On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  It’s icy cold in my room. From tomorrow on it has to be heated, at least a little bit. It isn’t at all pleasant to have to wash up half naked, to knot your dinner jacket’s bow tie with frozen fingers. From 7:00 to 10:30 I have a break. Only apparently, for I have to spend this time changing the suit I wore at the tea dance into the dinner jacket, and to also change my shirt, shoes, socks, and tie. No, it has to be heated tomorrow, by all means. People like us can afford that much, can’t we? …

  10:30 in the hotel dance hall. There are already guests. The good tables are reserved for theatergoers. Ladies in silver evening dresses with hairdos smelling of burned hair. Gentlemen in evening suits examining the prices on the wine list through their monocles. The round lady at the corner table lays her hand sensitively on her eyelids.… I sit down in some corner. Three waiters around me. The first is shoving the complete menu under my nose, the second the wine list; the third puts a vase with flowers on the table. “Please, are you waiting for someone, sir?” “Well, no—I’m just the new dancer.”

  Wilder reports that in addition to dancing at the Eden, he also “served as a tea-time partner for lonely old ladies” at the Hotel Adlon. Both venues were attractive not only for the wages but also for the connections one might make. These were posh places frequented by upscale people who could help Billie get a better job. If Klabund could help Billie publish his stories, maybe some of the foreign journalists at the Adlon or the film and theater crowd at the Eden might help him as well. Even if nothing else came of it, the hustlers got something to eat. As Walter Reisch once relayed, “The Hotel Eden was an international center for movie people…. One had to have impeccable manners. That was the way you got your dinner, a few drinks, a cigarette, and a little salary, too.”

  The gigolo articles were a big hit, at least as far as the Romanisches crowd was concerned. Besides being closely felt and beautifully written, they were sufficiently outré to pique the interest of sophisticated Berliners who prided themselves on knowing and seeing everything worth knowing and seeing in town. In a café where a famous artist/caricaturist could show up dressed as Jesse James without anyone batting an eye, this was an accomplishment. Billie earned enough from the gigolo articles to pay off some of his debts, and they also served to get him more work at the Ullstein publishing company—the publisher of the B.Z. He soon began writing for Ullstein’s Mittagsblatt and, later, for the company’s new afternoon paper, Tempo. The latter had Billie’s personality even before Billie got there: “It was a tabloid,” writes Peter Gay, “racy in tone, visual in appeal, designed to please the Berliner who ran as he read.” As a result, Tempo quickly earned a nickname that might as well have described Billie himself: “Die jüdische Hast”—“Jewish haste,” or as Gay more precisely defines it, “Jewish nervousness.”

  Perhaps owing to his friendship with Paul Erich Marcus, Billie also landed a job as a reporter for the Berliner Börsen Courier. One of his coworkers from those days, Hans Sahl, describes Billie as a lean young rake “who, with his hat tilted on his head and hands in the pockets of his pants, was already playing the American while we still hadn’t discovered America at all.” Writing for the Börsen Courier was a good gig for a young reporter. In fact, it was too good for Billie. “I was not very serious,” he later admitted. “I drank too much in Berlin. Once I didn’t show up at the editorial offices for a whole week because I went to Hamburg with a girl I was in love with. When I came back, I was fired.” His editor at the Börsen Courier was Emil Faktor, a man who was obsessed with films and theater and might have appreciated Billie’s similar interests, if only Wilder had played his cards right. Faktor’s daughter recalls the situation a little differently than Wilder does, but the result remains the same: “I remember that my father sacked Billie Wilder for sloppy writing.”

  In fact, Billie’s writing at the Börsen Courier was anything but sloppy. He wrote with precision, wit, and a palpable love of language. In one piece, he expressed his profound dismay at certain changes being wrought in his favorite hangout: “Cafés have something of the nature of a well-played violin. They resonate, swing with, and give off a certain color of sound. Years of the shouting of regular guests has placed their fibers and atoms in a special way, and, wonderfully, the timbers, paneling, and furniture vibrate in the rhythms of the patrons’ lives. On the smoky walls, a decade’s worth of evil, poisonous thoughts have laid themselves down as a shining golden lacquer—the richest patina.” Billie is then horrified to see that the women’s lavatory attendant is busily cleaning the floor, wiping away all his favorite jokes and bits of small talk: “Women are guilty of this, believe me—women, with their terrible lack of historical sense.” In another piece, Billie asked a professional witch what her clients wanted from her: “‘Mostly death and ruin,’ she says with a friendly smile. ‘Loss of wealth, disgrace, light damage. For this one I wish business fraud, for that one an unimportant but troublesome skin disease. The wishes of my female clientele are often very detailed—loss of jewelry, loss of hair, rapid weight gain. These are the things that sell well.’”

  Late in Billie’s tenure at the Börsen Courier, he crossed a line that had to do neither with drunken lateness nor sloppy writing. In his role as court reporter, Wilder wrote a story about the unusually stiff sentence handed down to a man who’d been convicted of stealing a bunch of empty egg crates. The incident had occurred around the Jewish holiday of Sukkoth, the harvest festival, a time when observant Jews build small wooden canopies called sukkahs in their yards and use them to celebrate the season’s bounty. In his coverage of the sentencing, Billie couldn’t resist making a smart remark: perhaps the convicted thief was hoping to build a sukkah with his stolen egg crates. Billie’s joke went flat as far as Emil Faktor was concerned, and Wilder felt that Faktor’s rage resulted from Billie’s having called attention to Jews at a time when assimilated Jews (at least those like Faktor) did not wish to draw attention.

  One rarely thinks of this hard-bitten man as a versifier, but during his time in Berlin he even managed to get a piece of poetry into print. He’d fallen in temporary love with a Revue Girls dancer named Olive Victoria, and he commemorated her in a poem. In what may be just another version of the Börsen Courier disaster, Wilder is said to have spent the night with Olive, after which he fell asleep on the job the following day and was summarily fired. In any event, Olive bit the dust as far as Billie was concerned, but her poem landed in the July 1927 issue of Revue of the Month. It was called “The Fifth from the Right,” and the accompanying photo showed a line of Revue Girls with an arrow pointing straight to the heroine of the piece.

  From then on, Billie worked consistently as a newspaper writer—without getting fired for drinking, absenteeism, sloppy writing, or offensive remarks about Jewish petty thieves—until 1931. He also wrote for the upscale literary journal Der Querschnitt (Cross Section). He was intrepid, conversational, likable, fearless. As his friend Walter Reisch recalled, Billie Wilder had “a fantastic knack for getting interviews,” though precisely how fantastic is uncertain. “For instance,” Reisch reported, “the richest man in the world was Sir Basil Zaharoff—he sold arms to governments, to the Fascists. Nobody ever saw this man. Billie found out he was going to make a two-hour stopover on the train in Vienna. He walked right onto his train and got the interview.” In reality, Zaharoff was in Monte Carlo, not Vienna, and Billie never interviewed him. With an advance of 1,000 marks, Billie’s editors at the B.Z. sent him to the Riviera and the Adriatic coast to do some travel reporting. He was expressly assigned to write an article on system gamblers in Monte Carlo, so in addition to his expense account, the paper gave him 5,000 marks with which to bet. Billie proceeded to lose it all in two days playing chemin de fer. It was on this trip that Wilder may or may not have gotten as far as actually seeing Sir Basil Zaharoff, who may or may not have owned the casino, but he returned to Berlin without a story. (Billie did, however, write an anecdotal piece about Sir Basil, which he published several years later in Der Qu
erschnitt.)

  Wilder did return to Vienna in June 1927 to write about the daring aviators Chamberlin and Levine. Billie would have been there to greet them upon their record-breaking, post-Lindbergh arrival from New York, but they crashed in Germany and never made it.

  Anecdotes continued to be Billie’s stock-in-trade. He was still taking Genia’s morning advice, as he would do compulsively for the rest of his life. Erich Maria Remarque, for example, is said (by Billie) to have told Wilder over lunch that he planned to leave his editorial job to write a realistic war novel, and Billie advised him against it on the theory that nobody wanted to read that kind of thing anymore. Using Wilder and Wilder’s friends as his chief source (and who else but Billie Wilder would have served as Wilder’s friends’ chief source?), Maurice Zolotow reported two versions of another remarkable encounter between Billie Wilder and the man who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front: either Billie had been caught fucking the first Mrs. Remarque and ended up being horsewhipped by an outraged Erich, or else Billie had been caught fucking the first Mrs. Remarque and the two men had duked it out until they drew blood. Neither story is true, Wilder made sure to tell Kevin Lally. In fact, Wilder insisted, he never even met the lady!

  Billie did meet and interview the American child star Jackie Coogan, however. It wasn’t the little boy who intrigued Billie but rather his parents. His reporter’s instincts aroused by the funky smell of deceit, Billie started asking the Coogans nosy questions—such as, “Who is handling this child’s money?”—and was summarily booted out of the room. Wilder wrote the story anyway, packing it with suggestions about financial impropriety, and indeed Coogan’s savings were eventually wiped out, his parents having grossly mismanaged his income. In late 1927, Wilder landed an interview with Fyodor Chaliapin, the basso Caruso. Billie also claimed to have sat behind the notorious Prince Youssopoff, the leader of the group that killed Rasputin, at a play, the subject of which was Rasputin. The prince’s response: he didn’t much like it.

  A more vital encounter took place at the Romanisches Café, where Wilder became friendly with the most famous newspaperman in Europe. Egon Erwin Kisch had a regular table at the Romanisches—yes, they called it the Tisch von Kisch—and it proved to be a popular destination for newcomers to Berlin. Here one could find Kisch and his circle of brilliant, verbal men: Fröschl, the editor of the Berliner Illustrierten; Jacobsohn, the founder of the highly respected Weltbühne; and, eventually, young Wilder. “Kisch used the Romanisches like you or I would use a hotel,” an associate once recalled. This alone would have endeared him to young Billie, but Egon Erwin Kisch boasted what may well be the single best journalist’s tale in the world:

  The year was 1914. The location: Prague. After one of his soccer teammates failed to show up for a Sunday game, Kisch, the team’s captain, discovered that his player had a very good excuse: a group of imperial soldiers had whisked him away from his locksmith shop and forced him to unlock the secret apartment of a highly respected army officer, Colonel Alfred Redl. It took three hours, and they found women’s blouses, silk stockings, cosmetics, a lot of perfume, but no evidence of any women. Having lost his interest in the soccer game, Kisch took the story, ran with it, and scored a cleaner goal than he could ever have imagined. By the following day, the young reporter not only had dug up most of the pertinent facts but had outfoxed the imperial censors by planting a false story with which he hoped to spring the truth. As he reported to his readers, “We have been requested by official sources to deny the rumors particularly current in military circles that the General Staff Chief of the Prague Corps, Col. Alfred Redl, who the day before yesterday committed suicide in Vienna, has betrayed military secrets and has spied for Russia.” Prague’s censors fell for it, believing that Vienna had authorized the denial. Kisch, meanwhile, sent the full story to a paper in Berlin, and before too long the whole word knew that the highly decorated Colonel Redl financed his extravagant tastes by selling secrets to the Russians.

  The Colonel Redl affair was a signal event in Austro-Hungarian history, for it provided an instant allegory in 1914: under the trappings of imperial formality and respectability lay debauchery, deceit, corruption. And Egon Erwin Kisch was the man who exposed it. Kisch’s triumph had not been simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time, though he had certainly been there. It was Kisch’s uncommonly brilliant strategy for unfolding the tale, outwitting the government, and revealing the truth to his readers. Like any journalist in middle Europe, especially one from Vienna, Billie Wilder had known and respected the name of Egon Erwin Kisch since he was a boy. Now, at the Tisch von Kisch in the Romanisches Café in Berlin, Billie could actually smoke and drink coffee with the man. So he did.

  Kisch’s continuing talent as a newspaperman was his knack for getting to the emotional heart of the story as well as its facts. Wilder learned from him. “Nothing is more imaginative than matter-of-factness,” Kisch wrote in the opening pages of Der rasende Reporter (The Breakneck Reporter, 1925). “Egon Erwin Kisch formed a completely new kind of journalism,” Wilder once explained. “His reporting was built like a good movie script—it was classically organized in three acts, and it was never boring for the reader.” For his part, Kisch was charmed by the brash young writer from Kraków and Vienna. They shared a love of sports, a sense of humor, and a sure appreciation of the value of scams in the service of a higher truth. In addition to enjoying coffee and bull at the Romanisches, Kisch and Wilder sometimes lunched together in the Austrian restaurant Mutzbauer on Marburgerstrasse. Kisch even helped Billie find a better furnished room in Kisch’s own building, where he lived with his girlfriend, Gisela Liner. As Wilder recalled: “He lived on the third floor of a tenement in the Bayrisches Viertel at Güntzelstrasse 3. By chance, he’d heard of a furnished room just below him on the second floor. I visited him very often in his apartment above me. His wife, ‘Gisl,’ cooked wonderfully for us. Kisch was completely crazy about soccer. Between two armchairs was the goal. I had to be the goalkeeper, and with an old, moldy tennis ball, Egon always shot in on me.” (Actually, Wilder is wrong on one point here. Kisch never married Gisela Liner. When asked why not, Kisch had a stock reply: “I know her too well—she’s not a nice person.”)

  Writing for the movies had been an idle dream in Vienna. But in Berlin, the second largest filmmaking city in the world, Billie could dream about concrete jobs. For the first year and a half or two years of his life in Berlin, though, dreaming was as close as he got; actual screenwriting assignments were entirely out of reach. A man of eclectic tastes, Wilder offered various memories of his first screenplay sale. “We were young and dreamed of writing screenplays,” he once told two French interviewers. “It’s typical. People always think that beyond their own vocation they’re also suited to become filmmakers. Hairdressers and chambermaids don’t escape the rule. Movie fans all believe they can put together a film. One day, in the Romanisches Café I met a man who worked for a photographic magazine of the Coronet type. He asked me if I wanted to write a screenplay. It was in 1927 to 1928, just before the appearance of sound (in Europe, at least, since in America it had already appeared). I said: ‘I’ve never written a screenplay.’” In this tale, the other man—Robert Siodmak—told Wilder that he, Siodmak, was going to do the directing himself, and what’s more, he had an uncle who owned a camera. “We wrote a very dilettante script which represented, if you wish, the New Wave or the Neorealism of the age and which was called Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday). The director was Siodmak. The only one who knew his trade was the cameraman. We immediately got work with Ufa and we started to write films for the stars of the time: Lilian Harvey, Willy Fritsch…. We also worked for Erich Pommer’s productions.”

  Not so fast, Billy. In fact, by the time Wilder wrote Menschen am Sonntag he had already ghostwritten a large number of screenplays and treatments—at times he’s claimed as many as 150—as well as one signed script that was filmed and bore Billie’s name as its sole screenwriter. Wilder
’s first professional screenwriting efforts do appear to have resulted from chance encounters at the Romanisches, but they occurred long before Robert Siodmak came along. Wilder had met a number of working screenwriters at the Romanisches as well as at the newspapers for which he wrote. While working at Tempo, for instance, Wilder met the scriptwriter Hans G. (Jan) Lustig, who served as the paper’s cultural editor. He already knew Walter Reisch, who was hacking out a career with some of the smaller studios. Anton Kuh, Billie’s friend from Vienna, had written Lubitsch’s Maria Stuart. Adolph Lantz, the father of agent Robert Lantz, also helped Billie to find screenwriting work; whenever Wilder would run into Robbie Lantz in later years, he always made it a point to introduce Lantz by saying, “His father gave me my first job.”

  There was another important contact for Billie in those years—an eccentric genius who was to German-language screenwriting what Egon Erwin Kisch was to journalism. Many mornings at 7:30 A.M., Billie Wilder turned up at the Café Kranzler, conveniently located near the zoo train station where Wilder could pick up copies of Viennese newspapers the minute they were unloaded. One of the Kranzler regulars was Carl Mayer, who had penned a string of German cinema’s most influential and artistically consummate films: Wiene’s Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari in 1919 and Genuine in 1920; Lupu Pick’s Scherben (Shattered Fragments) in 1921 and Sylvester in 1923; Murnau’s Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) in 1924 and Tartüff in 1925. Walter Reisch reported that the morose Mayer got a real charge out of young Billie. This must have been quite a trick, for Mayer was not a happy man. Born in the Austrian city of Graz, Mayer spent his childhood in provincial plenitude. His father was a rich businessman—until he decided to master the elusive but infallible trick of system gambling. Herr Mayer then sold off everything he owned and rushed to Monte Carlo. When he returned to Graz a few months later, he was destitute. Distraught and humiliated, he turned his sixteen-year-old son Carl as well as Carl’s three younger brothers into the street. Then he killed himself. Shocked into premature adulthood, Carl made his way in the world by singing in choirs and playing bit parts in peasant theaters. Billie Wilder was the only one who could ever get a laugh out of Carl Mayer.