by Ed Sikov
Billie, on the other hand, was ecstatic. “Whiteman Triumphs in Berlin” was the title of the story he filed for Die Stunde. Perhaps because of the questionable funding of his trip to Berlin, Wilder has been described as Whiteman’s publicist, but that’s not fair. Billie’s review was a rave, but it was an intelligent one, written with style and verve—a visceral appreciation of what Whiteman achieved onstage: “His body vibrates, his double chin waddles, the mustache jumps, the knee trembles—rhythm personified.” Billie reported to his readers that “Rhapsody in Blue” was a sensation in the United States, an attempt to use the rhythms of American folk music in a modern way. “If Whiteman is playing it, then it’s a big artistic thing,” Billie explained. The critic concluded with a youthful polemic: “For jazz? Against jazz? Most modern music? Kitsch? Art? Need! A necessary blood transfusion for an atherosclerotic Europe.”
Wisely, Billie had spent time during his last hectic days in Vienna securing a letter of recommendation from a Dr. Krienes, the Vienna correspondent for Scherl, the Berlin newspaper conglomerate. Armed with the Whiteman connection as well as Krienes’s letter, he managed in short order to sell a personality profile of Whiteman to the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, known in Berlin shorthand as the B.Z., which boasted a much more sophisticated audience than Die Stunde had in Vienna. After a few days, Whiteman moved on—first to Paris, then back to the States, where Calvin Coolidge invited him to the summer White House in upstate New York. Twenty-year-old Billie, meanwhile, was left homeless, friendless, and unemployed in Berlin.
But Wilder already had the skills it took to survive in the crusty city, a classic Berliner Schnauze foremost among them. Translating literally as “Berlin lip,” Berliner Schnauze describes the sarcastic, urbane way that Berliners deal with the world they inhabit—“a natural propensity for the ironic put-down or send-up.” Billie’s sneering Schnauze had already been formed in Vienna (if not in Kraków), but it worked even more self-assuredly in Berlin. A harder-edged, far less formal city than staid, old, waltzy Vienna, Berlin was a speedy, anxious place packed with speedy, anxious people. The playwright and journalist Carl Zuckmayer once said that Berliners talked about their city as though it was a highly prized woman: “We called her proud, snobbish, nouveau riche, uncultured, crude. But secretly everyone looked upon her as the goal of his desires. Some saw her as hefty, full-breasted, in lace underwear; others as a mere wisp of a thing, with boyish legs in black silk stockings. The daring saw both aspects, and her very reputation for cruelty made them the more aggressive. To conquer Berlin was to conquer the world.” Having started out in Berlin by selling cocaine on the streets, Zuckmayer knew what it took to lose one’s virginity there. “Berlin tasted of the future,” Zuckmayer wrote, “and that is why we gladly took the crap and the coldness.”
Hard, smoky, and driven, Berlin was Billie’s kind of town. Robert Lantz, whose father knew and worked with Wilder in Berlin, remembers Billie as having been “a real snotty Berliner—and I mean that in the most complimentary sense.” Berlin was a city of Jews. Its spirit was profoundly Jewish. As Peter Gay writes, “The idea of a Berlin-Jewish symbiosis” is “the only dogma that Jews, philo-Semites, and anti-Semites of all descriptions hold in common.” Cynical, critical, jokey, nihilistic, and not a little morbid, the spirit of Berlin resonated with Billie Wilder. In a way, by moving to this harsh and intimidating city, this young foreigner was coming home.
Berlin wasn’t the kind of city that gave transplanted foreigners any quick hugs to make them feel better about themselves in the morning. Still, it was a city of readers, and a young reporter looking for work could find considerably more opportunities than he had in Vienna. By the end of the 1920s, the city boasted more papers than any other city in the world. There were 149 of them by 1930, and they covered all constituencies. Twenty of the daily papers ran two editions; Tempo ran three. Nearly four hundred magazines were published in the city. In addition, Berlin had about sixteen thousand cafés, bars, and dance halls. As far as the cafés were concerned, there was a style and price range for everyone. For upper-level film people, there was Anna Maenze’s in Augsburgerstrasse; Ernst Lubitsch was a regular there before he moved to Hollywood. For actors, there was the Weinstube von Schwannecke or the bar at the Eden Hotel. The comedian Max Pallenberg and the actor Fritz Kortner liked the Eden, along with the novelist Erich Maria Remarque. Foreign press people gravitated toward the Adlon. Highbrow writers (like the movie-hating Alfred Döblin and his clique) preferred the Café Adler. Erich Kästner, who wrote the best-selling children’s novel Emil und die Detektive, was fond of the Café Leon, while at the Jockey one might see Max Liebermann, Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, or the racy cabaret and film actress Marlene Dietrich.
Then there was the Romanisches Café, a “horrible, inhospitable, neo-Romantic pile” with a “harshly lit interior divided into two rooms and a gallery.” The writer Anton Gill describes the cavernous place as being constantly full of “bearded men in tweed jackets and bow ties and plump or slinky women with bobbed hair smoking cheroots and waving long fingers heavy with rings.” The Romanisches was a bohemian café with bare tables—lots of them—on which patrons doodled on paper napkins while lingering over breakfast. For the most ragtag among the Romanisches crowd, Gill points out, two raw eggs in a glass might well have served as the only meal of the day.
The Romanisches was located on Auguste-Viktoria-Platz across from the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church). Inside the café, a hierarchy prevailed: on one side was the so-called swimming pool section for top-notch regulars like Emil Orlik and George Grosz. On the other side was the “paddling pool” for writers and poets—Bertolt Brecht could be found there, along with Heinrich Mann. In the middle, a flight of steps led to a balcony area with chess tables. The place was overscaled, like a train station—a thousand customers could drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, complain, and ridicule their friends, all at the same time in the same establishment. Eccentricities were not only tolerated but encouraged. Grosz, indeed, was known to show up dressed as an American cowboy, complete with boots and spurs. In short, the Romanisches Café was pure spectacle. Billie loved it.
If the memoirs of Wilder’s old friends can be trusted, Billie turned up at the door of the Romanisches Café soon after arriving in Berlin and asked the establishment’s porter to announce him to a man he didn’t know. Paul Erich Marcus, a stockbroker turned journalist, was writing for the prestigious Berliner Börsen Courier (signing his articles “Pem”). The porter told Marcus that there was a young man outside who wished to speak with him, and “then the shy young man was standing at our table. ‘My name is Billie Wilder, actually Samuel Wilder. I’ve come from Vienna—Kraków, actually.” Marcus asked, pleasantly but with some confusion, what he could do for the tall, slim, redheaded stranger. Billie replied, “If you’d invite me for a cup of coffee, for instance.” There was a moment of awkwardness (as well there might have been), whereupon another fellow sitting at Marcus’s table asked Billie what else they might do for him. “Tell me where I’m going to sleep tonight,” said Billie.
According to Marcus, Billie spent his first night in Berlin on the sofa of Marcus’s furnished room, though a more likely time frame is that they met after Wilder’s meal ticket, Paul Whiteman, left town. In any event, Billie had not a mark to his name when he moved to Berlin, he had nowhere to stay, and he had nothing to return to in Vienna, either. In mid-July, Die Stunde’s corrupt advertising manager, Eugen Forda, was arrested over the blackmailing business, and the following day Billie’s friend and editor, Karl Tschuppik, resigned from the company. This was no small scandal—Forda was sentenced to three months of hard labor. Kronos Verlag was sold almost immediately, and although its newspapers continued to be published by the new regime, most of Billie’s colleagues quickly departed. (Imré Békessy turned up in Paris for a year or two but eventually landed back in Budapest, where he resumed his publishing-blackmailing operations; he ended up committing suicide in 195
1.)
Tschuppik and Anton Kuh followed Billie to Berlin, along with a number of other Die Stunde refugees. They joined the seventy thousand Austrians, mostly Viennese, who were then living in Berlin. As usual, there were cafés open and waiting for them: the most influential Austrian émigrés tended to frequent the Wienlokal Schwannecke on Rankestrasse or the Mampestuben just off the Kurfürstendamm (that’s where Tschuppik and Kuh gravitated, along with theater critic Alfred Polgar; Kuh, of course, kept mooching). Billie preferred the manic Romanisches.
After spending any number of nights on the couches of his new friends, Billie found himself a furnished room on Viktoria-Luise-Platz, so tiny it had only enough space for a bed. Billie was thrilled to have it, though, even if the toilet next door ran constantly and kept him awake with the sound of gushing water. He consoled himself by imagining that it was a beautiful waterfall. Work dripped as well. From the Berlin offices of Die Stunde and Die Bühne, Wilder won the odd assignment, but Erich Leimdörfer was already their permanent Berlin correspondent, so Billie could take only the assignments Leimdörfer didn’t want. Still, he managed to land and publish an interview with Cornelius Vanderbilt III. Playing smart, Wilder casually asked the multimillionaire how much money he had on him at the time. Vanderbilt confessed that he had only a few coins. When they went out for lunch, the American robber baron stiffed Billie for the price of a few buletten and some beer.
From his arrival in June through mid-autumn of 1926, Billie managed to win some assignments as a crime reporter for the Berliner Nachtausgabe, a Scherl-owned paper. But Billie found it harder to make a go of it as a journalist in Berlin than he had in Vienna. As the Hungarian film director Géza von Cziffra observed, “Berlin newspapers were edited differently than Die Stunde. Most editors didn’t want to have anything to do with Billie. They said he wasn’t serious.” When Billie found work in 1926, it was piecemeal and freelance. He always needed money, and characteristically, he always needed attention, if not approval. In later years Wilder told a story about how he tried to trick his mother into thinking that he’d made a quick success of himself in Berlin, when in point of fact he was still a nobody long after he should have turned into a fledgling someone. He wrote to Genia, so the story goes, and told her that he’d changed his first name—to Thornton. To prove his point, Billie enclosed a series of clippings about his new novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. His mother then went out and bought the book, saw the author’s photo, and made light of her son’s lie by saying, “That other fellow Wilder, I never really liked his stuff very much.” As usual, the Thornton story is probably a thoroughgoing fraud, but it still hits at the truth: Billie was desperate. By the end of 1926 he was a gigolo.
He was standing on Potsdamer Platz, penniless—and coatless, too. A chilling autumn rain was pouring down on him, and his knees rattled from the cold. A voice yelled out from behind him—“Hello, Billie!” The greeting came from a French dancer he knew by the name of Robert. They’d met in Vienna. Robert was currently dancing at the Hotel Eden—he was a performer, not an Eintänzer, or dancer for hire—but he suggested to his freezing, starving young friend that Billie get a job there. The hours were from four-thirty to seven in the early evening and from nine-thirty at night to three in the morning. The pay wasn’t great—five marks a day plus tips—but it was more than Wilder had to his name. Billie scurried over to the Eden, applied for a job as an Eintänzer, got the job, found some dry clothes, and began dancing for money with lonely old ladies. He started work in the late afternoon of October 15.
“Since I was a gifted enough dancer and I was in a difficult period, I acted as a dancer-gigolo,” Wilder said. “But it wasn’t as romantic as it sounds, because I was gathering evidence to write a series of articles on what it’s like to be a gigolo in Berlin in 1926 and ’27. My reporting caused a small scandal with its look at a very old theme. Obviously the children’s films of today are much more daring than these revelations, which had nothing indecent. But for the age it was new and interesting.” Wilder did gather evidence, and he did write the articles, but he was aided immeasurably in this project by having danced with a moderately famous poet’s wife. Klabund (aka Alfred Henschke), who was also a novelist and composer of erotic cabaret songs, had tuberculosis, and his shortness of breath prevented him from dancing with his wife, the actress Carola Neher. So they picked Billie out of the crowd and paid him to do the dancing. Billie seemed like a nice young man, and after striking up a conversation with him, Klabund asked him what his real profession was. When Billie told him that he was a writer, Klabund suggested writing the series, and it was Klabund who facilitated Billie’s publishing his work in the B.Z. They struck up a friendship, in part because Klabund had a morbid sense of humor that Billie appreciated. (The consumptive writer titled his 1922 novel Spuk—a play on the German words for ghost and sputum.)
The scene in the dance hall was grim. Eight gigolos sat at a table in a room full of dance-hungry women and, sometimes, their decrepit husbands. For formality’s sake, the boys would ask the ladies if they’d like to dance, even though it was the ladies who controlled the transactions by way of their purses. According to Wilder, of course, the older and fatter the women, the higher the tips. Billie must have danced with some pretty fat women: in his first ten days he earned four hundred marks (about $100)—more than an assistant editor at a Berlin newspaper earned in a month. On a particularly good day—a day full of especially ancient and obese women, no doubt—he made as much as a hundred marks. In fact, of course, they weren’t all old, fat, or feeble, as Wilder himself wrote at the time:
I dance with young ones and old ones; with very short ones and women who are two heads taller than I am; with pretty ones and less attractive ones; with very slim ones who are drinking dieter’s tea; with ladies who send the waiter to me and enjoy the tango with closed, enraptured eyes; with wives—chic ones wearing black-rimmed monocles, while their husbands, themselves unable to dance, are watching me; with embarrassingly clumsy travelers for whom a trip to Berlin without 5:00 o’clock tea seems senseless; with splendid strangers, who divide their stay in Berlin between hotel room, hall, and ballroom; with ladies who are there day after day, whom one doesn’t know where they come from or where they go; with a thousand types.
In one of his articles, Billie chronicled the evening he spent dancing with two all-too-tireless young sisters under the watchful eyes of their parents. After dancing with both girls for hours, alternating one with the other, they finally reach their limit and prepare to leave. The father slips Billie a tip: “I feel something in the palm of my hand—paper. They’re already in the cloakroom. I put my hand in the trouser pocket and run, red as a freshly boiled crayfish, straight ahead into the men’s room, lock myself in and, with two fingers, pull the thing out of the pocket. A five mark bill.”
At one point, Billie found that he’d earned four hundred marks in ten days and immediately spent three hundred. He bought a portable record player, fifteen records (Whiteman, Hylton, the Revelers, Whispering Jack Smith), a new suit (“dark blue, finely-made, double-breasted, six buttons, broad trousers, the most modern”), three ties, four shirts, and a pair of black shoes. The record player was not only for personal use; Wilder also moonlighted as a private dance instructor. After a girlfriend named Margene came back from New York and taught him the new American dance craze, the Charleston, the two of them hired themselves out as coaches. They carried the record player to their clients’ apartments, and while Margerie worked on the husbands, Billie worked on the wives. There has never been any evidence that Billie Wilder ever sold a woman anything more lurid than a dance, though he did report that one of his customers at the Eden insisted that he accompany her home at 3:00 A.M., with all the attendant implications. In a rather obscure exchange, the woman attempted to elicit from Billie a brief explication of the life and work of Immanuel Kant, a question from which Wilder took umbrage. He felt as though he was being tested on something, and he resented it. Swathed in ermine, she had
treated him to a nine-course meal complete with a bottle of Veuve Cliquot: “In between, we dance. She does not say a word. She must think: ‘I rented two legs because I just wanted to dance, but their owner is an idiot.’” They climb into a waiting taxi, the woman tells the driver to take them to Kantstrasse, and at her door, she asks him to tell her about the philosopher. He responds by saying, “Of course, Madame—he is a Swiss national hero.” This was not the answer she wanted, apparently: “She twists her mouth, lifts her hand and caresses my cheek, like a poor crazy child. Then she steps into the house and locks the door behind herself. I put my coat collar up and walk down the street.”
Wilder always loved to talk about the sex he enjoyed in his youth, and if the mood was right he’d admit to sex with prostitutes, but he never suggested that he found himself on the receiving end of any money. Nonetheless, hiring himself out as a kind of pleasure machine for women struck a nerve. Wilder enjoyed trading on the stories of his experiences as an Eintänzer, but at the time it was probably not quite so amusing for him to feel like a whore.
Billie worked as a gigolo for about two months, until December 1926, whereupon he resumed hustling as a writer. He began publishing his gigolo stories in the B.Z. in January 1927 and even sold one to Die Bühne back in Vienna as late as September. He wrote:
It’s unbearably hot. My collar is weak as a pudding and completely soaked through with sweat, and my arms hurt. The two bands up there are playing without stop. On the dance floor, seven meters long and barely five broad, there are thirty couples….
