Michael Curtiz

A Life in Film

Alan K. Rode

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813173962
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Academy Award–winning director Michael Curtiz (1886–1962)—whose best-known films include Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945) and White Christmas (1954)—was in many ways the anti-auteur. During his unprecedented twenty-seven year tenure at Warner Bros., he directed swashbuckling adventures, westerns, musicals, war epics, romances, historical dramas, horror films, tearjerkers, melodramas, comedies, and film noir masterpieces. The director's staggering output of 180 films surpasses that of the legendary John Ford and exceeds the combined total of films directed by George Cukor, Victor Fleming, and Howard Hawks.

In the first biography of this colorful, instinctual artist, Alan K. Rode illuminates the life and work of one of the film industry's most complex figures. He explores the director's little-known early life and career in his native Hungary, revealing how Curtiz shaped the earliest days of silent cinema in Europe before immigrating to the United States in 1926. In Hollywood, Curtiz earned a reputation for explosive tantrums, his difficulty with English, and disregard for the well-being of others. However, few directors elicited more memorable portrayals from their casts, and ten different actors delivered Oscar-nominated performances under his direction.

In addition to his study of the director's remarkable legacy, Rode investigates Curtiz's dramatic personal life, discussing his enduring creative partnership with his wife, screenwriter Bess Meredyth, as well as his numerous affairs and children born of his extramarital relationships. This meticulously researched biography provides a nuanced understanding of one of the most talented filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age.

1

A River Runs through It

Long before Budapest was a city, it was three villages. At the northern reaches of the Great Hungarian Plain, a trio of settlements were separated by the mighty Danube River. Buda and Obuda were on the west bank, and Pest on the east.

The region was originally settled by the Celts; the Romans established a frontier outpost by the Danube named Aquincum. Located on the Buda side of the river, the enclave was part of the imperial province of Lower Pannonia, serving as an early warning system against barbarian invaders of the empire. Succeeding conquerors, including the Huns of the fifth century, held sway, but the carousel of historical dominance continued to rotate as leaders died off or the next wave of aggressors swept down from the east.

The Magyars arrived in the ninth century and never left. These horsemen from the steppe, the descendants of Attila the Hun, established a bulwark of Western culture between Rome and Byzantium. The kingdom of Hungary prospered under a series of Arpadian kings until being nearly annihilated by Batu Khan’s Mongol horde in 1242. A century and a half of subsequent rule by the Ottoman Turks partitioned the country into a perpetual battlefield that effectively protected Europe against further invasion. Although eventually dominated by the Germanic Habsburg Empire, Magyar-speaking descendants increasingly assimilated with Germans and Jews along with influxes of Romanians, Serbs, Slovaks, and Croats. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Hungarians were flourishing, and the trio of cities straddling the Danube reflected this increased prosperity.

The Ausgleich, or Compromise, of 1867 dissolved the old Habsburg multinational empire that had endured for five centuries. The compromise was a grand bargain between the Germans of Austria-Bohemia and the Magyars of Hungary to formalize their joint hegemony over a diverse population. Both nations became theoretically equal under a single ruler who was crowned emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. Each nation-state had its own parliament and its own language: German for Austria and Magyar for Hungary. One was a citizen of Austria or Hungary, but all were subjects of the Germanic emperor-king.

The merger of Buda, Obuda, and Pest into Budapest in 1873 codified the new empire. It was the beginning of a golden age rivaling that of any other European city before World War I. A cosmopolitan metropolis of stunning vistas and modern urban planning and infrastructure, Budapest became the crown jewel of eastern Europe and was the largest port on the Danube. By 1900 Budapest had the first subway in Europe, a sophisticated municipal water system, and an electrical tram service; electric lights replaced gaslit street lamps throughout the city.

Thirteen years after Emperor Franz Joseph rode across the Chain Bridge to commemorate the unification of Budapest, Emmanuel Kaminer, later to rename himself Mihály Kertész, then Michael Kertész, and finally Michael Curtiz, was born on Christmas evening in 1886. Curtiz’s correct birth date was historically elusive. His year of birth is recorded variously as 1888, 1889, and 1892 by different sources, and there is a death certificate with a birth date of December 25, 1887.

Curtiz fueled much of this uncertainty, first by falsifying the date of birth on his U.S. passport registration in 1934 and then fibbing about his age in press interviews and news articles. When his wife Bess Meredyth complained that her spouse’s erroneous passport date gave the appearance that she was considerably older than he was (he was actually three years her senior), Curtiz shrugged and said, “Why don’t you lie like I am?”

A birth certificate noting his name as Mano Kaminer records 9:00 p.m. on December 25, 1886, as the time and date of his birth. The certificate on file at the Jewish Community Archive in Budapest also includes the additional detail that Curtiz’s circumcision was performed in January 1887 by Jakab Weinberger at 12 Gyár Street, located in the Seventh District, where the Kaminers lived. Other sources incorrectly identify Curtiz’s given name as Miksa. This is actually a common Hungarian familial nickname that Curtiz was tagged with as a boy.

During Curtiz’s tenure at Warner Bros., his father was sometimes identified in magazine articles and studio biographies as an architect and his mother as an opera singer or a dancer. In interviews, Curtiz occasionally referred to his father as a carpenter. Curtiz’s father, Ignacz, was a painter and a bricklayer born in 1845 in Dalatyn, a Galician village in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains (now part of Poland). He immigrated to Budapest in 1866. Curtiz’s mother, named Aranka Nathan, was born in Delatyu, Poland, in 1862 and probably was a singer at one time.

Curtiz’s boyhood home was an apartment building, 23 Szovetseg, in the Seventh District of Budapest, the Pest side of the city, three blocks from the square named for the nineteenth-century Hungarian actress Lujza Blaha. The Magyar Theater, later renamed the Hungarian National Theater, was 250 yards from his front door.

Few details survive about Curtiz’s childhood. While it wasn’t a nightmarish saga of Dickensian misery, life certainly wasn’t easy. His father’s employment was sporadic; it was said that he laid the brick walls outside St. Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest. Late in life, Curtiz recalled from his childhood days “that many times we are hungry.” The family would eventually include seven children: Michael was the oldest, followed by Regina (1889), Dezso (David, 1893), Margit (1897), Kornelia (1900), Lajos (1901), and the youngest, Gabor (Gabriel, 1904). There was an apartment building boom in Budapest near the end of the nineteenth century, and the Seventh District was the most crowded; many residences were adjudged as “foul-smelling, cramped warrens.”

The Kaminers lived in a small apartment with a living room, two small bedrooms, and a tiny kitchen. Late in life, Curtiz recalled the poverty of his early days for a magazine interviewer: “I tell my brothers then, all my life I will work to keep from being that way. Sleeping with four kids in one room!” Such memories were the major impetus of Curtiz’s obsessive work ethic.

Mano Kaminer was a robust youngster and an attention-getter. Although raised in a gritty urban environment, he did not become a street urchin. Instead, he evolved into a budding artist. His earliest professional association with the entertainment business consisted of selling candies and refreshments to theater patrons, especially at the Népszínház (Folk Theater), running beer, cigarettes, and flowers to the actors backstage, then ducking in to watch plays and operettas. With his exuberant personality, the youthful Kaminer was drawn to show business like a moth to a flame.

He completed gymnasium, or middle and high school, in 1904. It was an education that was equivalent or superior to any in Europe. The rigorous Budapest citywide curriculum mandated six years of Latin, three years of Greek, mathematics to the level of calculus, and a heavy load of Magyar literature and Hungarian history. It was a pressurized environment characterized by rote memorization, testing, recitation, intensive study, and more testing. The rigidity of his formative education burnished several aspects of his personality. On the positive side, his robust ego became balanced by a well-rounded intelligence. But he also developed a lifelong impatience that could give way to explosive frustration.

Curtiz aspired to be a professional actor. So, as the imperial government categorized acting as a vested profession akin to engineering or medicine, he had to attend the Royal Academy of Theater and Art in order to legally work as a contract performer. How Curtiz accrued the money to attend the academy became fodder for another recycled saga concerning his youthful employment.

The year-round circus at City Park in Budapest had a profound effect on him as a boy. He apparently spent a period during his early teen years performing with a circus as a pantomime actor, a strongman, or an acrobat. The director Byron Haskin observed Curtiz during the filming of Black Fury in 1935 scuttling up a tipple ladder “like a monkey, having been a circus acrobat.” Another account had Curtiz performing as a teenage acrobat in something called “the Becket of Circus.” Curtiz told Pete Martin in a 1947 interview with the Saturday Evening Post that he went on the road with a circus when he was seventeen, performing pantomime and juggling because “I was good athlete at school. Runner, jumper, like that.” Curtiz remained a physically nimble man into his late middle age. On the set of The Unsuspected in 1947, he demonstrated an old circus trick by tossing a lighted match in the air and catching it by the unlighted end without extinguishing the flame. There was a fictitious claim that Curtiz was a member of the 1912 Olympic fencing team from Austria-Hungary that won four medals. Not coincidentally, this story was peddled at the time Curtiz directed Jim Thorpe—All American for Warner Bros. in 1951. Another version has him leaving home at the age of fourteen and joining a theatrical troupe in Székesfehérvár, a city in central Hungary, and touring the country for two years before applying for admission to the Royal Academy. Although the accuracy of these stories is uncertain, Curtiz’s youthful employment not only alleviated the severity of his impoverishment but also taught him how to perform in front of an audience.

Being a Jew didn’t damage his ambitions either. Under the long reign of Emperor Franz Joseph, Jews became semiassimilated as participative citizens. Fully one-fifth of Budapest’s population of 733,000 was Jewish in 1900, and a Jew named Ferenc Heltai was elected mayor in 1912. Although the specter of anti-Semitism was omnipresent, it noticeably receded in Hungary during the first decade of the new century and did not bar entry to most occupations; in fact, Jews constituted the largest percentage of selected professional classes, particularly artists and writers. In greater Budapest, Curtiz was part of a modern generation of Jews who considered themselves Hungarians and strove to achieve their dreams in that dynamic metropolis at the dawning of a new age.

Many Jews in Budapest spoke Magyar rather than Yiddish. The future film director formally acknowledged his Hungarian pedigree and cloaked his heritage when, upon embarking on his acting career, he changed his surname from the Jewish Kaminer to the Magyar Kertész. It was a common practice. The noted playwright (and Curtiz’s friend) Lajos Bálint boasted of his record of Magyarizing Jewish surnames for a plethora of Hungarian actors, including changing Mano Kaminer into Mihály Kertész.

Kertész’s artistic sensibility was developed in Budapest during those heady years before World War I. The city had a tremendously robust intellectual and cultural life. The new main thoroughfare of Andrassy Avenue bisected its three-mile ring of boulevards. At 140 feet wide, Andrassy was the Hungarian Champs-Élysées, home of the Magyar Theater, the Royal Academy of Music (later renamed the Franz Liszt Academy of Music), and the Comic Opera. Along Nagymezo Utca there was glut of cabarets highlighted by the famous Orpheum Theater, which specialized in operettas, highly popular at that time. And throughout Budapest there was the great cultural integrator of Hungarian society: the coffeehouse.

Budapest’s coffeehouses were an incubator of intellectual and artistic talent that shaped the new century. By the time of Kertész’s bar mitzvah, there were approximately six hundred coffeehouses throughout the city. Each establishment possessed a unique identity, bearing little resemblance to the modern chains of efficient but identical coffee purveyors. In addition to doubling as full-service restaurants and islands of leisure for families of different classes, they served almost as professional clubs by providing services and entertainment while competing for customers. One could receive mail at one’s coffeehouse, read multiple newspapers (there were twenty-two daily papers published in Budapest in 1900), write (pen, ink, and paper were provided upon request), discuss, debate, and think.

Foremost among the city’s coffeehouses was the Café New York. It was an opulently appointed café ensconced in a lavish building on the Elizabeth Ring in the Seventh District. Alajos Hauszmann, the chief architect of Buda Castle and many of the finest buildings in the city, designed the structure. Opening night in 1894 at the Café New York was consecrated by a celebrated event that will be forever associated with Hungarian show biz history. The story goes that on that night, around what would have been closing time, a tipsy group of artists strolled down to the Danube and ceremoniously consigned the front door key to the bottom of the river. From that moment on, the Café New York was officially open twenty-four hours a day, every day.

The interior of the Café New York, replete with faun statues, fancy chandeliers, and baroque decorations heavy with marble and gold, became the center of Budapest’s literary and artistic life. The film director Andre de Toth recalled waiters attired in white tie and tails who “glided through the SRO crowds as if skating on ice.”

One of the café’s habitués from the post-Curtiz generation, de Toth later summed up the New York’s unique atmosphere and clientele, which grew to include the distinguished nuclear physicists Edward Teller and Leo Szilard, as “the home of artists and fakers, literary geniuses and illiterates, apostles of peace and the future makers of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. In short, a full-blown nut house.”

A co-owner of the Café New York was a former newspaper columnist, Vilmos Tarjan, a charming bon vivant and ferocious card player. He unhesitatingly supported his artist friends when they were financially down on their luck with gratis food and drink and interest-free loans. After a couple of decades, Tarjan’s guest book resembled a who’s who of show business: Fritz Lang, Dita Parlo, Rod La Rocque and his wife, Vilma Bánky, Sonja Henie, Annabella, Sydney Chaplin, Max Pallenberg, Josephine Baker, Thomas Mann, Danielle Darrieux, Helene Thimig (Mrs. Max Reinhardt), Lilian Harvey, Adolph Zukor, and Louis B. Mayer.

It is easy to romanticize the Café New York, with its talented artistic clientele and environment of creative bonhomie. As the film historian László Kriston put it, it was more about the practicality of insular relationships: “Everyone knew everyone, they all screwed the same chorus girls and got drunk together and worked and argued.”

The interior had a definitive occupational pecking order. The table for film journalists who wrote for city’s three cinema magazines was located on the second-floor balcony; many a film review and subtitles for a foreign film were scribed there over coffee and pastries. By 1913 the owners and operators of movie studios and cinemas, together with filmmakers and actors, congregated downstairs. The cinemas had shows scheduled every two hours till 10:00 p.m. After these wheeler-dealers scrutinized box-office figures, the card games would begin at midnight and continue into the wee hours. Budapest had 114 cinemas when Kertész began making films; the number of theaters and studios would swell during World War I, when most foreign films were embargoed or unavailable. By the war’s end, in 1918, there were thirty-seven film companies operating in Budapest.

Kertész’s contemporaries at the New York included a pair of close companions: Sandor Kellner, who grew up down the street from Kertész and would famously reinvent himself as Sir Alexander Korda, and Lehol Gabor, who became Gabriel Pascal, the producer who first brought the work of George Bernard Shaw to the screen. There was also the photographer André Kertész, the novelist and playwright Ferenc Molnár, the portly actor-comedian Jacob Gerö, later known to American audiences as the jowl-shaking S. Z. Sakall, and a National Theater actor named Béla Blaskó who billed himself Arisztid Olt. When Olt transitioned into films, he appropriated the name of his hometown of Lugos and changed his name to Bela Lugosi.

Although Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope made its New York City debut in 1894, it was the Lumière brothers in France with their cinematograph projector who introduced the commercial possibilities of film in Europe. The Lumières presented a series of ten short films in Paris on December 28, 1895, at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines. In April 1896 the first screening of a Lumière film in Budapest occurred in the coffeehouse of the Hotel Royal on the Elizabeth Ring. Movies were also exhibited at the Urania Scientific Theater at City Park during Hungary’s 1896 millennium celebration. These early venues went bankrupt, but movies continued to be exhibited in movable cinema tents at the City Park as well as in cafés in Budapest.

The influence of these early images on the young Kertész cannot be underestimated. As he wrote in a 1913 Budapest movie magazine article: “Who could have dared to assume a mere ten years ago in the tents of Varosliget [City Park], watching those flickery images on badly constructed wooden benches, that Edison’s invention, the motion picture, would grow into such a grandiose enterprise.”

Mihály Kertész had discovered a new method of artistic expression. He became determined to shape it into his own.

2

Actor to Director

Kertész graduated from the Royal Academy of Theater and Art in 1906. Located on Rakoczi Avenue in Budapest, the academy was a highly competitive institution that provided its students with detailed instruction on acting, set design, and related subjects. The curriculum was designed to winnow out those who were not exceptionally talented, supremely confident, and willing to work intensely.

The actor Victor Varconi remembered that every September, a line of “handsome men and pretty girls” queued up for blocks down Rakoczi Avenue to take the entrance examination, which amounted to a cold audition. Varconi attended the academy in 1909 and remembered performing for three judges—all members of the National Theater—who reviewed hundreds of auditions over three days. The instructors were among the most revered performers in Hungary: Ujházi Ede, Teréz Csillag, Gyula Gál, and the school’s director, Sándor Somló.

It was the equivalent of actor commando training. The attrition rate was high. Kertész recalled the academic rigor in a 1947 interview: “I study three languages. I even study anatomy and makeup. There are examinations every three months. It is tough. There are a hundred eighty-two in the class. Sixteen get a diploma.”

The young actor became particularly interested in direction. Unlike other students, he obsessively scrutinized the smalles...