by Ed Sikov
Even with this onslaught of bad notices, Kiss Me, Stupid played well for a few weeks in America’s biggest cities—Los Angeles, Chicago, New York—but died soon thereafter. The hinterlands were an insurmountable problem. For example, after Loews canceled its scheduled run in Columbus, Ohio, Kiss Me, Stupid was picked up by the RKO Grand, which promptly canceled it as well after a deluge of protests. Across the nation the film was officially boycotted by the Council of Catholic Women, United Church Women, and the Christian Family Movement. With all these boycotts, cancellations, bad press, and worse reviews, Kiss Me, Stupid hadn’t a prayer.
Wilder remained bitter and defensive on the subject for years. He was unable to see why audiences rejected his dark-tempered farce-drama about the positive moral value of adultery. In his eyes, Kiss Me, Stupid is a quest for dignity in an ugly and humiliating world. And yes, the film does bear a certain moral message: only by fucking strangers may a husband and wife renew their love for each other. “I don’t know why the film shocked people,” Billy maintained. “It’s the most bourgeois film there is. A man wants a career and the person who wants to help him wants to sleep with his wife. He replaces his wife with another, but when he is nearest to success, he refuses it and throws the guy out…. The public accepted it better in The Apartment because it was better conceived, better written, better lubricated.”
The film fared much better in Europe. “British Critics Hail Billy Wilder’s Stupid for its ‘Cheery Bad Taste’” ran one Variety headline. The British in particular and Europeans in general tended to applaud the film, using it (in Variety’s opinion, at least) as a well-earned chance to make fun of hypocritical American sexual mores. As the London Times put it, “In a world all too obsessively infected with the cult of ghastly good taste, thank heavens for Mr. Billy Wilder.”
The only American critic who praised Kiss Me, Stupid was Joan Didion. Her venue served as its own irony: the one magazine in the United States that applauded Billy’s movie was Vogue. Didion loved Wilder’s dark realism, she wrote in her “minority report”: “Kiss Me, Stupid shows Wilder doing exactly what only he can do. It is a profoundly affecting picture, as witnessed by the number of people who walk out on it.
“They walk out, I suspect,” Didion continued, “because they sense that Wilder means it…. The Wilder world is one seen at dawn through a hangover, a world of cheap double entendres and stale smoke and drinks in which the ice has melted: the true country of despair.” Billy was sufficiently moved that he sent Didion a thank-you note: “I read your piece in the beauty parlor while sitting under the hair dryer, and it sure did the old pornographer’s heart good. Cheers, Billy Wilder.”
The failure of Kiss Me, Stupid had a profound impact on Wilder’s sense of himself and his place in the world of American mass culture. He began work on the film envisioning himself as a brave pioneer ushering in a new era of frankness and honesty in regard to sex, and he ended it as a martyr—an out-of-touch martyr at that. Walter Reisch summed it up: “Billy was spoiled lately with success. He asked me not to see the picture. It is the one thing about which he has no sense of humor.”
Wilder snarled about the aftermath of Kiss Me, Stupid: “When I was lying in the gutter, a number of people came along and administered a kick in the groin. But in that period of depression and self-doubt, there was an element of beauty. My office is a clearing house usually for my chums—maybe they have third-act troubles, maybe they have actor troubles, and I work with them. Well, they stayed away in droves. They don’t even put the bite on me right now. It’s like the Ford plant after the Edsel was made. And it’s wonderful. I have some time for the first time.”
It wasn’t pleasant for Diamond, either. As Billy put it, “After the picture came out, I went to Europe and walked through the snow and got it out of my system and came back and sat down with my esteemed colleague, I. A. L. Diamond. For twelve weeks we sat and stared at each other. He said we were like parents who have produced a two-headed child and don’t dare to have intercourse.” (One doubts whether “have intercourse” is the precise term Billy used.) Diamond himself remarked that “Nobody ever made a fast buck by telling people they’re no damned good.” “But we shall survive,” Billy insisted. “We shall now come out with the Mustang and sweep the market.”
There were no hard feelings as far as the Mirisch brothers were concerned. Five months after Kiss Me, Stupid opened and died they extended Billy’s contract.
Wilder bought art to distract himself. In 1964 alone, he added to his collection Aristide Maillol’s Jeune Baigneuse debout, a terra-cotta sculpture cast around 1914; Edouard Vuillard’s Femme coupant le pain; Braque’s Nature morte sur un guéridon, a watercolor over pencil on paper done in the mid-1920s; Miró’s oil on canvas L’Etoile, painted in 1927; Klee’s Haus am Wasser, a watercolor and pen and black ink on paper laid down by the artist on board in 1930; and Picasso’s Deux nus, a colored wax crayons and pen and black ink over pencil on paper. The following year, he bought yet another Picasso—Femme au bras gauche levé, a crayons and pen and brown ink on board, drawn in Barcelona in 1902, in the same series as the ones Wilder bought in 1962.
He needed a big hit more than ever before, so he turned his attention in three directions—his cherished Sherlock Holmes, a comedy about insurance fraud, and a successful Broadway play starring Walter Matthau and Art Carney. As far as the third idea was concerned, he may have first read about it under the hair drier—the March 1965 issue of Vogue in which Joan Didion wrote about Kiss Me, Stupid featured a two-page fashion spread with a chicly dressed model cavorting Avedon-style with Carney, Matthau, and The Odd Couple’s director, Mike Nichols.
The play was enjoying a long run on Broadway, and there would be no film version until the play closed. But in the meantime, Matthau expressed great interest in appearing in the film, as did Jack Lemmon; both thought of teaming up with Billy as director, and Billy agreed. The story of two men who share a bond of animosity, The Odd Couple was perfect Wilder material, and it promised to be a huge moneymaker as well. Paramount owned the movie rights, and the combination of Lemmon and Matthau and Wilder seemed a surefire plan to all three. As Lemmon recalled, “Billy and Walter and I were going to be partners in this thing and split it three ways. But nobody had asked Mr. Paramount—[Charles] Bluhdorn. And they had not asked Neil Simon. First of all, Neil would hardly want anybody to start fucking around with his script. Billy, obviously, would want some changes. Number two: Mr. Bluhdorn personally hauls me into the studio and says, ‘Why do I want Billy Wilder? Why should I pay Billy Wilder? I’ve got you and Walter and this great script—I don’t need Billy Wilder.’ That was it. And Billy just said to Walter and me while they were futzin’ around, ‘Look, you guys go to the dance without me.’” Which is exactly what they did.
27. FAKE
I didn’t like the setup, I didn’t like the characters involved—especially me.
—Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) in The Fortune Cookie
Before a fight, you know you can defend yourself. But I’m just going to get slugged, and there’s nothing I can do.” This is Billy Wilder speaking to a reporter right before a preview screening of his next film, The Fortune Cookie (1966). “If you’re a producer, you make eighteen pictures a year. An actor makes three pictures a year. If Al Kaline strikes out, he gets up again two innings later. We get to bat once a year—and the suffering in the dugout is prolonged, believe me, when the people are booing. The thing one has to remember is, it’s not going to be the greatest—not the greatest hit, not the greatest flop.” Billy went on in this vein for a while and then cut himself short: “Look, it’s just another picture. It’ll be on the bottom half of a double bill soon.”
Wilder turned to The Fortune Cookie after realizing that he had to postpone Sherlock Holmes indefinitely. In early 1965, Wilder had plans to film Sherlock that summer. Variety reported that Louis Jourdan was committed to a starring role, but no contracts had been signed yet for the roles of Holmes and Watson. Wilder still w
anted Peter O’Toole as Holmes, and (incredibly) Peter Sellers was still being mentioned as Watson, at least in the press. But as 1965 rolled on, Wilder had to put the whole thing off. First it was pushed back to the fall, then to the following summer. The reason cited: Jack Lemmon was available for The Fortune Cookie immediately. A more likely explanation is the absence of both a Holmes and a Watson. Billy’s Sherlock promised to be long, lush, and expensive, and it would have been foolhardy to proceed with preproduction work without the key performers in place.
The Fortune Cookie, an original story by Wilder and Diamond, concerns some of Billy’s favorite subjects: avarice, self-contempt, a fallen woman, male bonding, and televised sports. By the mid-1960s, the Wilders’ art-laden penthouse sported two televisions along with the Picassos, Klees, and Mirós, so that Billy could watch baseball and football games simultaneously during the crossover early-autumn season. He met with the owner of the Cleveland Browns in May to set up a crucial location shoot for The Fortune Cookie: he would film on the field during an actual Browns game in the fall.
In Billy and Iz’s new comedy, an immorality tale, Lemmon would play Harry Hinkle, a cameraman for CBS Sports who gets accidentally tackled on the sidelines by a player during a Browns football game. His shysterlawyer brother-in-law, Willie Gingrich (Walter Matthau), convinces him to feign injury and sue both CBS and the Browns for a million dollars. Given the history of American negligence litigation and damage awards, this sum probably doesn’t register with quite the ridiculous force it did in 1966. Toward the end of the film, when Gingrich agrees to settle the case for $200,000, he chortles that it’s “the biggest cash award ever made in a personal injury case in the state of Ohio.” (That line alone is enough to get a laugh in the late 1990s.)
Billy once said that The Fortune Cookie is about greed, love, compassion, and human understanding, but not sex. This is not entirely true. For one thing, the film features one of the most repugnant chippies Wilder ever created. With The Fortune Cookie, Billy returns to the emotional and moral terrain of Double Indemnity and Ace in the Hole: when a man pulls a scam, the only person he despises more than himself is the rotten blonde who spurs him on. The difference is that The Fortune Cookie is a comedy. So instead of dying at the end, Wilder’s protagonist ends the film by literally kicking the blonde in the ass, whereupon he proceeds to a football field and horses around with someone he can understand—another man.
Adding a bit of social tension to the comedy is the fact that the player who knocks him down is black. Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson would be played by a strapping newcomer, Ron Rich. The blonde was also a novice: The Fortune Cookie was Judi West’s first film.
Like Kiss Me, Stupid, The Fortune Cookie was set up as a coproduction between United Artists, the Mirisches, Billy’s Phalanx, and a star’s own production company; this time it was Lemmon’s Jalem. The budget hovered around $3.5 million; Phalanx advanced $450,000, and the terms of Billy’s directing deal remained the same.
“Why are you doing this film?” Matthau asked Lemmon; “I have the best part.” “Don’t you think it’s about time?” was Lemmon’s response. Lemmon didn’t mean that the two actors’ roles were reversed. In fact, they’d never worked together before and hadn’t even met until The Fortune Cookie. The idea of Jack Lemmon confined to a wheelchair and neckbrace, unable to fidget, is funny enough as it is, but in this film Billy’s American Everyman would also be yielding to a surly, growling cutthroat with a decidedly Eastern European demeanor. (Matthau is the son of a Russian Orthodox priest who abandoned him as an infant, but as David Thomson observes, he “was brought up by the Daughters of Israel Day Nursery and must have absorbed timing with his Vitamin C.”) Matthau was integral to The Fortune Cookie from the beginning. Matthau had done some movies, but his reputation rested on his theatrical success, most recently in The Odd Couple. As Diamond once explained, “before we put a word on paper we went to New York to see Mr. Matthau. We told him the story and got him committed to do it before we began to write. We thought he was ideal for the part of the shyster brother-in-law.” As Wilder and Diamond describe Matthau’s Willie Gingrich in their screenplay, “He is a tall, loose-jointed man of forty, with a brain full of razor blades and a heart full of chutzpah.” This was not an original turn of phrase; it’s what William Holden once said about Billy.
For Wilder, the personal cost of shooting a major-league sports film was that he was forced once again to film on location. He could fake the Paris Opéra and the markets of Les Halles, but since he wanted to use eighty-five thousand cheering football fans as a backdrop for the accident sequence, he was compelled to leave the soundstage. Filming began on Sunday, October 31, in Cleveland. The script called for a “gloomy, bonechilling” day, and the writer-director couldn’t have gotten a better one with all the special effects Hollywood had to offer. The world champion NFL Browns were playing the Minnesota Vikings before a packed Municipal Stadium. Three cameras were stationed around the arena. Wilder the sports fan and Wilder the director were each delighted by a spectacular punt return by the Browns’ LeRoy Kelly in the third period. Kelly, in his number 44 uniform, took the ball on his own thirty-two-yard line and ran it all the way back to the Vikings’ twenty-four. The crowd went wild. It was precisely the play Wilder needed. Boom Boom was now number 44.
Cleveland ended up losing; the fans turned so mean in the fourth quarter that they booed quarterback Frank Ryan off the field. There was a party/press conference later that day, and Billy chose the moment to say that “after my last picture I know how Modell feels. But he shouldn’t worry. There’ll be further disasters.” The prediction proved correct.
If there were any catastrophes during the rest of the location shooting on The Fortune Cookie, however, they went unreported. LeRoy Kelly’s triumphant rush was meticulously re-created and falsified the following day, with Browns halfback Ernie Green substituting as number 44. (At close range Kelly was simply too small to fake being Boom Boom.) This time, however, number 44 ran an extra 20 yards before being shoved out of bounds, at which point two stuntmen took over—one for number 44, one for the cameraman who gets creamed in the play. A few action shots were filmed, after which coach Wilder pulled the stuntmen out of the game and sent Lemmon and Rich in their places to film the conclusion of the sequence.
The following day, Ernie Green returned to the field, but the rest of the Cleveland Browns were off playing a real practice game, so the freshman team from nearby Kent State University took their place. They were joined by Lemmon, Rich, and about ten thousand extras who had been lured to the stadium with promises of over 5,600 prizes—televisions, transistor radios, a free trip to Hollywood, a 1966 Ford Mustang…. Suspiciously, the film’s press kit claimed that the winner of the car was none other than Audrey Wilder. In any event, Billy was out-DeMilleing DeMille; it was reportedly the largest extras call in film history. Shots were set up and filmed; prizes were awarded; more shots were taken; Green ran; more prizes; ten thousand people were ordered to stand up and cheer, and they complied; Lemmon was hoisted out on a stretcher; the day was a success.
With the location footage in the can, Billy and his cast and crew returned to the relatively predictable safety of the Goldwyn Studios, where the rest of The Fortune Cookie was filmed on schedule—at first. Lemmon spent all but one day of the rest of the shoot in either a wheelchair or a hospital bed. Matthau ended up spending time in a hospital bed, too—the result of a heart attack he suffered with only ten days of shooting left. Replacing him the way Walston replaced Sellers was out of the question. The production of The Fortune Cookie had to shut down for three months while Matthau recovered.
The Fortune Cookie was sneaked at a Westwood theater in June 1966, with Wilder, Diamond, Lemmon, and Rich in attendance. Art Modell showed up, too; the Wilders had dinner with him beforehand. The first big laugh of the evening occurred when old lady Gingrich turns to a nun and says, “Thank you, sister,” and Willie replies, “Shut up, mother.” Billy thought the preview we
nt pretty well, though a reporter found the crowd’s reaction to be “spotty.” All Billy planned to do with the film was to cut three minutes of baggage and revise the scoring at the end, changing the original waltz to a more playful tune for the sequence in which Harry Hinkle and Boom Boom play football under the lights of an empty stadium. Jack Lemmon, however, was troubled: “I thought it was a bomb—almost as bad as I thought Irma La Douce was at its preview. I thought it died every time Matthau was off-screen.”
Wilder brought The Fortune Cookie in at $3,705,000. Domestically, the film grossed about $5 million, with an added $1.8 million coming in from abroad. This was not a bomb, but it was scarcely a vast success on the order Wilder craved. He blamed the schizophrenic zeitgeist: “I have been criticized for happy endings. The easiest ending is the unhappy ending—that you can write any time. It’s become sort of a bromide now that they don’t live happily ever after…. The question is whether you have a right to get people into the theater and they expect a cocktail and they get a shot of acid. People don’t want to hear that they stink.” (Having built his career on the fact that they did, Billy was now forced by his own recent disappointments to reassess the matter.) He added an observation so firmly grounded in the 1960s that it seems laughable today: “It’s not like the theater,” he said, comparing the high cost of Broadway with low-priced movie tickets. “For $7.70 you can give a message. For $1.25—no message.”
But there was a message in The Fortune Cookie. As the film historian William Paul points out, this is a film concerned with image making. Its lead character is a cameraman, the opening sequence traces how television transforms real actions into broadcast images, and a good deal of the film deals with the way camera lenses transform private lives into public property. The film is divided into sixteen segments, each with its own title card, each a shot of acid: “1. The Accident”; “2. The Brother-in-Law”; “3. The Caper”; “5. The Chinese Lunch”…. Nobody is immune from modern decay. “The Caper” opens with a nun behind the desk at the hospital tiptoeing over to Boom Boom and saying in a whisper, “Can I ask you something? What do you think our chances are against the Philadelphia Eagles? Because Sister Veronica wants thirteen points.”