Close-up on Sunset Boulevard Read online

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  contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Voice-Over, 1948

  1. A La Recherche de Norma Desmond

  2. When Queens Collide

  3. The Happiest Couple in Hollywood

  4. Chaz

  5. Who Is Gloria Swanson?

  6. “The Cameras Have Arrived”

  7. The Bedroom of Norma Desmond

  8. That’s Why the Lady Has a Chimp

  9. “Ten Thousand Midnights Ago”

  10. “All Right, Mr. DeMille, I’m Ready for My Close-up”

  11. Chiffon, Velvet, Chinchilla, Tulle, Brocade, Taffeta, Ermine, and Leopard-Printed Crêpe

  12. If It’s a Paramount Picture, It’s the Best Show in Town

  13. Fiasco

  14. The Whole Audience Stood Up and Cheered

  15. And the Winner Isn’t Gloria Swanson

  16. I’ve Got Nobody Floating in My Pool

  17. Boulevard!

  18. “Funny How Gentle People Get with You Once You’re Dead”

  19. Popcorn in Beverly Hills with Nancy

  20. “Buttons and Bows”

  21. Men in Uniform

  22. “We’ll Make Another Picture, and Another Picture”

  23. Sunset Cul-de-sac

  24. Life Upon the Wicked Stage

  25. Fifteen Minutes of Close-ups

  26. A Dethroned Queen

  27. If They Put All the Norma Desmonds on an Island, Which One Would Survive?

  28. Billy Wilder from Noir to Blackout

  29. Lux Perpetua

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Also by Sam Staggs

  Praise for Close-up on Sunset Boulevard

  Copyright

  In memory of Pauline Kael

  (1919–2001)

  About Sunset Boulevard, she wrote:

  The whole enterprise exudes decadence like a stale, exotic perfume. You might not want to smell it every day, but then in 1950 you didn’t get the chance: it was certainly a change from oceans of rosewater, lilies of the San Fernando Valley, and the scrubbed, healthy look.

  No memory of having starred

  Atones for later disregard

  Or keeps the end from being hard.

  —Robert Frost, “Provide Provide”

  So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it a city to die in.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

  Voice-Over, 1948

  Yes, this is Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills, California. The famous restaurant on Rodeo Drive, not far from Sunset Boulevard. Tonight’s a busy night, lots of stars at dinner. The prince himself, Michael Romanoff, has just seated Samuel Goldwyn and party. The mogul and the prince are buddies.

  By the way, Michael Romanoff is no more a prince than Sam Goldwyn is. Mike is really Hershel Geguzin from Poland, a tailor’s son. Or maybe he’s from Lithuania. Anyway, the closest he ever came to the Czar was when Russian soldiers rounded up his relatives. But if he wants to bill himself as Prince Michael, part of the dynasty, nobody cares. After all, everybody in the place is royalty if you don’t look too close.

  Glance around the room. That’s Gable at the bar, talking to Jimmy Stewart. Over there at a corner table by the window, with a new man, the blonde is Lana Turner. Now a little to the left of her, keep turning and who do you see? Jane Russell, Robert Mitchum, Cornel Wilde. Lizabeth Scott. John Huston, Bogart and Bacall. Other nights you’ll see Richard Widmark, Barbara Stanwyck, Eddie Robinson, Mary Astor.

  Now the other way, and take a close look at the booth to the side of the bar. Goldwyn and his wife. They’re with a younger couple, Billy Wilder and his fiancée, Audrey Young. Goldwyn has just said something to Billy in Yiddish, Billy answers in German, and Audrey wants to know what it means. All four of them talking at the same time, when out of the corner of his eye Billy Wilder sees an unsteady old man near their table. The man’s untidy suit has a couple of spots on it and his cuffs are frayed. The white shirt he’s wearing might have been fresh the day before yesterday.

  This old man is very tall in spite of his sagging shoulders. He seems stooped forward to eavesdrop. But a glance at the face tells Billy Wilder the man’s not interested in anything they say at the table. His grayish face looks like worn asphalt, his hair is even grayer, and his nose could double as an umbrella hook.

  Talk and merriment drain from the table. The tall, gray old man sways like a tree in winter, points his long index finger at Goldwyn, and speaks in the courtly tones of the Old South. “Here you are, you son of a bitch.”

  “Drunk,” one of the women mutters.

  “Son of a bitch,” the man declaims to the stricken producer. “Here you are, and I ought to be making pictures, I’m the one—”

  Frances Goldwyn, Samuel’s wife, will not hear another word from this old fool. “Get away from here,” she hisses. “Get away, you silly old man.”

  Kicked by her words, the man lapses into the noise and gaudy elegance of Romanoff’s and is heard from no more. Sam Goldwyn’s face looks as if he has felt the shaky earth wince far below.

  “Do you know him?” demands his wife. “Who the hell is he?”

  “That man,” Goldwyn answers after a long moment of recovery, “was D.W. Griffith.”

  * * *

  This little scene won’t make the columns tomorrow, but a few months from now you’ll read about D.W. Griffith. He’s an old-time movie director and when he dies on July 24, 1948, the papers will run respectful notices. They’ll say he pioneered the art of motion pictures, that he directed hundreds of silents including The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, and that he was washed up even before talkies came in. They’ll mention that he hasn’t directed a picture since 1931, a flop called The Struggle.

  If you drop in at Griffith’s funeral, you’ll have no trouble finding a place to sit. In fact, only half the seats at the Hollywood Masonic Temple will be filled, so you and everyone else gathered outside the auditorium to watch has-been celebrities will be invited in to fill the empty seats. You might find yourself near Lionel Barrymore or Mack Sennett. Or behind Blanche Sweet, Richard Barthelmess, Walter Huston, Raoul Walsh, Mae Marsh, Donald Crisp. If you’re really lucky, maybe you’ll sit next to Mary Pickford or Erich von Stroheim.

  On several of these faces you may detect a sneer directed at two of the honorary pallbearers, Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn. That’s because Griffith’s friends think these two could have given the old man something to keep him busy in his final years. But didn’t.

  There’ll be a eulogy by screenwriter and producer Charles Brackett, who’s president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and never met D.W. Griffith. Brackett’s latest picture, written as usual with Billy Wilder, is A Foreign Affair. Brackett will stand up at the funeral and say, “When you’ve had what he’d had, what you want is the chance to make more pictures, unlimited budgets to play with, complete confidence behind you. What does a man full of vitality care for the honors of the past? It’s the present he wants, and the future. There was no solution for Griffith but a kind of frenzied beating on the barred doors. He lies here, the embittered years forgotten, David Wark Griffith, the Great.”

  A speech that’s rather fine and florid, an
d that in no way resembles the screenplay Brackett and Wilder will soon write, called Sunset Boulevard, about a murder in one of those great big houses, with an old-time movie star involved, one of the biggest. Sunset Boulevard, brutal boulevard, will be their mordant elegy to the silent-picture era. And, by a decree of cross-eyed fate, it will also be the picture that ends the collaboration of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.

  chapter 1

  A La Recherche de Norma Desmond

  The seed of Sunset Boulevard was not necessarily the pathetic story of D.W. Griffith, although that encounter at Romanoff’s and the subsequent funeral must have stirred the psychological sediment of Billy Wilder and of Charles Brackett. No doubt the sere and cautionary case of the broken giant also kicked the psyche of Brackettandwilder, their conjunctive moniker during the years when, according to Wilder, they formed “the happiest couple in Hollywood.”

  In a broader sense, however, Sunset Boulevard was all about has-beens. And about all has-beens. Then, as now, the formerly famous haunted the purlieus of Los Angeles, the only company town in the world whose by-products gnash their teeth in endless hope of resurrection.

  Billy Wilder’s mind was a magnet for such irony. And although in 1948 he was nearing the climax of his artistry as a filmmaker, he had the nerves of an ex-German Jew. The terror and desperation Wilder saw in Hollywood must have jarred memories of Weimar and the rising hysteria he left behind him in the thirties.

  Born in Poland in 1906 and raised in Vienna, Wilder moved to Berlin in 1926, and worked at various film studios, including UFA. In 1933, when Hitler took over Berlin, Wilder escaped to Paris. There he codirected (with Alexander Esway) his first film, Mauvaise Graine, which opened in the summer of 1934. But Billy Wilder didn’t stick around for the premiere. Already, on January 22 of that year, he had wisely sailed for the United States on the Aquitania. Hoping for picture work in America, he landed with slender prospects. “I came here because I didn’t want to be in an oven,” Wilder said many years later.

  In the words of Ed Sikov, Wilder’s most recent biographer, “Billy and [his first wife] Judith eloped to Yuma, Arizona, on December 22, 1936, six months after he married Charles Brackett.” Sikov’s hard-edged assessment of both matches is beyond dispute: “Wilder’s marriage with Judith produced two children and a lot of acrimony. His marriage with Brackett produced a lot of acrimony and eleven of the best, most successful films Paramount ever made.”

  If anyone ever films the Wilder—Brackett marriage, they might almost think of Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont while writing the screenplay. Charles Brackett, of course, wasn’t daft and he was nobody’s gaga sidekick, but he did possess the sort of upper-crust Eastern credentials that, in movies, used to signal “high-class,” “old money,” and “urbane gentleman.” A polished Republican, Brackett seemed, on the surface at least, the antithesis of Wilder, the hyper, street-smart immigrant. Teaming the two writers, as Paramount did, opened up screwball possibilities.

  Wilder was a scamp, while Charles Brackett lived so respectably that, by Hollywood standards, he seemed rather square. The son of a banker, Brackett was born in 1892 in Saratoga Springs, New York. He graduated from Williams College and Harvard Law School. While at Harvard he began writing short stories. Later he wrote several novels. One of these, Weekend, published in 1925, drew the attention of Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker. Ross made Brackett drama critic of the magazine, a post he held from 1926 to 1929.

  Hollywood began buying stories from Charles Brackett in the 1920s, and in 1930 RKO enticed him to go west. Like many writers from the East, he disdained the studio assembly line approach to writing. So he went home. Soon, however, Paramount’s blandishments lured him to Hollywood again, and in 1932 he signed a contract with that studio as a staff writer. Some half dozen scripts followed, not one of them note-worthy, until someone at Paramount had the crazy-brilliant idea of caging Brackett with Wilder.

  The matchmaker in this case was Manny Wolf, story editor and head of the Paramount writers’ department. Perhaps Wolf had heard the old chestnut about putting a typewriter into a room full of monkeys and the probability that eventually they would write Hamlet. And perhaps this was his experimental version of that theory.

  One day, Wolf called Brackett to his office. “Charlie Brackett, meet Billy Wilder,” Wolf said. “From now on you’re a team.” With Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett in the same room there were monkeyshines aplenty, screeching fights and endless chatter, but eventually they did use that typewriter for their own tragical historie, and it became the climax of their career. Only, the prince turned into Norma Desmond, there was something rotten in Hollywood, and a funny thing happened on the way to a comeback.

  A lot of funny things, in fact, and some not funny at all, for on the road to Sunset Boulevard Brackettandwilder created—with help, in some cases, from other typing monkeys—the following films: Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), Midnight (1939), What a Life (1939), Ninotchka (1939), Arise, My Love (1940), Hold Back the Dawn (1941), Ball of Fire (1941), The Major and the Minor (1942), Five Graves to Cairo (1943), Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), The Emperor Waltz (1948), and A Foreign Affair (1948).

  * * *

  Who was the world’s most famous has-been in 1948? At the time of Sunset Boulevard it was surely Greta Garbo, although the term was never applied to her. It didn’t fit. After all, Garbo had left pictures in 1941 of her own volition, and from then until her death in 1990 she could have named her price for a triumphant return to movies at any studio in the world. Garbo, whether working or retired, was always big news.

  Billy Wilder, however, had his own way of beholding, and to his eye Garbo looked like a magnificent remnant of Hollywood in its great years of muteness. Because he was not only a writer but a connoisseur of painting and sculpture, he saw silent pictures not as lacking words but rather as civilization’s newest form of visual art. Garbo’s face, to Wilder as to countless millions, amounted to a work of art, whether silent or speaking. Her enormous will—forsaking the stardom that others lusted for—along with the implied sadness in her beauty, augmented the Garbo legend. Perhaps more than anyone, she embodied the essence of movies. (That was in 1948, when Marilyn Monroe was just a twinkle in Hollywood’s eye.)

  Whether Billy Wilder entertained such elaborate Garbo thoughts or not, we don’t know. But soon after he and Brackett began planning “a new film about an old silent screen star who had a few problems,” Wilder invited Garbo to his house at 704 North Beverly Drive for a drink. He had known her since Ninotchka, the Lubitsch film that he, Brackett, and Walter Reisch wrote at MGM.

  Reisch came to Billy’s house, too, and they told Garbo some of their latest story ideas. Like so many others, they naively thought they might lure her back into pictures. At one point Wilder told Garbo about the death mask he had seen at the Louvre, titled L’Inconnue de la Seine, supposedly the image of an unknown woman drowned in the river. Wilder’s embryonic story had the woman narrating her life in flashback as the picture unfolds. Presumably, she was narrating from her watery grave in the Seine, as William Holden came to narrate Sunset Boulevard in one long flashback from Norma Desmond’s swimming pool. Garbo, of course, was not lured.

  * * *

  Reclusiveness is an essential part of the stereotype of every has-been. Without the disdainful seclusion that has kept her home for twenty years, Norma Desmond would resemble any difficult ex-actress. Her removal from life, however, magnifies the dark allure. A similar removal that occurred in real life impressed Wilder during the writing of Sunset Boulevard.

  Two of Billy’s old friends from Germany, the pioneering director Joe May and his wife, Mia, fled to Hollywood about the same time as Wilder. Unmoored in a strange new land, they spiraled downward into melancholy decline. Joe May was reduced to hack work. Eventually, with financial help from Wilder and others, the Mays opened a restaurant in Los Angeles called the Blue Danube. Mia May, once a star in her husband’s films, now cooked
goulash. But not for long. The restaurant closed soon after it opened. The Mays, broken by failure and shame, locked themselves away and almost never left home.

  Garbo, talking corpses, careers in collapse, and ex-actresses slinging hash—it’s impossible to measure their weight on Wilder and Brackett. It’s equally difficult to pinpoint the moment when Sunset Boulevard emerged in recognizable form, with Gloria Swanson marked forever as the archetype of Has-been, for the picture started out as a comedy with Mae West.

  * * *

  After toying with the idea of a story about a former queen of burlesque, Wilder and Brackett thought of Mae for the lead. But when they propositioned her about starring in this new picture as an old vamp with a dead monkey and a new gigolo, she didn’t go for it.

  Perhaps she recognized herself in Norma Desmond. Mae, too, kept monkeys as pets. When one of them died she grieved inconsolably, missing the premiere of I’m No Angel owing to one such demise. The time she and Garbo spent an evening together, Mae talked nonstop about her favorite subjects, monkeys and musclemen.

  Gigolos? Mae considered them “nice boys” (for gals who lacked what Mae had so much of). She couldn’t see herself, however, paying a man’s upkeep in return for favors, not even in a picture story. Mae, in fact, thought it should be the other way around. Years later Wilder said, “The idea of Mae West was idiotic because we only had to talk to her to find out she thought she was as great, as desirable, as sexy as she had ever been.” Approaching sixty, Mae couldn’t imagine herself as anything less than torrid—onscreen or off. She hadn’t made a picture in years, but Wilder didn’t bring that up.

  A. C. Lyles, a Paramount producer who had known everyone on the lot since he started as office boy to studio founder Adolph Zukor in 1937, pointed out that since Mae West was accustomed to writing her own material, she might also have balked at a script written by others. “She would certainly have wanted to rewrite it,” declared Lyles.