I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History

11. Billy Wilder and Some Like It Hot

11 Billy Wilder and Some Like It Hot B illy Wilder told us that he was interested in doing a film about an all-girl orchestra, the premise of which had been utilized many years before in a German film, Fanfare der Lieben, or Fanfares of Love. He proposed that we acquire the rights to Fanfare. It became a real test for the attorneys to find the then-owners of the film and to acquire the right to remake it. In his screenplay, Billy used little material from the original film, except the idea of two men who disguise themselves as women so they can get jobs in an all-girl band. Nearly everything else was original. Billy wanted to work on the script with I. A. L. Diamond, with whom he had worked for the first time on Love in the Afternoon, so we made a deal for Iz to collaborate with Billy on what was later titled Some Like It Hot. Billy Wilder had made The Seven Year Itch with Marilyn Monroe in 1955, and now he conceived the brilliant idea of creating for her the role of Sugar Cane, a vocalist in an all-girl band, in Some Like It Hot. Fanfare der Lieben had now became the story of two Chicago musicians during the Depression who happen to witness the St. Valentine’s Day massacre . Being pursued by the perpetrators, whom they can identify, they decide to disguise themselves so that the pursuing gangsters can’t find them. They dress themselves as women and get jobs in an all-girl band 100 that has been contracted to play at a Florida luxury hotel. It was Billy’s idea to cast Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon as the musicians. He created a satire of movie gangsterdom and sought to populate it with stereotypical gangsters. He chose George Raft to play Spats Columbo , the heavy, and Pat O’Brien to play the pursuing cop. From the very beginning he wanted Edward G. Robinson to play Little Napoleon , who was a satirized Little Caesar. We kept hoping that Robinson would play the role. To tempt him, Billy cast Edward G. Robinson’s son in the picture, as one of the thugs, but Robinson wouldn’t be drawn into it, despite all of our pressure. Finally Billy cast Nehemiah Persoff to play Little Napoleon. I’ve always regretted that Little Caesar didn’t play Little Bonaparte. There is no question that Billy wrote the role of Sugar for Marilyn Monroe, and certainly no one else could have played the part. Fortunately for us, no one else did. Marilyn was married to Arthur Miller at the time, and they were living in New York. They came to Southern California when we started production in September 1958 at the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego, which stood in for a luxurious Florida hotel of the 1920s. The difficulties of working with Marilyn Monroe have been told and retold. Certainly this was a troubled period in her life. For one thing, she suffered a miscarriage while we were shooting. For another, she had been seeing a psychiatrist in New York, on whom she had become quite dependent, and she would ask to go to New York on weekends so she could visit her doctor. The weekends sometimes became protracted, and we had to keep adjusting our schedules to work around her absences. She had great difficulty remembering her lines, and we would sometimes get up to forty or fifty takes of a scene. Billy showed remarkable patience through it all, and I don’t think he ever compromised. He didn’t try to work around her dialogue readings , but he just stuck with her until she finally got it right. Paula Strasberg , Lee’s wife, was her drama coach, and Marilyn insisted on having Paula on the set with her while she was working. After each reading she would look over at Paula and await her approval. Billy showed the most incredible tolerance of this process. Jack and Tony told me that the multiple takes were driving them around the bend. Jack once said to me, “My worst nightmare is that we’re going to be on the fiftieth Billy Wilder and Some Like It Hot 101 / take, and Marilyn is finally going to get it right, and I’m gonna screw it up.” Billy Wilder made his oft...