On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  She married Max in 1903 when the railway café idea seemed a good bet: from Vienna through Pressburg, Brünn, Mährisch-Ostrau, Kraków, and Lemberg, came a steady flow of customers. The couple trouped from town to town, managing the growing chain of little snack bars, and in 1904 they had their first child. By the end of June 1906, they were an itinerant family of four.

  Following Jewish custom, the baby, Samuel, was named for someone dead. He and his brother, Wilhelm, were each given the name of a deceased grandfather—Max’s father was a Wilhelm, Genia’s was a Samuel—but Genia had little intention of saddling yet another son with a moribund past. So she began calling him Billie, after Buffalo Bill. He may have been born in a dust speck of a Galician outpost, but Billie was her American boy.

  Wilder’s only memories of Galicia were of his grandmother, the last observant Orthodox Jew in his family. He visited her in the mountains every summer. He slept in her bedroom with her, and Wilder remembered that every night before going to sleep, his grandmother checked under the beds to make sure there weren’t any burglars lying in wait.

  Nowy Targ was a remote village in a severe, unforgiving land, and Jews weren’t held in the highest regard. Most Galician peasants lived in one-room huts with earthen floors. Barnyard animals strolled in and out at will. Being middle class, the Wilders were outsiders already. Being Jewish, they were set doubly apart from their Polish neighbors. Violence against Jews was scarcely unheard of in these parts—“The Jew will buy the entire countryside, and you’ll be working on your knees,” a peasant newspaper Zwiazek Chlopski in western Galicia had written only a few years earlier. “Shun the Jews. Pull yourselves together. Save every penny and learn.” In 1898, there was a wave of anti-Jewish tumult in western Galicia, with mobs setting fire to Jewish-owned businesses, attacking Jewish houses with rocks, assaulting synagogues during Friday night services. Maybe Billie’s grandmother knew what she was talking about.

  The critic and historian Verlyn Klinkenborg reports that “Lion Phillimore, a traveler who toured the Carpathians about 1911, remarked of the Poles that ‘their only oppressor was their own will-lessness. It was a blight lying on the face of the country.’” It was with this very population that young Billie Wilder saw his first business opportunities. Even as a child, Billie developed the skills necessary to parlay other people’s ignorance into personal gain. He became a pool shark.

  The Wilders settled in Kraków. With two young children and an ambitious wife, it became increasingly difficult for Max to manage all of his little businesses, so he consolidated his resources and opened a four-story hotel and restaurant at the base of Wawel Castle near Jagiellonian University, Poland’s oldest educational institution. He called his venture Hotel City, giving it an English name to make it seem all the more twentieth-century. In addition to its guest rooms, Hotel City featured a full-service restaurant, an outdoor terrace, and a gaming room with billiards as well as tables for card playing. Max dressed for work in a cutaway and striped trousers. Billie dressed in children’s play clothes and played the role of an average five- or six-year-old, but only as long as it took for him to snooker strangers into playing three-cushion billiards. The regulars set up the bets with each hapless newcomer. Tiny Billie did the rest, with the adult winners paying the child off in candy. (Stories like this led his second wife, Audrey, to remark, “Long before Billy Wilder was Billy Wilder, he behaved like Billy Wilder.”)

  Always a fast learner, Billie moved on to outright thievery and was soon enjoying the easy money to be gained by swiping the waiters’ tips off the tables when nobody was looking. Then the waiters caught him. “They beat the shit out of me,” Wilder recalled. Upon seeing his child being thrashed by his own staff, Max became enraged and demanded to know why the waiters were pummeling the boy. They informed him that his son was a crook, after which Max beat Billie himself for good measure. “I learned many things about human nature,” Wilder once said of his life at Hotel City—“none of them favorable.”

  Max’s power over Billie didn’t last very long. There comes a point when sons see their fathers as being, having been, or on the road to becoming pathetic, and they discover with a nasty jolt their own fate—to carry on the tradition themselves. Wilder’s epiphany came early on when he found out that Max had been nothing more glorious than a waiter at the time of his parents’ marriage. It was one of the great disheartening jolts of his childhood. Billie uncovered the drab fact on Max and Genia’s marriage certificate, which listed the groom’s profession. He was jarred, amazed, and more than a little disgusted.

  Krakόw was the ancient capital of Poland, a center of learning and culture where Jews could mix more readily with the Poles than they could in the countryside. After all, the Jew and the Pole shared a common pessimism, a joint appreciation of the brutal fact that nothing was ever likely to come of anything. At the time, this was especially true in regard to the institutions of government. Hardly anyone respected the imperial bureaucracy in Vienna, where, in classic Viennese fashion, scandal after scandal had succeeded in whittling away the mammoth empire’s confidence in its leaders. Franz Josef still cut an impressive figure, and his subjects continued to mourn the late Empress Elisabeth’s assassination. (“Sisi” was knifed to death in 1898 by a meddling anarchist—an ugly, gratuitous murder.) But the empire itself was increasingly the object of ironic contempt. Everyone knew that the never-ending territories of greater Austria-Hungary were desperately bloated, profoundly unrelated, and utterly unmanageable, and fewer and fewer people took anything related to the Hapsburgs with quite the same degree of seriousness and respect they once would have granted willingly. The Hapsburgs’ institutions still stood and functioned; they were powerful but hollow. Government buildings were inscribed “K. u. K.”—Kaiserlich und Königlich, Imperial and Royal—leading the acerbic writer Robert Musil to coin the name Kakania to describe Austro-Hungarian society. As no one failed to notice, Kakania meant more than just Kaiserlich und Königlich. The Hapsburg’s fine empire had degenerated into kakaland.

  Still, the existence of Austria-Hungary as a political entity was, as the old expression had it, good for the Jews. Franz Josef himself was excellent in this regard. The anti-Semitic Karl Lueger had to be elected mayor of Vienna five times before the emperor allowed him to take office. For the Jews in outlying provinces, there was an important practical consequence of Franz Josef’s friendliness: as long as the emperor kept his empire alive, the Jews could get out of Galicia. Between 1891 and 1914, 320,000 Jews emigrated from Austria-Hungary to the United States; 85 percent of these Jews were from Galicia. The Jewish population of Vienna rose as well. In 1880 Jews made up 18 percent of the population in the capital; by 1910 it was 23 percent, with most of the newcomers arriving from Galicia. The exodus was motivated to some degree by fear, but it was also driven by hunger—mercantile, social, financial ambitions. In the words of the historian William O. McCagg, “This was flight upwards as well as out.”

  The Wilders liked to think of themselves as moving up in the world, Genia in particular. She saw a wider, richer future than the one she inhabited. Her dream of America never left her, and she instilled it in her sons. She and Max were newspaper readers—keen on current events but more or less disinterested in fiction. Billie’s aunt, however, introduced the boys to the works of Mann, Dumas, and Zola, and their uncle steered them toward Zionism. Genia’s tastes veered more toward popular culture—specifically, anything to do with America. She had been to Coney Island as a child. Now, as a young mother stuck in an outback of the empire, she loved to tell her two boys about the bizarre sculptures of aborigines that lurked outside the doors of cigar shops—big, imposing, expressionless chiefs holding tomahawks and wearing headdresses and war paint. Once, in New York, she had gotten hopelessly lost and only found her way back home when she recognized the familiar wooden savage on the corner.

  From his mother, young Billie learned to tell a tale. You begin with the plausible and move on from there; when the actual event pale
s, you change it. And you never tell the same story twice. As told by Wilder, his life was a series of themes and variations, with heavy accent on the variations and little attention paid to inconsistencies. No one knows, for example, when his family moved from Kraków to Vienna. None of his biographers agree, least of all Billy. According to the entertainment writer Maurice Zolotow (who conducted extensive interviews with Wilder in the mid-1970s), the Wilders left for Vienna when World War I broke out and Kraków was evacuated. Wilder later reported that he “was brought as a kid of two and a half years old to Vienna, and I went there to grammar school, and then to high school.” In the late 1980s, Wilder spent several months recounting his life with a German writer, Hellmuth Karasek, at which time he revealed that he and his parents had moved to Vienna in 1910. Another writer, Kevin Lally, took his information in large measure from Karasek and agreed that by 1910 the Wilder family owned a house in Vienna’s First District. But according to Lally, the family shifted back and forth between Vienna and Kraków until 1914, at which time they moved to Vienna permanently.

  None of these stories seems to be true. According to an array of hotel registration forms unearthed by a particularly dogged Austrian journalist and film historian named Andreas Hutter, Max Wilder made a number of business trips to Vienna between 1910 and 1916. Over and over, Max stayed in hotels. (He favored the Hotel Dungl on Gluckgasse.) Unless Genia kept throwing her husband out, how likely is it that Billie’s father would have paid for all these hotel rooms if he already had an apartment in the center of town? These records have convinced Hutter that the Wilders actually lived in Vienna no earlier than 1916, two years after the war began.

  The precise time of the Wilders’ move to Vienna was probably not as crucial to the course of Billy’s life as the migration’s effect on the boy, the war’s impact on his family, and the ringing novelty of his new life in the heart of a crumbling empire. Wilder recalled the day the war began, a scorching August day in 1914. The family was still in Kraków. Wilder remembered his father cutting off the café band to announce the assassination of Ferdinand in Sarajevo. In this version, the Wilder family set off for Vienna quickly in a rented horse-drawn carriage because the trains were too crowded. Never mind that the assassination occurred on June 30, not in August, and the fact that it took another month before war was declared.

  Wilder never chronicled this migration as a single set of recordable facts. He also recalled spending the summer of 1914 with his grandmother. It was still an unusually hot season, he remembered, and he liked to spend his time sitting inside her cool, dark room in a Thonet rocking chair. In this version, it was Grandmother Baldinger who found the horse and carriage that set them on course toward Vienna, and as they packed their belongings onto the carriage, Billie, then eight years old, demanded that they take the rocking chair along with them. His grandmother put the problem to him tersely: she made him choose between the chair or the grandmother. Billie picked the chair. The old lady swatted him.

  Whenever the Wilders actually left Kraków, the turmoil of wartime spelled the end of Hotel City. Max lost his business, and when the Wilders arrived in Vienna he had to start virtually from scratch yet again. The family did, however, have enough money to afford a nice middle-class apartment at Fleischmarkt 7 in the First District. Dominated by the immense Stephansdom, the crowning symbol of Viennese Catholicism, the First District is the heart and lungs of the city. In fact, deep in Stephansdom’s crypt lie urns containing the disembodied guts of various Hapsburgs. One could scarcely be closer to the empire’s bowels than to live only a few blocks north on Fleischmarkt. Next door to the Wilders’ was an old inn, the Griechenbeisl, with its exterior sculpture of the legendary Viennese bagpiper who’d passed out in a drunken stupor during the plague of 1679 and been hurled into the plague pit, where he awoke, startled and surrounded by rotting corpses. He responded by playing a little tune on his bagpipes, a resurrection commemorated by the sculpture.

  A few blocks in the other direction on Fleischmarkt lay the old Jewish district, the Judenplatz, and the narrow streets surrounding it. Regarded in the most positive light, the area had been populated by Jews since the thirteenth century. On the other hand, the Jews of Vienna had become so successful by the fifteenth century that they were all thrown out, except for the three hundred people the Viennese burned alive in 1421. At Judenplatz 2, a memorial plaque commemorates this triumph. Commissioned in 1491, the relief depicts the Baptism of Christ in the river Jordan, the stream that cleans away evil. As the Latin text of the relief tells us, the evil in question was personified by the Jews, whom the Viennese rightly punished for their misdeeds by incinerating them. By the early twentieth century, the Jews had returned to the Judenplatz, but it was no longer a strict ghetto. They were integrated into the rest of Vienna, or so they thought.

  Ornate, courtly, formal beyond caricature, religious, cosmopolitan, and stretched and torn by the first global war—this was the Vienna into which the Wilder family moved and the neighborhood in which they lived. Max had new business opportunities, Genia had a good address, and Willie and Billie had the streets of Vienna to prowl. (Willie was now eleven, Billie ten.) They were practically within spitting distance of the ancient emperor, Franz Josef, who fortunately managed to die soon thereafter, thus providing Billie with an imperial spectacle the likes of which he had never imagined. It was rainy and cold on November 21, 1916, the day of the funeral. Franz Josef died eleven days earlier at eighty-seven years, sixty-eight years of which had been spent on the throne. Knowing that no impresarios in the world could put on a better show than the Hapsburgs, Max took his sons to the second floor of the Café Edison on the Ringstrasse to watch the funeral cortege. Wilder recalled that his father stood him on a marble table near the window. They waited a very long time, but eventually the procession appeared, everyone dressed in black. One by one, Max introduced the players: the German crown prince; the Bavarians; the Saxons; the Bulgarians; the Turks. Finally came the coffin of Franz Josef, followed by the new emperor, Karl, and his wife, Zita.

  One aspect of the spectacle made a particularly vivid impression on young Billie: “Amid all of the black splendor there was one point of white—a bright, radiant phenomenon: a figure of light signaling the future in all of the darkness.” Crown Prince Otto, more or less Billie’s age, was clad in pristine, fairy-tale white, his helmet topped by a feather. “He was my dream prince,” Wilder later recalled. “I became one with him, I took his place.” It was a magic moment of the sort that can only occur as a delusion. It goes without saying that Billie Wilder was not the crown prince of the Hapsburgs, but the harsher fact was that he wasn’t even an Austrian, the fact of which no Austrian could lose sight. Billie was a Jew from Poland. He was an immigrant, one of the many thousand foreign Jews who crammed themselves into Vienna as war refugees. Austria was—and still is—a Roman Catholic country, and a deeply conservative one at that. Its citizens, subjects of a rigid empire, were—and to some extent still are—obsessed with social standing. Wilder’s low position in Austrian society would bother him for the rest of his life. He was just another Polish Jew, and neither he nor they would ever let him forget it.

  In 1860, there were about 6,200 Jews in Vienna. By 1870 there were 40,200. By 1900 there were 147,000. The rich ones built great mansions on the Ringstrasse—the Wertheims, the Todescos, the Epsteins, the Ephrussis. There were Rothschilds living in a French-style palace on the Heugasse. Industrialist-financier Karl Wittgenstein lived in splendor, raising a family of rich overachievers that included Ludwig, a philosopher, and Paul, a onearmed concert pianist. Jews achieved fame in less monetary ways as well. Theodor Herzl, though born in Budapest, lived and worked in Vienna. Sigmund Freud lived on the Berggasse. In the formerly anti-Semitic areas of Josefstadt and Neubau, rising young Jews like Stefan Zweig were beginning to settle—perhaps because the Second and Ninth Districts had too many other Jews. Most of the new immigrants from Galicia, meanwhile, lived in poverty in the areas of Leopoldstadt and Brigi
ttenau. Billie and his family were far luckier. They had a First District address and all the amenities that went along with a middle-class lifestyle. The lobby of their apartment building was graced with tasteful blue tile work, and while the apartment itself wasn’t grand, it was clean, bright, and comfortable. But the Wilders still weren’t Viennese.

  In the fall of 1916, Billie’s parents sent him to his first Viennese school—the PrivatRealgymnasium Juranek, a public school. Most of the boys at Juranek were recent immigrants from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania. According to Wilder, this grammar school was “actually more of a franchise of the foreign legion, suited for slightly retarded or hard to handle students.” But unlike the other kids, Billie had his ausländisch difficulties built directly into his own name. In German, a Wilder is an uncouth foreigner, a barbarian. (In a slightly different sense, a Wilder is also a lunatic. “Er tobt wie ein Wilder” means “He was raving like a psycho.”) Billie may not have been the incorrigible, unruly child he likes to paint himself as being, but the Juranek was without doubt not one of Vienna’s finest academies for boys.

  All the elements of Billie’s adult personality were in place at ten, though they still took an awkward, childlike form: he was restless, easily bored, prone to pranks; a quick and incisive reader; a dicey student who excelled when he cared to and defaulted when he didn’t. He hated math and science, a fact reflected in his grades, but he loved history (a fact not reflected by his grades). He liked literature and languages, too—German and Latin were his strongest areas. “At the age of ten we had a choice of two of the dead languages,” he recalled. “Greek or Latin. I chose Latin.” When he was thirteen the boys were asked to choose between English and French: “I chose French, naturally—la langue diplomatique.” It was a disaster. Young Billie Wilder appeared to have only the weakest ability to speak a foreign language.