Although Bogart still had nothing but scorn for Sabrina, Schickel points out that “the pictures he made thereafter are best left in something like near silence.” Sabrina was the last blockbuster in which Bogart appeared before he retired from the screen in 1956. His final five movies lacked “the livewire energy” of Wilder’s stylish high comedy.37 Bogart succumbed to cancer on January 13, 1957. Lauren Bacall phoned Wilder shortly before the end to say that Bogie wanted to see him. Bogart wished to be reconciled with Wilder, and he apologized for his ill-tempered behavior while making Sabrina. Wilder replied generously, “There is nothing to apologize for; we don’t have court manners around a movie set. I fight with a lot of people.” Wilder always thought of Bogart afterward as a brave man because he endured his last illness “with great dignity.”38
It goes without saying that Lehman did not wish to collaborate with Wilder again anytime soon. Sabrina “began in disarray and finished in sheer panic,” he commented.39 When I spoke with Lehman, he reflected, “Billy always got his own way. Somehow Sabrina turned out the way he wanted it to, and I never figured out how he did it.”
Sabrina was the last picture in Wilder’s current contract with Paramount; he decided not to renew his contract but rather to leave the studio. After eighteen years and seventeen pictures at Paramount, he believed it was time for a change. Once Sabrina had been launched, Wilder drove his Jaguar through the Paramount gate at 5451 Marathon Street, never to return. He was looking for fresh challenges at other studios.
Wilder was not interested in signing a long-term contract with any one studio, as he had done at Paramount. Instead, he preferred to make a deal with a major studio for one picture at a time. Each studio would arrange the financing and distribution of the film he made for it. Wilder set up shop as an independent producer-director. He would now exercise more control over the screenplay, the casting, and the direction of each film he chose to make.
While he was shopping around for his next property, Wilder was contacted by Irving “Swifty” Lazar, a Hollywood agent. Lazar had earned his nickname from the speed with which he could put together a production package for a studio. He informed Wilder that George Axelrod, the author of The Seven Year Itch, a smash Broadway hit, would like Wilder to consider directing the film version. The play had premiered at the Fulton Theatre in New York on November 20, 1952, and it went on to run for 1,141 performances. There was little risk in choosing to film The Seven Year Itch; it seemed almost guaranteed to be a blockbuster movie. The story is set in New York City during a boiling hot summer. Asked what attracted him to the play, Wilder said of the heroine, “The girl keeps her underwear in the frigidaire! Wow!!”40
The story centers on Richard Sherman, a middle-aged man who becomes infatuated with a woman who lives in the same apartment building while his wife and son are away for the summer. (Because The Seven Year Itch is a May-December romance like Sabrina, Wilder had Linus Larrabee arrange to take Sabrina to see The Seven Year Itch on Broadway.) When a Hollywood reporter parodied the title of the play The Seven Year Itch as “The Lust Weekend,” Wilder was convinced that the project was made to order for him. Charles Feldman, who had produced the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), was now producing at Twentieth Century–Fox. Feldman, who was also an agent, had arranged to buy the film rights for The Seven Year Itch from Axelrod for five hundred thousand dollars as a vehicle for Marilyn Monroe, one of his clients.
Wilder, along with George Cukor and Joseph Mankiewicz, was one of the few directors Monroe was willing to work with, and she very much “wanted to work with Wilder on The Seven Year Itch,” notes Barbara Leaming.41 Since Monroe had an exclusive contract with Twentieth Century–Fox, Wilder would have to make the picture there. Lazar brokered a deal with the studio for Wilder to direct the movie, cowrite the screenplay with Axelrod, and coproduce the film with Feldman. Darryl Zanuck, the Twentieth Century–Fox studio chief, earmarked $250,000 for Wilder as director, cowriter, and coproducer of the picture—the same salary Wilder had gotten from Paramount for Sabrina.
The Seven Year Itch (1955)
When Axelrod reported to Wilder’s office at Twentieth Century–Fox for their first story conference in April 1954, Wilder began ribbing him from the get-go, just as he had done to the long-suffering Ernest Lehman on Sabrina. Axelrod had brought a copy of his play along, tucked under his arm. “I thought we might use the play as a guide,” he said. Wilder took the play and dropped it on the floor, replying, “Fine; we’ll use it as a door-stop.”42 Wilder’s insults had offended other writers Wilder had worked with. But Axelrod merely shrugged off Wilder’s barbs: “He sees the worst in everybody; but he sees it funny.”43 So the partners got along just fine.
Moreover, Axelrod did not believe he had much cause for complaint about Wilder’s plans to alter his play for the screen. Wilder assured Axelrod that he would retain the fundamental narrative structure of the play and as much of Axelrod’s original dialogue as the censor would allow. “For Billy I had awe,” Axelrod remembered; “I didn’t stand up to him” the way that Lehman had.44
The action of the play is limited to a single room in Richard Sherman’s apartment, but Wilder decided to open out the play for the screen by having a composite set of the whole apartment constructed. In this fashion Wilder could move the action throughout the apartment. In addition, he decided to play some scenes outdoors, to avoid the charge of merely making a “photographed staged play.” Wilder solved the problem of having a lengthy scene played in the same setting, such as in Richard’s living room, by never allowing the pace of the action to slacken during the scene. Moreover, he gave the scene variety by covering all aspects of the action from various camera angles.
The principal problem Wilder and Axelrod encountered in adapting the play for film was coping with the industry censor. In the play, while Richard’s wife Helen and his obnoxious son Ricky take a seaside vacation in Maine, Richard must stay behind in New York and endure the scorching heat. Nonetheless, he looks forward to his newfound freedom as a “summer bachelor.” After seven years of marriage, Richard has developed an itch to have a fling. Specifically, Richard yens for the blonde who has sublet the apartment above his in a Manhattan triplex for the duration of the summer. He invites her to his apartment with seduction on his mind. Significantly, Richard refers to her as the Girl, implying that, to him, she is a nameless, ethereal goddess who seems just beyond his reach.
Axelrod said that he and Wilder had “a horrible problem . . . with the Breen office” in developing the play’s spicy plot for the movie version.45 In fact, Geoffrey Shurlock had replaced Joseph Breen as film censor a few months earlier, and so it was with Shurlock, not Breen, that Wilder had to negotiate. To begin with, Shurlock contended that adultery was not an appropriate topic for comedy. Adultery had reared its ominous head in Double Indemnity too, but that was no comedy. In the stage play, Richard does in fact have an extramarital affair with the Girl. But the industry’s censorship code would not permit Richard’s flirtation with the Girl to be consummated in the movie. Wilder and Axelrod were forced to substitute fantasy sequences in their screenplay in which Richard imagines that he seduces the Girl.
Wilder had hoped at least to hint that Richard did have a sexual encounter with the Girl. “I remember spending a night wondering what to do,” and he finally came up with a solution to the problem. He went to Zanuck and said, “Try this: The maid of Richard’s apartment is making up the bed and finds a hairpin.” Wilder concluded, “And you know that they have committed the act.”46 But Zanuck refused to consider the idea, fearing that Shurlock would reject it too. Hence Wilder complained that he was straitjacketed in adapting the play for the screen: “The Seven Year Itch is a film about adultery, but the narrowminded morals of the 1950s made sure the climax only took place” in Richard’s overheated imagination.47
Wilder sent the completed screenplay, dated August 10, 1954, to Geoffrey Shurlock. (He had vowed never again to go into production with a rough dra
ft of the script, as he had done with Sabrina.) Shurlock objected to some naughty phrases cropping up in the script that were prohibited by the censorship code. He took exception, for example, to the Girl’s line, “I feel so sorry for you with those hot pants.”48 Wilder contended that she was referring to the summer heat, not the heat of passion. Besides, Wilder maintained, some of the words and phrases that Shurlock considered improper for the film proved quite acceptable to theater audiences when they were spoken from the stage. As Axelrod put it, “We managed to bring the play in unscathed,” meaning that there were no censorship problems with the dialogue in the Broadway play.49 But Shurlock was intransigent, so phrases like “hot pants” disappeared from the movie’s dialogue. Be that as it may, Wilder had a knack for saucy innuendo, which he had learned from Lubitsch, so the script as approved by the censor was “still able to offer moments of risqué dialogue.”50
While casting the picture, Wilder was looking very hard for a suitable leading man to play Richard Sherman. He tested a young actor named Walter Matthau, who he thought was hilarious in the part. But Matthau was not as yet a star, so Zanuck insisted that they go with Tom Ewell, who had originated the role of Richard on the stage. “He knows where all the laughs are,” said Zanuck.51 Feldman, Wilder’s coproducer, agreed with Zanuck, so Ewell was cast. Matthau, however, was destined to make his name as a major actor in other Wilder pictures, starting with The Fortune Cookie.
Wilder and Feldman were in harmony on the rest of the casting. Evelyn Keyes (The Jolson Story, 1946) was given the role of Richard’s wife, Helen. Robert Strauss, who was selected to play Kruhulik, the superintendent of Richard’s apartment building, “offers only a slightly more articulate version of his ‘Animal’ in Stalag 17.”52 The director of photography for this picture, Milton Krasner, had just filmed Jean Negulesco’s Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) in CinemaScope and color.53 When this wide-screen process was introduced in the early 1950s, director George Stevens quipped that “the dimensions of the widescreen were better suited to photographing a boa constrictor than a human being.”54 But Wilder was committed to wide screen as well as color for this film.
The CinemaScope process was not particularly useful in the scenes set in Richard’s apartment. Wilder employed it to better advantage in the fantasy sequences, as when Richard dreams of making love to the Girl on an expansive seashore. Wilder quickly learned that the first rule of utilizing the format was that, if the action in the center of the frame was blocked out properly, the action taking place on either side would pretty much take care of itself.
Principal photography began on location in New York on September 3, 1954, and ran for two weeks. “Personally, I would prefer to shoot in the studio, because I am in control,” Wilder observed years later.55 After all, when shooting occurred in a real location, crowds of onlookers often flocked to watch the filming and got in the way. That is just what happened when Wilder was filming in the streets of Manhattan. One location scene takes place when Richard and the Girl are strolling on a sidewalk in downtown Manhattan on a hot summer night. The Girl finds the heat too much for her and decides to cool off by standing over a subway grating. As Douglas Brode describes the scene, “A train rumbles beneath, blowing the cool air upward,” and sends the Girl’s skirt fluttering to reveal her gorgeous legs. “Laughingly, she struggles—but not too hard—to keep it down as Richard looks on, his mouth hanging open like a hound dog’s.” It is in scenes like this one, Brode concludes, that Monroe proved herself to be the most authentic blonde bombshell to hit the screen since Jean Harlow.56
Sheer pandemonium resulted when this scene was filmed on location. Wilder had chosen to shoot it at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Fifty-second Street in the wee hours, when presumably the streets would be deserted. But Harry Brand, Twentieth Century–Fox’s intrepid publicity chief, planted a notice in the newspapers of the metropolitan area that Marilyn Monroe would be filming at the site at two o’clock on Thursday morning, September 15. Consequently, nearly two thousand fans were on hand to watch the Hollywood superstar do the scene. The milling crowds were kept behind barricades, but they nevertheless were noisy and unruly.
Wilder called out, “Roll ’em!” and a train passed underneath one subway grating—actually a wind-blowing machine manned by a special effects technician. The gust of wind sent Monroe’s billowy white dress flying above her shoulders, accompanied by raucous cheers from the gawking bystanders. “The scene wasn’t working,” Wilder remembered, so “we reshot it several times” over the next three hours.57 Each time Marilyn’s skirt blew upward, the spectators roared like the crowds at the Roman circus. Joe DiMaggio, Monroe’s husband, was among the onlookers. She had been married to the legendary New York Yankees baseball hero for eight months, and their marriage was already on shaky ground. DiMaggio was outraged at what he considered his wife’s indecent display. One of his friends, who was boozed up, said to DiMaggio, “Joe, what can you expect when you marry a whore?” DiMaggio yelled in response, “I’ve had it!”58 After the next take, DiMaggio whispered something in Monroe’s ear and marched away in a huff. Asked if her husband’s angry departure had worried Monroe, Wilder replied, “No; she loved the crowds”; she was at heart an exhibitionist.59
Nonetheless, when Monroe returned to hotel suite 1105 at the St. Regis Hotel a couple of hours later, she had to pay the piper. She and DiMaggio had a horrendous quarrel, with DiMaggio denouncing the crass exhibition his wife had put on. Cameraman Milton Krasner, who was trying to sleep next door, “heard shouts of anger through the wall.”60 As a matter of fact, “within hours after the famous scene was shot,” writes Fred Lawrence Guiles, Monroe’s first biographer, “the marriage was over.”61 Two weeks later, Monroe filed for a divorce. When DiMaggio’s friends told him that he had overreacted on the night when the controversial scene was filmed, he said, “I regret it, but I cannot help it.” DiMaggio, who had been brought up in a morally conservative Catholic home, was convinced that the skirt-blowing scene had publicly humiliated him. “I would have been upset if I had been her husband,” said Wilder in DiMaggio’s defense, considering the raucous comments that were being made that night by some of the bystanders, including one of DiMaggio’s friends.62
Tom Wood, among other Wilder biographers, believes that “Billy was perhaps indirectly responsible” for the breakup of Monroe and DiMaggio’s marriage because he shot the scene in which “a blast of air sent her skirt soaring.”63 Wood seems less than fair to Wilder. The director believed that DiMaggio had for some time nursed ambivalent feelings about being married to a movie star–sex symbol. “I don’t know if he was jealous of other men” giving his wife the once-over or “jealous of her getting more attention than he did. Probably both.”64
Leaming states baldly that the sequence filmed on Lexington Avenue was nothing more than “a spectacular publicity stunt,” since the footage had to be largely reshot in the studio.65 As Wilder pointed out, however, he had every intention of using the material he filmed that night, until he discovered that much of the footage was unusable because of the chaotic conditions in which it was filmed. What’s more, the censor was nervous about the sexual implications of the scene and would not approve the location footage because Monroe’s skirt blew up past her waist. After all, Shurlock emphasized, the script states merely that “a subway train roars by, the breeze from it blows her skirt a little” (emphasis added).66 Therefore, after the film unit returned to the Twentieth Century–Fox Studios in Hollywood on September 17, Wilder said, “We constructed a corner of the street on the back lot; and it was perfect.”67 George Axelrod added, “We used the original location shots of Marilyn,” which were more revealing than what was filmed in the studio, “in the ads.”68
Shooting would continue on the soundstages at Twentieth Century–Fox throughout the rest of September and into October. As always, Wilder worked out in advance with Doane Harrison how he would compose the shots and select the camera angles for each scene.
Monroe ha
d an acting coach, Paula Strasberg, the wife of Lee Strasberg, the director of the Actors Studio in New York. Monroe leaned heavily on Paula Strasberg and demanded that she always be with her on the set. Hence Strasberg hovered over Monroe and was off camera giving her signals while Monroe was filming a scene. Wilder resented Strasberg’s intrusive presence on the set, and he saw it as an obvious sign of Monroe’s insecurity as an actress. But the front office had approved this arrangement, so Wilder had to put up with it. Still, he was frustrated by Monroe’s unprofessional behavior during the shooting period. Her growing psychic instability made her increasingly difficult to deal with; it was manifested especially in her chronic habit of showing up several hours late and not knowing her lines when she finally did report for work.
Howard Hawks, who directed Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, agreed with Wilder that Monroe had an inferiority complex about her acting ability. “She had to be convinced that she was good,” Hawks said. He remembered not being able to find her one day when it came time to shoot a scene. After looking everywhere, it occurred to him to lift up a table in the corner of the soundstage, “and there she was, hiding like a frightened girl.”69
It was not surprising that, by October 21, the movie was nine days behind schedule. It was largely Monroe’s fault. Wilder observed that “she had trouble concentrating because there was always something bothering her.” Understandably, “she was on the edge of a deep depression” because of the collapse of her marriage to DiMaggio.70 As her tensions grew, the dosage of her sleeping pills increased, and she started mixing her medication with alcohol. Leaming writes that, as time went on, Monroe “built up a tolerance to medication, driving her to ever larger doses.” Some days she showed up on the set in a groggy or dazed state. She sometimes seemed disoriented and would stumble over the simplest lines of dialogue. In short, she was a “sick, mixed-up girl.”71
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