On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  By 1917, the war was going very badly, at least as far as the Austrians were concerned, and Vienna was spiraling downward into a state of near-extreme deprivation. Like many youths his age—and many adults, too—Billie was pressed into service cleaning streets, shoveling snow, and collecting garbage. Max was in the reserves doing guard duty, while Genia worked with the Austrian Red Cross. Billie got used to waiting on food ration lines. He would return home with three potatoes. Still, Willie and Billie had an easier time of it than the adults. “We were flexible,” Wilder recalled. “You’d go out to the country and grab a couple of eggs and things like that. You went into the swapping business—I’ll give you my watch for a half a ham, or whatever.” At the time, of course, he blamed the English. The little soldier of the Central Powers proudly wore a lapel button inscribed Gott Strafe England (“May God Punish England”).

  On the day the war ended, November 11, 1918, Billie was in school. As he walked home to Fleischmarkt he watched mobs forming in the streets—looting, pulling down royal statues, tearing down any K. u. K. insignia they could find. Austrian soldiers, faced with the escalating chaos, quickly changed into civilian clothing to avoid being attacked.

  The empire was no more. From being the seat of a multinational, imperial conglomerate of 56 million people, Austria was reduced to a single small country of 7 million. Three million of those 7 million people were now living in Vienna. What had once been a sophisticated world capital had suddenly become a cramped backwater, and the infamous cynicism of the Viennese now had catastrophic recent history to back itself up. The sense of irony Wilder gained, the bemused bitterness on which he built his life’s work, no doubt found its roots in the heart of a twelve-year-old who watched, at close range, as an empire fell into dust and, thanks to the all-but-pointless war, took countless lives with it.

  By the age of fifteen, Billie Wilder was tough—a redheaded, wiry, muscular kid who stood at five foot ten and liked to show off his strength. He played soccer; he skated; he skied; he played hockey; he rode a bike. He stole a motorcycle—a Zündapp—and rode around Vienna until he ran out of gas. He is said to have moved on to stealing cars, though this is a bit suspect. In any event, young Billie was periodically truant from school, and he was well on the way to earning a solid reputation as a delinquent. He saw his first Egon Schiele nude while in grammar school—“pornography, we called it”—and on at least one occasion he blamed the possession of this Schiele reproduction for getting him thrown out of one school and dispatched to the foreign legion.

  That detail is improbable. More plausible, though perhaps only in degree, is the story of the first whore in Billie’s life. She’s said to have lived near the family’s apartment on Fleischmarkt, and she gave young Billy some small change to take care of her hideous dachshund while she was busy with a customer. The vile dog had a temper, barking and biting whenever it pleased, and one day the police showed up while the whore was tricking, arresting her and leaving Billie with the dog. How he got rid of it is anyone’s guess.

  Sex, nature’s way of torturing teenage boys, was now beginning to work its rotten charms on Billie. There is the beloved story about a chum whose father walked in on him while he was jerking off and announced that if he did it fifty more times he’d die. Terrified, the boy ceased the practice—but only for the following day or two, at which point he just couldn’t take it anymore and stroked again to full fruition. Shadowed by a sense of his own impending doom, the boy began marking off each session on a sheet of paper, tabulating his orgasms like a World War I dogfighter putting notches on his plane, except of course that in his case he was his own victim. At first, Wilder said, the boy beat off only twice a week, then only once a week. Finally, he hit the forty-nine mark. According to Wilder, “He wrote a farewell note to his parents about how he had fought against it; now he would be going to his death, and he asked their forgiveness.” Sliding the letter under his parents’ bedroom door, he returned to his room and masturbated himself to death—not the death of body and soul, but the death of his belief in his father: “And from then on, he never believed another word his father told him.” The boys’ room of the Privat-Realgymnasium Juranek was set ablaze by the tale.

  Billie’s own family life was troubled in ways both typical and particular. The twenty-four-volume standard edition of the collected works of Sigmund Freud attests to the daily derangement of Viennese family life in the early twentieth century, a quiet frenzy of deceit, repression, and melancholia from which the Wilders were hardly immune. Max was always on the make with some failed business scheme. He imported Swiss watches but knew nothing about them. The business failed. He bought a trout hatchery. His knowledge of the spawning habits of fish was equally limited, and the business collapsed. Max was, as Wilder described him later, “a dreamer and adventurer who searched his whole life after something without exactly knowing what it was.” He played a powerful role in Billie’s life: Max’s son knew with increasing self-assurance that his father was really very weak.

  Deceit was no stranger to the household. Wilder tells the story of the time he was playing soccer after school—with rocks, one of which went crashing through the window of a neighborhood shop. Billie, always enterprising, quickly struck a deal with the shopkeeper. If Billie paid for the damage, the owner would keep it a secret from his parents. Billie then explained to Max and Genia with great earnestness and enthusiasm that he was going to learn typing and stenographic skills at school—for a small fee. Thrilled with Billie’s newfound interest in schoolwork, they were only too glad to give the boy the money he needed, and Billie successfully faked them out by refraining from rock-soccer during the time he was supposed to be getting his typing lessons. Then one Sunday, Max had some business work to do, and since it was Sunday his secretary wasn’t available. After taking shorthand (meaningless doodles), Billie was asked to type the correspondence. A guilty look, a glance of paternal disappointment, but no punishment; by that point Billie was observant enough to understand that Max often went to the racetrack instead of his office. A workable family dynamic: if the son didn’t rat on the father, the father wouldn’t rat on the son.

  There was a much more serious bit of information about Max that Billie supposedly kept from his mother as well. It is a tale of such stupefying deception and backdoor domestic intrigue that the offhand way Wilder discusses it is all the more pathological. Wilder told Hellmuth Karasek that one day he accidentally found in the mail an invitation, addressed to his father, from a boarding school. It seems that Max was being invited to a party for one of his sons—a third son, one Genia didn’t know about. There was something bothersome about this, said the adult Billy, so he took the invitation out of the mail and gave it to his father later on the sly. Max looked at Billie, Billie looked at Max. No one said a word, and that is the end of the story. None of the volumes of material written about and by Billy Wilder ever mentions his half-brother again.

  Less extreme tales of Billie’s teenage years depict Billie dumping out a bottle of his father’s best wine in order to get the deposit on the bottle, and conspiring with a friend to steal some valuable stamps from a decrepit and half-blind philatelist. “But he was not as old and not half as blind as we had believed, and he caught us,” Wilder remembered, though he was quick to note that he and his friend escaped before the old man could call the cops.

  Distant from his father and treating his mother with filial bemusement, Billie does not appear to have been terribly close to his brother, either. In the hundreds of interviews Wilder gave over the years, Willie’s name hardly ever surfaces. Of anyone in his family, he got along best with Genia’s brother, David Baldinger, who trained as an engineer and fought in Haller’s Army during the war in an effort to gain independence for Poland. Baldinger then moved to Lodz and, later, Israel. Uncle David steered Billie away from Wagner toward Greek and Jewish classics—the Maccabees, Bar Kokhba, maybe Oedipus…. When his uncle realized that Billie was still a lot more interested in Austro-German and
American popular culture he was very disappointed, though he and Wilder stayed in touch even after Baldinger moved to Israel.

  Judah Maccabee may have sparked the heroic dreams of Jewish boys for thousands of years, but for daring, glamour, and heroism, Douglas Fairbanks held a more intense appeal to Billie Wilder. Once World War I was over, American movies came flooding into Vienna, and Billie began spending an increasing amount of time in darkened theaters. The Wiener Urania was a regular hangout, as was the Rotenturm Kino, located only a block or two from Fleischmarkt. Whenever Billie failed to show up at home, Genia would send Willie out to find him. The Rotenturm Kino was one of the first places he looked. Watching films may have been the only time Billie sat still.

  Wilder has said that he liked to watch Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, and William S. Hart, and to a certain degree he probably did, but it was Fairbanks who really did it for him. Fairbanks wasn’t just handsome and heroic. He was funny—a dashing, romantic leading man who was as much a master of the subtle smile as of a sword or knife. Billie found in the cinema what countless other restless, drifting adolescent boys have found: a better version of themselves in a better vision of the world.

  This was especially true in postwar Vienna, where Billie, despite his street smarts and ingratiating personality, was still very much an outsider. Anthony Heilbut, the historian of the Austro-German Diaspora in America, makes the point that many of the German and Austrian Jews forced out of their countries by the Nazis had a particularly visceral love of popular culture, and he links this appreciation of movies, sports, and popular music to their nature as outsiders. He quotes the politician Walther Rathenau (Jewish, gay, and, in 1922, assassinated) as observing that early in the life of every German Jew there comes a signal moment when “he realizes he is a second-class citizen.” The Wilders’ realization became concrete in 1920. The empire’s collapse left certain practical matters to be resolved, not least of which was the question of citizenship. After 1918, residents of the old empire were given two options: they could become citizens of whatever new country had been fashioned from the former crown land in which they had lived, or, if they spoke German or Hungarian, they could become citizens of the new republics of Austria or Hungary. Max Wilder chose the latter course, and in 1920 he applied for Austrian citizenship. His request was summarily denied.

  The official response he received is chilling in its bureaucratic clarity. August 20, 1920: “The claim of acknowledgment of Austrian nationality is dismissed because Mr. Max Wilder was not able to bring proof that he belongs to the German majority of the population of Austria according to race and language.” The Wilders may have spoken German, but they would never be German, nor would they be Austrian.

  Movies were a visceral link to a better, more egalitarian world. There were social benefits as well. Billie, increasingly obsessed with sex, fell hard for a girl named Greta, whom he met while playing tennis in the park. Wilder was still almost completely inexperienced, so he asked his friend Egon for advice, Egon having claimed to have earned a case of the clap at the age of eleven. (It was later revealed to have been measles.) Egon gave Billie some wise advice: take her to the movies. And when the lights go down, go for it. Cleverly, Billie took Greta to a film called Storms of Passion starring Asta Nielsen, and at an opportune moment, he reached between her legs. Greta, startled, screamed so loud that the lights were turned on throughout the theater; when an usher found them, Billie’s hand was pinned between Greta’s bony knees.

  It was a shame that something so simple would turn out to be such a disaster, though Billie, of course, would eventually earn millions of dollars and six Academy Awards chronicling people’s sexual catastrophes. For the time being, however, he was a ripe teenage boy with too much energy and too few chances. At school he sat looking out the window for hours—years, actually—trying to peer into the windows of the fleabag across the street, a crummy lodging house of the sort the Viennese called a “hotel by the hour.” Billie was fascinated by the Hotel Stadion—its appeal was obviously more intense than math or geography—and he spent much of his school day getting to know the Stadion’s cast of characters and their habits. Billie noticed, for example, that nobody ever carried a suitcase in; they weren’t staying long enough to need supplies. Soon Billie was an expert at who was who, which ones were the working girls, and which of their clients were married—they were the nervous ones. He reported: “I thought to myself ‘Patience, patience. Right after graduation I’ll go to the hotel with “Red Fritzi” or whatever her first name was.’ And so it happened. A couple of days after graduation, I went to her. We negotiated quickly over the price and marched into the hotel and straight to the front desk where I, with the sangfroid of an experienced Casanova, registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Finsterbusch,” which supposedly was the name of Billie’s French teacher.

  For a man who went on to write any number of films that dealt either directly or indirectly with prostitution, this was literally a seminal event. If it actually happened, it took place in July of 1924. More certain is the fact that Billie took his Matura, or exit exam, from the PrivatRealgymnasium Juranek on July 4. He passed. Billie Wilder got B’s in German and Latin and a surprising A in math, but he nearly flunked French. After eight years of school in Vienna, Billie Wilder still had little facility with foreign languages.

  The Wilder family, meanwhile, was heading into rougher financial waters. The circumstances aren’t entirely clear, but Max’s inability to keep a business running led to the family’s having to move out of their Fleischmarkt apartment and relocate in the distant Nineteenth District, where they found an even smaller place at Billrothstrasse 15. Willie had already moved out—he was living in London—and Billie was ready to be on his own as well. He may have spent the summer on Billrothstrasse, but by fall he was ready to go to work and live on his own.

  In regard to his college education, Wilder claimed to have entered the University of Vienna to study law and to have dropped out after a single semester, but there is no record of Samuel Wilder’s ever having matriculated at the University of Vienna, let alone attending it. (And the Austrians, like their German brothers and sisters, are adept at keeping records.)

  Wilder’s tale involves Genia’s long-standing wish for Billie to become a lawyer and Billie’s failure to comply, and it is compounded in the Zolotow version by an ill-fated romance with a whore. Zolotow finds in Wilder’s putative decision to drop out of college the seeds of his entire psychopathology, a theory that enraged Wilder no end. Wilder made the mistake of telling Zolotow about a girl he’d been interested in—a girl named Ilse. She worked at a record store on the Ringstrasse, the story goes, and Wilder, who was becoming interested to the point of obsession in American jazz, is said to have taken her on dates to the dance halls on Kärntnerstrasse. He wrote poetry to Ilse and even dreamed of marrying her and moving to the United States and starting a family. Zolotow reports that Billie registered for the university and began attending classes in September, information evidently supplied by Wilder himself. By December, the story has it, Billie quit school, stopped seeing Ilse, and moved out of his parents’ apartment. Willie Wilder, interviewed by Zolotow, said that he had no idea what happened to change Billie’s life in this way, and Zolotow concludes that it was all because Billie discovered Ilse was turning tricks on the side. The revelation allegedly caused him to fall into despair and abandon his studies, destroying his faith in all women as an extra measure of drama. It is Ilse, Zolotow concludes, who lies behind every hard-bitten, lying, cheating slut in Billy Wilder’s film career.

  “No! Bullshit! Total bullshit!” was Wilder’s emphatic response to Zolotow’s theory. “My God!” he told critics Joseph McBride and Todd McCarthy in a 1979 interview. “In my youth in Vienna, sex was far less prevalent. I never slept with a hooker in my high school days, (a) because I couldn’t afford it, and (b) because I was scared shitless. In those days, the idea of gonorrhea and the fear which it struck—no kid would have.” Wilder’s explanation, of cours
e, stands in thorough contradiction to the Red Fritzi–l’affaire Finsterbusch tale he told a decade later. While one can well understand Wilder’s fury at seeing his life and work reduced to a failed romance with a Viennese whore, it is a conclusion he wrought himself, having supplied Zolotow with all the raw material.

  In any case, Wilder himself admitted to Andreas Hutter that in fact he never studied law.

  What he did do was to begin learning a few words of English by memorizing the lyrics to the latest jazz hits, though he had no idea what the words actually meant. Music, not Ilse, was Billie’s real passion. Nothing was more appealing to the excitable, fidgeting eighteen-year-old than the rhythmic agitations of American jazz. Vienna was just beginning to bring in jazz records—perhaps to the very store in which the possibly fictitious Ilse worked—and Billie started collecting them. He snapped up Paul White-man’s “Japanese Sandman” when it came out and anything else he could find. He was rapidly becoming a proficient dancer as well. What better way was there to burn up all that excess energy and meet girls at the same time? But what on earth was he going to do for a job?

  2. DAREDEVIL REPORTER

  Mr. Boot, I’m a $250 a week newspaperman. I can be had for fifty. I know newspapers backward forward and sideways. I can write ’em, edit ’em, print ’em, wrap ’em, and sell ’em. I can handle big news and little news. And if there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog. Make it forty-five.