On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  With “Isn’t It Romantic?” still playing in the distance, Sabrina, in her room over the garage, continues to mull over David and his latest conquest. She walks to a desk and with a look of self-assurance writes a suicide note to her father: “I don’t want to go to Paris. I want to die.” Wilder makes it subtly clear that there’s no chance that this frail fawn will kill herself—this is just schoolgirl melodrama. All the more disconcerting then when Sabrina proceeds to the garage, closes the door, and starts running all the engines of the eight cars parked there, so as to methodically gas herself to death. (There is no suicide attempt in the play.) As noxious air fills the room, Wilder adds a bizarre joke—the last car blows smoke rings out of its tailpipe. Sabrina’s morbid self-annihilation goes on for longer than one expects until Linus saves her—dour, haggard Linus.

  Billy consciously evokes Lubitsch in the scene when her father, Fairchild (John Williams), reads one of Sabrina’s letters from Paris to a group of servants. As William Paul points out, Lubitsch’s films sound like Lubitsch no matter who wrote them. They are so rhythmic that the lines practically scan:

  FAIRCHILD (reading): “I don’t think of David very much any more.”

  THE MAID: That’s good.

  FAIRCHILD: “Except at night.”

  THE BUTLER: That’s bad.

  FAIRCHILD: “I decided to be sensible the other day and tore up David’s picture.”

  THE DISHWASHER: That’s good.

  FAIRCHILD: “Could you please airmail me some Scotch tape?”

  THE COOK: That’s bad.

  Lubitsch’s influence continues in the scenes set in Paris, especially when Sabrina meets the Baron (Marcel Dalio), her fellow soufflé student, who explains why he knows that Sabrina’s soufflé has failed to rise at all: “A woman happily in love? She burns the soufflé! A woman unhappily in love? She forgets to turn on the oven.” The Baron concludes the scene with the promise of a complete makeover for Sabrina. Regarding her hair, which is gathered in the back and hanging down her neck, he comments, “To begin with, you must stop looking like a horse.”

  One of Billy’s most subtly filthy jokes explains their relationship. Wilder needs to suggest—but only in the vaguest, least censorable way—that Sabrina and the Baron have enjoyed each other’s company. After all, Sabrina does return home with all those Paris originals, and she certainly cannot be assumed to have paid for them herself. The Baron must be given a rationale for buying them for the pretty little maiden. So when Fairchild reads a later letter from Sabrina, these are the words Billy Wilder makes him speak: referring to the Baron, Sabrina writes, “‘He came to the cooking school to take a refresher course in soufflés and liked me so much he decided to stay on for the fish.’”

  Sabrina returns to the States mature and self-assured. She is now a woman of some experience. David, speeding by the train station in his convertible (wearing a suspiciously Billy-like hat tossed back on his head) and whistling “Isn’t It Romantic?” squeals to a halt after seeing the gorgeous wisp of a woman in a turban and a slinky black dress standing at the curb. She greets him warmly: “Well hello! How are you!” “Well I’m fine!” he says with a grin. “How are you, and, I might add, who are you?” “We must be neighbors,” he decides, “and if there’s one thing I believe in, it’s ‘Love Thy Neighbor!’”

  Later, they arrange one of David’s patented rendezvous in the indoor tennis court, Sabrina looking utterly poised, so relaxed as she waltzes with David at the ball, so delicate and radiant…. It’s shocking to realize that Sabrina looks forward to her meeting with this flippant stud, with his champagne and the band playing “Isn’t It Romantic?,” knowing full well how the scene will end. (Or should end; events transpire to prevent the consummation from occurring.)

  Sabrina marks Billy’s return to the terrain of Ein blonder Traum—two men in love with the same woman. Linus and David may not boast the same degree of friendship as the two Willies do in the old German film, and they don’t bear any trace of Laurel and Hardy’s screwball romance, but there’s still a palpable bond-rivalry between them, and they, too, end up coming to blows. Low comedy is likewise employed. Gone are the sausage jokes; in their place is an extended butt routine. David has put two champagne glasses in his back pockets in preparation for his tennis-court date, and Linus forces him to sit down, thereby cutting his ass to ribbons.

  Cue “Isn’t It Romantic?” as Linus takes David’s place on the courts. Sabrina and Linus embrace and twirl, dancing with champagne glasses in their hands. Wilder cuts to a deadeye shot of Holden lying with his head facing the camera and groaning, shards of glass being extracted from his rear end by a doctor wielding forceps. His father stands with the doctor as David moans in agony. “How are we going to make sure that all the fragments have been removed?” old man Larrabee asks. “Very simple,” the doctor replies. “We will reconstruct the two champagne glasses.” Holden lets out a particularly loud wail. “Now I cannot possibly be hurting you!” the doctor snaps. “The area has been completely anaesthetized,” “It’s not you,” Holden whines—“it’s that song.”

  Always the entrepreneur, Linus has both the means and the creativity to invent a plastic hammock with a hole cut out for David’s hindquarters. Indeed, David’s rear remains the nagging joke of the subsequent hammock scene. Not only do his buttocks poke through the hole in a manner verging on obscene, but the two brothers begin the scene by pointedly attempting to find, for David’s poem, a word that rhymes with glass. “Alas!” Linus cries, snapping his finger. “Of course!” says David with another snap. “So long, Scarface,” are Linus’s parting words at the scene’s end.

  Even with all the vulgarity Wilder inserted into Taylor’s bland romance, the nastiest moment in Billy’s Sabrina occurs when a son takes vengeance on his father. Old man Larrabee, who runs scared from his wife throughout the film and appears to have nothing to do but drink, smoke cigars, and attempt vainly to extract the last olive out of a jar for his martini, nevertheless begins stupidly second-guessing the deal Linus proposes to give Sabrina for leaving David alone. Linus snaps. “How would you do it?” he roars. “You can’t even get a little olive out of a jar!” Then he grabs the jar out of his father’s hands, smashes it to bits, picks the olive out of the shards, and jams it violently into his startled father’s mouth. “Eat it!” he snarls.

  Audiences seem not to have minded the edge Billy gave to Sabrina; the film was a big hit. There was cause for celebration. After Holden was through with The Bridges of Toko-Ri, he and his wife joined Billy and Audrey on a trip to Europe. Wilder delighted in introducing Holden to European culture. Restaurants, galleries, museums—and they all ended up at Billy’s favorite mountain retreat, the spa at Badgastein, where one could take the waters in style.

  Back home, Billy’s influence on Holden began to show itself clearly when Holden bought a new painting—Paul Clemens’s graphic nude of a model named Maddy Comfort. It was precisely the sort of shocking art Billy loved—the full-frontal exposure of a woman who seemed easy and available. Holden had to hang the work in his office because his wife wouldn’t have it in the house. Unlike most of his art purchases, Holden picked this one entirely on his own without Billy’s input. So when Wilder showed up at Holden’s office one day and said nothing about the obscene new painting, Holden was first confused, then amused and fascinated by Billy’s nonchalance. Billy simply refused to acknowledge it. But at the end of the conversation, Wilder got up from his chair, kissed the painting squarely on the pussy, and exited.

  Sabrina fulfilled Billy Wilder’s obligation to Paramount under the three-picture deal he signed after Sunset Boulevard, and given the economics of Hollywood in the mid-1950s, Wilder had little reason to sign another. The studio era was over, and in a way, Billy had made his last three films under already archaic conditions. Moreover, he was not just a writer-director. He’d produced his last three films, too, albeit under Paramount’s aegis. Why did he need Paramount Pictures anymore?

  The camel’
s back broke when a second-tier functionary called Billy one day and told him that the studio was planning to make some changes in the German release print of Stalag 17. The spy, Price, wouldn’t be German anymore, he’d be Polish instead, and would that be okay? Wilder flew into an unusually severe rage: “I wrote them a letter that I was absolutely out raged, that I didn’t understand anything like this,” he says. “Asking me to permit anything like this—me, whose family died at Auschwitz.” He demanded an apology and said that if he did not receive one he would leave the studio. “I never heard anything from Paramount—no excuse, no nothing.”

  He decided that Paramount Pictures could screw off. He would not help promote Sabrina—he would never work for those bastards again. After eighteen years and seventeen pictures, Billy Wilder left Paramount and went out on his own, and he never forgot or forgave the studio’s ungrateful slap.

  Billy Wilder was not on his own for very long. He had a few ideas. He’d already snapped up a deal to write and direct a long-running Broadway comedy, he was trying to get the rights to a play by Ferenc Molnár so he could use it as the basis of a film he planned to call One, Two, Three, he was still thinking about A New Kind of Love, there was a biography of Charles Lindbergh in the works at Warners, there was that old Count of Luxembourg musical he still wanted to put together, and he was hoping to remake a 1931 romance called Ariane. In May 1954, with a handsome deal already in place at Warners (for the Lindbergh picture) and a distribution deal in the making at Fox (for the Broadway comedy), Billy signed yet another deal with yet another company. Originally called Monogram, one of the Poverty Row studios, Allied Artists had been transformed by the new economics of Hollywood moviemaking; studio chief Steve Broidy was forging it into a much more prominent company with far loftier goals. Almost overnight it boasted three of the biggest directors in Hollywood; John Huston had already agreed to direct for Allied, and William Wyler was set to sign as well. Allied’s vice president, Harold Mirisch, was largely responsible for attracting the talent. Mirisch, a former theater owner and popcorn concessionaire, gave these three headstrong men exactly what they wanted: money, clout, and independence.

  21. TROUBLES

  Oh, you better get her up higher, much higher. Play it safe. If anything happened you could cling to the sky a little longer.

  —Charles Lindbergh (James Stewart)

  in The Spirit of St. Louis

  Here’s the itinerary for tonight,” Linus Larrabee tells his secretary in preparation for his evening’s date with Sabrina. “I want two tickets to The Seven Year Itch, a table for two at the Colony before the show, a table for two at the Persian Room after the show. Make it a corner table—a dark corner.” The couple ends up staying in Linus’s office for Sabrina’s homemade omelette, so Linus’s secretary (Ellen Corby) takes the tickets. She arrives late to work the next day. With sleeplessness and tension written all over her face, she apologizes to her boss: “I’m sorry. I had a very bad night last night. I used your theater tickets and took my mother.” Linus cuts her off before she can explain any further.

  George Axelrod’s adultery comedy The Seven Year Itch was a smash hit when it opened in November 1952. Defying the era’s prescribed domestic values—cheery marriages, persuasive monogamy, kids, devotion to work—the play was daring to the point of being shrill. Tom Ewell played Richard Sherman, a Manhattan book editor and all-around American dad whose wife and child depart for the country in the summer, leaving him alone to face his personal demons. For Sherman, the devil is his new upstairs neighbor, a beautiful young woman who is built, as Stalag 17’s Animal might say, like a brick Pentagon. She’s so generic a dumb 1950s blonde that Axelrod doesn’t give her a name. She’s just “the Girl.” Guilt and craving ensue, but only for Sherman. “The Girl” is oblivious to everything. Audiences adored it.

  Billy couldn’t have helped noticing the roar of acclaim for The Seven Year Itch, especially when the Hollywood Reporter dubbed it the “lust weekend.” Various movie deals were in the works even before the play opened. MGM was interested, and so was the millionaire gadfly Huntington Hartford. By December, Warner Bros, was making noises about buying the film rights as well. Jack Warner, planning to see the play while on a Christmastime trip to New York, asked his staff to look into possible censorship problems. The Code office replied bluntly. They would never approve a play about adultery, the censors stated, and even if the play’s hanky-panky were eliminated completely, The Seven Year Itch would remain unacceptable because “the subject material of adultery would still be the springboard of all the comedy.” Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, then at Twentieth Century–Fox, also queried the censors about the acceptability of the play under the Code, but when the Code’s Geoffrey Shurlock replied that it was impossible, Johnson gave up.

  Having battled the censorship office for almost two decades, and having won nearly all the big fights, Billy Wilder was scarcely intimidated by anything as trivial as the Production Code. He proved to be correct. By the time the film was released, the Production Code Administration concluded, astoundingly, that The Seven Year Itch was not about adultery. (Since no adulterous sexual acts were committed in the film, there was therefore no adultery in the film.) So with an eye toward the end of his three-picture deal with Paramount, Wilder began negotiating for the rights in January 1953. Haggling on his own behalf—but fully backed by his current agent, MCA Artists’ Lew Wasserman, and his lawyer, Larry Beilenson—Billy proposed a deal not for one film but for three. First, there would be an English-language Seven Year Itch in which Wilder proposed to star Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe. For a French version, Fernandel would take Ewell’s part. Cantinflas would get the Spanish-language lead.

  Charles Feldman, a successful Hollywood agent who listed Monroe among his clients, was also considering making an offer, but he was not yet in discussion with Axelrod or his agent. Since Feldman had Wilder in mind to direct the film anyway, Feldman proposed a deal directly to Billy: they would buy the property together, with Feldman putting up the money and taking title in exchange for Wilder’s agreeing to write and direct the film in at least three languages—English, French, and (instead of Spanish) German. An Italian version was also mentioned. Billy, of course, would withdraw from negotiations himself, so there would be no self-defeating bidding war. Billy agreed to Feldman’s terms. When the deal was done, the Feldman Group paid George Axelrod $255,000, and Billy got both a nice fee and a hefty share of whatever gross proceeds the film generated.

  The original idea—at least for Feldman—was that Wilder would write the screenplay himself. But, characteristically, Billy insisted that he needed a partner. His newest choice: George Axelrod. By April 1954, the playwright was on board. (There was no great rush to make the film, since Axelrod was adamant that the film not be released until the play’s run on Broadway wound down.) Axelrod found Wilder to be rather mean; “He sees the worst in everybody, and he sees it funny,” the playwright declared. When Axelrod showed up for his first meeting with Wilder, he brought along a copy of the script of the original play. “I thought we might use this as a guide,” he said mildly. “Fine,” said Billy, who took the script and dropped it on the floor. “We’ll use it as a doorstop.”

  Even before Sabrina opened to great acclaim, Billy was running around telling everyone that Audrey Hepburn “singlehandedly may make bosoms a thing of the past.” Like most phrasemakers, Wilder knew that a good line bore repeating. But now that he was writing for Marilyn Monroe, he tempered his enthusiasm for the new flat-chested look and heartily embraced the breast obsession of his era.

  Wilder and Feldman quickly got into a bit of a battle over both the casting and the distribution of The Seven Year Itch. They argued their cases for months; it was Hollywood gamesmanship. While the dispute dragged on in the spring and early summer of 1954, Feldman consulted Wilder on practically everything, and the production developed smoothly. Feldman never thought Axelrod’s collaboration on the screenplay was necessary. Billy did, so Axelrod was hir
ed. Feldman—who had an earlier deal with Warner Bros. that fell through—wanted to strike a distribution deal with United Artists or else go ahead and make the film without a distributor in place. Billy liked a deal proposed by Fox; the Fox deal was struck. Both Feldman and Wilder agreed completely on the casting of Marilyn Monroe, which was convenient, since she was not only Feldman’s client but was also under contract to Fox and was provided by the studio as part of the distribution deal. When the dust cleared, Wilder’s only major concession was to give up his plans for the simultaneous production of foreign-language versions of The Seven Year Itch. He fought for them, but he lost.

  Under the Fox deal, $500,000 went to the Feldman Group and Billy Wilder, plus money to make the film, plus Monroe, plus distribution prints and advertising. Fox got the gross distributor’s proceeds up to $3,200,000; above that, money went first to pay the costs of foreign dubbing, after which 60 percent went to Fox and 40 percent to the Feldman Group. Of that 40 percent, Feldman was allowed to reimburse itself for the cost of the property (the $255,000) as well as all payments to Wilder and Axelrod that weren’t reimbursed by Fox. Wilder got 50 percent of the balance. If there did happen to be a French version later, Billy would get an additional $50,000. The studio system was dead, and this is what took its place.