Selznick did his best to interfere with Hitchcock’s creation, but Hitchcock was too clever for him. “When Selznick came down to the set,” Miss Bergman recalled, “the camera suddenly stopped, and Hitchcock said the cameraman couldn’t get it going again. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with it,’ he would say. ‘They’re working on it, they’re working on it.’ And finally Selznick would leave, and miraculously the camera would start rolling again.” Selznick presumably guessed that he was being deceived (other headstrong directors, like John Ford and Howard Hawks, used similar tactics against meddling producers), but he departed without complaint. Emotionally involved as he was in Spellbound, he was far more involved in a far more grandiose and far more demented project, Duel in the Sun.
When Selznick originally bought the novel by Niven Busch, he assigned it to King Vidor as director and said he wanted nothing more than “an artistic little Western.” Soon, however, he was making announcements like “I want to shoot the works on numbers of horsemen, wild horses, cattle, etc.” By the time he had spent more than twenty months on various stages of production, he had invested more than five million dollars, more than the cost of Gone With the Wind. Selznick not only indulged in a producer’s whims, paying Walter Huston forty thousand dollars for four days’ work, for example, but he also wrote the script himself, and so indulged in writer’s whims, rewriting scenes that had already been shot and insisting that Vidor reshoot them.
The main reason for all this eccentricity was that Duel in the Sun was to star Jennifer Jones as a half-caste in love with the evil hero, Gregory Peck. This was counter-typecasting of the most extreme sort, the hyper-respectable Peck as a killer and Saint Bernadette as a slut. The odd thing was that Miss Jones, perhaps precisely because of the demureness of her previous roles, did have a strangely erotic quality, and Selznick took an almost perverse pleasure in bringing it out of her and putting it on display and having it photographed. “It was on the love scenes especially . . .” Selznick said when a dispute later arose over directorial credits, “that I was on the set morning, noon, and night, redirecting the actors, the camera, and even the lighting.”
This constant interference, in which Selznick took such pride, eventually infuriated King Vidor, particularly when the whole crew was sweltering on location in the desert near Tucson. At one point, Selznick began shouting at Vidor about something he wanted changed, and Vidor grimly said, “Don’t do that, David. I won’t have you doing that in front of the company.” Selznick apologized, but he could not stop interfering and domineering. Occasionally, he insisted in playing the grandee, as when he took a band of his employees to a seedy gambling house so they could watch him play roulette at 5 A.M. and lose thirty thousand dollars at the wheel. Then back to work in the desert.
In the bombastic climax to the film, when Peck and Miss Jones shot each other but kept crawling toward each other through the sand, Selznick abruptly decided that the doomed lovers didn’t look sufficiently doomed, so he stepped forward and sprinkled some more blood on them. Vidor couldn’t stand it any more. “You can take this picture and shove it,” he said to Selznick, then stalked off the set, climbed into a black limousine, and told the driver to head for Los Angeles. It happened that the desert road stretched eight miles westward without a bend. The whole Duel company, including the perspiring Selznick and the blood-spattered Miss Jones, watched in silence as Vidor’s black limousine sped toward the horizon, growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared into a distant row of hills. “Well, that’s all for today,” said Selznick.
The producer eventually hired William Dieterle to come and clean up the odds and ends, and so his “artistic little Western” was finally finished. The critics laughed at it, laughed at Orson Welles’s thunderous off screen narration and at Dimitri Tiomkin’s shtump music, and at Jennifer Jones crawling through the sand and calling out the name of her lover/murderer, “Lewt! Lewt!” Perhaps the cruelest judgment came from Charles Brackett, the writer who had collaborated with Billy Wilder on such elegant screenplays as Ninotchka, and who now compared Selznick’s new epic to the famous saga of Billy the Kid, which Howard Hughes had finally exhumed from his vault and released. Duel in the Sun, said Brackett, was “The Outlaw in bad taste.”
Selznick was unnerved, but by Hollywood standards, Duel in the Sun was a big hit, Selznick’s last. On its first release, pushed along by a two-million-dollar advertising campaign, it made seventeen million dollars, more than three times its production cost. (Spellbound did very nicely too, earning more than $7 million on an investment of $1.5 million, plus an Academy Award nomination as the best picture of the year.) But Selznick was still haunted by demons, and so was Jennifer Jones (it was not until 1949 that they finally married). Mrs. Selznick, who had moved to New York and established herself as a theatrical producer, heard that Miss Jones was repeatedly calling her. She refused to take the calls. Miss Jones then pretended to be Dorothy Paley, the wife of the CBS chairman, and said she was calling on a matter of life and death. Mrs. Selznick came to the phone, found that it was Miss Jones calling again, and tried to turn her away. Miss Jones took to waiting outside the theater where Mrs. Selznick was rehearsing a new play.
“There was no ducking it,” Mrs. Selznick said of her eventual meeting with her successor. “I told my driver to take us through Central Park. She was distraught about David’s unhappiness—he claimed his life was ruined and she blamed herself. She was bad for him. His career was over. He didn’t love her, he loved me. . . . She grew hysterical and tried to throw herself out of the car—I only just managed to pull her back. We drove round and round the park. As I quieted her down, I told her David was bad for himself and nothing she did or didn’t do could change that. . . .”
After a lifetime of failure, Raymond Chandler found the success of his late fifties rather bewildering. For years, he had sat at home and cranked out pulp fiction, and now he was the coauthor of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, and Paramount paid him a thousand dollars a week, and the Writers Building was well stocked with liquor, and people told funny stories at the writers’ table in the studio dining room (“You mean to say she’s a nymphomaniac?” somebody asked about some ambitious actress, and Harry Tugend said, “Well, I guess she would be, if they could get her quieted down a little”). Chandler’s wife, Cissy, was now seventy-three, and John Houseman noted that “the presence of women—secretaries and extras around the lot—disturbed and excited him.” Houseman, just starting out as a producer at Paramount, worked with Chandler on a minor thriller called The Unseen and claimed that Chandler regarded the two of them as bound by the tie of having both gone to English public schools, two gentlemen adrift in the horse latitudes.
When Chandler signed a new three-year contract at Paramount and reported for work at the start of January 1945, the studio was in considerable disarray. Buddy DeSylva, the chief of production, had just suffered a heart attack and never returned to the studio; his right-hand man, Bill Dozier, departed for RKO. The official studio boss, Y. Frank Freeman, was primarily a hand-shaker who knew little about making movies, so the surviving executives were going around in circles. In the midst of this, the word spread that Alan Ladd, the studio’s biggest star, was due to be drafted in three months and that nobody had prepared any films to entertain Ladd’s fans during his imminent absence. General manager Henry Ginsberg, who seemed to be in charge of the confusion, told a meeting of Paramount executives that anyone who could concoct a Ladd movie that could go into production within a month would, as Houseman recalled it, “earn the eternal gratitude of the Studio.”
Houseman went to lunch with Chandler that same day at Lucey’s restaurant. Chandler complained, he recalled, of being stuck on a book about three homecoming war veterans. The hero, Johnny Morrison, returned to discover that his wife was being unfaithful. They quarreled. Then she was found dead. Chandler didn’t know exactly how the story would turn out. He was thinking vaguely of turning it into a screenplay. Houseman hungrily followed Chandler ho
me to his Spanish bungalow on Drexel Avenue, where they found the aged Cissy swathed in pink tarlatan and nursing a broken leg. Houseman sat down right there and read about a hundred pages of The Blue Dahlia. He sensed success. Two days later, Paramount bought the story and assigned Houseman and Chandler to work on it. “They are already casting it without a line of screenplay written,” Chandler wrote anxiously to a friend. “Why do I get myself into these jams?”
Worse was to come. When Chandler delivered the first sixty pages of script, roughly the first half of the film, Paramount assigned the picture to a veteran director, George Marshall, and told him to start shooting the beginning while Chandler continued working on the script. After a month or so, a script girl pointed out the alarming fact that Marshall was filming faster than Chandler was writing. At that point, the crew had finished sixty-two pages but the writer had produced only another twenty-two.
“Ray’s problem with the script . . .” Houseman cheerily recalled, “was a simple one: he had no ending.” Alan Ladd, the betrayed war hero, was naturally a prime suspect in his wife’s murder, but many other people might have committed the crime, anyone in that swarm of shadowy dealmakers and black marketeers who had flocked to the dead woman’s rowdy parties. Houseman said he remained “quite confident” that Chandler would think up some interesting solution to the murder, but when the front office started worrying about the dwindling number of unfilmed pages, the story conferences began. “It was during one of these meetings, early one afternoon,” Houseman recalled, “that a man came running down the Studio street, stopping at various windows to shout to the people inside something we could not hear. When he reached us, he shoved his head in and told us that Franklin D. Roosevelt was dead.” They all “sat stunned for a while,” and then, like everyone else, “said all the obvious things,” and then “fell silent and sat there gloomily for a while.” But The Blue Dahlia still had no ending, so the executives resumed their search for the murderer. “We went through all the tired alternatives,” Houseman said, “using them to smother the realities of the world outside, and Ray sat listening, only half there, nodding his head, saying little.”
Two days later, Chandler presented himself at Houseman’s office and dolefully announced that he would have to withdraw from the whole project. He looked very shaky. He couldn’t solve the murder. Ginsberg, the officious studio manager, had summoned Chandler to his office—warning him not to mention this to Houseman—and then offered him a bonus of five thousand dollars if he could deliver the finished script of The Blue Dahlia on time. Chandler appeared to be shocked, stricken. It took Houseman a little time to figure out why, and he concluded that there were three reasons. First, since Houseman had always feigned confidence in Chandler’s ability to finish the script, Ginsberg’s offer of five thousand dollars provided the first disclosure that Paramount was worried, and therefore Chandler’s “sense of security was now hopelessly shattered.” Second, Chandler had been “insulted” by the offer of additional money to complete an assignment that he had agreed to undertake. Third, Ginsberg’s action in making the offer without Houseman’s knowledge meant to Chandler that he was being invited “to betray a friend and a fellow Public School man.”
This may sound a little too labyrinthine even for Hollywood, but the Paramount administration building was ornamented with Elizabethan timbering and casement windows and quasi-antique hunting prints, so perhaps it was fitting for Chandler and Houseman to sit there and ruminate on the possibilities of an affront to a Public School man. By now, according to Houseman, there were only thirteen pages of script still to be shot, no prospect of an ending, and Ladd due to enter the army in ten days. While Houseman pondered what to do next, Chandler returned to the studio the following day with a remarkable proposition. Although he remained convinced that he could never finish the script while sober, he was just as convinced that he could easily finish it if he stayed drunk. This was a serious matter, for Chandler had only with great difficulty stopped drinking, and his doctor had warned him that he might jeopardize his life if he ever resumed. But for the sake of honor and all that, Chandler now produced a sheet of yellow paper on which he had listed for Houseman his basic requirements:
A. Two Cadillac limousines, to stand day and night outside the house with drivers available for:
1. Fetching the doctor (Ray’s or Cissy’s or both).
2. Taking script pages to and from the studio.
3. Driving the maid to market.
4. Contingencies and emergencies.
B. Six secretaries—in three relays of two—to be in constant attendance and readiness, available at all times for dictation, typing and other emergencies.
C. A direct line open at all times to my office by day and the studio switchboard at night.
This bizarre proposal included obvious signs of a writer’s neurotic need for attention, and of an alcoholic’s desire to camouflage his need for liquor, but Houseman took it all very literally. His own boss, Joe Sistrom, approved the arrangement on the ground that “if the picture closed down we’d all be fired anyway.” And so, to get the project under way, Houseman took Chandler to an expensive lunch at Perrino’s, where the novelist fortified himself with three double martinis before eating and three double stingers afterward.
For the next week, according to Houseman, Chandler “did not draw one sober breath.” Nor did he eat. His doctor came twice a day to give him injections of glucose. He worked intermittently and drank steadily, around the clock. From time to time, he would fall into a light sleep. “He woke in full possession of his faculties,” Houseman recalled, “to pick up exactly where he had stopped with whichever of the rotating secretaries happened to be with him. He continued until he felt himself growing drowsy again, then dropped back comfortably into sleep while the girl went into the next room, typed the pages and left them on the table beside him to be reread and corrected when he woke up.”
Houseman, who dropped by periodically to see how Chandler was progressing, arrived one morning to find that the murder had been solved. Although Chandler was lying unconscious on his sofa, there were several pages of neatly corrected script lying next to a half-empty glass of bourbon, and these pages provided the answers. It was Dad Newell, the house detective, who had murdered Morrison’s unfaithful wife. And now the killer turned on his pursuers: “Cheap, huh? Sure—a cigar and a drink and a couple of dirty bucks—that’s all it takes to buy me! That’s what she thought—Found out a little different, didn’t she? Maybe I could get tired of being pushed around by cops—and hotel managers—and ritzy dames in bungalows. . . .” It was not very plausible, but that didn’t greatly matter, since there were so many suspects that almost anyone in the cast could have committed the crime. Besides, it was an Alan Ladd movie, and Alan Ladd movies didn’t need to be plausible; they just needed to display the handsome star, always the loner, hard but vulnerable, vulnerable but hard. He was, as Chandler tartly observed, and as Shane was later to demonstrate, “a small boy’s idea of a tough guy.”
“The film was finished with four days to spare,” Houseman said, to conclude his splendid story, “Alan Ladd went off to the army, and Paramount made a lot of money.” One of several problems with this splendid story, however, is that although there were announcements the previous fall that Ladd would soon be drafted, there seems to be no evidence that he actually did return to uniform. Ladd had in fact joined the Army Air Corps early in 1943, had served nearly a year in various promotional and fund-raising assignments, and then had received a medical discharge for a double hernia. The idea that a man with such a record should be threatened by the draft in 1945, when the war was virtually over, is rather hard to believe. When this flaw in the story was pointed out to Houseman, though, he strongly answered that “the facts about The Blue Dahlia, as outlined in my book—believe me—are totally correct.” On the other hand, Ladd’s biographer, Beverly Linet, stated just as firmly that no such redrafting ever took place. What Ladd did do after finishing The Blue Da
hlia was to go off to his ranch in Hidden Valley while his wife, Sue Carol, a prominent Hollywood agent, bargained with Paramount for a new contract.
Another problem with Houseman’s story is that Chandler seems to have had a solution to the murder from the beginning. The killer was not really the house detective, a very marginal character, but the hero’s best friend, Buzz Wanchek. Nor was The Blue Dahlia a book on which Chandler found himself blocked. On the contrary, he wrote to a friend at the start of 1945 that he was having “a lot of fun” in “writing an original screenplay—a murder mystery, but not entirely that—and if it turns out good enough, I have the right to make a book of it.” Chandler’s original idea was that Buzz Wanchek (played to perfection by William Bendix) was a hot-tempered man who returned from the war with a serious head injury that left him periodically subject both to bursts of violence and to spells of amnesia. “What I wrote,” Chandler said later, “was a story of a man who killed (executed would be a better word) his pal’s wife under the stress of a great and legitimate anger, then blanked out and forgot all about it; then with perfect honesty did his best to help the pal get out of a jam, then found himself in a set of circumstances which brought about partial recall.”
In a strange way that Chandler himself could hardly have known, his original plot bore remarkable resemblances to the real relationship between Ladd and Bendix. They had met in 1942 in filming a remake of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key. It was a peculiarly sadomasochistic film, in which the mountainous Bendix, assigned to guard the diminutive Ladd inside a locked basement, kept hitting him and then picking him up and hitting him again, until, ordered to stop, he complained, “Aw, you mean I don’t get to smack baby no more?” This was all playacting, of course, except that in the middle of it, Bendix accidentally smashed Ladd on the jaw and knocked him cold. Then, when he realized what had happened, he burst into tears. “My God, what have I done?” he cried.
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