On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Walston, meanwhile, was taken aback by the seaminess of his new picture. He was struck in particular by the line, “Well, it’s not very big, but it’s clean,” ostensibly made in reference to his house. Billy “wanted it done with a slight look from her as if it meant my cock,” says Walston. As though the dialogue itself wasn’t clear enough:

  POLLY: Nice place you got here.

  ORVILLE: Oh, you’ll like it. It’s not very big but it’s clean.

  POLLY: What is?

  ORVILLE: What is what?

  POLLY: I don’t know—you brought it up.

  The cast and crew of Kiss Me, Stupid were taken aback one day when Wilder pulled a prank. Walston recalls: “I had a scene where I was supposed to get under the sheets with Kim Novak—nude. You didn’t actually see us nude, but you did see us taking off our clothes and then assumed the rest. So I got ready to do it, and Wilder said, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, I’ll show you how to do this.’ So he took off his clothes and got into bed with her.”

  Billy was already needling Walston about the potential reaction of his TV audience to Kiss Me, Stupid. One day Walston snapped. “Eight or nine weeks into the shoot he said to me, ‘What do you think the kiddies are going to say about you when they see this picture?’ And I said, ‘What do you think the public and the critics are going to say about you?’ ‘What do you mean?’ he said. I said, ‘You’ve got a lot of risqué bullshit in this.’ ‘Lemme tell you something,’ he said. ‘I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen in pictures. You are going to see nudity. Profanity. Things that you are never going to believe in your life that you would see in movies.’ Well, true to his word, all of those things started—in 1968, not 1964.”

  According to Walston, “Felicia Farr was really quite wonderful and very helpful. The fellow who played the big guy—he was a problem.” As Walston describes it, Cliff Osmond “had become Wilder’s favorite. In all of Wilder’s pictures he latched on to someone he admired and liked and was very friendly with. Well, this guy took advantage of that and got in my way quite a lot.”

  Like all too much of life itself, Kiss Me, Stupid is a comedy of meager sex jokes and unfulfilling punchlines. Giant cacti serve as erections in the Spooners’ front yard. One can’t miss them; rudeness, not subtlety, is their point. Zelda’s maiden name is Pettibone. (It makes more sense once you see her wizened parents.) Since Polly’s talking parrot spends his days watching old westerns on television, the only thing he can say is “bang bang,” a phrase he repeats when Dino starts to undress in front of Zelda. “No coaching from the audience,” Dino tells the parrot.

  Audiences were meant to get these jokes—and get them hard. Wilder and Diamond make no attempt to write slyly, nor is this comedy light-hearted. With a sick, sinking sensation, we are confronted by the everyday crumminess of being human. How can there be romance in a world of bodily functions? The whole comedy has an unpleasant aroma—as when Dino goes into the men’s room at Barney’s gas station and Barney forces Orville to go in behind him (to chat Dino up about their songs). Orville, of course, heads in singing what is at its core a love song: “I’m a haunted house that hasn’t got a ghost, when I’m without you….” The door closes behind him. A splashing sound is heard on the soundtrack. Wilder cuts to the gas hose overflowing on the sidewalk. When he cuts back to the men’s room door, Dino is emerging; he shakes his dripping hands dry. Barney tells him that there are paper towels in the ladies’ room. Dino goes in, and Orville, still singing his love song, follows him.

  Barney suggests getting rid of Zelda temporarily and substituting a whore from the Belly Button, all in order to please Orville’s houseguest:

  ORVILLE: Just tell me one thing if you’re so clever. How do I get rid of my wife?

  BARNEY: That’s the easiest part. Hit her.

  ORVILLE: Hit her?!

  BARNEY: Start an argument. Get her sore at you. Shove a grapefruit in her face! There’s lots of ways.

  Kiss Me, Stupid turns especially bitter and dark when Polly gets pinched, fondled, slapped, and clawed by Dino as Dino tells Orville an especially rancid joke. Polly clearly hates being treated this way, but she’s used to it. Orville plays “All the Live Long Day” and lulls himself into a romantic reverie that redeems him; he forgets entirely about his pimping plans. Polly, who begins to feel for him, forces him out—because she loves him. Just when the world seems as if it couldn’t stink any worse, Orville and Polly fall for each other, if only for the night. Orville throws Dino bodily out the door, after which Wilder’s camera traces a wistful path as Orville locks the door, turns out the lights, and escorts Polly into the bedroom. That this tenderness occurs in the midst of such grossness is crucial. It would be easy to find beautiful moments in a beautiful world, but since Wilder sees life as unbearably ugly, any instance of redemption is all the more powerful.

  These flickers of tenderness don’t preclude more raunchy humor. “Not a bad lookin’ dame, if ya like home cookin’,” Dino slurs to Zelda in Polly’s trailer. “Me, I like to eat out.” When he gropes Zelda in Polly’s tiny bed, it’s particularly unpleasant. Then his back goes out. “I’ve always had back trouble. It’s an old football injury.” Zelda replies in disbelief: “You played football?” “No, I was watchin’ the game on TV and this girl was sittin’ on my lap….” Zelda gives him an alcohol rub, and Dino falls asleep—or appears to. “You know something?” Zelda softly says; “If I weren’t so old-fashioned, and you weren’t asleep….” “Whadja say?” Dino pipes up. “Nothing. Go to sleep.” Fade to black. Exterior: the Belly Button. Dawn. The neon signs go off. Wilder cuts to a high angle of Dino leaving the trailer, stretching. Orville’s tryst with Polly bears a trace of sentimentality, whereas Dino’s and Zelda’s morning-after scenes are sweet but tough. When Zelda wakes up, obviously naked, and finds a wad of money stuffed in an empty bourbon bottle, her first reaction is a smile of pleasure. She clearly liked spending the night with Dino, and she likes getting paid for it.

  For the marketing of Kiss Me, Stupid, caricaturist Al Hirschfeld was commissioned to create line drawings of Novak, Martin, and Walston, and novelty pins were produced and distributed. Spoofing the current campaign for Avis rental cars (“We try harder”), these buttons commanded “Kiss me, stupid” in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German (“Küss mich, Dummkopf”). In the theatrical trailer, the Mirisches retroactively awarded Billy name-above-the-title status for his previous UA films. “Remember Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot?” a male voice asks above shots of Monroe, Lemmon, and Curtis in the train station sequence. “Who doesn’t?” a female voice coos. “And Billy Wilder’s The Apartment?” (Lemmon serving MacLaine spaghetti off his tennis racket). “Great, great,” the woman sighs. “And Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce?” (Shirley dancing on the table). “Hilarious,” the woman says. “But what’s he done lately?”

  Then, in a tone of disbelief, she says “Kiss Me, Stupid?! You’re kidding. What could it possibly be about?”

  The final shot of the trailer contained a written warning—“This picture is for adults only!” These words of caution appeared over a shot of Dino, in Las Vegas, spinning his Dual Ghia convertible to the left and looking guiltily over his shoulder as he makes the turn. At first, steering Kiss Me, Stupid past the censors didn’t seem like much of a problem. By 1964, the Production Code Administration was strictly pro forma, and even the Legion of Decency was on the wane. The Legion continued to ask practicing Catholics to sign a pledge not to see films the Legion denounced, but the Legion hadn’t issued a “C—condemned” rating to any American film since 1956, when it damned Baby Doll to perdition along with any Catholic who saw it and didn’t confess. For Billy, the old battles seemed over. The Apartment passed with all its shack-ups and sex jokes, as did One, Two, Three, with its leering references to umlauts and tongues. (“I’m bilingual,” says Ingeborg; “Don’t I know it,” says MacNamara). Irma la Douce slid by as well, complete with jokes about impotence and fellatio. (“What a night!”
Irma exclaims. “Everybody seems to have the same idea! Always happens when there’s a full moon—I haven’t even had time to catch my breath!”) Given Irma’s vast commercial success, Billy had no reason to expect a problem with Kiss Me, Stupid. The new film was darker-tempered, but Wilder’s war over censorship and sexuality seemed to have been won. He saw himself as a victorious crusader.

  In the fall, Billy met personally with Monsignor Little of the Legion of Decency, after which he agreed to reshoot several scenes. A less explicit denouement of Dino’s encounter with Zelda in Polly’s trailer would be filmed. Billy also agreed to take out some of the bedspings’ rhythmic squeaking in the Spooners’ guest room; to change a Palm Sunday reference to Thanksgiving; and to remove one offensive line—“Give it both knees.” Billy and Little did not reach an understanding on several other points, however. With reference to the screenplay, Billy told UA executives after his meeting that he was not at all disposed to changing the line about the organ on page 61, the word screw on page 68, and his little joke about families “that pray together” on page 84 (the family in question being the madam and her whores at the Belly Button). Billy also refused to reshoot the sequence on page 116 when Dino gets on top of Polly, nor was he about to cover up Kim Novak’s cleavage, for reasons he found obvious. Finally, Wilder reported, “The use of any other vegetable other than parsley would satisfy them because several female members of the committee felt there was something particularly suggestive in the use of parsley,” but Billy was recalcitrant. His parsley was there to stay.

  Monsignor Little raised a pertinent point: he asked UA to reconsider releasing Kiss Me, Stupid at Christmastime. Not only was it a central holiday in the Catholic calendar, Little observed, but there was a practical matter. As the monsignor told Billy and United Artists, the nation’s Catholics would be taking their Legion of Decency pledges in church on Sunday, December 13. Even Monsignor Little saw this as a significant marketing problem as far as Kiss Me, Stupid was concerned. Had UA, the Mirisches, and Billy listened to the clergyman’s advice, Kiss Me, Stupid might not have bombed.

  “United Artists Reedits Wilder Pic Though MPAA Gave It Clean Bill,” Variety reported in late October after Kiss Me, Stupid was sneaked in New York. The drastically diminished power of the Hollywood censoring agency was duly noted. As Variety pointed out, the MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America, under whose aegis the Production Code was administered) also approved that season’s new James Bond thriller, Gold-finger, even though it featured a character named Pussy Galore, a joke few English-speaking adults or children failed to get. By that point, Variety reported, Wilder had reshot the new sequence between Farr and Martin so that the sexual culmination was left to the audience’s imagination, but as Harold Mirisch explained, the Legion demanded so many changes that they would have had to bring Kim Novak back for extensive reshooting, and she couldn’t return, since she was in Britain filming The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders.

  Kiss Me, Stupid remained under the editing knife, and by late November, Variety reported (under the headline “Billy Wilder in Grip of Reticence as His Kiss Me, Stupid Scrubbed”) that the latest round of revisions “involved more than just a few cuts.” It wasn’t simply the fault of the Legion of Decency, Variety noted. By then, preview audiences had been reacting most “unfavorably to some of the bluer aspects of the Wilder film, both in Gotham and Hollywood.” Billy himself was in New York for these previews earlier that week, but he declined Variety’s request for an interview.

  The cast and crew’s expectations ran as high as the preview audiences’ responses ran low. “When you were on a set with that man, you knew why,” says Walston. “It’s difficult to this day for me to express, but you knew you were working for someone who had this aura about him. I was absolutely flabbergasted with his technique with the camera. And yet, on the other hand, there was a preview of the picture in Westwood, and I was surrounded by several agents from the William Morris office, and I was very down, and they said to me, ‘Don’t give up, don’t be stupid, Wilder will take this thing into the cutting room, and he’ll pull Wilder wonders.’ And I said to them, ‘Did you see the picture I just saw? Did you see the manner in which it was shot? He doesn’t have any coverage.’ He shot the picture in continuity—that was the way he shot everything. That’s all he had. Once the picture bombed he had nowhere else to go.”

  As the ill-timed Christmas release of Kiss Me, Stupid approached, the story of sex, censorship, morality, and the cinema began to grow into a national affair. It wasn’t being covered in the mainstream press yet, but every movie reviewer in the country had heard about it, and this exposure proved decisive. “Although it has a Code seal,” Variety commented, “the gag going around UA in past weeks has been that in order for the pic to get by more strenuous censor groups like the Legion of Decency, Stupid would have to be cut into a fifteen-minute silent short.” More serious discussions involved the removal of UA’s corporate label from Kiss Me, Stupid. Arthur Krim and his team were in no mood to have their company’s name sullied by a dark, dirty sex farce released at yuletide. The film would now be released under the imprimatur of Lopert Films, UA’s art house subsidiary. This was not an insignificant shift, since Lopert had never handled a Wilder film before, nor a Mirisch film, though the company did have success with the Legion-condemned Never on Sunday (1960). Kiss Me, Stupid’s advertising campaign was rethought and toned down. References to Climax, Nevada, were eliminated from the ads.

  The Legion then issued its rating: C—condemned. In a remarkable commentary accompanying the rating, the Legion set the tone for most of the nation’s film critics by calling Kiss Me, Stupid “a thoroughly sordid piece of realism which is esthetically as well as morally repulsive. Crude and suggestive dialogue, a leering treatment of marital and extramarital sex, [and] prurient preoccupation with lechery compound the film’s condonation of immorality.” As Variety pointed out, this was “some of the sharpest criticism that the Roman Catholic reviewing organization has ever leveled at a major American film.” Variety went on to note that the Legion was astonished “that a film that is ‘so patently indecent and immoral’ should receive a Production Code seal.” Ironically, the Legion of Decency cited The Apartment as an example of effective social satire—the kind of film Hollywood should be making instead of filth like Kiss Me, Stupid.

  Kiss Me, Stupid was no longer just a tasteless movie. It had become a symbol of everything that was wrong with American entertainment, a threat to American families, a moral blight and an embarrassment, and—worst of all—the harbinger of a sex-ridden future. In retrospect, the backlash seems only natural, given the film’s holiday-season release. For the Legion, it was “a commercial decision bereft of respect for the Judeo-Christian sensibilities of the majority of the American people.”

  Ironically, the Kiss Me, Stupid furor erupted, as if on cue, immediately before a nine-week retrospective of Wilder’s films opened at the nation’s best-known bastion of contemporary highbrow taste—the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The museum’s auditorium was categorically unlike a Loews, a Roxy, a Pantages, or a Grauman’s (not to mention the Bijou in Butte). Despite MoMA’s embrace and promotion of American mass culture, the Rockefeller-funded museum was the essence of upscale urban elitism. When the retrospective’s curator, Richard Griffith, applauded Wilder for being “the most precise, indeed relentless chronicler of the postwar American scene, in shade as well as in light,” he was subtly, unwittingly damning him in the eyes of mainstream moviegoers. Billy himself felt the need to set the record straight at the press conference announcing the retrospective: “I’m just a pop artist, not Rembrandt,” he insisted. He added this choice observation: “I’ve been compared to Lubitsch and von Stroheim. Does that mean I specialize in cruel bedrooms?”

  Billy was his usual voluble, phrase-making self at the press conference, but it was Audrey Wilder who got the day’s biggest laugh. At one point she put up her hand and, when called upon, instructed her husb
and to talk louder. After that, the Wilders fled to Europe.

  When they returned in early January, Billy saw for himself how the American press treated his movie. He reacted with paranoia. “Dear Geoff,” he wrote to Shurlock. “I have just returned from Europe and have been briefed on the uproar the picture has caused. It is obvious that the Legionnaires have been lying in the bushes, biding their time until they could waylay some picture-maker of import and use him as a whipping boy for the entire industry. At this late date it would be both pointless and useless for me to stand up and defend myself against this vicious onslaught of bigotry. However, I am aware that I must have caused you considerable trouble, and for this I am genuinely sorry. Let me assure you that I am resolved never to put you on the spot again. Affectionately, Billy Wilder.”

  Shurlock responded: “My warm thanks for your kind and generous letter. Basically, I have no right to object to being put on the spot by any of my friends in the business, because after all this is, among other things, what I get paid for. But in your case, I was motivated primarily by my esteem and affection for you, over and above the normal call of duty. And I hope I can oblige again some day. Affectionately, Geoffrey Shurlock.”

  The critics, of course, had already attacked:

  “Wilder, usually a director of considerable flair and inventiveness (if not always impeccable taste), has not been able this time to rise above a basically vulgar, as well as creatively delinquent, screenplay.” “A jape that seems to have scraped its blue-black humor off the floor of a honky-tonk nightclub.” “A painful, loud-mouthed, two-hour recitation of … the dirty jokes the boy down the street used to tell.” One critic went so far as to wonder about Billy’s mental health: “Is senility setting in or has he always been, beneath his satiric grin, not quite bright?”