On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  —Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) in Ace in the Hole

  Billie Wilder was no longer a child, if indeed he’d ever been one at all. He was eighteen years old, tall and lean and sporting an adult smirk. He was scarcely about to continue living with his parents in the depressing Ausland of the Nineteenth District. Quiet suburbs were not his style, nor was the prospect of taking the first dumb job that came his way. Restless and eager to get out of the house and live on his own, back in the heart of Vienna, Billie set out to find work that would engage him. But what could he do with a high school diploma and a lackluster academic record? Sure, he loved movies, and yes, he thought he could write, but the Austrian film industry was small, scarcely big enough to offer him even an apprenticeship. Inspired by an American newsreel, he found himself considering a career in journalism. He liked the way the young reporters dressed.

  There were several highly respected newspapers in Vienna—the conservative Neue Freie Presse, the progressive Arbeiter Zeitung—but Billie had no training as a reporter, and he wasn’t likely to convince anyone to hire him simply on the basis of his aggressive, prickly charm. There was Die Fackel (The Torch), Karl Kraus’s magazine, but Kraus was a high-class, one-man show, and he would never have hired a fast-talking and utterly inexperienced eighteen-year-old jazz fan. Kraus was the undisputed master of the Viennese feuilleton—a beautiful, fiery essay / prose-poem / polemic. Kraus’s play of language was dazzling, and better still, Kraus was supremely nasty. He was bilious and respected very little about the Viennese, so naturally the Viennese adored him—except, of course, for those he mauled.

  But there were two new tabloid papers, the daily Die Stunde (The Hour), and its sister publication, a weekly theater magazine called Die Bühne (The Stage), both run under the corporate umbrella of Kronos Verlag. Started up in 1922 by a shady Hungarian named Imré Békessy, Kronos Verlag was on the cutting edge as far as Viennese journalism was concerned: Békessy’s papers peddled scandal, crime, sports, movie reviews, theater reviews, and snappy personality profiles. If any newspaper had a job opening, it would be one of Békessy’s. So in December 1924, eighteen-year-old Billie Wilder wrote a letter to the editor of Die Bühne begging him kindly to reveal the secret of what a guy had to do to become a reporter. Billie particularly wanted to know how to become an American reporter, by which he meant either a Viennese correspondent for an American newspaper or just a Viennese reporter who acted like an American. As a jumping-off point for his planned career as a press hound, he even offered to work for Die Bühne for free, if only the editor would take him.

  Sadly, he could not. Just before Christmas, in a published response addressed to Billie S. Wilde [sic] of the Nineteenth District, Die Bühne told the aspiring cub, “We cannot employ anyone without salary, because that isn’t permitted by the company. But if you want to get acquainted with journalism, you may come in from time to time. Conditions in America are very difficult, which we know all too well. Reporters are crucial to American newspapers, and it isn’t easy to compete with a whole troop of those clever boys. Without perfect knowledge of English, you can’t get anywhere in German newspapers either. Many thanks for your best wishes!”

  It was a setback, but not a major one; Billie was not so easily dissuaded. Die Bühne and Die Stunde were too appealing as potential employers. When Die Stunde’s reporters covered crimes, they included the dirty details other papers demurely glossed over. They covered sports, which Billie adored. And they were full of photographs. While the other Viennese newspapers still depended on sketches and drawings to illustrate their stories, Die Bühne and Die Stunde were pioneering the use (in Austria) of photojournalism with captions—direct images unmediated by an artist’s imagination, with just a few descriptive words to nail down the facts. This was exactly the kind of tough, modern paper Billie wanted to join.

  None of this was what Genia had in mind for her second son. As Wilder describes it, his parents’ dreams were typical for their class—the first son is the doctor, and the second is a lawyer, “or at least one of them is a dentist and the other an accountant.” In the Wilders’ case, none of it worked out, at least as far as Genia was concerned. Willie took a job in New York in a company that made ladies’ handbags. As for Billie, he saw plainly that his father couldn’t support him anymore, and besides, he craved independence.

  Years after the fact, Wilder would tell and retell the story of how he was hired by the theater editor and chief drama critic of Die Bühne, Hans Liebstöckl. Fifty years old then and one of Vienna’s leading theater critics, Liebstöckl wrote not only for Die Stunde and Die Bühne, where he was soon to become editor in chief, but also for the more respectable daily paper Wiener Tagblatt. According to Wilder’s tale, one of his high school teachers, Alfred Spitzer, encouraged him to be a writer and, after Wilder’s graduation, gave Billie a letter of introduction to the esteemed Herr Liebstöckl. A cleaning lady was mopping the floor in the lobby, Billie said, when he wandered through the seemingly empty office building. She jutted her thumb in the direction of the second floor. Gasping sounds were heard as Billie approached a closed door. Opening it, he discovered a panting, beet-faced Liebstöckl sticking it to his disheveled secretary and, soon thereafter, all too conveniently, offering Billie a job to keep his mouth shut.

  Wilder was never one to pass up the chance to embellish a tale, especially when it involved a penis being inserted into or withdrawn from an orifice. He particularly loved the Liebstöckl story. But as Wilder finally confessed to Andreas Hutter in 1990, he got his first job from Maximillian Kramer, the games editor: “I made up crossword puzzles. That was the beginning of my career as a journalist.”

  He published his first piece of reportage in Die Bühne on January 22, 1925—a profile of Hungary’s greatest actress, Sari Fedak. She was the divorced wife of the playwright Ferenc Molnár, and the rumor was that she was currently having a torrid affair with none other than Imré Békessy. (Eagle-eyed Viennese wags hadn’t failed to notice that photos of Sari Fedak were showing up with great regularity in both Die Stunde and Die Bühne.) But even after he cut his teeth on his publisher’s girlfriend, Wilder was still not promoted to first-string reporter, so he spent most of his first few months at Die Bühne editing crossword puzzles and writing short reviews of amateur theater, opera, and dance. In March, Die Bühne paid a dividend to the Wilder family when Genia successfully solved one of her own son’s puzzles and won, as her prize, a bunch of bananas.

  For his short writing efforts, Billie was paid “space rates.” He only earned money when he got something into print. Wilder quickly learned to be pragmatic, understanding that he had to connect with both his readership and his bank account. It was a talent that would serve him well once he got into the film business.

  By May, it was clear that Billie needed to earn more money than he could possibly make doing short pieces for Die Bühne, which only came out once a week. So Billie began writing for the daily Die Stunde as well. He wrote at night and handed in his copy at ten in the morning, when the paper went to press; by noon, his articles for Die Stunde were in print.

  He tells of waiting in the café across the street from police headquarters, playing pool or chess while waiting for the day’s horrible crimes to unfold. The reporters on the crime beat had an agreement with the police: a red light installed in the café flashed whenever the cops had something juicy for the boys of the press. Dead bodies in the Danube, suicides at the Sacher, Lippizaner stallions led away by crafty cabdrivers—these, supposedly, were the seedy, everyday horrors that served as Billie’s bread and butter. “I was doing some reportage of a criminal nature. I would do the dirty work,” he said. Wilder’s crime reportage may have been repellent, but it doesn’t appear to have been terribly extensive; the number of crime stories Wilder actually wrote is much lower than he remembered. After painstakingly going through volume after dusty volume of Die Stunde looking for articles by Billie Wilder, Andreas Hutter found only a single signed article covering a crime. Then ag
ain, as another one of his colleagues from the Die Stunde days remembers, Billie liked to go around the office telling his colleagues that “his mother woke him up every morning with the instruction, ‘Get up and write some anecdotes.’”

  Some of Wilder’s peers recalled him as being an industrious young reporter who often stayed in the office until 2:00 A.M. or later. On the other hand, one of Wilder’s old friends, Anton Kuh, once remarked that “Billie always had an alibi. Whenever there was something going on, he had an alibi. He was born with an alibi, and as a consequence, he was never there when anything happened.” Békessy’s assistant, Ludwig Hoffenreich, remembered Wilder as being “extremely lazy” (an unduly harsh assessment, given that no one else has ever described this agile, work-obsessed, notoriously antsy man as “lazy”). But even Hoffenreich was quick to add that when he did write, the results were marvelous.

  Wilder himself once acknowledged that his reputation among his peers was spotty. Young Billie earned a nickname among his fellow reporters. In Viennese dialect the word is Schlieferl—in English, “the bootlicker.” In the eyes of his fellow journalists, Wilder displayed a tendency to curry favor whenever necessary—to get ahead by whatever means he could find. It’s not a stretch to think of Billie Wilder as an opportunist, but then his ambition was powerful, compulsive, and enviable, and he always had the talent to back it up. As for his relationship with his bosses, Wilder reported that he finally won Hans Liebstockl’s grudging respect, but only after a lot of effort and one particular turn of phrase. After some minor famous fat man died, Billie closed his obituary with the line “May he become as light as the earth.”

  At Die Stunde, Wilder soon began covering sports. He found two experienced sportswriters to serve as his mentors—Maximilian Reich and Aurel Fold. They taught him how to create atmosphere, how to be lively and easy to read, and how to write in a breezy but elegant style. Wilder’s were snappy, clever, discursive essays—sports feuilletons. (In a feuilleton, the writer’s feeling about his subject mattered more than the subject itself.) Wilder covered not only athletic events, but he also wrote profiles of the leading athletes of the day—soccer, tennis, and biking stars.

  The copy room in which Wilder worked was also used by a man named Friedrich Porges, who wrote the film columns for both Die Stunde and Die Bühne. Porges had been a scriptwriter and director of early Austrian and German silent movies; more recently, he had been the editor of the Berlin paper Der Montag Morgen, after which he returned to Vienna to edit Die Bühne’s cinema section. It was thanks to Porges that Billie Wilder first witnessed the daily, grinding hell of making a motion picture. One day in August 1925, Porges assigned him to write a piece on the filming of Robert Wiene’s Der Rosenkavalier, then in production in Vienna. Eager to finally see filmmaking at close range, and fascinated by the idea of meeting the director of Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari, Billie set out to interview Wiene. He didn’t get very far. Wiene was frantic, the production chaotic, and none of the reporters who were seeking interviews got anywhere. There was, Billie learned, a lot of waiting. “This is no profession for me,” an exhausted Wiene told the bored and frustrated journalists at the end of the day; “It’s awful.” Billie was most impressed. Hoffenreich remembered Wilder telling him, “Film is the future—one has to do it. You can make money with it.”

  Making money, or better keeping money, wasn’t easy in Vienna in the 1920s. Inflation was rampant, and the nation was still struggling to recover from the war and the ensuing collapse of the empire. In another article for Die Stunde, Wilder wrote with sick, funny irony about the current state of Vienna’s economy, using its best-known pawnshop as his focal point. “The size of a city’s pawn industry enables one to conclude something about its citizens’ pecuniary state,” Wilder began. “The Dorotheum, the main office of our pawn industry, is an impressive business with four floors, eight staircases, countless corridors, and some one hundred rooms.” But, he went on, so many people were hawking so much of their patrimony that the Dorotheum had to add a whole new layer: “Yes, a fifth floor, in order to store your winter coat or your fifteen-volume edition of Meyer, which your grandfather’s father bought in the good old days. A few more years of restoration and Vienna will give the Old World its first skyscraper.”

  Billie is said to have met and interviewed Cardinal Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII. He also maintained that he met and interviewed Ferenc Molnár on the outdoor terrace of a country hotel, where Molnár was repeatedly interrupted by an aggressive chicken. The irritated playwright kept kicking it away and ultimately threatened to cook it. As another old friend put it, “Billy Wilder wants his biography to be as original as his movies.” The most outrageous story concerns the breathtaking day Billie interviewed Sigmund Freud, Richard Strauss, Arthur Schnitzler, and Alfred Adler; the tale appears in nearly every profile of Wilder ever written. For a Christmastime article on the rise of Fascism, the story goes, Billie was dispatched to the four internationally renowned men’s houses to get their impressions of the newly rumbling Right. Strauss, it’s said, told Billie that he rather admired Mussolini and believed that Austria needed precisely such a man to set the nation on the correct course. With a few good quotes in his notebook, Billie proceeded by trolley to Schnitzler’s house, where the grand old man of Austrian letters told him that he believed Mussolini wouldn’t last very long because the Italians, like the Viennese, were too wedded to their own passions and wouldn’t tolerate any degree of rigid discipline in the long run. Adler, who lived in a large apartment on Nussdorferstrasse, turned out to be a fat man who wore a pince-nez; he rambled on and on about Mussolini’s inferiority complex, the existence of which was self-evident to Adler. “Strauss and Adler talked their heads off,” was how Wilder described it later. Finally, Billie showed up at the door of Sigmund Freud’s home and office at Berggasse 19 and asked to see the doctor. The founder of psychoanalysis appeared with a napkin tucked under his chin—Billie had interrupted his lunch—and when Billie handed him his business card, Freud summarily threw him out. He didn’t like reporters.

  Wilder finally admitted in 1990 that these four interviews did not, in fact, take place on a single day around Christmastime. He kept insisting, however, that he really did speak to all four men, though on different occasions.

  Friedrich Porges may have given Billie his first film-related writing assignment, and Reich and Föld were his sports mentors, but it was still another writer and editor, Karl Tschuppik, who became Wilder’s greatest influence—his first role model. Tschuppik was something of a bohemian who became editor in chief of Die Stunde in 1923, but he’d written and edited for better, more respected papers earlier in his career. Billie began frequenting the same cafés as Tschuppik—the Atlantis, the Central, and the Herrenhof—and he ingratiated himself with Tschuppik’s circle of friends, including Klaus Mann, Joseph Roth, and Anton Kuh. Kuh, the incarnation of what the Viennese call a Kaffeehausliterat, was a writer who essentially lived in cafés and did most (if not all) of his writing there. To say that he lived in the cafés is not entirely hyperbolic; Kuh rarely had his own place, tending instead to stay in hotels. Kuh was also, in Andreas Hutter’s words, “the most successful scrounger in the Café Herrenhof and the Café Central.” In return for a little cash, Kuh would stage extemporaneous performances on a variety of themes—politics, literature, the arts. He was always terribly funny and quick on the trigger with clever remarks. He was Billie’s sort of man.

  During this time, Wilder made another new friend—Laszlo Löwenstein, a Hungarian actor known for his sharp wit and buggy eyes. “Laczy” and Billie made a good team, and together they formed a kind of impromptu cabaret act for their pals at the Café Herrenhof, including Tschuppik, Alfred Polgar, Franz Werfel, and Max Prel. The son of a rabbi, Löwenstein was obsessive on the subject of theater. He’d begun his career in drama as a claqueur, a professional applauder hired to get the audience up to speed, but by 1925 he was getting some pretty good acting roles. Round and puffy-faced with a set of
dark, haunted eyes and a notoriously nasal voice, Laczy was hardly a handsome leading man. But he had an extraordinary stage presence and could turn himself into whomever he wished, as long as he had an audience. He and Billie quickly hit it off. Constantly ribbing each other and everyone else, the two young cutups were always good for an obscene rhyme, a hilarious pun, or a malicious remark about some idiot they both despised. Until Laczy developed a fierce drug habit later in his life, they stayed good friends.

  In early November 1925, Billie got himself into a bit of a jam—a minor if sticky jam, one that most writers find themselves in at some point or another. It occurred because he interviewed another writer. When Dr. Hans Fulda picked up Die Bühne and read what he supposedly said, he was appalled, and he fired off a hostile letter to Liebstöckl: “In the last issue of your esteemed newspaper Die Bühne … it is reported that I said things ‘about myself.’ The literal reproduction of transitory answers to transitory questions cannot, of course, be demanded. But it cannot be indifferent to me if your Mr. Contributor places remarks into my mouth that in both tone and content are strictly contrary to my nature and views.” Billie was snidely contrite. He responded defiantly and with characteristic humor: “Dearest Dr. Fulda! I admit the possibility that of the many witty and striking things you said, just a few casual and unessential remarks stuck in my ear. Will you forgive that? Your very devoted, Billie.”

  Wilder had already developed an eye for ironic black comedy, as evidenced by a squib he wrote in December 1925: “A suitable Christmas present for 12- to 14-year-old boys,” the piece was called, and it had to do with the advertisement Billie had seen posted on a billboard under a trolley bridge: “Machine gun, in good working order, as a Christmas present for 12- to 14-year-old boys,” it said, giving a telephone number to call for more information. “Oh, by today it has certainly been sold already,” Wilder wrote. “On Christmas Day little Wotan Wotawa will play with his Christinas present and his father will buy him ammunition for New Year’s Eve. Symptoms of the time—the little one gets a machine gun and makes himself independent.”