. . . Winter 2003 The Saga of Douglas Sirk Michael Stern grew up in the north Chicago suburbs. He fell in love with food and movies at Michigan. ("I lived above a no-doubt-long-gone diner called Red's Rite Spot. I think the vapors from Red's hash browns insinuated themselves into my brain and directed me down my career path.") Among the buff-est of campus film aficiandos during those cinema-centric days of the '60s, Stern became fascinated with the work of Douglas Sirk, master of the ultra-soap opera. Later, at Yale, Stern wrote his doctoral thesis, Douglas Sirk (G.K. Hall, 1978) on the Danish-German émigré director.
Sirk's Imitation of Life was "so popular," Stern said, as he ate as little possible of the road food he was sampling (see accompanying article), "that his studio finally acceded to his persistent request that he be allowed to make any kind of picture he wanted. Now was his chance to depart from highly wrought melodramas drenched in Freudian themes and symbolism." Facing such freedom, Sirk went hysterical and returned to Germany, where he'd lived before World War II with his Jewish wife before they escaped to save her from the Nazis.
"But coming to the States meant he had to leave his little son by his first, non-Jewish wife," Stern said. "The only way Sirk ever saw his son again was in the movies—anti-Jewish Nazi movies the boy appeared in after he became Hitler's Shirley Temple." Stern paused and looked at his wife, Jane. "Should I tell what happened later?" "Oh, that's the worst—I don't know," Jane replied, but picked up the tale: "Michael and other Sirk admirers arranged for Sirk to return to the States and receive a tribute to his career. But on his way to the airport for his flight to New York, he was struck by blindness. We didn't know what happened. When he failed to arrive as scheduled, Michael called him. His wife answered and said, 'You have blinded him, Michael!' The whole affair was a quintessential Sirk plot. Just like his Magnificent Obsession, featuring the blind Jane Wyman character." But what about Sirk's son? "The boy died fighting on the Eastern Front." |
