by Ed Sikov
At the age of eighty-nine, Billy was approached to make his Hollywood feature film debut. It wasn’t his brow that was being kissed when Cameron Crowe, preparing Jerry Maguire, tried valiantly to convince Wilder to play the role of Jerry’s mentor, an aging sports agent called Dicky Fox. After much plotting and planning, Crowe was told by a mutual friend that Billy had agreed to meet with him. After mistaking the boyish Crowe for a messenger, Wilder invited him into his paneled Brighton Way office; after much conversant fawning, Crowe said, “There is a part I want you to play in my movie.” “I don’t act,” Billy answered. “I won’t do it.” “It’s just a small part,” Crowe persisted. “Then I definitely won’t do it,” said Billy.
Crowe, having been around the Hollywood block a few times himself, kept right on pitching until finally Wilder agreed to read the script. According to Crowe, Billy was rather positive about the idea over the next few months, but when Crowe called to cinch the deal, Wilder only grunted, “Why are you doing this to me? I said, ‘No.’ I’m too old. Leave me alone.” Then he hung up on him.
Crowe proceeded to Wilder’s office; this time, Tom Cruise accompanied him. With Cruise fidgeting in one chair, Crowe kept on pitching from another. Billy was unmoved. “And why do we care about this sports agent to begin with?” he inquired. Crowe had no answer. Cruise took over, explaining how important it was to both of them, and so on, and as Crowe reports, “Suddenly, the chemistry of the room shifted, and Wilder knew it. He snapped back to attention. The cloudiness in his eyes disappeared. Earnestly, the globe’s best-known male actor explained that it was not so much an acting job as a documentary-style appearance. The room was suddenly filled with hope.” Then: “No. I am too old to be in front of the camera.” Billy concluded the meeting by criticizing Cruise’s outfit (black jeans and a dress shirt). “Nice to meet you,” Billy said to Crowe as he rose out of his chair. Then he turned to Cruise: “And nice to meet you. Especially you.”
Billy did end up onscreen in 1998 after being approached by one of his shoe salesmen. Steven Proto, an aspiring filmmaker, worked in a boutique under Wilder’s office on Brighton Way. “He came in a lot and tried on shoes,” said Proto. “He never bought anything. He just wanted company and to bust chops.” Proto didn’t even know who Billy was until the cantankerous old man started griping about Woody Allen’s Oscars. “I still have more than he does,” said Billy. Proto, who wanted to make a documentary called “The Shoe Store,” suddenly saw possibilities. After much begging, he convinced Wilder to sit for a short interview. “I’ve always been depressed,” Billy confessed to Proto’s camera, “even to the point of suicide…. My chums that I used to hang around with, most of them, are dead. I live a sincere, orderly life, and I wait for things to happen.”
Hollywood youth are still impressed by the master’s wit. They keep telling “Billy” stories, as well they should. Billy Bob Thornton, for instance, tells the story of how he worked as a caterer’s assistant when he first moved to Los Angeles. At one of the parties he helped cater, he met Billy. “You want to be an actor, don’t you?” Billy asked the young waiter. Thornton admitted that he did, to which Wilder replied, “Let me give you a piece of advice. You’re not handsome enough to be a leading man, so write yourself a good part and play the hell out of it.” Thornton won a screenwriting Oscar for Sling Blade (1996) as well as a Best Actor nomination.
Paramount Pictures named a building after him, but Wilder was unmoved: “I was on the lot for its seventy-fifth anniversary. All the old-timers were there. I said, ‘There’s a building named after me, can I see it?’ Nobody had heard about it. But then, somebody told me, ‘It’s not on the Paramount lot, it’s on the RKO lot,’ which they bought and never built on. I never worked at RKO. I think my name must be crowning a latrine someplace. So much for glory.”
At the 1994 Oscars, Fernando Trueba, the director of Belle époque, the year’s Best Foreign Language Film, accepted his award by saying, “I would like to believe in God so that I could thank him, but I just believe in Billy Wilder. So thank you, Billy Wilder.” “I was just mixing myself a martini and I heard it on the television,” Billy said. “The bottle of gin falls out of my hand.” When Trueba’s phone rang the following day, the voice on the other end said, simply, “It’s God.” Billy told the Los Angeles Times that he wished Trueba “hadn’t said that. People start crossing themselves when they see me.”
On June 22, 1996, Billy Wilder turned ninety. He spent the day at home in bed because he wasn’t feeling well—his persistent vertigo was acting up—but he was back in his office again two weeks later, reworking sentences, repeating dirty jokes, planning his lunch, and, as he has been doing since the age of two, telling stories and hurling insults at anyone lucky enough, and resilient enough, to listen.
A joke: “An elderly man goes to see a doctor, and the doctor asks him, ‘What is your problem?’ And he says, ‘I can’t pee.’ And the doctor asks him, ‘How old are you?’ He says, ‘I’m ninety.’ And the doctor says, ‘You peed enough.’”
EPILOGUE: THE DAY I MET GOD
I met God on a bright and sunny L.A. day in 1999. I’d just written His biography. He’d declined all my requests for an interview, but the book—a big doorstop of a thing—got good reviews despite His celestial silence. (He wasn’t silent about me; He told Jack Lemmon that the idea of doing an interview with me made Him “want to throw up.”) But now, apparently having read Andrew Sarris’s kind review in the New York Times Book Review or similar ones elsewhere, He commanded an audience on a particular August afternoon. I checked my calendar. Lo: I happened to be free all day.
So we spent two or three hours together, God and me. It was the greatest day of my life.
By God, of course, I do not mean anyone supernatural. This was no rendezvous with a bush that burned while it talked, no tête-à-tête with Jesus in the gutter outside a slummy bar. By God, I mean the God in whom the film director Fernando Trueba believes—the God I have worshipped for much of my life, the one writer I most wanted to emulate, in Platonic terms the perfect universal to my own highly flawed particular. “I would like to believe in God in order to thank him,” the obviously non-American Trueba had the balls to announce in his Oscar acceptance speech in 1994. Trueba either didn’t know or didn’t care that atheism is criminal in this country when expressed openly on awards shows, where Jesus competes with CAA for the “Most Urgently Thanked” prize. “But I believe in Billy Wilder,” Trueba went on. “So, thank you Mr. Wilder.” Mr. Wilder called him the next day and said, “Fernando, this is God.”
At the time of my audience, God was working out of a small second-floor office over a shoe store on Brighton Way in Beverly Hills. I made my way up a plain flight of stairs, knocked on the door of what could well have been some schlub’s podiatry practice, and there He was, sitting behind a large desk surrounded by leatherbound copies of his screenplays lined up like the holdings of the Special Collections room of the Paradise Public Library. He shook my hand. My knees still rattled after I sat down opposite Him. We chatted. He didn’t throw up.
That’s the short version. In fact, like the labors of Hercules, my path to Mr. Wilder was perilous; unlike Hercules, I am weak and small of stature. I’d say I’d had to get past a cretin bull, but that would be unfair to the mythical ox.
The story really begins with a staticky, half-intelligible message on my answering machine. The German-accented voice said, as far as I could make out, “This is Ben Dictahtion at the hemisphere shsloulsh. Billy Wilder wanztoshmeeshoo so if shoowooshd call thishhumbershhhhhh.” The string of digits that followed was too long to lead to a United States phone. I wondered if the Eternal had an especially lengthy area code.
The message was Gabriel-like in its announcement of approaching divinity, like a few others I’d heard my machine play back over the years. (One was, in its entirety: “Joan Fontaine. 5–0-niiiine—3–3-niiiiine-7–5-3-niiiiiiiiiiine. Call me.”)
I dialed the number and found myself chatting wit
h Benedikt Taschen, the publisher, who wanted me to write what turned out to be The Some Like It Hot Book, an exquisitely produced, gorgeously illustrated, yellow-bound beauty written by someone who evidently didn’t mind being paid very little. But that’s skipping ahead.
Taschen gave me an address just off Mulholland Drive and told me to meet him there in the late morning of an August day. I was anxious as I pulled up at a driveway that seemed to have no house nearby—only a stone wall. A handsome blonde youth was skipping down the hill above the wall. “I’m looking for the Taschen house.” “You are here!” he cried with the same accent as Taschen’s, then pointed straight to the sky.
Sunk into the hillside was a thirty-foot concrete column. At the top was an octangular pedestal; I couldn’t see the slightly smaller octagonal house perched on top. “You must take ze elevator,” the kid advised, pointing to a steep funicular with the carriage waiting for me at the bottom.
This was the landmark Chemosphere, the Jetsons-like residence designed by the daring architect John Lautner in 1960 and featured in Body Double and The Simpsons. Taschen met me at the top, escorted me into and through the house (including his pre-teenage daughter’s bedroom with the half-naked daughter asleep in her bed), after which he told me that he wanted me to write a book that looked like a sketch he quickly drew on a slip of paper. It was rectangular. I was to fill in the rest.
We set off for Brighton Way in separate cars—his SUV, my little rental car—across Mulholland toward Laurel Canyon, Sunset Boulevard, and Beverly Hills. The Kraut careened across the treacherously winding Mulholland Drive as though it was the Autobahn. I followed, sweat-covered and shaking, convinced that the next day’s Los Angeles Times front page would feature an article headlined “Millionaire German Publisher Dies in Fiery Crash,” with a paragraph buried deep in the paper with the subhead, “Writer Also Dies.”
By the time we reached the parking lot I was a nervous wreck, my shirt soaked in sweat, my knees wobbling, my mind in a badly altered state—exactly not the way I wanted to be when meeting the man I most wanted to meet on the face of the earth.
But Mr. Wilder greeted me warmly and seemed quite pleased to meet me. He offered me a seat and immediately asked, “Why didn’t you contact me? I would have been happy to talk to you.”
I never imagined that God would lie.
I was flabbergasted and momentarily speechless. “Um, well, uh—my agent did talk to your manager,” I stammered, failing to mention the five or six letters I had sent to him personally at his various addresses. “There must have been some sort of miscommunication.” Blaring inside my head was a voice saying, “Billy! Billy! Billy! No wonder you thrived in Hollywood for over sixty years. You lie so charmingly.”
Taschen then inexplicably rushed out of the office, leaving Mr. Wilder confused and me holding the bag. “Where did he go?” Mr. Wilder asked me. “I have no idea,” I answered, then added—equally inexplicably—“You know those Germans.”
Where this came from or what it meant I still can’t say, but Mr. Wilder was amused by it and repeated it knowingly. (Mr. Wilder was not himself German. He had several other nationalities: he spent his formative years in Vienna, but he was most accurately a German-speaking Polish Jew, having been born in a village called Sucha Beskidzka, about thirty-five miles from Krakow. He moved with his parents and brother to Vienna when he was about ten, then split to Berlin in 1926 when he was twenty. He stayed for seven years, exited to Paris in 1933 just after the Reichstag burned and Hitler took power, and landed on these shores in 1934. He became an American citizen in 1939.)
With Taschen mysteriously having taken a powder, making small talk with God wasn’t easy. What does one say? “How’s tricks?” “What’s new?” “Where do you keep the Oscars?” “Who’s the most famous woman you ever screwed?” Mr. Wilder seized the reins by looking me squarely in the eyes and declaring, “Your book is the best researched book I’ve ever seen.” I fought back tears. “Thank you very much, very very much,” I got out. “Very impressive,” he said. “I’m relieved to hear you say that,” I squeaked. “Very relieved.”
Taschen burst back into the office. “I hadt to get some feelm for ziss cahmera,” he announced. “Helmut gave it to me.” (Who’s Helmut, you ask? Helmut Newton! Don’t you know anything?)
“I made a reservation at Mr. Chow’s,” Mr. Wilder said. “Is that okay with you?” He was looking at me. I would have been happy on all fours eating out of Fido’s dog dish in the corner. “Of course,” I said. “Sounds great.” And with that we left the office.
Mr. Wilder was quite a bit frailer than I had expected or could notice when he was seated behind his desk; Taschen had to help him down the stairs. I hovered nervously, but not so anxiously as to fail to notice that Mr. Wilder was wearing the most gorgeous slippers I have ever seen, with the possible exception of those once owned by the late Wicked Witch of the East. They were black velvet with elegant gold-, silver-, and red-metallic-threaded embroidery; they looked like they’d been created by a team of talented elves. Mr. Wilder’s feet dragged; it took some time for us to make our way around the corner to Mr. Chow’s, where the maître d’ greeted us as though—well—as though the God, party of three, had just arrived. He seated us immediately at Mr. Wilder’s preferred table and presented no menus. Mr. Wilder didn’t even order. Waiters simply began bringing us his favorites: a large plate of shrimp dumplings, bowls of hot and sour soup, a vast dish of lo mein, and a platter of frighteningly spicy chicken.
Then She arrived: the legendary Audrey, the second Mrs. Billy Wilder, the one Truman Capote wrote about in his lost short story, “And Audrey Wilder Sang.” Dressed in her characteristic Chanel-inspired (or perhaps original) suit and defining Louise Brooks wig, she was exactly as I imagined she would be. One of their friends I interviewed had told me, “She always wears the same kind of outfit: white suit with black trim, black suit with white trim, brown suit with tan trim…. And she’s a real pistol.” Another friend of theirs once said, “She’s brilliant, beautiful, and as hard as he is.”
“Audrey, my dear,” Mr. Wilder said as she strode around the table. “This is the man who wrote the book.”
“What book?” she snapped as she sat down beside me.
“The book!” he repeated. “The big book!”
“Oh, that!” Her face assumed the expression of someone who has just discovered that the milk has turned. She faced me and said, “That book. Full of mistakes.” She brought her index finger within inches of my nose and wagged it at me. “Wrong, wrong, wrong!”
Now I was the one who wanted to throw up.
“I’m so sorry to hear that, Mrs. Wilder. Please tell me what isn’t right.”
“Well,” she started, as though she was about to read the Torah from beginning to end. “Marlene never said that.”
I knew immediately, of course, to what she was referring. I’d found a detail somewhere about Marlene Dietrich telling Mr. Wilder that his marriage to Audrey, a big band singer at the time, would never work because they were astrologically incompatible. “I’m not a Cancer—I’m a Scorpio! Somebody got it wrong once, and you’ve repeated it, and now it’s replicating.” She pointed her fingers toward each other and wound them in circles in the air, indicating infinity. Okay, I thought—I can live with that. She can’t sue over an astrological error. But she had more to correct: “And we weren’t married in Linden, Nevada—we were married in Minden, Nevada!” She’d obviously looked herself up in the book, noted the booboos, and stopped reading.
To the “Minden” correction I had a comeback: “I can cite the source on that one right now,” I said, “I got that directly from Louella Parsons’ column announcing your elopement.” She immediately made the cuckoo sign and said, “Figures.”
As Fagin sings in Oliver, I found myself reviewing the situation. In the past three minutes I had met the wife of God; heard the name “Marlene” uttered familiarly in reference to one of the greatest, most luminous movie stars in history
; been told off by the wife of God; and found redemption by way of a cuckoo sign applied at the mention of that big fat cow, Louella Parsons. My head was very light. The air, as the studio boss tells Daisy in Inside Daisy Clover, was “very thin, but very good.” I really did feel like I was in heaven. For a boy from a dinky little town north of Pittsburgh, I was shocked to have my entire, mostly discontented life suddenly stamped “Worth It.” I excused myself from the table and went to the men’s room to splash some cold water on my face.
There was a pay phone at the top of the stairs. I dialed the number of my then-boyfriend, later partner, now husband. “Hello?” he answered.
“I’mwithhimhe’sdownstairsHiswifejustshowedup,” I blurted. “Shewasjusttalkingabout’Marlene’—byherfirstname! MarlenefuckingDietrich! Igottagobye.” And then I ran downstairs and rejoined the little party.
We spent two hours over a superb lunch. I may have gotten the astrological stuff wrong, but I’d been told by another friend that despite his age Mr. Wilder ate like a horse, and that turned out to be quite true. It was a pleasure to watch him devour much of the spicy chicken himself. He was ninety-three at the time.
But he wasn’t the firebrand he’d been all his life—the one who said, after Peter Sellers had a series of massive heart attacks and had to leave the production of Kiss Me, Stupid, “Heart attack? You have to have a heart to have an attack.” The one who loudly berated an interviewer after she misquoted Norma Desmond’s famous line in Sunset Boulevard: “No! No! No! You fucked it up! It’s ‘I am big—it’s the pictures that got small.’” The one who’d terrified me whenever I thought about what might happen if I actually did get to interview him. This was Billy Wilder diminished, an old man in declining health—still funny, but not as deadly.
He’d start to tell a story, but he’d forget the ending. I’d jump in and supply it, knowing it already, having written “the big book.” Mrs. Wilder, sensing the increasing awkwardness, swiftly took command by launching into a selection of Audrey’s Greatest Hits: she swung effortlessly from stories about Marlene’s peculiarities to the fact that she, Audrey, had personally dyed Marilyn’s hair for Some Like It Hot. (Note: That would be Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe!—who once called Mr. Wilder at home and reached Audrey instead. “Tell Billy he can go fuck himself,” Marilyn said; “And my very best to you, Audrey.”)
