by Ed Sikov
By the beginning of 1926, Wilder was a seasoned newspaperman—he learned fast—and he was given a plum assignment: an interview with the film star Asta Nielsen. A World War I pinup girl who managed to attract both French and German soldiers alike, Nielsen still had star power. She could, in the words of the critic and film theorist Béla Balázs, “suggest obscene nudity with her eyes, and she can smile in a way that would oblige the police to ban the film as pornography.” It was Nielsen’s face, after all, that had shined on the screen while Billie’s hand was clamped firmly between his date’s legs. The only trouble was that Nielsen generally refused to grant interviews even if she was allowed to read them before publication. Wilder cornered her at the Raimund Theater, where she was currently appearing, and waited in the coatroom with her husband, Gregory Chmara. “Like a schoolgirl,” he wrote, “she sits down at the table while Chmara’s hand caresses her hair. (The two love each other like seventeen-year-olds.) I am brief. Asta Nielsen answers quickly and precisely. She speaks with a foreign accent, almost like an Englishwoman, but fluently and easily understood. ‘So you left film forever?’ ‘No—I left it because it had no new, true tasks for me. But I will belong to it again if it becomes an art. For me, film and theater are the same. I am loyal to myself.’ Asta Nielsen, the world’s greatest film actress, will not appear again on-screen for a long time. The many thousands who could admire her ingenious art will become hundreds. And that, I think, is a shame.”
While Billie was gaining a foothold in the world of Viennese journalism, he was also moving around Vienna. In his seventies, Wilder blamed his chronic backaches on his youthful transience: “It is all the result of those hot nights in Vienna when I was screwing girls standing up in doorways—and sometimes, alas, no girls, just doorways.” In March, Wilder moved out of his furnished room and began living in more respectable Viennese hotels—first at the Prager Hof and then at the Österreichischen Hof at Fleischmarkt 10, just a few doors down the street from his family’s old apartment. He was where he once thought he wanted to be, and he was finding that it wasn’t enough. Vienna was an irrelevant backwater, driven by the same intrigues and pretensions it had under the Hapsburgs but without any of the gaudy power to justify it. He was getting bored.
Vienna was still, however, the world capital of rumors. By 1925, the whispers that swirled around town concerning Imré Békessy, his newspapers, the police, and the state prosecutor were becoming considerably more audible. The word was that Békessy had a penchant for blackmailing people, and the habit had finally attracted the attention of the authorities. Banks and cafés were Békessy’s prime targets. Békessy threatened to expose the banks’ illegal business dealings unless they put ads in his papers or simply paid him off. As for the cafés, Békessy had set up an informal system of restaurant criticism: Die Stunde’s photographers went around Vienna taking pictures of new cafés and then turning the pictures over to the head of advertising at the paper, Eugen Forda. If the cafés put ads in Békessy’s papers, his roving critics would give them a good write-up. If they refused, they got panned. For a city propelled by its Melange und Strudel, this was hot news.
From the Olympian heights of Die Fackel as well as from his lecture stage, the journalist-lecturer Karl Kraus stepped up his attacks on Békessy, whom he despised. With characteristic wit and malevolence, Kraus called the Hungarian immigrant a “Budapestilence.” Die Stunde was nothing more than a “daily inbreeding of stock exchange and brothel.” To Kraus and his many fans, Békessy and his writers were foisting upon Vienna a “journalism of glutton and sweet-tooth.” In short, Békessy was a panderer, and a foreign one at that. In a November 1925 lecture, Kraus turned yet again to the subject of Békessy, who was now beginning to resemble a hounded rat in the public eye, and delivered his soon-to-be-famous imperative: “Imré Békessy is a scoundrel…. Out of Vienna with the scoundrel!”
For the most part, Billie found an alibi, watching from a safe distance as the scandal unfolded—as safe a distance as the offices of Békessy’s company allowed. But he did play a minor role. Ernst Spitz, another Die Stunde writer, accused Wilder of having an active part in the blackmailing business by way of the so-called café tax. Wilder, said Spitz, was one of the reviewers who reported favorably on new cafés in exchange for a payoff to Békessy. For Békessy and his boys, this was merely a form of ad sales, albeit an illegal one; Austrian law covered the crime with a fine of between 3,000 and 30,000 kronen. According to Spitz, Die Stunde’s advertising manager, Eugen Forda, used to personally pay Billie a little extra for his good reviews. In addition, Spitz charged Wilder with engineering his firing from Die Stunde. Spitz claimed that he told the management of Die Stunde that he had heard blackmailing rumors against one of the assistant editors, Ladislaus Frank, little knowing that blackmailing was actually an integral part of the Békessy publishing empire. The other editors decided to fire Spitz, and they gave Billie the task of finding an acceptable pretext. Békessy then called Spitz into his office, where his secretary read a report—penned by Billie—that accused Spitz of making ugly and derogatory remarks about his colleagues. Spitz realized that he’d been set up, and he was forced to leave the paper that day.
Békessy refused to pay Spitz the severance pay that was due to him, so Spitz went to court to retrieve it; he also made the incident public by writing an article about it called “Békessy’s Revolver,” by which he meant none other than Billie Wilder. He won his lawsuit and enraged Billie. When Andreas Hutter asked Wilder about his encounter with Spitz, Wilder replied bluntly: “I remember him as a mean and totally untalented asshole.” As for Békessy, Wilder recalled that he “knew that Békessy was an unscrupulous scoundrel, but my principal worry was not to sit in judgment but to feed myself and have a roof over my head.”
In addition to his forays into café-tax-collecting, Billie was also given the job of writing puff pieces about various politicians whose favor Békessy needed to curry; the mayor of Baden, for example, earned at least one friendly article by Billie. But Wilder’s journalistic tastes were running in a much different direction. In early April, he wrote a disturbing but hilarious article about current social and moral conditions in Vienna, using the then-current craze for commercial hunger-strikers (Hungerkünstler—literally, “hunger artists”) as his theme. Four years earlier, in his short story “Ein Hungerkünstler,” Franz Kafka reported that the starvation-as-entertainment craze had vastly diminished in Prague, but apparently it was still going strong in Vienna in 1926. Wilder had no need to write social satire. He simply reported some bitterly funny news.
The man is called “Nicky.” Today, at exactly 6:00 P.M., he will climb into the glass case. University professors, doctors, an expert commission, and a notary will be present during the festive sealing. The scene is the L. W. Olympiasaal in the Rothgasse. A huge cube has been standing there for a few days, three meters at the edges, completely covered with glass, above which is only a fine wire grating. In the glass case, a bed. Shelves with 300 bottles of mineral water and 3000 Kedive cigarettes, a table with a ventilator on it, an electric heater, a radio with headphones and a speaker, books about occultism and theosophy, some volumes by Rabindranath Tagore, a perfume sprayer, a wash tub, and even a “private” area. Around the glass case is a barrier. The audience will be able to see Nicky from all sides…. The sealing occurs tonight. Admission is one shilling. It will be a smash. A man sitting 45 days long with an empty stomach in a glass case: that’s a feast for the Viennese.
In early April 1925, an all-female swing band swept into Vienna from England by way of Berlin. Billie was there to meet them when their train pulled in:
Out of the train from Berlin, which arrived today before noon at the Westbahnhof, stepped thirty-two of the most attractive legs. Their owners, delightful ladies, were wearing fashionable traveling outfits…. These are the charming Lawrence Tiller Girls from Manchester. Everybody is pleased as punch, chirping and giggling. You don’t know where to look first. Sixteen of the most sple
ndid girls in the entire world, one more beautiful than the other. These figures, these legs, these tiny faces, and so well-bred—aristocratic, so to speak…. Sixteen girls, sixteen questions. Let’s go! Hilda is always tilting her head. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” “If I’m looking at you, yes!” Olive has wonderful teeth. “What do you think about short skirts?” “If you have great legs like Flossie, Vera, Molly, Marjorie, Mabel, and Maisie, then the shorter the better!” Joyce is laughing seductively. “Bernard Shaw? No idea. Don’t know him.” Flossie is serious: “Do you know Hamlet?” “Yes, a good piece. Why doesn’t this Shakespeare guy write shows?”
Billie filed it all away for future reference.
In June of 1926, two completely unrelated events occurred more or less simultaneously to propel Billie Wilder out of Vienna. Imré Békessy, having been warned that his arrest was imminent, fled Austria for Bad Wildungen in Germany, and the American bandleader Paul Whiteman showed up in Vienna on a European tour. By the beginning of June, everyone in the offices of Kronos Verlag knew that their boss was in deep, possibly abysmal, trouble, and that their own jobs were in grave jeopardy. Billie was certainly not exempt. His writing career was flourishing, but if Békessy’s papers were forced to close he’d be back to square one. Who in Vienna would hire the very reporters who’d been collecting the café tax? Enter Paul Whiteman and his band.
Vienna had its share of Whiteman fans, but Billie Wilder was a fanatic. He had been collecting jazz and swing records for years, he knew the songs by heart, and he couldn’t get enough of them. There was a jittery quality to jazz that appealed to Wilder’s naturally overstimulated mind and soul. You could dance to it, too. And Paul Whiteman was the best, most famous jazz bandleader in the world. His recordings of “Whispering” and “Japanese Sandman” were hugely popular all around the world; each sold a million copies. His music moved. It was most emphatically not Viennese. It was purely, loudly, at times even raucously American. It was Whiteman, after all, who had commissioned George Gershwin to write “Rhapsody in Blue” in 1924, the New York premiere of which shook musicians and listeners alike around the globe.
“Rhapsody in Blue” was a major factor in getting the tour organized. It had become immensely popular all over Europe, and audiences specifically wanted to hear Paul Whiteman conduct it. Not only was Whiteman’s concert at Royal Albert Hall on April 11 sold out, but London papers reported that five thousand more people had tried, and failed, to get tickets. (This prompted one London paper to call Whiteman “the Mussolini of jazz.”) The band stayed on in England and Scotland until June, playing the Kit Kat Club almost every night, with the Prince of Wales a regular patron. Offstage, Whiteman was a man who liked to have a good time—an excessively good time. He was a heavy drinker and an even heavier eater. He and his trumpeter once drank a case of champagne a night for nineteen nights. Solo, Whiteman himself drank a hundred pint bottles of beer in a single sitting.
In June, the band left England for the Continent. A general strike in England had forced the cancellation of several concerts, giving the band some time to rest, relax, and consume a lot of food and drink in Vienna. The group on tour included a total of fifty people—Paul and twenty-eight other musicians, about a dozen wives, and even some children. Wilder has always liked to tell the story of how he discovered that White-man and his party were in Vienna: ace reporter that he was, Billie was doing his usual snooping around at the best hotels to see who was in town. One can picture him strolling up to the concierge at the Hotel Sacher and asking his buddy if anyone of note had just checked in. There he is, sitting at a café across from the Opera, making notes about anyone arriving at the Imperial with an especially majestic array of trunks. And here he comes, into the Hotel Bristol, where a porter pal reveals that none other than the great American bandleader Paul Whiteman had registered that very morning. Billie rushes back to the office, where he pitches a story idea to Békessy, who hadn’t fled yet: Billie would bring the work of some Viennese musicians to the king of jazz himself and record his opinion. Three hundred words, Békessy told Billie, and no more. So Billie and a photographer go back to the Bristol and present Paul Whiteman with two new songs written by the composer Robert Katscher—“Wenn der Weisse Flieder Wieder Blüht” (“When the White Lilacs Bloom Again”) and “Madonna, Du Bist Schöner als der Sonnenschein” (“Madonna, You Are Lovelier Than the Sunlight”). Whiteman loves Billie, loves “Madonna,” buys the rights, gives Billie an exclusive interview, turns the song into one of his most successful recordings, and accepts Billie’s offer to show him around the best nightspots in Vienna.
It’s a fine tale, but not a true one. Franz Lehár, the king of Viennese operetta composers, knew precisely when Paul Whiteman and his immense entourage were arriving in Vienna and arranged to give them a not-so-secret welcoming luncheon in Paul’s honor. And Robert Katscher needed no intermediary. Katscher was at the train station along with Billie and a host of other reporters when Whiteman and his party arrived in town on June 12. Whiteman had already purchased “Madonna.”
Still, Billie was disarmingly charming as far as Whiteman was concerned, and Billie did write a series of very favorable articles about the band, jazz, and why they mattered. Unlike the other reporters who met Whiteman at the station, Billie Wilder knew what he was talking about. More important, he was so chutspadiche that he became the bandleader’s favorite Viennese host. Franz Lehár may have known Vienna’s best and brightest people, but Billie knew where to get the best food and drink late at night. Wilder’s knowledge of jazz was extraordinary, his memory for facts superb, his command of Vienna’s culinary hot spots unparalleled. His knowledge of English was limited almost entirely to fragments of jazz lyrics, and he had the guts to throw them willy-nilly into the conversation whenever things got dull.
The day after Whiteman and the band arrived, Billie published a glowing appreciation, not only of Whiteman’s music but of Whiteman himself: “You add the most delightful mustache imaginable,” Wilder wrote, “an entirely charming double chin, two gentle, child’s eyes in a good, broad face, a massively graceful, tall stature slovenly but respectably dressed, and you have—Paul Whiteman.” He was a fat man with a cartoonishly open and jolly face. In fact, his band’s logo was a drawing of Whiteman’s head—a big, long moon of a face decorated with a tiny mustache formed by two spiky lines drawn out from under the nose.
Having found this funny, tall, and yet somehow elfin guide who always made him laugh, Whiteman didn’t want to let him go. He offered Billie the chance to accompany him on the next leg of his tour—to Berlin. It mattered not a whit that Billie had never been to Berlin; he scarcely needed to inform Whiteman of his own ignorance. The publisher of “Madonna” agreed to pay Billie’s expenses and a small stipend. With Békessy himself about to skedaddle out of town as fast as his corrupt legs and bank account permitted, there was really no reason for Billie to stay in Vienna. He asked his editors at Die Stunde for a three-day leave of absence and said farewell to his mother and father.
Ludwig Hoffenreich and a secretary from Kronos Verlag accompanied him to the train station. They brought with them a going-away present—a wreath fashioned from a string of Viennese knockwurst. They wanted their gift to be practical as well as ridiculous, for after a year and a half of steady work as a reporter, a train ticket to Berlin was essentially the only worthwhile thing that twenty-year-old Billie Wilder possessed.
3. JUST A GIGOLO
God wants me to go to Berlin.
—Peter Hannemann (Johannes Riemann) in Der falsche Ehemann
I left Vienna and went to Berlin like a schmuck,” Billy Wilder once declared to Garson Kanin. At the time, however, he probably didn’t feel so schmucky. The means of financing Wilder’s trip to Berlin remain murky, but the outcome is a sure bet: he left Vienna for good. Whoever it was, somebody else paid for Billie Wilder’s ticket to Berlin. “Madonna”’s publisher has been credited, but Wilder once said it was Whiteman’s own money: “I persuaded him
to buy me a train ticket to Berlin, where he was going to play, and I would write a review of his concert in my newspaper in Vienna that would have never paid for me to go there. So I went to Berlin for a two- or three-day trip, but I didn’t come back.” What did it matter if the portly bandleader paid an ambitious young writer for a series of good reviews? Billie’s editors at Die Stunde had more troubling ethical lapses to worry about, and Wilder himself had little intention of returning to Vienna anyway.
Upon his arrival in Berlin, Billie quickly learned that he was not Whiteman’s only champion in Germany. He had to share nightclubbing duties with the violinist Fritz Kreisler, who was almost as big a Whiteman fan. Kreisler had actually been in the audience at the world premiere of “Rhapsody in Blue” in New York. Better still, he knew his way around Berlin, whereas the twenty-year-old Billie was a complete stranger in the immense, harsh city.
The Berlin papers treated Whiteman well, at first. The popular Berliner Zeitung am Mittag welcomed the entourage by hiring a plane to give them an aerial tour of the city. The concerts themselves played well enough, too, but Whiteman’s American jazz wasn’t nearly as well received as it had been in Vienna. Jazz was popular in Berlin—there were about nine hundred dance bands in Berlin in those years. Oscar Joost, Teddy Stauffer, and Bernhard Etté were the kings of modern German dance music. But German jazz wasn’t the genuine article—the lampooning caricaturist George Grosz once described it as nothing more than a deranged rendition of Viennese salon music—but it was German jazz that Berliners wanted to hear. As a result, Berlin’s music critics weren’t as wild about Whiteman’s music as either the Viennese or the British. The conservative papers in particular were outraged by everything jazz represented, calling it “a shriek from the jungle and a proof that American civilization is basically Negroid.”
