jewish aspect, well-featured but sinister. He was very shabby and dirty, and wore a red beret and a large velveteen cloak, with a big metal clasp at the collar. His thick, heavy, languid, lustreless black hair fell down behind his ears on to his shoulders, in that musician-like way that is so offensive to the normal Englishman. He had bold, brilliant black eyes, with long heavy lids, a thin, sallow face, and a beard of burnt-up black, which grew almost from his under eyelids; and over it his moustache, a shade lighter, fell in two long spiral twists. He went by the name of Svengali.4
Svengali became a synonym for any menacing individual who, acting behind the scenes, directs and manipulates the career of a talented innocent. Once John Barrymore played him in Archie Mayo’s eponymous 1931 film, the name became part of the language. Von Sternberg often attracted the label “Dietrich’s Svengali.” Despite rejecting the comparison in interviews, he encouraged it in his actions, courting dislike and dressing to emphasize his strangeness. At times, the resonance between his behavior and that of the fictional Svengali was eerily exact. “[He] would either fawn or bully,” wrote du Maurier, “and could be grossly impertinent. He had a kind of cynical humor, which was more offensive than amusing, and always laughed at the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. And his laughter was always derisive and full of malice.”5
Love and Other Distractions
Allah be praised for always providing new women.
—Dr. Omar (Victor Mature), in The Shanghai Gesture
YOUNG JONAS LOOKED FORWARD to weekends at the Prater all the more because of the ordeal of his weekdays. He hated the yeshiva, which, beginning at age six, he was forced to attend after regular classes to learn Hebrew. He particularly resented the teacher, a “bearded monster” named Antcherl, on whom he partly modeled Professor Rath in The Blue Angel.
Fortunately, this misery lasted only a year. Though not exactly prospering in the United States, Moses found enough work to send for his family, but not enough to pay their fares, which Serafin borrowed from relatives. In December 1901, with seven-year-old Jonas, little Siegfried, and baby Hermine, she embarked for New York. Because the Austro-Hungarian empire had only one outlet to the sea, the Adriatic port of Trieste, the family had to travel by train to Hamburg, Germany. Until the ship sailed, they took a room in a boardinghouse, the walls of which crawled with red-brown bugs. By comparison, the fourteen-day transatlantic voyage was uneventful, and after screening at Ellis Island, they joined Moses in the Yorkville district of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Although, as in Vienna, they had to climb many flights of stairs to reach their new apartment, it offered the relative luxury of hot water, a bathtub, and a dumbwaiter to bring goods from the ground floor.
Moses took menial jobs, including working at the Coney Island amusement park, where he controlled the flow of water that carried boats through the Tunnel of Love. Meanwhile, in 1904, sister Mole (pronounced “Molly,” but listed in the 1910 census as “Amelia”) was added to the family. Education being free, Jonas enrolled in the local grade school and struggled with English. He soon forgot his German and rarely spoke it for the rest of his life; in fact, when he went to Berlin in 1929 to make The Blue Angel, negotiations were conducted in English. According to Carl Zuckmayer, the film’s principal screenwriter, multilingual playwright Karl Vollmoeller sat in on discussions with von Sternberg, Emil Jannings, Erich Pommer, and himself “as a kind of interpreter, since none of us spoke correct English at the time and von Sternberg did not like to remember his German descent.”1 Von Sternberg’s rejection of his German connections became more pronounced with age. He lied to Cahiers du Cinema in 1963, claiming, “I had never been in Germany before [I made Der Blaue Engel]. I knew nothing about Germany. I was an American director who had come from Hollywood to make the film.”2
Migrants pouring into New York made it the world’s second-largest city after London. But few of today’s residents would recognize it. The Bronx, recently annexed by overflowing Manhattan, remained mostly farmland. Coney Island was still an island, separated from Brooklyn by Coney Island Creek. Oystermen harvested in Jamaica Bay, and fishermen’s shanties lined the shores of Manhattan. With the subway not yet completed, horse-drawn streetcars provided public transport, augmented by elevated railroads such as the one that ran down Sixth Avenue. Horses were so common that doomsayers foresaw their accumulated manure blocking entire streets. (Instead, it dried and blew about, spreading intestinal and respiratory diseases.) Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central had yet to be built. Once they were, pedestrians on Park Avenue choked on coal smoke and cinders until the New York Central was electrified in 1912.
Von Sternberg detested this thrusting, greedy metropolis. He would set his first film as a director, The
