saw many such dredges at work as Manhattan created new land by dumping garbage and deepened the Hudson and East rivers to accommodate larger ships carrying yet more immigrants. Father and son agreed on the deficiencies of New York, and in 1904, Moses sent the family back to Vienna while he remained in the United States.
Serafin was pregnant, and a third son, Heinrich, was born the following year. Their new home in Vienna, the middle story of a freestanding house, was an improvement over the Blumauergasse tenement. A carpenter’s workshop occupied the street level, while in the loft above them, housemaids aired and dried washing. The family scratched along on odd jobs and charity from Serafin’s family. Young Jonas found an after-school job grazing circus horses in the Prater, but it lasted only for the summer. During the winter of 1905 he was forced to endure the humiliation of lining up with other poor children for a free overcoat from the city—on which, to make everyone aware of its largesse, the council had embroidered its coat of arms. He unpicked this badge of poverty. In 1960, when the mayor of Vienna proposed to present von Sternberg with a medal, he “described the decoration that had honored me when I was cold.” The mayor promised to end the practice immediately.
At eleven, Jonas enrolled in a local gymnasium, a form of high school inferior to the more demanding lyceum. One of his teachers was Karl Adolph, a former housepainter who later earned a modest reputation as a writer, publishing collections of stories about working-class life in the Austrian capital. Adolph’s stories concentrated on the peasant girls, drawn to the city from all over the empire by employment as maids or laundresses, who offered rich pickings to the city’s bachelors.
Between eleven and fourteen, von Sternberg’s adolescent preoccupation with sex developed into a lifelong interest. Obscene graffiti gave him a knowledge of anatomy, which improved when he gathered in a cellar with some other boys to watch a girl on a swing show herself naked under her skirt. He had a few brushes with homosexuality. A teacher invited him to his apartment, ostensibly to help with his studies but actually to make advances, and an older boy pursued him with poems and even flowers. Jonas claimed to be indifferent, as he was to the men who pressed themselves against him on crowded streetcars.
Because his work deals so frequently but often obliquely with sex, this has invited speculation about von Sternberg’s sexuality. Superficially, he was almost obsessively heterosexual. Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, overheard her mother saying, “Of course, Jo, being a Jew, never stops—they always want to do it, all the time! Especially if they are small and have a thing for tall, blue-eyed Christians!”3 Dissenting opinions come mostly from those who disliked him. Sergei Eisenstein, initially an admirer and then a jealous rival, suggested that von Sternberg was, like himself, homosexual, with a taste for well-built young men, but this sounds more like bile than a serious claim.4 Screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas, a friend of von Sternberg’s first wife, Riza Royce (and thus no champion of Josef’s), commented tartly that the marriage may not have been consummated because, “according to Riza, Josef von Sternberg’s equipment was faulty.”5 Obviously it functioned well enough, since he married three times and fathered a son. Less easy to ignore are the indications of masochism, particularly in relation to Marlene Dietrich, his star and lover for almost a decade. If not for reasons of sexual gratification, why would he have stood by, stoically, as a succession of men and women occupied her bed and claimed her affections? To clarify their relationship, in almost every film he made after she entered his life, he included the character of a frustrated, impotent, or abandoned lover, costumed and made up to resemble himself. Only one scene in his work is directly traceable to a childhood sexual experience. While swimming in the Alte Donau, a dammed-off branch of the Danube, he blundered into a group of nude women, who warned him off in the impolite local German. He replicated that moment in one of his most sensual sequences, the opening of Blonde Venus, where Herbert Marshall and hiking friends encounter Dietrich and her companions naked in a forest pool.
At thirteen, Jonas did fall in love with a girl. He praised her “graceful posture [and] proud stride,” her “lithe and alluring” body and “long swinging braids,” and wrote of “trembling for hours on a street waiting to catch a distant glimpse.” He was desolate when he saw her kissing a more forward friend. It is inviting to compare her with Dietrich’s character in Dishonored, who fools rival spy Victor McLaglen with an imitation of a country maiden—dirndl, braids, and all. Despite describing his early sexual stirrings as a “song of the flesh [in the midst of which] we were as innocent as are newly born kittens” and claiming, “I sought only companionship and affection,” he had already cast himself as the passive partner, squirming while more confident rivals swept away the object of his desire. Revealingly, he said of this first love, “she permitted me to worship her, and in turn she worshipped herself”—a capsule description of his male protagonists’ relationship with women. “There was no guilt in me, no stealth and no fear,” he wrote—adding, ominously, “though these chimeras developed with time.”
An Artist’s Life
Von Sternberg is a painter in the narrowest and broadest senses of the word.
—Max Reinhardt1
VON STERNBERG’S LIFE IN Vienna ended in 1908 when Moses, who became a U.S. citizen in 1906, decided that the family should rejoin him in the United States. He’d found steady work in the clothing business. His naturalization application lists his profession as “furrier,” and the 1910 census as “lace worker.” To signify his commitment to his adoptive home, Moses changed his name to Morris. On their arrival in the United States, Serafin became Serafina, Heinrich was renamed Henry, Hermine became Minna, and Siegfried was known as Fred. Jonas assumed the more common Josef but never liked the diminutive Joe. He always signed himself “Jo,” a reminder of the original. Since Moses was naturalized, the entire family automatically acquired U.S. citizenship.
A million immigrants passed through Ellis Island in 1908, many squeezing into the tenements of New York’s five boroughs. The Sternbergs lived at various addresses around Brooklyn before settling in Nassau County at 57 Lloyd Avenue, Lynbrook, where Morris remained for the rest of his life. Josef enrolled in Jamaica High School in Queens. He lasted there only a year before an aunt found him a $4 a week job sweeping up in a millinery shop—one source of the later rumor that he began working life as “a pants-presser from Brooklyn.”2 From there, he moved to a lace warehouse on Fifth Avenue, probably the one where Morris worked. The 1910 census lists him as “errand boy.” His work gave him an intimacy with fabric and lace, but also a contempt for working-class Americans. His colleagues spent their time boasting of whores they had visited, commiserating about their doses of the clap, and indulging in pranks, such as waylaying Josef after work, getting him drunk—for the first and last time in his life, he claims—and pulling down his pants to decorate his behind with the company’s date stamp.
Morris’s bad temper didn’t mellow with age, and he frequently took it out on his family. “He and my father didn’t get along,” confirms von Sternberg’s son Nicholas, “due to my grandfather’s rough handling of my father when he was young.”3 It was particularly galling that, after each beating, he required the children to kiss his hand. Eventually Josef stood up to his father when he tried to beat young Fred, a courageous gesture for someone who had stopped growing at five feet five inches tall. Morris never struck his sons again but continued to inflict his ill temper on Serafina, who left him to live with relatives in the Bronx. The 1910 census shows Morris Sternberg as a single parent living in Brooklyn with his five children. The three youngest later moved in with their mother. Seventeen-year-old Josef preferred independence and left home. For the next year he shoveled snow, drove a team of horses to
