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YOU'LL NEVER WRITE A BOOK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN

December 13, 2002
By D.K. Holm

Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me

Memoirist Charlotte Chandler has written a fascinating account of her years in Hollywood, socializing with important directors, hobnobbing with international stars, traveling from New York to Paris to Rome. We learn about her moods, her fears, and her hopes. Yet curiously she has called her memoir Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder, A Personal Biography (Simon and Schuster, 352 pages, $27.50, ISBN 0 7432 1709 8), as if the book were really about someone else. As you read through this volume, you'd think that it might really be an oral history, or a lengthy interview, with Wilder, rather than a highly personal account of whom she knows and where she's been. But then, as you are reading along, Chandler once again inserts herself into the proceedings and you know that the book is truly about her. It's the Charlotte Chandler channel: all Chandler, all the time.

Chandler clearly spent a lot of time with the elderly Wilder. And it's evident that she once wanted to write a book about him. She may still. But until that time comes, we must make do with this anecdote-filled memoir of her life as a roving journalist in which Wilder makes occasional cameo appearances. It's the life story of Charlotte Chandler occasionally interrupted by interesting if irrelevant wisecracks from Wilder.

In a normal biography, the author might write, "Barbara Stanwyck confirms this fact," or "Barbara Stanwyck has a different take on the situation." Here's how Chandler handles it: "Barbara Stanwyck approached DOUBLE INDEMNITY apprehensively. We talked at lunch in the Beverly Hills Hotel [page 117]." It is apparently so important that Chandler mention that she had lunch with Stanwyck.

Chandler's book is filled with lunch dates, dinner dates, hotel lobby encounters, even meals in diners. "Billy Wilder and I frequently ate breakfast at the Beverly Hills Hotel, in the Polo Lounge, and occasionally at the counter of the basement coffee shop [page 6]." Chandler seems obsessed with food on both the grand and quotidian level. She is proud to reveal that there is a Billy Wilder café in Berlin, but she also finds time to mention that the matzo balls in the MGM cafeteria were stale. A lot of food and tea and coffee and whatever else were consumed during the making of this book, and Chandler misses no opportunity to cast herself in a co-starring role as mutually munching amanuensis. There are no small parts, only small writers trying to put on a little weight.

In his later years. a flurry of activity surrounded the otherwise inactive Wilder. It was as if the impoverished wit of contemporary movies created a void, into which rush nostalgia for the dexterity and craft of Wilder's nimble films. SUNSET BOULEVARD was turned into a musical. SOME LIKE IT HOT was named the funniest movie of all time by the AFI and was captured in aspic by Taschen in a massive and expensive monument to the movie. Then, first there was Kevin Lally's biography (from Henry Holt), followed by Ed Sikov's massive, sympathetic, detailed, and near-definitive bio (from Hyperion, which has specialized of late in bulky bios of living directors). Meanwhile, Cameron Crowe, who had tried to cast Wilder in JERRY MAGUIRE, ended up instead compiling a Hitchcock-Truffaut-style interview book with the director (from Knopf). Sam Staggs, who had previously written a "making of" book about ALL ABOUT EVE, next put out (via St. Martin's) a chronicle about the making of SUNSET BOULEVARD (in which he more or less accused Wilder of homophobia). Even Andrew Sarris, who had famously debunked Wilder in his catalog and ranking of American directors, revised his views and allowed Wilder into the Pantheon. The biggest "production" of Wilder's later years was the wholesale dispersal of his art collection.

Throughout all this attention, Wilder couldn't make a movie. Of course, he was in his 80s, soon to be followed by his 90s. Also, his long time writing partner, I. A. L. Diamond, had died, along with other key collaborators. And anyone who had seen BUDDY BUDDY might not, um, trust Wilder with $30 million dollars. Also, with so many biographers and interviewers tromping through his modest office in Beverly Hills, who could get any work done?

Funnily enough, Charlotte Chandler and Cameron Crowe never seemed to have bumped into each other on the stairway outside Wilder's door as they clocked in and out in on interviewing shifts. Chandler doesn't mention Crowe in her book, and Crowe seems not to mention her in his. Nor does Chandler mention Sikov, who returns the favor (and cruelly, Paramount, in its recent DVD of SUNSET BOULEVARD, has seen fit to include an ad for Chandler's book despite the fact that Sikov does the audio commentary for the disc). Chandler isn't even mentioned in Maurice Zolotow's BILLY WILDER IN HOLLYWOOD, which Chandler's book most resembles. All these invisible sprites were hovering around Wilder, intent on inscribing the director's aperçus, but seemingly unaware of each other.

One assumes that Charlotte Chandler is unrelated to Raymond Chandler, with whom Wilder feuded. You can tell by the prose, which is flat and sometimes disjointed. Yet despite her gushing accounts of her various lunches, there are a lot of things she surprisingly doesn't mention about herself.

What is known is that Chandler first published a book about Groucho Marx, which seems to have been her entré into Hollywood society. This book was followed by a volume called THE ULTIMATE SEDUCTION, which is about "creative work and people who were lucky enough to do successfully what they loved to do." In the course of writing that book, Chandler met Fellini, who became the subject of her next volume I, FELLINI (Chandler also appears in a 20 minute video interview on the recent DVD of Fellini's INTERVISTA). Somewhere along the way Chandler decided to write a book about Wilder, whom she met while hanging around Groucho, but she seems to have taken so long about it that at least five other books came out before hers. Perhaps she was waiting for Wilder to die, which he did in March 2002, but if so, there is nothing in the memoir that is so shocking or revealing so as to require posthumous publication. Such a revelator book, filled with salacious gossip and truly insiderish information, may indeed come out some day (written by Patrick McGilligan?) but this isn't it.

The best way to assess Chandler's book is to compare and contrast the information she elicits from Wilder about a specific film with the accounts her predecessors have provided. And it's best to take on one of Wilder's "lesser" or more obscure films, one that also happens to be a favorite of many viewers, THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES.

References to PRIVATE LIFE are scatted throughout Crowe's chaotic book, but he does get Wilder to reveal that after the film was butchered he learned that the negative for some of the footage had gone missing (so much for a restored DVD) while some footage survived without sound, and some audio tracks survived without the image. Crowe is interested how Wilder achieved such a "meticulous" look for the film, and asks him technical questions. He also gives Wilder a platform to defend himself against interpretations in Zolotow's book, which Wilder says makes inaccurate statements about Wilder's past and his supposed association with hookers, which in Zolotow's view was to have an influence on his films, especially Private Life.

Sikov sets the genesis of the film within the generally melancholy times that surrounding Wilder in that period, tells interesting stories about Robert Stephens, and quotes dialogue from the much sought after deleted scenes. He also links the film thematically to the thrust of Wilder's work.

Chandler's chapter begins with an excruciatingly boring story about the moon landing that occurred during filming. Then Chandler gives a cursory production and deal history of the film, familiar from Lally and Sikov's accounts. Christopher Lee "talked with me" about how he was cast; and DP Christopher Challis "told me" about working with Wilder. Genevieve Page "described for me" differences between life in France and London: "Probably because I was away from my family, alone, away from France, away from dressing according to fashion, I felt a kind of freedom from my own normal identity…I remember I wore boots and a tiny fur coat, things I never thought I would ever do." Chandler goes on to delineate the parts left out of the edited film, as did her predecessors.

The book does have a modest quotient of gossip about the director. Squeeze this book very very hard, and a tiny bit of pallid sap drips out:

• POTEMKIN was his favorite movie.

• Wilder preferred brunettes.

• Garbo was a good drinker.

• Fred Astaire made it clear to his associates that he did not want to see Ginger Rogers socially.

• Wilder mentor Ernst Lubistch got his best ideas on the toilet (page 87).