by Ed Sikov
On his first day on the Columbia lot, when May introduced him to Sam Briskin, Cohn’s right hand, Briskin was visibly shaken when he realized that the studio’s newest screenwriter barely spoke English. He angrily dispatched the embarrassed immigrant to the Writers’ Building in short order.
Billie was better off working on Pam-Pam at the Mays’ house, by himself. He received some translation assistance from an American who spoke German, while an old friend from Vienna, Reginald LeBorg, tutored him in English. Six weeks later, he turned in his first draft. It impressed nobody, and Pam-Pam died.
One wonders whether anyone ever had any real intention of making Pam-Pam, or whether Joe May simply took the first available opportunity to finance yet another Jewish refugee’s passage out of Europe using a tiny sum of corporate funds that would never be missed. According to Wilder, Pam-Pam “never got beyond a draft of a screenplay, with no final dialogue or anything like that. It did not work anyway, even if it had been in perfect English. They liked the original story, but they did not like what I did with it. It’s forgotten.” But what could May have expected from a writer who didn’t even speak the language in which he was required to write? In his dealings with Briskin, May either covered up the fact that Wilder spoke only German and French, or else he lied outright.
In any event, at the end of the appointed six weeks of Pam-Pam neither May nor Briskin had anything more to offer at Columbia. There was now the visa problem to contend with. Since Wilder had entered the United States with a specific job and the job was now over, the American immigration service required that he leave the United States and reenter it on a new visa. (Either that or his tourist visa simply ran out; the circumstances of Wilder’s emigration are murky.) As far as money was concerned, Billie had only what he’d earned for Pam-Pam—the portion he didn’t hand over to Joe May for the rent. He had no permanent residence and no sponsor willing to sign on as his financial supporter should he become completely indigent.
Billie headed to Mexicali, a pungently squalid border town whose American sister city had the equally failed-festive name of Calexico. Thanks to the 1928 DeSoto coupe he managed to acquire with what remained of the Pam-Pam proceeds, getting down to Mexicali was not a problem. Getting back into Calexico—that was the trick.
The stream of immigrants trying to squeeze their way into the United States was growing, but the immigration department’s control over the flow remained tight. Historians disagree violently on this point, but certain facts are clear: the Immigration Act of 1924 established national quotas for immigration, the Depression served to reduce the number of immigrants, and the national quotas were not filled through most of the 1930s, despite the urgency with which the Jews of Austria and Germany needed asylum. In 1930, under pressure from restrictionists in Congress, the State Department began to enforce the so-called public charge clause in the Immigration Act: “If the consular officer believes that the applicant may probably be a public charge at any time, even during a considerable period subsequent to his arrival, he must refuse the visa.” This effectively cut immigration by 90 percent in the first five months. Anyone who knew Billie Wilder knew that he wasn’t likely to sit still long enough to become a burden on the state. But to the American Immigration Service, an unemployed writer who spoke very little English would not have been the most promising candidate for a residency permit.
In 1933, fifty thousand refugees left Germany. Many headed for the United States. In April 1934, following President Roosevelt’s personal directive, the State Department called on its consuls to give refugees “the most humane and favorable treatment under the law.” Still, in 1934, only 13.7 percent of the quotas for Austrians and Germans were filled. In 1935, the number rose, but only to 20.2 percent. Why? One theory casts the problem in an economic light: owing to the Depression, fewer families and friends in America were able to sponsor refugees by paying for their transportation and guaranteeing that they wouldn’t become public charges. The historians who float this argument point to the quotas and say: you see, America couldn’t even fill its quotas. David Wyman, on the other hand, takes a far more critical view. Wyman, a preeminent historian of the Holocaust, sees America’s failure to fill its quotas as evidence of the intense pressure to keep the refugees out: you see, he writes, America wouldn’t even fill its quotas. But whatever the subsequent interpretations of history, the practical result of American immigration policy during the rise of Nazi power was that Mexicali, Tijuana, and other border towns from California to Texas were overrun with would-be Americans forced by America to wait, firmly on the other side of its doorstep. Conceivably, Billie could have sat in Mexicali for years. Some refugees did.
Industriously, Billie managed to jump to the head of the line and get back into the States without having to do anything more than make pleasant conversation with a border guard. Naturally he tells a story about this: according to Wilder, world cinema owes a debt to an anonymous consulate official in Calexico. When he accepted the Thalberg Award at the Academy Awards in 1988, Wilder took the occasion to thank the anonymous bureaucrat who approved his reentry into the United States despite Wilder’s lack of proper papers. When he learned that the young émigré was going to be writing movies in Hollywood, the functionary is said to have told him, “Write some good ones.” He stamped Billie’s new visa instantly, thus enabling Wilder to enter the States and stay indefinitely. There is clearly something missing here, but since the official never surfaced to take credit for his cultural prescience, Wilder’s tale is the only explanation available. According to the tale, it took a matter of minutes for the United States to officially recognize Billie Wilder as exactly what he had been since the day his family moved from Krakόw to Vienna: a resident alien.
Returning to Los Angeles with his papers but still without a job, Billie moved into the ladies’ room at the Chateau Marmont Hotel. Maybe. It wasn’t precisely the ladies’ room; it was a sort of antechamber to the ladies’ room, a glorified closet with a Murphy bed that the hotel, then five years old, rented to Wilder for $70 or $75 a month. Wilder tells a different story every time. He moved there after returning from Mexicali, he moved there in 1935, he lived there with Peter Lorre, Lorre’s apartment was somewhere else and cost $5 a week, his room was in fact the ladies’ room, his room was next to the ladies’ room…. Whatever it was, it was cheap. Wilder once said that the Chateau rented the room to him only on the condition that he keep the door securely locked. He claimed later to have objected—he didn’t want to inconvenience the poor women—but the spoilsport at the desk demanded that he keep himself as well as his room under lock and key. According to that account, Wilder made himself at home and even decorated the tiny room with more of those phantom paintings he was said to carry with him whenever he moved; this time they were contemporary French works he’d picked up in Paris.
One sees, beneath the requisite bathroom joke, the loneliness and subtle brutality of his life as a refugee who’d just been hit by the heartless glare of Southern California: “When I could not sleep, when women were coming in and peeing and looking at me funny, when I […] knew that war was on the way for Europe, suddenly I wasn’t sure if I fitted in around here in Hollywood. I had the feeling I was not in the right country and I didn’t know if there was a right country for me. Right here was the low point of my life.” Whether or not he actually saw women urinating in his room is quite beside the point. Billie’s life at the Chateau Marmont wasn’t much fun, if for no other reason than it marked the first extended time in his life when it wasn’t easy for him to talk. He had little desire to hang around with Germans and kvetch in his native tongue. He wanted to become an American—fast.
He was game for almost anything. According to a desk clerk at the Chateau, Wilder was quite the young roué: “I doubt if he dated the same girl twice,” the clerk reports. One imagines that the term date is something of a euphemism; Billie on the make must have been quite a spectacle. In a more public vein, for either fifteen or fifty dollars (depe
nding on when he tells the story), he plunged fully clothed into a Hollywood swimming pool and swam from end to end at the behest of another transplanted Jew—Erich Pommer, who obviously knew he’d get a good little show for his money. Wilder had always been something of a show-off, but he’d never before been clownish.
Billie was living alone at this point. He didn’t have Joe and Mia May to speak German with over homemade goulash. But Wilder was stalwart, not to mention desperate, and he knew that his future lay in yet another foreign language. “You know, when you are a writer, when you are deprived of your language, you know, more or less, you are dead. So I searched for very handsome young ladies who only spoke English—that is a great help—I went to night school, I listened to the radio. I kind of tried to make a living by writing stories in German which were translated, and I sold a couple here and made a few thousand dollars.”
Wilder made a conscious decision not to situate himself in the ghetto of Europe’s dispossessed. “I learned by not associating myself with the refugee colony, by going around with new American friends, by listening to the radio. Perhaps it helps you to learn the language if you go into it cold. It pours into you and it stays.”
“If you think I have an accent,” Wilder commented on another occasion, “you should have heard Ernst Lubitsch.” For Wilder and the other Germans living in Hollywood in 1934, Lubitsch represented the pinnacle of achievement. He was funny and vulgar in person, funny and sophisticated as a director, and he managed to make films that appealed to Americans without ever giving up being a Berliner himself. A favorite joke among the Germans who’d fled to the United States was that a refugee is nothing but “an imported exporter, a man who has lost everything but his accent.” Wilder’s accent has always been pronounced; Lubitsch’s was far worse. “But he had a wonderful ear for American idiom and slang,” Wilder continued. “You either have an ear or you don’t, as van Gogh said.”
For the refugees, a harsh accent was the least of their troubles. The precise cases, endless portmanteaus, and complex syntactical structure of the German language made their transition to English a strain. It required a thorough rearrangement of thought. In German, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence; in English, it appears everywhere but. In German, conversation as well as written discourse, like a well-ordered stream through a series of civilized farms, flows. In English, such constructions are stilted. We like to get to the point and get there fast. For a displaced screenwriter—an adaptable one, anyway—American English lent itself to the kind of direct, immediate, constantly unfolding expressivity that German tended to thwart. Linguistically at least, American emotions are more straightforward. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it this way: “When you start a sentence in German, you have to know at the beginning what the end will be. In English, you live the sentence through to the end. Emotion and thought go together. In German, they’re divorced. Everything is abstract.”
For a flexible storyteller like Billie Wilder—or Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, for that matter—the new mix of languages was wondrous, pregnant with sounds and bursting with meaning. Wilder’s ear picked up our slang as well as our pragmatic syntax, and his inventive, hard-edged mind found twentieth-century poetry in them. Puns, jokes, verbal color, even the modern-sounding American tones and resonances one could make in the mouth—all were deeply engaging to the young writer-raconteur. It was exciting for him to get laughs in a new language. He was still speaking in song lyrics. If anyone asked him if he hoped to go back to Berlin someday, he had a ready-made punch line: “Gee but I’d give the world to see that old gang of mine.”
It was the Fox Film Corporation, not Paramount, that gave Billie Wilder his second screenwriting job in Hollywood. The movie was Music in the Air, an aggressively Bavarian operetta featuring lots of singing birds and Bavarian music and men wearing lederhosen and a quaint brass band in town playing for peasants dancing around the maypole in the marketplace. Fox purchased the rights in June 1933, for $50,000 against 10 percent of the gross. It was a big investment, but then the authors were Hammerstein and Kern, kings of Broadway, where the musical had been a big hit.
Music in the Air is a merry, meaningless venture. Two young lovers from the countryside, Karl and Sieglinde, travel to Munich and meet a pair of sophisticated, squabbling theater people, Bruno and Frida. A tangle ensues but everybody ends up singing. Fox’s original plan was to shoot the picture in either London or Paris. A deal had been struck in 1933 for Erich Pommer, then head of Fox-Europa, to produce the film, and Pommer arranged with a German director, Ludwig Berger, to shoot it for simultaneous release in English, French, and German. Fox also hired Billie’s friend Walter Reisch to adapt the property for film. But by the end of 1933, Fox-Europa was in trouble. It wasn’t just that the Continent was continuing to unravel politically and socially. More troublesome from the point of view of foreign film production was the fact that Roosevelt devalued the dollar, thereby rendering Fox-Europa’s production plans unfeasible. Music in the Air was on its way to Hollywood.
Fox continued its efforts to maintain the project’s beery flavor by hiring even more displaced Germans: Robert Liebmann, in Paris, signed on as a scriptwriter in January 1934, and Franz Wachsmann agreed to adapt Jerome Kern’s score in February. By March, Liebmann had sent in two drafts—one in German, the other in English—but staff writer and story editor Howard Irving Young wasn’t impressed. The Karl character, for example, had become a little too blustery in Liebmann’s adaptation. Liebmann had turned Hammerstein and Kern’s schoolteacher into a mountain climber who had the annoying habit of hoisting women up in the air with his bare arms to show off his strength, a display of Bayerische-Alpen prowess that Young found idiotic. In response, Young wrote some new scenes himself and submitted them.
By June 1934, Joe May had moved from Columbia to Fox, and he signed onto Music in the Air as a writer. Pommer, having moved to Los Angeles with what seemed like the rest of Ufa, was still the film’s producer, and May and Pommer generously brought their hungry young friend Billie Wilder along with them to complete the writing team. May ended up directing the film himself—it was the first of his ten American pictures—and the final screenwriting credit went to Liebmann, Young, and Wilder, in spite of the fact that two more writers, Joe Cunningham and William Counselman, contributed additional dialogue along the way. Eight writers had their hands in the beer.
Music in the Air flopped, but it’s not all that clear why. The film’s chic, magnetic star, Gloria Swanson, had been a top draw in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but her fortunes were sliding by the time she played Frida, the temperamental Bavarian diva. Maybe Swanson was too closely identified with the rollicking excesses of the Jazz Age; perhaps her glamorous persona made no sense in Bavaria; audiences may simply have grown bored with her. Music in the Air slipped quickly into the fog of forgotten movies, and Swanson didn’t appear on-screen again for another seven years. After that, 1950.
With such a tortured trail of contributors, drafts, and revisions, it’s impossible to attribute anything in the screenplay to anyone in particular, let alone Wilder. Swanson herself later claimed that Pommer convinced her to make the film on the strength of its screenplay, citing Billie Wilder’s name in particular, but this is almost certainly hindsight’s revision, since in 1934 Billie Wilder had no reputation at all in the United States. For a top producer to tell a top star that she should be in his film because it was cowritten by an unknown immigrant makes no sense.
Struggling young scripters hope for a hit as much as stars do, and Wilder was no exception. Disappointed, he was forced once again to start virtually from scratch, depending as usual on the kindness of people who spoke German. His next chance came with another Fox project, Lottery Lover. He had his work cut out for him. Firmly on the other side of insufferable, Fox’s original treatment for Lottery Lover concerned a boisterous band of French military cadets, one of whom falls in love with a dancer at the Folies-Bergère and finds a rival in the form of a Ba
lkan prince. Cadet and prince each court the luscious Gabrielle. When the prince buys the showgirl a lapdog, the contest appears to be over; cadet Pierre counterattacks with a superior dog. Somebody named Polette substitutes a mangy mutt for the prized canine, however, and, well, it all works out in the end because Gabrielle loves the new dog and she marries Pierre. Lottery Lover needed a great deal of work.
On April 12, 1934, Billie Wilder, Hanns Schwarz, and Franz Schulz signed a contract with Fox to write what the deal memo colorfully described as “a continuity entitled Lottery Lover, based on a continuity entitled Lottery Lover, by George Marion, Jr., and Dorothy Yost, and a story outline by Hanns Kräly, based on a continuity by Edward T. Lowe, Jr., based on an original story by the same name by Sig Herzig and Maurice Hanline.” Like Billie, the Viennese Schwarz and the German Schulz were both eager to tap into the Hollywood pipeline. What Fox executives didn’t know at the time, however, was that Wilder, Schwarz, and Schulz were confidently writing their screenplay in German with no intention of translating it into English themselves. That would be somebody else’s problem.
The three screenwriters managed to turn in a polished draft—entirely in German—less than two weeks later. In total, Wilder worked for five weeks at $200 a week. Since the screenplay was now written in a foreign language, Fox had to hire somebody to translate it back into English. Lottery Lover dragged on through the summer, largely because the scheduled star of the film—Pommer’s girlfriend, Lilian Harvey—walked out of another Fox production in a huff, forcing the studio to replace her in both projects. Compounding the mess, Hanns Schwarz, who had also been inked in to direct the film in addition to cowriting it, fell ill after an appendectomy. Two more screenwriters, Sam Hellman and William Thiele, joined the parade of typists in September, and the roster of writers on Lottery Lover finally reached its limit at twelve.
