One of Wilder’s chores was to collaborate on a documentary about the concentration camps, to be titled Die Todesmühlen (Death Mills). The filmed record of the Nazi atrocities, a frank account of man’s inhumanity to man, was to be shown in German cinemas. Wilder viewed the raw footage of the extermination camps filmed by official army photographers who had accompanied the liberating armies. He found the shots of the gas ovens, mass graves, and skeletal survivors shattering.
By the time Wilder joined the project in August 1945, Hanus Borger, a U.S. colonel in PsyWar and a documentary filmmaker, had produced a compilation of the footage. His rough cut of Die Todesmühlen, which ran eighty-six minutes, had been shipped to the PsyWar branch in London. Ivor Montagu, a British documentary filmmaker who was supervising Die Todesmühlen, judged Borger’s preliminary edit to be much too long. Borger’s version of the film was accordingly shipped back to Bad Homburg, where Wilder condensed and polished it for a documentary short running half an hour.54
Wilder left Germany with the outline of a film he hoped to make about the American occupation of Berlin firmly in mind. The movie would focus on a GI’s romance with a German woman. “As for the GI,” Wilder wrote in a farewell memo to the OWI, “I shall not make him a flag-waving hero,” but something of a cynic.55 The picture, when it was finally made in 1948, would be called A Foreign Affair.
On the credit side of the ledger, as we know, Wilder returned home to find that he had a successful film on his hands, The Lost Weekend. On the debit side of the ledger, however, Judith Wilder, his estranged wife, sued him for divorce two weeks after he returned. This came as a surprise to no one, least of all Billy Wilder. Wilder’s marriage had for all practical purposes ended by the time he finished shooting The Lost Weekend. It was an open secret that his mistress was Doris Dowling, whom he had cast in the movie. What’s more, he had started dating Audrey Young, a bit player who played a hat-check girl in the film. Young was not much of an actress; she was better known as a singer with Tommy Dorsey’s band. Thus Wilder, while cheating on his wife with Dowling, was also “cheating on his mistress by pursuing Audrey Young.” That spelled the end of Wilder’s stormy relationship with Dowling. Young “got her man, but her part wound up on the cutting room floor,” David Freeman observes.56
Judith Wilder officially filed for divorce on October 2, 1945; the divorce decree was finally granted on March 6, 1947. In the meantime, Judith and Victoria, their only child, took up permanent residence in the San Francisco Bay area. Wilder always blamed himself for the breakup of his first marriage. “I thought I was in love with Judith,” he reflected, “but I didn’t know what love was.”57
When Wilder started dating Young, he discovered that she lived in an unfashionable district of Los Angeles. “I would worship the ground you walk on,” he quipped, “if you lived in a better neighborhood.”58 Audrey learned from the outset of their relationship to roll with the punch lines of Wilder’s jokes.
Billy Wilder and Audrey Young were married on June 30, 1949. Audrey recalled that Billy was self-conscious about getting married a second time and wanted to keep the occasion as simple and unostentatious as possible. They drove to Linden, Nevada, and were married by a justice of the peace. They tied the knot, she remembered, “for $2.00 in three minutes.” He bought her a wedding ring for $17.95, which Audrey has worn ever since.59 Billy’s marriage to Audrey lasted till the end of his days. On their first wedding anniversary, Audrey greeted her husband at breakfast by reminding him of the date. Without looking up from his copy of the Hollywood Reporter, he exclaimed, “Please, not while I’m eating!”60 When asked whether she felt that her husband placed his movie career ahead of his marriage, Audrey answered, “You’re always going to come second.”61
Wilder wanted his film about an American GI in occupied Berlin to be his next project for Paramount. But he realized that it was too soon after the war to attempt extensive location shooting in the streets of Berlin. Berliners were understandably resentful of the American occupation forces. They would not welcome a Hollywood film crew taking over whole blocks of downtown for shooting. So he postponed A Foreign Affair. When Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons asked him in February 1946 what his next film would be, he responded that he was going to make a musical called The Emperor Waltz. “Instead of the bat and the mouse in The Lost Weekend,” he added, “we’re having Bing Crosby and Joan Fontaine.”62
6
Wunderbar
The Emperor Waltz and A Foreign Affair
I never knew the old Vienna with its Strauss music, glamour, and easy charm. I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market after the war. Vienna didn’t look any worse than Berlin—bombed out.
—Graham Greene
When Wilder returned to Hollywood from Europe in the fall of 1945, he turned his back on war-ravaged Vienna. Instead he decided to make a lush musical about pre–World War I Vienna, after the manner of the Waltz King, Johann Strauss (“The Blue Danube”), and Franz Lehar. Wilder remembered the Viennese operettas of Strauss and Lehar from his youth in Vienna. Furthermore, Wilder had collaborated with Lehar himself on a musical film in Berlin back in 1932, Es war einmal ein Walzer (Once There Was a Waltz). One of Strauss’s finest waltzes, “The Emperor Waltz,” would provide the title of Wilder’s present film and be featured in the movie’s score.
Wilder was, of course, bracketed with Brackett, his writing partner, in the film colony, and not always to his advantage. Brackett, it was whispered in industry circles, “exercised a restraining, civilizing influence on the cynical, callous, morbid tendencies of Billy Wilder.”1 Yet The Emperor Waltz was to be a fluffy Viennese musical confection, a project that obviously appealed much more to the Austrian Wilder than to the New England Brackett. “I don’t suppose I ever understood it very well,” said Brackett.2
Wilder returned to Paramount in mid-September 1945. “After cutting . . . a thirty-minute documentary about the concentration camps,” he explained, he wanted to get those images out of his mind. During a conference with the studio brass one afternoon, an executive noted that the studio did not have a suitable vehicle for Bing Crosby. Wilder picked up on the idea. Speaking on Brackett’s behalf, as well as for himself—as he always did at these meetings—Wilder ventured, “Why don’t we just do a musical?”3
The Emperor Waltz (1948)
At the time, making a picture with Crosby seemed like a good bet. Crosby had won an Academy Award for playing a priest in Going My Way, and his other recent pictures had been hits. In addition, Wilder had personally liked Crosby as a top vocalist ever since he had met him in Vienna in 1926, when Crosby was touring with Paul Whiteman’s band. Crosby was to play an American by the name of Virgil Smith, peddling phonographs in Austria.
Joan Fontaine excelled in playing refined heroines. She had won plaudits for playing the title role in Jane Eyre (1944) opposite Orson Welles. She was to take the part of Countess Johanna Augusta in Wilder’s film. Richard Haydn, who specialized in playing elderly types twice his age, such as Professor Oddly in Ball of Fire, was called on to take over the part of the aging Emperor Franz Josef after Wilder decided that Oscar Karlweis, who had originally been cast, was not right for the part.
The story that Wilder devised with Brackett was set at the beginning of the twentieth century in Vienna, when Wilder was himself a child; he clearly looked back on his boyhood and homeland with affection. The plot was derived from an actual incident: a Danish inventor had demonstrated a primitive talking machine to Emperor Franz Josef, who rejected it out of hand as a newfangled innovation.4 In the film, Virgil Smith endeavors to get the emperor to endorse his gramophone to spark European sales of his product. While visiting the imperial palace, Virgil’s fox terrier, Buttons, takes a fancy to the persnickety poodle of Countess Johanna Augusta, and Virgil, in turn, becomes enamored of Johanna.
Wilder had been frustrated when he collaborated on movie musicals in his Berlin days, such as the one he worked on with Franz Lehar, because
the musical numbers were merely appendages to the plot. He wanted each song in The Emperor Waltz to be an extension, not an interruption, of the plot. For example, the song “Friendly Mountains” in The Emperor Waltz expresses how dazzled Virgil is when he visits the Tyrolean Alps, where he has a rendezvous with Johanna. Wilder envisioned The Emperor Waltz as an homage to Ernst Lubitsch, who had directed some delightful musical films, like his version of Lehar’s Merry Widow (1934).
When Wilder and Brackett finished the first draft of the screenplay in late May 1946, they submitted it to the industry censor. After the troubles they had encountered with Joseph Breen over Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend, they thought their featherweight musical would pass muster with ease. Not a bit of it. Breen’s report to Wilder stated flatly that the censorship code would not tolerate the “offensive sex-suggestions inherent in a parallel between the mating of two dogs and the love affair of their respective owners.” Wilder and Brackett accordingly met with Breen and his chief assistant, Geoffrey Shurlock; the authors agreed to excise explicit references to canine mating habits. They also were willing to delete the phrase son of a bitch in reference to a male character. Wilder said he was tempted to playfully ask Breen whether he could substitute the circumlocution “If you had a mother, she would bark.” But he let that remark pass. Finally, the screenwriters agreed to delete references to the dogs’ “wetting,” because of the “vulgar connotations.”5
Once the screenplay was approved by Breen, Wilder and Brackett circulated a memo around the studio addressed “to all concerned with the production.” They began by declaring that The Emperor Waltz “is a comedy with a smattering of songs. Just because it plays in Vienna in 1906, don’t let’s have everyone talk like Herman Bing,” a German-born character actor with a thick German accent who had appeared in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife.6 The only character in the film who speaks with a pronounced German accent is Dr. Zwieback, the court veterinarian, played by Sig Ruman (Ninotchka). Dr. Zwieback employs Freudian psychology in diagnosing the illness of Johanna’s ailing poodle Scheherazade. “Was your home life always congenial?” the doctor inquires of the whimpering poodle. Apparently Wilder never forgave Sigmund Freud for tossing him out the front door when Wilder sought to interview him for a Vienna daily.
Wilder and Brackett’s office memo about The Emperor Waltz continued, “And just because it’s in Technicolor, don’t let’s have the Emperor wear canary-yellow jaegers and a purple jock strap.” As a matter of fact, The Emperor Waltz was Wilder’s first film in color. Paramount utilized color sparingly in the 1940s, usually limiting it to lavish musicals and costume pictures—both of which criteria The Emperor Waltz met. Wilder admitted to being prejudiced against color movies. “Everything looked like it was in an ice cream parlor,” he observed; “a little raspberry, a little lemon. I was against color.”7 Despite his misgivings about Technicolor movies, Wilder went ahead. He picked George Barnes as his director of photography on The Emperor Waltz. Barnes had skillfully photographed Leisen’s Frenchman’s Creek (1944), a swashbuckler with Joan Fontaine, in Technicolor. In fact, Barnes was renowned for his color palette. He supplied rich colors for the opulent ballroom sequence and subtler, softer hues for the love scenes.
The front office allotted $2,879,000 for the budget of The Emperor Waltz—more than twice the budget allotted to The Lost Weekend. The huge budget allowed Wilder to shoot the Alpine scenes on location in the Canadian Rockies, rather than on the studio back lot. Wilder and Doane Harrison departed from Los Angeles for Jasper National Park in Alberta, in western Canada, on May 19, 1946, to scout locations. The full unit of three hundred cast and crew followed over the next two weeks. Principal photography was set to begin on June 1, and the location shooting would continue throughout June.
The breathtaking Canadian Rockies were not quite grand enough for the director. “Not that we disagreed with nature,” he said, “but Technicolor is sometimes a little harder to please.” Once he had committed himself to filming in color, Wilder became very conscious of the movie’s color scheme. He imported four thousand daisies from California, but Technicolor bleached them out. “White photographs too glaringly,” he explained. So he had all the daisies painted with a cobalt blue tinge. Furthermore, the park’s pine forest did not have enough pine trees to suit Wilder. So Paramount paid to transport several dozen pine trees from California and had them planted exactly where Wilder wanted them. The total cost of Wilder’s improvements of mother nature: $120,000.8
Word reached Hollywood about Wilder’s wholesale remodeling of the landscape. Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz commented wryly, “It only goes to show you what God could do, if he had the money.”9 Nevertheless, in fairness to Wilder, all the money spent was displayed on the screen. Barnes’s color photography in the Alpine sequences was rapturous, making splendid use of the Canadian wilds.
There was a good deal of late-night carousing on location. Wilder posted an edict declaring, “We are here as representatives of a great American industry and a great country; and we are judged by our actions. Everyone will behave as if you were at home.” Wilder let it be known that any member of the company caught drinking or making love with one of the natives would be fired forthwith. Some members of the unit denounced Wilder as a “goddam hypocrite,” since on his previous picture he had romanced both actress Doris Dowling and bit player Audrey Young. But their grumbling never reached Wilder.10 In any case, location shooting wrapped on June 30, and the production team was back in Hollywood in July, shooting the interiors at Paramount.
Given Crosby’s screen image as Mr. Nice Guy, it is astounding to find that he was not popular with cast or crew during shooting. He comes across on film as affable and warm, but off camera he was aloof and cold to the unit—even to the director. Crosby snidely told Fontaine at one point that “he had some trouble understanding Wilder’s funny accent.” Fontaine said that Crosby, as one of the studio’s biggest box office draws, thought of himself as the emperor of Paramount. “Crosby had the power over Billy Wilder,” she said.11
With the studio’s endorsement, Crosby even brought in his own writer, Barney Dean, to revise his dialogue. Dean had been fiddling with Crosby’s lines in the pictures he made since the 1930s. Fontaine remembers Crosby showing up on the set one morning and cavalierly handing Wilder some new lines, saying, “This is what we’re going to do.” Said Fontaine, “It must have been very demeaning for Billy.”12 Dean’s emendations to the dialogue of The Emperor Waltz are not very impressive. For example, he has Virgil seek to ingratiate himself with Johanna by calling her “Honey Countess,” a cloying phrase that must have made Wilder wince. Wilder commented that “Crosby was a big star; . . . he operated for himself, not for the group or the film.”13
Filming ended on September 20, 1946, twenty-eight days over schedule. The final cost of the production was $4,070,248. Wilder, whose pictures had usually come in on budget, had some explaining to do to the front office. For a start, he pointed out, there was the unpredictable Canadian weather; heavy rains had complicated location shooting and delayed filming on several days. Wilder explained that he could not begin shooting a scene in sunshine on one day and then continue filming the scene the following day in a cloudburst.14 There were other variables, Wilder continued. When Karlweis had proved unsatisfactory in the role of the emperor, all of the emperor’s scenes that had already been shot had to be redone with his replacement, Haydn. Wilder was hoping that the picture would come together in the editing room as he worked with Harrison on the rough cut during postproduction.
To score the picture, Wilder chose Victor Young, who had been scoring Paramount films for over a decade and was De Mille’s favorite composer. Of course, Young took no part in putting together the sheaf of songs that Crosby warbled in the movie; he rather composed the incidental music for the rest of the picture. Young did a masterful job of meshing his own original melodies with excerpts from the Strauss waltzes used in the picture.
The opening credits are pre
sented on a background of yellow brocade, as the sound track evokes old Vienna with the title waltz. There follows the kind of printed prologue that Wilder had gotten into the habit of using: “On a December night some forty years ago, His Majesty, Franz Josef, the First Emperor of Austria, . . . King of Galicia, and so forth, was giving a little clambake at his palace in Vienna.” Trust Wilder to slip in a mention of the Austrian province where he was born.
In the opening shot, Virgil Smith climbs up the terrace to the balcony of the imperial palace, smashes a window, and goes inside. He stands above the elegant ballroom, looking at the waltzing couples below, while still wearing his earmuffs. Virgil is looking down on the Austrian nobility, both literally and figuratively, as a class of people he no longer views as being above him. This implies that “Wilder’s sympathies are not with the Viennese royalty, but with the American salesman.”15
Then Virgil spies the radiant Countess Johanna Augusta waltzing in the elegant ballroom, and he impertinently cuts in on her partner to dance with her. The snobbish Princess Bitotska (Lucile Watson), an elderly gossip, recounts to her companion Isabella the events that have led up to Virgil’s brazenly gate-crashing the gala. Like Double Indemnity, this film is mostly narrated in flashback.
“This vulgar and obnoxious American is a traveling salesman from New Jersey,” Princess Bitotska begins. She describes Virgil as having only average looks, “with ears like a bat.” (It is surprising that Crosby let that line pass, since he did have protruding ears.) As the flashback begins, Virgil shows up at the imperial palace, wearing his straw hat tilted jauntily, accompanied by his fox terrier, Buttons. He hopes to coax Emperor Franz Josef into endorsing a new contraption called a phonograph, thereby increasing sales throughout the empire. The emperor is unimpressed by Virgil’s sales pitch, however. Virgil even uses his terrier to simulate the famed RCA Victor trademark: he positions Buttons in front of the gramophone and has him peer into the horn on top of the machine, just like the dog on RCA’s emblem. But it is no go.
Some Like It Wilder Page 13