On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Stewart called his agent, Lew Wasserman, and declared that he wanted to go home. Wasserman called Hayward and said that he thought that if Wilder and Hayward just took Stewart out to lunch and explained the situation to him he’d be fine. Wilder and Hayward issued the invitation and, unbeknownst to Stewart, held a long meeting with the key members of the production team to forge a plan to make Stewart happy and keep him that way. Then they had lunch, which Hayward described as “a very unpleasant experience.” The producer and director patiently explained why they needed their leading man, but the leading man insisted on going back to California. At one point, an exasperated Billy told him, “Jimmy, you’ve got us in a very bad position. If you go home we’ll be sore and if you don’t go home you’ll be sore and I’ve got a long picture to make with you of about four months’ shooting and I want it to be pleasant for all of us because that’s the only way you get good work and for God’s sake trust me and believe in me and let me get these shots.”

  Stewart responded by becoming, in Hayward’s words, “semihysterical.” He repeated his intention to leave in ever shriller tones. Wilder continued to explain all the planning they’d done, but suddenly Stewart bolted from the table, saying “I’ve got to go.” Wilder and Hayward were stunned. By the time Warner Bros. personnel told Mrs. Stewart that the studio had procured plane reservations for them, the Stewarts had already bought their own tickets, and they were on the eight o’clock flight for Los Angeles that very evening.

  While production assistants and the Stewarts were busily making airline reservations, Wilder and Hayward spent the afternoon discussing the possibility of replacing their star. After hours of pacing and debating, they decided that too much publicity had already gone into the film for them to recast Lindbergh. Besides, as Hayward noted at the time, “We haven’t got anybody to change to.” As for Stewart himself, he was just walking out on Paris, not the whole project.

  The production of The Spirit of St. Louis sunk further the following week when Jack Warner took a look at the first set of bills. He was enraged by what he saw. Hayward couldn’t explain it, he told Warner. He and Billy were just as shocked as Warner was, he said, and they couldn’t figure out what they should have done differently. The only excuse Hayward offered was that neither he nor Billy had had anything to do with the accounting.

  By the end of September, the distressed company was back in Los Angeles, having stopped in New York to do some shooting at the Woolworth Building along the way. The production proper had not yet begun. The script proper was not yet complete. Warner, Hayward, and Wilder met in early October and agreed not to start shooting The Spirit of St. Louis again until the script was finished and there was a final budget and schedule. This was wishful thinking. When the production reopened on November 14, the script was unfinished and several parts were still uncast.

  Warners prepared a huge location, or set of locations, up the California coast at Santa Maria. The Curtis, Georgia, and Roosevelt Field scenes were shot there, along with some hangar scenes and a Minnesota landscape. Shooting the film’s many airplane stunts was a terribly elaborate and time-consuming process. Planes were sent down the runway for takeoff, stopped, reset, and sent again and again. In fact, there were often two planes—one to be shot, the other to do the shooting. At one point, Billy himself boarded the Spirit—on top of the plane, in a harness—and flew, standing on the top wing with his arms outstretched. Jimmy Stewart had bet him $100 he wouldn’t have the nerve. That cinched the deal.

  There were up to 386 cast and crew members on these days in November; by December 6 it was up to 448 and the pricetag was rising all the time. The original estimate of $2 million had become an old joke. “God, it was horrendous,” Billy declared. “The weather would change from one minute to the next. I never should have made this picture.”

  The script for The Spirit of St. Louis was still not complete as 1955 turned to 1956. Because of the turmoil and pressure, Billy was finally forced to give up on A New Kind of Love.

  By February 6, the production was running ten days behind schedule. The aerial unit flew up to Massachusetts, but even the North Atlantic didn’t look like the North Atlantic—there weren’t enough waves—so they couldn’t shoot. The process shots Jimmy Stewart depended upon when he bolted from Paris were unusually slow and painstaking to film. Often they worked all day for a minute of usable film just to get Lindy to look like he was really flying when Stewart was in fact on the ground. During a night shoot at the Platt Ranch in Canoga Park, Stewart’s parachute caught the wind and dragged the star fifty feet along the ground. (He was shaken but not badly hurt.) Billy himself was losing his usual grip on what he wanted. He rehearsed the air circus scene all week long but waited until Friday to decide he didn’t like it and had to rethink the whole thing. Stewart, meanwhile, was unnerved by a visit paid by Lindbergh himself. Stewart asked him at what point he got tired. “I never got tired,” Lindy replied. “This was rather disconcerting,” Stewart later said, “as I had based the whole performance on the fact that he did.”

  Still, there were some gratifying moments. Now that Billy had the authority earned by years of success, he could finally film the kind of interchange between man and insect that had been denied him with Hold Back the Dawn. Unlike Charles Boyer, Billy later observed, “Mr. Stewart did not object to talking to insects. After all, he had to deal all of his life with agents and producers.” Wilder’s script for The Spirit of St. Louis devoted not only one scene to Lindbergh and his friend—a fly rather than a roach—but thirty separate scenes (numbers fifty-nine through eighty-nine). Billy admired the insect’s skills: “Who ever saw a fly crash?” he once pointed out. A prop master named Limey Plews was put in charge. First he tried an artificial fly tied onto a strand of human hair and manipulated by way of a stick. Wilder hated it, saying “Do you know what it looks like? It looks like an artificial fly attached to human hair and being handled from the end of a stick.” Then they caught real flies with a trap, retaining only those that were photogenic. The trouble was to find a way to stun them long enough to get them to walk on Stewart’s face and across the control panel without flying away. They tried spraying them with various substances, but the stuff either killed them or revved them up into a kind of mania. Icing them worked better, but not well enough, and they ended up using animation to fill in what strands of hair, chemicals, and refrigeration failed to accomplish. Billy rewrote some bits of business—the script originally described a “massacre of fly”—and ended up sending it out the window over St. John’s.

  Spirit closed on March 2 only to reopen again on the 27th. The production had a 64-day shoot scheduled; ultimately it took 115. Wilder shot footage through April and most of May. On May 21 at eleven-thirty at night, after shooting Lindbergh in the cockpit at Le Bourget, the production of The Spirit of St. Louis closed. Or so they thought.

  On May 27, clips of The Spirit of St. Louis were showcased on one of American television’s most popular programs, The Ed Sullivan Show. Jack Warner instigated this publicity ploy—over Hayward’s and Wilder’s objections—because he wanted to capitalize on the anniversary of Lindbergh’s flight on May 20th. As far as Billy and Leland Hayward were concerned, it was a total disaster. For one thing, there was no mention at all of Wilder’s name, despite Hayward’s insistence that Billy should always be connected with the film. In addition, Wilder was enraged that the format was wrong: the clips were shown not in CinemaScope and Warnercolor but cropped for television and in black-and-white.

  The Spirit of St. Louis now required a lot of editing. The lone-gendarme arrival was cut. Much of the relationship between Lindbergh and his closest friend, Bud Gurney (Murray Hamilton)—a friendship Wilder and Mayes explored at some length in order to develop Lindy’s character and make him less of a loner—had been deleted even before it was shot; now it was cut back even further. New fog shots were taken in July. But by that point, Billy himself was no longer working on The Spirit of St. Louis.

  He’d go
tten bored with it, it was out of control, and anyway he had more important items on his mind, things to do, deals to make. For one thing, Ariane was well into preproduction. For another, he still wanted to get moving on the Molnár farce Egy-kettö-három. This was turning out to be an expensive proposition, so the matter was put off for another day. Next: Billy and Mirisch revised their agreement on Ariane, and Billy ordered a print of German film called Spionage with an eye toward making a film about the same subject: the Colonel Redl Austro-Hungarian drag-queen-spy scandal of 1914. Next: Billy and Audrey set sail for France on the SS Liberte in July and arrived in Paris on the 25th. They checked into the Hotel Raphael. Ariane was scheduled to go before the cameras around September 1.

  So Hayward and Jack Warner took over The Spirit of St. Louis and immediately handed it over to the director John Sturges, who had already been lined up to begin work on Hayward’s next film, The Old Man and the Sea. Sturges filmed retakes of some of the process shots and inserts and even a number of retakes of Stewart himself, though he got no screen credit. This second round of filming continued as late as January 7, 1957, when Sturges reshot some scenes of Stewart in the Garden City hotel lobby and bedroom as well as some of the Le Bourget sequence.

  Warner, after seeing the assembled film in early November, demanded all kinds of revisions: “Add comedy music when Lindbergh as boy is sleeping on railroad tracks. Music too somber; also, get to gag faster.” Billy had filmed the young Lindy lying with his head on the tracks holding a fishing pole as a train speeds toward him from the rear of the image. Because of the angle, it looks as if the child is about to be beheaded; only when the train reaches the foreground can one see that it’s on the adjacent track. It’s a “gag,” but a grim one. (Billy, by the way, had always held Warner’s sense of humor in contempt: “Warner would have given everything he owned to be a stand-up comedian. He tried it all the time, and the results were pathetic”)

  Warner and Sturges could only go so far in tampering with Wilder’s film, one of the most remarkable features of which is its Godlessness. This is the exchange between Lindbergh and Frank Mahoney, who is in charge of designing the plane:

  MAHONEY: How are you going to navigate?

  LINDBERGH: Dead reckoning. I take up a compass heading of sixty-five degrees out of New York, keep correcting the heading every hundred miles. Over the water I keep watching the waves, see which direction the wind’s blowing, allow for the drift….

  MAHONEY: And hope the Lord’ll do the rest!

  LINDBERGH: I never bother the Lord. I’ll do the rest.

  MAHONEY: Might need a little help up there, dontcha think?

  LINDBERGH: Only get in the way.

  Who else but Billy Wilder would, at the height of the 1950s, describe God as a piece of jetsam? (Wilder has a characteristic ambivalence about his spiritual life. When Chris Columbus asked him why each Wilder script has “Cum Dio” written on the first page, Billy answered, “I got that from a writer whom I worked with in Germany. He said, ‘It can’t hurt.’ Look, this is the cheapest way of bribing that thing in the clouds there.”)

  For all of Jack Warner’s “good, Americana kind of feeling,” The Spirit of St. Louis is a surprisingly dark-tempered film. Wilder’s Lindy descends into morose musings to a far greater degree than Lindbergh himself does in his book, and Stewart’s itchy anxiety reaches practically the same pitch as it does in Rear Window. At one point, Lindbergh’s backers, fearing for his life, try to talk him out of the flight. “Nungesser and Coli would understand,” Lindbergh explains, Nungesser and Coli having just drowned in the icy drink of the North Atlantic.

  Neither Wilder’s morbidity nor Stewart’s neurotic performance were to blame for the film’s failure. Warner Bros. was shocked to learn after a sneak preview of the film that hardly anybody under the age of forty knew who Lindbergh was. Their solution was to send teen heartthrob Tab Hunter out on a twelve-city tour. As Tab explained to the press, “I had an overwhelming feeling that every American who belongs to this generation—my generation—should see the picture. I know what The Spirit of St. Louis did to me, and for me. Because I’m one of them, I can get the word to young Americans, and I’ll be doing them a favor.” Jimmy Stewart, meanwhile, fled to South America with his family.

  The Spirit of St. Louis received its West Coast premiere at the Egyptian Theater in early April. Warner personally invited Lindbergh to the star-studded gala at the Egyptian, but Lindbergh sent his regrets, having already seen the picture at Radio City. Warner planned a real blowout for the Hollywood opening, inviting such luminaries as Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, George Murphy, Burt Lancaster, Donald Crisp, Walter Brennan, Jayne Mansfield, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Warner also got Frank Sinatra to perform a special show at the postpremiere party at the Mocambo. Hollywood Boulevard itself was covered in a red carpet for the festivities, which included televised spots on everything from The Tonight Show to Truth or Consequences. There was, however, one celebrity Jack Warner couldn’t convince to show up. As he wrote in a note to Hayward, “I asked Billy Wilder several times, but he alibied that he was leaving town. Have you any people you would like to invite to the premiere and party? Do not include Wilder. You will just have to forget this fellow as he belongs in another world—you know which one.”

  Reviews of the film were good, but it bombed. Most people didn’t get the chance to dislike it. They just stayed home. Warners’ poll proved accurate: Americans didn’t know who Lindbergh was, and they didn’t care to learn. Lindy’s obscurity, and the film’s failure, were the subjects of a New Yorker cartoon: a father and his little boy are seen exiting from a movie theater showing The Spirit of St. Louis. With a puzzled expression on his face, the boy asks, “If everyone thought what he did was so marvellous, how come he never got famous?”

  Having cost the astronomical sum of $6,000,000, the end-of-year gross of $2.6 million was more than just a disappointment. It pushed Warner Bros. into the red for the first time in twenty years. Leland Hayward’s other big picture for Warners, The Old Man and the Sea, turned out to be a big bomb as well. If it hadn’t been for the studio’s top-grossing film—The Bad Seed—Warners’ balance sheet would have looked even worse. “I felt sorry for Jack Warner,” Billy claimed. “I thought of offering him his money back, but then I thought he might take it.”

  Wendell Mayes blamed the title: “The picture should have been called The Lindbergh Story or something like that, because when they put it out as The Spirit of St. Louis everyone thought it was an old musical. They didn’t know what The Spirit of St. Louis was. They had no idea it was the name of a plane.”

  Curiously, Wilder’s assessment of the film’s failure had nothing to do with the enormous technical difficulties he and his staff faced, nor Stewart’s performance, nor Stewart’s age. Billy blamed himself: “I succeeded with some good moments, but I wasn’t able to depict the character. That’s what was lacking—the exploration of a character.” He thought it was his worst movie. “I should confine myself to bedrooms maybe,” he said. That the General Federation of Women’s Clubs gave The Spirit of St. Louis an award for being “the most typical American story” and the Airline Stewardesses and Stewards Association bestowed a “Miss Spirit of St. Louis” medal to the “world’s ideal airline stewardess” were of no consolation.

  PART FIVE

  1957–1961

  22. IN THE AFTERNOON

  ARIANE (Audrey Hepburn): If people loved each other more, they’d shoot each other less.

  FLANNAGAN (Gary Cooper): Are you a religious fanatic or something?

  —Love in the Afternoon

  A few days after Billie Wilder turned fourteen, the man who was to become his closest friend was born in Romania. Itek Dommnici, from the mountain town of Ungheni, made it to America before Billie did. In 1929 he moved to New York with his mother. There, they rejoined the father and husband who left them to find enough work to finance their reunion in a more promising country. Itek, now of Brooklyn, now named Isadore, enrolled at Boys H
igh School, learned English, and became a math whiz, and by the mid-1930s the young ex-Romanian was an Ivy League engineering student. He changed his name to Diamond and adopted the initials I. A. L., which stood for Interscholastic Algebra League, of which he had been tri-state champion (the 1936 and 1937 seasons). His friends called him Iz.

  At Columbia University he teamed up with a fellow student, Lee Wainer, and wrote the Varsity Show for each of the four years he was a student. Every summer, the duo continued their writing in the Catskills, where they came up with Borscht Belt skits and revues aimed strictly at the Jews who could appreciate them. Back at the patrician university, Iz edited the Columbia Daily Spectator, abandoned math and engineering, and graduated with a degree in journalism and a professional need to spin words. For the rest of his life he never earned a dollar doing anything other than writing.

  “I wanted a goyische handle,” I. A. L. Diamond once said of his made-up initials, “in case I should ever try to join the Los Angeles Country Club or work at Disney.” He never worked at Disney, and his country club memberships haven’t been quantified, but Diamond did land many Hollywood screenwriting jobs after his Columbia graduation—first at Paramount, then at Universal, and still later at Warners and Twentieth Century-Fox. Diamond’s original deal at Paramount was for ten weeks, but the junior scripter ended up staying for seventy-eight, even though all he did was write unproduced sequels and earn a living. Billy Wilder, the biggest of all the big shots in the Writers Building at Paramount, had no reason to know Iz Diamond.

  Diamond’s first screen credit was for Universal’s Murder in the Blue Room (1944), a haunted-house mystery-comedy with music. While Billy was winning his Oscars for The Lost Weekend, Diamond was at Warner Bros. for Two Guys from Milwaukee (1946). He landed at Fox in the early 1950s, where, after a few more anonymous fliers, he had the good fortune to be assigned to rewrite a script called The Fountain of Youth. Darryl Zanuck liked Diamond’s revisions, but when Howard Hawks signed on as the film’s director with Cary Grant as his star, the journeyman Diamond was tossed off the project in favor of the eminently more bankable Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer. The film was rewritten and retitled Monkey Business (1952). Diamond’s career was not clicking. He was successful enough at making a living, but his most characteristic work may have been the humor column he published in the Writers Guild newsletter and the skits he wrote for Guild dinners and testimonials.