Billy Wilder on Assignment

by Noah Isenberg

  Berliner Börsen Courier, August 19, 1927

  Little Economics Lesson

  Thirty-five years ago, I was given a present of a children’s chocolate vending machine. You would beg your relatives desperately for money, throw it into the machine, give one pull—and right in front of the buyer or seller, a bar of chocolate would appear, turning gray at the edges, and it was happily offered to your aunt. When the machine was empty, it could be opened with a little key, and the available money had to be used to purchase new supplies, which in bulk came out somewhat cheaper than getting them from a vending machine. In addition to having a toy to play with, you also got a nice little lesson in the workings of a supply chain. You earned profits, replenished your inventory, and functioned as an entrepreneur. “Business personified,” in the guise of a fairy-tale prince, peered into the nursery through a crack in the door. It was there that sales prowess was trained from an early age, pushiness perfected, and business sense aroused and placed in the service of national wealth.

  The chocolate vending machine was the model. It’s hard to grasp that it took until now for the seed planted in me so far in the past to sprout; just recently this productive idea has ripened, an idea I am now preparing to implement to make myself rich and powerful. “Each his own middleman” is the motto by which I now intend to live and whose meaning and contents I hereby convey to the public.

  One example: I shave my own face. I buy soap, brush, styptic pencil, aftershave, and powder. I sharpen the knives. I spend time, effort, and money on removing my beard neatly. What use do I get out of that? Where do the capital revenues and output of my daily efforts wind up? Has it ever crossed my mind, in all my heedlessness, to remunerate myself appropriately for all my labor? A criminal waste of economic capital! From now on this will be different. I will pay myself. I will shave my face a bit more cheaply than the guy who does shaves, because I’ll want to compete with him. But I’ll pay myself.

  I’ll give myself food that I’ll buy at cheap prices and pass along to myself more expensively. How happy I will be to pocket the profit that the restaurant gets for a couple of sausages!

  For all the necessities of life that I fulfill for myself as an entrepreneur, I’ll add a middleman surcharge of 20 percent to the cost of the goods and services.

  I’ll get my chewing gum from a vending machine set up in my hallway, and the profit will go straight to me.

  I’ll get myself cigarettes for no more than the price that waiters charge.

  When I unlock the front door I’ll give myself a tip.

  I’ll constantly court myself as a consumer for whom only the very best will do, and to whom demonstrating the greatest obligingness is one of my immutable business principles.

  In my apartment are posters that employ sumptuous and invigorating words to tout the high quality of cosmetic items, the beneficial nature of well-established wine and liquor brands, and the effectiveness of tried-and-true medicines.

  I’ll prudently regulate supply and demand, constantly increase consumption with well-considered methods, and conduct effective advertising.

  On a lectern there is a thick, bulky ledger in which I note down my business dealings under debit and credit with the meticulousness of a shrewd businessman. I take stock daily. I know at all times what I need to achieve.

  Unfortunately, I am somewhat lacking in working capital. Recently I gathered some information about myself from Schimmelpfeng. Should I continue to extend myself credit? As a businessman, I need to exercise caution.

  I fear I’m not looking good.

  Berliner Börsen Courier, August 21, 1927

  Film Terror

  ON THE THREAT OF BEING PHOTOGRAPHED

  This has been going on for months already, twice a day, at noon on the way to the restaurant, and barely an hour later when I come back, always at the same inevitable spot, this person harasses me, ambushes me as he calls out his solemn, menacing message: You have just been filmed. The first few times, I was seriously frightened, and actually thought that some director on the hunt for characters had chosen me without my knowledge to play an extra. Now that I know this nonsense has nothing to do with the world of movies, only a modern new type of business that represents “action photography,” I’m less thin-skinned about it. Even so, the formulation of this statement, this insulting passive “being filmed,” never ceases to bother me.

  It rankles me that without even obtaining my consent, this picture-hungry yellow box can keep taking possession of my face, even though I go to great pains to avoid appearing in front of any camera lens. But what annoys me even more than this intrusion is actually the blind idiocy of the cameraman, this witless wastrel who went to great effort a hundred times to capture my portrait, a hundred times in vain sent his leaflet distributor to get me, but still failed to recognize my aversion to film every time, and still inflicts on me twice a day the unpleasant duty of leaving him disappointed. I tried with various demonstrations, holding my hat in front of my head, looking toward the other side of the street, waving him aside with my arms and hands, but nothing works—the cameraman interpreted everything as just a new and interesting variant of his action studies.

  Recently I thought I could escape my fate by choosing a side street beyond the range of the camera. But I hadn’t counted on the tripod being mobile, and all it took was a little rotation to catch up with me on my escapade.

  After giving the matter quite a bit of thought, I have now tried an experiment that I hope will free me from the film terror once and for all. Not grudgingly, offering opposition as I had in the past, no, smiling gleefully, with a stiff posture, eyes right to the camera, really photography-friendly, I allowed myself to be filmed, then gratefully received the announcement of my film premiere.

  Yesterday I picked up my picture. My legs seemed somewhat overly crooked—most likely a problem with the lens—but other than that it was a very lifelike, moving photograph. Under the photograph I wrote in red ink, “This person no longer wishes to be filmed,” and handed it to the cameraman at noon. “You see,” I explained to him, “it would be best for you to attach this picture directly to your camera. If you do that, you’ll save a filmstrip every day and I can finally go into my restaurant undisturbed.” He seemed too astonished at my offer to come up with a reply on the spot. I don’t seriously think he’ll fulfill my wish, but even so, he will surely remember my face. That someone does not pick up his picture is something he understands, from his everyday experience, as a reflection of financial inertia. But the idea that someone would forfeit payment of a mark in order not to be filmed is ultimately a thinly veiled attack on his professional honor. Something of that sort is not forgotten. I hope he doesn’t now come up with the idea of launching a new business in—film removal.

  Berliner Börsen Courier, September 1, 1927

  Berlin Rendezvous

  Rendezvous (Fr., pronounced raan-dey-voo, “present yourselves”): a meetup, together, at a specific spot, also the place itself.

  Adam, for example, liked to meet up with Eve at a certain apple tree. As for Ramses, he waited patiently every single evening at the third corner of the twelfth pyramid for his favorite lady. Caesar, by contrast, met up with Vercingetorix in the rain under the Rhine Bridge. The excesses in which Casanova indulged cannot be described in view of space limitations; his rendezvous are said to have been recorded in a saffiano leather tome as thick as a Berlin telephone book.

  There are distinctions between rendezvous pertaining to business, friendship, love, and family; consequently, there are rendezvous that people are happy to go to and others they dread.

  Rendezvous at apple trees, pyramids, and under Rhine bridges have naturally fallen out of fashion. Nowadays people prefer to use a café, a restaurant for these purposes. People meet up outdoors, at popular gathering spots, under monuments and clocks, at streetcar stops, and in front of theaters and cinema houses.

  In Berlin, three places are the top choices: the Kranzlerecke, that famous str
eet corner on Kurfürstendamm; the Berolina on Alexanderplatz; and the Normaluhr, the oversized clock, at the Zoo railway station. (This does not claim to be a complete list.)

  As far as the Kranzlerecke is concerned, it vividly recalls one of the world’s classic meeting points, the Sirkecke in Vienna. It is the rendezvous spot for international society, the gathering place of the glamorous set that is at home in the hotels on Unter den Linden. Madame sports a chinchilla fur and doesn’t wait for too long; her pinscher looks around for Monsieur and barks. Mustaches carry the fragrance of Paris pomades, every trouser crease is absolutely precise, and the honking cars sound like a well-rehearsed saxophone concert. Berliners get together there too, of course, but rarely, usually to go to the theater or to amble through the museum in the evening: midtown Berlin.

  Alexanderplatz is the rendezvous spot for the stream of women in the workforce—civil servants and shopgirls—who move along until the plaza and jam up at the bus stops and the subway. There, a young woman waits. Determinedly. He has to come. She’ll wait three more minutes, and if he doesn’t come then … He doesn’t come. The girl decides to count to a hundred. Counts up to nine hundred. Not a trace of him. It is well past the fifteen-minute mark. I’m going to strangle him, she tells herself. Then he comes. And arm in arm they flutter away.

  The most popular summer rendezvous point is the Normaluhr at the Zoo railway station. The gateway to nature. Packed with families on Sundays. Kith and kin. Sunday drivers. Juveniles. Boy scouts. Country bumpkins with badges at their buttonholes. A date for the Wannsee. Or for the Kurfürstendamm Kino. Or for five o’clock tea. For the amusement park. Or for the zoo. Everyone stares up at the clock. Sometimes it goes so fast, sometimes so slow. But there are also rendezvous that are not kept.

  Why, it occurred to me, would I choose the Tiergarten bench as a meeting point in this cold weather, where I waited for her in vain? And it didn’t hail and it didn’t rain.

  Berliner Börsen Courier, November 13, 1927

  Night Ride over Berlin

  HOW GERMAN NIGHT FLIGHT OPERATIONS ARE ORGANIZED

  “But now I’m curious,” said the neighbor to my left, as she pressed her nose against the ice-cold windowpane of the airplane cabin and looked down while we were passing by Schöneberg, “whether my husband is home yet.” Fifteen minutes earlier she was still a bundle of nerves, freezing, her teeth chattering. She put up a brave front and tried to fool all of us while facing the roaring three-engine plane, then refreshed her lipstick, which rendered her lips as signal red as the neon tubes that bordered the Tempelhof field.

  Well, as we flew over Berlin, with one curve after another, at night at an altitude of two thousand feet, all nine passengers fell for her composure, even for the straightforward consideration she showed for her husband in Schöneberg, which she displayed clear as day or, rather, clear as night.

  After all, how did we really feel? Cool to our very hearts.

  And what was below us? The sea of lights of Berlin.

  How were the motors working? Like precision instruments. What lay behind us? The concerns of an incredulous generation. And in front of us, any moment now, Bal paré in the giant aircraft, followed by a billiards tournament. The development is that rapid.

  Because today even the night is a time for traffic.

  In 1924, when we heard that American airship travel had instituted regular day-and-night service between New York and San Francisco, we shook our heads in disbelief. We had yet to be convinced of the safety of a daytime flight, and technical futurists were already planning to do everything they could not to waste the night, the terribly dark, perilous night: to fly independent of time, irrespective of whether land could be sighted below.

  People are not drawn to fly at night for the sport of it; the impetus for nighttime travel arises from the need to travel great distances. The seasons, the winter, even the fall and the spring make it necessary to fly after dark as well. We no longer wish to sacrifice the day to travel; it is part of work.

  Germany was ahead of all the other European countries in the arena of nighttime travel. In 1924 the Berlin–Warnemünde–Stockholm route was used for overnight airmail, and Berlin–Copenhagen and Berlin–Hamburg followed. The year 1926 saw the first nighttime passenger flights along the Berlin–Königsberg route as a link in the London–Moscow air route. In the course of the past few years, airports, routes, and the airplanes themselves have been adapted to accommodate night duty. Light signals were introduced, wind direction indicators were added, and landing areas were surrounded with floodlights that illuminated large areas in green and white and red. They even went to the length of compensating for the reduced visibility compared to daytime flying by constructing a row of lights with a high-wattage rotating searchlight mounted every eighteen miles, and prominent neon lamps every three miles. These light towers are in service night after night, all indicating emergency landing fields. But that’s not something to think about right off; a carefully devised system of signals, the use of radio telegraphy, landing lights, and magnesium lighting on the wings of the planes ensure the same level of safety as during the day. The pilots are all experienced veterans, and it is regarded as a special distinction to serve as a night pilot.

  Director Milch, who gave these explanations yesterday during an official visit to the nighttime illumination of the Tempelhof airfield, remarked in closing that the comprehensive implementation of aviation on all routes by day and by night was one of the most important tasks of international airship travel. In the foreseeable future we will easily work with all routes independent of the time of day and the weather conditions.

  The Berlin–Hanover route has already been completed, as has the one linking Berlin and Königsberg. Berlin–Cologne, Berlin–Halle–Munich, and Berlin–Breslau are under construction, and in the spring new Junker airplanes will make it possible for Lufthansa to service all German routes at night as well.

  The airplane glided over Berlin like a giant bat, giving people a clear view of the streets and squares of the city as they marveled at their ability to scan the enormous distance from the radio tower to the thermal power station in Rummelsburg at a glance. No sooner were we flying over the Kurfürstendamm than, after just one curve, the airplane was already rolling across the Tempelhof lawn. Seconds earlier, millions of lights had been shining up from below, but now there was nothing but night around us, and the airport building, which from above had seemed like a match, now towered up like a skyscraper.

  Berliner Börsen Courier, December 6, 1927

  The Business of Thirst

  WHAT PEOPLE ARE DRINKING NOWADAYS

  The saying about love and hunger making the world go round is quite literally wrong. These elemental factors should be named, but thirst is even more elemental, powerful, and immediate than hunger. There are people who can go hungry for two to six weeks, yet they can cope with thirst for forty-eight hours at most.

  Hunger is a furious, burning sensation at first, then a weakness. A person’s eagerness to satisfy hunger eases up, and the person is said to be too hungry to eat. Thirst is an opening up of the expectant body from deeper and deeper within, awaiting the moment when an overabundance of the long-anticipated drink streams into the dryness of the body.

  Berlin has been dreaming of quenching thirst for days. Directly, with water, soda, beer, and ice cream, and indirectly (thirst of the skin), with baths, snow mountains, wind on a sailboat.

  Heat renders manifest the most vital mystery of the body: we burn off moisture. The sun, which enables us to live, heightens its intensity: life, known in this form as sweat, breaks out. We dispense it to the atmosphere, we have to decompose. According to Joseph Löbl, perspiration amounts to ¾ quart per day even at moderate temperatures. Other numbers he cites: a ride through a southern Californian plain at 75 degrees produced 10½ quarts of sweat loss, an intense soccer game 14 pounds in 70 minutes, a marathon race 8½ pounds in three hours.

  Berliners could now theoretically lose qu
ite a bit of weight, free of charge! But they drink as much as their bodies can hold. Beer, with its thermal value, least of all. The spike in consumption is slight, as everyone knows that heat increases the debilitating effect of the beer. Let us recall that attempt at hiking the Bilkegrat. They climbed from 5,000 feet up to 8,000 feet, twice under the same conditions, but once after consuming an ounce of alcohol. Result: one-fifth more time = one-seventh greater energy consumption. Once this finding was expressed in popular terms, the result was a reduction of beer consumption in Germany, where it amounted to three quarts per capita, per week for every person over the age of fifteen in 1913, and by 1927 it was down to two quarts.

  The big restaurants are even reporting a decline in beer consumption these days, offset by an increase in sparkling water and other carbonated drinks, and of course the sale of milk doesn’t bring in much business. But at the bars, all the cocktails made with tea are selling better than ever.

  Profiting the most from the heat are the small and makeshift drink stands and the train station restaurants. People quench their thirst when they get the chance; they don’t arrange for it the way they do for a meal. Ice cream parlors and ice cream carts are showing the relatively highest sales increase. On Sundays, large snack bars geared to tourists have sold between four thousand and five thousand portions of ice cream, and small vending trucks up to five times the usual sales volume; they constantly need to restock their supplies. And all dining cars are sure to report as they reach their destination: “Drinks sold out.”