On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Kiss Me, Stupid was financed as a coproduction among the Mirisch Company, Phalanx, and Claude Productions. Dean Martin was Claude. Like other top-drawing stars, Martin had set up his own production company to ensure profit participation in his films. What was odd about Kiss Me, Stupid was that Dino, in addition to starring in and coproducing the film, was also its overt subject. As Martin’s biographer Nick Tosches puts it, “He was to play himself: the singer of ‘That’s Amore,’ consul of cool, holy ghost of tastelessness.” He serves as his own point of reference.

  Postmodern film theorists should be struck by the film’s fascination with signs, most of them deteriorating. The film begins with an iris-in on a sign painted on the side of a truck (LAS VEGAS SIGN CO.). To the brassy opening fanfare of “’S Wonderful,” the camera tilts and pans right to a shot of the vast neon sign of the Sands hotel, ending in drastically low angle to further aggrandize the glitz. The camera tilts down to the Sands marquee announcing Dino’s show. (Dino doesn’t need a last name, his caricature and nickname signifying more than enough already.) This was the actual marquee of the Sands announcing Martin’s performance there in July 1964. But in Wilder’s vision, the sign is in collapse; the letter O has already been pulled off the marquee by a harnessed workman, who swings across the sign, removing the other letters as Wilder cuts inside to the stage, where Dino is singing “’S Wonderful” with a line of befeathered Las Vegas chorus girls staring glumly into space behind him.

  “You can’t blame me for feeling amorous,” Dino croons, then says with a cock of the head to the nearest showgirl, “Now is this a bit of terrific, hmm? Las’ night she was bangin’ on my door for forty-five minutes. I wouldn’ let her out.” He toasts his own terrible joke, sips his drink, and lets the laughter wash over him. Billy cuts to a line of five waiters stretched out across the Panavision screen. The one in the middle isn’t laughing. The others are chortling raucously, but the guy dead center remains stone-faced. This is the tone of Kiss Me, Stupid—the sour joke, the half-failed communication. Out of this poverty Wilder finds redemption and love, and it’s not terribly funny in the end.

  Wilder makes fun of Dean Martin (as Dino graciously did to himself), but there’s a sense of personal identification, too—the womanizing old pro always on the make. Billy had been something of an adjunct Rat Packer for years, but one incident secured his personal admiration for Martin. Three years before he approached Martin to play Dino in Kiss Me, Stupid, Billy let fly at a Hollywood Press Club dinner with a torrent of bad-tempered, well-publicized remarks: American theater owners were thoroughly uninterested in the movies they showed, they didn’t keep up their movie houses, they made no effort to sell the films they screened, and, by the way, actors were totally irrelevant. “Stars don’t mean a thing today,” was how Billy put it. The story hit the trades, of course, and Martin was outraged. He quickly wrote Billy an angry letter in which he told Wilder off for being such an arrogant and self-important jerk. Billy appreciated it.

  According to Wilder, Martin wasn’t the slightest bit embarrassed to play this cruel, complicit self-parody. “He’s a delicious and adorable man who does what you ask him,” Billy later said. “He’s one of the most relaxed and talented men I know. With him, no intellectual discussions. ‘Dean, we’re making a film.’ ‘When?’ ‘We start in June.’ ‘What clothes? Thanks, ‘bye.’”

  Forced to detour off the highway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles after his Sands act closes, Dino asks the highway patrol where he’ll end up. “You come out at Barstow—by way of Warm Springs, Paradise Valley, and Climax.” “The only way to go,” says Dino. Dry and dusty Climax, where there is little action and where Orville and Barney desperately try to sell Dino their own musical compositions. Peter Sellers was cast as Orville.

  The thirty-eight-year-old Sellers was the kind of tension-provoking funnyman who upsets his way through the world, using his audiences’ discomfort to nag them into helpless laughter. In Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962), Sellers’s Clare Quilty is such a relentless adversary to James Mason’s Humbert Humbert that he becomes a sort of torture device. In Kubrick’s more recent Dr. Strangelove (1964), Sellers’s triple role—Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and the title character himself—were all menacing. Strangelove’s mind-of-its-own arm, constantly shooting up in a Nazi heil, was like Sellers himself—unpredictable, out of control, hysterical. Sellers’s latest antic screen persona, Inspector Clouseau (in Blake Edwards’s The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark, both 1964) was a bungling idiot—a moron, and violently so. Casting him as a milquetoast piano teacher consumed by jealous rage was a stroke of genius.

  Wilder knew that Sellers was a man of infinite masks. He also knew how difficult Sellers could be—the rotten times he’d given Edwards and Kubrick were fresh legends in Hollywood—but Wilder thought he could control him, at least to the extent of making Sellers say his lines the way Billy and Iz wrote them. Kiss Me, Stupid was not the only project Wilder had in mind for Sellers, either. Billy wanted him to play Dr. Watson in his Sherlock Holmes project, with Peter O’Toole as Holmes, and Sellers readily agreed. Both men saw Kiss Me, Stupid as a pleasant warm-up act to the more important comedy-drama to come.

  Kiss Me, Stupid’s star slate was completed by Kim Novak, who projects an image of luminous confusion on-screen. Her in-over-her-head quality is essential to her emotional appeal. As David Thomson writes, “There was a mute honesty in Novak: she did not conceal the fact that she was a broad drawn into a world capable of exploiting her. Filming itself was an ordeal for her; it was as if the camera hurt her…. Novak was stoical, obdurate, or sullen, like the stolid girls in Faulkner novels. She allowed very few barriers between that raw self and the audience.”

  By 1964, Novak had a reputation for causing trouble on the set. Like Sellers, her insecurities registered as defiance, especially to the men for whom she labored. “I was warned about Kim before I started to work with her,” Billy admitted at the time. “They said she was difficult, so I said to her on the first day that if there were any difficulties she would be tossed out and not the director. The girl said with tears in her eyes that she was misunderstood, and in fact working with her has been a most pleasant surprise. She has the quality of Monroe and Dietrich, and that’s remarkable because she was a studio-created star—a nylon artificial thing to be scraped off, something created as a threat to Rita Hayworth.” (Novak was invented by Harry Cohn as competition for Hayworth, with whom Cohn had grown impatient in the mid-1950s.)

  Novak’s greatest, most disturbing film performance occurs in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in which she plays a woman playing another woman in the service of a disturbed man’s morbid fantasy. As Thomson puts it, it’s “less a performance than a helpless confession of herself.” For Kiss Me, Stupid, Wilder cast her in a similar if more vulgar role—Polly the Pistol, a roadhouse whore hired to play Orville’s wife for the night so Orville can pimp her off on Dino, the sale of his songs as his goal. If Vertigo’s Judy Barlton hadn’t jumped off the mission bell tower at the end of the film but disappeared instead into the Nevada desert with nothing but the clothes on her back, she might well have ended up as Polly the Pistol.

  For the role of Barney Millsap, Wilder needed a good-natured sharpie, a wiseacre slob. He chose Cliff Osmond, with whom Billy had been most impressed during the production of Irma la Douce. Osmond was an imposing man—six foot four and 260 pounds. As Wilder said at the time (with extraordinary hyperbole, even for Billy), “He is the only man in pictures today who, in my opinion, can come close to filling the shoes of the late Charles Laughton.” Rounding out the bill was Felicia Farr, a relaxed and beautiful actress who could project an image of domestic allure with even greater ease than Arlene Francis. Farr also had an intimate personal connection to Billy and Audrey Wilder: she was now Jack Lemmon’s wife, having married him in Paris during the production of Irma la Douce. Billy was one of Lemmon’s two best men at the wedding. (The other was the director Richard Qui
ne.)

  In February 1964, right before the production of Kiss Me, Stupid was scheduled to begin, Peter Sellers married a twenty-one-year-old bombshell named Britt Ekland. She learned something quickly about her new husband: “His incredible affection soured rapidly into an habitual jealousy which filled the first few weeks of our marriage with despair.” Possessive and weak, neurotic but highly energized, Sellers grilled Ekland relentlessly about her daily activities, convinced she was already cheating on him. He stationed spies on the set of Guns at Batasi, the film she was making at the time, and they dutifully reported her every move back to Sellers, whose jealousy was truly insane. As Sellers’s biographer Roger Lewis notes, “instead of playing Orville J. Spooner, he was Orville J. Spooner.”

  There was some tension when Sellers began working with Wilder, but no more than the usual stress between a strong-willed director who demanded total control and a high-strung, erratic star with ego problems. Famous for his deft improvisations, Sellers found himself being told to confine his inventions to the sphere of gesture and business; the words he was to utter were unalterable. Sellers hated it. That Sellers wasn’t happy was nothing new. He could be genial and charming if he cared to be, but other times he showed up at the studio late in the afternoon and the whole day was wasted. It was the price to be paid for his performance.

  “The two directors I’ve always wanted to work with are Vittorio De Sica and Billy Wilder,” Sellers said at the beginning of the production. “I think Wilder is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, comedy directors in the world.” As late as March 20, after shooting began on the Goldwyn lot, Sellers was telling the press that he was really quite content: “It’s proving to be very enjoyable indeed—a wonderful opportunity.” There was an ominous note, however: “The trouble is, you find yourself trying all the time for satisfaction and then never really being satisfied with yourself. I suppose that’s good for an actor, but sometimes it is awful—like a battle you can never win.”

  Privately, though, Sellers was upset by the casual bonhomie of Billy’s set. For all of Wilder’s autocratic control over his performers and crew, he seemed to exert no restraint whatsoever at the door of the soundstage. Some directors kept a closed set, but by the early 1960s, Billy was so relaxed in the role of supreme commander of the cinema that he turned his sets into the working equivalent of the Romanisches Café. Crowds strolled in and out at will. Stars, writers, poker buddies, Audrey’s friends—a party atmosphere prevailed on Wilder’s soundstages. As one of his camera operators put it, “When you leave a Wilder set at night, you feel you’ve enjoyed yourself, not as if you’ve finally dragged yourself through another day of miserable chores.” The reclusive Sellers disagreed.

  Sellers was living high at the time. Pot and poppers were his drugs of choice, and he consumed them with abandon. Already wound too tight for his own good, Sellers’s self-medication pushed him further toward catastophe, though neither he nor his friends and family seemed to be aware of any danger. Sellers spent his days frantically tracking his bride, following Billy’s demanding directions, and hating his own exposure to strangers’ eyes on the set; at night he smoked weed, sniffed amyl nitrite, and wished he didn’t have to show up the following morning to film any more scenes of Kiss Me, Stupid.

  On Sunday, April 5, Sellers, Ekland, his children (by a previous marriage), and some friends spent the day at Disneyland. They returned to Sellers’s house in the evening, the children were dispatched, and Sellers did some poppers and began having sex with Britt. Suddenly he felt terrible. A doctor was summoned. He examined Sellers and departed. When Sellers still didn’t feel right he went to Cedars of Lebanon hospital. “You’ve got to have top billing to get into a five-star joint like this,” the grinning actor told the staff as he checked in. He was soon diagnosed as having suffered a mild heart attack. One of the friends who accompanied them to Disneyland had to laugh when she found the scribbled note left at home by Ekland; having spent the day listening to Sellers bitch about Wilder and Kiss Me, Stupid, her first thought on learning that Sellers had been rushed to Cedars of Lebanon was, “Good God, the lengths he’ll go to so he doesn’t have to make this film.”

  Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, a nurse found Sellers lying in his hospital bed with no blood pressure and no pulse. He was rushed into the intensive care unit and, to everyone’s surprise, revived. It happened several more times over the next few days—Sellers would die and then return to life, like a ghastly comedy routine. By the end of the week he’d suffered a total of eight separate heart attacks and lived through them all. He was taken off the critical list on Friday at 10:30 A.M., by which time Billy had already replaced him with Ray Walston. Walston began filming all of Orville’s scenes from scratch on April 13.

  The production of Kiss Me, Stupid proceeded with Walston having to reshoot all of Sellers’s scenes with actors who had already been through Billy’s extensive rehearsals and knew precisely how Billy saw everything. Walston felt like an outsider, but what could he do? On exceptionally short notice, he had to fill Sellers’s closetful of shoes—the manic Sellers, the placid Sellers, the suspicious Sellers and the sly one, too; Sellers the wimp, the lothario, the fool. His task was difficult, to say the least.

  Walston was currently starring as the alien title character of television’s My Favorite Martian, complete with little rabbit-ear antennae that shot up from behind his head. “When I went in to see Wilder and talk to him,” Walston says, “he had his entire crew in that office—there were fifty people there. And the first thing he did was say to me, ‘Come over here by the window, I want to see your face.’ I had been in an accident in one of the segments of the Martian show—we were working with a chimpanzee and the chimpanzee went berserk and attacked me and chewed me up quite a lot—but he said it was okay. Then I went home with the script, and I read it with my wife, and I said, ‘It won’t go. It’s not good.’ Everybody said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, this is Billy Wilder, he doesn’t make mistakes, he’ll fix all that bullshit….’ I thought, ‘Well, let’s hope he does.’ I couldn’t say that I wouldn’t do a picture with the great Billy Wilder because I don’t like the script.”

  Walston’s first day of shooting was not without comedy. With Dean Martin leaning against a nearby wall, Billy issued a long set of instructions to Walston on how to play the scene. As he stepped back to the camera, Dino loudly put his two cents in: “Tell the cocksucker to go fuck himself,” Martin advised. “Do it your own way.” Billy loved it. Walston also reports what Martin told Wilder after listening to a similar set of commands: “Well for Chrissake Jesus Christ Almighty what the fuck! I mean, if you wanted an actor what the fuck did you get me for? Why didn’t you go get fucking Marlon Brando?”

  Sellers was gone, but his shadow remained. It found its voice in June. By that point fully recovered and feeling his oats once more, Sellers decided to tell Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard that in Hollywood, the studios “give you every creature comfort except the satisfaction of being able to get the best work out of yourself.” He complained about all the hangers-on on the set of Kiss Me, Stupid, and how distracting it had been for him. (As he described Billy’s behavior later, “He was running a bloody Cook’s Tour!”) Sellers also made no bones about his dissatisfaction with Billy’s exacting and thorough control.

  Billy, Dean Martin, Felicia Farr, and Kim Novak sent him a collective wire. It read, in toto, “Talk about unprofessional rat finks.”

  Sellers’s appearance in the Sherlock Holmes film was already in doubt, but by June 20, he officially pulled out. “I’m surprised they should be so sensitive,” he added. “I made my criticisms in public and in America and I only told the truth.” Sellers also defined “rat fink” for the British press: “Someone who says something you don’t like.”

  Wilder responded with a famous quip: “Heart attack? You have to have a heart before you can have an attack.”

  Sellers took out an ad in Variety to make his position clear: “There appear
s to be a feeling getting around in Hollywood that I am an ungrateful limey or rat fink or whatever, who has been abusing everything Hollywood behind its back…. The creative side in me couldn’t accept the sort of conditions under which work had to be carried out…. The atmosphere is wrong for me.” While this unpleasant, well-publicized exchange between star and director didn’t threaten to sink Kiss Me, Stupid entirely, it certainly didn’t help.

  Meanwhile, Kim Novak tripped over someone’s stray foot and took a bad fall on the set. She resumed work immediately. Knowing all too well her own reputation for being difficult, Novak wanted to work through it without complaining: “I wouldn’t go to the doctor because I’d started the picture. I kept thinking it would all work out.” Ten days later she was rushed to the hospital in acute pain. Her doctor prescribed two weeks in traction, but Kim refused. So he administered pain pills and injections of novocaine and sent her back to the studio.

  Visitors to the set continued to show up unannounced, and in one case Billy put one to work. On the day Novak and Walston were rehearsing their ridiculous dance of joy (after Dino agrees to buy “Sophia”), Gene Kelly stopped by to say hello. According to Walston, “Wilder had everyone in Hollywood at his beck and call on a friendly basis. He called Gene Kelly in to stage all that dancing and jumping around when I pull the Kleenex out of the box—that was Kelly’s work.” Before the day was over the dance steps between Orville J. Spooner and Polly the Pistol were laid out by the man who choreographed On the Town (1949) and An American in Paris (1951). “Your contribution will be unbilled and unpaid, naturally,” Billy told him.