Ernst Lubitsch Made the Hollywood Comedy Sublime
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In the summer of 1943, the playwright and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson received word that Ernst Lubitsch, the Berlin-born director of such incandescent Hollywood comedies as “Trouble in Paradise,” “The Shop Around the Corner,” and “Heaven Can Wait,” had suffered a fatal heart attack. Raphaelson, who had written scripts for those films and for many others, set about composing a tribute to Lubitsch, extolling him in terms that few other directors of the era elicited: “However great the cinema historians will eventually estimate him, he was bigger as a person. He was genuinely modest. He never sought fame or coveted prizes. . . . He was as free from guile and pretense as children are supposed to be, and this made him endlessly various and charming.”
Lubitsch had not died, it turned out, though he never fully regained his grinning, cigar-chewing buoyancy. When, in 1947, he worked with Raphaelson again, he let it slip that he had read and appreciated the premature memorial. Out of habit, the two men began going over the text, as if it were a bit in a script. Was it true, Lubitsch wondered, that his pants and coats frequently clashed? Perhaps an overstatement, Raphaelson admitted, but a humanizing touch. About the phrase “free from guile,” Lubitsch said, “You know better than to call me honest”—a line that could fit into any of his films. Only once did he show serious discomfort, and that was at the mention of the historians: “What historians? They’ll laugh at you. A movie—any movie, good or bad—ends up in a tin can in a warehouse; in ten years it’s dust.” He expressed envy for Raphaelson, whose stage plays counted as literature and might live on. Eventually, Lubitsch decided that the tribute was perfect as it was, exaggerations be damned. It was published unaltered when, later that year, Lubitsch’s heart did give out. He was fifty-five.
Raphaelson told the story of Lubitsch previewing his own eulogy in an article for this magazine in 1981. By then, it was evident that the director would not be forgotten—indeed, that Raphaelson would go down in history mainly as a screenwriter. Still, there is no question that Lubitsch’s renown has faded in recent decades. He is best remembered as the purveyor of the so-called Lubitsch Touch, which is understood to mean some blend of cosmopolitan sophistication and winking innuendo. His movies radiate those qualities in abundance, but categorizing him as a kind of cinematic cosmetician sells him short. Technically virtuosic and visually poetic, he elevated comedy to the realm of the sublime. The late Peter Bogdanovich, who knew many of the major filmmakers of the mid- and late twentieth century, wrote that Lubitsch was “the one director whom nearly every other director I ever interviewed mentioned with respect and awe as among the very best.” Jean Renoir put it pithily: “Lubitsch invented the modern Hollywood.”
Billy Wilder, another of the awestruck, enjoyed telling an anecdote from the making of the 1939 classic “Ninotchka,” which he co-wrote and Lubitsch directed. Greta Garbo plays a dour Bolshevik ideologue who falls prey to capitalist temptations in Paris. Wilder and his writing partners, Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch, were struggling to convey the stages of Garbo’s transformation. One day, Lubitsch emerged from the bathroom saying, “It’s the hat.” Here is Wilder’s recounting, more than five decades after the fact:
Wilder can be excused for missing a few details: the hotel is called the Clarence, and Ninotchka actually says, “How can such a civilization survive which permits their women to put things like that on their heads?” (She adds, “Won’t be long now, comrades.”) Adding to the intricacy of the joke is the unambiguous ridiculousness of the hat in question: it looks a bit like an upside-down drinking goblet of Bronze Age manufacture. Bolshevism is being lampooned, but so is capitalist taste. Lubitsch prizes, above all, the freedom to be ridiculous, in the context of whatever ideology.
In a curious twist, Wilder, Lubitsch’s most devout acolyte, has a stronger hold on the public imagination. “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Apartment,” and “Some Like It Hot” are pop-culture monuments, and books about Wilder have piled up: the latest include Joseph McBride’s “Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge,” a critical study of the director’s films, and Noah Isenberg’s “Billy Wilder on Assignment,” a selection of his youthful journalistic writing in Vienna and Berlin. Lubitsch, in contrast, is mostly the terrain of academics, though McBride pleaded for a broader reassessment in a 2018 study, “How Did Lubitsch Do It?”—the title based on a sign that hung in Wilder’s office.
How he did it, no one knows. His films, with their interweaving of formal elegance, sly wit, and emotional ambiguity, resist analysis. His entire career is a singular event: arguably, no director maintained so distinctive an identity within the Hollywood studio system. McBride’s deeply researched, impassioned book nudged me into a Lubitsch obsession, which involved viewing prints at the Museum of Modern Art, exploring archives at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and visiting the director’s daughter, Nicola. I found Lubitsch to be the rare case of a major artist who becomes more likable the more one learns about him. He had nothing dark or demonic in him, even if there were chambers of sadness behind his suggestively closed doors.
The fate of Lubitsch is a familiar one for the comic auteur. The genres on which he thrived and that he helped to establish—romantic comedy, the movie musical, warm-blooded social satire—are routinely overlooked in catalogues of directorial genius. Wilder escaped that lot by demonstrating a flair for drama: “Double Indemnity” and “Ace in the Hole” count among the boldest, bleakest films ever made in Hollywood. Lubitsch’s occasional ventures into “serious” territory are less persuasive. His 1932 antiwar picture, “Broken Lullaby,” about a French veteran who falls in love with the former fiancée of a German soldier he killed, labors under tearjerker tropes, although its raging sorrow at the waste of war commands respect.
An added problem for Lubitsch is that the early-twentieth-century German cinema, from which he emerged, tends to be defined by its artier, eerier products: “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “Nosferatu,” “Metropolis,” and other staples of college classes. The focus on Expressionist styles reflects the long-standing influence of Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner, émigré critics who interpreted German film in light of the country’s slide toward Nazism. As latter-day scholars complain, Kracauer and Eisner emphasized tales of madness and horror over comedies, operettas, melodramas, adventures, and other popular fare of the day. After the First World War, the movie that reopened the American market for German filmmakers was not “Caligari” but “Madame DuBarry” (1919), a vibrant epic of French decadence and revolution. Its director was Lubitsch, whom Eisner dismissed as a “one-time shop assistant” with a penchant for “telling love stories in sumptuous period costume.”
Like so many film pioneers, Lubitsch had Eastern European Jewish roots. His father, Simon, was a Russian-born tailor who had settled in Berlin; his mother, Anna, grew up east of the city. Lubitsch gravitated to the theatre at an early age and was mentored by Victor Arnold, who played comic roles in Max Reinhardt’s celebrated company. Lubitsch, too, became a Reinhardt actor. Although he never advanced beyond bit parts, he was able to study at close range Reinhardt’s brilliant direction of onstage movement. Those lessons are reflected in the vitality of Lubitsch’s party scenes, where everyone seems to be having the time of his life, probably because there was no better party to be found.
Lubitsch received his first film-acting credit in 1913, when he was twenty-one, and made his début as a director a year later, in a short titled “Miss Soapsuds.” He achieved considerable popularity playing a certain comic type: a Jewish schlemiel who, despite his vulgarity and klutziness, maneuvers his way up the social ladder. Critics have debated whether these “milieu films,” usually set in the garment business, indulge anti-Semitic stereotypes. McBride follows scholars like Enno Patalas and Valerie Weinstein in concluding that Lubitsch treats his subjects with a “complex blend of affection and mockery.” Weinstein calls it a form of Jewish camp, dismantling clichés through “exaggerated, theatrical masquerade.” As a performer, Lubitsch is a relentless but irresistible ham; it’s a pity that he stopped acting in 1920.
The German film industry benefitted from its isolation during the First World War; with foreign movies effectively banned, it could develop free of Hollywood’s growing domination. Lubitsch took the opportunity to broaden his template. In “I Don’t Want to Be a Man,” from 1918, Ossi Oswalda plays a rebellious tomboy who decides to dress as a man. On the town, she encounters her natty male guardian (Curt Goetz), who fails to recognize her and goes drinking in her company. Attraction grows, leading to a kiss in broad daylight. When everything is sorted out, the guardian recovers remarkably quickly. He asks, “You let me kiss you?” She answers, “Well, was it not to your taste?” We are only a step away from the gender-bending antics of “Some Like It Hot,” except that Lubitsch is really a step ahead: the casualness about sexuality is thoroughly modern.
The following year, Lubitsch made “The Oyster Princess,” again starring the gleefully anarchic Oswalda. The plot is standard-issue operetta material—an American millionaire’s daughter woos an impoverished European prince—but the visual invention is electrifying. In one scene, the prince’s servant is kept waiting in a palatial room at the millionaire’s mansion. Out of boredom, he becomes absorbed in an elaborate pattern in the floor, and amuses himself by balletically prancing across it. As in the comedies of Jacques Tati, quizzical mischief warms up a cold environment. Later, a stuffy wedding party is overcome by a “foxtrot epidemic.” The exquisitely choreographed chaos—couples kicking their legs in mass formation, the kitchen staff joining in while balancing trays, a bandleader wiggling his butt—is a convulsively musical experience, even without music.
Several other films from Lubitsch’s German period display avant-garde features: surrealist sets, geometrical manipulations of the screen image, self-referential cameos by the director. At the same time, he was devising lavish costume pictures that adroitly mix comedy and drama. In “Madame DuBarry,” aristocratic shenanigans go off with the expected saucy wit; more startling are the helter-skelter scenes of revolution. “The Loves of Pharaoh” (1922) contains sequences of staggering complexity, with thousands of extras in motion. Such proficiency in the epic mode caught the attention of Hollywood, which saw Lubitsch as a European counterpart to D. W. Griffith. Thankfully, he turned out to be something quite different.
When Lubitsch moved to Los Angeles, in December, 1922, his background caused unease. The First World War was not long in the past, and some rabid patriots took umbrage at the idea of a German-speaking filmmaker working in Hollywood. Unlike his predecessor Erich von Stroheim, who had come to America at the age of twenty-four and spoke English fluidly, Lubitsch retained a strong accent. During the Second World War, his Germanic delivery led to a cherished incident on the streets of Bel Air. Lubitsch was serving as the local air-raid warden, identifying blackout infractions as he patrolled the neighborhood in a white helmet. Outside the home of Walter Reisch, an Austrian who tailored scripts for M-G-M, he barked, “Walter—your lights! You have forgotten!” Reisch answered, “Ach, yes, was gibt’s?” (“What’s going on?”) The American director Mervyn LeRoy, hearing this exchange from a neighboring house, merrily yelled, “German paratroopers have taken over!”
The jest had some truth in it: Lubitsch had been the advance agent for a mighty squadron of German-speaking directors, actors, screenwriters, producers, composers, and technicians. Even before Hitler and Goebbels drove hundreds of film people into exile, a substantial German-Austrian colony had formed in Hollywood, with Lubitsch at its center. The director didn’t Americanize himself—nor could he, really. Instead, he fused European and American traditions. “Every good film is by nature international,” he wrote in 1924.
In defiance of commercial nostrums, Lubitsch trusted in the intelligence of his audience. The way to win the hearts of moviegoers, he once told Wilder, was not to tell them that two plus two equals four but to let them do the addition themselves. The hat in “Ninotchka” is a case in point: when Garbo puts it on, no one reminds the viewer that she castigated the same hat half an hour earlier. Lubitsch’s reliance on the oblique, the elliptical, and the unsaid leads the audience to suspect innuendo where none may have been intended. When Genevieve Tobin, in the marital-temptation comedy “One Hour with You,” asks, “Do you play Ping-Pong?,” we giggle at God knows what.
Lubitsch’s early American films have a cool, polished look. When I went to MOMA, which has restored prints of several Lubitsch silents, I was struck by the elemental beauty of the images. “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” released in 1925, is based on the Oscar Wilde play, though none of the original text appears in the intertitles. Instead, Lubitsch discovers cinematic analogues to Wilde’s aphoristic razzle-dazzle. The claustrophobia of the upper crust is captured in hard gazes, sidewise looks, stolen glances, and flashes of raw desperation. The characters drift through strangely vast rooms, dwarfed by the architecture of their station. The central figure is the social outcast Mrs. Erlynne, whom Irene Rich endows with wounded power. In a tour-de-force racetrack scene, she withstands the scrutiny of half a dozen binoculars. At the climax, she glides majestically into a room full of scandal-seeking men, saving Lady Windermere from ruin.
Women are objectified in Lubitsch’s world, but so are men. The 1924 film “Forbidden Paradise,” which MoMA has returned to gleaming condition, is a comic take on the story of Catherine the Great, with a libidinous Tsarina (Pola Negri) delighting in a handsome guardsman (Rod La Rocque). Movies of the twenties fetishized beautiful men like Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro; Lubitsch is plainly having fun with that trend, reducing his male lead to a stupid sex object. In one scene of deafening innuendo, La Rocque’s chest swells so muscularly that a button bursts off his tunic, causing the Tsarina’s eyes to open wide. At the end, she moves on to a new conquest, without having paid any great price for her exercise of lust. Lubitsch, in a later discussion of the roguish 1933 comedy “Design for Living,” said that women in film should do “what all the male Don Juans have been doing for ages—and attractively.”
So absolute was Lubitsch’s mastery of the silent-film medium that he might have been expected to stumble with the introduction of sound. Instead, starting in 1929, he launched another ebullient revolution, codifying the film musical with a run of movies, most of them featuring Maurice Chevalier: “The Love Parade,” “Monte Carlo,” “The Smiling Lieutenant,” “One Hour with You,” and “The Merry Widow.” In retrospect, it was obvious that the man who made “The Oyster Princess” would thrive in the new genre. A famous sequence in “Monte Carlo”—Jeanette MacDonald at the window of a speeding train, singing “Beyond the Blue Horizon” to peasants in fields—was described by the film scholar Gerald Mast as the “first sensational Big Number” in Hollywood history.
In the matter of gender relations, the musicals have aged less well. The empowerment of the female gaze in the silent films gives way to a male-dominated perspective, a sacralizing of Chevalier’s roué persona. Characters played by MacDonald and Claudette Colbert are not granted the freedom that Oswalda and Negri earlier enjoyed. McBride argues, in Lubitsch’s defense, that the movies address the “emotional consequences of male abandon.” The rake is often exposed as a grownup boy who fears both loneliness and commitment. As it happens, the cinematic bard of sexual laissez-faire was himself unlucky in love. Lubitsch’s first marriage, to Helene Kraus, ended when Kraus had an affair with the screenwriter Hanns Kräly, who had been working with Lubitsch since the garment-comedy days. A second marriage, to Vivian Gaye, fell apart following a passionate beginning.
After Kräly made his exit, in 1930, Lubitsch turned to Raphaelson, one of many New York writers who went west when sound came in. In 1932, the two concocted “Trouble in Paradise,” which is to film comedy what “The Marriage of Figaro” is to comic opera. McBride rightly says of it, “Nothing could ever be more perfect.” Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall play Lily and Gaston, master thieves on a debonair rampage through high society. Kay Francis is Madame Colet, an eccentric perfume executive who is initially Gaston’s mark but then becomes the object of his conflicted affections. The thieves inhabit a world of pure artifice, which allows for pitch-perfect parodies of tony movie dialogue (“Out there in the moonlight everything seemed so perfect, so simple—but now . . . ”). Colet, a mesmerizing Francis creation, has a way of puncturing illusions with regal candor: “You see, François, marriage is a beautiful mistake which two people make together. But with you, François, I think it would be a mistake.”
“Trouble in Paradise” was made during the Great Depression, and at first glance it seems frivolously detached from its historical moment. There is, however, a political undertow beneath the froth. Aaron Schuster, in the 2014 essay collection “Lubitsch Can’t Wait,” tracks recurrences of the phrase “in times like these”: well-off people use it to gesture emptily toward the Depression while justifying their usual behavior. The chairman of Colet’s board says to her, “If your husband were alive, the first thing he would do in times like these—cut salaries.” This is, as Schuster says, the cruel politics of austerity, and Colet nobly, if daffily, rejects it: “Unfortunately, Monsieur Giron, business bores me to distraction. Besides, I have a luncheon engagement. So I think we’d better leave the salaries just where they are.” Naturally, Giron is unmasked as the biggest thief of all. Gaston boasts that he can at least count himself a “self-made crook.”
Gaston is another Lubitsch rake who rethinks his two-timing ways. Marshall, hinting at vulnerability beneath an impeccable veneer, makes the transition more believable than Chevalier ever could. A bittersweet atmosphere infiltrates the relationship between Gaston and Colet, culminating in an almost shockingly expressive series of shots. Colet, embracing Gaston in her bedroom, says, “We have a long time ahead of us, Gaston—weeks, months, years . . .” First, we see the couple reflected in a circular mirror over the bed; then, at the word “months,” they appear in a small cosmetic mirror; and finally, at “years,” they dematerialize into shadows on the bed. It’s like an abyss opening and then quickly closing.
The final decade and a half of Lubitsch’s career unfolded under the cloud of the dreaded Production Code, with its prudish horror of sexuality and its callow fear of politics. The mechanism of studio self-censorship took shape in 1930 but wasn’t fully enforced until 1934, when the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America handed control of the process to Joseph Breen, a conservative Catholic journalist. The following year, Breen barred a reissue of “Trouble in Paradise” on moral grounds. In the same period, Lubitsch accepted an offer from Paramount to become the studio’s head of production. Putting a director in charge of other directors invites conflict, and Lubitsch was soon skirmishing with Josef von Sternberg, Paramount’s other paragon of Continental style. The experiment lasted only a year, and Lubitsch emerged with his reputation diminished and his creative path uncertain.
After two much debated outings—“Angel,” an absorbing but imperfect vehicle for Marlene Dietrich, and “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife,” a fitfully funny pairing of Colbert with Gary Cooper—Lubitsch returned to peak form in “Ninotchka,” released in 1939 by M-G-M. This was the director’s second collaboration with Brackett and Wilder, who had first joined forces to work on “Bluebeard.” As McBride points out, the duo imported the raucousness of screwball comedy, which in “Bluebeard” clashed with Lubitsch’s airier sensibility. Wilder, who had arrived in Hollywood in 1934, may have adulated Lubitsch, but he had different cultural roots, his voice having formed in Jazz Age Berlin. Lubitsch was whimsical; Wilder was savage. In “Ninotchka,” the two met on fertile middle ground.
The Turner/M-G-M script collection at the Margaret Herrick Library, the home of the Academy archives, contains hundreds of pages of drafts for “Ninotchka,” which had undergone many iterations before Lubitsch got involved. The idea for a story about a cold Bolshevik fanatic finding love in Paris originated with the playwright Melchior Lengyel, who had also helped to conceive “Forbidden Paradise.” Several other writers, including S. N. Behrman, fleshed out the screenplay. By late 1938, the pivotal scene was in place—one in which Ninotchka’s worldly lover, Leon, gets her to guffaw in a restaurant, enabling the promotional tagline “garbo laughs”—but acres of clunky dialogue surrounded it.
When Lubitsch took over the project, in early 1939, he first brought in Reisch, a wizard of plot construction, and then the verbally dexterous Brackett and Wilder. Reading the team’s drafts, you can almost hear the kibbitzing in the room as ideas were bandied about, rejected, altered, and perfected. Here are successive versions of a line that Ninotchka utters to her Russian comrades after arriving in Paris:
According to Brackett, this line originated with Lubitsch, who had visited the Soviet Union in 1936, coming away with a grim view of the Stalinist state.
Yet “Ninotchka” is by no means an anti-socialist tract. The title character may succumb to the silly hat, but Leon (Melvyn Douglas) experiences his own evolution, and Ninotchka fires some sharp quips in his direction: “I have heard of the arrogant male in capitalistic society. It is having a superior earning power that makes you that way.” The two end up in Constantinople, in what feels like a geographical and ideological compromise. A lovably rascally trio of Bolshevik functionaries, played by the émigré actors Alexander Granach, Sig Ruman, and Felix Bressart, exemplify the make-the-best-of-it types who populate any system.
Bressart, a lanky, twinkling, birdlike man who had been a star of German comedies before fleeing the Nazi regime, is a mainstay of Lubitsch’s later films. In “The Shop Around the Corner,” he portrays a meek clerk who assiduously avoids any confrontation with the shop’s overbearing owner, played by Frank Morgan. Three times Morgan asks those around him for an “honest opinion,” and three times Bressart acrobatically vanishes. In a very Lubitschean way, this gag undergoes a diminuendo as it is repeated, until, by the end, we catch only a glimpse of Bressart’s legs at the top of a spiral staircase, taking a few steps down and then scampering back up. A similar trick is performed in “Ninotchka,” as the Bolshevik buffoons furtively check out the grand lobby of the Hotel Clarence one by one. Granach, the last in the series, merely takes a turn in the revolving door, staring wide-eyed through the glass.
The most memorable of Bressart’s performances is in “To Be or Not to Be,” Lubitsch’s anti-Nazi comedy of 1942. The deliciously convoluted script, which Edwin Justus Mayer wrote in league with the director, imagines a troupe of Polish actors who pass themselves off as Nazis in a scheme to protect the resistance. Jack Benny, as the self-infatuated thespian Joseph Tura, first pretends to be a Gestapo colonel, in order to obtain information from the treacherous Professor Siletsky; then he pretends to be Siletsky, in a meeting with the actual colonel (a magisterially simpering Ruman). All the while, Tura fumes over an affair between his free-spirited wife (Carole Lombard) and a hunky airman (Robert Stack). At the climax, a fake Hitler stages a distraction at a theatre where the actual Hitler is in attendance. Lubitsch’s message is clear enough: the Nazis are themselves a gang of ham actors who bamboozled the world.
Bressart plays Greenberg, an actor who dreams of a starring role as Shylock but is relegated to the part of a spear-carrier in “Hamlet.” This makes him an obvious stand-in for Lubitsch, an erstwhile Second Gravedigger for Max Reinhardt. At three points in the film—Lubitsch’s law of three in operation again—Greenberg recites phrases from Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech. First, it serves as an expression of artistic longing; then it communicates mourning amid the ruin of war. Finally, during the resistance action at the theatre, the monologue becomes an act of heroic defiance, as Greenberg speaks the lines to Hitler’s face. That he is addressing the fake Hitler and not the real one hardly matters in the movie’s topsy-turvy world.
Although Greenberg is never explicitly identified as Jewish, we surmise that he is, not only because of his identification with Shylock but also on account of a groan-worthy exchange with another actor. (Greenberg: “Mr. Rawitch, what you are, I wouldn’t eat.” Rawitch: “How dare you call me a ham!”) The Hollywood studios, in deference to the German market, had long discouraged representations of Nazi anti-Semitism, and even as late as 1942 such references were rare. Lubitsch knew how to circumvent the Code, however, and in “To Be or Not to Be” he got in a joke at Breen’s expense. On the eve of the German invasion of Poland, the actors are told that they cannot stage an anti-Nazi play they’ve been rehearsing, because it “might offend Hitler.” Benny replies, with brittle sarcasm, “Well, wouldn’t that be too bad!”
Wartime America wasn’t quite ready for this brand of labyrinthine satire. Critics of the day took particular exception to Colonel Ehrhardt’s comment about Tura’s acting: “What he did to Shakespeare, we are doing now to Poland.” Bosley Crowther, in the Times, called the movie “callous and macabre.” Lubitsch, in a response published in the newspaper, argued that the best way to combat Nazis onscreen was to ridicule them, thereby puncturing their negative mystique. He also sought to transcend the conventional division between “drama with comedy relief” and “comedy with dramatic relief”; his aim was not to “relieve anybody from anything at any time.”
Wilder made that formula his own in his great string of black comedies and screwball tragedies. Whether Lubitsch himself could have capitalized on the advance of “To Be or Not to Be” is unknowable. He completed two more high-end entertainments—“Heaven Can Wait” and “Cluny Brown”—but health issues curtailed his energies and ambitions. As his heart disease advanced, he was often housebound. According to his biographer, Scott Eyman, friends found him gentler and more reflective in mood. Increasingly, the chief joy of his life was Nicola, his only child.
Nicola Lubitsch did some acting in her youth, and later worked as a radio producer and announcer in Los Angeles. She lives in Brentwood, in a house stocked with mementos of her father. An honorary Oscar that Lubitsch received the year of his death stands on the piano on which he improvised operetta-style melodies. Nicola was nine when her father died, and she can’t shed much light on what he thought about weighty matters. Yet she remembers him vividly and fondly.
“All the beautiful things in his films—the luxurious textures, the objects—Daddy didn’t really care about any of that at home,” Nicola told me. “He was a man of fixed habits. He had prunes every morning for breakfast, listening to Fred Waring or ‘The Breakfast Club’ on his portable radio. If the car broke down, he’d tell Otto, our chauffeur, to go buy another big black car. He lived in his own world: he was consumed by his work, and by music, and by me. And, of course, he loved having interesting people around.”
Nicola brought out a guestbook that documented gatherings at the Lubitsch home, on Bel Air Road. The roster of names includes Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Gary Cooper, Claudette Colbert, Charles Laughton, Jack Benny, Franz Waxman, Salka Viertel, Bruno Walter, Alma Mahler-Werfel, and Billy Wilder, who gives his middle name as “Valentino.” Nicola told me, “All these great musicians would be at the house, and Daddy would always be at the piano, even though he couldn’t actually read music. Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein would be sitting there listening to Daddy’s Viennese café music. But they all loved him.”
The headline in Daily Variety on December 1, 1947, might have made the Master laugh: “lubitsch drops dead.” The interment was at Forest Lawn, in Glendale. Nicola and her mother were shown several grandiose burial sites, including one in a walled-in garden with piped-in Muzak. Nicola said, “Daddy couldn’t possibly live in a place with such awful music.” Instead, Lubitsch took up residence out on the rolling lawn, under a simple, flat headstone.
After the burial, Wilder walked glumly next to his colleague William Wyler. “Well, no more Lubitsch,” Wilder said. “Worse than that,” Wyler replied. “No more Lubitsch films.” ♦
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