In line with this massive post I did on the Lindberghs – here’s something else. I love this story. It combines two of the Sheila obsessions: the Lindberghs, and Billy Wilder (who, of course, directed Jimmy Stewart in The Spirit of St. Louis). Wilder and Lindbergh were good friends and here is Wilder’s story (or one of them) of filming that movie (and what he would have done, if he had been free from obligations to Lindbergh) – I got this excerpt from the book Conversations with Billy Wilder:
Cameron Crowe interviews Billy Wilder about each and every film he directed (I’ve posted 6,000 quotes from it before):
Billy Wilder: “Spirit of St. Louis”. I got into that. I suggested it. But I could not get in a little deeper, into Lindbergh’s character. There was a wall there. We were friends, but there were many things I could not talk to him about. It was understood — the picture had to follow the book. The book was immaculate. It had to be about the flight only. Not about his family, about the daughter, the Hauptmann thing, what happened after the flight … just the flight itself.
I heard a story from newspapermen who were there in Long Island waiting for him to take off. And the newspapermen told me a little episode that happened there, and that would have been enough to make this a real picture.
The episode was that Lindbergh was waiting for the clouds to disappear — the rain and the weather had to be perfect before he took off. There was a waitress in a little restaurant there. She was young, and she was very pretty. And they came to her and said, “Look, this young guy there, Lindbergh, sweet, you know, handsome. He is going to–” “Yes, I know, he is going to fly over the water.” And they said, “It’s going to be a flying coffin, full of gas, and he’s not going to make it. But we come to you for the following reason. The guy has never been laid. Would you do us a favor, please. Just knock on the door, because the guy cannot sleep…”
So she does it.
And then, at the very end of the picture, when there’s the parade down Fifth Avenue, millions of people, and there is that girl standing there in the crowd. She’s waving at him. And he doesn’t see her. She waves her hand at him, during the ticker-tape parade, the confetti raining down. He never sees her. He’s God now.
This would be, this alone would be, enough to make the picture. Would have been a good scene. That’s right — would have been a good scene. But I could not even suggest it to him.
Cameron Crowe: Couldn’t you have had your producer bring it up?
Billy Wilder: No. Absolutely not. They would have withdrawn the book or something, “There you go, Hollywood, out of here!” I don’t know — very tough guy, very tough guy. I know, because I pulled jokes on him. One day when we were flying to Washington, Charles Lindbergh and I, we were going to the Smithsonian Institution to see the real Spirit of St. Louis, which we had duplicated. Hanging off the ceiling, it’s there. And we were in a plane flying to Washington, and it’s very rough, so I turned to him and I said, “Charles, wouldn’t that be fun if this plane now crashed, can you see the headlines? — LUCKY LINDY IN CRASH WITH JEWISH FRIEND!” And he said, “Oh, no no no, don’t talk like this!”
Cameron Crowe: Did you ever think about using that character in another picture? The waitress from the early days?
Billy Wilder: Sure, that can be used, yeah, but it fit there. And just that girl, who we’d see again at the very end. And you fade out on that. That would have made the whole picture.
But it was not to be, so we had to invent … because I did not want to have voice-over. I had to invent a fly that finds its way into the cockpit, and Lindbergh, played by James Stewart, talks to the fly. The fly is very good, because when Lindbergh talks to the fly, he says, “Look, you’re good luck, because nobody’s ever seen a fly crash.”
