On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  The film is too faithful to the play to be anything other than dated. Wilder and Axelrod don’t click as cowriters; their words are slack and charmless. “My theory about collaborators,” Wilder once wrote, “is that if there are two guys that think the same way, that have the same background, that have the same political convictions and all the rest, it’s terrible. It’s not collaboration, it’s like pulling on one end of the rope. You need an opponent there, and then you’ll have it stretched and tense.” There is no tug-of-war in The Seven Year Itch, and the rope is just a piece of string.

  With The Seven Year Itch in release, Billy might have turned his sights fully toward The Spirit of St. Louis—he had been traipsing back and forth between Fox and Warners all the while—but he still had A New Kind of Love on his mind. Paramount was trying to lure him back to do it. A studio executive told the New York Times in mid-June that the film would be “a Hollywood story with and about Chevalier” to be written and directed by Billy Wilder. Billy also bought a two-year option on the rights to an Arthur Schnitzler play, Fräulein Else, a deal negotiated by Kohner. Told by Schnitzler as an interior monologue, Fräulein Else is a satirical melodrama about a young woman who is forced by her mother to extract money from a rich man in order to pay off her father’s debts. The rich man agrees, on one condition—that she strip for him. Else, a moralist but a sensual one, is torn. Eventually she breaks down and takes off her clothes—in a public place before a crowd of gasping onlookers. Else’s tale does not end well. She faints, comes to, repairs to a bedroom, and commits suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills.

  All the while, of course, Billy was preparing Ariane.

  He was also forced to give up yet another set of plans: Billy wanted to direct the film version of a Broadway show about an evil, murderous little girl. The Bad Seed, Maxwell Anderson’s play (based on the novel by William Marsh), opened on Broadway on December 8, 1954, to a cascade of great reviews. It starred the gleefully hateful Patty McCormack as a little pigtailed child who slaughters people brutally and without any trace of remorse. Billy thought it was a great idea and immediately tried to buy the movie rights. Wisely, his first stop was the Production Code office. On December 30, he told the PCA that he was interested in purchasing the rights to The Bad Seed himself with an eye toward producing and directing the film independently, and he asked for a copy of the censorship report on the play. Wilder wasn’t the first to be interested, the PCA’s Geoffrey Shurlock advised him; Warner Bros. had already asked, and the PCA had made it clear that it could not approve the material under any circumstances.

  On January 11, 1955—the day he finished shooting Marilyn Monroe’s retakes for The Seven Year Itch—Wilder met with a group of censors and Swifty Lazar (representing Maxwell Anderson) to discuss whether The Bad Seed could ever be acceptable on American movie screens. By the following day, the censors had met privately and concluded that they would be compelled to reject any treatment of any story dealing with any elementary-school killer. Shurlock got Billy on the phone, told him of the decision, and asked if he needed a letter to confirm it. Billy replied that he understood the decision and required no additional confirmation.

  As it turned out, of course, Warner Bros. had more success with the censorship office, perhaps because it was a studio and not a lone individual. Warners made and released The Bad Seed the following year under the direction of Mervyn LeRoy.

  Billy was also approached by Jerry Wald, a Columbia Pictures producer, to direct the film adaptation of Pal Joey, the Rodgers and Hart musical. It might have been a good project for Wilder, given that the protagonist is an unredeemed crud, but it never came to fruition. Billy proposed casting Marlon Brando and Mae West in the leading roles, and he got as far as floating the idea to Harry Cohn over lunch at the studio commissary. Cohn despised the notion and rejected it instantly, and then, supposedly, turned around and billed Wilder five dollars for the lunch.

  Wilder’s first official day on the Warners lot was January 3, 1955, by which time he’d taken up with yet another new writing partner. Charles Lederer, who had been writing screenplays in Hollywood since 1931, was a whimsical choice for The Spirit of St. Louis, having written neither action-adventure films nor biographies. Lederer’s métier was witty, abrasive comedy: the battling-buddy movie The Front Page (1931), a hilarious screwball farce called Love Crazy (1941), and three fairly brutal comedies for Howard Hawks—I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Monkey Business (1952, cocredited to Ben Hecht and I. A. L. Diamond), and the deceptively glossy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Now he was mapping out a lone aviator’s odyssey, a story of technology and stamina. Lederer was hired to do fourteen weeks’ worth of writing on The Spirit of St. Louis, for which he received $30,000.

  The Spirit of St. Louis was troubled from the start. Lederer, like others before him, made a valiant effort to work with his volatile, high-strung writing partner (who was still zipping between studios, spitting out ideas, and dreaming up future projects, snapping his fingers all the while), but the daily barrage of insults was more than he could take. “For surgery that takes off three-quarters of a person’s hide, I can’t compete with Billy,” Lederer later declared. So he quit. (To be fair to both Lederer and Wilder, Lederer went on to say that “Billy doesn’t have malice. I don’t think he’s aware of other people’s constant fear that they are the target of malice. I don’t believe Billy would open his mouth—and believe me, that would be a deprivation to him—if he thought he would hurt somebody’s feelings.”)

  Billy, reading the morning paper soon thereafter, noticed a review of a teleplay written by Wendell Mayes. Hire him, Billy told Spirit’s producer Leland Hayward. Mayes, living in New York, had never written a film, never been in Hollywood, never heard of Billy Wilder. Soon he was on a plane to Los Angeles with a plum new assignment. As it turned out, Mayes loved working with Billy, largely because he treated the slurs Billy threw at him as nothing more than an ongoing joke between good friends—a kind of love. (Funny that Lederer was great at writing screwball comedies but found living one unbearable, while Wendell Mayes fell into the constant joke routine with all the self-assurance of Myrna Loy standing up to William Powell.)

  The next problem was casting the lead. Charles Lindbergh was twenty-five at the time of his flight, so Billy needed someone young, unassumingly handsome, and Nordic for the role. His first choice was the engaging John Kerr, fresh from his appearance as a psychiatric patient in Vincente Minnelli’s The Cobweb (not to mention his stellar performance in the hit Broadway show Tea and Sympathy). But Kerr turned down the role on moral grounds. Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer, and Kerr refused to play him.

  Kerr’s objection is striking, not only because of what it reveals about the limitations of Lindbergh’s popular appeal in the 1950s, but also because Lindbergh’s morality was not a problem for Billy Wilder. Ernest Lehman once theorized that Wilder wanted to make the film because Lindbergh was so purely American, but Wilder’s interest in Lindbergh is much more perverse. Lindbergh made several trips to Germany in the late 1930s as a guest of the German government, and he made no secret of his admiration of what the Nazis were achieving in terms of air power. Much of what the Nazis told Lindbergh about the Luftwaffe’s superiority was false, but the aviator’s gullibility pointed not only toward his own naive character but also toward the genuine sympathy he felt for the Nazis and their Fascist cause. As war with Germany seemed more and more likely, Lindbergh went out of his way to lobby the British and American governments to forge an alliance with Hitler. He was one of the leading isolationists in the United States and Britain.

  In October 1938, while Billy Wilder found an outlet for his fears by helping to fund other refugees’ passage out of hell, Charles Lindbergh was being decorated with the Service Cross of the German Eagle, an honor presented by Hermann Goering on Hitler’s direct order. Lindbergh and his wife even went to look at a house in Wannsee with the idea of moving there to raise their children. After Kristallnacht, when storm troopers beat
and killed Jews, burned Jewish businesses, and desecrated synagogues, Lindbergh’s reaction was to say that, yes, the Nazis “have undoubtedly had a difficult Jewish problem, but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?” Even as late as 1955, Lindbergh felt absolutely no remorse for having accepted Hitler’s medal: “I always regarded the fuss about it as a sort of teapot tempest.” He never understood why his reputation had been so tarnished.

  John Kerr had a problem with Lindbergh, but Wilder did not. Neither did Jack Warner, who was also Jewish. The filmmakers were delighted to have the chance to make The Spirit of St. Louis. Justifiably impressed by Lindbergh’s daring, they ignored whatever qualms they may have had about further mythologizing the flying ace, and they were unable to resist the lure of making what they were certain would be a commercial blockbuster. The Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh’s own book about the historic flight, had been a Pulitzer Prize–winning best-seller in 1953, and despite Kerr’s demurral on moral grounds, neither Wilder nor Warner could see any reason why the rest of America would reject a laudatory biopic about Charles Lindbergh. And anyway, Billy had his own ideas about transforming Lindbergh’s story. He would make it his own. Wilder’s The Spirit of St. Louis would be about a man’s effort to convince the money boys to finance his preposterous idea, his sweating blood to achieve it, his near-paralyzing fear of failure midflight, and the confusion and letdown of his enormous success.

  With Kerr out, Billy and Leland Hayward picked a familiar face. Jimmy Stewart, a twenty-year, fifty-picture veteran of American moviemaking, saw himself as the perfect Charles Lindbergh. Having just appeared opposite twenty-six-year-old Grace Kelly in Rear Window, the forty-six-year-old Stewart somehow believed that he could be equally convincing as a twenty-five-year-old aviator—that there was nothing about his middle-aged face, body, and voice that a little makeup and a diet couldn’t hide. He lobbied hard for the role, even after Jack Warner flatly said no. “I need a star,” Warner declared, “but not one that’s pushing fifty.” Stewart’s father took up where Stewart himself left off. Having recently remarried, the eighty-four-year-old and his new bride visited Los Angeles on their honeymoon. They dined with the younger Stewarts and Mr. and Mrs. Leland Hayward, and much of the dinner was taken up with the old man hectoring Hayward about casting his son as Lindy. Hayward took the idea to Billy, and against all reason, Billy agreed. Warner knuckled under as well. A deal was signed. Hayward, Wilder, Lindbergh, and Stewart would each have a share of the film’s profits in addition to their individual fees.

  Lindbergh wouldn’t be participating directly in the production of The Spirit of St. Louis, but Hayward and Wilder invited him out to the coast for an informal meeting over dinner at Billy’s house on North Beverly. Lindbergh ended up taking the bus all the way from Pasadena. (Hayward, assuming that Lindbergh had his own chauffeur-driven car, ignored his wife’s suggestion that they pick their guest up on their way.) Lindbergh arrived a few minutes late and explained to his startled hosts that it was because he’d underestimated the walk from the bus stop to Billy’s house in Beverly Hills. “You took the bus?” Billy asked, incredulous. Lindy explained that he liked to travel by public transportation so that he could get a feel for how ordinary people lived, and since he hadn’t permitted any photos to be taken of himself for twenty years, nobody knew it was him.

  Wilder found Lindbergh to be impenetrable. “I couldn’t get into his private life,” he recalled. “He had become a Scandinavian Viking hero, without flesh and blood.” Billy did, however, slip a little jibe into their conversation. At one point they flew together (on a commercial airline) to Washington on a research trip; Lindy was going to personally show Billy the original Spirit at the Smithsonian. Their plane hit some rough weather and began to bounce, at which point Wilder leaned over to his seat mate and said, “Mr. Lindbergh, would it not be embarrassing if we crashed and the headlines said, ‘Lone Eagle and Jewish Friend in Plane Crash’? He just smiled. He knew exactly what I had in mind.”

  Wilder and Mayes worked together through the summer with an eye toward a late-autumn shoot. Billy found in his new collaborator a kindred spirit. They could work together, but more important, they could bullshit together. They filled their days with laying out scenes, pitching and fielding insults, composing dialogue, and hurling requests for minutiae at Warner’s research department. Le Bourget was to be reconstructed based on photographs from 1927, but that was the least of the researchers’ tasks. Wilder and Mayes asked for details concerning 1926 license plates and whether women wore nail polish in those days and, if so, what kind. Billy wanted to know how much a gallon of gasoline weighed. (Answer: It depends on the grade.) Mayes wished to know the complete line of Egyptian dynasties, and it was duly provided for him, beginning with Lagus, the Macedonian nobleman of Eordaea, through various Ptolemys all the way through to Cleopatra and her brother and husband, Ptolemy XIV. Billy, meanwhile, inquired as to the date on which Gene Tunney won the heavyweight title from Jack Dempsey. (Answer: September 23, 1926, in a ten-round decision.) This was their daily routine.

  In August, Billy, Mayes, Charles Eames (who had been hired as a photographic consultant), and aerial cameraman Tom Tutwiler flew east with the goal of shooting footage of the first leg of Lindbergh’s flight—from Long Island to the skies over St. John’s, Newfoundland. Accompanied by Hayward, Doane Harrison, and cameraman Ted McCord, they made their way from New York to Boston, to Halifax, to St. John’s, and finally to Gander, shooting aerial footage all the while. In Nova Scotia, Billy decided he needed to take a nap, so he found a wooden plank just wide enough to accommodate his body. Eames was fascinated as Billy explained the design: you lie down on it, he said, and since there is no place for your arms, when you go into a dead sleep your arms drop to the floor and you wake up. Moreover, Billy allowed, a man of his stature simply couldn’t have anything as obvious as a real casting couch in his office; the gesture would be too blunt. So Wilder asked Eames to design a real piece of furniture based on this dual principle, and Eames agreed. Then it was off to Paris, where the Spirit team set up headquarters at the Ritz.

  At Guyancourt Airport, Wilder worked out some preproduction details for the film’s climax—Lindbergh’s arrival at Le Bourget. Actually, he had two arrivals in mind: before the tumultuous greeting Lindbergh described in his book, Billy wanted to show Lindbergh, in his imagination, greeted by a lone gendarme. Before shooting either scene, however, Billy and his crew flew first to Shannon to get some of the Irish coast footage out of the way. By the time they returned to Paris, their star had arrived.

  In late August and early September, the Le Bourget scenes were filmed at Guyancourt. (“Since it was night, who could tell?” said Billy.) First they did it with the single gendarme. Then came 3,500 Frenchmen, 1,500 Frenchwomen, 30 gendarmes, 150 French soldiers, and a 30-piece French band. As Wilder reported, “There were three thousand extras that we were trying desperately to transform into an hysterical crowd that had to break down the barricades and run on to the airfield. Then they had to take the half-conscious Lindbergh out of the cabin and carry him triumphantly while others broke the plane into pieces to take home souvenirs.” About seventy vintage cars and taxis, along with forty bikes and motorcycles were also pressed into service, along with a total of twenty-one assistant directors. The film’s production records make special note of one salient fact: “Note: no children.”

  Vast amounts of footage had already been shot by this point, and filming had only just begun. Strangely, Billy saw the need to extend the most famous transatlantic flight in history all the way to Cairo. The production schedule of The Spirit of St. Louis allotted time and expenses for shooting point-of-view shots, from what Billy later called Lindbergh’s “half-dazed” perspective, all the way from Ronda, Spain (for a bullfight seen from the air) and the Rock of Gibraltar to Algiers (the Casbah), Libya, and Egypt (the Sphinx). These shots were ultimately taken by the second unit team, led by Eames, specifically to save money. None of them made it int
o the final cut.

  Jimmy Stewart, meanwhile, was every inch the obnoxious superstar in Paris, and by September 19, the rest of the company was sick of him. In fairness to Stewart, he was late getting started with The Spirit of St. Louis because of delays in shooting The Man Who Knew Too Much, and he’d had no time to rest. Stewart arrived in Paris grumpy and his mood deteriorated from there. Hayward and Wilder met him personally at the airport and took him out to dinner, and Hayward, of course, had seen to it that his star was put up in style at the Ritz, the finest hotel in Paris. Stewart also had his own car and driver, and yet by mid-September Stewart was bitterly complaining that nobody was paying enough attention to him. He threatened to leave, even though Wilder was trying to get shots of Stewart in the replica Spirit in actual fact as well as in the process shots to be effected later at the studio. Stewart’s response was to tell Wilder it would look better in process shots anyway and he was wasting his time.

  The star’s central concern, though, was that (as Hayward put it) “this is the most important picture in his whole life and it’s essential to him to look as physically well as possible for the part.” Hayward pointed out that the beds in the Ritz were very comfortable, to which Stewart grumbled that he couldn’t rest there, he hated Paris, the food made him sick, his wife had the trots, and he had to get back to Beverly Hills immediately.

  Hayward, who knew Stewart for at least twenty-five years and considered him one of his oldest friends, was perplexed about why the usually agreeable star was being so difficult. Then Billy tried to help. He got together for a private chat with Stewart and left convinced that he’d calmed him down enough to agree to stay until they got all the shots they needed. But a few days later, Stewart started whining all over again, and he picked the worst time to do it: during Billy’s meal. Billy lost his temper. “For God’s sake,” he snapped, “let’s don’t talk about it now. We’re having dinner!”