by Ed Sikov
European culture offered him breathing room of a sort the American way of life did not. He did what he wanted in Los Angeles, of course, but it was better on the Continent. Other countries were like the past—they did things differently there, and Billy found it comforting. In Rome in 1974, Billy was seen picking up a whore on the Via Veneto. He was placid when confronted with it. “There was a strike on at the Grand Hotel where I was staying,” he explained. “And no hot water. After a few days I was desperate for a bath—so I went and picked up a girl on the Via Veneto and went back to her place. I had a nice hot bath, paid her, and went on my way. Cheap at the price, I thought. I did it several times while the strike was on.”
Despite his last two bombs, Billy Wilder wasn’t about to quit making pictures. His work was his life. The Front Page was originally announced in June 1973 as a project for Joseph Mankiewicz, but his actual involvement was practically nonexistent. By the end of July, Mankiewicz was out and Wilder and Diamond were on their way in. Talks were being held with Universal’s Jennings Lang, the producer whose aggrieved testicles had served as an early inspiration for The Apartment, and by mid-August it was official: The Front Page would be Wilder’s next film. On the surface it sounded perfect: two seasoned, bantering reporters, Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson; Billy Wilder and Izzie Diamond; Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.
“We felt we should go back to one of the classic farces of the 1930s,” Diamond said, implicitly acknowledging a retreat after the twin debacles of Sherlock Holmes and Avanti!. “We thought of Roxie Hart, Libeled Lady, Nothing Sacred. It just so happened that these were all newspaper stories. Nobody has made this kind of picture recently.” This might have been a reason not to remake The Front Page again, especially when younger, hotter directors were dazzling audiences with visually au courant films like Chinatown and The Godfather Part II (both 1974), but Wilder and Diamond thought they were being topical and, hopefully, commercial. In their view, the current Watergate scandal had made heroes out of journalists once more.
So in the fall of 1973, Wilder and Diamond set to work on a complete rewrite of one of the most popular American plays of the twentieth century. Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien starred in the 1931 film version, and Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell took over the roles in Howard Hawks’s gender-switched 1940 remake His Girl Friday. Wilder and Diamond kept the plot but sharpened the vulgarity, Billy apparently convinced that the way to appeal to mid-1970s audiences was to give these hard-bitten characters lines that he himself would use. “Listen, you lousy baboon,” Wilder’s Hildy barks to Walter, “you better start wearing cast-iron shorts because the next time I see you I’m going to bury my shoe up your ass, so help me.”
By mid-February 1974, Wilder and Diamond had produced a complete draft. A shooting script was ready by mid-March, by which time nearly the entire film had been cast. A pretty young actress, Susan Sarandon, would play Hildy’s fiancée, Peggy Grant; Austin Pendleton would play the sniffling, neurotic anarchist Earl Williams; and the television comedy star Carol Burnett would play Mollie the whore. In 1961, Burnett, then appearing as a featured comedienne on The Garry Moore Show, told an interviewer that she would work for free in a movie if Billy Wilder directed and Jack Lemmon starred. But Burnett had to be honest: “You don’t see them knocking down my doors.” She got her chance in 1974. Burnett didn’t work for free, certainly, but she did donate her salary to the Jonas Salk Institute.
On April 2, 1974, just as The Front Page was going in front of the cameras, Billy’s friend Armand Deutsch and his wife threw an Oscar-night party. It was a particularly exciting night for the Wilders, since Jack Lemmon was nominated for Save the Tiger (1973) and stood a good chance of winning. Deutsch mailed out ballots for an Oscar pool beforehand—$50 a pop with the winner getting all the money, the only stipulation being that everybody had to vote for Lemmon. When Billy and Audrey showed up, Billy surprised his host by carting in his own six Oscars, which he kept at his office on the Goldwyn lot. He lined them all up on a table—three on one side, three on the other, with an open space in the center. “Lemmon will walk in later and put his in the middle,” Billy announced.
On the television set, Liza Minnelli and Gregory Peck opened the Best Actor envelope. Lemmon won. Billy, overwhelmed, beamed in pride—but only until the other guests turned and looked at him, at which point he quickly wiped the grin off his face and resumed his usual look of vague perturbation. “I had a speech prepared in 1959,” Lemmon said from the TV. “I’ve forgotten it.” After the televised ceremonies concluded, Lemmon showed up at the party and immediately rushed to Billy’s side. “Congratulations,” Wilder brusquely offered, “but remember, don’t be late to work tomorrow. Actors are apt to take these things too seriously.” Lemmon’s face fell. Having achieved his aim of deflating the winner, Wilder then grinned and gave his close friend a big bear hug—a most uncharacteristic response for a man who disliked physical contact with others. He took Lemmon’s Oscar and put it in the place of honor at the center of the family stash. Walter Matthau, who witnessed the whole interchange, thought the happy outcome was a bit of a toss-up; “It could have gone either way,” he said. For his part, Lemmon made it a point to tell reporters in the next few days that “If Billy Wilder tries to give me any direction, I’ll hit him right over the head with both my Oscars.”
This was a merry group, by and large—egotistical and competitive but fun. These men knew each other very well and usually enjoyed themselves in their joint company. Lemmon, Matthau, and Deutsch had a standing date at the Wilders’ apartment on Monday nights to watch football and lay large bets. Everyone wagered $100 per game—except for Matthau, who tended to have thousands of dollars at stake on any given evening. It was boys’ night out, even if the boys were all Hollywood millionaires. The men watched TV; Audrey cooked. Other than to thank her when she served the meal at halftime, they paid her no attention. She once complained to Billy that she might as well be serving them naked because none of them would look up long enough to notice. Just as Walter Reisch described her years earlier, Audrey Wilder remained every bit as hard as her husband. “Yes, I think she’s tough,” agrees someone who knows them both; “You’d have to be to be married to Billy.” It stands to reason. To field Billy’s endless, tasteless, often cruelly personal wit, and even just to withstand the force of his larger-than-life personality, one would have to be pretty resilient. One would also have to enjoy it, and by all accounts Audrey Wilder always did. “There aren’t many men like Billy, I can tell you that,” she said. “And he’s difficult. But all great men are difficult, you know. So? It goes with the territory. He may have been a headache, but he never was a bore. Ever. Ever.”
Principal photography on The Front Page began on April 3, at the Universal Studios on the hills between Hollywood and Burbank. “He fired someone the first day of shooting,” Susan Sarandon recalls. “That got everybody very much on their toes. One of the reporters was having trouble getting his lines right. The more pressure he felt, the worse it got, and that was it. Mr. Wilder wasn’t particularly nasty about it, but it definitely set a standard. We knew he was serious.” Sarandon, whose career was just beginning, was amazed by Wilder’s precision, not to mention his commanding presence: “I had a wardrobe test; we were due to shoot in two days. He said, ‘Her neck is beautiful. Get rid of that costume and do something that shows more of her neck.’ I was flabbergasted. I’d never even noticed that I had a neck. And to expect a costume to appear the day after tomorrow…. And it did.” Sarandon goes on:
I was pretty inexperienced at the time, so he was a shock to me. He directed with a stopwatch. He didn’t “cover” in the traditional way—master, two shot, single. He knew exactly what he wanted, and that’s all he shot. It was a great lesson for me. That was a time when people were encouraged to indulge themselves; he was of an era when the script still meant something. So he had this little stopwatch, and he’d count down—’Three more seconds,’ and then we’d do it. He also insisted on eve
ryone going to dailies in the afternoon. Everyone would eat lunch together and watch them. It was a very social gathering, but I was not comfortable seeing myself on film—I still don’t go to dailies—and Mr. Wilder found it personally upsetting that I didn’t join in with everyone else. I tried to explain it, and he eased up a little bit, but he kept kidding me about it throughout the shoot.
After a lifetime of smoking, Billy Wilder had finally quit; The Front Page was his first production without cigarettes and cigars. To keep himself distracted he stuffed his mouth with chewing gum.
Much to the dismay of Helen Hayes, Charles MacArthur’s widow and the owner of his share of the rights, Wilder and Diamond rewrote about 60 percent of the original dialogue. Part of this transformation, as Joseph McBride notes, was due to the fact that the play takes place entirely in a pressroom, whereas the film is opened up to an outside world. Wilder and Diamond’s script describes Walter Burns as falling in “the great tradition of Machiavelli, Rasputin, and Count Dracula.” And, for that matter, Billy Wilder, a fact acknowledged by Matthau. “I always play Wilder,” Matthau said at the time; “Wilder sees me as Wilder.”
“Billy Wilder said I like to humiliate directors. That’s not true.” This is Walter Matthau in the 1990s, explaining his reputation for impromptu rewriting during a shoot. Matthau went on to say that he always knows the story of the film he’s making, and as a result, he knows best what his character should say at any given point. Jack Lemmon was always more accommodating to Billy’s direction. Even when Matthau speaks with open admiration of Wilder, there’s conflict. Referring to one of their many conversations on the set, Matthau reports that Billy wanted every scene to crackle: “He said, ‘Each scene that you do must have some dramatic explosion, some astonishing thing about it. Otherwise it falls down.’ I said, ‘How about if I build to that.’ He said, ‘No, forget about building. Building is for architects.’”
Austin Pendleton, thrilled to be in a Wilder picture, was nevertheless a nervous wreck. It wasn’t Billy’s fault. As Pendleton describes it, “He came over to me the first day on the set and said, ‘I made up my mind I would not die without having you in a film of mine.’ I mean, this is serious charm we have going here. I was overwhelmed.” Pendleton continues: “We started shooting, and he said—very kindly but firmly—that he wouldn’t print it because I wasn’t truthful enough. He didn’t want to embarrass me artistically by releasing across the country anything less than the truth—the absolute vulnerability of the character. He said it as if he was just concerned for my well-being. It wasn’t sharp or embarrassing. He had a kind of courtly concern for my reputation.”
“For some reason, the part [of Earl Williams, the neurotic killer] was very frightening and threatening for me,” Pendleton goes on.
Now, he’s easily smart enough to use that. You don’t make a lot of really great films without having figured that out. I have a feeling that part of the reason people think the performance does work is that he decided to photograph my own turbulence, as opposed to trying to correct it or edit it out. Sometimes I would just get overwhelmed and be all but unable to do the scene. One time I was doing a scene with Martin Gabel, and I just couldn’t do it. [It’s the scene in which Williams undergoes a psychiatric examination by a German-accented Freudian, played by Gabel.] “We did a couple of takes, and then Billy came over to me and simply put his hand on my shoulder. That’s all he did. And then I did it. I felt very protected by him, and yet I felt he wasn’t going to let me get away with anything bad.
Carol Burnett was also nervous and insecure even though, unlike Pendleton’s, her part didn’t particularly call for it. Wilder didn’t bother to soothe her very much, and she was too embarrassed to ask him what she was doing wrong. Confused by Wilder’s tendency not to rehearse much before each take, Burnett also felt like an outsider in the blustering, boys-club world of Billy, Izzie, Jack, and Walter. Moreover, she was a successful TV star then, one of the most recognizable and popular women in American entertainment, but it didn’t matter a whit to Billy as far as her scheduling was concerned. Wilder kept her waiting on the set all day long, requiring her to be there in the morning but not filming anything with her until late at night. Mollie Molloy is not one of her best performances. Later, after the film was released, Burnett and her husband were on a plane on which The Front Page was shown during the flight. Burnett was aghast and hid under her coat, but after it was over she asked the flight attendant if she could make an announcement. Grabbing the mike, Burnett said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Carol Burnett. I didn’t know that this movie was going to be shown on this flight, and I would sincerely like to apologize to each and every one of you.”
The Front Page was still in production when, on May 6, 1974, at around 4:15 P.M., an electrical switch shorted out on Goldwyn’s Soundstage 5 on the set of Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, a children’s television program. A flash fire erupted, and soon two other Goldwyn soundstages, the Writers Building, and several executive offices were engulfed in flames and acrid smoke. Firefighters were quick to respond. So was Steve McQueen, who explained to the boys and girls of the press that he was researching his upcoming role as the fire chief in the Fox-Warners coproduction of The Towering Inferno (1974). When the flames were finally put out, Billy’s office in the Writers Building lay completely destroyed. All the papers, correspondence, contracts, script drafts, notes, doodles, and poker chits collected over the course of his long career were gone, along with some paintings and sculptures he’d been storing in a loft space tucked away in a secluded area of Soundstage 5. He did not, however, lose his six Oscars. He simply hadn’t gotten around to bringing them back from Armand Deutsch’s place. Walter Mirisch was not as lucky. The Academy Award he won for In the Heat of the Night was decapitated.
Austin Pendleton describes Billy’s state of mind just after the fire: “We were preparing the lighting for a scene, and he got a call that his office burned down, and all these expensive and beloved paintings had been destroyed. I went over and told him how sorry I was. He kind of shrugged. I was astounded.” The art Billy lost was very disturbing but not devastating; they weren’t the key works in his collection. (He kept many of those stacked in closets and behind furniture at home.) Moreover, the destruction of his screenplay drafts, notes, deal memos, and correspondence may even have been something of a relief to such a private man. But whatever he lost, and however much the items meant to him, Wilder’s steely reaction to the fire went beyond mere grace under pressure; perhaps he didn’t react with shock because the fire only confirmed once again the way the world worked. “Things could have been worse,” he told a journalist. “Hitler could have won World War II.”
The Front Page wrapped after a two-and-a-half-month shoot. For all its amusing, even endearing moments—Eggelhoffer’s examination of Williams, the smoky camaraderie of the pressroom, the hatchet-faced janitress (Doro Merande in her third appearance for Wilder)—The Front Page is Wilder’s slightest work. Its themes are so integral to his worldview that he doesn’t have anything new to say about them. Competence and deceit, uneasy male bonding, the distracting pleasure of chopping words out of thin air, a hooker—Wilder and Diamond had little need to remake and rewrite Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play other than to use it as a gimmick to get financing. It’s not that they were disinterested in the film they made. If anything, they cared too much about making the film, any film, in order to keep working, and they ended up settling for less rather than accepting the early retirement to which Hollywood was otherwise consigning them. Wilder actually begins his film with a montage of an antiquated system—one that he and Diamond clearly loved: a newspaper is made from hand-set type. The headline, a Wilder-Diamond addition, is revealing in its morbid logic: “Cop Killer Sane, Must Die.”
With all its burnished nostalgia for a more accommodating (if not especially simpler) era, The Front Page contains some of Billy’s most unpleasant interchanges. More heartless by far than Kiss Me, Stupid, The Front Pag
e dwells (as does the play) on the gallows being built outside the pressroom window in the deep pit of a jailhouse courtyard. Wilder’s camera stares down on it from above and zooms back to become a point of view that is shot from the perspective of an annoyed reporter, who calls for quiet. When the tubby cop who supervises the construction (Cliff Osmond) calls for a halt, looks up, yells “Screw you,” and waves the builders back to work, it’s not very nice on any level. Billy introduces his surrogate with similar coarseness. Hunched over with his back to the camera, Walter Burns shouts into the telephone: “That dumb sonofabitch bastard, who does he think he is?! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you. Well look, if Hildy shows up will you be so kind as to tell that dumb sonofabitch bastard to get his ass over here? Thank you.”
With The Front Page, Wilder and Diamond wrote their first practicing homosexual, the effeminate Bensinger (David Wayne), who seems to have been designed to distract audiences from the male bonding on which The Front Page has always stood and on which Wilder and Diamond had themselves been dwelling since Some Like It Hot. Their attempt to create a gay Sherlock Holmes having ended in ambivalent disappointment, they now strove to create a classic mincing fag. “Never, never get caught in the can with Bensinger,” is Hildy’s central piece of advice to the callow novice-reporter Rudy Keppler (Jon Korkes), and sure enough, not only does Bensinger insinuate his hand onto Keppler’s shoulder in a later scene, a comical epilogue finds the two men having moved to Cape Cod together to open an antique shop. But unlike Wilder’s and Diamond’s earlier (and funnier) gay jokes, homosexuality in The Front Page is all about incompetence. “Jesus, Hildy, you’re a newspaperman, not some faggot writing poetry about brassieres and laxatives.” That’s Walter Burns trying to convince Hildy not to get married and become an advertising copywriter. “Nobody but fairies go into advertising,” another reporter underscores. All of this is meant to explain why Jack Lemmon should ditch Susan Sarandon and stick with Walter Matthau.