by Ed Sikov
With Monroe running late, being ill, and finally getting pregnant, Wilder and Diamond found themselves having to write and film around Monroe’s unreliability. With uncanny foresight, they’d written Sweet Sue’s first complaint before the trouble began: “Idiot broads! Here we are, already packed, ready to leave for Miami, and what happens?! The saxophone runs off with a Bible salesman and the base fiddle gets herself pregnant!” Faced with a pregnant broad of their own, Wilder and Diamond decided to get rid of Sugar quickly by writing a short scene in which she and Joe drop out of the shot in the boat at the end, presumably to keep kissing. This leaves Jerry alone in the image with Osgood. Curtis may also have been aware that Wilder thought his girl-voice wasn’t right and decided to loop it all later in a recording studio. Sensing the ongoing tension on the set and hoping to dispel it, Curtis hired a real stripper to pop out of the cake during the filming of Spats’s birthday party. With the cast and crew laughing all around him, Billy was mortified. A Playboy photographer covering the shoot tried to get him to kiss the stripper. He simply shook his head and refused.
The precise ending to this farce was most unresolved when Some Like It Hot went into production, and it remained so for much of the filming. According to George Raft, Monroe suggested ending the film with Sugar and Spats tangoing together. Wilder is said to have liked the idea at first, but he and Diamond decided to end the movie with Brown and Lemmon—in part because Marilyn wasn’t available. Raft’s story has an unreliable air, given that Spats is otherwise occupied at the end of the film, having been rubbed out by the machine-gun-wielding thug in the birthday cake. More important, the whole thrust of the narrative points toward the two central male characters each finding a mate. Spats Columbo dancing with Sugar would scarcely have served that end.
“Diamond and I were in our room working together,” Billy recalled, “waiting for the next line—Joe E. Brown’s response, the final line, the curtain line of the film—to come to us. Then I heard Diamond say, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ I thought about it and I said, ‘Well, let’s put in “Nobody’s perfect” for now. But only for the time being. We have a whole week to think about it.’ We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied. When we screened the movie, that line got one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard in the theater. But we just hadn’t trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn’t see it. The line had come too easily, just popped out.” Originally, Diamond wanted to stick the line into the security scene, but he was afraid it would kill both jokes.
The last moments of Some Like It Hot are probably the best known in Wilder’s career. Osgood’s line is openly gay, there’s no question about that. The line is meaningless otherwise. The scene also includes one last off-color joke, as Daphne insists upon retaining her penis:
OSGOOD: I called Ma-ma. She was so happy she cried. She wants you to have her wedding gown. It’s white lace.
DAPHNE: Uh, Osgood, I can’t get married in your mother’s dress. She and I—we are not built in the same way.
OSGOOD: We can have it altered.
DAPHNE: Oh no you don’t. Osgood, I’m going to level with you. We can’t get married at all.
OSGOOD: Why not?
DAPHNE: Well, in the first place, I’m not a natural blonde.
OSGOOD: Doesn’t matter.
DAPHNE: I smoke. I smoke all the time!
OSGOOD: I don’t care.
DAPHNE: I have a terrible past! For three years now I’ve been living with a saxophone player.
OSGOOD: I forgive you.
DAPHNE: I can never have children.
OSGOOD: We can adopt some.
DAPHNE: You don’t understand, Osgood. (He whips off the wig.) I’m a man.
OSGOOD: Well, nobody’s perfect.
Indeed, perfection is impossible to attain—especially for the writer-director, who was so anxious, enraged, and queasy during the filming of Some Like It Hot that his chronic backaches grew worse and he even threw up from all the fear and tension. Once shooting was completed and he could step briefly off the field of eggshells with which Monroe surrounded herself, Wilder told the press that since he was the only director ever to make two films with her, the Directors Guild should give him a Purple Heart. Somebody asked him if he’d ever make another picture with her. “In the United States, I’d hate it,” Billy said. “In Paris, it might not be so bad. While we were waiting we could all take painting lessons on the side.” Monroe didn’t think any of this was very nice.
Shooting was over, but certain details still needed attention, among them the score. Matty Malneck, who was out of his element with the Witness score, was back to his metier with hot jazz and swing. (In fact, Sugar sings one of Malneck’s most popular compositions—“Stairway to the Stars.”) Malneck flew to New York to work with Monroe, who was also to sing the title song (tune by Malneck, lyrics by Diamond). He tried to forge a working détente between the two inflamed egomaniacs. He said he’d call Billy at home, right then and there, and he’d help them work it out. The call was placed. Malneck put Marilyn on. The conversation ran as follows:
“Audrey?”
“Hi, Marilyn.”
“Is Billy there?”
“No, he’s not home yet.”
“Well, when you see him, will you give him a message for me? Tell him to go fuck himself. And my warmest personal regards to you.”
The Monroe partisans (Marilyn, Arthur Miller, his mother, and hundreds of thousands of her fans) blamed Billy for the miscarriage she suffered only twelve hours after filming her last take on Some Like It Hot. Gossipmeister Earl Wilson got the scoop from the family: “She had to run upstairs about fourteen times in the picture and the temperature was about 104,” Mrs. [Isadore] Miller said. “All the time she was expecting and not feeling well.”
Arthur Miller seconded the notion, in public. Wilder fired off a telegram to the playwright: “Had you, dear Arthur, been not her husband but her writer and director, and been subjected to all the indignities I was, you would have thrown her out on her can, Thermos bottle and all, to avoid a nervous breakdown. I did the braver thing. I had a nervous breakdown.”
To the press, Billy was even more succinct. His work with Monroe was over, he declared, and therefore “I am able for the first time to look at my wife again without wanting to hit her because she’s a woman.”
Earl Wilson, fanning the flames, got Marilyn on the phone. “Who says stars are temperamental? Now it’s directors who get that way!” Wilson quoted Monroe as saying. He went on to say that “she wishes that Billy’d remember that Some Like It Hot cost her the baby.” But as Diamond pointed out, of course, it was a fallopian pregnancy, doomed from the start.
Everything was kissy-kissy again when the movie was released. Wilder and Monroe each had a percentage of the gross. “I would make a picture any time with Billy Wilder,” Marilyn told Louella. “I liked making a comedy, and I would like to do another comedy with Mr. Wilder.” “She is a very great actress,” said Billy. “Better Marilyn late than most of the others on time.” He still had a few zingers left in him, though. “The question is whether Marilyn is a person at all or one of the greatest Du Pont products ever invented,” he said. “She has breasts like granite and a brain like swiss cheese.” For the sake of her talent, Billy declared, he wished that her endless therapies and acting training wouldn’t work: “It is better for Monroe not to be straightened out. The charm of her is two left feet. Otherwise she may become a slightly inferior Eva Marie Saint.”
Some Like It Hot came in half a million dollars over budget for a total negative cost of $2,883,848. The first preview of Some Like It Hot occurred in December 1958, at the Bay Theatre in Pacific Palisades before an audience of 800. According to Billy, 799 of them didn’t like it. Wilder ran down the aisle at the end to shake the hand of the film’s only fan—comedian Steve Allen. Some Like It Hot also previewed in New York, where it was sneaked at the Fiftieth Street Loews. Monr
oe herself showed up. She was so mobbed by fans that her friend Montgomery Clift, who accompanied her to the screening, couldn’t even get into their limousine after the show and had to pound his fist on the roof to be let in.
After the previews, Wilder made one minor change to Some Like It Hot: the train station sequence was extended to allow for more laughs. Billy claims to have put in every take of the scene he’d filmed; according to him, Lemmon and Curtis walk past the same three train cars five times. (In fact, they don’t.)
Able to shill for the film more reliably than she could work in it, Marilyn delighted the boys of the press with comments on underwear (“I have no prejudice against it”) and her role as a sex symbol (“How do I know about a man’s needs for a sex symbol? I’m a girl”). Her luminous face graced the cover of Life, and everyone was happy—except for the Legion of Decency. The Very Reverend Monsignor Thomas F. Little, S.T.L., the Legion’s executive secretary, wrote a testy letter to Geoffrey Shurlock explaining why the Legion issued Some Like It Hot a B rating (“morally objectionable in part for all”). The reason: “gross suggestiveness in costuming, dialogue, and situations…. Since the initiation of the triple-A method of classifying films in December 1957, this film has given the Legion the greatest cause for concern in its evaluation of Code Seal pictures. The subject matter of ‘transvestism’ naturally leads to complications; in this film there seemed to us to be clear inferences of homosexuality and lesbianism. The dialogue was not only ‘double entendre’ but outright smut.”
The critics weren’t particularly impressed with Wilder’s taste either. As one sniffed, “I suppose Billy Wilder is entitled to a farce now and then but I personally wish he’d stick to ironical and satiric comedy. He’s not at home in a burlesque show, which is all Some Like It Hot is.” Diamond recalled the fact that the picture didn’t do especially well in its first week of release, but word of mouth made it grow. He recalled the Los Angeles Times review having been headed “Some Like It Hot Not As Hot As Expected.” But if the Mirisches and UA were worried at first, they were certainly happy by the end of 1959, by which point the film was the year’s third biggest blockbuster (behind Auntie Mame and The Shaggy Dog). By the end of 1963 Some Like It Hot had earned more than $7.5 million in the United States alone and another $5.25 million abroad. Billy himself pulled in $1.2 million.
He celebrated by buying a Paul Klee drawing; a Paul Klee painting; Egon Schiele’s Akt mit grünem Turban; Braque’s Nature morte and another Braque, too—“La théière grise.” He wasn’t finished. In 1959 alone he also purchased Nicolas de Staël’s Nature morte and Balthus’s 1957 painting La toilette. These he added to the works he bought the previous year, including a Matisse, a Klee, a Nicholson, a Schwitters, and a de Staël, in addition to a captivating nude by Suzanne Valadon—Femme nue devant un miroir.
Wilder also took the occasion of Some Like It Hot’s release to issue his opinion of television: “We should all thank God for TV. It is the most wonderful thing that could have happened to us. We have always been the lowest of the low, but now they have invented something which we can look down on.” He evidently changed his mind by 1960, when a television series based on Some Like It Hot was briefly in the works and he voiced his intention to direct the first episode.
Some Like It Hot didn’t get quite the attention from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that one might expect. True, the film garnered six nominations—Lemmon for Best Actor, Wilder for Best Director, Wilder and Diamond for Best Adapted Screenplay, Lang for Best Cinematography, Ted Haworth and Edward G. Goyle for Best Art Direction, and Orry-Kelly for Best Costume Design. But Orry-Kelly was the only winner. Fortunately for Billy, the Writers Guild gave its award for Best Comedy to Wilder and Diamond.
After the film opened, the Wilders, the Diamonds, the Harold Mirisches, and Jack Lemmon headed for Europe on the luxury liner United States. Their fellow passengers included the duke and duchess of Windsor. Some Like It Hot was screened in the ship’s theater, but the duke and duchess, trying to beat the crowd, got up from their seats before it was over. A steward (obviously an American) blocked the royals’ path. “You don’t want to miss this,” he advised them, and according to Diamond, the duke and duchess meekly took their seats again. At dinner, the Wilders and their extended party were seated at the table next to the Windsors, whose dinner partner leaned over to them and whispered, “I think one of the actors from that picture is at the next table.” “The one I liked?” asked the duke audibly. “No, dear,” said the duchess—“the other one.”
24. THE APARTMENT
From what I hear through the walls you got something going for you every night. Sometimes there’s a twi-night doubleheader! A nebbish like you.
—Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen) to Baxter
(Jack Lemmon) in The Apartment
He was up to four packs of cigarettes a day. He’d give it up, Billy said, except that he might get hit by a car and he’d hate to lie bleeding to death in the gutter thinking about all the pleasure he missed by not smoking. He also favored icy martinis—not a lot, just frequently. He thrived on his vices.
And why not? In 1959, Billy Wilder was a fifty-three-year-old firebrand with a huge hit on his hands and thirty years of filmmaking experience under his belt. He had the added virtues of wealth, cunning, and a healthy contract with the Mirisches. He was eager to make another blockbuster with complete artistic control.
As Billy and Iz moved on to write their next film, they found themselves the objects of an increasing number of profiles and interviews. Always good for the insulting remark, Wilder had become every journalist’s dream; in addition to his highly quotable wit, he was making an extraordinary amount of money even by Hollywood standards, and his vast wealth gave him extra color. Wilder possessed forty or fifty walking sticks by that point, Hollywood Close-Up reported in a characteristic profile. The journalist found him working with Diamond in their joint office and chain-smoking (alternating between cigarettes and cigars). On the wall were the Japanese woodcuts Bill Holden presented Billy after returning from shooting The Bridge on the River Kwai. There were tiger skins on the floor—a gift from John Huston. In Wilder’s pocket, the reporter noted, were a money clip—a present from his friend Joan (“Sweet Sue”) Shawlee—and a little gold medallion from Marlene Dietrich. The reporter found Wilder and Diamond struggling over the title of their next picture. Neither of them especially liked The Apartment, so they were mulling over alternatives—Someone’s Been Sleeping in My Bed or Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed?
It should not be surprising to learn that Billy had other projects on his mind during the composition of The Apartment. He changed his mind once again about A New Kind of Love, deciding in early January 1959 not to part with the rights in case he found the time and money to make the film someday. (Fox’s Jerry Wald had been interested in buying them.) Louella, obviously prematurely, announced at the end of May that Billy and his friend William Wyler would codirect and coproduce something called The Human Strong Box, from a story by Wyler’s brother Robert, but nothing ever came of it.
There was still the Colonel Redl thing with Laughton. In June, Paul Kohner pointed out to Billy that a new biography of Redl had just been released, and to keep others away he advised Wilder to announce his interest. Billy seems to have let it slide. And later that year, Louella revealed that the late Charles Vidor (who died in early June) felt that if anything should happen to him, he wanted Wilder to take over his pet project—The Nijinsky Story. Parsons asked Billy about it. He replied, “Naturally I would like to carry out the wishes of my good friend, but I don’t want to go to work on the story until all the rights have been cleared.” Vidor, it seems, had been battling a Broadway producer for the rights, and although he won every suit, there was still one more round to go. Louella herself continued: “Billy says if he makes the movie it will be another Red Shoes.” The talking horse bit he told Goldwyn would have been pretty good, too.
For fun, Billy did what he’d been
doing since childhood: laying bets. When Douglas Sirk’s latest film, Imitation of Life, approached its release, Billy bet Kohner $100 that the film’s domestic gross would be closer to $4 million than to the $8 million Kohner predicted. Harold Mirisch then joined Billy in the bet, whereupon Billy promptly laid a separate bet with Mirisch, also for $100 but this time at 3:1 odds. Imitation of Life, Billy declared, wouldn’t even hit $4 million. He lost.
When he ran into Satyajit Ray around this time, Wilder was blunt: “You won a prize at Cannes? Well, I guess you’re an artist. But, I’m not. I’m just a commercial man and I like it that way.” Having gotten away with all the dirty jokes in Some Like It Hot, he turned back to an idea he had been carrying around since the 1940s: “I remembered having seen a long time ago a very good film by David Lean—Brief Encounter, the story of a married woman and a man who use the bedroom of a friend for their rendezvous. I always thought there was an interesting character there—the one who loans the apartment, a touching and funny character, and I kept this idea with me. After finishing Some Like It Hot, I wanted to make another film with Lemmon and I found that such a role would fit him well.” He offered the role to Lemmon in the car on the way to a private screening of Some Like It Hot (according to Lemmon, the first screening) at the Long Island home of Billy’s old army buddy William Paley.