Raphaelson told the story of Lubitsch previewing his own eulogy in an article for this magazine in 1981. It was published unaltered when, later that year, Lubitsch’s heart did give out. Eventually, Lubitsch decided that the tribute was perfect as it was, exaggerations be damned. A movie-any movie, good or bad-ends up in a tin can in a warehouse in ten years it’s dust.” He expressed envy for Raphaelson, whose stage plays counted as literature and might live on. Only once did he show serious discomfort, and that was at the mention of the historians: “What historians? They’ll laugh at you. About the phrase “free from guile,” Lubitsch said, “You know better than to call me honest”-a line that could fit into any of his films. Was it true, Lubitsch wondered, that his pants and coats frequently clashed? Perhaps an overstatement, Raphaelson admitted, but a humanizing touch. Out of habit, the two men began going over the text, as if it were a bit in a script. When, in 1947, he worked with Raphaelson again, he let it slip that he had read and appreciated the premature memorial.
Lubitsch had not died, it turned out, though he never fully regained his grinning, cigar-chewing buoyancy.
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He was as free from guile and pretense as children are supposed to be, and this made him endlessly various and charming.”
He never sought fame or coveted prizes. . . . Raphaelson, who had written scripts for those films and for many others, set about composing a tribute to Lubitsch, extolling him in terms that few other directors of the era elicited: “However great the cinema historians will eventually estimate him, he was bigger as a person. In the summer of 1943, the playwright and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson received word that Ernst Lubitsch, the Berlin-born director of such incandescent Hollywood comedies as “Trouble in Paradise,” “The Shop Around the Corner,” and “Heaven Can Wait,” had suffered a fatal heart attack. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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