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 at the New York World's Fair, to name a few--Eames took twelve years to satisfy Wilder's need, while Billy had to make do with a chair and ottoman. But the result, called simply "the Chaise" by its designer, was worth the wait. It is a long, curiously narrow (only 17 1/2 in. wide), aluminum and leather chair, shaped beyond any suspicion to fit the contours of just one reclining human form, and strikingly handsome in a severe, neo-Bauhaus way.

Director Wilder grows ecstatic about his new acquisition. "I adore the originality of its shape," he says. "It isn't the old-fashioned Rubens couch; it's more like Giacometti." Eames agrees that the Chaise "is comfortable and works," but he has one reservation: "I'm sad that it's so miserably expensive. What's really discouraging is that its cost doesn't rule it out of the market." Indeed not. This fall, Manhattan's Herman Miller Inc. began taking orders for copies of the Eames-Wilder Chaise--at $636 apiece.

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