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268 ERICH VON STROHEIM
harmonium wheezes and her German-American family stand in limp attitudes of maudlin and sentimental attention, a great crowd can be seen through the window, gathered on the opposite side of the road. For McTeague's wedding ? One might suppose so, until Stroheim causes an elaborate funeral cortege of a local bigwig to pass.
That sort of thing was typical of his work. Cecil B. DeMille was surfeiting the world with lavish spectacle which played around but only hinted at sex. Stroheim gave the world the real thing ; where other directors ended their stories with the marriage of hero and heroine, Stroheim started his stories with their marriage. Foolish Wives and Blind Husbands startled Hollywood considerably, for they dealt with after-marriage problems of sex, whereas the screen had hitherto only ever dealt with the pretty-pretty but uncomplicated situation of boy merely meeting girl.
Stroheim, unlike Griffith and Chaplin, was unable to conform to Hollywood standards of production. Anything was liable to happen when he started shooting ; he had no regard for expense or time. The studios humiliated and crushed him by calling him off a film and substituting another director because the executives were fearful that he would land them in bankruptcy.
They even made him toe the line to the extent of turning out a conventional box office subject, The Merry Widow. Stroheim made a great job of it — for his employers — and the film took four million dollars at the box office, but Stroheim himself has always hated it.
He came to Hollywood via the Austrian cavalry, the Imperial Palace Guard in Vienna, selling fly-papers and hawking picture postcards (the latter, presumably, during the debacle in Austria following the collapse of Germany in 191 8), and he brought a measure of Prussian arrogance to bear in the studios, a factor which doubtless contributed to his feuds with the executives.
They tell a story in Hollywood to the effect that he once planned to stop one " front office " interfering with the production of one of his films by the drastic expedient of mobilising his actors and stage crew as a fighting unit and holding his preserves by sheer armed force, a course from which he was dissuaded by his wife, who pointed out that such things are " not done " in America.
It was the day when stars always stipulated that the studios should provide them with a car in addition to their salaries. The studios were miles apart and transport was practically non-existent.
When Alice Terry was promoted from thirtydollar-aweek extra