City of Nets (34 page)

But Chandler still had his list of indignities that must cease. According to John Houseman, who was then an assistant producer at Paramount, the indictment and proposed settlement went into considerable detail: “Mr. Wilder was at no time to swish under Mr. Chandler's nose or to point in his direction the thin, leather-handled malacca cane which Mr. Wilder was in the habit of waving around while they worked. Mr. Wilder was not to give Mr. Chandler orders of an arbitrary or personal nature such as ‘Ray, will you open that window?' or ‘Ray, will you shut that door please?' ” Wilder himself remembered a few more of Chandler's grievances: “Mr. Wilder frequently interrupts our work to take phone calls from women. . . . I can't work with a man who wears a hat in the office. I feel he is about to leave momentarily.”

And so on. How did they ever continue? Somehow they did, for another six months, with Chandler repeatedly threatening to resign, and Wilder repeatedly cajoling him into continuing, until finally there was a script, which seemed to be a faithful re-creation of the novel but was markedly different. Wilder's direction would make it more different still (but, strangely, more faithful too). In the novel, for example, after Walter Neff, the insurance man, impersonated his victim and then jumped off the train near where the body was to be found, and then Mrs. Dietrichson had to drive him away from the scene, Cain wrote only, “She started up. We passed the factories.” In the film, that became the famous scene of the car refusing to start, the engine endlessly going
urrun-urrun-urrun,
until Fred MacMurray leaned over and turned on the ignition, which the panicky Barbara Stanwyck had forgotten to do. “Barbara and I sat in this dummy car,” MacMurray said later. “Just a car seat. No dashboard. No ignition key to turn. We faked it, pantomimed it. When I changed places with her and turned the key I remember I was doing it fast and Billy kept saying, ‘Make it longer, make it longer,' and finally I yelled, ‘For Chrissake Billy, it's not going to hold that long,' and he said, ‘Make it longer,' and he was right. It held. It held. . . .”

That was much later, of course. That was after MacMurray, who didn't want to play the part of Walter Neff at all, realized that he had been tricked and manipulated into the best role of his life. That kept happening. Many of the famous talents in Hollywood never seemed to recognize a good idea when it was proposed to them. So Billy Wilder, having bullied and maneuvered Chandler into helping to create a great script, now discovered that nobody wanted to play in it. Paramount's biggest star, Alan Ladd, wouldn't touch it. And then there was the inevitable scene with George Raft. Wilder wanted to send him the script.

“I don't read scripts,” said Raft. “Tell it to me.”

Wilder told it to him, but Raft couldn't understand what had happened to “the lapel bit.” Wilder looked blank. “You know,” said Raft, who couldn't bear the idea of playing a villain, “when the guy flashes his lapel, you see his badge, you know he's a detective.”

Wilder told him there wasn't any lapel bit in
Double Indemnity,
so Raft turned him down. Perhaps Wilder sighed in relief—“That's when we knew we had a good picture,” he said later—for the star he really wanted, he claimed, was MacMurray, somebody amiable and happy-go-lucky and slightly flabby, the all-American salesman, ready to be corrupted. MacMurray was fighting with Paramount about a new contract, and he knew that the studio's production chief, Y. Frank Freeman, disliked Wilder and particularly disliked Wilder's newest project. So MacMurray agreed to Wilder's importuning as a way to torment Freeman, confident that Freeman would forbid him to play such a sordid part, but Freeman consented because he thought
Double Indemnity
would ruin MacMurray's career and thus punish him for arguing about his contract. “I never dreamed it would be the best picture I ever made,” MacMurray said.

Barbara Stanwyck, too, was terrified of the best role she ever had. She was afraid, she told Wilder, “to go into an out-and-out cold-blooded killer.” Wilder bullied her too. “Well, are you a mouse or an actress?” he demanded. And when he got her to take the part, he insisted on outfitting her in a blond wig because “I wanted her to look as sleazy as possible.” Paramount's chief of chiefs, Buddy DeSylva, was dismayed at seeing his star in such a wig. “We hire Barbara Stanwyck and here we get George Washington,” he said.

Wilder pressed on. He defied the studio conventions by shooting much of his film on seedy locations around the Los Angeles railroad station. He alone knew what he was doing, and even when he didn't know what he was doing, he knew how to correct his course. He proved that in the ending. Cain's original ending had been a rather absurd demonstration of the villainess turning into an angel of evil, dressed all in scarlet and trying to destroy the corrupted salesman. The Chandler-Wilder script was more practical, and also conformed to the Hays Office rules on crime and punishment: The salesman died in the gas chamber at Folsom. A strong ending, sharp, indisputable. Wilder spent $150,000 to recreate the Folsom death chamber, and he devoted five days to filming the whole scene, and then he decided that the ending was wrong. Too blunt. It lacked subtlety.

Chandler didn't want to rewrite the ending, and Paramount certainly didn't want to throw away $150,000 to restage and refilm that ending, but Wilder insisted. His new scene, one of his very best scenes, went very quietly. MacMurray, wounded and bleeding badly, asked Edward G. Robinson, the insurance investigator who represented a figure of paternal authority, for twenty-four hours to get to the Mexican border. “You'll never make it to the elevator,” said Robinson, lighting MacMurray's last cigarette. MacMurray said Robinson had been unable to solve the crime because the murderer had been “too close, right across the desk from you.” Robinson said, “Closer than that.”

When Wilder went to Grauman's for the Academy Award ceremonies the following spring, he hoped and expected to win an Oscar even though he knew that Paramount had been pushing Leo McCarey's saccharine
Going My Way,
which was in fact voted best picture of the year. When McCarey was also named best director, though, Wilder could not bear it. As McCarey proudly marched down the aisle of Grauman's to receive his award, Wilder stuck out a foot and tripped him.

 

It was never completely clear why Vera Zorina was cast in the choice role of Maria in
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
A Norwegian known primarily as a ballerina, she had made some undistinguished appearances in
The Goldwyn Follies
(1938) and
On Your Toes
(1939). Many newspapers reported that Ernest Hemingway had seen Ingrid Bergman in
Intermezzo
and wanted her to play Maria. David Selznick, who owned Miss Bergman's contract, claimed that he himself almost bought the Hemingway novel for her but “was so exhausted after
Gone with the Wind
and
Rebecca
that I simply could not face a job of this size.” Selznick said he was determined to get Miss Bergman the part no matter who produced the movie, so he “planted all kinds of newspaper items to the effect that she was the only possible Maria.” He also telephoned Miss Bergman on a ski vacation in Sun Valley and asked whether it would be possible for her to have lunch with Hemingway in San Francisco before the novelist departed for China. “Is it possible?” Miss Bergman echoed. “Possible? I am already on my way.” She had been skiing in the sun for a week, so her face was very tanned and her nose was peeling from sunburn. Hemingway was awed by her beauty—indeed, he remained somewhat in awe of her for the rest of his life. “You'll get the part, don't worry,” he said.

Hemingway had turned over his best-selling novel to Paramount for a sum of money that he called “bloody wonderful”—between $100,000 and $150,000, according to different accounts, more than twice the payment for
Gone With the Wind
—but that did not give him any control over what was done with it. So Paramount, having paid a lot of money for the novel, and a lot more to get Gary Cooper from M-G-M, probably decided to economize by assigning the role of Maria to Vera Zorina, who was under contract to Paramount and needed a part. (“Zorina . . . is a lovely dancer,” Hemingway complained to Maxwell Perkins, “but has a face rather like a dachshund.”) Sam Wood, the director, later blamed this inept decision on Paramount's DeSylva, while DeSylva blamed it on Wood. In any case, the Paramount authorities sheared off all Miss Zorina's hair—as had happened to Maria in the course of being mauled and gang-raped by the Fascists—and sent her off to Wood's headquarters in the Sierra Nevadas. Then, when they looked at the first three weeks of rushes, they decided that she couldn't play the part.

Ingrid Bergman was in the midst of
Casablanca
during all this. Paul Henreid was impressed by how “sweet and gentle” she was, “a retiring, patient woman, wonderful to work with and an excellent actress, but . . . terribly vulnerable. We wanted to take care of her, to protect her.” Henreid was surprised to find her in tears one day, and to learn that it was because she had lost the part of Maria, and to see a different side of Ingrid Bergman. “Those idiots!” she cried, in what Henreid called a “hardened” voice. “What the hell do they know? Picking Vera Zorina of all people. She can't act, Paul. She just can't, and I'm good. I'm really good!” Henreid was present, too, when Miss Bergman got the telephone call that she had been hungering for. “She went to it and said, ‘Yes, yes . . .” then let out a yell I can only compare to that of a tigress who has made a kill, a yell of such joy and triumph that I was stunned. Was this submissive Ingrid? She put down the phone and yelled, ‘I got it, Paul! I got it!' ”

The day after that phone call, Miss Bergman said farewell to the set of
Casablanca
and drove nearly five hundred miles into the mountains until she found a group of cabins just beyond the Sonora Pass. “Then I see this beautiful man coming down the mountainside toward me,” she recalled. “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and I blushed naturally. Then he said, ‘Hallo, Maria?' and I blushed again. . . .” Gary Cooper took her to meet Sam Wood and helped her to get installed and then asked if they could rehearse some of their dialogue. She agreed, and so he started right in. “I thought he was still talking to me, because he didn't change his voice,” she said. “He didn't become an actor who acted, he was exactly the same. So I kept saying, ‘Excuse me, what did you say? I can't understand what you're talking about.' And he said a little reprovingly, ‘I'm reading the dialogue, that's the dialogue.' So I blushed again and said, ‘Oh, that's the dialogue.' ”

Dialogue was one of the things for which Ernest Hemingway had originally become famous, but Hollywood had to improve on everything, so Paramount hired Dudley Nichols to improve on
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Nichols was both a successful screenwriter (
The Informer,
1935;
Stagecoach,
1939;
Manhunt,
1941) and a dedicated liberal, one of the founders of the Screen Writers Guild and its president during the difficult years, 1937 and 1938. But somehow, by some half-unconscious process of self-neutralization, a novel that had been conceived partly as a eulogy on the death of the Spanish Republic turned into a movie script about politically indeterminate heroes and villains. Hemingway disapproved. He described Nichols's version of the Loyalist guerrillas as something derived from fourth-rate productions of Bizet's
Carmen.
He particularly objected to their wearing red bandannas and demanded that they all wear blacks and grays. “I went all over Dudley Nichols' script and suggested an enormous amount of changes and absolutely necessary alterations, excisions, and additions,” Hemingway wrote to Perkins. “In the end he rewrote it and incorporated almost everything I had suggested.”

But even then, as usual, things somehow got changed, depoliticized, neutralized. This was largely the work of Sam Wood, who had the authority, far off in those Sierra Nevadas, to shade the script as he pleased. “It is a love story against a brutal background,” Wood said. “It would be the same love story if they were on the other side.” Wood had originally seemed an ideal director because he was a Hemingway-style man of action (one of his previous successes had been to guide Ronald Reagan through
Kings Row
), and only after the filming was done did it become apparent that Wood's conservatism was turning into an obsession.

Wood was by no means alone in his obsession. In February of 1944, he announced the formation of a militant organization called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Among the founders were Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Walt Disney, Roy Brewer, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, John Ford, Irene Dunne, and John Wayne. Wood's announcement was timed to appear the day before a lavish dinner by the Hollywood Free World Association, under the chairmanship of Dudley Nichols, to hear a speech by Henry Wallace. “The American motion picture is, and will continue to be, held by Americans for the American people, in the interests of America, and dedicated to the preservation and continuance of the American scene and the American way of life,” Wood proclaimed in his inaugural address.

After that heroic beginning, the organization met every month at the American Legion auditorium on Highland Avenue, conducted its routine business, and then listened to inspiring talks from anti-Communist crusaders like J. B. Matthews, Louis Budenz, and Ralph de Toledano. That might have been harmless enough, but the organization also began quietly lobbying for the House Un-American Activities Committee to come and investigate un-American influence, Communist influence, in Hollywood.

By this time, Wood was carrying a little black notebook in which he jotted down names of Hollywood subversives who would have to be purged. In his family, according to Wood's daughter Jeane, his crusade was known simply as “It.” “ ‘It' invariably transformed Dad into a snarling, unreasoning brute,” she said. “We used to leave the dinner table with our guts tangled and churning from the experience.” When the House Un-American Activities Committee finally did descend on Hollywood in 1947, Wood was one of the first of the “friendly” witnesses (right after Jack Warner and shortly before Gary Cooper), welcoming its investigation and testifying to his own struggles in the cause. At a meeting of his own MPA one day in 1949, finally, Wood worked himself into a rage at the news that a liberal screenwriter was suing the organization for slander. Shortly after the meeting ended, Wood suffered a heart attack and died. When his will was read, it turned out that he had left his various bequests on one condition. Except for his widow, whom he apparently trusted, no heirs could inherit anything until they filed with the probate court an affidavit swearing that they “are not now, nor have they ever been, Communists.”