The Golden Look

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It was the opening night of the first-grade play. Up to the theater door came skipping the prettiest little girl in the world--her golden hair in loving braids, her skin like pinks in a bowl of milk, her chin arriving at a charming little point, her eyes as wide and innocent as a china doll's. But the lobby was packed tight with squealing children and shushing mothers. How to get through? The wide eyes narrowed, the pointed chin shot forward, and daddy's darling charged. "Hey!" a five-year-old hollered as he pulled her elbow out of his ear. "Who do you think you are?" The little girl drew herself up. "I," she announced in a powerful voice, "am the leading lady!" The crowd fell back, an aisle was made, and down it the six-year-old diva swept grandly to her dressing room.

"Ach," Maria Schell recalls, her eyes misting, "it was wonderful!" And wonderful is the way it has been ever since. In the 25 years that have waltzed by since that evening in Vienna, Actress Schell has swept--and elbowed--her way to a considerable reputation in the European theater and through a remarkable series of triumphs on the European screen. For six years she has been top draw at the German box office, and she makes more money (about $85,000 a picture) than any other German actress. At 31, she is a serious professional player who takes more pride in the parts she can perform than in those she possesses. British Director John Boulting says flatly that she is "the greatest actress I have ever directed--a tremendous talent."

Last summer the leading lady swept on to what may become her greatest triumph. Wowed by the ability displayed--and the receipts shown--by some of her recent foreign pictures (The Last Bridge, The Heart of the Matter, Gervaise), the we-gotta-have-new-talent hounds at M-G-M came briskly to a point.* Actress Schell was promptly signed to a comfy contract, written to her own shrewd terms: four Hollywood pictures in seven years, $100,000 for the first picture, $175,000 for the last, script and director to be approved by Actress Schell, full freedom to make pictures for any other producer.

As Big as Bergman? Last week M-G-M was getting ready to hurl "the blonde bomb Schell," as the movie columnists like to call her, at the U.S. moviegoing public in her first Hollywood picture--a $2,500,000 adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, in which, as Hollywood would have it, the first lady of the European screen will be seen in a role (Grushenka) that was originally intended for Marilyn Monroe. Maria Schell has already burst on several preview audiences with a flash that clearly dazzled them, and last week the boys in the executive steamroom were sweating out the final decisions and the finishing touches on the film--the anxious countdown before the launching of a star that shrewd little Benny Thau, an M-G-M production boss, expects to be "as big as Bergman."

The comparison is not at all farfetched. Perhaps not since the full-blown Garbo has the old world offered to the new such a prepotent image of the eternal feminine as can be seen in the mysteriously soulful face of Maria Schell. It is the face of a princess in a German fairy tale. Her hair is still the palest gold, and it tumbles over her shoulders, when she lets it down, in quietly melodious loops. Her skin is white and perfect. Her mouth is delicate, and her smile almost too exquisitely sweet. Her eyes change, as the light changes, from blue to grey to green, and are unusually large; when she smiles, they brim with tenderness and a kind of luminous spirituality that seems to tame the beast and inspire the best in men. Says a hardbitten, hard-smitten Hollywood producer: "It is the face of a madonna."

Yeah, yeah, say some of his skeptical colleagues, but how will the U.S. moviegoer--who has been powerfully polarized to The Peroxide Ideal of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield--cotton to this refined new kind of stimulation? "That smile," one executive shuddered. "It doesn't arouse the cad in a man. It brings out the uncle." And another thing: Maria's earthy body makes a startling contrast to her heavenly face. From her father's side of the family she has inherited the chunky frame of a Swiss farm girl, with heavy hips and strapping thighs. Richard Brooks, who directed her in Karamazov, sums up: "She isn't the sort of girl who gives you sweaty palms."

"Real Womanliness." What Maria does give, according to Director Brooks, is something new to U.S. show business. Instead of North American sex, Maria has Central European Seele, which Brooks defines as a sort of spiritual dreaminess, interfused with girlish innocence and a tender maternal quality. They all add up to "real womanliness." Says Brooks: "Here for the first time on the screen the American man will see a woman who really understands him, who can give herself as American women have never learned to. This is the woman that American women long to be, and that American men are looking for."

Whatever her merits as a screen personality, Maria Schell is not universally liked by her fellow workers. Even in a business where professional jealousy is a strictly observed rule, she has inspired a surprising amount of viciously unflattering comment. A well-known French actor last week gritted: "I have never in my life hated a woman so much." A German director said: "I never think of that kleine Biest without wanting to slap her face." To the cast and crew of Une Vie, the French picture she has just finished shooting, she was openly known as "The Monster." A French director called her "one of the worst experiences of my life. In that sweet smile I see nothing but bared fangs. Inside the fairy princess is a witch."

Unashamed Tightwad. The plain fact seems to be that Actress Schell suffers from a virulent condition known in show business as "star personality." She is a diva on the grand, almost forgotten scale. Says one of her directors: "Maria is an unmitigated egomaniac. For her, nobody else really exists." Says another: "She lets nothing, but nothing, interfere with her career. She is a pure power type. What love means to most women, fame means to Maria." And if a sense of humor includes the ability to laugh at oneself, she is blankly devoid of humor.

Like Sarah Bernhardt--who forced her managers to trot backstage after every performance with a little bag of gold--Maria is an unashamed tightwad. Her colleagues say that she overworks and underpays her personal staff, and scrimps on the hairdresser by having her hair done free at the studio. In Europe she negotiates all her own contracts--a practice that saves plenty in legal fees. Yet, though Maria can think like a man when she has to, she all too often talks like a stubbornly opinionated woman, and her excellent European education gives her a mighty big bat to swing at the conversational ball. She is, for instance, a connoisseur of Japanese poetry, and is fluent in five languages (German, Swiss-German, French, English, Italian).

As in business, so in love. "Maria doesn't give," says one of her old beaux. "She takes. She is more like a man than a woman." Says Maria: "Without love, I can't glow [leuchten]." Nowadays the glow is supplied by a German director named Horst Haechler, whom she married last April.

The Right Way. Maria's glow--an astonishing animal incandescence that Germans call "the golden look"--does not shine only for the camera's eye. She plays to her friends as well as to her audiences, and she plays with most devastating effect to her directors. It works like this, says a French actor: "Maria is one of those people who is convinced that the right way to do a thing is her way. She is therefore determined to direct the director, and she is smart enough to go about it in the sweetest possible way. 'Don't you really think we should do it like this?' she will ask. And the director, confronted with that overpowering smile, is sure to give in, unless he has the strength of a lion." If he doesn't give in, Maria knows how to take her revenge. When she could not break the will of Director Rene Clement, she forced him to delay release of the French version of Gervaise for a full six months while she perfected her "southern accent" and haggled for the right to dub her own part--a procedure that seriously embarrassed him financially.

The point is that Maria's way is often the wrong way. Like most performers, she is a bad judge of what is good in her own work. "She consistently overacts," says one of her leading men. "And she forces the pace so hard that everyone else overacts in self-defense." She tends to read the little lines as intensely as the big ones--a practice which the French describe as swatting flies with sofas. What's more, Maria is prone to heavy Germanic mannerisms, hardly the ticket in French and British films. She overprepares her lines, to the serious loss of spontaneity. And, worst of all, she would secretly rather please the public, many of her fellow actors believe, than satisfy a role, which may mean that she would rather be a great star than a good actress.

Turn on the Faucet. Whatever her weaknesses, Maria has her qualities too, and some are prodigious. She has, says Director Brooks, "an enormously wide range of basic emotions," and she has a marvelous natural facility in expressing her feelings--a talent formed and fortified by long, hard schooling in the Central European traditions of acting. For example, she can weep to order as easily as turning on a faucet. For The Brothers Karamazov, she did five takes, without a break, of the same crying jag, and the fifth time she wept as profusely as the first. Even more remarkable, other actors say, is Maria's ability, not only to act, but to react--to lose herself in the relationships with other actors. "As you play a scene with her," says Yul Brynner, her co-star in Karamazov, "you experience a curious generation and regeneration of feeling. There seems to be no end to the possibilities of relationships between you."

Even greater than Maria's talent, moviemakers feel, is her awesome passion for work. "If hard work is genius," says Director Robert Siodmak, "that girl is a genius. She is an artist. She has the inner toughness." She drives like a demon all day, and studies far into the night. Many a dazed director has fumbled for a jangling phone in the middle of the night--Maria with a question. "I'd rather have a vulture pick my liver," says one of her victims, "than Maria pick my brains." Her energy is boundless. She is never ready to quit at closing time. One day in Berlin she begged Director Siodmak to let her make "a few more takes" while he was off the set. The scene called for Maria to run down eight flights of stairs while the camera, set up in an elevator, followed her all the way. When Siodmak came back, several hours later, the scene had been photographed 43 times, and Maria was still raring to go.

This Is Truth. Actress Schell works out her parts with a passion for detail that is eminently Swiss. For Die Ratten, in which she played a refugee girl, she traipsed over to East Berlin to have her hair done in a Sovietized style, and bought the shabby clothing she wore in the picture off the back of a girl in a refugee camp. On the set she lives with "total concentration" the character she is playing; if she wants a glass of water between takes, it is the character who makes the request. She covers her scripts with more interpretive notes than there is dialogue--but sometimes the writing is not in her usual hand. It is in what she imagines to be the handwriting of the character she is playing.

Obviously, Maria does not go through these Stanislavskian contortions for the histrionic hell of it. She finds that they give her a more immediate experience of how it feels to be the person she is portraying. As Maria explains her method and her goal: "I drive to the center of the being I must become, until I know it as I know my own. But more than that. I want the parts I play to represent not one woman, but all women, The Woman. I am trying to separate truth from reality. There are millions of leaves, each in itself a work of art. This is reality. But a leaf painted by Michelangelo is much more than just one leaf. It is The Leaf. It is all leaves. This is truth."

Always Smiling. Maria's inwardness and philosophical passion, the special glory of her art, is not merely a personal characteristic; it is the peculiar tradition of the German theater, to which she was apprenticed as soon as she could talk. Her father, Hermann Ferdinand Schell, was a Swiss playwright, moderately well known in Vienna, where he lived and worked, and where Maria Margarethe Anna Schell was born on Jan. 15, 1926. Her mother, a Viennese actress, daughter of a prominent neurologist and granddaughter of Vienna's chief of police, ran an experimental theater--along with a family of four children. Maria was the eldest, and in the nursery dramas of that stage-struck house, she insisted that she must play the Virgin Mary (Die Jungfrau Maria). She was a "sweet little blonde girl," the neighbors recall, "always happy and smiling." At six, she made her first public appearance, as the star of a drama entitled The Princess Searching for a Good Human Being, and she brought down the house.

In 1938, just after the Anschluss, the Schells moved to Switzerland and rented the Zurich villa where Richard Wagner had worked on Tristan und Isolde. Maria was packed off to a convent school at Colmar in Alsace. At 15, she begged her father to let her study dramatics, but papa was an unsuccessful playwright as well as a practical Swiss, and he laid down the law: business school. Maria took a typing course and a job wrapping books in a mail-order house. Salary: about $11.50 a month. It was grim, but it did not last long. At 16, she was a movie star.

Scene Stealer. It happened suddenly. A friend of mother's came looking for a girl to play a small part in a picture (Steinbruch) that he was making. When he saw Maria he asked her to read a minor role; when he heard her read, he offered her the main part. The picture was a hit, and papa gave in; she enrolled at Zurich's School of Theatrical Arts. "She worked like the devil," says one of her instructors. Within a few months she was starring in a stage version of the film she had made. The critics were impressed, the audience was overwhelmed, her fellow actors were appalled. She stole scene after scene with the cunning of a crow, and when she was charged with the larceny, she only blinked her big round eyes and vowed that it was only "natural exuberance." One day an actor decided to get even. At a point in the script where he was supposed to slap her lightly, "he slapped me so hard it almost knocked me down." But it was no use. "I cried real tears of pain and looked so genuinely hurt and startled that the audience stood and cheered." Says Director Josef von Baky: "It was all there at 17. The tremendous intensity and ambition, the radiance and the look of sentimental innocence, the specific Schell personality." At 20, Maria was hired by the State Theater of Bern as its leading lady. Salary: $250 a month. Repertory: Shakespeare, Shaw, Goethe, Ibsen.

A World Reputation. At 22, Maria made tracks for Vienna and the famous Burgtheater. the sum and summit of the German theatrical tradition. She never quite made it. A film director named Karl Hartl met her in a cafe, felt the burn of her blowtorch intensity, and offered her on the spot the lead in the picture he was casting. She took the job, and pretty soon any number of Herzen, as the romantic rumors had it, were beating in Dreivierteltakt. She was simultaneously supposed to be in love with Producer Ernst Lothar, with a cameraman named Guenther Anders, and with the famous star of the Burgtheater, Attila Hoerbiger. In any case, the picture (The Angel with the Trumpet) somehow got made, and she was so good in it that the producers were soon pounding at her door.

Sir Alexander Korda, the British movie mogul, signed her to a seven-year, nonexclusive contract. The late great Albert Basserman dragged her off on a tour of Europe to play Gretchen to his Faust. By 1950 she was in a flood tide of some of the weepiest (and most popular) German pictures ever made. This was her Seelchenperiode as a leidender Engel (suffering angel), the shopgirl's ideal, when the Schell smile was as famous in Germany as the Monroe walkaway was in the U.S. Maria and Dieter Borsche, with whom she was starred in Es Kommt Ein Tag, were the "ideal couple" of Lieschen Mueller (the Jane Doe of Central Europe), whose interest was still further excited by rumors that the passion was even more flaming off the screen than on. In 1952, when Borsche was replaced by O. W. Fischer, "Schell-Fisch" became an even more popular couple.

Nevertheless, as long as Lieschen was crying in her beer, Maria was wasting her talent, and in the fall of 1953 she took thought, went to work for the most gifted moviemaker in Germany. Helmut (The Devil's General) Kaeutner. In The Last Bridge, cast as a woman doctor in wartime, she gave a memorably jolting performance, and in 1954, at the Cannes film festival, Maria was voted the year's best actress. Overnight she had a world reputation, and the films that followed impressively sustained it.

The Sun Came Out. By 1957 Maria decided that she was ready for Hollywood. Alone, and armed with only an invitation to the Academy Award festivities, she left last March for the U.S. An officer of the Academy met her at the Los Angeles airport and took her to her hotel. No flashbulbs, no pressagents; nobody knew who she was and nobody cared. But 48 hours later she had MGM's top brass in a corporate rattle, and into her lap had fallen a tentative offer of the juiciest part the studio had to offer. And how did she do it? She went to a cocktail party.

The room was full of famous and beautiful women. "But when Maria walked in," says an actor who was there, "it was as if the sun had come out. and a lot of stars looked suddenly pretty dim." Producer Pandro Berman (who had just lost Marilyn Monroe for the part of Grushenka, and could not be sure that Warner Bros, would let Carroll Baker play it), took one startled look at Maria and got on the phone to Director Brooks. "I just saw Grushenka." After the party, Maria happened to meet Actor Brynner in the lobby of her hotel. He took one startled look and got on the phone to Director Brooks. "I just saw Grushenka." "O.K., O.K.," said Brooks. "You just saw Grushenka. Everybody just saw Grushenka. But can she act?" A quick look at Gervaise settled that. Brooks arranged a lunch at MGM. They gave her the script to read. "I could hardly breathe," Maria recalls; but the next day she had breath enough to harangue Brooks and Brynner "like a Prussian drill sergeant" about why she should have the part and Carroll Baker should not.

The Walls Shook. M-G-M was hopeful that in Actress Schell it had found a dish to tempt the flagging U.S. appetite for films--but was the dish just a little bit too full for the American taste? Director Brooks suggested tactfully that Maria refuse some of those second helpings of Kartoffelkloesschen and Sachertorten, and lose a little weight--say, 20 Ibs. Maria agreed, but when she arrived in Hollywood to start shooting, she was as broad as ever. Furthermore, she was dressed like a middle-aged Central European frump. Her frocks were all in the height of Paris fashion--most of them made by Dior--but she had not bothered to take care of one minor detail: none of them had been properly fitted.

Director Brooks decided to be firm. "Maria, you have to lose weight." "Why?" "Because"--he took a deep breath--"you are not sexually attractive." That tore it. Says Brooks: "The walls shook. My teeth rattled. What a tigress." She concluded coldly: "In Europe, people look at my face, not at my body." But she pared away 15 Ibs. in about two weeks.

When work began, the crew at first suspected Maria's actressy airs and star-bitrary manners. But once they saw her in front of the camera, says Brooks, "they knew they had to do with a real professional, and the whole atmosphere of the picture changed. The other actors worked like hell to keep up with her." She was into everything. She had notions for the costume people, insights for the cameraman. And most of her points, says Brooks, were well taken. Most important of all, perhaps partly because she was anxious to be liked in Hollywood, she took direction well--she fought it but she took it.

To Be Somebody. Hollywood is confident that Maria's work will please the critics. M-G-M is gambling heavily that she will also make the grade with the joe who has the entertainment dollar in his pocket. A number of big producers, having put a cautious ear to the Schell, think they hear the clink of coin, and are shipping her scripts and making her offers. Moreover, some of the biggest acting names in the business--Gary Cooper, Gary Grant and others whom she will not name--are angling and wangling for Maria to be their leading lady.

So far Maria has said yes to none of them. Last week in a Hamburg studio she finished dubbing the German version of a recent film, and then went to Munich for a little holiday with husband Horst. "I've only had three weeks' vacation since I was 18," she says, "and I need a rest. Ach! I don't know where I get the strength." In Munich she likes to lounge among the Barock madonnas that fill her pretty white villa on the fashionable Pienzenauerstrasse. She calls her husband Goldschaedtzchen (Little Golden Treasure), and when people come to visit, she gazes at him adoringly, or licks her fingers, smooths his thinning hair and murmurs, "Horst, am I pretty?" But Horst plays glum. One day she gurgled: "Guess what we're having for dinner--your favorite dish!" And Horst replied: "So what? You act as if you'd cooked it." At such times, Maria murmurs soothingly, in the best tradition of the German Hausjrau: "Ach, Horst!"

In any case, Maria will not be home for long. Around the first of the year she returns to Paris to dub the dialogue for Une Vie. In the spring she hopes to make a picture in Greece. "I love it, every moment of it," she says. "It's not only the money. There's more glory in it than money. To be wonderful in front of everybody, that's the real reward. To be known. To be somebody."

* For a glimpse of some other foreign objects that Hollywood has been ogling, see color pages opposite.

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