Von Sternberg

Three Sheets to the Wind

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 55 Von Sternberg 56 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 Three Sheets to the Wind 57 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...