Billy Wilder on Assignment

by Noah Isenberg

  A massage is part of my bathing routine. My legs float in the soapy water, and I notice that this new job is good for their muscles. My dutiful legs, my breadwinners.

  Then four minutes shaving, four minutes hairstyling, ten minutes getting my clothing ready, ten minutes necktie, eight minutes suit, five minutes final look into the mirror.

  By quarter after four I have to leave the house, because the people at the hotel are punctilious about punctuality. Four thirty is the time to make my appearance.

  I basically already feel at home. I actually say little to my colleagues, I’m merely there, like someone at the office. Just: Good day, adieu, earned something? Who was the snazzy lady, you know, the one with the two gentlemen in the car? Do you have an extra cigarette? Lousy weather today—and so forth.

  * * *

  I actually have the first stage of my training behind me. Herr Isin no longer points out the ladies I am to dance with; I choose them myself.

  “Bear in mind that you are not here for your own enjoyment. You are here to dance. Including with ladies who don’t appeal to you. In fact, the less they appeal to you, the more honestly and conscientiously you are doing your job. The dancer’s First Commandment is: there can be no wallflowers. He needs to pluck them, because that is what he is getting paid for. Bear that in mind.”

  I make my living honestly, honestly and with difficulty, because I dance honestly and conscientiously. No wishes, no desires, no thoughts, no opinions, no heart, no brain. All that matters here are my legs, which belong to this treadmill and on which they have to stomp, in rhythm, tirelessly, endlessly one-two, one-two, one-two.

  I dance with young and old; with the very short and those who are two heads taller than I; with the pretty and the less attractive; with the very slender and those who drink teas designed to slim them down; with ladies who send the waiter to get me and savor the tango with eyes closed in rapture; with wives, with fashion plates sporting black-rimmed monocles, and whose escorts, themselves utterly unable to dance, hire me; with painfully inept out-of-towners who think an excursion to Berlin would be pointless without five o’clock tea; with splendid women from abroad who divide their stay in Berlin between hotel rooms, halls, and ballrooms; with ladies who are there every day and no one knows where they’re from and where they’re going; with a thousand kinds.

  * * *

  This is no easy way to earn your daily bread, nor is it the kind that sentimental, softhearted types can stomach. But others can live from it. I did not earn badly this first week, but starting out is typically always difficult; let’s hope it goes on this way.

  I won’t go hungry. My average daily earning is twenty marks, plus my wages. Later it will surely get better, only practice will get me there. Willy and the Spaniard earn twice as much, but they have experience, they are better psychologists, they know their way around.

  * * *

  The treadmill in the hotel keeps running, and with it the whole hullabaloo to which I now belong, full-fledged, like the others: the Spaniard, Willy, the paper sales representative, and Kurt.

  In my notebook the reservations for dance lessons are increasing. Yesterday I was employed from ten to twelve—a family in Grunewald—and from two to four—two ladies who live in the hotel. The instructional hours alone make me forty marks. But the bad part is that I can no longer get a good night’s sleep.

  These past ten days I earned roughly four hundred marks. Three-quarters of this sum got eaten up by the purchase of a portable gramophone, which I now need for the classes, as well as fifteen records. Whiteman, Hylton, the Revelers, Jack Smith. On top of that, the down payment at a top-notch tailor, on Kurfürstendamm, for a suit, dark blue, finely patterned, double-breasted, six buttons; wide trousers, the latest; three neckties; a pair of black shoes; four dress shirts.

  * * *

  Saturday is the worst day for the dancer. All the halls are full to the very last seat. On the dance floor fifty couples crowd together, stepping on one another’s feet, panting and sparring. One single mass of flesh, quivering in rhythm like aspic. It is a day when the dancer for hire loses a couple of pounds of weight but is unlikely to gain a single pfennig.

  I position myself at the wall in the large hall and analyze all the tables. Facing away from me are two ladies, both with Eton crop hairdos and red ears.

  I dance with the two Eton crops. With one of them, this dialogue ensues:

  “I actually feel sorry for you, having to work so hard.”

  “Oh, it’s a pleasure to be able to dance with my dear Madame.”

  “Is it?”

  “It is indeed.”

  “And you think I dance well?”

  “Superbly.”

  “That I cut a fine figure?”

  “A fabulous one.”

  The eternal feminine—yet I’m nothing but a dancer for hire.

  * * *

  It is incredible how mean people can get.

  A waiter informs me: table 87 wishes to have a dancer.

  Fine, I go there. But not to table 87, because I misunderstand the number; I go to table 86. Sitting at this table are a burly young man and a bulbous-nosed lady with a tangerine-colored gown that comes down to her ankles.

  I make my obligatory bow in front of the couple and recite my set phrase as I face the gentleman: May I be permitted to dance with the lady?

  The man turns bright red in an instant, and his dueling scars stand out like white crisscrosses. His bellowing makes all the guests in the room jump up from their seats:

  “I will permit nothing of the sort. How dare you indulge in this boorish behavior? How do you figure you can harass this lady? Youuu … nobody!”

  I can’t think of absolutely anything to say in response. Dozens of curious people are now assembled around the table. I finally stammer: I beg your pardon—but I am the house dancer, and I was sent for!

  “Is that so!” the man shouts back, foaming and trembling with fury. “What are you? We know these kinds of excuses.”

  Herr Isin is already behind me, profusely begging forgiveness for my behavior. The customer is always right.

  * * *

  With a lovely black woman in sumptuous ermine, underneath it an evening gown that looks like a silver suit of armor, a pink rose at her hip.

  She has summoned me to the table: nine courses, plus a bottle of Veuve Clicquot sec. Hither and yon we dance. She doesn’t say a word; she’s probably thinking: I’ve rented two legs because I want to dance right now, but their owner is an idiot.

  Just once she asks, “Do you think the Black Bottom dance is coming into fashion?”

  “No,” I answer. And once again there is silence for two hours. We just dance. Or we sit across from each other without speaking.

  At two o’clock she says, “We’re going.” I am to bring her home, because she’s alone.

  Fine by me, I think.

  A taxi is already there. We get in, she says to the driver, “Kantstrasse …”

  I’m nervous. I look through the side window at the neon signs outside, washed by the November rain. Kantstrasse. The taxi stops. I help the lady out of the car.

  The taxi drives away.

  She opens the front door. Suddenly, however, she wheels around, gazes into my eyes, and asks, looking dead serious: “Do you know who Kant was?”

  Who Kant was? What a sweetheart. I don’t want to spoil the setup for which she paid seventy-two marks, not including the car expenses.

  I answer: “Of course, my dear Madame, a Swiss national hero.”

  She grimaces, then lifts her hand and caresses my cheek, the way you would with a poor little inane child. Then she goes into the house and locks the door behind her.

  I turn up the collar of my overcoat and walk down the street.

  B. Z. [Berliner Zeitung] am Mittag, January 19, 20, 22, and 24, 1927; reprinted in Die Bühne, June 2, 1927

  Promenaden-Café

  In Stockholm and in Singapore, people know just as well as they do in Ca
iro and Montevideo that in Vienna you need to have seen four things: the girls, St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the Cobenzl Castle, and the coffeehouses.

  As every child knows, the coffeehouse is a specifically Viennese affair. And now Vienna has gotten its most beautiful café. Located at the corner of Schwarzenbergplatz and Parkring, it had its opening yesterday, and its name is Promenaden-Café. Even the most pampered visitor is impressed. The elegant red hall with the charming corner arrangements, the green and the blue salon, the dining room, the appetizing food, the waiters in finest tails, all that attests to charm and good taste. And the specialty coffee! Praise be to the cook, praise to her heartwarming approach: half a cup of whipped cream swims over that wonderfully fragrant specialty coffee, the Weisse (you don’t know when to settle down and rejoice—each tastes better than the one before). The pastry, the newspaper, cigarettes all appear quick as lightning, materializing on the marble table as if by magic. How comfortable, how patriarchal you feel in those velvet armchairs! The window, adorned with flowers, offers a splendid view onto the Ring, with the aroma of Turkish coffee under your nose.… No, you have to get to know this feeling for yourself! Go there and judge. I have found my favorite café.

  Die Stunde, September 17, 1925

  That’s Some Cold Weather—in Venice!

  Venice, late February.—The airplane passenger escaping the winter over the Alps sets the heat down to the halfway mark at Udine, presses his cheek against the window, closes his eyes partway, and lets the full sun shine on his nose; he stretches out his arms and legs until his joints crack, spreads out as if under a warm quilt, and stays hushed in sweet sultriness until the Italian pilot notifies him that the sky-blue thing on the left is the Adriatic Sea, and the river down below is the Piave.

  From the landing place, S. Niccolò di Lido, a motorboat brings him to Venice. He sees the Canal di S. Marco, which is as smooth as a billiards table and as clear as the eyes of the Madonna del Mascoli. He slips off his glove and sticks his finger into the water, for just a second, then pulls it out again, blue with cold. But he is delighted about the South that surrounds him, devotedly lays his traveling cap on his lap, and thinks he sees the Ponte della Paglia and the Campanile over there.

  Upstairs, in his hotel room, he happily opens the window and breathes in the spring. Then he takes light flannel trousers out of his suitcase, white shoes with yellow toe caps and a violet shirt, and he deeply regrets having left his straw hat at home. He walks across the Riva degli Schiavoni, bareheaded, buoyant, and revitalized. He stumbles across scuffling young rascals, orange peels fly out of laundry-laden windows onto his head; he doesn’t notice any of it. A cold wind from the Isola di S. Giorgio Maggiore makes him shiver, he puts only his right hand into his trousers pocket—his left hand points to Venice and the surrounding areas—while whistling Puccini and picturing himself on the equator. Doesn’t see black clouds looming up. Doesn’t hear the raindrops splashing onto the pavement of the piazza. He walks across it to the Lavena confectionery. Orders gelato and a dozen postcards. Spoons some ice cream and writes to his family. I’m in Arcadia, too. And: here there’s sun and paradise. And: see Venice and die. And: I swim in the nice warm Adriatic every day.

  He looks out onto the grand Corso in front of the old Procuratie and joins the people there; detects something of a change in the temperature, sneezes three times, goes back to the Albergo, gets his coat and hat and praises the travel guide, where he reads, on page 12, “When the sun goes down in the late afternoon in the winter months, there is a sudden, very noticeable cooling down, on an average of at least six to ten degrees, which is disconcerting to people from the North. The best months for a trip to Venice are April to May and September to November. But the winter is also mild because of the sea and the lagoons.”

  The traveler buttons up his coat as far as he can and goes to supper, through wonderfully winding little streets so narrow that a good bit of mortar sticks to his elbows, over bridges with slippery steps. He eats at a tavern near the opera: gamberetti, pea soup with parmesan. Tangerines, heavy wine from Verona, eight lire a quart, and an espresso with confectioners’ sugar. He wants to go dancing and asks the waiter where: Niente, he says.

  The next morning, the man opens the window shutters out to the side and doesn’t see three yards ahead of him. London fog lies all over Venice. It is also raining, and snowing with watery flakes. The mercury is a couple of lines below zero. He turns up his coat collar and walks to the Canal Grande. At the Piazzetta there are a good twenty gondolas. No dogs anywhere. Only a rampino with a rusty grappling hook and a wet nose with drop after drop trickling out of it, on and on. For thirty centesimi this fellow will do a run to the Osteria where the gondoliers drink grappa, white grain.

  They ride along the Canal Grande, toward the Rialto Bridge: the gondolier, who sends a wide arc of spittle hurtling toward a vaporetto, and the passenger, leafing through his travel guide with chattering teeth. He reads, “On the left, the Santa Maria della Salute church, dedicated to the rescuer from the great plague. 1030. Baroque.” He glances over: nothing. He adjusts his binoculars: nothing. The fog is so thick that he could cut it with a knife. He goes on to read, “On the right, Palazzo Contarini, magnificent Early Renaissance construction (1504), with half-figures over the portals.”

  But he doesn’t see the palazzo, nor does he see the Early Renaissance or the portals or the half-figures. Only the gondolier, who wipes his mouth on his sleeve here and there.

  At the Rialto the traveler goes ashore. An elderly British woman with checkered stockings and a blue face is daubing a colorful piece of canvas; it is intended as a painting of the Rialto. A boy is stoking a charcoal fire under her feet to keep them from freezing. People become blurred in the fog, coughing and hiding away half their faces in their capes. May God have mercy.

  In the Merceria the man buys a thick scarf, which he winds around his neck twice. He rides up the Campanile, 316.7 feet high. The curator says, in a hoarse voice, “Signore, Lei è fortunato, perché oggi il panorama è meraviglioso, vedrá tutte le Alpi e tutto l’Adriatico.”* A whole system of binoculars is set up, but our man doesn’t even see Café Aurora, let alone the Alps and the Adriatic. He spends a full three hours making the rounds of the churches, the Doge’s Palace, ten museums, and Pietro Lombaro’s clock tower, his feet freezing the whole way. He spends a little while watching the photographer hopping from one leg to the other, blowing into his cupped hands and holding them over his ears, and looks at the man selling corn. Japanese tourists have just bought three bags of grains from him and are scattering them on the ground for the pigeons.

  The traveler gives a beggar a lira. The old man points to his hat, brimless and full of holes where moths have eaten away at it, then points to the pigeons tussling over the corn and states emphatically: Yesterday a pigeon dropped something onto his hat, which essentially means that there will be a full seventeen more days of fog, rain, and cold.

  Brr, the traveler thinks, and goes into Café Florian. Americans are bent over newspapers as big as bedsheets, a newlywed couple is eating whipped cream with a spoon, young Venetians with wavy hair are playing Briscola, two others are playing Italian billiards, with two large balls and one small one, pins and holes in every corner.

  The man orders tea. And the railway timetable.

  Then he packs at the hotel, damns the ridiculous tiled stove to hell, takes two aspirin, and dreams of doges in ermine furs skating on the frozen Canal Grande.

  Die Stunde, March 3, 1927

  This Is Where Christopher Columbus Came into the Old World

  Genoa, in February

  NULLA DOMUS TITULO DIGNIOR

  HEIC

  PATERNIS IN AEDIBUS

  CHRISTOPHERUS COLUMBUS

  PUERITIAM

  PRIMAMQUE JUVENTAM TRANSEGIT*

  This inscription is on the marble slab mounted over two windows where, about 480 years ago, Christopher Columbus’s diapers were hung out to dry.

  I don’t know w
hether Christopher Columbus had brothers and sisters, or whether he was an only child. No matter: the Columbus family seems to have lived in cramped quarters; this house, with windows and a marble slab—a hundred steps from the Piazza di Ferrari Ponticello—is barely thirteen feet wide, twenty-three feet long, and sixteen feet high: stone, dark gray, flat roof, and cracked walls.

  The houses to the left and right have all been torn down, thus freeing up the historic stone structure in which the man who discovered America was born, and forming the corner of a little garden surrounded by a high iron lattice in which wild grass is strewn with twisted tin cans and broken bottles, a few rotted trees, and an extremely odd edifice: a poorly restored ancient Roman portico, the parts of which were dug out of the ground eighteen years earlier during work on the Banca d’Italia. It appears to have been there since the birth of Christ and served young Columbus and his friends as a fort when they played cops and robbers.

  The aforementioned marble slab and the two windows are the only adornments on the little house apart from two heavy iron doors, just recently painted dark green, and a wreath hanging under the flat roof, which is already so withered that only an expert can establish the genus and species of the flowers. The three other façades are bare.

  A curiosity-seeker finds the two iron doors locked. It is still quite early in the day, with rain on and off, and a strong wind tears at the few dusty leaves that climb up the little house. A girl in clogs is walking across the street with a milk jug.