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| Billy Wilder by David Hockney |
Detective work
It started with a chance encounter, and led to a lifelong obsession. Jonathan Coe on the clues he unearthed, the music he heard, and the friends he made as he pursued Billy Wilder's Sherlock Holmes
"To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman." — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia
1972
A boy of 11, on holiday with his family on the Cornish coast, stops to look at the paperbacks in a seafront shop. A title catches his eye: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. The book has a lurid cover, on which Holmes's deerstalker frames the image of a half-naked woman. The boy is horrified. A young moralist, puritanical beyond his years, he worships the Sherlock Holmes stories and is appalled at what he assumes to be an act of desecration. Some cheap exploitation merchant, it seems, has taken the great detective and written a book of sleazy erotic adventures about him. The young boy shakes his head, saddened by the ways of the world.
1975
A Sunday night, full of horrors: school tomorrow, and only the prospect of a night's television to keep it at bay. There is a film showing on BBC One tonight: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. I remember, dimly, seeing the novelisation of the screenplay on my Cornish holiday some years ago, and being repelled by it. But the newspaper gives this film serious attention. The director, Billy Wilder, is apparently famous. I will watch the film.
Afterwards, I discuss it with my grandfather. It was he who introduced me to Sherlock Holmes in the first place. We share a passion for these stories, and a kind of mania for authenticity when it comes to their screen adaptations. He was not impressed: thought that Colin Blakely, as Dr Watson, was too vocal and strident. I can see his point. Robert Stephens, as Holmes, was not quite right either: there was a high-pitched campness to his performance that seemed almost absurd. And yet already something about this film haunts me. Something about the bachelor snugness of Holmes's apartment (sets designed by Alexander Trauner), about the melancholy of the Scottish countryside (photographed by Christopher Challis), which I can't get out of my head. Perhaps it's the music. A recurring motif is the famous theme from Swan Lake, and I find myself whistling it on the way to school the next morning.
1976
Somewhere, at the back of a novel (I have long forgotten the title), I find a list of other books available from the same publisher. One of them is the novelisation of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. I order it, somehow not believing that it will ever arrive. But a few days later, a package appears for me in the post.
At this time, of course, it is not possible to "own" films on video. You cannot see them whenever you want, or rewind and freeze-frame your favourite scenes. It is rare for original screenplays to be published, and so the existing technology really allows only one way of capturing and reliving your favourite movies: the novelisation, that bastard, misshapen offspring of the cinema and the written word. At home, my bookshelves groan under the weight of these execrably written texts: cheap, hastily assembled adaptations of recent movies and TV series. And despite my feelings about Billy Wilder's film, I expect this one to be no better.
But I'm wrong. It's a beautifully judged pastiche of the Conan Doyle style, by two well-known writers, Michael and Mollie Hardwick. I enjoy it every bit as much as the original Holmes stories, and read it again and again, even when I should be reading my Shakespeare plays and my Jane Austen novels and all the other sacred cows of the British school system.
1978
A couple of years later, the film is on television again, and I realize that yes, the music is the key to its magic. But most of it is not by Tchaikovsky. It's by someone I have never heard of, until now: Miklós Rózsa. An adaptation of his own violin concerto, according to the opening credits. There is an aching, desperate sadness and nostalgie to the love theme in this movie, which seems — theoretically — to be at odds with the lightheartedness and brittle humour which characterise the first hour or so. The combination shouldn't work, but it does.
There are two stories in the film: a mad Russian ballerina asks Holmes to become the father of her child, and he gets out of it by pretending that he and Dr Watson are homosexual. Then, a beautiful woman arrives at 221B Baker Street late one night, having apparently survived a murder attempt. She, Holmes and Watson go to Scotland together, to find her missing husband. During their investigation, Holmes falls in love with her, but he discovers, in the end, that she is a German spy, and has been deceiving him all along. Months later, in the closing moments of the film, he learns that she has been executed by firing squad. He is heartbroken.
On this viewing, I notice that there is something odd about the movie. The shape of it is all wrong. The two stories — one lasting half an hour, the other lasting 90 minutes — don't seem to fit together. The pace is leisurely, but every so often there are sudden, unaccountable cuts from one scene to another. And some of the scenes which I enjoyed in the novelisation — a diatribe from Holmes about ballet, delivered while sitting in the bathtub, and a long, present-day prologue in which Dr Watson's grandson arrives at a bank in modern London to retrieve his ancestor's lost manuscript — don't actually seem to be in the film.And yet in spite of these odd, dislocating omissions, it seems to move me more deeply, and speak to me more directly, than any other film I have seen; and provokes me into a kind of frenzy of research and information-gathering.
Who is Miklós Rózsa?
In a tiny, Dickensian back street of Birmingham, Needless Alley, there is a record shop called Vincent's. At this point in my life (I am 17 years old), I visit it all the time: at least two or three times a week. The proprietor, a taciturn but well-informed man, has never heard of Miklós Rózsa. He looks him up in the catalogue, and orders for me an LP called Rózsa Conducts Rózsa. When it arrives in a couple of weeks, I discover that it is an album of film music, which contains pieces from Wilder's Five Graves to Cairo, Korda's Lydia and many other movies. There is also a ten-minute suite from The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. At last, I can listen to that love theme whenever I want! But even this is not enough. I have a fetish for completeness. I need to hear the concerto from which it came. And there the owner of the shop cannot help me. There is one recording — made by Heifetz for RCA in the 1950s — but it has been out of print for years.
Next, I discover a book by Maurice Zolotow, called Billy Wilder in Hollywood. An odd sort of biography, composed of one part psychoanalysis and two parts salacious gossip. But it tells me some important things about the Sherlock Holmes film. The version released in the cinemas, the version I have seen on television, is only two-thirds of the completed film.
Two whole stories, and numerous important scenes, were chopped out by Wilder at the studio's insistence. A flashback to Holmes's student days at Oxford, when the discovery that his girlfriend is really a prostitute confirms his lifelong misogyny. More details about his drug addiction, which gets so out of control that Dr Watson himself devises a phoney case about a corpse in an upside-down room, purely to get his friend away from the cocaine. Many others, as well.
This was to have been Wilder's longest, most complex, most personal film. Now, all that remains are its ruins. I know that I cannot rest until I have seen the original version.
1979
The British musicologist Christopher Palmer has written a monograph about Miklós Rózsa, which I have bought in London. The front cover is illustrated with some record sleeves, including the long-deleted RCA recording of his violin concerto. The reproduction is so clear that I can even read the catalogue number: LSC-2767. I travel to America for three months with my girlfriend, in the year before we go to university, and for some reason I am convinced that I will find this record there. I spend many hours one day in a gigantic record shop in Washington, thumbing my way through sleeve after sleeve: they seem to have every single recording from this series, except the one that I want. The frustration is unbearable.
The 1980s
I find a shop in London which sells film posters. I buy the poster for the film and hang it, successively, on the walls of each of the rooms I inhabit as a student at Cambridge and Warwick universities. It watches over me like a friendly muse as I secretly work on my first novels. And when the film is next shown on television, I have a brilliant idea: I connect my tape deck to the earphone socket on the television, and record the complete soundtrack. I lie awake at night, listening to the dialogue on my Walkman in the dark, until I know every line, every intonation off by heart.
But all traces of the original version seem to be lost. The National Film Theatre, staging a Wilder retrospective, cannot find a complete print of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Other restorations come and go: Cukor's A Star is Born and Kubrick's Spartacus. Hitchcock's Rear Window and Vertigo, unseen for many years, are rediscovered and shown again. I hear of sporadic attempts to find the lost scenes from Wilder's movie, but no one succeeds.
As a postgraduate at Warwick University, I haunt the university library in search of tatters and fragments from the lost scenes. I comb through the back issues of film magazines. There is nothing in Cahiers du cinéma — I have the sense that they look down on Wilder, despise him for his literariness — but I find a long article in Positif, which contains a still from one of the missing sequences: Holmes contemplating a corpse in a room which has been turned completely upside down, with the bed hanging from the ceiling and the lamp protruding from the floor. I photocopy the image and store it in my files, like a child hiding some secret toy which he values too highly to share with the rest of the world.
1994
As I grow older, history begins to repeat itself, patterns begin to emerge. Today, there is another chance sighting on a bookstall: this time at Liverpool Street Station in London. Both in its themes and in the story of its fate at the hands of the studios, this film has become, for me, intimately bound up with ideas of loss: lost time, lost opportunities, the rapidity with which events recede into the past and can never be recaptured. And so it seems appropriate that this new discovery should occur on a day when I am travelling to Norwich, to reacquaint myself with an old schoolfriend whom I haven't seen for many years. Looking for a magazine to while away the two-hour train journey, I glimpse, incredibly, exactly the image which arrested my attention in Cornwall more than 20 years ago: the familiar outline of Holmes's deerstalker framing the image of a half-naked woman. But what magazine would conceivably want to put this picture on its cover?
A doomed magazine, certainly. Its name is Movie Collector, and it is fated only to last for a handful of issues. It caters to a small audience of fanatics, fetishists, obsessives: people like myself, in short. It carries letters and articles about deleted footage, missing scenes, tiny shards of forgotten movies which have vanished into some kind of cinematic purgatory. And in the course of a long essay on The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes — containing information which is mainly, of course, known to me already — I learn this amazing news: that some of the lost material has been recovered, and is available in the form of an American Laserdisc.Laserdiscs: the format is barely known to me, but within a few days I have become an expert. A mail-order company in England supplies me with a copy of the disc, which arrives in a gatefold sleeve like an LP from the 1970s, and I marvel at the shimmery, abstract beauty of this new technology. I can scarcely believe that this glittering object contains what it promises: two of the missing sequences, but in comically truncated form. One of them has video only (but lacks the soundtrack), the other has soundtrack only (but lacks the video). A black joke, in a way, almost worthy of Billy Wilder himself.
There is only one problem: I don't have a Laserdisc player.
The machines, apparently, cost £500: surely a small price to pay for something which will unlock parts of a mystery that has been plaguing me for two decades. But something holds me back. Can I justify this expense to my wife, at a time when we are struggling to buy furniture and redecorate our flat? Suddenly this whole quest seems almost ... frivolous. And there is another reason, somewhat harder to articulate. Part of me, I realise, would prefer this material to remain lost, unseen. That is its very essence. Take away that quality and you have destroyed something fragile, irreplaceable.
I will not play the disc, for the time being. It sits on a shelf, awaiting its moment: a shiny chalice of pure, unrealized potential.
1997
Technology changes everything, it seems. Suddenly everything has become more retrievable
Music, for instance. Since the advent of the CD, there has been a vast expansion in the variety of classical music available to the consumer. Every conceivable byway of 20th-century music can now be explored with a single visit to your local megastore. It can only be a matter of time before ... And yes, sure enough, a recording of Miklós Rózsa's Violin Concerto appears, beautifully performed by Igor Gruppman and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. A small victory.
This music accompanies me in the months and years it takes me to complete a new novel, The House of Sleep. A novel about lost time, lost opportunities and so — naturally — lost movies. I invent a film reviewer called Terry whose absurd critical outpourings are a kind of punishment for all the journalistic crimes I myself have committed over the years. (He dismisses Wilder, quite wrongly, as a "middlebrow talent".) The novel contains only fleeting reference to The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, but for those few people who love the film as I do, there is also a hidden network of codes and allusions: Ashdown, the name of my Gothic mansion, is also a name Holmes assumes in the film when he pretends to be a married man; Valladon, the name of the café where all the characters meet, is also the assumed name of the German spy with whom Holmes falls in love. And so on ...
Meanwhile, I appear on a television programme to talk about Alfred Hitchcock's film Sabotage, and after the recording the producer tells me, in passing, that the BBC has facilities for viewing Laserdiscs, which I am free to use whenever I want. It seems almost ungracious to refuse this offer, so pressingly made. And so perhaps it is time to confront my demon after all.
I am accompanied that morning by my wife, who has lived with my obsession for years and watched it with the detached fascination of the former psychologist. We arrive at BBC Television Centre on an impossibly wet, cold, bleak weekday morning, and drink black coffee in the canteen before making our way to the screening room. The engineer takes the disc and I explain to him which sections I want to view. The lights go down a few minutes later, and the screen flickers into life.
It is important for some things to remain lost. A quality of evanescence is central to cinema. Despite the video revolution, a film should not be like a book, something to take down from the shelf and open whenever we want. You mustn't slip a copy of Sansho the Bailiff out of its case, and skim through a few minutes on your DVD player when you have a spare moment. It does violence to the medium. Cinema owners and TV schedulers are the real gods of film: a movie is something we should only see when somebody else shows it to us
Of course I have a copy of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes on video, but I don't watch it very often. I even have, on tape now, the audio and video versions of those missing scenes. But it comforts me to know that they are still incomplete, and that there remain other scenes from the film which are lost, perhaps irretrievably. This is how it should be. After all, I have not really been searching for the complete film all these years. I have been searching for something even more unreachable: trying to recapture, somehow, the sense of wonder, of security, of happiness I felt when I first saw the film on that Sunday evening, when it made me forget, for two blissful hours, my fear of returning to school the next day. It is that young self I have been trying to bring back to life. And perhaps my grandfather, too, who loved Sherlock Holmes almost as much as I did, and died 14 years ago but has revisited my thoughts every day since.
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is maybe not a masterpiece, in any of its versions. Do we even know what the masterpieces of cinema are any more? But to me, it is always the film.
Six months ago I was at a party and I mentioned its title to another guest — a young musician — who told me that his grandmother had worked on the novelisation. Her name was Mollie Hardwick. I asked him if she would mind signing my copy and he said no, quite the opposite; she had been rather ill lately and to hear that somebody remembered her work would probably cheer her up. So I sent her my precious copy, and she signed it, in her frail, elderly hand, and returned it to me. It was the second time in my life that this book had arrived in the post. Events continue to repeat themselves, the circle reveals itself more and more clearly, but is never quite closed.Postscript (2004)
Six years after writing this piece, I have little to add, except to mention two letters that it provoked. One — much to my surprise — was from the great Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who sent me a copy of the British edition of his novel A Heart So White inscribed, "To Jonathan Coe, with whom I think I share, at least, something mentioned on page 214." He had read my article when it was published by Cahiers du cinéma as part of a series called "Ecrire le cinéma", and wanted me to know that he was haunted by the same film — and, in particular, by Miklós Rózsa's soundtrack music.
Emboldened by this response, in part, I decided to write to Billy Wilder himself. I knew that he was in poor health (he was into his nineties), and I knew, too, from the biographies I had read, that he was still slightly bitter about the whole Sherlock Holmes experience: not just the mangling of the film at the hands of the executives, but also — and perhaps more keenly — its commercial failure in 1970. At the back of my mind, I suppose, was the rather morbid thought that he was going to die quite soon and I wanted him to know how much the film meant to me and many others.
I can't remember now what I said in the letter, except that I had also been authorised by the Observer to ask him for an interview. I enclosed a copy of my article and wrote to his home address, which I found on the internet in less than three minutes. Shortly afterwards, a letter arrived at my flat with a California postmark. He must have replied almost by return.
Dear Mr Coe,
I am dictating this letter out of my sick bed. At 94 I have retired from Pictures and have not done one in twelve years.
An interview with me would not be very rewarding. I am a little confused and not quite with it. But I do want to thank you for your piece in the French "ECRIRE LE CINEMA".
"Holmes" was not a success, it is wonderful to see that for somebody it has become an obsession.
With warmest regards, I am yours.
Billy Wilder
• This is an extract from 9th & 13th, a collection of short pieces by Jonathan Coe in the Penguin 70s series, published in honour of Penguin's 70th anniversary
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