by Ed Sikov
Years later, Billy described his vocation: “A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant, and a bastard.” On March 11, 1941, he didn’t know as much. In fact, he discovered on the evening before shooting started that he knew nothing at all. He ran into Ernst Lubitsch that night and said, expressively, “Don’t tell anybody else, but I’m shitting in my pants.” Zolotow actually claims that Wilder had uncontrollable diarrhea, but whatever balance Wilder struck between metaphor and diagnosis, Lubitsch knew exactly how his young friend felt. “Look,” he told Billy, “I have made sixty pictures, and I still do the same thing every time I start a new one.”
Billy’s personal life was in flux as well. Only someone as peripatetic as Wilder would have launched his directing career and moved into a new house at the same time. On March 9, he and Judith bought themselves a large, isolated estate at 9590 Hidden Valley Road, near the top of Coldwater Canyon. The house, itself surrounded by a good deal of property, couldn’t have been more removed from the high voltage of Hollywood. Situateci at the very end of a twisting lane, Billy and Judith’s new residence was removed even from tiny Hidden Valley Road. It befitted Billy’s new status. Now that he was a big man in town, he had a big house high in its outskirts. Judith could even keep horses up there. The place was a refuge—at least for Judith.
On March 12, 1942, a very large crowd of people met on Paramount’s sound stages 16 and 17 to begin filming some of The Major and the Minor’s Grand Central Station sequences. There were electricians, props assistants, sound men, Leo Tover and his assistants, extras, script assistants, makeup artists, costumers, and every Austro-German émigré director Ernst Lubitsch could round up, the latter group hoping to give Billy moral support: William Wyler, Michael Curtiz, William Dieterle, Henry Koster, E. A. Dupont, and Lubitsch himself. Preston Sturges also showed up on the set that first morning. Billy was wearing a sweater, which Sturges promptly yanked up in order to examine what was underneath. “All wrong,” he said. Sturges then explained to the puzzled Billy that since he was now engaged in what was essentially physical labor, he would end up with terrible back problems unless he wore a strong belt for support. “What size are you?” the seasoned pro asked the novice. “Thirty-two,” Billy replied. Sturges promptly handed him a gift: a wide leather belt, which Billy gratefully accepted. He still ended up with severe and persistent backaches.
Ginger Rogers and her stand-in were called to the set on schedule at 9:00 A.M. The first shot was taken at 10:25 A.M. Billy Wilder was now a director.
“I would like to give the impression that the best mise-en-scène is the one you don’t notice. You have to make the public forget that there’s a screen. You have to lead them into the screen, until they forget the image has only two dimensions. If you try to be artistic or affected you miss everything.” This is Wilder’s aesthetic, a governing philosophy that holds true from the first shots he directed with Ginger Rogers in the Grand Central Station sets to sequences of war, romance, murder, heroism, sleaze, comedy, music, and drama. At no point does Wilder ever yank his audience’s attention away from his characters toward self-aggrandizing, showoffy visual effects. Such ostentatious finger pointing simply isn’t Wilder’s style. From watching Howard Hawks, Wilder learned to shoot in ways both formally strict and relaxedly invisible. As he later said, “When somebody turns to his neighbor and says, ‘My, that was beautifully directed,’ we have proof it was not.”
Wilder also quickly discovered that in order to make his films as self-effacing as he wished them to be, he had to depend on someone else. On the first day of shooting The Major and the Minor, Billy confronted the fact that if he wanted to keep his audience’s mind on the characters and story he was creating, he needed an experienced editor to be close at hand while he filmed. Hawks, Ford, and Hitchcock could edit in their minds; Wilder knew he couldn’t—at least not yet. So he summoned an editor named Doane Harrison to the set to tell him what angles worked and what angles didn’t. A tall, slim, exceedingly low-key man with stooped shoulders, Harrison had been cutting film since the days of Mack Sennett. Most recently, he had edited Arise, My Love and Hold Back the Dawn. Wilder respected him greatly. He kept him by his side throughout the filming of The Major and the Minor and well beyond. The construction of each scene was Wilder’s; the bridges between shots were also Wilder’s, but with a lot of advice from Harrison.
Ray Milland was summoned for his first day of filming on March 18. Shooting proceeded on schedule until the second week of April, when over two hundred children stormed the set to film the scenes at the military school dance. All the kids had to be in wardrobe, there were welfare workers all over the place making sure the children weren’t being overworked, the kids themselves had restricted working hours, and, since it was 1942, of course, all the girls had to have their hair done in the fashionable style of Veronica Lake. Filming of the school dance scenes took six days.
“Well, the bus is here. The zombies have arrived,” says one of the cadets escorting Su-Su to the dance. “Who?” asks Su-Su. “The girls from Miss Shackleford’s School,” replies another boy. “We use ’em for women,” a third chimes in. After a cut, the cherub-faced child continues: “May as well warn ya, there’s an epidemic at Miss Shackleford’s School.” The cadets and Su-Su are now entering the ballroom, and Su-Su asks for clarification: “An epidemic?” “Yeah. They all think they’re Veronica Lake. Look!” Wilder cuts to a shot of four girls seated and looking down at the floor. They look up and turn simultaneously to the camera, identical long hair falling alluringly over their right eyes. Ginger stifles a laugh.
Robert Benchley’s scenes were shot at the end of April, and they required a great deal of rehearsal. It wasn’t Benchley’s fault; Wilder had quite a precise notion of how Susan’s scalp massage should be performed and received. Wilder has said that Benchley was delightfully bookish, did everything perfectly on the first take, and then went back to his trailer and continued reading, but that’s the generosity of hindsight speaking. In fact, Wilder and his actors spent most of Benchley’s first day working out the mechanics of the extended scalp routine. The shot in which Rogers breaks an egg over Benchley’s head took six tries before they got it right. As always, timing was essential. “Really, Miss Applegate, you shouldn’t be so businesslike,” says Mr. Osborne as the increasingly resistant Susan prepares to actually massage his scalp. “First we’re going to have a little drinkeypoo, then a little bitey-poo, then a little rhumba-poo….” When she forces him into a chair and breaks the egg methodically on his skull, he shuts his eyes and grimaces, caught in a prim, corn-fed American nightmare. She begins using an electrical contraption to mix the egg protein and create some foam, at which point he gets a smirk on his face, reaches around behind him with his eyes shut, and tries to grab her wrists. “I can’t help it,” he bleats—“it’s the vibrator!”
Reading through the daily production logs of Wilder’s first film, one is struck by how smoothly everything proceeded. Running against everyone’s expectations, this volatile, often downright hostile man responded exceedingly well to the pressures of directing a million-dollar picture. With Doane Harrison’s guidance, Billy knew what he wanted to shoot; with two exceptionally competent stars and a host of journeyman supporting players, he got what he wanted. Relations among Wilder, Rogers, and Milland were by all accounts fine. Even before shooting was finished, Rogers presented Billy with a tiny silver Oscar as a sign of her affection and respect. The Major and the Minor progressed so smoothly that Brackett went out on loan to RKO while The Major and the Minor was still shooting to write something called Bundles for Freedom.
By early May, The Major and the Minor was running six days behind schedule through the fault of no one in particular. Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela, was summoned from her ranch outside Medford, Oregon, to play the role of Mrs. Applegate. Her scenes required innumerable retakes, though this may not have been Mrs. Rogers’s fault. On May 9, principal photography was completed. The St. Johns sce
nes and some backgrounds taken at Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, were filmed by the second unit, led by C. C. Coleman, with stand-ins for both Milland and Rogers as well as 350 actual military cadets from the school. Like Doane Harrison, Buddy Coleman was dependable and low-key, and he soon became a regular member of Wilder and Brackett’s production team. He got along well with people—most crucially, with Billy.
Apart from the snickering Benchley sequence, The Major and the Minor is pretty saccharine stuff—until Lucy Hill (Diana Lynn) shows up. Ginger Rogers gets the job done in the train sequences, as does Milland, and she’s more ironic as a fake twelve-year-old than one might imagine. Still, just when all the cuteness and light begins to grate on the nerves, in waltzes a character with a working brain. Pamela’s little sister Lucy sees through Su-Su instantly. Lucy is a sardonic smart aleck—a wisenheimer who finds herself adrift in a sea of scrubbed, midwestern military school pabulum. Wilder introduces her at the top of the stairs, literally looking down on Su-Su with her arms folded knowingly across her chest, her eyes aiming at Su-Su like darts. Su-Su, sensing trouble, starts laying it on thick:
SU-SU: Oh, what a lovely room! Goldfishes! Look at the ones with the flopsy-wopsy tails! One’s sticking his nose up—he wants his din-din!
LUCY: Oh, get up and stop that baby talk, will you? You’re not twelve, just because you’re acting like six. How old are you, anyway? Twenty? Twenty-five? Or what?
Lucy is a tough-talking adolescent intellectual. Not only has she pried open Su-Su’s suitcase and investigated its contents, but she precisely observes that her experimental subject’s “adolescent adiposity—or baby fat—has disappeared.” (She spits out the “baby fat” remark as if speaking to a cretin; she knows what adiposity means, and so should everybody else.) “Hypotheses have to be checked and double-checked,” she explains. Fearless, brilliant, scientific, and utterly bored with the constraints of the social world into which she was born, Lucy is a young Sherlock Holmes. She is the only character in The Major and the Minor Wilder fully respects.
“Well, at least I don’t have to play Baby Snooks anymore,” Susan sighs with notable relief. “Not with me you don’t,” says Lucy.
Lucy Hill is a minor character but a potent one, who embodies her creator’s cynical, rip-through-everything intellect. In the insipid context of prep school Americana, Lucy is more than devilish; she’s practically satanic. When Pamela closes a conversation with Lucy and little Su-Su in their room, looks around and notices all of Lucy’s scientific paraphernalia, and remarks, “Does this room always have to smell like sulfuric acid?” one gets the sense she’s sniffing traces of the devil himself. Lucy’s sharp intelligence threatens to send Pamela and everything she represents straight to perdition. When Pamela leaves and the child whips out a stash of cigarettes and offers Ginger a smoke, 1942 audiences must have sensed that they were entering a new era of picture making, one that promised to cut through all the bland Hollywood crappola. The fact that Lucy goes on to decline a cigarette herself—she has found that “adolescents are nervous enough as it is”—only demonstrates the type of crappola Wilder felt the need to slice through.
The novice director brought The Major and the Minor in within spitting distance of the budget, a fact that vastly increased his chances to write and direct another film. Paramount executives were well pleased. If any of them were sorry the film turned out well, they never acknowledged it; faced with a moneymaker, the object lesson’s value vanished. In fact, relations between Brackett and Wilder and the front office were so good that the writers were able to announce their next project as early as June: it would be a comedy about a traveling saleswoman, and it would be called Women’s Wear.
Another film idea was kicking around Hollywood as well, though the facts are far from clear. This film is said to have concerned hypnotism, to have been set in San Francisco, and to have involved both Bertolt Brecht and Billy Wilder. These are the scattershot details that have survived; the rest is a matter of conjecture. Brecht’s journal refers to the time the playwright spent developing a screenplay idea with the actress Elisabeth Bergner, another German émigré, and her husband, the producer Paul Czinner. Bergner suggested the story: a young woman pretends to be hypnotized at a party and then goes out and commits various radical political acts that she wouldn’t have committed without the excuse of hypnosis. On April 11, 1942, Brecht wrote: “Czinner began to help Wilder (film writer, German) with some other production, and had no more time. Now Bergner tells me that my film has been bought by somebody else, a friend of Wilder’s, with all the details of the story, only in another milieu—without the hypnosis introduction. $35,000.”
Wilder denies any involvement in the dispute with Brecht: “I met him two or three times at parties during the war. That’s all I can tell you.” Paul Czinner was indeed on the payroll of The Major and the Minor as Wilder’s assistant, though he may have received as little as $500 for whatever work he did. For his part, Brecht wrote a poem about the incident in which he is the sorry victim of a Hollywood refugee scam. He called it “Shame.”
Reason is on Wilder’s side. Wilder himself received less than $35,000 for writing and directing The Major and the Minor, and a payment of $35,000 for a story idea would have been so astronomically high as to merit comment in the trade papers. Moreover, Brecht himself tried to hit Billy up for a job several years later. The playwright may have held a grudge against Billy for helping to steal his great hypnosis story, but he found himself able to ignore the grudge when in need.
As The Major and the Minor neared its release, Louella Parsons announced a change in plans for the writing-directing team of Brackett and Wilder. The comedy Women’s Wear, now called Traveling Saleswoman, was postponed indefinitely; Paramount was unable to put together the right cast. Instead, Brackett and Wilder would be doing a combat picture. By the time the Hollywood trade papers were pronouncing The Major and the Minor a surefire hit (the Hollywood Reporter called it “Wilder’s brilliant debut”), Brackett and Wilder had already begun to write Five Graves to Cairo.
Billy’s choice of material was again exceptionally shrewd. He was lucky not to have been able to cast Women’s Wear to his satisfaction; two back-to-back light comedies would have typed him. A combat picture, on the other hand, gave Wilder a chance not only to direct a hard-edged drama, but also to try his hand at orchestrating action sequences. He’d proven his expertise at comedie timing. Now he could show Hollywood that he knew how to direct World War II.
Brackett and Wilder were officially assigned to Five Graves to Cairo on August 10. As usual with the writing team, they worked out the mechanics of plot and character jointly. Brackett was literally the writer, drafting everything in longhand on a yellow legal-size tablet, after which Helen Hernandez typed it. Billy, meanwhile, paced furiously around the office spitting out plot twists and waving a stick: “I just needed something to keep my hands busy and a pencil wasn’t long enough.”
The writers began sketching Five Graves to Cairo at a time when the outcome of the battle for North Africa was still in doubt. The Nazis and their Italian Fascist allies were storming across the Egyptian desert in the summer of 1942; the British were getting pounded. The shifting fortunes of the Allies were not the screenwriters’ only concern. Paramount already owned the rights to the property they wished to adapt, but an internal Paramount memo noted that the title of the original source material was “very confidential”—and for good reason. Based on Lajos Biro’s play Hotel Imperial, the property had already been filmed twice by Paramount, the second version only three years earlier. Hotel Imperial, after all, was one of the two pictures Erich Pommer had produced during his short tenure as a Hollywood producer in the mid-1920s. That version, starring Pola Negri, did well commercially, but Paramount’s attempt to remake the silent picture in the mid- to late-1930s was an unmitigated disaster. The studio first tried to mount a production in 1936 under the direction of Ernst Lubitsch. The film was to star Marlene Dietrich, but Dietrich backed out. She wa
s replaced by Margaret Sullavan, who proceeded to break her arm. Lubitsch departed as well. “The project was thrown into the drop-dead file,” the film historian John Douglas Eames reports, but was resuscitated in 1939 with the signing of an Italian star named Isa Miranda. Paramount paired her with Ray Milland. The film flopped. Given this sad recent history, the studio was certainly not about to sabotage its latest attempt to remake Hotel Imperial by announcing that it was remaking Hotel Imperial.
Paramount executives were certain what they were not going to call the film, but they could not agree on a new title. Brackett and Wilder proposed Five Graves to Cairo; the executives fretted. At least one front-office lackey found the word Graves to be “objectionable” for use in a motion picture title and urged that it simply be deleted. What about Five to Cairo? he proposed. Wilder and Brackett ignored the suggestion. Even after the film was well into production, the executives were still fussing. In December, Brackett and Wilder responded to the studio’s latest attempt to retitle their film: “We find on our desks an excerpt from the night letter to New York. Rommel’s Last Stand seems to us as poor a title as was ever suggested for anything and is completely inappropriate for this picture. Take our word for it: we would have nothing to do with any picture so baptized. Please communicate this to the source from which the suggestion came.”
Brackett and Wilder had every reason to treat Rommel’s Last Stand with contempt. The Desert Fox was not George Custer, North Africa was not the Little Bighorn, and the Nazis were not the American cavalry. Five Graves to Cairo was to be a World War II film—in other words, a film set in the present day. Indeed, the Nazis were still in control of North Africa when the two men began writing their script in August. In the spring of 1941, British forces in North Africa were overwhelmed by German and Italian troops led by Erwin Rommel, the brilliant strategist who sometimes took orders badly and thus stood in constant danger of proving his superiors wrong. Plowing across the Libyan desert in March 1941, Rommel had seized enough of North Africa that he began to seriously threaten British control of the whole eastern Mediterranean. Even the Allies couldn’t help but marvel at the Desert Fox’s skills, and he became a kind of dastardly folk-anti-hero in the American press.
