Wisecracker

“Long live Billy Wilder,” we say, crossing ourselves in our secret places, watching him survive Stanley Kubrick, Wilt Chamberlain and the days when decent pictures were almost automatic. We cling to him, and we love the notion that he may still be writing the town’s best scripts, which the town ignores as the easiest way of proving its stupidity. But he is also old, a little unsteady, and he writes alone now, without an I.A.L. Diamond (his cowriter from “Love in the Afternoon” to “Fedora”). Does he need a Joe Gillis (his more dead than alive writing ghost in “Sunset Boulevard”) to turn the trick?

He turned 93 this summer, so he is getting on for twice the age of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson was only 52 when she filmed that iconic role in “Sunset Boulevard”). But Wilder has never taken Norma’s dive into the isolation of self-regard, or that protective madness of hers. He prides himself on still “getting” it, us and the modern idiom. He goes regularly to his office. He has been a great art collector and a subject for David Hockney. He is a coup at parties, a man in whom old age and infirmity seem to fuel the wisecrack, the “Wilderesque” stuff, that he and fellow writers used to dream up in halcyon days. With just the right whiplash grumpiness, Wilder flatters Hollywood now and allows its kids to think they are in touch with the Lubitsch touch. It ain’t so; he’s having us on toast. But Wilder would eat us raw if it was a matter of survival.

Cameron Crowe’s book is not strictly necessary, nor is it the unprecedented voice of Wilder as claimed by its publisher. (A few years ago, Wilder did a brilliant three-part television conversation with German director Volker Schlondorff. But he then forbade its showing because he reckoned he looked “undignified”; that was as misguided as the vanity was unexpected.) Still, Crowe’s book is a pleasure. Crowe was 39 when he made “Jerry Maguire,” an age at which Wilder had just begun to direct: His debut, “The Major and the Minor,” appeared in 1942, when he was 38. Crowe is from Southern California. He was writing for Rolling Stone in his late teens. A novel of his, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” became a successful movie, and he went on to do “Say Anything” and “Singles” before “Jerry Maguire.”

He was drawn to Wilder out of admiration and the idea of doing an extended interview book, such as Francois Truffaut did with Alfred Hitchcock in the 1960s. He’s well-equipped: He does comedy himself; he is a writer-director; and he has a real tenderness for the older man, enough to handle those moments when Wilder is brusque, forgetful or pretty rough. There’s a fondness in the book that will likely make a bestseller out of it. At the same time, nothing can bridge the cultural gap between the two men, or disguise the ways in which Wilder is averse to being likable or sentimental. You get the feeling that in 100 years, the talented Crowe is never going to make a film that stings and wounds like the best of Wilder.

There’s often a needler in Wilder, an urge to jeer or be cruel. Don’t forget the insider jabs at Erich von Stroheim in “Sunset Boulevard” or the larger contempt for muddled attempts at decency throughout his work. To this day, Wilder takes every opportunity to attack Mitchell Leisen, the director of some of his scripts in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s. Yet the more one sees of Leisen, the more intriguing and humane he becomes. For Wilder, though, it’s enough that he’s the gay jerk who got in his way.

There’s one way in which Wilder has always resembled Norma Desmond. He sees things his way. He likes to be right. He means to survive. Don’t expect him to end up face down in the pool, telling the story. He is the story. Ten years before “Some Like It Hot,” Norma was a control freak and oddly like a man.

That’s why Ed Sikov’s biography, “On Sunset Boulevard,” just now appearing in paperback, is the prize book of these two and an essential Hollywood biography. It’s worth stressing that Sikov gets to “The Major and The Minor” only on page 171. For proper space and research has been given to Wilder’s formative struggles before he ever “made it.” That age of insecurity seems essential; like the German accent, it has never lost its grip on the man.

The Wilders were German-speaking Jews. The father ran a cafe at a railway station on the Vienna-to-Lemberg line. The mother had lived in New York City as a child, and she cherished it as a destiny for her second son, Samuel, born June 22, 1906--but always known as Billie (because of Buffalo Bill, the mother said). The family moved to Krakow and then Vienna, and it was in Billie’s childhood that the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke up. Thus he knew poverty and hardship as well as anti-Semitism, just as he felt every normal pang of growing up.

But Sikov does not offer a wistful or romantic child. He shows the young Wilder as a seething, ambitious kid, ready to do anything to get ahead, to survive and be competitive. He was smart, fast, chilly and hard, and that’s not far from the unyielding guy Crowe talks to, seldom happy plumbing depths but looking to top everything with a wisecrack.

As a youth, he was in and out of scrapes, stealing motorbikes and cars, not always telling the unvarnished truth. He earned money as a pool shark and a cafe dance partner for lonely women. Though his mother wanted him to study law, he preferred journalism. He was listening to American jazz records, trying to master English. He was also eager for sex, a bit of a user--and very angry, years later, when one biographer, Maurice Zolotow, alleged that he had his heart broken by a girl who turned out to be a hooker. Nonsense, says Wilder. But so many of his most striking female characters are sluts.

Sikov’s portrait of the young man is especially valuable in that it helps substantiate the bittersweet tone of so many films. But I’d urge anyone to study his early chapters and the photographs of the young Wilder--so attractive, so cocksure, so sardonic in the curl of his lip, as precocious as the Artful Dodger. If only Wilder had ever written that part of his life as he became a screenwriter who sailed to America in 1934, and if only there had been room in his art for that kind of personal reflection or for characters as naive and vulnerable as, say, Jerry Maguire himself.

The memorable men in Wilder’s films--I’m thinking of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) in “Double Indemnity,” Don Birnum (Ray Milland) in “The Lost Weekend,” Gillis (William Holden) in “Sunset Boulevard,” Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) in “Ace in the Hole,” Sefton (Holden again) in “Stalag 17”--are so much more weathered, soured or defeated than today’s heroes. Of course, I’m referring to the years 1944 to ‘52, which I take to be Wilder’s richest period, when he took on so many of America’s white lies and easy assumptions. He had the nerve then to make sleazy people the center of attention, plus the wit and the charm to treat them as our fellows.

Among the institutions subverted in those classic films are marriage, the insurance business and the true kinship of men in “Double Indemnity”; the chances for cure versus addiction in “The Lost Weekend” (still the most candid cinematic portrait of the terrible appeal of booze or drugs); the essential public spirit of the entertainment business in “Sunset Boulevard”; the reliability of the press in “Ace in the Hole”; and the comradeship of men under pressure in “Stalag 17.”

There was a remarkable mix of showmanship and social skepticism in that Wilder--or, rather, in Wilder and Charles Brackett, his co-writer and producing partner, the man who had worked with him since 1938 as a writing team on “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife,” “Midnight,” “Ninotchka,” “Arise My Love,” “Hold Back the Dawn,” “Ball of Fire,” “The Major and the Minor” and so on. Yet, after “Sunset Boulevard,” Wilder dropped Brackett, who was left wounded and bewildered. Was it boredom or a deeper, competitive need on Wilder’s part? “Ace in the Hole,” his next film, was both uncommonly misanthropic and such a flop that it seemed to scare Wilder away from tough material.

And here’s the abiding difficulty in studying Wilder. For a supposedly great director, he has made many ruins or flawed films, many that seem halfhearted or cautious, many that muffle that abrasiveness from the best years. There are films in which the cynical attitude reforms itself and turns sweet. I’m thinking of many of the later films, of the 1957 “The Spirit of St. Louis” (how does Lindbergh fit with Wilder’s best characters?), “The Emperor Waltz” (1948), “Sabrina” (1954), “Witness for the Prosecution” (1958), “Irma la Douce” (1963), “The Fortune Cookie” (1966), “Avanti!” (1972), “The Front Page” (1974), “Fedora” (1978) and “Buddy Buddy” (1981). Then there are “Love in the Afternoon” (1957) and “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” (1970), the latter a broken project, never really seen as Wilder intended, which seem uncertain and problematic, as if they had novel or larger subjects that Wilder could not quite grasp.

*

I’ve omitted thus far two works that may settle the argument: “Some Like It Hot” and “The Apartment.” The latter, it seems to me, promises one of Wilder’s greatest dark views of America and then betrays it with a forced happy ending. I say “forced” because I cannot believe that Baxter or Fran (Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine) have the resources for a lasting relationship. Nor can I feel that Wilder has that much faith in them. Lemmon, his late favorite, was too neurotic or guilt-ridden an actor for Wilder, though he was perfect in “Some Like It Hot.” But Lemmon lacks the wry stoicism of a Holden, ready to take his medicine.

But if “The Apartment” is overrated (it won best picture and Wilder’s second Oscar as best director), “Some Like It Hot” (which won nothing) only becomes more significant in the history of American film. For once, Wilder turned to farce instead of realistic comedy. The narrator, who often plods when tying ends together, suddenly flies on the breathless momentum of absurdity. And so many things lurched out of the closet: the undying alliance of untrustworthy guys, the shunting aside of women as gorgeous freaks, the intimations of sexual confusion and the campiness that begins to see incident and situation less as real life than as items from the almanac of show business. “Some Like It Hot” is one of those films--years ahead of their time--that sense the American abandonment of reality. Maybe no one making it grasped more than a fraction of what it meant. Who says they had to? “Some Like It Hot” is a revolution. Wilder would have been great if he had made just that one film.

Is he an artist, though? I’m not sure, but only because I suspect that American film does not really tolerate such creatures. Wilder is--like Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and maybe a few others--a great movie-maker (incidentally, of all of these, he is also the one least interested in visuals, the most obsessed with talk). And he is as tricky still and as wary as any chronic survivor. Consider this:

One night at Paramount in 1950, the royalty of Hollywood was invited to see an early screening of “Sunset Boulevard.” Louis B. Mayer was there: for many years the West Coast head of MGM, once the highest-paid person in America and the most feared man in town. He ranted against the “expose” Wilder had done and rebuked him for biting the hand that had fed him and rescued him from Europe (other Wilders died in Auschwitz). “F--- you!” Wilder is supposed to have said. “Sunset Boulevard” is sometimes taken as the end of old Hollywood. But 50 years later, it plays not as an attack, but as a tribute to that lost glory. The satire has turned to tragedy, and now the picture is a measure of how much we miss that grand empire, no matter that it warped us for all time.

Years and decades later, Crowe asked Wilder if he’d like to read their book before it was printed. “No,” says the wisecracker. “That way I can always say, ‘Well, he f---ed it up!’ ” There’s something in the helpless joker that has no roots or ground. It’s a lack of confidence or dignity. But how were we to know that our paragon, our master, was actually so insecure?