City of Nets (33 page)

Morocco was by now safely under Allied control, but when the air corps flew Hope to Tunisia, the Germans were still staging nightly raids. “All of a sudden a couple of red tracer bullets came pretty close over our heads,” Hope recalled of his effort to escape in a jeep from an attack on Bizerte, “and the MP hollered, ‘Get out and get under something.' For the first time in my life, I wished I was a gopher. . . . The MP kept hollering, ‘Don't just stand there, Hope! Crawl in here!' I said, ‘That's a sewer!' ‘Listen, Mac, you're lucky to get in anywhere at this hour! Don't argue!' . . . Have you ever crawled into a North African sewer? If you have there's nothing I can tell you about it. If you haven't. . . .”

The Allies invaded Sicily that July, and within a week, Hope flew to Palermo to do more shows. Once again, the air raid sirens began to sound. “When I heard the drone of JU-88s, I knew we were in for it,” Hope said. “The docks, which were naturally the target for the raid, were only about two blocks away. And two blocks isn't very far as the bomb flies. . . . They say when you're drowning your whole life flashes before your eyes. . . . With me, it's the same way with bombing. I thought of my first professional tour in vaudeville. . . . A great big hunk of red-hot flak sailed past my window and the Heinies started dive-bombing. . . . I threw up my dinner. . . .”

Hope did several shows at frontline infantry bases in Sicily, then flew back to Tunisia for another appearance in Bône (Hope did more than two hundred fifty shows in all during this three-month, twenty-thousand-mile tour), and there somebody in the back of the auditorium shouted: “Draft dodger! Why aren't you in uniform?” Stung, hurt, Hope remained the consummate professional. “Don't you know there's a war on?” he shouted back. “A guy could get hurt!”

 

Billy Wilder, who had once been a kind of ballroom gigolo in Berlin, an
Eintänzer
ready and available to dance with the matrons who came to the regular
thé dansant
at the Eden Hotel, wanted to make a musical, a stunning, spectacular musical. Then he saw Rita Hayworth in
Cover Girl.
“I realized,” he told an interviewer, “that no matter how good my musical might be, most people would say it was no
Cover Girl.
This
Double Indemnity
looked like a better chance to set Hollywood back on its heels. And I like to set Hollywood back on its heels.”

This
Double Indemnity,
as Wilder called it, was something that derived from an old newspaper story. Back at the dawn of time, back even before Arthur Krock first arrived in Washington to cover the administration of William Howard Taft for the
Louisville Times,
a terrible thing happened at the printing plant in Louisville. There was an ad in the paper for women's underwear, as Krock recounted the episode to a young writer on the
New York World,
and it was supposed to say, “If these sizes are too big, take a tuck in them.” But as Krock was reading through that night's first edition, he saw that somebody had changed the first letter in the word “tuck.”

Krock ordered the ad changed for the next edition, then summoned the printer and demanded an explanation. The printer couldn't provide one. He couldn't understand how such an embarrassing accident could have happened. Krock remained suspicious. Two days later, he went and interrogated the printer again, in the interrogatory manner that would daunt future presidents and secretaries of state when Krock became Washington bureau chief for the
New York Times.
The printer confessed. “Mr. Krock,” he said, trying finally to explain, “you do nothing your whole life but watch for something like that happening, so as to head it off,
and then,
Mr. Krock, you catch yourself watching for chances to do it.”

The young writer to whom Krock told this story, James M. Cain, was fascinated by the idea of a young man yearning to commit the one crime he is responsible for preventing, using his specialized knowledge to violate the social contract that assigned him that specialized knowledge. Cain had once been an insurance salesman, and his father had been an insurance executive, so as Krock's story floated around in his mind over the course of many years, it acquired a characteristically Cainian form: insurance fraud. And since Cain's plots generally revolved around lust and murder, the half-remembered tale of the hapless printer in Louisville eventually became the story of an insurance salesman who meets an attractive woman who wants to have her husband insured and then killed. And only the salesman can teach her how to commit the perfect crime against her husband and his own employers.

Cain, who had been living in Hollywood since 1931, writing intermittently and unsuccessfully for various studios, banged out
Double Indemnity
as a magazine serial, hoping that the serial could then be sold as a movie. He was dismayed when several major magazines rejected it. To his publisher, Alfred Knopf, he described it as “a piece of tripe [that] will never go between covers while I live.” The Hollywood possibilities seemed somewhat better. Cain's agent, James Geller, had sent a mimeographed typescript to five major studios, and they all said they were interested in the story if the Hays Office would clear it. After all, Cain's first novel,
The Postman Always Rings Twice,
had been a major best-seller in 1934, but the Hays Office had blocked M-G-M's efforts to turn it into a movie. When Geller finally telephoned Cain with the news about
Double Indemnity,
it was as bad as possible. “The Hays Office report on that story just came in,” Geller said. “It starts out: Under no circumstances, in no way, shape or form. . . . Want to hear the rest?”

Cain's New York agent eventually sold
Double Indemnity
to
Liberty
for five thousand dollars as an eight-part serial that ran through much of 1936. Like most such things, it appeared and then disappeared, and it was not until 1943 that Cain persuaded Knopf to publish a collection of three of his magazine fictions under the title
Three of a Kind.
Two were “The Embezzler” and “Career in C Major,” and the third was the story that Cain had said would “never go between covers while I live.”
Three of a Kind
did quite well, received respectable reviews, and began circulating around the Hollywood studios.

Billy Wilder, according to Cain's version of the story, couldn't find his secretary one morning. She wasn't at her desk, and he kept asking where she was. Another secretary finally said, “I think she is still in the ladies' room reading that story.”

“What story?” Wilder asked.

At that point, the secretary emerged with the bound galleys of Cain's
Three of a Kind.
Wilder, recognizing the ultimate proof of popular appeal, took the galleys away from her and carried them home. Wilder was still near the beginning of the series of pictures that would establish him as one of the great filmmakers of the 1940's. As a writer for other people, he had reached his peak in
Ninotchka,
and having determined to direct his own stories, he had begun well with
The Major and the Minor,
and now he had just finished
Five Graves to Cairo,
with his preposterously marvelous casting of Erich von Stroheim as Marshal Rommel. (Wilder loved to tell of his first encounter with Stroheim, the son of a Jewish hatmaker, who had somehow managed to convince the world that he was both a Prussian nobleman and an artistic genius. “You were always ten years ahead of your time,” said Wilder, obsequiously, to the director of
Greed.
“Twenty, Mr. Wilder, twenty,” said Stroheim.)

Wilder had taken a different route: Americanization. Having arrived in Hollywood unable to speak English, less than a decade earlier, Wilder was now an encyclopedia of American slang, baseball statistics, Tin Pan Alley trivia, everything that a refugee from Galicia would consider emblematic of his new homeland. This was a matter not just of factual detail but of style. Billy Wilder saw in southern California things that no Californian could see, things that only an ex-Berliner could consider self-evident.

Paramount bought
Double Indemnity
for Wilder for fifteen thousand dollars, but Wilder's regular collaborator, Charles Brackett, refused to work on the script. He said Cain's story was disgusting. Wilder didn't care. He hoped to get Cain himself to work on the script, but Cain was under contract to Fox, working on a treatment of
Western Union
for Fritz Lang. Then Wilder's producer at Paramount, Joe Sistrom, suggested a relatively obscure detective story writer named Raymond Chandler. Wilder had never heard of him, so Sistrom gave him a copy of Chandler's first novel,
The Big Sleep,
published four years earlier, and Wilder was captivated. Paramount telegraphed Chandler's publisher, Knopf, to find out where he was—and was surprised, of course, to find that he was living right there in West Hollywood, in a little Spanish-style house on Drexel Avenue.

Chandler was a strange and crotchety man, an American by birth but obsessed with the fact that he had learned Latin and Greek at an English public school, Dulwich, and that he had therefore acquired a degree of gentility that he thought nobody in Los Angeles could possibly understand. A former businessman, an executive for the Dabney Oil Syndicate, Chandler was also an alcoholic, disastrously dependent on whiskey, and oddly dependent, too, on a wife eighteen years his senior, whom he had not dared to marry until the death of his disapproving mother. Chandler had been fired by Dabney for alcoholism in 1932, and so he found himself, at the age of forty-four, unemployed and unemployable in the depths of the Depression in southern California. He began eking out a living by producing detective stories, written in the tough manner of Dashiell Hammett but so luxuriantly overdone that S. J. Perelman was ultimately inspired to murderous parody: “From an open window beyond the bed, a roscoe coughed, ‘Ka-chow!' . . . A brunette jane was lying there, half out of the mussed covers . . . dead as vaudeville.” Still, Chandler doggedly kept writing:
The Big Sleep
(1939) was followed by
Farewell, My Lovely
(1940),
The High Window
(1942),
The Lady in the Lake
(1943).

Summoned to Paramount for a story conference, Chandler had to confess that he didn't know where the studio was. Then came a disastrous encounter with Wilder. Chandler, by now in his fifties, was wearing a tweed jacket with leather-patched elbows, a button-down shirt, and a striped tie, and he smoked a pipe. Wilder was deeply suspicious. Wilder himself wore a baseball cap and waved a riding crop whenever he spoke. Chandler was equally suspicious. He truculently announced that he would have to be paid $150 a week. Sistrom, the producer, said Paramount had expected to pay him $750. In fact, Sistrom felt it his moral duty to call in an agent, H. N. Swanson, to protect Chandler from both Paramount and himself.

Chandler, who had never before written anything for the movies, said it might take him two or even three weeks to finish a script of
Double Indemnity.
Wilder, who was accustomed to spending months on such a project, provided Chandler with one of his own scripts,
Hold Back the Dawn,
as a specimen of how such things were done, and then awaited the results. Chandler returned a month later with a script filled with impressive technical instructions like “
DOLLY IN FOR CU.
” Wilder read the script, while Chandler sat there waiting for approval, and then threw the manuscript at him. It hit him in the chest and fell to the floor. “This is shit, Mr. Chandler,” said Wilder. Chandler was speechless. Wilder insisted, then, that they work in the only way Wilder knew how to work, “We are going to write this picture
together.
We are going to lock ourselves in this room and write a screenplay. It is going to take us a long time. You will be on salary even if it takes a year to write this picture.”

It was a kind of torture. Wilder respected Chandler's talent but yearned for some kind of respect in return. Chandler scorned him. Yet Wilder was the one who knew how to write movies. Working with Wilder, Chandler wrote to a friend, “was an agonizing experience and has probably shortened my life.” Wilder was no less bitter. “He gave me more aggravation than any writer I ever worked with,” he told an interviewer. Yet they labored together for months, hating the collaboration, hating each other. They talked, they argued, they imagined all the various ways to film
Double Indemnity.

Wilder wanted to follow Cain's novella as closely as possible. Chandler insisted that this approach wouldn't work. Chandler despised Cain's writing in general. “James Cain—Faugh,” he wrote to Knopf, with a vehemence that suggested a bit of jealousy. “Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.” More specifically, Chandler was convinced that Cain's jazzy dialogue wouldn't work on the screen. It sounded like “a bad high school play,” Chandler argued. “The dialogue oversaid everything and when spoken sounded quite colorless and tame.” He insisted on this judgment even in a conference with Cain himself, and Cain, who never seemed to be able to write successfully for the movies, docilely acquiesced.

So the struggles went on. Chandler puffed on his pipe. Wilder went often to the bathroom, not to urinate but just to escape from Chandler. In Wilder's absences, Chandler would take a pint of bourbon from his briefcase and drink. Finally, Wilder would return to the smoke-filled office and cry out, “For Chrissakes, Ray, open a window.” Chandler became filled with alcoholic anger at being ordered around. One day, when the sun came pouring through the venetian blinds, Wilder gave one order too many. “Go and fix that, will you, Ray?” he said. Chandler got up and walked out of the office, walked out of Paramount, and went home. Three days later, he turned up in Sistrom's office and said he wanted to quit the whole project. By this time, he had a long list of grievances against Wilder, all written out in quiet fury on a series of pages of legal-sized yellow paper. He demanded, among other things, that Wilder apologize. Sistrom summoned Wilder to his office, and Wilder came. Wilder apologized. Sistrom apologized.