by Ed Sikov
Shooting began on Soundstage 5 with Laughton and Lanchester doing scenes in Wilfrid’s private office and anteroom. Power appeared two days later, Marlene the following week. They filmed through July and August.
Before shooting began, of course, Alex and Lina Trauner arrived from Paris to supervise the construction of Trauner’s elaborate set designs. London’s Old Bailey and Wilfrid’s quarters at the Inns of Court were meticulously re-created on various Goldwyn soundstages. Shooting at the actual Old Bailey was out of the question, and according to Trauner he couldn’t even take pictures of it, so his research task was substantial. Trauner’s sets are so accurately realized, so rich in plausible detail, that most audiences probably don’t notice them. Trauner rebuilt the Old Bailey in actual mahogany, or perhaps it was Austrian oak. (The film’s publicity contradicts itself.) In either case, it was an exceedingly heavy set, not to mention a cumbersome one, so Trauner designed it in sixty sections, each of which was set on wheels. Within each section there were hinged panels, too, so that the camera could poke through if the setup called for it. Working from blueprints, Trauner designed the set to be exactly the same size as the original—forty-three feet by fifty-six feet with a twenty-seven-foot ceiling. Even the floor was moveable; it contained nineteen detachable panels.
In the first shots of the film, the ailing Sir Wilfrid is a tired old toad being carted away from the hospital, but by the time he gets home—which is to say back to the office—he’s already in full recovery. He’s outraged by his infirmity. They’ve put his barrister’s wig in mothballs. “Might as well get a bigger box, more mothballs, and put me away too,” he gripes. The aggressive Miss Plimsoll, a sadistic Mary Poppins, confiscates his beloved cigars. She is infuriated when two visitors show up—Mayhew (another lawyer) and Leonard Vole. Their arrival offers Billy the chance to rewrite the play. Christie’s Sir Wilfrid takes Vole’s case because he is interested in it; Wilder’s takes it because Mayhew has two cigars in his pocket and Vole has a lighter.
Wilfrid’s servant appears: “Sorry, Sir Wilfrid, but Miss Plimsoll has issued an ultimatum. If you are not in bed in one minute, she will resign.” “Splendid,” Sir Wilfrid replies. “Give her a month’s pay and kick her down the stairs.”
After Vole is arrested and departs, Wilfrid, seated on the personal lift that has been installed on his staircase, goes on elaborately about how his associate (John Williams) should treat Vole’s wife, Christine, with the utmost delicacy. Being a foreigner, she’ll probably become hysterical. She may faint. She’ll need smelling salts, handkerchiefs…. From offscreen a deep, authoritative voice is heard: “I do not think that will be necessary.” Wilder cuts to a smartly if inexpensively dressed woman in a tailored gray suit and hat. The camera tracks forward: “I never faint because I am not sure that I will fall gracefully, and I never use smelling salts because they puff up the eyes. I am Christine Vole.”
In tandem with Miss Plimsoll, the exquisitely brittle Christine drives Sir Wilfrid back into the fray. Like Billy himself, he would rather keel over from a massive coronary than submit to a life without cigars, and the two women’s abject malignancy rouses his sense of honor. The tired old toad rises like a stalwart lion to defend an innocent man, especially one who is held at the mercy of a bitch. As Wilfrid tells his nurse, “If you were a woman, Miss Plimsoll, I would strike you.”
Shooting was peaceful. Wilder and Hornblow got along very well—Billy filmed, Hornblow ran interference. “He took the dark load off my shoulders,” Billy admitted. “I didn’t have to go to the front office and say, hey, you can’t cut this budget here because I need the set as it is. Hornblow did it.” All the Old Bailey sequences were completed by the end of July, and Wilder and his cast and crew moved on to the scenes set at Euston station involving Dietrich with her fake nose and accent. Orson Welles stopped by to help Dietrich build the nose out of putty while Laughton dealt with the accent. Laughton demonstrated to Marlene the technical points of Cockney dialogue at his house while lounging around the pool with Elsa, and he stayed at the studio with Marlene after his own scenes had been shot, just to help her out a little more. Even Noël Coward got into the act. He was visiting Laughton, and as Coward put it in his diary, it was “not easy to teach Cockney to a German glamour-puss who can’t pronounce her r’s.” Still, the acidic playwright thought she did a pretty good job in the end.
Wilder brought Matty Malneck in once more, not only to compose the score but also to work with Marlene on her cabaret song. By mid-August, the company was finishing up with the exteriors of the bombed-out German street and the interiors of the nightclub, all of which were built on Soundstages 8 and 5. The final day of filming was August 20, with Power and Dietrich finishing up with scenes set in Christine’s room as well as the nightclub. In those scenes, Leonard Vole, a soldier in postwar Berlin, meets and gets to know Christine. She leads him into the dank back room of the cellar bar. The hovel is her bedroom. He responds in a way Agatha Christie could not have dreamed: “This is pretty horrible, in a gemütlich sort of way.”
Billy was struck by Dietrich’s extraordinary commitment to the role. As he described it later, she acted “as if she thought her career depended on it.” “You’ll never win an Oscar for this,” Billy told her; “People don’t like to be made fools of.” Indeed she was “desperately disappointed” at not even earning a nomination. In the spring of 1958 when the nominations were announced, Dietrich was performing a one-woman show in Las Vegas, and she was so certain of being named in the Best Actress category that she began her act with a recorded voice trumpeting, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present the Academy Award nominee for Witness for the Prosecution, Miss Marlene Dietrich!” They had to rerecord the introduction.
Wilder earned a nomination for Best Director, but he ridiculed it, at least in retrospect. As he said some years later, “To give an Academy Award to a man who directs a play is like giving the removalists who took Michelangelo’s Pietà from the Vatican to the New York World’s Fair a first award in sculpture.”
Marlene may not have impressed the Academy voters, but she sure knew how to keep the town talking. Billy and Audrey invited her to dinner, and as always she made herself the center of attention. Billy, knowing the many answers in advance, began asking her to recall some of the men in her life. Marlene responded in intimate detail. The guests were riveted, amazed, enthralled. Wilder then asked her to talk about the women in her life. She was only too glad to do so. “Well, of course there was Claire Waldoff,” and on and on and on. A silence fell over the room. “Oh,” Billy said, turning to his guests. “Are we boring you?”
Laughton, meanwhile, told the press that Marlene often cooked him lunch in the small working kitchen that was set up for him in his dressing room. When Dietrich was busy, Elsa took over as chef for the corpulent actor. According to Laughton, Dietrich made such specialties as goulash, strawberries in red wine, beef Stroganoff, Wiener schnitzel, and palaczinki. Billy added his own remark: the men in Marlene’s life tolerated her legs, he said, just for the sake of her cooking.
As was often the case, Billy went into production on Witness without a complete script, but this time it was for an unusual reason. The screenplay was finished, revised, and polished at the start of filming, but because of the surprise ending, Wilder left out the last ten pages when he distributed it to the company. Even the scripts received by Dietrich, Power, and Laughton ended with the immediate aftermath of the verdict, with Sir Wilfrid voicing his nagging doubts about the way it all worked out so neatly. Much of this was just a publicity ploy; Power could tell the many interviewers who sought the inside story that even he didn’t know what was going to happen until the end, though of course Wilder filmed the courtroom ending well before the last day of the shoot. Variety reporter Leonard Lyons insisted that Wilder stationed armed guards at the doors of the set to keep people from knowing the secret plot twist. When Witness for the Prosecution was shown at a command performance in London, Hornblow was even said
to have succeeded in getting the British Royal Family to “sign pledges that they would not divulge the film’s surprise ending to the Commonwealth.”
During their work together on Witness for the Prosecution, Marlene developed quite a crush on Tyrone Power, but then so did everyone else. As Billy said, “Everybody had a crush on Ty. Laughton had a crush on him. I did, too. As heterosexual as you might be, it was impossible to be impervious to that kind of charm.” Wilder found Power to be a real gentleman—very shy, very honorable. If anything he liked Laughton more, so the three men planned a lengthy trip to Europe together—in part to promote their film, in greater measure to have a good time in one another’s company. Wilder seemed to have worked himself into a state of exhaustion over the past several years, and as Witness neared completion he announced that he was taking a four-month vacation—“for health reasons.”
Laughton was a most entertaining companion. The fact that a man was gay was certainly no reason for Billy not to enjoy his companionship. If the man had the confidence to divulge some of his own dirty details, so much the better. Wilder claims never to have seen any indication of homosexuality in Tyrone Power. But, he quickly added, “I’m fully aware that if someone doesn’t make a pass at me, that doesn’t prove he’s a heterosexual. He may happen to be a homosexual with excellent taste.”
So with Elsa Lanchester heading to New York to star in a Broadway show, and with Audrey Wilder apparently at home, Wilder, Laughton, and Power flew off together to Paris and Vienna, after which they drove to Badgastein, where Billy once again shared the pleasures of the fabled, naturally irradiated waters with his two movie-star friends. As Wilder explained to the press, the trip to Badgastein “was supposed to be a men’s cure”—thus they left Marlene and the wives behind. (Badgastein’s waters were world renowned. Pumped fresh from thermal springs, they contained lithium, manganese, phosphoric acid, fluorine, cesium, a touch of arsenic, and up to three hundred Mache units of radium per liter.) From Badgastein they went to Berlin. Although they did work a bit of publicity in along the way, the whole trip was essentially a holiday.
For Wilder, Badgastein was pleasant as always. Vienna was not. Wilder’s visit to his boyhood home was dreadful. What should have been a triumphant homecoming turned into a sour disappointment.
He went shopping, of course: a crocodile handbag for Audrey, a Schiele print to add to his growing collection of works by the modern Viennese master, and a Fritz Wortuba sculpture. Egon Schiele was, and would remain, a central inspiration for Wilder—in sexual attitude if not in formal style. During Wilder’s youth, Schiele was Vienna’s most successful avantgarde artist, a position Wortuba assumed in the 1950s. Billy knew precisely what he was doing when he bought both artists’ work: they were shocking. He also tried to buy a watercolor by a very young artist named Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who later became an extraordinarily successful painter and architect, but unfortunately the work had already been sold.
The attention Billy got from the Viennese took several forms. According to one account, Wilder received about four hundred manuscripts from Austrian writers in addition to self-introductions by any number of would-be Austrian starlets. Somebody even offered to sell him an Austrian castle for only $300,000—not to live there, but to use for some kind of arts festival. Billy declined these various propositions.
Amid all the festivities and the shopping and the crowds of people wanting him to give them jobs, Billy couldn’t help but notice that the Viennese were still quietly, methodically, and guiltlessly relegating the city’s Jewish history to a position somewhat lower than a footnote. Having slaughtered or exiled virtually all of the city’s Jews less than twenty years before, the Viennese of the late 1950s were making no effort to atone for the murders and destruction they committed in the name of racial supremacy. For one thing, Wilder noticed, the residence and psychoanalytic office of the twentieth century’s most famous Viennese Jew remained entirely uncelebrated. “I counted sixty-three statues for Johann Strauss,” Billy said, “but at Berggasse 19 there wasn’t even a marble plaque.”
His own treatment was scarcely better. In 1957, Billy Wilder was one of the most successful film directors in the world, and although he knew he’d never be Vienna’s favorite son, he was still shocked by the lack of warmth accorded him upon his return. The Viennese newspaper Kleine Blatt devoted only fifteen lines to his homecoming. The Volksstimme ignored him completely. (Tyrone Power’s appearance, in contrast, was celebrated under the headline “Holidays in Vienna and Salzkammergut.”) Der Kurier managed to report on the heartwarming relationship between Billy and a sausage seller on the street, but that was the sole aspect of Wilder’s trip the paper reported.
Only one newspaper covered Billy Wilder’s return to Vienna in any detail. Die Wochen-Presse devoted a good deal of space to the press conference held by Wilder, Power, Laughton, and (mysteriously) Oskar Werner. In keeping with Viennese good taste, the paper was discreet about Wilder’s family background. According to Die Wochen-Presse’s capsule history of Billy’s life, Wilder’s father accompanied him when he moved to Berlin back in the 1920s, his mother having already passed away. The paper devoted just five words to Genia Wilder, and they were dead wrong.
But Wilder was upset about the Viennese even before he saw the way they obliterated his mother a second time. He remembered his father’s failed attempt to become an Austrian citizen; the names he’d been called; the way Viennese doors tended to close on the low-born Jew. As he observed in The Emperor Waltz, when the low-born has the impertinence to come distastefully close to the high-born, what can he expect but to be bitten? He was already testy at the news conference, particularly when the subject of Vienna came up. “That’s the way it is when you have a little success,” he snarled at the assembled journalists. “When I came as a little boy to Vienna, they called me ‘the Polak.’ After that, they called me ‘the bootlicker.’ Now suddenly they call me ‘the Viennese.’” Billy Wilder had come home. He couldn’t wait to leave.
23. SOME LIKE IT HOT
DAPHNE (Jack Lemmon): Oh, you invest in shows?
OSGOOD (Joe E. Brown): Showgirls. I’ve been married seven or eight times.
DAPHNE: You’re not sure?
OSGOOD: Ma-ma’s keeping score. Frankly she’s getting rather annoyed with me.
DAPHNE: Wouldn’t wonder.
OSGOOD: So this year when the George White Scandals opened she packed me off to Florida. Right now she thinks I’m out there on my yacht—heh-heh—deep sea fishing. Ahem.
DAPHNE: Well pull in your reel, Mr. Fielding, you’re barking up the wrong fish.
—Some Like It Hot
In jazz, we must distinguish between two ways of interpreting: ‘straight’ and ‘hot,’” the French jazz historian and impressario Hugues Panassié wrote in the 1930s. Panassié is describing what makes le jazz hot hot: “In general, you could say that ‘straight’ playing is playing the piece just as it is written without modifying it. To play ‘straight’ is to follow a direct line.” Other jazz writers use the word sweet instead of straight, but their point is the same: sweet and straight is dull and flat. But as Panassié put it, the term “hot” was coined “to describe the style of certain jazz musicians who played their solos with warm, eloquent intonations of a very special kind.” It was real jazz—dirty, sweaty, sexy, spontaneous.
In the spring of 1958, Billy ran into Jack Lemmon at Dominick’s, a restaurant in Hollywood. “I have an idea for a picture I would like you to play in,” said Billy. “Sit down,” said Lemmon. “I haven’t got time now,” said Billy, “but I will tell you what it is about. It is about two men on the lam from gangsters, running for their lives, and they dress up in girls’ clothes and join an all-girl orchestra.”
“If anybody else had said that,” Lemmon said after the picture was released to tepid reviews but great box office, “I would have run like a jackrabbit. Go in drag? Since it was Billy Wilder, I said, ‘Fine, I’ll do it if I’m free to do it, and if I’m not free
I’ll get free.’”
Wilder and Diamond had been meeting every day at Billy’s office on the Goldwyn lot since at least the beginning of the year, trying to work out the plot of the farce they wanted to make for the Mirisches. It would be based on Fanfaren der Liebe, they knew, though neither was especially fond of that film. They liked its basic premise but not the execution, and even then their interest focused on only one of the film’s three central incidents. In Fanfaren der Liebe, two hungry musicians resort to a series of disguises in order to find work: first they dress as gypsies and join a gypsy band, then they put on blackface for a jazz ensemble, and finally they don dresses, wigs, and makeup and join an all-female orchestra. As Diamond later recalled, Fanfaren der Liebe was “heavy-handed and Germanic. There was a lot of shaving of chests and trying on of wigs. When one of the musicians is seen sneaking into his room in men’s clothes, the other girls beat up his roommate because ‘she’ has disgraced the honor of the band. It was all rather Mädchen in Uniform.”