On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Wilder handles Sherlock’s falling in love as a series of subtle glances and refined gestures. On the train to Scotland, with Holmes and Gabrielle sharing a sleeping compartment (posing as Mr. and Mrs. Ashdown), Holmes is clearly captivated by her, though he keeps himself safely separated from her by remaining in the top bunk. He trusts her, however tentatively. When she starts talking to him about women, he tells her a story. He was on the rowing team during his undergraduate days at Oxford, he recounts, and if his team won, someone’s name would be pulled out of a hat and the winner would get a prostitute as his prize. Holmes, who was passionately attracted to a beautiful girl he kept seeing from afar, was the prizewinner one afternoon; the encounter was to take place in an Oxford boathouse. When the callow Sherlock arrived, he reports, he was shattered to discover that his real prize was knowledge, an end to innocence: the prostitute was the girl he loved. Sherlock’s story, of course, bears more than a passing resemblance to the tale that so intrigued Maurice Zolotow: Vienna, Billie, the corrupted record-store girl whose name was Ilse…. Whether or not Billie’s crushing disappointment in matters of love ever happened in fact, it certainly occupies a central place in his imagination.

  By the time Sherlock and Gabrielle check into a Scottish inn, their phony identities as Mr. and Mrs. Ashdown have become more genuine than their real ones. They sleep in twin beds that have been built as a single unit, connected by one of Trauner’s carved wooden arches. After Mycroft dashes his brother’s tenderness by pointing out that he has been duped by a German spy, Wilder constructs this heart-rending sequence: Holmes walks to the rear of the image, where Gabrielle lies asleep, the covers pulled off her bare shoulders. Despite her deceit, his first reaction is tender: he lifts the covers higher to keep her warm. Then he rudely bangs the parasol on the metal chandelier. She wakes up with a start. “Sorry about that,” he says, “but as long as you’re up, what is the German word for castle? Schloss, isn’t it?” “I think so,” she says. “And how would you say ‘under the castle’? Unter das Schloss? Or die Schloss?” He calls her by name—“Fräulein Hoffmannsthal”—and it is chilling when she responds in perfect German: “Unter dem Schloss,” she says. It is a shocking revelation—not because she reveals that she is a spy (which we already know), but because her very voice reveals a more startling twist: Wilder sees himself in her. It’s Gabrielle, the professional fraud, who bears the weight of Billy’s empathy. Figuratively as well as literally, she speaks his language.

  Their parting, as romantic a scene as Wilder ever filmed, is almost entirely wordless; Billy conveys the depth of his feelings through glances, lighting, and the placement of his camera. When Ilse crosses the length of the Ashdowns’ bedroom toward Sherlock, Wilder pans with her, as if to capture a last embrace. All she wants is her parasol. “I’ll take that,” she says as she pulls it away from a perplexed Watson. Framed in the doorway, she departs with a single word of farewell (“Gentlemen”). With Watson pestering him for an explanation, Holmes watches from his window as she is driven away in a carriage. With the carriage receding farther and deeper into the image, surrounded by dappled sunlight in a bower of lush trees, Ilse sends Morse code signals by opening and closing her parasol; the carriage heads toward a blazing patch of sunlight in the far distance. Billy cuts to Ilse, staring ahead in the carriage, never looking back as she opens and closes the parasol over her shoulder. “Auf wiedersehen,” Holmes reads, at which point Wilder slowly dissolves from the Scottish highlands at the end of summer to London in the cold dead of winter, the point of light remaining over Baker Street for a few moments until it fades completely from view.

  In a delicate, depressing coda, Holmes learns in a letter from Mycroft that Ilse has been killed. According to the letter, she had been caught spying against the Japanese and summarily executed by firing squad. Mycroft’s postscript evinces a rare touch of brotherly love (or is it simply more cruelty?): she was living in Japan under the name Mrs. Ashdown. Holmes, drained, calmly asks Watson where he has hidden the cocaine. Watson tells him. (“You’re getting better,” Holmes says with real tenderness.) With Holmes having walked swiftly to his room, closing the door behind him, Wilder ends his personal film with a shot of Watson, no longer foolish, sitting in his chair by the fire, pulling his desk toward him, looking at a stack of blank paper, and beginning to write.

  On December 13, after eleven solid months of intensive preproduction work, rewriting, and shooting, Billy was on his way back home. He did not return empty-handed, having purchased one more Henry Moore sculpture—Maquette for Square Form with Cut, a newly cast bronze he bought through the Gimpel Fils Gallery in London.

  Miklós Rózsa’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (Opus 24) had originally been commissioned, performed, and recorded in the 1960s by Jascha Heifetz, and according to Rózsa, Wilder approached him at Walter Reisch’s annual Christmas party “and said he loved my violin concerto and that he had worn out his copy of the record and wondered if I had another one. I was as intrigued as much as flattered but all he would say was, ‘I’ve got an idea.’” Later, Wilder revealed that he was writing Sherlock Holmes and (according to Rózsa, at least) “he had written it around my concerto, inspired by the fact that Holmes liked playing the fiddle.” Billy didn’t give Rózsa quite as much elbow room as he’d given André Previn. As Rózsa put it:

  For the scenes shot in the lovely Scottish highlands Wilder wanted Scottish music of some kind. As usual, I did my homework and wrote music based on some Scottish national tunes I had researched. Wilder complained that it was too Scottish. The scene itself was a happy one, with Holmes, Watson, and the “Belgian” girl scooting along on bicycles. Then Wilder, perhaps remembering “Bicycle Built for Two,” asked for a waltz, but when he heard it he complained that it was too Viennese. There was only one session left, in two days’ time, and he at last allowed me to write something that I considered appropriate. I used the love theme, but with an urgent, pulsating rhythm underneath, and it worked well.

  In March 1970, Wilder was back in London for an appearance at the National Film Theatre, where he reported to his audience that Sherlock Holmes was then being fitted with its musical score. Someone asked him if he would consider it an insult to be called a good commercial director, and Wilder’s answer was characteristic and concise: “It depends on the percentage I have of the picture.” Responding to a question of how Holmes turned out, Wilder answered, “It’s like asking a pregnant woman what the baby’s like. I haven’t seen it yet, and I won’t till I see it with an audience.”

  In point of fact, he had certainly seen the three-hour-and-twenty-minute cut he and his editor, Ernest Walter, had turned in to the Mirisches in Los Angeles. “To my astonishment, they were surprised,” Walter recalls. “But having seen the script in the first place, it was obvious it was going to be a long movie.” United Artists and the Mirisch brothers’ anxiety over Billy’s long, exorbitant, intimate movie heightened considerably after the initial previews: audiences found it dull. Alarmed, they demanded that Billy pare the picture down considerably. They also scuttled the road show plan. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes would be released in a normal manner at a normal length, UA and the Mirisches announced, or it would not be released at all.

  The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was no longer simply about a famous man’s devastating secret life; it had become its director’s personal desolation. Billy raised objections to a level and a volume one can only imagine, but given his recent track record combined with Holmes’s extreme cost (not to mention the catastrophic failure of similarly overproduced films like Doctor Doolittle, Star, and Darling Lili), he had little choice but to accept the Mirisches’ and UA’s harsh decision. Wilder had the right of final cut, of course, but it did him no good if the cut he demanded remained coiled in its cans in a United Artists warehouse.

  “I suggested that we remove the ‘Upside-Down Room’ completely,” Ernest Walter reports. Wilder did so, and Walter returned to England. United Artists and the Mirisches we
re still displeased, so the prologue in the bank, the flashback to Oxford and the prostitute, and the entire “Case of the Naked Honeymooners” were cut out as well. Walter remained concerned about the downbeat ending of Holmes retreating into solitude and cocaine, and he suggested an alternative: “I said to Billy Wilder, ‘Why don’t we end with that scene with [Rogozhin and] the violin and the flowers?’ He wouldn’t have it at all.”

  Billy was brokenhearted. According to Trauner, the evisceration of Holmes “wasn’t done without resistance on his part. But Wilder thinks that if a film isn’t an immediate success it’s because he has failed. So he let them cut the two sequences, and it’s really too bad.”

  The failure of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, however, owes as much to what Wilder left in as to what the Mirisches and United Artists took out. The tone is off. Having bared his own soul with such sweet delicacy in the scenes between Holmes and Gabrielle, Billy was compelled to subvert the romance by way of some peculiarly lame comedy. The scene between Mycroft and Holmes, in which one brother calmly delivers to the other his personal ruin, is exquisite; for Holmes, the revelation of Ilse’s dishonesty is crushing, particularly because the news comes from his lifelong rival. But Wilder is unwilling to sustain this mood, preferring to cut it short with the arrival of Queen Victoria. It’s tacky. “I trust you had a pleasant journey, Ma’am?” Mycroft asks, to which the doughball queen responds: “It was long, and it was tedious, and it had better be worth our while, Mr. Holmes.” There is an unpleasant ring to the line, since it also defines the film’s structure and payoff. By interrupting two of the most heartfelt scenes he ever directed with a fakey Queen Victoria parading around an overly whimsical monster contraption, Wilder misfires so profoundly that the film can’t recover. Then he throws the silly submersible scene itself away with a crass low-angle shot of Victoria uttering her greatest cliché, the inevitable “We are not amused.”

  Victoria was not alone. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes opened at Radio City in the last week of October 1970, and it was gone before Thanksgiving. Its entire domestic gross was $1.5 million.

  In the heat-seeking eyes of American reviewers, old Billy Wilder wasn’t with it anymore. Pauline Kael was bored. For her, Holmes was “rather like the second-class English comedies of the fifties: it doesn’t have enough bounce, and it isn’t really very interesting, but it would be quite pleasant if it didn’t dawdle on for over two hours.” Wilder’s critical fans surfaced only later, in journals. Writing in Film Quarterly the following spring, McBride and Wilmington began by remarking on a certain sea change: “It was only seven years ago (remember?) that the Legion of Decency condemned Kiss Me, Stupid in terms usually reserved for the Whore of Babylon; now it has slipped quietly into release with a GP rating. But Wilder is still harnessed with his old press agent’s image of the bull let loose in the china shop of American Puritanism—and now, with the fragments of the china scattered all over the shop, the reviewers are ready to consign the old bull to the pasture.” McBride and Wilmington saw the poignance with which Billy portrayed his detective hero: “Holmes appeals to Wilder for his human failings more than for his legendary qualities as a detective—The Private Life depicts a crushing humiliation which Dr. Watson has suppressed from public knowledge—but Wilder’s tone is unusually subdued, even elegiac, perhaps because the film is set in a simpler, more gentlemanly era far from the barbarism of James Bond and Pussy Galore.”

  Wilder was bitterly disappointed in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and he blamed himself. “I should have been more daring,” Wilder mused to the director Chris Columbus in the mid-1980s; “I wanted to make Holmes a homosexual…. That’s why he is on dope, you know…. Look,” he continued, “we have been freed now from the Breen Office or the Johnson Office or that stupid thing. In many respects it’s terrifying, because now any idiot and any pornographer can do anything. But for the ones who are a little bit discriminating, who do it delicately, a grand new thing is opened. But that was after Private Life. Just the saddest thing about it is that it was a waste of a year and a half of my life.”

  PART SEVEN

  1971–1998

  29. LOVE AND DEATH

  REPORTER 1: Why the hell don’t we chip in and get some new cards?

  REPORTER 2: Don’t look at me—I haven’t won a hand since Leopold and Loeb.

  —The Front Page

  In 1970 Charles Eames finally gave Billy the napping couch he’d asked for in Nova Scotia fifteeen years earlier during location shooting on The Spirit of St. Louis. It was called, plainly, “the Chaise”—a long, narrow, modernist plank made of aluminum and cushioned in black leather. Conforming to Billy’s specifications, it is self-evidently not a casting couch, since it’s impossible to fit more than one person on it except in a most extreme manner. (The Chaise is only 17.5 inches wide.) Copies soon went on sale at $636 apiece. Wilder loved it, but he had to make a crack nonetheless: “If you had a girlfriend shaped like a Giacometti it would be wonderful.”

  In need of a temporary getaway from the jangle of Hollywood, Billy and Audrey bought a one-story bungalow on Broad Beach Road in Trancas, a slip of land off the Pacific Coast Highway just north of Malibu. The house cost $70,000. The next-door neighbors were Jack and Felicia Lemmon. The Matthaus lived down the block, as did Carroll O’Connor, Goldie Hawn, and Dustin Hoffman. This beach house in an exclusive, star-laden enclave was as close to the model American dream as Billy Wilder got: it featured a rose garden in the backyard and a white picket fence. Trancas had none of the high-gear energy of Malibu—it was more mellow and secluded. But then the Wilders used it only on weekends. The rest of their time was spent in the thick of Beverly Hills and Westwood.

  Holmes’s failure was vast and symptomatic. Hollywood found itself adrift in a jittery sort of way. The town had always been trendy, but now the only trend was heightened confusion. The Best Director nominees for 1970 tell the schizophrenic story: Arthur Hiller for Love Story, Federico Fellini for Fellini Satyricon, Ken Russell for Women in Love, Franklin J. Schaffner for Patton, and Robert Altman for M*A*S*H; Schaffner won. Trying to stay hip in Hollywood while imagining broad, bankable hipness for the rest of the country, nobody was quite sure what movie audiences wanted—especially not older directors who’d grown accustomed to a steady career. Casting about for another project, Billy turned to a play he’d considered and forgotten a few years earlier. Samuel Taylor’s play Avanti! opened and closed on Broadway in 1968 to a cascade of terrible reviews. Even before opening night, however, Charles Feldman had purchased the film rights and announced that Billy was set to direct. Feldman and Wilder remained friendly after The Seven Year Itch, and in fact Billy did some uncredited script doctoring on Feldman’s James Bond send-up, Casino Royale (1967). Julie Christie was mentioned as the top candidate for the leading lady, but perhaps because of the play’s negative notices and the impending production of Sherlock Holmes, Billy put Avanti! on hold. He did take over the option from Feldman, but he didn’t do anything about it until Taylor ran into Diamond one day and asked him to remind Billy about it.

  When Wilder did pick up Avanti! again, Diamond wasn’t part of the game plan. Instead, Billy chose a new old writing partner, Julius Epstein, to help him adapt the play for the screen. The Wilder-Epstein collaboration wasn’t a particularly happy one, and it ended without a draft of Avanti! having been completed, though Epstein was paid $50,000 for his work. A new collaborator was brought in—once again, not Iz. Norman Krasna tried. He failed. Then Luciano Vincenzoni, the Italian playwright and screenwriter best known for his collaboration with Sergio Leone on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967), began working with Billy in the summer of 1971. Avanti!’s premise had shifted. No longer was it the story of a rich young American finding unlikely love in Italy. The protagonist was now an Italian-American trying to recapture his father’s romantic past in their shared homeland. Wilder offered the lead to Nino Manfredi.

  But Vincenzoni departed as well, as did Manfredi, and by Ja
nuary 1972, Billy was back to the old routine—a script with Diamond, a role for Jack Lemmon. Lemmon had a key virtue: like Diamond, he was not only a close friend but also an old one. “At first, I was thinking of casting someone around thirty years old,” Billy explained. “Then I gave him, as a friend, the first half of the script to read, and he asked me to play it. So I adjusted the character to fit his age, and I wrote the second half.” Familiarity, the comfort of habit, is key to Avanti!’s relaxed tone. What Billy said about Lemmon applied equally to Diamond: “I love working with him. We understand each other, and after all these years, we’ve developed a language between us—he understands my half-formed thoughts.”

  By the early spring Avanti! was mostly scripted. The film was now about a middle-aged man who finds redemption by cheating on his wife. Billy himself described it very differently: “It’s basically a love story between a father and a son.” The father, dead throughout, serves for Wilder as a kind of angelic bastard. Heartless toward his family in life (we’re led to believe), he becomes a blessed figure in death—once, that is, his son discovers the old man has been flying to the glorious island of Ischia once a year to wine, dine, and screw a working-class British woman behind his wife’s and family’s back. Wendell Armbruster Jr., the forty-two-year-old head of a large corporation, discovers his father’s secret, cherished life only after Senior drives over an Ischia cliff and spectacularly dies. Junior, having flown to Italy to retrieve one body, discovers two in the morgue, elderly Dad having gone out in a blaze of glory with his lower-class lover in the car beside him. For Junior this is a devastating blow.