During his time in Berlin, Wilder had a number of mentors who helped guide his career. First among them was the Prague-born writer and critic Egon Erwin Kisch, one of the leading newspapermen of continental Europe, who was known to hold court at his table—the “Tisch von Kisch,” as it was called—at the Romanisches Café on Kurfürstendamm, a favorite haunt among Weimar-era writers, artists, and entertainers. (Wilder would hatch the idea for the film Menschen am Sonntag [People on Sunday, 1930]—on café napkins, the story goes—at the Romanisches a handful of years later.) Kisch not only read drafts of Wilder’s early freelance assignments in Berlin, offering line edits and friendly encouragement, but helped him procure a furnished apartment just underneath him in the Wilmersdorf section of the city. A well-traveled veteran journalist, Kisch had long fashioned himself as Der rasende Reporter (The Racing Reporter), the title he gave to the collection of journalistic writings he published in Berlin in 1925, serving as an inspiration and role model for Billie (a caricature of Wilder from the period encapsulates that very spirit).
“His reporting was built like a good movie script,” Wilder later remarked of Kisch. “It was classically organized in three acts and was never boring for the reader.” In an article on the German book market, published in 1930 in the literary magazine Der Querschnitt, he makes special reference to Kisch’s Paradies Amerika (Paradise America, 1929), perhaps a conscious nod to the nascent Americanophilia that was already blossoming inside him.
FIGURE 5. Caricature of Billie as a “racing reporter,” Die Bühne (February 18, 1926).
Among the best-known dispatches of the dozens that Billie published during his extended stint as a freelance reporter was his four-part series for the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag (B. Z.), later reprinted in Die Bühne, on his experiences working as a dancer for hire at the posh Eden Hotel. The piece bore an epigraph from yet another of his Berlin mentors, the writer Alfred Henschke, who published under the nom de plume Klabund and was married to the prominent cabaret and theater actress Carola Neher. In it, Klabund advises young writers, gesturing toward the contemporary aesthetic trend of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), to write about events as they really occurred: “The only thing that still interests us today about literature is the raw materials it’s made of: life, actuality, reality.” Since it’s Wilder, of course, the truth is mixed with a healthy dose of droll, martini-dry humor and a touch of unavoidable poetic license as he recounts the gritty details of his trade: the wealthy ladies of leisure who seek his services, the jealous husbands who glare at him, and the grueling hours of labor on the dance floor. “I wasn’t the best dancer,” he later said of this period, “but I had the best dialogue.”
Early on in the same piece, he includes a review of his performance attributed to the hotel management that in many ways serves as an apt summation of his whole career: “Herr Wilder knew how to adapt to the fussiest audiences in every way in his capacity as a dancer. He achieved success in his position and always adhered to the interests of the establishment.” He put the skills he acquired on the dance floor to continued use on the page and on the screen, always pleasing his audience and ensuring his path to success. “I say to myself: I’m a fool,” he writes in a moment of intense self-awareness. “Sleepless nights, misgivings, doubts? The revolving door has thrust me into despair, that’s for sure. Outside it is winter, friends from the Romanisches Café, all with colds, are debating sympathy and poverty, and, just like me, yesterday, have no idea where to spend the night. I, however, am a dancer. The big wide world will wrap its arms around me.”
An ideal match for Billie arrived when, in 1928, the Ullstein publishing house, publisher of the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, introduced a new afternoon Boulevard-Zeitung, an illustrated paper aimed at a young readership and bearing a title that would speak directly to them and to Wilder: Tempo. “It was a tabloid,” remarked historian Peter Gay in his early study of the “German-Jewish Spirit” of the city, “racy in tone, visual in appeal, designed to please the Berliner who ran as he read.” The Berliners, however, quickly adopted another name for it: they called it jüdische Hast, or “Jewish haste.” Billie, an inveterate pacer and man on the move, was a good fit for Tempo and vice versa (it was in its pages that he introduced Berliners to the short-lived independent production company Filmstudio 1929 and the young cineastes, including Wilder himself, behind its creation).
In 1928, after serving as an uncredited ghostwriter on a number of screenplays, Billie earned a solo writing credit for a picture that had more than a slight autobiographical bearing on its author. It was called Der Teufelsreporter (Hell of a Reporter), though it also bore the subtitle Im Nebel der Großstadt (In the Fog of the Metropolis), and was directed by Ernst Laemmle, nephew of Universal boss Carl Laemmle. Set in contemporary Berlin, it tells the story of the titular character, a frenetic newspaperman played by American actor Eddie Polo, a former circus star, who works at a city tabloid—called Rapid, in explicit homage—and whose chief attributes are immediately traceable to Wilder himself. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, young Billie even has a brief appearance in the film, dressed just like the other reporters in his midst. “He performs this cameo,” write German film scholars Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen, “as if to prove who the true Teufelsreporter is.” In addition to asserting a deeper connection to the city and to American-style tabloid journalism, Der Teufelsreporter lays a foundation for other hard-boiled newspapermen in Wilder’s Hollywood repertoire, from Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) in Ace in the Hole (1951) to Walter Burns (Walter Matthau) in The Front Page (1974).
Further affinities between Wilder’s Weimar-era writings and his later film work abound. For example, in “Berlin Rendezvous,” an article he published in the Berliner Börsen Courier in early 1927, he writes about the favored meeting spots within the city, including the oversized clock, called the Normaluhr, at the Berlin Zoo railway station. Two years later, when writing his script for Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930), he located the pivotal rendezvous between two of his amateur protagonists, Wolfgang von Waltershausen and Christl Ehlers, at precisely the same spot. For the same script, he crafted the character of Wolfgang, a traveling wine salesman and playboy, as a seeming wish-fulfillment fantasy of his own exploits as a dancer for hire. Likewise, in his early account of the Tiller Girls arriving by train in Vienna, there’s more than a mere germ of Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators, the all-girl band in Some Like It Hot (1959); there’s even a Miss Harley (“the shepherdess of these little sheep”), anticipating the character of Sweet Sue herself. In a short comic piece on casting, Billie pays tribute to director Ernst Lubitsch, a future mentor in Hollywood (many years later, Wilder’s office in Beverly Hills featured a mounted plaque designed by Saul Bass with the words “How Would Lubitsch Do It?” emblazoned on it). Finally, in his 1929 profile of Erich von Stroheim, in Der Querschnitt, among the many things young Billie highlights is Gloria Swanson’s performance in Stroheim’s late silent, Queen Kelly (1929). It was the first flicker of the inspired idea to cast Swanson and Stroheim as a pair of crusty, vaguely twisted emissaries from the lost world of silent cinema in Sunset Boulevard (1950).
FIGURE 6. Lobby card for the film Der Teufelsreporter (Hell of a Reporter, 1928).
FIGURE 7. Billie Wilder appears in a cameo, second from left, in Der Teufelsreporter.
FIGURE 8. Berlin as it appears in Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1929).
* * *
By the time Wilder boarded a British ocean liner, the S.S. Aquitania, bound for America in January 1934, he’d managed to acquire a few more screen credits and a little more experience in show business, but very little of the English language (he purportedly packed secondhand copies of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel in his suitcase). He had gone from a salaried screenwriter at UFA in Berlin to an unemployed refugee in Paris to an American transplant with twenty dollars and a hundred English words in his possession. “He pa
ced his way across the Atlantic,” remarks Sikov. And soon he’d pace his way onto the lot of MGM, Paramount, and other major film studios, joining an illustrious group of central European refugees who would forever change the face of Hollywood.
FIGURE 9. Wolfgang von Waltershausen with Christl Ehlers and Brigitte Borchert in Menschen am Sonntag.
FIGURE 10. Wilder, at center, with Peter Lorre and other central European refugees in Hollywood.
Wilder’s acclaimed work in Hollywood, as a screenwriter and director, is in many ways an outgrowth of his stint as a reporter in interwar Vienna and Weimar Berlin. His was a raconteur’s cinema, long on smart, snappy dialogue, short on visual acrobatics. “For Wilder the former journalist, words have a special, almost material quality,” comments German critic Claudius Seidl. “Words are what give his films their buoyancy, elegance, and their characteristic shape, since words can fly faster, glide more elegantly, can spin more than any camera.” Wilder’s deep-seated attachment to the principal tools of his trade as a writer is recognizable throughout his filmic career. He even provided an apt coda, uttered by none other than fading silent screen star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard, when she learns that Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a writer: “words, words, more words!”
A Note on the Text
To give the reader the most representative selection of Billy Wilder’s writings from the period, we have drawn on two separate German-language anthologies: Der Prinz von Wales geht auf Urlaub: Berliner Reportagen, Feuilletons und Kritiken der zwanziger Jahre (Berlin: Fannei und Waltz, 1996), a collection of Wilder’s Berlin-based journalism from the second half of the 1920s edited by Klaus Siebenhaar; and “Billie”: Billy Wilders Wiener journalistische Arbeiten (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2006), a companion volume of Wilder’s Viennese publications from the mid-1920s, co-edited by Rolf Aurich, Wolfgang Jacobsen, and Günter Krenn.
We have organized the pieces into three separate sections, defined by formal and thematic categories. In some instances, we opted not to include pieces that seemed either too esoteric, too anachronistic, or simply inaccessible to an Anglo-American audience. We believe the selection we have chosen gives the greatest sense of Wilder’s unique voice, his budding skills as a writer, his wit and intelligence, and his range.
Finally, we’d like to thank the Billy and Audrey L. Wilder Foundation for their very kind support of our effort to bring Wilder’s early writings to an English-language audience.
I
Extra! Extra!
REPORTAGE, OPINION PIECES, AND FEATURES FROM REAL LIFE
Between September 1925 and November 1930, Wilder published dozens of freelance pieces. He began in the pages of Vienna’s Die Bühne and Die Stunde (where he started out as a reporter in his teens), to which he continued to contribute intermittently after relocating to Berlin in the summer of 1926, just after his twentieth birthday. There he became a regular contributor to the Berliner Zeitung (or the B. Z., as it was more commonly known) and the Berliner Börsen Courier, where he worked as a night editor from April to December 1927. In the late 1920s, while still hanging his hat in Berlin, he wrote for Tempo, the Ullstein publishing concern’s short-lived illustrated magazine aimed at a youthful audience, and for Der Querschnitt, the publishing house’s more highbrow literary magazine (which was something of a distant cousin to the New Yorker).
One of the principal genres in which young Billie trafficked was the feuilleton, or cultural essay, a potent mix of reportage and descriptive musings, which had gained considerable popularity in the newspapers—broadsheets and tabloids—of western and central Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wilder’s feuilletons often took the form of jaunty, mordant, self-stylized personal essays; on occasion they read a bit more like the pointed writing we find on today’s op-ed pages.
FIGURE 11. Title page of the four-part article “Herr Ober, bitte einen Tänzer!”—in which Wilder describes his days as a hotel dancer for hire—from its reprint in Die Bühne (June 2, 1927).
The following selection includes travel pieces (on the urban history and lore of such cities as Venice, Genoa, and Monte Carlo, and even an imagined dispatch from New York City); a pair of heartfelt tributes to the coffeehouse; a long-form essay on the book market circa 1930; and a piece devoted to the art of getting by as an impoverished freelancer. There are numerous articles specific to the contemporary scene in Berlin, among them a four-part eyewitness account of being a dancer for hire, which cast light on the darker corners of the German capital in the late 1920s while also presenting key facets of Wilder himself. In “When It’s Eighty-Four Degrees,” his witty reflections on a sudden heat wave, he describes Berliners dancing the Black Bottom—an American Jazz Age craze that had crossed the Atlantic to inspire legions of dance fanatics during the Weimar years—despite the inhospitable temperatures. Billie’s love of speed, and of shiny new objects, finds expression in “Night Flight over Berlin,” his report on the beginnings of commercial air travel in Europe, while “Berlin Rendezvous” not only plants some of the seeds of his script for Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930)—which he describes here in affectionate detail and with the panache of a savvy press agent in “Here We Are at Film Studio 1929,” noting a certain “reportage” as its basis—but also captures the romance of the city at an especially exciting, if equally fragile, moment.
“Waiter, A Dancer, Please!”
FROM THE LIFE OF A DANCER FOR HIRE
I. I’m Looking for a Job
First, a letter, complete with a motto:
Dear B. W.—Write your memoirs of a dancer for hire. The only thing that still interests us today about literature is the raw materials it’s made of: life, actuality, reality. The motto of “vitalism” is: Every living thing is but a metaphor—Yours, Klabund
So don’t be ashamed of what you’ve done. Don’t even offer up the excuse: “A job is a job,” or “It’s no disgrace to work.” Come straight out with it.
I received my dismissal as a dancer for hire as requested, and my record of that is in my wallet:
Record!
Herr Billie Wilder was employed in our establishment as a Social Dancer from October 15, 1926, until today.
Herr Wilder knew how to adapt to the fussiest audiences in every way in his capacity as a dancer. He achieved success in his position and always adhered to the interests of the establishment.
Herr Wilder is parting ways with our business at his own request.
THE MANAGEMENT OF THE … HOTEL.
BERLIN W.
So I have it in black and white that I was a dancer, a social dancer, in a word: a dancer for hire, for two months, and one who “knew how to adapt to the fussiest audiences in every way,” at that.
That’s what happened, and here’s how: I was not doing well—
My trousers aren’t ironed, my face is badly shaved, my collar greasy, the cuffs of my shirt folded over. My tongue tastes bitter, my legs are leaden, my stomach is so empty that it’s hurting, and my nerves are shot. Behind every knock on the door the venomous face of the landlady, shrieking, with the bill in her hands. For me the street is made up of gourmet food stores, restaurants, and pastry shops, and I cut my cigarettes in half to make them last longer.
I was not doing well.
Today I’ll be sleeping in the waiting room of the train station.
Sad financial reckoning in front of a cigarette store:
Eleven pfennigs, another five in my vest, that comes to sixteen.
“Four for four!”
That makes it easier to move on. But where to?
* * *
Potsdamer Platz. Someone is shouting through the clamor of the traffic, swinging his walking stick, smashing into a baby carriage.
“Hello! Imagine meeting you here! What, you don’t recognize me? No? From the Tabarin in Vienna? Yes, of course—Roberts.”
I sink through the floor in shame.
“Come for a cognac; it’s on me. Got an appetite? Ex
cellent. Caaaar—available? To Kempinski!”
And in the restaurant: “Bring me two orders of fish in mayonnaise, two beef filets, English-style, medium-rare, please, two salads, a bottle of 1917 Liebfraumilch. But first, two large Hennessys.”
* * *
That is Roberts, the dancer: his hair is black as ink and shiny as rain-slicked asphalt, his eyes evince the South, his nose and his lips those of the dead Valentino.
He eats a hot lunch and smokes imported cigarettes, coins jingle in his pockets, he pays his rent on time, and doesn’t owe a single pfennig to the washerwoman; yes, the word “inhibitions” has never crossed his mind. Maybe that’s how billionaires live.
Of course, he’s a dancer. Yvette and Roberts. He’s danced in London and in Paris, in Warsaw, in Vienna, in Nice, in Karlsbad, in Brussels and in Rome, in San Sebastian, everywhere.
While we’re eating, he tells me that he’s been hired for the entire winter in Berlin. A giant hotel near the Memorial Church. Every evening, Yvette and Roberts in their dances. People are so nice to him, he adds.
“And you? What are you up to?”
I lower my head so he can’t see my collar. Well—this and that. I tell him I don’t have anything at the moment, no job, for the past three weeks already, but that something will turn up soon. I even have an idea, I say, I always have ideas.
“Can I help you?”
Roberts puts his hand on my arm. I tug on my tie and look away, read the label on the wine bottle.
Billy Wilder on Assignment Page 2
