by Ed Sikov
On October 13, 1950, the day All About Eve premiered in New York, Mankiewicz summoned those Guild members he trusted most to a meeting in the back room of Chasen’s, the elegant Beverly Hills restaurant. Billy was one of the chosen, along with William Wyler, Elia Kazan, John Huston, George Seaton, Don Hartman, King Vidor, Richard Brooks, John Farrow, and H. C. Potter. The stage was set for a clash between the two factions. The ugly battle was fought on Sunday, October 22, in an unlikely setting for a war: the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Mankiewicz’s biographer Kenneth Geist has recorded every delicious detail of this meeting, the essential elements of which included DeMille’s linking his own struggle with that of the GIs fighting the Korean War (“You all read this morning about the American boys who were prisoners, who were taken out, promised food, and then were machine-gunned with their hands tied behind their backs …”). It is the kind of story that rings funnier in retrospect than it did at the time. In the early 1970s, when Geist asked Wilder about the meeting, Billy didn’t even remember that Mankiewicz was central to the affair. What he recalled was DeMille’s having attacked him for being an immigrant. According to Wilder, part of DeMille’s performance at the meeting was the reeling off of a list of foreign-sounding names, all with a pointedly thick foreign accent. Billy’s was among them. When Geist asked Billy if he responded to DeMille’s scurrilous attack himself, Wilder replied that he didn’t have to, because John Huston said it all for him: “Huston applied a samurai sword to Mr. DeMille’s withered neck.” (“Mr. DeMille,” “Mr. von Hindenburg,” “Mr. Hitler …” Billy never lost his proper Viennese manners.) When all was shouted and done, Cecil B. DeMille was vanquished.
DeMille’s demise was a triumph for Mankiewicz and his friends, but it did nothing to alter the steady flow of paranoid anticommunism in the United States. Mankiewicz survived and thrived. So did Billy. But A New Kind of Love fell victim to the State Department. Maurice Chevalier had made the mistake of signing the so-called Stockholm Appeal, which urged a ban on atomic weapons. He’d also erred by appearing at a benefit for the French Resistance some years earlier. Promoting world peace, deploring weapons of mass annihilation, and fighting the Nazis—in 1951, these activities were enough for the State Department to bar the man from entering the United States.
A New Kind of Love was listed on Paramount’s production schedule for the summer of 1951, but as Chevalier’s visa problem dragged on, Paramount’s corporate feet grew colder. In March, the studio’s lobbyists in Washington tried to convince the State Department to change its mind, but before too long the studio caved in, and Billy’s next project was on indefinite hold.
By May, when Ace in the Hole opened to scant box office returns and a flood of mixed to negative reviews, Wilder was in no position to argue the point. Having just directed his first big dud, Billy was no longer able to dictate terms to Paramount; having calculated the risks, as always, he knew that to get the independence he wanted he needed at least one more big hit.
He also required a new collaborator. Lesser Samuels and Walter Newman were decent enough writers, but there was none of the buddy-based camaraderie he needed to ensure an ongoing relationship. Even if the three of them had all been bound together as tightly as Brackett and Wilder at their most marital, rehiring the two writers who helped him write his first fiasco was out of the question. He needed someone fresh.
Wilder’s friend and former agent Paul Kohner pushed one of his clients, Robert Rossen. Tough-minded, athletic, Jewish, and conflicted, Rossen might have been an ideal match for Billy, except for three things: he was too much like Billy, he’d already directed films himself, and he was an ex-Communist. Wilder worked best with lower-key men who offered no competition, at least in terms of grabbing public attention, and having steered clear of Communist affiliations before McCarthyism, he had little reason to embrace anyone who had been subpoenaed to appear before HUAC, as Rossen was that year. Rossen invoked a modified Fifth Amendment. Declaring that he was not currently a member of the Communist Party, Rossen then refused to answer any other questions.
Billy met with Rossen, and Rossen came away from the meeting thinking he had the makings of a deal. He reported back to Kohner that Billy seemed to welcome him onto the team, but more tellingly, Wilder himself doesn’t appear to have responded to Kohner about it, and no deal was ever struck. Rossen went on to testify more fully before the Committee in 1953, but he never worked in Hollywood again.
Norman Krasna was next up. An accomplished screenwriter, Krasna had worked in Hollywood a little longer than Billy, mostly on comedies. Krasna had a real knack for writing screwballs. Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) was the best of them. Others include Mitchell Leisen’s Hands Across the Table (1935) and Garson Kanin’s Bachelor Mother (1939). Wilder, after getting at least some of the bile out of his system with Ace in the Hole, was in the mood to make a screwball comedy himself—one with a contemporary slant: the screwball couple would consist of two men. Laurel and Hardy’s joint career was creaking to a close, but Billy saw possibilities. Transplanting the premise of Ein blonder Traum to Los Angeles in the days of Mack Sennett, Wilder wanted to introduce the two comedians with a shot of the famous Hollywood sign, and as the camera tracked forward, the audience would find Laurel asleep in one of the Os and Hardy asleep in the next. They’d live in a cemetery. A woman would come between them.
Krasna was surprised but pleased when Billy asked him to lunch at Romanoff’s. They worked together for less than a month, then Krasna quit. He simply couldn’t take the barrage of verbal indignities to which Billy subjected him as part of his daily routine. He hit Krasna where he knew it would hurt the most, and he did it consistently. As Krasna described them, “They were sharp wisecracks.… I wouldn’t repeat them to you. They could still be used against me. I just couldn’t take the abuse.”
When Billy hired one more new partner to help him write his next movie, he chose another journeyman. Edwin Blum wrote two good films before Billy hired him—The Canterville Ghost (1944) and, perhaps more crucially as far as Billy was concerned, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1938). Conan Doyle’s brilliant, misogynistic, drug-addicted detective had long appealed to Billy’s imagination, and many of the world’s Holmes fans considered Blum’s script (not to mention Basil Rathbone’s performance) to be suitably Holmesian, even definitive, though without the cocaine. Mostly, though, Blum penned sequels and toss-offs—everything from Tarzan and the Green Goddess (1938) and Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour (1942, yet another in the series engendered by Brackett and Wilder’s What a Life) to the Peter Lorre–Boris Karloff spooker The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942). Blum was scarcely an artist, but he knew how to map out a screenplay and follow Billy’s instructions. Not coincidentally, he also played tennis and bridge.
They started working on the Laurel and Hardy comedy, but Ollie soon fell ill and the project was scrapped. Billy, flying madly from idea to idea, landed briefly on the notion of a jazzy black Camille. “Unless she’s a whore, she’s a bore,” Billy once instructed Walter Newman; his Camille would be anything but dull. Lena Home would be an elegant Harlem hooker, Paul Robeson would be her father. A navy lieutenant, Tyrone Power, would fall for her. Duke Ellington, one of Billy’s favorite musicians, would write a jazz score. As a final kicker, the drama was to be complicated by the fact that Ty Power would turn out to be part black himself. Paramount had no interest at all in the idea.
Then Billy took a trip to New York, saw that season’s big Broadway hit, and returned to Los Angeles with a new idea. Blum couldn’t quite see the appeal and asked Wilder what he saw in Stalag 17. “Guys in underwear,” said Billy. Blum was put on the payroll in September 1951, at $1,000 a week.
“Along with Sunset Boulevard,” Wilder once declaimed, “Stalag 17 is one of my favorites, perhaps because there are eight minutes that are any good.” Those eight minutes, left unspecified by the ever-hyperbolic Billy, were conceived and executed, like the rest of the film, under unusually g
reat pressure. The Ace in the Hole flop meant not only that Paramount’s executives could no longer give Wilder carte blanche, but also that they expected his next film to perform doubly well. In fact, Paramount told him directly that the next movie he made had to earn enough profits to cover both itself and Ace in the Hole.
Stung by the failure of his own original story, and forced to deliver double the goods on his next project, Wilder wisely retreated to the safety of a Broadway hit—that is, if the writing, producing, and directing of a Hollywood feature film can ever be said to occur in a zone of safety. Stalag 17 was a known quantity with a proven track record, at least among New York theatergoers. But Billy did not abandon his sensibilities in his greed for another hit. Stalag 17 was a comedy about American GIs held captive in a squalorous Nazi prison camp—a Nazi prison camp in Austria, to be precise. The real Stalag 17 was located near Krems, about forty miles west of Vienna. Wilder didn’t make a point of it when he adapted Stalag 17 for the screen, but when he wrote, cast, blocked, and filmed it Billy knew that all his Nazi camp guards, and all his guard dogs, were really Austrians, and that when the heroes escaped from Stalag 17 they were getting the hell out of Billy’s own country.
Paramount’s script-reading department earnestly rejected Stalag 17 five times before an executive decided to pay over $100,000 to acquire the rights. By then, of course, it was a huge success on Broadway. In late 1948, a theatrical promoter had submitted an early script to Paramount on behalf of the playwrights, Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, but to no avail. A year later, another script was submitted, this time by a New York theatrical manager. Stalag 17 bore a new ending, but Paramount’s on-staff reader was still unimpressed: “The play is too sprawling and monotonous, and too lacking in plot progression, action, suspense, to stand a chance with any ending.” Yet another script found its way to Paramount in late 1949 or early 1950, and Paramount assigned the same reader to cover it. She was getting annoyed: “All they did this time was type it over.… It was a very poor POW play the first, second, third, and fourth times I read it, and it hasn’t changed a bit.” Bevan and Trzcinski were themselves survivors of a Nazi prison camp, but as far as Paramount’s reader was concerned, they still didn’t know how to write a play.
By the spring of 1951, Stalag 17 was selling out on Broadway in a production directed by Jose Ferrer. Covering the play was no longer the province of the script reader, but rather a theater specialist; he loved it. Louella Parsons announced Wilder’s interest in directing the movie version at the end of May. When Bevan and Trzcinski submitted their play to Paramount yet again later that summer, a new reader gave it an enthusiastic report, and by the end of August Paramount had purchased the rights and officially announced Wilder as the director. Billy revealed his choice of star: the part of Sefton, the manipulative cynic-turned-hero, would be played by Charlton Heston.
In order to take the role, Heston would have to be borrowed from Hal Wallis, with whom he was under contract, but Wilder saw no difficulty in that transaction. For the role of Lieutenant Dunbar, the war hero who must be smuggled out of the prison camp, Wilder chose one of Paramount’s most promising young leading men, the affable and unpretentious Don Taylor, who surprised the director by mulling over whether or not to take the part. (“I had the feeling he was a little pissed off at me for debating,” Taylor says.) Wilder also announced to the press that he’d hired Robert Strauss to repeat the role Strauss inaugurated on stage—the loud, vulgar, hilarious Stosh—while Cy Howard, a radio and television writer-producer (My Friend Irma was his big hit), would take over the part of Stosh’s friend Harry Shapiro from Broadway’s Harvey Lembeck.
Smart, practical, and sublimely exploitive, Sergeant Sefton was precisely Billy’s kind of character, and he became even more so in Wilder’s rewrite. Described by Bevan and Trzcinski as “a handsome but sullen young man dominated by an animosity toward the world in general,” Sefton could have been played well enough by Heston, but as Wilder and Blum finessed Sefton even further away from heroism toward hard-bitten cynicism, it began to dawn on Billy that handsome Chuck Heston wasn’t his man. Kirk Douglas claims that Billy asked him to be Sefton before asking William Holden and that he turned it down, but what is certain is that Wilder did ask Holden and Holden was smart enough to accept the role even though he didn’t like the play. In fact, Holden walked out after the first act.
Since Sunset Boulevard, Bill Holden and Billy Wilder had become extraordinarily close. On the surface they were so different. Holden was a laconic descendant of George Washington who hid his deep insecurities with an easygoing demeanor, a killer grin, and liquor. But Holden admired Billy’s intellect, experience, and taste, and Wilder was enthralled by Holden’s rugged good looks and low-key friendliness. To Wilder, Bill Holden was the all-American guy Billy himself could never be. According to Holden’s biographer Bob Thomas, the two men eventually spent so much time together and became so well acquainted with each other’s habits and tastes that when Holden asked Billy for his opinion on a painting he was thinking of buying, Wilder replied, “If I were you—and I am …”
Holden was, Billy said, “the kind of leading man who not only wears well but he does not rub men the wrong way. Just because women like a man on the screen is not necessarily it—men should approve of their wives and daughters carrying a torch for the guy. The refreshing thing about Holden is that coming from Pasadena he has never been exposed to the deep-dish acting seminars. If a scene requires him to ask a girl if she wants two lumps of sugar in her coffee, he does not ask me if his grandmother on his father’s side is supposed to be a screaming nymphomaniac. And he uses underarm deodorant.”
Still, Holden was an actor, and, like many actors, he seemed to want his audience to like his character as much as he wanted them to like him. Concerned that in Stalag 17 he was playing the very essence of a mercenary louse, Holden asked Billy to add a line—something, anything—to show that Sefton really did hate the Nazis after all. Billy refused.
In preparation for a February start date, Paramount built Wilder his own prison camp on a ranch in Calabassas. The production was well timed; it was Southern California’s version of a rainy season, so the ersatz camp would have the benefit of gray skies and acres of mud. Stalag 17 would be a moderately inexpensive film, with minimal sets and costumes. It went into production with a projected cost of $1,315,000, a smaller budget than Ace in the Hole, which wasn’t especially costly either. Holden got about $48,000, Taylor $25,000. In a masterstroke of stunt casting, Wilder snared the services of yet another in a series of famously fierce Teutonic movie directors—the tyrannical, brilliant Otto Preminger, who was paid $45,000 for three weeks’ work as the Nazi commandant, Oberst (or Colonel) von Scherbach.
A production meeting held only days before Stalag 17 went before the cameras spelled out some remaining details: Billy insisted that Preminger should be given a special wardrobe (à la Stroheim); that the commandant’s office should not contain even so much as a single picture of Adolf Hitler; and that there should be nine hundred extras for the biggest day of the shoot. The dependable and conservative Buddy Coleman thought they could make do with five hundred; the crowd scenes, after all, would have to be shot on location, not at the studio, and everyone needed to be fed. Notes taken at this meeting reveal, once again, Billy’s characteristic approach to music: “Wilder: Main title, end music and in certain sections a drum only. Will not change mind this time.” This was true: he didn’t.
After a week of rehearsal, Stalag 17 began shooting on February 4, 1952. The production proceeded efficiently. Only there was a problem: Cy Howard, the actor Billy hired to play Harry Shapiro, was awful. Apparently Wilder wanted someone who could be broadly, identifiably Jewish, but the blustering and abrasive Howard gave him more than he bargained for. So he got rid of him in the middle of the shoot and went back to Harvey Lembeck, who could take over the role quickly, since he’d originated it on Broadway. When Don Taylor asked Billy why he axed Howard, Wilder’s response was
direct: “He’s making me anti-Semitic.”
The Calabassas ranch was a muddy mess—that was the point—and the company only worked there a few days at a time, returning regularly to the comfort of the lot for interior shooting. The relative ease of a sound-stage was the practical result, but the back-and-forth schedule also had an emotional consequence for the performers: even when they filmed indoors in the heart of Hollywood, they had recent (and future) experience of working in a mucky mess to remind them that this comedy was rooted in real despair.
A few days were lost for rain, a few more for delays in shooting interiors. By March 18 Stalag 17 was a week behind schedule. This time, Wilder’s failure to complete the script before shooting was partly to blame, as the actors found themselves unable to rehearse as well as they wanted or
19. CALCULATIONS
