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Prologue:
The Champion Driver:Exodus, Chapter 14, verses 14-25:
“And the Lord said unto Moses: Wherefore criest thou unto me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.
“But lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea, and divide it, and the children of Israel shall go on to dry ground through the midst of the sea… And the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I have gotten me honour upon Pharaoh, upon his chariots, and upon his horsemen…
“And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.
“And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground, and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.
“And the Egyptians pursued, and went in after them to the midst of the sea, even all Pharoah’s horses, his chariots, and his horsemen…
“And it came to pass…”
From the words of Charlton Heston, A.D. 1954:
“Yesterday was the exodus, and I led them out. When we were discussing the scene the other day DeMille put it to me with apt awe, I think; `When you lift your staff to signal the start of the Exodus, twenty thousand hearts will be beating in front of you.’ …I don’t think I can really convey to you what a genuinely moving experience it was to take part in this… I can only say that it was real. We are three thousand years from the time of Rameses II, and Egypt is the world’s youngest republic, instead of its oldest empire, but DeMille succeeded in making again, on the sand at Beni Youseff, an instant in history… Moses the man makes a shadow in which the actor disappears… It felt magnificent, and as we walked I said again to myself the other words I’d spoken in the scene. `Hear O Israel! Remember this day, when the strong hand of the Lord leads you out of bondage!’”
And it came to pass… What is this moment, in which reality, myth, history, imagination, inspiration, dreams, delusions mix into the realm that we now call “Hollywood” – the American version of an art born of the marriage of modern science and the age old gift of story-telling? The movies, as we know them, were born simultaneously in several countries, France, Britain and the United States primarily, but seized as a narrative form by pioneers in Italy, Germany, the Scandinavian countries and elsewhere, by the first decade of the 20th century. It was, however, that small town in California that made the cinema into the 20th century’s strongest cultural force, and, in that small town in California, Cecil B. DeMille was one of those men who made the movies what they are today.
So far, so familiar. The bare facts of DeMille’s life story have often been told. He was born on August 12, 1881 to a family that was to be steeped in the theatre. His father, Henry Churchill de Mille, was at that time a jobbing actor but would soon be well-known as a successful playwright and a co-writer with the mercurial David Belasco. His brother, William DeMille, born in 1878, would be a major American playwright, and Cecil would pursue his own play-writing career in collaboration with him. Their mother, Beatrice Matilda de Mille, would be a playwright, play broker, theatrical agent, founder of a school for girls and primary energiser and mentor for young Cecil after his father died when the boy was barely twelve years old. Cecil B. DeMille, Young Dramatist, was even to become the title of a children’s book in a series of “Childhood of Famous Americans,” published in 1963. The book informs us that when Cecil was born, in 1881, in Ashfield Massachusetts, “There were thirty-eight states in the Union. Chester A. Arthur was President,” and “the population of the country was about 50,155,000… Thomas Edison,” the book patriotically, if inaccurately, reminds us, “invented the motion-picture camera, 1889.”
Many boys decide at an early age that their life is going to be legend, but few have persevered with such stubborn determination as Cecil Blount DeMille. At the family home at Echo Lake, New Jersey, “an old pre-revolutionary house still held together on its original wooden pegs,” Cecil dreamed, as the 1963 Young Dramatist puts it, “that he was the champion driver who rode a tireless, magnificent Arabian horse. He liked to pretend that people were in trouble and had sent for him. He would come galloping to the rescue, the sweat glistening on the sides of his trusty black steed.”
In 1919, already an established film-maker, the champion driver’s steed had morphed into a big, red aeroplane, in which DeMille had chosen to conduct “the first interview which really took place in an aeroplane,” in the breathless words of Photoplay magazine’s writer Elizabeth Peltret, who described this historical moment:
We were moving slowly – that is, I thought we were moving slowly – over the oil fields on the outskirts of Los Angeles… I could not believe we were going at seventy miles an hour (though we were), and thought that something must have gone wrong. A glance at Mr. de Mille reassured me. He was smiling. He smiled every time I looked at him…
“I am,” he intoned, with an assumption of much gravity, “a great believer in the philosophy which says that nothing in life is worth taking too seriously… but at the same time I take my work seriously – tragically so, sometimes.”
To conduct the interview, DeMille had shut off the motor, something which deeply disconcerted early flight passengers whose faith in the this new triumph of modern technology was shaky at best. DeMille’s senior partner in the film business, Jesse Lasky, famously relayed his panic at this kind of manouever when Cecil persuaded him, against his better judgement, to take to the air in the front seat arranged for student pilots. He would not have been reassured to know that, at this time, the trainer pilot at the back always took aboard a heavy monkey wrench so that he could knock out the trainee and take control of the aircraft if the latter made any sudden and potentially fatal error. But the Champion Driver was in his element, sailing above the grubby fields of the earth. As Miss Peltret resumes:
Mr DeMille turned, several times, banking at only a slight angle, making as he said “an easy figure eight,” and looking over the tilted edge of the wing I was treated to the unusual spectacle of being able to see equally well on both sides of a mountain at once… We were flying due west but the sun appeared to be below us. I most particularly wanted him to talk about God and that, too, he understood.
“My God is a God of nature, of bigness, rather than a personal God,” C.B. DeMille went on. (He was, by the way, brought up as a strict Presbyterian, notwithstanding his father’s constant connection with the theater.) “As a boy, I pictured Him as a sort of glorified man sitting on a throne in the clouds, pointing out individuals with a golden scepter saying, ‘Punish this man, and reward that one.’ Now I do not picture Him at all. I think, though, that he builds forever. I cannot believe that we are put here for fifty or sixty years and that after that there is nothing. If a man has a strong personality I do not see why it should not endure after death, but where and in what form it endures I am willing to wait to find out.”
Four years later, DeMille progressed forcefully towards a “picturization,” if not of the Almighty Himself, of His agents upon earth with his first depiction of Moses in The Ten Commandments of 1923, the vital precursor of his last, Hestonian epic. Although this was not DeMille’s first historical epic – that honour is due his 1916 version of the tale of Joan of Arc, Joan the Woman – it was the film that began to establish the legend of Cecil B. DeMille as master of the grandiose and Biblical sagas, a position that was cemented with his 1927 version of the life of Christ, King of Kings. This latter film, as if in premonition of our own day and age, sparked both adulation and rage across a wide spectrum from fundamentalist Catholics to appalled Jews, who denounced the film as a vivid reminder of anti-semitic Christianity. It also made vast amounts of money, over many years of revivals, well into the “Talkie” age, and convinced DeMille, and his backers, that historical blockbusters were a sure-fire path to a commercial heaven. The famous catch-phrase – “Ready when you are, Mr DeMille,” – marking an event that never happened, or not the way it was told – the cameraman who failed to roll his camera when DeMille signalled the blowing up of a massive period set, denoted the director as indeed a King of Kings, master of the vast fantasies he surveyed from his own virtual hilltop throne.
And yet, few except film historians are aware that Cecil B. DeMille directed seventy motion pictures, all of them long-length, “feature” productions, that fifty-two of them were silent pictures, that only eight of these could properly be called “epics,” and only four of these – The Ten Commandments 1923 , King of Kings (1927), Samson and Delilah (1949) and The Ten Commandments 1956 version – were “Biblical” films, with a fifth, The Sign of the Cross (1932) coming close to the New Testament era.
Of DeMille’s silent pictures, the first twenty-four were all shot in the three-year period of his first avalanche of motion-picture making, from the end of 1913 through 1916, when he was feeling his way, learning his craft, with few precursors in the art of the long-length movie. Thereafter he slowed down, a little, but still produced a further twenty-eight films until the end of the silent movie era, the change-over years of 1928-29. To many critics, in fact, he was a man of yesterday, by the time of the Talkies, a dinosaur who had seen his best years a decade before, as the century’s teens segued into the twenties.
The curious, and somewhat stunning fact of the life in art of Cecil B. DeMille, is that most of his best, most intriguing, masterfully crafted and indeed amazing movies remain invisible and unknown even to film buffs who were brought up on the legendary sagas of this iconic movie maker, the man who invented the sterotype of the swaggering director, with his desert puttees and rough-hewn casual get-up, the snapping maestro and generalissimo, with his megaphone and his dedicated chair-boy who always has the boss’s chair ready for him to sit on wherever and whenever, without looking round. Many of these films are familiar only to a small group of movie historians, writers and archivists, who have travelled across the world to view rare prints in film libraries dedicated to preserving films that have almost, but not quite, vanished into the great sink-hole of silent movie oblivion. Some of these films, neglected for decades, are finally beginning to appear in new DVD versions that can enable us to glimpse DeMille in his heyday, films like Manslaughter, The Affairs of Anatol, Male and Female, Carmen, Joan the Woman and King of Kings itself, now fully restored, some with the full glory of original tinting, toning and coloured intertitles brought back to shimmering life. Hopefully, as time goes on, more will follow. In due course, new audiences should be able to reel in disbelief at the bizarre, often delirious plot twists and visual pyrotechnics of movies like Fool’s Paradise, The Golden Bed, The Godless Girl, or the early excesses of DeMille’s almost hallucinatory saga of the Conquistadores and the Aztecs – The Woman God Forgot, of 1917.
Long before DeMille was seen as Bible interpreter – or hack – he was lauded as the producer-director of Hollywood’s most adult-themed entertainments, his series of husband-wife-divorce-and-remarriage satires, most of them starring his youngest discovery, Gloria Swanson, rescued from Mack Sennett’s slapstick factory. These movies, with titles such as Old Wives For New, Don’t Change Your Husband and Why Change Your Wife? featured Miss Swanson and other ladies in exquisite gowns and headgear, set in exquisite homes with exquisite furniture and fittings, usually with less than exquisite male partners, who might be swapped for sins such as neglect of their spouses, forgetting the wedding anniversary, or an overindulgence in eating onions. Husbands would let go of their wives for incipient adultery, only to find their loss outweighed their gain. Long before he was holding forth about God’s presence and plan for the universe, DeMille was telling Miss Peltret of Photoplay, in his aerial interview of 1919:
“I am a great believer in goodness and virtue, but if a woman has made a false step, as it is called, I don’t see anything to agonize over. She has had an experience, and if she only knows how to profit from her mis-step, she will become all the bettter. “Anyway, the best thing for her to do, in my opinion, is to forget it. Everyone else will forget it too. The ‘ruined woman’ is out of style; as out of style as the woman of the Victorian era who used to faint at every little alarm. The only reason why a fallen woman shouldn’t get up again lies in her own foolishness, not the opinion of the world. Society will forget as soon as she will let it.
“There is a stronger thing in life than love, and that is friendship. Friendship can exist with passion… My wife and I are friends, comrades in every sense of the word, true partners in life. And we do not in any way restrict each other’s liberty. She has a sense of humor as keen as my own and for two people to be able to laugh at the same things is the best guarantee of happiness.”
“There was a pause,” Miss Peltret wrote, “once more the engine roared, and we rose. Then he shut off the motor and volplaned; an interesting and thrilling sensation. I was always thrilled when the motor was off and always relieved to hear it start again… Going back to the studio (in) the automobile seemed – tame? No, speedy in comparison…”
DeMille’s public declarations about his marriage masked a complex relationship, which wove several other long term partnerships into the director’s life, and determined his personal principles and practice in dealing with others. In many ways, DeMille’s films comprised a battleground in which he played and replayed his ideas, emotions, and peculiarities in matters of male and female sexuality and mores. The art is, in effect, more revealing of the man’s inner life than the mounds of paper, letters, notes, voluminous production files and records that he stockpiled and left for posterity to wade through. At a very early stage in his film career DeMille determined that he was to become a figure of at least national importance whose every move, gesture, thought and utterance should be left as a treasured artefact for the future. The major gain has been the preservation of the movies, which DeMille began to attend to in the mid-1920’s. Even by then the negatives of six of his movies made between 1914 and 1917 had disappeared, and a seventh survives only in a truncated two-reel fragment, such was the cavalier attitude of the movie studios’ executives to their product: Shoot, release, exploit, and move on. But at least the other negatives exist, to make prints and restorations possible.
In 1950, when Billy Wilder featured DeMille, playing himself, in the dystopian Hollywood satire Sunset Boulevard, the script gave Erich Von Stroheim – as the chauffeur to ageing star Gloria Swanson, who reveals to the anti-hero, played by William Holden, that he was once her first husband and her director – the line: “In those days, there were three motion picture directors that mattered: D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Max Von Mayerling” – his name in the movie. This was, when one substitutes Stroheim’s own name, unvarnished fact. But Griffith’s early masterpieces, flawed as his breakthrough Birth of a Nation (1915) was by racism, and crippled as 1916’s Intolerance was by commercial failure, led to lesser and lesser works, and Stroheim’s films – after his first three – are justly celebrated despite their survival as ruins of what should have been but was curtailed, slashed and burned by the studios. In contrast, DeMille’s silent films, from 1917 until the end of the silents, are almost all precisely as the director wished them to be. For a full decade, he was the complete master and auteur of his films, though some were chosen by circumstance of war and the commercial desires of Jesse Lasky rather than artistic preference. And DeMille continued to be the author of his films throughout the sound era too. For such an auteur, and such a world-famous person, the lack of knoweldge of his best work must surely be considered peculiar, if not astounding.
And so this book is an attempt to tell the story of Cecil B. DeMille largely through his work: The Life In Art. It will form part of a process that appears to be unfolding as a rediscovery of DeMille’s central place in the history of the American cinema. This was begun by the fine, definitive filmography and production history of DeMille’s movies by Robert Birchard, Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood, published in 2004. As in all else, the study of DeMille engenders its own politics, and the heritage of DeMille, as an American icon, is shaping up as an important factor in the battle of ideas that is now raging in the body politic of America itself.
For DeMille, once considered an artistic dinosaur, a purveyor of outmoded nineteenth century standards, now appears, in the era of a new global American crusade, as a precursor of the “neo-conservative” age of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. As the son of a socially progressive, if morally conservative playwright, DeMille imbibed both his Jewish mother’s strong drive towards achievement, and his father’s Protestant ethos of sharp moral dichotomies, in an age in which modernity, the machine and the pursuit of money made America a battlefield of clashing values and temptations. Young Cecil embraced the America of rising expectations, new sexual freedoms, the birth of a powerful consumer society, until the old time religion slowly began to waft down from his pervading childhood memories to infuse his films with strange, unanswered questions, and then emphatic, age old answers. From a carefree dalliance with the burgeoning jazz age, replete with the syncopations of desire and pleasure – and delicious orgies – DeMille’s films revealed a growing, nagging doubt about the salvations of secularity, until his eventual discovery of the potent power of presenting his modern dilemmas in their ancient settings.
For Moses hefting the stone tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai had more than a chance resemblance to the ambitious director who decided he now wished to reform a wayward world. America as a Biblical template for a moral rearmament is an idea that DeMille did not invent, but he gave it its strongest portrayal in the twentieth century’s most powerful and influential medium. In his political journey from soft left to hard right, becoming the scourge of left wing unions and the communist menace, the imagery he presented upon the screen mirrors a cultural journey that America has forced the entire world to pay attention to, on pain of serious consequences. We must all pay heed now to these siren voices that came down, piggy-backing upon the Founding Fathers’ democracy, from America’s pioneer origins. Was Cecil B. DeMille savant or sinner, mentor or malcontent, artist or hack, a principled defender of American freedoms or a hypocritical opportunist who embraced the golden calf of sheer commercialism? Was he, as his detractors insisted, a vulgarian who mixed Sex and God in an unholy brew that made the box office tills ring with Hosannahs, or was he indeed, as portrayed by his hagiographers, the master craftsman, a man loyal to wife, mistresses, long-serving crews and casts, and audiences, over his almost half-century of achievements? Garlanded with praise, the list of his awards fills pages of press releases, and he was the crowned king and progenitor of movie hype and merchandising, self serving to beyond a fault. Could he be all these, and more – the most complex personality of the American screen? Or does the collision of so many opposites reduce him to a chaotic mediocrity, like the Wizard of Oz, a thing of bells and whistles and puffs of coloured smoke, but little substance in the end?
Here then, is the pirate DeMille, the Champion Driver of his own imagination, the “Unauthorised” version of a pervasive puzzle that mirrors the larger puzzle, and contradictions, of America itself.
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