Film Bios is an occasional series reviewing autobiographies of notable filmmakers

“I lived three golden periods of my time: Paris in 1920, the Riviera in 1927 and Hollywood from 1930 to 1970.” So writes director Jean Negulesco in his enchanting memoirs, “Things I Did …and Things I Think I Did”, published in 1984.

The first period he alludes to seems straight out of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Moving to Paris from his native Romania at 20 (he was born in 1900), his dream is to study painting. From Montparnasse to Montmartre, “these are the lean years of hunger and ecstasy but time was never boring” as he nostalgically remembers. “Rich with an infinite crowd of fascinating people and of pendulum-like events that still cross and recross my memory- a kaleidoscope of gifts.” Through his fellow expatriate, the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, he meets the who’s who of the artistic elite of the time.   Foujita, Modigliani, Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau…

His Riviera interlude evokes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and the life of painter Gerald Murphy and his family depicted by Calvin Tompkins in Living Well is the Best Revenge. He came to the still unspoiled Côte d’Azur to paint but had to earn a living. “Owning a tuxedo, I was engaged as a professional gigolo-dancer at the Hotel Negresco in Nice”.  Enough to survive. One night finds him dancing side by side with Rudolph Valentino, here to visit Rex Ingram, his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’s director now settled in Nice where he had just taken over the Studios de la Victorine. Verdict? “In life, his features were common, beautiful but not uncommonly so. He was well built but no a tall God, somehow on the short side. I was a little taller than he was!”         

But the carefree salad days have to end. Negulesco needs another playground and decides to move to America. Queen Marie of Romania having posed for him, a Royal Romanian painter’s business card will help attract a wealthy clientele in Hollywood. Once there he was soon very much in demand, but not only for his artistic talents as he drolly recalls. “Unattached, foreign accent, good dancer, and most important, no competition for the rich jobs of the film people I met all those attributes which I employed with a dash of calculation, made me an instant social success and the most desirable single man for Hollywood parties. I met stars and romanced hopeful starlets. Tired executives and busy producers asked me to escort their wives and mistresses to opening and glamorous parties. They lived to regret it. I became the woman’s confidant and often her revenge”.

Negulesco doesn’t hide the fact he was quite a playboy and ladies’ man.  A rather unusual way to make a name for himself and to get into the movie business but it obviously worked for him. Soon, he was bored with painting on commission. One night in 1931, after another premiere, another party, he had an epiphany. “I’m going to make films! I had been ready for a long time to change my dream. I had the arrogance and courage of youth and I dared to risk.” Even though he candidly admits his only qualifications are pretty basic. “I loved films, hungrily, with no reserve, passionately.”

He decides to start by writing a script, finance and direct it himself with his savings. The result, Three and A Day, is so bad it is never released.  Broke again, salvation came as he is hired to design the drawings which will be used as storyboards to satisfy the censorship for the famous rape scene of Miriam Hopkins in The Story of Temple Drake, an adaptation of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary.

He quickly finds work as second assistant director, easily adapting to the rigors and constraints of the studio system of the golden age and quickly grasping Hollywood’s inner ways of functioning. “Here I discovered that conceit was mistaken for confidence, work for opportunity, knowledge for charming ability, sex for love, friendship for usefulness, help for compensation…” By 1941, under contract at Warner Bros., he directs his first film, Singapore Woman. Three years later his adaptation of Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Demetrios demonstrates a real knack for film noir. And in 1948, Johnny Belinda, his last film for the studio, would earn a Golden Globe and an Oscar for its star Jane Wyman, a Golden Globe for Best Picture and an Oscar nomination for him as best director. But soon after, fired by Jack Warner, Negulesco retreated to Palm Springs, intending to go back to painting for good. “Having come to term that Hollywood was not for my sensitive soul.”

In 1961, walking the Via Veneto in Rome with Angie Dickinson and Italian producer Robert Haggiag (far left), druing the filming of JessicaBoy on a Dolphin ar the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, 1956; with producer Frank Ross and Lana Turner on the set of The Rains of Ranchipur, 1955.

hulton archive/bettman/getty images

An unexpected phone call will help change his mind: Daryl F. Zanuck offers him a job at 20^th  Century Fox. “He was a great S.O.B. and I loved him. Under his inspired leadership, I delivered 22 pictures from 1948 to 1970. I will always be grateful to him for picking me up for the team and for giving me for many years of security and luxury, and for helping me make my place in this racket I love.” Negulesco was able to impose his mark with a series of elegant movies in a variety of genres. Equally at ease in comedy, adventure stories or romantic dramas, even musicals.  From Road House to Titanic, from Three Came Home to The Gift of Love. And lavishly photographed  CinemaScope classics like How to Marry a Millionaire, The Rains of Ranchipur, Three Coins in the Fountain, Daddy Long Legs and The Pleasure Seekers. First-rate escapism entertainment filmed in gorgeous locations.

He writes at length on the making of Boy on a Dolphin in 1956, the first Hollywood production to be filmed in Greece, with Sophia Loren. Her behavior and their quarrels. “Showered with praise by the studio executives, she believed too quickly in all these kudos. At times, it gave her the false star confidence- the I- think-I-know-a-better-way-to-read-this-line attitude.” He also has this unusually harsh assessment of her American career with her “many films cleverly cast by Carlo Ponti against big Hollywood stars were good pictures, many were indifferent, but many were also not so good.” Of course, there is a chapter on Marilyn Monroe, a few revealing moving anecdotes on the star he called “a vulnerable phenomenon” (for a silent shot of her asleep, covered with a silky sheet, he realized she was actually totally naked under it.). There are many other zestfully told snapshots and portraits of his notable friends and memorable encounters. Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, David O’Selznick, Billy Wilder, Lubitsch… One wonders why this expert raconteur doesn’t mention anything about some of the other stars he worked with, Fred Astaire, Leslie Caron, Claudette Colbert, Deborah Kerr, Lana Turner, Richard Burton, Maurice Chevalier. But don’t count on the ever-classy Negulesco to intellectualize his process as a filmmaker, to explain his approach, how he directed his actors. He knows he is a good reliable director able to finish a picture under budget and on time before being assigned to the next one, an obedient worker at the service of the dream factory. One feels that most often in his mind, a film has to be judged by its results at the box-office, more than for their artistic merit.

By 1970, he had moved to Spain with his wife Dusty, living in Marbella, where he would die aged 93. His circle of friends was not comprised of big Hollywood names anymore, but the likes of famed bullfighters El Cordobes and Luis Miguel Dominguin, Cristobal Balenciaga, several grandes of the flamenco, Antonio Gades, Lola Flores…As he reflects on his charmed existence at the sunset of his life, he still wants to communicate to the reader the inextinguishable thrills he experienced when it all started for him, back in 1930. When “all these marvels, this merriness, and madness, went into the knapsack on the back of a young painter and were there when an aspiring moviemaker had to show his bag of tricks before the dream merchants of Hollywood, and get a chance to entertain millions of people when pictures of the real and imaginary worlds became a reality.” Enchanting indeed.