by Ed Sikov
Wilder, on the other hand—more than any other screenwriter with the exception of Preston Sturges—wrote scenes to be experienced richly, not merely recorded. His stories lived; his characters breathed and thought. To connect with these characters, Wilder knew, audiences needed to see every gesture in just the right way at just the right time. When Lubitsch directed them, they did. When Leisen directed them, they didn’t—not in Wilder’s eyes. At the same time, Billy was constitutionally disappointed; for all his worldly success, his wife and little daughter, his friends, his tennis, his bridge, and his art, the world still didn’t measure up. Not by a long shot. Wilder couldn’t live with himself knowing that Sturges and Huston were achieving something he could not achieve—or would not even try. He wanted to watch at close range as an expert director filmed his next screenplay.
The film was Ball of Fire, but since it was being made in Hollywood, neither the screenwriter nor the director drove the project. It was, instead, all up to the star. Gary Cooper, the great wooden Indian of the American cinema, was at the peak of his popularity in the spring of 1941. Cooper projected an appealing self-confidence in the face of his own lack of intellect. As one critic once described him, “His ineptitude was often his appeal…. Audiences ascribed more credence to his characters than he himself could actually inject.” On-screen, Cooper’s homegrown masculinity was conflicted enough to be recognizable and real. As a result, the characters he played were unable to appreciate how dumb they were and were thus able to survive. Gary Cooper was the perfect American man.
In 1941, Cooper was under contract with Samuel Goldwyn, an equally intuitive Hollywood success who was looking for the right picture for his star. He’d been looking for several years; Cooper’s last three hits—Northwest Mounted Police, Meet John Doe, and Sergeant York—had all been made by other studios with Cooper out on loan from Goldwyn. Since his own story department was unable to come up with anything for Cooper since The Westerner, Goldwyn put in a call to William Dozier, the head of the story department at Paramount. “You know, Bill,” Goldwyn told the young executive, “I’m thinking it’s time you and I started doing each other favors. Let’s start by you doing me one—I’d like to borrow Brackett and Wilder.” Dozier wasn’t keen on the idea until he and his fellow executives thought the deal through, at which point they realized they could exchange their two star writers for none other than Gary Cooper, whom Paramount coveted for the taciturn lead in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Goldwyn, always a shrewd Hollywood horse trader, convinced Paramount to add a little money and throw in Bob Hope as well, and soon they all had a deal.
At Goldwyn’s studio on North Formosa (off Santa Monica Boulevard), the producer set his new writing team to work by handing them stacks and stacks of scripts and treatments that had been written with Cooper in mind. Nothing worked. Then Billy had an inspiration. They didn’t need to start with somebody else’s idea because Billy had already written the picture. “It was a story that I had written in Germany,” Wilder reports, though on other occasions he said he’d come up with the idea in his early Hollywood days. It doesn’t much matter. Whenever Billy thought it up, A to Z was one of his best ideas. “I found in my trunk this story of a conflict between brains and tommy guns”: a gangster’s moll meets a linguistics professor. Language on one side, muscle on the other. Gary Cooper as an intellect. It was intrinsically funny.
Of Goldwyn, Wilder has said, “He was a titan with an empty skull—not confused by anything he read, which he didn’t.” Still, Goldwyn retained a bit of Wilder’s respect owing to his instinct for quality and his drive for work. He was, in Wilder’s words, “an absolutely, totally dedicated man—like a passionate collector.” After unearthing the story, Wilder handed it to a junior writer on the Paramount staff, Thomas Monroe, for a quick rewrite to update the idea. He and Brackett then gave it to Goldwyn, who did with it what Goldwyn usually did with scripts: he gave it to his wife to read for him. “Frances read the story,” Goldwyn told Wilder the following day. “She likes it. How much?” “Ten thousand,” said Billy. Goldwyn thought the price was on the high side, so he offered to strike a bargain: Goldwyn would pay $7,500 off the bat, and if the film was a hit, he’d pay the balance. Billy agreed, with one further condition: that he be permitted to be on the set while Howard Hawks was filming it, so he could see, firsthand, how a nonidiot directed a motion picture. Goldwyn agreed.
“I stayed constantly on the set, because I had a lot of esteem for Hawks, who knew his trade very well and made very good films. I wanted to know about everything. That lasted nine or ten weeks.” Wilder’s admiration for Hawks was pronounced, but it never came close to his adoration of Lubitsch. Still, Hawks was much more profoundly influential on Wilder’s own cinematic style than Lubitsch had been. Lubitsch imprinted himself onto every frame; Hawks effaced himself. Lubitsch called visual attention to his own cleverness; he was exquisitely subtle about it, but movie reviewers all over the world could plainly see “the Lubitsch touch.” So could audiences. Hawks, on the other hand, made films that unfold naturally and invisibly, apparently without any authorial intervention. When Hawks filmed a scene, he knew not only what each shot would look like but also how each of these pieces would fit together in a seamless flow of images. He was one of a handful of directors who edited in his mind as he filmed. The films of Howard Hawks were never assembled in the cutting room. They were made in Hawks’s mind while his cameramen filmed them, and they were shot so that nobody else could monkey around with them during the editing process.
Hawks also had a graceful knack with actors. In fact, he’d already directed Cooper in Sergeant York, a smash hit. A man’s man himself, Hawks hunted with Hemingway, fished with Faulkner, knew how to dress well without preening, and lost a lot of money gambling and playing the horses. He understood Cooper’s sententious masculinity and used it to its best advantage. Hawks made his female stars look and sound good, too—Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, Frances Farmer in Come and Get It, Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday…. These were bright, sexy women who, under Hawks’s direction, knew precisely how to irritate men to the point of abiding passion. Ball of Fire was to feature just such a woman—the charmingly named Sugarpuss O’Shea. The question was, who would play her?
So flawless is Barbara Stanwyck as Sugarpuss that Ball of Fire seems inconceivable without her. But Stanwyck wasn’t even Goldwyn’s third choice for the lead. At first, the producer wanted Ginger Rogers, but she turned him down. According to the legend, Rogers responded to Goldwyn’s offer through her agent by saying that she didn’t want to do a tough-talking comedy role—she only wanted to play “ladies”—to which Goldwyn replied by screaming, “You tell Ginger Rogers ladies stink up the place!” Goldwyn then approached Jean Arthur. She, too, wasn’t interested in playing anyone named Sugarpuss, so he sent the script to Carole Lombard, who replied by saying that she liked neither the character nor the story. Only then did Goldwyn offer the role to Stanwyck, who quickly accepted it.
For his part, Gary Cooper didn’t like Brackett and Wilder’s screenplay at all. Coop detested the unusually articulate dialogue the writers proposed to give him. The star who was scheduled to play a brilliant grammarian called the script “gibberish that doesn’t make sense.” Cooper also faced a practical problem: “I can’t memorize it if it doesn’t mean anything!” the actor declared. So he burst into Goldwyn’s office and demanded a story conference. This must have been a real meeting of minds. But the producer managed to work out this dispute with his star, and Cooper finally agreed to do the picture more or less the way Brackett and Wilder wrote it. “Two-dollar words, okay,” Cooper muttered, “but not ten-dollar words.”
Words—particularly low-price ones—are the backbone of Brackett and Wilder’s script for Ball of Fire. Eight male professors live and work in a house in New York City. They are compiling an encyclopedia. Professor Bertram Potts (Cooper) has just finished his entry on Slang when a garbageman appears inquiring about the death of Cleopatra. He’s tr
ying to win first prize in a mail-in quiz: “I could use a bundle of scratch right now on account of I met me a mouse last week—whadda pair’a gams!” Then he mentions smackeroos. Professor Potts claims that no such word exists. “Oh, it don’t, huh? A smackeroo is a dollar, pal.” Potts is not willing to yield the point: “The accepted vulgarism for a dollar is a buck,” he informs the man, to which the trash collector replies, “The accepted vulgarism for a smackeroo is a dollar. That goes for a banger, a fish, a buck, or a rock!”
Potts asks what is a mouse. “A mouse is a dish! That’s what I need the moolah for—yeah, the dough! We’ll be stubbin’, me and the smooch, I mean the dish, I mean the mouse—you know, hit the jiggles for a little rum boogie? Brother, we’re going to have some hoy toy toy!” The professors are most excited but still perplexed as to the precise meaning of hoy toy toy. “Yeah,” says the garbageman, “and if you want that one explained, you go ask your papas.”
Seven years before cowriting this dialogue, its rhythm as polished as its tone and definition, Samuel “Billie” Wilder from Krakόw spoke next to no English. Now he was fluent—not only in American words and grammar but, even more important, in American thinking. The quickness and color of American slang gave Billy a voice for what was already inside him; fueled by the structure of the English language and the sheer beauty of American slang, he could live his sentences through to the end. For Wilder, language had never before been as immediate and expressive as it was in Ball of Fire.
The professors, whose stodginess might have been their only character trait had the writers and the director had less respect for them, are in fact eight of the most likable smart people in the American cinema. They’re as sweet as their acknowledged antecedents, the Seven Dwarfs. There is something infantile about them, but for Hawks, infantilism is underrated as a strategy for enduring a hostile world. The professors, isolated and cared for in the mansion provided them by the Daniel S. Totten Foundation, are essentially helpless as individuals. They function, insofar as they do, as a team: Potts, Gurkakoff (Oscar Homolka), Jerome (Henry Travers), Magenbruch (S. Z. Sakall), Robinson (Tully Marshall), Quintana (Leonid Kinskey), Peagram (Aubrey Mather), and Oddly (Richard Haydn)—all fed, clothed, and reprimanded by a stern nanny, Miss Bragg (Kathleen Howard).
But as Potts discovers in his encounter with the garbageman, the life of the mind is severely limited. “That man talked a living language,” he observes with evident self-contempt; “I embalmed some dead phrases.” So, armed with a notebook and an acute mind, he sets out to hear his language come alive in the mouths of people who haven’t yet calcified, as he has. He approaches a newsboy, who responds skeptically to Potts’s taking notes: “Hey mister, what are ya checkin’ up on me or somethin’? Blitz it, mister, blitz it, will ya? Ya gimme the mimis!” Thrilled, Potts invites the newsboy to an informational seminar at the Daniel S. Totten Foundation.
At the end of his day, Potts finds his way to a nightclub where, luckily, Gene Krupa and His Orchestra are playing. (Hawks was almost as much of a jazz and big band fan as Billy was.) Krupa’s lead singer, Sugarpuss O’Shea (Stanwyck), is very hubba-hubba, especially when she sings “Drum Boogie,” the title of which sends Potts into complete bafflement. “What does ‘boogie’ mean?” he asks the waiter. “Are you kiddin’?” the waiter replies. A little later, Potts asks him what the singer’s name is, and the waiter tells him. “She jives by night!” the boy explains. (You can practically hear Wilder and Brackett enjoying their own Hollywood joke.) The waiter then provides his assessment of Miss O’Shea: “Root, zoot, and cute—and solid to boot!”
By that point, Sugarpuss has developed a problem backstage. She has been whisked into her dressing room by two thugs named Pastrami (Dan Duryea) and Asthma (Ralph Peters). “Hey sister,” Pastrami informs her, “you gotta take it on the lam! You gotta get dressed and outa here before they slap a supeeny on ya!” “A supeeny?!” Sugar cries. The police have picked up someone named Benny the Creep on a traffic violation and, examining his car, have discovered a man named Kinnick. “In the accident?” asks Sugarpuss. “Yeah, that’s what Benny was tryin’a tell ’em,” Pastrami relates, “only they saw Kinnick’s feet!” “They was in a cake o’ cement,” Asthma explains. Benny the Creep has an obscure but significant professional relationship with Sugar’s gangster boyfriend, Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews), and although Sugar has no idea who Benny is, she nevertheless appreciates how precarious her own situation has suddenly become, thanks to the Creep’s accident. When Potts knocks on Sugar’s door, she naturally assumes he’s a detective bearing forth a supeeny:
POTTS: This inquiry is one of considerable importance.
SUGAR: Stop beatin’ up with the gums.
POTTS: What was that?
SUGAR: Get this—I don’t know from nothin’!
POTTS: Oh, but you do! Every word you say proves as much! Where’s that paper?
SUGAR: Supeeny? Suppose you tell the D.A. to take a nice running jump for himself!
POTTS: Bewildering! And you want to tell me you’re not the person I’m looking for!
(Sugar figures out there’s been some sort of mistake.)
SUGAR: Say—are you a bull or aren’t you?
POTTS: Well, if bull is a slang word for professor, then I’m a bull.
(She throws him out.)
SUGAR: Shove in your clutch!
POTTS: Exactly the kind of thing I want!
SUGAR: Okay, scrow! Scram! Scraw!
POTTS: The complete conjugation!
Back at the Foundation, Potts explains his research to his fascinated colleagues. “How do you account for the name?” asks Professor Peagram (Aubrey Mather). “You see,” says Potts, “the word ‘puss’ means face—as for instance ‘sourpuss.’ ‘Picklepuss.’ ‘Sugarpuss’ implies a certain sweetness in her.” Had there not been a Production Code to prevent him, Professor Potts might have gone on to describe the meaning of a term closely related to puss, but as it happens, he’s merely interrupted by the other professors, who seem to know all about it already. “Never mind the etymology,” says one pedagogue; “Was she …?” “Was she blonde or brunette?” asks another, getting quickly to the point. “That I don’t know,” Potts answers; “I didn’t notice.”
Requiring a hideout, Sugar appears at the professors’ door. Potts greets her. The other men scamper up the stairs, every bit as bashful and dopey as their forebears. “Say, who decorated this place?” Sugar asks as she looks around the house—“the mug that shot Lincoln?” And then: “How do we start, Professor? See, this is the first time anybody moved in on my brain.” “Where do I sleep?” she asks; “I don’t know—where do you live?” Potts answers. Feigning illness, she gets a few of the geniuses to examine her throat. Professor Magenbruch notes a certain rosiness of the laryngeal region. “Slight rosiness?!” Sugar cries. “It’s as red as the Daily Worker and just as sore!” The other professors thus begin to fret about sending Sugarpuss out in the cold and rain. Sugarpuss herself concurs: “I’m a pushover for streptococcus.”
Ball of Fire is the first Brackett and Wilder script since Midnight to have absolutely nothing to do with world events. No political problems trouble this sphere (if one excludes the matter-of-fact way in which the mob operates in the United States). While Ball of Fire was being filmed in Hollywood, the major cities of Allied Europe were burning from Luftwaffe bombs; by the time the film opened in December, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. But one gets no sense of nightmarish reality in this comedy. Freed from any obligation to be topical, Wilder and Brackett let their imaginations be governed only by the pure delights of language and story, character and setting. The ridiculous romance of Sugarpuss O’Shea, nightclub singer, and Bertram Potts, professor of linguistics, plays itself out against a backdrop of utter irrelevance.
The only problem here is to get Sugar together with Bertram, a task that becomes more difficult when Joe Lilac sends his henchman over to Sugar’s hideout with an engagement ring, the theory being that a wife
cannot be forced to testify against her husband. Sugar is less than impressed, so Pastrami tries to make her feel better: “He sends ya a love message! He says ta tell ya he gets more bang outa you than any dame he ever knew!” Pastrami then advises Sugar that he and Asthma will return to pick her up the following day, but “in the meantime,” he tells her, she should “lie low and stick close to the Ameche!” Even Sugar is mystified by this reference. She stops in her tracks at the front door, does a small double take, and asks, “The what?” “The telephone,” Asthma explains, evidently having just seen The Story of Alexander Graham Bell.
Bertram Potts, meanwhile, has concluded that Sugar must go. Not only is Miss Bragg offended by the presence of this flashy, sequined siren, but Bertram himself is unnerved by everything she represents. He clarifies his position: “Make no mistake. I shall regret the absence of your keen mind. Unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.” For her part, Sugarpuss eventually comes to understand that this gawky guy loves her; “Pottsie” is the first man in her life who respects and covets her soul as well as her body. This revelation of mutual tenderness and affection between two deeply flawed, superficially ridiculous, and radically mismatched people is not unique in Wilder’s career, but he would not achieve it on-screen again for another twenty-two years (when he made Irma la Douce). For whatever reason, Wilder was still receptive enough to this kind of heartbreakingly ideal love to write about it—and to write it so beautifully—in 1941. And he was lucky enough to be working with a director who knew precisely what he meant. Ball of Fire is as much a Billy Wilder romance as a Howard Hawks comedy.
