Billy Wilder on Assignment
Billy Wilder on Assignment
Billy Wilder on Assignment
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR BERLIN AND INTERWAR VIENNA
Edited by Noah Isenberg
Translated by Shelley Frisch
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2021 by Noah Isenberg
English translation of Billy Wilder articles copyright © 2021 by Princeton University Press
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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following previously published material:
Figures 8, 9, 12, and 13, from Deutsche Kinemathek.
Figure 14, from Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.
Figures 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, and 11, from Filmarchiv Austria.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wilder, Billy, 1906–2002, author. | Isenberg, Noah William, editor. | Frisch, Shelley Laura, translator.
Title: Billy Wilder on assignment : dispatches from Weimar Berlin and interwar Vienna / edited by Noah Isenberg ; translated by Shelley Frisch.
Other titles: Articles. Selections. English.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2021] | Includes index. | In English, translated from the original German.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021170 (print) | LCCN 2020021171 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691194943 (hardback) | ISBN 9780691214559 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Journalism—Germany—Berlin—History—20th century. | Journalism—Austria—Vienna—History—20th century. | Theater—Reviews. | Motion pictures—Reviews. | Berlin (Germany)—Social life and customs. | Vienna (Austria)—Social life and customs. | Berlin (Germany)—History—1918–1945. | Vienna (Austria)—History—1918-
Classification: LCC PN4725 .W54 2021 (print) | LCC PN4725 (ebook) | DDC 073–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021170
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021171
Version 1.0
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Jacket art: (1) Portrait: Filmarchiv Austria; (2) background image: Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, ca. 1930, INTERFOTO / Alamy
Contents
Editor’s Introduction: A Roving Reporter, a Tale of Two Cities, and the Making of Billy Wilder 1
I. Extra! Extra! Reportage, Opinion Pieces, and Features from Real Life 19
“Waiter, A Dancer, Please!” 23
Promenaden-Café 42
That’s Some Cold Weather—in Venice! 43
This Is Where Christopher Columbus Came into the Old World 47
The Art of Little Ruses 50
Naphthalene 52
Anything but Objectivity! 54
When It’s Eighty-four Degrees 56
Day of Destiny 58
Wanted: Perfect Optimist 60
Renovation: An Ode to the Coffeehouse 63
Why Don’t Matches Smell That Way Anymore? 65
The Rose of Jericho 68
Little Economics Lesson 69
Film Terror: On the Threat of Being Photographed 72
Berlin Rendezvous 74
Night Ride over Berlin 76
The Business of Thirst: What People Are Drinking Nowadays 78
Here We Are at Film Studio 1929 80
How We Shot Our Studio Film 83
Getting Books to Readers 87
How I Pumped Zaharoff for Money 90
II. Portraits of Extraordinary and Ordinary People 95
Asta Nielsen’s Theatrical Mission 97
My “Prince of Wales” 100
Lubitsch Discovers: A Casting by America’s Great Director 103
The Tiller Girls Are Here! 105
The Tiller Girls’ Boarding School at the Prater 107
Girardi’s Son Plays Jazz at the Mary Bar 110
Paul Whiteman, His Mustache, the Cobenzl, and the Taverns 111
Whiteman Triumphs in Berlin 115
I Interview Mr. Vanderbilt 118
The Prince of Wales Goes on Holiday 121
Chaplin II and the Others at the Scala 124
The Lookalike Man: Tale of a Chameleon Named Erwin 126
A Minister on Foot 129
Interview with a Witch: Women’s Newest Profession 131
Grock, the Man Who Makes the World Laugh 134
Ten Minutes with Chaliapin 137
Claude Anet in Berlin 139
At the Home of the Oldest Woman in Berlin 140
Felix Holländer 141
The Elder Statesman of Berlin Theater Critics 143
The B. Z. Lady and the German Crown Prince 145
Stroheim, the Man We Love to Hate 148
A Poker Artist: The Magic of Fritz Herrmann 152
“Hello, Mr. Menjou?” 157
Klabund Died a Year Ago 161
III. Film and Theater Reviews 165
Broken Barriers (1924) 167
Marital Conflicts (1927) 168
Eichberg Shoots a Film 169
The Beggar from Cologne Cathedral (1927) 170
Ole and Axel at the North Sea Shore (1927) 171
Radio Magic (1927) 172
Frost in the Studio: A Bath at Twenty Degrees Fahrenheit 173
Ole and Axel at Beba Palace 173
His Wife’s Lover (1928) 174
From the Studios 175
Greed (1924) 176
A Blonde for a Night (1928) 176
The Valley of the Giants (1927) 177
The Last Night (1928) 177
In the Name of the Law (1922) 178
Sounds Are Recorded: The Studio Shots 179
The Threepenny Opera, for the Fiftieth Time 181
Springtime in Palestine (1928) 181
First Silhouette Sound Film 182
What a Woman Dreams in Spring (1929) 183
“Youth Stage”? 184
Stroll through the Studios—They’re Shooting Silent Films 185
The Missing Will (1929) 188
The Winged Horseman (1929) 188
Men without Work (1929) 189
The Merry Musicians (1930) 190
Susie Cleans Up (1930) 190
Translator’s Note 193
Index 197
Billy Wilder on Assignment
Editor’s Introduction
A ROVING REPORTER, A TALE OF TWO CITIES, AND THE MAKING OF BILLY WILDER
Long before the award-winning Hollywood screenwriter and director Billy Wilder spelled his first name with a y, in faithful adherence to the ways of his adopted homeland, he was known—and widely published—in Berlin and Vienna as Billie Wilder. At birth, on June 22, 1906, in a small Galician town called Sucha, less than twenty miles northwest of Kraków, he was given the name Samuel in memory of his maternal grandfather. His mother, Eugenia, however, preferred the name Billie.
She had already taken to calling her first son, Wilhelm, two years Billie’s senior, Willie. As a young girl, Eugenia had crossed the Atlantic and lived in New York City for several years with a jeweler uncle in his Madison Avenue apartment. At some point during that formative stay, she caught a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring show, and her affection for the exotic name stuck, even without the y, as did her intense, infectious love for all things American. “Billie was her American boy,” insists Ed Sikov in On Sunset Boulevard, his definitive biography of the internationally acclaimed writer-director.
Wilder spent the first years of his life in Kraków, where his father, the Galician-born Max (né Hersch Mendel), had started his career in the restaurant world as a waiter and then, after Billie’s birth, as the manager of a small chain of railway cafés along the Vienna-to-Lemberg line. When this gambit lost steam, Max opened a hotel and restaurant known as Hotel City in the heart of Kraków, not far from the Wawel Castle. A hyperactive child, known for flitting about with bursts of speed and energy, Billie was prone to troublemaking: he developed an early habit of swiping tips left on the tables at his father’s hotel restaurant and of snookering unsuspecting guests at the pool table. After all, he was the rightful bearer of a last name that conjures up, in both German and English, a devilish assortment of idiomatic expressions suggestive of a feral beast, a wild man, even a lunatic. “Long before Billy Wilder was Billy Wilder,” his second wife, Audrey, once remarked, “he behaved like Billy Wilder.”
The Wilder family soon moved to Vienna, where assimilated Jews of their ilk could better pursue their dreams of upward mobility. They lived in an apartment in the city’s First District, the hub of culture and commerce, just across the Danube from the Leopoldstadt, the neighborhood known for its unusually high concentration of recently arrived Jews from Galicia and other regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the monarchy collapsed, after the First World War, the Wilders were considered to be subjects of Poland and, despite repeated efforts, were unable to attain Austrian citizenship. Billie attended secondary school in the city’s Eighth District, in the so-called Josefstadt, but his focus was often elsewhere. Across the street from his school was a tawdry “hotel by the hour” called the Stadion; he liked to watch for hours on end as patrons went in and out, trying to imagine the kinds of human transactions taking place inside. He also spent long hours in the dark catching matinees at the Urania, the Rotenturm Kino, and other cherished Viennese movie houses. Any chance to take in a picture show, to watch a boxing match, or land a seat in a card game was a welcome chance for young Billie.
Although Wilder père had other plans for his son—a respectable, stable career in the law, an exalted path for good Jewish boys of interwar Vienna—Billie was drawn, almost habitually, to the seductive world of urban and popular culture and to the stories generated and told from within it. “I just fought with my father to become a lawyer,” he recounted for filmmaker Cameron Crowe in Conversations with Wilder: “That I didn’t want to do, and I saved myself, by having become a newspaperman, a reporter, very badly paid.” As he explains a bit further in the same interview, “I started out with crossword puzzles, and I signed them.” (Toward the end of his life, after having racked up six Academy Awards, Wilder told his German biographer that it wasn’t so much the awards he was most proud of, but rather that his name had appeared twice in the New York Times crossword puzzle: “once 17 across and once 21 down.”)
In the weeks leading up to Christmas 1924, at a mere eighteen years of age and fresh out of gymnasium (high school) with diploma in hand, Billie wrote to the editorial staff at Die Bühne, one of the two local tabloids that were part of the media empire belonging to a shifty Hungarian émigré named Imré Békessy, to ask how he might go about becoming a journalist, maybe even a foreign correspondent. Somewhat naïvely, he thought this could be his ticket to America. He received an answer, not the one he was hoping for, explaining that without complete command of English he wouldn’t stand a chance.
Never one to give up, Billie paid a visit to the office one day early in the new year and, exploiting his outsize gift of gab, managed to talk his way in. In subsequent interviews, he liked to tell of how he landed his first job at Die Bühne by walking in on the paper’s chief theater critic, a certain Herr Doktor Liebstöckl, having sex with his secretary one Saturday afternoon. “You’re lucky I was working overtime today,” he purportedly told Billie. (It’s hard not to think of the cast of characters that emerge from the pages of his later screenplays—the sex-starved men in his American directorial debut The Major and the Minor [1942] or in Love in the Afternoon [1957] or The Apartment [1960]—who bear a strong family resemblance to Herr Liebstöckl.) Soon he was schmoozing with journalists, poets, actors, the theater people who trained with Max Reinhardt, and the coffeehouse wits who gathered at Vienna’s Café Herrenhof. There he met writers Alfred Polgar and Joseph Roth, a young Hungarian stage actor named Laszlo Löwenstein (later known to the world as Peter Lorre), and the critic and aphorist Anton Kuh. “Billie is by profession a keeper of alibis,” observed Kuh with a good bit of sarcasm. “Wherever something is going on, he has an alibi. He was born into the world with an alibi, according to which Billie wasn’t even present when it occurred.”
FIGURE 1. Crossword puzzle by Billie Wilder, Die Bühne, 1925.
FIGURE 2. Group portrait of the Max Reinhardt Circle in the countryside, Die Bühne (August 6, 1925). From left to right: Bianca Békessy, Dr. Hans Liebstöckl, Dr. Eugen Lazar, Sybille Binder, Lina Wolwode, Billie Wilder, Louis Rainer, Annie Körner, Director Ludwig Körner, Mrs. Witzmann, Editor in Chief Emmerich (Imré) Békessy, Gitta Lazar, Theodor Danegger, Camilla Gerzhofer, Max Gülstorff, Architect Karl Witzmann.
FIGURE 3. Billie Wilder’s visiting card while a reporter for Die Stunde.
The Viennese journalistic scene at the time was anything but dull, and Billie bore witness, alibi or no alibi, to the contemporary debates, sex, and violence that occurred in his midst. He carried with him a visiting card with his name (“Billie S. Wilder”) emblazoned upon it, and underneath it the name of the other Békessy tabloid, Die Stunde, to which he contributed crossword puzzles, short features, movie reviews, and profiles. Around the time he was filing his freelance pieces at a rapid clip, a fiery feud was taking place between Békessy and Karl Kraus, the acid-tongued don of Viennese letters, editor and founder of Die Fackel (The Torch), who was determined to drive the Hungarian “scoundrel” out of the city and banish him once and for all from the world of journalism. To add to this volatile climate, just months after Billie began working for the tabloid, one of Die Stunde’s most famous writers, the Viennese novelist Hugo Bettauer, author of the best-selling novel Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews, 1922), was gunned down by a proto-Nazi thug.
“I was brash, bursting with assertiveness, had a talent for exaggeration,” Wilder told his German biographer Hellmuth Karasek, “and was convinced that in the shortest span of time I’d learn to ask shameless questions without restraint.” He was right, and soon gained precious access to everyone from international movie stars like Asta Nielsen and Adolphe Menjou, the royal celebrity Prince of Wales (Edward VIII)—to whom he devoted two separate pieces—and the American heir and newspaper magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt IV. “In a single morning,” he boasted in a 1963 interview with Playboy’s Richard Gehman, speaking of his earliest days as a journalist in Vienna, “I interviewed Sigmund Freud, his colleague Alfred Adler, the playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler, and the composer Richard Strauss. In one morning.” And while there may not be any extant articles to corroborate such audacious claims, he did manage to interview the world-famous British female dance troupe the Tiller Girls, whose arrival at Vienna’s Westbahnhof station in April 1926 the nineteen-year-old Billie happily chronicled for Die Bühne. A mere two months later he got his big break, when the American jazz orchestra leader Paul Whiteman paid a visit to Vienna. There’s a wonderful photograph of Billie in a snap-brim hat, hands rest
ing casually in his suit-jacket pockets, a cocksure grin on his face, standing just behind Whiteman, as if to ingratiate himself as deeply as possible; after publishing a successful interview and profile in Die Stunde, he was invited to tag along for the Berlin leg of the tour.
In his conversations with Cameron Crowe, Wilder describes visiting Whiteman at his hotel in Vienna after the interview he conducted with him. “In my broken English, I told him that I was anxious to see him perform. And Whiteman told me, ‘If you’re eager to hear me, to hear the big band, you can come with me to Berlin.’ He paid for my trip, for a week there or something. And I accepted it. And I packed up my things, and I never went back to Vienna. I wrote the piece about Whiteman for the paper in Vienna. And then I was a newspaperman for a paper in Berlin.” Serving as something of a press agent and tour guide—a role he’d play once more when American filmmaker Allan Dwan would spend his honeymoon in Berlin and, among other things, would introduce Billie to the joys of the dry martini—Wilder reviewed Whiteman’s German premiere at the Grosses Schauspielhaus, which took place before an audience of thousands. “The ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ a composition that created quite a stir over in the States,” he writes, “is an experiment in exploiting the rhythms of American folk music. When Whiteman plays it, it is a great piece of artistry. He has to do encores again and again. The normally standoffish people of Berlin are singing his praises. People stay on in the theater half an hour after the concert.”
FIGURE 4. Billie Wilder, second from right, with Paul Whiteman and his band, 1926.
Often referred to as Chicago on the Spree, as Mark Twain once dubbed it, Berlin in the mid-1920s had a certain New World waft to it. A cresting wave of Amerikanismus—a seemingly bottomless love of dancing the Charleston, of cocktail bars and race cars, and a world-renowned nightlife that glimmered amid a sea of neon advertisements—had swept across the city and pervaded its urban air. It was a perfect training ground for Billie’s ultimate migration to America, and a place that afforded him a freedom that he hadn’t felt in Vienna. As the film scholar Gerd Gemünden has remarked in his illuminating study of Wilder’s American career, “the American-influenced metropolis of Berlin gave Wilder the chance to reinvent himself.”