HOLLYWOOD: Policeman, Midwife, Bastard

Director Billy Wilder, fresh off the boat from Europe and without a bean in his pocket, picked up his first salary check in Hollywood by hiring out as a stunt man and jumping into a swimming pool in full fig. Since that day, he has splashed about so energetically in the cinema swim that now he is established beyond question as one of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters, as a director who ranks with George Stevens (The Diary of Anne Frank), William Wyler (Ben Hur) and Fred Zinneman (A Nun’s Story) in the Big Four, and as a witsnapper, fathead-shrinker, Sunset Boulevardier and allround character who has achieved notoriety not often rivaled in movieland.

Having made 23 Hollywood pictures, most of them commercial successes, Wilder has been nominated 18 times for Academy Awards and won three, for Lost Weekend (director and coauthor) and Sunset Boulevard (co-author). Says he with a snarl: “I was robbed 15 times.” But he adds: “I am batting twice as good as Ted Williams ever did.”

Nevertheless, in the opinion of many critics, it was only last year, in the magnificent locker-room farce called Some Like It Hot, which rang up the biggest gross ($14 million) ever achieved by a Hollywood comedy, that Wilder revealed himself at his wildest and most wonderful.

Last week, with the release of The Apartment, which opened in Manhattan to rave reviews (“trenchant” . . . “sardonic” . . . “tumbling with wit” . . . “the most sophisticated movie I have ever seen”), Moviemaker Wilder obviously had another big hit on his hands. He also raised some intriguing questions in the minds of his audience about what, if anything, he is trying to say.

Berlin Accent. The Apartment has its moments of sentimentality, even soap opera, when the heroine tries suicide for love of a married man. It has moments of sharp, watercooler burlesque as it glances at an office Christmas party. But beyond that, unfolding the story of a nice little guy whose bosse’s use his apartment as launching pad for some fairly sordid affairs, the picture takes on a hard, unwinking look of irony. Again and again, Wilder seems to speak in the accents of one of his favorite cities, prewar Berlin, a tough, sardonic, sometimes wryly sentimental place whose intellectual symbol was Bertolt Brecht. Is Billy trying to say something serious about men and women, heels and heroes? Is he as a sort of puritanical pander, trying to instruct as he entertains?

Wilder himself backs away from the question with alarm. Says he: “I want to be truthful, but if I have to choose between truth and entertainment, I will always choose entertainment. I have a vast and terrible desire never to bore.”

Billy almost never does, on screen or off. Inside a head that makes him look like a benevolent old bullfrog resides a restless imagination, a “flypaper memory” and a wit that ranges from the merry to the mordant. Wilder, not Benchley, was the man who first said: “Wait till I slip out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.” He is also the author of this scathing epigram: “I would worship the ground you walk on if you lived in a better neighborhood.”

As a gregarious “coffeehouse guy,” he mixes at all levels of the Hollywood social scale—in the Holmby Hills Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra), in the Kosher Rat Pack (Groucho Marx and friends), even in the exclusive A Group (top studio brass and long-established superstars, like Gary Cooper). For all his gregariousness, he can be cruel without reason, successfully plays the domestic tyrant. At dinner one evening, his wife Audrey announced brightly: “Darling, do you realize this is our anniversary?” Replied Wilder: “Please—not while I’m eating.” Says Playwright George Axelrod: “Billy is essentially, not personally, mean. Most of his meanness goes into his work. He sees the worst in everybody, and he sees it funny.”

Undivided Fame. For a professed cynic, Wilder was born at an unlikely time and place—the Johann Straussian Vienna of 1906. The son of a well-to-do restaurateur, Billy dodged law school at 19, signed on as a reporter for a Vienna daily. At 20, he was off to Berlin as a movie and drama reviewer. Not long afterward, he fell in love with a dancer and was fired for neglecting his work. Next thing he knew, Billy himself was dancing for his supper as a nightclub gigolo, and writing film scripts on the side. At 27, with 50 screenplays behind him and the German movie industry apparently at his feet, Billy, who is Jewish, fled to France to escape the Nazis.

In 1934, he landed in Hollywood with a little money, less English and no job. For several weeks he lived in an empty ladies’ room at the Chateau Marmont (“Just me and six small toilets”), then shared the digs of a Berlin buddy named Peter Lorre. Rent: 50¢ a day.

After two punishingly lean years, Wilder at last got a screenwriting job at Paramount. And at the whim of an executive producer, he was teamed with Writer Charles Brackett, onetime drama critic for The New Yorker. Suave Charlie Brackett and rough Billy Wilder clicked right away. Wilder spewed Niagaras of notions, and in this prodigious stream of consciousness, Brackett fished for usable ideas. Together they wrote 14 films without a single flop, and some of their movies were among the biggest hits (Ninotchka, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard) of the era. But in 1950 Brackett and Wilder broke up. Says Wilder: “Sometimes a match and the striking surface both wear out, and that’s what happened to us.” Says Brackett: “Billy had outgrown his divided fame.”

Exuberant Vulgarity. On his own, Billy wrote, produced and directed a savage social satire (Ace in the Hole) that flopped hard, then came back handily with Stalag 17, Sabrina, Seven Year Itch, Love in the Afternoon, Witness for the Prosecution. All these films were made from scripts that Billy himself had written—though always in collaboration. “Most of Billy’s collaborators,” says a friend, “are just $50,000 secretaries.” They sit at a typewriter while Billy strides feverishly up and down, slashing the air with a swagger stick, frothing at the mouth with dialogue and situation. On the set, Wilder is relaxed, ribald but in deadly earnest about his work. He is so sure of what he wants that he wastes an amazingly small amount of film footage. Says Billy: “All that’s left on the cutting-room floor when I’m through are cigarette butts, chewing-gum wrappers and tears. A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.”

Other Hollywood directors answer that description. What makes Billy Wilder stand out? Two things, says Writer Brackett: “His exuberant vulgarity and his magnificent awareness of the audience. When it comes to guessing audience reaction, Billy is almost never wrong.”

Dangerous Ideals. That awareness of audience and story somehow enables him to carry off situations that seem outrageous. Few moviemakers nowadays would dare stake a whole picture, as he did in Some Like It Hot, on the comedy to be derived from two muscular men dressing up as girls. Few producers would have permitted themselves, as Billy did in Sunset Boulevard, to start a movie with a corpse floating in a swimming pool and then have the corpse himself tell the story. He seems almost to be playing a game with himself to see how close he can come to the edge of questionable taste or implausibility without ever falling over the brink.

What keeps him sure-footed may well be an obsession with the craft of storytelling. One of his favorite games is called “openers” and consists of inventing bizarre movie situations. Quite a few of them reach the screen. One of his most famous openers, eventually used in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife: a man (Gary Cooper) and a girl (Claudette Colbert) meet at a d’epartment store counter because she tries to buy only the pants of a pair of pajamas and he only the top. One of Wilder’s current and so far unused openers : the Russians kidnap a famous American actress, who might be Marilyn Monroe, in West Berlin; they take her away to brainwash her, but she beats them because she has no brain to wash. Another: a high-ranking Communist defects to the West, leaving his wife and three children behind in Russia. When they are liquidated, he goes back: he was not a defector at all, but merely wanted to get rid of his family.

Many of Wilder’s fans think that he is capable of being far more than an entertainer, that he could turn into a Brecht of the cinema. But if Billy did that, he might find himself playing the lead role in a terrifying “opener”: big director wins fame and fortune by making solidly entertaining movies, suddenly gets ideals and loses everything on one big flop, winds up living in the ladies’ room in the Chateau Marmont.