‘Some Like It Hot’ Legend Fled the Nazis to Become Hollywood’s Great Social Satirist. Louis B. Mayer Despised Him.
By Gregory N. Joseph
BILLY WILDER the monumentally gifted writer, director and legendary Hollywood wit, film’s greatest social satirist in whom critics found traces of Mark Twain, Bertolt Brecht, Erich von Stroheim and Ernst Lubitsch, the movies’ ultimate outsider despite being one of its most respected and honored insiders, was 77 years old when I visited him in April 1984 at his elegantly disheveled second-floor cubbyhole of an office in the famous Writers and Artists Building on the chic, bustling corner of South Santa Monica Boulevard and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.
Later that month at the historic Spreckels Theatre in downtown San Diego, I was to serve as onstage host and interviewer of “An Afternoon with Billy Wilder,” which included an onstage appearance by I.A.L Diamond, his second writing partner following Charles Brackett.
Four years earlier, in 1980, Diamond and Wilder had been given the Writers Guild of America’s Laurel Award for career achievement in screenwriting — Wilder had previously received the Laurel Award in 1957 for his screenwriting partnership with Brackett.
Two years after our meeting, in 1986, Wilder would be awarded the AFI’s Life Achievement Award, then in 1988 came the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, followed by Kennedy Center honors in 1990 and the National Medal of Arts in 1993.
In all, he won six Oscars, three of them for “The Apartment” — the first time anyone had won as producer, director and screenwriter on the same film.
He directed 14 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances.
The American Film Institute has ranked four of Wilder’s works among the top 100 American films of the 20th century: “Sunset Boulevard” (No. 12), “Some Like It Hot” (No. 14), “Double Indemnity” (No. 38) and “The Apartment” (No. 93). For the tenth anniversary edition of their list, the AFI moved “Sunset Blvd” to 16, “Some Like it Hot” to 22, “Double Indemnity” to 29, and “The Apartment” to 80.
With Woody Allen and the Marx Brothers, he shares the most number of films on AFI’s 100 funniest American films list with five films written, and owns the top spot with “Some Like It Hot.”
In 1989, two of his films, “Sunset Boulevard” and “Some Like It Hot,” were among the first 25 motion pictures selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry, deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” and worthy of preservation. As of 2019, seven of his films graced the National Film Registry.
In 2022, Variety listed three of his films among the 100 greatest ever made: “The Apartment” at No. 23, “Double Indemnity” at No. 29, and “Some Like It Hot” at No. 39.
Our “An Afternoon with Billy Wilder” was intended to be part of a 25th anniversary celebration being held in the San Diego area feting “Some Like It Hot,” the classic 1959 screwball comedy about two musicians (played by Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) who disguise themselves as women in an all-female band to escape from the mafia after stumbling across a gangland shooting. The film, whose screenplay Wilder co-wrote with Diamond based on a story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan, stars Marilyn Monroe as the band’s vocalist (and ukelele player) with whom the two become obsessed.
The film was partially shot at the Hotel del Coronado, an iconic wooden, red-roofed Victorian beachfront hotel and resort in the city of Coronado across the bay from San Diego that has a glamorous reputation of its own. Opened in 1888, it has been revered in books and movies and boasts a guest list featuring some of the most famous people on the planet, including presidents, royalty and a wide swatch of celebrities.
Now, anxious locals were rolling out the red carpet in an effort to fondly recall one of the most glittering moments in the hotel’s, and San Diego’s, histories. The head of the San Diego Film Society and I were visiting Wilder in hopes of convincing him to take part. If he agreed, he would be the crown jewel of the entire celebration, the hands-down star attraction.
“I von’t have to dance vit the mayor’s mudder and all of that (bleep), will I — God, der von’t be speeches, vill der?” asked Wilder, a tough dervish in owl-shaped glasses, stylish beige sweater and brown slacks, as he chewed, as ever, on an eternal cigar stub as he spoke.
Once assured the mayor’s mother and daughter would be nowhere in sight and that there would be only discussion of filmmaking, he relaxed, carefully sliding a new cigar from the glass jar on his desk and revealing a fascinating side of himself, part professor, part avuncular drinking companion and that true anomaly, a great moviemaker who could slice and dice Hollywood, corporate America and even the Mob, and keep his job.
This was no ordinary filmmaker who feared rocking the boat and splashing invictive on whomever might be in it.
Samuel Wilder was born on June 22, 1906, to Polish Jews in Sucha Beskidzka, a small town which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was nicknamed “Billie” by his mother, who was reportedly inspired by the Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows she saw during a brief stay in New York, and he changed the spelling to “Billy” upon his arrival in America.
Billy’s parents owned a cake shop in Sucha’s train station that spun off into a chain of railroad cafes. His father moved the family to Krakow to accept a job managing a hotel, then to Vienna. He died when Billy was 22 years old, and Billy, uninterested in following the family business or attending the University of Vienna, became a journalist.
In 1926, Wilder met and interviewed Paul Whiteman, an immensely popular American band leader of the day, who liked the young writer enough that he took him with the band to Berlin, where Wilder made more contacts in entertainment.
At first working as a stringer writing crime and sports articles, Wilder next landed a regular job with a Berlin tabloid. He then became interested in the movies (his older brother was a filmmaker) and found work as a screenwriter, from 1929 to 1933 producing a dozen short German films.
When Hitler rose to power, he moved to Paris and made his directorial debut with the 1934 film “Mauvaise Graine” (Wilder’s mother, grandmother and stepfather perished in the Holocaust). He relocated to Hollywood in 1933 before the film’s release, and found work as a screenwriter.
His first real success came with “Ninotchka,” a romantic comedy starring Greta Garbo made in collaboration with fellow German immigrant Lubitsch, who was known for his elegance and refinement (not to mention his deft way of circumventing the censors with sophisticated innuendo). Lubitsch was an enormous influence on Wilder, so much so that for years after Lubitsch’s death in 1947 at the age of 55, a sign reading “How would Lubitsch do it?” famously hung on the wall of Wilder’s office.
Using the tagline “Garbo laughs” as playful counterpoint to the actress’ prior screen persona in somber melodramas, “Ninotchka” changed the course of her career and brought Wilder his first Academy Award nomination (shared with co-writer Brackett, with whom Wilder would work from 1938 to 1950).
After this film came a string of successes for Wilder, then in 1942, he made his American directorial debut with “The Major and the Minor,” a farcical romantic comedy starring Ray Milland and Ginger Rogers (fresh off her Oscar-winning Best Actress performance in the drama “Kitty Foyle” and eager for a change of pace). It was a critical and box office success hailed for its playfulness, effervescence and style.
Wilder’s third American directorial effort, 1944’s “Double Indemnity,” was something diametrically different: a dark, deadly serious crime film noir. Co-written by Wilder and novelist Raymond Chandler, a founder of the hard-boiled-detective literary movement, it starred Fred MacMurray as an insurance salesman and Barbara Stanwyck as a conniving wife who methodically plan (and carry out) her husband’s murder. A landmark in the noir genre, establishing a number of cinematic conventions now taken for granted, it was extremely bold for its day and an enormous box office hit. It earned seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and Actress, and is now considered a classic. Interestingly, the contentious writing collaboration between Wilder and the uber-idiosyncratic Chandler, in which they battled Hollywood censors and frequently each other to bring the controversial story to the screen, spawned a 2014 off-Broadway comedy, “Billy and Ray.” (The play, directed by Garry Marshall — who created the television sitcom “Happy Days” and directed films such as “Pretty Woman” and “The Princess Diaries” — was widely panned.)
Then, in 1945, Wilder, with characteristic boldness, changed course yet again. This time, he confronted a subject society all too often preferred to make light of, shrug off, or ignore altogether: alcoholism. “The Lost Weekend,” directed by Wilder from a screenplay by him and his writing partner Brackett based on Charles R. Jackson’s novel of the same name, was the first major American film to deal seriously with the subject. Starring Milland and Jane Wyman, it was raw and hard-hitting, and a critical and box-office success. It not only shared the top prize at the first Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, and won the festival’s Best Actor award for Milland, it also captured Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and Actor (once again, for Milland). (In 2011, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry for “its uncompromising look at the devastating effects of alcoholism” that “melded an expressionistic film-noir style with documentary realism to immerse viewers in the harrowing experience of an aspiring New York writer willing to do almost anything for a drink.”)
Wilder was now solidly part of the Hollywood firmament, known for his wit, innovation — and courage. No subject, including Hollywood itself, was off-limits.
One famous story exposing his rich vein of contempt for power and anything approaching censorship involved a private screening Paramount had arranged for “Sunset Boulevard,” the 1950 black comedy noir Wilder co-wrote and directed that exposed the dark underbelly of Hollywood that Tinseltown preferred be left unacknowledged and undiscussed.
In attendance was the feared and often loathed MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer, who reportedly blurted to anyone within earshot after the closing credits, “You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!”
Upon learning of the slight Wilder didn’t hesitate, searching out Mayer and offering an unmistakable response that required little interpretation: “I am Mr. Wilder, and go fuck yourself!”
When Wilder began his Hollywood ascent as a writer, he came up the hard way, initially residing in what amounted to a broom closet at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, an establishment (still) located on, appropriately enough, Sunset Boulevard (which perhaps had something to do with his 1950 black-comedy film of the same name lambasting Hollywood).
By the time of his confrontation with Mayer, he was a respected, and busy, filmmaker of the first rank. During our conversations, he lamented that Hollywood now was a different kettle of fish, and not in a good way.
“When we did films, we just did them — it was no big deal, it was no big thing to make two, three, four movies a year,” Wilder explained. “Now all of Hollywood is making 50 a year. Now you have to guarantee financing — you spend more time writing the contract than the script. I never talked about money in those days. You worked at MGM, for example, and there was all the money in the world.”
Wilder had another bone or two to pick with filmmakers of the day. He thought the Hollywood in which we now sat not only had misread, but was abusing, the concept of artistic freedom, crossing the lines of good taste and social responsibility with frequency. He also found it lacking in original product.
“I’m against any form of censorship,” he stressed, “but it’s being taken advantage of. We’ve lifted the cycle of violence. Instead of crashing a car once, we do it 114 times per film. We show everything when someone dies.
“We make pictures about people taking the law in their own hands, and if you continue to remake all the hits of yesterday, you’re standing still. What’s important in making film is what you leave to the audience’s imagination.”
Then he offered an example that he himself had used in depicting a murder, one of the most famously wrenching such scenes ever committed to celluloid — achieved without showing a thing.
“In ‘Double Indemnity,’” he said, “I focused on Barbara Stanwyck’s face while Fred MacMurray is in the back seat of her car strangling her husband. I will tell you it’s better to film the back of a person’s head when some human crisis is taking place. Let the audience think what is going on — they know, they know. No actor can act better than the audience can imagine.”
Wilder believed filmmakers would do well to borrow a page from his mentor Lubitsch, with whom he collaborated not only on Garbo’s “Ninotchka” but also “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife,” the latter a romantic comedy starring Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert. He co-authored the scripts for both.
“Lubitsch was the first filmmaker who could subtly make a point — he didn’t hit you over the head with something,” Wilder said, puffing on his cigar with the assured elegance of a Hollywood legend who had paid the price.
“He supposed the audience was intelligent, and everything he did was innuendo. He played a game with the audience. They loved that and played along with him. His movies were more fun and more erotic than all the movies with nudity now.”
After I finished my visit with Wilder, I drove to the nearby office of “Some Like it Hot” co-star Lemmon, an Academy Award-winning actor who, with absolutely no prompting at all, not only described but hilariously re-created the serendipitous moment in 1958 that he ran into Wilder and wound up with a role in the film.
“I was having dinner with my soon-to-be wife (actress Felicia Farr) at Dominick’s one Sunday evening,” Lemmon recounted while sitting at his desk, effortlessly slipping into character as the jauntiest and most skilled kind of anecdotalist, his two Oscars gleaming in the bookcase over his shoulder, the first as Best Supporting Actor for 1955’s “Mister Roberts” and the second as Best Actor for 1973’s “Save the Tiger” — making him the first person to pull off victories in both categories.
Considered one of the great tragi-comic performers of his era with enormous range, Lemmon starred in more than 60 films and was nominated for an Academy Award a stunning eight times, winning twice. Two of those nominations, as Best Actor, came in films directed by Wilder — “Some Like It Hot” and “The Apartment.”
Lemmon’s storytelling was the highest form of performance art, and in this instance, it was clearly dedicated to a friend for whom he palpably had great respect. He relished telling of that chance meeting that led to “Some Like It Hot,” an account he would repeat, word for word, six year later to a packed auditorium and a television audience numbering in the millions in beginning his introduction of Wilder when the director received Kennedy Center honors.
“I didn’t know Billy very well then, but had met him and was impressed with his work,” Lemmon explained to me, warming to the occasion as though an unseen director had yelled “Action!”.
“Well, Billy asked me to stop by his table on the way out of the restaurant, that he had something to ask me. So I drop by the table, and Billy says in that German accent of his, ‘Gunna do dis film about two guys who dress up as women because dey’ve seen the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. You’d be von of the two guys in drag — vanna do it?’ In 20 seconds, I had the whole plot.
“I’d never taken a picture without seeing a script first, but I did then.”
It was a momentous decision for Lemmon.
In all, “Some Like it Hot” was nominated for six Academy Awards: for Lemmon, Wilder (as both director and screenwriter, the latter with Diamond), cinematography, art direction and costume design, winning for the latter. It’s now considered a classic.
Lemmon ultimately worked on seven films with Wilder over the course of 32 years in what is now regarded as one of the screen’s most productive and memorable actor-director collaborations. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the chance restaurant encounter with Wilder changed the trajectory of Lemmon’s career.
Later, onstage with me, Wilder lived up to his reputation as one of Hollywood’s great raconteurs and piercing wits. At one point during our onstage chat, he gently if firmly interrupted me, addressing me with the tone of a favorite but affectionally annoyed uncle who utters the truth so you won’t further embarrass yourself: “By da vay — yer French is terrible!” (Duly noted. And full disclosure: It is.)
One of Wilder’s anecdotes (Lemmon’s imitation of the great director was spot on) involved his idea in “The Seven Year Itch” to have Marilyn Monroe’s skirt blown up by a gust from a street grate, a scene and image that has transcended Hollywood and become part of our cultural lore.
Monroe’s then-husband, baseball great Joe DiMaggio, Wilder remembered, was on the set at the time.
I inquired as to what DiMaggio’s reaction was. “Vat vould yur reaction be if I blew up yer wife’s skirt?” Wilder shot back. DiMaggio, he confided, “slapped Marilyn around that night at home.”
Wilder was surprisingly protective of Monroe, even as he described having problems working around her infamous tardiness and myriad psychological issues to produce an acceptable performance.
“Tony Curtis told me kissing Monroe was like kissing Hitler — dat vasn’t very nice, I didn’t think,” Wilder said quietly, his voice trailing off. (Monroe died in 1962 of a barbiturate overdose. Whether it was suicide, unintentional — or something more sinister — remains a subject of debate. Conspiracy theories abound.)
After our stage presentation concluded, dignataries and fans jammed the theatre’s green room.
Much to my surprise, the legendary filmmaker wended his way through the crowd and sought me out as I stood in a corner talking to one of the event’s organizers. I had my back turned, and Wilder tapped me politely on the shoulder. As I swiveled around slowly and recognized him, he leaned forward on his cane, looked at me through trademark thick glasses that magnified his eyes into warm, penetrating saucers, and chirped brightly, “Dat vas fun! Let’s do it again some day!” I wish I had taken him up on it.
Billy Wilder died a generation later, on March 27, 2002. He was 95.
Fittingly enough, a frisky, Wilder-esque quip is etched just below his name on the square, dark green marble tombstone that marks his final resting place at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles. You can almost hear the legendary filmmaker’s thick dialect, the one his friend and sometime muse Jack Lemmon was so fond of good-naturedly mimicking, as he uttered the words: “I’m a writer — but then, nobody’s perfect.”
It echoes, of course, the famous line delivered with cheerful gusto by Joe E. Brown at the conclusion of “Some Like it Hot” after Jack Lemmon’s frantic character in drag reveals he’s really a man, a storied denouement widely regarded as one of the finest payoff moments in all of movie history.
Billy Wilder knew how to go out in style as he left the biggest stage of all. He remained true to himself, and once again, one final time, he had the last laugh.
