Norma wanting to work for Cecil B. DeMille would have hurt in almost any other circumstance. But Max has just triumphed by accomplishing what everyone has told him was impossible, to film an operetta in a silent medium. He's starting to eye the ultimate challenge, a film which will last not for one hours, not for two, but for six, possibly eight - why should there be limits, if a film is compelling enough? Of course, there will have to be a worthy subject. And someone to finance it, because by now he's grown fastidious. When someone eats caviar in a Max von Mayerling film, only real caviar gets served. He demands it, and it happens; a part of him which will be eternally fourteen and eternally running from a factory in Vienna will never stop being pleased and amazed.
In any case, he's basking in acclaim and filled with creativity, which means he can be generous. DeMille, admittedly, is a talented director, he'll serve Norma well, but DeMille is also someone who is playing it safe. Take that scenario of his. It aims for sophistication and sexual frisson, the story of a young woman who ends up at the altar three times, only to eventually return in the arms of her childhood sweetheart whom she thought lost in the war. The audience can feel simultanously dissapproving of a frivolous young woman and then reassured she only ever loved one man all the time; delighting in her flirtations while knowing she will end up in a wholesome marriage behind a white picket fence.
"What, you don't think I can do wholesome?" Norma asks. She's only recently celebrated her twentieth birthday, and the fan letters arrive daily by now. They'll soon be able to move into an even bigger house. "I thought you said I can play anything."
She's teasing, but not completely. Norma will get up at five in the morning if the studio demands it and work till ten at night, but she needs her praise.
"Of course you can," Max says, mentally trying to calculate just how much a film version of Emile Zola's Nana would cost, Zola's story of a streetwalker turning high class cocotte, destroying every man around her until she rots away of small pox. Now that would be a true challenge, and no one but he would dare to master it.
"Well, then there's nothing to worry about, is there?" Norma comments a bit archly, and suddenly he imagines her still tied up in this lightweight thing by DeMille when he needs her for a true masterpiece. He decides that it couldn't hurt to keep an eye on things and asks DeMille, man to man, to give him a small part in the film. "Something to pass away the time while I decide on my next project," Max says grandly, and in the knowledge that since he's the one negotiating his wife's contracts, DeMille has no choice but to do him the favour if he wants Norma to star.
"Naturally," DeMille replies, and casts him as the butler of Norma's second husband, an English lord. If possible, it calls for even less variety of expression than evil German officers do, but it gives Max the opportunity to keep an eye on proceedings.
Satisfyingly, DeMille, while very good with detail, is cheap enough to accept dross for gold, literally. And does indeed play it safe. He dresses Norma in gorgeous clothes that tantalize, but only so much and not further, just like Max expected, and as if to prevent the embarassment of trying to flirt with her and being rejected, calls her "young fellow". Well, he could be her father.
Out of sheer generosity, Max offers to help him out with the directing of the ball scene.
"I know how to move people," DeMille says stonily.
"But you don't know what a real European ballroom looks like," Max says, deliberately allowing his accent to thicken, "do you?"
At that moment, he has utterly forgotten that his own idea of ballrooms in mansions and palaces is entirely derived from watching operettas at the Josephstheater. His past has been successfully rewritten. DeMille visibly seethes but says "Of course I'm glad to get the benefit of your expertise" nonetheless. What Max utterly misses is Norma's embarrassment, until they're alone again.
"Are you going to do that every time I shoot with another great director?"
"DeMille isn't great," he protests. "Griffith, now... but Griffith would be glad to have my advice in any case."
"I want a divorce," she says, utterly shocking him.
"But..."
"Max," she says, "nobody will cast me again if they think they have to put up with you as a fellow director just because we're married. DeMille has made that quite clear to me today."
He hadn't believed it possible that anyone or anything could hurt him like this.
"Nobody," he says slowly, "can direct you like I can. Nobody."
She doesn't resemble any of the roles he's given her, or like that charming but ultimately harmless creature she portrays for DeMille when she looks at him. Instead, she comes across like a stranger, a young woman just beginning her life, when they both know her life already started years ago when the two of them met.
"Maybe," she says. "And maybe you won't find anyone to direct like me."
He wants to say that there are dozens and dozens of girls like her, all arriving in Hollywood eager to do just about anything, and he can make any of them a star, but he doesn't believe it, that's the trouble. He can only lie when he believes.
He imagines not directing her anymore, and the hollowness inside is unbearable.
"I will not act or interfere in any more of your pictures not directed by me. There is no need for a divorce," he replies at last, stiffly, and despite the pain and humilation, a part of him seizes this moment, and declares this must be what the signing of the treaty at Versailles felt like, and if he ever needs to play a German officer again, he can remember this moment. Norma senses it as well, the seismic shift of power that lies in his capitulation, and he hopes she'll remember the next time she plays one of her exquisite tyrants, because this is her expression exactly.
"Darling," she murmurs, and pats him on the cheek, despite being smaller, "of course there isn't."
