On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  After ditching two of the three incidents in Fanfaren der Liebe, Wilder and Diamond had to decide what kind of tone their comedy would take. It wouldn’t be a Teutonic Mädchen in Drag, but rather a lighthearted farce with sexual tension and a lot of dirty jokes—in short, sublime but filthy. They were concerned about motivation. In Fanfaren der Liebe, the two musicians were spurred by hunger, but Wilder and Diamond realized that if poverty was their own characters’ sole incentive, they could just take off the dresses once they had enough to eat and move on in men’s clothes to another gig. Diamond and Wilder understood precisely what it would take to force an American man even to play at being a woman in the 1950s—the threat of death. Iz killed the second bird with the same stone by suggesting that they make the comedy a period piece, his theory being that “when everybody’s dress looks eccentric, somebody in drag looks no more peculiar than anyone else.” Thus Americans of the repressed 1950s were disguised in roaring, Jazz Age clothing.

  “The next morning,” Diamond recalled, “Billy came into the office and said, ‘Driving home last night I was thinking about what you said, and I think I have the solution: 1929, Chicago, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.’ That was the breakthrough, and suddenly we had a wealth of material to work with—speakeasies, bootleggers, Florida millionaires. We started writing.”

  Some Like It Hot’s casting is the Rashomon of drag comedy. Everybody has a slightly different tale to tell about who’d be wearing skirts for Billy Wilder. According to Tony Curtis, United Artists (which distributed the film for the Mirisch Company) originally pushed the idea of casting Bob Hope and Danny Kaye as the two musicians, with Mitzi Gaynor in the role of Sugar Kane. Billy is said to have rejected all three suggestions, choosing instead to sign Curtis right off the bat, believing that the dazzlingly handsome actor could play either male role. Wilder first knew Curtis when Curtis was starring in Houdini for Paramount in 1953.

  Tony Curtis was fine as far as UA and the Mirisches were concerned, but they still felt strongly that there had to be at least one very big star in this film. Their suggestion: Frank Sinatra. As I. A. L. Diamond recalled it, Billy made a lunch date with Sinatra, but Sinatra didn’t bother to show up, and that was the end of the matter. According to Diamond, too, there was no need for a big star on the order of Frank Sinatra once Marilyn Monroe signed on and filled the bill herself.

  Sinatra was more central at the time. And Monroe’s appearance didn’t obviate the need for Ol’ Blue Eyes—at least not in the beadier eyes of either the Mirisches or United Artists. In late March, UA’s Arthur Krim was told that the film (still referred to as Fanfares of Love) would start shooting in July and would probably star Sinatra, Curtis, and Monroe. The Mirisches were budgeting Sinatra and Monroe at $200,000 each, plus a quarter of the film’s profits. (Monroe ultimately got 10 percent of the gross over $4 million.) Curtis would get $100,000 against 5 percent of the gross over $2 million. As for Billy, he’d be getting $200,000 plus 17.5 percent of the gross above two times the cost of the negative. If the film grossed $1 million after the break-even point, Billy’s take went up to 20 percent. It was a very sweet deal.

  Another young actor was approached, too, and he remembered Sinatra’s importance as well. According to Anthony Perkins, “Billy Wilder stopped by my dressing room [in New York, where Perkins was appearing in Look Homeward, Angel] and asked if I’d star in a movie with Frank Sinatra. I told Billy I’d committed myself to Mel [Ferrer, for Green Mansions] and couldn’t go back on my word.” Sinatra was apparently going to play Joe, while Perkins would have been given the Jerry role. Tony Curtis has similar memories: “It’s you, Marilyn, Sinatra, and Edward G. Robinson and George Raft as the gangsters,” Curtis remembers Billy telling him.

  Wilder and Sinatra were buddies, though the friendship was periodically strained. For instance, Frank supposedly screamed at Billy over Love in the Afternoon. “He was quite vehement about it,” Wilder rememberd—“so vehement that he made my wife cry. He said he didn’t like the picture because he thought it was immoral for an elderly man to make love in the afternoon to a young girl.” This must have struck Billy as peculiar, given Sinatra’s own notorious womanizing. (It probably seemed even more peculiar at the 1966 party Billy and Audrey threw when the fifty-one-year-old star married twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow.) Wilder also reported, years after Sinatra stood him up for lunch, that he never cast Sinatra precisely because of the performer’s unreliability: “I’m afraid he would run after the first take—‘Bye-bye kid, that’s it. I’m going. I’ve got to see a chick!’ That would drive me crazy.”

  Still, Billy loved the way Sinatra looked and acted on-screen: “I think this: instead of involving himself in all those enterprises, nineteen television shows and records by the ton and four movies all at once and producing things and political things and all those broads—this talent on film would be stupendous. That would be the only word—stupendous. He could make us all—all the actors that is—look like faggots.”

  In any event, Jack Lemmon landed what started out as the Tony Curtis role, and Curtis took over Sinatra’s. As for Monroe, Diamond remembered that while he and Billy were still writing their first draft, Billy got a letter from Monroe telling him how fondly she recalled their work together on The Seven Year Itch and hoping that they’d be able to work together again. This was amusing, given the tsouris he’d endured with her. But as trying as The Seven Year Itch had been for Billy, he’d always loved her performance. Besides, as Wilder himself put it in 1959, Sugar was “the weakest part, so the trick was to give it the strongest casting.” When he read her a few passages of the script, she agreed to appear in Some Like It Hot. She liked Billy well enough, and she liked Curtis, too, having been friendly with him when they were both aspiring stars. Curtis even claims to have spent the night with Monroe in a Malibu beach house in the early 1950s.

  The relaxed bonhomie between stars and director dissipated all too quickly. At the 7:00 P.M. dinner party Harold Mirisch threw to welcome Marilyn back to Hollywood, Marilyn showed up at 11:20. Then Arthur Miller put his arms around both Wilder’s and Diamond’s shoulders and patronizingly began to lecture the two literate screenwriters on the essential differences between comedy and tragedy. They rolled their eyes in irritation. Marilyn, watching the interaction, became tense.

  Lemmon, who claims to have literally fallen off a couch laughing when he first read the script, didn’t yet realize that he’d been cast in the role of a lifetime by a director who would become one of his closest friends and most devoted employers. Wilder knew what Lemmon didn’t: “Within three to four weeks after the start of production,” Billy reported, “Diamond and I had decided that this was not to be a one shot thing with Jack. We wanted to work with him again.” Lemmon himself didn’t quite see it. As he noted it later, his girlfriend, Felicia Farr (whom he’d just begun dating and later married), “kept asking me what I thought of Wilder and I told her, ‘I guess he’s okay.’ She’s never let me forget that one.” Wilder described his friend with genuine affection—which is to say with a put-down: “Lemmon had to be an actor. I doubt he could have done anything else, except play piano in a whorehouse.”

  Wilder understood quickly, and Lemmon eventually, that the two men could forge a rare kind of bond between director and actor. Even more than Bill Holden, Lemmon’s average-Joe Americanism gave Everyman’s voice and gesture to Wilder’s quirky, immigrant-Jewish imagination. Onscreen, Lemmon was a nebbish, but a goyish one—small and fidgety but white-bread. As spoken by Lemmon, Billy’s lines could never seem alien to the Americans he so wanted to please (and appall).

  Tony Curtis, meanwhile, was able to lend glamour to the character Wilder and Diamond wrote for him, but his persona was essentially foreign to Billy. He was a prettyboy. Curtis was known for wearing exceptionally tight clothes, some of which he designed himself, all the better to show off his pinup, classic 1950s vealcake physique. As Billy once said, “Tony’s pants look as though someone dipped him in India ink up to hi
s waist.” One day on the set of Some Like It Hot, Curtis raised a fuss over whether or not his name would or would not appear in the large-size type his contract specified. He approached his director and launched into a lengthy remonstration. Billy listened patiently and then slid the knife in: “The trouble with you, Tony, is that you’re only interested in little pants and big billing.”

  With his pants off and his flapper skirts and wig on, Curtis was ill at ease when filming began. He walked onto the set markedly discomposed. Lemmon, however, clomped onto the set waving happily to the crew and introducing himself with “Hi, I’m Daphne!” “You create a shell and you crawl into it” is the way he later described it. (This was a switch; Lemmon generally thinks of himself as a Method-oriented actor who finds his character in precisely the opposite way.)

  The shells he and Curtis created in Some Like It Hot were designed in part by one of the twentieth-century’s preeminent drag artists. Barbette, whom Billy fondly recalled from his own days in Berlin and Paris, was lured out of semiretirement (at Billy’s behest) to teach Lemmon and Curtis how to effectively transform themselves—not into women, but into drag queens.

  Billy flew Barbette in from Texas to train Lemmon and Curtis in the art of female impersonation. It wasn’t just a matter of seeing to it that their chests were properly shaved, their eyebrows plucked to the correct degree, their hips padded just so, and their penises strapped down. Barbette’s lessons were those of a performance artist, not a costumer. She taught them, tried to teach them, how to walk: you cross your legs in front of each other slightly, which forces your hips to swing out, subtly but noticeably, with each step. Thus you draw attention to the leg and buttocks. Then there was the art of sitting still: you make it a point to hold your hands with the palms down, so the muscles in your arms won’t flex and give your masculinity away. Tony Curtis was a perfect student as far as Barbette was concerned. Under her tutelage, Curtis’s Josephine was a model of classic, discreet femininity. Lemmon, however, couldn’t be taught. Daphne was a disaster.

  Lemmon simply wouldn’t follow Barbette’s rules. It was the walking that Lemmon particularly refused to learn. He claims to have found it not only awkward but, more important for his performance, uncharacteristic: “The goof I was playing wouldn’t be very proficient at walking in heels. I needed to be barely good enough to look like a clumsy woman.” There is a more fundamental point, though: Lemmon’s Daphne is utterly irrepressible. She’s not especially feminine, but the funnier fact is that Lemmon’s male character, the whining and pushed-around Jerry, gives way to an androgyne of startling gumption. This creature does precisely what she pleases. As men, Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Lemmon) plan their names—Joe will be Josephine, Jerry Geraldine. But when, in drag, they introduce themselves to the bandleader Sweet Sue, “I’m Daphne!” is what pops out of Jerry’s mouth. The amazed look on Joe’s face at that moment is second only to the look of shock Jerry himself registers upon Daphne’s self-proclamation. Nobody tells Daphne how to behave—certainly not Barbette, who stormed off in a queeny huff after three days. As Lemmon recalled, “He told Wilder that Curtis was fine but Lemmon was totally impossible.” Billy found the whole thing hysterically funny. He knew he was onto something.

  Men who love drag love it because it gives them access to an otherwise hidden part of themselves. It isn’t just their feminine side. Both Lemmon and Curtis report that when they put on dresses for Some Like It Hot they became their own mothers. On one occasion Curtis claimed that he modeled Josephine after Grace Kelly (for glamour) and ZaSu Pitts (for comedy), with a bit of his mother thrown in (for soul). Another time he said, “I looked like a combination of my mother, Dolores Costello, and Eve Arden.” For Lemmon, the family resemblance came as a shock. After describing his own mother as “Tallulah Bankhead’s road company,” Lemmon claims to have been stunned when he saw a photograph of Daphne standing next to Mrs. Lemmon on the set, the resemblance was so unnerving.

  Does one require a background in clinical psychology to appreciate that another aspect of men’s attraction to drag is the temporary disavowal of their own penises? Maybe. But the fact remains that with the Production Code all but dead, Some Like It Hot pays a great deal of attention to penises—their presence as well as their threatening absence. This is in keeping with the sexual thrust of hot jazz. (Louis Armstrong’s Hot Seven? Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers?) The comedy of Some Like It Hot is literally phallocentric. Wilder’s dick jokes begin in the office of Sid Poliakoff (Billy Gray), the music booking agent, and they continue to the very end of the film:

  JOE: What kind of a band is it, anyway?

  POLIAKOFF: You gotta be under twenty-five.

  JERRY: We could pass for that!

  POLIAKOFF: You gotta be blonde.

  JERRY: We could dye our hair!

  POLIAKOFF: And ya gotta be girls!

  JERRY: We could …

  JOE: No we couldn’t.

  Then there’s the scene in which Daphne and Sugar snuggle together in the upper berth on the train:

  DAPHNE: No lights! We don’t want them to know we’re having a party!

  SUGAR: But I might spill something.

  DAPHNE: So spill it! Spills, thrills, laughs, and games—this might even turn out to be a surprise party!

  SUGAR: What’s the surprise?

  DAPHNE: Heh-heh—not yet!

  SUGAR: When?

  DAPHNE: Better have a drink first.

  Daphne and Sugar’s get-together soon expands to include the rest of the band. It gets raucous. One of the girls suddenly blurts “Anyone for salami?” and waves one center-screen.

  Earlier, Dolores (Beverly Wills) tries to tell a joke, but Beinstock (Dave Barry), factotum to the brassy, big-boned Sweet Sue (Joan Shawlee), finds it in such bad taste that he cuts Dolores off before the punchline. “Say kids!” Dolores announces. “Have you heard the one about the girl tuba player who was stranded on a desert island with a one-legged jockey?” Luckily, Dolores finally gets to finish her joke in the upper berth:

  DOLORES (drunk): And so the one-legged jockey says….

  DAPHNE (drunk): Well, wha’did’e say?”

  DOLORES: And so the one-legged jockey says, “Don’t worry about me, baby, I ride sidesaddle!”

  It was fun for Lemmon and Curtis to pretend not to have one for a change, and their performances have delighted countless millions over the years, but on the practical side it was plain uncomfortable because they had to wear steel jockstraps. While Lemmon suffered through hours without a convenient bathroom break, Curtis had the good sense to rig up a funnel and hose contraption so he could urinate without having to get all the way out of his costume. He could do it anytime, standing up. Unaware of his invention, everyone else marveled at his stamina.

  Drag comedy is all about gender anxiety and sexual panic. It forces people to worry about presence and absence, but the worry is part of the pleasure; the laughter is literally hysterical. Jack Lemmon reports that after putting the finishing touches on their outfits, the two stars approached their director for final approval. With clinical precision, Billy’s first thought was of the ladies’ room: “We had our dresses on and the whole goddamn thing. And [Billy] says, ‘Follow me.’ And we did. We go into the commissary and he brings us into the ladies’ room in the commissary. Well, I thought, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ We just sat in the outside part, you know—where the girls are making up and everything? They paraded in and out. Nobody batted an eyeball. I’d say, ‘Hello, girls!’ and girls would come in and out saying, ‘Hello, girls!’ And they just thought we were doing a period piece or something. We went back to Billy, and he said, ‘That’s it, lock it, keep it, boom.’” Wilder knew it was a riot: “Audiences will be laughing so hard they won’t hear half the dialogue,” he told the press midway through production. “I may be the first to put English subtitles on an English-speaking movie so people will know what’s being said.”

  Wisely, Wilder avoids explaining the mechanics of his characters’ tran
sformation from men to women. He just cuts from the men arranging for their employment with Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopators to Josephine and Daphne at the train station, thus leaving out entirely the question of how they accomplish the transition. They simply are women at that point. Or better: they are not themselves anymore. And audiences accept them.

  Throughout the first half of 1958, Wilder and Diamond wrote together on their usual schedule—from 9:00 in the morning to 6:00 in the evening, Billy having been up for three hours already at the start of his workday. When filming began in early September, they continued the same schedule and added evening rewriting sessions as well, from 8:30 to 11:00 P.M. More than any other film to date, this was a Wilder movie that demanded to be written concurrently with its filming. Drag comedy was dicey, he knew, so he and Diamond saw what worked and what didn’t and developed the screenplay organically on that basis. David Selznick told Billy it was impossible from the start: “You want machine guns and dead bodies and gags in the same picture? Forget about it, Billy. You’ll never make it work.” But by growing it slowly and essentially, by constructing each piece on its own, he did precisely that.

  Along with the sexual drive of this comedy, a certain Judaism emerges in Wilder’s second script with Diamond; the writers are having fun being themselves. Listen to the booking agent Sid Poliakoff on the phone trying to round up some “girl musicians”: “Gladys! Are ya there? Gladys!” (He hangs up.) “Meshuggeneh! Played a hundred and twelve hours in a marathon dance, now she’s in bed with a nervous collapse!” When Poliakoff tells Joe and Jerry about a gig, he inflects his declarative statement with the eastern European lilt of a question: “At the University of Illinois they’re having (you should pardon the expression) a St. Valentine’s dance?” Even Geraldine’s line “We spent three years at the Sheboygan Conservatory of Music” sounds like a Catskills routine (or a Columbia Varsity Show written by a Jewish boy from Brooklyn).