by Ed Sikov
Wilder and Feldman traveled to New York in May 1954 to scout locations and interview actors. Billy also spent time working with Axelrod on the script. When they returned to Los Angeles, Axelrod accompanied them and stayed until early August. Axelrod later recalled driving with Billy back and forth between Wilder’s offices—one at Fox, the other at Warners—stopping habitually at little boutiques and antique stores and galleries and bookstores between Beverly Hills and Burbank. According to Axelrod, Billy was particularly obsessive about buying skinny neckties, which Axelrod thought was strange, since he never saw Billy wearing any ties at all.
Casting was still up in the air—particularly the male lead. Wilder, having second thoughts about Ewell’s ability to stand up to Monroe onscreen, now wanted a better-known actor. On August 3, the trades reported that Jack Lemmon was being tagged for The Seven Year Itch, but it was a false rumor. Walter Matthau, on the other hand, actually auditioned for the role. In July, Wilder set up a screen test for the jowly comedian, after which he and Feldman had to decide between the three top contenders: Matthau, Ewell, or Gary Cooper.
Forty years later, Billy claimed to have been bowled over by Matthau: “He was so funny I just screamed with laughter. I thought I must have this guy because he’s so interesting.” But by July 19, 1954, Billy was in fact no longer interested in Matthau. Given the two men’s long and (reasonably) happy collaboration, blame for Matthau’s having been turned down for The Seven Year Itch has tended to fall on Darryl Zanuck and Twentieth Century–Fox. “I was not powerful enough to get Matthau,” says Billy, but in fact it was Billy who didn’t think Matthau was right for the role. He simply wasn’t a big-enough star, and Wilder thought that the role of Richard Sherman required a major screen presence to match Monroe, who had become a top-ranked star in such box office winners as Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and How to Marry a Millionaire. Gary Cooper was precisely the star Wilder wanted, but Cooper was nixed as well—this time by Zanuck, who earnestly pushed William Holden. Apparently Wilder didn’t think his good friend was right either. Jimmy Stewart expressed interest—on a cash basis only—but Stewart had another commitment, a western for director Anthony Mann. When it was determined that The Man from Laramie (1955) couldn’t be postponed, Stewart had to bail out, and Wilder and Feldman finally decided to go with Ewell.
A budget of $1,721,500 was drawn up by the end of August, by which time Marilyn had read the script and called Feldman to tell him how very happy she was with it. She’d get $100,000 for her appearance; Ewell would be paid $25,000. In addition to exercising her talents as a comedienne, Monroe would also be singing the film’s title song, which Darryl Zanuck insisted on commissioning from Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn. Billy didn’t much like it, but the song was a problem he could put off for a while.
He had other things on his mind. In addition to preparing both The Seven Year Itch on the Fox lot and the Lindbergh picture, The Spirit of St. Louis, at Warners, he and Paul Kohner were working together to get Ariane off the ground. Kohner specialized in foreign rights and deals involving foreign actors, and in late August, Wilder told Kohner that because the Lindbergh picture was scheduled to go into production the following spring, he wouldn’t be able to do Ariane until the fall. Ariane would be his first Allied Artists project, Wilder noted, and it would star Audrey Hepburn. As if his plate wasn’t full enough already, Wilder also mentioned to Kohner the possibility of making A New Kind of Love, saying that the property was now his, not Paramount’s, though he’d need to buy some songs from Paramount if he wanted to do the film. He closed by saying that he was off to New York on Monday, August 30, to start filming The Seven Year Itch; he’d be there until September 12.
Shooting began September 1 at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx for a scene that ended up being cut. Wilder, who hadn’t done location shooting in New York City since The Lost Weekend, found it exhilarating but exasperating. “Personally I prefer to shoot in the studio because I can control it,” he later said. “And then there’s the bother of working with strangers.” He delegated some of the latter responsibility to his art director, George W. Davis.
The number of people who participated in the production of The Seven Year Itch expanded greatly when the crass but industrious Harry Brand, head of Fox publicity, alerted the New York metropolitan area to Monroe’s arrival on September 9. It was great publicity—as far as publicity was concerned. But when hundreds of people showed up at the first location, the film itself was thrown into jeopardy. This was not a question of a stray bystander or two recognizing a made-up, transformed movie star, as had been the case with The Lost Weekend. This was pandemonium on the scale of Ace in the Hole, except that the disaster the crowds came to witness was Marilyn Monroe and her personal life, though nobody knew it was a disaster. Billy began shooting her scenes with Ewell in a leased apartment on East Sixty-first Street, with a barricade set up on both ends of the block to keep the crowds away. Still, the noise level was so high that he had to shoot the film without sound, to be looped later in the studio. Wilder knew Monroe was drinking to soothe her nerves, but he wasn’t terribly concerned; he knew she photographed beautifully.
Marilyn’s husband, the baseball star Joe DiMaggio, hadn’t accompanied her when she flew from Los Angeles, but he joined her on the 11th. The marriage was already unsettled, and the shakes were about to get worse. DiMaggio stayed out of the way of the filming as best he could, but when Marilyn arrived for a night shoot at a subway grating near the corner of Lexington Avenue and Fifty-first Street, DiMaggio made the mistake of tagging along. Harry Brand, with his flawless touch for generating publicity and his equally perfect disregard for everything else associated with making movies, had seen to it that the cast, crew, and director of The Seven Year Itch were not left alone. A crowd of reporters and (according to those reporters) from 1,500 to 2,000 sight-seers greeted Marilyn with a roar.
“There were a good 5,000 people there waiting to see Marilyn’s legs,” Billy later declared, “and under the grating the electricians who were working the ventilator were accepting jugs of wine from gawkers who wanted to see Marilyn from below. We reshot the scene several times. It wasn’t working. The crowd was becoming agitated, asking for autographs. It was becoming very embarrassing, and DiMaggio didn’t like his wife putting herself up for display.”
The shot Billy wanted was one of Marilyn standing on the subway grating letting the air rush up under her skirt. It took about fifteen takes before they got it right, the crowd chanting “Higher! Higher!” all the while. The scene was set in the summertime—that was the point (well, half the point) of Marilyn’s wanting to cool herself off—but the night air was chilly. “I’m freezing,” Marilyn complained. DiMaggio, watching from the sidelines as the crowds tried to catch a glimpse of his wife’s crotch, was mortified. He left for Los Angeles the following morning, the marriage essentially over.
Wilder had other problems on his mind. The chaos at the location meant that at least some of the scene had to be reshot. He returned to the Fox lot, where, he remembered, “we reconstructed a corner of the street and it was perfect.” Another issue was, for Wilder, much more unusual: instead of the script remaining unfinished during production, this one was polished—and too short. The Sabrina fiasco had made an impression on Billy. This time, the front office did get the script beforehand and responded with alarm at its brevity. Wilder kept insisting that the film would play longer with all the comic business he planned to add as he shot, but Feldman fretted. If a single scene didn’t work, he pointed out, the film would simply not be long enough. He urged Billy to put back some of the scenes he and Axelrod had cut from the play, especially those involving Dr. Brubaker, the psychiatrist.
The filming of The Seven Year Itch continued in Hollywood through the rest of September and October. Apart from the fact that Monroe was chronically late, the production progressed smoothly. As always, Wilder had surrounded himself with dependable technicians, true team players who knew their business and performed it w
ithout fuss. Doane Harrison once again provided advice on how each shot Wilder planned would fit with those on either side, this time with the added technical problem of editing in CinemaScope. George Davis recalls Harrison as “a tall, lanky fellow who didn’t look very healthy.” But, Davis goes on, “he was a gentle guy and as nice as could be. He was at Billy’s elbow all the time.” Cinematographer Milton Krasner, who had just shot Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) in both CinemaScope and Technicolor, proved to be equally low key. Davis found his own work with Wilder to be remarkably free of intervention: “I made some sketches and showed them to him and he okayed them right away and I just went ahead and built them. When we were building them I’d show him a sketch and he’d say, ‘Oh, hell, go ahead and build it.’ And that’s all there was to it.”
Both Feldman and Zanuck left Billy and his team alone. Once Zanuck read the script in mid-September, he knew his instincts weren’t as good as Billy’s as far as the casting was concerned. He told Billy that he thought the screenplay was an improvement on Axelrod’s play, and now that he’d read it he couldn’t imagine anyone but Tom Ewell in the role. William Holden, he realized, would have been as much of a mistake as Gary Cooper. Zanuck was also pleased with the rushes he saw, except for one thing: don’t get too close to Ewell in CinemaScope, Zanuck warned Billy: “In medium shots he is very likable and attractive, in a strange sort of way. When we get too close to him he sort of loses something.”
By October 21, the film was nine days behind schedule, partly because of bad weather in New York; the rest was largely Marilyn’s fault. One of Zanuck’s assistants reported back to the front office at Fox that “although Wilder tries to break up scenes due to [her] inability to memorize dialogue, he still has to make from fifteen to eighteen takes on almost every setup.” He suggested, both to Billy and to Zanuck, that a second unit do some of the shooting to pick up lost time, but Wilder detested the idea and refused. Billy did remain calm, though, even when Monroe kept showing up late to the tune of about $80,000 per day. As Davis remembers, “Billy was a great baseball fan. He had a baseball, and he used to say to me, ‘Come on, let’s play catch.’ So we’d go outside the stage and we’d play catch until she arrived.”
“I had no problems with Monroe,” Billy later claimed:
It was Monroe who had problems with Monroe. She had trouble concentrating—there was always something bothering her. Directing her was like pulling teeth. But when you finished with her, when you had made it through forty or fifty takes and put up with her delays, you found yourself with something unique and inimitable. When the film was finished, you forgot your troubles with her. It’s not that she was mean. It’s just that she had no sense of time, nor conscience that three hundred people had been waiting hours for her. However, she had a great sense of timing for herself. At times she could do three pages of text without making a mistake. At other times she had real mental blocks. She needed the best psychoanalyst or a team of psychoanalysts to figure out what was going on in her head.
On another occasion, he reported that he “didn’t realize what a disorganized person this was until I looked in the back of her car. It was like she threw everything in helter-skelter because there was a foreign invasion and the enemy armies were already in Pasadena. There were blouses lying there, and slacks, and dresses, girdles, old shoes, old plane tickets, old lovers for all I know.”
Axelrod traveled to Los Angeles to see a rough cut in early November and liked what he saw. Zanuck liked it, too, except for the escalating cost. The film was already running almost two full working weeks over schedule, there were many retakes still to be done, and the head of the studio was getting irritated. “Wilder did a sensational job from the standpoint of quality,” he told Charlie Feldman, but “he certainly did not do a sensational job from the standpoint of shooting time and schedule.” Zanuck decided that it was Billy’s fault, not Marilyn’s. After all, Zanuck pointed out, she’d gone from her last Fox picture, There’s No Business Like Show Business, into The Seven Year Itch with no rehearsal, not to mention time off. In fact, she’d left for New York the very day she finished Show Business, and she gave up her planned vacation in order to do The Seven Year Itch. By mid-November, Zanuck had been pestering Feldman for some time over the escalating price tag, and Feldman knew that the film would have to gross well over $4 million for there to be any profit at all. The announcement of Monroe’s divorce from DiMaggio and the flood of publicity caused her to miss an entire week of shooting, but when she returned she worked for fifteen days straight.
Zanuck, Feldman, and Wilder watched another rough cut just before Christmas and immediately began planning more retakes. To Zanuck and Feldman’s dismay, the title song was still not in the picture, and Feldman cajoled Billy to put it in, in part because Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn were telephoning Feldman every day about it.
Monroe finished her retakes on January 11, 1955, after which Billy and Audrey threw a celebratory party. The cast and crew of the film were there, of course, as were Mr. and Mrs. Gary Cooper, the Holdens, Mr. and Mrs. Jimmy Stewart, Doris Day, Claudette Colbert, and, amazingly, Lauren Bacali and Humphrey Bogart; apparently any grudges had dissipated. The party was a happy event. Near the end of the evening Marilyn joined Audrey Wilder in a duet of “Let’s Do It.” Her first experience with Wilder having been so successful, Marilyn looked forward to working with him on another picture. “Billy’s a wonderful director,” Marilyn told George Axelrod. “I want him to direct me again. But he’s doing the Lindbergh story next. And he won’t let me play Lindbergh.”
At this point, the film was running long; Billy was right about the comedy business. Zanuck begged him to cut it down, a demand Billy initially ignored. Zanuck became furious. He liked the film, but Billy wasn’t listening to him. Only 150 feet had been deleted since he’d seen the film. “Apparently I wasted the evening and none of my recommendations were followed,” Zanuck told Feldman tersely.
The Seven Year Itch was trimmed a bit in the months to come, though Billy was quite stubborn about the process. Feldman had to nag him repeatedly about cutting some of Ewell’s monologues down, and several cuts had to be made in order to get Code approval, including one of three shots of Marilyn with her skirt blown up over the subway grating. In addition, all references to glands were deleted from an early scene between Richard and his wife (Evelyn Keyes) on the terrace.
Wilder hired a rising young graphic designer, Saul Bass, to design the credits sequence for The Seven Year Itch. There are two versions of the way Bass first met Billy: either they were introduced by the Eameses, or else Bass was hired by Fox first and then met Billy through the Eameses. In either case, it was the beginning of a long and successful collaboration and friendship.
Fox was increasingly anxious to release the film ahead of schedule. In May 1955, Axelrod agreed to modify his original agreement with the studio not to release the film before February 1, 1956, for which he received a bonus of $175,000. The Seven Year Itch was set to open in June.
The New York premiere was arranged for June 1 at the Loews State theater in New York, where a racy, fifty-two-feet-tall billboard of Monroe was erected over the theater during the last week of May. In fact, the billboard was so revealing—and Fox was flooded with so many complaints—that the studio was forced to take it down and replace it with a more modest version. The premiere itself was pandemonium, especially when Marilyn showed up (ten minutes after the picture began) with her escort—her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio. It was, by pure coincidence, Marilyn’s twenty-ninth birthday, so Fox had a huge cake delivered to the theater. The cake was cut just before the film began, so Marilyn missed her own birthday party.
Fox received one particularly vocal complaint from the Legion of Decency. The studio arranged a meeting with one of the Legion’s chief moral arbiters to try and work something out. Billy was outraged, both personally and professionally. “I do not have the reputation of having ever been connected with pictures of lascivious character,” Billy snappe
d. In fact, he thought The Seven Year Itch was too soft. He really wanted Sherman and The Girl to sleep together. “I could have done it very easily,” he said many years later. “I went to Zanuck and Feldman and I said, ‘Look, unless they do it, we have no picture. I would just like to have one tiny little scene where the maid of the Tom Ewell apartment is making the bed and finds a hairpin. That’s all I want, nothing more.’ The whole aspect of the picture would have changed.” He was forbidden.
Audiences seemed not to miss it, though. The Seven Year Itch was an enormous success. A little over a year later, the worldwide gross was $5,734,471. Even with its cost overruns, the film turned a healthy profit.
Popular, funny, and very thin, The Seven Year Itch is one of Wilder’s weakest films. Sherman’s mind is “disoriented by temporary celibacy” as François Truffaut described it, but it’s a one-note theme. Truffaut applauded the “deliberate, measured, finally very effective vulgarity” of the comedy; Wilder, he wrote, “the libidinous old fox, moves along with such incessant suggestiveness that ten minutes into the film we aren’t sure what are the original or literal meanings of faucet, Frigidaire, under, above, soap, perfume, panties, breeze, and Rachmaninoff.” Movie parodies abound, as Sherman draws his overheated fantasies from the silver screen—From Here to Eternity, Picnic, each more ridiculous than the last. But as Truffaut observes, “the film Wilder constantly refers to, so that each scene becomes a vengeful slap, is David Lean’s Brief Encounter …, the least sensual and most sentimental film ever wept over.” From Brief Encounter Wilder draws the pounding, high-drama theme from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, which (in Sherman’s fantasy) sends The Girl over the edge: “It shakes me. It quakes me! It makes me feel goosepimply all over! I don’t know where I am, or who I am, or what I’m doing! Don’t stop! Don’t stop! Don’t ever stop!”