On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  It was the Hollywood Reporter that coined the term “unfriendly witnesses” to describe those directors and screenwriters who refused to testify before HUAC. The second round of hearings, the round in which the Unfriendly Ten refused to testify and were cited for contempt of Congress, occurred while Brackett and Wilder were making A Foreign Affair. Wilder was mildly involved in liberal Hollywood’s response. In September, the Committee for the First Amendment was founded by Philip Dunne, William Wyler, and John Huston while sitting around a table at Lucey’s. The Committee’s first regular meeting was held at Ira Gershwin’s house. Supporters of the Committee included Billy and his former producers Arthur Hornblow Jr., Joe Pasternak, and Joe Sistrom, as well as Judy Garland, Edward G. Robinson, and others. These were not rabble-rousers. Mostly, they wrote petitions, signed their names, and simply let the right wing know they weren’t going to remain silent. The Committee itself was specifically and expressly Communist-free. Real Reds were asked overtly to keep their distance so as not to ruin their relatively few friends’ careers along with their own. Wilder’s politics had always leaned to the left, but he was becoming even less actively so by 1947. He supported the Committee, but on principle. It certainly wasn’t because he had any particular respect for the Unfriendly Ten. “Only two of them have any talent,” Billy said in a widely quoted remark. “The rest are just unfriendly.” “Blacklist, schmacklist,” he also said—“as long as they’re all working.”

  Billy Wilder was getting rich. For A Foreign Affair his director’s fee alone had escalated to $111,000, and that didn’t include his salary as a writer. But as Billy’s own fortunes continued to rise in Hollywood, so his old friend Joe May’s declined, ever more precipitously. Now that May’s directing career was over, he was nearly destitute. His last picture was a 1944 B movie comedy for Monogram called Johnny Doesn’t Live Here Any More. The Mays were in such dire straits in the fall of 1947 that they stood in real danger of losing their house. So Paul Kohner, always a gentleman and a friend, took matters into his own hands and frankly asked Billy, Wyler, and Lubitsch each to give May and his wife, Mia, $100 a month for six months. Kohner discreetly called it an “advance,” though it’s likely that nobody ever thought they’d be repaid.

  In late November, with A Foreign Affair ready to begin filming, Billy accepted an invitation to attend a screening of a French film, Le Diable au Corps, at the home of William Wyler. Marlene Dietrich was trying to introduce her new discovery, the actor Gérard Philipe, to those members of the Hollywood community she continued to respect. Dietrich had set up the screening particularly for Lubitsch’s benefit, since he was considering making Der Rosenkavalier; she thought Philipe would be great in the picture. Wilder arrived for the screening on Sunday, November 29, along with Dietrich, Walter Reisch, Otto Preminger, Edmund Goulding, and the restaurateur Mike Romanoff. But no Lubitsch.

  Billy’s friend and mentor suffered a fatal heart attack in the shower that afternoon. When they received word of Lubitsch’s death, everyone at Wyler’s house moved over to Reisch’s, along with about fifty others, to mourn their friend and tell Lubitsch stories. The turnout for the funeral was grander still. The great director’s honorary pallbearers included Paul Kohner, Arthur Hornblow Jr., Frederick Hollander, Louis B. Mayer, Franz Waxman, William Wyler, Walter Wanger, and Darryl Zanuck. Charlie Brackett delivered the eulogy. Billy himself was one of the actual pallbearers, along with Reisch, Henry Blanke, Mervyn LeRoy, Gene Raymond, Gottfried Reinhardt, and Richard Sale. They came very close to dropping Lubitsch on the pavement. Only Sale’s quick reflexes prevented catastrophe; he managed to wedge his knee under the coffin and kept it from crashing down. The seven shaken pallbearers were rescued by the funeral home attendants. It was after this harrowing moment and the burial that followed that Wilder said to Wyler, “No more Lubitsch.” “Worse than that,” Wyler famously replied. “No more Lubitsch movies.”

  Years later, Billy flatly denied a story that had flown around town at the time regarding the circumstances of Lubitsch’s death. As the tale had it, Billy arrived at Lubitsch’s house moments after Lubitsch died. He saw a weeping blonde sitting in the living room and, in an effort to comfort her, encouraged her to cheer up. After all, Billy told her, Lubitsch had been like a father to him, and he wasn’t crying, so neither should she. “Easy for you to say,” the blonde replied. “He didn’t fuck you and then stiff you for the money.” Billy is said to have handed her $50; this was enough to make her stop crying. “Absolutely not true,” Billy declared when asked for verification. “It was Otto the chauffeur who paid her off.”

  The week after Lubitsch died, Louella Parsons announced one of the most bizarre mismatches between writer-director and property in Hollywood history. Billy Wilder, Louella reported, had been approached to direct The Robe. (“This picture will do much to bring a message of religion into a world that needs it,” said Louella.) There was just one problem: Brackett and Wilder were under contract to Paramount, and The Robe was then scheduled to be an RKO picture unless, of course, Paramount bought the rights from the other studio. Louella’s zany news flash is almost certainly the result of wish fulfillment on the part of the producer Frank Ross, who owned the rights to The Robe and was eagerly trying to drum up support for the expensive religious spectacle he hoped to create. Ross may well have approached Brackett and Wilder; whether they expressed any interest at all is questionable. (The Robe was ultimately made by Henry Koster in CinemaScope for Twentieth Century–Fox in 1953, and Brackett and Wilder had nothing to do with it.)

  They did, however, do some rewriting for Samuel Goldwyn on another religious picture, a comedy called The Bishop’s Wife. David Niven plays an Episcopal bishop who wants to build a new church, and Loretta Young is his wife. Cary Grant is the angel who comes down and helps them. This wasn’t exactly Brackett and Wilder’s emotional terrain; they did the quick polish for Goldwyn as a friendly gesture, nothing more. Initially, Goldwyn offered them $25,000 for the job, but after completing their minor revisions the two writers decided that since most of the money would end up going to taxes anyway, they’d take no fee at all. When they announced their generous decision to Goldwyn, the tight-fisted studio boss responded, “That’s funny—I’ve come to the same conclusion.”

  A Foreign Affair remained Brackett and Wilder’s chief concern, especially when the PCA registered its latest set of objections on the brink of the film’s going back into production. The United States government, the United States Army, and members of Congress were not to be ridiculed, the PCA advised. “We further believe that the portrayal of the Congress-woman, Phoebe Frost, getting drunk in a public nightclub of poor reputation, hanging from the ceiling, and being arrested and carted off to jail in the police van is in violation of that portion of the Production Code which states that ‘the history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry of all nations shall be represented fairly.’” There was an “overemphasis on illicit sex [that] seems to run through most of the script.” Brackett and Wilder agreed to some revisions, first and foremost the disposition of the mattress. As the PCA’s Stephen S. Jackson noted, “The following basic changes will be made: It will be clearly indicated that John brings the mattress to Erika’s apartment for some reason other than making the bed more comfortable.” Dialogue changes were ordered as well: “Page 33: We suggest you change the expression ‘pig’ as applied to the girls.” When Phoebe is on the bed with another congressman, the PCA insisted, she should not be asking, “Anything I can do for you?” Another line, too, was completely unacceptable: “Yes, sir, there’s the kind of dish makes you wish you had two spoons.”

  Marlene moved into Billy’s house while filming A Foreign Affair in December, January, and February, and she proved to be a great companion. They told filthy jokes and stories to each other in German, both on the set and off. Billy liked to get her going on the subject of her torrid affairs with both sexes, and Marlene was all too happy to oblige. Her costar Jean Arthur, meanwhile, became increasingly flu
stered by Dietrich’s worldly charm. The more Dietrich swept around the soundstage amusing the cast and crew and looking fabulous, the more Arthur kept to herself in her dressing room. Dietrich’s fascination with her own glamour found its obverse in Arthur’s escalating paranoia about hers. A Foreign Affair features a cruel observation about Arthur herself. Erika describes Phoebe Frost as “that funny little woman with a face like a scrubbed kitchen floor,” whereupon she throws her head back and laughs derisively. Arthur took such things personally; she found herself on the set of this film trying to compete on-screen with one of the world’s great sirens. As the filming went on she was less and less happy about doing so. Dietrich’s omnisexuality probably unnerved Arthur as well. Here was Marlene, openly enjoying her body and lending it to anyone she pleased; there was Jean, frightened of revealing her own desires and trying her best to avoid the subject entirely. One night she showed up at Billy’s door with her husband, Frank Ross, in tow. She was, in Wilder’s words, “absolutely frenzied, with eyes bulging.” “What did you do with my close-up?” she demanded. “You burned it! Marlene told you to burn that close-up! She does not want me to look good!”

  Billy grew frustrated. “What a picture,” he said to John Lund in exasperation. “One dame who’s afraid to look in a mirror, and one who won’t stop.” He stayed very friendly with the dame who wouldn’t stop, but by the time the production closed he’d had enough of Jean Arthur, whom he later called “a doozie.”

  Arthur fell ill for a few days in January, but the shoot was otherwise fairly smooth. A Foreign Affair wrapped on February 12.

  A Foreign Affair is a most brutal comedy. Wilder sticks Jean Arthur with the bluntly descriptive name “Phoebe Frost.” He makes her wear her hair in a constricting, repressive style (“What a curious way to do your hair—or not to do it,” says Erika). And he compares her, inevitably and unfavorably, to Erika’s continental sophistication. For Billy, Phoebe Frost embodies everything wrong with American women. She can’t help but extol the virtues of her native Iowa. Johnny is from Iowa, too, but it’s perfectly clear that he prefers his life in depraved Berlin to anything in the American heartland, and he adamantly resists her attempts to get him to return home. “We won a lot of honors last year,” she sighs, dreamily. “All the 4-H prizes!” Billy then sets up a mean little joke. Phoebe continues: “We had the lowest juvenile delinquency rate in the country till two months ago.” “What happened?” Johnny asks, and she answers: “A little boy in Des Moines took a blowtorch to his grandmother. We fell clear down to sixteenth place. It was humiliating.”

  As far as Johnny’s character is concerned, Brackett and Wilder were forced to tread a thin line. Johnny has to enjoy the pesthole of Berlin, but he also has to fall in love with a repressed puritan from Iowa. They end the film with the latter, but they give much more emotional weight to the former. Billy still hadn’t gotten the erotic allure of a blonde Nazi bitch out of his system. And since John Lund is by far the weakest of the three stars, the film’s resolution is even more unsatisfying. Ultimately, Johnny seems to end up with Phoebe simply because they are both Americans.

  Soaring above them is Erika, the hot Nazi. “That’s the kind of pastry makes you drool on your bib!” says one GI admiringly. In Wilder’s view of the world, she is the moral center of the film; her dazzling amorality makes her so.

  When the film was released, Billy found himself denounced on the floor of Congress for treating Germans and Americans with equal irreverence, but it was only hot air. Similarly, and equally uselessly, the Defense Department stated that there was absolutely no similarity between the GIs depicted by Wilder and the real American soldiers who were serving in Berlin. Most ironic of all, A Foreign Affair, which began its life as a propaganda film, was banned in Germany. “Crude, superficial, and insensible to certain responsibilities which the world situation, like it or not, has thrust on” Hollywood was the way an American in charge of approving films put it; “Berlin’s trials and tribulations are not the stuff of cheap comedy, and rubble makes lousy custard pies.”

  After a long delay, The Emperor Waltz enjoyed its world premiere at the Paramount Hollywood Theatre on May 26, 1948. The Hollywood Reporter loved it: “Here’s a picture that’ll bring lots of joy to the box-office and even more to those who go in to see it…. Bing has never been cast better, nor has he given a better performance and in wonderful voice, too…. Charlie Brackett and Billy Wilder get better with every picture.” Variety applauded as well: “It’s Crosby all the way down the line. As a result, there’s a long, long line of greenbacks indeed in store for The Emperor Waltz.” The Motion Picture Herald agreed: “Bing was never better than in The Emperor Waltz and not as good since Going My Way.”

  Wilder did not attend the premiere of The Emperor Waltz, having left for a vacation in Europe. He told the press before departing that he was thinking about making a film in Palestine and was trying to win permission to film some preparatory footage there, but the day after the Examiner printed this detail, the state of Israel was created and the Middle East fell into deeper turmoil. The film project was scuttled.

  Wilder’s private life was settling down somewhat. He ended his affair with Doris Dowling, who appears to have felt the need to make an unusually clean break: she moved to Rome and stayed there for three years. According to Billy, he never considered marrying Doris because of their constant arguments. The end of the affair might have given Billy more time to spend with Audrey, but to the extent that one believes Hollywood gossip, he filled the gaps in his schedule by dating Hedy Lamarr on the side. Hedy and Billy were “seeing each other all the time,” Louella gasped in April 1949, adding that “most of the girls who fall in love with him really fall.”

  Whatever happened between Billy Wilder and Hedy Lamarr, on June 30 Billy married Audrey in Linden, Nevada. Billy’s new but close friends, the designers Charles and Ray Eames, were the Wilders’ attendants. (The graphic designer Alvin Lustig, who was using Billy’s garage as a design studio, introduced Billy to Charles; Billy promptly ordered one of the prototypes of Eames’s 1946 plywood chairs.) Said Billy, “We asked them one day whether he would like to be the best man and she the maid of honor, and they said okay. And then the four of us took off to Nevada, where you can get married for two dollars in three minutes.” It was hasty but not without a touch of romance: “I bought her some bouquet of flowers,” Billy noted.

  Audrey supplied another detail or two: “The morning we were leaving to get married, Charles and Ray Eames showed up at the house. And Billy had a convertible Cadillac. And we all got in, and we start for Linden, Nevada. I said, ‘Okay, I want to change.’ I had on jeans (or the version of that in those days) and a sweatshirt. And he said, ‘No. You either get married like this or you don’t get married at all.’” She continued: “We stopped in the San Fernando Valley at a jewelry shop on the road, and he bought me my wedding ring. $17.95.”

  The spirit of camaraderie prevailed throughout the trip. The Eameses also accompanied Billy and Audrey on their honeymoon.

  Louella broke the news to the world. Audrey, she reported, called her father, Stratton Young, and told him over the phone that she had gotten married. Parsons also declared that nobody in Hollywood was surprised by Billy’s marriage to Audrey, “for they have been keeping steady company for two years,” thus ignoring completely her own chronicling of his affair with Lamarr. Marlene, meanwhile, wasn’t pleased. “She was the worst,” Audrey reported, referring to the general dismay of Billy’s friends when she and Billy married. “What sign are you?” Marlene demanded of Audrey. “Cancer.” In ominous tones, Marlene informed the new Mrs. Wilder that a Cancer-Gemini relationship would never work out. Marlene also made a point to bring over some homemade mushroom soup one night because she knew how much Billy liked it. Later, when Audrey and Billy opened the Thermos container in preparation for dinner, they found precisely one portion of soup.

  On June 8, 1948, Elizabeth Brackett died at her home on Bellagio Road in Bel-Air. Th
e obituaries cited her long illness and left it at that. Charlie headed east for the funeral in Saratoga Springs. The following month, he was back in Hollywood delivering a eulogy for another sad alcoholic when D. W. Griffith died, virtually alone and thoroughly ruined. Wilder recalled a disturbing incident that occurred a few months earlier in which Griffith drunkenly accosted Samuel Goldwyn at Romanoff’s. The Goldwyns and Wilder were enjoying dinner in one of the booths near the bar when a stately but dissipated old man appeared at their table waving his index finger in Goldwyn’s face. “Here you are, you son of a bitch,” he slurred. “I ought to be making pictures …” Frances Goldwyn, having no idea who the old man was, shooed him away. Once he was safely gone, Goldwyn, shaken, told her that the old drunk was Griffith.

  At the end of July, Griffith was dead and Charlie was delivering his eulogy: “Many of us who didn’t know David Wark Griffith personally have in the last years lost our awareness of what he meant in our industry. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that our view of him has been obscured by a disturbing shadow, the shadow of an elderly man living in our midst, but outside the industry.”

  Brackett spoke movingly of Griffith’s achievements, but he had to acknowledge—twice, in fact—that he’d never met the man. Griffith had become one more disturbing shadow in a town full of shadows—just another old-timer who used to be big.