On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  The final preliminary budget called for a total cost of $2,373,490. When filming began, Monroe was up to $300,000; Curtis and Lemmon each got $100,000. Diamond got $60,000, Billy $200,000. Filming began in September 1958 at the Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood (off the corner of Formosa and Melrose, where the Mirisches rented space) and on location at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego. Arthur Krim of UA gave the goahead, but he was a little worried. This was going to be an expensive picture, and he wanted to protect his company against the big loss he thought Some Like It Hot might incur simply because of its high salaries. Marvin Mirisch wrote to UA’s lawyer in early August noting that if they wanted to call the film Some Like It Hot, as Wilder demanded, they’d need to get a waiver from MCA, which owned the rights to the 1939 Paramount film of the same title. This, however, would not be much of a struggle, since Billy was represented by MCA’s own Lew Wasserman (who also represented Curtis and Monroe).

  The script called for a Miami resort hotel, the Seminole-Ritz, but by the late 1950s very little was left of the Roaring Twenties Florida, the magnificent old resorts having been pulled down to make room for the gaudy, streamline-rococo gloss of postwar beach development. The Coronado, however, was perfect—a grand 1887 heap with turrets, a big veranda, and a wide white beach in front. Given Monroe’s participation, the Some Like It Hot location shoot was scarcely a secret. Hundreds of onlookers crowded behind ropes in mid-September “as Miss Wiggle-Hips put her all into an ill-fitting 1929-vintage bathing suit.” Billy was quoted as calling the film “a combination of Scarface and Charley’s Aunt.”

  Back at the studio, shooting continued in fits and starts. Wilder and Diamond were piecing the film together as they went along, Monroe was characteristically late to arrive in the morning, and when she did show up she had a tendency to miff even the simplest of lines. Then a minor catastrophe occurred. In the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre scene, in which Spats Columbo rubs out the diminutive Toothpick Charlie and his gang before Joe’s and Jerry’s horrified eyes, Wilder insisted that George Raft (as Spats) perform a final indignity upon the bullet-riddled corpse of Toothpick Charlie—namely, to kick the toothpick out of Charlie’s mouth. (Raft seems either to have forgotten or forgiven Billy’s jibe about him after Double Indemnity.) The actor playing Charlie, George E. Stone, was an old friend of Raft’s, and Raft couldn’t bring himself to kick him so close to his jaw. Two takes, three takes, five, ten … Billy was getting frustrated. It was bad enough that Marilyn was constantly requiring multiple takes to speak the simplest of lines. Now George Raft was using up film stock as well, and Billy couldn’t take it anymore. “Please, please, George—kick the toothpick!” he begged. Then he marched over and demonstrated it himself, missed, and kicked Stone right in the head. The actor had to be rushed to the nearest hospital.

  Monroe was, of course, a bigger problem than any character actor’s broken jaw could possibly have been. She cost more. Things didn’t start off badly. “I want the world to know that Marilyn’s not only on time, she is three hours early,” Billy told the press when Some Like It Hot when into production in August. By September, some tension surfaced when Marilyn declared that Billy wanted her to lose weight—eight pounds, to be exact—but she refused. “Don’t you want your audience to be able to distinguish me from Tony and Jack?” she claimed to have asked Billy. “Besides,” Marilyn added, “my husband likes me plump.” In October, Wilder was still putting a happy face on things: “There are very few leading ladies in the business today. Of the few, there is just one Marilyn Monroe,” he told a reporter. But by that point, he had to confess that his earlier declaration about her punctuality was false: she was frequently late or absent altogether, Billy admitted, “but she does beautifully once she gets under way. She warms up to her scenes and will work untiringly. If I demand sixty takes Marilyn accepts the additional work without question.”

  The reason Billy demanded sixty takes was, of course, that it often took Marilyn that many before she got it right. The tales are legendary:

  Diamond (in retrospect): “One morning a couple of hundred extras waited on the set while reports kept filtering in on Marilyn’s progress—she was in makeup now, now she was in hairdressing. Finally, at eleven o’clock, Marilyn walked on the stage carrying a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man under her arm. Without a word of greeting or apology, she crossed to her dressing room and locked herself in. Billy waited another fifteen minutes, then sent the assistant director to fetch her. The A.D. knocked on her door and called, ‘We’re ready for you, Miss Monroe.’ From inside came the answer: ‘Drop dead.’”

  Lemmon (at the time): “The whole idea is a laugh. We were called for the first shot this morning, so we arrived at 7:00 A.M. Here it is, noon, and we still haven’t been in front of the cameras. They’ve been retaking Marilyn’s scenes.”

  Diamond (in retrospect): “After each scene, Marilyn would call out to her secretary, ‘May! Coffee!’ And May Reis would bring her a Thermos bottle.” It contained not coffee but vermouth.

  Lemmon (in retrospect): “One day she walked onto the damned set and it’s the train scene, and she crawls up into my upper bunk and snuggles in next to me, and it goes on—really, it’s a pretty long scene—and Billy shot it in one. And that was it. And I damn near shit. It was five minutes after eight and we’re done.”

  Curtis (at the time): “I don’t know why they go into these huddles. Maybe Paula [Strasberg, Marilyn’s personal acting trainer] helps her read her lines. I never saw anybody else with a coach like that on the set.”

  Wilder (in retrospect): “I knew we were in mid-flight and there was a nut on the plane.”

  Paula Strasberg earned $1,500 a week to flutter around her neurotic boss whispering suggestions in her ear and holding a big black umbrella over her head, always urging Marilyn to “relax! relax!” Strasberg herself offered the press her views on Billy’s work: “Everything is in such good taste. It’s naive purity.” She’d learned to keep her mouth shut on Wilder’s set. On the first day of shooting, which covered some of the sequence with Sugar at the train station, Monroe looked not at her director but at Strasberg for approval. “How was that for you, Paula?” Wilder barked, after which no more was heard from Strasberg.

  With all of Monroe’s mishegoss, however, Billy still loved the work she did: “We were filming the scene in which she appears for the first time on the train platform: Lemmon and Curtis dressed as women, and Marilyn with her ukulele. She came up to me and immediately said, ‘Billy, you have to come up with something for this. The scene doesn’t work. If I’m just walking here, that’s no entrance.’ She was totally right, and I couldn’t sleep that night, but the next morning I found the solution. She walks alongside the train, and then I let out the hot steam at the exact right moment—pffft, right on her fanny. She was very happy with that, and I was, too, because it was the right lead-in for the star of the film.”

  At least some of Monroe’s legendary dispute with Tony Curtis (“It’s like kissing Hitler,” Curtis said at the time) appears to have been rooted in mutual jealousy. The costume designer Orry-Kelly had the pique to point out to Monroe that “you know, Tony’s ass is better-looking than yours.” “Oh yeah?” Monroe replied. “Well he doesn’t have tits like these,” whereupon she opened her blouse and proved it.

  “It’s me, Sugar.” That was the line, and Marilyn couldn’t say it. Over and over, she flubbed it. “It’s Sugar, me.” Cut. “It’s Sugar, me.” Cut. “It’s Sugar, me …”

  Finally she said it. Billy, trying to soothe her, told her (after yelling “Print!”), “Don’t worry.” “Worry about what?” said Marilyn.

  “Where is that bourbon? Oh, there it is.” With Curtis and Lemmon standing by through take after take, Monroe was utterly unable to complete the line. They tried taping a tiny cue card in the dresser drawer she opens in her search for the bottle, but it didn’t help. It seemed only to confuse her more. “Where’s the …” “Where’s …” “Bourbon is …” After the f
orty-second take in a row, a bleary Billy offered a suggestion: “Marilyn, possibly—” “Don’t talk to me now!” Marilyn snapped. “I’ll forget how I want to play it!” As Lemmon recalls, “I have never seen a director stopped so cold—Billy Wilder, the fastest mind on earth. He was absolutely stunned.” According to Diamond it took forty-seven takes over a period of two days. Even then, one can’t help but notice that her back is to the camera when she says the line; the voice track may well have been dubbed in later.

  By late October, Marilyn missed twelve days “because of so-called illness” and was late for a total of thirty-five hours, which translated to a five-day lag. As one jittery Mirisch noted, only a small part of this was covered by insurance. The cost was escalating, and UA, never particularly gung-ho about Some Like It Hot, was growing alarmed. Marilyn’s absences had cost the company $200,000, bringing the total negative cost up to $2,600,000, and the film wasn’t finished yet.

  Monroe was a constant problem, but Lemmon and Curtis were consummate, responsible actors. Curtis may have come away from the film a bit rankled—not only by Monroe, but by Billy himself (“I never felt he really cared that much for me”)—but he got the job done. Lemmon was more enthusiastic. As the filming proceeded, his admiration for Wilder grew exponentially. “I walked in all excited, early in the morning,” Lemmon remembers. “Billy was just pacing up and down, as usual, waiting. And I said, ‘Billy, I was thinking….’ And he stopped right there and said, ‘No you weren’t.’ I said, ‘I wasn’t?’ I thought—oh God, he’s not going to let me try. He said, ‘No. You may have been thinking, but now you’re going to be showing. Don’t tell me, because I may misinterpret what you’re talking about. Do it. Do anything you want, always, at any time. I don’t care what it is or how long, whether I think you’re crazy or not, do it—always do it. Don’t hold back, but do it—don’t talk about it.’”

  Lemmon also noticed that his inventions were strictly circumscribed by Wilder and Diamond’s screenplay. He claims that the only time he ever changed a line of dialogue in a Wilder script was in the music agent’s scene in Some Like It Hot, in which he wanted to repeat the line “Now you’re talkin’!” “It was twenty minutes before he said yes. He and Iz talked that thing over, I swear to God, a half an hour, and then finally he came back and said, ‘Okay, you can repeat it.’”

  Curtis, for his part, was impressed by Billy’s willingness to accommodate an actor’s creativity—as long as it had nothing to do with changing the words. It was Curtis’s idea to play Shell Oil, the phony millionaire Jerry invents to impress Sugar, as an extended Cary Grant routine. Originally, Wilder simply wanted him to be Bostonian or at least some sort of American aristocrat. Curtis not only did what Billy wanted, he topped him. Grant himself found the idea amusing when Wilder told him about it, but behind the goof was a rather more biting observation about Cary’s image. Not only was Grant’s manliness something of a hoax, but the hoax was the key to his charm.

  Jack Lemmon describes a scene that occurs midway through Some Like It Hot as probably “the best scene I’ve ever been in.” It’s about men:

  JERRY: I’m engaged!

  JOE: Congratulations! Who’s the lucky girl?

  JERRY: I am. (He sings and shakes his maracas.)

  JOE: What?!

  JERRY: Osgood proposed to me. We’re planning a June wedding. (Sings, dances, shakes.)

  JOE: What are you talking about? You can’t marry Osgood!

  JERRY: (Getting up from bed and entering two-shot) You mean he’s too old for me?

  JOE: Jerry, you can’t be serious!

  JERRY: Why not? He keeps marrying girls all the time.

  JOE: But, but, you’re not a girl! You’re a guy! And why would a guy want to marry a guy?

  JERRY: Security! (Sings, dances, shakes.)

  JOE: Jerry, you better lie down. You’re not well.

  JERRY: Will you stop treating me like a child? I’m not stupid. I know there’s a problem.

  JOE: I’ll say there is.

  JERRY: His mother. We need her approval. But I’m not worried, because I don’t smoke. Ha ha ha ha! (Sings, dances, shakes.)

  JOE: Jerry, there’s another problem. Like what are you going to do on your honeymoon?

  JERRY: We’ve been discussing that. He wants to go to the Riviera, but I kinda lean toward Niagara Falls.

  Joe presses further in his quest to end Jerry’s joy, and Jerry finally admits that his goal is a quick annulment and a handsome settlement. But even this ultimate recouping of the character’s heterosexuality is not quite so ultimate, for it is here that Jerry mourns: “I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I wish I were dead. I’m a boy. Oh boy am I a boy.” Daphne, one might add, does not depart without a struggle. She reappears in spirit if not in form very soon afterward when Jerry feels hurt and insulted that Joe could note with surprise, “These are real diamonds!” “Of course they’re real,” Jerry snaps. “What do you think—my fiance is a bum?”

  Lemmon remembers the dynamic business of the scene: “Billy handed me a set of maracas and I thought he was crazy. If Billy hadn’t had me dancing around with those things in my ‘joy,’ most of the dialogue would’ve been lost. Every time I’d read a line I’d follow it by waltzing around with those maracas while Tony was looking at me like I’m out of my mind.” Apart from their value as comic punctuation, Wilder gave the maracas to Lemmon as a way of prolonging the enormous laughs he knew the sequence would provoke. After the film’s previews, he tinkered with the editing to allow even more time for laughs. After all, Billy wanted to please his audience: “Movies should be like amusement parks,” he said at the time. “People should go to them to have fun.”

  Critics have rarely taken issue with the fact that Some Like It Hot is fun. They just can’t bring themselves to figure out why. Neither did Diamond and Wilder, who claimed that the reason he didn’t shoot his comedy in color is that it would have turned into a “flaming faggot” film. Their defensiveness is striking, Diamond’s in particular:

  Diamond: “The whole trick in the picture is that while the two were dressed in women’s clothes, their thinking processes were at all times a hundred percent male. When there was a slight aberration, like Lemmon getting engaged, it became twice as funny. But they were not camping it up. They never thought of themselves as women. Just for one moment. Lemmon forgot himself—that was all. The rest of the time, Curtis was out to seduce Monroe no matter what clothes he was wearing.”

  Wilder: “But when he forgot himself it was not a homosexual relationship. It was just the idea of being engaged to a millionaire. It’s very appealing. You don’t have to be a homosexual. It’s security.” Wilder was just as defensive on other occasions; to listen to him talk, you would think Some Like It Hot had no gay content at all: “Those thin-magazine people I mentioned before said Some Like It Hot had homosexual overtones as well as transvestite undertones. Well, I know that transvestites are cases for Krafft-Ebing, but to me they are terribly funny.”

  Those thin-magazine types (whoever they were) probably didn’t dispute the fact that drag comedy is funny, but the question remains: why? As Wilder and Diamond themselves prove in the final moments of their film, the reason is perfectly clear. Because no one is 100 percent male or 100 percent female, it’s funny to realize we’re all somewhere in the middle. In hot jazz, it’s the pleasure of veering off the tune purely on impulse: “One can hardly play hot while following the tune literally, for there is something about any tune, however beautiful, that is rigid, symmetrical, and unfriendly to that spontaneity necessary for hot interpretation.” In Some Like It Hot, it’s a form of comic relief. The ending of Some Like It Hot is hilarious, but it’s also true. As everybody knows, nobody’s perfect.

  For the pivotal role of Osgood Fielding, the randy millionaire coot with whom Daphne finds enduring joy, Billy chose the biggest mouth in show business. It wasn’t that Joe E. Brown talked a lot. It was that his mouth was abnormally large. Brown and his gaping grin, staples of late 192
0s and early 1930s screen comedies, appeared in a range of later films—from the 1951 remake of Show Boat (as the riverboat captain) all the way down to Judy Canova’s hillbilly caper Joan of Ozark and his own tailor-made vehicle, Shut My Big Mouth (both 1942). Brown’s trademark gesture, a nearly silent laugh effected by stretching his huge orifice as wide as possible, is infectious—Daphne does it, too. These two are clearly made for each other.

  Brown’s personal history was, if anything, even more appealing to Billy than his mouth was. The comedian was a baseball fanatic of equal or greater proportions than Wilder; his son was the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Nineteen fifty-eight was not only the year in which Some Like It Hot was filmed; perhaps more gratifying to Billy, it was the Dodgers’ first season in Los Angeles. Much to his hostesses’ annoyance, Wilder made it a point to tote a transistor radio to dinner parties all season long. Radios didn’t yet have earphones, so Billy just held the radio up to his head until the game was over, punctuating the drinks, meals, and after-dinner conversation with shouts of “Oh my God!” and “I don’t believe it!” whenever anything notable occurred in the game. Sometimes an insensitive hostess would scold him for what she considered his rudeness, but for Billy it was not a question of manners. Baseball was more important than sociability. As long as Joe E. Brown was on the set, Billy conveniently had the inside track on all the players, managers, and umpires in the National League.

  The production of Some Like It Hot appears to have been amusing and miserable in nearly equal measure. George Raft was a genial presence, offering to teach Brown and Lemmon how to tango when it became clear that the young dance instructor Wilder hired couldn’t manage the task. Jack Lemmon, meanwhile, was constantly muttering “Magic time!” before every take, a habit he’d developed early in his career to give his performance that extra sparkle. “It’s a habit of his on the set,” Wilder explained. “Each time he starts to act, he acts as if it were a magic moment: ‘Magic time!’ That means—we’re going to enter into this character, we are going to make the public enter his make-believe world.” Jack Lemmon is verbally reminding himself that the camera is on and he must do reality one better. “Magic time!” Monroe is flubbing her lines; it’s take thirty-eight. “Magic time!” Lemmon is in a dress and wig and ghastly greenish makeup, and Monroe is still blowing her cues. Take forty-one. “Magic time!” Tony Curtis says the whole thing drove him slightly mad.