His best known works include the novel The Buddha of Suburbia and the Oscar-nominated film, My Beautiful Laundrette. One is almost as rueful that Wilder will not allow his memoirs to be translated from the German (which goes unmentioned by Crowe, as does Ed Sikov’s 650-page biography On Sunset Boulevard, published in 1998, but only in America).With somebody of Wilder’s talent and diverse energies, there are always going to be many versions of the truth. After all, another report of the Joyce/Proust encounter has a resonance worthy of the film-maker himself. So funny that I peed in my girlfriend’s hand.”One is left more rueful than ever that the Evelyn Waugh-like novels by Wilder’s collaborator, Charles Brackett, remain out of print, and also that Wilder did not dig in his heels and save the rest of the footage thrown out by the studio behind the much-underrated movie The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.It’s a puzzle that, while admiring Dean Martin, he downplays Kiss Me Stupid (1964) and makes no mention of the unknown Gershwin material supplied for it – “All The Livelong Day (And The Long, Long Night)” is masterly. On Cinemascope, he says: “The love story of two dachshunds, that was the only thing it was good for.” And he happily returns to that wonderful story about the preview of Ninotchka. Afterwards, Ernst Lubitsch could not speak for laughing over the card filled in by one of the audience, which read: “Funniest picture I ever saw.
Wilder continues effortlessly to remind us of his quip about Marlene Dietrich’s concern for the sick (“Mother Teresa with better legs”), and the incident with Charles Boyer and the cockroach, while adding further droll, practised remarks. He wanted to make a drunk out of me.” According to Zolotow, however, he was on the wagon and Wilder tempted him: “One drink can’t hurt you.” Hard fact is always more elusive in Hollywood than elsewhere.Wilder shows little softening towards Marilyn Monroe, whose timekeeping makes Crowe’s appear linked to the Greenwich Observatory. Donald Wolfe, however, has made the point that, by demanding take after take on Some Like It Hot, Marilyn was instinctively trying to wear down Wilder so that she could play Sugar Kane her more subtle way -and keep the film from falling into the kinetic mayhem of Wilder’s subsequent farce, One, Two, Three.This is hardly a point that Crowe is likely to make. Few prolific film-makers have been as consistent and as deeply rooted in art, literature – and food. He is always reading, which is not to deny his work’s central strength – that he relishes a vulgarity that stays just the right side of tastelessness.Like a greatest-hits CD with bonus tracks, this volume is a counterweight to the hyperactive prose of Billy Wilder in Hollywood by Maurice Zolotow – of whom Wilder observes: “He was so haggard, you wanted to cry He was in AA.
He still builds a witty and civilised edifice that, none the less, has one wishing that the creators of this elegant, outsize volume had left a pouch for the necessary salt.Even so, it is a bargain, of a piece with the seamless work bred in Wilder’s genes. In this 390-page volume comes the rider that “anyway, it’s better than being given a state dinner by Saddam Hussein.” The pop journalist-turned-movie director Cameron Crowe sets up running gags about his own poor timekeeping and Wilder’s doubts over the project’s worth. At that time the future director was a young journalist eager for the psychoanalyst’s views on the emergent Mussolini. He waited one lunchtime in a study near a small couch (“all his theories were based on the analysis of very short people”) and the great man entered, napkin at neck.”A reporter?” “Yes, I have a few questions.” “There is the door.”Wilder was out on his ear, and the story never stales. In fact, I must leave at once.” “I’m in the same situation, if I can find someone to take me by the arm Goodbye.”"Charmé…
oh my stomach!”Close on its heels was the meeting in mid-Twenties Vienna between Sigmund Freud and Billy Wilder. Conversations with Wilder by Cameron Crowe (Faber & Faber, £20)
Conversations with Wilder by Cameron Crowe (Faber & Faber, £20)
THE LAST century’s greatest brief encounter was between Proust and Joyce “I’ve headaches every day My eyes are terrible,” said the Irishman Proust replied: “My poor stomach It’s killing me. The winner of the Children’s Book award will then be considered by the judges alongside the other books for the Book of the Year Award and could be in for a large payout if the author wins that category too.The judging panel for the Book of the Year consists of: Mr Anderson, Ms Hall, the shadow Home Secretary, Ann Widdecombe, the writers Robert Harris, Anthony Holden, Glyn Maxwell and Nigel Williams, the actress Imogen Stubbs and the broadcaster Sandi Toksvig.. But its organisers caused some controversy when they named Ms Hall as a judge, with the Booker administrator Martyn Goff accusing them of demeaning and “dumbing down” book prizes.For the Children’s Book Award, the shortlist consists of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J K Rowling; The Illustrated Man by Jacqueline Wilson; Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo; and the collection of poems Meeting Midnight by Carol Ann Duffy.The Harry Potter book has already been a bestseller in Britain and America and has proved a rarity for a children’s book in becoming popular among adults. All four writers on the shortlist receive £2,000, with the overall winner receiving £21,000.A separate £10,000 award will be given to the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year at the ceremony on 25 January.The Whitbread is widely viewed as second to the Booker in the multitude of literary prizes. That will be presented this month in a ceremony in London hosted by the broadcaster Sheena McDonald, who was badly injured last year when she was involved in an accident with a police vehicle.Among the judges, chaired by Dr Eric Anderson, the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford and a former schoolmaster to Tony Blair, will be Jerry Hall, the model and erstwhile partner of Mick Jagger.The shortlist also consists of the novel Music and Silence by Rose Tremain, a debut novel White City Blue by Tim Lott, and the second volume of David Cairns’ biography of the composer Berlioz.
The poet Seamus Heaney has beaten his close friend, the late Ted Hughes, on to the shortlist for the Whitbread Book of the Year prize. The poet Seamus Heaney has beaten his close friend, the late Ted Hughes, on to the shortlist for the Whitbread Book of the Year prize.
Hughes was awarded the prize posthumously last year for his poems about Sylvia Plath, Birthday Letters, and was tipped to be on the shortlist once more for his Alcestis. However, poetry is represented on the final shortlist by Heaney’s Beowulf, his reworking of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem.The book is dedicated to Hughes, his friend and coeditor of two anthologies.Between them Heaney and Hughes have dominated the Whitbread Book Awards for the past three years, winning the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Book of the Year Award between them.In the curious tradition of the Whitbread prize, poetry competes with fiction and biography for the overall award. “Right now I know I’m getting ready to write some new songs, but I don’t know what,” he says.