Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  Wilder now looked back nostalgically on his quarrels with Bogart while making Sabrina. “At least Bogart was there on time; and he was there all day,” Wilder mused. He endured such agonies while working with Monroe that Bogart seemed “amiable” by comparison.72 Wilder was convinced, however, that “it was worth going through hell” while making fifteen to twenty takes with Monroe because, when she finally got it right, “it was the best it could be.”73 Wilder found that, once Monroe finally emerged from her dressing room, he could work with her effectively. In fact, he managed to elicit a very good performance from her in The Seven Year Itch.

  The production at long last wrapped on November 4, 1954, thirteen working days over the original thirty-five-day schedule, and more than $1 million over budget—mostly thanks to Monroe’s erratic and unpredictable behavior. So Wilder got going on the editing of the footage posthaste. Because he had planned the editing of the film with Harrison while shooting the picture, the two of them, plus editor Hugh Fowler, accomplished the final edit in record time.

  Only one obstacle surfaced during postproduction: Wilder had to cope with the Legion of Decency, a Roman Catholic organization that rated the moral suitability of movies for its Catholic constituency. “Although the Legion was never officially an organ of the Catholic Church and its movie ratings were nonbinding,” Bernard Dick explains, “many Catholics were still guided by the Legion’s classifications.”74 In addition, in the absence of an industry rating system, which would not come to pass until 1968, the legion’s ratings were followed by many non-Catholics. The studio bosses tended to do the legion’s bidding to avoid receiving an objectionable rating from the legion for a movie, which would damage the film’s chances at the box office. The Seven Year Itch was Wilder’s first serious run-in with the legion. It would not be his last.

  After the legion members attended a private screening of the movie, Monsignor Thomas Little, the legion’s director, registered a complaint with Twentieth Century–Fox. So Zanuck arranged for Little to meet with Wilder. The offending scene was one in which the Girl, while taking a bubble bath, gets her toe stuck in the faucet. A plumber (deadpan comedian Victor Moore) accidentally drops his wrench into the suds and has to feel around in the water to find it. When he retrieves it, he takes the phallic wrench firmly in hand. The plumber’s dropping the wrench in the bathtub is not in the shooting script, and therefore it must have been invented on the set. The screenplay merely says, “An elderly, shriveled plumber in overalls is trying to free her toe, working on the faucet with a monkey wrench.”75 Consequently, Wilder could not maintain that the gag the legion had found offensive was integral to the sequence. He grudgingly agreed to cut the shots of the plumber dropping the wrench in the tub and groping around in the soapy water for it. Still, The Seven Year Itch helped to pave the way for more artistic freedom in the making of Hollywood movies. “The picture could be done today without censorship,” Wilder opined years later; “one can now tackle more daring themes.”76

  Wilder engaged Saul Bass, who was justly famous for designing the opening credits for many films, to create the title sequence for The Seven Year Itch. Recalling the old-fashioned French sex farces, in which a lothario is discovered hiding behind the closed door of a lady’s boudoir closet, Bass designed a patchwork of multicolored doors “that one by one slide aside to reveal the film’s credits lurking coyly behind them.”77

  After the credits, Wilder forged ahead with a prologue for the movie that is nowhere suggested in the play. A narrator explains that it was the custom among the Native Americans on Manhattan Island “to send their wives and children upriver for the summer. . . . The husbands would remain behind to attend to business.” We see the Indian men, after they have loaded the women and children into large canoes, turn their attention to a sexy Indian maiden walking by. “Actually our story has nothing to do with Indians,” the narrator explains; “it plays five hundred years later. We only wanted to show you that nothing has changed in Manhattan; husbands still send their families away for the summer.” Richard Sherman puts his wife, Helen, and son, Ricky, aboard a train at Grand Central Terminal bound for Maine. He returns to his apartment to face another sweltering New York summer.

  Richard soon encounters the Girl, who has sublet the apartment upstairs for the summer. In one of their chats she mentions that she is a model and also does TV commercials. The Girl later discovers a photo of herself in U.S. Camera and shows it to Richard. She calls it “one of those art pictures.” (This seems to be a reference to the nude photograph of Monroe that appeared as the Playmate of the Month centerfold in the first issue of Playboy in 1950. “All I had on was the radio,” Monroe recalled later.78) An explicit reference to the offscreen Monroe appears later in the movie when someone inquires about the identity of the vivacious blonde Richard has been hanging around with. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Richard retorts. “Maybe it’s Marilyn Monroe!”

  Richard is determined to remain faithful to Helen. (“I’m probably the most married man you’ll ever know,” he boasts.) Nevertheless, he fantasizes that he is a successful Casanova. In one of Richard’s daydreams, he pictures himself making love to a beautiful young woman on a sandy beach. His playmate emotes, “Richard, your animal attraction will bother me from here to eternity.” Louis Giannetti calls this fantasy a “delicious parody-homage” to Wilder’s old friend Fred Zinnemann, since it is modeled on a sequence in From Here to Eternity in which Burt Lancaster romances Deborah Kerr on the seashore. Richard’s middle-age spread, Giannetti adds, “presents an absurdly comical contrast to Burt Lancaster’s manly physique.”79

  After he finally summons the courage to make his fantasies a reality, Richard invites the Girl down to his apartment for a drink. Before she arrives, he puts a recording of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto on his phonograph, muttering, “It never misses.” The concerto conjures up a fantasy of Richard suavely sporting a scarlet smoking jacket and playing the concerto on the piano. The Girl, wearing an evening gown festooned with black stripes, struts around like a tigress in heat. But she is soon overcome by the strains of the lovely concerto, and she melts into Richard’s arms. They kiss passionately as the daydream fades. French filmmaker François Truffaut (The 400 Blows, 1959), who was a cinema critic before he became a director, wrote in his critique of The Seven Year Itch when it was released in France that Wilder, “the libidinous old fox,” parodies in this fantasy Brief Encounter, “the least sensual and sentimental film ever wept over.” Wilder’s movie, like David Lean’s, is “beyond smut and licentiousness” and treats the lovers “with good humor and kindness.”80

  When the Girl really arrives, she notices Richard’s wedding ring and mumbles, “A married man won’t get drastic.” But Richard fully intends to get drastic. He uncorks a magnum of champagne, and the foaming liquid gushes out of the bottle—another phallic symbol supplied by Wilder, “the libidinous old fox.” Richard turns on his trusty Rachmaninoff recording, but the Girl shuns classical music—”No vocals,” she explains. In yet another of Wilder’s inexhaustible supply of baseball metaphors, Richard says, “Maybe we should send Rachmaninoff to the showers.” He invites the Girl to sit next to him on the piano bench while he tickles the ivories. He makes an abortive pass at the Girl; they topple over backward onto the floor. With sublime understatement, he says apologetically, “I’m afraid this wasn’t a good idea.” He politely asks her to leave.

  Undaunted, Richard invites the Girl to take in a movie with him. As they stroll back to their apartment building afterward, the Girl casually mentions that she has just appeared in a TV commercial for Dazzledent toothpaste. “Every time I show my teeth on TV,” she says proudly, “more people see me than ever saw Sarah Bernhardt. It’s something to think about!” She adds that Dazzledent leaves her breath “kissing sweet” and demonstrates by kissing Richard full on the mouth. He returns the favor.

  But Richard ultimately abandons his endeavor to become a swinging summer bachelor; seized by propriety, he de
cides to join his family in the boondocks of Maine. When he bids farewell to the Girl, she confesses in a speech that is not in the play that she is drawn to him because he is the “shy, gentle type” that she finds “tender and kind and sweet. . . . If I were your wife,” she concludes, “I’d be jealous of you.” Sarah Churchwell comments on the Girl’s perceptive observations about Richard, “She is not as dumb as some writers make out. The Girl is artless and unsophisticated; but she is not stupid.”81 The Girl gives Richard an affectionate good-bye kiss, and he dashes off to catch his train.

  In April 1955, two months before The Seven Year Itch premiered, Marilyn Monroe was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow on CBS-TV. Monroe said, “One of the best parts I’ve ever had is in The Seven Year Itch. I knew when Billy Wilder wanted me for the part that it would be very important for my career.” She continued, “Billy Wilder is one of the best directors I have ever worked with. A good director contributes a lot when he is with you every moment on the set, helping you with your performance.” She added, “I enjoy doing comedies, but I would like to do dramatic parts too.”82

  The studio brass decided to open The Seven Year Itch on June 1, 1955, Monroe’s twenty-ninth birthday, at Loew’s State Theatre on Broadway. DiMaggio accompanied Monroe to the premiere only as a publicity ploy, since they were already divorced. Twentieth Century–Fox had erected a blow-up of Monroe’s skirt-blowing pose on a billboard fifty-two feet high, which towered above the theater. When she saw the poster, Monroe grumbled, “That’s what they think of me.” She was tired of the image of the blonde bombshell that the studio had created for her. Monroe and DiMaggio showed up half an hour late for the movie—much to Wilder’s annoyance. “Marilyn made a grand entrance,” he complained, “thereby taking everyone’s attention away from my picture.”83 Still, there was a standing ovation at the end of the movie, which eventually grossed $5,734,471 worldwide. Zanuck had good reason to overlook the $1 million budget overrun.

  The Seven Year Itch was enthusiastically received by reviewers as a sizzling sex farce beautifully mounted in CinemaScope. Milton Krasner’s cinematography is suitably lush, with bright reds and luminescent greens, befitting Richard’s garishly provocative daydreams. The Wilder-Axelrod dialogue delights in swerving off on unexpected tangents until the moment of truth is reached, while the plot is masterfully orchestrated throughout. The imaginative and inventive score was composed by Alfred Newman, head of the Twentieth Century–Fox music department. Because The Seven Year Itch is a romantic comedy, Newman’s fulsome melodies resemble the tunes one hears in elevators. It is particularly attuned to Richard’s florid fantasies.

  The public adored Monroe in the picture, and she was never more radiant. Truth to tell, however, she was weary of playing sexpots that were none too bright. After Monroe completed The Seven Year Itch, “in a gesture of defiance against Fox, she went to New York and began attending acting classes at the Actors Studio,” under the direction of the Strasbergs.84 Twentieth Century–Fox lured her back to Hollywood in December 1955 with a lucrative contract that also gave her approval of the directors she worked with. Billy Wilder was on her short list of acceptable directors.

  For his part, asked whether he would consider directing Monroe again after the anguish she had caused him while making The Seven Year Itch, Wilder replied that he was willing to forgive and forget. In The Seven Year Itch Monroe gave a fine-spun performance in one of her most appealing roles. Admittedly, “Marilyn Monroe was never on time; not once,” he concluded. “Of course, I’ve got my Aunt Ida in Vienna, who was always on time for everything; but who would want to see her in a movie?”85

  Wilder would indeed work with Monroe again, a few years down the road; in the meantime, he had signed with Warner Bros. to make The Spirit of St. Louis, a movie about Charles Lindbergh. Axelrod shuttled back to Broadway with a play titled Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955). And so it was that Wilder was looking for yet another collaborator on his screenplay.

  10

  Light Up the Sky

  The Spirit of St. Louis and Love in the Afternoon

  We live not as we wish, but as we can.

  —Menander, 300 B.C.

  Wilder had written a news story about Lindbergh’s historic flight across the Atlantic back in 1927 for a Berlin paper, when he was a freelance reporter. He could not afford to go to France to cover Lucky Lindy’s landing in Paris. Nevertheless, he never forgot this thrilling event, and his having covered it for a Berlin daily was one of the contributing factors in his directing The Spirit of St. Louis nearly thirty years later. “You cannot imagine now what the name of Lindbergh meant to us in Europe in 1927,” he said.1

  Ernest Lehman told me in 1976 that Wilder made the picture in part because he suspected that around Hollywood he was still thought of as a European. “Unlike many of his fellow emigrants,” says Volker Schlöndorff, “Wilder never felt as if he was in exile in Hollywood. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the American popular culture, pulp, sports, and radio.” The Spirit of St. Louis was an American subject, and “he wanted to take the most American of subjects and make it his own.”2

  Lindbergh published his autobiographical account of his celebrated flight in 1953 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Leland Hayward, a former Hollywood agent, was now a producer at Warner Bros. (Mr. Roberts, 1955). Hayward brought the project to Wilder, who agreed to direct the picture, coauthor the screenplay, and coproduce the film.

  The Spirit of St. Louis (1957)

  Charles “Slim” Lindbergh was born on February 4, 1902, in Detroit, Michigan, of Swedish stock, and grew up in Little Falls, Minnesota. In 1926, while serving as an airmail pilot between St. Louis and Chicago, Lindbergh decided to compete for the $25,000 prize offered by French-born Raymond Orteig, a New York hotel proprietor, for a nonstop flight from New York to Paris in May 1927. “Think of being able to leap over the earth,” Lindbergh mused.3

  At 7:52 on the morning of May 20, 1927, Lindbergh roared aloft from Roosevelt Field, Long Island; he landed at Le Bourget Airport at 10:24 on the evening of May 21. With the completion of his thirty-three-and-a-half-hour nonstop solo flight in a tiny monoplane, Lindbergh’s daring thrilled the world. President Coolidge awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross and commissioned him as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve.

  In the years ahead, however, there would be some dark days. In 1932 his two-year-old son was abducted and murdered by a kidnapper. After the outbreak of the war in Europe, Lindbergh gave speeches in 1940 and 1941 endorsing America’s neutrality, insisting that Britain be left to fight Nazi Germany alone. Indeed, in his public addresses he “soft-pedaled Nazi Germany’s obvious menace.”4

  Wilder subscribed to a statement issued by Lindbergh’s wife, Anne, who declared that, when her husband realized how wrong he had been in his judgment of the Nazis, “he completely reversed himself and entered the U.S. war effort” to make “a considerable contribution.” In the wake of the Nazi V-2 rockets and the blitzkrieg of London, Lindbergh lamented, “I have seen the aircraft I loved destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.”5 He ultimately flew fifty combat missions against the Japanese in the South Pacific theater.6 At all events, Wilder’s movie would end with Lindbergh’s triumphant homecoming parade in New York City in 1927 and would not touch on later events in his life.

  Film historian Scott Eyman notes that the first star of talking pictures was not Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (which premiered on October 6, 1927); it was Charles Lindbergh! The first sound film in wide distribution was a newsreel of Lindbergh taking off for Paris from Roosevelt Field “with a motor that sounds like a lawn mower.” More impressive was the newsreel shortly thereafter that recorded Lindbergh’s brief speech on the reviewing stand as part of the homecoming celebration in Manhattan. Film executive A. C. Lyles remembers, “That scene excited Hollywood tremendously. It made the possibility of sound movies so much more immediate.”7

  It was no secret that James Stewart was lobbying for the role of Lindber
gh in The Spirit of St. Louis. Stewart had been a fan of Lindbergh’s since he was in his teens. Lindbergh’s flight to Paris had begun on Stewart’s nineteenth birthday. At the time Stewart had hand carved a wooden model of the Spirit and stuck it on a map of the North Atlantic, which he proudly displayed in the window of his father’s hardware store.8 When Lindbergh subsequently landed on an airfield near Stewart’s home in Indiana, Pennsylvania, as part of his personal appearance tour, Stewart attempted unsuccessfully to get his autograph. Still, he never forgot the event. Lindbergh inspired him to become a pilot himself, and during World War II Stewart flew twenty missions over Germany as a bomber pilot.9

  Withal, Stewart was acutely aware that Jack Warner considered the forty-seven-year-old actor too old to play the twenty-five-year-old Lindbergh. “I need a star,” Warner told Wilder and Hayward when they discussed the matter, “but not one that’s pushing fifty.”10 After interviewing several other actors, though, Wilder and Hayward ultimately came back to Stewart. The tall, lanky actor resembled Slim Lindbergh; with a pilot’s cap and goggles, Stewart might just get by as an aviator half his age. Wilder and Hayward agreed on casting Stewart, so Warner finally relented. They signed Stewart to play Lindbergh on March 22, 1955, with filming to commence in September 1955.11

  Stewart got the opportunity to meet Lindbergh shortly after he signed for the movie. He was so awestruck at meeting his idol that “I suddenly realized I had no questions to ask him” about how to play him in the movie.12 “I still wanted his autograph, but I was too shy to ask him for it.” Finally Stewart said, “I hope I can do a good job for you.” Lindbergh replied, “I hope so too.”13