Von Sternberg. John Baxter
… for the spiritual significance of the original [story]. The story is told on the screen in a brisk and logical manner which unifies the plot and holds the attention of the audience.” But new previews didn’t confirm this judgment. Despite more retakes, and retitling as Heaven on Earth, the film remained a flop.
While the studio hacked at The Exquisite Sinner, von Sternberg was assigned a melodrama of the Parisian underworld, The Masked Bride. Gaby, a onetime thief but now a dancer in a Montmartre café, meets Grover, an American millionaire. They fall in love, but before they can be married, Antoine, her former partner in both dancing and burglary, forces her to steal a necklace from Grover, threatening to kill her lover if she doesn’t. Both are caught, but Grover, realizing that Gaby did it for love, marries her anyway. The studio assigned two actors from von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow to the film: Mae Murray as Gaby, and Roy D’Arcy as the Prefect of Police. In addition, Ben Carré, one of the old French contingent at World, designed the production. But news of the mutilation of The Exquisite Sinner stretched von Sternberg’s patience too far. After two weeks he ordered cinematographer Oliver Marsh to turn the camera to the ceiling and film the rafters as an expression of contempt, and he left the set. Shortly after, MGM terminated his contract.
On August 12, 1925, von Sternberg went public in the Los Angeles Times. “I was given very little choice in the selection of my story, or the cast,” he complained, “or opportunity to aid in writing the scenario, titling, editing, or even in methods of direction…. I am glad that the break has been made, and think it is a fine thing for me.” Christy Cabanne finished The Masked Bride. Von Sternberg disowned the film, and he never forgave MGM. Throughout his tenure at Paramount in the 1930s, a board in his outer office listed past projects, with comments on their fate. After “Opus # 1. The Salvation Hunters” came “Opus # 2—The Exquisite Sinner,” with the note “(Sabotaged by Thalberg).”
With time on his hands, von Sternberg continued writing. His one fiction success was a short story, “The Waxen Galatea.” Published in 1925 in the trade magazine The Director, it describes a repressed young man whose sexual ideal is represented by a shop-window mannequin made of wax. Finding a woman who resembles the dummy, he falls in love with her, only to despair when she chooses a rival. Embittered, he returns to the abstract love of the inanimate figure, forever perfect, forever faithful. The story has significant resonance with von Sternberg’s private life. All three of his wives were younger, unassertive women he could dominate, and in Marlene Dietrich he found a performer willing to let herself be molded to his ideal.
A by-product of Chaplin’s patronage was the opportunity to socialize with the star and his cronies, who gathered for breakfast at Henry’s, a Hollywood Boulevard café not far from the studio. Another customer was an actress with a formidable profile named Riza Royce. She had arrived in Los Angeles in August on a contract from B. P. Schulberg, having graduated from the Ziegfeld Follies to some minor success in Broadway comedies. But Royce was making little headway, despite efforts by her friend, screenwriter Frederica Sagor, who provided room and board until the actress found more work. It’s hard to imagine the reticent von Sternberg picking up a girl, but he bought Royce a cup of coffee and a doughnut and invited her to join Chaplin’s table. She soon became a fixture there, and in his life.
Three Sheets to the Wind
What decadent rubbish is this?
—Madame Arkadina in Anton Chekhov’s The Sea Gull
VON STERNBERG’S ACCOUNT OF the next episode in his career was laconic. “During a period when I was confronted with failure,” he wrote, “[Charles Chaplin] asked me to direct a film for him. This was quite a distinction, as he had never honoured another director in this fashion, but it only resulted in an unpleasant experience for me.”
The film, variously known as Sea Gulls (its official title in the Chaplin studio records) or The Sea Gull, was retitled by von Sternberg The Woman Who Loved Once and then, definitively, A Woman of the Sea by Chaplin, to remind people that leading lady Edna Purviance had starred in his own A Woman of Paris. Purviance was one of many old girlfriends Chaplin left behind as he strove single-mindedly for success. Evidently feeling guilty about abandoning her, he kept her on salary all her life and tried to restart her career from time to time.
Innocent and winning as she appeared in The Immigrant and other Chaplin films, Purviance was not a natural actress. “I suffered untold agonies,” she wrote. “Eyes seemed to be everywhere. I was simply frightened to death.” Von Sternberg claimed she found relief in alcohol—corroborated by an incident on New Year’s Day, 1924. At a party at Purviance’s house, attended by her fiancé Courtland Dines and her actress friend Mabel Normand, Dines was shot and wounded by Horace Greer, Normand’s chauffeur. Police found quantities of then-illegal liquor in the house, and Greer was charged with attempted murder. His attorney described the party as a “Roman saturnalia” and his client—though admittedly an ex-con—as the “only clean soul in the midst of a bunch of drunks.” With A Woman of Paris still in the theaters, the case caused comment, and some exhibitors pulled the film. A scandal appeared imminent. However, the April 1924 trial showed every indication of strings being discreetly pulled, probably by Chaplin. Greer declined to testify about the party, supposedly out of respect for Normand, and the jury returned a speedy acquittal.
Following this incident, Purviance’s nervousness increased. She didn’t work for more than a year and in August 1925 left for a long rest in Europe. She stopped off in New York to see Chaplin, where he was dallying with his latest lover, Louise Brooks. He told her that if any European film project caught her interest, he might be willing to invest in it. That November, Chaplin spent some time 300 miles north of Los Angeles near Monterey, where his friend Harry Crocker owned the stretch of coast near Carmel that is now Seventeen Mile Drive and Pebble Beach golf course. He returned to Los Angeles with the idea of setting a future production there. When Purviance arrived back in December 1925, he offered to star her in such a film and proposed von Sternberg as the director and writer.
To von Sternberg, the promise of Chaplin’s near-limitless resources and prestige seemed the answer to every prayer. But people still argue over the part played by Chaplin in the conception and eventual destruction of what became A Woman of the Sea. One of the few movie professionals with firsthand knowledge of the project was John Grierson, an aggressive young Scot in California on a three-year Rockefeller research fellowship to study the psychology of propaganda. A few years later, back in Britain, he would put his findings to work by launching what he christened the “Documentary Film movement.”
Taken under Chaplin’s wing, Grierson saw The Salvation Hunters and met von Sternberg, whose character didn’t measure up to the Scot’s harsh standards. “It struck me that sensibility of his peculiarly intensive and introspective sort was not a very healthy equipment for a hard world,” he wrote. “A director of this instinct is bound to have a solitary and (as commerce goes) an unsuccessful life of it. Von Sternberg, I think, was weak.”1 In Grierson’s recollection of The Sea Gull, “the story was Chaplin’s, and humanist to a degree; with fishermen that toiled, and sweated, and lived and loved as proletarians do.”2 Chaplin, he said, admired Charles Dickens and had detected a similar sympathy for ordinary people in The Salvation Hunters. A Dickensian spirit was intended to pervade the film—a point that, Grierson insists, was made clear to von Sternberg before work began. If this is correct, von Sternberg either failed to grasp Chaplin’s wishes or ignored them—more likely the latter, since it wouldn’t be the last time he acted so autocratically.
Harry Crocker showed von Sternberg around Monterey. The net-draped docks, clapboard shacks, and wind-contorted, salt-silvered cypresses of the rocky coastline suggested obvious locations for a drama. Within a few weeks, he had composed a scenario about two sisters from a fishing family. Joan, the Purviance character, is lovable and playful—ideal wife material. In contrast, the glamorous Magdalen, though courted for years by solid but dull fisherman Peter, still hungers