On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Wilder mastered the game of chess as well, but it had one insurmountable problem: it took too long.

  André Previn recounts a typical day at Billy’s penthouse: “Once we arrived in his living room, he went to a closet and brought out his new Schiele watercolor. It was one of the master’s more luridly explicit efforts: an emaciated young woman, green-tinged flesh, sunken cheeks, hopeless eyes, naked, and about to engage in what used to be called self-abuse. Billy contemplated the picture with total concentration. ‘Isn’t it great?’ he said. At this moment, his wife Audrey came in the front door. Audrey is chic and dear and extremely funny. As she passed us, she gave a quick glance of horrified appraisal. ‘Good God, Billy,’ she said. ‘Just once—buy a landscape!’” One gets the sense that the couple played this gag routinely for any new audience that came along.

  Billy Wilder at sixty bore a great resemblance to Billy Wilder at twenty. As his old friend Walter Reisch observed in the mid-1960s, “Speed is absolutely of the essence to him. He cannot do anything slowly. If he enters a party, and everybody is talking slowly, he leaves. People who insist on finishing their sentences drive him crazy—he wants to write it himself. That’s why he likes paintings—they don’t talk back.” Wealth, fame, and thirty-seven years of filmmaking hadn’t quenched his impatience. “That’s his only fear in life—to be bored,” Reisch went on. “He cannot stand to be with people who bore him. Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t like them or respect them. He just doesn’t mingle with them. He loves them and he avoids them.” Reisch continued: “He has never gone ‘Hollywood.’ He makes everybody in his pictures feel important. Of course, he’s also cruelly rude.”

  Being Billy Wilder, he needed something new to sink his teeth into—films to make, art to buy. In 1966 alone, while mulling over whether or not to make one or the other of two musicals as well as the Sherlock Holmes film, Billy bought a Klimt, three Roys, a Dufy, a Cornell, a Rivers, a Moore, and two Steinbergs, and in the fall he supervised an important exhibition of his collection at the University of California Santa Barbara. “You don’t have paintings,” one dealer told Billy; “You have hors d’oeuvres.” The Santa Barbara exhibition was an especially rich array, featuring many of the best works in the collection: seven Picassos, four Klees, four Moores, five Steinbergs; a couple of Schieles and a Klimt; two Calders, three Braques, one Cornell, two Renoirs, one Giacometti, and sixty other works ranging from an anonymous French eighteenth-century eyeball and a wooden Bazangi mask to a 1962 Larry Rivers collage. He’d also begun collecting bonsai trees for his penthouse terrace and, of course, more fine, often custom-made clothes for his overstuffed closets and bureau drawers. He was still in the market for stories.

  On Billy’s behalf, Paul Kohner continued on the trail of Franz Lehár’s The Count of Luxembourg; this, of course, was the project Billy had been talking about since January 1945, when he and Charlie Brackett told Louella Parsons that Danny Kaye would be starring in their own adaptation. Twenty-one years later, at the end of January 1966, Billy met with UA and the Mirisches in Beverly Hills after Wilder officially submitted a proposal. The film would cost $7.5 to $8 million, Billy estimated, and he’d like to see Brigitte Bardot in the lead opposite Rex Harrison, Cary Grant, or (Billy’s first choice) Walter Matthau.

  The Mirisches and UA seemed lukewarm at best, so Wilder agreed to proceed on a step-by-step basis, with United Artists reserving the right to turn the project down after seeing the screenplay (which was, needless to say, not written yet). Wilder also wanted the right to take The Count of Luxembourg elsewhere, should it go into turnaround at UA. If the Mirisches and UA didn’t want to proceed, Billy added, he would be willing to do something else for them. This seems to have been the cue for Harold Mirisch to propose an idea that he, his brothers, and United Artists had already floated: My Sister and I, revived from the Hepburn-Holden proposal of the mid-1950s. Julie Andrews would assume the lead.

  No problem. If the Mirisches and United Artists wanted a Julie Andrews picture he would certainly be able to give them one, Billy said, and departed.

  Within moments of Billy leaving the room, the assembled executives put a quick end to The Count of Luxembourg. Moreover, the partners did not want to give Wilder the right to take it elsewhere if they did not proceed with it themselves. Harold Mirisch was given the task of informing Billy of their decision; he was also told to say that everyone preferred that Wilder go to work on the Julie Andrews picture. As for Sherlock Holmes, as far as the Mirisches were concerned Billy was off the project as director. It is most unclear whether Wilder was aware of this decision, though, since the discussion occurred only after Billy left the meeting. By this point, Wilder had presented the brothers with an idea for a Holmes picture, but the Mirisches were busily looking for the right director for the project. In their view, Billy was not the man to do it; the name on everyone’s lips was Bryan Forbes. The Mirisches were attempting to strike a deal with Forbes whereby he would write an outline of his concept of the story based on Billy’s original idea. If Forbes wasn’t interested, the Mirisches told UA, they already had a back-up in mind: John Schlesinger.

  Two years earlier, Billy Wilder had been full of enthusiasm about the new direction movies were taking. “Pictures will be better and better,” Billy announced, “with more skill and fewer bromides. Anyone who says the movies of the past were great is out of his tiny mind.” With a new film for Mary Poppins on the drawing board, perhaps he wasn’t so sure anymore.

  28. HEARTBREAK

  I’ve often been accused of being cold and unemotional. I admit it. And yet, in my own cold, unemotional way, I’m very fond of you, Watson.

  —Sherlock (Robert Stephens)

  in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

  Two of Billy Wilder’s oldest friends died in 1967 while the sixty-one-year-old Billy was writing the second of the two most personal films of his life. During that year he lost Doane Harrison, his trusted editorial advisor, and Franz Waxman, who had been his chum as long ago as Berlin and Paris. Waxman’s death was a personal blow; Harrison’s was both personal and professional. Mild-mannered to the point of almost complete self-effacement, Harrison had been by Billy’s side for all of his films since The Major and the Minor. The depth of Wilder’s affection for Harrison is evident not so much in the fact that Billy eventually cut Harrison in on the profits, but in his response to Harrison’s gratitude: “It’s not because you have talent but because I’m used to you.” Now Billy was on his own.

  A third friend, one from whom he had been long estranged, suffered a debilitating stroke that year. At the age of seventy-four, Charlie Brackett was still suffering from the sting of Billy’s rejection. He reminisced sadly with Garson Kanin about Billy, the films they wrote together, and the way their friendship had once mattered. Charlie mentioned Ace in the Hole, the first picture Wilder wrote and directed after they separated: “Billy used to say he thought it failed because it was too tough. I don’t think he’s right about that. Tough is all right. I admire toughness. I don’t admire hardness. That picture wasn’t tough. It was hard. But then, Billy’s hard, isn’t he?” Brackett died two years later—in March 1969, just before The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes went into production. Billy may not have been quite so hard anymore. Rather than further embittering him, the loss of friends to illness, anger, time, and ambition served, finally, to soften him—a little.

  He continued to talk hard, however, and he always would. Emphatic declarations kept coming, fast and furious. Reporters all over the world knew he was ceaselessly good for a quote, and lucky for them, Billy remained untroubled by contradictions that arose between one announcement and another. “A movie is a star vehicle,” Billy insisted in 1966. “What good is it to have a magnificent dramatic concept for which you must have Laurence Olivier and Audrey Hepburn if they’re not available?” Thus, he explained, he and Diamond only wrote scripts with specific actors already signed up. Wilder reversed gears completely two years later, and he did so in a most flambo
yant way. He was speaking to a British reporter about his upcoming Sherlock Holmes film. “The star thing is changing,” he announced while on a location-scouting trip to England. He offered an example: “There was nobody of importance in Bonnie and Clyde.”

  Like the film itself, the saga of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is long, convoluted, and melancholy. Wilder briefly attempted a collaboration with Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, and Moss Hart (the trio behind My Fair Lady) but nothing came of it. By 1964, Rex Harrison was out and O’Toole and Sellers were in, but then came the Kiss Me, Stupid imbroglio, and Sellers, too, was history. O’Toole was still Sherlock by the time Kiss Me, Stupid opened in London, but by 1967, when the film still hadn’t come together, all the roles were once again wide open, and Wilder had to start casting from scratch. In addition to a Sherlock and a Watson, Billy needed a Mycroft Holmes and a mysterious and sexy French-speaking woman for his long-planned, pricey film. In March, Paul Kohner mentioned three film projects to Jeanne Moreau, one of which was Billy’s; she replied that Wilder’s idea was the one she was most interested in pursuing. Wilder was apparently not interested in pursuing Moreau in return.

  Wilder and Diamond spent much of that year laying out what was still the first draft of Sherlock Holmes, though they’d been working on ideas for quite some time. Then, for the first time in their collaboration, Billy brought in a third collaborator. Billy and Iz had been kicking Holmes scenes around for ten years—almost their entire relationship—and it still wasn’t what Billy envisioned. So Diamond went off to write Cactus Flower (1969) for Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman, and Goldie Hawn (as well as doing some uncredited rewrite work on Sweet Charity, also 1969). The man Billy selected to replace him had experience writing and shouting with Billy—Harry Kurnitz, whose appeal was that he loved British culture and was an accomplished crafter of detective stories; he was, of course, the already-broken-in cowriter of Witness for the Prosecution.

  On January 10, 1968, Billy arrived in London, checked into the Connaught Hotel, and began looking for actors for Holmes, which he hoped to start filming that summer. Kohner did some of the legwork long-distance from Beverly Hills by sending advance word of Wilder’s arrival to various British talent agents. “He is not looking necessarily for name actors but wants an excellent cast, even if the names are lesser known,” Kohner told one.

  Wilder was still at the Connaught in late February. “What I plan is a serious study of Holmes,” he told the British press—“something in depth.” Wilder had been fascinated with Sherlock, he said, ever since he was a boy. “After all, he was a most riveting character—a dope addict and a misogynist. Yet in all the movies made about him nobody has ever explained why.” This would be Sherlock’s 128th feature film appearance, and Billy planned to change his image—to fill in the blanks and reveal the private life of a public man. “He’ll still be tall, ascetic, and cerebral, of course, but he’ll be real.” There was one aspect of Billy’s Holmes that remained as yet unspoken to the British press. Billy’s Sherlock Holmes was going to be homosexual.

  Wilder expanded on his personal attraction to Sherlock:

  I was interested by this bachelor misogynist—the way his brain worked. “The best of the century,” as Watson said of his very dear friend. Was he just a thinking machine? An extraordinary eye with great intuition? With a great combination of talents? Or was there something in his life which wounded him, which gave him emotions? Did he hate women? Why did he take drugs? (You know that he took cocaine.) I had to explore all that as well as his marvelous relationship with Watson, a petit-bourgeois doctor retired from the Army. It’s a situation like The Odd Couple, only with a Victorian backdrop—two bachelors living together. We made it funny and romantic. It’s not a Freudian analysis.

  It was 1968, the counterculture was in full swing, and Wilder, having swept past middle age, found himself careening toward an elderstatesmanship he never wanted. He was sixty-two. Given the box office performance of his last two films, he was feeling more intensely than ever the pressure of remaining contemporary and commercial. He had to find a way to stay on top of the rapidly changing culture without giving up his own style—a style he had honed for nearly forty years. As he said at the time, he was “neither nouvelle vague nor ancienne vague but moyenne vague”—an awkward position for an aging firebrand. “Some of these young guys coming up are goddamn good—and using brand-new styles. What is one to do?” he went on. “When you’re a painter of a certain school and you see the gallery across the way selling pop and doing well while your stuff is gathering dust, the worst thing you can do is change your style. One must try to keep up with the times, but in one’s own style.” In Billy’s mind, the time couldn’t have been more fit for an in-depth portrait of his own fictional hero—a brilliant, maladjusted, misogynistic gay drug addict.

  Billy shuttled back to Hollywood but returned to England in mid-April. By the end of April he had his Sherlock. Robert Stephens, a key member of Olivier’s National Theatre Company, had played several major, demanding, and diverse roles there—Horatio in Hamlet, the Incan god-king Atahualpa in Peter Shaffer’s highly regarded Royal Hunt of the Sun, and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. Beatrice was played in that production by the incomparable Maggie Smith, whom Stephens had just married. When he signed onto Sherlock Holmes, Stephens was about to appear with Smith (albeit in a supporting role) in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), after which he would be free to appear in Billy’s film. “I’m one of Billy Wilder’s greatest admirers,” said Stephens at the time. “So is my wife. So is my dresser.”

  Billy had never seen Stephens perform onstage or on film before. He had barely set eyes on Stephens at all: “I’d never seen Stephens except for twenty minutes in the bar of the Connaught Hotel. But I thought, ‘What’s good enough for Larry Olivier is good enough for me.’” As Stephens recalled, “We had one drink. I didn’t read anything or do an audition. We chatted, and I left. I had lunch with a playwright friend, and when I got home there was a message to ring my agent. Billy Wilder wanted me to play Sherlock Holmes. I was more elated than I had ever been in my life.” Wilder told Stephens he didn’t want the film to be good or even very good but perfect. According to Stephens, “He didn’t care how long it took.”

  As Wilder and Diamond originally conceived it (with help from Kurnitz), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes opened in the present day, with Watson’s grandson arriving in London from his home in Saskatchewan. Young Watson is a veterinarian, and he has come to England to attend a hoof-and-mouth disease convention. He’s Watson’s grandson, all right, and he’s tired of people constantly referring to the fact. At the bank in which the elder Watson had deposited a box of great secrecy and value—a box that young Watson is about to open—the banker Havelock-Smith (John Williams) describes himself as a charter member of the Sherlock Holmes Society. There has been a recent rush of new memberships, Havelock-Smith says, “in protest against that Secret Service chap—the one with the hairy chest. What’s his number?”

  “You mean 007? James Bond?” asks the thudding Cassidy of the legal department. Havelock-Smith continues on the theme: “It’s trash. Cheap sensationalism. Totally witless. Berettas and bare bosoms. Sports cars with flamethrowers and booby-trapped attaché cases. Smersh. Now really! Give me a foggy night, a hansom cab drawing up to 221B Baker Street, a desperate knock on the door….” The three men open the dusty strongbox, which contains photos of Watson and Sherlock, Holmes’s famous deerstalker hat, a few hypodermic needles, and a manuscript, the first case of which is “The Curious Case of the Upside-Down Room.” The tale begins on a train, with Holmes and Watson returning from some solved case or other. When a wounded Italian bursts into their compartment, Holmes deduces from the usual scant evidence that the man is a Neopolitan singing teacher who, after being caught trysting with a nobleman’s wife, has injured himself in a hasty self-defenestration. Watson, disbelieving, urges Holmes to prove his bizarre deduction, whereupon Holmes pretends to be the noble
man and the Italian hurls himself off the train. Watson is deeply offended at Holmes’s cold cruelty: “Of all the heartless, cynical, inhuman…. It’s unworthy of you, Holmes—just to prove how clever you are.” Holmes shuts him up: “I’m trying to get some sleep, Watson.”

  Billy’s Holmes is an erudite, successful man—world renowned, in fact—but a bored one. His is a life of edgy ennui. The world, a dull disappointment, no longer engages him. He’s momentarily distracted by a new case—the corpse of an elderly man has been found with a stuffed owl, a boomerang, a meat grinder, and a Bible, with all the furniture upside down on the ceiling. Holmes’s interest soon dwindles, the solution so touchingly obvious. In the cadaver’s clenched hand is a playing card—the seven of diamonds, to be precise. Holmes deduces the solution to “The Curious Case of the Upside-Down Room” but doesn’t spell it out right away except to say that the case clearly involves narcotics. First of all, Sherlock notes, the corpse’s clothes were buttoned by someone else (because they were buttoned in reverse). When they return to Baker Street they find Mrs. Hudson playing solitaire; Holmes gives her the seven of diamonds, which matches her deck. The person responsible has been in their own neighborhood, Sherlock declares, there being four shops between 221B and the bus stop—a hardware store, a bookstore, a sporting goods shop, and a taxidermist. (Meat grinder, Bible, boomerang, owl.) Holmes also knows that the corpse had been borrowed for the occasion, since its big toe bore the marks of an identification tag wire. Referring to the mysterious Mr. Fowler, who rented the room in which the corpse was found, Holmes announces to Watson that “he rigged up an elaborate puzzle, replete with red herrings, for the sole purpose of baffling the expert.” “I’m sorry, Holmes, but you’ve lost me,” says Watson. “Have I really, Mr. Fowler?” says Sherlock.