Second Takes -- Billy Wilder

Coming soon: "The Emperor Waltz," May 24, 1948.

Later appraisals of Billy Wilder's career dismiss "The Emperor Waltz" as a footnote, blaming bad chemistry between Wilder and Bing Crosby. Years before making "Waltz," Wilder said he wanted to do a musical to avoid being typecast. It was billed as a frothy romantic comedy and that's how Edwin Schallert described it in his review.

May 27, 1948: " 'The Emperor Waltz' has the rather pleasing quality of seeming to kid itself along, and I can't imagine that either Mr. Brackett or Mr. Wilder ever took what they did too seriously." Realism in Films, Dec. 26, 1948 Realism in Films, Dec. 26, 1948 Dec. 26, 1948: Philip K. Scheuer takes a look at the year's films, what we consider today the prime of film noir: "The Naked City," "Street With No Name," "He Walks by Night" and "Kiss the Blood Off My Hands." He dismisses "The Emperor Waltz" and "A Foreign Affair": "The impeccable Brackett taste had likewise evaporated from his (and Billy Wilder's) "The Emperor Waltz" (love me, love my dog) and "A Foreign Affair" (fun among the Nazis), despite certain scattered merits in each."

Second Takes -- Billy Wilder

After 13 films between 1938 ("Bluebeard's Wife") and 1945 ("The Lost Weekend"), there's a three-year gap before the 1948 release of "The Emperor Waltz." Wilder was active personally and professionally during this period. He divorced his wife, served in Germany (see story at left) and with Charles Brackett pursued several other projects as their contract with Paramount came to a close in 1949.

Hedda Hopper runs an item on Wilder on April 6, 1945.

At left, Billy Wilder is sued for divorce, Oct. 3, 1945. It's interesting to speculate whether Hedda Hopper, above, was referring to Doris Dowling, who appeared in "The Lost Weekend" and "The Emperor Waltz."  Nov. 12, 1945: Edwin Schallert reports that Billy Wilder has expressed interest in a story by Guy Endore.

At left, Jan. 22, 1946, Brackett and Wilder are at work on "The Emperor Waltz." But the April 16, 1946, item sounds like a sketch for "Some Like It Hot." July 24, 1946: Doane Harrison briefly takes over for Wilder.

Brackett and Wilder get Richard Breen for their upcoming film, "A Foreign Affair." At right, a project that eluded them: "Sorry, Wrong Number." March 22, 1947: Brackett and Wilder are at work on "Foreign Affair." It will also be referred to in the gossip columns as "Operation Candy Bar."

May 28, 1947: Hedda Hopper plugs Marlene Dietrich for "A Foreign Affair." It's rather amazing just how often Hopper made pointed comments about casting in films. Not only did she lobby for certain stars to be cast in particular roles, she also criticized the studios for letting actors get away.    Dec. 30, 1947: Hedda Hopper reports that Wilder and Hedy Lamarr are an item. She mentioned them again in another item dated April 9, 1948, a little more than a month before the release of "The Emperor Waltz."

Second Takes -- Billy Wilder

"Andrea Leeds is cast for the lead of "Lost Weekend" ... ... or maybe Katharine Hepburn.   Note the use of the theremin in Miklos Rozsa's score.

Edwin Schallert reviews "Lost Weekend," Nov. 30, 1945

Billy Wilder wins an Academy Award for best direction and shares an Academy Award with Charles Brackett for screenplay for "Lost Weekend." Ray Milland wins an Academy Award for best performance.

CRITIC AT LARGE 'Lights' Director Focuses on 'Lost Weekend' April 28, 1988 By CHARLES CHAMPLIN, Times Arts Editor Watching "Bright Lights, Big City" a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that it was "The Lost Weekend" of the cocaine age. For the protagonist, very well played by Michael J. Fox in a wild change of venue from "Family Ties," the social sniffing of the drug had corrupted every aspect of his life, as booze had undone Ray Milland as a writer of promise. The moments of exultation -- Milland was unforgettable saying that the first drinks made him feel "like Michelangelo, sculpting the beard of Moses" -- had died all too quickly for the Fox character. It was clear in the Jay McInerney novel that the boy had been using hard for only two months. But he was on the verge of losing his job as a fact-checker at a magazine like the New Yorker (where McInerney himself had worked as a fact-checker). His days and nights were a desperate scramble to maintain even the appearance that nothing was different. He had cut himself off from his family and had no sustaining relationship simply because he couldn't sustain one. "Yeah. We thought about 'The Lost Weekend.' We talked about it," the film's director, Jim Bridges, said at lunch earlier this week. The psychological parallels extended to the ending. "There had to be hope in it," Bridges said. "But it's very guarded, as it was in 'The Lost Weekend.' " Milland drops a cigarette into his highball, the most mixed of mixed emotions playing over his face. Fox sits on a wall, watching the dawn come up over the East River. You hoped hard lessons had been learned, but you could only hope. "(Cocaine's) so deceptive," Bridges said. "It makes you feel good and even look good -- you sparkle -- until you've gone too far." He thinks the social usage has dropped off sharply in Hollywood since the early '80s, but not before some careers were severely damaged. Bridges, whose earlier films included "The Paper Chase," "Urban Cowboy" and "The China Syndrome," became involved with "Bright Lights, Big City" in the least comfortable circumstances for any director. He replaced a director (Joyce Chopra) who had already been shooting for 20 days on a script that, all too significantly, had gone through five writers, including McInerney himself, and as many as 15 drafts. After Chopra left the project, Bridges read the shooting script and concluded it was undoable. "It would have run 10 hours," he said. "I went back to the novel, which had been left rather far behind." In six days, McInerney and Bridges, who had begun his Hollywood career as a writer in television and learned to move fast, produced a new script, following a bare-bones outline of the book. Bridges also had some sets revised and recast several supporting roles, bringing in Frances Sternhagen as the magazine's head of research, Swoosie Kurtz as a fellow worker and Jason Robards as the alcoholic editor who used to run with the Algonquin crowd. He also brought in his own cinematographer, Gordon Willis, famous for his films with Woody Allen. Willis is known to work swiftly, and contractual commitments left Bridges only 36 days to do the film. "My deal was that we wouldn't use a foot of what had been shot before, and we didn't." Necessity occasionally mothers some nice inventions. In this case the necessities of time forced a useful simplicity. The jangling discos where the Fox character spends most of his nights have by now become a cinematic cliche of jump cuts, a hyperactive camera and a blizzard of lights and blurs. But in the discos here and at a climactic cocktail party, the Bridges/Willis camera stays remarkably calm, maintaining a steady, almost clinical watch on Fox. "It's the most simply and directly shot film I've ever done," Bridges said. "We focus only on the people. It was the pressure of time." It works better than a multitude of cutaways might. The camera never moves in for an extreme close-up until the critical moment Fox confronts his face in the mirror and comprehends, as if for the first time, all that he has done to himself and his life. Particularly in its late stages, "Bright Lights, Big City" has a power of implication, when what is going with Fox's emotions is readable but unsaid and not overtly shown. "I try to make the audience work," Bridges said. "I don't believe in making everything cut and dried and then dumping it in the audience's lap. I don't think of a film as being finished until the audience is there." After 30 years in Hollywood, Bridges is philosophical about success and failure and has tasted both. "I think they run in 10-year cycles of favor and disfavor, hurt and happiness," he said. He had two big commercial successes in a row, "Urban Cowboy" and "The China Syndrome." But when a very personal film of his called "Mike's Murder" was sneak-previewed in its original form, the audience screamed at the screen and there were cries of "Lynch the director!" "There is real violence and make-believe violence, and I had obviously gone over the line," Bridges said. But he had brought the film in $1 million under budget, and the company allowed him to spend the savings on a partial remake. The later version was enthusiastically reviewed and has become something of a cult classic. "A writer friend says there are three career stages," Bridges said: "New Kid in Town, Fall of New Kid and The Comeback. I'm not the new kid. But once you begin to understand the cycles, it's not so bad."

Second Takes -- Billy Wilder

July 1, 1943: "Five Graves to Cairo" opens in Los Angeles.

July 12, 1943: A typical post-release blurb about the film. Erich Von Stroheim as Field Marshal Rommel in "Five Graves to Cairo @ Yahoo! Video Nov. 5, 1942.

Above, Nov. 19, 1942, Erich von Stroheim joins the production of "Five Graves to Cairo." Attempts to cast Ingrid Bergman in the film are unsuccessful. It's interesting to speculate what it would have been like with her. At left, Dec. 22, 1942, Billy Wilder casts Anne Baxter in the role. Here's the "Lux Radio Theater" version of "Five Graves to Cairo" with Franchot Tone and Anne Baxter.

Hedda Hopper: Jan. 16 and Jan. 23, 1943. April 10, 1943: The war in Africa is influencing Hollywood, The Times' Edwin Schallert says.   June 1, 1943: Reports from the New York reviews of "Five Graves to Cairo." The film hasn't yet opened in Los Angeles.

June 6, 1943: The Times' Philip K. Scheuer looks into conflicting attitudes toward war films.

July 2, 1943: Schallert reviews "Five Graves to Cairo" and calls the ending "bitterly tragic."

Second Takes -- Billy Wilder

After the opening, Paramount went to one-column ads for "The Major and the Minor," then bought larger ads once the film was held over. "Lux Radio Theater" featured "The Major and the Minor" on May 31, 1943. Showings of "The Major and the Minor" included the Fleisher cartoon "Japoteurs," which is filled with the predictable World War II caricatures.

The Times' Philip K. Scheuer visits Billy Wilder on the set of "The Major and the Minor."

As far as I can tell, this is the closest we ever came to a review of "The Major and the Minor," and it's a pastiche of the New York reviews This blurb is typical of the items we used to run in the 1940s and '50s about current films. Sometimes they're only one paragraph. A popular picture might get three or four brief plugs with some tidbit about one of the stars.

Jack Smith on the "dry martini" line in "The Major and the Minor."

Second Takes -- Billy Wilder

SALUTING STANWYCK: A LIFE ON FILM 'When I'm Doing a Role, a Good Role, I'm Being Someone Other Than Me . . .' April 5, 1987 By PAUL ROSENFIELD, Be it Marwyck, the Irish farmhouse with stables and brood mares where she lived in the '40s, or the Broadway apartment she shared in the '20s with two other chorus girls, Barbara Stanwyck has always lived in a style that says actress . On the big front door of the Beverly Hills house where she now lives is a small mirror--for guests to check their faces: It's the perfect movie star front door. And Barbara Stanwyck answers it herself. "I've got an IQ of 7," she says, quickly leading the way to a red-carpeted living room. "I've been working with barbells and I threw my back out. So I'm wearing a corset. You can't see it, of course. On top of that my throat is raw. Two things wrong is one too many. But every moment from now until April 9, I live in absolute terror. Believe me." Believe her: On Thursday, Barbara Stanwyck receives the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award at the Beverly Hilton. And the woman who is practically Hollywood's equivalent of Garbo (in terms of privacy) is not exactly overwhelmed. "Honored, yes, but I tried to get out of the damn thing," she confessed on a recent afternoon, sighing. "But (AFI president) Bonita Granville worked on me, and so did George Stevens Jr., and then they got Charlton Heston to work on me. Chuck said, 'You will be there.' So I will be there." Finally, reluctantly, Stanwyck had told AFI co-chairman Stevens she would appear. But she would do only that--appear on Thursday. The question is why. Stanwyck, in a red jogging suit serving coffee and answering phones and right up close looking nothing like her 79 years, is something to see. She has an almost unlined face, with the kind of Irish skin that begs for a camera. The eyes still blaze for a close-up. She's lucid, and best of all the voice still sounds like coffee grounds. So why not be happy about the AFI? After all, the former orphan from Brooklyn has belonged to Hollywood now for 60 years. "When I'm doing a role, a good role, I'm being someone other than me," Stanwyck said, taking a swivel chair, and swiveling. "See, I'm a true Irishman, and I glide with the leprechauns. They say the Irish are brash, but there's also a quietness. Sometimes I can sit a whole evening and say nothing--but I absorb everything. I happen to like being alone a lot. I'm called a little nuts. I call it concentration. So I have a shell I creep into. So? To my friends who don't like it, I say, 'That's too bad.' " Times film critic Edwin Schallert calls "Ball of Fire" the "It Happened One Night" of the 1941-42 season. To her fans, Stanwyck would say something else. She admits that, "Yes, the work was good, but I'm not Albert Schweitzer." In fact, Stanwyck has an uncanny way of looking at herself almost in the third person. "I'm always surprised I looked so well on the screen," she said quietly. "Some of the pictures I never saw, and I stopped going to rushes in the early '30s." Stanwyck explained that she took the advice of director Frank Capra, her Hollywood mentor. "It was one of the tricks he taught me, not to go," Stanwyck said matter-of-factly. "Mr. Capra said, 'You never really look at yourself. You're always looking at the veins sticking out of your neck or how you hold your hands. So never look at yourself while you are working. Only go later, when the thing is done.' I was noticing the dainty things, the feminine things, and missing the larger picture. Capra had such patience with me!" But Stanwyck was a director's darling, right from the start. From Capra she segued to Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, King Vidor, John Ford, Preston Sturges, Rouben Mamoulian, William Wellman, George Stevens and almost everyone else. (Several directors, like Cecil B. De Mille and Douglas Sirk, claimed that Stanwyck was not only their favorite actress, but also their favorite professional.) Instinctively, too, the directors knew what material to give the actress. Stanwyck was never typecast, thus she's not now remembered by a particular image. For a star, that works both for and against you. "I never wanted to play the same things," Stanwyck said, adding, "Only once was I really worried in terms of image." The movie was Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity." "I was scared because I'd never before played an out-and-out killer. I was scared and so was Fred (MacMurray). I thought, 'This role is gonna finish me.' And I remember Billy saying, 'An actress is supposed to play everything. Are you an actress or are you a mouse?' So I thought about it, and I thought, 'Who am I kidding? What am I hiding behind?' I said to myself, 'Shut up trying to analyze everything. Say yes or no!' " Here Stanwyck's hard-on-herself streak was apparent. Orphans who create their own lives usually learn early not to blame others. "Yes or no" is a recurrent phrase when you talk to Stanwyck. "Once you say yes, you do it," she said several times--and this applied to being interviewed as well. Originally Stanwyck said no, and said no again. But when she finally reconsidered, that was it. Nothing was off-the-record, but also nothing was extraneous. In character, and in her work, Stanwyck isn't wasteful. Ambivalence is something she tackles. Sept. 10, 1941: Three months before "Ball of Fire" is released, an item in a Hedda Hopper column announces  Billy Wilder wants to be a director even if it means breaking up "one of the greatest writing teams of our time." Yet she breathed deeply, surprising even herself at the thought that she might have refused "Double Indemnity." "Once I said yes, I was awfully glad. During the making of it, Fred would go to rushes. I remember once the next day he said, 'You're not acting. You're enjoying it.' And I remember saying, 'Fred, really, how was I?' And very candidly he looked at me and said, 'I don't know about you--but I was wonderful!' And that was such a true remark. Actors only look at themselves." Does Stanwyck look now at herself on screen? Perhaps no other star of her magnitude has both the body of work (88 films) and her longevity--she first faced movie cameras in 1927. "Do I watch 'The Late Show'?" Stanwyck asked rhetorically. "No, I'm in bed during 'The Late Show.' " But to the point: Does she derive some satisfaction from 60 years on the screen? "It's not . . . satisfaction exactly. Let's say I did what I was supposed to do. I did my work." Un-self-consciously, Stanwyck pointed to herself and said: "I was no beauty. I was an average-looking person. When I was first starting out--the director is now dead so I guess I can't hurt him--I was screen-tested. This director put me in front of tapestries and screens and nothing worked. I remember he just sunk his head, in despair, and said to me, 'I have tried everything! But look at the way you look! It's hopeless!' " Stanwyck waited, then reacted: "I got my Irish anger up and said, 'Look--they sent for me! I didn't ask to come to Hollywood!' " She didn't even want to stay, in fact. "I was a chorus girl, and I wanted to be on the stage," said Stanwyck, irreverently. "The movies weren't my medium. I'd done 'Burlesque' in New York. Then (RKO's) Joe Schenck brought me out here." Stanwyck neglected to add that Schenck brought Stanwyck out in a private railway car with her first husband, vaudevillian Frank Fay, in tow. "But my first movie ("Broadway Nights," 1927) bombed. I didn't like the work, I missed audiences, but I did another film ("Locked Door," 1929) and it bombed, too. So really, I intended to go back East." Former orphan Ruby Stevens was looking for a niche, and Broadway seemed to be it. Her stage saga is something Stanwyck can still marvel at, and as she tells the story you feel even now she's still startled at her life. "I applied for a job in a dramatic show, and within the show was a nightclub scene. This was during Prohibition. The man doing it, Willard Mack, was a writer-producer-director-actor--and he saw something in me. He said, 'You can have this part out-of-town, but it's already been cast for New York.' I was a dancer, not a great one, but I knew left from right. But I was no actress. He just began training me, day and night. Taught me how to walk, taught me nuances, taught me tricks to use and not to use." Then, bingo: "The girl on Broadway was replaced, and I got the part! Willard Mack was behind me; he talked 'em into it! He taught me a lot but most of all he taught me to use this"--Stanwyck pointed her index finger at her forehead--"to think. Acting is thinking." It was no wonder Stanwyck wanted to stay on Broadway. Had she not in the mid-'20s married Fay, who was himself toying with Hollywood, she might not ever have come West. But if the initial stint here was disaster, there was a lifesaver waiting in the wings. His name was Capra. "Again, here was a man who saw something. Mr. Capra took me and taught me film. He put me in 'Ladies of Leisure' (1930) and, well. . . ." What did Capra teach Stanwyck? This time she pointed to her eyes. "These are the greatest tools in film," she said simply. "Mr. Capra taught me that. I mean, sure, it's nice to say very good dialogue, if you can get it. But great movie acting . . . watch the eyes." It's rarely noted these days, but striptease artist Betty Rowland was known in the 1940s as the "Ball of Fire" and she was a consultant on the film. Listening to Stanwyck, it becomes clear she has--with major stardom and barely a year off since the late '20s-- an awful lot to tell. Though reclusive, she's articulate about acting--not at all non-verbal. "I marvel at people who have theories about acting," she said mock-modestly. "I just go and do the work." Yet listening to her you begin to grasp how screen acting works. "Frank Capra taught me that if you can think it, you can make the audience know it. You can make them know what you are going to do. On the stage, it's mannerisms. On the screen, your range is shown in your eyes." Did the Stanwyck gaze work offscreen for her as a woman, as it did onscreen? Star magnetism often evaporates in the living room--unless there's a camera whirring in the background. Stanwyck's private life has been just that, private, and because she hasn't done Barbara Walters or a book tour (or a book) or "The Tonight Show" or anything media-wise, we know her as Martha Ivers or Annie Oakley or Mae Doyle or Phyllis Dietrichson. The public knows less of Barbara Stanwyck than they do of Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis, her only peers. Do woman and actress differ? "I dunno," shrugged Stanwyck. "If something has worked, it's worked. If I analyzed it too much, it would destroy what they buy in me." Though Billy Wilder says that Barbara Stanwyck knows not only every line of her own dialogue but other actors' dialogue too--Stanwyck again shrugs it off. "I couldn't take a part and tear it to pieces, analyzing it. See, I'd rather make a mistake than lose the vitality." It was the vitality that catapulted Stanwyck, that and her willingness to try any role, to not lock herself in. Example: "Ball of Fire," Howard Hawks' vintage 1942 romantic comedy featuring the he-she chemistry of Stanwyck and Gary Cooper. (And the classic comedy dialogue of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.) She's Sugarpuss O'Shea, the yum-yum girl, actually a stripper who falls for egghead Cooper. When she dances "Drum Boogie," with Gene Krupa behind her, the chorus girl is in her element. "I'm mink coat--I'm no bungalow apron," she tells Cooper, who goes on to tell her, "You have an extremely disturbing body." Stanwyck beams when you tell her you ran the picture only the night before. "One day I asked Mr. Wilder what it was about, and he said, 'Oh, simple. It's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.' Which was both true and brilliant. They didn't want me for the picture. They cast it with Ginger Rogers. The gossip then was that she wouldn't do it because the part was, well, a hooker really. And Ginger's morals and beliefs wouldn't let her play it. Me, I didn't give a damn." Stanwyck talking is like Stanwyck acting in one way: The Voice. "I had it from the beginning, God save me!" she roared, shaking her head. "One day on the set of some carnival picture, I saw some boy, maybe 13 years old, really staring at me. I thought, 'Maybe there's something he doesn't like. Why is he staring at me in such a strange way?' So I asked him, and he said, 'I was wondering who you sound like . . . and I figured it out. You sound like Mr. Ed.' It was such an honest remark, so like a child should be." Stanwyck's own childhood is a subject unspoken. In today's post-Freudian movie-star-mentality, we tend to "understand" stars in terms of Bette Davis' stage mother Ruthie or Katharine Hepburn's liberal doctor father. "I know," Stanwyck agreed, "but I haven't got it to fall back on. I didn't know my parents." Here Stanwyck tightens up slightly, then gives a what-the-hell look. "In interviews, I always used to refuse questions about childhood. But all right, let's just say I had a terrible childhood. Let's say that 'poor' is something I understand." Did "poor" lead to ambition? "It led to dreams," Stanwyck answered. "I used to dream when I was little that somebody got me all mixed up, that I belonged to nobility. That my parents had been very rich. Again, that's because I understood poor. This dream kept me going." And driving? "I just wanted to survive and eat and have a nice coat," Stanwyck returned. "What those two men--Willard Mack and Frank Capra--saw in me I still don't know." What Stanwyck saw in herself was discipline. She looked skyward, almost reverently, when the word came up. "As a chorus girl," she said like it was yesterday, "I danced even when I had pleurisy. You can't take a deep breath with pleurisy, so you take a short breath. And you go on, until you run out of breath. I danced with blisters on my heels because I didn't want an understudy to take my place. I had to learn discipline as a chorus girl, or be fired. If you didn't want to be fired, you showed up on time. Maybe today people have outside incomes, I don't know, I don't get friendly with them. But I didn't have an outside income." Yet by 1944 the IRS named Barbara Stanwyck the highest-paid woman in America. From 1930-57, she did a minimum of two pictures a year, sometimes even four or five. Yet it wasn't workaholism, according to the actress: "I was afraid they'd get somebody better, frankly. I never really thought I had any clout. For a lot of years I was free-lancing, by choice, but I think discipline stays with you. It's this fear that maybe somebody can come in and take over. Maybe a Redford or a Streep can take the luxury of a year off, but I never thought I could. Of course, we were more workable in those days. And they make more money now. Anyway, I never had self-assurance about leaving." What she had, according to every source living or dead, was manners. Barbara Stanwyck on a movie set was everybody's favorite; the crews called her "Missy" and studio bosses called her cooperative. Stanwyck has an unusual fix on temperament--she isn't naive or apolitical; rather, she's practical . "This is how I felt," she said, addressing the issue. "If you have something to say, you should say it before you start a picture. Say it in the confines of where it should be said, in an office. If you didn't win, at least there was time for them to tell you why you didn't win." Stanwyck insists she fought, but "I only fought for the right things. My concern was for the role; if I didn't believe it, I couldn't make an audience believe it. I didn't want anything else, just that the thing be believable. . . . If I am secure in what I am playing, then nothing can touch me. And so there's no reason to be temperamental." The answer was neat, but Stanwyck wasn't done. "An Eloise or a Joe could walk away, but that went on around me. It wasn't me walking. People picked on such silly things, like, 'Why can't I open my purse now?' I don't see where that has anything to do with acting. Also it's not what you get paid for. If you are worried about a pocketbook, you are in trouble already. But if you are worried, why not quietly work it out ahead of time?" Stanwyck was savvy enough to concentrate on acting. If she was less glamorous than, say, Dietrich, she was sexier than, say, Davis. Rather than being an iron butterfly, though, she was really one of the boys. She disavows the notion that she was technically smart about films. "I'd say to the cameraman, 'Don't teach me, take care of me.' Still to this day I don't know which is my better side, left or right. Because if I thought about that stuff, then I'd be technical. I don't want to look at myself, because then I am looking at me. And what I do in a role is not me. I could put my mouth on without a mirror. How? Because I know where my mouth is. People would say, 'What if it smears?' And I'd say, 'Then the makeup man fixes it. That's his job. We all have our jobs.' " Stanwyck isn't Norma Desmond (the faded star in Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard"). She isn't a dweller on past decades. Yet the notion amuses her. "I see things," she said smiling. "I have instincts. Many times before somebody says something, I know what they'll say. A couple of times people said, 'You are weird,' so I don't do it anymore. Nancy Sinatra (Sr.) says, 'You've been here before,' and who knows? Other people say senility is setting in." It's more like reality. Director Douglas Sirk said Stanwyck was "more expressive than any actress I ever worked with," adding: "She had depth as a person. There is this amazing tragic stillness about her, and there is nothing the least bit phony. She isn't capable of phony." Film historian James Harvey may have hit it on the head when he wrote that Stanwyck's voice suggests "not whisky or disillusionment or sexual provocation as much as it does the quite unsentimental sound of tears . . . tears sensibly surmounted but somehow, somewhere, fully wept." (This is not meant to imply Stanwyck is humorless; when ex-husband Frank Fay made a Broadway comeback in "Harvey," Stanwyck didn't attend, claiming, "I've seen all the rabbits Fay has to offer.") Stanwyck's second, and last, marriage ended 35 years ago. Her husband was Robert Taylor, and the two of them were the stuff of Hollywood legend. From 1936, when they first worked together (in "This Is My Affair"), to 1965, when they reunited on screen (in William Castle's "Night Walker"), Stanwyck and Taylor seemed to be the cream of Hollywood coupledom. Stanwyck's star was brighter, but Taylor had the cushion of an MGM contract when such contracts counted. Together they were athletic and attractive and productive, and when it ended the professional weepers shed tears for Stanwyck--and claimed she never got over Robert Taylor. Stanwyck hasn't discussed Taylor publicly, and one doesn't feel she has to. Yet it was she who brought up his name. The subject was social Hollywood. "I was only social when I was married to Bob," she said, being smart enough to realize the omission of Robert Taylor from her "story" would be a true omission. "He was under contract to Metro, and they made you-- made, you --go out two or three nights a week. So I used to go out with Bob. I was his wife." Two careers, one marriage; the equation has to be hard. Stanwyck looked intensely into the observer's eyes. "Living is hard," she said knowingly. "Getting along with another person is hard. When it doesn't work out, when it falls apart, there's pain. You say I'm known as someone who takes care of herself. It's true. But I worked hard at the marriage because I wanted it." Stanwyck seemed to have perspective on the subject, saying she never thought of marrying again. ("I'm concentrating on work," she told Hedda Hopper at the time of the divorce from Taylor. "What that takes is serenity, beauty, quiet, friends when I need them, and the valuable state of being alone.") Now, out of the blue, Stanwyck said: "Bob was bored. It took me a long time to accept that. To understand it. He said he wanted to be a married bachelor. And I remember telling him that every man who ever lived wants that, wants it both ways. . . . The pain followed. But it comes with the territory." The territory was work. The roles had a range probably unmatched-- by anyone. From murderess ("Blowing Wild") to other woman ("Forbidden") to reporter ("Meet John Doe"). From invalid ("Sorry Wrong Number," for which she received one of her four Academy Award nominations) to gold digger ("The Lady Eve") to evangelist ("Miracle Woman"). From mistress ("Executive Suite") to cattle queen ("Forty Guns") to actress ("All I Desire"). From shoplifter ("Remember the Night") to burnt-out case ("Clash By Night") to chorine ("Ladies of Burlesque"). The cost, on some level, was a private life. "But in those days we could at least come home and have a civilized dinner, even a social hour," Stanwyck reasoned. "It was a rational day from 9 to 6; now, working on TV, you have to be up at 4. Four a.m. to 10 p.m. is tough on a woman. I can't imagine actors today sustaining a marriage. Or coming home and listening to kids. Kids need to be listened to." (Stanwyck's adopted son, Dion, has been out of her life for decades. He goes unmentioned.) "I don't know how TV actors have time for spouses and children. At night, you have a pot of soup and go to sleep. It's a brutal life." Stanwyck knows. Though she adored the four seasons as the matriarch Barkley in "Big Valley," she had no fun at all with "The Colbys" last season as the sister of Colby patriarch Charlton Heston. She refers to the sudser as "that turkey. . . . It wasn't acting, it was just the same scene every week, in a different dress. I mean, you open your mouth and what comes out is not dialogue! I don't have very much integrity, but I have enough integrity that I got out." How did she get into the turkey in the first place? Stanwyck explained that her house burned down, and it was either work or wait around L'Ermitage, where she was temporarily living. "And then things were told one way that worked out another way. Aaron (Spelling, producer of 'The Colbys') is a kind man, but the telling of it was better than it was on paper. I wanted a legal out, and I got it. At the beginning, I told Aaron, 'If it doesn't gel, I want to be able to get out without scrapes.' So I did. Aaron asked me to come back for four or six shows, but that doesn't work. Four or six appearances hurts the rhythm the show does have. When you can't win, there's no point wasting your life. Don't be a bore. Move on. I got out nicely." Also, and importantly, she also didn't bad-mouth the show while appearing on it. Stanwyck's understandable ax is with modern writing, TV or otherwise. When you've had Brackett-and-Wilder dialogue (or Odets or O'Casey), you come to expect something. Her sneakered foot hit the floor when writing was discussed. "On 'Colbys,' I said, 'Give me something to work with! You're not letting me work.' My work is in there," Stanwyck said, pointing to another wing of the house. "In there, I go over and over a scene. Not only the words. You see, acting is silence, sometimes, when it works. On 'Colbys,' they were giving me talk-talk-talk." Certainly writers paid more attention to stars once upon a time. "The Philadelphia Story," for example, was tailored by Philip Barry to a T for Katharine Hepburn. Stanwyck singles out "Stella Dallas" (1937, her first Oscar nomination). "She wasn't me, that woman, but she was a woman I understood completely. She was good, cheap but good, and I could play her. Sam Goldwyn made sure everything was first-class. He may have come out of the penny arcade, but he took a lot with him--and what he took he used." But writers? "Writers then knew a part of you. I could never answer a question about a character until I was playing her, so I was no help to writers. But writers used to look at your work, and they knew a certain part of you." A part of Barbara Stanwyck has stayed with her characters. Or been left behind. "When you finish," she said slowly, "you walk off the set and a little part of yourself stays there. It's gone and done and you did it and you feel a little bit of emptiness after it's over. You thought it had left you, but it hadn't. It's that damn Irish in me. You say to yourself, 'I hope she lives.' "

Second Takes -- Billy Wilder

Kevin Thomas writes an appreciation of director Mitchell Leisen for a 1977 revival of "Midnight" and "Death Takes a Holiday." The 1941 film "Hold Back the Dawn" reunited Leisen, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder.

The Times' Philip K. Scheuer calls Brackett and Wilder's script for "Hold Back the Dawn" "close to brilliant." According to a 1942 Times story, Paulette Goddard was originally cast in the role of an Azusa schoolteacher who succumbs to the wiles of a gigolo played by Charles Boyer, then yielded the role to Olivia de Havilland and became Boyer's cynical partner. "I backed all the way into this business," she said, "and I may have to back some more. But I'm getting there." (According to the story, Goddard had been stonewalled by the studios for several years because she threw a telephone at a Hollywood producer). Bonus fact: Ketti Frings, who wrote "Memo to a Movie Producer," the original story for "Hold Back the Dawn," was the 1958 Times Woman of the Year for playwriting.

Second Takes -- Billy Wilder

Nov. 21, 1940: "Arise, My Love." Look! It's Rube Wolf! "You'll like it, I promise," -- Philip K. Scheuer

Second Takes -- Billy Wilder

Aug. 21, 1940, a half-page ad for "Rhythm on the River" and no sign of Billy Wilder's name anywhere.

If you didn't know, you probably wouldn't guess from this clip that Wilder was involved in this film. Not a trace of Billy Wilder in the review, either.

Second Takes -- Billy Wilder

Dec. 5, 1939: "Ninotchka" opens tomorrow! And no, not a word about the screenwriters in this anonymous review, which appeared in The Times on Dec. 7, 1939.

"I still remember the day of the funeral," Billy Wilder said of Ernst Lubitsch. "After the ceremony William Wyler and I walked silently to our car. Finally, I said, just to say something to break the silence, 'No more Lubitsch.' To which Wyler replied, 'Worse than that -- No more Lubitsch filmes.' How right we were. For 20 years since then we were all trying to find the secret of the 'Lubitsch touch.' Nothing doing. Oh if we were lucky we sometimes managed a few feet of film here and there in our work that momentarily sparkled like Lubitsch. Like Lubitsch, not real Lubitsch. His art is lost. That most elegant of screen magicians took his secret with him."

Second Takes -- Billy Wilder

Sept. 16, 1939: The Times' review lists Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder for the first time.

Second Takes -- Billy Wilder

Photograph by Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times Billy Wilder, Dec. 17, 1999, at Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood.

Note: I had so much fun posting a month's worth of Times stories about Raymond Chandler that I thought I'd continue the feature. Here's the first feature in a month-long look at Billy Wilder--lrh. BILLY WILDER'S 50-YEAR ITCH IN HOLLYWOOD March 2, 1986 By PAUL ROSENFIELD, Billy Wilder was having trouble finding a teaspoon--in his own kitchen yet--so finally, sheepishly, he curled a finger and led a visitor to the Wilder dining room. There, Hollywood's most mischievous immigrant borrowed a spoon from the impeccably set table. That night, Audrey and Billy Wilder were entertaining for 10. ("A nice group of right-wing Democrats," joshed the host.) As Wilder swiped the spoon, he did a double take, making very sure his wife wasn't around. It's no accident that the Wilders' dinner parties are the closest thing Hollywood has to an '80s salon. (Truman Capote's chapter on Hollywood in his unfinished "Answered Prayers" was called "And Audrey Wilder Got Up To Sing." There's a reason. The former Tommy Dorsey band singer, still skinny as a hairpin sideways, still gets up to sing, but she also doubles as the town's most entertaining hostess.) "But today," Billy Wilder complained, "I wish I was on Sam Spiegel's yacht. In Sardinia. If I wanted all this media attention, I'd have called myself Billy Windex." With that, the writer-director-producer made instant coffee, answered another call and took a seat. There was no more stalling:On Thursday, Billy Wilder is getting the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award, and that's what the shouting's about. The irony is that for all Wilder's bravura, and credits--"Sunset Boulevard," "Stalag 17," "Sabrina," "Seven Year Itch," "Spirit of St. Louis," "Some Like It Hot" (and those are just the ones starting with S )--Wilder is still very much the loner. For years now, he and collaborator I.A.L. ("Iz") Diamond have spent five of every seven mornings (sans secretaries) at the Writers and Artists Building in Beverly Hills, working on screenplays. (Lately, though, Wilder can be found down the street at United Artists' new headquarters, where he's just signed on as a special consultant. "I'm in the kitchen cabinet, and busy," as he puts it.) So when the home phone rings, as now it must, for autographs and interview requests--Wilder wears a mock look of being put-upon. The thing is, he doesn't mean it. Mr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde, as the late wit Harry Kurnitz called him, would never admit it, but he likes the attention. To be 50 years at the top is no accident. In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock said it best:"The two most important words in the motion picture business are Billy Wilder. " Hitchcock was talking about variety . To co-write "Ninotchka" for Garbo, then last long enough to be in Jerry Weintraub's kitchen cabinet at UA, is to go the distance. But unlike director-peers Hitchcock and John Huston, Wilder got the attention on his own terms, in his own private, chameleonic way. No cameo roles for him, onscreen or off. The Wilder wit--the sweet-and-sour cocktails he delivers on command, the lines like "slipping out of wet clothes into a dry martini"--are always forthcoming. But Wilder, the man with the mind full of razor blades, is behind the scenes, never in front. Until now. (NBC will air a one-hour version of the AFI evening April 26.) One resists the temptation to ask Wilder if, like his quintessential Hollywood character Norma Desmond, he's ready for his close-up. More to the point: What would the close-up reveal? How much of Billy Wilder is in Billy Wilder's movies? The silver-haired septuagenarian rolled up the sleeves on his gray cashmere sweater and agreed to give the question a whirl. In the '20s, after leaving Vienna to become a journalist in Berlin, in one morning he interviewed Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Arthur Schnitzler and Richard Strauss. So the question-answer process is not unfamiliar. "Isn't it pieces of yourself, of your life, that you inevitably use?" he asked rhetorically. "You suck art out of your finger in a way." In one way or another. Wilder was a gigolo in Mexico a thousand years ago, and a Mexican gigolo (played by Charles Boyer) turned up, rather impishly, in "Hold Back the Dawn." "Or let's take 'Sunset Boulevard,' " suggested Wilder. "Maybe you believe it when William Holden's car is repossessed. Because yes, it happened to me, it happened here in Hollywood, and it happened to work in that movie." On a more personal level, isn't Kirk Douglas' cynical reporter in "Ace in the Hole" more than a little bit of Wilder? Maybe and maybe not. "Anyone who knows me," he said slowly, "knows the cynicism hides my sentimentality." It's why Wilder's refugee-freshness about America slipped into Garbo's Russian in Paris in "Ninotchka"--or James Cagney's outsider in Berlin in "One, Two, Three." Before he was 30, Wilder had lived in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Mexico and Hollywood, and what he saw he used. Clearly one could play 20 questions about Wilder's characters--Sefton in "Stalag 17," Don Birnam in "Lost Weekend," Walter Neff in "Double Indemnity," Linus Larrabee in "Sabrina"--but clearly he'd rather talk about the casting. Wilder is canny enough to know the public is more interested in Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart than in the types they played, and so he deftly moves a conversation from characters to stars. "Three times in my life I almost got to work with Cary Grant," remembered Wilder with both enthusiasm and disappointment. To realize that Wilder never directed Grant or Katharine Hepburn or Spencer Tracy is to be surprised, but not after listening to Wilder's explanation. "Every movie begins with the dream casting of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Then every movie faces the reality of casting Lyle Keller and Sadie Glutz. Cary (Grant) almost did 'Ninotchka,' in the Melvyn Douglas role;imagine him opposite Garbo! The second time was 'Sabrina,' and then at the last minute it was Bogart." (Bogart as the tycoon was, in fact, such a last-minute replacement that editorial adviser Doane Harrison remembers Wilder asking him to stall a day's shooting while new Bogart dialogue was written;almost no Wilder film begins with a finished script.) "The third one Cary almost did was 'Love in the Afternoon.' Gary Cooper played it. Not that the replacements were so bad. . . ." Wilder paused long enough that the dream pairing of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in "Love in the Afternoon" could be seen in the mind's eye. "Afternoon" was the first writing partnership of Wilder and Diamond, and it goes without saying that it must have been written with Grant in mind. "Cary is a good friend of mine, but maybe he was scared of me, I dunno," Wilder mused. "Cooper, I think, had not as much going for him in that role. Say the name Gary Cooper, and people think of a 'High Noon' sheriff kind of guy, not a Ritz Hotel lover with Gypsy music in the background who gets into one-night stands. . . ." The Hollywood one-night stand of all time, of course, is the one William Holden tripped into in "Sunset Boulevard." It's the film Wilder tends most often to talk about;mention it to him, and certain buttons are pressed. The quintessential movie about Hollywood, it was the last of his collaborations with writer-producer Charles Brackett--but again Wilder wants you to know the accidental nature of its having gotten made. "Mr. Montgomery Clift changed his mind," Wilder said, shaking his head at the very idiocy of such a move. "A week, maybe 10 days before filming, Mr. Clift's New York agent sends word that maybe his client, the young actor Clift, should be gotten out of it. The feeling was that the younger man/older woman thing could actually ruin his career. (Co-star) Gloria Swanson was 50," Wilder said, making it sound like 15. "Fifty is younger than Audrey Hepburn is now. Is 50 old? I think Mr. Clift was tortured--can you imagine? Suddenly this change of heart I found very peculiar. . . ." But "Sunset Boulevard" was an inevitability. Budd Schulberg and Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald had already fictionalized Hollywood, but nobody had made the movie. Wilder and Brackett were already in place as the happiest professional couple in Hollywood, and ready to take more risks in exposing their adopted hometown. "Kaufman and Hart could write a terrible play and close it in New Haven before Broadway," said Wilder logically, "but in Hollywood we don't bury our dead. We finish the movies we start, then we find them turning up on TV in the middle of the night. That could be one explanation for an actor's fear." If Montgomery Clift had cold feet, co-stars Swanson, Erich von Stroheim and Cecil B. DeMille did not--and Wilder is the kind of realist who understands the Hollywood high wire. In other words, the show goes on, understudies emerge. "William Holden was a Paramount man, and he got a script at 3 p.m. on a Monday and said yes by 5. No test, no reading, and he was, you know, perfect." (In her memoir "Swanson on Swanson," the actress made the point that Holden was 31, while the character Joe Gillis was 26, and it was maybe he not she who should be "re-aged" with makeup, but the chemistry worked nevertheless.) One Wilder trademark has been to get once-in-a-career performances from actors--Gloria Swanson, Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland--but again the director emphasizes serendipity. "It's because I know just how much was accidental. Swanson was not the first choice for Norma Desmond. As it turned out, it worked with her, and it would have collapsed without her. But Pola Negri is the one we thought of first, then we thought she hadn't really been in sound pictures. And then there was--can I tell you a story?" Wilder, with the kind of timing only actors and athletes know, then told it. "I pitched 'Sunset Boulevard' to Mary Pickford," he said, letting the scene emerge. "I went to Pickfair, to see Mary, with a script under my arm. Imagine me walking into that house with that churchy atmosphere. And then beginning to read 'Sunset Boulevard' aloud to Mary Pickford. It hit me midway through that Mary Pickford was not going to play Norma Desmond. But what do I do? How do I get out of this one?" If you're Billy Wilder you think on your feet. "I suddenly stopped reading, and just said, 'You know, Mary, you can play anything. You really can. You can act rings around any actress. But this is not on your level. It's not up to your caliber.' . . . So you grasp what I mean about accidents." And casting. Anyone who's seen Wilder's "Double Indemnity" can only imagine Fred MacMurray as insurance salesman Walter Neff. Yet MacMurray, too, was an accident and probably never again as good as he was under Wilder, in "Indemnity" and again in "The Apartment" 15 years later. "Nobody wanted the part of Neff, nobody. The leading actors said, 'It will be the end of me!' Only Dick Powell said yes, but nobody else. (Co-star Barbara) Stanwyck knew from instinct how sharp the story was, and she knew not only her lines, but everybody else's lines. She's the quickest study I've ever met in my life, by the way. But I remember asking MacMurray to do it, and him saying, 'Billy, you know what I am? I'm not the actor for this. I'm a sax player.' " Was MacMurray maybe worried about the film's possible violence? Wilder practically put up his dukes at the mention. "I'd like you to compare 'Indemnity' to the other James M. Cain book, 'Postman Always Rings Twice'! No comparison. I hope I am not known as the early Austrian Sam Peckinpah! Not only do I hate filming violence, I also hate watching it in other peoples' movies! In my movies, there have only been two or three deaths, unless you count the St. Valentines Day Massacre in 'Some Like It Hot.' " Point made, Wilder was back on the subject of MacMurray. "It's 1959 and we were all set to go with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine on 'The Apartment.' With Paul Douglas as the boss who's been having an affair with the elevator girl. Again, last-minute casting changes, and Paul Douglas was out. Again I'm on the phone, what is this, 15 years later, to Fred MacMurray. Again he says, 'No, Billy.' He had, at that time, a two-or-three year deal with Disney, because he was doing the 'Absent-Minded Professor' things. So he says, 'Billy, how can I play a family man from Long Island who has an affair with an elevator operator? Disney would get mad! I mean, Billy, are you crazy?" Like a fox. "The Apartment" left Wilder with the triple crown of Oscars (for writing and directing and producing) in one night. (He has 20 nominations and 6 Oscars.) The other afternoon, he rankled at the label "dirty fairy tale" attached to "The Apartment." The notion being that C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) gets corporately ahead by offering his bachelor pad to executives for after-hours affairs. "I don't understand that 'dirty fairy tale' thing," scowled Wilder. "The character tries to have a nice little career for himself, and he doesn't go after the arrangement--he gets asked for the use of the apartment. So he gets a little promotion? So? "My father told me once, nobody's an alchemist," added Wilder with a wink. "But if I was, I'd make a thriller. There was never one kind of picture I made. I went from 'Witness for the Prosecution' to 'One, Two, Three.' Mr. Hitchcock, he made only thrillers, and magnificently. But you know what a thriller is to me? It's the movie where the boss chases the secretary around the desk. . . . That's a thriller--and that's alchemy!"