On Sunset Boulevard

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On Sunset Boulevard Page 38

by Ed Sikov


  By order of the High Command,

  BRACKETT AND WILDER

  Brackett and Wilder had a valid concern—if not over Edith Head’s ideas of what costume spectacle should look like, then certainly over the front office’s philistinism. For Brackett and Wilder, a certain realistic, understated taste had to prevail, even if their new film was a baroque imperial fantasy.

  The Emperor Waltz was a weird film for Wilder to make, even—or perhaps especially—at the time. For one thing, he hated operettas. He has always claimed, for good reason, to have been sick of writing them in Berlin in the early 1930s. Now, as an Oscar-winning writer-director who could have chosen to make practically any film he wanted to make in 1946, here he was returning to royalty, romance, and song. The Emperor Waltz was part of Billy’s ongoing attempt to keep directing films against his own type. From The Major and the Minor Wilder moved on to a combat picture; from Five Graves to Cairo he took on and helped to invent film noir; from Double Indemnity he moved to social-problem drama with a horror twist. What was left after The Lost Weekend except a gaudy musical starring the Hapsburgs?

  His imagination drawn back to Vienna and Berlin, Wilder made two films in the mid- to late-1940s that attempt to reclaim his own wounded history. His urge to document the harsh ironies of postwar Berlin in A Foreign Affair parallels the desire to re-create, in The Emperor Waltz, the stately, mannered Vienna that predated his own birth. Wilder’s cultural heritage, the artistic patrimony of a displaced Viennese-Berliner, had not been obliterated by Nazism and the war, but his family had been. Where did this leave him? The Emperor Waltz, just as much as A Foreign Affair, is a lavish, high-budget effort to come to terms with himself and his double-edged identity.

  The conflict was not unique to Billy Wilder. Who and where he was, the languages he spoke, his childhood and how differently his life was turning out, the continuing doubt about whether he fit in anywhere—these were questions of the mind and soul, and the whole refugee community was asking them. The end of the war only brought the matter into the realm of practicalities. When the Allies defeated the Germans a new set of decisions surfaced: Should they remain as increasingly assimilated refugees in a foreign land that accepted them, or to return home to people that had tried to slaughter them? To reclaim their rightful place as humanistic, enlightened Austro-German culture makers, or to abandon it altogether in favor of the great wash of Americanism?

  Erich Pommer, after years in exile, returned to Germany in 1946 to work with the Americans to rebuild the German film industry. Indeed, by that point Pommer was an American himself, having earned United States citizenship in 1944. Hans Albers repatriated as well. Eventually so did Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Bertolt Brecht. Douglas Sirk went back and soon left again, as did Fritz Lang. Marlene Dietrich maintained a harshly ambivalent attitude about Germany for the rest of her life; to many Germans she was a traitor. “This was the most poignant of endings,” Anthony Heilbut writes. It went “beyond the loss of language or a reading public, for it called into question an entire cultural inheritance: What could one possibly retain from this ‘shitty people’? Writers of dissimilar persuasions shared a sense of fatal estrangement. Perhaps the most famous statement about this was Adorno’s postwar remark that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric.” Stefan Zweig described Rilke as an exotic bird who would never be able to fly again, thanks to the violent heritage bestowed upon Germany by the Nazis: “Will such lyricism again be a possibility in this era of turbulence and universal destruction? Is it not a lost tribe that I am bemoaning?” Zweig resolved his own conundrum fatally; he committed suicide in 1942 in South America. For his part, of course, Adorno didn’t have to face the question of whether or not to write poetry after Auschwitz because he had never written poems to begin with.

  Billy Wilder made movies—specifically, world-class Hollywood movies—and there was no question about his continuing to do so after Auschwitz. What’s bizarre is that after scrutinizing countless thousands of feet of celluloid that chronicled the horrors of the death camps, Wilder turned to a Viennese-Tyrolean reverie in glorious Technicolor. The Emperor Waltz would be his first film that wasn’t toned in various shades of gray. Still, this supersaturated extravaganza was going to tell Billy Wilder’s kind of story. It is the tale of two dogs and how they rut.

  Brackett and Wilder opened their script at Schönbrunn Palace, where an American, Virgil Smith (Crosby), climbs an exterior wall. He makes his way onto a balcony, opens the shutters, smashes the window, and enters the palace still wearing his earmuffs. He meets the countess Johanna Franziska von Stoltzenberg-Stoltzenberg (Fontaine). They argue. She calls him “Swine!” He waltzes away with her. Nobles, including a gossipy monsignor, sit on the sidelines discussing the relationship, at which point a flashback takes the audience to the beginning of the scandalous affair, with Virgil arriving at the palace with a mysterious black box and a dog.

  The dog, an American impure-bred, is named Buttons. He soon meets a chic black poodle named Scheherazade, whose mistress is Johanna. The canines fall instantly in love with each other, though in their initial encounter they express their passion in screwball style by snapping at each other viciously. Buttons takes the worse bruising; Scheherazade bites him clear to the bone. (This is a pleasure Brackett and Wilder deny Johanna in her dealings with Virgil.) Virgil’s box turns out to be a gramophone, an invention he tries to sell to the emperor. Buttons, one then realizes, is a dead ringer for the RCA Victor dog. Complications, insults, love, emotional turmoil.… By the end of the movie, Scheherazade and Buttons have exercised their concupiscence. Three mongrel puppies result. On the set they nicknamed them Hart, Shaffner, and Marx.

  In a stroke of commercial if not artistic aptitude, Brackett and Wilder cast Paramount’s most popular star, Bing Crosby, in the lead. In 1946, the two-time “Father O’Malley” was both America’s top box office draw and the nation’s most successful radio crooner. As one musical director described it, Bing’s voice was “phonogenic”—smooth and melodic in person, exquisite and resonantly velvety when recorded. One 1946 estimate claimed that more than half of the eighty thousand weekly hours of recorded radio music were filled by Bing Crosby alone. Twenty-five million people listened to his radio show every week. Each of his films was seen by 250 million people worldwide. In 1948, when The Emperor Waltz was released, Crosby was named by the Motion Picture Herald as the year’s male box office champ, but the award startled no one because it was the fifth year in a row that Bing had nabbed the title. “Mr. Crosby is entitled to the all-time box office championship,” the Herald concluded. Crosby got $125,000 for his appearance in The Emperor Waltz.

  Joan Fontaine’s deal was more complicated, since she was under contact to David O. Selznick, who then proceeded to loan her to RKO. For Selznick, she did Rebecca; for RKO Fontaine starred in Suspicion; both were directed by Alfred Hitchcock. For her appearance in The Emperor Waltz, Paramount was obliged to pay RKO $249,000 for Fontaine’s services, with RKO paying a portion back to Selznick. Fontaine herself earned a signing bonus of $50,000 for doing the film as well as $3,000 per week, with $36,000 guaranteed.

  The Emperor Waltz featured two stars—one very big, the other gargantuan. Their billing order was resolved diplomatically. Fontaine’s contract reads: “Joan Fontaine shall receive first star billing, except however that Bing Crosby may be accorded first star billing, providing the Artist is co-starred with Bing Crosby on the same line, in the same size of type, and with equal prominence.” It might go without saying that both Crosby’s and Fontaine’s names were placed over the film’s title, an honor the film’s Oscar-winning director wouldn’t be granted for fifteen more years.

  For the pivotal role of the emperor, Wilder chose Oscar Karlweis, a fellow refugee. Karlweis had recently starred on Broadway in a musical, but he was an unknown in Hollywood. And yet he didn’t come particularly cheap. Karlweis’s deal with Paramount was set for $3,500 per week for a period of almost twelve weeks. This was higher
than Billy’s $2,500 weekly rate for writing the screenplay. (Brackett was now up to $3,000 per week as a writer—the same as Billy’s rate for directing.)

  Brackett and Wilder turned a first draft of The Emperor Waltz in to the PCA in late March or April. Joseph Breen got back to them in early May. As usual, there was trouble. The PCA rejected the whole thing outright. The censors, Breen wrote, “regret to have to report that in our opinion this material is unacceptable from the standpoint of the Production Code. This basic unacceptability arises from the offensive sex-suggestiveness inherent in a parallel between the mating of two dogs and the love affair of their respective owners. Such a story idea would, we believe, be enormously offensive to mixed audiences everywhere.” A meeting was arranged. Billy, Charlie, and Luraschi sat down with Joseph Breen and Geoffrey Shurlock from the PCA and went over the first draft of The Emperor Waltz in detail. Together, they removed the dogs’ sexuality from the movie as well as all references to excretions.

  After caving in to the censors’ demands on some obvious points, including the excision of the word bitch, Brackett and Wilder were now free to make The Emperor Waltz more or less the way they wanted. With Breen’s own fingerprints on the revised script he could scarcely fail to pass the picture. Minor annoyances continued in the months to come, though. “The expression ‘poop’ is unacceptable,” the writers were later told, “because of its vulgar connotation.” Actually, Brackett and Wilder’s use of poop didn’t even have to do with the dogs but was, instead, a reference to a tiresome human character. Even as late as the end of August, Brackett and Wilder, having not fully learned their lesson, were still writing new scenes in which the canines were doing things they shouldn’t: “The dog wetting business is unacceptable,” at least as far as the PCA was concerned. Through all of this, clearly, it was Brackett and Wilder who were really being the bad little doggies. The thankless task of training them fell to Joseph Breen.

  Much of the film was to be shot on location in Alberta’s Jasper National Park, a place of sumptuous natural beauty. Drastic mountains, lush green forests, a glacial lake, the intense blue of a Canadian Rockies sky—Jasper would photograph extremely well. It also meant that Paramount’s expansive entourage would have to be housed and fed in Alberta for a full month. The elaborate palace interiors and exteriors, meanwhile, would be meticulously constructed on the Paramount lot. First of all, there was Schönbrunn Palace to re-create. An enormous ballroom, the emperor’s throne room, a lengthy gallery, and the emperor’s private closet needed to be built, all in eighteenth-century rococo style. Then there was the emperor’s hunting lodge, with various living rooms done up in a more rustic baroque. The Countess von Stoltzenberg-Stoltzenberg needed a palace of her own. It was no Schönbrunn, of course, but it did require at least a vast marble parlor in which to insult Virgil. There was also an inn in the mountain village, both interior and exterior. The Emperor Waltz was going to be shot in Technicolor, which itself didn’t come cheap. Paramount’s “quick figure” cost estimate in April was $2,742,000—more than twice the price of The Lost Weekend. By May, when a more detailed budget had been prepared, Paramount was looking forward to spending $2,879,000 on Billy’s new movie.

  Billy, Charlie, and Doane Harrison left Los Angeles for Jasper on May 19. They were followed by the rest of the cast and crew over the next two weeks. About three hundred Paramount people showed up in all—a record-breaking number for location shooting. Helen Hernandez was able to accompany the producer and director this time, and she was amazed at how beautiful Jasper was: “This is the dream spot of the world. No scenic photos do it justice.” Then again, mere scenic justice had never been Brackett and Wilder’s goal. Their point was to do Jasper National Park in Technicolor, which was far more dazzling than any natural scenery would be on its own. For once, John Seitz was not the man for the job. Brackett and Wilder needed a cinematographer who had experience with the elaborate three-strip Technicolor process. George Barnes was summoned from RKO. (Technicolor also supplied its own team of personnel as well as all the equipment, and charged Paramount accordingly.) Paramount already had confidence in Barnes, since he had shot the richly colored Frenchman’s Creek for Mitchell Leisen two years earlier. Since Frenchman’s Creek had also starred Joan Fontaine, the match was doubly good.

  The production opened on June 1. As with the location shooting of The Lost Weekend, bad weather was a continuing problem. Rain or sometimes just gray cloudiness delayed or completely prevented filming on eighteen of the thirty days the company spent at Jasper. Even more exasperating was Crosby. “It wasn’t a very happy picture for me,” Joan Fontaine says. The costars’ relationship started off badly. Fontaine was introduced to Crosby in his dressing room. Crosby was in his makeup chair and didn’t find it necessary to get up and say hello. “I think Crosby was more used to the Road pictures, with Hope, and he treated The Emperor Waltz a bit like that. And me also. I mean, I wasn’t even Dorothy Lamour to him.”

  Crosby pulled rank on Wilder as well. Fontaine has described Crosby as “pretty much the king of Paramount,” and from what she saw, she didn’t think Wilder was used to dealing with such a royal personage. For example, the king arrived at Jasper with his own team of speechwriters, except that in Crosby’s case they were there to rewrite Billy and Charlie’s dialogue. These revisions were made whenever der Bingle thought Wilder and Brackett’s words weren’t good enough. “He had his writers with him—his own writers,” Fontaine remembers. “They came en masse on the set in the morning. We all felt peripheral.” One member of Crosby’s writing team was an old vaudevillian gag writer named Barney Dean. He’d worked on Hope and Crosby’s Road pictures. Now he was improving upon Brackett and Wilder. It was one thing to bring on a for-hire collaborator to polish the script while Charlie and Billy were busy producing and directing. Jacques Théry, in fact, performed that service on The Emperor Waltz. Théry worked on the screenplay for two months, though he received no screen credit. But Barney Dean?

  Fontaine was also put off by two other issues: the company’s late-night carousing and the complete lack of rehearsals. “We were on location, and the first day I was in makeup and dressed, and there I was with Bing Crosby, and they said, ‘Here are the lines, say them.’ There was no introduction or getting together or team work or any of that feeling at all. Billy Wilder didn’t do that. Mr. Brackett, of course, was a gentlemen of the old school—a charming and delightful man. I don’t think he was used to the autonomous thing that Crosby was doing.” Then there was the partying. “I had my own cabin on the other side of the lake, but at night I could hear a great deal of, uh, ‘happiness’ going on.”

  Billy filmed The Emperor Waltz in one of the most spectacular spots in the Western Hemisphere, but Jasper National Park was still incapable of measuring up to Wilder’s image of the Austrian Tyrol. The park’s failure became increasingly expensive for Paramount. The script demanded an island in the middle of the lake. No island existed, so on Billy’s insistence the studio built one for him. Earth, rock, and trees were placed onto a wooden platform and floated out onto the park’s Leach Lake on hidden oil drums. The cost was said to be about $90,000.

  The roadway turned out to be the wrong color. Paramount’s crew painted it ochre.

  Then four thousand daisies were all wrong, completely wrong. They looked fine to the naked eye, but Technicolor bleached them out. So Paramount’s crew painted them all blue.

  According to Billy there weren’t enough pine trees in the pine forest. Paramount hauled more trees into the park at a cost of $20,000.

  By the time the company left Jasper on June 30, the budget was out of control and the studio publicists had a lot of material.

  Crosby kept insisting that Barney Dean and his team rewrite his lines when the company returned to Hollywood. According to Fontaine, “One morning on the set when we were back in Hollywood I remember well that Mr. Crosby handed Billy some new lines and said, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’” On another occasion, Crosby handed
Billy the day’s rewrites and simply said, “I’ll be playing golf. Let me know.” As Fontaine said, “It must have been very demeaning for Billy.”

  The production continued apace. For one of the elaborate court scenes, Wilder wanted a sense of nobility and decorum to prevail. In both scope and detail he was trying to out-Stroheim von Stroheim. Unhappily, all too many extras simply were not able to execute the lengthy curtsey Billy ordered. Camp chairs had to be fitted under the gowned rumps of about 250 women so that they could maintain their curtsey in front of the emperor for the full seventy seconds Wilder required. Wilder got sick toward the end of July, causing further delays. And all the while they were working with a pair of canine costars who sometimes didn’t take direction very well. The company manager filed a personal injury report on July 9: “Dog jumped into Crosby’s arms during scene—dog’s teeth broke the skin near nose, causing bleeding.” The script was not yet complete.

  When Oscar Karlweis showed up on July 22 to film some of his scenes, he was met by a surprise. It was his last day of work on the film. For undocumented reasons, Karlweis simply wasn’t working out, so Billy replaced him midpicture. All the scenes involving the emperor had to be reshot, but first, a new emperor had to be cast. Wilder and Brackett settled on Richard Haydn, the brilliant character actor who’d played the nasal Professor Oddly in Ball of Fire. To age Haydn properly for the role of Franz Josef required him to be in makeup for three hours every day.

  The dogs, Crosby, and illness were constant plagues in August as well. Fontaine was under medical care to pull excess fluid from her tissues; the treatment involved mercury dissolved in a large volume of water and infused into her system. It took about an hour every morning. The dogs, meanwhile, were never quite able to do their parts right on the first take. At one point, Crosby got so worked up over Buttons’s inability to jump in a bag on cue that he shouted, “Get your damn ass right in here!” It worked. On the very next take, the dog was so cowed that all Bing had to do was shoot him an angry look and the dog jumped.

 

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