On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  In March, he appeared at the Oscars as one of three presenters of the Best Picture award. John Huston, Akira Kurosawa, and Billy made their entrance to a standing ovation, though Huston, suffering from advanced emphysema, had to be wheeled onto the stage on a strict timetable. As Wilder recalls, “They had the presentation carefully orchestrated so they could have Huston at the podium first, and then he would have forty-five seconds before he would have to get back to his wheelchair and put the oxygen mask on.” The plan was for Huston to open the envelope and then hand it to Kurosawa, who, according to Billy, “was to fish the piece of paper with the name of the winner out of the envelope and hand it to me, then I was to read the winner’s name.” But there was a problem. “Kurosawa was not very agile, it turned out, and when he reached his fingers into the envelope, he fumbled and couldn’t grab hold of the piece of paper with the winner’s name on it. All the while I was sweating it out; three hundred million people around the world were watching and waiting. Mr. Huston only had about ten seconds before he needed more oxygen.” A quip came to mind. According to Billy (who went on to tell the joke as often as possible), he wanted to turn to Kurosawa—and the microphone—and say, “Pearl Harbor you could find.”

  The following month, a reporter from the Austrian monthly Profil got Billy on the phone and asked him about the current Kurt Waldheim scandal. No longer the secretary general of the United Nations, Waldheim was running for the presidency of Austria, and his Nazi past had surfaced. (Until then, Waldheim simply lied about having been an intelligence officer for the German army unit that dispatched most of the Jews of Salonika to Nazi death camps in 1943.) The young Viennese reporter wanted to know what the old one’s impressions were. “We are living on the other side of the world,” Billy explained. “People here still think that Beethoven is Austrian and Hitler German.” Americans have their own problems, Wilder continued, though he didn’t much care what they were: “How the vox populi is, I really have no idea. First, I don’t think people are very interested in Waldheim, and second, I don’t see the populi.” As for Waldheim’s shady past, “We have bigger problems than what he did fifty years ago,” Billy said impatiently. But then, he added, the Holocaust itself was no big deal either: “I was embarrassed during the time of Hitler. It was a huge shame. Now it’s a small detail—a postscript.”

  He turned eighty in June. “For a while I felt either morose or suicidal,” he confessed in a letter to Miklós Rózsa the following year (on the occasion of Rózsa’s own eightieth birthday), “but then I came up with a little trick. I started lying about my age. No, I’m not making myself younger. Now I’m telling everybody I’m ninety-five. Suddenly they all wonder at my youthful appearance. For eighty I look slightly moldy. For ninety-five I’m a remarkable specimen.”

  In May 1987, he and Audrey traveled to Europe for a well-received revival screening of One, Two, Three in Berlin. They stopped off in Paris, where they tried to get in touch with Marlene Dietrich, to no avail. Dietrich had become more reclusive than ever. Billy called her on the phone: “After pretending to be her own masseuse or a cook, she admitted it was herself. At first Marlene had agreed to see my wife and me. We offered to take her out for dinner or to bring food to her apartment—anything that would please her. But then she changed her mind, saying that she had to go to an eye doctor. It was obvious she just didn’t want to see anyone. Or anyone to see her.” She died in 1992.

  When he received the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award later that year, he knew there was only one reason. As he told Armand Deutsch, “I’m getting it because Lubitsch is dead.” Billy was publicly grateful but privately disturbed; as Deutsch later described it, Billy saw the award as “simply another marker to the grave.” Interviewed by Lubitsch’s biographer Scott Eyman around this time, Wilder waxed morose. He continued to be haunted by the past—in particular, his own inability to measure up to it. “You know,” he mused, “if one could write Lubitsch touches, they would still exist, but he took that secret with him to his grave. It’s like Chinese glass blowing. No such thing exists anymore. Occasionally, I look for an elegant twist and I say to myself, ‘How would Lubitsch have done it?’ And I will come up with something and it will be like Lubitsch but it won’t be Lubitsch. It’s just not there anymore.”

  Still, Wilder’s trip to Berlin had gotten him thinking; now he was talking to Jackie Mason about remaking One, Two, Three—in China. Billy didn’t express the desire to direct the picture himself—by this point even he was forced to admit that he just didn’t feel up to it anymore—but he was interested in supervising the project for Buddy Buddy’s coproducer, Jay Weston. Arthur Hiller was asked to direct. The film never got made.

  On April 11, 1988, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented Billy Wilder with its Thalberg Award at ceremonies at the Shrine Auditorium. Jack Lemmon introduced the winner, noting that the award had only been given to twenty-five people in its fifty-year history. “Mere mortals need not apply,” he said. Calling Billy “a master of the art of the movie, unfailingly true to himself and his audience,” Lemmon presented the heavy award to Wilder, who immediately handed it right back to him. “I have a feeling it is going to break,” he said. Billy then made a five-minute acceptance speech before a worldwide audience. He thanked the Academy and “all the millions of fans I have all over the world—the civilized world,” he made sure to add. The grateful Wilder also made a point of saluting “one specific gentleman without whose help I would not be standing here tonight. I have forgotten his name but I have never forgotten his compassion.” It was the American consul in Mexicali who in 1934 granted him permanent entry into the United States, but only after finding out that he was a movie writer. At the end of the speech, Billy added one final, personal remark to an ailing friend: “I hope you’re watching, I. A. L., because part of this is yours. So get well, will you?” The Los Angeles Times opined that Billy’s acceptance speech “about his career lasted almost as long as his career.”

  In the backstage pressroom, Wilder was in fine form. First he ripped into the Coca-Cola Company for interfering in the operations of its subsidiary, Columbia Pictures: “It would never occur to a filmmaker to go to Atlanta and tell them how to make a soft drink. I worked at Paramount for eighteen years. They were making fifty pictures a year. Now they’re making four or five, and they’re always looking over your shoulder. In the old days, we had the moguls. At least you knew whose ass to kiss.” A reporter then asked him how he most wanted to be remembered. “As a great lover,” he said, after which Jack Lemmon whisked him away. “Mr. Wilder has to point his peter at the porcelain,” Lemmon explained.

  Izzie Diamond was ill, and gravely so, when Billy wished him well over the airwaves. He was far sicker than Wilder was able to acknowledge, even to himself. Ten days later, Billy’s closest friend and most intimate professional associate was dead. Diamond, true to form, had steadfastly refused to tell Billy the truth—it was multiple myeloma—until very late in the course of his illness, preferring to keep it to himself and work on, unencumbered by emotion. As one of Wilder’s friends put it, Billy was “flattened” by Diamond’s death. “He knew he had that disease four years,” Wilder told David Freeman later. “He never said a word. Finally, when we were talking about something I thought we could do, he said, ‘I better tell you, I guess.’” A month later, Billy was in his office with an interviewer but more alone than ever. “He used to sit in that chair there, the Eames chair,” Wilder reflected. “Raymond Chandler said in one of his books, ‘Nothing is as empty as an empty swimming pool.’ Well, nothing is as empty as this Eames chair now. I feel very sentimental about it. The way we had plotted this script—the script about our lives—was that being twelve or fourteen years older I was supposed to go first. And as you see, that didn’t happen.”

  There was still no work, though as late as 1994 he was telling the press of his latest filmmaking schemes. The book he most wanted to make into a film was Josefine Mutzenbacher, he ann
ounced to a British magazine that year. A porno novel by Felix Salten, “it is the diary of a prostitute whose father was a janitor,” said Billy. There were always trade papers to read, gossip to spread, industry news to bemoan. Having arrived in Hollywood in 1934 in the midst of a war between scripters and studio executives, Billy followed the Writers Guild strike of 1988 with interest. He supported the strikers, of course, and he did so publicly in a letter read aloud at a Studio City rally in late July. He was currently resting at the beach house on doctor’s orders, Billy wrote, but that was the only reason he didn’t make a personal appearance. The strike was then twenty weeks old. “We are all writers together,” Billy declared, “from those of us fortunate enough to have the Academy Award to the WGA member so new that he or she hasn’t yet heard the joke about the Polish actress.”

  He still considered himself a working writer, and he always would. In November, Doubleday announced a new book deal: Billy Wilder had finally agreed to write his memoirs. He had the chance to set the record straight—about his youth, about his films, about that cockamamie Ilse story…. Billy’s book was scheduled for publication in 1990. He brought in cowriter Herman Gollub, who soon departed. That book was never completed, but in 1998, the film director Cameron Crowe announced that he was working with Wilder on Conversations with Billy, a series of film-by-film interviews modeled after the book-length dialogue François Truffaut conducted with Alfred Hitchcock in 1966.

  At home with Audrey, life proceeded as a ceaseless string of purchases (art, clothing, knickknacks, books) and attempts to increase the apartment’s storage capacity. The Wilders’ penthouse had long been a marvel of juxtaposition, not to mention capacity. Above an autographed picture of Marilyn Monroe hung a Renoir. Frank Stella paintings graced the bathroom. Saul Steinberg drew Billy one of his famous scribbled diplomas; Billy hung it in a place of honor over the desk in his den. In a small powder room were Matisse drawings. The bar featured six Henry Moore maquettes. Billy and Audrey shared their quarters with Kirchner, Rouault, Vuillard, Caillebotte, Münter, Nicholson, Braque, Miró, Hockney, Hartung, Marini, Manzu, Hepworth, Maillol, Calder, Giacometti, Lachaise, Graham, Jawlensky, Klee, Vivin, Rimbert, Bombois, Perennet, Botero, Balthus…. “You start collecting material objects,” Billy reflected, “so you wind up having to buy a house at the beach.”

  As a senior curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art once said, “There’s nothing like it in Los Angeles. It’s the kind of personal collection that is rare now, with a taste for the small and felt work of art and a sense of wit and humor. Billy bought at a time when he had a tremendous amount of choice, and he’s always had an exquisite eye.” Literally, as it happened: one of his favorite works was an anonymous French oil painting of a single human eyeball—in Billy’s description, “a cross between Magritte and CBS.” “I don’t have a collection,” Wilder said. “I have accumulations, like a squirrel.”

  Several years earlier, Wilder commented on the fact that the art in his office was almost completely nonrepresentational: “I prefer to look at abstract works when I work, rather than landscapes, portraits, or still lifes. You look around a lot when you write a script, when you try to resolve a narrative problem or find a good reply, and if you fix on a landscape or a cup of fruit, it quickly becomes annoying. But an abstract canvas can signify different things at different times. It can become a portrait or a still life. It stimulates my imagination and lets me invent my own story.” Wilder also said that he bought what he liked, without caring about its projected future value, and that when he was really crazy about something he would never consider selling it: “I never collected paintings, sculptures, African or Oceanic art to protect me against inflation. When I’m crazy about a canvas, I could never envision selling it. Nor would I separate myself from a dog I love.” “It’s a sickness,” Billy went on. “I don’t know how to stop myself. Call it bulimia if you want—or curiosity, or passion. I have some Impressionists, some Picassos from every period, some mobiles by Calder. I also collect tiny Japanese trees, glass paperweights, and Chinese vases. Name an object, and I collect it.”

  In the 1980s Billy Wilder became an avant-garde artist himself. His plastic-artistic creations were, characteristically, both witty and crowd pleasing. One of his sculptures, for example, was called Stallone’s Typewriter. The work, constructed in the immediate post-Rambo period, consisted of an old Underwood that Billy painted in camouflage colors and appliquéd with bullets and little toy guns. The stars and stripes wrapping the platen provided additional political irony. Several years later, in December 1993, Wilder curated a show of his own work at his longtime friend and art dealer Louis Stern’s gallery in Beverly Hills. The exhibition included Variations on the Theme of Queen Nefertete I, a sculpture Wilder cocreated with Bruce Houston; the ravishing Egyptian queen sported a Campbell’s soup can on her head. A necklace made of smaller red-and-white tins graced her throat. This Fish Needs a Bicycle and Marble Salesman’s Sample Case were also featured in the exhibition.

  Because his tastes ran toward “good examples of painters I love,” and because he was always a shrewd deal maker, Billy was known for trading up in the art world. For example, he once swapped a minor Cézanne watercolor for Kirschner’s Two Nudes. Lesser oil paintings by Roualt and Miró were also swapped—for five small Picassos in crayon and watercolor. He once traded Charles Eames two Yoruba tribal sculptures (a jaguar and a leopard) for a rare Calder stabile that Eames had acquired from Joseph Cornell.

  In 1989, Billy decided to part with some of it. The art market had skyrocketed in the giddy, greedy 1980s, and Billy, having been out of the public eye (except for all the awards ceremonies he didn’t enjoy), was curious to know what ninety-four of his choicest pieces would pull in on the grossly inflated market. Christie’s handled the sale. “I wanted to test my willpower,” he said. “I kept reading about those fantastic sales, those incredible prices. So one day I said to my wife, ‘Let me call their bluff.’” After a series of small, sample showings in Tokyo, Zurich, Geneva, and Paris, the Billy Wilder Collection was shown for two days in September at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Crystal Room.

  Asked why he decided to sell, Wilder cited several factors: “An art collection is a living thing, like a river,” he said. “If you don’t keep developing it, it becomes a silent pond. Algae starts to grow. It starts to smell.” In addition, Billy noted, the idea of completing his collection at current prices was impossible: “Fifty years ago, of course, you paid just a small fraction of today’s prices. Moreover, I didn’t have enough room in my apartment, which is quite big, but not as big as a whole house. The walls weren’t long enough. Finally, I didn’t want to pay the huge insurance premiums.” He tried out another metaphor on someone else: “A collection needs to grow with the times or it becomes like an old suit—you love it, but the moths have eaten it.” Moreover, he allowed, “We worried that the people in the apartment above ours would let the bathtub overflow.” Finally, he claimed that he didn’t want Audrey, whom he had begun calling the “widow-to-be,” to have to deal with the whole thing after his death.

  David Hockney, Tony Bennett, Walter Matthau, Victoria Principal, Peter Falk, Betty White, and Henry Mancini all showed up at the Crystal Room for the preauction viewing. Hockney was most impressed by Balthus’s La Toilette; “It’s magnificent,” he marveled. Billy was enormously pleased and surprised by the crowd’s seriousness of purpose. “Amazing,” he said. “People didn’t just run for the cocktails and for friends to talk about their private lives. They actually talked about the paintings.” He had no plans to maintain a discreet distance from the auction itself: “I want to be present at the fight. Money is of less importance than the inner satisfaction that I was on the right Lotto numbers.… I’d like to give a little advice to the purchasers,” he declared: “‘This Matisse drawing needs to be in the shade,’ or ‘That Braque needs to be watered three times a week.’ I had those things for twenty, thirty, forty years. Now they’ll just have to leave their pare
nts’ house and see whether they can stand on their own two feet.”

  At the auction itself, held on November 13, Billy paced the floor of the sale room while Audrey watched from the safety of Christie’s boardroom, where she was joined by Claudette Colbert, Angie Dickinson, and Dominick Dunne. The sale progressed smoothly, and a short time later Billy’s collection was dispersed to collectors and museums all over the world. The take: $32.6 million.

  The highest price—$4,840,000—was paid for Picasso’s 1921 pastel, Classic Head of a Woman. As high as the price may seem, however, it was actually disappointing. Before the auction the work was estimated to be worth as much as $7,000,000; Christie’s low estimate was $160,000 more than the final bid. Kirchner’s Two Nudes on a Blue Sofa brought in $1,540,000. The Balthus pulled in $2,090,000. An American dealer bought Miró’s 1936 gouache The Farmer and His Wife for $2,700,000, while Miró’s 1927 oil painting The Star brought in $2,600,000. Giacometti’s painted bronze sculpture Standing Woman II took in $1,100,000. “It was less nerveracking than a film preview,” said Billy. Also, as Wilder made sure to point out, he paid about $14 million in taxes.

  Billy sold only the most valuable pieces in his collection, which meant that the Wilders’ penthouse still hosted drawings, paintings, sculptures, and a wide array of African-primitive and pre-Columbian art, not to mention a library of over two thousand books. Thus the anxiety the following month when two explosions and a fire broke out at a construction site next door. Billy and Audrey had to be evacuated along with the other residents. Four hundred firefighters arrived to battle five separate blazes, which spread into the lower floors of the Wilders’ building. Twenty-two of the building’s apartments were destroyed or severely damaged. The Wilders’, fortunately, was not among them, though there was considerable smoke damage. Billy noted with relief that while his current policy would cover the costs of conservation, he and Audrey would have been vastly underinsured if the fire had happened before the auction.