by Ed Sikov
They tried another preview—this time in Poughkeepsie: “Same goddamn reaction.” The Great Neck, Long Island, preview began badly as well. “The public wasn’t interested in the other cadavers,” said Billy. “They wanted to hear Holden, and they found the atmosphere of the morgue depressing.” Preview audiences weren’t alone in their response. According to John Seitz, Barney Balaban, the head of the studio, also took a particular dislike to the opening morgue scene. Balaban, who had so steadfastly defended The Lost Weekend against the naysayers, was now asking that the scene be cut and that Sunset Boulevard be given a new opening.
Wilder was forced to agree. He cut the whole morgue scene out of the picture and filmed a new traveling camera shot of the Sunset Boulevard pavement (and a tilt up to the police cars) and a shot of the cops arriving at the Sunset driveway. Finally, he added a new voice-over narration by Joe Gillis. The last element, at least, preserved the film’s crucial talking corpse setup, though the revision disguised the fact from the audience until the end, at which point they could appreciate the sour humor of it. Even if they didn’t, at that point in the film it was too late for them to rebel.
The final element to be added to Sunset Boulevard was its musical score. The songwriting team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, fresh from receiving an Oscar for the song “Buttons and Bows” (from Paramount’s The Paleface) had been hired to appear as themselves for Artie Green’s New Year’s Eve party; they led the guests in a good-natured sing-along rendition of none other than “Buttons and Bows.” Wilder and Brackett also commissioned Livingston and Evans to write a new song especially for Sunset Boulevard—“The Paramount-Don’t-Want-Me Blues.” The song was cut.
For the film’s score, Wilder turned to his old friend Franz Waxman. Since moving to Hollywood, Waxman had become one of the industry’s most dependable and original composers. After writing the moody, eminently apt score for James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, Waxman took over as the head of Universal’s music department. In the late 1930s he moved over to MGM. He scored Rebecca for Hitchcock and Selznick, Suspicion for Hitchcock and RKO, and moved to Warner Bros. in 1943. In each case, Waxman’s rich German Romanticism enhanced the dark psychology and unsettling emotional tension of the films. Inspired by Wagner, Strauss, and Korngold, Waxman’s compositions were elegant, full, and slightly tortured. Even more than Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman was quite the man for the job of scoring Sunset Boulevard.
Even in the opening moments, as the movie-music historian Christopher Palmer points out, Waxman’s nervous, percussive music suggests the tenor of the film in microcosm; one key note, “trilled, jabbed, and pecked out, heavily accented, syncopated, or merely repeated in fast notes” foretells Norma’s obsessive lunacy. And Palmer notes, her own theme begins here as well, “as if incidentally, beneath the racket of roaring, screeching brass and motoric rhythms.” For Gillis’s theme, Waxman composed what Palmer calls “an aimless, nonchalantly syncopated melody—deliberately flat in tone, gray in color (it is usually given to the piano),” it reflects his “ingrained hopelessness.” As a musical joke, Waxman took the familiar, ridiculously jumpy theme from old Paramount newsreels and slowed it down drastically to accompany Gillis and Betty Schaefer as they walk on the Paramount lot at night. For the climactic murder, a tango theme reappears (Waxman introduces it during Norma’s distressed New Year’s Eve celebration), but now it’s “twisted and tortured.” And for Norma’s ghastly descent down the staircase, “a bevy of unseen trumpeters, as if in the far distance, sound a muted fanfare, always over the sustained trills.” The tango reappears, along with a vague echo of Strauss’s own “Tanz der sieben Schleier,” to sweep her “in an ecstasy of madness down the stairs….”
No stars’ names appear over the title of Sunset Boulevard, nor does Billy Wilder’s, though such high billing for a director wasn’t unheard of at Paramount. Cecil B. DeMille, William Wyler, and Frank Capra all demanded and received above-the-title billing, with their names printed at fully 75 percent of the size of the title itself. Brackett and Wilder were important enough to merit inclusion in the film’s ad campaign, however. The studio’s ads for Song of Surrender omitted the name of Mitchell Leisen, and the ads for Copper Canyon didn’t mention John Farrow, but Paramount sold Sunset Boulevard specifically as a film “from Brackett and Wilder.” This, Paramount reminded audiences, was the same team who had made the Oscar-winning The Lost Weekend.
Paramount launched Sunset Boulevard with a series of twenty-one private screenings for various taste-making leaders of the Hollywood community. Publicity chief Norman Siegel played the movie colony expertly by setting up a waiting list; only when the list reached seventy-five to a hundred names was a screening arranged. Almost everyone loved the film. At one of the particularly large screenings, most of the three hundred honchos in the audience burst into applause at the final fade-out. Barbara Stanwyck was so impressed that she reportedly knelt down and kissed the hem of Gloria Swanson’s silver lamé gown.
But one member of the audience was not very happy with the film. Louis B. Mayer left the screening room in a rage. The other movie people may have loved watching Hollywood shoot itself in the back on-screen, but MGM’s in-house emperor apparently took it personally. Storming out of the theater, Mayer is said to have shrieked at Wilder, “You bastard! You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!” Mayer may also have employed phrases having to do with coming over to this country, biting hands that feed you, and horsewhipping, but there were no tape recorders present.
“Fuck you,” said Billy.
Or: “Go shit in your hat.”
Onlookers are said to have gasped. But however the crowd may have responded, Billy wasn’t playing to them. He was speaking to L. B. Mayer. And he had a point. When Mayer attacked the creators of Sunset Boulevard, he did appear to be taking his ire out on the immigrant, not the native-born Republican. Charlie Brackett, still president of the Academy, appears to have escaped the incident unscathed.
As Sunset Boulevard neared its release, the trade papers issued their appraisals. Variety liked the movie well enough but found it disturbing. The Motion Picture Herald applauded as well. The Hollywood Reporter, on the other hand, was ecstatic: “That this completely original work is so marvelous, satisfying, dramatically perfect, and technically brilliant is no haphazard Hollywood miracle but the inevitable consequence of the collaboration of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder…. You want to applaud Sunset Boulevard frame by frame.” The Reporter mentioned admiringly that Paramount’s publicity department had already been pushing Swanson and her performance “for months” before the film’s opening. “Parts like this come once in a lifetime,” the Reporter declared; “personalities like Gloria Swanson come once in a generation.” This was an observation Paramount hoped the public would make as well. The studio sent Swanson on a national promotional tour. Swanson, only too glad to be back in the public eye after an almost unbroken sixteen-year absence, seized on the chance to shill for an industry that had once tossed her aside. For her efforts, Paramount paid her $1,000 per week as she gamely trooped around the nation on the dual mission of convincing the public that Hollywood was a healthy, thriving, trustworthy place and simultaneously promoting Sunset Boulevard, which still ranks as one of the nastiest and most derisive films about Hollywood ever made.
Sunset Boulevard’s world premiere occurred in August at Radio City Music Hall, where the critic Andrew Sarris claims to have seen it at least twenty-five times during its run. The film was a hit, and Paramount was already banking on Academy Award nominations. The film’s pressbook, written and printed before the film even opened, heralded it as a major Oscar contender. Indeed, when the nominations were announced in February 1951, Sunset Boulevard was named in eleven separate categories, including Best Picture and Best Director. Erich von Stroheim was nominated as Best Supporting Actor and responded angrily. He was too big for that category, he told the press, and he even thr
eatened a lawsuit.
For Wilder and Brackett, the problem was much more clearly defined. Its name was All About Eve. Joseph Mankiewicz’s highly polished backstage drama, starring Bette Davis, had featured more than its share of bitterness about show business, but it still wasn’t as nasty as Sunset Boulevard. The two films seemed to have equal support among Academy members in the weeks between nominations and the ceremony itself, but when the Oscar for Best Picture was announced it was Mankiewicz who accepted it, not Billy. According to Billy, Mankiewicz, with his Oscar in his hand, then told Wilder that Wilder would certainly win the directing award, at which point Mankiewicz’s name was called for that award and he scurried away from Billy’s side to accept his second statuette. (Mankiewicz himself denied the incident, saying that it was just another one of Billy’s fabrications.)
After the ceremony, the disappointed Sunset Boulevard partisans moved to the party Paramount arranged at the Mocambo on Sunset Strip. Holden, having lost the Best Actor award, was morose. Trying to cheer him up, Wilder told him, “It was a miscarriage of justice, Bill. You should have won tonight.” At that point Holden’s wife, Ardis, responded, “Oh, I don’t think so. Jose Ferrer was much better than Bill.” [Ferrer won for Cyrano de Bergerac.] The grim mood didn’t stop Billy from providing an unprintably salty story to some reporters who happened to be hanging around looking for quotes. Billy greeted Barbara Stanwyck warmly at the party and proceeded to tell the reporters what Stanwyck said to an aging star who’d complained that her youthful lover was spending a hundred thousand dollars of her money on fast cars and slick outfits, all for himself. Billy claimed Stanwyck had said, “Tell me, darling, is the screwing you’re getting worth the screwing you’re getting?”
Billy and Audrey, meanwhile, were planning for the future. In late 1949, while Sunset Boulevard was still in production, they commissioned their friends Charles and Ray Eames to design a house for them for a hilltop property in Beverly Hills—on Sunset Boulevard, in fact. The design the Eameses produced was classically industrial—a 4,600-square-foot rectangle constructed in prefabricated steel and glass panels and surrounded by concrete. Filled with the sharp light of Southern California, the interior was to include a two-story living room, several dining areas, three bedrooms and bathrooms, a study, dressing areas, and a functional, easy-upkeep utility room. Boldly colored panels separated these areas from one another—sky blue upper walls in the living room, a bold red panel here, a sunny yellow one there. From the Sächsischen Palais in Berlin to the new house he planned to build in Beverly Hills, Billy never lost his taste for Bauhaus simplicity; the Eames commission was a natural step. The Wilders’ house would have been as sleek, contemporary, and hard as its owners, providing great freedom of movement and a kind of steely grace. It was never built. Audrey talked Billy out of it on the grounds that it would require too much maintenance. “Are you crazy?” she said to Billy finally. “It’s completely idiotic.”
Billy and Audrey’s marriage was thriving, but Billy and Charlie’s was not. In the summer of 1949, before Sunset Boulevard had even finished shooting, Brackett and Wilder made a stunning announcement. They were splitting up.
The men themselves had actually decided to split up the previous autumn. They signed new contracts during the writing of Sunset Boulevard, and this time their contracts specified independence from each other, though their deals only became effective after the completion of Sunset Boulevard.
Wilder and Brackett each ascribed to an old-fashioned code of honor—the honor of gentlemen. They fought often while working together, but when they decided to split up they didn’t air their old grievances. They parted responsibly if not entirely amicably and finished Sunset Boulevard in peace. This sense of courteous integrity remained in force for the rest of their lives. Neither ever stole credit from the other. Neither bit the other’s back in public. When it became necessary for one to put himself on the line in defense of the other, he did. Brackett and Wilder had enjoyed a relatively acrimonious marriage, but their separation and divorce were as quiet and honorable as Hollywood could possibly have allowed.
In 1960, Brackett told Time simply that “Billy had outgrown his divided fame.” But a few years later, when he was ailing, Brackett spoke in a little more detail about the breakup. He told the screenwriter-director-raconteur Garson Kanin that he didn’t see it coming: “I never knew what happened, never understood it. We were doing so well. I always thought we brought out the best in each other, didn’t you? But we met one morning, as we always did, and Billy smiled that sweet smile of his at me and said, ‘You know, Charlie, after this I don’t think we should work together anymore. I think it would be better for both of us if we just split up.’ I could say nothing. It was shattering. And Billy—you know how he is, bright and volatile—got right into the business of the day, and we said no more about it. But it was such a blow, such an unexpected blow. I thought I’d never recover from it. And in fact I don’t think I ever have.”
For four years Brackett and Wilder had been bringing other writers in to keep their own joint creativity fresh; theirs was a monogamy that allowed other partners. Brackett thought the civilized way they’d worked out their relationship meant everything was fine, but he was mistaken. “It was just that I loved working with him,” Brackett continued. “If he wanted to write alone and direct, I’d have been pleased to be his producer. Or even work together now and again. Maybe not every picture. But he was firm and didn’t want to work with me again ever at all. I suppose it was foolish of me to think it was going to go on forever. After all, it wasn’t a marriage.”
Billy, who does appear to have engineered the split entirely on his own, has always been much more reticent on the subject. “It’s like a box of matches,” he once said. “You pick up the match and strike it against the box, and there’s always fire, but then one day there is just one small corner of that abrasive paper left for you to strike the match on. It was not there anymore. The match wasn’t striking.” A more confessional moment occurred when Maurice Zolotow asked him to respond to what Brackett told Kanin. Billy turned, stared out the window, and said nothing at all.
PART FOUR
1951–1956
18. ACE IN THE HOLE
How’d you like to make yourself a thousand dollars a day, Mr. Boot? I’m a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman. You can have me for nothing.
—Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), immediately before dropping dead in Ace in the Hole
The breakup of Hollywood’s best-known, highest-earning screenwriting team was hot, uncomfortable news, and Paramount’s flacks were under pressure to explain it nicely. Generally, couples divorce when times are tough, but Brackett and Wilder broke up during a smooth production. The team’s very success was in fact the seed of the explanation Paramount devised. Brackett and Wilder were so successful, the PR department announced, that the studio could no longer afford to keep them together: “Paramount feels their combined salaries of $400,000 a year are too exorbitant to check up against one super film annually. That’s why they’re on their own in the future.” It was true enough as far as it went. It just didn’t go very far.
At first, being “on their own” meant that they would each be working separately for Paramount, but by the end of October 1950, Brackett was even more on his own than Billy. He quit the studio angrily after an absurd, last-straw encounter with the head of production, Sam Briskin. Trouble had been brewing for months beforehand. Briskin insisted that Brackett produce at least two films every year, and Brackett, accustomed to producing only one film and producing it well, steadfastly declined. When Briskin berated Charlie for taking a two-day trip to New York to speak at a meeting of the Motion Picture Advertisers’ Association, Brackett decided he’d had enough. He asked to be released from his contract, and Paramount was happy to oblige. “I am not in the habit of giving anyone an accounting of my comings and goings,” Brackett sniffed, after which he swiftly signed a lucrative new deal with Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox.<
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The solidity of Brackett and Wilder’s long-standing bond heightened the tension of their separation; Billy was now a free-firing cannonball without the weight of the cannon to guide him, while Brackett was left with his affable dependability without Billy’s insatiable energy to spark him. And yet both succeeded very well on their own. In 1951, along with Richard Breen and Walter Reisch, Brackett went on to write The Model and the Marriage Broker for George Cukor and The Mating Season for none other than Billy’s old scourge Mitchell Leisen. His script for Fox’s 1953 Titanic—also with Breen and Reisch—won him an Oscar from the Academy over which he continued to preside, and the threesome followed up their triumph with Niagara (1953), a tight thriller starring Marilyn Monroe. After Niagara Brackett produced a string of films written by others: Woman’s World, Garden of Evil, The Virgin Queen, The King and I.… And he kept writing with Reisch, apparently needing the ongoing verbal exchange with another loudmouthed Jew from Vienna; together they wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959). He married his deceased wife’s sister in 1953 and stayed at the top of the Bel-Air social scene until his death in 1969.
Brackett and Wilder found themselves back together again in October 1951, though not by choice. They were sued—jointly—for plagiarizing Sunset Boulevard. Stephanie Joan Carlson, a former member of the accounting department at Paramount, alleged that between 1943 and 1947 she had written a series of stories about the studio—stories, she claimed, that bore too close a resemblance to Sunset Boulevard. Some of these tales were fictional, while others were based on a mix of known fact and studio lore. In 1947, Carlson charged, she submitted some of these stories in manuscript form to two of the studio’s writers—Brackett and Wilder. One story was called “Past Performance.” Sunset Boulevard, she insisted, was the result of this material.
