Von Sternberg

The Ascent of Paramount

The Ascent of Paramount American husbands are the best in the world; no other husbands are so generous to their wives, or can be so easily divorced. —Elinor Glyn OF A WOMAN OF THE SEA, von Sternberg wrote that it “nearly ended” his career. Offers of directing work dried up. Following the double debacle of the aborted MGM contract and the shelved Chaplin project, nobody would trust him with a film of his own. On July 6, 1926, Riza Royce phoned her friend Frederica Sagor and asked, “How would you like to stand up for me today? Von Sternberg and I are getting married.”1 Sagor, who had never met the groom and barely knew his name, joined the couple at the West Hollywood sheriff’s office—“a dirty, tiny store with two roll-top desks and two swivel chairs—one for the sheriff and the other for the only working judge [in the district]. A toilet in the back was in plain view. The only other furnishings were a battered broom and a large cardboard box serving as a wastebasket.”2 Sagor thought von Sternberg and Royce “mentally, spiritually, and physically unsuited” and called their union “a curious, if temporary alliance—a marriage convenient for both participants. It lent an aura of security and respectability to an up-and-coming director who felt himself in an atmosphere he did not fully understand or belong in, but 61 Von Sternberg 62 in which he was determined to be noticed. For the bride, it was an immediate and happy solution to her financial situation and a heaven-made opportunity to reach her ambition, to achieve stardom, with a talented young husband to further her career.”3 Immediately after the wedding, von Sternberg took his new wife on a three-month honeymoon to Europe. As described to Sagor by Riza, it was no idyll. “On the train trip from LA to New York,” wrote Sagor, “the honeymooners did not splurge on a compartment, but had separate beds. Von Sternberg ordered his bride to the upper berth, while he slumbered below. In New York, to keep expenses down, they stayed in the small Bronx apartment of his mother, sleeping on a broken-down sofa-bed in the living room.”4 Before they sailed, von Sternberg asked Riza to give her winter coat to his mother, promising to buy her another in Europe. Riza complained that he never did, and she shivered across Austria and Germany, but since it was high summer, this seems exaggerated. In Vienna, two weeks after arriving, von Sternberg gave an interview to reporter Georg Herzberg, explaining expansively, “I want to show my young wife Europe and—civilization.” He claimed to be “in negotiation with a big German company,” which Herzberg assumed to be the near-monopolistic Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft, Europe’s largest studio, sited at Neubabelsberg in Potsdam, outside Berlin, and known everywhere as UFA. In Berlin, Riza discovered the true reason for their visit to Germany . After seeing The Salvation Hunters, Max Reinhardt had suggested that he might find von Sternberg some work in Berlin or even make him director of a theater company. Reinhardt’s innovative production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author had been hugely successful on tour, so von Sternberg proposed that they film it, with him directing and Reinhardt playing the key part of the producer. Although Reinhardt and Vollmoeller were cordial, von Sternberg soon realized it had only been talk. He did make some useful contacts, however , including actor Emil Jannings, but after a few weeks of what a colleague called “sniffing around,” he and Riza returned to Los Angeles. There, according to Sagor, von Sternberg took out his disappointment on his wife, losing no opportunity to belittle and berate her. “Riza The Ascent of Paramount 63 was made to understand her inferiority, ignorance, and stupidity,” Sagor wrote. “[Von Sternberg] did not believe she had film possibilities, and would do nothing to advance her career.”5 The couple moved into a small Spanish-style house at 6252 Drexel, off Fairfax. Sagor claims that Riza was expected to feed them, and even to hold dinner parties, on a budget of $10 a week. This doesn’t square with the 1930 census, which shows the couple maintaining a live-in housekeeper. Nor does it explain a later newspaper report that the house on Drexel was new...