On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  After Lottery Lover, Billie languished. He ghosted a number of scripts, including a late rewrite of Fox’s Under Pressure, the story of a couple of roughnecking sandhogs named Shocker and Jumbo. The plot alone is enough to give anyone the bends: Shocker gets “the staggers”; Jumbo slugs him; there’s a “blow” and Jumbo doesn’t come up; Jumbo’s leg becomes paralyzed and has to be amputated…. Another Fox production, Thunder in the Night, bore some of Billie’s influence as well, though his name doesn’t appear in the credits; at least seven other screenwriters worked on the film, a thriller set in Budapest. To the sound of thunder and flashes of lightning, the countess Madalaine’s first husband reappears, seemingly back from the dead—everyone thought he’d committed suicide—and causes a lot of trouble for everybody. This is especially true when he dies for real, having been shot in the heart by a mystery killer, and so on.

  Billie’s more notable achievement during this period was that he changed the spelling of his name to Billy, having learned enough English to realize that in America the name his mother had given to him belonged to a girl. His last name no longer rhymed with builder, either. Like Thornton, he was now a Wilder.

  In the summer of 1935, the possibility of remaking Mauvaise Graine in English surfaced, but it came to nothing. In July, the Gaumont British Picture Corporation contacted the Production Code Administration (PCA), headed by the reactionary Republican Will Hays. Since the previous year, the so-called Hays Office had been empowered to censor Hollywood films against explicit sex, raunchy dialogue, adultery, homosexuality of any sort, crimes that paid, on-screen drug use, and any mocking of religion and the law. In this regard, Mauvaise Graine was an unlikely prospect for approval, but Hays’s assistant responded to Gaumont with the censoring office’s stock answer to all inquiries: Mauvaise Graine would be acceptable with the proper treatment. However, the Hays Office continued, there was some concern about the essentially criminal nature of the story. Its protagonist, after all, was a car thief.

  By September, the Hays Office had seen Mauvaise Graine itself and, not unexpectedly, pronounced it thoroughly unacceptable. The movie detailed the methods by which car thieves stole their cars; thus it might inspire copycat criminals in the mass audience; and furthermore, neither its male nor its female lead was brought to justice in the end. The office made it a point to note, however, that this judgment was based solely on the existing French film, so it might become acceptable if it were completely rethought, restructured, and rewritten.

  This was a signal moment for Billy Wilder, who would be fighting American censors—not to mention run-of-the-mill, homegrown neopuritans—for the rest of his career. He lost the first round, but at least he saw what he was up against if he wanted to make films in the free world.

  Despite his lack of artistic success, Billy was moving up in Hollywood circles. The more English he knew, the more he could make Americans laugh; the more he made them laugh, the more friends he made. They weren’t close friends, necessarily—they were more like café pals, only without the cafés. The outdoorsy quality of Los Angeles meant that the athletic Billy could connect with people through the sports circuit. He became friendly with one of his tennis partners—a successful screenwriter named Oliver H. P. Garrett. Garrett was a thoroughbred easterner, an established member of the film community, a man who knew how to dress and generated a fine enough income to do so. He had cowritten A Farewell to Arms in 1932, Manhattan Melodrama in 1933, The Story of Temple Drake in 1934, and various other successful films. Garrett and Wilder enjoyed playing tennis together, and on this friendly basis they ended up cowriting two scripts in 1935: a musical called Encore and a spy story called Gibraltar. Thanks, no doubt, to Garrett’s Hollywood-insider status, they quickly sold them both to Jock and Sonny Whitney’s Pioneer Pictures. Billy earned a healthy $5,000 for the two scripts, but Pioneer soon folded and the films were never made.

  In the fall of 1935, Wilder made a fascinating choice. As unsettled as he was in his little room at the Chateau Marmont, as intermittent as his screenwriting career was, and as much as he needed to just keep plugging and earn money, Wilder set sail for Europe—specifically, Vienna. He took his $5,000 and spent it on a round-trip ticket to Austria. Ever the news-hound, Wilder had been following international politics closely, and he was painfully aware of the month-by-month souring of both Germany and Austria. In July 1934, 154 Nazi storm troopers dressed in Austrian army uniforms strode into the Federal Chancellery in Vienna and shot the Austrian chancellor in the throat at a range of two feet. In March 1935, Hitler announced universal military conscription in Germany, thereby breaking the Versailles covenant. Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria, was looking more and more likely. Billy was getting jumpier in Los Angeles thinking about his mother. He wanted to convince her, in person, to get out of Austria once and for all and come to the States. The time, Wilder knew, was now. This was also precisely the first opportunity in Billy Wilder’s life when he could return to his boyhood home in triumph as a big-shot Hollywood writer. No matter that he wasn’t a big-shot writer in Hollywood. He could be one if he was in Austria. Billy seized the moment and went home.

  He saw his mother and her new husband, but he didn’t stay with them. Instead, he used up a little more money by checking into the Hotel Krantz-Ambassador, smack in the heart of the First District. He listed his nationality on the hotel registry as Polish.

  Ensconced in a good hotel near the best cafés and nightclubs, Wilder spent the latter part of November visiting with old friends and plying them with Hollywood tales—people he’d met, movies he’d written, the sun, the swimming pools, the women. They were successful conversations, no doubt. But his attempts to talk his mother into getting out of Austria ended in failure. Genia, then in her mid-fifties, saw no need to panic over events transpiring across the border in Germany, and although there is no documentation to support it, her husband may well have resisted the notion of giving up his business and uprooting himself in order to follow his bragging and hyperactive stepson to the land of big dreams and wooden Indians.

  One thing is clear, however: Billy’s failure to get his mother out of Austria was one of the most painful experiences of his life, and it became even more so in the years to follow. Austrian independence was unlikely to continue much longer; that they all knew. But Billy had what his friends and family lacked. Not only could he afford a room in a First District hotel, but his instinct for survival had procured for him the residency permit that saved his life. Its existence was a matter of pride for Wilder, but the pride had a double edge: “I remember how embarrassing it was for Willi Forst to be seen walking down Kärtnerstrasse in Vienna with me, an emigrant.” Forst had been one of the ones who fled to Vienna; now he was stuck there while Billy was heading back to Hollywood. (On the other hand, Forst’s embarrassment may have been a result of his being seen around town with a Jew who’d run away; Wilder’s meaning isn’t entirely clear.) In any event, Billy soon left Vienna. For the second time in his life, he bade farewell to his mother and left in order to pursue a better life in a foreign country.

  Wilder returned to Los Angeles just before Christmas. It was at this point, he told yet another interviewer, that he moved into the ladies’ room at the Chateau, and this time it was simply because he’d forgotten to reserve his regular room and the hotel was booked for the holidays. This explanation sounds likely enough, if for no other reason than the fact that in this version Wilder lived in the bathroom for only a few days. Peeing women or no, Billy needed to find work, as much to keep his mind off things as to earn a living. Influential new friends continued to help him.

  Salka and Berthold Viertel lived at 165 Mabery Road in Santa Monica, a pleasant but unexceptional house that Salka turned into a most extraordinary nexus of art, intellect, and commerce. The salons she held there are legendary. Her guests were smart, sophisticated, and on the make, comfortably surrounded by other Germans with thick accents and awkward sentence structures, not to mention European-born mo
vie stars. They included Ernst Lubitsch, William Dieterle, Fred Zinnemann (who had become Berthold’s assistant), Erich Pommer, Greta Garbo, Charles Chaplin, Leopold Stokowski, Max Reinhardt, Artur Rubinstein, and many others. Wilder remembered meeting Thomas Mann at the Viertels’: “I was so impressed—he’d won the Nobel Prize in the 1920s—that I don’t remember what he said or if I said anything.” The late Robert Parrish, who began his long Hollywood career as a child actor (he’s one of the cruel paperboys who throw spitballs at Charlie Chaplin in City Lights), told of being a guest at Salka Viertel’s house. Greta Garbo was asleep on the couch, Artur Rubinstein was tinkling on the piano, and an unkempt guy in the backyard was busily grilling something on the barbecue. The Viertels wouldn’t tell young Bob Parrish who it was. Only years later did he realize it was Bertolt Brecht.

  So many new émigrés needed employment, and so few of them knew anything about the way Hollywood worked. Salka, who had lived and worked there since the 1920s, put these all-but-desperate foreigners together with the more established Hollywood émigrés, especially those who were looking for new employees. As Gottfried Reinhardt recalled, “She was one of the few who knew and faced the fact that it was a ghetto. Hers was one of the few clearinghouses between the inmates and the guardians. It was neutral ground where, for a few hours, everything was allowed and many an opportunity was created.” A house on Mabery Road in Santa Monica became the sieve through which the subtle filtration of refugee sensibilities through American popular culture took place.

  Cultural historian Anthony Heilbut describes the effect of all this Austro-German talent on the new shores onto which the émigrés had washed: “Knowing so much already—no matter how partial or artificial the knowledge—they became in short order professional interpreters of the American temperament. Bertolt Brecht once observed the émigré filmmakers—although the demand was not limited to Hollywood—were expected to decipher the Americans’ hidden needs and discover for them a means of fulfilling them: this was called delivering the goods.”

  Billy Wilder saw the goods and knew he could deliver them, but Hollywood, like Berlin, required contacts, mentors, protectors, and incessant back-scratching. This was not a problem for Billy. Through Salka Viertel, Oliver H. P. Garrett, the Mays, and Pommer—not to mention through the agency of his own sharp charm—he kept on making friends in Hollywood. One was the screenwriter Jacques Théry. In fact, Mrs. Théry fixed him up with his future wife; she knew it would work out for them. Judith Frances Coppicus was a tall, smart, good-looking woman who spoke French and knew about culture. Born in New York, she was five years younger than Billy and had the black hair and high cheekbones he tended to favor. She was funny, quick-witted. Well-versed in art, she was a painter herself. And she knew how to move. Judith was graceful and athletic, and it didn’t hurt that she had some show business connections, too. Her father was George Coppicus, head of Columbia Artists agency. Judith’s mother, after divorcing her father, had remarried the Basque caricaturist Paul Iribe, who had done some scenic design work for Cecil B. DeMille. Judith dressed elegantly, and she could navigate her way through Hollywood’s competitive social world, though she also liked her privacy.

  Their biggest stumbling block was politics—Judith was much more conservative than Billy, who in the mid-1930s still carried traces of his old leftist friend, Egon Erwin Kisch. But this was a couple who were on even ground when they disagreed. Judith could field Billy’s wisecracks about the state of the world and throw them right back at him with perfect aplomb.

  Billy and Judith eloped to Yuma, Arizona, on December 22, 1936, six months after he married Charles Brackett.

  Until then, however, Billy was engaged with H. S. “Hy” Kraft, a former Broadway playwright, in the writing of a screenplay called Vienna Hall for Paramount Pictures. (A little later they changed the title to Moon Over Vienna.) It was the story of an American bandleader who travels to Austria and sets up shop next to a waltz hall. Wilder and Kraft turned in their first draft on May 11, 1936, after which the project was whisked away from them and handed over to two other writers, Don Hartman and Frank Butler. It was retitled again—this time as Champagne Waltz.

  According to Zolotow, a Paramount producer named Lester Cowan offered Wilder and Kraft $10,000, jointly, for Moon Over Vienna. Cowan got as far as giving them each a $1,000 advance, the story goes, but then ran into some roadblocks. He couldn’t seem to get the film through the production channels at Paramount, so he offered Billy a writing contract with the studio at $250 per week. Billy accepted the offer. The head of Paramount’s writers’ department, Manny Wolfe, interviewed Billy and gave him the position. This account makes little sense. Why would Wilder accept a job requiring sixteen weeks’ work from him simply to earn what had been promised for work he’d already delivered? A more likely scenario is that Cowan gave Billy $750 toward an eventual $1,000, and when the film’s production was postponed, Cowan compensated by offering Wilder a position on staff. In one week’s time Billy earned what he was owed, and anything after that was steady employment.

  Champagne Waltz still bears traces of Wilder and Kraft’s original screenplay, not the least noteworthy aspect of which is the whirlwind arrival of a popular American swing bandleader in Vienna. A press agent, Happy Gallagher (Jack Oakie), brings Buzzy Bellew (Fred MacMurray) and his orchestra to Vienna. Happy sets the band up to perform at a dance hall owned by Max Snellinek (Herman Bing). No, an ambitious young reporter does not show up speaking in song lyrics. Instead, the complication is that Snellinek’s dance hall is located next door to the Strauss waltz palace. The establishment not only plays Strauss waltzes, it’s run by Franz Strauss (Fritz Leiber) and his daughter, Elsa Strauss (Gladys Swarthout). As in Es war einmal ein Walzer and Scampolo, Vienna is a city of misapprehended love, but now America (rather than Berlin or an airplane heading out of town) is the site of resolution.

  Billy might have continued writing innocuous scripts like Vienna Hall, had he not found the right writing partner. But on July 17, 1936, Manny Wolfe appeared in Billy’s office and led him away to meet his new collaborator. Wolfe was a snappy dresser and a shrewd executive. He had among his large staff of writers two literate, creative men who, separately, were working beneath their potential. He brought them together to work on a screenplay for Ernst Lubitsch, and they became one of the American cinema’s greatest writing teams. Mrs. Jacques Théry dreamed up the perfect love match for Billy based on similarities; Billy and Judith soon married. Manny Wolfe put together a professional team based on essential differences; the team lasted longer than Billy’s marriage. In temperament, background, political leanings, and personal style (not to mention amplitude and taste in women), Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder had practically nothing in common. What they shared was more vital: a love of language, a steely devotion to work, and a fine sense of humor. Wilder’s marriage with Judith produced two children and a lot of acrimony. His marriage with Brackett produced a lot of acrimony and eleven of the best, most successful films Paramount Pictures ever made.

  8. COUPLED

  One discovers his intelligence at the end of five seconds, his cynicism at the end of five minutes, and his charm from one end of the year to the other.

  —Ghost Music

  A soft-spoken Republican gentleman from Saratoga Springs, New York, the gray-haired, forty-three-year-old Charles Brackett stood at nearly six feet and could look Billy Wilder directly in the eye. He was Billy’s senior by fourteen years. In 1914, when Billy was still a child pool shark in Krakόw, Brackett graduated from Williams College. In 1920, while Billy was a semidelinquent Jewish teenager running loose on the depressed streets of postwar Vienna, the blue-blooded Brackett was finishing up at Harvard Law, having already served a short stint as vice-consul in St. Nazaire and as a liaison officer for a French general during World War I. Max Wilder failed at nearly everything; Charlie Brackett’s father was a prosperous lawyer, a state senator, and the owner of a Saratoga Springs bank. Billy loved tennis and skiing; Brac
kett hated sports and sunshine. Other than a passion for cribbage, bridge, and words, Billy and Charlie had few affinities.

  Wilder began writing because he thought newspaper writers were hot stuff. Brackett wrote because he was brought up to be a cultured man of the world and because he knew he was good at it. He wrote short stories during his time at Harvard, and when he graduated with his law degree, he returned home to Saratoga Springs and continued his nascent literary career while working in his father’s law firm. At first he had to get the war out of his system. He’d composed a story called “War” while he was serving in Nantes and, once he was safely back in law school, sent it to an agent, who promptly turned it down. He told Brackett that the story was censurable and therefore unpublishable. The young writer may have been discouraged, but the writer’s mother was not, and she encouraged him to send “War” to the Saturday Evening Post. He did—anonymously—and they accepted it and asked for more. Brackett was ready for them. He immediately submitted his novella, Counsel of the Ungodly, which soon ran in the Post in three installments.

  Breezy, knowing, and exquisitely fashioned, Brackett’s literary works seem in retrospect to be the essence of their age, though their style is archaic. They read like a kind of talky, bland Fitzgerald—dry, lovely stories. The subtle ironies they may once have possessed were apparently so timely as to have disappeared almost entirely with the passage of the century. Their characters have names like de Missiac and Cousin Dorothea. Zolotow’s description of Brackett’s oeuvre is right on the mark: “bright, sardonic novels: crisp, lean books written in the manner of Aldous Huxley and Ronald Firbank, books about rich, decadent people.” They aren’t Fitzgerald; they’re what Fitzgerald’s characters would have read.