Some Like It Wilder Read online

  Danielle Darrieux, who played Jeanette, remembered that the cast considered Wilder the principal director of the picture. He coached the actors during rehearsals, while Esway kibitzed from the sidelines. Wilder added, “Most of the interiors were shot in a converted garage, even the living room scenes.”17

  Wilder shrewdly incorporated into the film several sequences that were shot silent, with only the addition of background music and sound effects. Waxman’s lively jazz score was filled with fox-trot tunes.

  Wilder came up with some inventive directorial touches for his first effort as a filmmaker. Jeanette first appears holding up her compact mirror while checking her makeup. Then she lowers the mirror to reveal her lovely face. Jeanette, it develops, is the only female member of the mob of youthful auto thieves to which her brother Jean (Raymond Galle) also belongs. After Henri (Pierre Mingand) joins the gang, he soon falls for the beguiling Jeanette, and their relationship blossoms into love. Wilder slyly introduced a veiled homosexual subplot into the film. Baby-faced Jean has a crush on Henri, whom he invites to share his flat and sleep on his couch. Jean proudly proclaims more than once that Henri is his best friend, trots around after him like an adoring puppy, and is on hand when Henri undresses for bed. Yet none of the other characters seem to notice, perhaps because Henri is seriously preoccupied with Jeanette.

  When Henri and Jeanette are spotted by the police riding in a stolen vehicle, the cops give chase. The speeding car careens off the road and crashes into a ditch. Henri and Jeanette manage to survive the accident and elude the police, but the harrowing experience motivates them to go straight. The film concludes with the young lovers’ embarking on a steamship bound for America and a new life.

  Like Wilder’s earlier German film, the present French picture was shot documentary style in the streets and alleyways of the city and on country lanes. “We didn’t use a single studio soundstage. We shot mostly outdoors on real locations,” Wilder explained, just as François Truffaut and his comrades would later advocate.

  Long unavailable for viewing, Mauvaise graine was released on DVD in the United States in a spiffed-up digital package in 2002. Wilder’s directorial debut cleverly weaves bouncy comedy with high-octane thrills. This movie is significant because it fills in a gap in Wilder’s filmography; it is a potboiler that mixes comedy with crime melodrama, as Wilder would later do again in Some Like It Hot (1959).

  Mauvaise graine went into general release in France in the summer of 1934, greeted by mostly positive reviews. “I cannot say that it made me very happy” to have directed a feature film, Wilder said, since the pressure of directing his first film on the double and on the cheap made the production experience a real ordeal. “But now I knew I could do it.”18 He still preferred writing to directing, and by the time Mauvaise graine was in the cinemas, he was already in Hollywood pursuing his career as a film writer.

  After finishing Mauvaise graine, Wilder sent an original script, “Pam-Pam,” to Joe May, a German who had known him at Ufa and was now a producer at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood. On the strength of Wilder’s screenplay, May arranged to bring him over to Hollywood at the studio’s expense for a brief writing stint at Columbia. Several of Wilder’s fellow refugees, including Lorre and Reisch, also decamped for Hollywood around this time.

  Wilder left Europe for New York on the Aquitania on January 22, 1934. His brother Willie, who had preceded him to the United States by some years, met him at the dock. Willie had developed a successful line of women’s handbags in New York. Billy stayed a few days with Willie and his family in their home on Long Island, where he got his first impression of America. When he got up one snowy morning, he noticed a big, black Cadillac stopping in front of the house. A boy with a stack of newspapers got out and tossed one on the porch. The weather was bad, so the newsboy’s family, it seems, was driving him on his paper route. “What kind of a country is this?” Wilder exclaimed. “Newspapers delivered by Cadillac!”19 A few days later, Wilder arrived by train in Los Angeles.

  A decade later, Willie followed Billy to Hollywood, where he produced and directed a variety of cheapies under the name of W. Lee Wilder to avoid being confused with his brother Billy. Willie’s only film of note was The Great Flamarion (1945), a low-budget film noir starring Erich von Stroheim, whose career was in decline, and directed by Anthony Mann, whose career was on the rise.

  Soon after Billy’s arrival in Hollywood, he set to work at Columbia expanding his scenario for “Pam-Pam” into a full-length screenplay. Looking back, he said,

  Basically you would have to divide the influx of German picture makers into the United States into two categories. First there were the ones that were hired by the American studios because they were outstanding geniuses like Murnau and Lubitsch, to mention just the very prominent ones. These were the people who came over in the ’20s who were sought after by studio executives because they had made enormously successful films in Europe. That was the first group.

  Then in the middle ’30s came an avalanche of refugees who were looking for jobs on the basis of their experience in German pictures such as Zinnemann and myself. We didn’t come because we were invited like the first group; we came to save our lives, and from the first we desperately tried to learn English so that we could get work in Hollywood. So you see in my case I was a job seeker, not an accomplished motion picture maker. Moreover, Austria, my country, no longer existed for me. I really had to make good here. It wasn’t a question of my saying to myself, “Well, if things don’t work out here I can go back to Austria or to Germany.” For me it was a question of fighting it out here and surviving, or going back and winding up like most of my family in the ovens of Auschwitz.

  Since my profession at the time was writing, it was especially important for me to learn English, and here I was knowing only German and French. It was a very tough period for me. I had sold an original story to Columbia while I was still in Paris and I made $150 a week for a short time because of that when I first arrived in Hollywood.

  Though Wilder spoke no more than a smattering of rudimentary English, he admitted to knowing about a dozen words that the industry censor would not tolerate. He taught himself the language by regularly listening to baseball games on the radio and by going to American movies.

  Hollywood Immigrant

  The studio boss of Columbia was Harry Cohn, an obstreperous, volatile, vulgar-tongued Hollywood mogul; he was once called a thug in a front-office suit. Sam Briskin, Cohn’s chief assistant, was an equally gruff, outspoken type.

  During his first meeting with Wilder, Briskin was chagrined to observe Wilder’s poor command of English. When Briskin inquired about Wilder’s nationality, Wilder froze; his English temporarily deserted him and he muttered, “I . . . been . . . Austrian.” Briskin dispatched Wilder to the writers’ compound, where he was assigned to a six-by-eight cubicle. Wilder was severely handicapped by his elementary English. “I kept writing in German, and some of my pals who were a little ahead of me would translate my stuff into English.” Years later, he examined the translation of one of his scripts and suffered “a mild coronary” when he discovered that his translators were not always accurate in rendering his work into English.20

  Wilder’s six-month contract with Columbia expired; so did the visitor’s permit with which he had entered America. He had to go to Mexico to obtain an immigration visa because the U.S. quota for immigrants from Europe had been filled. Wilder crossed the border into Mexico and rented a squalid hotel room in Mexicali, where he presented his case to the official at the U.S. Consulate. “I knew I needed a bunch of documents to present to the consul,” he said later, “but all I had was my birth certificate and my passport.” Wilder explained to the consul that he had left Berlin on very short notice; if he went back to Germany to obtain additional credentials, “they would ship me to Dachau on the next train.” Finally the consul asked him how he hoped to support himself in the United States. “I write screenplays,” Wilder answered. The consul
paced up and down his narrow, dilapidated office, then returned to his desk and said, “Write some good ones!” With that, the consul, a movie buff, stamped Wilder’s passport, allowing him to stay permanently in the United States. Wilder concluded, “I have tried ever since not to disappoint that dear man in Mexicali.” For the record, Wilder became an American citizen in 1939, a date he remembered as one of the shining days of his life.

  When he returned to Los Angeles from Mexicali, however, life was still bleak; he went hungry for weeks on end while he continued to study English. He endeavored to find employment as a scriptwriter on the basis of his previous work in Germany. “I had collaborated on German films that most people in Hollywood had never heard of. . . . I had to entice an agent to handle me because my list of credits from Germany was not impressive. There was no Nosferatu behind me as there was behind Murnau. I had none of the accomplishments of an Ernst Lubitsch.”

  For a time Wilder got a cramped room at the tacky Château Marmont, an actors’ hotel on the Sunset Strip. During the Christmas season, however, the hotel was fully booked, and Wilder was reduced to living in the lounge adjoining the women’s restroom, since that was all he could afford. The ladies eyed him suspiciously as they passed through his “quarters” en route to the lavatory. Later on he bunked with Peter Lorre in a fleabag hotel for ten dollars a week. They survived “in dignified starvation” on one can of Campbell’s soup a day, warmed on a hot plate. “I had leather patches on the elbows of my jacket,” Wilder recalled, “not because it was fashionable, but because there were holes in them.”

  Wilder’s poverty did not last, but he always retained his German accent. “You could lose your accent if you came over from Europe as a youngster,” he explained; “if you went to school here. But I was nearly twenty-eight when I arrived. It was too late for me to lose my foreign accent.”21 Elsewhere, he remarked, “If you think I have an accent, you should have heard Ernst Lubitsch,” for whom Wilder would work as a screenwriter. Wilder continued, “But he had a wonderful ear for the American idiom and slang; you either have an ear or you don’t, as Van Gogh said. I suppose I have it; many foreigners do.”22

  Wilder also never lost his outsider’s view of American life. “We who had our roots in the European past, I think, brought with us a fresh attitude towards America, a new eye with which to examine this country on film, as opposed to the eye of native-born moviemakers who were accustomed to everything around them. Hence there was some novelty about our approach to the films that we made here from the start.”

  As Wilder’s English improved, so did his fortunes. Joe May was offered a chance to direct films at Fox Studios, and he managed to wangle a short-term contract for Wilder there. Wilder collaborated on the script for May’s Music in the Air (1934), which was based on a dated operetta by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. The movie was produced by Erich Pommer, another immigrant for whom Wilder had worked at Ufa. Wilder received his first official screen credit on an American film, but the hummable Kern-Hammerstein score could not redeem the flimsy plot, and Music in the Air failed at the box office.

  When Fox merged with Twentieth Century in 1935, Wilder was out of a job. He continued to live a hand-to-mouth existence in the film colony, not having much luck as a screenwriter. He collaborated on scripts for a string of forgettable pictures, sometimes uncredited; these included love stories, crime melodramas, and musicals.

  Finally, in 1936, Wilder was placed under contract to Paramount by Manny Wolf, head of the story department. Wolf, a short, nattily dressed chap with Coke-bottle glasses, was a shrewd judge of talent. He saw that Wilder was a promising writer and hired him at a salary of $250 a week. The writers’ building on the Paramount lot, which housed 104 screenwriters, had been christened the Tower of Babel because it housed so many writers who were exiles, like Wilder himself.

  One of the writers whom Paramount employed around this time was American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wilder was unimpressed by Fitzgerald’s screenwriting abilities: “It seemed to me as though he could never get beyond page 3 of a script. He made me think of a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect the fucking pipes, so the water would flow.” Fitzgerald was a great novelist, Wilder concluded, but he did not know how to construct a scene in a screenplay.23

  During his first couple of years in Hollywood, Wilder shied away from dating women in the German refugee colony who, like himself, were employed in the film industry. Instead, he acquired American girlfriends who could help him master English. As a freelance screenwriter, he played the field and did not think seriously about marriage. Once he had a steady job on salary, however, he decided that he was in a position to marry.

  Wilder had been introduced by another screenwriter to Judith Iribe, a sophisticated lady from a prominent California family. They had been dating for more than a year when he finally popped the question; they eloped to Yuma, Arizona, on December 22, 1936. The newlyweds moved into an apartment on South Camden Drive in Beverly Hills and eventually into a house on North Beverly Drive. Their daughter Victoria was born on December 21, 1939, one day before their third wedding anniversary.

  Judith was courtly and reserved; Billy was brash and indelicate. Not surprisingly, they gradually grew apart, and Billy sought companionship elsewhere. Judith and Billy became increasingly estranged as the years went by and eventually divorced.

  Wilder formed an important professional relationship in 1936, the year of his first marriage, that proved to be far more viable than his personal relationship with his wife. Wolf decided to team Wilder with another contract screenwriter, Charles Brackett. Fourteen years Wilder’s senior, Brackett was a graduate of Harvard University. He had become the first drama critic for the New Yorker while publishing short stories in slick magazines with big circulations like the Saturday Evening Post. He had been associated with a number of minor movies like The Last Outpost (1935), a flaccid Cary Grant starrer about British troops in the desert, codirected by Louis Gasnier and Charles Barton. Brackett was an accomplished wordsmith. So it was that, on the morning of July 17, 1936, Wolf called Wilder into his office and said, “Meet Charles Brackett; from now on you’re a team.” Brackett declared solemnly that a team was made up of those “whom God had joined together.”24

  Once Brackett and Wilder joined forces, their screenwriting careers flourished. The two partners could not have been more dissimilar. Wilder was a feisty middle European Jew; Brackett was an East Coast patrician. “Brackett and I had nothing in common but writing,” said Wilder. It was precisely because he and Brackett were so different that their collaboration worked. “If two people think alike, it’s like two men pulling at one end of a rope,” Wilder commented. He was a firm believer that the best scripts emerged from the friction between the writers who collaborated on them. “If you are going to collaborate, you need an opponent to bounce things off of.”25 Moreover, Wilder welcomed a writing partner who could polish his uncertain English. He wrote, “I was lucky enough to be teamed with Charles Brackett,” an experienced writer for whom he already had great respect.26

  The creative association of Wilder and Brackett was to last for more than a decade. They functioned perfectly as a writing team: Brackett, who had an impeccable command of English, fine-tuned the dialogue, while Wilder concentrated on plot construction, at which he had become proficient in his Berlin days.

  The first film that Brackett and Wilder coscripted was a comedy titled Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), derived from a French farce that had been filmed in 1923 with Gloria Swanson. The remake would be directed by none other than Ernst Lubitsch, Wilder’s idol.

  2

  Champagne and Tears

  Ninotchka, Midnight, and Ball of Fire

  In a film, marriage is a beautiful mistake that two people make together.

  —Ernst Lubitsch

  When he was preparing Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife for filming, Ernst Lubitsch wanted Charles Brackett to write the screenplay. He did not as
k the studio for Billy Wilder as well because he did not want to give the impression that he was a German-born director who favored hiring members of the German immigrant colony in Hollywood. But Manny Wolf told Lubitsch that Brackett and Wilder were a team, so Wilder was part of the deal.

  Lubitsch, a stout, cigar-chomping little man with a thick German accent, had a genius for making Hollywood pictures, like Trouble in Paradise (1932), marked by sophisticated Continental humor. In his first meeting with Brackett and Wilder, he posed a thought-provoking question. In romantic comedies, he explained, the hero and the heroine should not meet in an ordinary way. They should “meet-cute,” as the saying goes; that is, they should meet in an unexpected manner that will get the audience interested in them. Lubitsch accordingly asked his writers, “How do the boy and girl get together?”

  Wilder, who kept a notebook of clever ideas for use in screenplays, volunteered this proposal: Wealthy Michael Brandon (the character eventually played by Gary Cooper) is trying to buy pajamas in a men’s store on the French Riviera where he is vacationing, but he sleeps only in the pants. He is thrifty, as millionaires go, so he insists on purchasing only the pants. The clerk says he must buy the tops as well. Nicole de Loiselle (who would be played by Claudette Colbert) comes into the store and asks to buy the tops only, because she sleeps only in the tops. So Michael and Nicole divide a pair of pajamas. Lubitsch was enthusiastic about Wilder’s suggestion, which was the ultimate meet-cute scene.

  Wilder continued the habit of scribbling ideas into a pocket notebook throughout his career. “I have always been an inveterate note-taker, because you never know when the muse will touch your brow.” These bright ideas, he concluded, could come in handy on the days “when the muse goes out to have her hair done.”