On Sunset Boulevard Read online

  Praise for Ed Sikov’s

  On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder

  “A perceptive and profound appreciation of one of Hollywood’s most accomplished and consistently iconoclastic filmmakers…. With the insights of a sophisticated film scholar and the expertise of a tenacious reporter, Sikov takes us with Wilder on a 90-year roller-coaster ride.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Superb, vivid.”

  —The San Francisco Chronicle

  “Exciting research into the most remote period of Wilder’s long life has somehow yielded an intimate portrait of the young hustler…. The book is bound to appeal to Wilder’s fans and reignite interest in a man who, in his 90s, is a living symbol of Hollywood’s glorious past.”

  —The Boston Sunday Globe

  “Exhaustively researched yet enormously engaging … Sikov has complete command of his subject and his man.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Superb.… It’s now the definitive book on the subject.”

  —San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

  “The first to really get at the complexities of the man, to provide keen analyses of his work and cut through the colorful fabrications and fictions…. Sikov’s voluminous research, his interviews with Wilder’s friends, collaborators, casts and crews, his perceptive takes on Wilder’s pictures, represent more than three years of effort. It has paid off, in spades.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Highly readable … worthwhile and enjoyable.”

  —Kirkus

  “By naming this attempt at a definitive Wilder biography after the savagely humorous 1950 classic, Sikov invites a risky comparison—and pulls it off with a broad, well-documented overview of Wilder’s life and work.… It reads almost as if Wilder’s own hand were behind it.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] 592-page act of annotated detection … [this] monumentally research-heavy approach proves a curiously satisfactory foil to Wilder’s more outlandish bits of exaggeration…. Makes Wilder appear funnier, more prodigiously colorful, and more astonishing than ever.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “While cataloguing in detail Wilder’s life from 1920s’ Berlin up to the present, this new volume also gives extensive discussion of each of Wilder’s films, a unique combination.… As entertaining a biography as one might want, rich in detail, and filled with enough movie information to satisfy any serious film enthusiast.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Sikov’s chronicle of Mr. Wilder’s private life … is as outstanding as his examination of the director’s enviable career.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “Just grand.”

  —The New York Observer

  “An enlightened and well-researched chapter of Tinseltown history, bursting with new anecdotes from old Hollywood about one of its legendary geniuses.”

  —The Advocate

  “A terrific book on the life and times of a fascinating filmmaker.”

  —The Flint Michigan journal

  “Compelling and authoritative…. Gets behind the Billy Wilder legend…. Sikov’s book is so damned good.”

  —LA Weekly

  ON SUNSET BOULEVARD

  ON SUNSET BOULEVARD

  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BILLY WILDER

  ED SIKOV

  UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

  JACKSON

  www.upress.state.ms.us

  The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

  A version of “The Day I Met God” previously appeared on LitReactor.com, December 8, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

  Copyright © 2017 by University Press of Mississippi

  All rights reserved

  First printing 2017

  ∞

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sikov, Ed, author.

  Title: On Sunset Boulevard : the life and times of Billy Wilder / Ed Sikov.

  Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017003989 (print) | LCCN 2017014985 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496812650 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496812667 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496812674 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496812681 (pdf institutional) | ISBN 9781496812452 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Wilder, Billy, 1906–2002. | Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts. | PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / Direction & Production. | PERFORMING ARTS / Individual Director (see also BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts).

  Classification: LCC PN1998.3.W56 (ebook) | LCC PN1998.3.W56 S55 2017 (print) | DDC 791.4302/33092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003989

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  PART ONE 1906–1933

  1. From Krakow to Vienna

  2. Daredevil Reporter

  3. Just a Gigolo

  4. In the Fog of the Metropolis

  5. Taking Off

  6. Escape

  PART TWO 1934–1941

  7. To Hollywood

  8. Coupled

  9. Heil Darling!

  10. Ball of Fire

  PART THREE 1941–1950

  11. Mr. Director

  12. Double Indemnity

  13. Reeling

  14. Proof

  15. Cheers

  16. Homesick

  17. Sunset Boulevard

  PART FOUR 1951-1956

  18. Ace in the Hole

  19. Calculations

  20. Audrey

  21. Troubles

  PART FIVE 1957-1961

  22. In the Afternoon

  23. Some Like It Hot

  24. The Apartment

  PART SIX 1961-1970

  25. Selling It

  26. Kiss Me, Stupid

  27. Fake

  28. Heartbreak

  PART SEVEN 1971-1998

  29. Love and Death

  30. Fedora

  31. “Nice Working with You”

  32. In Turnaround

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Filmography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PREFACE

  In real life, most women are stupid—and so are persons who are writing biographies of Hollywood celebrities.

  —Billy Wilder

  I don’t go to church,” the sneering floozy announces to Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. Then she explains why: “Kneeling bags my nylons.” The floozy is married, her husband is dying at the bottom of a dank pit—a collapsed cave into which he has ventured to steal sacred Indian relics. Douglas, an ambitious and self-serving reporter, keeps him trapped there to enhance the drama and advance his own career. Sightseers show up, sniffing thrills. A traveling carnival arrives on the scene complete with a Ferris wheel and junk food stands. Newspaper readers across the country shiver at each day’s breathless account of the rescue operation until the trapped man stops breathing and the excitement dies with him. Douglas nearly strangles the floozy with a ratty fur stole, and she responds by stabbing him in the gut with a pair of scissors. After a period of slow, degrading bleeding, he keels over, slamming headfirst onto the floor, and dies, his empty eyes staring in close-up into the camera.

  Wilder wrote, produced, and directed Ace in the Hole in 1951. It was his most personal movie to date, and it bombed—badly. American audiences just weren’t willing to see themsel
ves exposed in the most searing, caustic light he could shine at them. They’d bought Fred MacMurray as a greedy strangler in Double Indemnity, Ray Milland as a sullen terminal drunk in The Lost Weekend, and Gloria Swanson as the crazy has-been movie star in Sunset Boulevard who shoots a young screenwriter in the back and lets him bleed to death in her Beverly Hills swimming pool, but they drew the line at the corrupt, self-hating journalist and his slut (who, by the way, simply walks off into the dust at the end and never pays for her crime).

  With our national spirit growing ever more poisonous in the final, hissing years of what was once billed (proudly) as the American Century, Billy Wilder’s morbid cinema takes on a richer burnish. Our cynicism has grown rootless. His was always romantic. Our national strain of self-loathing is inescapable in the 1990s—even the average television laughs have a bitter bite, and the best cartoons are surly—and as a result Wilder’s sour comedies and harsh, morally compromised dramas now ring truer than ever. In the quaint-seeming past, Wilder offered sharp refreshment from Hollywood’s egregious gladness—the flood of sappy endings in which nice peoples’ lives worked out just fine. With a series of toxic antidotes, Wilder hit at some deeper, more depressing truths. He offered shots of acid in place of bromides, leering smirks instead of contented smiles. Even his blockbuster comedies Some Like It Hot and The Apartment are tinged with meanness. Astoundingly, he almost always got away with it. But not even Wilder, the master cynic, could foresee the kicker. The big joke is, with each passing decade Wilder’s acerbic tales only seem more tender. At the end of our vicious and exhausted century, Wilder’s nastiness has taken on a kind of romantic poignance. His movies are shockingly delicate.

  There was always decency there, even if no one could ever quite grasp it for good. There was love, however uncertain or tentative. Sometimes there was hope, of a sad sort. But there was never sloppiness. Wilder crafted his movies in a classical and beautiful way. They are structured, refined. His rhythmic words matter as much as his understated images. Because his bitter jokes were composed with virtuoso care, they have become reassuring. The fact that Wilder got it so right for so long is itself a profound solace, even if the relentless proof he offers of life’s rottenness never fails to haunt and dishearten. Wilder’s is a world of cheaters and jerks, bitches and whores; a diseased world; an ugly one. He looks at humanity and he is sickened by it, in part because of his own complicity.

  It isn’t as if Wilder remained an unsung outcast in his own time, a lone artist rubbing against the grain of his culture. On the contrary. His knack for tapping and expanding a vast public’s limited imagination made him a very rich man who boasted a slew of handsome gold trophies to go with his museum-quality art collection. He was an uncommonly successful, unrepentantly commercial Hollywood director, a genius at making corruption marketable. Except for Ace in the Hole, Wilder’s films hardly ever found critical and commercial disfavor until the final few (and ironically, two of those box office duds are among his most sweet-tempered pictures). With hit after hit, he prospered. An outsider when it came to sentiment, he was always an inside player. Never did he pit himself against the system—not in his first job (as an editor of crossword puzzles for a Viennese scandal sheet); not as a hungry young screenwriter in Berlin making the rounds of cafés, smoking and looking for work; not as a multimillionaire director in Hollywood hanging around Romanoff’s puffing cigars, drinking martinis, and insulting his competition. Wilder adapted—wherever he landed, whatever it took. At an early age he learned to work the system, in middle age he became it, and he hung on as long as he could, to his own enormous benefit.

  Because he wrote all the films he directed, Billy Wilder’s body of work is unparalleled in the American cinema. Nobody else’s career lasted as long. No one else wrote and directed a more accomplished string of hits. Sturges and Welles burned out. Chaplin felt no compulsion to keep working all the time. Hitchcock, Ford, and Hawks didn’t write their own material; Spielberg, Scorsese, and Coppola don’t either. Wilder personally wrote every word of every film he directed, though always with a teammate. Blending story and image with rare taste and intelligence, the refugee director learned to speak the subtle, supple language of American filmmaking perfectly, though always with an accent.

  And he lasted. His movies still hold up, some better than ever. Wilder’s artistic stock would be higher if his visual style had been more ostentatious, but his goal was never to dazzle his audience with pretty pictures. His visual gestures are too intimate and self-effacing. Now, in our gaudier, more kinetic era, Wilder’s camera style seems so restrained as to be invisible, but that is simply because he never clobbered anyone with it.

  On Sunset Boulevard is the story of Billy Wilder’s life in motion pictures. It focuses on what he achieved on-screen and how he came to achieve it. It is an unauthorized biography. When Jack Lemmon called Wilder to ask whether he should grant an interview to me, Wilder said bluntly that the idea of sitting through an interview made him want to throw up. Funny, I felt the same way. The fastest, funniest, meanest mind in Hollywood, he has been ridiculing friends and enemies in three languages for most of his ninety-two years, and frankly I wasn’t certain I could withstand his legendary assault. When he declined my repeated requests for meetings, lunches, and tours of art galleries in which I promised not to bring even a piece of paper or a pencil, I confess to feeling as much relieved as disappointed.

  Still, writing about Billy Wilder’s extraordinary life has been the greatest honor of my own. I hope to have done him justice.

  July 1998

  PART ONE

  1906–1933

  1. FROM KRAKÓW TO VIENNA

  There is the low-bred and the high-bred. And if the low-bred has the impertinence to come distastefully close, what can he expect but to be bitten?

  —Countess Johanna Franziska von Stoltzenberg-Stoltzenberg (Joan Fontaine) in The Emperor Waltz

  On June 22, 1906, in the Galician village of Sucha Beskidzka, south of Kraków, Eugenia Wilder went into labor with her second child. Her husband, Max, ran a small café at the Sucha railroad station, one of several along the Vienna–Lemberg line. The Wilders didn’t live in Sucha, a tiny nothing of a town. They were there because Max was checking up on business, his wife and infant son, Willie, in tow. They didn’t live much of anywhere, really, though Kraków was more or less their home base. Max was trying to work his fledgling business into something sustainable, and he and his young family had to spend a few days here and a few days there while Max nursed the business along. At the end of June, there happened to be Sucha Beskidzka, where Genia gave birth to another boy. She and Max named him Samuel.

  The Wilders were German-speaking Jews living among Poles and Gypsies in an absurdly overstretched empire run by a dynasty of Roman Catholic Austrians. (After young Samuel grew up and became a famous film director in Hollywood, the world forgot that he and his family used to pronounce their name in German, too. It didn’t start out sounding like the comparative form of wild. Billy’s name used to rhyme with builder, however accented the rhyme may have been. And it began with the sound of a v.) Galicia was poor, peasant country with scattered dirt farms and isolated villages; the locals spoke Polish. The Hapsburgs, seated in imperial splendor well on the other side of the Carpathians, had pocketed an immense swath of land north of the mountains when Poland was partitioned in the late eighteenth century. They called their new trophy Galicia, a Latinate corruption of Halicz, the title of an ancient Hungarian duchy. Along with their vast new territory, the Hapsburgs took on a huge number of new subjects—Poles, Ruthenes, Silesians, Gypsies, Ukrainians, and Jews, the latter constituting about 9 percent of Galicia’s population. Some of the Jews spoke German; some spoke Polish; most knew Yiddish. It was a destitute area, agrarian and superstitious, and outside of Kraków there was little in the way of education and culture. Vestiges of an old szlachta, or gentry, survived, but even the landowners were in tatters. As one historian describes them, “In Galicia even the szlachta
was poor.”

  Eugenia’s middle-class mother had imagined better things for her daughter than this, but then she’d probably imagined a more suitable match than Max Wilder. In the eyes of his wife’s family, Max was a bit of a peasant himself. Like Genia, he was not a dirt-poor Galician. He was, however, a Galician. Max was from Stanislawczyk, much farther to the east, in the part of Galicia dominated by Ruthenes, and the farther east one hailed from, the further down the scale he was thought to be. Across the mountains to the southwest, in Vienna, the social ideals of which Genia’s German-speaking family had adopted, anyone from Galicia was suspect. Max, like many Galician Jews, aspired early on to leave his eastern Galician heritage behind him. He’d been named Hersch Mendel Wilder at birth, late in the spring of 1872, but he soon adopted the regal name Maximilian—to make himself more of an Austro-Hungarian, to fit in with a better class of people. A tall, good-looking young man with clear brown eyes, who tried earnestly to shed the mud and sweat of eastern Galicia in favor of the more dignified and sophisticated west, Max affected a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache to go along with the emperor’s dead brother’s first name.

  Max Wilder had been working as a headwaiter in a Kraków restaurant when he met Eugenia Dittler, a dark-haired, energetic, quick-witted girl in her late teens. She was from Zakopane, a small mountain town ninety kilometers south of Kraków. Her mother owned and operated a resort hotel, the Zent’al, in nearby Nowy Targ, which was the next-to-the-last stop on the railway line that took people into the mountains for some beneficial high-altitude air. The hotel was small, consisting of only nine rooms and a single bathroom, but it was reasonably successful, and Genia’s mother had reason to be proud of it. Genia herself was no simple peasant girl from the mountains. By the time she turned up at Max’s restaurant, she’d already spent five or six years in New York City, where she had lived with her uncle, a jeweler named Reich, and his family on Madison Avenue. Genia’s extended holiday in America was part of her mother’s ongoing effort to raise her standing in life, to expose her to a more refined world than the one into which she was born. Why she went back to Zakopane is unclear. Her father was dead, her mother had remarried a man named Baldinger (who proceeded to widow her a second time), and Genia, having tasted a better future, set her heart on finding her way back to the United States, where she thought she could really get somewhere.