On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  With blacklisting now in full force, the Committee for the First Amendment found itself unable to do much beyond tying itself to a sinking ship. So it dissolved. Billy’s political interests turned back to Europe. By 1948, Paul Kohner’s European Film Fund had evolved into the European Relief Fund, the purpose of which was now to provide assistance to the war’s survivors. Billy was named to the board of directors, along with Walter Reisch, Henry Blanke, Robert Siodmak, Robert Thoeron, and Gottfried Reinhardt, who served as the organization’s president. Wilder contributed to the Fund at least as generously as other directors of his stature, if not more so, but it appears that most of his spending that year was directed toward his burgeoning art collection. Through the Galerie Pétridès in Paris, he bought Picasso’s Tête de femme, a pastel on paper. As his signature makes clear, Picasso drew the work in Fontainebleau in September 1921. The 25½-by-19⅞-inch drawing depicts a sculptural, contemplative woman’s head and shoulders set against a roughly sketched blue background. It proved to be one of the best investments Billy Wilder ever made.

  Through Curt Valentin and the Buchholz Gallery in New York, Billy bought two Henry Moore bronze sculptures: Family Group and Stringed Figure. He told a puzzled friend, who was unaware of a certain Dada collagist, that he’d begun collecting “cashmere Schwitters.” He also purchased Rouault’s 1930 work Critique through the Stendahl Gallery in Los Angeles. The gouache, pastel, brush, and India ink on paper represents in very stylized form a dour, gray-headed and gray-mustachioed gentleman seated in a posture of judgment. Billy soon began calling it “Judge Brackett.”

  The real Judge Brackett, meanwhile, remained a staunch defender of the film industry he loved and the American system that enabled it to thrive economically. He and his conservative Hollywood friends—the very crowd against which Billy and the Committee for the First Amendment had rebelled—were eagerly looking forward to Truman’s defeat in the presidential election and a return to respectable, proindustrial Republican rule. On election night they all met at Samuel Goldwyn’s house on Laurel Lane. It was a merry scene, and it became even more so as each radio report suggested, ever more enthusiastically, that the next president of the United States would be named Dewey. Billy left around midnight to pick up Audrey. He returned to a funereal mood. “Sitting in the living room on the carpet, with their backs to the wall, were Charlie Brackett, Mary Pickford, and Louella Parsons, all dissolved in tears.” “‘We’re leaving the country. Truman won. The Reds are taking over,’” he recalled them moaning. “Goldwyn was just staring into space, completely pale. Now believe me, I lived through Hitler being appointed Chancellor, and we took it better than that.”

  As acting president of the Academy, Brackett might have chosen to downplay the more acerbic aspects of his and Billy’s joint view of the world in favor of the bland respectability the industry promoted in its public relations campaigns. Instead, he and Wilder began planning a new film about an old silent screen star who had a few problems. Curiously, it was also around this time that Billy invited Greta Garbo to his house on North Beverly for a drink. He and Walter Reisch wanted to talk to her about returning to films. According to Wilder, Audrey was upstairs in the bedroom. Billy yelled up to her, “Come on down, we’ve got a visitor!” “Who?” Audrey asked. “Greta Garbo,” said Billy. “Oh, fuck off,” said Audrey.

  Wilder and Reisch went on to describe a few story ideas to Garbo. Billy’s involved a death mask he supposedly saw at the Louvre—la inconnue de la Seine. The tragic story he wove concerned an unknown girl who drowns in the river and goes on to narrate the story of her life in flashback. She was the wife of a banker, Wilder said, and … Garbo dismissed the idea by saying that she didn’t want to play the wife of a banker. At that point Audrey offered drinks. Reisch took over. He pitched an idea about the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, whose only dream is to run away from her life as an empress, and … Garbo reminded Reisch that she’d already done Queen Christina. Reisch drove her home. On the way, she told him that the only role she would be at all interested in playing was that of a male clown—actually a woman playing a male clown. “And all the admiring girls in the audience who write him letters are wondering why he does not respond. They do not understand.” Wilder explained many years later that all Garbo really wanted to do was “to hide behind greasepaint. She could play the clown in white makeup so no one would be able to see her face.”

  A much more extreme career collapse was on Billy’s mind when he and Brackett were writing Sunset Boulevard. In an effort to earn some kind of living in Hollywood, Joe May decided to open a restaurant. His wife, Mia, once one of Germany’s leading stars, was the cook. The restaurant had a Hungarian theme; it was called the Blue Danube. Some of the Mays’ old friends, including Billy and Joe Mankiewicz, invested in the fledgling operation and did what they could to bring in the crowds. Billy himself contributed $3,000 to the effort. The Blue Danube opened during the first week of April 1949. It closed two weeks later, an utter failure. The Mays became so despondent that they rarely left their house.

  17. SUNSET BOULEVARD

  JOE GILLIS (William Holden): Wait a minute—haven’t I seen you before? I know your face.

  NORMA DESMOND (Gloria Swanson): Get out! Or shall I call my servant?

  JOE GILLIS: You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures—you used to be big.

  NORMA DESMOND: I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.

  JOE GILLIS: Uh-huh—I knew there was something wrong with them.

  —Sunset Boulevard

  On December 21, 1948, Brackett and Wilder turned in the first sixty-one pages of their new screenplay. It began with a curt notation: “This is the first act of Sunset Boulevard. Due to the peculiar nature of the project, we ask all our co-workers to regard it as top secret.” What was peculiar about the film was its central female character, a batty silent screen star who’d passed her prime. Its narrative structure was also strange. Sunset Boulevard began in a morgue. Its leading man, the film’s narrator, was a cadaver:

  An attendant wheels the dead Gillis into the huge, bare, windowless room. Along the walls are twenty or so sheet-covered corpses lying in an orderly row of wheeled slabs with large numbers painted on the walls above each slab. The attendant pushes Gillis into a vacant space. Beyond him, the feet of other corpses stretch from under their sheets: men’s feet, women’s feet, childrens’, two or three Negroes—with a linen tag dangling from each left big toe. The attendant exits, switching off the light. For a moment the room is semi-dark, then as the music takes on a more astral phase, a curious glow emanates from the sheeted corpses.

  A MAN’S VOICE: Don’t be scared. There’s a lot of us here. It’s all right.

  GILLIS: I’m not scared.

  (His head doesn’t move, but his eyes slowly wander to the slab next to him. There, under a partially transparent sheet, lies a fat man aged 60 or so. His eyes are open, too, and directed at Gillis.)

  FAT MAN: How did you happen to die?

  GILLIS: What difference does it make?[…] It’ll be a good joke, lying here like a jigsaw puzzle all scrambled up, with the cops and the Hollywood columnists trying to fit in the wrong pieces.

  FAT MAN: Hollywood? You in the movies?

  GILLIS: Yeah. Came out in forty-five, to catch me a swimming pool. And, by gosh, in the end I got myself one. Only there turned out to be blood in it.

  FAT MAN: Were you an actor?

  GILLIS: No. A writer. Never had my name on anything big, though. Just a couple of B pictures. One stinker, and the other one—well, that wasn’t so hot either. I was having a tough time making a living.

  FAT MAN: It’s your dying I was asking about.

  (Gillis chuckles.)

  GILLIS: Well, I drove down Sunset Boulevard one afternoon. That was my mistake. Maybe I’d better start off with the morning of that day. I’d been out of work for six months. I had a couple of stories out that wouldn’t sell, and an apartment right above Hollywood and Vine that wasn’t pa
id for….

  Brackett and Wilder listed their cast of characters along with “the actors we hope to get” to play the roles. For Dan Gillis they wanted a bright young star—Montgomery Clift. Gloria Swanson, herself a silent star who hadn’t made any movies in a while, would be the demented Norma Desmond. Erich von Stroheim would appear as her butler, Max. The character of Betty, a Paramount script reader, would be played by “a new face,” and Brackett and Wilder hoped that the role of Kaufman, a Paramount producer, would be taken by Joseph Calleia. There would also be a number of smaller roles—“movie people, cops, and corpses.”

  Magnificently handsome and charismatic, Montgomery Clift had appeared in only two films—Howard Hawks’s Red River and Fred Zinnemann’s The Search—when Wilder approached him for the lead in Sunset Boulevard. His third picture, Paramount’s The Heiress (costarring Olivia de Havilland) hadn’t finished filming yet, but the buzz surrounding him was extraordinary. He was a studied, upper-crust twenty-eight-year-old who assiduously played the role of a relaxed bohemian in his public life. The combination was dazzling. Billy gave him the first section of the screenplay, Clift loved what he read, and he agreed to play the role. Paramount’s contract with Clift for The Heiress included options on future films, so all Paramount had to do was exercise the first of these options for Sunset Boulevard and Monty was ready to go. He’d get $5,000 per week for a guaranteed twelve weeks on the film. Clift agreed to report for work in early April—about six weeks after he officially signed on. In the meantime, Billy and Charlie wanted him to stay in Hollywood for story conferences, as did Clift’s protective agent, Herman Citron. But Clift, having finished work on The Heiress, was in the mood for a nice vacation, so he flew to Switzerland and went skiing.

  Clift was a fine match for Gloria Swanson. Hollywood’s hottest young man would play beautifully opposite the Jazz Age’s flashiest, most glamorous woman. Swanson had been a genuine sensation in the 1920s. “You must remember,” said Wilder, “that this was a star who at one time was carried in a sedan chair from her dressing room to the soundstage. When she married the Marquis de la Falaise and came by boat from Europe to New York and by train from there to Hollywood, people were strewing rose petals on the railroad tracks in her direction. She’d been one of the all-time stars, but when she returned to the screen in Sunset she worked like a dog.” In the film, Wilder gives Norma’s butler a punchline that plays on Swanson’s own erotic allure: “She was the greatest of them all. You wouldn’t know, you’re too young. In one week she received seventeen thousand fan letters. Men bribed her hairdresser to get a lock of her hair. There was a maharaja who came all the way from India to beg one of her silk stockings. Later he strangled himself with it.”

  When he described Swanson’s dedication to her performance, Wilder makes an important point: she was not the crazy diva she played on-screen but a tough and hard-working actress. But then nobody had ever called Gloria Swanson either lazy or dizzy. Swanson’s movie career appeared to be over, but she never stopped working. By the late 1940s, Swanson was acting in summer stock productions, doing radio shows, and trying to keep her company, Multiprises, from going bankrupt. Still, Swanson continued to consider herself one of the greatest film stars in the world; she’d earned the title in the 1920s, and in the late 1940s she saw no need to give it up. As one contemporary account explained, Gloria was “keeping up appearances by spending $7,000 a year on clothes, which, in her special instance, she regarded as more of a professional expense than an extravagance.”

  In June 1948, Swanson began earning $350 a week on WPIX radio in New York City. When Paramount called her in September to see if she was interested in returning to motion pictures, Swanson naturally assumed it was a bit part and said that she might be able to leave her radio show for two weeks. No, the studio told her, it was for the lead in the picture, and she’d get somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000 for a ten- to twelve-week shoot. Swanson said she could be in Hollywood by the first of the year (though Sunset Boulevard didn’t start to roll until April). She promptly divorced her fifth husband, to whom she had been married less than twelve months, and—according to Swanson, anyway—flew to Hollywood and arrived on the set having no idea of the plot of the picture or the role she was to play.

  On the day Swanson returned to Paramount Pictures, the studio she had indeed helped to build, she found a huge likeness of herself on a billboard near the gate. Paramount’s publicity department was working on a self-promotional campaign to tie the studio in, decidedly obscurely, with the centennial celebration of the 1849 gold rush. The billboard featured a huge comet blazing through the sky leaving pictures of past and present Paramount stars behind it. The size of the picture and its position relative to the comet’s tail was determined by the star’s perceived importance to the studio. At the head of the tail was Gloria Swanson. According to her, the chief casting director, Bill Meiklejohn, explained why: “Baby, am I glad to see you. You took me off a helluva spot! If I’d put Crosby’s picture on the front end of that comet, Hope would have blown his top, and Crosby would have had a fit if Hope was up there. Stanwyck or Hutton would’ve scratched my eyes out if one got top billing over the other. You turned out to be a real lifesaver.” “That’s when I knew I was home,” Miss Swanson told the press. “Right back in the jungle, up to my ears in the rat race.” A more likely rationale is that the studio had already begun its publicity campaign for Sunset Boulevard. They also wanted Swanson to feel the way Norma Desmond feels when she returns to Paramount in the film, except of course that Norma Desmond is delusional.

  Brackett reported that he and Billy had never considered anybody else for the part: “We knew no time would be wasted getting into the story as soon as Swanson appeared on the screen. Youngsters who never saw her would immediately accept her as an old-time movie queen. Older fans would identify her with the characterization and get a bigger emotional wallop from the story.” To the degree that the extended comedy routine that served as Billy’s memory can be trusted, however, Brackett and Wilder originally wanted another old-time star. “For a long time I wanted to do a comedy about Hollywood,” Wilder claimed. “God forgive me, I wanted to have Mae West and Marlon Brando.” He also said they tried Pola Negri: “We called her on the phone, and there was too much Polish accent.” Then they went up to Pickfair, Mary Pickford’s immense estate high in the hills. “Brackett began to tell her the story, because he was the more serious one. I stopped him. ‘No, don’t do it.’ I waved him off. She was going to be insulted if we told her she was to play a woman who begins a love affair with a man half her age. I said to her, ‘We’re sorry, but it’s no use. The story gets very vulgar.’”

  Frustrated at his lack of success in casting this most particular, most peculiar role, Wilder turned to his colleague and friend George Cukor for help. They were sitting in Cukor’s expansive garden drinking tea when Cukor mentioned Swanson. Wilder probably hadn’t thought very much about her since Music in the Air. He’d predicted in the pages of Der Querschnitt that Queen Kelly, the film Swanson made for Erich von Stroheim, would be a huge hit. Little did he know at the time that Swanson, on the other side of the world, was becoming increasingly horrified at such Stroheimian touches as her costar (Tully Marshall) drooling brown tobacco juice on her delicate hand while slipping a wedding ring on her finger. Queen Kelly died before completion; Swanson’s producer/lover, Joseph Kennedy, pulled the plug, and Swanson’s fame began a protracted collapse as well. Music in the Air all but finished her off. In Cukor’s garden, Billy saw several reasons why Gloria Swanson was the ideal Norma Desmond.

  One of these reasons served doubly as the solution to another problem—the casting of Max, the servile butler who used to be a famous film director. Erich von Stroheim came naturally to mind. Von Stroheim did not become a butler; he became an actor and, at times at least, a good one. Before playing Rommel in Five Graves to Cairo, von Stroheim played the gentleman soldier von Rauffenstein in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion. After Five G
raves, though, von Stroheim descended into drastic self-parody. The only two film roles he landed in the mid-1940s were in cheapies, and, humiliatingly, each required him to play a ruined artiste—a mad Hun on the skids. In Anthony Mann’s The Great Flamarion (the first of Willie Wilder’s film productions for Republic), von Stroheim played a pathetic vaudevillian sharpshooter who comes to a depressing end, thanks to a woman. In The Mask of Dijon (1946) von Stroheim was a third-rate hypnotist whose end was even worse. He trips over a guillotine and beheads himself. But even in decline, Erich von Stroheim had no equal as an arrogant Teutonic grotesque. “There was something great in him,” Billy said. “When he made an error, it was grandiose, and when it was good, it had class.” He would be perfect as Max von Mayerling.

  Von Stroheim was living in France at the time. Wilder approached him through Paul Kohner, von Stroheim’s agent. Von Stroheim responded in a letter to Kohner: “I don’t have to tell you that I would not mind at all working again with ‘witty-Billy.’ His last endeavor with me had a tremendous success here in France, or was it my extraordinary popularity here that made his picture go over big? Ask him.”

  Von Stroheim already knew the nature of the role Wilder wanted him to play in Sunset Boulevard: “I read in the old bitch Parsons’ column that Billy wants me to play the role of a crazy motion-picture director.… He likes his actors true to type, does not he? Tell him for me that if he were as smart as he likes to be considered he would play the part himself! But even in craziness I prefer to be the first and therefore I would accept his proposition.”

  With the three major roles cast, Brackett and Wilder continued to pull Sunset Boulevard together in preproduction. As was their practice by this point, they had already brought a third cowriter onto the project—a former Time-Life reporter named D. M. Marshman Jr., whom they’d gotten to know as an affable card-playing partner. After an early screening of The Emperor Waltz, Marshman critiqued the film so extensively and so intelligently that Brackett and Wilder told him they’d ask him to collaborate on something in the future. When they found themselves stumped on how to proceed with Sunset Boulevard, they made good on their promise. Jacques Théry, Robert Harari, Richard Breen, and now Marshman—in the mid- and late 1940s, Brackett and Wilder did their best work together when there was someone else there with them.