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Note: I had so much fun posting a month's worth of Times stories about Raymond Chandler that I thought I'd continue the feature. Here's the first feature in a month-long look at Billy Wilder–lrh.
BILLY WILDER'S 50-YEAR ITCH IN HOLLYWOOD
March 2, 1986
By PAUL ROSENFIELD,
Billy Wilder was having trouble
finding a teaspoon–in his own kitchen yet–so finally, sheepishly, he
curled a finger and led a visitor to the Wilder dining room. There,
Hollywood's most mischievous immigrant borrowed a spoon from the
impeccably set table. That night, Audrey and Billy Wilder were
entertaining for 10. ("A nice group of right-wing Democrats," joshed
the host.) As Wilder swiped the spoon, he did a double take, making
very sure his wife wasn't around. It's no accident that the Wilders'
dinner parties are the closest thing Hollywood has to an '80s salon.
(Truman Capote's chapter on Hollywood in his unfinished "Answered
Prayers" was called "And Audrey Wilder Got Up To Sing." There's a
reason. The former Tommy Dorsey band singer, still skinny as a hairpin
sideways, still gets up to sing, but she also doubles as the town's
most entertaining hostess.)
"But today," Billy Wilder
complained, "I wish I was on Sam Spiegel's yacht. In Sardinia. If I
wanted all this media attention, I'd have called myself Billy Windex."
With that, the writer-director-producer made instant coffee, answered
another call and took a seat. There was no more stalling:On Thursday,
Billy Wilder is getting the American Film Institute's Life Achievement
Award, and that's what the shouting's about.
The irony is that
for all Wilder's bravura, and credits–"Sunset Boulevard," "Stalag 17,"
"Sabrina," "Seven Year Itch," "Spirit of St. Louis," "Some Like It Hot"
(and those are just the ones starting with S )–Wilder is still very
much the loner. For years now, he and collaborator I.A.L. ("Iz")
Diamond have spent five of every seven mornings (sans secretaries) at
the Writers and Artists Building in Beverly Hills, working on
screenplays. (Lately, though, Wilder can be found down the street at
United Artists' new headquarters, where he's just signed on as a
special consultant. "I'm in the kitchen cabinet, and busy," as he puts
it.) So when the home phone rings, as now it must, for autographs and
interview requests–Wilder wears a mock look of being put-upon.
The
thing is, he doesn't mean it. Mr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde, as the late wit
Harry Kurnitz called him, would never admit it, but he likes the
attention. To be 50 years at the top is no accident. In 1944, Alfred
Hitchcock said it best:"The two most important words in the motion
picture business are Billy Wilder. " Hitchcock was talking about
variety . To co-write "Ninotchka" for Garbo, then last long enough to
be in Jerry Weintraub's kitchen cabinet at UA, is to go the distance.
But unlike director-peers Hitchcock and John Huston, Wilder got the
attention on his own terms, in his own private, chameleonic way. No
cameo roles for him, onscreen or off.
The Wilder wit–the
sweet-and-sour cocktails he delivers on command, the lines like
"slipping out of wet clothes into a dry martini"–are always
forthcoming. But Wilder, the man with the mind full of razor blades, is
behind the scenes, never in front. Until now. (NBC will air a one-hour
version of the AFI evening April 26.) One resists the temptation to ask
Wilder if, like his quintessential Hollywood character Norma Desmond,
he's ready for his close-up.
More to the point: What would the
close-up reveal? How much of Billy Wilder is in Billy Wilder's movies?
The silver-haired septuagenarian rolled up the sleeves on his gray
cashmere sweater and agreed to give the question a whirl. In the '20s,
after leaving Vienna to become a journalist in Berlin, in one morning
he interviewed Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Arthur Schnitzler and
Richard Strauss. So the question-answer process is not unfamiliar.
"Isn't
it pieces of yourself, of your life, that you inevitably use?" he asked
rhetorically. "You suck art out of your finger in a way." In one way or
another. Wilder was a gigolo in Mexico a thousand years ago, and a
Mexican gigolo (played by Charles Boyer) turned up, rather impishly, in
"Hold Back the Dawn."
"Or let's take 'Sunset Boulevard,' "
suggested Wilder. "Maybe you believe it when William Holden's car is
repossessed. Because yes, it happened to me, it happened here in
Hollywood, and it happened to work in that movie." On a more personal
level, isn't Kirk Douglas' cynical reporter in "Ace in the Hole" more
than a little bit of Wilder? Maybe and maybe not. "Anyone who knows
me," he said slowly, "knows the cynicism hides my sentimentality." It's
why Wilder's refugee-freshness about America slipped into Garbo's
Russian in Paris in "Ninotchka"–or James Cagney's outsider in Berlin
in "One, Two, Three." Before he was 30, Wilder had lived in Vienna,
Berlin, Paris, Mexico and Hollywood, and what he saw he used.
Clearly
one could play 20 questions about Wilder's characters–Sefton in
"Stalag 17," Don Birnam in "Lost Weekend," Walter Neff in "Double
Indemnity," Linus Larrabee in "Sabrina"–but clearly he'd rather talk
about the casting. Wilder is canny enough to know the public is more
interested in Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart than in the types they
played, and so he deftly moves a conversation from characters to stars.
"Three
times in my life I almost got to work with Cary Grant," remembered
Wilder with both enthusiasm and disappointment. To realize that Wilder
never directed Grant or Katharine Hepburn or Spencer Tracy is to be
surprised, but not after listening to Wilder's explanation. "Every
movie begins with the dream casting of Cary Grant and Katharine
Hepburn. Then every movie faces the reality of casting Lyle Keller and
Sadie Glutz. Cary (Grant) almost did 'Ninotchka,' in the Melvyn Douglas
role;imagine him opposite Garbo! The second time was 'Sabrina,' and
then at the last minute it was Bogart." (Bogart as the tycoon was, in
fact, such a last-minute replacement that editorial adviser Doane
Harrison remembers Wilder asking him to stall a day's shooting while
new Bogart dialogue was written;almost no Wilder film begins with a
finished script.)
"The third one Cary almost did was 'Love in
the Afternoon.' Gary Cooper played it. Not that the replacements were
so bad. . . ." Wilder paused long enough that the dream pairing of
Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in "Love in the Afternoon" could be seen
in the mind's eye. "Afternoon" was the first writing partnership of
Wilder and Diamond, and it goes without saying that it must have been
written with Grant in mind.
"Cary is a good friend of mine, but
maybe he was scared of me, I dunno," Wilder mused. "Cooper, I think,
had not as much going for him in that role. Say the name Gary Cooper,
and people think of a 'High Noon' sheriff kind of guy, not a Ritz Hotel
lover with Gypsy music in the background who gets into one-night
stands. . . ."
The Hollywood one-night stand of all time, of
course, is the one William Holden tripped into in "Sunset Boulevard."
It's the film Wilder tends most often to talk about;mention it to him,
and certain buttons are pressed. The quintessential movie about
Hollywood, it was the last of his collaborations with writer-producer
Charles Brackett–but again Wilder wants you to know the accidental
nature of its having gotten made.
"Mr. Montgomery Clift changed
his mind," Wilder said, shaking his head at the very idiocy of such a
move. "A week, maybe 10 days before filming, Mr. Clift's New York agent
sends word that maybe his client, the young actor Clift, should be
gotten out of it. The feeling was that the younger man/older woman
thing could actually ruin his career. (Co-star) Gloria Swanson was 50,"
Wilder said, making it sound like 15. "Fifty is younger than Audrey
Hepburn is now. Is 50 old? I think Mr. Clift was tortured–can you
imagine? Suddenly this change of heart I found very peculiar. . . ."
But
"Sunset Boulevard" was an inevitability. Budd Schulberg and Nathanael
West and F. Scott Fitzgerald had already fictionalized Hollywood, but
nobody had made the movie. Wilder and Brackett were already in place as
the happiest professional couple in Hollywood, and ready to take more
risks in exposing their adopted hometown. "Kaufman and Hart could write
a terrible play and close it in New Haven before Broadway," said Wilder
logically, "but in Hollywood we don't bury our dead. We finish the
movies we start, then we find them turning up on TV in the middle of
the night. That could be one explanation for an actor's fear."
If
Montgomery Clift had cold feet, co-stars Swanson, Erich von Stroheim
and Cecil B. DeMille did not–and Wilder is the kind of realist who
understands the Hollywood high wire. In other words, the show goes on,
understudies emerge. "William Holden was a Paramount man, and he got a
script at 3 p.m. on a Monday and said yes by 5. No test, no reading,
and he was, you know, perfect." (In her memoir "Swanson on Swanson,"
the actress made the point that Holden was 31, while the character Joe
Gillis was 26, and it was maybe he not she who should be "re-aged" with
makeup, but the chemistry worked nevertheless.)
One Wilder
trademark has been to get once-in-a-career performances from
actors–Gloria Swanson, Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland–but again the
director emphasizes serendipity. "It's because I know just how much was
accidental. Swanson was not the first choice for Norma Desmond. As it
turned out, it worked with her, and it would have collapsed without
her. But Pola Negri is the one we thought of first, then we thought she
hadn't really been in sound pictures. And then there was–can I tell
you a story?" Wilder, with the kind of timing only actors and athletes
know, then told it.
"I pitched 'Sunset Boulevard' to Mary
Pickford," he said, letting the scene emerge. "I went to Pickfair, to
see Mary, with a script under my arm. Imagine me walking into that
house with that churchy atmosphere. And then beginning to read 'Sunset
Boulevard' aloud to Mary Pickford. It hit me midway through that Mary
Pickford was not going to play Norma Desmond. But what do I do? How do
I get out of this one?" If you're Billy Wilder you think on your feet.
"I suddenly stopped reading, and just said, 'You know, Mary, you can
play anything. You really can. You can act rings around any actress.
But this is not on your level. It's not up to your caliber.' . . . So
you grasp what I mean about accidents."
And casting. Anyone
who's seen Wilder's "Double Indemnity" can only imagine Fred MacMurray
as insurance salesman Walter Neff. Yet MacMurray, too, was an accident
and probably never again as good as he was under Wilder, in "Indemnity"
and again in "The Apartment" 15 years later.
"Nobody wanted the
part of Neff, nobody. The leading actors said, 'It will be the end of
me!' Only Dick Powell said yes, but nobody else. (Co-star Barbara)
Stanwyck knew from instinct how sharp the story was, and she knew not
only her lines, but everybody else's lines. She's the quickest study
I've ever met in my life, by the way. But I remember asking MacMurray
to do it, and him saying, 'Billy, you know what I am? I'm not the actor
for this. I'm a sax player.' " Was MacMurray maybe worried about the
film's possible violence? Wilder practically put up his dukes at the
mention. "I'd like you to compare 'Indemnity' to the other James M.
Cain book, 'Postman Always Rings Twice'! No comparison. I hope I am not
known as the early Austrian Sam Peckinpah! Not only do I hate filming
violence, I also hate watching it in other peoples' movies! In my
movies, there have only been two or three deaths, unless you count the
St. Valentines Day Massacre in 'Some Like It Hot.' "
Point made,
Wilder was back on the subject of MacMurray. "It's 1959 and we were all
set to go with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine on 'The Apartment.'
With Paul Douglas as the boss who's been having an affair with the
elevator girl. Again, last-minute casting changes, and Paul Douglas was
out. Again I'm on the phone, what is this, 15 years later, to Fred
MacMurray. Again he says, 'No, Billy.' He had, at that time, a
two-or-three year deal with Disney, because he was doing the
'Absent-Minded Professor' things. So he says, 'Billy, how can I play a
family man from Long Island who has an affair with an elevator
operator? Disney would get mad! I mean, Billy, are you crazy?"
Like
a fox. "The Apartment" left Wilder with the triple crown of Oscars (for
writing and directing and producing) in one night. (He has 20
nominations and 6 Oscars.) The other afternoon, he rankled at the label
"dirty fairy tale" attached to "The Apartment." The notion being that
C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) gets corporately ahead by offering his
bachelor pad to executives for after-hours affairs. "I don't understand
that 'dirty fairy tale' thing," scowled Wilder. "The character tries to
have a nice little career for himself, and he doesn't go after the
arrangement–he gets asked for the use of the apartment. So he gets a
little promotion? So?
"My father told me once, nobody's an
alchemist," added Wilder with a wink. "But if I was, I'd make a
thriller. There was never one kind of picture I made. I went from
'Witness for the Prosecution' to 'One, Two, Three.' Mr. Hitchcock, he
made only thrillers, and magnificently. But you know what a thriller is
to me? It's the movie where the boss chases the secretary around the
desk. . . . That's a thriller–and that's alchemy!"
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