That Old Feeling: Hot and Heavy

Nobody involved in the making of this movie thought it would be a classic. It was just a screwball comedy, in drag, with a supporting cast of gangsters, flappers and millionaire playboys; Billy Wilder, its director, producer and co-writer, called it “a combination of ‘Scarface’ and ‘Charlie’s Aunt.'” On its release in 1959 it made a lot of money but not much of a critical splash. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, but not Best Picture, nudged off the finalists’ list by four inferior movies with serious subject matter (nuns, Nazis, rape, class anxiety — you look ’em up) and by the ultimate winner, “Ben-Hur,” one of the most turgid epics ever to take the top prize. The only Oscar it won was for Orry-Kelly’s costume design, for which he clothed Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, and semi-clothed Marilyn Monroe, in silly ’20s frocks.

Yet “Some Like It Hot,” like its three stocking’d stars, had legs. It was a TV and revival favorite; it spawned a 1973 Broadway musical (and another one due there next year). The film’s ubiquity helped overturn a prejudice in certain critical circles against Wilder; as his esteem in academe grew, as the Life Achievement banquets and tribute books blossomed, so did an informed appreciation for his most agreeable, enduring comedy. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected “Some Like It Hot” as the best comedy of the century. All that remained was the publication of a weighty tome to commemorate the film’s greatness.

Did I say weighty? The Taschen superproduction called “Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot” is as heavy as a gravestone, a Hupmobile, a gangster’s birthday cake. It will lighten your wallet by $150, plus tax or shipping. If you can find it. Though the book has been widely reviewed, it is not readily available through amazon.com. You may, however, try amazon.co.uk., where the volume ranks a respectable 588 (much higher than “Germs,” for example) and is “usually dispatched within 24 hours.” The price — 100 pounds — sounds light for a Jazz Age chorine, steep for what is, at heart, the cinema’s most elaborate souvenir book.

To some devout bibliophiles, Taschen is cherished as the publisher of such scholarly works as “1000 Nudes,” “Eric Kroll’s Fetish Girls” and “Exquisite Mayhem: The Spectacular and Erotic World of Wrestling.” But maybe those are just the company’s bill-payers. Certainly the Wilder book is handsomely produced, with a slipcase woven from shahtoosh, the film’s title set in diamonds on a redwood cover, each word of text inscribed by Trappist calligraphers — something like that. Edited by Alison Castle, from interviews by film scholar Dan Auiler (author of the helpful directorial dig “Hitchcock’s Notebooks”), this swank objet du commerce contains the final script, comments by Wilder and the main actors, many color photographs (of a black-and-white film) and, inset into the inside back cover, a copy of Monroe’s “prompt book” — all of her character’s dialogue — with the star’s poignantly diligent marginal notes.

As a kid, I loved “Some Like It Hot,” and I’ve still got the soundtrack LP to prove it. I remember choking back laughs so I could hear the next line of dialogue. Like few other movies, it gave me pleasure whenever I saw it, every few years from boyhood till now. For me, that makes it a classic. And — who knew? — classical too. “Wilder crafted his movies in a classical and beautiful way,” Ed Sikov notes in “On Sunset Boulevard,” a sharp book-length summary of the writer-director’s career. “They are structured, refined.” Certainly, the Monroe movie is structurally refined: three characters, three settings, three songs, with virtually every shot and word contributing briskly to the elaborate tension of plot and character. It’s a perfectly devised trap for laughter, a spider’s web of a comedy.

THE MOVIE

Confusion of sexual identities is at the heart of this story about two Chicago musicians, Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Lemmon) who witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 and go on the lam from Spats Columbo (Raft) and his murderous gang. Disguised as women named Josephine and Daphne, they join an all-girls’ band whose vocalist is sad, sweet Sugar Cane (Monroe). They land in Florida, where Joe tries to seduce Sugar by dressing and speaking like a Shell Oil scion, while Jerry attracts to the attentions of a real millionaire, Osgood Fielding III (Brown). The gangsters show up and, fruitlessly, chase our girl-boys around the hotel a few times. Joe sees the lovelight and reveals his true ID to Sugar; Jerry ends up with Osgood.

It’s also a movie that was old even when it was young. Viewers of the day would be expected to remember such venerable pop tunes as “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Down Among the Sheltering Palms,” “By the Sea” and “Stairway to the Stars,” all on the soundtrack. It was assumed audiences would understand references to the ’20s names and phrases — Valentino, Stokowski, marcelled hair, the Graf Zeppelin, Rudy Vallee, Johnny Weissmuller — that pop up in the dialogue. Moviegoers of a certain age would also recognize a few old movie tropes, like the grapefruit that gangster George Raft starts to push in henchman Harry Wilson’s face (as James Cagney did to Mae Clarke in “The Public Enemy”) and the coin-toss mannerism that young punk Edward G. Robinson Jr. affects. When Raft sees him, he asks sarcastically, “Where did you pick up that cheap trick?” From the 1932 underworld classic “Scarface,” where Raft did it. Big inside joke.

When the film was released, the top three stars were in their early 30s, but many of the featured players — Raft, 73, Wilson, 61, Joe E. Brown, 66, Pat O’Brien, 59, and George E. Stone, 56 — had been in movies since the early talkies. In 1929, the year the story is set, Raft made his first movie, Brown had just signed with Warner Bros. and O’Brien was starring in “The Front Page” on Broadway. And where was Wilder? In Berlin, helping to write the acclaimed “Menschen am Sonntag” (“People on Sunday”), a vignette film made by other four future luminaries of Hollywood: Fred Zinnemann (“High Noon”), Edgar G. Ulmer (“Detour”), Robert Siodmak (“The Killers”) and his brother Kurt (“Bride of the Gorilla” — all right, but three out of four ain’t bad). It would take a few more successful screenplays, and Hitler, to get the Polish-born Jew to Hollywood.

Some of the most acute movie depictions of Americana came from emigrees who had watched the U.S. carefully from afar and, when they arrived, saw it fresh with mature eyes. “Some Like It Hot” is in part a wise-cracking love letter to Wilder’s adopted country. In an early scene an exasperated Joe asks the ever-fretful Jerry, “Why do you have to paint everything so black? Suppose you get hit by a truck. Suppose the stock market crashes. Suppose Mary Pickford divorces Douglas Fairbanks. Suppose the Dodgers leave Brooklyn.” It happens that these last two cracks tell a lot about Billy Wilder. When he was a teenager in Vienna, his silent screen idol was the wittily heroic Fairbanks. As an adoptive American and baseball fanatic, he had attended the first-ever Los Angeles Dodgers game earlier in 1958 and would listen to their broadcasts while at dinner parties, his ear soldered to a transistor radio.

“Some Like It Hot” was loosely based on a script written by Richard Thoeren and Michael Logan for director Richard Pottier’s 1935 French film “Fanfare d’amour,” which was remade as “Fanfaren der liebe,” a popular German comedy of the early ’50s. (The Taschen book would have been a more valuable reference if it had included script extracts and photos from these films.) The three-act structure of “Fanfaren” has two desperate musicians dressing us as gypsies, in black-face for a jazz band and as girls — all to get a job. I.A.L. Diamond, Wilder’s longtime writing partner, recalled the film as “heavy-handed and Germanic. There was a lot of shaving of chests and trying on of wigs.” Wilder thought American men would need an impetus stronger than unemployment to get them into wigs and girdles; his inspiration of their witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre made it all work.

The Mirisch brothers, his bankrollers, wanted Bob Hope and Danny Kaye for the men’s roles. Wilder thought of Frank Sinatra, but when the singer didn’t show up for a meeting, he moved on to Curtis. For Sugar, which he considered the least important of the major roles, Wilder had comedienne-dancer Mitzi Gaynor in mind. Then Monroe expressed interest, and that cinched Lemmon, then just below star level, for the Jerry role.

It all turned out wonderfully, with Wilder and Diamond producing a lean, rich script and Wilder setting a brisk but not dizzy pace that never lets up; even in the romantic scenes, the actors don’t stop to ponder or mope over their dialogue. The script is full of repeated grace notes (“Big joke”; “Type O”; “caught dead”; “I’m a girl/I’m a boy”) and lovely filigree work that’s there for no other reason than giving pleasure — like the thug who helps Robinson, Jr. step inside a huge cake (so he can pop out to gun down Spats and his gang). then warns: “And don’t mess up the cake. I promised to bring back a piece for my kids.” The piece seems to have come together as snappily as Joe turns himself into Sugar’s dream man after hearing her describe him, and as amusingly as Jerry tumbles into his role as a dirty old man’s girl-toy.

THE GUYS

The movie is a camp, masquerade, travesty. Nearly everyone’s pretending to be someone or something else. Joe, is at first a heartless womanizer, then a man dressed up as one of the creatures he enjoyed exploiting, then a poor guy in millionaire sportsman’s garb. (It was Curtis’ idea to play the millionaire as a cut-rate Cary Grant — a lovely idea, since Grant’s screen persona was a suave blend of the regally masculine and the flirtatiously effeminate.) Sugar, whose real surname is Kowalczyk, and whose baptismal name probably wasn’t Sugar, puts on a debutante act when she meets “rich” Joe. She may not even be a genuine blond, though we can see that her curves, in those gowns and swimsuits, are for real.

Jerry, in his flirtation with opposite sexuality, finds he can get closer to girls as a girl than he could as a guy; in bed with Sugar, he says, “This may even turn out to be a surprise party.” (Hey, Sugar, let’s play the Crying Game.) Certainly Jerry gets closer to a sexual relationship with Osgood than with any woman. The old plutogoat takes every rebuff as a come-on. “How do you play the bass?” he asks. And “Daphne,” threatening or promising rough sex, said, “Mostly I just slap it.” Well, at least Osgood appears unencumbered by artifice. He’s a playboy, impure and simple: seven- or eight-times married, and ready to tango till dawn with a muscular blond who insists on leading. Then he speaks the film’s famous last line, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” and seems to lift another mask. He is revealed, maybe, as a man who — whether because he’s addled or impish or deaf or gay — says he doesn’t mind marrying another man. That Osgood: zow-ie!

Curtis and Lemmon were schooled in effeminism by the legendary drag artiste Barbette (Vander Clyde), who in his prime, around 1929, had been the subject of Man Ray photographs and a Jean Cocteau essay and had appeared in Cocteau’s film “Blood of the Poet.” Curtis, who said that in a dress he “looked like a combination of my mother, Dolores Costello and Eve Arden,” took to the tutelage splendidly: the hauteur, the pursed mouth — he looks like the Charles Busch of the 50s. (Curtis also created a contraption that allowed him to pee without either removing his complicated clothing or getting a urostomy.) Lemmon, though, quickly tired of his graduate course in mincing. “The goof I was playing wouldn’t be very proficient at walking in heels,” he said. “I needed to be barely good enough to look like a clumsy woman.”

Jerry is a clumsy woman, even as a man. His relationship to Joe is one of the exasperated but loving wife. He is ready to be dragged, to to speak, into any of Joe’s schemes of getting rich or getting a girl. In one early scene, as Curtis pours on the high-calorie honey to a suspicious ex-flame, Lemmon turns to the camera and murmurs in admiration, “Isn’t he a bit o’ terrific?” Joe has a high seduction quotient, as a man or a woman. Jerry is a whiny guy, then just one of the girls: chatty, catty. It’s a perfect comedy match — man’s woman, girls’ girl — that is spelled out in the one long scene that was cut after previews. On the train, Jerry gets into bed with Joe, thinking he’s Sugar, and confesses his true sexual identity, whatever that is. Wilder was right to excise the scene; it would have made the subtly suggested sadomasochism of the Joe-and-Jerry friendship too explicit.

When the notion of playing in an all-girl band is broached, Jerry jumps at it, to Joe’s disgust. Five minutes later we see the two dolled up for the first time. Joe is instantly as sexy and secure a woman as he had been a man, while Jerry, ever the hysteric (Lemmon reads most of his lines as if he’s just run out of breath but can’t stop speaking), struggles to keep steady on his stilts. Lemmon plays it brilliantly, especially in the scene when Joe, fresh from his shipboard conquest of Sugar, finds Jerry in bed shaking his maracas and announcing, “I’m engaged.” Joe asks who’s the lucky girl, and Jerry says, blissfully, “I am.” Now Joe must force him to intone the mantra, “I’m a boy, I’m a boy-oh-boy I’m a boy.” It comes back to him at the very end of the film, when he says he can’t wear Osgood’s mother’s wedding dress, because “We are not built the same way.” When Osgood replies, “We can have it altered,” Jerry spits out, “Yaw, no ya don’t!”

THE GIRL

At a Christie’s auction of Marilynabilia in 1999, her “Some Like It Hot” prompt book, which the house valued at $15,000, sold for $51,750. Perhaps the surcharge was for irony; prompt Marilyn never was. On the Wilder film she was late a cumulative 35 hours, costing the production a full week of shooting. She’d show up at 11 a.m. instead of seven, hide in her dressing room until the muse moved her, seek solace (as Sugar does) in alcohol, then, when an assistant director rapped on her door, cuss him out rather than confront her director in public. Even her private abuse to Wilder was second hand. In a 1985 memoir of the shoot, Diamond described a call Monroe made to the Wilder home; she got Audrey, his wife. Told that he wasn’t in, Marilyn said, “Well, when you see him, will you give him a message for me? Tell him to go fuck himself. And my warmest personal regards to you.”

To the press, Wilder was diplomatic: “She does beautifully once she gets underway… If I demand sixty takes Marilyn accepts the additional work without question.” He didn’t disclose the reason he had to do 60 takes: because Monroe couldn’t remember the simplest line (“Where’s the bourbon?” or “It’s me — Sugar”). At other times, she was a resourceful, responsible actress, nailing on the first take a long, complex scene with Lemmon in the train’s upper berth. “I damn near shit,” he said much later. “It was five minutes after eight and we’re done.”

But mostly she was stubborn. When Wilder told Monroe he wanted her to lose some of her heft (about eight pounds, or the weight of the Taschen book), she refused, saying the audience needed a way to tell her apart from her co-starring drag queens. So she went onscreen appearing much heavier than before or after, with a big gut and a big butt, though her face was never prettier. She looks even fuller in the flimsy, white, breast-caressing dress she wears on the bandstand. In the last scene, when the despondent Sugar is now clothed in widow’s weeds: the same outfit, but in black.

There are plenty of “Some Like It Hot” anecdotes (retold in the new book) that display traditional on-the-set banter. Here’s one: Orry-Kelly, who dressed all three stars, had the cheek to tell Monroe that Curtis’ ass was better than hers — upon which provocation she opened her bloused and retorted, “Well, he doesn’t have tits like these.” But for Monroe, the shoot was often a hard slog. “We are going through the Straits of Dire,” she wrote to her friend Norman Corwin, the radio writer. “It’s rough and choppy.” Of course, she was the one roiling the waters. By this stage in her career, the insecurities and illnesses that doomed her last project, “Something’s Got to Give,” were already vexatiously evident. Her unaccountability helped give Wilder a nagging backache, even as she later blamed him for a miscarriage she suffered after the shoot.

In her depression, she may have recalled a maxim about acting that she copied in the cover of her prompt book: “It’s not more important that life.” (It’s only a movie, Norma Jean.) Some of the jottings are hints to Sugar’s character: “inocent” [sic] and “Don’t Take Their Tone!” (i.e., don’t speak like a female impersonator). Some are specific: “Freeze like a bunny”; “lets herself go really relaxed.” And, gee, how does Sugar pronounce her last name? Marilyn has scribbled three different phonetic spellings. Notations for the long scene on the yacht, where she tries to thaw her frigid millionaire, read like tips from Wilder, or from Monroe’s acting coach Paula Strasberg: “Alice in wonderland”; “watching like a Cat”; “Continue the barrage, get him or else”; “Getting drunk on kisses.” And a few are messages a child might write herself after attending a Lee Strasberg class: “WHAT I am doing not HOW”; “All I have to do is to play THAT moment”; “Trust it, enjoy it, Be Brave”.

Today we can feel sorry for Monroe, dead at 36, or sympathetic to the put-upon Wilder, still around at 95. But if they had to fight and yank and delay and wheedle to get what’s on the screen, so be it, because what’s there is choice. She was Brave; he trusted her; we enjoy it.

THE ACTRESS

It’s clear that Marilyn, Sugar, Wilder and the movie all understand each other from her entrancing entrance, 24 mins. into the film. To the soundtrack sass of a trombone warbling the first notes of “Sugar Blues,” Monroe clutches her ukulele case and briskly sashays down the Union Station platform. Passing the Eddie Cantor-eyed Joe and Jerry, she lets her caboose swing as if it were on a Wild Mouse track. Suddenly a whoosh of steam shoots across her stern; even the engine can’t help emitting a wolf whistle and making a grab for her. The steam geyser also reminds viewers of the rush of subway air that elevated Monroe’s skirt in her previous Wilder film, “The Seven Year Itch,” and prepares them for another comedy in which men — those “dirty beasts, with eight hands,” as Daphne righteously calls them — will scheme to take the sexy blond to bed.

Perhaps it could have been any ’50s sexpot (Mitzi Gaynor?); Wilder always thought the two men carried the movie, and certainly their attempts to elude their killers while chasing after a dame gives “Some Like It Hot” its plot propulsion. But casting Monroe raised the film’s and the audience’s expectations. She was not just a dame; she was the dame, the reigning sex diva, and the last one in movie history whom one could call “inocent.”

Monroe’s acting was akin to Greta Garbo’s: an art that both ignored craft and transcended it; it was off-kilter, alien and seductive. Nobody used the language, oral or gestural, in quite the way they did. In this movie set in the year that silent pictures gave way to talkies, Monroe lets Curtis and Lemmon rat-a-tat their dialogue like a couple of pre-Code sharpies — say, Gable and Cagney — while she makes cogent use of the conventions of screen miming. She slumps when discouraged, puts her hand to her open mouth when surprised. Her Sugar represents not only a “whole different sex” but an earlier, now vanished movie era. To these modern men on the run, she is a glorious cinematic anachronism.

And then Monroe talks. Her breathy voice, superficially erotic, was in part a halting, haunted whisper — the spoken equivalent of those childlike notations in the prompt book — and in part a comedienne’s supple instrument. For much of Sugar’s dialogue, Monroe pushes her intonations up a stop or two, painting a bigger, richer picture than another actress would. On the beach with Junior, she gives a jazz-babe jizz to “Yeah! Real hot!” When she finally nailed that simple line, “It’s me! Sugar!”, she lent it the giddy musicality of the 20s’ liveliest songs. But she could handle arias too. In Sugar’s long speech about those saxophone-playing no-goodniks she keeps falling for — call it her sax solo — Monroe puts over every phrase as if she were selling kisses for the Milk Fund. She dares viewers to choose between watching her mouth, with its artful phrasings and overprecise pronunciation, and her eyes, which dramatize each of Sugar’s desperately shifting moods.

This comedy about three musicians is also a musical, with Marilyn sings three period tunes. In “Runnin’ Wild,” performed at runaway tempo on the train, she shimmies her shoulders, sending her bra-less bosom on a brief, bouncy trip, while a platinum curl coyly obscures one eye. (Jerry, watching her behind from behind, twirls his bass fiddle a few times and, for a moment, distractedly plays the back; we know that it’s Sugar’s ass he’s metaphorically playing.) “I Wanna Be Loved By You” has Marilyn peddling sweet sexuality with a silvery glissando and the girlish capper “pa-deedly-deedly-deedly-dum, poo-poo-pee-doo.” She’s all grown up, and an octave lower, in “I’m Thru With Love,” a bitter farewell song that Monroe renders with breath-suspending grace and gravity. She briefly ascends to a trillinf, thrilling high note — the window ledge a suicide steps onto — before plunging down to the last six monotones (“Baby, I’m thru with love”). It’s still one of the great musical moments in movies.

Beneath the gags and songs of “Some Like It Hot” are mortal matters. Wilder had determined that the two men needed a mortally compelling reason to put on dresses: for them it was drag or death. Monroe’s presence gives Joe — the very image of the man-trap Sugar keeps walking into — a reason to change his life at the risk of ending it. What would make a guy stop while being pursued by large men with guns? Well, the script says, his better instincts, dormant till stirred by a love, and maybe a pity, for a “not very bright,” alcoholic masochist. Ah, but Monroe is that woman: blond on top, brooding inside. A lot of men, in 1959 and especially after hearing of her death three years later, wished they’d had the chance to walk up to Marilyn, give her a kiss, wipe a tear from her cheek and say, “None of that, sugar. No guy is worth it.” In a dress.