You Must Remember This (18 page)

Today, just one of those paintings would bring eighty million dollars, or close to it. I shudder to think what the entire collection would bring, not that anybody but a Silicon Valley entrepreneur could afford it. Today the major art collections in Hollywood tend
toward the modern, filled with still living or recently dead artists whose work costs much less. Amassing a collection like that is more of a gamble, and I would wager it’s not as much fun.

That’s the way Bill and Edie Goetz would have looked at it.

Very few stars’ houses were as grand as the Goetzes’. Jimmy and Gloria Stewart’s Tudor-style house on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills was quite homey and unpretentious. Jimmy did what I thought was a very classy, not to mention telling, thing: he bought the house next door, tore it down, and planted a garden. He and Gloria would be out there all the time, supervising the gardeners or harvesting flowers and vegetables.

Inside the house, the piano in the living room was covered with pictures of family and friends, only some of whom were famous. Other than that, it was a comfortable home, with splashes of orange in the furnishings, but otherwise unremarkable. It could have been the home of a banker in Chagrin Falls.

The only room that told you who owned the house was the library. There was a niche that held Jimmy’s Oscar, as well as his certificate from the New York Film Critics Circle for Best Actor of 1939 for
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
. There was a citation from the air force—Jimmy flew many combat missions during World War II—and lots of photos. Oh, and one other thing—there was a small statue of a rabbit in there as well: Elwood P. Dowd’s old friend Harvey.

Some of the photos were stills from movies, although interestingly they weren’t necessarily shots from films regarded as classics—there was nothing from
Rear Window
or
Mr. Smith
, for instance. Instead, Jimmy featured shots from
Winchester ’73
,
The Stratton Story
, and
The Glenn Miller Story
. The others were simply family photos: Jimmy’s beloved twin girls; Jimmy’s father’s hardware
store in Indiana, Pennsylvania; Jimmy visiting Vietnam. In that sense, the house was a true reflection of the man Jimmy was: a family man who was as much a product of Pennsylvania as of Hollywood.

Toward the end of his life, Jimmy and I were shooting a promotional film for St. John’s Hospital, the charity to which Jimmy devoted so much time and energy. After we finished the scene, we were walking away from the camera crew when an old wino staggered down the street and saw who was coming toward him.

“Hey, Jimmy,” he said. “Where’s Harvey?”

And without missing a beat, Jimmy, with his inimitable stutter, said, “Why, H-H-Harvey’s
everywhere
!”

In his will, Jimmy named me to replace him as a director of St. John’s, and I’ve continued on the board down to the present day. It’s the least I can do to show my love and gratitude to such a great actor, such a superb human being.

When people think of beautiful Hollywood women, they think of movie stars, but there were extravagantly lovely women who were not actresses. Billy Wilder’s wife Audrey, for instance, was one of the chicest women I’ve ever seen in my life.

When I knew them, Billy and Audrey had an apartment on Wilshire that was overflowing with his splendid modern art collection—Schiele, Klee, Braque, Miró, Balthus, Picasso—all the artists that Billy had admired when they, and he, were starting out in Europe but that he didn’t have the money to buy until he became successful in Hollywood. There were also a couple of comparative latecomers to Billy’s collection—Saul Steinberg and David Hockney—but they were friends, so they were in on a pass.

A few years before he died, Billy decided to sell off some of his art, and made more than thirty million dollars at auction—more than he’d ever made in the movie business. Not only that, but Billy said that the art was a lot more fun than the movie business, which is always like pushing a huge boulder uphill.

The Wilders’ apartment wasn’t really big enough to entertain more than a handful of people, so most of Billy’s parties took place at Chasen’s or at L’Escoffier at the Beverly Hilton. When Billy and Audrey threw a party, it was a particularly delicious affair, because their level of taste and style was so high. These affairs were strictly black tie, and they tended to be centered on Billy’s or Audrey’s birthdays or their wedding anniversary. There would be a small orchestra, and the guest list always included Jack Lemmon and his wife, Felicia Farr.

Billy was an adorable man, a combination of the acerbity of Berlin, where he worked as a newspaper reporter in the Weimar era, and of the far more benevolent Vienna—he was born in Austria. If you asked him, he would talk about his old pictures, but you had to ask him. When he did discuss them, it was with a remarkable level of objectivity, probably because he wasn’t the sort of man who dwelled in the past.

Billy didn’t go through his long life wondering about why one picture was a hit and another picture was a flop. Maybe he should have used Cary Grant instead of Gary Cooper, maybe the problem was the script, maybe the problem was the director (both jobs often filled by Wilder himself). He would shrug his shoulders and say, “The hell with it!”—about success or failure alike. Although, like anybody else, he found the successes lots more fun and a lot more lucrative.

Billy had copies of his scripts, but he didn’t read them, and he
didn’t have 16mm or 35mm prints of his films. If they were shown on TV, he didn’t watch them, and he evinced only polite interest if you watched them and wanted to talk about them.

He once explained to me why he was able to maintain an emotional distance about his movies. It involved one of the pictures he made in the 1960s. He had assembled his first choice in every area—I. A. L. Diamond had written the script with Billy, and Billy had gotten his first choice of cameraman and composer. The cast was just what Billy wanted.

After having spent nearly two years of his life working on the film, it was finally ready to be shown to the public for the first time. The preview was in Westwood, and Billy was understandably nervous. Anxious to get firsthand reactions, he hovered in the lobby as the show was breaking, and fell in step behind a young couple who were leaving the theater.

“What did you think?” asked the young woman.

The young man sighed and said, “Where do you want to have dinner?”

For Billy, that was an eye-opener. He’d had great successes and great failures, and he would always insist that he had worked just as hard on the failures as he had on the successes—
The Spirit of St. Louis
was one of the biggest financial disasters in the history of Warner Bros. Why some pictures soared from their first day while others sputtered, strained, and dropped was one of the mysteries of the universe, and Billy didn’t pretend to understand it.

All that work . . . And as far as the audience was concerned, it was just a diversion, something to fill the time before dinner.

I think Billy was always subtly embarrassed by critics theorizing about him, whether for or against, because so much of what he did—what any creative person does—derived from a passion for
the material. And how do you analyze passion? You feel it or you don’t. Billy didn’t like being ignored, but he didn’t like being taken too seriously, either.

Like so many of the truly creative people in Hollywood, Billy was focused on the next movie, not the last one, so his enforced retirement must have been very tough on him. Not that he ever let on—he didn’t want sympathy. He knew his career had been close to unparalleled, and he wasn’t given to self-pity.

After Billy died, Audrey carried on, through years of declining health, until her death in 2012. Because Billy was a famous filmmaker, the world knew how special he was—not just as an artist, but as a man. But a man like Billy had to have a special woman, and Audrey was truly that.

Someone once asked my wife Jill why she thought Billy and Audrey’s marriage had worked.

“Because they loved each other,” she said.

And that says it all.

By the 1950s, tastes had definitively changed, and the vast Spanish and Italianate mansions seemed permanently passé. They were also incredibly expensive to run, so it became cheaper to tear them down, as was the case with Marion Davies’s great beach house at Santa Monica. The destruction of the great mansions sped up over the succeeding years. Even Pickfair, the original movie mansion, was leveled in 1990.

The years of the great parties were beginning to fade as well. There were many reasons for that. I had usually hung out with a crowd that was ten to fifteen years older than I was, so as those people aged they had less to celebrate. Some died, and some just left
Hollywood, so the nucleus got smaller and smaller. And the business got more diversified. TV people worked much more and longer hours than movie people, so they tended to go to bed earlier. Finally, the great restaurants that had hosted so many great parties began going out of business.

It was a classic generational shift.

It was a lesson to me that nothing lasts forever. Except the movies.

F
rom its inception, the movie business attracted extremely ambitious, type A personalities for whom the making of motion pictures was an all-consuming activity. This meant that blowing off steam in between films or on weekends became even more important than it would have ordinarily been.

People who were working in the industry in the early days told me that a lot of the pastimes enjoyed by the stars were on the innocent side. Besides fads like theme parties, there were also all sorts of games that ran through groups like wildfire, mostly variations on charades.

Carole Lombard once threw a party on a hospital theme, with equipment rented from a medical supply company. Each guest was given a hospital gown to wear over his or her evening clothes and was then led to a standard-issue hospital bed. Dinner was served at an operating table.

Lombard’s most epic party probably came in 1935, when she took over the entire Ocean Park amusement pier and invited a couple of hundred friends to come in street clothes. There were stars there, of course—Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Errol Flynn—but
there were also the grips and extras and crew members that she valued just as highly as the members of her peer group.