by Ed Sikov
In April 1955, Billy and Audrey Wilder attended one of those dinners. The evening’s entertainment took the form of two sketches Billy found funny. Both were written by Diamond. In one, two screenwriting collaborators struggle to think up precisely the right word for the parenthetical description of the tonal inflection of a certain line of immaterial dialogue. One writer sits at a typewriter, stumped, while the other paces furiously around the room. Quizzically, suggests the one, to which the other doesn’t bother to reply. The first one tries again with truculently. This gets a response: “That’s close.” Suggestions begin to flow back and forth and eventually build to a crescendo. “With mixed emotions!” the first writer shouts. “With wild surprise!” the second one cries in triumph, to which the first one responds, “How about quizzically?”
The other skit parodied the “Fugue for Tinhorns” number in Guys and Dolls, except that instead of lowlifes discussing horses, three agents try to sell their screenwriting clients to Samuel Goldwyn. These sketches made Billy Wilder laugh, so Billy, who was getting used to hiring screenwriting collaborators with less deliberation than he employed when buying a new pair of shoes, quickly handed Ariane to their author. This left him more time to concentrate on The Spirit of St. Louis.
In their long career together, Wilder and Diamond may have done battle over words and lines, stories and characters, congressional elections, and the rules of card games, but their partnership was far less heated than the one Billy forged with Brackett. Each was happily married, Diamond to a charming woman named Barbara, herself a novelist and screenwriter. Each was a father—Diamond had two children, a son and a daughter. Theirs was a partnership of security. Telephone books were rarely, if ever, thrown. If there were violent shouting matches, they were not of the magnitude that plagued Charles Brackett. Diamond was even more low-key than Brackett—pathologically so. He was too restrained even to engage in a fight, let alone pick one. (“I was married to him for ten years before I noticed that when I was talking no one was answering,” Barbara Diamond once observed.) Wilder and Diamond were two Jews from middle Europe, so of course they argued and told jokes at each other’s expense. The more salient point is that when he met Iz Diamond, Wilder was a more perspicacious, one might even say kinder, man than he was when he first knew Brackett. He could afford to be. In the second and final long-term writing relationship of his life, it was Wilder who had the age, the experience, the wealth, and the prestige. With Brackett he’d been all too junior. More important, Diamond knew, as Brackett didn’t (not to mention most of the others who came in between) that—under the crust—Billy was a softie.
“The highest compliment you could get from him would be, ‘Why not?’” Billy once said of his friend and partner. He and Diamond understood each other. They were harmonic.
Diamond once claimed that “in the top 10 percent of directors you’ll find mostly men who came up from writers’ ranks. The other 90 percent of directors I consider nothing but traffic cops.” Diamond was wrong, needless to say. John Ford didn’t start out as a screenwriter, nor did Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Charles Chaplin, Otto Preminger, Buster Keaton, F. W. Murnau, Josef von Sternberg, George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, or Erich von Stroheim. Ernst Lubitsch was an actor first, and Orson Welles was so young when he directed Citizen Kane that he can’t be said to have come from any ranks at all. However fallacious Diamond’s point may have been, Billy agreed totally: directors who did not start out as screenwriters did not understand what good directing was. In these men’s joint mind, great filmmaking stands upon a finely wrought screenplay, a detailed verbal blueprint. It was Diamond, after all, who suggested that they do a final polish on their script for The Apartment, an idea he proposed three months after the film was released.
In a perceptive essay called “The Private Films of Billy Wilder,” the critic George Morris wrote of Diamond and Wilder that “the two men complement each other beautifully. Diamond’s ready wit leaves Wilder free to tap his emotional resources more fully.” After meeting Diamond and working with him on Ariane—or Love in the Afternoon as it was soon retitled—Billy Wilder turned inward, allowing himself far greater latitude in exploring the heart as well as the mind. Love in the Afternoon is Sabrina with a more finely wrought script, more Paris, no Bogart, and a wiser feel for love. Wilder’s movies continued to have a sour streak, sometimes violently so. But in the scripts he composed with Diamond, Billy found himself able to develop themes of affection, even joy. Of course, when he met his newest partner Billy Wilder was himself in the afternoon of his glorious life. The sun was warm, the day was long, and it wasn’t even close to dinner.
Love in the Afternoon was Billy’s first film for Allied Artists under the deal orchestrated by Harold Mirisch. There were two other Mirisches, Walter and Marvin, and before too long people in Hollywood started calling Billy the fourth Mirisch, so closely was he associated with the wheeling-dealing brothers. Wilder’s deal with Allied allowed him to do pretty much whatever he wanted, provided that he and the Mirisches ran Billy’s ideas past Steve Broidy, the head of the company. When Love in the Afternoon was taking off, they met in Broidy’s office, and Billy started to tell Broidy the story of the film he wanted to make. It’s about an older man, Billy began, and a younger woman, and they’re in Europe—Paris—and—“Just tell me the highlights,” Broidy demanded. “What’s the title? Just give me the title.” “Love in the Afternoon,” said Billy. “That’s a terrible title!” Broidy exclaimed. There was silence for a moment or two. “So what do you think is a good title?” Billy inquired. Broidy thought for a second and said, “Omaha.”
They all sat there pondering Omaha for a while, and then they left. Out in the hall, one of the Mirisches made the mistake of remarking, “That’s not a bad title, Omaha,” and Billy went nuts.
According to Wilder, the idea for Love in the Afternoon came from one of the increasing number of artworks he was purchasing. “I bought a painting by Pierre Roy in New York,” he says. “There was a black derby and a soft hat, and the sun was shining on the parquet floor. I thought of Love in the Afternoon there.” The inspiration was actually planted much earlier—in 1931, when Wilder’s morose café friend Carl Mayer wrote the script for Paul Czinner’s Ariane, starring Czinner’s wife, Elisabeth Bergner. In particular, Billy fondly recalled a scene from Ariane in which the two lovers bid farewell at a train station while the train hissed and steamed behind them.
In 1954, when Billy began seriously to plan his own remake, it was all about Audrey Hepburn. He cabled Hepburn in late December 1954, telling her that he was very interested in signing a deal for the rights, but he wouldn’t commit himself without Hepburn’s own promise: “Ariane without you unthinkable,” he wrote. He was right—the part seemed tailor-made for her. Still, despite his enchantment with Hepburn, whom he clearly respected more than most of the actresses he worked with, Wilder only gave her roles originally created by others. He rewrote Hepburn’s characters beautifully, but he was apparently incapable of imagining them entirely on his own.
Billy made sure to sign Hepburn a year before the film was ready to roll—even before she filmed the megaproduction War and Peace. (Hepburn was now represented by a new agent—Kurt Frings, the original subject of Hold Back the Dawn who had threatened to sue Paramount for defaming his character under Billy’s and Brackett’s mean-spirited hands. Now he was Billy’s poker buddy. It was Wilder who introduced Frings to Hepburn.)
Originally, Billy’s idea was to pair Hepburn with Cary Grant, but Grant once again found himself unavailable for a Wilder film. In the spring of 1956, Billy and his new collaborator, Diamond, considered writing the part for Yul Brynner, with Brynner’s character modeled on the glamorous international playboy Aly Kahn. Diamond was dispatched to the home of the socialite Doris Vidor, who was known to be friendly with Khan, to pick up some details and flesh out the character with true-life observations. Mrs. Vidor described her friend simply as “charming.” Diamond, sensing a certain reticence, pressed he
r for more details. Well, Doris Vidor noted, Aly knew all about the most fascinating things. Like what? Well, like Paris fashions. And horse racing. After thinking for another moment, she confessed: “To tell you the truth,” she said, “Aly Khan is a fucking bore.”
Wilder and Diamond are then said to have considered using Howard Hughes as their model; that’s supposedly when they thought of Gary Cooper. There may be a trace of Hughes in the character Wilder and Diamond ended up creating, but just barely. By the time Wilder and Diamond were writing Love in the Afternoon, Hughes was no longer the playboy he’d once been. Increasingly eccentric, Hughes drove the studio he’d bought, RKO, straight into the ground by the mid-1950s, and despite his having sold the tattered company for a $10 million personal profit, most Hollywood sharpies considered Hughes an idiot and a crank.
Cooper was fifty-five years old when he was tapped for the role of Frank Flannagan in Love in the Afternoon. Wilder, himself nearly fifty, was plainly drawn to the idea of matching a decidedly middle-aged man of the world with a wispy girl-woman half his age. The Spirit of St. Louis was still in postproduction; critics were not yet remarking on Jimmy Stewart’s maturity, so Wilder proceeded with Cooper unperturbed. He used gauze to disguise the wrinkles, a lot of shadow on the face, and many of the same type of over-the-shoulder shots of Hepburn that so bothered Humphrey Bogart. Wilder was also forced to contend with Cooper’s gracelessness. The lumbering Coop, fresh from High Noon, simply could not dance. “Old Hopalong Nijinsky” is what Billy called him. (That and “Coopsy.”)
Love in the Afternoon, a paean to the romantic comedies of Ernst Lubitsch—in particular, The Merry Widow and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife—concerns an ingenue’s love for an aging playboy. Like the dashing Danilo in The Merry Widow, Frank Flannagan lives a life of splendid, unfettered promiscuity, and the girl’s father is a private detective who specializes in tailing the graying lothario and chronicling his many affairs for a string of outraged husbands. The ingenue, at first glance a proper young lady, understands with steely determination that the way to win the playboy’s heart is to convince him that she herself has been well used. Lubitsch’s merry widow pretends to be a whore at Maxim’s and drives Danilo to drink; Ariane, a woman of the 1950s, torments Flannagan by leaving a lengthy account of her lovers on his Dictaphone machine. Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife starred Gary Cooper. The Merry Widow starred Maurice Chevalier.
Billy saw the popular song-and-dance man perform at the Empire Room of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria and decided to offer him the role of Ariane’s father. He’d been wanting to do a film with Chevalier for years, and now that the red-baiting era was on the wane, he could afford to take the chance. Wilder recalls that Chevalier had been considered for a big star buildup at Ufa in the early 1930s, but that the studio bosses decided against it because of the conspicuous mole that graced Chevalier’s left cheek. Wilder didn’t care about the mole, but he was dissatisfied by something else: by 1956, Chevalier’s English was far too good for the role of a Parisian detective, and Billy had to keep begging Chevalier to be “a little more French.” Chevalier, meanwhile, was irritated and insulted by Wilder’s refusal to allow him to sing in the film.
The shooting of Love in the Afternoon at the Studios de Boulogne and on location in Paris remained free of turmoil until the vicissitudes of international relations got in the way. The Soviets chose October 1956 to invade Hungary. This caused street rioting in Paris. The Soviet embassy was firebombed and stoned, and one of the French crew working on Love in the Afternoon is said to have been struck by a rock. There was no immediate danger to the film’s stars or director; the rioting didn’t take place anywhere near the filming. Still, Wilder sped rapidly through the rest of the shoot in order to get everybody out of Paris as soon as possible. The news struck a chord in Wilder. A refugee himself, he was personally upset by it, and between setups he huddled over the most recent editions of Paris newspapers to try and make sense of the world he lived in.
On top of the Soviet-Hungary turmoil, the Suez Canal crisis reached a head when Israeli troops plunged into the Sinai Desert and Britain and France moved to occupy the Canal Zone. Panicky Allied Artists underlings were ordered to make block bookings on airlines every day in the event of a sudden evacuation. There was a lot of tension but no catastrophe, though, and Love in the Afternoon’s cast and crew made it safely out of France in December.
“How proud I would be, and full of love I would be, if I really had a daughter like you,” Maurice Chevalier told Audrey Hepburn via telegram on the first day of shooting. Chevalier was being courtly, and Audrey appreciated it, but there was no particular warmth in their offscreen relationship. The film’s French crew was known for its Friday-night get-togethers. Described by Hepburn’s and Chevalier’s biographers as wild blowouts, they were really just sociable, relaxed affairs with aperitifs and conversation. The Wilders were there, of course, as well as Cooper and Hepburn. Once or twice Billy asked the gypsy band to stick around and provide background music, and they graciously obliged. (In the film, the band absurdly follows Cooper around town, accompanying him even in a steam room.) But Chevalier didn’t like these affairs, particularly the bills that served as their finale, so he stayed away. Chevalier did, however, introduce Wilder to his old friend and former collaborator Henri Betti, from whom Chevalier had been estranged for years over a loan. The two reconciled at the time of Love in the Afternoon, and Wilder ended up hiring Betti to write a song for the movie. The result was “C’est Si Bon,” and it became a huge hit.
Apart from the threat of rioting and Cooper’s lead feet, the biggest complications that occurred during the shooting of Love in the Afternoon were the bad weather and mosquitoes that hung over the Château de Vitry, the location Wilder chose for the picnic scene. When the bugs weren’t biting, the microphones started picking up noise from the many airplanes heading in and out of Orly Airport. All of this resulted in many retakes. Mostly, though, filming was tranquil. Audrey Wilder got into the act in a literal way when Billy cast her in the wordless role of the brunette whose tryst with Flannagan is interrupted by the arrival of her husband and Ariane. It has been reported that Audrey never worked again after her arm appeared in The Lost Weekend, but in fact she appears in small roles in at least nine subsequent films, including Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Easy Living (1949), and the Doris Day–Jimmy Cagney musical Love Me or Leave Me (1955), in which she sings an introductory jingle for a vaudeville act. With Love in the Afternoon, Billy must have enjoyed directing his wife in assorted clinches with Gary Cooper, though he does keep her face mostly in shadow.
Newsweek flatteringly chronicled the day Cooper and Hepburn rehearsed and finally shot the sequence in which Ariane, having spent the afternoon in Flannagan’s room at the Ritz, crawls around the floor looking for a lost slipper. Cooper kept falling asleep. “Somebody wake up Coop,” Billy requested time and again. (The magazine described Billy as “a nearsighted man of fifty with a face rather like a Kewpie’s and a comedy German accent.”) It took hours before Wilder was ready to shoot, and when the take was completed, “Wilder began to smile gently. his eyes brimmed with a kind of loving tenderness. His head tipped from side to side as if to sentimental music. His expression became that of a proud father setting eyes on his newborn child for the first time. At the end of the scene, he lay back in his chair, threw up his hands, and laughed wildly, as if he had never watched the scene before.”
In addition to marking his first script with Diamond, Love in the Afternoon sparked a second long-term collaboration for Billy. Alexander Trauner, a Hungarian Jew who fled his country’s endemic anti-Semitism, wound up in Paris. He arrived there more or less in tandem with sound film, which created special conditions for scenic design and, consequently, more jobs for designers. Trauner, who began as a painter, now found work in the cinema. Beginning as an assistant to René Clair’s designer, Trauner quickly developed such technical skill and taste that he became one of the chief visual architects of poetic realis
m, the dominant French film style of the period. Perfected by Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert, with whom Trauner was closely associated, poetic realism was also influenced by the westward expansion of Expressionism, with which Trauner had grown up in Hungary. (Trauner designed both Le Jour Se Lève and Les Enfants du Paradis, leading François Truffaut to dismiss Marcel Carné simply as the fellow who directed Prévert’s words and Trauner’s sets.)
“It was exactly thirty years ago that I met Alex and Lina Trauner,” Wilder wrote in his introduction to Trauner’s lavish, 1980s catalogue raisonné. Lina Trauner was not the art director’s wife. She was his dog. Wilder was shooting the colossal Le Bourget crowd scene of The Spirit of St. Louis, and “Trau, who had been taken there by my friend Noel Howard, looked at this frenetic agitation with a skeptical eye. He held Lina, his beloved dachshund, in his arms, clutching her to keep her from being trampled. After the seventh take, he turned to me and said: ‘Why are you shooting that?’ ‘What do you mean? It’s an important scene in the film.’” Trauner replied: “‘That’s second unit work. You should be at Maxim’s eating a superb supper.’” Wilder had found a kindred spirit. So impressed with Trauner’s sensibility was Wilder that he decided to begin Love in the Afternoon with a shot of Trauner himself. A painter is seen tacking his work up on a board; Trauner is the artist.