Jean Seberg describes her experience working with Otto Preminger

 

 

 JEFFREY ST. CLAIR >

+ In Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s rapturous tribute to Jean-Luc Godard and the making of Breathless, Jean Seberg, the rebellious American beauty from Marshalltown, Iowa, describes her experience working with Otto Preminger on St. Joan and Bonjour Tristesse: “the world’s most charming dinner guest and sadistic director.”

Preminger was, by all accounts, a tyrant on the set. During the filming of his Freudian psychodrama, Angel Face, he made Robert Mitchum slap Jean Simmons in multiple takes, irritating both actors. Then Preminger yelled, “Once again!” Mitchum turned to the balding Austrian and said, “Like this!” And slapped him in the face.

Seberg survived despotic directors, but was hounded to death by the FBI. She became a target of Hoover’s COINTELPRO operation for sending money to the Black Panthers and the Meskwaki tribe in Iowa. The Feds planted false stories in the press that Seberg had gotten pregnant by a Black Panther. The harassment became so distressing that she gave birth prematurely and her infant daughter died two days later. But the FBI kept defaming her, causing the actress to be blacklisted in Hollywood. Hoover wanted her “neutralized.” She was wiretapped, and many of her conversations were reported directly to Nixon, who was thrilled reading these dispatches as if these reports on her persecution were his own little gossip page. She was stalked. Her apartment was repeatedly broken into. She was sent threatening letters.  Her friends were pestered. Even the CIA got into the act, surveilling her across Europe. Finally driven to despair, Seberg committed suicide in 1979.