City of Nets (83 page)

But the accounts were not yet settled. The House Un-American Activities Committee had not forgotten Thomas Mann's support for the Hollywood Ten, or his statement comparing their case to the first days of Nazism in Germany. The United States consulate in Munich had warned him not to go to East Germany. Now, in this same spring in which Heinrich died, Mann was scheduled to deliver an address at the Library of Congress on “The Years of My Life,” which was to deal with America's “mindless hysteria” about communism. HUAC charged that the Library of Congress was “infested with Communists,” and the library thought it would be best to cancel Mann's speech. If Washington was succumbing to “mindless hysteria,” so was California. The Beverly Wilshire Hotel refused to rent a dining room to a political group that was to be addressed by Mann.

Mann's sense of outrage boiled over in his letters. “A good many people here are on their way to becoming martyrs—namely, all those who oppose the destruction of democracy, a process which is in full swing under the guise of protecting that democracy. Doesn't it all strike you as dreadfully familiar . . . ?” And again: “This land of pioneers and liberty is at present supporting the old, worn-out, rotten and corrupt forces throughout the world.” And again: “The ‘cold war' is bringing physical and moral ruin upon America; that is why I am against it—and not ‘against America.' If the Mundt-Nixon Bill should be passed, I shall
flee
—head over heels, together with my seven honorary doctorates.”

Congress was not opposed to the idea. Just as Senator Nixon endorsed the expulsion of Charlie Chaplin, just as Senator Johnson endorsed the expulsion of Ingrid Bergman, Representative Donald L. Jackson of Los Angeles inserted into the
Congressional Record
an article in
The New Leader
that described Mann as “one of the world's foremost apologists for Stalin and company.” Congressman Jackson added his own view that “our eminent guest within the gates of what we Americans consider to be a land of liberty and justice will do well to lard his obvious sympathies for communism and communists with a few strips of common sense and common gratitude. Mr. Mann should remember that guests who complain about the fare at the table of their hosts are seldom invited to another meal.”

Mann was engaged, in these portentous times, in an engagingly frivolous project, the completion of
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.
He had put it aside back in 1911 to write
Death in Venice,
and now, after a lapse of more than forty years, he began writing again on the same page that marked the ending of the original manuscript. How much could he have cared about what Congressman Jackson thought was due from “guests . . . at the table of their hosts”? “The sick, tense atmosphere of this country oppresses me,” Mann wrote to a friend, and to another he expressed a yearning “to go back to the old earth.” This could never be the bloodstained earth of Germany, but Mann needed a home where the language was German. He abandoned Pacific Palisades in the summer of 1952—“I have no desire to rest my bones in this soulless soil, which I owe nothing, and which knows nothing of me”—and flew to his last exile, in Zurich.

 

The end: Gloria Swanson went gloriously mad in
Sunset Boulevard.

12
Farewells

(1950)

G
loria Swanson was attending the coronation of King George VI when she got a telegram from Hollywood saying that Harry Cohn wanted her there immediately to sign a contract to appear in something called
The Second Mrs. Draper.
So she hurried back, only to find that Cohn had changed his mind. “I don't want you to play a stepmother, an older woman involved with a young guy,” he said. “I want you in a very sympathetic role.” Cohn agreed to put Miss Swanson on salary while his lieutenants searched for a new project for her. Somebody suggested a play, which was now owned by David Selznick, that Tallulah Bankhead had recently done on Broadway, and Miss Swanson liked that. It had a great death scene. To make sure of Cohn's support, Miss Swanson insisted on going to his home and reading aloud to him the whole twenty-five-page scenario. She was in tears when she finished, and Cohn said she was wonderful, but he wanted to wait until the next day to telephone her with his final decision.

She stayed home all morning to wait for the call. Then the phone rang.

“It's Harry Cohn, Gloria,” said Harry Cohn. “The answer is no.”

“But why, Harry?” asked Miss Swanson, who said later that she began to feel like screaming.

“Because if David Selznick wants to sell it,” said Cohn, with impeccable Hollywood logic, “that means it can't be any good.”

Miss Swanson could not remember exactly what she said next, only that “deep inside me a dam burst.” She began shouting curses and denunciations such as Harry Cohn had probably never heard in all his years of despotism. “I flew into the greatest rage of my life,” she said. “I told him exactly what I thought of him and all the other vulgar boors in the studios who wouldn't know a good story if it bit them. . . . I screamed and swore and called him everything I could think of. I only stopped, exhausted, when I realized that I had pulled the thirty-foot extension cord out of the wall.”

So Miss Swanson canceled her contract with Columbia and moved to New York. The death scene that Harry Cohn had denied her was eventually played by Bette Davis, in the very successful movie
Dark Victory.
Then, as in those traditional shots of calendar pages turning in the wind, a decade passed. Miss Swanson's phone rang in New York. “I suddenly got a call from somebody at Paramount,” she told an interviewer, “—my old studio, you know, the one you might say I built—and some nauseating little creep said they wanted me to fly out to the coast at once—
at once,
mind you—and take a screen test for the role in this movie. Test for a part in a picture? Me? Test? I was revolted. Never made a test in my life. Then Mr. Wilder called. I was rude to him. I said what the hell do you have to test me for? You want to see if I'm alive, do you?”

Billy Wilder was used to such things, to the extent that anyone ever gets used to such things. He had last seen Gloria Swanson when she was making a Jerome Kern confection called
Music in the Air
(1934), and he was barely surviving in a cubicle in the Chateau Marmont, with a Murphy bed and a hot plate.
Music in the Air
was being directed by his friend Joe May, and he used to hang around the set, and he finally got a partial screenwriting credit, his first in America. There is no indication that Miss Swanson ever met him, or if she did, ever remembered him.

Billy Wilder, of course, had become very big, considerably more so than Miss Swanson. (“You used to be big,” Wilder wrote the casual insult for Bill Holden to throw at her, thus setting up the most famous line she ever spoke: “I am big. It's the pictures that got small.”)
Double Indemnity
had proven Wilder's gifts as a director as well as a writer, and it had made enough money to give him a very free hand at Paramount. He had used every bit of that freedom in making one of his most brilliant films,
The Lost Weekend.
Y. Frank Freeman, the head of production, was out of town when Buddy DeSylva authorized the purchase of Charles Jackson's bleak novel about an alcoholic's pursuit of self-destruction. When Freeman returned, he announced the only terms on which he would permit the film: “Over my dead body.” But Barney Balaban, the company president in faraway New York, okayed the project, so Wilder went ahead. The idea was important to him. He had recently witnessed, experienced, survived the alcoholism of Raymond Chandler. His regular partner, Charles Brackett, had an even more painful knowledge of the subject: His wife was an alcoholic, and so was his daughter, who died in a drunken fall downstairs. Indeed, the staid and respectable Brackett seemed to attract Hollywood's literary alcoholics. He had nursed Scott Fitzgerald through several binges; he nursed Bob Benchley, and Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett.

What a grim subject, and how grimly Wilder filmed it, on location in New York: P. J. Clarke's saloon, the shadows under the Third Avenue El, the nighttime fear in the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital. The famous sequence of the unshaven Ray Milland lurching up Third Avenue, trying to hock his typewriter at some pawnshop and not realizing that the pawnshops were all closed for Yom Kippur—that was all filmed on one Sunday, with Milland actually trekking from 55th Street to 110th Street while Wilder's camera followed him from inside a bakery truck. And then the scene of Milland screaming in the terror of delirium tremens as an imaginary bat pursued an imaginary mouse in the darkness of his apartment—had anyone, in all the years of Hollywood's fascination with the macabre, ever filmed a scene of greater horror?

Laughter was what greeted the preview of
The Lost Weekend
in Santa Barbara, laughter and giggles and cards that said the movie was disgusting. Y. Frank Freeman triumphantly decreed that this depressing film should be shelved, abandoned, killed. There was even a report that Frank Costello, the gangster, acting on behalf of the liquor industry, would pay Paramount five million dollars for the negative so that it could be destroyed. But after about six months of delay, Balaban decided that it was a waste of money to make movies and then shelve them, so he ordered
The Lost Weekend
released in the fall of 1945. It got marvelous reviews; it also won Wilder his first Academy Award as director and another as co-screenwriter.

In this time of triumph, Wilder became afflicted with a touch of megalomania. Shooting
The Emperor Waltz
in Canada's Jasper National Park, he decided that the pine trees didn't suit his purposes, so he spent twenty thousand dollars to have pine trees shipped in from California and planted just where he wanted them. Then he had four thousand daisies shipped in and planted just where he wanted them. Then he decided that he didn't like the color of the daisies, so he had them all sprayed with blue paint. While he was at it, he had all the roads in the area repainted ocher. Then he decided that he wanted an island in the middle of Lake Leach, so he had one built out of oil drums, covered with earth and planted with flowers. That island alone cost ninety thousand dollars.
The Emperor Waltz
(1948) earned all the money back and made a handsome profit as well, but it was a dull movie, hardly a Wilder movie at all.

Real Wilder movies were hard and cynical, dedicated to the principle that every man had his price, and every woman too. In his earlier days, Wilder had been greatly influenced by Ernst Lubitsch, though his misanthropy was tempered by Lubitsch's lighthearted romanticism. If Ninotchka lost her austere principles in hedonistic Paris, she lost them to silk stockings and champagne and love. But Lubitsch suffered a severe heart attack in 1944, in the middle of filming
A Royal
Scandal,
and that changed him. “The heart attack . . . demoralized him, and he lived in terror of another one,” said Otto Preminger, who had taken over and completed
A Royal Scandal.
“One night at a small dinner party in my house he got up after the first course and asked me to take him home at once. ‘I'm dying,' he said. ‘Please call my doctor.' It turned out to be nothing but a mild indigestion.”

One of Lubitsch's great ambitions—it is hard to imagine such a yearning in Billy Wilder—was to film
Der Rosenkavalier.
There were problems about studio financing, about copyrights, about everything, but Lubitsch persisted. Marlene Dietrich, who inevitably became involved in such things, thought she had found him the perfect romantic hero, and she wanted everyone to come and admire her discovery, Gérard Philipe. This was in November of 1947, when Hollywood was writhing in the aftermath of the HUAC hearings in Washington, and so it was a splendid time to think about something else, like Philipe's great performance in a great new French film,
Le Diable au Corps.
All kinds of people came to the special screening for Lubitsch at the home of William Wyler. Miss Dietrich was there, of course, and Billy Wilder, and Preminger, and even Mike Romanoff, but Lubitsch himself was unaccountably missing. He had been taking a shower that afternoon, when the new heart attack that he had been dreading struck him down and killed him.

The other restraining influence on Billy Wilder was Charles Brackett, who shared Wilder's love of witty dialogue but shared with him almost nothing else. He disliked, in fact, many of the essential Wilder qualities—the misanthropy, the sense of the macabre, the cruelty, the sheer wildness. Brackett had disapproved so strongly of
Double Indemnity
that he refused to have anything to do with it, but he knew that his collaborations with Wilder resulted in scripts better than either of them could have written on his own. And since Brackett acted as producer while Wilder directed, they enjoyed a freedom almost unknown in Hollywood. The only people they had to fight were each other.

It was originally Brackett's idea to write a comedy about an aging star of the silent movies and her efforts to revive her career, but neither Brackett nor Wilder could figure out what to do with the idea, how to turn it into a story. They happened to be talking about the problem one day with a young Time-Life reporter named D. M. Marshman, and he proposed a solution. “He suggested a relationship between the silent movie star and a young man,” Brackett said, “she living in the past, refusing to believe her days as a star are gone and holing up in one of those run-down, immense mansions. We saw the young man as a screenwriter, as a nice guy, maybe from the Middle West, a man who can't make the grade in Hollywood and who is really down on his luck.” Wilder and Brackett liked the idea so much that they recruited Marshman to join them in writing the script. The next key idea was Wilder's. “Suppose,” he said, “the old dame shoots the boy.”

There are several ways of interpreting
Sunset Boulevard
as an autobiographical work. Wilder had once been a hired dancer and escort in a Berlin hotel, so the embarrassments of a gigolo, such as they are, were familiar to him. On the other hand, he had just divorced his wife and was now involved with a much younger woman, a singer, so he also knew the torments of being in love with someone of a very different age.
Sunset Boulevard
is about all of that: self-consciousness, infatuation, shame, anguish, incongruity, obsession, absurdity, and love's refusal to accept any of those things. Wilder had also decided, even before the making of this film, to end his long partnership with Brackett, and
Sunset Boulevard
is about that too, about irreconcilability and parting.

But
Sunset Boulevard
is also very much about Hollywood, about Hollywood power and Hollywood imagery, about its worship of youth and its worship of its own past. (Because of this, Wilder insisted on keeping everything secret. No script was shown to anyone. The project was known only under a dummy title, “A Can of Beans.”) As his main location, Wilder had to find a ruined Hollywood palace for his movie queen to reign in, and since nothing in the real Hollywood could be sufficiently palatial, or sufficiently ruined, Wilder had to create the Frankensteinian castle of his imagining. He found a Renaissance-style mansion at the corner of Wilshire and Crenshaw boulevards, which had been built in 1924 by William Jenkins, a former consul in Mexico, for $250,000. Jenkins had abandoned the place after living there for just a year, and it had then stood vacant for eleven years before being bought by J. Paul Getty, the oil man. When Getty was divorced by his second wife, she got the house, and now she was willing to rent it to Paramount, on one condition. Paramount wanted to build a swimming pool, and if Mrs. Getty didn't like it, the studio would have to remove it.

Paramount built the pool (Mrs. Getty liked it), and it built a lot of other things as well. It put stained-glass windows in the front hall and a pipe organ in the living room. It also installed heavy velvet curtains, and palm trees in the conservatory, and dozens of framed portraits of Miss Swanson. The same procedures applied, on a somewhat smaller scale, to the grand automobile that Wilder felt a silent-movie queen should have. The antique Isotta Fraschini limousine that he rented for five hundred dollars a week was a marvel in itself, but he spent several thousand dollars more in having it upholstered in leopard skin and equipped with a gold telephone for his star to talk to her chauffeur. The chauffeur himself was an Isotta Fraschini among actors, and among the directors of Wilder's youth, Erich von Stroheim. “Erich didn't know how to drive, which humiliated him,” Miss Swanson remarked of her chauffeur, “but he acted the scene, and the action of driving, so completely that he was exhausted after each take, even though the car was being towed by ropes the whole while.”

As so often happened, Wilder seemed to stumble onto his brilliant cast by a series of accidents. Just as
Double Indemnity
had been saved by the fact that George Raft was too stupid to accept the leading role,
Sunset Boulevard
was saved by the fact that Wilder's first choice as his heroine was immensely vain. Mae West professed to be shocked by Wilder's proposition. At fifty-five, she claimed that she was much too young to play a star of silent movies. Wilder then asked Mary Pickford, and she was willing, but she wanted the role greatly enlarged. Wilder ducked out. Then he asked Pola Negri, and she, like Mae West, thought she was too young to play a woman of fifty. George Cukor, the director, was the one who finally suggested Gloria Swanson for the role of Norma Desmond and even persuaded her to do a screen test to get it.