by Ed Sikov
After spending six years toiling in the country-clubby sphere of Brackett and Eddy, his father’s firm, Charlie took a big if impeccably financed chance. He moved to Manhattan and began writing full-time. His novel Weekend came to the attention of the New Yorker’s Harold Ross, who offered him a job as the magazine’s drama critic. With his golden touch, Brackett wrote criticism and two more novels—The Last Infirmity (1926) and American Colony (1929)—and then, with the supreme confidence that old money can buy, he left his plum post and went off to write more books. Robert Benchley replaced him at the New Yorker.
RKO lured Brackett to Hollywood in the early 1930s. His agent in New York packed him onto an airplane, a Hollywood agent met him in Burbank, and together they sped directly to RKO’s studios in Hollywood complete with Brackett’s luggage. Brackett expected to be welcomed as the literary star he saw himself to be, but the RKO executive he was sent to Hollywood to meet, David O. Selznick, kept him waiting for an hour and then told him brusquely to talk to Adela Rogers-St. Johns about a Liberty magazine article that Selznick thought was kind of interesting. The story is said to have concerned Jack Dempsey’s heart problems. Brackett did his best, but when it came time for the obligatory Hollywood story conference, the Brahmin lawyer/critic/novelist had no idea how to play it. As Brackett later recounted, “I simply got up and stammered out my story. When I got through there was a deadly silence. Then Adela said quietly, ‘I don’t see it that way at all. The boy loved that girl. That girl loved that boy. They loved each other.’ And on that note I was wafted out of Hollywood.”
Not for long. Brackett went on to write a number of successful scripts—successful enough, at any rate, to keep him employed at a fairly high salary. Three of his stories were adapted for the screen by others—Pointed Heels (1930), Secrets of a Secretary (1931), and Woman Trap (1935)—but Brackett himself wrote or cowrote at least seven screenplays before teaming up with Wilder. First, for Paramount, was the atrociously named Enter Madame (1935), a romance starring Cary Grant. Also for Paramount were College Scandal (1935), one in a series of varsity-themed films at that studio; Without Regret (1935), a kidnapping melodrama; The Last Outpost (1935), a Cary Grant action-adventure film set in the desert; and Rose of the Rancho (1935). Rose marked the film debut of opera star Gladys Swarthout, who played an unlikely dual role: on the one hand, the fetching Rosita; on the other, a cross-dressed vigilante named Don Carlos. In one remarkable scene, Swarthout transforms herself from bandido to fiesta queen and nobody notices the similarities. With the possible exception of The Last Outpost, which survives in film history (however obscurely) thanks to Cary Grant, none of Brackett’s early films lasted much beyond the year of their release. This isn’t to say that Brackett was not thriving. By 1936, he was making $1,000 a week at Paramount—four times what Wilder earned. Brackett’s talents were recognized by other studios as well. In April 1936, Brackett went out on loan to MGM to write Piccadilly Jim, a romance starring Robert Montgomery. In June, he was loaned to B. P. Schulberg to write the script for the screwball comedy Wedding Present.
However unconscious Manny Wolfe’s perception may have been, he knew that Brackett needed somebody to toughen him up a little—someone who would make up for the edginess this sophisticated, quiet, erudite man lacked. In addition, by pairing Lubitsch with Wilder and Brackett for a new screwball comedy, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, Paramount may have been trying to get the director into a snappier, more up-to-date mood than he took with Angel; that film, which Lubitsch was already preparing with Samson Raphaelson, turned out not to be a commercial hit.
In his 1993 profile of Billy Wilder for the New Yorker, David Freeman neatly sums up the dynamic between the two writers, who rapidly became the best known and, eventually, the highest-paid writing team in town: “Brackett’s boozy Republican gentility was often at odds with Wilder’s brash ambition. Wilder was the junior man but the more forceful personality. The partners were known for their screaming matches as well as for their scripts.” Wilder himself is quoted: “We fought a lot. Brackett and I were like a box of matches. We kept striking till it lights up. He would sometimes throw a telephone book at me.” Freeman goes on to say that the writers “walked out on each other several times, each vowing to go it alone. But, like a couple in a marriage that doesn’t quite work but won’t quite end, they kept at it, locked in productivity and combat, and came to be known as Brackettandwilder.”
Individually, both men had spent their careers writing for hacks. Wilder’s screenplays were directed by such functionaries as Hanns Schwarz, Paul Martin, Hans Steinhoff, and A. Edward Sutherland—Robert Siodmak was an exception—and Brackett was stuck with a similar roster of competent, now-forgotten men: Charles Barton, Louis Gasnier, Harold Young, Elliott Nugent, Marion Gering, and Robert Z. Leonard. For both Billy and Charlie, writing a screenplay for Ernst Lubitsch must have been like writing for God. “Lubitsch was one of the great ones,” Wilder said many years later, “like Griffith, Eisenstein, and the early René Clair.” Lubitsch’s worst film, had he ever made one, would have been a damn sight better than anything either Brackett or Wilder had done before. They may have begun their long-lasting battle while composing Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, but each writer, separately, had an unimpeachably good reason not to screw up the relationship beyond repair.
Wilder had long admired Lubitsch’s films, as many people did. But Billy, an acutely visual man, knew what he was seeing. Lubitsch’s films were never merely clever words nicely filmed. They were cinematic, and exquisitely so. Billy understood that their art was on the screen, not the page—that their beauty lay not in mere art direction but rather the gradual unfolding of meaning and emotion. It was Lubitsch who taught Wilder how to think in film sequences—where the camera was, how long the shot held, where the cuts should be. Lubitsch’s storytelling was the richest and most sophisticated Wilder had ever encounted. As he once said, “Lubitsch could do more with a closed door than most directors can with an open fly.”
The taste and grace of Ernst Lubitsch’s pictures stood in comical contrast to the man himself. He was surprisingly stubby in person. Both Wilder and Brackett dwarfed him, but only physically. Samson Raphaelson, with whom Lubitsch worked on nine films, once wrote that he “didn’t notice, for months, that he was a short man—about five feet five or six. Only when an envious Berliner mockingly compared him to Napoleon did I think of Lubitsch in terms of height. Actually, not only was he short, but his hands and feet were small, and he walked with a faintly bowlegged, lilting step.” Adept at depicting aristocratic foibles, Lubitsch himself came from a Galician petit bourgeois family that had moved to the drab eastern part of Berlin. And, strangely, the master of the discreet glance and the courtly doorway was always on the brink of losing his cigars and forgetting his own telephone number. He was a man who had more important things on his mind than where he last put his matches. Lubitsch ran around Hollywood wearing rumpled pants and shirts, and he waved his fork in the air while he ate. Wilder adored his films, and once they finally met long enough to have a conversation, he grew to adore the man as well. “If the truth were known,” Wilder has said, “he was the best writer that ever lived.”
Most writers respected Lubitsch, some loved him, but very few were ever truly chummy with him. Walter Reisch was one of Lubitsch’s closest friends, maybe even his best friend according to Raphaelson, and still Reisch called him “Herr Lubitsch.” There was a Promethean quality to him. Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife was his thirty-fourth feature film, and despite the fact that his sound-film scripts had been penned by various sharp writers (Raphaelson, Kräly, Hecht), these movies not only looked but also sounded unmistakably as Lubitsch’s own. As Raphaelson later wrote, “Lubitsch was not what a writer would call a writer, nor did he waste time trying to be. I doubt if he ever tried to create a story, a film, even a scene entirely on his own. He had no vanity or illusions about himself. He was shrewd enough to cherish writers, and he welcomed the best available, roused them to outdo themselve
s, and at the same time contributed on every level and in ways that I cannot measure or define.”
Raphaelson, an eminently sweet-tempered man whose screenplays—The Smiling Lieutenant, The Man I Killed, One Hour with You, Trouble in Paradise, The Merry Widow, Angel—were even more so, was Lubitsch’s chief writer in the 1930s; he was Jewish, but not foreign born. Lubitsch broke his association with Raphaelson only twice in the 1930s—first with Ben Hecht for Design for Living, and then with Brackett and Wilder for Bluebeard. (Hecht, too, was an American Jew.) Hecht’s script for Design for Living is harsher and more brittle than anything Raphaelson wrote for Lubitsch, and the screenplay Wilder and Brackett composed took a similar turn. Based on a play by Alfred Savoir, the film Lubitsch proposed to make for Paramount, the last in his contract, was to be about a charming but impoverished French heiress, Nicole de Loiselie, and a surly, parsimonious, overmarried American multimillionaire named Michael Brandon. It would be Lubitsch’s first screwball comedy; the others were romantic comedies, but Lubitsch announced to the press that this one would be different—“mental slapstick,” he called it.
With screwball comedies, audiences laughed at the nagging hatred that develops between two people in love. Indeed, in screwball comedies fighting was loving—a way for two equals to express mutual respect and commonality of purpose. To set these ridiculous sparring matches in motion, screenwriters were in constant need of “meet-cutes”—funny setup scenes that bring two unlikely people into such close proximity that, following genre convention, they can do nothing but start some sort of emotional or physical brawl. Wilder even claimed to have had a little meet-cute notebook going, filling it with page after page of strained, funny introductions. For Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, he tried one out on Lubitsch and Brackett. Claudette Colbert would be Nicole, Gary Cooper would be Michael, and Billy suggested that they meet in the menswear section of a department store on the Riviera, each trying to buy only half of a pair of pajamas. Nicole wants the bottoms, Michael wants the tops. Wilder has said that the inspiration was personal—he himself slept only in pajama tops—but regardless of its origins, this particular pajama gag wasn’t a question of the buyers’ comfort but rather one of money: Nicole cannot afford more than half a pair of pajamas, and the immensely wealthy Michael is a bit of a miser. Thus Billy’s meet-cute perfectly established the two key characters of this screwball comedy immediately: each has a problem, they both know how to argue, and they’ll wind up in bed together at the end.
Billy’s meet-cute was good, but not good enough—not on its own. It was too smooth, too neat for Lubitsch. One day the three of them were at the director’s house batting around the problem of how to punch up the pajama bit when Lubitsch emerged from the bathroom with the solution: “What if when Gary Cooper comes into the store to buy the pajama top, the salesman gets the floor manager, and Cooper again explains he only wants to buy the top. The floor manager says, ‘Absolutely not,’ but when he sees Cooper will not be stopped, the floor manager says, ‘Maybe I could talk to the store manager.’ The store manager says, ‘That’s unheard of!’ but ends up calling the department store’s owner, whom he disturbs in bed. We see the owner in a close shot go to get the phone. He says, ‘It’s an outrage!’ And as the owner goes back to his bed you see that he doesn’t wear pajama pants either.” (This is Billy’s rendition of the event, not Lubitsch’s.)
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife is an unusually irritating comedy—unusual for Lubitsch, not for Wilder, though even at the time it offered Billy greater latitude in exploring elegant romantic hostility than he’d enjoyed previously. Perhaps for this reason, critics haven’t been very kind to the film. It seems to run against the Lubitsch grain, though in fact the grain it rubs is Raphaelson’s, not Lubitsch’s. Lubitsch’s biographer, Scott Eyman, goes so far as to call it “the emptiest movie [Lubitsch] ever made.” But screwball comedies of the mid-to late-1930s are not often charming, at least not in the blissful and airy manner of classic drawing room comedies, and their romances are anything but relaxed. One doesn’t come away from the best of them feeling optimistic about love. Instead, these films are characterized by anger, rage, and frustration, and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife is no exception. When Nicole winds up getting Michael secured into a straitjacket toward the end of the film, she’s simply developing screwball’s conventionally frustrating, and bitterly funny late-’30s visions of love.
This zeitgeist of marital rancor was so widespread on American screens that one can only go so far with the parallel in Wilder’s personal life: his own two marriages were full of rancor. Billy and Judith lived briefly in a suite at the Chateau Marmont, but for reasons that Wilder has never explored in interviews, they moved into Judith’s mother’s house at 8224 DeLongpre in West Hollywood. Money is a possible explanation, though Wilder was certainly making enough for them to have afforded their own place. But whatever the motive, Billy went home every day to his wife and mother-in-law.
At the same time, Brackett wasn’t monogamous with Wilder. He strayed from his partner almost immediately by writing other films with other writers. Lubitsch was taking his time preparing Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, so in April 1937, Brackett went on loan to B. P. Schulberg to write a film called Bonanza (which seems never to have gotten made). After that, MGM borrowed him to work on the screwball comedies Wedding Dress and Live, Love, and Learn (the latter featuring Brackett’s replacement at the New Yorker, Robert Benchley). Even at Paramount, Brackett worked with other screenwriters after meeting Wilder, contributing dialogue and story ideas to the gangster comedy-drama Wild Money.
Still, Brackett and Wilder were well on their way to becoming the squabbling Siamese twins of the film industry. In the summer of 1938, when Universal Pictures needed to put the finishing touches on a Deanna Durbin musical-comedy called That Certain Age, the studio borrowed Brackett and Wilder from Paramount as a team. The none-too-American Wilder was probably more of a draw than Brackett for this thin exercise about Boy Scouts, a phony haunted house, a teenage crush on an older man (Melvyn Douglas), and of course the sprightly Deanna. That Certain Age, after all, was a Joe Pasternak production (Pasternak having commissioned Der Teufelsreporter, not to mention Mr. and Mrs. Allan Dwan’s illfated tour of Germany). Bruce Manning’s screenplay needed some polish, and Pasternak knew that his old friend Billy, along with his new writing partner, could provide it—especially in regard to the scenario involving the older man and his response to Durbin’s crush. Left unclear is the extent and nature of Wilder and Brackett’s contribution to the script, however, since records of their work survive only in the form of production listings in Hollywood trade papers.
Durbin, who is much better than her material, is forced to set the tone of That Certain Age in her first song, which cheerfully but unequivocally extols the virtues of loyalty, bravery, and cleanliness. Given this spray of all-American fun, Melvyn Douglas’s hard-bitten reporter is quite a relief. The best line of dialogue in That Certain Age is his. Extolling the virtues of urban life in contrast to dull Mt. Kisco, New York, where he faces exile for the duration of the film, Douglas growls, “What I need is a good steak every night—smothered in chorus girls.”
Of Pasternak, Wilder said, many years later, “Pasternak didn’t do anything memorable, but he was practical—commercial. We are an industry. There’s nothing wrong with that, when you know you’re commercial and aren’t under any illusions of doing something else.”
As Wilder moved up in Hollywood, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the way his agency, H. E. Edington–F. W. Vincent, Inc., was managing his deals. He knew the business better than they did, or so he thought. In May 1938, he terminated his relationship with the agency and turned his career over, briefly, to Paul Kohner. Wilder was concise in his letter of termination; his current contract with Paramount hadn’t been negotiated by Edington and Vincent, Wilder wrote, but rather by Wilder himself; hence he was no longer represented by Edington and Vincent, and that was the end of it.
Wilder fou
nd himself in familiar company with Kohner, who had opened his new agency the year before, and whose client list grew to include many if not all the top émigré talents in Hollywood: Edgar Ulmer, William Thiele, William Dieterle, William Wyler, Anatole Litvak, Max Ophuls, Joe May, Gottfried Reinhardt, and Robert Siodmak, as well as non-émigré John Huston. Kohner and Wilder’s formal and financial relationship as agent and client didn’t last very long, but as late as 1998 Billy continued to conduct informal business through the Paul Kohner Agency, which survived its founder by many years. And when, in 1938, Kohner cofounded the European Film Fund, with Ernst Lubitsch as its president, Billy was among the first to sign on. The Fund provided relief and support for the stream of refugees who managed to get out of Europe and the would-be refugees who were still trying to do so, with ever increasing urgency. The Fund operated entirely on the donations of its members; the theory was for everyone to give 1 percent of his income for the benefit of new refugees. According to the surviving records, Billy was generous.
Wilder’s personal life in 1938 is almost entirely undocumented, but it was nonetheless a crucial year—a time when his lifelong bitterness proved to be absolutely justified. Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife finished filming in January and was released on March 18, a week in which Billy had more pressing concerns than his own jokes and wardrobe. Only days before Bluebeard’s gala premiere—when audiences first saw Billy’s marvelous meet-cute with the pajamas; the funny, ugly bathtub in which Gary Cooper is forced to sit; the straitjacket; the spanking scene in which Cooper turns Colbert over his knee—Hitler led his troops into Vienna, annexed Austria in a flash of military might, and immediately supervised the systematic torture of Vienna’s Jews. With ghastly precision, the Anschluss occurred during the very week in which Billy ought to have been enjoying the release of his first major American film—a light if brutal comedy.
