by Ed Sikov
In any event, Double Indemnity was in the can. Paramount News announced—wrongly, as it turned out—that César Franck’s lush but haunted Symphony in D Minor was to be the sole background score for the film; originally, it was to have been played only during the scene in which Walter and Lola sit in the hills above the Hollywood Bowl, but by May it was being considered for the opening titles as well. In fact, however, composer Miklós Rózsa ultimately provided the film with a full, pounding, orchestral background. Wilder gave Rózsa free reign to compose as disturbing a score as he wished. Wilder knew what he wanted in general, tonal terms; it was actually Billy’s idea to use unsettled strings for the scenes between Walter and Phyllis. Rózsa’s musical tastes—described by one critic as “stark and angular with bitter harmonic clashes”—blended well with Wilder’s own visual and emotional style. In the opening credits sequence, Rózsa’s characteristically stressful orchestrations set the tone for the rest of the film. He introduces the score’s main theme immediately, as the silhouette of a man hobbles on crutches toward the camera; it reappears both for Walter and for the man he kills and impersonates. Later, Rózsa develops a different theme for Walter, a relatively neutral running figure for strings, but it sours whenever Phyllis appears; when Phyllis tells Walter that she has arranged the killing, “this theme is given so rancid a harmonization as to impress upon us the full force of her evil.”
Once again, Louis Lipstone, Paramount’s musical director, expressed his contempt for Rózsa’s dissonant score, but Wilder turned to him and said, witheringly, “You may be surprised to hear that I love it. Okay?” Later, Lipstone was heard to complain that the Double Indemnity score sounded like something from The Battle of Russia.
Not only could the Hays Office find no good reason to reject the finished film, the whole thing came in under budget. Paramount had allotted $980,000; Double Indemnity ended up costing $927,262. Billy earned a little less than $44,000 for writing the film and $26,000 for directing it. MacMurray, Stanwyck, and Robinson each made about $100,000 for their performances.
This perverse film’s marketing provided a few choice ironies. The exhibitors’ journal Boxoffice suggested, for instance, that theater owners encourage insurance companies to arrange group screenings for their employees, blithely ignoring the fact that Pacific All-Risk is run by a nincompoop and that its star salesman has spent years figuring out a way to bilk his own company. The only reputable person at All-Risk is an embittered claims investigator who has nothing but contempt for everyone in the firm except Walter, who kills one of his clients. Paramount, meanwhile, was industriously arranging advertising tie-ins for the stars and planting fake stories in Los Angeles newspapers. Perhaps in an attempt to cover up the Dreyfuss affair, Paramount told the Los Angeles Examiner that some of the film’s fans dialed the phone number quoted by MacMurray in the film and got none other than Judith Wilder. “How did you like the picture?” Judith is said to have asked. When the callers wondered who she was, Judith allegedly replied, “I’m Mrs. Billy Wilder. My husband used his own telephone number, and since so many people are calling, we just thought we would check up on how you like the movie.”
More conventionally, though no less bizarrely, Paramount arranged for its leading lady, who played a coldhearted bitch in the film, to appear in ads for such things as Max Factor cosmetics, Bates bedspreads, and Deltah pearls. As the Deltah ad put it, pearls were essential “for that flattering finishing touch.” In appreciation of Barton Keyes’s stogies and the camaraderie expressed by their lighting, the Cigar Institute of America was thrilled with the film and happily distributed window cards to tobacco stores depicting MacMurray lighting Robinson’s cigar. Never mind that the match was held by a double homicide. (One can only wonder what the Cigar Institute’s marketing department would do with the critic Frank Krutnik’s psychoanalytic reading of Double Indemnity, in which Keyes’s cigar is not just a cigar.)
Double Indemnity previewed in Glendale and Westwood in July 1944 to great success, though the latter screening provided a moment of panic when the film began and was almost immediately wolf-whistled. “There goes my picture,” Billy muttered in despair, only to realize with relief that the whistles were for Stanwyck at the top of the stairs in her towel.
Knowing how good his new film was, and confident that he had become one of the best and most commercially successful directors in the business, Billy could afford to pull a few pranks in the trade papers to celebrate the release of Double Indemnity. Self-puffery, a staple of the industry, ran especially amok in the ads producers took out in the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Motion Picture Herald to promote their latest products. David O. Selznick, for instance, was constantly pumping up his pictures—and himself—in ostentatious trade ads designed to turn well-made feature films into paragons of cultural import. His latest opus, a homefront melodrama called Since You Went Away, made its entrance into the marketplace accompanied by a series of ads in which various dignitaries allowed themselves to shill for Hollywood. Since You Went Away, they claimed, was the finest drama they had ever seen, it served such noble purposes, it elevated humanity to unparalleled new levels, and so on, ad nauseum. Since You Went Away were, as Selznick himself said, the four most important words uttered in motion picture history since Gone With the Wind. These ads rankled Billy no end. So he placed an ad of his own: Double Indemnity, it claimed, were the two most important words uttered in motion picture history since Broken Blossoms, thus comparing Griffith’s tender, selfconsciously arty classic with his own dirty murder story. Enjoying the novelty of a parody ad in the trades, Wilder published a second one; it called Double Indemnity “the two most important words since Capital Gains.” Selznick wasn’t at all amused, but one of Selznick’s ex-directors was. Alfred Hitchcock sent Billy a wire: “Since Double Indemnity the two most important words in motion pictures are Billy Wilder.”
Selznick continued placing his self-aggrandizing ads, and so did Billy, though they took a rather different form. The idea that civic leaders were parading themselves around in the pages of the Hollywood Reporter was just too delectably annoying, so Wilder enlisted his own civic leader to help sell Double Indemnity: George Oblath, who ran the greasy spoon across the street from Paramount. “This is what a distinguished restaurateur thinks,” Billy’s ad trumpeted. It continued: “Dear Mr. Billy Wilder. I certainly do appreciate the opportunity you gave me to see your picture Double Indemnity. It held my attention, it held my wife’s attention, it held my sister-in-law’s attention. It certainly was a good picture, one of the best pictures we have seen in several days. Sincerely, George Oblath.” Billy added the final kicker at the bottom of the ad: “Oblath’s: The Best Foods for Less Money and Utmost Effort for Service.” Wilder must have found that line particularly funny, given the cuisine at Oblath’s. As he used to say, Oblath’s was the only place in town where you could get a greasy Tom Collins.
David Selznick did not laugh. In fact, he went completely nuts and threatened to stop advertising in any trade paper that continued to run any more of Billy Wilder’s little jokes. But Billy had no need to print any more of them, since the first three had so squarely hit their target.
Double Indemnity was an immediate hit, despite the fact that “this fat girl Kate Smith” was said by James M. Cain to have “carried on propaganda asking people to stay away from this picture.” (The homespun singer implored the public to shun the film on moral grounds.) As for Raymond Chandler, his collaboration with a volatile, bullheaded foreigner who couldn’t stop pacing was no happier at the end than it was at the beginning. In a widely quoted letter to his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, Chandler complained that “working with Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity was an agonizing experience and has probably shortened my life.” In 1946, Chandler published a scathing attack on Hollywood, and although he didn’t name names, his target was certainly clear enough: “The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking and drabbing, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-per
vasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.” Chandler also griped bitterly in an article in Atlantic Monthly that he wasn’t even invited to his own movie’s preview. But as usual, Billy enjoyed the last laugh. “How could we?” Billy remarked. “He was under a table drunk at Lucey’s.”
13. REELING
It’s like the doctor was just telling me—delirium is a disease of the night. Good night.
—Nurse Bim (Frank Faylen) in The Lost Weekend
It is evident to me,” Maurice Zolotow writes of The Lost Weekend, “that Brackett was writing himself in the characters of Don Birnam’s brother and Jane Wyman, and that Wilder was writing Wilder in the opposing constellation of sardonic characters—Howard Da Silva’s bartender, Doris Dowling’s hooker, Frank Faylen’s homosexual Bellevue Hospital nurse.” As appealing as Zolotow’s theory may be, The Lost Weekend’s appeal to the two screenwriters was much simpler and also more complicated. Both Brackett and Wilder were Don Birnam. They were writers, after all. And while neither Brackett nor Wilder was a terminal drunk, they each bore a familiar burden of self-contempt—familiar to writers, anyway. When Wilder read Charles Jackson’s excruciating novel on a train bound for New York, he certainly found something he could relate to.
The Lost Weekend begins with an epigraph:
And can you, by no drift of circumstance,
Get from him why he puts on this confusion,
Grating so harshly all his days of quiet
With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?
This was Billy’s kind of book—a psychologically sharp, miserably accurate page-turner about a man in awful trouble. Still, however much he responded personally to the central character’s torments, given his own recent history with Raymond Chandler he must also have been quite entertained by the idea of writing and directing a detailed portrait of a lush novelist. By the time he got to Penn Station he had an outline for the film he planned to make. He telephoned Brackett immediately upon his arrival. It was only 6:00 A.M. in Bel-Air, but Wilder knew his partner wouldn’t mind the intrusion. He was certain that The Lost Weekend was a story to which Brackett would relate as well.
Charlie’s wife, Elizabeth Fletcher Brackett, was generally reclusive, a severe alcoholic. Brackett had her institutionalized once, but the treatment failed and Elizabeth kept drinking. She was scarcely the only drunk in his life. Charlie Brackett had served as nurse and helpmate to a variety of other, more famous boozers over the years, including Robert Benchley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker. One of Dashiell Hammett’s biographers even credits Brackett with rescuing Hammett from a particularly unresponsive drunken stupor in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in the late 1930s. Brackett and his wife paid Hammett’s enormous bill out of their own pockets, so the story goes, after which they sobered him up enough to get on a plane back to Lillian Hellman in New York. (Then again, according to Diane Johnson’s biography of Hammett, it was the Hacketts, not the Bracketts, who bailed out and dried out Dashiell Hammett.)
Brackett might have had another personal interest in The Lost Weekend—one that had nothing to do with drinking. If the story is true, Billy would have known about it, though he’s never discussed the matter in public; if it’s not true, it only serves as further evidence of how bogus Hollywood gossip can be. One of the most compelling and disturbing aspects of Charles Jackson’s novel is its portrait of a deeply closeted gay man. Don Birnam drinks, in part, to deaden himself to his own identity. He knows it is true but he cannot come to terms with it:
All the woeful errors of childhood and adolescence came to their crashing climax at seventeen. They gathered themselves for a real workout in the passionate hero-worship of an upperclassman during his very first month at college, a worship that led, like a fatal infatuation, to scandal and public disgrace.… It was a dread that he fully understood, but which carried so many other fears in its wake that he had never been able to free himself of anxieties since his seventeenth year.
Zolotow describes Brackett’s failed attempts to get Wilder to cast his son-in-law, James Larmore, in a small role in The Lost Weekend. Larmore, according to Zolotow, was delightful when he was sober, but he was a mean drunk. A former chorus boy, Larmore was working as Brackett’s assistant during the time Brackett and Wilder wrote The Lost Weekend, and Wilder grew to detest him. “Larmore was an actor,” Zolotow writes, but “Wilder would not cast him in any picture he directed. Brackett pointed out that Billy put girlfriends into their pictures, so why shouldn’t Larmore have a chance? Billy stopped going to the Bracketts’ on Sundays because he did not want to run into Larmore.” The missing element of Zolotow’s pregnant description is this: the Hollywood rumor mill of the 1940s had it that Larmore had been Brackett’s lover as well as his son-in-law.
Whatever the underlying personal dirt may have been with Brackett, The Lost Weekend’s appeal for Billy was its danger. This was a novel about a closet-case drunk. Its protagonist’s mind is twisted, its authorial voice morbid in its self-deceits and overarching despair. Jackson painstakingly traces Don Birnam’s obfuscations and denials, his clouded dreams and morose ramblings. Best of all, Jackson’s is not a romanticized view of alcoholism. The hero of both the novel and the film of The Lost Weekend doesn’t wallow and sink against a backdrop of neon and love. He’s just a sad, ordinary drunk who wastes his life. He appealed to Billy’s imagination.
Energized by the idea of writing something so wrenching—and evidently grateful to be back with each other again—Brackett and Wilder returned to their old routine in the spring of 1944: work, talk, cards, gossip, lunch, naps, work, talk, and work. They began writing The Lost Weekend at the end of May, having put another idea on hold—a picture for Joan Fontaine. Brackett and Wilder had been kicking around the idea of adapting a Ferenc Molnár play, Olympia, but for various reasons it hadn’t gotten off the ground. A budget was drawn up, rights were purchased, preliminary casting decisions were made—Fontaine would play Olympia, Ray Milland would be her romantic interest, and Erich von Stroheim would play the chief of police—but then came some unpleasant news. Although Paramount had paid MGM $30,000 for what the studio believed were worldwide rights, the fact was that the purchase failed to include a crucial piece of the pie—the American rights. As a result, $29,999 had to be written off to overhead, and Olympia was postponed.
Brackett and Wilder threw themselves into The Lost Weekend. Billy’s nose for publicity was sharp, and he had more than enough energy to tackle some new filmmaking challenges. He understood that it took guts to make a film about a drunk—the kind of guts that would get a lot of attention. He also set himself a difficult artistic task to keep his mind from wandering. He told the New York Times in mid-July that 70 percent of The Lost Weekend would be silent.
For the part of Helen, the concerned girlfriend, Wilder wanted Katharine Hepburn. In the novel, Birnam’s girlfriend barely figures; Jackson’s Birnam is barely interested in women. He makes some noises about Helen here and there, but there’s no passion. Some nervous play with a prostitute named Gloria occurs, but it leads nowhere. At the same time, he finds himself thinking about his old boyhood chum Mel, and how they used to fool around in a shed behind the Presbyterian church, and how Mel fantasized about a girl while they were doing it while Don shocks himself by imagining Mel’s father. And naggingly, his thoughts keep returning to his old fraternity brother and the story of why he’d been thrown out of the fraternity and how it was just a misunderstanding. He hadn’t meant that, no. That wasn’t what he meant at all.
That, of course, needed to be drastically downplayed for the film version, if not entirely eliminated. The Production Code permitted no treatment of homosexuality, let alone an emotionally sympathetic one. A ready method of covering over the central character’s sexuality was to expand the role of
his putative girlfriend and then give the part to a magnetic star. Hepburn was intrigued enough by what Billy told her initially, and she became even more so after he began reading whole stretches of the script to her over the telephone as soon as he and Brackett wrote them. But Hepburn had a problem: she was already committed to costarring with Spencer Tracy in Without Love at MGM in August, when The Lost Weekend was scheduled to roll. By the last week in July, the idea was history—Hepburn was officially out. Billy gave the script to Jean Arthur.
Throughout the summer of 1944, the Hays Office was reading those small portions of the script that Brackett and Wilder submitted to them and earnestly rejecting them on moral grounds. The start date of the film was pushed back to late September. Don Birnam was no longer gay, but he was still a drunk, and that fact alone was enough to rattle the PCA. Hollywood radio commentator Jimmie Fidler reported that Paramount had to “scrap the valuable property and rewrite the story,” the Hays Office having “banned it because the plot concerns a man who spends a drunken weekend.” Fidler’s announcement wasn’t just breathless. It was totally false; Wilder and Brackett did not have to scrap their work at all. Fidler’s broadcast nevertheless illustrates some of the nervous buzz surrounding The Lost Weekend within the industry.
Billy thrived on precisely this kind of tension. It was scarcely the first time he had deliberately picked a troubled property, and it would hardly be the last. Remarkably, Paramount continued to green-light his ideas on the promise, or at least the hope, of their eventual approval by the PCA, in spite of the fact that The Lost Weekend was proving to be as difficult in this regard as Double Indemnity had been. Billy’s chief goal was to make the film as brutally realistic as possible. There would be no soft-focus photography here, no back lot New York street scenes, no generic Hollywood sets. Once again, he wanted his film to be as hard as he was. He wanted to make a picture that was somehow both raw and polished—a work of art so involving that audiences, immersed in the harsh world he created for them, would never notice the artistry. The Lost Weekend was going to watch a man slide into a self-induced hell, and the trip would not be beautiful.