On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Ball of Fire previewed in Sun Valley on October 29, 1941, to great success. The audience loved it, and Goldwyn was ecstatic. When the film was finally released in December, its box office receipts fulfilling and maybe even exceeding Goldwyn’s expectations, Wilder made it a point to call the producer and demand the balance of his writer’s fee. Goldwyn had no idea what Billy was talking about. “If I promise, I promise on paper,” the producer insisted. Billy hung up on him. A few minutes later, Wilder’s phone rang. “I just talked to Frances,” said Goldwyn. “She don’t remember it either.” Enraged, Billy informed the producer that from that second on they simply wouldn’t know each other anymore. “If you don’t remember the deal and Frances doesn’t remember the deal, the hell with both of you!” he yelled, at which point Billy hurled the phone down on the hook again. It rang again soon thereafter. “Look, Billy,” said Goldwyn. “I don’t want people going around Hollywood saying I’m not honest. Come on over, right now, and pick up the $1,500.”

  Wilder never got the last grand. But Goldwyn did tell Brackett and Wilder to order suits from the best tailor in town and to send him the bill. The suits cost the then-fabulous sum of $175 each. Brackett claimed later to have been mortified by Goldwyn’s little tip: “Taking that suit was the most humiliating thing I ever did.”

  For his own gratuity, Billy had a whole lot more than a piece of menswear in mind. Since Ball of Fire was a hit, Wilder hoped that Goldwyn would reward him with what he really wanted—a film to direct. But he soon realized that Goldwyn wasn’t about to take such a risk. After all, Wilder was not just a writer. He was a belligerent, abrasive writer—a loose cannon who fought with people and screamed at them and made trouble on the set when he didn’t get his way. Entrusting an entire production to a novice as volatile as Billy Wilder must have seemed absurd to Samuel Goldwyn. But as Goldwyn’s biographer A. Scott Berg reports, Billy retaliated, albeit in his own way: he made “an appointment with the producer just to tweak his nose.” Billy pitched to the notoriously uncultured Goldwyn a fabulous story idea: “Why not do a picture about Nijinsky?” Goldwyn, of course, had no idea who Nijinsky was, so Billy explained to the former glove salesman that Nijinsky was the world’s greatest ballet dancer. He was born a peasant, Billy said—he came from dirt, he was nothing, but he loved to dance, and his unquenchable drive led him to the great Diaghilev, head of the Bolshoi. They fell in love, Billy went on, and … “Homosexuals? Are you crazy!” Goldwyn shouted. Not to be deterred, Wilder insisted that the best was yet to come. Nijinsky went mad, Wilder explained to a stunned Goldwyn, and eventually the great ballet star landed in a Swiss nuthouse because he thought he was a horse. “A homosexual! A horse!” Goldwyn repeated in disbelief. Billy still wasn’t finished with his little joke and, racing to the conclusion, related the story of Nijinsky’s marriage, Diaghilev’s envy, and the ensuing tragedy—Nijinsky spent the rest of his life whinnying.

  Outraged, Goldwyn berated Billy for wasting his time and forced him out the door. “Mr. Goldwyn,” said Billy, popping his head back into the office for the punch line, “you want a happy ending? Not only does Nijinsky think he’s a horse, but in the end he wins the Kentucky Derby!” Goldwyn was not amused, but Billy certainly was. And rightfully so. He’s been telling the story ever since.

  PART THREE

  1941–1950

  11. MR. DIRECTOR

  SUSAN APPLEGATE (Ginger Rogers): “Why not look around?” Well, I came and I looked around, from every angle. From the bargain basement to the Ritz Tower. I got myself stared at, glanced over, passed by, slapped around, brushed off, cuddled up against. But Mr. Osborne, in all that wrestling match there’s one thing they didn’t get out of me—not out of Sue Applegate!

  OSBORNE (Robert Benchley): So you’ve got your self-respect. But self-respect isn’t everything.

  —The Major and the Minor

  Finally, I pissed them off enough that they got rid of me by making me a director.” This is Billy describing how he came to make The Major and the Minor and twenty-four more films over the next four decades. He’s probably right. The arguments Wilder floated in Paramount’s front offices in 1941 aren’t difficult to imagine in all their resonant amplitude. How inescapable was his lobbying? How incessant were his pledges of budgetary restraint? His proposals for stars and stories? His promises? He probably even begged, though not without dignity.

  Charlie Brackett didn’t think Billy had the temperament to direct. Helen Hernandez also had the benefit of experience, having grown used to listening to the would-be director screaming at his would-be producer inside their joint office suite, pitching objects at each other and slamming doors. At times, she was forced to act as their go-between because they stopped talking to each other. And these two were proposing not only to write another screenplay, a task they could barely achieve without maiming each other, but also to hand the script over to the more volcanic of the two to direct? The idea must have seemed lunatic.

  But Wilder persevered. He made the executives so sick of him that they caved in just to shut him up. Wilder has also said that the men who green-lighted The Major and the Minor hoped he’d fail. It’s a paranoid view, but given Hollywood’s long-standing working methods, a sane one—particularly at the time.

  Hollywood was a corporate system—from production and distribution to exhibition. To entrust the direction of a motion picture to a writer—even one who had already directed a film—not only seemed inane, it violated the very premise of the division-of-labor basis on which Hollywood made its money. Wilder’s experience in France counted for nothing in Hollywood. If it is indeed true that Paramount executives wanted Wilder’s first film to fail, the failure would have been balanced by a profitable object lesson. As long as the budget of Billy’s little experiment was tightly controlled, its failure at the box office couldn’t do that much damage, and it would teach any other upstarts a valuable lesson.

  Still, there was a precedent—Preston Sturges. In March 1941, when Billy was pressuring Paramount, Goldwyn, anyone, to let him take a crack at directing his own script, Sturges’s screwball comedy The Lady Eve was the top-grossing film in the country. As a writer, Sturges was a firecracker; as a director, he was as brisk and efficient as anyone in town. The combination was dynamite. Sturges turned out to be as genial on the sets of his own pictures as he was in his off-hours. He invited his cast and crew to dinner at his house, he joked with his actors and made them feel important, and he often brought treats to the set, just to keep everyone happy and relaxed—another good lesson for a would-be writer-director. Sturges was on a winning streak, providing aid and comfort to aspiring writer-directors in what was still a company town.

  In the fall of 1941, Billy got his wish. Paramount Pictures and Billy Wilder finally agreed that Wilder himself would direct the next Brackett and Wilder screenplay. His director’s fee would be minuscule, but he would indeed direct. In November, at the behest of both Arthur Hornblow Jr. and a twenty-nine-year-old executive named Joe Sistrom, Paramount optioned an innocuous play that had been produced in New York in September 1923, eighteen years earlier. Connie Goes Home (based on a short story, “Sunny Goes Home,” that had run in the Saturday Evening Post two years earlier) was about a grown woman who pretends to be a little girl. It was a piece of sweet-tempered fluff. Sistrom, a compulsive reader, must have found the tale by going through old story reports, since there is no other reason why such an obscure little comedy would have come to his attention. Sistrom knew Billy, and he knew Billy wanted to direct—they often played bridge together—so he proposed that Wilder and Brackett update the property as a screwball comedy. The writers found it appealing enough, and Paramount executives found it harmless enough; after all, Brackett and Wilder already had a good track record with kid movies (What a Life and That Certain Age). In December, Paramount took the next step and bought the rights to both Connie Goes Home and “Sunny Goes Home” for a combined total of $2,750. Since this was a trial, Hornblow himself would produce the film;
Brackett had to wait until Five Graves to Cairo to become a full-fledged producer.

  As Wilder and Brackett worked on the screenplay and gave the fluff some bite, Joe Sistrom, acting as both executive and spy, reported back to the writers that the project was the subject of great mockery in the front office, but this had been part of Wilder’s calculated risk all along. Sturges was bold in choosing as his first film a political satire. At Warners, John Huston picked a thriller, The Maltese Falcon, and Orson Welles was in a different category altogether. Wilder’s ambitions were long-term, so the insignificance of The Major and the Minor worked to his advantage. An adroit bridge player, Billy understood the concept of vulnerability: because he’d been scoring extremely well as a screenwriter, the penalties for losing the next round were much greater. By agreeing to direct something as apparently inconsequential as a light romantic comedy, Wilder reduced the chances of catastrophe enormously. The executives would still be watching his every move, but they would be doing so under lights that were much less glaring.

  By the end of 1941, Billy and Charlie had the makings of a script, but they had no stars. For the role of Susan Applegate, formerly “Sunny” and “Connie,” they needed someone who combined glamour and wholesomeness. They needed Ginger Rogers. For the military school commander who can’t help but fall a slight bit in love with little “Su-Su,” they wanted Ray Milland. Both stars had eminently good reasons not to agree to perform in The Major and the Minor, chief among them being the fact that they were hot box office draws. Rogers, in fact, had recently won an Academy Award for the drama Kitty Foyle. But both agreed to star in Billy’s movie—Rogers in large measure because her agent, Leland Hayward, was by that point also representing Billy. As for Milland, Wilder offered him the role by shouting through the window of his car at the intersection of Melrose and Doheny, Billy having followed the star all the way from Paramount after work one afternoon. “Would you work in a picture I’m going to direct?” Wilder yelled; “Sure,” Milland replied. “I was too tired to go into it with him and thought he wasn’t serious anyway.” Moreover, as Milland put it, “Hell, in those days you finished one picture on Friday and started a new one on Monday.” The Major and the Minor was not a big deal for anyone—except, of course, for Billy.

  The script for The Major and the Minor was almost complete by mid-January 1942. Susan Applegate transforms herself into a twelve-year-old called Su-Su so she can get a half-fare ticket on a train. In the sleeper car she meets Major Kirby (Milland), an instructor at a military school; Kirby’s obnoxious fiancée, Pamela (Rita Johnson) shows up and makes it clear who Kirby should really marry; Kirby doesn’t realize that Su-Su is an adult until the final moments of the comedy; clinch. As usual with Brackett and Wilder’s screenplays, there were matters of taste to be resolved. The Production Code Administration was worried about several things, among them a line about glandular trouble running in Su-Su’s family: “If it refers to her breasts,” the PC A explained to Paramount, then the line must go. (Wilder solved the problem during filming by having Su-Su point to her throat.) There was also some concern over a line Wilder and Brackett proposed to give to Ray Milland: “Met your daughter on the train and took care of her last night.” The Major and the Minor may have seemed safe at first, but as the screenplay neared completion there was a dawning awareness on the part of both Paramount executives and the Production Code Administration that this little comedy was flirting with pedophilia.

  In January 1941, Wilder learned another lesson about the value of bad taste from Ernst Lubitsch. After To Be or Not to Be previewed on January 21 in Westwood in the first of its less-than-triumphant screenings, Wilder, Brackett, and Walter Reisch took the unnerved director nightclubbing on Sunset Boulevard to help console him. Lubitsch’s wife, Vivian, suggested over drinks that, given the carnage in Europe, the line “What he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland” was not the brightest thing for a character to say, even (or perhaps especially) in a contemporary political satire. Everyone else agreed. According to Reisch, Lubitsch was stunned: “To be accused of lack of taste made his face waxen and the long cigar tremble in his mouth.” Still, Lubitsch held his ground, just as Wilder would later hold his, because Lubitsch knew he was right. The line was funny. And, given Jack Benny’s genuine hamminess and the Nazis’ equally authentic destruction of Poland, it was true. If audiences didn’t appreciate it, they could go to hell. The line stayed in.

  In February, Paramount came up with a detailed budget for The Major and the Minor: the film would cost $928,000—an average price tag for an average A-grade picture. Of this total, a whopping $175,000 would go to Ginger Rogers. Ray Milland would be paid $46,667. Robert Benchley, cast in a small supporting role, would receive $10,000; this was more than Billy got for directing the picture. For writing the screenplay, Brackett’s services were budgeted at $27,000, Wilder’s at $17,233. Brackett eventually got an additional $4,500 for three weeks’ worth of solo script polishing, which he performed while Billy was filming. For directing the film Billy received $9,800.

  The whole premise of The Major and the Minor rested on Ginger Rogers’s ability to transform herself on-screen from adult to child. Her makeup had to remain more or less uniform throughout the picture, leaving the burden of the transformation on costumes. This presented problems for Paramount’s chief costume designer, Edith Head, as well as for Wally West-more, the head of the makeup department. Westmore and Head conferred for weeks on how to accomplish the task, after which they presented their ideas to Wilder. But Billy had ideas of his own and kindly asked them to go back to the drawing boards and come up with something else. The fact that he wasn’t Mitchell Leisen didn’t mean that Billy would leave design issues to others.

  One problem that both Wilder and Head faced was that Ginger Rogers was not built like a twelve-year-old girl. There is a dispute about how this obstacle was overcome. Wilder was blunt on the subject: “We had Ginger’s marvelous tits strapped down.” Ray Milland also claimed to have witnessed the flattening effect on Rogers’ chest, which he attributed to the judicious use of tape. Miss Rogers, however, denied everything. In fact, she was outraged when presented with her colleagues’ fond reminiscences: “Taped down, was it? Who the hell told you that, anyway? I can assure you that my tits were absolutely not taped down, not strapped down, not even a tight brassiere…. Don’t give me this drivel about strapping down tits.” However they accomplished the task, by the time the cameras were ready to roll in the second week in March, Head and Westmore had succeeded in making Ginger Rogers as presentably believable as a twelve-year-old girl as she was as an adult woman—at least to the extent of sufficing for a light comedy, where strains on credulity are part of the pleasure. And as Wilder points out, the issue was never whether or not audiences believed that Su-Su was twelve years old. The problem was to make sure that the other characters could believe her without themselves looking too moronic.

  As he would remain for the rest of his career, Billy Wilder was flexible when he could be and recalcitrant the rest of the time. The Production Code Administration labeled the whole opening of the film distasteful, but Wilder stuck with it. He and Brackett planned to introduce Susan Applegate as an itinerant scalp masseuse who rubbed men’s heads for money. In the opening scenes of the film, she arrives at the home of the leering Mr. Osborne (Robert Benchley), who obviously has more than a few healthy scalp strokes on his mind, and it’s this tawdry encounter that convinces Susan to get out of New York City and head back to the Midwest as quickly and cheaply as possible. This, after all, is the moment at which Benchley utters the marvelous line, “You know what I always say—no matter what the weather is, I say, ‘Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?!’ Dry martini? Wet coat? Heh heh heh heh.” He follows it up by noting that he’d offer her a whiskey sour, but it would mean thinking up a new joke.

  When Wilder and Brackett gave the martini bit to Benchley they were under the impression that the line was already his, and the
clever phrasemaker tacitly accepted credit for it; Wilder discovered later that Benchley had actually lifted it from his friend Charles Butterworth’s 1938 picture Every Day’s a Holiday, in which Butterworth delivers the line to Charles Winninger. (Every Day’s a Holiday was written by Mae West, who also starred.)

  The week before filming was scheduled to begin, the PCA told Paramount that the Benchley scenes were unacceptable, based as they were on a “sex suggestive situation where Mr. Osborne actually seems to expect illicit relationships with girls that come from the massage offices.” The PCA was also upset by one of the smirking elevator boy’s lines: “Ain’t it awful the way a fellow’s scalp dries out this time of year?” Billy, not to be bullied by some humorless censors, kept Benchley’s scenes almost entirely intact, and he retained the elevator boy’s line as well. When faced with the finished film, the PCA raised no objections.

  On the other hand, Billy did agree to dispense with four split-screen shots he’d planned for the film, deciding for reasons apparently both budgetary and artistic that these process shots were an expensive frill that he could do without. Although he and Brackett had wanted Paramount’s ace cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff to shoot the film, they were tractable enough that when Tetzlaff’s current film ran overschedule, they accepted the services of Leo Tover in his place. Tetzlaff was a technical genius with a taste for blazingly brilliant lighting and crisp, elegant cinematography; Tover was an accomplished journeyman—clearly a step down, but an unavoidable one. In addition, Wilder and Brackett wanted to use the George Military Academy in College Park, Georgia, for location shooting, while Arthur Hornblow favored the New Mexico Academy in Roswell; they all had to compromise. In order to get the right weather conditions they found that Wisconsin was a better bet for a May shoot, so they arranged with the St. Johns Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin.