Close-up on Sunset Boulevard Read online

  Turned loose on the script, would Mae have kept the famous lines? Imagine the hip wiggling, the eye rolling, and the suggestive slant she’d give to “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” From Mae’s mouth, “I’m ready for my close-up” wouldn’t be addressed to DeMille but to a young stud, and she’d make it clear she didn’t mean a camera shot.

  Wilder was right; she would have turned Sunset Boulevard into “a kind of Laurel and Hardy picture.” For starters, she didn’t take Hollywood seriously enough to convey Norma Desmond’s clawing desperation. Arriving from New York in the early thirties, Mae told reporters: “I’m not a little girl in a big town. I’m a big girl in a little town.” Kidding the movies, kidding sex, Mae West refined the shtick she had derived from the rowdy ribaldry of burlesque.

  Nor had Mae appeared in silent pictures. Silents—the source of Norma Desmond’s melodramatic posturing—were alien to Mae’s brand of comedy. Silent film was the wrong medium to express comic horniness, and Mae was always comically horny. She was smart to wait for talkies, since they conveyed the adenoidal innuendos and the Brooklyn double entendres of her acting style. The only thing Mae West had in common with Norma Desmond was audacity. Filming Myra Breckinridge (1970), her first movie in twenty-seven years, Mae declared: “I’m not making a comeback. I never went away.”

  * * *

  “We needed a passé star who has gone down the tubes,” Wilder said, recalling the hunt for Norma Desmond. “And the reason we needed a real passé star to play her was because it’s very difficult to find a woman in her sixties, let us say, who is undiscovered—where was she until sixty? It would be hard to believe she was ever a big star. So we went after one who had been big.”

  Next stop, Mary Pickford. Wilder sums it up in a sentence: “Mr. Brackett and I went to see her at Pickfair, but she was too drunk—she was not interested.” Pickford biographer Scott Eyman gives a different version. According to him, “Pickford said she adored the script … but she demanded a major structural alteration: The screenwriter/gigolo must be made completely subordinate to Norma Desmond; there must be no question about who was to be the star of the picture.”

  The same biographer offers a glimpse of Pickford in retirement that evokes Norma Desmond’s Chaplin imitations and the bridge parties for her old friends, the silent movie “Waxworks”: “She would throw parties for … Constance Collier, D. W. Griffith, Dorothy and Lillian Gish.… At these parties, Mary would offer an after-dinner turn, a scene between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, with Pickford playing both parts.”

  chapter 2

  When Queens Collide

  Next, Pola Negri flitted across the joint mind of Brackettandwilder. The Polish-born Negri possessed a mysterious background befitting Norma Desmond and her ilk, and by the late 1940s she, too, lived in seclusion. Several contradictory versions of this approach have been told, making it unclear whether the team actually offered Negri the role or only talked about it. The upshot, however—assuming that contact actually was made—resulted in the sputtered refusal of the proud, forgotten star to become food for vultures.

  Little is known of Pola Negri, or perhaps the problem is that too much is known. At one time, however, people knew a great deal about her, or thought they did. Still, the very first question remains unsettled after a hundred years: was she the daughter of a down-at-heels Polish noblewoman and a Slovak tinsmith, or did a Gypsy violinist beget her on a peasant maiden as his caravan passed through the Polish town of Lipno? And did the conception of Barbara Apolonia Chalupiec (a surname which, when pronounced, sounds like a sneeze) take place in 1894, 1896, 1897, or 1899?

  Like her younger neighbors from the country next door—Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda Gabor—Pola Negri air-brushed her past and took the first sleeper car out of Warsaw in the direction of stardom. In 1917 she appeared on the Berlin stage in a Max Reinhardt production. This success brought her to the attention of Lubitsch, who starred her in The Eyes of the Mummy and Carmen in 1918, and in other pictures later on.

  Arriving in Hollywood in 1923, Negri found the throne of Paramount occupied by Gloria Swanson, a mere commoner. “That’s Countess Pola to you,” the foreign woman might have informed Swanson if the two detested one another as much as the studio’s publicity mill prodded them to. Pola would have been half-right, for she had shed her husband, Count Eugene Dambski, only recently, a little before her advent in the Kingdom of Make Believe.

  The crisis of precedence was solved when Swanson married Henri, Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye, in 1925—only to be unsolved two years later when Pola married Prince Serge Mdivani, who claimed royal blood from the ancient lineage of Georgia, Stalin’s homeland. Prince Serge was, above all, a royal pain, and so was his brother David, who for a time functioned as the husband of silent star Mae Murray. A biographer once dubbed them “million-dollar studs,” referring to the average amount paid by a rich woman to divorce one of them. It was sometimes whispered that the Mdivanis grew up far from any palace, on a sheep farm in the old country.

  Between husbands La Negri carried on panting affairs with Chaplin and Valentino. When the great Latin lover died in 1926, she swooned for the cameras in her $3,000 mourning outfit. Despite her passion schedule, she found time to star in Bella Donna, The Cheat, Lily of the Dust, Flower of Night, and other films equally florid. Her perfumed acting matched the aroma of the titles, for on screen Negri did everything that Swanson did not do. She overacted, chewed the scenery, lolled on luxurious beds, flung herself about on divans, and flared her nostrils. To rev up her emotional heat, Pola Negri demanded that the floor of her dressing room be strewn with fresh orchid petals.

  For recreation, she strolled up and down Sunset Boulevard with her pet leopard on a leash.

  Paramount, like London in the sixteenth century, had one queen too many. Which one would reign, and which one lose her head? That question led to the affair of the cats.

  While it is an established fact that Pola walked a leopard (or was it a tiger, after all, as a few reports insist?), she reputedly suffered from ailurophobia. Only a specialist in psychiatry can say whether fear of the house cat excludes or encompasses fear of its fiercer relative. Other versions of the story abound. No, no, they insist, Gloria Swanson and not Pola Negri hated cats and so Pola rounded up a multiplicity of the creatures and unleashed the disgruntled felines in Gloria’s dressing room (or possibly the set of her current picture). Swanson, ill and terrified, retreated to her mansion.

  In her autobiography, Memoirs of a Star, Negri wrote that “every unkind thing that was said about me was attributed to Gloria Swanson, so that the Paramount publicists could keep interest high in our imaginary fight.” She admits to being superstitious about cats and adds that Swanson adored them. Someone released “a herd of felines” on the set her first day of work at the studio, and a black cat indeed raced in front of her. “I fled back inside,” Pola recalled, and sent word that she could not work because “it would be fatal to start the picture today.”

  Swanson called the feud rumors “pure nonsense.” In an attempt to squelch them, she gave a dinner party to which she invited Pola, Charlie Chaplin, and several others. Since Swanson didn’t allow photographers in her house, no one snapped a picture of the two queens together. “So far as the world knew,” Swanson mused, “instead of sitting down to a fancy dinner, Pola Negri and I had spent that night dreaming up hateful things to do to each other.”

  The decline of Pola Negri began not long after the death of Valentino. Perhaps the public found her histrionic keening out of control. Or maybe she simply ran out of flamboyance and had no solid acting talent to fall back on. Sound might have done her in if mawkishness hadn’t, for her accent remained as pungent as her emotional displays.

  Negri left Hollywood and returned to Europe, where she made films in several countries during the thirties. One of these, Mazurka, filmed in Germany in 1935, became Hitler’s favorite picture. Rumors of a romance between Pola and the Führer sent her ballistic. She sued the French magazine Pour Vous for printing the rumor, and collected a bundle. Her wardrobe mistress discounted the Nazi romance. “Miss Negri is herself a dictator,” she said. “She would never take orders from Hitler.”

  During the war Pola lived in New York. Maggie Lewis, a former actress, recalled meeting her there in the midforties. “She had an Addams Family look,” Lewis said. “The hair was dyed black and the skin was dead white. She had that old silent-screen look.” One day Lewis asked, “You worked under Lubitsch, didn’t you, Miss Negri?” Lewis imitates the accent: “Did I vork under Lubitsch? I vorked under Lubitsch—and Lubitsch vorked under me.” (According to Lewis, it may or may not mean what it suggests.)

  Pola Negri appeared in no films between 1943 and 1964, when she made a comeback in The Moon-Spinners with Hayley Mills. Pola remembered how to be a star, and in the picture she made a star’s entrance—“sitting in an ornate chair with its back to the viewer, with only her hand visible. At first glimpse, she is busily cleaning her jewelry, dipping a large diamond necklace into a glass of champagne and then scrubbing it with a little brush. She wears gold brocade and a mink stole. Her thick black hair is arranged in a simple pageboy, with an elaborate braided chignon on top.”

  That entrance was also her exit. Demand was small for elderly ladies who looked like Vampira crossed with Marilyn Manson. Pola Negri settled in San Antonio, Texas, where she lived in peaceful seclusion until her death in 1987.

  Every gossip I know descended on me with the information that in San Antonio, Negri spent the last twenty-five years of her life with a wealthy lesbian lover. True or false? Written confirmation proved elusive. Even the archgossip, Axel Madsen, in his cultish book The Sewing Circle: Hollywood’s Greatest Secret—Female Stars Who Loved Other Women, holds his tongue. He supplies a mere tidbit from Tallulah Bankhead, who supposedly called Negri “a lying lesbo.” The context of Bankhead’s remark remains obscure.

  David Shipman, however, in The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years, recounted a telltale anecdote. Writing in the seventies, when sexual secrets of the stars were still discussed through gauze, Shipman nevertheless said a mouthful: “Pola Negri later retired to San Antonio with a friend, a Texas heiress … and made headlines some years later when the woman married and she threatened to sue—but she didn’t; soon after, the heiress divorced and the ladies were reunited.”

  chapter 3

  The Happiest Couple in Hollywood

  As the year 1950 approached, the flamboyant myths of Hollywood ripened, unharvested, in the sun. For more than fifty years a great glamorous divinity—in effect, the New World’s technological metamorphosis of Greek and Roman deities—had created and destroyed, battled monsters, reveled and sorrowed, raped, ravaged, wept, and loved. These Californian gods and goddesses, sweeping in from every corner of the globe, brought on their wings more than jolly new entertainments or a revised pagan cult. Already, in just a half century, they had restructured the desires and principles of entire civilizations. In homage to this pantheon, Celebrity was now heralded as the fairest grace.

  So far, however, no local Hesiod or Ovid had collected and codified the stunning stories, the fabulous exploits of movieland Olympus. There had been vignettes, meaning sanitized movies about the movies, with stars playing stars, but these pictures amounted to little more than industry PR. They left out the cruelty and the rock-bottom heartbreak.

  In their book Hollywood’s Hollywood, film historians Rudy Behlmer and Tony Thomas trace the fascination of behind-the-scenes stories to 1908, when Vitagraph, a New York production company, filmed Making Motion Pictures: A Day in the Vitagraph Studio. In that early film, moviemakers established the formula for portraying themselves. Since then, most movies on the subject have been variations on that first scenario, which Behlmer and Thomas summarize: “In the executive office of Vitagraph a script is being considered. A director and supervisors enter, receive their instructions, and proceed to the studio in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Preparations begin, actors and actresses are made up, and performers and crew are shuttled in studio cars to the location.

  “After the scene is shot, everyone returns to the studio where, following a quick meal at the Vitagraph lunch counter, the studio scenes are rehearsed and photographed. All the necessary equipment for the different effects are shown. After the picture is finished, it is projected, and the audience sees Love Is Better Than Riches, the story within a story, in its entirety.”

  Dozens of self-referential silent pictures followed, including Mabel’s Dramatic Career (1913), directed by Mack Sennett and starring Mabel Normand, Chaplin’s His New Job (1915) and Behind the Screen (1916), and Cecil B. DeMille’s We Can’t Have Everything (1918). In the latter, a sequence depicts a director filming a harem scene—DeMille’s witty hommage to himself.

  One of the most significant of these silents bore the straightforward title Hollywood. Released in 1923, this spoof follows an obtuse wannabe actress from the Midwest to Hollywood, where she bumps into all the stars and fails to recognize a single one. It’s impossible to say much about the picture, because no negative or prints survive. Yet its influence seems marked. It’s likely that Billy Wilder saw the movie as a youngster in Europe, and Charles Brackett as a man about New York.

  Produced by Famous Players—Lasky (soon to become Paramount Pictures), Hollywood included more than eighty cameo appearances by stars and personalities of the time: Mary Astor, Cecil B. DeMille, Sid Grauman (of the Chinese Theatre), William S. Hart, Pola Negri, Anna Q. Nilsson, Mary Pickford, and Gloria Swanson. A still reproduced in Behlmer and Thomas’s book shows silent star Nita Naldi in the backseat of a Norma Desmond—type car, with scowling, uniformed chauffeur in attendance. Is the resemblance purely coincidental, or does it foreshadow Sunset Boulevard?

  Another scene in Hollywood was worthy of Billy Wilder himself. The young actress, seeking work at the “Christie Comedies” studio, stands in the employment line near a corpulent man who moves aside to offer her his place. When the man eventually steps up to present his own credentials, the window is slammed in his face and the CLOSED sign shoved into view. The camera moves into close-up … and Fatty Arbuckle gazes at the forlorn, one-word verdict. This was one of Arbuckle’s few appearances onscreen after the 1921 rape scandal that ruined his career. The daring, poignant inclusion of Arbuckle reeks of the “bad taste” that Wilder has been accused of throughout his career. Who knows; if Arbuckle had been alive when Sunset Boulevard was made, Wilder might have seated him at the bridge table with Norma Desmond and the Waxworks.

  The studio-and-stars genre continued into the era of talking pictures, with What Price Hollywood? (1932), The Death Kiss (1933), Hollywood Boulevard (1936), A Star Is Born (1937), to name only a few. (“I loved What Price Hollywood,” Wilder said, “and I loved the original A Star Is Born.”)

  The genre mutated in the forties to become the all-star musical entertainment awash in patriotism and packed with famous personalities: Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), Hollywood Canteen (1944), and the like.

  The influence of these myriad earlier pictures on Wilder seems minimal. Billy Wilder at the movies, watching Hollywood’s flattering portrayals of itself, is like Shakespeare attending the plays of John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd—his forerunners and contemporaries—and then going home to write Othello.

  Sunset Boulevard is an extreme work, full of bile. It’s as black as obsidian, and as lustrous. This is, indeed, Billy Wilder’s Othello, his Paradise Lost, and also his Day of the Locust. Watching it is a painful pleasure because our illusions are mangled along with those of every character. A half century later it’s still ahead of its time, for it’s not only everybody’s autobiography in Hollywood—one long in-joke—but also an accusing finger pointed at the film industry’s oversupply of dreamers. (Those dreaming fans “out there in the dark” also stand warned.) A bitter comedy and a tragedy of absurd ambition, the film is a vivisection of success and celebrity, of Hollywood, America, and the world. Whatever the measure of that success—small, medium, large—in Sunset Boulevard it’s shrouded in noir.

  The emotional color scheme of Sunset Boulevard ranges from twilight shadow to haunted midnight, brightening occasionally to ominous afternoon but shading back, always, to darkness visible. Wilder’s palette subsumes the conventional tones of film noir and adds a wash of melodrama. If most forties films noirs could be called “men’s pictures,” Sunset Boulevard is the great aberration: it’s a “women’s picture” where the tears turn to dust. It’s Mildred Pierce with a swimming pool through the eyes of Euripides.

  What’s unique about Sunset Boulevard, however, is not its noir thesaurus but rather the subject and style of this tableau. That’s because no other filmmaker dared paint Hollywood stark naked. Or if they dared, they lacked the Wilder touch, meaning Billy Wilder’s technique, his bravado, his genius, and his gift for humanizing even a Godzilla ego like Norma Desmond’s. Better than anyone who preceded or followed him, Wilder knew how to mirror the backside of the silver screen as a kind of purgatory.

  With silent laugh track.

  * * *

  That mirror was cracked, or at least opaque, on the day in autumn 1948 when cynical, jaded Billy Wilder (those clinging journalistic epithets say so much about him, and so little) and his milder cohort, Charles Brackett, settled down to their next big project. Sunset Boulevard would prove unruly. So unmanageable was it, in fact, that shooting would start minus a completed script, proceed without one, and only when the picture was nearly over would anyone know how, or why, William Holden’s character ends up dead in Norma Desmond’s pool.

  Earlier in 1948—on February 12—A Foreign Affair had wrapped. It was produced by Brackett, directed by Wilder, and written by them and Richard L. Breen. On May 26, the Brackett—Wilder picture The Emperor Waltz was released after a two-year delay. The reason for that delay was obvious to anyone who saw it: the picture was no good. Wilder hated it; Brackett called it a “stinker.”