by Ed Sikov
Shooting progressed methodically, though with a certain awkward stress involving star and director. Jack Lemmon remembers the tension between Wilder and MacLaine: “She hated rehearsals and had a bad habit of ad-libbing, which didn’t set well with Billy Wilder.” To say the least. MacLaine herself is markedly cool on the subject of Wilder. She’s appreciative but reservedly so. At a 1982 tribute to Billy, she spoke of him fondly: “In a Wilder film, nobody is spared that Wilder X-ray cynical wit. As a matter of fact, there is no institution so sacrosanct that it can’t be punctured by Billy’s sense of humor. I’m rather glad he hasn’t put his talents to the life story of Mother Teresa yet.” In one of her books, on the other hand, she writes: “I wished Billy Wilder would pay as much attention to my talents as he did to Jack’s.” The attention Billy lavished on Lemmon, MacLaine writes, “had its downside, too. Billy was so enamored of Jack that he pressed him to do take after take just to see what would happen. Jack, being the cooperative professional, complied, often to his own detriment. The later takes were forced, and often those were the ones Billy printed. I, on the other hand, only had to do it three or four times because frankly I don’t think Billy thought I was capable of much more, but at least I stayed fresh.”
How strange that Wilder’s confidence in MacLaine’s ability was taken by MacLaine herself as a form of disinterest, while his insistence on Lemmon’s retakes she recalls as evidence of infatuation. Still, MacLaine echoes Joan Fontaine describing her experiences on The Emperor Waltz. To particularly self-assured, strong-willed actresses, Wilder’s sets probably did seem like boys’ clubs. Girls were tolerated only as long as they didn’t get in the way too much and never talked back. The atmosphere is easy to imagine. To keep Jack Lemmon happy and occupied, for example, Billy had a pinball machine installed on the set. Lemmon’s personality was something Billy could appreciate. Men played games like pinball and poker. Women played mind games. Billy preferred men’s games. He always liked spending his days with his buddies, and they were hardly ever female. That was for later.
Wilder found Shirley MacLaine’s mouthiness exasperating in person, but he made it seem admirable on celluloid. Notice the brisk way Fran turns and walks away from the sniveling Baxter in the middle of their conversation in the office lobby. Watch the crisp confidence in MacLaine’s eyes. She knows what Fran knows: many men want her, but she’s the one who does the choosing. One can hardly say she’s nobody’s fool—The Apartment is about people willing to kill themselves for scum—but Fran Kubelik has the kind of raw vitality that makes her attempt at selfannihilation seem all the more a pity. Wilder wrote her that way, but MacLaine embodied her. On-screen, her resistance to Billy’s bossiness pays off.
MacLaine’s performances for Wilder, like much of the best filmmaking, are a set of fortuitous accidents strung together with an unbreakable cord of talent. So are Fred MacMurray’s. In 1943, Wilder cast him in Double Indemnity because George Raft turned the role down and nobody else would take it. In 1959, he cast him in The Apartment because Wilder’s original choice, Paul Douglas, died two weeks before shooting began, felled at the age of fifty-two by a heart attack. Burly and formidable, Douglas would have made a more conventional romantic heavy, especially in a businessman’s drama. His character’s extramarital affair in Executive Suite is a pivotal plot device. Douglas’s widow, Jan Sterling (who costarred in Ace in the Hole), remembered the circumstances of his casting in The Apartment: “We came out of a restaurant one night, and Billy said, ‘I want to do a movie about’ (a word that starts with f and ends with g). ‘You’re the one to play the lead.’”
Fred MacMurray, on the other hand, was fresh from Disney’s The Shaggy Dog and was therefore a downright appalling choice for J. D. Sheldrake—insurance executive, Westchester dad, philanderer, swine. Brought to life by MacMurray, Sheldrake is the very essence of magnetic, everyday rottenness, the kind of man who could drive a woman like Fran Kubelik to suicide.
Having radically shifted MacMurray’s persona in the early 1940s from that of the happy-go-lucky hoofer to a guilt-ridden, sex-sniffing killer, Wilder was in an excellent position to effect a similar change in the late 1950s. MacMurray recovered his good-natured image soon after The Apartment’s release when his TV sitcom My Three Sons began its long run. But according to MacMurray, there was still a price to pay for playing such an evil lout. On a visit to Disney’s Magic Kingdom in 1960, shortly after The Apartment opened, MacMurray found himself accosted by a former fan—someone who’d loved The Shaggy Dog: “I saw The Apartment last night,” the woman snapped. “How could you? You spoiled the Disney image!” At which point she slammed him over the head with her purse.
To his credit as a judge of human nature, Wilder understands why people hit other people, or shoot them, or strangle them with ratty furs, and why, when violence isn’t directed outward, it turns in on the self. Fran’s suicide attempt is entirely motivated. She loves Sheldrake precisely because he doesn’t care about her; she feels a passion for him she’ll never feel for Baxter. Even at the end of the film there’s no ardor. “I love you, Miss Kubelik,” Buddy-Boy tells her in the final moments. “Shut up and deal,” she replies. This is not Tristan and Isolde. Not only is the romance muted, there’s little in the way of closure. Wilder likes to throw his characters off into a void—that is, if he doesn’t kill them. In Mauvaise Graine the two lovers sail toward nowhere. At the end of Five Graves to Cairo Billy sends Bramble running off to keep fighting World War II. In Stalag 17, Sefton and Dunbar walk into the dark. In Some Like It Hot the four principals, also left in the dark, are running away. Where are they going? Even in Sabrina we don’t see the final clinch. It’s no different in The Apartment. Fran Kubelik and Bud Baxter have given up their past to begin some kind of life together, but its nature is cloudy, tentative, and, for Wilder, practically unimaginable.
David Denby describes Billy’s mewling protagonist well: “Baxter is a study in spinelessness—prissy, sexless, and passive.” His first great moment of joy in the film occurs when Fran’s brother-in-law beats him up. Karl (Johnny Seven) throws but a single punch to lay Buddy-Boy to waste; Baxter, having never been treated like a man before, is thrilled. Wilder films him lying against the wall with blood trickling out of his mouth, grinning in ecstasy. (Lemmon had to fake this look of joy. According to the press-book the punch actually knocked him cold.)
The other moment of physical violence in The Apartment has proven to be more controversial because it is directed at a woman. Wilder responded to one of his critics on this score:
I read Axel Madsen’s book about me. It’s composed for the most part of interviews already published elsewhere. But I have to address this idea that he has that he develops assiduously in all the passages of his work that he wrote himself—an idea moreover false. It’s about my alleged misogyny. According to him, the best example is the sadistic satisfaction I took in having Shirley MacLaine slapped in the face in The Apartment. But I had three doctors on the set whom I’d asked what you would do to a patient who’d taken twenty-five sleeping pills. They told me that it would be absolutely necessary to keep her awake, then to slap her, make her drink coffee and walk without stopping. We did a take and I asked the doctors if it was correct. They said, “You have to slap her harder.” And I refused to do a second take.
There is, without doubt, a pronounced streak of misogyny in Wilder’s career, but The Apartment is not a key work in this regard. Here, it’s the human race that Wilder finds vaguely contemptible, not merely half of it. Just as he accurately describes Walter Neff’s company in Double Indemnity by calling it Pacific All-Risk, Wilder characterizes the world he represents in The Aparment: Consolidated Life. It’s men and women together. They just reveal their near worthlessness in different ways, that’s all. Baxter’s bosses (later, his colleagues; still later, his underlings) at Consolidated Life—Dobisch (Ray Walston), Eichelberger (David White), Vanderhof (Willard Waterman), and Kirkeby (David Lewis)—are crass, heartless users, midlevel sharks
in a brackish corporate pool. What Fran says of Sheldrake applies to them all—“He’s a taker. Some people take, others get took.” In The Apartment, women and Baxter are part of the ranks of the took.
And for once, Billy’s on their side. A romantic at heart even when the romance is sour, Wilder puts the world’s baseness to the service of a higher good in this film, his most genuinely sweet-tempered and generous work to date. “In my opinion it is a highly moral picture,” he once told an interviewer. “I had to show two people who were being emancipated, and in order to do that I had to show what they were emancipated by.” (“From” said the interviewer. “With” Billy replied.) Wilder’s colleague, the filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff, echoes the point when he describes the way The Apartment ends: “For me, there is nothing more liberating than this cut from a long, frustrating, static, hypocritical dialogue sequence [Sheldrake wishing Fran a happy New Year] to a wonderful tracking shot of MacLaine running to rescue Lemmon from despair.” (Woody Allen picks up the same graceful, vigorous formal figure to end Manhattan, but he adds his own characteristic style: his tracking shot is longer and showier, the camera is at a greater distance from the subject, and the subject is himself.)
Wilder and Buddy-Boy are scarcely one and the same. One suspects that Billy wrote himself more into the smirking Dobisch than anyone else. Still, Billy felt the need to add a personal touch: he donated his and Audrey’s own beautiful bentwood bed for Fran to try to kill herself in. Billy had used the bed on-screen before. With remarkably similar logic it graces Audrey Hepburn’s room in Sabrina.
The words in Wilder and Diamond’s screenplay were sacrosanct, but as far as bits of business were concerned they were only a blueprint. For the scene in which Baxter, plagued with an extravagant cold, is summoned to Sheldrake’s office for the dual purpose of promotion and humiliation, Jack Lemmon had an idea: “I went to props and I had him cut the top off, empty it, and put milk in it. Well, MacMurray is about ten feet away from me. I say, ‘Oh, it won’t,’ and this thing shot right under MacMurray’s nose, and all MacMurray did was just keep on going. Oh, man, I—I blessed him for that. Then Billy said ‘Cut,’ and the whole place fell apart.” The fact that Lemmon’s milk squirts in an arc all the way across the width of the Cinemascope screen makes the bit all the funnier.
Lemmon’s description of the filming of that scene is incorrect: Wilder doesn’t cut the shot for quite some time after the squirt. Instead, he lets his actors continue to play the scene. The squirt isn’t sledgehammered by way of an abrupt cut. Wilder favors long takes throughout The Apartment. Often they occur as two-shots, which grant characters equal emotional weight. One of the best of these occurs when Baxter, disheartened by his discovery that Fran is sleeping with Sheldrake, picks up a drunken blonde in a bar. To the tune of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” Buddy-Boy and Margie MacDougall (Hope Holiday) sit in a widescreen two-shot, each staring straight ahead, musing drunkenly on Christmas Eve:
MRS. MACDOUGALL: ’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirrin’. Nothin’. No action. Dullsville. You married?
BAXTER: No.
MRS. MACDOUGALL: Family?
BAXTER: No.
MRS. MACDOUGALL: Night like this it sort of spooks you to walk into an empty apartment.
BAXTER: I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.
In apparent contrast, Wilder cuts an earlier scene between Baxter and Fran more dynamically, but here, too, the editing remains expressive, character-based, and categorically unself-conscious. Alone in Baxter’s office as the wild office Christmas party rages just a few feet away, Fran and Baxter have a moment of quiet near intimacy. Wilder films them in a two-shot over Fran’s shoulder as Baxter fusses with his ridiculous new bowler. Fran hands him her compact so he can adjust it to its best advantage (a contradiction in terms, given the hat and Lemmon’s head). At the moment of revelation, Wilder cuts to a close-up of the mirror in Lemmon’s hands. Because the mirror is broken, his reflection is split in two with a crack down the middle at the precise moment that his image of Fran fragments along with his own. We watch his expression change from grin to devastation, at which point Billy cuts to a reverse two-shot as Lemmon hands the mirror back to Fran. He comments on the fact that the mirror is broken. “Yes I know,” says Fran, still in two-shot. “I like it that way. Makes me look the way I feel.” Where another director might cut to a close-up of Fran on that line, Wilder keeps his distance. His restraint serves a purpose: he keeps the emotional emphasis not just on Fran but on Baxter as well. Both characters get to suffer equally.
As The Apartment rumbled toward its release, Wilder and Diamond found themselves growing uneasy. They wondered if this blend of comedy and drama would find an audience. Diamond in particular worried about the suicide scene and its aftermath. After all, there was Fran dying from an intentional drug overdose in the background while Baxter comically yanks tacky Mrs. MacDougall out the door. (Margie, taken aback at what she thinks is Baxter’s sexual enthusiasm, cries “Not so rough, honey!”) Nonetheless, Diamond’s wife, Barbara, remembers that UA and the Mirisches planned a huge party at Romanoff’s after the film’s first preview. “You don’t usually do that,” Mrs. Diamond points out, “so somebody must have thought they had something very good there.”
Billy, always one to pull a good prank in the trades, decided to run a parody of the ads Columbia used to promote its cannibal melodrama: “Suddenly, Last Summer—She knew she was being used for something evil,” they boded. Wilder’s ads trumpeted, “Suddenly, Last Winter—He knew his Apartment was being used for something evil!”
The Apartment premiered at Grauman’s Chinese on Tuesday, June 21, 1960, having already been screened for select members of the Academy. For the national release, UA spent almost $560,000 promoting the film, including $10,000 for the director’s personal appearance tour, the first of Billy’s career. He held forth on any number of subjects to a fascinated press corps. “Better the nouvelle vague than Albert Zugsmith,” he declared. He was impressed with the quality of their questions, he told them; time was, he noted, that all they cared about was whether or not Dorothy Lamour wore a bra. If only the reporters had been able to print more of what Billy told them. Practically every account of Wilder’s conversations mentions the profanity of his language, but owing to what is sometimes known as journalistic standards, none of them offers much proof.
UA was very pleased with The Apartment’s initial performance, and it would only get better as the year progressed: “10 regional premieres rack up over a quarter of a million dollars in the first week,” a full-page ad in Variety proclaimed. Billy brought The Apartment in on (or near) budget at $2,825,965. By the end of 1963, the film had taken in a domestic gross of $6.5 million, with an additional $2.7 million coming in from abroad.
A “tasteless gimmick,” a “dirty fairy tale,” “immoral,” “dishonest,” “without style or taste”—this is how some of the nation’s leading film critics described The Apartment. Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic didn’t think Wilder had the talent to mix comedy and melodrama: “the script wanders from near slapstick to the near tragic,” Kauffmann opined, and while he was at it he ripped into Shirley MacLaine: “She can ‘do’ small-scale, snub-nosed humor appeallingly enough,” Kauffmann wrote, “but see how flat she falls when she is called on for anything else—compassion, for instance.” Dwight Macdonald didn’t like the comedy-melodrama blend either—The Apartment shifted “gears between pathos and slapstick without any transition”—and he found the whole thing phony, “fuzzed up with a queasy combination of slick cynicism and prurient sentimentality.” Wilder, who was finally showing some genuine warmth for his characters, wasn’t nasty enough for Macdonald: “He uses bitter chocolate for his icing, but underneath is the stale old cake.”
Time was more enthusiastic: “The funniest movie made in Hollywood since Some Like It Hot.” The New York Times liked it, too. MacLaine and Lemmon were widely applaude
d, and nobody was surprised when they each landed an Oscar nomination.
Money was cascading in. By the end of the year, two new Schieles graced the Wilders’ crammed penthouse walls—Stehender Akt and Zwei Freundinen. Jawlensky’s 1917 painting Blauer Mund and Léger’s 1948 gouache-and-ink drawing Etude pour le Cirque were added to the collection as well.
Wilder was in the finest of forms in an interview he granted to Playboy in 1960. He said:
“I wouldn’t drink the water in television.”
“Somebody asked me once if I thought any of the television stories would be good on the big screen. I said I didn’t think most of them were worth even the small screen.”
“France is a place where the money falls apart in your hand and you can’t tear the toilet paper.”
“When I am finished there is nothing left on the cutting-room floor but cigarette butts, chewing gum wrappers, and tears.”
“I could clean up in the film festivals if I took $25,000 and made a picture about the sex life of fishermen in Sardinia—as long as it had a certain morbid message and was slightly out of focus.”
“What seems to make the European pictures more adult than ours is that we don’t understand the dialogue.”
This highly flattering interview did not come about by luck. UA arranged for Playboy to get a plug in The Apartment so they could strike a deal with Hugh Hefner for what UA’s publicity department artfully called “editorial cooperation.” Still, Playboy gave Billy precisely the right kind of extensive national exposure to an audience he coveted. It also offered him the chance to retell some of his favorite stories, and his friends got to put their two cents in as well. Mike Romanoff (“ex-prince, ex-imposter, den father to Those Who Count in the Industry”) called Billy “the most unusual and amusing man in Hollywood.” Walter Reisch reported, “He’s always been the way he is today. He was never sentimental; he was always fearless, even when he had nothing. He was sassy and aggressive—he would rather have lost a job than compromise or say yes.”