by Ed Sikov
Even the camp commandant, von Scherbach, is comical, albeit in a ghastly way. (The character is Wilder and Blum’s invention; he does not appear in the play.) Here is Otto Preminger’s first line, delivered in consummate, harsh Germanic tones: “Guten Morgen, sergeants. Nasty weather we are having, eh? And I so much hoped we could give you a white Christmas, just like the ones you used to know.” Later in that scene, von Scherbach makes another little joke, this one for his own amusement: “All right, then, gentlemen, we are all friends again. And with Christmas coming on I have a special treat for you. I’ll have you all deloused for the holidays.” Still later, he makes this amusing quip: “Curtains would do wonders for this barracks. You will not get them.”
The intelligence and discretion of Wilder’s camerawork reaches its highest level in a single shot of violence and perfect timing. Marko brings a copy of Mein Kampf to the men by orders of von Scherbach. He discards it contemptuously by tossing it to the rear of the image, and Wilder cuts on action to Duke catching the heavy volume in the next shot. “That’s the wrong direction,” Duke says in medium distance, whereupon he swings around and hurls the book—hard—toward the back of the room. Wilder pans to reveal Duke’s target—Sefton. The book hurtles toward him—all in the same shot—and misses his head by a fraction of an inch. It slams against the wall. Duke’s perfect shot would be marvelous on its own, but one then realizes that at the moment that the book shoots just over Sefton’s head and slams against the wall behind him, Sefton is having his face shaved, by Cookie—with a straight razor. Sefton doesn’t flinch. It’s a remarkable moment for Holden, who could easily have been smacked square in the face by a hardbound book. “Give that man a Kewpie doll!” Sefton says mildly, and only then does Wilder cut to the next shot.
When Stalag 17 opened in May 1953, Wilder got all the applause, approval, and financial return he lacked with Ace in the Hole. The film is said to have made about $10 million in the United States alone, which more than compensated for Ace in the Hole’s losses. This was due in part to better marketing. Despite its violent opening scenes, in which two good-looking American boys get machine-gunned to death, Paramount’s publicity department sold Stalag 17 as a comedy—a “star-spangled, laugh-loaded salute to our POW heroes!” The studio shrewdly previewed it at the annual convention of the American Ex-Prisoners of War in Oklahoma City, and American Legion groups, the VFW, and the Military Order of the Purple Heart were treated to advance screenings as well. The press material made sure to note that Wilder had written to a number of former prisoners of war offering them parts in the film, and that a few of the on-screen POWs had really been prisoners of the Nazis. Paramount invited fourteen former POWs to the premiere at the Warners Beverly Hills Theater and a post-premiere supper party. The Hollywood trade papers loved it, and so did most of America’s movie reviewers. Billy Wilder was back on top. He was probably even more relieved that he’d gotten rid of Cy Howard, too. Howard managed to get picked up in a whorehouse raid right before Stalag 17 premiered.
When the Oscar nominations were announced the following February, Wilder found himself named in the Best Director category. Stalag 17 failed to earn a Best Picture nomination, nor was it mentioned in any of the three writing categories, but Bill Holden was one of the five Best Actor nominees (the others being Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Montgomery Clift, and Burt Lancaster). The awards themselves were personally disappointing for Billy; it was a sweep for his old Menschen am Sonntag gofer, Fred Zinnemann, whose From Here to Eternity won eight awards, including Best Director and Best Screenplay. (From Here to Eternity is a World War II picture as well, but a much more romantic one.) All was not lost, though. When Shirley Booth announced the Best Actor award via a live television hookup from her backstage dressing room in a Philadelphia theater, it was Bill Holden’s name she announced, and Holden ran happily to the podium. Emcee Donald O’Connor whispered to him that the show was running overtime and he’d better make it quick, so Holden simply said, “Thank you, thank you,” and left the stage. Billy was pleased for his friend and told him so, but later that night when Holden headed home, his wife, Ardis, set him straight about the quality of his performance in Stalag 17: “Well, you know, Bill, you really didn’t get the award for Stalag. They gave it to you for Sunset Boulevard.”
Relieved by the commercial success of Stalag 17, Billy turned his sights to his next projects, invested in some more art, took some trips with Audrey, and rose even higher on the Hollywood social scale. Through a New York gallery he bought a Joseph Cornell box, Untitled (Grand Hotel Pharmacy), made in the 1940s; given Cornell’s reputation at the end of the century it was a most prescient purchase. In Paris, he bought Rouault’s Passion, a gouache and black wax crayon work on paper—another astute buy, though not as remarkably foresighted. Always a clotheshorse, Billy continued buying himself the finest menswear the world’s best stores had to offer, and by this point he was so rich that it didn’t matter how much he spent. With Billy’s full encouragement, Audrey became a well-known fashion plate as well. Her shopping trips to the Parisian couture houses were becoming legendary. Slim, beautiful, and exquisitely poised, Audrey Wilder looked fabulous in the elegant high-style clothes she bought with an abandon to rival her husband’s, and by 1953, she was one of the few Hollywood women to whom other Hollywood women turned when they wanted a living definition of the word chic.
After shooting Stalag 17 Wilder remained undecided about his next film through the remainder of the year. He told Don Taylor that he wanted to adapt a then-best-selling novel about a depressive teenager, but like a number of Billy’s overflowing ideas, it went no further than talk; Billy Wilder did not end up directing Catcher in the Rye. In May 1952, before leaving for a trip to Europe, he told Louella Parsons that he wanted to make an independent German-language film—in Germany—with Marlene Dietrich. Billy reported that he would still be in Europe in mid-June, when he was scheduled to attend the Berlin Film Festival; he and Audrey would be joined there, he said, by Bill and Ardis Holden. He also told Parsons that he would be stopping off in New York on his way to the Continent so that he could meet with Yul Brynner about yet another film idea. As Louella put it, “all [Wilder] knows about the Brynner story is that Yul will play a Soviet ballet dancer who comes with a troupe from Russia to appear at the Venice Art Festival.”
Brynner was enthusiastic about Billy’s idea, and by the end of the year Wilder had fleshed out his plans with yet another in a string of new collaborators—Julius Epstein. Best known for writing Casablanca (1942), Epstein had also written such successful films as The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), Mr. Skeffington (1944), and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). On December 10, Wilder and Epstein met with the censors to discuss their ideas. A memo describes the meeting: “Messrs. Vizzard and Shurlock had a conference with Messrs. Luraschi, Billy Wilder, and Julius Epstein. It is their intention to do a modern story very much along the lines of Anna Karenina. The lead, Jule [sic] Brynner will be a member of the Soviet embassy in Washington. He will fall in love with the wife of some other foreign diplomat. The situation will develop to the point where they will have to flee the country to Mexico. The Soviets will be after him throughout the story. After a very unhappy and tragic time in Mexico, our lead will realize the impossibility of the situation and will let the Soviets catch up with him and kill him, somewhat as in the case of Trotsky. The wife will then be free to endeavor to rehabilitate herself.” The censors found little to object to, as long as “the proper compensating moral values are injected.”
Wilder and Epstein planned to call their film A New Kind of Love; the fact that Chevalier was out didn’t mean that they couldn’t still use the title. But the name turned out to be as jinxed as Chevalier, and A New Kind of Love fell apart. Brynner was paid $15,000 on his acceptance of the role, but casting complications prevented the project from getting any further off the ground. A comely young all-but-unknown, Audrey Hepburn, is said to have been cast in the film, but she soon backed out because of prior
commitments. Billy announced that Katharine Hepburn would take the role, but she, too, withdrew. The only other details of A New Kind of Love that appear to have survived come thirdhand from Billy’s friend Armand Deutsch, who recalls George Axelrod telling him about some of Billy’s meet-cute ideas, including this one: “We find Audrey Hepburn in her bed, late at night, perhaps with glasses on, working a crossword puzzle. She is the wife of England’s Ambassador to the United States. She picks up the telephone, calls the Russian Embassy, and asks for someone who can give her assistance. It is Yul Brynner who answers the phone. Hepburn politely asks Stalin’s middle name. Brynner angrily replies, ‘We are not here for such nonsense!’ He hears Hepburn’s distinctive tinkling laugh and bangs down the phone. The next night at a large ball Brynner hears that laugh. Looking up, he sees Hepburn, walks over to her and says, ‘Ilyich.’ They meet and fall in love.”
A New Kind of Love got no further than the earliest drawing-board stage, but Wilder’s association with Audrey Hepburn had just begun. He wrote his next film especially for her, and—thanks to Audrey Wilder’s taste and Hepburn’s own extraordinary figure—she immediately became a world-renowned exemplar of fashionable good taste, not to mention a first-rate actress and glamorous movie star. Billy himself was well on the way to setting the tone for some of the best-known taste-making elements of 1950s culture: Givenchy originals in Sabrina; Tom Ewell’s emblematic sexual frustration—and Marilyn Monroe’s comic timing—in The Seven Year Itch; the wistful romance between Hepburn and Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon; and eventually, of course, Some Like It Hot.
How different it might have turned out. Had his gambler’s luck and persistence not been so sharp, the desperate immigrant of 1934 might have remained so twenty years later, his talent notwithstanding. The shadow of what might have been was never far from his thoughts. Hollywood was too full of memento mori for him to forget. Where was Franz Schultz in 1952? Where was Wilhelm Thiele or Hanns Schwarz? Lubitsch was dead. Lang was surviving well enough. Reisch was working, but his scripts were never that great. Robert Siodmak was on his way down, Curt was already deep into Tarzan’s Magic Mountain–land. And oy, Edgar Ulmer (The Man from Planet X; Babes in Bagdad…). Even Willie was cranking them out—Phantoms from Space, Killers from Space…. What could he possibly think of next—an abominable snowman movie? If Billy Wilder hadn’t been as smart as he was—and as tough as he was—his artistic life might have been equally pathetic. Billy was a big shot, and he planned to stay that way.
20. AUDREY
FAIRCHILD (John Williams, playing Sabrina’s father): May I ask, sir, what exactly are your intentions?
LINUS LARRABEE (Humphrey Bogart): My intentions? Unethical, reprehensible, but very practical.
—Sabrina
Wispy, delicate Audrey Hepburn had two notorious pit bulls running interference for her—her mother, a fat baroness, and Lew Wasserman, a thin agent. The Baroness Ella van Heemstra bossed Audrey’s personal life, Wasserman orchestrated her deals. When the Sabrina deal was struck, Audrey was twenty-two years old—a fresh Hollywood meteor who had just set the screen ablaze in Roman Holiday as a disenchanted princess who ends up with Gregory Peck. In Sabrina she’s even more luminous. According to some accounts, Sabrina may have been Audrey’s idea all along—not Paramount’s or Wilder’s. She’s said to have read the script of Samuel Taylor’s play Sabrina Fair before it even opened on Broadway (with the sprightly but rather long-of-tooth Margaret Sullavan already cast in the title role) and knew it was a perfect role for her: the chauffeur’s daughter who wins the hearts of two wealthy brothers, her father’s bosses. Whether Hepburn asked Wasserman to convince Paramount to buy the film rights and cast her in the title role, or whether Wilder asked Paramount to buy it for her without her input (as Billy himself claims), by March 1953, Sabrina was Audrey’s vehicle. (The film’s title remained Sabrina Fair until just before its release, when it was shortened.) In early May 1953, just as the brutally comic Stalag 17 was about to be released, Louella Parsons announced to the world that this slight romantic fairy tale would be directed by Billy Wilder.
Billy was dazzled by Audrey’s beauty, as were many men. But he was just as impressed with her graceful intelligence. “She looks as if she could spell schizophrenia,” he noted. Better still, unlike many movie stars, she could spell it without being it. Billy waxed enthusiastic: “After so many drive-in waitresses in movies (it has been a real drought) here is class—somebody who went to school, can spell, and possibly play the piano. The other class girl is Katharine Hepburn. There is nobody else—just a lot of drive-in waitresses off to the races, wriggling their behinds at the 3-D camera.” Audrey, Billy said, was “like a salmon swimming upstream. She can do it with very small bosoms. Tit-ism has taken over this country.”
The critic Walter Kerr once described her as “every man’s dream of the nymph he once planned to meet,” a true enough claim as far as Billy was concerned. (Billy was forty-seven when he made Sabrina.) But Hepburn’s nymph-hood was always counterbalanced by the fortitude of Hercules. Onscreen and off-, she had a core of iron that sustained her through difficult times. Audrey was as fearless as she was industrious. When the Nazis rounded up the citizens of her town for transport, she found herself guarded at gunpoint by a young soldier who eventually made the mistake of putting down his rifle to roll a cigarette. So Audrey made a run for it. Luckily, the girl was small and fast, and her escape was successful. Still, she ended up spending the next month slipping in and out of consciousness while hiding in a rat-filled cellar. This tenacity is an essential part of her appeal, and Billy saw it quickly and clearly. In both Sabrina and Love in the Afternoon, Hepburn projects a tough inner core disguised by a fragile exterior. With most other stars it’s the other way around—the surface may be pure vigor, but the inside is a mess.
It was this reversal that captured the attention of the French writer Colette, who in 1951 was scouting actresses for the title role in the theatrical adaptation of her novel Gigi. By then, Audrey had already broken into films, but mostly in minor roles: a hotel clerk in One Wild Oat; a cigarette girl in Laughter in Paradise. In The Lavender Hill Mob, the character she played actually had a name, and a most un-Audrey one at that—Chiquita, the girl to whom Alec Guinness gives some cash in the opening sequence. After The Lavender Hill Mob, Audrey landed a bigger role in Secret People, a political assassination drama, but the director, Thorold Dickinson, wasn’t much impressed. Still, she kept working. She was busy filming a glossy farce called Monte Carlo Baby when a heavyset woman with hair the color of shredded carrots showed up on the French set and relentlessly disrupted the day’s filming with an intrusive running commentary on the action. The clownish grande dame took an immediate shine to Audrey. This young thing, Colette declared, simply had to be Gigi. When the old woman met with her shy star-to-be, Audrey was self-deprecating to the point of refusing even to consider the role on the grounds that she was utterly talentless. To every one of Colette’s protests to the contrary, Hepburn presented a solid argument, but the pure stubbornness of her modesty only served to charm Colette further. With a novelist’s eye for clarity, Colette saw that underneath this young woman’s superficial insecurities was an unbendable core of will.
Billy Wilder shared Colette’s eye for talent. He knew that tiny Audrey could stand up to both of the costars he had in mind for Sabrina—William Holden and Cary Grant. Holden was most amenable to doing another film with Wilder, and when Grant agreed as well, Wilder and Samuel Taylor began to rewrite the part of Linus, the elder Larrabee brother, especially for him. Then, suddenly, Grant pulled out for reasons he never explained, and Billy was left in the lurch. The role of Linus Larrabee demanded the stature, weight, and scope that only Grant and a handful of other stars possessed. Not only did Linus have to be of a certain age and import, but he had to provide a convincing alternative to devilish, athletic-looking Bill Holden.
There was Jimmy Stewart, who hadn’t yet been cast in Paramount’s Rear Window. T
here was Gregory Peck. Tyrone Power or James Mason might have worked, too. Joseph Cotten was by all accounts terrific in the role on Broadway; if only he’d been a bona fide movie star on the level of Grant or Stewart or Peck. Whether these dapper actors weren’t available or Wilder just didn’t like them, when the dust settled after Grant’s departure Humphrey Bogart was Linus Larrabee—to the thundering tune of $200,000. One measure of his stature was that Bogart also won the right to approve Billy’s script before setting foot in front of a camera (though he never got the chance, because the script was written concurrently with shooting). Holden got $80,000, Hepburn $35,000; Billy’s fee stayed firm at a hefty $250,000.
It boded well, the teaming of Billy and Bogie. By the early 1950s Wilder was one of the few directors Bogart eagerly consented to work with. (A contract Bogart signed with Warner Bros, specified that the only directors he approved in advance were Wyler, Dmytryk, Huston, Ford, and Wilder.) Bogart and his wife, Lauren Bacall, were leaders of Hollywood’s liberal wing. Bogart himself joined Wilder in the formation of the Committee for the First Amendment back in 1947. Since then, the Bogarts and the Wilders had become friendly, the Bogarts having hosted Billy and Audrey at their own home. They liked each other. Their personal styles were in synch—a love of dirty jokes, a flat refusal to suffer fools, and a surfeit of talent. The two men looked forward to working together.
Bogart initially agreed to take the role based on pure trust of Billy; only after agreeing in principle did he demand script approval. He heard not a single word about the nature of the part. His agent, Phil Gersh, later said that he had been the one who’d suggested Bogart to Wilder, and that Billy had called two weeks later requesting a meeting with Bogie himself. They met at five in the afternoon and spoke relaxedly for two hours. Sabrina was never mentioned. Bogart, who had another appointment that evening, finally said, “Look, let’s just shake hands on it, and you take care of me.” There was only one problem: as Wilder said at the time, “Audrey is a tall girl. She’s five foot seven, I think. She’ll need tall leading men. Maybe she’ll have to wear flat heels in Sabrina and Bogart will have to wear high heels.”