by Ed Sikov
Two of Wilder’s best Otto Preminger jokes finally found a wider audience than the Hollywood mavens who’d been telling them for some time: the story of Preminger screaming at Sam Goldwyn and Wilder saying, “Calm down, Otto, I’m not going to fight with you—I’ve still got relatives in Germany”; and the line Billy used when somebody asked him where Otto had gone: “His summer home—in Belsen.”
Several of Wilder’s old chestnuts about his wife appeared, along with a new one. When the couple met, the writer Richard Gehman noted, Audrey was living in the decidedly downscale Pico-La Brea district, though she told Billy it was East Beverly Hills. When he found out where she really lived, he told her, “I’d worship the ground you walk on if you lived in a better neighborhood.” On their first wedding anniversary, Billy was reading the Hollywood Reporter at breakfast when Audrey got up. “Do you know what day this is, dear?” she asked. He informed her of the day of the week. “It’s our first anniversary,” said Audrey. “Please, not while I’m eating,” answered Billy. The previous year, Billy made a trip to Paris. Audrey asked him to bring back some Charvet ties and, while he was at it, to ship home a bidet as well. After a few days she received a cable: “Charvet ties on way. But bidet impossible obtain. Suggest handstand in shower.”
The Wilders had recently been paid a visit by Vladimir Nabokov. “Which of my paintings do you think Nabokov liked best?” Billy asked Gehman. “That is the one he liked,” he said, pointing to a Balthus painting of a preteenage girl wearing a camisole. Billy was quite evidently pleased to share an appreciation of nymphets with the world’s preeminent authority. Wilder’s chronic backaches were brought up, obviously by Billy. As Audrey explained, “It used to be headaches, then it was stomach trouble—now it’s the back.” Things hadn’t changed much over the years. In 1944, Judith Wilder claimed that Billy was such a hypochondriac that he was planning a case of meningitis.
In a shorter, less detailed profile in Time earlier that year, Wilder claimed to be working on several script ideas with current-events themes. One began in West Berlin with a meet-cute opener in which Soviets kidnap an American bombshell (“who might be Marilyn Monroe”). “They take her away to brainwash her, but she beats them because she has no brain to wash.” Another idea centered on a high-ranking Communist official who defects to the West. He leaves his wife and three small children behind in Russia. They are summarily liquidated. The Communist quickly returns to Russia. He didn’t really defect, he says—he just wanted to get rid of his family.
The Academy announced its Oscar contenders in February 1961, a few weeks after the Directors Guild bestowed its own Best Director award to Billy in ceremonies at the Beverly Hilton. Despite all the charges of smut leveled against it, The Apartment racked up nine nominations. United Artists’ press agents began stumping.
On Oscar night—April 17, 1961—the crowd at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium was treated to a Bob Hope monologue: “And how about those movies this year? Exodus, the story of the Republican Party; Sons and Lovers, the Bing Crosby family; The Apartment, the story of Frank Sinatra….” The gorgeous Italian bombshell Gina Lollobrigida mounted the stage three-quarters of the way through the ceremony to announce the year’s Best Director award. The Apartment had picked up only two Oscars thus far. Alex Trauner won one of the Art Direction awards, and Daniel Mandell won for his editing. Jack Kruschen lost to Peter Ustinov for Spartacus. Joseph LaShelle lost to Freddie Francis for Sons and Lovers. The sound award went to The Alamo. It was not a foregone conclusion when Lollobrigida opened the Best Director envelope and announced, “The winner is Billy Wilder for The Apartment!” A triumphant Billy ran to the stage, accepted his first Oscar in fifteen years, and said, none too humbly, “Thank you so much, you lovely discerning people.”
When Kitty Carlisle and Moss Hart presented Billy and Iz with the award for Best Original Screenplay, Hart whispered something in Billy’s ear that made him chuckle: “This is the moment to stop, Billy.” At the microphone, Wilder said, “Thank you, I. A. L. Diamond,” and Diamond said, “Thank you, Billy Wilder.” William Wyler then arrived to present an honorary award to Gary Cooper (in absentia) and expressed his gratitude to the Academy for Wilder’s trophies, knowing he’d be congratulated for them himself.
Jack Lemmon swiftly lost to Burt Lancaster (for Elmer Gantry). Shirley MacLaine then lost to Elizabeth Taylor—a sympathy award for Taylor’s illnesses and past performances (Malta fever, Suddenly, Last Summer, meningitis, A Place in the Sun, a car wreck, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a tracheotomy) rather than for her current film, Butterfield 8. Finally Audrey Hepburn announced the Best Picture award and Billy bounded up to collect his third Oscar of the night. Graciously, he said that “it would only be proper to cut it in half and give it to the two most valuable players—Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.” MacLaine herself was in Japan at the time filming My Geisha for her husband, Steve Parker. Billy sent her a telegram: “Dear Shirley, You may not have a hole in your windpipe but we love you anyway.”
In June of 1960, the Mirisches (in association with producer Edward Alperson) bought the rights to a 1956 French musical comedy about a whore. Wilder not only signed on as director but took part ownership of the property. The transaction was rather complex: United Artists agreed to finance the film at a projected budget of $5 million, with ownership of the negative and all profits to be split between UA, the Mirisches, Wilder, and Alperson. According to Variety, the purchase price for Irma la Douce was as astronomical as Witness for the Prosecution’s—$330,000. Jack Lemmon was mentioned as the likely choice to play the prostitute’s jealous lover, but the whore herself was still uncast.
Billy might have been intrigued by Irma la Douce even if the crowd-pleasing show hadn’t featured a well-worn prostitute. The play’s self-description sounds a lot like something Wilder himself could have written: Irma la Douce, the narrator declares, is “a story about passion, bloodshed, desire, and death—everything that makes life worth living.”
Billy soon announced that Charles Laughton had agreed to star in the film. Laughton would not be playing Nestor, the young leading man (a law student in the play, a failed policeman in Wilder’s adaptation); he would be the narrator/host, Bob-le-Hotu.
As soon as July 1960, Billy was in Paris doing preproduction work. He’d settled on Laughton’s costar—none other than Marilyn Monroe. “I’m possibly mad, but that’s who I want,” he told British journalist Roderick Mann. “All right, I know that after Some Like It Hot I swore I’d never use her again. She’s like my smoking. I keep swearing off cigarettes but I still get through sixty a day.” Mann pressed for a serious explanation of why Wilder would work again with a woman he was still calling “a nightmare.” Wilder answered: “Marilyn is very talented and a huge box office star. And that’s what matters. After all, if her picture is running in Manchester and a man tells his wife, ‘There’s a Monroe picture showing,’ the wife doesn’t turn around and say, ‘We don’t want to see her—she’s always rowing with her directors.’ They go to see her, and that’s why I want her.”
“I’d settle for Elizabeth Taylor,” Billy added.
Billy told the Herald Tribune’s Art Buchwald the same thing, only with even more wisecracks about Marilyn and a few new ones about himself. “We made up at the Khrushchev luncheon at Twentieth Century-Fox,” Wilder declared. (The Soviet premier toured the United States in September 1961.) “The FBI asked all of us to be there at noon for security reasons, and Marilyn, who flew in from New York, not only showed up on time but was twenty minutes early. This was the first time I had ever seen her early for anything, and I was so thrown by it I threw my arms around her and we made up on the spot. I vowed then that if I did another picture with her I’d hire Khrushchev to hang around the set so she’d show up on time.”
But, asked Buchwald, didn’t you have to wait for her for hours? “Exactly,” said Billy. “But we didn’t waste those hours. We played poker. I managed to read War and Peace, Les Misérables, and Hawaii, and we all
got wonderful suntans. The extras made twice as much money as they expected, and while it might have taken slightly longer to make the film, we did get to know each other so much better.”
But, asked Buchwald, didn’t you say she couldn’t remember her lines? “That’s the beauty of working with Monroe,” Billy declared. “She’s not a parrot. Anyone can remember lines, but it takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and give the kind of performance she did.” Buchwald then had the bad taste to point out some of the nasty things Billy had said about her in the past. “I was speaking under duress and the influence of barbiturates,” Billy confessed, “and I was suffering from high blood pressure and I had been brainwashed.”
“You know how it is,” Billy told still another reporter. “You hate your dentist while he’s pulling your teeth out, but the next week you’re playing golf with him.” Just to be on the safe side, Billy also mentioned that he might decide to cast Taylor. Brigitte Bardot would work, too, he said, and so would Shirley MacLaine.
In September, Elizabeth Taylor signed a deal to play the lead in Irma la Douce. Iz Diamond also had a contract by the end of September. As far as writing and schmoozing were concerned, Diamond handled Billy himself, but when it came to negotiating his deals he had Swifty Lazar do the talking. Diamond agreed to start working on Irma la Douce the following week at rate of $2,000 per week for fifty-two weeks guaranteed. Publicly, Billy and the Mirisches were saying that the film was scheduled to roll the following spring, but if Diamond’s year-long contract was any indication, they all knew the schedule was hopeful at best.
By late October, it was official—Irma la Douce was postponed. According to the terms of the movie-rights sale, the film could not be released until the play’s road show engagements ended. Irma had been on Broadway for two years, London for three. Both productions recently closed, but the tour had just begun. The estimated start date was now August 1962.
A controversy erupted; the Hollywood buzz had it that Liz quit the picture. Taylor’s agent, Kurt Frings, denied the rumors—Taylor was still going to star in Irma la Douce, he said—but Frings soon announced that she’d withdrawn from the film, though not by her own choice.
Deals sometimes move fast in Hollywood. Variety reported in the same article that Shirley MacLaine had already agreed to replace Taylor.
MacLaine certainly had incentive to take the role. Her deal called for sixteen weeks of work for $350,000 against 5 percent of the gross, with an escalator clause (should the film become an enormous success) bringing her share up to 7.5 percent. The billing order was left up to Billy to decide, though if Jack Lemmon did end up in the picture, his standard contract at that point specified top billing and Billy would have to try to convince him to make an exception.
With Irma postponed, Billy had a year’s time on his hands. He had several ideas to fill the gap; world politics helped him make his choice. At the time Nikita Khrushchev facilitated Billy’s rapprochement with Marilyn, the Cold War appeared to be winding down. Despite the presence of some unruly demonstrators at the airports, the Soviet delegation’s tour of the United States in 1959 was an outstanding public relations success. But whatever goodwill such cultural exchanges engendered suddenly vanished in May 1960 when the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane. Everybody found a reason to be hostile. Americans were furious that the Russians shot down one of their planes, and the Russians were outraged that the Americans were spying on them, a charge American officials vehemently denied for the few weeks it took to accustom themselves to the fact they’d been caught. The superpowers’ imminent summit conference in Paris was canceled.
Thus in November 1960, Billy announced his next project: a Marx Brothers comedy set at the United Nations. “We want to make a satire on the conditions of the world today,” Wilder declared, “a satire on the deterioration of diplomatic behavior, on brinksmanship, wild jokes about the H-bomb—that type of stuff. It’s all so dramatic that a few jokes put over by the Marx Brothers should alleviate the tension.” He estimated that the number of jokes would be somewhere in the neighborhood of three thousand. “That’s quite an order, isn’t it?” Billy said. “We might have the Marx Brothers mixing up all the flags with, say, Nasser coming in under the Star of David. Mad fun like that. We will keep the same Marx Brothers technique of playing against a very serious background. We’ll try to keep it all—the dignity of the locale, the procedure, the enormity of the problem—with Groucho, Harpo, and Chico in the middle of it.”
Billy was convinced his idea had vast international appeal: “It’s fun and it involves the world as a whole. It will be understood universally—therefore it’s worth a film. Making a film is like gambling with the chips getting more expensive every day. That way you can’t afford too big a gamble. So we’ve got the UN and we’ve got the Marx Brothers. Put them together, and—boom!”
Having finally acquired the rights to Molnár’s Egy-kettö-három, the 1929 one-act comedy about a raging capitalist, his dippy houseguest, and her surprise husband, a Socialist cabdriver, Billy Wilder was in an excellent position to capitalize on current events. With the world edgily watching the two superpowers focus much of their hostility on the still-divided city of Berlin, Billy Wilder knew from experience that he could get some pretty good laughs out of Berliners’ misery. He was itching to characterize the German people as greedy, money-grubbing ex-Nazi liars on one side of Checkpoint Charlie and dull, fascist, out-of-time dummkopfs on the other. He thought it would be funny.
For Billy, the ongoing crisis in Berlin wasn’t the only incentive to adapt Molnár for the modern age. At least as much of a goading spur was the fact that Michelangelo Antonioni’s ponderous L’Avventura had been a huge art house hit on both sides of the Atlantic the previous year, and American art house critics were still falling all over themselves spreading the gospel of serious cinema. For Wilder, Bergman was bad enough. Now there was Antonioni, whose films were even more nose picking. In response, Billy wanted not only to make yet another enormously successful and crowd-pleasing comedy, but to make the most raucous farce he could think up. He was compelled to make the absolute antithesis of L’Avventura, if only to prove a point to himself. So 1961 was the perfect time to make One, Two, Three.
PART SIX
1961–1970
25. SELLING IT
PIFFL (Horst Buchholz, in despair): Is everybody in this world corrupt?
BORODENKO (Ralf Wolter, with a shrug): I don’t know everybody.
—One, Two, Three
In 1929, a feverish young reporter with too much wit on his hands declared in the Berlin newspaper Tempo that Coca-Cola “tastes like burnt pneumatic tires.” Thirty-one years later, Berlin was segmented and half ruined, Germany torn in two. Tempo, the frenetic Jewish daily with multiple editions and sharp opinions, was out of business for years, many of its readers gassed. The journalist had become a wealthy film director living in a Beverly Hills penthouse. The Americans and the Russians, formerly allies against the Germans, were now suspicious foes. The Germans were schizophrenic but pragmatic, their ideology running along geographical lines. The entire Free World was drinking Coca-Cola, and everyone on one side of the Iron Curtain believed that everyone on the other side thirsted for it in vain. But despite the shifting winds of politics, trade, art, and personal fortune, one thing hadn’t changed: Billy Wilder still thought Coke tasted like burnt tires with fizz.
The same year Billy slammed Coca-Cola in Tempo, Ferenc Molnár’s play Egy-kettö-három opened in Berlin as Ein, Zwei, Drei. It was a wild farce about a frenzied capitalist, Norrison—played by and, in fact, written for the great comedian Max Pallenberg—whose young female houseguest, the daughter of an important banking client, throws his life and career into jeopardy by marrying a Socialist taxi driver. Pallenberg spat his lines in “a sharp, penetrating, crystal-clear, amazingly fast staccato, like the rapid clatter of a machine gun.” In other words, he was like a gangster on Benzedrine. Wilder saw the play and loved it.
One, Two, Three played itself out furiously in a single act, all of which takes place in Norrison’s office. Young Lydia waltzes in, announces that she has married the cabbie and is pregnant with his child, so the manipulative Norrison uses all the power at his disposal to turn the cabbie, Anton, into an ersatz nobleman before the day is through. With tailors, haberdashers, barbers, and shoe salesmen rushing madly in and out (the stage design calls for curtains to separate the rooms, since the opening and closing of so many doors would prove to be impossibly loud), and with Anton reduced nearly to tears not only by Norrison but by the surprisingly fierce Lydia as well, the banker triumphs. Molnár offers a moral at the end. “It must be very wonderful, sir, to be as you are and have almost all mankind at your disposal,” Norrison’s aged servant tells him. “You’re quite right, Pynnigan,” Norrison says. “But as regards mankind, after what was just done here, I think mankind—or as you so carefully put it, almost all mankind—should damn well be ashamed of itself.”
Wilder and Diamond weren’t constrained by Molnár’s preachy conclusion, nor by any of his lines. By the time Wilder got through adapting the farce, practically none of the dialogue remained intact, and the moral ending turned absurd. At one point during the shooting of One, Two, Three, Scarlett (formerly Lydia) whines to MacNamara (formerly Norrison), “Why didn’t you take better care of me?” Pamela Tiffin, playing Scarlett, had some trouble delivering the line with great enough amplitiude. “Pamela, dear,” Billy began. “A little louder, please. We want to hear this line very clearly. It’s the only line we’ve kept from the original play, and it’s a very expensive one.”
