“the film director has to consider other men and human material.” He didn’t hesitate to step on the toes of technicians. On Shanghai Express he climbed on top of a locomotive to paint in shadows that the director of photography had failed to provide, and on Crime and Punishment he not only dabbed paint on sets but also physically moved equipment. Nor did his practice of scrawling graffiti across mirrors and walls or plastering sets with posters endear him to art directors. Although the exclusive American Society of Cinematographers honored him with the first membership ever conferred on a director, and many lighting cameramen acknowledged him as an equal, if not their master, just as many resented him. He was to learn that “human material” could harbor a grudge for a dismayingly long time.
In Uniform
The apparel oft proclaims the man.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
IN APRIL 1917 THE United States entered the European war. As Hollywood whipped up hatred of the Hun in its films, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and other stars toured the nation, selling bonds. In July Congress ordered the Army Signal Corps to obtain photographs and create a comprehensive pictorial history of the war. With U.S. troops already in France and General John Pershing installed in Paris, the Signal Crops hurriedly formed a Photographic Section. Moviemakers who had been peeling potatoes, drilling, or learning the workings of an Enfield rifle were whisked to Columbia University in uptown Manhattan, where the School of Military Cinematography ran a six-week course for combat cameraman and photographers. Among them was Victor Fleming, former cameraman for Douglas Fairbanks and later director of Gone with the Wind, as well as future directors Wesley Ruggles; Ernest B. Schoedsack, creator of King Kong; Henry Hathaway, who would work as von Sternberg’s assistant and second unit director on Morocco and other films; and Lev Milstein, who, as Lewis Milestone, showed war from the German side in All Quiet on the Western Front.
Josef Sternberg and his brother Fred enlisted on the same day, June 5, 1917. Jo gave his profession as “lab expert” and his address as the World studios; Fred was listed as “salesman” with Sternberg Brothers, 902 Broadway. Jo went to the Signal Corps, Fred to the Marine Corps. Their ready acceptance into the armed forces is surprising, given the prevailing anti-Teutonic hostility. Many actors with German names adopted something more Anglo-Saxon for the duration. Gustav von Seyffertitz, who later acted in The Docks of New York, Shanghai Express, and Dishonored, became “G. Butler Clonebaugh,” and von Sternberg’s future scriptwriter Jules Furthman used the noms de plume “Stephen Fox” and “Julius Grinnell.” But apparently an Austrian-born editor with an unrepentantly German name working at the heart of the U.S. war information effort aroused no suspicion. His posting even made the trade paper Moving Picture World, which reported, “Joe Sternberg has been stationed at Columbia University, where he will be engaged in important work connected with the preparation of a film which will be used as an aid to training recruits.” It was a milestone of sorts—his first citation in the “trades,” where he would appear with some regularity. Von Sternberg probably planted the story himself.
Von Sternberg’s training films attracted attention, particularly one on the use of the bayonet. According to a 1931 profile, “officers at the cantonments had been complaining that they could order the doughboys to attend showings of these educational pictures, but they could not command them to stay awake. Von Sternberg, wholly uninhibited by censorship for once, began a lesson on the bayonet with a few feet showing what knife wounds looked like. Enthusiastic reports reached the War College; the men had stayed awake, not only during the show, but most of the night as well.”1 Fred was less fortunate. Caught in a gas attack at Belleau Wood in June 1918, he was invalided home. Subsequently the French government awarded his unit, the Fourth Brigade of Marines, a collective Croix de Guerre for courage. After the war Fred found work as a film projectionist, but he never fully recovered his health and died in 1936.
In July 1915 von Sternberg was in Chicago when the steamer Eastland capsized while ferrying employees of the Western Electric Company back from a picnic, causing 844 people to die. “I wept while the bodies were carried off in truck after truck,” he wrote. Such emotion wasn’t typical, since he was already formulating a rebarbative personal style. Jesse Lasky Jr., son of the man who cofounded Famous Players–Lasky, remembered “a short, somewhat hunched figure, opinionated, pompous, seemingly unhumorous, introverted and vain, [who] looked like hell.”2 Much calculation went into this image. At a time when fashion favored a clean-shaven face and neatly trimmed hair, gleaming with pomade, von Sternberg wore his hair long, letting it droop over his pale forehead, conferring a poetic melancholy on his deep brown eyes. Describing him in middle age, Sergei Eisenstein wrote, “He was short, greying, with a slightly artistic haircut. He sported a greyish moustache which drooped unevenly on either side.”3 The moustache was a relatively late addition. In 1922, while on location in Wales as assistant director on Alliance’s Love and a Whirlwind, von Sternberg shared a room with actor Clive Brook, who found him staring into the mirror one morning.
“Which is more horrible?” he asked. “With a moustache or without one?”
When Brook queried the need to look horrible, von Sternberg replied, “The only way to succeed is to make people hate you. That way they remember you.”4
This remained his doctrine, accentuated by a studied, often exaggerated choice of clothes and accessories. He favored red or black shirts and jackets in fabrics and colors that most people shunned but that caught the eye—acid green or a bilious beige—accentuated by contrasting white or yellow shoes. Eisenstein noted a “passion for jackets and short square-cut coats.”5 Before he could afford tailoring, von Sternberg bought these secondhand. Though well made, such hand-me-downs were seldom the right size. “He buys his suits to fit the man he’d like to be, about three sizes too large,” jeered Joseph L. Mankiewicz. “He gets in his pants with a step-ladder, and takes three steps before the suit moves.” Allowing for the malice behind it, the comment is apt. Von Sternberg saw himself as physically larger than he was. Once he became wealthy, he continued to wear well-padded suits and heavy coats that sometimes reached his ankles, while the collars rose above his head. He chose the grandest cars, unconcerned that they dwarfed him, and he kept the largest or most aggressive breeds of dog—Great Danes and Dobermans.
More observant people admired the calculation that went into his wardrobe. Like Woody Allen closer to our own time, he expended money and effort on appearing casual. Berlin painter George Grosz remarked, “His outer garments were … always, naturally, made to measure by the very best tailors. The lapels … were cut like a shawl collar and without buttonholes. Moreover, he favoured waistcoats with long sleeves, as did the equally individualistic Bert Brecht. Von Sternberg also wore soft, broad, comfortably-cut shirt-collars with elongated, slightly protruding points…. It all hinted at a ‘closet’ unconventionality, the kind that did not offend too grossly against the rules of gentlemanly dress.”6 He particularly intrigued visitors from Britain, where clothes signified social class. Two English guests on the set of The Docks of New York in 1928 were sufficiently struck to describe a typical von Sternberg costume. “His rough tweed Norfolk jacket was sportive. His fat walking cane betokened a dash of the country squire; his full-bottomed, well-creased flannel trousers, white with a narrow blue line, hinted at the fashionable beach club; while his shoes, white buckskins with black decorations, lent a touch of lawless fantasy.”7
For a model in both his personal style and his work, von Sternberg looked no further than Erich von
