On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  One reason the preview audience laughed was that they were cued to do so by a terrible and inappropriate musical score that had been laid onto the print. The filmmakers knew it was only a temporary score; the audience did not. Accompanying the opening sequence, as Wilder’s camera pans across the New York skyline and finds its way into the window of Don’s apartment, was a jazzy theme with a lot of xylophone. This urbane faux-Gershwin jive set a decidedly false tone, one that reigned for the duration of the picture. The Lost Weekend was not Another Thin Man, in which a debonair New Yorker cracks jokes while getting looped on martinis, but given the music they heard the audience had no way of knowing that. The filmmakers, too close to their own film, were unable to see (or hear) what the problem was. All they knew was that the audience laughed when they weren’t supposed to, then they got bored and confused, and the picture went straight down.

  The audiences’ hoots and jeers weren’t the only problem. There were unconfirmed but no less unnerving reports that the gangster Frank Costello was offering to pay Paramount $5 million on behalf of the liquor industry for the negative of The Lost Weekend, which he planned to destroy.

  Between the disastrous previews and the mob, Paramount’s executives quickly lost what little enthusiasm they still had for The Lost Weekend. The head of production, Y. Frank Freeman, had truly hated the idea of making this movie to begin with. Buddy De Sylva had authorized the purchase of the novel while Freeman was out of town, and when Freeman returned, he’d declared that the film could only proceed “over my dead body.” The single reason he could not carry out the threat was that his own boss, Barney Balaban, had okayed the film. They’d put up with the delays in the script, they’d acceded to Billy’s demands about location shooting, and now they’d had enough. Freeman was adamant: audiences hated The Lost Weekend, too, and he was shelving it. They’d write the whole thing off as a total loss. Freeman’s right-hand man, Russell Holman, backed him up. The film was dead.

  When Hollywood talents discuss Hollywood executives, the talk often turns to stupidity. Even in this context, however, Y. Frank Freeman was considered unusually dumb, an assessment shared widely across the Paramount lot. “I wish I had the answer,” Bob Hope once said to Bing Crosby. “To what?” Crosby asked. “Y. Frank Freeman,” said Hope. The composer Jay Livingston once overheard Freeman talking to screenwriter Bob Hartman about Mitchell Leisen. Freeman said that he just couldn’t understand Leisen, to which Hartman replied, “He’s a homosexual.” Freeman asked Hartman what homosexual meant. Hartman delicately replied that it involved “unnatural sexual practices.” Freeman was stunned: “Does that mean he’s unfaithful to his wife?”

  This was the man who pulled the plug on Billy’s movie. Billy descended into as morose a mood as he had ever been in his life.

  14. PROOF

  How about a kiss now, you Beast of Belsen?

  —Johnny to Erika in an early treatment of A Foreign Affair

  In the spring of 1945, with the fate of The Lost Weekend seeming quite dismal and his mood even worse, Billy Wilder left Beverly Hills and traveled back to defeated, ruined, starving Germany to work for the United States government. His mission: psychological warfare, a military imperative that remained vital long after physical combat drew at last to a close. Hollywood had been doing its share in the war effort all along, as Hollywood always made sure to point out. Clark Gable famously enlisted in the air force, became a major, and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal after leading bombing missions over Germany. Jimmy Stewart became an air force bomber as well. Colonel Stewart, in fact, remained in the reserves after the war, and by the time he retired in 1968 he’d risen to the rank of brigadier general. Frank Capra served as a colonel in the army and made war documentaries. Naval Lieutenant Commander John Ford led his own reserve intelligence unit and made countless informational films, some under the utmost secrecy.

  Billy Wilder, on the other hand, did not join the army. He did what he could in Hollywood. He was a writer-director of motion pictures—an increasingly wealthy one at that—and his contributions to the war effort were financial and indirectly propagandistic. He gave generously to Paul Kohner’s European Film Fund, and he and Paramount made Five Graves to Cairo. But as the war approached its merciless end, Wilder’s adoptive country asked him to lend his expertise directly and in person, and he gave it gladly. As it turned out, he would have given the world much more, if only the United States Army had let him.

  The Allies had discovered after the fall of Mussolini in late July 1943 that they were totally unprepared for victory. Allied troops controlled Italian territory, but Italian minds were left alone to wander unsupervised. So with the defeat of Germany seeming likely, British and American officials began to prepare a long-lasting assault on the German psyche. In September 1943, General Robert McClure proposed the establishment of the Publicity and Psychological Warfare Section for the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF). In early 1944, General Eisenhower voiced his preference for a single American head of the division, and he put McClure in charge. McClure’s first task was to convince German soldiers that the Allies were reliably informed, completely united, and certain to win. Once the war ended, McClure would be in charge of turning German minds toward peacetime cooperation and rebuilding.

  The Office of War Information (OWI) for the United States, meanwhile, was headed by Elmer Davis, a CBS radio commentator until his appointment to the OWI in 1942. Davis was a popular, genial on-air personality who radiated a sense of reassuring integrity both to his audience and to those who knew him. Never a great diplomat, Davis had a tough time administering the vast military/bureaucratic agency, which eventually employed ten thousand people worldwide. Still, Davis’s respect for the American news and entertainment media led him to Billy Wilder. He read the Life profile of Brackett and Wilder when it appeared in mid-December 1944, and, impressed with Wilder’s wit and intelligence, he contacted Billy and asked if the émigré writer-director would be willing to suspend his Hollywood career when the war ended to help the Allies recivilize his former home. There was certainly no one more qualified to supervise filmmaking activities in postwar Germany, and doubtless Davis knew that Wilder had personal reasons for wanting to be among the first refugees to return to the defeated Reich.

  Wilder accepted Davis’s invitation eagerly and was briefed on his upcoming tasks: his precise duties would be determined later, but in general terms he would oversee the reconstruction of the German film and theater industries, including the interrogation and de-Nazification of personnel. As the Allies moved slowly across the Western Front into Germany, SHAEF put a halt to all film and theater in the occupied territories. As the war neared its end, the Allies, having learned from their failure in Italy, began planning the defeated Germans’ leisure activities. In addition to being able to provide technical expertise about filmmaking, Billy remembered (all too well, no doubt) many of the key players in the German film industry. He knew which ones were certified Nazis and which were merely careerist parasites who filled in the gaps when all the Jews were thrown out. More important to Billy personally was the fact that once the war was finally over he could try to find his mother.

  Louella Parsons announced Wilder’s appointment in early March. According to Louella, it was “one of the greatest honors ever paid a Hollywood director.” She made sure to alert her readers to the fact that Billy Wilder already spoke German.

  Billy’s stint as a government employee was set to begin immediately after the end of the war. Paramount gave him a leave of absence to begin whenever necessary. He would depart for Europe on short notice, and since no one knew precisely when that would be, some of Billy’s refugee friends in Hollywood threw him a farewell party on March 24. We know this because an FBI spy dutifully recorded the event for his superiors: “According to [informant] CNDI LA 2718, Bert Brecht attended a farewell gathering given for Billy Wilder of Hollywood, California, who had been selected by OWI to handle American motion
pictures in Germany after the war. Informant advised that in fact this gathering had been arranged principally so that Brecht might talk to Wilder, Brecht having previously expressed a desire to do so.” Evidently Brecht wanted to participate in the anti-Nazi reeducation aspect of Wilder’s official portfolio, but his hopes came to nothing. Wilder barely remembered even seeing Brecht at this party, let alone arranging any employment for him.

  On April 30, 1945, with the Red Army advancing into the heart of Berlin, Adolf Hitler ended his life by shooting himself through the roof of his mouth in the concrete bunker he built fifty meters under the New Chancellery, the gargantuan seat of Nazi power on Vossstrasse near the Brandenburg Gate. One week later, when the Red Army finished pounding through what remained of the streets of Berlin, Germany finally surrendered. By that point Wilder had already left Los Angeles.

  According to Billy, he was in New York on VE day (May 8), where he reported to an office in the Fisk Building. A paper-pushing functionary became annoyed at Wilder’s appointment to the rank of colonel and demanded to know how much he was earning as a civilian. Wilder began to reply $2,500, whereupon the foul-tempered clerk berated him for taking a huge pay increase—all the way up to $6,500 per year, though of course he wouldn’t be working that long—No, Billy broke in, he had been earning $2,500 per week. The idiocy of bureaucrats is always a pleasant topic of conversation and storytelling, but there is something wrong with this particular anecdote. Billy may have been paid and billeted at a colonel’s rank, but army documents inevitably refer to him as Mr. Wilder, not Colonel Wilder. Rank is everything in the military.

  He left for Europe on May 9 in a Dornier seaplane. He landed in Limerick, took a bus to another airport in Ireland, and flew to England. “Everything was terribly clandestine,” he recalled. Wilder was certainly no ostrich as far as war news was concerned—he’d followed it closely—and yet he was still shocked at the extent to which London lay ruined. Los Angeles had indeed been terribly remote from reality. A British newspaper tracked him down for an interview, but Billy’s usual volubility was tempered by a sense of duty. He told the reporter only that he was on “a film mission to Germany for SHAEF,” specifically as production chief for the Film, Theatre, and Music Control Section of the Psychological Warfare Division. “I can say very little now, as no final decisions have been taken,” Billy allowed, leaving the job of clarification to the British Ministry of Information, which announced merely that Wilder would “advise on the kind of films to be produced in Britain for German consumption during the post-war years.”

  In England, Wilder is said to have met a man named Voss, who had apparently been in line for Wilder’s job despite the fact that he spoke no German. True, Voss had once been a chauffeur for one of the Warner brothers, but according to Billy this was the extent of his knowledge of the world film industry. Wilder also spent some time with his old friend Emeric Pressburger. “All we did, I remember, was talk,” Wilder said. “We talked about a thousand things. We wondered where we should go now that the war was over. None of us—I mean the émigrés—really knew where we stood. Should we go home? Where was home?” True to form, Wilder has a joke that clarifies his feelings (one that requires an explanatory setup—glücklich is German for happy/lucky): “Do you know the story about the two émigrés who meet in New York? One says, ‘Walter! How are you!’ And the other says, ‘I’m fine. How are you, Leo?’ He says, ‘I’m happy—but I’m not glücklich.’”

  The ban on all film and theater in Germany was lifted on May 12, only days after the war’s end, while Wilder was still in London. Both arts, however, would remain strictly regulated for quite some time. (In the fall, for instance, The Maltese Falcon was released in Germany, but John Huston’s diverting thriller was abruptly withdrawn a few days later when the authorities concluded that it made American police look stupid.)

  At its best, the Americans’ propaganda goal was four-pronged: the need to purge Nazis and Nazism and the desire to confront the German people with the extent of their atrocities were accompanied by the goal of providing the Germans with some relief from the wretched conditions under which they lived and to compete with the Soviets in doing so. For Billy, the first of these goals would occur only after he arrived in Bad Homburg, where the Psychological Warfare Division—known to its staff as PsyWar—was headquartered. But he began to accomplish the other three while he was still in London in May. There were, no doubt, innumerable staff meetings concerning strategies for rehabilitating the Germans and their culture, but these meetings probably didn’t capture Billy’s dark imagination as much as the film footage he began to see. It concerned concentration camps.

  As early as the summer of 1942, American, British, French, and Russian intelligence officers knew that the Nazis were systematically killing the Jews of Europe. It was nevertheless a shock to most of the world to discover the fact in the spring of 1945. Once Allied cameramen began recording the barbaric physical realities of each of the death camps as they were liberated by Allied soldiers, it required no more proof. They filmed the crematoria and the ash piles. They filmed skeletal corpses, piles of shoes, lampshades made of human skin. They took motion pictures of mass burial pits, ovens made to burn vast numbers of people, dead babies, bones. Inhuman horror, unimaginable in scale, was photographed. They shipped some of this footage to London, where it was waiting for Wilder upon his arrival.

  He began viewing this footage in London in May, and he continued viewing it during the weeks the army kept him waiting for his eventual posting in Germany. Whatever else he did in Europe, Billy wanted to use this footage as the basis of a documentary. He wanted to show Germany, and the world, what the Germans had done. In the late 1980s, the film director Volker Schlöndorff asked Wilder about the atrocity footage—in particular, scenes of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Wilder replied: “There was an entire field, a whole landscape of corpses. And next to one of the corpses sat a dying man. He is the only one still moving in this totality of death and he glances apathetically into the camera. Then he turns, tries to stand up, and falls over, dead. Hundreds of bodies, and the look of this dying man. Shattering.” This was a particularly horrifying image for Billy Wilder because he knew that his mother’s and grandmother’s bodies might well have been in those acres of twisted, grimacing corpses. Every new frame of raw footage he saw thus held the potential of revealing his mother’s fate. Every corpse might have been hers, but no corpse actually was. And when she did not appear in any image, each new frame of film led to an accumulating sense of failure and despair.

  By the first week in June, Billy’s coworkers in Bad Homburg were getting impatient for him to arrive. Wilder would be reporting to General McClure, but he would be working more closely with Colonel William Paley, the head of CBS who, as an army officer, had already moved from his wartime headquarters in London to Bad Homburg to supervise postwar information control. Paley’s assistant, Davidson Taylor, wrote to the chief of the film section (in London) on June 4, noting that Wilder hadn’t left London yet. Taylor understood that Wilder was working on the concentration camp footage while he was delayed in London, he wrote, and he acknowledged that Wilder should be put to work wherever it would do the most good. But, Taylor noted, they really could use him in Bad Homburg.

  By mid-June, Wilder was on his way to Germany—via Paris, where he stayed at the Hotel d’Astorg across the street from the United Artists building. Characteristically, Wilder remembered the cuisine, a surprisingly marvelous set of meals produced by a trained French chef, who adeptly turned the only available supplies, Army K-rations, into excellent meals. (Billy described K-rations generously as “a kind of dog food.”) While in Paris, too, Wilder met his old flame Hella Hartwig and spent a little time with her catching up on the last decade of their now-very-different lives.

  Wilder then proceeded to Bad Homburg, where PsyWar had set up shop in a barbed-wire-enclosed compound that had been built as a training facility for German railroad workers. The compound included abo
ut twenty-five houses, a large auditorium, a dining hall, and a kitchen. True to character, Wilder managed to steer as clear of the army brass at Bad Homburg as he could. The front office had never been his favorite place on the Paramount lot, and the corresponding spot on an army base held no more appeal. General McClure’s secretary, Sally Rice Taylor, recalls that Billy hardly ever came into McClure’s office—even for the customary courtesy calls one is generally obliged to make to the commanding officer—but that Wilder and Paley became fast friends. The two got along immediately, owing to a shared love of food and gin rummy. They made a fine team, and not simply because of their energetic media expertise. As a high-ranking officer, Paley was able to obtain a pass to the generals’ PX, where he could buy excellent chunks of beef. Wilder, meanwhile, could venture comfortably into the German countryside beyond the compound’s barbed wire, where, owing to both his native language and his equally native talent for striking deals, the nightly dinner menu found completion. Local farmers wanted cigarettes, Billy wanted homemade bread, butter, and eggs, and everyone ended up happy.

  Colonel Paley had a private house on the compound. Billy, billeted at the same level, had one of his own. They met often in Paley’s kitchen, where the two men fashioned a workable barbecue out of a broken toaster. “Over and over we would fix up very festive and good-tasting dinners,” Billy once said. “He did a lot of the cooking and he ate with tremendous enjoyment. The Germans have a word, essen, which means to eat. They also have fressen, which means to devour. That suited him much better, but the food had to be good.”

  One of Billy’s favorite stories from the time concerns his single moment of combat. Civilians were not permitted out of the compound unless they were in uniform—an olive-colored, official-looking outfit designed to distinguish American personnel from Germans. Wilder wore one; McClure’s civilian secretary wore one as well. According to Wilder, General McClure sent him and a few others out one day on a special mission—to get as much booze for the unit as they could find. As Wilder told it, he and his men commandeered a jeep and successfully liberated several cases of wine and champagne from enemy cellars. It was a dangerous mission. There was, after all, the possibility of meeting recalcitrant Nazi resistance fighters along the way. Uniformed and traveling openly in a U.S. Army jeep, Wilder and his men were an easy mark. They ventured as far as Salzburg. Finding himself in Austria for the first time since 1935, Billy grew edgy. He heard gunshots. Reacting as any military man would, Wilder instantly ordered his men to stop the jeep and hit the ground. When the Nazi barrage finally stopped, Billy retrieved enough presence of mind to understand that a few of the pilfered champagne bottles had blown open in the heat.