Some Like It Wilder Page 22

  “Bewitched”

  It is not uncommon for a studio to buy the screen rights to a Broadway play before it opens to get the jump on rival studios. Samuel Taylor’s play Sabrina Fair: A Woman of the World had been submitted to Paramount in typescript months before the New York premiere in November 1953. A reader in the story department turned in an enthusiastic report on the play, and this prompted Wilder to get Paramount to purchase the film rights immediately.

  Wilder’s decision turned out to be a wise one; Taylor’s four-act play was a hit and eventually racked up 318 performances. Sabrina is the daughter of Thomas Fairchild, the chauffeur on the estate of the wealthy Larrabee family on Long Island. Sabrina nurtures a crush on David Larrabee, an irresponsible playboy, but eventually falls for Linus, David’s older, more sensible brother. Neither David nor Linus takes much notice of Sabrina, however, until she returns from a sojourn in Paris, where she has been transformed into “a woman of the world.”

  Sabrina (1954)

  Samuel Taylor was invited to Hollywood to collaborate with Wilder on the screenplay in the summer of 1953. He had absolutely no experience in writing for the screen and found Wilder an exacting taskmaster. For a start, Wilder wanted the film to be called Sabrina, not Sabrina Fair. Taylor pointed out that he drew the play’s title from John Milton’s masque Comus (1637). Sabrina is the ancient name of the goddess of the River Severine: “Sabrina Fair . . ./ Listen for dear honor’s sake, / Goddess of the silver lake.”1 Wilder insisted that Sabrina Fair sounded like one of those dreary English rural comedies, set at a country fair, that inevitably died at the box office in America. Wilder, as usual, got his way, and the title of the film was shortened to Sabrina.

  Obviously, Wilder did not regard Taylor’s play as a sacred text, any more than he thought Bevan and Trzcinski’s Stalag 17 was scripture. Taylor was dismayed when Wilder began excising large chunks of the play’s text. Wilder explained that a four-act comedy was too long for a movie under any circumstances, since most stage comedies were three acts at most. What’s more, Wilder had to make cuts to make room for additional scenes in the screenplay; for example, he wished to dramatize on screen Sabrina’s stint in Paris. This episode is only referred to in the play, which is set entirely in the Larrabee mansion. Wilder also aimed to make the screenplay sharper and funnier than Taylor’s talky play, in which the dialogue overexplained everything. In this, Wilder succeeded.

  Wilder and Taylor finished a preliminary rough draft by July 1953. By then Taylor had found working with Wilder too taxing. The frustrated playwright abruptly threw up his hands one day and announced that he was returning to New York to oversee the rehearsals of his play, scheduled to open on November 11, 1953. In the Broadway theater, Taylor reasoned, the playwright was respected and listened to, whereas in Hollywood the playwright had little control over how his work was recast for the screen. In 1974 I met Taylor in New York; by then he had received plaudits for his screenplay for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Taylor confirmed that he had found Wilder difficult to work with. Nevertheless, he respected Wilder, like Hitchcock, “as a genuine auteur, the true author of every film he makes.”

  Wilder heard from William Holden about Ernest Lehman, who had just completed the screenplay for Robert Wise’s Executive Suite (1954) at MGM. Holden was starring in the movie, which was still in production; he informed Wilder that, although Executive Suite was Lehman’s first movie script, he clearly had an ear for good screen dialogue. In checking on Lehman with a fellow screenwriter at MGM, Wilder learned that Lehman had graduated from City College in New York and had since been freelancing as a writer. The other writer recommended Lehman to Wilder, saying that, on the grounds of Lehman’s script for Executive Suite, it was evident that he had a gift for the tongue-in-cheek, wry repartee that had distinguished the best films of Ernst Lubitsch. That was all that Wilder had to hear to prompt him to phone Lehman and ask him to replace Taylor immediately.

  Lehman told me when I met him at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976 that he inquired when Wilder wanted him to show up at Paramount, and Wilder replied, “How about this afternoon?” Wilder then explained to Lehman the sad state of affairs. Paramount had established a starting date for principal photography in the last week of September 1953, with shooting running through most of November. It was already August, and Wilder had completed only a preliminary rough draft of the script. So he had to get rolling on the final shooting script posthaste. Lehman moved over to Paramount from MGM that afternoon.

  There is an old adage in Hollywood that it is suicidal to begin principal photography on a film before the final shooting script is completed. Wilder was violating that sage bromide in spades. The film was already in preproduction, and Wilder and Lehman would have to continue hammering out the final shooting script all the way through the production period. “This was a picture that was still being written and shaped as we went,” Wilder moaned. “I don’t write; I rewrite.”2

  Lehman was no pushover when it came to defending his point of view; in this respect Wilder had met his match. Lehman could be “as stubborn as the director; and their collaboration was stormy when it wasn’t openly hostile,” writes Donald Spoto.3 Like Edwin Blum, Ernest Lehman never got used to the fact that Wilder dished out insulting wisecracks even to people he liked. Lehman told me that Wilder called him all sorts of nasty names, ranging from “a eunuch, a misogynist, and a queer” to “a middle-class Jewish prude.” Lehman concluded, “Wilder never grasped how his jibes offended his friends.” Not surprisingly, Lehman found collaborating with Wilder exasperating and exhausting. When Lehman tossed Wilder a line of dialogue, Wilder invariably replied, “Very good; but let’s make it better.”4 What Lehman did not know was that Wilder was telling Lehman what Lubitsch had said repeatedly to him.

  Despite Wilder’s quarrels with Lehman, which recalled his arguments with Brackett, they turned out what Philip Kemp terms “a witty, literate, well-paced, and stylish” screenplay for Sabrina. Yet Richard Corliss has written off Lehman as a “mere service station attendant of other writers’ vehicles.” Kemp counters that Corliss’s view seems “singularly inapt,” in view of Lehman’s shrewdly gauged collaboration with Wilder on Sabrina.5

  Since preproduction was in full swing when Lehman began working on Sabrina, Wilder was busy with casting the picture as well as writing the final shooting script. He settled on Audrey Hepburn to play the title role; as a matter of fact, Wilder considered the movie first and foremost a vehicle for her. Hepburn’s first big film was Roman Holiday, in which she played a runaway princess in Rome; it would not be released until September. But its director, William Wyler, assured Wilder that Hepburn had given a star-making performance. “I saw the test that Wyler made with her,” Wilder remembered, “and I was absolutely crazy about her.”6 In the test she radiates poise and beauty as she recalls studying ballet when she was growing up.

  When Hepburn’s casting was announced, Wilder gave a press conference in which he decried “the number of drive-in waitresses” being groomed for stardom; they just “wiggle their behinds at the camera.” By contrast, said Wilder, Audrey Hepburn, at age twenty-four, was known for her grace and elegance. “God kissed her on the cheek, and there she was.” Hepburn had class and intelligence as well as beauty, he concluded. “She looks as if she could spell schizophrenia.”7 Later on he told Hepburn that, for him, it was love at first sight when she walked onto the set. He confessed that he talked in his sleep about Audrey, but fortunately his wife’s name was Audrey as well, “so I got away with it.”8 In Sabrina Audrey Hepburn grows up to be a fairy princess solely because of her “charm and beauty,” Peter Bogdanovich writes. Wilder retained the play’s Cinderella theme in his film; as he put it, there could be no more perfect Cinderella than Audrey Hepburn.9

  Wilder had no trouble in convincing William Holden to do his third Wilder film, as David Larrabee. Casting Linus Larrabee, however, presented a knotty problem. Cary Grant had agreed to play the part of David’s older brother, but
he changed his mind and bowed out one week before filming was to begin. Grant had decided he did not want to play a stuffed shirt like Linus who was in love with a much younger woman. Wilder needed a star of Grant’s stature, and Humphrey Bogart was available, so Wilder offered the part to Bogart. At fifty-four, Bogart was twenty-five years older than his wife, Lauren Bacall, and yet he had made four pictures with Bacall. So Bogart as Linus could be a credible love interest for Audrey Hepburn’s Sabrina.

  Wilder went to Bogart’s home in Holmby Hills to convince him to take the part. Bogart accepted the role reluctantly; he had an inferiority complex about playing a part originally intended for Cary Grant. Still, Bogart was mollified in some degree by the substantial salary of $200,000 he would receive—considerably more than Holden ($80,000) and Hepburn ($25,000) were allotted. Bogart cited an old bromide attributed to Sam Goldwyn, “You must take the bitter with the sour.”10 Still, throughout the shoot, Bogart needled Wilder about preferring Grant to him. As a matter of fact, one of the handicaps Wilder and Lehman experienced in composing the final shooting script was that they had to tailor the role of Linus for Bogart, who, unlike Grant, had never played light romantic comedy.

  This is not to say that Bogart was miscast as Linus Larrabee. Despite his tough-guy image in pictures, Bogart’s background was one of “inherited wealth,” as Richard Schickel is at pains to emphasize in Bogie. He grew up in a privileged, upper-class family in New York City. What’s more, he had often played classy romantic leads on the Broadway stage in the 1920s. He was probably the first stage actor to utter to his country club companions a line that has since become a cliché: “Tennis, anyone?”11

  Wilder managed to corral for Sabrina three trusted associates who had collaborated with him on previous pictures: film editor Arthur Schmidt (Sunset Boulevard), composer Frederick Hollander (A Foreign Affair), and cinematographer Charles Lang (Ace in the Hole). Since Sabrina was scheduled to go before the cameras with two weeks of location work on Long Island, Wilder, Lehman, Lang, and Doane Harrison, Wilder’s longtime supervising editor, embarked for New York on September 22, 1953. The rest of the film unit would follow in a couple of days.

  Wilder had no trouble securing an ideal location at Glen Cove, Long Island, to stand in for the Larrabee estate in the movie; it was the property of Barney Balaban, the president of Paramount. After shooting exteriors at Glen Cove, the cast and crew returned to Hollywood, where Wilder was scheduled to film interiors at Paramount for seven weeks. Filming resumed on October 6. The following day, Wilder submitted the shooting script to the front office. “But the shooting script was still not finished,” said Wilder.12

  By day, Wilder directed the picture while Lehman labored on the script alone. In the evenings, they worked together, with Wilder kibitzing on what Lehman had written. The writing partners continued grinding out new pages in a frenzy. But they could scarcely keep up with the shooting schedule; they wrote some scenes the night before they were to be shot. Lehman’s nerves got increasingly ragged, while Wilder survived each night on black coffee and cigarettes. “It was agonizing, desperate work,” Lehman remembered, “and at times our health broke down from the effort.” Wilder had some sleepless nights when his back troubled him, as it always did when he was operating under a great deal of stress.

  One afternoon, Wilder ambled up to Harrison, his right-hand man, and said casually, “Please get the electricians to invent some complicated lighting effects for the next scene that will take some time.” Puzzled, Harrison inquired, “What for?” Without raising his voice, Wilder replied, “We haven’t got the goddamed dialogue written yet!” Harrison then instructed Lang to have the crew create a varied range of gray and dark, shadowy tones for the night scene coming up, so that Wilder and Lehman could finish revising the scene. Little wonder that Lehman called Sabrina the scariest experience he ever had in his life.13

  The shoot also proved to be an ordeal for most of the cast and crew, said Martha Hyer. She played David Larrabee’s fiancée, whom David largely ignores once he becomes attracted to Sabrina. “There was much friction, side-taking, and intrigues during the filming,” she said, especially from Bogart. Perhaps he was insecure because “he didn’t feel comfortable in the part.”14 Bogart’s son Stephen put it more bluntly. “Bogie seemed to bask in his role as a troublemaker,” and make trouble he did on the set of Sabrina.15 According to his biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, Bogart “was unstable, edgy, and somewhat paranoid” about playing high comedy. Furthermore, he was “drinking more than was good for him.”16 Bogart had always been a heavy drinker. He no longer drank his lunch, but he regularly had his secretary, Verita Petersen, bring him a glass of Scotch on the set at five o’clock, an hour before quitting time. As he sipped the whiskey between takes, Bogart became even more dyspeptic and surly.

  As filming progressed, Wilder took to inviting Holden and Hepburn to his office for drinks at the end of the day. Bogart, whom Wilder did not find congenial company, was not included. When Wilder discovered that Bogart felt ostracized, however, he gave Bogart a belated invitation to join the group each afternoon. Bogart curtly turned Wilder down, since he had not been asked to join Wilder’s “clique” at the outset. From then on, the battle lines were definitely drawn. Bogart resented Wilder, Holden, and Hepburn as having formed a conspiracy against him.

  Wilder shrugged off Bogart’s antipathy as best he could. “I get along very well with actors,” he declared, “except when I have to work with sons-of-bitches like Mr. Bogart. . . . He was crazy, Bogart was; I knew I was on his list of bastards.” But Wilder consoled himself that, once a picture is finished, a director’s relationship with an actor is over. After all, “you’re not married to them!”17

  Bogart continued to snipe at Wilder and at his two costars. At one point Wilder handed Bogart the new script pages. After looking them over, Bogart inquired whether Wilder had any children. “Yes,” Wilder responded, “a thirteen-year-old daughter.” Bogart pitched the pages back at Wilder and barked, “Did she write this?”18

  Bogart even maliciously mocked Wilder’s German accent. When Wilder was under pressure, his accent became more pronounced. One day he gave a direction to Bogart, “Giff me here a little more faster.” Bogart jeered at him: “Hey, Wilhelm, would you not mind translating that remark into English? I don’t schpeak so good the Cherman, jawhohl!”19 Bogart later explained to the press that he thought Wilder was too authoritarian. Wilder, he said, was “the kind of Prussian German with a riding crop.” Bogart continued, “He’s the type of director I don’t like to work with. He works with the writer and excludes the actor. It irritated me, so I went to work on him. One thing led to another. This picture Sabrina is a crock of crap anyway.”20

  On another occasion, Bogart complained that Wilder strutted around the set like a “kraut bastard Nazi son-of-a bitch.”21 Wilder finally had had enough. After all, it was common knowledge in the film colony that Wilder’s mother, stepfather, and grandmother were victims of the Holocaust. Wilder addressed Bogart in measured tones: “Mr. Bogart, some actors are talented and some actors are shits. You, Mr. Bogart, are a talented shit.”22

  Wilder told journalist Ezra Goodman a couple of years later that Bogart “surrounds himself with whipping boys, aspiring young directors like Richard Brooks,” who had directed Bogart in the Korean War movie Battle Circus (1953). “He exposes them to ridicule; and they have to like it,” because they want to direct an established star like Bogart. But experienced directors like Joseph Mankiewicz, who directed Bogart in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), and, of course, Billy Wilder, “don’t take that from him.”23

  Bogart’s paranoia particularly focused on William Holden, who was the matinee idol Bogart had once been. Bogart accused Holden of trying to steal the picture by upstaging him during their scenes together. Moreover, Bogart noticed Holden puffing on a cigarette and was certain that Holden was attempting to make him cough when saying his lines. Bogart stormed at Wilder, “That fucking Holden over there, waving cigaret
tes around, blowing smoke in my face, crumpling up papers. I want this sabotage ended, Mr. Wilder.”24 Wilder, who wrote “Cum Deo” on the first page of every screenplay, began to think God was deserting him. He rolled his eyes to the heavens and did not reply to Bogart. In his effort to needle Holden, Bogart called him “lover boy,” ridiculing Holden’s good looks. Bogart implied that “pretty boy” Holden was merely a movie star and not a serious actor.

  “I hated the bastard,” said Holden; “he was always stirring things up when he didn’t have to.”25 Still, Holden usually lived up to Wilder’s expectations as an agreeable and cooperative actor, except for those times when he was in his cups. Holden’s drinking problem had become more pronounced since Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17. Bogart too was a heavy drinker, but he was more in control of his drinking than Holden. One afternoon, after he had had a liquid lunch, Holden showed up on the set bleary-eyed, in an alcoholic stupor. He was in no condition to work, and he kept forgetting his lines. “Methinks the lad has partaken too much of the grape,” Bogart sneered, adding that Holden was “a dumb prick.”26 Holden, enraged, threw a punch at his costar, and Bogart retaliated. Wilder, acting as referee, had to pull them apart; he then ordered Holden to retire to his dressing room and rest until he sobered up. Asked by a reporter for his opinion of Bogart, Holden answered with circumspection that Bogart was “an actor of consummate skill, with an ego to match.” Yet the antipathy between Bogart and Holden was never visible in their performances on the screen, and as Wilder was fond of saying, “What the audience sees is all that matters.”27

  Not even the winsome Audrey Hepburn could escape Bogart’s wrath, since he saw her as part of the clique with Wilder and Holden. Wilder and Lehman were still falling behind in their revisions of the shooting script, and one morning when Hepburn arrived at the studio, she was handed new pages of revised dialogue. The pages had been ripped out of Lehman’s typewriter only a few hours before. When Hepburn fumbled her lines during the first take, Wilder was understanding, but Bogart, who had an uncanny facility to master his lines, smirked, “Maybe you should stay home and study your lines, instead of going out every night.” Hepburn smiled graciously; she was a young, inexperienced actress and Bogart was an old pro. She was not going to bicker with a cranky star. Bogart later said to a reporter, speaking of Hepburn, “Yeah, she’s great, if you can give her twenty takes.”28