On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Whether they screamed and fought over it or simply parted for a few months knowing they’d get back together again in the end, the separation caused Billy an immediate headache. With Brackett bailing out he had to find a new collaborator. He was headstrong, but he knew he couldn’t write this peculiarly American tale of loathing, killing, and sex all by himself, if for no other reason than to get the tough-talking language exactly right. “I wanted James Cain,” said Wilder. “But Cain was working on a script with Fox—something called Western Union for Fritz Lang, believe it or not. And Joseph Stern said to me, ‘There’s a guy around town, an Englishman. He’s never been inside the studio. And I think in order to support himself he was not too long ago stringing rackets for Spalding. But read a few stories in Black Mask and read a couple of his books.’ I did. I was crazy about the guy.”

  By this Billy meant that he was crazy about the guy’s work. The guy himself turned out to be more problematic. Raymond Chandler, a former businessman and oil company executive, had begun a new career as a writer ten years earlier at the age of forty-four. By the time he met Billy Wilder, Chandler had published about twenty short stories, mostly in the magazine Black Mask, and several novels—The Big Sleep in 1939, Farewell, My Lovely in 1940, and The High Window in 1942. He also had a new novel coming out—The Lady in the Lake. They were elegant but hard-boiled, gripping but mannered. Chandler’s first problem as far as Billy was concerned was not that he had no idea how to write a screenplay, but rather that he thought he did: “When he came in, he did not understand that we were going to collaborate on the script. He said, ‘All right, I’ll write you a screenplay. Show me a screenplay—the way it’s written.’ I didn’t show him a screenplay; he just wanted to see ‘fade-in’ and ‘dissolve’ and camera moves—crap that a writer should not even know about. And he said, ‘This being Tuesday, I can’t have it finished until a week from Thursday. Would that be all right?’ Stern and I just looked at each other, it was so fast. ‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘I want a thousand dollars for the script.’ We just looked at each other. We said, ‘Sure.’”

  “By God,” Wilder continued, “a week from Thursday, he came in with eighty pages. He said, ‘I could not quite finish it, but that’s all right. I’ll still do it for a thousand dollars.’ And we read it. It was full of technical things: fade-in, fade-out, dissolve…. And then we sat him down and said, ‘Look, you’re not going to write this thing yourself. You’re going to write it with Mr. Wilder, and it’s not going to be by next Thursday. It’s going to take ten or twelve weeks, and you’re getting two thousand dollars a week.’ He almost fainted.” Another version of Billy’s response is saltier and simpler. After reading Chandler’s first draft, Billy picked it up and threw it at him and said, “This is shit, Mr. Chandler.”

  For the next several months, the two men sat in Paramount’s Writers Building pounding out a screenplay and driving each other to seething distraction. To their great credit, neither felt the need to get the job over with as quickly as possible and go their separate ways. Instead, they hammered methodically for months. Wilder and Chandler even went further in their adaptation than Cain did in his novel, and surprisingly Cain loved what they added: “It’s the only picture I ever saw made from my books that had things in it I wish I had thought of. Wilder’s ending was much better than my ending, and his device for letting the guy tell the story by taking out the office dictating machine—I would have done it if I had thought of it. There are situations in the movie that can make your hands get wet.”

  By the time Chandler came on board in May, Billy and Paramount were already battling the censors. Wilder himself once told an interviewer that “we had no problems whatsoever with the Hays Office,” but that’s nonsense. In mid-March, Joseph Breen informed Paramount that nothing had changed since the novel had originally been submitted for PCA approval, that the basic story line of Double Indemnity still stood in unequivocal violation of the Production Code. Breen could not help but notice that “the leading characters are murderers who cheat the law and die at their own hands.” (Cain’s novel ends with the promise of a double suicide.) Second, “the story deals improperly with an illicit and adulterous sex relationship,” the representation of which was strictly forbidden. Finally, the novel helpfully provided details of the murder, and the PCA, ever vigilant, was firmly opposed to giving the American people instructions on how to kill others. This was clearly going to be a long battle, a test of wills, but Billy had made up his mind. He was going to make Double Indemnity and make it the way he wanted and nothing was going to stop him. The story was just too cruelly appealing.

  Raymond Chandler went to work for Paramount Pictures on May 12, 1943, and he continued to work on salary until November. His collaboration with Billy was a productive hell. Chandler “didn’t really like me—ever,” Wilder avowed. “To begin with, there was my German accent. Secondly, I knew the craft better than he did. I also drank after four o’clock in the afternoon and I also, being young then, was fucking young girls. All those things just threw him for a loop…. He would just kind of stare at me. I was all that he hated about Hollywood.”

  It wasn’t easy for Billy either. Chandler spent the whole day smoking his pipe but refusing ever to open the window, believing as he did that the fresh air of Los Angeles wasn’t as fresh as it was cracked up to be. Between the stale smoke and the constant arguments, Billy kept having to take breaks. He was forever going to the bathroom, not to use the toilet but simply to calm down and ruminate over how much he detested Raymond Chandler. For his part, Chandler threatened to quit and kept on threatening, at least once a week, throughout the collaboration. “Marvelous writer,” Billy once noted, “but he was a nut.”

  Some battles were actually won by Chandler. Wilder tried hard to convince the literate (though as yet largely unsung) master of tough talk to use Cain’s own dialogue directly from the book. He thought it lent authenticity. So he brought in some actors to read aloud sections from the novel to his skeptical cowriter. It didn’t work very well. Lines of dialogue that rang true on the page sounded forced and phony when spoken. Chandler explained the reason to Billy: “I could have told you that Cain’s dialogue in his fiction is written to the eye. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s dialogue it in the same spirit as he has in the book, and not the identically same words.” But Wilder, always stubborn, refused to budge. He brought Cain himself in for another reading, only to find to his chagrin that Cain agreed with Chandler. As Cain described it later, “Chandler, an older man a bit irked by Wilder’s omniscience, had this odd little smile on his face as the talk went on.”

  Cain also reports on his own lesson from the meeting:

  A thing was said at this story conference—and not by Chandler—that made even more of an impression on me. A young guy named Joe Sistrom was Paramount’s producer on the picture. He was bothered that in the script and to some extent in the book this guy hit on the scheme for the perfect murder much too quick and easy. I said that it was implied that he had been subconsciously meditating on this for years. Well, this didn’t satisfy Joe Sistrom. He sat there unhappily in a sulk and then suddenly said, “All characters in B pictures are too smart.” I never forgot it. It was a curious observation, putting into words—vivid, rememberable words—a principle that when a character is too smart, convenient to the author’s purposes, everything begins getting awfully slack in the story, and slick. Slack is one fault and slick is another. Both are bad faults in a story.

  For Billy, the tensions of collaboration were of an entirely different nature than what he was used to. Wilder and Brackett’s cycle of working and shouting together had forged a tight bond between the two men, a kind of screwball love. The more they wrangled, the better they knew each other, the closer they became. But as Chandler and Wilder worked and fought, their hatred for each other only grew and festered. They didn’t socialize, as Billy and Charlie did. They didn’t play cards together, which alone should have told Billy that t
his collaboration would be personally disastrous. Wilder reported: “On the third or fourth week of writing, he didn’t show up. I went to Stern and said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘Well, he was here at nine o’clock this morning, and he wanted to quit. He brought a long list of complaints about you.’ ‘Like what?’ And Stern said, ‘You told him, “Will you close the venetian blinds a little because the sun is shining in?” and there was no “please.”’”

  Then there were the women: “And he says you have two, three, sometimes as many as six calls from females distracting you.’” Billy’s hyperactive, many-partnered sex life seems to have been especially offensive to Chandler. Wilder enjoyed explaining Chandler’s response to his own randiness: “Chandler was typical of a man who was an alcoholic and was on the wagon and was married to a very old lady, and so he had no sex and no booze. And the jealousy came out of him…. But the small revenge I had—because at the very end, he hated me—was that he started drinking, became an alcoholic again. It was tough, you know. Writing together is more intimate than being married.”

  When Wilder says that writing in collaboration is a lot like being married, he speaks as someone with a long history—a man who played around a bit in his youth, then settled down and wrote with only two partners for the rest of his life. Sure, there were a few dalliances here and there between these two marriages, and even during the marriages themselves there were sometimes third partners brought in to keep things interesting. But Billy Wilder was essentially monogamous as a writer. It may have taken his separation from Brackett to prove it to him, but he enjoyed a routine with Charlie, the reassuring flow of everyday life. With Brackett, Billy spent his days with someone he respected—a man who may have been enraged (often) by him and his quirky behavior but who, more fundamentally, knew him well and accepted him for the man he was. They created together. The suite they shared in the Writers Building was as much of a home as Billy had. It was certainly more congenial to him than the isolated estate he owned at the top of Coldwater Canyon, where he kept his wife and daughter. Billy’s domestic life occurred at work. Mornings with Brackett were spent writing and schmoozing; then came lunch. Every working day after their meal they returned to the larger of the two offices in their suite, the room they called their “bedroom,” and took a nap together. Wilder would no sooner have slept in the same room with Raymond Chandler than he would have wanted to catch a nap with Mitchell Leisen.

  Wilder’s actual marriage, meanwhile, was beginning to rot. Its deterioration was spurred by Billy’s raging, insatiable energy. The degree of intimacy Billy enjoyed at work—even, apparently, with Raymond Chandler, who despised him—was less and less a feature of his relationship with Judith. She loved the distance that separated their house on Hidden Valley Road from the shrill buzz of Hollywood and the lunatic competition of Beverly Hills. She liked caring for Vicki, then age three, in the quiet and healthy environment of the upper canyon. She kept horses and loved to ride into the scruffy hills below Mulholland. She kept a garden and tended it in solitude. Billy hated horses, hated quiet, hated solitude. As far as he was concerned, a nurturing environment was one with jazz bands and fine cuisine. He spent less and less time on Hidden Valley Road.

  The strain of a failing marriage, the continuing carnage in Europe—slaughter that was disturbingly complemented by his own rising fame and wealth in Hollywood—his absence from Brackett, and perhaps even lingering grief over the death of his son all combined to send Billy into an intense cycle of promiscuity at precisely the time that he made Double Indemnity. By Wilder’s own admission, Chandler was not exaggerating: women were calling all the time, and Billy was answering. He was throwing his marriage away on a string of meaningless if satisfying lays while cowriting the tensest, most alluring, most convincingly rotten sexual relationship of his career. Only Kirk Douglas’s muscular scorn for the whorish Jan Sterling in Ace in the Hole compares to the itchy, funky contempt Fred MacMurray displays toward Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. Wilder’s explanation for his own state of mind at the time is brief but revealing: “Sex was rampant then, but I was just looking out for myself.”

  While he and Chandler conducted their waltz of loathing and brilliant dialoguing, Billy began the search for a leading man. Walter Neff, the anti-hero of Double Indemnity, is an intelligent, tough-talking dupe—a man smart enough to plan the perfect moneymaking murder, hard enough to actually commit it, and dumb enough to fall for the cheap charms of a much smarter, much harder blonde. For some reason Billy approached George Raft. The popular star of both crime and song-and-dance films had never been known for his mental agility nor his great range. Why Billy thought the beady-eyed gangster-hoofer could play the lead in a complex psychological drama is unclear. Perhaps Billy couldn’t convince anyone else to take the role, owing to the project’s disreputable nature. In any event, Wilder claims to have been surprised when Raft read the script and didn’t get the point. He was amused and appalled at Raft’s response. The actor inquired where was “the lapel bit?” Billy asked what he meant. “You know,” Raft said, “when the guy flashes his lapel, you see his badge, and you know he’s a detective.” Wilder explained that there was no such scene, and Raft declined the role. (Raft’s taste was impeccable; he also turned down The Maltese Falcon.) A grudge appears to have been held, at least in the short term. When Double Indemnity was released to great acclaim, Billy made a point of telling the press about Raft’s refusal to accept the lead he’d offered him: “We knew then that we’d have a good picture.”

  Wilder then approached one of Hollywood’s least likely actors. Fred MacMurray was among Paramount’s chief song-and-dance men, a likable light comedian: Hands Across the Table (1935), The Princess Comes Across (1936), The Bride Comes Home (1936), Sing You Sinners (1938), Star Spangled Rhythm (1942)…. What Wilder saw was MacMurray’s grinning, guy-next-door affability. He wasn’t glamorous and aristocratic. Or rugged. Or callow. What he was—purely, indistinguishably—was American. Fred MacMurray could play a glad-handing everyday salesman. In Billy’s mind at least, he would be perfect as a scheming killer on the make.

  MacMurray greeted Billy’s offer with open disbelief. He thought the idea of playing a murderer was suicidal in terms of his career, and besides, he simply could not imagine that Paramount, with which he was under contract, would ever permit him to stray so far from the happy niche they had carefully tailored for him. Still, faced with the relentless, cajoling pressure of Billy Wilder, MacMurray agreed. According to MacMurray, Wilder pestered him about it every single day—at home, in the studio commissary, in his dressing room, on the sidewalk—until he simply wore him down. Then again, MacMurray thought he was safe. He figured he could afford to cave in to Billy’s wheedling because the boys in the front office were certain to nix the idea anyway.

  MacMurray tended to be pretty pliable as far as the executives were concerned. At least he had been, until his friend and costar Carole Lombard shrewdly and successfully taught him how to play hardball over contract negotiations a few years earlier. By 1943, MacMurray had wised up somewhat to his own authority as a star. His contract was up for renewal, and he was making noises about money again, so Paramount decided to let him hang himself by doing Double Indemnity. The disaster of Double Indemnity would teach him a lesson. And it did, though not the one Paramount’s executives had had in mind.

  For the murderous black widow who ensnares Walter in her trap, Wilder turned to Barbara Stanwyck. Never one to pull a pompous star trip and turn down a plum role for a respected director, Stanwyck hesitated nonetheless. She was frankly worried about the damage playing an evil killer might do to her image. Wilder responded simply but firmly—by taunting her. “Are you a mouse or an actress?” he asked. She took the role.

  “I wanted her to look as sleazy as possible,” Billy has said, lovingly, of his star. Barbara Stanwyck was naturally neither patrician (like, say, Katharine Hepburn) nor charmingly fresh-faced (like Jean Arthur or Ginger Rogers), but her unaffected, even co
mmon beauty wasn’t quite common enough for Wilder. Since she would be playing a siren from Southern California—the kind who wears perfume from Ensenada—Stanwyck’s hair needed to radiate on celluloid as intensely platinum-blonde as possible. So a wig was produced in a shade verging on pure white. This prompted Buddy De Sylva to take one look at the star and remark, “We hire Barbara Stanwyck and here we get George Washington.”

  As their screenplay neared completion in the beginning of September, Chandler and Wilder were still playing around with the central characters’ names. Cain had called his protagonist Walter Huff, but the screenwriters changed it to Neff. Phyllis’s surname, however, was still in flux. She’s Nirdlinger in the novel, but that didn’t quite work, so Chandler and Wilder tried “Derlinger.” Since Paramount stood some risk of legal action if anyone by that name actually turned up, the research department ran a check and reported that “Derlinger” was fine, but only if it was pronounced “Derlinjer.” No matter how it was pronounced, however, “Derlinger” didn’t last. By the end of September when the film went into production, killer-blonde Phyllis had a new surname—the much more evocative “Dietrichson.”