by Ed Sikov
Wilder knew about Paramount’s plans for Hold Back the Dawn as early as August 1939, when he tried to get Hornblow to hire an Austrian refugee actor named Hans Jaray for the lead. Hornblow got as far as looking at Jaray’s picture before turning him down. It’s probable that Hornblow had Wilder and Brackett in mind when he bought Frings’s idea. After all, how many other top-flight screenwriters had spent time on the other side of the Mexican border trying to wangle himself a residency permit? Brackett and Wilder began working on the script in late 1939, but since they were involved in other screenplays, they only appear to have concentrated on Hold Back the Dawn in the last half of 1940, finishing it up in January 1941. (Another writer, Richard Maibaum, gave the script a polish after Wilder and Brackett turned in their final draft.)
Charles Boyer was Paramount’s pick for the male lead. Boyer, whose screen persona hasn’t aged particularly well, was nonetheless a great choice at the time. Other 1940s male stars of varying types—Cooper, Grant, Bogart, Wayne, Stewart, Fonda—have survived much more fondly in the American imagination, probably because they were Americans. Boyer, of course, was French, and the romance associated with debonair French roués has dissipated in the intervening years. Otto Friedrich, describing Hold Back the Dawn in City of Nets, derides Boyer as “a onetime classical actor who now lived mainly by his toupee, his corset, and his heroic image of himself,” but that’s not fair—not to Boyer, certainly, but also not to the countless moviegoers on both sides of the Atlantic who continued to see him as an appealing movie star in films like Gaslight, The Earrings of Madame de, Cluny Brown, and The Cobweb, to name only a few. Billy himself grew to detest Boyer personally, but for a different reason.
For the leading woman, the refugee’s naive American bride, Paramount chose Olivia de Havilland, with Paulette Goddard playing a prominent supporting role—the refugee’s gold-digging girlfriend. Brackett and Wilder helped engineer de Havilland’s casting themselves. They’d had her in mind for the role when they wrote it, even though she was under contract with Warner Bros. According to Tony Thomas, de Havilland’s biographer, Paramount tricked Jack Warner into letting her go. When Warner read the list of available stars to the Paramount exec who’d called him to see about a loan, the executive feigned disinterest when de Havilland’s name came up. He called Warner back a few days later and said that, well, he guessed she’d do. Brackett, meanwhile, had already slipped a copy of the script to de Havilland, who agreed to do the part. Since Warner wanted to borrow Fred MacMurray from Paramount for a war picture, Dive Bomber, the studios arranged a trade. Jack Warner reportedly thought he’d gotten the better deal.
“My papers give my profession as a dancer,” Boyer’s character announces in the beginning of Hold Back the Dawn, an annotation “which is correct in a general way. It was an easy life, if you had a deep voice and knew how to look at a woman.” Georges Iscovescu is a Romanian gigolo, a man with few scruples. This was Brackett and Wilder’s most significant revision from Ketti Frings’s treatment. Frings’s “Memo to a Movie Producer” wasn’t just a good idea for a movie; it was a public relations effort on behalf of her husband, whom she sketched in wholesome, loving strokes. Brackett and Wilder turned him into a scoundrel—a lover-for-hire whose self-contempt isn’t great enough to prevent him from looking for more work. At the beginning of the film, he shows up at the Paramount lot, desperate to see a film director named Saxon (played by Leisen himself). Iscovescu has a story to tell—his story, for which he asks $500. Except for a brief coda, Hold Back the Dawn is told entirely in flashback—a tale of deceit and remorse, with Iscovescu casting himself in a none-too-flattering light.
Informed by immigration officials that the quotas for Romanians are so tight that he’ll have to wait five to eight years before he can enter the United States, Iscovescu tries to find a room in a hotel for the near-permanant transients who have crowded into town. He’s lucky to get one; a Jewish refugee hangs himself in his room just in the nick of time: “There was an unexpected, shall I say, departure. A man by the name of Wechsler.… So the German moved out of Room 27 and I moved in.” The maid hasn’t even finished stripping Wechsler’s bed before Georges Iscovescu has made himself at home.
He meets Anita, his former “dancing” partner. She’s gained residency status thanks to the American who married her: “Shaughnessy was a jockey from Caliente,” she tells a fascinated Iscovescu. “Five foot three. Once over the border I went to a judge. I said, ‘A woman wants a man, not a radiator cap.’ Divorce granted—$50.” When Iscovescu meets Emmy (de Havilland), the harried American schoolteacher leading a station wagon full of illbehaved American boys on a day-long tour of Mexico, he sees his pigeon. He borrows Anita’s wedding ring and, before the night is through, he and Emmy are husband and wife.
De Havilland’s performance as Emmy is one of her most restrained; her character is innocent but not to the point of stupidity. She’s lonely, and she falls for him too quickly, but de Havilland keeps her from being as pathetic as she might have been. Brackett and Wilder provide her with a fine, depressing little scene in which Iscovescu and Emmy ride in the rain at night, and Emmy, with excruciating innocence, notices that the windshield wipers are beating out a message for the newlyweds. They sweep across the windshield in a terrible rhythm, meeting in the middle, over and over again: “Did you ever notice how things talk sometimes?” she says to a mortified Iscovescu. “Listen to those windshield wipers: Together. Together. Together. Together…. Can you hear it?”
Hold Back the Dawn is a study of a man’s ascending self-loathing. Faced with someone who actually needs him, Georges learns just how worthless he is. Eventually, Anita takes Emmy aside and wakes her up to reality by advising her to read the engraved inscription on the inside of her wedding ring: “To Toots” it says—“for keeps.” Emmy doesn’t bother to take the ring off and check, but she knows it’s true. Anita then delivers a line of breathtaking simplicity: “I know what you’re thinking—This woman’s a tramp and she’s in love with him.’ Well I am a tramp, and I am in love with him!” She continues by explaining the attraction: “I’m his sort. I’m dirt, but so is he. We belong together.”
Iscovescu eventually displays a modicum of honor, and he does succeed in gaining both Emmy and American residency (though Leisen shrewdly withholds the patriotic clinch from view, ending the film instead on a fadeout of Iscovescu walking through a crowd of people). But Iscovescu’s role in the final third of the film is a bit truncated, and his reunion with Emmy is virtually nonexistent. This was Boyer’s fault. Wilder and Brackett had no idea when they wrote “Scene B-8, Int, Iscovescu’s Room” that it would be not only the pivotal scene of the film but also the turning point of their careers.
Absurdity, stupidity, and the gutlessness of Mitchell Leisen combined to make this one of Wilder’s most treasured stories. The date is March 15, 1941: “Brackett and I are having lunch at the restaurant across the street from Paramount, and there is Boyer having lunch. And I said, ‘Well, how’s it going, Charlie?’ He says, ‘Beautiful. Love it.’ And I say, ‘What are you shooting today?’ He says, ‘Well, we are shooting that scene with the cockroach, but we changed it a little. I do not talk to the cockroach, because that’s stupid. How can I talk to a cockroach if a cockroach cannot answer me?’ I was really furious, and on the way out I said to Brackett, ‘That sonofabitch. If he don’t talk to a cockroach, he don’t talk to nobody.’ We went back and finished the third act, and we gave everything to Olivia de Havilland.”
In one variation of the tale, Boyer adds a little insult: “I do not wish to have these discussions while I am at the table,” Boyer is said to have told Billy. “Go away, Mr. Wilder, you disturb me.” In this rendition, too, Wilder returns to his office, pounds on his desk, and shrieks, “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!” Whatever the precise dialogue happened to be at the time, Billy Wilder drew the correct conclusion from his lunchtime interchange with Charles Boyer. As always, Wilder phrases the moral lesson colorfully: “What w
e wrote was a bit of toilet paper that they either used or they didn’t.”
This was not the first time an actor had deleted some dialogue from a Brackett and Wilder script. Midnight’s script featured an even more elaborate version of the party sequence at the Flammarions’ chateau, the centerpiece of which was to have been Eve, as the spurious Baroness Czerny, roasting hot dogs in the fireplace. On the day of shooting, however, Miss Colbert flatly refused to have anything to do with a weenie roast, and the scene had to be completely revised on the spot. The extended conga line in the finished film is Leisen’s attempt to cover for the missing material. But there were several key developments between the hot dogs and the cockroach. Billy Wilder had written two more commercially successful films. His salary had risen commensurately, along with his prestige, though he was still being paid only a little more than half of what Brackett earned. (Brackett got $42,063 for writing Hold Back the Dawn, while Billy only got $23,025.) Still, Billy Wilder had been nominated for an Academy Award. People knew him. He had a bit of clout.
Even more important, Preston Sturges had become a director. Sturges was proving, right on the Paramount lot, that great writers could also become great filmmakers. Sturges blamed poor, much-maligned Mitchell Leisen for driving him into the directors’ ranks as well; according to Sturges, Leisen totally ruined his script for Easy Living (a charge for which Leisen was once again quite innocent). Because Sturges was a Paramount writer-director, there was an excellent precedent to which Billy could point when he approached the front office. Moreover, although Sturges was the first Hollywood writer to attempt such a usurpation, he was no longer alone. Across town at Warner Bros., John Huston was making the same demand, and Huston was getting his wish as well. (He launched his directorial career with The Maltese Falcon.) For Billy Wilder, the cockroach episode may have been the final straw, but the salient point is that this straw hit Billy’s back at a most opportune moment.
When Zolotow mentioned Leisen’s name to Billy, Billy flew into a nasty tirade: “Leisen was too goddamn fey. I don’t knock fairies. Let him be a fairy. Leisen’s problem was that he was a stupid fairy.” This exchange has been quoted as evidence of Wilder’s homophobia, but Wilder never cared about anyone’s sex life as long as the details were filthy enough to make a good story. Leisen was no exception. It was the director’s putative idiocy, not his sexuality, that got Wilder’s goat, though Leisen’s penchant for fussing over the decor was always a thorn in Wilder’s side. “He hated writers,” Billy told David Freeman. “I would come on the set and stop him. ‘What happened to that line?’ I would say. He would say, ‘I cut it. You’re bothering me.’ He came from set dressing.”
As for Leisen, he was just as uncharitable, though in a different way. Leisen accused Wilder of writing scenes that made no emotional sense, and furthermore, “Billy would scream if you changed one line of his dialogue. I used to say, ‘Listen, this isn’t Racine, it’s not Shakespeare. If the actors we have can’t say it, we must give them something they can say.’” The reason Leisen ascribed to Billy’s temperament is fascinating: “Wilder’s the one with whom we had the most difficult discussions, because he comes from Central Europe and he was stubborn as a mule when anyone touched his words.” Leisen claimed to have watched Billy directing one of his own scripts years after their professional collaboration had ended badly, and he was amused to see Billy facing the same problem from a different perspective: “It was very funny—he was having to rewrite the whole thing!”
Leisen claimed that Brackett “was sort of a leveling influence” on Wilder: “He would referee my quarrels with Billy. As a team they were the greatest.” Wilder, when told of this remark, had none of it. “Charlie hated him as much as I did,” Wilder exploded. “Charlie never was a peacemaker. That’s bullshit. It was Arthur Hornblow who refereed our fights.”
These ugly little snipes, of course, occurred decades after the fact. When they were actually working together, Wilder and Leisen managed somehow to get through it. After all, if fighting over a screenplay had been an insurmountable problem, Wilder’s relationship with Brackett would have ended after Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. It was only after writing his third script for Leisen that Billy decided he’d had enough, and by that point Wilder’s rage was fueled more by his own ambition than by anything else.
By March 1941, when the cockroach scene was aborted, Billy Wilder had had enough. He was through with actors who not only thought they could rewrite his dialogue but then brazenly went ahead and did it. He was absolutely and irrevocably finished with Mitchell Leisen. He’d also had enough of being confined—insofar as Billy Wilder could ever be confined—to an office suite in the Writers’ Building. He had sworn after Mauvaise Graine that he’d never direct a film again. Now he changed his mind.
10. BALL OF FIRE
Make no mistake. I shall regret the absence of your keen mind. Unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.
—Professor Potts (Gary Cooper) to Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) in Ball of Fire
Billy was sitting in the Paramount canteen enjoying his lunch one early afternoon in 1941 when an executive named Luigi Luraschi approached him with a favor to ask. One of Luraschi’s jobs was to deal with the censors; another was to show important foreign visitors around the lot. That day, Luraschi was escorting some Austrian who wanted to see what a movie studio looked like. “I don’t know what to do with the guy,” Luraschi told Billy confidentially. Then he brought over his guest. “I want to introduce you to a fellow countryman,” Luraschi said. “He is one of our scriptwriters—Billy Wilder from Austria. From your home, from Vienna. This, Mr. Wilder, is Otto von Hapsburg.” Wilder was dumbfounded. This was the little boy he’d watched from the second floor of the Café Edison on that rainy day in 1916, when Franz Josef’s funeral cortege paraded through Vienna. Now he was just an ordinary middle-aged man in a nondescript gray suit. “I considered how I should address him,” Wilder reported. “‘Your Majesty!’ or ‘Mr. Crown Prince!’ or simply ‘How ya doin’, Otto? Glad to see you again!’ Ultimately I decided on ‘What brings you here?’” The dream prince was on a lecture tour on the West Coast, trying, as Wilder put it, “to keep his head above water. And they weren’t exactly the top universities he was visiting then—Long Beach College, Pomona, and Pepperdine.” Since the deposed prince was in Hollywood, he thought he’d see how other people’s dreams were made. “We talked for an hour in Viennese German,” Wilder remembered. “I told him about the years of starvation during the war—how my brother and I, in the bitter winter, stood in line for sixteen hours for a handful of potatoes. He wanted to know everything about Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald.”
Obviously, some of Europe’s mighty had already fallen by 1941. Others were still in midplunge, but Billy’s fortunes continued to rise. He hadn’t forgotten his old émigré friends, but he was good at making many new American ones. Of the old crew’s fates, Joe May’s was probably the most drastic. Wilder had been watching May’s professional life decline since 1933, when the wildly successful director was forced to abandon his lucrative career in Germany and start almost from scratch in Hollywood. It hadn’t worked out terribly well for him, and by 1941, May’s depressing career as a Hollywood director was sputtering to a close. In 1940, the showman-director of Das Indische Grabmal was trafficking in You’re Not So Tough, a Dead-End-Kids-Go-to-Los-Angeles picture for Universal. May also directed The Invisible Man’s less classy sequel. Both were far beneath him, but he had no choice in the matter. Joe May was an object lesson in the fate of immigrants who couldn’t cut it in Hollywood.
Billy, meanwhile, was thriving—and seething with ambition. He craved the control directing would give him, but he was still a compulsive scriptwriter, and a well-known one at that, even outside the gates of Paramount Pictures. The scenes he’d caused with Mitchell Leisen were no secret around town, but neither were Billy’s wit and charm, not to mention his talent, so when independent producer Sam Spiegel foun
d himself in dire straits, unable to pull a project together, it was Wilder to whom he turned for assistance. He begged Billy for an idea—anything that would make a good, profitable picture. So Wilder offered him one of his old stories—the one he and Walter Reisch had used for their last Ufa film, Der Frack mit der Chrysantheme. Spiegel is said to have succeeded in getting the actual Ufa screenplay smuggled out of Nazi Germany thanks to a Hungarian aquaintance, and he remade the film as Tales of Manhattan with Charles Boyer, Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth, and Paul Robeson, among many others. The grateful Spiegel told Wilder and Reisch that he’d give them anything they wanted as payment. Wilder asked for two handsome chairs he’d been admiring in a Beverly Hills shop. For his part, Reisch requested two audio speakers. After fielding a cascade of complaints from Wilder and Reisch, Spiegel finally had the articles sent to the two writers—along with the bills.
Around this time, too, Wilder was approached by Leland Hayward to come up with a story idea for Sonja Henie, the Norwegian ice-skater-turned-movie-star. According to Billy, Billy was paid $2,500 for about a half hour’s work—the dictation of a short treatment to Helen Hernandez, his own fingers snapping wildly while hers were occupied with the shorthand. (Wilder doesn’t name the picture, and he was never credited; if this film was actually made, it would have been Sun Valley Serenade, Iceland, or Wintertime.)
Assignments like the Sonja Henie idea may have been lucrative, but they weren’t enough. Neither was the never-simple act of writing a feature-length screenplay for a major Hollywood studio. It wasn’t just that he wanted to keep his stories from being mangled. Billy Wilder wrote for the screen, not the page, and when someone else directed his work, it did not look or sound right to him on the screen. For Billy, Mitchell Leisen was a decorator, not a director, and was consequently unable to realize the full potential of Wilder’s scripts. Wilder has always been unfair to Leisen, who was certainly competent. He never ruined Wilder’s screenplays, but he didn’t do much more than record them on celluloid and make sure the lighting was good.
