Josef von Sternberg Week #2 – Did Josef von Sternberg Meet Count Leopold von Sternberg in Shanghai?

I’ve found that one of the most useful aspects of having a blog like this is that I can occasionally throw out questions and conundrums I’ve been unable to solve and find people who know the answers. Here’s one I’ve not got very far with…

The film director Josef von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg in Austria in 1894 to a Jewish family. He obviously became a film director and crops up repeatedly on this blog for his excellent autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry and his movies Shanghai Express, The Shanghai Gesture and Macao. He added the “von” to his name in 1925 when he was starting out in the film business.

In his autobiography he recounts that “many years later” he met the Count Leopold von Sternberg in Shanghai – a Czech and the most well known genuine von Sternberg in the world at the time. The Count apparently asked to meet Josef in Shanghai to thank him for making his name famous. However, I can’t find any reference to the Count visiting Shanghai. His wife, Cecilia, wrote an autobiography of her life with the Count, The Journey (1977) but doesn’t mention China or Shanghai at all. The photo below shows the Count and Countess in 1934 (“some years later”) relaxing on the beach at Waikiki, Hawaii in 1934 on what was supposedly their first “American stop” on a trip from Europe to the USA. This indicates that they came via Suez and Asia to America, rather than across the Atlantic and then overland, and so could well have previously stopped in Shanghai and met Josef as he claims in his autobiography. I like the picture below as it features a Chinese parasol, another favourite motif of this blog.

If anyone has anymore information on the Count in Shanghai I’d love to know?

on the beach at Waikiki, 1934

Count Leopold, Countess Cecilia and their daughter Diana