Excerpts

Chapter One Beginnings Erich von Stroheim was no mere mortal. To speak of his birthdate, family, schooling, or personal life is to succumb to facts. What is extraordinary about this man is the fiction, a fiction more real than reality. After he left Vienna at age twenty-four to come to America, he foundered for years in poverty and failure, one disappointment following another. His sense of destiny, however, gave him the strength to persevere, for when happenstance and hunger brought him to the fledgling movie industry, he not only found his métier, but soon grew to master it. Where else but in the fantasyland of Hollywood could he have realized his dreams? Those visions that surged within him took form and, through the authority of his aristocratic stance, he was able to convince Hollywood, at least for a while, to come to his terms. Such an incredible presence was not fathered by a press agent; he gave birth to himself.     Even as a penniless immigrant, he had a sense of that self. When he arrived at Ellis Island in 1909, he might have mumbled out "Erich Stroheim" or meekly stood by while an immigration officer simplified his proffered name. But, with the supreme confidence of a man who knew he would ascend the heights of his own invention, he grandly declared that he was Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von Stroheim. Like the soul of Walt Whitman that contained multitudes, he would be equal to that long list of names.     Later, in Hollywood, Stroheim became an officer and an aristocrat and an unforgettable rogue. As an actor, he won fame first as a villainous Hun and shortly afterward as "the man you love to hate," but he soon began writing, directing, and often starring in his own films. Always at the center of a maelstrom of activity and contention, he provided good columns for the press: Stroheim became not only an uncompromising stickler for authenticity who raged about details that no audience would ever notice--real champagne, not soda water; caviar, not blackberry jam; Death Valley, not a sand dune--but also an incorrigible martinet barking out orders from morning to the next dawn to shoot eight-hour movies that would never be seen. His scarred face was notorious, as were his hairstyle, his military bearing, his monocle, and even his heel. It was a heel that was always being spun upon. Two examples will suffice: when Irving Thalberg, the newly installed production chief at Universal, called a halt to the shooting of Foolish Wives, "Von Stroheim stood glaring at the young studio boss, then turned on his heel and stalked off." A year later, when Thalberg fired him from Merry-Go-Round, Stroheim again glared and, "turning on his heel, walked out."     When almost every major studio had experienced that spinning heel, Stroheim was finally banished and relegated once more to acting for others. He played a mad ventriloquist, a mad vaudevillian, a mad scientist, a mad director--always a mad something. To the world, and even to the professionals in Hollywood, he was indeed mad, a genius who did not know where or when or how to stop and so could never be allowed to direct again.     The living, breathing Erich von Stroheim was so outrageous that only a gifted scenario writer could have invented him, as indeed was the case. The man was a host of contradictions: he played at being a nobleman yet gave us great insights into the lower classes. He appeared cynical yet showed he was the most dedicated of men. He provided glossy fiction yet depicted a gritty truth. Although he came from the mercantile class, he became the least commercial of directors. Always fascinated by the wheels of fate, he eventually found himself ground up by them. In his films, he fused art and reality, myth and naturalistic detail, love and lust, idealism and cynicism, discipline and unbelievable excess. In the process, he became the legend that he had created: Erich von Stroheim.     Stroheim spent so many years creating a mythic past for himself that uncovering the truth is perhaps a desecration. After all, the fairy coach is lovelier than the lowly pumpkin, well-groomed horses nobler than mice, and gloriously garbed coachmen more elegant than rats. Fortunately, the truth never came out in Stroheim's lifetime, for it might have crushed what dignity he still had. His friend Thomas Quinn Curtiss acknowledged that Stroheim "had a morbid fear of being mocked"--but in the perspective of time, the facts now make his achievements even more extraordinary.     Despite his artistic sincerity, Stroheim was a fibber incarnate. His autobiography, as reported in interviews and told to biographers, reveals that this supreme realist of the screen was personally unencumbered by facts. Truth rarely interfered with many of his recollections, even in his last years, when it no longer mattered--or perhaps mattered even more.     Throughout his career, Stroheim offered several versions of his past. In 1919, he told an interviewer, "My father was a count, and my mother, before she married him, was a baroness and lady-in-waiting to the late Empress Elizabeth." "Then you are a count?" [asked the interviewer.] "A `no-count' is more like it," he replied modestly. "Titles are not worth a pfennig in Austria. In any case," he added, "I've been an American citizen too long to care for such baubles." He repeated this thought in another interview a few months later: "Titles mean nothing. I gave up mine for I am an American citizen." (Actually, he did not become an American citizen until 1926.)     This explanation of his background was a bit more fanciful than later ones. After a while, he dropped the count business and transformed his father into a colonel in the Sixth Regiment of the Dragoons; his mother, however, remained a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth. In another, more modest, recollection, he averred that his father was Hans Stroheim, a civil servant. In still another, his father was a commanding officer. Although the rank of the father and the status of the mother varied--she was not always a lady-in-waiting--the Stroheim family was always highly connected.     This aristocratic background was an important part of Stroheim's persona. Sam Goldwyn's ghost-written book Behind the Screen, published in 1923, quoted Stroheim's distinct recollections of his upper-class past: When I was a young man at home I remember that one day at the dinner-table I unhooked the high collar of my uniform--just the top hook, you understand--because the day was so warm and the collar so tight. My stern old father glared at me across the table and then he sent me away from the room. "Low-born," "vulgarian"--these were some of the words he hurled at me as I went out. And, now, behold! I sit here without any collar and in my shirt-sleeves, and when I go home tonight I shall sit down to dinner without putting on either collar or coat. My wife doesn't mind--neither do I. There you are. Thus the public image of a now-democratized Austrian nobleman!     What was Stroheim's past before the magic wand of imagination transformed it? The mystery began to unravel in the winter 1961-62 issue of Sight and Sound, when Denis Marion printed a copy of Stroheim's birth records. In 1971, Thomas Quinn Curtiss, a newspaper reporter who was a close friend of Stroheim, issued a biography and chose to ignore these facts, although he parenthetically mentions "an alleged Austrian birth certificate." Curtiss, for years, had listened by the hour to tales told by this "splendid raconteur" and felt there was "a consistency" to Stroheim's recollections that he found entirely convincing.     What was the truth? I went to Austria to see for myself. As a result of that detective work, plus a thorough examination of Stroheim's early years in America, the so-called facts have eroded considerably. Curtiss's rendition of this period reads entertainingly, but it is almost entirely fiction. Therefore, the information in the following pages will differ markedly from what has hitherto seen print. For the most part, I shall not quibble with what others have written--the errors are legion--but where certain important matters have been considered immutable fact, I shall explore the issues more fully. Clearly, I differ with the adage "print the legend." Erich Oswald Stroheim was born on September 22, 1885, the son of Benno Stroheim, who was born in Gleiwitz, in Prussian Silesia, and Johanna Bondy, born in Prague, where the two were married on August 3, 1884. Both parents were Jewish. After the marriage, the couple moved to Vienna, where Benno had lived since the early 1880s. The father was a Kaufmann [merchant] and had a hat store. According to the Vienna city directories, the couple lived in the Seventh District, Lindengasse 17A, from 1884 through 1886. Erich Oswald was born at their home, the delivery assisted by a midwife. According to the birth certificate, his father was in the business of manufacturing and selling straw hats. The term manufacturing might be misleading. The general procedure of the time would be to take a circle of straw and add to it feathers, pieces of fur, and other decorations to make an original creation, an operation that could easily be done in the back of the store.     The firm, Baeger and Stroheim, was located at 26 Kirchengasse 7. In 1891, the business moved to 8 Lindengasse 7, and by 1896 it became known as Stroheim and Company. By 1907, it produced not only straw hats but those made of felt as well and also handled imported hats and fashions. It was in this reasonably successful milieu that Erich was reared. The family adhered at least superficially to its Jewish heritage, for Erich was circumcised on September 29, 1885, according to the Israelitische Kultusgemiende in Vienna. A brother, Bruno, was born on February 18, 1889.     Emil Feldmar, Stroheim's cousin, in an interview in the early 1960s, mentioned that Stroheim's mother was a docile lady of great charm, whereas Stroheim told Curtiss that she was a nervous woman often on the verge of hysterics. The father, said Feldmar, was a self-made type and somewhat of a tyrant. Stroheim seems to have been an uneasy mixture of his parents' character traits--a charmer and a tyrant. Both Curtiss and Feldmar agreed that after the birth of Bruno the couple grew less happy and that there was a good deal of squabbling caused, apparently, by the father's profligate ways and infidelities. This unhappy marriage may have found echo in Stroheim's film scenarios.     The mother and the children often went to the Tyrol to enjoy the summers and, Feldmar implies, to escape the tense atmosphere at home. The family may not have been rich, but they were comparatively well off. One day, when Stroheim's younger brother was about eleven or twelve years old, Bruno accidentally killed a childhood companion while hunting. This event, mentioned by both Curtiss and Feldmar, could have ended with attorneys' fees and perhaps a cash settlement to prevent the boy from being brought up on manslaughter charges. Bruno's police file mentions nothing of this, however, and certainly there was no personal pardon by Emperor Franz Josef on Christmas Eve 1902, as Curtiss claims. Stroheim hinted to Curtiss that the costs of settling Bruno's accident helped put the family in dire financial straits; more likely, the family business failed because of mismanagement and the father's spendthrift habits.     Stroheim's youth in Vienna acquainted him with various realities. Besides witnessing his warring parents, he saw the high and somewhat decadent lifestyle of the aristocrats and the seething underbody of the city--its business deals, hypocritical postures, mistresses, and prostitutes--a teeming environment in which Hungarians and Poles and Croats, Jews and gentiles contended for survival and even mastery.     The Austro-Hungarian Empire was always in turmoil, but despite the uneasy political climate, the capital city of Vienna was experiencing its golden age. Music, theater, military bands, and the cavortings of the aristocracy gave color to the city's life. In 1898, at the age of thirteen, Stroheim may have seen Emperor Franz Josef (on the fiftieth anniversary of the emperor's ascension to the throne) riding in the gold Hapsburg coronation coach from the Hoffberg Palace to St. Stephen's Cathedral to celebrate Corpus Christi Day. With only slightly less pomp, the emperor would continue to make an annual appearance on this holy day, an event that would be faithfully reenacted in Stroheim's film The Wedding March .     Stroheim undoubtedly attended concerts, operas, and plays. In his scripts, he makes reference to Gustav Mahler, who was the director of the Vienna State Opera from 1897 to 1907, and to Richard Strauss, who contributed to twentieth-century "modernism." Stroheim was familiar with the cultural milieu in which playwrights such as Artur Schnitzler cynically but wittily observed contemporary mores. As one of the playwright's biographers put it, Schnitzler sang "the swan song of old Vienna" and "caught in his gentle hand the last golden glow of its setting glory and converted it into art."     Although Schnitzler reflected the brittle life around him, as in The Affairs of Anatol, he also showed how sophisticated men of the world could be entranced by "the sweet little girl," whom Anatol defines: "She's not fascinatingly beautiful--she hasn't a particle of style--and she certainly is not brilliant." But, he adds, she "has the soft charm of a spring evening--the grace of an enchanted princess--and the soul of a girl who knows how to love." Such a girl would appear in several of Stroheim's films.     Besides Schnitzler, Stroheim also remembered the charm and sentimentality of the Volksoper, with its offerings of old and new operettas. But nestled also in Vienna was Freud, whose case histories reveal a dark vein running through the city: solid citizens beset with neurotic dreams, foot fetishes, molestations by relatives, and a host of paranoid fears and aberrant desires.     If Vienna was divided into intellectual, aristocratic, and common work-a-day levels, the great melting pot was the Prater, the Coney Island of the city. An immense Ferris wheel, a carousel, freak shows, games of skill, and shooting galleries allowed all the classes to mix. This type of amusement park appears in Merry-Go-Round, the cut portions of Greed, and Walking down Broadway . Other mixing grounds were the wine gardens in the city's suburbs, the kind of place where the heroine works in The Wedding March . There is still another area of commonality: the brothels. Although the lower classes of Vienna could hardly afford them, the aristocrats and the mercantile classes could.     In all these places where social classes mingled, a young man could observe the military, the aristocrats, and the middle and lower classes unencumbered by the rigid rules of society. Their common denominator was sex--the great leveler. Thus, in Stroheim's work, we have fanciful images of an aristocratic world undercut by the realities of a less noble one, a proletarian world with which he became painfully familiar during his early years in America.     The Viennese world was not the invention of a soured writer. As one commentator put it: Taken as a whole, Austrian upper society, while charming and pleasant, was gripped by moral indolence and without much initiative or sense of public responsibility. It was, in fact, an anachronism, out of place in an age of capitalistic industry and bustling commerce. The class was astonishingly ignorant and narrow-minded; shallow, pompous, futile; there was much marital infidelity and unconventional licentiousness. Bourgeois morality represented a code of personal conduct beneath the notice of the aristocracy. One writer characterized the patrician order in general as "irresponsibly frivolous, irresistibly gay, fundamentally ignorant, devotees of sport and fashion, hopelessly gregarious, and class conscious."     Although Stroheim left his homeland as a young man, he could never forget its vivid impressions and continually recreated its settings (and his boyhood fantasies) with extraordinary accuracy. He had almost total recall of myriad details, from candy boxes to streetcars. Stroheim's genius lay in making his fantasy seem real rather than in reproducing actual happenings. But intermixed with his nostalgia was a clear and unswerving vision of life as it really was. In 1968, Josef von Sternberg stated that it was Stroheim's capacity to recreate the tapestry of old Vienna, its glitter, its tinsel, its uniforms and pageantry that made him formidable. Drawing upon his Viennese background, no flaw escaped him. His attention to every blossom on every tree that confronted his camera, to every button on each uniform, to every prop used, to the authenticity of each scene, was unequaled. How he acquired the ability to transfer imponderables to the screen is not known. He was about twenty years old when he left Vienna [actually twenty-four]. His experiences there were hardly enough to make him an authority. His talents came from a secret desire to master other human beings and to create their environment.     Stroheim spent his grade school years in Vienna. The boy must have observed his father's customers. Young girls and their mothers, single women, reluctant husbands, and men with their mistresses would have frequented the shop. Hats, scarves, and lace were taken from boxes or from the glass counters and studied before a mirror. Perhaps as a result, Stroheim became acutely aware of what people wore. The lesson for him was not "all is vanity" but how clothing defined a person and revealed the character beneath. Unlike D.W. Griffith, who often left clothing details to his actors and actresses, Stroheim, for his films, always carefully selected every item and frequently drew sketches for the wardrobe department. Even much later in his life, in two BBC broadcasts about fellow directors Griffith and Robert Flaherty, he minutely described their apparel.     But what most interested Stroheim as a young boy, and what continued to interest the man, was soldiers. Only a few blocks from his residence were the Hapsburg palace and the imposing government buildings, with the military personnel standing guard and marching in parades. He longed to be not only one of these men, but an officer. Such a career often required family connections, education, and of course money, for officers had to live up to their rank in their dress, their means of transportation, their restaurants, and perhaps even their mistresses. Later, Stroheim's films would satisfy these longings, for he invariably cast himself in officer roles.     Stroheim endured much pain as a youth. Undersized, not terribly attractive, and hampered by a Jewish ancestry in a Catholic society, he longed to be something else: an aristocrat, an officer, a hero, a Don Juan, a heavy drinker, and an apparent practicing Catholic.     What his religious beliefs were, we of course cannot know. The young Stroheim probably had little religious faith, considering his taste in plays, his interest in Freud, and his essentially rebellious nature. Having been born Jewish, claiming in his teenage years to be Protestant, and later assuming the mantle of a Roman Catholic, he undoubtedly was a skeptic, like many bright young men in Vienna. However, from at least 1915 on in America, Stroheim often attended Mass in California. Needless to say, practice did not make perfect, for his Catholicism hardly interfered with his lifestyle. However, when he married his third wife, Valerie, on October 16, 1920, the wedding took place in a Catholic church.     The frequent Catholic references in Stroheim's films could have been included for their visual appeal and for their aid in characterization rather than from any deep-seated beliefs. In short, they could have been employed as a kind of theological costuming. But some of the letters that this seemingly skeptical, worldly, and cynical man sent his wife Valerie and his son Josef in the early 1940s--a time when he was living with his mistress--are studded with phrases such as "May God grant ..." and "My prayers" and "I am praying everyday for you and your welfare." However, his religious views were so intertwined with superstition, with a belief in fate and the wisdom of fortune-tellers, that they would hardly pass muster at a seminary. In short, his religious beliefs were a host of contradictions, as simple and complex as the man himself.     According to Curtiss, in 1897, at age twelve, Erich "was physically robust" and was "dispatched to a preparatory boarding school for cadets," from which he was graduated as a second lieutenant, a rank that he held from 1902 until 1909. The young man experienced machine-gun fire in a minor skirmish on the Bosnian border, sneaked off to a gypsy camp one night for some illicit love amid throbbing violins, and returned to Vienna, where financial reversals in his family made it difficult for him to maintain an officer's expensive lifestyle. In interviews in America, Stroheim discussed his military past. "I became an officer in the army, and I saw service in the Bosnian campaign and in Mexico." He explained that his facial scar came from the Bosnian battle. In another account, the Bosnian campaign became even more bloody. He said that he crossed the lines into Bosnia on horseback and came out in an ambulance with sixteen inches of cold Bosnian steel through him. A group of Viennese surgeons repaired the damage. Then, he said, something went wrong, and he was banished for five years. "It comes under the head of private troubles," was the laconic description by the banished. It is a heroic tale, a romantic tale, a plausible tale, but unfortunately a completely fanciful one.     Reality was much more prosaic. Stroheim's parents planned for young Erich to go into the family business to manufacture and sell hats. As a result, in 1901 he was sent to the city of Graz, where he attended Die Grazer Handelsakademie, a business high school and by no means a Gymnasium (where higher and more intellectual studies were offered). This school still exists, and its director and his staff were astonished to hear, when I arrived in Graz in 1980, that they had had such a famous student. After I gave them certain dates, they went into their archives and found Stroheim's school records. With a look of chagrin (Stroheim was hardly a prize scholar), the school officials handed me the documents and kindly provided photocopies.     Although Stroheim's German language skills were "satisfactory," his studies of French and English were not. His grades in bookkeeping and economics and other business skills were poor, a judgment with which his employers in Hollywood surely would have concurred. His written assignments also received "the least possible recommendation." He was, however, outstanding in one area: he was an extraordinary class-cutter. Of the 225 hours of absences listed on his record--a truly impressive number to begin with--62 did not even have the faintest excuse, and he was listed as "truant." In the future, Stroheim would be known as a great authoritarian, yet, ironically, the man had a long and consistent history of ignoring or subverting authority.     In Austria, citizens had to register where they lived. The records in Graz reveal that Stroheim boarded in a private student dormitory housing six students, located in an apartment house at 26 Wielandgasse--a building that still stands. It is a respectable edifice in a good part of town and shows that he was reasonably well-off at the time. The teenager stayed there from September 17, 1901, until September 21, 1903.     When Stroheim moved to Graz in September 1901, he was already trying to mask his background. The school's records list him as Jewish--he could not avoid the written documents--but when he reported to the police to establish his residence, he stated that he was Protestant. These records also show that he spent some time in the summer of 1903 in Innchen in Tyrol, the mountain area of Southern Austria, near the setting of his first film, Blind Husbands . On September 24, 1903, he moved to other rooms in Graz--apparently cheaper ones--and on April 30, 1904, he changed residence once more. Even after graduation, he continued to live in Graz.     A terrible student, and probably a spoiled brat as well (mothers who hate their husbands tend to love their sons fervently), this bright but incorrigible boy tried his best to escape his mercantile background. A lad with poetic leanings does not want to help out in a hat store, not when others are engaged in a fantastic life of coaches, balls, ostentatious wardrobes, and elaborate public ceremonies--the life of the "rich and famous." Also, Stroheim was a loner. In a 1941 letter, he would advise his son Josef "to be a good mixer. That was one of my many shortcomings. I couldn't mix to make friends."     A significant aspect of Stroheim's life was that he was always in some way the outsider. In Catholic Vienna, he was a Jew; in melting pot America, he was the aristocratic European; and in France, in his later life, he was a curious mixture of Austrian and American. Thus, he was always the Auslander.     Two world wars, a cold war, and various international skirmishes have eradicated much of the glow of a military career. But in the days of Stroheim's youth, the army seemed like a colorful and exciting--and not very dangerous--way of spending a life. In Austria, according to one commentator, the army was a "State within a State." It was in the army and the army alone (for not even the Church was all embracing) that the concept of the Empire with the Emperor at its head was translated into reality. All races served in it. Hungarians too. All who served in it, their families in civilian life divided from each other by religion, national hatreds, conflicts of political and economic interest, political ideas, found in their military duties a common tongue, a common ideal, a common loyalty.... In the simple, hierarchical organization of this great closed society with its career officers, its unceasing flow of conscripts from half the lands of Europe, there was indeed something splendid and unearthly, a glimpse of the true supra-national society. In membership of this unique institution, which transcended all civilian bitterness and lifted them up and set them apart from the welter of nationalist and party strife, individuals of all kinds found fulfillment in service. For many short-term soldiers the brief time of army service was a return to a golden age when all problems were solved by simple obedience in a mood of universal brotherhood to a remote and ineffable father-figure, Franz Josef.     As far as we know, Stroheim's first contact with the military occurred while he was still living in Graz on April 19, 1906, when he was given a conscription examination. The military records kept at the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna reveal that Stroheim was a graduate of a Handelschule, that he was 168 cm tall (five feet, six inches), and that he was proficient at playing the violin. He was classified as "derzeit, untauglich, Schwach, Zuruckstellen" [currently unfit, weak, (and) to return to the rank of civilian].     These results must have been devastating to this proud young man with his martial dreams. The army could have been a way for him to escape the commercial world for which he seemingly had little interest. But the young Stroheim did not give up. A short time later, he reapplied and prevailed upon the military authorities to accept him in the Royal and Imperial Training Regiment 1, which was stationed in Vienna, "auf eigene Kosten" [at his own expense]. He would pay for his own uniforms and his own horse, if he had one. He entered the supply and transport division, where he undoubtedly became familiar with horses, then the main military means of transportation. It was probably at this time that the photo of the young Erich that appears in Curtiss's book was taken. Shortly after, Stroheim received the pronounced scar on his forehead. One interviewer, in France in the 1950s, suggested that maybe it had come from a duel. Stroheim answered that he was not the Prussian type who dueled, adding that he had been injured by a horse. "J'ai reçu un coup de pied de cheval en Autriche, quand j'étais officier" [I was kicked by a horse in Austria, when I was an officer]. The young Erich proved himself somewhat capable and was commissioned on December 23, 1906, as a "one-year voluntary soldier-in-training with the title Corporal."     In late 1922 Stroheim lent his Merry-Go-Round scenario to another writer to be transformed into a novel. In it there is a passage about soldier life in Austria that mentions "a little lieutenant" who shows up at a fancy party. He is sneeringly looked upon by a count as a "Mosesdragooner." A footnote in the novel explains that this term was a "slurring way of referring to men of the train and transport service, because so many Jews served under this branch unable to be admitted to the cavalry." This passage has an autobiographical ring and surely is as close to the humiliating truth as Stroheim ever came.     There is another section in that novel that might be all fiction but could possibly be true. The count recalls that one day, when he returned home from school, he found his mother in "a very sheer negligee" with another man. This is followed by a passage about the father, who would go away for days and come back from his escapades "fatigued." Although Stroheim might have invented this, there was no doubt that his films often had philandering fathers and unhappy marriages.     Now that Stroheim had joined the army, the usual Hollywood script would have him rapidly rise in the ranks, thanks to his intellectual and literary gifts, his extraordinary feeling for detail, and his intense energy and ambition. Reality, however, was different. After only four months, on April 20, 1907, Stroheim's conduct, skills, and performance were examined and he was classified as "invalid [that is, what we would call 4-F], incapable of bearing arms, to be discharged from the service, but capable of work as a civilian." As a result of these findings, Stroheim was given leave on April 23, 1907, and was discharged from the Royal-Imperial Army on May 29, 1907. His entire military career had lasted five months. This is quite a contrast to Stroheim's obituary in the New York Times, which stated that he "was an officer in the Austrian cavalry at seventeen and served in the Army for seven years."     One year later, in 1908, Stroheim again tried to enter army life, but on June 25, he was once again classified as "unsuitable for military service, unable to bear arms." Whatever dreams he had for a military career were now completely shattered. When the Bosnian crisis occurred in October 1908, Stroheim remained a civilian in Vienna at the family store and certainly was far from the machine-gun fire, the flashing swords, and the nearby passionate gypsies. Having given up any hope for a military career and after perhaps going through a session of soul-searching, on November 17, 1908, he officially left the Jewish faith.     Stroheim's brother, Bruno, was no more successful with the army. In 1910, 1911, and 1912, the military archives mention that he was a graduate of a Gymnasium and that he was employed as a bookkeeper. The army noted that he also was too weak and narrow-chested for military duty. On December 8, 1913, Bruno also left the Jewish religion. Although Jews were quite successful in Austria, there is a possibility that the weaknesses ascribed to both Stroheim boys might have stemmed from the military's religious prejudice. However, a five-foot-six-inch fellow like Erich would be at a disadvantage with a six-foot enemy. Incidentally, not long after, on February 5, 1914, Adolf Hitler was rejected by the Austrian military as being also "too weak" and thus "unable to bear arms." Six months later, when the First World War broke out, Hitler volunteered his services to the German army and was accepted. World history and film history would be far different if the Austrian standards had not been so stringent.     Stroheim's lifelong passion for uniforms shows that he had watched the various ranks of the military avidly and longed to be one of those smartly dressed soldiers. When his numerous attempts to join the army--a quick way to vault from his class into another--failed, his despair at having lost a military career gave him an enduring wound, one that he could never quite overcome. In his fantasies, he provided the life he should have had. In all of the biographical information that he later offered, he always included a military background: an Austrian lieutenant, a dissolute officer, a member of the National Guard, a trainer of troops at Plattsburgh (in upstate New York during the First World War), an officer in the Mexican army, and sometimes a member of the U.S. army as well.     After being rejected from the Austrian military, according to his cousin, Emil Feldmar, Stroheim worked in the family store. The cousin recalled that he and Stroheim spent much of their time flirting with the pretty milliners of the neighborhood. Stroheim, with the personal charm he inherited from his mother, apparently could be quite winning in his ways.     The family hat concern was faltering. The father probably had made bad business decisions or was frittering away his money. Although the store in 1908 had a listed capital of forty-five thousand kronen, it quickly came onto hard times, then went into bankruptcy, and was liquidated in April 1909. Meanwhile, the father entered a kind of partnership, called Ludwig Macho and Company. He must have proven himself a rather irresponsible businessman, because the new firm's incorporation papers had a clause stating that accounts had to be cosigned by Macho and Johanna Stroheim and not by Benno, her husband. The new firm was capitalized at thirty thousand kronen in 1910 and 1911 and then advanced to fifty thousand by 1912. By 1913, however, it also went into liquidation. On December 22, 1913, Stroheim's father died at age fifty-six, his troubles finally over. A few months later, in 1914, Macho was listed as liquidator of the firm. Stroheim's cousin said that the father had divorced shortly before his death, but I could find no record of that. The father was living at a different address at that time; perhaps the couple had just separated.     After her husband's death, Johanna moved in with her sister-in-law, Ernestine Stroheim, in an apartment house at 22 Esterhazy 6. Also living there was her brother, Emil Bondy, not an "Imperial Counselor" but a "chemiser" in an optician shop, who died on July 31, 1917. Johanna was first listed as living with Ernestine in the 1915 directory. By 1921-22, her son, Bruno, then cited as a "civil servant," was also in residence. Ernestine died in 1923 at age eighty, but Johanna continued to live in the building with Bruno until 1941, when she died at seventy-eight years of age of arteriosclerosis, a rather broad term that included heart attacks and strokes. She was buried in the Jewish section of the Vienna cemetery. Bruno spent the last two years of his life "incurably insane" in an asylum and died on December 29, 1958.     In 1908, when Stroheim made his last attempt to get into the army, the family firm was experiencing its first bankruptcy. There was now no way that Stroheim could be supported; he would have to earn a living on his own. Echoes of this situation would certainly appear in The Wedding March: the unhappy battling parents and the family beset by bills. If Stroheim would not "blow out his brains," as a title from that film stated, he could "marry money." However, there was no money that wanted the penniless and unaristocratic Stroheim.     In his later years, Stroheim mentioned to Curtiss that he had resorted to the blandishments of a moneylender and had become embroiled in a serious debt. Whether the headstrong youth had actually done this or whether it was pure invention to cover the embarrassment of the family's bankruptcy, no one knows, but Stroheim had referred to a similar financial difficulty in a semiautobiographical play that he had written after arriving in America. His cousin, Feldmar, felt that there was some secret cause for Stroheim's sudden departure "in a couple of hours," which otherwise appeared "a perfect enigma." In any case, there was America--the one hope for this desperate young man.     The year 1909 must have been full of frustration and dissatisfaction for the twenty-three-year old. He wanted to do something--but he could not get a foothold. Money was not a prime object. His Hollywood career showed that; he was paid by the picture, not by the week, but he would never rush production or issue anything short of perfection.     Stroheim must have taken stock of himself. Coming from the middle class, educationally deprived (a Handelschule was no recommendation for a position entailing "brains"), and born Jewish, he desperately wanted to belong to a culture that did not want him. Perhaps as a writer or a journalist he might have succeeded, but his limited scholastic background would hardly have helped him in that field. His accent, too, was not that of the elite. In Europe, furthermore, a man's past could never be entirely forgotten or ignored. The documents remained. But across the sea lay America, so Stroheim made his decision. He bade farewell to his family, traveled to Bremen, took ship on November 15, 1909, and arrived in New York on November 26.     In America, he could be reborn. He would be an aristocrat, a high-ranking army officer, and a Catholic. The entry book at Ellis Island was his baptismal certificate. He crowned himself "von," and he would live up to it with a vengeance.     But when the penniless twenty-four-year-old ex-Jewish tradesman stepped off the boat on that November day, he realized that a newborn Christian aristocrat could also be hungry. Christmas was approaching, and he obtained a job gift-wrapping packages. What must his feelings have been on that first Christmas Eve in America--his temporary job now ended--as he sat alone, far from his family and his homeland, with only a few dollars in his pocket? That lonely and hungry Christmas may have made a permanent imprint on his mind (perhaps coupled with the fact that his father died a few years later on December 22), for throughout his films and scripts, the Christmas season is when the worst events invariably occur.     If Stroheim hoped for success in the new year, it did not come. What menial jobs he held, we do not know. Around December 1910, he witnessed the fall of a horse on a Brooklyn street and helped the animal to its feet. A member of the National Guard, Captain McLeer Jr. (Stroheim remembered the name as McLean), introduced himself and, after some conversation, suggested that Stroheim join the regiment. He did, but although promised the rank of sergeant, according to Curtiss, he was made a private. Curtiss also states that Stroheim enlisted in the U.S. Army for two years, and the New York Times obituary mentions that he served two years in the U.S. Cavalry.     In an American interview in 1919, after he became famous, Stroheim said that, while a member of Squad C of the first Cavalry of the National Guard of New York, he worked at a military camp in Plattsburgh, New York, as an expeditionary officer training men for World War I. In another interview at that time, he added the following to his military background: "About six weeks before the armistice was signed I was offered a commission in the Intelligence Department of the United States Government. I had served four years in the U.S. Army when I first came over ten years ago." In 1954, Stroheim claimed that he had "served in the American army for three years." He referred to his military service also in a letter to Peter Noble that mentioned "Squadron C First Cavalry in New York, the outfit in which I served as private from 1909 to 1912." I cite these examples just to prove that this was his story, not a misquotation by a newspaper reporter. Official records show, however, that Stroheim (there was no "von" mentioned) enlisted in the New York National Guard (Troop 8, Squadron C) on January 30, 1911, and was "dropped" two months later on March 27, 1911. So much for his American military career.     We must rely on Stroheim's memories, as repeated by Curtiss, to discover the events of the next few years. In 1911, we are informed, he began work for a fashion house in New York--drawing upon his previous experience in the family business--and in 1912, he arrived in San Francisco as a traveling salesman for the firm. Clashes of personality within the main office resulted in his being discharged. He stayed in the San Francisco area and, he claimed, took jobs as a flypaper salesman, a telephone company repairman, and a travel agency clerk. In short, his early years in America, like his dreams of a military career, were a series of failures. Like many bright men, he felt himself too superior to be a mere clerk or a businessman. His brother, Bruno, back in Austria, also tried to become something else. He, too, attempted to join the gentile establishment, and strove to become a writer.     Bruno would later contact the Hubertus publishing firm in Austria, which specialized in hunters' novels, poems, and novellas. Shortly after, Bruno's twenty-two short stories were printed in a volume titled Im Schilf [In the reeds]. They are sensitive, though sentimental, tales of lonely hunters up in the wooded hills, of poachers, and of nymphlike girls bathing in mountain lakes. They deal mostly with the joys and guilt of shooting animals. (A curious subject matter, considering the childhood accidental murder.) One, the title story, concerns the legend of Pan. In another tale, "Der Sprung" [The leap], a policeman and a hunter are lying in wait to capture a poacher who kills for sport and leaves the bodies to rot. When they catch the young man, he leaps to his death. His dying cry haunts the hunter, who says an Our Father for the man's soul. At that spot, now, says the narrator, can be found a wayside cross proclaiming for all to see that here, in 1920, a man met his death. The sign advises the passing wanderer to pray for the man's soul. Another story, "Verwehtes Lied" [A song fading away in the wind], is about a poacher who fires at a ranger who, in turn, shoots back and kills him. A church bell tolls, calling the faithful to early Mass, and the tones are carried on the wind over the fields and meadows, where the sounds fade away like a song.     Bruno's stories seem to indicate that certain thoughts and attitudes and settings were common to the two brothers: the wayside cross with its admonitory message, the church bells sounding over the valleys, the hunting lodges, the references to Pan, and women giving themselves to lovers in almost mystical unions. Similar content can be found in the first film that Stroheim directed, Blind Husbands .     Stroheim, living in the San Francisco area, was far from the mountains of Austria, although he still longed for them. On one of the days Stroheim was unemployed--of which there were many--he explored the countryside a few miles north of Oakland and climbed the 2,608-foot Mount Tamalpais, an adventure that recalled his previous experience in the Dolomites. While hiking and enjoying the stunning vistas, he encountered the proprietor of the West Point Inn, an Austrian known as Captain Henry Masjon, whose continental manner and Franz Josef whiskers made him locally famous. According to Curtiss, Stroheim became a handyman at the inn. There he met Margaret Knox. She was not a "practicing physician" as Curtiss avers, but her mother, Dr. Myra Knox, did have a medical practice in Oakland. Margaret was one of the smart set but unmarried and lonely, and the sunsets over the bay must have been romantic. Stroheim probably turned her head with tales of his wonderful youth in Austria. This encounter with Margaret at a mountain hotel undoubtedly inspired his story "The Pinnacle," which would become Blind Husbands . Whether this was a real love match or an affair of convenience cannot be ascertained, but the two began to live together in Mill Valley at the foot of the mountain.     Meanwhile, Stroheim decided to become a writer, and on November 16, 1912, an "E.O.H. von Stroheim" (using Dr. Knox's address in Oakland as the return address) copyrighted a short play called In the Morning . This is probably a variant title for Brothers, which was printed in 1988 in the magazine Film History . Although the play is somewhat reminiscent of Artur Schnitzler's work, it lacks his theatrical wisdom of short speeches and deft character interaction. Stroheim's people are often given to extended observations that would prove deadly on a stage.     As the play opens, we find that Nicki (short for Nicholaus Maria Erwin Count von Berchtholdsburg), a young Austrian dissolute, is deeply in debt to Eppsteiner, a Jewish moneylender, who visits him and suggests that his one hope is to marry money. Eppsteiner: There are always a few rich, very rich girls, who would like to marry a man like you. Of course, you will have to overlook the religion-- Nicki: And more or less bent noses--No, Eppsteiner, if I could buy my life that way--in marrying a Miss Kohn, or Rosebluh--Better die. Not that I have anything against the religion--No, no--It's--I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the blood--I could not do it to save my life. After the moneylender exits, the doorbell rings, and Mitzi, his girlfriend from the theater, visits, bringing some bills for him to pay. However, when he informs her he is both penniless and deeply in debt, she does not leave him (as would happen in most melodramas) but passionately kisses him and says, "I love you Nicki, you the man, not the uniform--not the title--you--you all alone."     After Mitzi leaves for the theater, Nicki writes some farewell letters and prepares to commit suicide. A stranger, having just escaped from the police, enters and explains that he is a robber. Nicki asks him why he does not work. The stranger accuses him of being "a child--an infant." The outside world is "no place for men like you--for men with manicured nails and monocles. You couldn't stand the smell of horsemeat and poverty." When Nicki offers him a champagne cup, the stranger tells him his own recipe: Moselle (Berncastler, specifically), some Cliquot (brut), a pressed orange, two glasses of curacao, a lemon, powdered sugar, pineapple. Thus, the play abruptly stops while Stroheim gives us details of a fruit punch! (Should we be surprised that twenty-five years later, in La Grande Illusion, a punch with some of the same ingredients appears?)     The stranger hints that he is as wellborn as the count and then discusses how wine, women, and song have contributed to his downfall. "It's rather interesting, let me tell you, to observe yourself--at first slowly, then rapidly progressing downward, and to realize how close to the surface the old, old savage lies. With every tie broken, the veneer goes quickly and the primitive--the predatory, comes through. It's very interesting--a study worthwhile--Naturally it's rather hard, to take the first steps down--But those once accomplished, it's astonishing how very easy the others come." What is remarkable about this speech is how it echoes Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and how it uncannily prefigures the main theme of McTeague, a book that Stroheim probably had not yet read. Furthermore, it seems to reflect Stroheim's own descent from a somewhat well-off Viennese into a poverty-stricken immigrant in Oakland.     The stranger takes away the suicide implements, binds Nicki, and leaves. In a brief scene the next morning, Nicki's servant unties him, and a letter reveals that his aunt has died. He will now have money.     This short play, although fascinating in what it reveals about Stroheim's thoughts at this early date, has too heavy a subject to be handled in about twenty minutes. It also contains some improbabilities, such as the stranger's arrival and the binding of the hero. Actually, the stranger is more a messenger of fate, a kind of good angel, as well as a doppelganger, and not perhaps a credible human being. Unfortunately, except for a moment or two, the play is a poor piece of theater.     Stroheim later said that he had mailed a copy of this play to Bronco Billy Anderson, the western star, at Essanay studios. What a weird choice, because the play had very little plot and was all dialogue, and slow-moving dialogue at that. By no means could it have been converted into a western or, in fact, into any kind of film.     One can readily see that Stroheim's play contains striking parallels to his later scenarios Merry-Go-Round and The Wedding March --he constantly reworked his ideas--but whether it gives us any insight into his former life in Vienna is another matter. The family firm had gone bankrupt and there was no longer any money to support the young man. Was this the reason that he left Austria? Did Stroheim imprudently become indebted to a Jewish moneylender, as he hinted? Was he urged to marry a well-off Jewish girl? Or did he invent these dramatic events? In any case, there is no doubt that in America he saw himself as an impoverished count who, being too educated, sensitive, and genteel to fit into a crass world, had sunk low in society.     During the time Stroheim was writing this play, his real-life affair with Margaret progressed. Curtiss mentions that she introduced him to such books as Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage and Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology . (Masters's book, however, was not published until April 1915.) Stroheim implies, via Curtiss, that he charmed Margaret's upper-class mother in the family mansion at 958 Fourteenth Street. He may have temporarily ingratiated himself with the mother, who had some respectable social connections, but she was not rich, nor was the house a mansion. In fact, the neighborhood was not especially affluent. The 1913 Oakland directories list the occupations of the residents in the area as messenger, worker, barber, clerk, corsetmaker, and tailor. No doubt, Dr. Knox had her office in the family home. (This whole side of the street was torn down years ago.)     On February 19, 1913, Stroheim and Margaret Knox were married. The Oakland Tribune of that date printed his age as twenty-one and hers as eighteen. The license shows that the twenty-seven-year-old Erich listed himself as the son of the Baroness Bondy and Benno von Stroheim. The Oakland Tribune of February 21, 1913, described the wedding: "Dr. Myra Knox is making the announcement of the marriage of her daughter, Miss Margaret Knox and Erich O. von Stroheim of San Francisco, which was a quiet home ceremony at the family home on Wednesday afternoon. Rev. William Day Simmons officiated at the service in the presence of a few relatives. The couple will make their home in Mill Valley, where they went immediately after the ceremony. The bride is an attractive girl with musical tastes and has been popular among the younger set here. Von Stroheim is connected with a large importing firm across the bay." The only thing that Stroheim was importing, however, was fantasy.     Curtiss weaves an imaginative account of this period. He says that, shortly after the wedding, Erich received an appointment as a captain in the Mexican army and arrived in Mexico on the day that President Madero was assassinated. As a result, he was advised by the American consul that such military appointments would not be honored and that he should return. The fact that Madero was killed on February 22, just three days after the wedding, is ample proof that this is fiction. Later, in Picture Play Magazine, Stroheim claimed that he had served as an officer "in the Bosnian campaign and in Mexico."     Within two months, the marriage began to erode. The "scion of the Austrian nobility" still could not find an adequate job, and he began drinking. The more humiliated he felt because of his poverty, the more angry and abusive he became. There were fights--Margaret claimed that he blackened her eye and punched her on the side of her head--and she rushed back to her mother in Oakland. There was a tearful reconciliation, and they found quarters a few blocks away. When the frustrated Stroheim still could not find a position appropriate to his talents, the fights began anew and again Margaret moved back to her mother's house. Angry at himself, at society, and at Margaret, Stroheim grew absolutely furious and telephoned his wife one day in the early part of May 1914 and threatened to punch her in the face. That was enough for Margaret, and at the urging of her mother (who saw Stroheim as an eternal loser), she filed for divorce on May 28. When Stroheim failed to appear, the divorce was granted.     Not only had the young Stroheim failed at marriage; he had also failed at life. In the six years since his rebirth in America, he had accomplished nothing--not happiness, not vocational success, and not monetary security. His experience in America consisted of boarding houses, occasional daily wages, and grinding penury--a world captured faithfully in Greed and in the original version of Walking down Broadway . At this period of his life, he would have understood Ambrose Bierce's definition of a year: 365 disappointments. Copyright © 2000 Arthur Lennig. All rights reserved.