Modern Living: The Anti-Casting Couch

It was 1957, and Billy Wilder had a problem: finding a piece of furniture for his afternoon naps. "After all," the famed movie director (Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment) confided to a friend, "a man of my reputation simply can't afford to have something that looks like a casting couch in his office. It's too obvious a symbol of lechery."

The friend happened to be Charles Eames, the multitalented industrial designer whose molded plywood and leather "Eames chair" is a furniture classic. Busy on a host of other projects—films, graphics, toys and the IBM Pavilion...

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