by Ed Sikov
The film’s leisurely pacing is more damaging than a few callous fairy jokes. Overlapping dialogue, one of the play’s best-known devices, was such an anathema to Wilder that he eliminated it, and the film suffers greatly for its absence. As much as One, Two, Three, The Front Page has always been a play of speed. Since George S. Kaufman first staged it on Broadway in 1928, actors were instructed to step on each other’s lines to create a breakneck whirl of words. But as Lemmon said, “I think that the idea of overlapping is repugnant to Billy, because you’re going to lose some of the dialogue. And he really stopped us from overlapping.” The Front Page never played so slow.
In 1974, Universal’s big films were Airport 75 and Earthquake. This in itself might have told Billy that his character-driven, language-loving brand of filmmaking would be a hard sell for the studio’s publicity department. The Front Page premiered on December 19 at the Plitt Century Plaza theater, with a supper served afterward at the Century Plaza Hotel. Guests included Ross Hunter, Mitzi Gaynor, and then-governor Ronald Reagan and his wife, who was clad in a bugle-beaded Galanos gown. (Audrey Wilder countered with a silver fox coat.) The film quickly bombed. The Front Page “sure looks good on paper,” Variety opined. “But that’s about the only place it looks good.” “Wilder is out of touch with the temper of the times,” said Newsweek. Time was crueler: “This is a movie conceived with indifference and made with disinterest, like a piece of occupational therapy.”
Even the praise of Wilder’s critical admirer George Morris rings with inadvertent dismay. Noting that the property had already been filmed twice before, Morris observes that Wilder gives it “a predictably distinctive interpretation.” The very predictability of its distinctiveness was precisely the problem. Ironically, what a host of hostile critics wrote wrongheadedly about Sherlock Holmes and Avanti! was actually true of The Front Page: despite its moments of humor and affection, particularly in regard to Pendleton’s Earl Williams, the film is old and tired and out of touch. With sickening accuracy, something Wilder once said of Preston Sturges was suddenly true of himself: “His was the case of the strikeout fear. You go to bat and you hit singles, doubles, you hit them out of the ballpark—and then comes a series of strikeouts. You strike out, and you can’t even bunt anymore. There was a loss of self-confidence and a sense that the money men were dealing with a burnt-out but enormous talent. And, of course, bad luck.”
Hollywood had changed, and Billy, who hadn’t missed an issue of the trades since he learned English, knew it as well as anyone in town. He’d always been for sale, with all the accompanying gigolo guilt, but it had been over a decade since audiences bought him. He wasn’t the agile young dancer anymore. If anything, he’d become one of the old ladies he used to guide around the Hotel Eden ballroom—the ones who couldn’t get dates unless they paid for them. After the failure of his fifth film in a row, Billy Wilder seemed to be truly out of time. Audiences were to blame. “The subtlest comedy you can get right now is M*A*S*H,” he complained. “They don’t want to see a picture unless Peter Fonda is running over a dozen people or unless Clint Eastwood has got a machine gun bigger than 140 penises.”
Still, another one of Universal’s 1974 releases caught his attention and admiration—a Goldie Hawn/William Atherton/Ben Johnson road movie that stirred genres in a manner Wilder could appreciate better than anyone. This slick but quirky film combined comedy and drama, adventure and emotion, action and soul, and Billy loved the mix. The Sugarland Express wasn’t all that well received by the critics—in England, it was such a bomb that it only played on the bottom half of a double bill with The Front Page. But Wilder knew genius when he saw it. “The director of that movie is the greatest young talent to come along in years,” Billy said at the time. Then he added a personal remark: “I was Steven Spielberg—once.”
30. FEDORA
It’s a whole different business now. The kids with beards have taken over. They don’t need scripts. Just give ’em a handheld camera with a zoom lens. For two years I’ve sweated blood to get this project off the ground; now I’ve finally found me some tax-shelter guys. They’re willing to finance it, but only if I can deliver Fedora. Without her there’s no picture.
—Barry Detweiler (William Holden) in Fedora
In March 1977, Billy and Paul Kohner met in Munich to negotiate a whole new deal for Wilder’s latest project, a film about the impossibility of recovering the past. The first deal had completely and demeaningly fallen apart. But thanks to what Billy called the German “money boys,” Fedora was revived, and with unusual efficiency it was scheduled to go before the cameras two months later in Corfu. Seven weeks at Munich’s Bavaria Studio would follow, after which the production would shift to Paris. The budget was $4,250,000, 47 percent of which was cobbled together from tax-shelter sources in Germany. Fedora would be a warped elegy to a world that no longer existed except in the minds of those who once loved it.
A year earlier, none of this multinational bean-counting would have been necessary. Fedora was a Universal project then. The Front Page had spooked the studio, but not enough to prevent another go-round with Wilder. The Front Page hadn’t been botched; it just bombed, and like any studio in the 1970s, Universal was used to releasing money losers, the hope being that for every ten Front Pages there might be one Jaws (1975). After the best-selling author (and former actor) Tom Tryon signed his own four-picture deal with Universal, the studio announced that Wilder and Diamond would adapt and film one of the novellas in Tryon’s collection, Crowned Heads. The film, now called Fedora, was soon scheduled to roll in the fall of 1976. Jennings Lang would produce, and Billy would direct.
There was one new element on which the studio insisted, however. This time, Universal demanded what was called a “step deal.” The fact that Wilder and Diamond were hired to write the screenplay, with Wilder signing to direct, did not mean that Fedora would be made. No, this deal would be structured in stages, based on the executives’ continuing approval. Universal had forty-five days after receipt of Billy and Izzie’s completed script to decide whether or not to green-light the production. Wilder hadn’t been treated like this since the early 1940s, but given his commercial track record over the last dozen years, he was in no position to argue the point. “I’m going through a dry spell, that’s all,” he snapped. “I did not suddenly become an idiot.” It was the mid-1970s, and Billy, age seventy, was not much impressed with the world he was forced to inhabit. In his view, he hadn’t changed at all. It was the pictures that got small. “They say Wilder is out of touch with his times,” he admitted, but “frankly I regard it as a compliment. Who the hell wants to be in touch with these times?”
When Universal executives read the script Wilder and Diamond created, they summarily put Fedora in what they called “turnaround,” a popular Hollywood euphemism for garbage can. Billy was stunned—and enraged. “I don’t know who they are, the mysterious people up there,” he said. “It’s Kafka. From what I gather—I didn’t even talk to them because I was pissed off, as they say—I gather that they didn’t think that it had a chance. What hurts the most is that they may be proven right.” Universal’s decision makers, led by Sidney Sheinberg, were motivated not only by concern over the script’s defiantly loopy quality—it was a long, lovingly sick joke on Hollywood—but also by a string of past flops about the golden age of American cinema. Two of these money losers were Universal pictures—Gable and Lombard (1976) and W. C. Fields and Me (1976). Like The Front Page two years earlier, both were bits of burnished Hollywood nostalgia, both were major box office disappointments, and the studio saw no need to make it three in a row.
Billy was immediately on the phone shopping Fedora to all the other studios in town. One after another they turned him down. Universal’s step deal was degrading enough. Now Wilder found himself hurled back to the 1930s, peddling a screenplay nobody wanted to buy.
Depending on the loyalty of friends, Wilder turned to Kohner. Thirty-six years earlier, the honorable agent knew Billy
had gotten too big for him to represent. When he congratulated Wilder on the success of Hold Back the Dawn, Kohner concluded by noting, “I don’t know why I am writing you such letters since I know I can’t get you as a client anyhow.” Now that Kohner could get Billy again, he did, and together the two old refugees found support from the Germans. Universal still wanted the right of first refusal as far as distribution was concerned, but Billy, holding a grudge, put enough of his own money into the project to prevent that double humiliation. It was the last-minute infusion of muscular German marks, though, that was his salvation. “Look, I can’t lose,” Billy declared as Fedora approached its release, “because if this picture is a big hit, it’s my revenge on Hollywood. If it’s a total financial disaster, it’s my revenge for Auschwitz.”
Fedora is the story of a reclusive, foreign-born movie star who has remained ineffably beautiful despite her advancing years. When an on-the-skids Hollywood producer tracks her down at her remote villa on a tiny island off Corfu, his pestering, belligerent attention sets off a chain of events that results in suicide. The Hollywood rumor mill had it that Wilder was trying to convince Greta Garbo to come out of seclusion to play the role of Fedora, but Billy denied it. He did, however, ask Marlene Dietrich, with an eye toward casting Faye Dunaway as her daughter. Marlene declined—“for various reasons,” according to Billy. “She thought there was some kind of similarity with her own life, which it certainly is not. And she is not well.” More to the point, Dietrich despised the screenplay. “I hated the book, I hated the script, and I don’t know why you want to do it,” the cantankerous recluse told Billy by letter.
Artistically, the seventy-year-old Billy was in a reflective and morose mood. By 1976, when Universal threw Fedora into turnaround, he had spent more than ten years planning, writing, and directing a series of beloved failures. It is hardly surprising that he found himself musing on the theme of Hollywood’s cruelty to has-beens.
Fedora wasn’t his only idea with a Tinseltown motif. He claims to have been working on an original story about a multigenerational, Mayer-like Hollywood family. Its title was the punchline: The Foreskin Saga. “I had another idea,” he said, “a film about a retirement home for movie stars. It’s one of the rare successes that the community can be proud of. They take out a percentage of your salary for this institution, which is located in the valley on land that used to belong to Warner…. My plan was to make a film about a child star à la Shirley Temple, whose career is over at age seven and who argues that she should have the right to live there since she filled all the conditions. So this little monster arrives in the world of the aged, and they have only one wish—to kill her.”
Fedora held more appeal, though the property brought with it a difficult problem: “What attracted me was what I finally wasn’t able to resolve: would it be the same actress playing the mother and the daughter? Could I find someone who can appear both twenty years old and eighty, decrepit in a wheelchair, without revealing my secret? It was a big problem and if I had only partially solved it, I would have been very happy.” Wilder describes the tale as one of reverence: “The story is the old homosexual dream of admiration for strong women—Garbo, Dietrich, Mae West—at whose feet they throw flowers.… I needed an actress with the force of Bette Davis at her peak. But at the same time—and this increased the difficulties—I wanted her to be an imported star, with a vague air of Dietrich, Garbo, or Pola Negri.” He settled on Marthe Keller.
Sydney Pollack planted the notion when he invited Billy to a prescreening of Bobby Deerfield (1977). The Swiss actress was glamorous, refined, and lightly accented. The camera adored her cheekbones and creamy-velvet complexion. He delivered a script to her on January 28, Keller’s thirty-second birthday. At first, Keller was to play both parts—the aged Fedora as well as her daughter, Antonia. Hildegard Knef, who ultimately took the role of Fedora, was an afterthought—a kind of human Band-Aid. “Keller had been in a very bad automobile accident,” Wilder explained. “Her face was smashed up, and she had a bad cut. It’s all fixed up, but the nerve ends are such that when you try heavy makeup, with rubber and stuff like that, she couldn’t tolerate the pain when they took it off.” That was the practical excuse. More salient was the fact that the magnitude and presence of the elderly Fedora, said to have been one of the greatest movie stars of the century, was more than Keller could handle.
William Holden provided Billy with a firmer foundation, not to mention a more resonant icon. Wilder cast his old friend in the role of Barry Detweiler, film producer manqué. Said Wilder, “My only problem was that it would reinforce the parallel with Sunset Boulevard,” an echo Billy seems not to have wanted to create quite so self-evidently. “But he has a seriousness, a presence, a maturity, a solidity which makes him indispensable. You know he’s maybe the only actor in Hollywood his age who hasn’t had facelifts. It’s remarkable in a city where, with the pieces of skin that have been cut from the face of one star you could make five or six new ones.” Holden was cagey about accepting the role, which required extensive time in Greece, Paris, and Munich. He played some money games through his agent, but Billy knew he’d do it in the end: “You know why? Because he had ordered a new BMW and he told them he would pick it up personally.”
The most striking change from novella to film lies in Holden’s character. In the book, he’s a successful writer who searches for Fedora out of a romantic nostalgia; he and Fedora had once been lovers. Wilder and Diamond keep their past tryst, but they make Barry Detweiler older and more bitter, an aging producer on the skids. Detweiler introduces his brief affair with Fedora in voice-over: “It was 1947. We were shooting something called Leda and the Swan. I was the second assistant. You didn’t even know I was around—until we started on the big pool scene—the handmaidens, and the water lilies, and you in the nude.” A flashback begins. “I’m afraid we’re going to have a little problem with the censors,” says Leda’s thickly German-accented director. “You mean the boobs,” his assistant clarifies, at which point young “Dutch” Detweiler (Stephen Collins) is ordered into the studio tank to rearrange the water lilies on Fedora’s bare breasts. He slaps them on and yawns.
Later, in her dressing room, she confronts him: “Tell me, Mr. Detweiler, are you a faggot?” “A what?” he answers with a look of shock. “A queer. A fairy,” she reiterates, biting on both expressions hard enough to wound him all the more deeply. “Don’t tell me you’re normal. Because no normal man would yawn if he saw me without my clothes.” “I had a very rough night last night,” he explains. “Doing what?” she answers. “Picking up sailors at the bus station?” “Boy have you got the wrong number. Ask any of the girls on the set! Or in wardrobe. Or makeup!” They proceed to enjoy a romantic night together on the beach in Santa Monica, but the only moment of this lovemaking Wilder shows on-screen is a brief, morning-after sequence with the couple, fully clothed, huddled together for warmth in the front seat.
Fedora herself changed subtly in the adaptation as well. In the novella, she’s a nearly fantastic character of almost eighty years. Wilder and Diamond make her younger and more plausible, and the film explains her secret more pragmatically than does the novella. As the critic Christian Viviani points out, Tryon doesn’t detail what Fedora’s career was like or what made her a star. He “shows us how the legend survives, but not what it’s based on. Wilder’s approach is diametrically opposite: the foundation of the legend is what interests him, but he doesn’t really evoke it in the script. He prefers to let images play with all their hypnotic power.” The trouble was, late 1970s audiences were less willing to be hypnotized by images of old, demented movie stars. They preferred young Jedi knights and voracious sharks.
In Wilder and Diamond’s Fedora, another character plays a pivotal (some might say reeling) role—Doctor Vando (José Ferrer). The secret of Fedora’s persevering beauty—her plastic surgeon—is dead in Tryon’s novella, but Wilder and Diamond keep him very much alive and center screen. This, too, was problematic for a
udiences, since Vando’s perseverence turns comical. Finally, there are profound differences between Tryon’s and Wilder’s visions of Fedora’s daughter. She’s called Ophelia in the book, but Wilder and Diamond rechristen her Antonia. In the book, Ophelia is more responsible for her precarious state of mind. She believes in the star myth and tries to become it herself, whereas Antonia is a confused pawn driven to madness by her own victimization. Ophelia drugs herself; Antonia gets dosed by Dr. Vando. Viviani picks up on the more subtly allusive name change: “In giving her a first name that evokes Hoffmann via Offenbach, Wilder and Diamond make her a sister of the unhappy heroines of the poet: dancers who fly into pieces, singers who can only sing by accepting death, victims of a fatality that annihilates them.” If only Fedora sustained this degree of operatic grandeur.
Wilder expands on the morbid texture and theme he wished to create: “My original idea was an impressionistic quest like Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead. That took place in Greece, but I wanted something Wagnerian—like on Lake Como. But I would have had to wait three weeks to have the necessary light or use a fog machine to envelop the island. Then I told myself that the murder could be much more interesting in full sun. Another difficulty was finding a sufficiently imposing and isolated villa.” In terms of its peculiar comico-mythic tone, Fedora, clearly, was one of Billy Wilder’s most ambitious pictures.