by Ed Sikov
The Anschluss was not exactly a shock. Wilder’s old friend Karl Tschuppik, in what became his most famous bon mot, was among the many Austrians who predicted it. “The Anschluss will come,” Tschuppik said in the mid-1930s, “and it will come in the form of a music festival.” He was right: his Austrian compatriots greeted the Nazis with a sense of felicity and celebration—Aryan violence to the tune of a biergarten chorale. (Luckily for Tschuppik, by the time his prediction came true he was already gone, having died of natural causes in Vienna the year before.) Since late 1935, when Wilder returned from Vienna to the undying warmth of Southern California, newspapers, radio, and newsreels had been chronicling the Nazis’ rise in great detail. When the Anschluss actually occurred, and the Jews were thrown into the streets and beaten, the news was widely reported in the world press. History has simply added more colorful details to stories that appeared in every major paper in the world. At the time, Billy Wilder knew what was going on and he understood keenly that he was powerless to do anything about it.
In the days following the Anschluss, the Jews of Vienna were hounded, kicked, beaten, and in many cases driven to suicide. Jewish stores were painted with scrawls reading “Jew” and “Jewish shop,” and the gentiles who patronized them were forced by the SS to wear signs around their necks reading “I, Aryan swine, have bought in a Jewish shop.” Jews were immediately deprived of their civil rights: the right to own property, the right to be employed and to give employment, the right to enter businesses and public parks. Jews were forced out of their homes and into the streets, where they were given hot water and little brushes and told to scrub the curbs and the pavement. The chief rabbi of Vienna, a man in his seventies, was hurled into the street in his prayer shawl and ordered to scrub the sidewalk to the general amusement of Viennese passersby. In late April, storm troopers forced as many Jews as they could find into trucks, drove them out to the Prater (Vienna’s popular amusement park), and ordered them to get down on their hands and knees and eat grass like pigs. When the terrified Jews complied, the storm troopers jumped up and down on their heads. And Billy Wilder was spending his summer polishing up a Deanna Durbin Boy Scout comedy and going home to a little house in West Hollywood with his wife and her mother.
Judith Wilder and Charlie Brackett bore the brunt of Billy’s anxieties. One can easily imagine Billy responding to the daily news reports out of Vienna by stepping up his already frenetic pacing and darkening his already troubled view of the way human beings treat one another. Even in the best of times, Brackett found that watching Billy work was like watching a tennis match—it gave him a stiff neck. Wilder was forced to contain himself as best he could in sunny California while his mother’s life hung in the balance. It may be this—as much as love, lust, and social ambition—that explains his marriage to Judith. When he returned from Vienna in 1935, Wilder seized whatever stability marriage seemed to offer. Three years later he was still trying to settle down, and it wasn’t working.
Wilder’s two marriages provided stability and rancor in what appears to have been nearly equal degrees. Europe was about to blow up, but Billy Wilder was in Hollywood living with a beautiful and intelligent woman and working with a talented, literate cowriter. Each gave Billy enough of what he lacked to make up for what he held in contempt. They steadied him and helped make his life as tolerable as possible. With Charlie, he could keep getting top-drawer work. By this point, in fact, the genial and well-connected Charles Brackett had been elected president of the Screen Writers Guild. The Guild’s war with the Academy was over by then; the Guild had won. Not only did the National Labor Relations Board recognize the Guild as the legitimate collective bargaining organization for Hollywood writers, but the Academy completely yielded its role in labor relations. By the time the conservative Brackett was elected as the Guild’s president, there was no longer any need to put a radical in charge. Brackett’s position certainly didn’t hurt the team’s chances for employment on pictures that mattered—pictures like Midnight, another screwball comedy about a mismatched couple.
Mitchell Leisen, who was scheduled to direct Midnight for the producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., was one of Paramount’s most commercially successful directors. Indeed, in terms of box office clout, Leisen was second only to Cecil B. DeMille. In 1935, when Ernst Lubitsch assumed the position of head of production at Paramount, the first film he supervised from screenplay to screen was a project for Mitchell Leisen: Hands Across the Table, starring Fred MacMurray and Carole Lombard. Leisen also directed Jean Arthur in Easy Living, from a script by Preston Strurges; though not a commercial hit at the time, it ranks as one of the finest screwball comedies ever made. These and other Leisen films combine verbal wit and classy visual style. But Leisen wasn’t Lubitsch, and Billy grew to hate him. Leisen hated Billy back.
Any comparisons between Mitchell Leisen and Ernst Lubitsch obviously favor Lubitsch, except for these: Brackett and Wilder wrote Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife for a director they both loved; Midnight, much tougher on everyone’s nerves, is the better film. Lubitsch, Wilder, and Brackett began Bluebeard from scratch—everything in it was theirs; Midnight began as a Marlene Dietrich project, it was to be directed by (of all people) Fritz Lang, a total of six writers worked on it, and it ended up being not only funnier but more whole artistically. (Edwin Justus Mayer and Frank Schulz, who had changed his name from Franz, won only story credit on Midnight, but as evidenced by their salaries, they wrote substantially more than just a story outline. In fact, even though the shooting script was written entirely by Brackett and Wilder, Mayer earned over $34,000 for his work on the film—more than twice what Wilder made.)
There’s an old story, borne out by production records, about Arthur Hornblow Jr. deciding to exert his power by handing Wilder and Brackett’s fully polished draft to a staff writer named Ken Englund. (Like many producers, then and now, Hornblow just wanted to put some more thumbprints on it.) Englund asked Hornblow what he was supposed to do with the script, since it looked good enough to him. “Rewrite it,” said Hornblow. Englund did as he was told and returned to Hornblow’s office with a new draft, whereupon the producer told him precisely what the trouble was: it didn’t sound like Brackett and Wilder anymore. “You’ve lost the flavor of the original!” Hornblow declared. Englund then pointed out that Brackett and Wilder themselves were currently in their office doing nothing, so Hornblow turned the script back to them for further work. Charlie and Billy spent a few days playing cribbage and then handed in their original manuscript, retyped and doctored with a few minor changes. Hornblow loved it, and the film went into production.
We meet Eve Peabody (Claudette Colbert) in a train that has just arrived in Paris from Monte Carlo. She is lying on a bench in her compartment, asleep, and she is wearing a fabulous gold lamé evening gown. “So this, as they say, is Paris, huh?” she says. Though penniless, she hails a cab. This is a woman who remains in full control of her life despite her dire circumstances. She lands in Paris with $1,000 less than Wilder had when he first found himself in the City of Lights, but she surely has all of his gumption: “Here’s how things stand,” she tells the cabbie. “I could have you drive me all around town and then tell you I left my purse home on the grand piano. There’s no grand piano, and no home. And the purse? Twenty-five centimes with a hole in it. That’s what’s left of the Peabody stake.… I need a taxi to find myself a job, and I need a job to pay for the taxi. No taxi, no job. No job, no soap.”
The cabbie, Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche) is impressed. He asks if she always travels in an evening gown. “No,” Eve replies, “I was wearing this in Monte Carlo when a nasty accident occurred.” “What happened? Fire?” “No, the roulette system I was playing collapsed under me. I left the casino with what I had on my back.” Like Carl Mayer’s father and Billy himself, Eve has learned that system gambling doesn’t pay very well. “What you went through!” Czerny says a little later, and Eve responds by alluding to worse events that remain otherwise unremarked: “How far do y
ou think ‘through’ is for a woman these days?”
Midnight is a comedy of ruses and intrigues, adultery and great lines. The animosity between the principals is more vital than in Bluebeard, and their love is thus more real. Eve leaves Czerny alone in the rain, having concluded that she could never find happiness with a man with no money, and she crashes a party just to get out of the downpour. It’s a dull affair. (In fact, it’s a direct recycling of the hideously tiresome party in Wilder’s Der falsche Ehemann, complete with a silly violinist.) In a terrific, irrelevant aside (a lost art), a guest remarks, “It always rains when Stephanie gives one of her dull parties—even nature weeps.” Using a pawn ticket as her invitation, Eve enters Stephanie’s beautiful home and promptly sits down on a dog. This woman is clearly in need of assistance, and she finds it in the form of a multimillionaire named Flammarion (John Barrymore), who hires her to help break up his wife’s affair with a smooth-talking rotter named Jacques Picot (Francis Lederer). Eve, who has been passing herself off as the Baroness Czerny, quickly finds herself the beneficiary of cash, clothes, a chauffeur, and a suite at the Ritz.
They all proceed to the Flammarion estate at Versailles, where they’re joined by a fey guest—the hilarious Marcel (Rex O’Malley). Midnight’s plot becomes increasingly twisted when Czerny shows up, since Eve has been finding herself increasingly attracted to Jacques—or, rather, to Jacques’s money. (“Jacques’s family makes a very superior income from a very inferior champagne,” Flammarion tells her.) The Baron and Baroness Czerny, however, are clearly in love, though, a fact that becomes increasingly evident in the bitterness and rancor with which they treat each other. Mme. Flammarion’s suspicions about Eve’s real identity are allayed when Eve and Czerny get into a testy exchange about their fictitious daughter, Francie, and her equally fictitious case of the measles. Using one of Brackett and Wilder’s best lines, Marcel treats the illness as a delightful fashion accessory: “That polka dot effect is very becoming!” This oblique, shorthand suggestion of Marcel’s sexual orientation flew past the censors, of course, who couldn’t very well object to a silly remark about fashion. But when Brackett and Wilder included a bit in which Marcel was seen removing women’s clothes from his suitcase, the Hays Office vetoed it.
John Barrymore was of two minds about Midnight’s screenplay. On the one hand, Barrymore’s wife, Elaine Barrie, asked Brackett and Wilder for a copy of the script. At this point in his downhill slide, Barrymore was so drunk and degenerate that he usually didn’t bother to read the screenplays of the films in which he appeared. Instead, he just read his lines off slates held out of camera range. “I’ve never known John to be so amused by a picture,” Barrie told Wilder and Brackett. “He’s actually asked if he could read the script!” On the other hand, Barrymore still refused to learn his lines. For one scene, the set was so tight that there was no room for Barrymore’s idiot cards. Leisen asked Barrymore to memorize his lines, and Barrymore refused, saying, “Why should I fill my mind up with this shit just to forget it in the morning?” They wedged the idiot cards in somewhere and filmed the scene. Not only that, but Barrymore was also known to piss in the plastic bushes used for the terrace of the Flammarion chateau.
Midnight ends with a wise judge (Monty Woolley) spelling out the law of screwball marriage: “There’s a very healthy law—in Albania, I think it is—that a husband may bring his wife back to her senses by spanking her, not more than nine blows with any instrument not larger than a broomstick. What do you say to that?” Eve has no objection. She’s evidently been watching 1930s romantic comedies: “I say it’s a fine idea! A husband should have that privilege, and no wife would resent it. If she knew he loved her.” (Punching, slapping, or spanking had already occurred in Nothing Sacred and The Moon’s Our Home and would continue to occur in The Mad Miss Manton, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Philadelphia Story, and other comedies of the period. Billy Wilder eventually became notorious for his putative misogyny, but at this point in his career he had genre convention on his side.)
Midnight opened in March 1939 to a flood of laudatory reviews, the most revealing of which appeared in Motion Picture Daily. Wilder, Brackett, and Leisen had battled during the film’s preparation, and on-screen the characters were all set to slug each other, but according to the Daily, the industry screening of Midnight was a love fest: “This is, in fact, just about the best light comedy ever caught by a camera, as of the glad evening of March 8, 1939, when a cross-industry turnout enjoyed its preview screening with that wholesome, whole-hearted enthusiasm which, about once a year, erases company boundaries, banishes professional prejudices, and makes of a top-flight Hollywood audience a mere theatreful of completely contented film fans for a night. It takes a pretty fine piece of entertainment to do that.” In a snap, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett became the hottest screenwriting team in town.
A measure of Billy Wilder, an intensely voluble but inordinately private man, emerges from the games he plays: Hollywood deal making, of course, but just as definingly, the game of bridge. He learned both more or less simultaneously in the mid- to late-1930s, about the time he began working with Brackett. Cards were seminal to the collaboration—bridge, cribbage, maybe some poker. Billy was particularly good at bridge. A contest of skill, intellect, chance, and risk, bridge requires several strengths—a crisp and complex logic, a sturdy memory, and a dextrous, adaptable strategy. The cards you hold are yours, but you get them by pure chance. Based on your hand, and your skill, and your degree of calculated avarice, you bid.
Your partner is crucial. Bridge, predicated on pairing, is profoundly psychological and dependent on subtle communication. To win, you have to understand and mesh with your partner’s nature while sizing up and defying your antagonists. As one popular guide to the game points out, “bridge involves ‘playing the people’ as well as playing the cards,” a task at which Billy always excelled. You must know who your partner is and who your opposition is, and you must imagine, based on highly educated guesses, how well your own hand fits your partner’s and how the combination stacks up against your opponents’. A set of inviolable rules governs the information you can share with your partner. As phrased by the instructional guide, the game of bridge sounds a great deal like the screen-writing team of Brackett and Wilder: “Within these severe limitations, players must choose ways to exchange information in order to get the most out of the combined partnership assets.”
For a restless mind like Billy’s, bridge offers no chance of boredom. There are over fifty-three octillion possible deals. Moreover, bidding is a language—not only a means of communicating with someone else, but a way of connecting with him and moving forward toward a goal. Defense, of course, is all a matter of logic. And as the great bridge master Alfred Sheinwold once wrote, “One of the most important things to learn about bridge is how to tell your friends from the hyenas. Once you learn the difference, you act one way toward your friends and quite another way toward the other jokers.”
Billy and Charlie played a lot of bridge together, but Charlie preferred cribbage. You could play it with two people rather than four, and it wasn’t nearly as complicated.
9. HEIL DARLING!
This has the ugly sound of regeneration.
—Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire) in Ninotchka
On the night of November 9 and the early morning of November 10, 1938, groups of Austrians and Germans rampaged through the streets of the greater Reich and, with rocks, bats, and kerosene, tore as many synagogues as they could find into ruins. This was the so-called Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. In all, 119 synagogues went up in flames, 76 of which were completely destroyed, along with 815 Jewishowned stores and 171 houses. Twenty thousand Jews were arrested; thirty-six were murdered. In Vienna, the Nazis destroyed every synagogue in the city except the Stadttempel, and for good measure they looted Jewish shops all over town. It was the most concentrated and deliberate Nazi assault on Jews to date.
Anthony Heilbut describes the effect of th
e metastasizing European horror on Hollywood’s refugees: “In a political age, the Hollywood émigrés found themselves in political situations. While few were more than salon gauchistes, most had no qualms about working again with Marxists to combat Fascism, as they had in Europe. But Red-baiting was abroad in the studios, and the refugees found themselves forced to choose between quietism and fellow-travelling. The problem was that if one chose the first, one might be able to live in America, but one couldn’t live with oneself.” As Heilbut notes, these were people who already knew enough to play it cool in the American democracy. The fact that they had been forced to emigrate in the first place meant that they were already “trained in the arts of concealment.”
Billy Wilder, like the other Hollywood refugees, walked a thin line between politics and survival. Unlike some other screenwriters of his generation, he came down on the side of survival and therefore enjoyed a long and productive career in the United States. Wilder’s political sympathies lay with the left, but as a refugee he knew he was vulnerable. He wanted to continue working. More to the point, he was compelled to work, if only for the sake of his sanity. This was his constitutional state, and it would have held firm even without emigration, an impending war, and the anxiety of knowing that his mother’s and grandmother’s lives were under direct threat. Motion had always been his way of surviving, and in order to keep going forward in Hollywood he knew he needed to keep his political sentiments in check.
Billy Wilder chose to work and play. He didn’t join any leftist study groups and made a life and a career for himself instead; eventually he joined some refugee committees, but politics was never a primary focus. He lived in acceptable if somewhat cramped comfort in West Hollywood. He drove a new DeSoto convertible. He hung out after work at Oblath’s, a homey, divey restaurant across from the Paramount lot; on better occasions he went to Lucey’s. On the lot itself, Wilder spent a great deal of time at the precise spot where he could hear and share all the latest studio buzz while smoking cigarettes and telling off-color jokes. It wasn’t the Writers Building, where walls had ears and rivals had mouths. It certainly wasn’t the front office, where nobody went unless they had to. Billy’s regular spot was Paramount’s own Gossip Central: Oscar Smith’s shoeshine stand, conveniently and pivotally located right inside the Bronson Avenue gate. Oscar Smith knew a lot and so did his customers. Eventually, then, so did Billy. (Wilder went on to cast Smith as the Pullman porter in Double Indemnity.)
