Some Like It Wilder Read online

  “If I did not work with a writer twice,” Wilder observed, he had not found the collaborator he was looking for. By contrast, Wilder had worked with I. A. L. Diamond on Love in the Afternoon and had already committed himself to collaborating with him on Some Like It Hot. That was the clue that Wilder had at last found a permanent collaborator. The souvenir program accompanying the DVD of the present film states that Some Like It Hot “marked Wilder’s first collaboration with his new writing partner,” overlooking Love in the Afternoon.14

  The writing pair spent the spring of 1958 composing the first draft of the script. Wilder, who was fourteen years older than Diamond, liked working with his junior partner, whom he viewed as a younger brother. While collaborating on the screenplay, Wilder and Diamond settled into a routine which lasted for nearly a quarter of a century. They worked on the script of Some Like It Hot daily from nine to six. “You arrive in the morning, and you have forty-five minutes of bitching about your wife, . . . and how you saw a picture,” and it was lousy. “It establishes a good atmosphere, before you get going on your own stuff.” Wilder said that they worked methodically, “like two bank tellers.”15

  When they began the writing process, they would block out each scene thoroughly. Diamond would type out the draft of a scene and show it to Wilder, who would say—quoting Lubitsch—”Now we make it better.”16 Then they would revise the scene together, fine-tuning it until they were both satisfied. That is why their screenplays are models of economy.

  Wilder said that his relationship with Diamond was “like a marriage; we fought all the time.” But Wilder had always believed that a writing team must be able to argue about their work without destroying the relationship. Unlike Charles Brackett, Diamond was a taciturn man; he would not engage in “verbal sparring” with Wilder.17 If Wilder occasionally threw a cantankerous temper tantrum, Diamond would simply wait it out. When it passed, they would go back to work.

  The dynamic duo finished the first draft of the screenplay on May 2, 1958. They then labored on the second draft, finishing the first two-thirds of the revised script by the beginning of principal photography. They revised the last third of the screenplay during production, which is why their final shooting script is dated November 12, 1958, shortly after the conclusion of the shooting period. The last third of the script “is never finally formulated when we begin shooting,” Wilder noted. The point is, “If you give the bosses the final third in advance, they can fire you at any time.”18

  Wilder was fortunate to line up some top-notch production artists. The director of photography was Charles Lang. Another Wilder alumnus, editor Arthur Schmidt, edited the present film. Orry-Kelly, who designed Monroe’s strategically abbreviated, diaphanous costumes, was the only individual to win an Academy Award for Some Like It Hot. This is an indication that the film was not taken seriously in the film colony at the time of its release.

  Doane Harrison, Wilder’s perennial supervising editor, was on the set every day, standing unnoticed in the background, always making sure that Wilder had all the coverage he needed to cut a scene together. Diamond, equally unnoticed, was also on the set daily, holding on to the script as if it were the Bible, vigilantly helping Wilder protect the dialogue in the script from being altered by an actor. Wilder had arranged for Diamond to be given the status of associate producer.

  Wilder had acted as his own producer on most of his films, starting with Ace in the Hole. One exception was his previous film, Witness for the Prosecution, which was produced by his old friend Arthur Hornblow. But with Some Like It Hot, Wilder was once more acting as both producer and director. He said he liked holding down both jobs, so he had the final say on the making of the picture, from casting to cutting.

  As producer-director of Some Like It Hot, Wilder had to cope with Monroe’s complaints during production. Monroe showed up at the studio expecting to do color tests during preproduction, only to discover that Wilder had decided that the picture would be in black and white. She promptly reminded him that her contract stipulated that all of her films were to be shot in full color, just as The Seven Year Itch had been. “I’m at my best in color,” Monroe insisted. Wilder did not confess to Monroe that his real reason for not filming in color was simply that he hated color movies. He told her that, for one thing, he chose black and white for the movie because it was set in the era of the great gangster pictures, which were all in black and white. For another thing, the color test footage revealed a blue tint of stubble on the cheeks of her two costars. After viewing the color tests of Lemmon as Daphne and Curtis as Josephine, Monroe conceded that “the boys’ makeup would appear gaudy in color.” Wilder was franker; he said the color tests for Lemmon and Curtis made them look like “flaming fagots.” Wilder recalled, “So Monroe said, ‘Forget it!’ Marilyn gave in, but not with very good grace.”19

  To help coach Lemmon and Curtis in the fine art of female impersonation, Wilder hired Vander Clyde, a legendary drag queen known in Europe as Barbette, whom Wilder remembered from his younger days in Berlin. Lemmon said that Clyde quit after three days. He told Wilder, “Curtis is very good; Lemmon is impossible. I’ll never be able to teach him anything, and he won’t do what I tell him anyway!”20 Curtis played Josephine as a restrained, sophisticated lady, but Lemmon saw Daphne as much less ladylike. He went to Wilder and declared, “The goof I am playing wouldn’t be very proficient in walking in heels. I need to be barely good enough to look like a clumsy woman.”21 Lemmon told Wilder that Clyde was too finicky, and Wilder sided with Lemmon. The two “girls,” Wilder maintained, should have different personalities. “I didn’t play Josephine for laughs,” Curtis noted; “I tried to make her more demure, because Jack played Daphne as more gauche. I modeled Josephine after Grace Kelly. Whereas Jack loved tromping around in high heels, swinging his hips; he had a ball. He looked like a ditzy 20-cent tart.”22

  Lemmon challenged Curtis to attempt the acid test of their disguise: Lemmon, dragging a bewildered and somewhat shy Curtis behind him, went traipsing to the ladies’ room in the studio lobby. They sat in front of the mirror in the lounge adjoining the women’s restroom, “where they did their make-up for a good half hour. Apparently nobody batted an eye.” Then they went to Wilder’s office to see if they passed his inspection. They told him of their experience in the ladies’ room, and he exclaimed, “That does it—don’t change a thing! This is exactly the way I want you to look!” He added humorously that Curtis resembled Joan Crawford and Lemmon resembled Mae West.23

  By the time Wilder hired Monroe to play the female lead in Some Like It Hot, he discovered that her personal problems had increased and her mental health had deteriorated. Monroe was up to her old tricks, but she was more difficult to work with than ever. Because she could master only a snippet of dialogue at a time, Wilder was reduced to filming her scenes in a succession of brief shots. Curiously enough, said Wilder, when all of these bits and pieces were strung together at the editing table, a complete performance emerged.

  Wilder also had to cope once again with Monroe’s chronic tardiness. She set the tone of how she was going to behave during the filming of Some Like It Hot on the day of her makeup and wardrobe tests. She was scheduled to appear at 1:00 P.M.; she arrived at 3:30. By the time her assistants had prepared her for the camera tests, it was 6:10. Diamond recalled, “Billy had dismissed the crew at 6:00 and then departed himself—which left her ready for action—all by herself.” That same night, Wilder received the first of several phone calls from Arthur Miller. Regardless of his personal feelings about his wife’s behavior, Miller always defended her to Wilder. Wilder thought it demeaning for Miller to be arbitrating with him about the vagaries of Monroe’s behavior. She should have had her agent, not her husband, who was a distinguished playwright, dealing with him.

  Principal photography began on August 4, 1958. Monroe’s erratic behavior did not improve once shooting commenced. Wilder would sometimes endeavor to make the best of a bad situation by making wry witticisms at Monr
oe’s expense. “She has breasts of granite; she defies gravity,” he fulminated one day to friends. “She has a brain like Swiss cheese—full of holes; she hasn’t the vaguest conception of the time of day. She arrives late and tells you she couldn’t find the studio” because she lost the address. “And she’s been working there for years.”24

  Wilder said that he did not realize what a disorganized person Monroe was until one day she gave him a lift and he looked in the back of her car. “It was like she threw everything in the back helter-skelter, because there was an invasion and the enemy armies were already in Pasadena. There were blouses lying there, old traffic tickets, old plane tickets, old lovers, for all I know.”25 Elsewhere he said, “She was the most rude, mean, discourteous and completely selfish person I have ever met.”26 One day, while Wilder was waiting for her on the set with cast and crew at eleven o’clock in the morning, he dispatched the second assistant director, Sam Nelson, to her dressing room. Nelson discovered her reading Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. According to Norman Mailer’s book on Monroe, she looked up from her reading and barked, “Go fuck yourself!”27 Sarah Churchwell, commenting on Monroe’s profanity, writes, “Marilyn Monroe became nastier” as she became more anxious, more insecure, “and more addicted to the chemicals that were making her moods even more volatile.”28

  Wilder was appalled when he learned that Monroe had studied at the Actors Studio with Paula Strasberg after finishing The Seven Year Itch. “Here you have this poor girl, and all of a sudden she becomes a famous star,” he said. “So now these people tell her she has to be a great actress.” He was not convinced that she needed training. In fact, he was concerned that her sessions at the Actors Studio had shaken her confidence in herself. “God gave her everything she needed,” Wilder continued; she is “a calendar girl with warmth and charm.”29

  One thing Monroe learned from her stint at the Actors Studio was to study her scenes to develop a concept of how she should play each one. Monroe had all the scenes in the script of Some Like It Hot in which she appeared bound together, and she discarded the rest. She then made marginal notes on each page of her script to help her in preparing the scene.

  Paula Strasberg was omnipresent on the set, as she had been when The Seven Year Itch was being shot; she received fifteen hundred dollars a week for coaching Monroe. Curtis said that Wilder thought this an unnecessary expense and referred acridly to Strasberg, who inexplicably always dressed in black, as “the bat.” As a result of her internship at the Actors Studio, Monroe was leaning on her acting coach even more than she had in her previous pictures. Wilder griped that Monroe worshiped the Actors Studio like a religion. Sometimes Strasberg even interfered when Wilder was conferring with Monroe on the set, to make her own suggestions. Wilder was determined to indicate to “Madame Strasberg” early on that he was running the show, said Curtis. “After each take, Marilyn wouldn’t look at Billy for his reaction; she would look at Paula for her approval.” One day during the first week of filming, writes Barbara Leaming, Wilder got what he needed in a single take. When he called “Cut!” Monroe glanced over at Strasberg. Wilder rose from his director’s chair and shouted, “How was that for you, Paula?”30 From then on Strasberg was relegated to the sidelines, where she could confer with Monroe in private between takes, but she was not to interfere when Wilder was directing her protégé on the set.

  The production unit moved to San Diego, which was standing in for Miami, Florida, for location shooting at the Hotel del Coronado, an oceanfront resort; it is called the Seminole-Ritz in the movie. Shooting was scheduled to start on September 8, 1958, and last for a month.

  Miller did not accompany Monroe to San Diego, but, despite their constant bickering when they were together, she was desperately lonely without him. She had found the pressures of making mainstream commercial films to be more and more stressful in recent years. According to Alison Castle, the editor of the published screenplay, “her anxiety level only increased her dependency on barbiturates, which she was taking in alarming amounts.” On September 11 she addressed a letter in a trembling hand to her friend the poet Norman Rosten, saying that she was aboard a ship sinking in a “rough and choppy” sea. On the hotel stationery was a sketch of the resort facing the ocean. Monroe drew a tiny stick figure drowning in the surf, shouting “Help!”31

  The following night Monroe “swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills”; not for the first time, she attempted suicide. “Paula found her in time” and took her to the hospital.32 Miller rushed to her bedside, and Monroe spent the weekend in the hospital. The whole affair was hushed up by the studio; the public relations department announced that Monroe was suffering from exhaustion. Later, while Miller was on hand on location, he learned that his wife was pregnant. In due course, Wilder recalled, Miller took him aside and informed him confidentially that Monroe was expecting. He accordingly requested that Wilder allow Monroe to leave at 4:30 every day, instead of the customary 6:00. Wilder was beside himself. He pointed out to Miller, “It is already 4:30, and I still don’t have a take,” because Monroe had not showed up until noon. He promised Miller that, “if she was on the set at 9:00 A.M., then by noon I would be finished with her,” and he would let her go—not at 4:30, but at noon.33 Whatever polite relationship had once existed between Miller and Wilder was at an end.

  Wilder later confided to William Schorr, a former production assistant, that his back, which always troubled him when he was tense, was giving him severe pain, caused by his having to cope with Monroe. He added ruefully, “I don’t know if I will be able to live through this.”34 At all events, location filming in San Diego finished in the first week of October 1958. The remaining month of shooting back at the Goldwyn Studios was strained. As shooting wore on, Monroe’s takes were more and more “stretching into double digits,” and the patience of her costars was wearing thin.35 Wilder was bewildered by her erratic behavior. “I knew we were in midflight, and there was a nut on the plane, and they’ve got a bomb.”36

  Curtis remembered enduring endless takes until Monroe finally did a scene properly. “When she got it right at last, Billy would use that take,” which might not be Curtis’s best take, because he was tired out by then. When Curtis brought this to Wilder’s attention, Wilder replied that he had to go with Monroe’s best take, “because when she was on screen, the audience could not take their eyes off her.” Curtis hit the ceiling when he heard this, and he became all the more disgruntled with her. He expressed his irritation with Monroe one evening while the cast and crew were viewing the rushes and she was absent. Curtis was asked what it was like to be kissed by Marilyn Monroe in a love scene. “It’s like kissing Hitler,” he responded curtly.37

  Jack Lemmon claimed, “Only the cast and crew heard him say it.” But his statement reached the press. Curtis denied making the remark when he was interviewed by a gossip columnist, to avoid a clash with Monroe. But, years later, Curtis admitted that he made the insulting comment. “She was very good in the movie,” he said, “but she was difficult to deal with.” He confessed that he was fed up with her when he made the statement. “Now she is dead, and it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  During the final weeks of filming, the actors found it more and more frustrating to work with Monroe because “more often than not, Marilyn seemed to be tipsy,” according to Diamond. “After each scene Marilyn would call out to her secretary, ‘May! Coffee!’ and May Reis would bring her a red thermos bottle,” which contained not coffee but sweet vermouth.38 Monroe’s gynecologist warned her that her steady intake of alcohol and barbiturates “could trigger a miscarriage,” writes Leaming. “Yet the red thermos remained a fixture on the set. And though Marilyn insisted that she wanted a baby more than anything, she continued to take drugs.”39

  Late in the shoot Monroe seemed to be “pilled out,” as Curtis put it. “She was mixing sleeping pills and vermouth, and she had increasing difficulty in memorizing her lines.”40 Wilder recounted how Monroe blew a scene in which Sugar ente
rs a hotel room looking for whiskey. “This is Prohibition time, and alcohol is hard to come by,” Wilder explained. Sugar searches through the drawers of a bureau for the elusive bottle. It took Monroe forty-seven takes to say coherently, “Where’s that bottle?” instead of “Where’s the bonbon?” or “Where’s the whiskey?” After the twentieth take, Wilder said to her, “Relax, Marilyn; don’t worry.” She asked dazedly, “Worry about what?”41

  “Finally Wilder had the line pasted inside the dresser drawer,” Roger Ebert notes. “Then she opened the wrong drawer. So he had it pasted inside every drawer.”42 Wilder, we know, would not allow any deviation from the dialogue as written in the screenplay. Churchwell declares, “His insistence on take after take until she got the line right” suggested that they were engaged in a test of wills—”indeed, a pissing contest.” Someone was going to win, and it was going to be Wilder. In the last analysis, this incident indicates that “her drug use was spiraling out of control.”43 Wilder said to himself after this episode, “I’m in jail; but not for life!”44

  When principal photography wrapped on November 7, 1958, Wilder was at last sprung from prison. Monroe returned to New York, where she and Miller had an apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street. On the night of December 16, Monroe suffered a miscarriage. In the past, when she lost a baby, she had blamed fate. This time she took the responsibility herself. She had ignored her gynecologist’s warnings that her addictions to pills and liquor could harm the baby; now it was too late. Yet Miller maintained quite unfairly that his wife’s miscarriage resulted from her being overworked while shooting Some Like It Hot. Asked by Volker Schlöndorff subsequently to comment on Wilder, Miller answered tersely, “He was a bastard.”45