Written on the Wind started life as a novel written by Robert Wilder and published in 1946. It was a thinly disguised recounting of the real-life scandal of famous torch singer Libby Holman and her husband, tobacco heir Smith Reynolds. The two were married in 1931, and the fast-living Holman joined her husband on his family's North Carolina estate. She frequently invited her New York and show business friends down for wild parties and at one notorious shindig in 1932, Holman reportedly made her husband jealous by kissing his closest friend, Ab Walker. Later that evening, she told Reynolds she was pregnant, which sent him into a fury. Because Reynolds had been dealing with impotence for a number of years, he was certain the child couldn't be his. No one knows for sure what happened, but a shot rang out from the couple's room and Reynolds lay dead. Holman and Walker were indicted on murder charges, although they insisted it was suicide. The charges were later dropped at the request of the family, reportedly to prevent unpleasant details of Smith Reynolds' life from becoming public.

While he was still producing films at MGM, David O. Selznick prepared an original story treatment based on the Holman case. It was first titled "A Woman Called Cheap" and was brought to the screen as Reckless (1935), a vehicle for Jean Harlow that capitalized on her own recent public scandal. Harlow's husband was also found dead from a gunshot, but it was ruled a suicide and the facts of the case were quickly hushed up and remain a mystery to this day.

Wilder's novel kept the story's setting within the world of big tobacco money in the South. Somewhere along the way, the setting was switched to the oil fields of Texas.

Producer Albert Zugsmith went into motion pictures after a career in journalism as a reporter, editor and eventual manager and owner of newspapers and radio stations. He began as producer of B-pictures at various studios and production companies, priding himself on being able to pick up on a kernel of value in a script and rescue properties languishing in development. Zugsmith went to work for Universal in the 1950s, having his first success with a lurid melodrama for Joan Crawford, Female on the Beach (1955).

At Universal, he found the studio had, in his words, "about a quarter or a third of a million invested in a pile of scripts three feet high" of Wilder's novel, which had been junked and written off as unfilmable. Zugsmith coaxed the studio into letting him revive the project, and they reluctantly gave him $500 to do a treatment. Eddie Muhl, the studio's production head, read it, and although he was convinced it was unfilmable, he agreed to give Zugsmith an inexpensive writer, George Zuckerman, whose last assignment was the Zugsmith-produced boxing drama The Square Jungle (1955), starring Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine. Zuckerman had come into the business via Zugsmith, for whom the writer once worked as a reporter.

Zugsmith worked very closely with Zuckerman on adapting the book. Rather than read any of the previous scripts, Zugsmith decided it was best to just go back to the source material and work from there. He thought Zuckerman's first draft was "magnificent," and later said that most of what was shot was from that first draft: "It was that good."

In an interview with Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn for the book Kings of the Bs: Working within the Hollywood System (Dutton, 1975), Zugsmith said that what attracted him to Written on the Wind was "the impotence angle, which of course, we had to play down, down, down, but we had never shown impotence on the screen before. That was what attracted me to it." In the version that reached the screen, Kyle Hadley's problem revolves around an issue of infertility, although the actions and attitudes of Kyle and other characters certainly seem to suggest that impotence is the real problem.

Universal contract director Douglas Sirk was also attracted to the subject of impotence and commented to the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema on the prevalence of that theme in many of his films: "Yes, that is one of the great problems of modern life. The man of today is practically 'impotent' before religion, or in his conduct, because of a certain frustration. You know that it has been proven medically that if you think too much of the sex act, you lose your sexual power. That is true of Robert Stack [as Kyle in Written on the Wind] and of a certain element of upper middle class Americans."

Sirk's take on the impotence theme, as something more than just sexual dysfunction, is supported by Zuckerman's description of Kyle in his outline of the story: "The scars of his boyhood include the high, lonesome plateau of his father's wealth...the realization that he has neither the resources nor the temperament for filling his father's oversized shoes."

Sirk later said he and Zuckerman conceived the Mitch Wayne character, the "potent" male of the story, to be "opposite in every way to the Stack character...so full of goddam typical American naiveté."

For his typically naive American, Sirk naturally thought of the actor with whom he'd worked most frequently in recent years, one who was fast becoming the cinema's standard for solid inner strength with a soft touch of vulnerability: Rock Hudson.

The fortunes of Sirk and Hudson were closely tied together in the 1950s. Sirk's background as a student of art and drama in Germany led first to a career as a theatrical producer and director, then into film. In 1937 he fled the Nazi regime, eventually landing in America. After a difficult and stormy first decade in Hollywood during which he managed to turn out some interesting films that proved him to be a first-rate cinematic stylist, he contracted with Universal Studios. The studio had a young actor under contract, Rock Hudson, one of a number of pretty faces then working at every studio in the business. But Sirk saw something more in Hudson, the first to realize his potential. "I thought I saw something," Sirk told Jon Halliday in the book Sirk on Sirk (Viking, 1972). "So I arranged to meet him, and he seemed to be not much to the eye, except very handsome. But the camera sees with its own eye...and ultimately you learn to trust your camera. I gave him an extensive screen test, and then I put him into Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952). ... Within a very few years he became a number one box-office star in America."

Hudson and Sirk did several pictures together before this one: Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), Captain Lightfoot (1955). But the film that really launched Hudson's career as a major star was also the one that propelled Sirk's career into the big-budget, high-gloss melodrama genre with which he's most associated: Magnificent Obsession (1954). Thanks to the great success of that picture, and the image-defining role Hudson played, director and star (along with leading lady Jane Wyman) were quickly put into another project, All That Heaven Allows (1955), considered one of Sirk's very best films. So it was natural that Hudson would take the lead in Written on the Wind.

When Lauren Bacall was offered the part of Lucy, she seized the opportunity to work with "a hot new star" like Hudson. It was also a lot of money for only a few weeks work, and her husband, Humphrey Bogart, encouraged her to take it in light of the fact that her career was not flourishing. "It had a big budget, a good cast," she noted in her autobiography. "I'd never done anything quite like it before - a really straight leading lady, no jokes, so I said yes."

Robert Stack had started out in the early 1940s as a handsome young supporting player (and the boy who gave teen sweetheart Deanna Durbin her first on-screen kiss). He graduated to solid adult leads in relatively uninteresting pictures. The part of Kyle Hadley in Written on the Wind offered him a chance to add new dimension to his image and range. "When I read the script, I cried for the fellow," he said later. "I knew him without ever having been an alcoholic."

Dorothy Malone was another actor for whom the project promised a way out of a rut. Her career had had its ups and downs since her debut more than a decade earlier. Although she had made an impression in a few roles, she was generally relegated to window dressing, and she considered her pictures under contract to Universal to be mostly junk. Late in 1955, however, she hired a new press agent, bleached her hair platinum and decided to go after parts that emphasized sex and glamour. It paid off with her casting as the wanton Marylee.

by Rob Nixon