The Search for André De Toth

André De Toth knew from the very beginning that he had to create a larger-than-life persona for him to be trusted with directing a picture. So he played the European swashbuckling director to the hilt. But he also lived that life. He may not have been married seven times, but he had a string of affairs with women all over the world. He surfed, skied, rode horses, raced cars, and flew his own plane.

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In October 2022, Ráduly György and Barkóczi Janka of the National Film Institute (Nemzeti Film Intézet) told me they were planning a retrospective of the films of André De Toth the following year, at the 6th Budapest Classics Film Marathon. They had heard that Hungarian American documentarian Gábor Kálmán had shot an interview with De Toth in Budapest and wanted to find out if the footage existed. Gábor had been a good friend of mine who had arrived in Los Angeles in the 1950s and had made a point of getting to know all Hungarians who worked in Hollywood. And he brought them together. That is how I met Vilmos Zsigmond, László Kovács, George Kaczender, and Peter Medák – at a dinner he arranged. He dreamed of and planned on making the definitive film about Hungarians in Hollywood until the day he died in April 2020.

I called his partner Norm and asked if Gábor had left any film. That he did. “Please take a look at it and let me know what he shot.” When I went to Los Angeles in December, I followed up on my call. “No, I haven’t had the time to look at it, but why don’t you take it all? You can look at it and give it to the Nemzeti Film Intézet if they are interested.” I lugged a heavy can of 16mm reels out of his garage and onto a plane. In the next few days I looked at the film and, sure enough, it contained footage of interviews with De Toth that Gábor shot in 1987, when he accompanied the director to Budapest, his first trip to Hungary since he left in 1939. In the succeeding months, an agreement was hammered out between Norm and the NFI depositing the material in Budapest, giving the NFI the right to create a film from the footage, the first and only material showing the director talking about his films and his life.

Norm informed me that the last of André De Toth’s seven wives, Ann Green, was alive and gave me her phone number. A gentle English voice answered my call and said she would be happy to talk about her husband, but not right now. She had to prepare for a doctor’s appointment. Why don’t I call her when I am next in Los Angeles? Ann passed away in March 2023. Did De Toth have any other descendants? I turned to Lucia Schultz, a former student of mine, now a librarian at the Motion Picture Academy Library. She found his son Nick De Toth, an editor, and his agent. I sent off an email, knowing full well that agents never respond unless there is a solid financial offer. To my great surprise, the following day I received a response saying that he had forwarded my letter to Nick.

That evening I received a call from Auckland, New Zealand, where Nick was cutting Avatar 3. He would be happy to talk about his father and dig up some memorabilia that could become part of the collection of NFI. His sister probably would not want to part with the rifle from Springfield Rifle that Gary Cooper gave her father, but he was sure he could dig up a bunch of posters and mementos he had in his Berlin apartment. Nick began to tell me stories of his growing up. Now I was hooked.

In truth, I did not know much about André De Toth. For me he was on the periphery of film history, not part of the cinematic canon. I had met him once in 1997 when he appeared in a wheelchair at a screening of one of his films at the San Francisco Film Festival. He was irascible. He cut off a long-winded question. “Your question is much longer than my answer, which is ‘No.’” It was only later that I found out he was in great pain, having broken his back three different times.

Nick suggested I talk to his father’s biographer, Anthony Slide, living in Studio City. A call and visit followed with Slide, and phone calls and emails continued with Nick.

What I found out from Nick and from Slide are facts, stories I had not come across anywhere else. The personality of artists is always a fascinating topic. Some are interested in them to find out more about the ways they created their films. Some are curious about them as individuals. In either case, it is fruitful to discover the person behind the works of art. There is yet another consideration. All of us attempt to put ourselves in the best light, so every filmmaker’s account of his creativity is somewhat suspect. With André De Toth, the truth is particularly difficult to establish, since he clearly and consciously created a larger-than-life persona of a legendary director.

At this point there are two books in English about De Toth. One is a series of interviews edited by Anthony Slide, De Toth on De Toth: Putting the Drama in Front of the Camera. The other is De Toth’s autobiography, Fragments: Portraits from the Inside. Slide’s interviews are a small part of interviews he conducted with the director. The totality of the interviews were deposited by Slide in the Motion Picture Academy Library. The autobiography is also a cut-down version of what the director had written.

Public domain photo of De Toth, Ken Russell, and Michael Caine on the set of Billion Dollar Brain, for which De Toth did some producing. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I will attempt to give a sense of the man, the artist, the storyteller by comparing the images on three screens: De Toth’s accounts, stories by people who were close to him, and other outside sources. And in doing so, perhaps the reasons for his fabrications will begin to emerge.

Anthony Slide met André De Toth in the 1980s, and they became good friends. When they began to do the interviews, Slide would come over to De Toth’s apartment. Over a Danish, the director would lay out the way he wanted the interview to go. He realized that he was now shaping his legacy, so he carefully planned the questions, the answers, and how he would give them. He would prep Slide with the questions to ask and then orchestrate the answers. “You ask me this question, I will get mad, tell you ‘That’s obvious,’ and then you go on to the next one.” Later, when he was writing his autobiography, he would take the bus with Slide to the Los Angeles County Library – he did not own a car – and would do research on historical events, the studios, people he worked with. He sprinkled the facts he dug out casually throughout the work, so that he would come across as well-informed, erudite, in complete command of all the relevant information.

He played the successful man-of-the-world, always picking up the tab. When Scottish director Kevin Macdonald was working for Faber and Faber, editing De Toth’s autobiography, he flew to Los Angeles. He scheduled a final interview with De Toth just before the flight back to London. De Toth called a limousine to take him.

When he had to give an interview to someone, he did not want to meet them in his modest apartment, so he asked Slide if he could use his house in Studio City. De Toth himself recounts the way he started to work with Alexander Korda in London. As soon as he told Korda he was staying at the Cumberland Hotel, Korda lost all interest in him. That day De Toth moved into the Claridge Hotel, which he could barely afford. The following morning he stepped into the elevator with Korda and was taken straight to the studio and assigned to work with Korda’s brother Vincent. Even if apocryphal, the story underlines the absolute importance in his mind of creating the right appearance for a successful director.

When he returned to Budapest in 1938 from Rome, he chose to fly in, unusual and expensive at the time, so he could make a splash. He reminisced, “One of Alex Korda’s most annoying habits was being right so often, and he was right again to suggest I should arrive by plane in Budapest. Without it, I believe I would have never landed my first directorial assignment within four hours after the Savoia-Marchetti’s wheels touched the Hungarian ground. It was ridiculous.” He was greeted by his investor, Dr. Steinmetz, who said: “I wanted a director with style, guts and class. . . .”1

Nick’s stories reveal an even more intimate knowledge of the man and raise questions about a number of claims he made about himself throughout his life. According to Nick, his father wasn’t around much for his children. Yet Andre was concerned with Nick because he was his only male heir. Nick still vividly recalls the time when André insisted that he finish the third plate of food on the table. Nick could not eat any more, so he went upstairs. André followed him and apologized, explaining that he wanted to make sure he would grow up big and strong and so he had to eat.

De Toth was not concerned with Nick’s career. While he had many contacts, he did not get him started in the motion picture business. Nick did that on his own.

De Toth had to be in charge. He had to make an impression. He looked for an effect in his life as he did in his films. Nick recounts that he would go into the best restaurant and order a fine meal. When he was finished, the maître d’ would ask how was the dinner. “Terrible!,” he bellowed. That got the man shaking. “What was wrong?” pleaded the man. De Toth waited, then made the pronouncement, “Absolutely nothing.”

I was curious about some of the claims he made about himself. While Nick did not really know how he lost the sight in his eye, he suspected that it was the result of an accident when he was a child, not other more glamorous versions, such as in a duel over a lady. Nick volunteered that the nineteen children he claimed to have sired is a gross exaggeration.

Because he listed the names of many of them in his autobiography, anyone who knows the family recognizes some of the names as belonging to spouses of his children or refer to his grandchildren. So if there were nineteen children, they were his children figuratively.

De Toth also claimed that he had been married seven times. In the United States, he was married to Veronica Lake, Marie Louise Stratton, and Ann Green. In his autobiography, he mentions Lillian, whom he wanted to marry in Vienna, but she refused. Perhaps he counted her as his first. He left no clues to any others. So I emailed Nick and asked if he really had seven wives. Nick replied, “The answer to that one went with him to the grave. But my mother implied it was unlikely.”

Candid shot of Veronica Lake and DeToth, 1944. Editor’s collection

In many public documents De Toth listed his name as Sasvári Farkasfalvi Tóthfalusi Tóth Endre Antal Mihály. The first three indicate the place where his family came from. Only the most illustrious noble families sported several toponymic names. Or gentry who had no lands, only titles. To anyone who knows Hungarian, the names seem fanciful, meaning “eagle castle,” “wolf village,” “village of the Toths.” While occasionally one finds these as Hungarian last names, they do not appear in registries of nobles. Once again, most likely they are inventions of De Toth’s.

It was Nick who volunteered a curious piece of information about his father in our second long telephone conversation. De Toth was fond of repeating the story of why he left Hungary in 1939. He had directed five feature-length films in one year, an exceptional feat for any director in any country, at any time. One of his Jewish friends came to him and told him that the reason he was getting these assignments was because he was not Jewish. De Toth suddenly realized that he was right. He could not continue working under those circumstances, so he packed his bags, drove to the train station, left the key in the car, boarded the next train, and made his way to Vienna, not to return to Hungary for nearly fifty years. This was total fiction, since there is a photo of his departure from a train station in December 1939, surrounded by his friends.

In his autobiography, De Toth tells a riveting story about location scouting in Egypt right after the 1973 Yom Kippur war when he was mistaken for Moshe Dayan, the one-eyed Israeli minister of defense. Six men kidnapped him, beat him, and were ready to kill him. He saved his life only by unzipping his fly and showing that he did not have the undeniable mark of a Jewish man. Both of these stories are dramatic and heroic. Are they true?

Nick mentioned that recently he had taken a genetic test that showed he was 40% Ashkenazi Jew. He said that there was no way his mother Marie Louise Stratton had any Jewish blood. Therefore the genes had to come from his father. I asked him if he had ever seen André naked. Yes he had. Was he circumcised, I pursued. Yes he was. A newborn who was circumcised in Hungary in 1913 had to be Jewish. It is a bit more complicated because André’s birth certificate identifies him as “görög katolikus,” “Greek Catholic,” a peculiar combination of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox faiths that form a small religious community in Hungary. While we do not know the exact nature of his lineage, it appears that his father was at least part görög katolikus and his mother’s family Jewish. Once again André embellished his origins, which would create a mythic persona that would serve him well in his film career.

While De Toth played fast and loose with stories about his life, he was nonchalant and unpredictable in relating his memories. He did not strictly adhere to one version. Hungarian American director Gyula Gazdag spent a week with him in New York in the 1990s, and De Toth simply told him that he left Budapest in 1939 because he was ready to try his luck in the West.

De Toth had wanted to go abroad from the beginning. In October 1937, he went to London on a study tour. Certainly he met Alexander Korda then, if not before. Soon after, he accompanied director Székely István and his star and wife Ágay Irén on an eight-month visit to Hollywood. These trips are barely mentioned in his autobiography, perhaps because they did not supply the raw material for the life of a legendary director.2

Toprini Nász (Wedding in Toprin). Public domain still

He had longed to work in London and Hollywood. In 1939, he directed five feature films in Budapest. For Toprini Nász (Wedding in Toprin), he received the prize for most artistic film in Hungary. He took it to London, where it was well received, and there was talk of Charles Laughton playing the English version.3

That year he had other adventures that propelled him out of Hungary and made a lasting impact on him. In March, Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels visited Budapest, stopped by Hunnia Studios, and met De Toth, who was shooting 5 Óra 40 Perc (5:40 p.m.) with his mentor, cinematographer István Eiben.4 That was most likely the reason Eiben was called to shoot footage in Poland that summer. The assignment was to film a bunch of exteriors. Eiben shot them out of focus on purpose, knowing that the film was to be used for the military. He asked De Toth to join him. And so De Toth went, shot film for the Germans, and was there on September 1, the day the Germans invaded Poland, that started the Second World War.

He left as fast as he could. “If you were in civilian clothes, the Germans shot at you; if in uniform, the Poles.” He set out with one of the Poles, who was killed. He walked the whole way, taking provisions from dead German soldiers, eating whatever he could find. “I was often asked about that escapade in my life and I have refused to talk about it until now.”5 In fact, in his autobiography he talked about it only in general terms. And that experience had a shock effect on him and his work. In 1944, he directed None Shall Escape in Hollywood, the only film to deal with Nazi war crimes made during the war, prescient in presenting a war crimes tribunal that would become a reality in Nuremberg in 1946.

Because we know De Toth would hide what was embarrassing, could it be that it was none other than Goebbels who had asked him to come to Poland? And did he really walk all the way from Poland to Hungary? We can never know.

When he returned to Budapest in September of that year, he finished Két Lány Az Uccán (Two Girls on the Street, 1939), started and completed Semmelweis (1940). And he left from the Keleti railroad station at the end of the year, before the film opened.

André De Toth directing Two Girls on the Street. Author’s collection

Exaggeration, fabrication, outright lies are common practice in show business. When I worked as Roger Corman’s assistant, I saw in Variety a notice that Corman was preparing a $20 million remake of Ivan the Terrible, Marlon Brando in the lead. That was preposterous at every level. I walked into Corman’s office. “What’s this all about?” “Don’t pay any attention. My publicist puts this stuff out. That’s why I pay him.”

A director must also project confidence, ego, bravado. You don’t want a shy, self-effacing person in charge of a production. The bigger, the better. The movie must dazzle. So must the individuals putting it together. The stars are our gods. We want them to shine.

André De Toth knew from the very beginning that he had to create a larger-than-life persona for him to be trusted with directing a picture. So he played the European swashbuckling director to the hilt. But he also lived that life. He may not have been married seven times, but he had a string of affairs with women all over the world. He surfed, skied, rode horses, raced cars, and flew his own plane.

Writing and directing films was his profession and main passion, but there were others. That is clear from his autobiography, which is as much about his real adventures, exaggerated, as about the making of films. He lived his life with exuberance. And being a raconteur, he made it even more dazzling in its retelling.

Near the end of his autobiography, he recounts the way that he stole footage and ideas from Lawrence of Arabia, where he was setting up shots for David Lean, who was way behind schedule, to make his film Play Dirty. In summing up his experiences making that film he touches on his creativity in his life and on the screen.

Movie still from Play Dirty. Editor’s collection

I defy you to point out where it gives away that Play Dirty wasn’t shot where it really happened, on the cruel, naked desert. . . . Challenges like this make life worth living and making motion pictures such a joy and fun, creating reality when it doesn’t exist. After all, we are working with make-believe. It is so easy to distort, falsify the truth. But making truth, something out of nothing, is what life is all about – for me. I always loved making pictures. I suppose by now you have guessed it.6

Works Consulted

Budapesti Hírlap. 1939.

De Toth, Andre. 1994. Fragments: Portraits from the Inside. Faber and Faber.

Pesti Hírlap. 1939-1940.

Slide, Anthony. 2011. De Toth on De Toth: Putting the Drama in Front of the Camera. Faber and Faber.

Színházi Élet. 1937-1938.