On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Unlike his earlier run-ins with major stars, Billy’s experience with Cagney occurred at a time when he himself had achieved star status. Just after One, Two, Three’s release, Wilder told two interviewers from Cahiers du cinéma that the politique des auteurs, the polemical position held by Cahiers’s own critics, was responsible for directors’ increasing prominence and fame: “Until these last few years, there were only two directors of value known to the general public: DeMille and Hitchcock. Even Lubitsch was known only in our milieu. The director wasn’t recognized as an author; that fashion came about in Europe, it won over New York and then Hollywood, where the director too became a star. Ten days ago in New York I saw for the first time my name as big as that of the star, James Cagney. It’s to European journalism that we owe that.”

  Not exactly. Billy himself hadn’t coveted the name-above-the-title fame that others—Capra, Wyler, and DeMille—insisted upon in the 1940s, long before Cahiers began ranking directors on a steep ladder of talent and neo-Platonic moral value. By 1960, the ladder descended from Hitchcock and Hawks at the top to Wilder hanging somewhere below the middle and Fred Zinnemann, Carol Reed, and the whole French cinéma de qualité (Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Delannoy, Julien Duvivier …) clinging to the bottom rung, with Jean-Luc Godard stepping on their fingers. As the two Cahiers critics themselves put it, “Billy Wilder’s words are famous in Hollywood. But, we must say, it’s the man’s verve that attracts us more than his work, which is not among those we place in the highest ranks (even if we would put it a hundred notches ahead of our compatriots whom Wilder admires).”

  If anything, Wilder had even more control over his projects than Capra, Wyler, and DeMille did, for the simple reason that he wrote his films as well as produced and directed them, but until 1961 Wilder didn’t seem to care all that much about his own name recognition. Now, with all those Oscars under his belt, Wilder saw himself as a selling point. He was aided by the New York Times, which noted that “in many respects Wilder is a bigger star on his own pictures than any of his actors.” (“Something of an aggressive imp,” the Times continued, “he achieves his results with a steady barrage of bubbling comments, most of them derogatory, many of them unprintable, but all of them highly quotable.”) Wilder’s success was now such that United Artists featured him on one of the posters for One, Two, Three. It shows Wilder—and Wilder alone—sitting with his chin resting glumly on his hand and holding three cartoon balloons. “This is Billy Wilder” the tag line explains. “He made The Apartment and Some Like It Hot. Now—his explosive new comedy, One, Two, Three.” Practically as an afterthought, the ad continues: “It stars James Cagney, Horst Buchholz, Pamela Tiffin, Arlene Francis….”

  For the musical score, Wilder turned to André Previn, who at the age of thirty-one had already been working as a film scorer and composer for eleven years. A two-time Oscar winner (for the scores of Gigi, 1958, and Porgy and Bess, 1959) and seven-time nominee, Previn was literate, cultured, a bit arrogant, and very much an admirer of Billy Wilder. Previn soon grew to respect Wilder’s musical tastes, not to mention his professionalism: “He was a far cry from the imperious producers who asked their composers to audition their ‘themes’ for them before they were recorded,” Previn notes, “and who then demanded countless changes and rewrites, all stemming from an ignorance of music only outdone by an unending need to flaunt authority. Not so with Billy.” According to Previn, Wilder would run the unscored print for him and offer an extensive running commentary—one that was restricted to the dramatic elements of the picture, not its musical demands. Previn found it refreshing. He went on to compose three more scores for Wilder.

  One, Two, Three is Wilder’s most abrasive comedy. Adding to the tension of the film’s political farce is a smarmy overlay of mercenary sex. Wilder even makes orthography dirty. MacNamara greets his secretary by calling her “Frau-lein Ingeborg.” “It’s Fräulein,” she corrects, “mit a umlaut!” This gives MacNamara the chance to remark that he’s looking forward to his wife’s departure so he can have the “chance to brush up on the umlaut.” When MacNamara escorts Ingeborg into the Grand Hotel Potemkin, he greets the three Russians with the remark, “If it isn’t my old friends Hart, Schaffner, and Karl Marx.” Mishkin immediately grabs Ingeborg’s ass. “I said Karl Marx, not Groucho.” All the while, Ingeborg remains only too happy to be pimped—first for the West, then for the East. She embraces MacNamara’s scheme as enthusiastically as she embraces the married MacNamara himself. Without any hesitation whatsoever, she jumps up on the table at the Potemkin and dances a lurid routine with flaming shish kebab skewers, all so that MacNamara will buy her a dress.

  The ballroom, by the way, looks suspiciously like a Berlin dance hall from the 1920s—one that has gone through the war. Two couples dance, adrift. One acts like a gigolo forced to sway his stone-faced partner around in order to earn small change; the other two, equally stone-faced, are both women. The band’s conductor, leading a rendition of “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” seems to have years of experience behind him, and indeed he has: he’s Frederick Hollander.

  As the scene progresses, the camera, at high angle, stares down from a considerable distance at an American executive calmly biding his time as three leering Russians go wild watching a West German woman wearing a loud, tight polka-dot dress shove her beautiful rear end in their faces while waving a whip. She cracks it on the table, showing them who’s in control, MacNamara all the while patiently sitting there waiting for them to sell out. It seems an accurate prediction.

  Capitalizing on their Some Like It Hot reputation, Wilder and Diamond added a subplot involving Schlemmer donning Ingeborg’s covetted polkadot dress in order to distract the three Russians, thereby giving MacNamara extra time to spirit Piffl out of the East. This leads to a nervous gag when Schlemmer returns to West Berlin utterly bedraggled, the dress in ruins. “Did you have any trouble getting out of East Berlin?” MacNamara asks. “No,” Schlemmer responds, “but I had a little trouble in West Berlin. I was picked up by an American soldier in a jeep. He was very fresh.” One can only imagine, since even in the dress Schlemmer looks nothing like a woman. Schlemmer cleans the joke up a little in his follow-up explanation: “Wanted to take my picture for something called Playboy,” he explains unconvincingly.

  “Sorry, sir,” says Schlemmer later, pulling up his pants and running into MacNamara’s office. “I had difficulty getting out the girdle.” “Schlemmer!” MacNamara barks. “I want all those people out there to drop everything and stand by for orders. General alarm! Complete mobilization!” Schlemmer is thrilled: “Ah, like the good old days! Yes, sir!”

  Later, when Schlemmer’s old SS commander resurfaces in the form of a seemingly respectable West German journalist, Schlemmer automatically heils him; Billy was scarcely willing to let the Germans forget their own history. Wilder told Ray Eames what one of the German actors in One, Two, Three had told him about the war. Wilder was fascinated: “He said to me, ‘Billy, you know, during the war, we hid Jews.’ And I said, ‘You hid Jews?’ ‘Yes, we hid Jews.’ ‘And how many Jews did you hide?’ ‘Well, we only hid about two or three.’ ‘That’s significant,’” Billy replied, “‘because of all the Germans I talked to—how many Germans are there?—fifty million, forty million, something? That’s 120,000,000 Jews you hid.’”

  Young American women may be as nubile as Ingeborg, but in One, Two, Three they’re dumber. Played winningly by Pamela Tiffin, Scarlett is nevertheless an idiot. “You can forward my mail to American Express in Moscow,” she confidently declares. “Do you realize that Otto spelled backwards is Otto?” In her finest moment, she casually executes her parents on her way out the door: “They’re the ones I feel sorry for,” she confides to MacNamara. “Otto says they’ll have to be liquidated. ‘Bye!”

  Still, for all of Scarlett’s inanity, MacNamara’s cruelty, and the thoroughgoing prostitution of the West, communism ultimately fares worse than capitalism in One, Two, Three. Never one to pocket a windfa
ll for writing and directing a paean to peasants or a venerating tribute to the working class, Billy is honest about his own sensibility. He respects the sellouts of the world:

  BORODENKO: Well, comrades, what are we going to do? He’s got it, we want it. Are we going to accept this blackmailing capitalist deal?

  MISHKIN: Let’s take a vote.

  BORODENKO: I vote yes!

  MISHKIN: I vote yes!

  BORODENKO: Two out of three—deal is on.

  PERIPETCHIKOFF: Comrades, before you get in trouble I must warn you—I am not really from Soft-Drink Secretariat. I am undercover agent assigned to watch you.

  MISHKIN: In that case, I vote no. Deal is off.

  PERIPETCHIKOFF: But I vote yes!

  BORODENKO: Two out of three again. Deal is on!

  There is a difference between East and West, however. Inside the grim, imposing confines of the People’s Police Station in East Berlin, the torture of the prisoner is conducted: Piffl is forced to listen to “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” Holding his ears and screaming in agony, Piffl breaks down. A confession is extracted, and, despite the ridiculous song, the East German police state doesn’t seem very funny. On the other hand, when Piffl rushes into MacNamara’s office in his boxer shorts, he declares, “I’m going to like this job! Do you know what the first thing is I’m going to do? I’m going to lead the workers down there in revolt!” “Put your pants on, Spartacus,” says MacNamara. As Mrs. MacNamara says when she learns that Scarlett’s parents are about to arrive later that day, “Now that’s funny.”

  Wilder’s moral vision hinges on expedience. His favorite characters are heroically glib. The little MacNamara boy is admirably matter-of-fact about Scarlett’s putative illness: “If she dies can I have my room back?” For Billy, idealism isn’t simply out-of-date. It’s contemptible. “Maybe we should liquidate the whole human race and start all over again,” Piffl cries in despair. It’s at this point that Billy gives voice to his own concluding moral: “Look at it this way, kid,” says MacNamara in close-up. “Any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare, and Stripe toothpaste can’t be all bad.”

  One, Two, Three came in at a cost of $2,927,628. This was hardly excessive. Still, the picture did not make its money back. The domestic gross was less than $2.5 million, its foreign gross was only $1.6 million, and after all the advertising and distribution expenses were figured in, the Mirisch Company and United Artists were stuck for a loss of $1,568,500. Jimmy Cagney never saw the film, and neither did most other potential audience members. The Germans were particularly unamused. It was Billy’s first bomb since The Spirit of St. Louis. “I happen to think Coca-Cola is funny,” Billy said later. “A lot of people didn’t. Maybe that’s why the picture bombed out. I still think it’s funny. And when I drink it, it seems even funnier.”

  In London for the British opening in early February 1962, Billy was defensive. “If there’s anything I dislike more than being taken too lightly, it’s being taken too seriously,” he griped. “After every drama people say, ‘What do you want to give us all this bitterness and gloom for? Why don’t you go back to comedies instead?’ while after every comedy they say, ‘Very nice, but isn’t it now time for you to give us something really serious?’” He confessed that he was worried that audiences just couldn’t keep up with the frenzied pace of the film. Perhaps they simply didn’t “have the stamina to pay such close attention continuously,” he mused. Maybe, he said, his little “experiment” in speed went a step or two too far.

  Some American reviewers applauded One, Two, Three; others were lukewarm at best. Stanley Kauffmann called the film a “political satire with an air of daring but without daring anything.” John Simon decried the “shallow, gratuitous cynicism which, somewhere in the back of Mr. Wilder’s mind, seems to say, ‘I laugh at the whole damned world—whether it’s Shakespeare, striped toothpaste, or you.’” For Simon, this was wrong and immoral: “It’s all right to laugh at striped toothpaste,” Simon opined, “or us, or even Shakespeare, provided there is somewhere, at least by implication, something that one does not laugh at.” Pauline Kael was simply disgusted: “One, Two, Three is overwrought, tasteless, and offensive—a comedy that pulls out laughs the way a catheter draws urine.” Judging by the increasingly defensive tone he took whenever the subject of critics came up in the years to come, Billy noticed these jabs and was far more hurt by them than one might expect, given his own abrasive nature.

  Still, life in Hollywood went on, with Billy and Audrey Wilder at the top of the social scene. There was a dinner party at Romanoff’s on October 17, 1961. Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son, was in town; a writer, he was working on a story about the production of Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent (1962). It was a typical evening in Hollywood—Preminger was there, along with Charles Laughton (who was starring in the film), Elsa, Iz and Barbara, and the Wilders—and it was fairly raucous. Then Churchill became radically drunk. The group turned anxious, then enraged, as Churchill loudly insulted everyone. “Somebody ought to hit that man!” Billy said to Preminger at one point. By the following day, all of Hollywood was buzzing: Audrey Wilder was said to have actually taken her husband up on the suggestion and slapped young Churchill across the face with a fish. According to the rumor mill, she had good reason. After someone made a joke that was well received by the crowd, Churchill observed that Audrey Wilder laughed like the soundtrack of Make Room for Daddy. The next thing anyone knew, “Billy’s wife got him right in the kisser with a carp.”

  The Wilders both denied it, though Audrey did acknowledge having thrown her napkin vaguely in Churchill’s direction.

  A few months earlier, Billy himself was involved, in absentia, in a comical incident involving Stanley Kramer’s earnest Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Marlene Dietrich costarred as the widow of a Nazi general. She took the role to make the same point Schlemmer keeps making ridiculously in One, Two, Three: World War II was all Hitler’s fault, nobody else’s, and the Germans really had no idea what was going on. Dietrich found this notion to be a big historical fraud. She also found her dialogue to be a lot duller than Schlemmer’s—or any other Billy Wilder characters’—so behind the backs of Kramer and screenwriter Abby Mann, Marlene asked Billy to do a little rewrite job. He did, all too gladly. Mann later recalled sitting with Dietrich as Spencer Tracy, her costar on Judgment at Nuremberg, kept “storming up and down and giving me dirty looks.” Said Mann, “I went over and asked him, ‘What’s the matter?’ and he said, ‘Don’t you know she has Billy Wilder rewriting all your lines?’” Mann, who thought he could write dialogue, was enraged. “So the next time when Marlene came in with her script with ‘little changes’ in it, I tore up the script and she had to go out and read my lines as written.” Billy had the last laugh, as (almost) always. Later, when Mann chose the occasion of his guest appearance at the Moscow Film Festival to criticize Hollywood filmmaking, Wilder sent a message to Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Referring to a well-known company in the business of leasing household items by the week, Wilder asked, “Who appointed Abby Mann as spokesperson for the American film world in Moscow? Personally, I’d rather be represented by Abbey Rents.”

  In the spring of 1962, Paul Kohner helped Billy acquire the rights to an Italian play called L’Ora della Fantasia (The Dazzling Hour). It concerned the emotional and spiritual virtues of mate swapping. Another project was offered to him as well. In October, Wilder was approached by Darryl Zanuck to direct one of Diamond’s solo scripts—a comedy called Goodbye Charlie. “Dear Billy,” Zanuck wrote. “I have been told that you like the script Goodbye Charlie which was written by Issie [sic] Diamond. Is it true? If it is, I will read it immediately and get in touch with you. In one way or another, I intend to talk you into working with me. Best always, Darryl.”

  “Dear Darryl,” Billy replied. “Thank you very much for your invitation to do Goodbye Charlie for you. However, you’ve been too long and too far away to know that a wav
e of disgust has swept over this town since the brutal and callous dismissal of people even though they hold perfectly legal contracts. The ‘let them sue’ attitude is reprehensible. No selfrespecting picture-maker would ever want to work for your company. The sooner the bulldozers raze your studio, the better it will be for the industry. Yours truly, Billy Wilder.”

  Wilder was angry at the way Zanuck had just fired two of Billy’s oldest friends—Joseph Mankiewicz, whose lavishly messy Cleopatra was a long thorn in Zanuck’s side, and Charles Brackett, an innocent bystander. Having been ousted from Fox and then returned to power, Zanuck was refusing to honor deals struck by the interim regime; that was his excuse for terminating Brackett’s contract. Although he and Charlie had been anything but close since their breakup, Billy was infuriated by what he perceived as Zanuck’s insensitively public cruelty to his old partner. His letter to Zanuck was widely reported in the trades, having almost certainly been leaked by Billy. Unfortunately, One, Two, Three’s disappointing box office tally left Wilder exposed to a sharp retort on Zanuck’s part: “Reviewing Wilder’s professional record since his statement, he obviously got in the way of his own bulldozers.”

  During this period, too, there were plans for a Broadway musical based on Sunset Boulevard to be written by Stephen Sondheim, but Billy didn’t like the concept. Basking in the success of his latest hit, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Sondheim began outlining the first act of his Sunset Boulevard and even started composing the first scene with his lyricist, Burt Shevelove, but a chance encounter with Billy at a cocktail party put an end to Sondheim’s project. “I had never met him before,” Sondheim recalls, “but I shyly advanced the proposition of writing a musical of Sunset Boulevard. His response was, ‘But you can’t write a musical of Sunset Boulevard—it has to be an opera. After all, it’s about a dethroned queen.’” Years later, Hal Prince and Hugh Wheeler tried to talk Sondheim into writing a musical film of Sunset Boulevard for Angela Lansbury; in this scheme, Norma Desmond was to be a musical comedienne of the 1920s rather than a silent film star. “I demurred on Mr. Wilder’s grounds,” Sondheim says, “to which Hal replied ‘Then let’s make an opera out of it.’ Since I don’t much like opera as a form, I demurred again.” Thus Andrew Lloyd Webber.