I was a very small fish in the German celluloid pond. I had worked at the Ufa studios in Berlin, but I had only been a tiny wheel in that big machine.
—Billy Wilder
“Are we rolling?—as we say on the set?” Veteran film director Billy Wilder eyes the tape recorder before him on his desk and the interviewer across from him. It is hard to believe that this energetic, articulate man began his career in films many years ago in Berlin by writing film scripts, most notably for a semidocumentary called People on Sunday (1929). After he migrated to Hollywood in the 1930s in the wake of the rise of Hitler, Wilder continued his career as a scriptwriter for such major directors as Ernst Lubitsch. When he graduated to film direction with The Major and the Minor (1942), he continued to collaborate on the scripts for his films, and he finally took over the task of producing the films he directed to ensure his artistic independence. He was, therefore, able to create motion pictures that bore the unmistakable stamp of his own artistic vision.
Although Wilder made comedies as well as dramas, his satirical purpose was the same in film after film: to expose the foibles and flaws of human nature to the public eye to stimulate audiences to serious reflections about the human condition. It has been said that if a satirist like Jonathan Swift had lived in the twentieth century, he would have written screenplays for Billy Wilder.
Wilder’s office was richly endowed with memorabilia associated with the greats of Hollywood history with whom he had worked in his long career. There was, for example, a photo of Marlene Dietrich, whom he first knew in Berlin in the early 1920s. Some of the awards he had received over the years were inconspicuously stashed on bookshelves (he won no fewer than six Oscars); they easily went unnoticed by visitors. A veteran like Wilder had no need for self-advertisement.
Billy Wilder was born on June 22, 1906, in Sucha, a town in the Austrian province of Galicia, about one hundred miles east of Vienna, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now part of Poland. He was christened Samuel, but his mother Eugenia, who had lived in New York City for a time in her youth, nicknamed him Billy. She had seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Madison Square Garden and was fascinated by stories about Billy the Kid.1 Billy had a brother, Wilhelm, one year older than Billy, whom his mother nicknamed Willie. Maximilian Wilder, their father, ran a chain of railway restaurants at the depots where the trains on the Vienna line stopped. In due course Max moved on to owning a hotel for transients in Krakow called (in English) Hotel City. “My father was a failed entrepreneur; none of his business enterprises ever succeeded,” Wilder said.2
Billy Wilder was born during the reign of Emperor Franz Josef, who would figure in Wilder’s film The Emperor Waltz (1948). “Billy Wilder was part of the crowd that watched Emperor Franz Josef’s funeral procession in 1916,” writes Geoffrey Macnab. “He marveled at the scale of the pageant and the sight of the tiny Crown Prince Otto amid the black clad mourners.”3
The Wilders moved to Vienna at the outbreak of World War I and remained there after the war. The gymnasium Wilder attended in Vienna was for recalcitrant students. He had earned a reputation early on as a problem student because he sometimes rebelled against the “iron discipline” of the Vienna schools, and he often played hooky. He preferred to skip school and go to the movies. American films were widely available, and his favorite silent film star was Charlie Chaplin.
A crucial incident of Wilder’s youth occurred when he noticed a postcard addressed to his father in the afternoon mail. It was an invitation to attend the graduation of his son Hubert from boarding school. The lad in question was Max Wilder’s illegitimate son, about whom his immediate family knew nothing. Later Billy silently handed the card to his father, who made no comment about it. “My father and I had an unspoken agreement about the matter,” Wilder explained. Hubert was their secret, and that created something of a bond between father and son.4 In light of this episode, young Billy began to sense at this early age that deception was the normal climate of life—an attitude that would later surface in his films.
Wilder graduated from high school in 1924 at age eighteen with barely passing grades. Soon after, he had another traumatic experience. Having become a rabid fan of American jazz, he frequented a record shop in downtown Vienna, where he bought imported jazz recordings. One of the clerks was an attractive girl named Ilse, and Wilder began dating her—until two of his friends told him that they had noticed Ilse leaning against a lamppost in the red-light district of Vienna, soliciting customers. Wilder went to see for himself. He confronted Ilse, slapped her across the face, and angrily broke off their relationship.
According to biographer Maurice Zolotow, this bitter experience destroyed Wilder’s faith in women, and it explains the hard-bitten, cynical females who turn up in his movies, from femmes fatales like Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity to the seductive spy named Ilse in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Wilder even employed a similar episode in Sherlock Holmes, wherein Holmes recalls, in a flashback, discovering that his girl was a harlot (a scene deleted from the release prints of the film). But Wilder maintained that Zolotow’s remarks amounted to a kind of “primer level” Freudian analysis. “He tried to explain why I hate women,” Wilder fumed. “Well, I don’t hate women”; so, he said, there was nothing to be explained. He added that Ilse made no lasting impression on him whatever.5
Wilder was eager to contradict Zolotow on a related point. Zolotow hazarded that Wilder fell into such a deep depression after his breakup with Ilse that he dropped out of law school after only one semester.6 It is true that Billy’s parents had hoped that he would become a lawyer and urged him to enroll in the University of Vienna after high school. But Wilder insisted, “I never attended the university at all, I would have been bored stiff studying law; and I told my parents so.”7
In any case, after he quarreled with his parents about his future, they finally relented and inquired what career he had in mind. Wilder stubbornly replied that he had set his sights on becoming a newspaper reporter. He had liked writing for his high school newspaper and thought that the life of a journalist would be more interesting and eventful than a job in an office.
In 1924 Wilder moved out of his parents’ home and got himself a tawdry flat of his own. He started his writing career by becoming a reporter for Die Stunde (The hour), a Viennese tabloid. The paper wanted to feature celebrity interviews for its special Christmas issue in 1925, so Wilder, a cub reporter full of bravado and ambition, sought out renowned Viennese figures for interviews. He succeeded in snaring composer Richard Strauss and playwright Arthur Schnitzler, but he got his comeuppance from Sigmund Freud. Wilder showed Freud his press card, and Freud promptly showed Wilder the door. The controversial founder of psychoanalysis was understandably wary of journalists, but Wilder was proud to have met Freud at all and took this rejection with equanimity.
Because he was an aficionado of jazz, Wilder was particularly interested in interviewing American bandleader Paul Whiteman, the King of Jazz, in the summer of 1926, when he came to Vienna for a concert. Whiteman’s lead vocalist was Bing Crosby, who would star in Wilder’s musical The Emperor Waltz two decades later. Whiteman was pleased with Wilder’s write-up of his Vienna concert, so he asked him to come to Berlin and cover his concert there. Wilder cagily notified his parents that he was going to stay in Berlin for a few days after the concert, when he had actually decided to stay there for good.
When Wilder arrived in Berlin at age twenty-one, it was a heady center of the arts that drew ambitious young people from all over Europe. He soon earned a reputation as a freelance crime reporter for Berlin tabloids like Tempo. Wilder was already cynical by nature; hence the exposés of greed, lust, and political corruption that he reported for the scandal sheets in Vienna and Berlin served to deepen his cynical attitude toward human nature—an attitude that was later to surface in his films.
Wilder’s earnings as a freelance journalist were meager, since he got paid only for the pieces that were accepted. Indeed, he was sometimes reduced to sleeping in the waiting room of a railway station. To make a fast buck in the autumn of 1926, he conceived the idea of writing a series of articles on gigolos, so he posed as a dancing partner for elderly ladies at the Hotel Eden. It was the hotel’s custom to hold a thé dansant every afternoon, when young men steered lonely matrons around the dance floor. According to protocol, a lady would ask the waiter for an Eintanzer (dancer): “Waiter, I’d like to order one extra-dry dancing partner.” The dancer then went through the ritual of asking her to dance with him. “One had to say enchanting things while dancing divinely with those dreadful creatures,” Wilder commented. His outré series of articles, “Waiter, Bring Me a Dancer: The Life of a Gigolo,” was published in January 1927 in four installments. The series caused quite a furor. Wilder coyly implied that some of the boys provided services for the ladies beyond ballroom dancing, but he always contended that he was not one of them. “I was a newspaper man, gathering evidence for a story”; he maintained that he was not inclined to bed down with any of these “corpulent old ladies,” even for a considerable hunk of cash.8
Wilder liked to hang out at the Romanisches Café, a Bohemian tavern frequented by people in the film industry as well as newspapermen. He began moving around the edges of the German film industry by making contacts at the café. It was there that he encountered Joe Pasternak and Paul Kohner, managers of the Berlin office of Universal Pictures in Hollywood. He also met a rising young actress named Marlene Dietrich, who would star in two of his films years later.
Berlin in the 1920s was the film capital of Europe; indeed, this period became known as the golden age of German cinema, when directors like Ernst Lubitsch (Madame Du Barry), F. W. Murnau (Nosferatu), and Fritz Lang (Metropolis) produced major silent films in Germany that were seen around the world. So Wilder, while still working as a newspaperman, began writing film scenarios on the side, with a view to pursuing a career in the movies. He could not sell any script under his own name, since he had no standing in the film industry. So he became a ghostwriter: he would collaborate on a script with an established screenwriter but would not receive an official screen credit for his efforts as coauthor of the script.
In all, Wilder worked on close to fifty scripts for silent pictures from 1927 to 1929, receiving twenty-five to fifty dollars per script. The number of screenplays is somewhat misleading, since scripts for silent movies were usually about thirty pages long—there was no dialogue, only action.
In 1928 Max Wilder came to Berlin to visit his son, only to be stricken with severe stomach pains while there. Max expired of an abdominal rupture on November 10, 1928. Wilder buried his father at the Jewish cemetery on Schönhauser Allee in Berlin, since he could not afford to ship the corpse back to Vienna. He was eking out an existence in Berlin. Sometimes he was compelled to borrow money from a man named Nietz, leaving his typewriter as collateral. Wilder would use this incident in The Lost Weekend (1945), when a failed writer decides to hock his typewriter.
Wilder was making enough money from ghostwriting to rent a modest accommodation in a slightly disreputable rooming house. It was there that he sold his first solo script. “I was living in a rooming house where there was also living Lulu, the daughter of the housekeeper. Lulu was engaged, but she was also playing around a little on the side. One night, when she was at it again,” Heinz, her muscle-bound fiancé, “stormed up the stairs and pounded on the door.” Suddenly Wilder saw a frightened man on the ledge outside his window, carrying his clothes in a bundle under his arm. He hauled the man into his room. Wilder recognized him as Herr Galitzenstein, the president of Maxim Films. Wilder seized a script that had been turned down all over town and informed the producer that the price of his hiding out in Wilder’s room was that he purchase the screenplay. “Send it along to my office,” the producer said. Wilder replied, “Tomorrow you’ll forget you ever met me,” and demanded payment on the spot. Galitzenstein gave Wilder five hundred marks and beat a hasty retreat down the back stairs.9
Carl Laemmle, studio chief at Universal Pictures in Hollywood, sent word to Pasternak and Kohner that he wanted them to produce a low-budget silent picture starring Eddie Polo, a has-been Hollywood Western hero who was trying to revive his sagging career in Germany. Pasternak and Kohner immediately commissioned Wilder to concoct a script for Polo.
Writing the script, Wilder was able to draw on his own experiences as a journalist. Polo had been an action star at Universal in his heyday, so Wilder had him playing an intrepid reporter who captures a mob of kidnappers singlehandedly. Wilder endeavored to enliven the proceedings with a climactic car chase in which Polo gallantly pursues the kidnappers. He even has Polo gamely holding the gang at gunpoint while phoning in his story to his editor—before calling the police! Alas, it was too late to salvage Polo’s stalled career, given his advanced age; he was no longer credible as an action hero. Der Teufelsreporter (The daredevil reporter) opened on June 19, 1929, in Hamburg and was quickly forgotten. Wilder nursed a grudge against Polo, who had seduced Wilder’s current girlfriend, so he wanted to forget Polo and the picture—except for the fact that the film represented his first official screen credit as a scriptwriter, and a solo credit at that.
Wilder developed the habit of writing on the title page of each script “Cum Deo,” Latin for “With God.” He did so because he was convinced that whatever talent he possessed came from above. He picked up the practice, he said, from another writer whom he worked with in Germany. Then, perhaps a little embarrassed by expressing some religious sentiment, he added, “It can’t hurt; it’s the cheapest way I know of to bribe that being up there in the clouds.”
Wilder’s contacts at the Romanisches Café were beginning to pay off, not only in terms of his relationship with Pasternak and Kohner but also in the case of Robert Siodmak, an aspiring filmmaker. Robert’s brother Curt suggested that Robert assemble an independent film unit to make a low-budget semidocumentary, shot entirely on location in and around Berlin. The story was about a group of young Berliners sharing a Sunday afternoon outing on their day off at Lake Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin. Wilder’s scenario was based on Curt’s concept. Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) was the projected title.
The picture was to be shot on a shoestring; Siodmak drew up a budget of five thousand marks (roughly five hundred American dollars at the time). He then set about cobbling together the financing. He borrowed a goodly sum from a relative. In addition, Edgar Ulmer, a friend of Siodmak’s and the assistant director on the film, cofinanced the picture with money that he had earned as a production assistant on Lang’s Metropolis and other movies.
The balance of the crew included cinematographer Eugene Schüfftan and assistant cinematographer Fred Zinnemann. Schüfftan, who had served as one of the cinematographers on Metropolis, was the only pro in the film unit. “Four nonprofessionals were selected to play themselves,” remembered Zinnemann, “because we couldn’t afford professional actors.” They could shoot only on Sundays because all of the actors had regular jobs during the week.10 The cast included Edwin Splettstösser, a taxi driver; Wolfgang von Walterschausen, a wine salesman; Christl Ehlers, a movie extra; and Brigette Borchert, a salesgirl in a record shop. Each weekend Wilder would meet with Siodmak and Ulmer at the Romanisches Café to flesh out the scenes in Wilder’s scenario to be shot that Sunday. Wilder would scribble the additional material “on pieces of scratch paper,” the backs of envelopes, and even the café menus.11
No one on the team owned a car, so they had to travel by bus to the location sites. During the week, Wilder and Siodmak would take the footage shot on the previous Sunday to the laboratory to be developed. One day they got into a heated argument about a brainstorm that Siodmak had, which departed significantly from the script. To Wilder, the script was always “scripture.” They both stormed angrily off the bus, “leaving the film negative behind them—a whole day’s work, which was never seen again and had to be reshot.”12
During production Wilder wrote an article for Tempo in which he explained that the film aimed to render a portrait of daily life in Berlin, focusing on a cross-section of typical Berliners. He and his fellow filmmakers wanted to bypass the conventional methods of traditional German cinema. So the movie avoided the “clearly contrived situations” characteristic of the schmaltzy pictures being turned out by the big studios.13 Since the actors could shoot only one day a week, the filmmakers worked at a fevered tempo each Sunday, to get as much accomplished as possible before having to shut down until the next weekend. When filming finally wrapped, the four principals in the cast retired permanently from the screen. But work on the film continued.
Siodmak and Schüfftan edited the footage into a one-hour film and finished postproduction on December 11, 1929. Wilder and his partners beat the bushes for a distributor, until finally Hanns Brodnitz, who was in charge of distribution at Ufa, the enormous studio at Babelsberg outside Berlin, bought the exhibition rights. (Ufa was the acronym for Universum Film-Aktiengesellschaft, the Universal Film-Production Company). Menschen am Sonntag was given a limited release on the art house circuit in Germany in December 1929. It opened in Berlin on February 4, 1930.
Critics noted enthusiastically that the ordinariness of the characters was captured with unvarnished realism. Edwin and Christl loll languidly about on the beach together, while Wolf and Brigette go off into the woods, where he seduces her. The camera coyly pans up to the treetops and descends to the lovers. Brigette then removes a pinecone from under her back; it has been poking her and making her uncomfortable all the time that Wolf was on top of her. She feared that if she mentioned it during their lovemaking, it would ruin the moment. Both Brigette and Wolf laugh nervously as they stare at the cone. At the film’s end the four individuals go their separate ways, realizing that they never got to know each other at all. They part nonchalantly, with no plans to see one another on the following Sunday. A printed epilogue declares, “The actors went back into the nameless crowd from which they came.”
Menschen am Sonntag is a movie of honesty and simplicity. Wilder’s script brings “zest, humor, and enthusiasm to what could have been dull material,” noted Sight and Sound when the film was released on DVD.14 “The film did make quite a splash at the time it was released,” Wilder remembered. “People talked about it. It was a semidocumentary type film, which was very novel for its time. We had a fresh approach to our material because we made the film on our own, and we were therefore not caught up in the quagmire of banality of some of the big studio films. We were chiefly concerned with learning our craft and trying from the beginning of our careers to avoid the clichés of the average commercial pictures.”
Wilder and his colleagues were fortunate that their picture was a big success, despite that it was released when silent movies were going out of favor. “Klangfilm, that is, sound movies, were introduced in America with Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson,” on October 6, 1927, Zinnemann said. The film had a musical score and four musical numbers, but only one dialogue sequence. “It was followed in July 1928 by Brian Foy’s The Lights of New York, a gangster movie that was the first all-talking picture,” he continued. “The coming of the sound era took Berlin by storm,” and there was a frantic rush to convert studios to sound in Berlin.15 Movies have not shut up since. Melody of the Heart, a musical released in Germany in late 1929, formally inaugurated the era of talking pictures in Germany. Wilder welcomed the advent of sound because it allowed for spoken dialogue and thus for more character development. Individual characters could now reveal themselves more effectively through the nuances of speech.
Wilder, Zinnemann, Siodmak, and Ulmer would all become Hollywood directors, but at the time he scripted Menschen am Sonntag, Wilder pointed out, he was still making the rounds of the studios. He remembered sounding off at the Romanisches Café about how the studios should be more willing to hire young talent. Robert Liebmann, head of the story department at Ufa, went over to Wilder’s table and announced, “If you are as talented at screenwriting as you are at shooting your mouth off, I might give you some work.” With that, Wilder began to obtain writing assignments, mostly at Ufa, which was presided over by Erich Pommer, a canny impresario who had helped to make it the top German film corporation.
Between 1930 and 1933, the year that Wilder left Germany, he received official screen credits on at least a dozen films. He said he also made uncredited contributions to some other screenplays, for example, Ein Burschenlied aus Heidelberg (The student song from Heidelberg, 1930). One of the most noteworthy films for which Wilder was granted a screen credit was Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives, 1931), a fresh, vigorous movie about a lad who secures the help of a gang of street urchins to help him catch a thief. The film was derived from the 1928 novel of the same title by Erich Kästner, which had become an instant children’s classic.
Film historian Kevin Brownlow thinks very highly of Emil und die Detektive. It “is brilliantly written and directed; it keeps up a tremendous pace. . . . Gerhardt Lamprecht, the director, has a marvelous light touch; the children are appealing and very well directed.” The documentary-style use of locations, Brownlow continues, makes the film of special interest. “The freshness and vitality of the street scenes must have been astonishing to audiences accustomed to all of the studio-bound talkies.” He concludes, “This is one of my top favorite German films.”16 The movie was a big hit in Germany when it premiered on December 2, 1931, and it went on to be booked on the art house circuit in the United States.
The last German movie Wilder collaborated on was Was Frauen träumen (What Women Dream, 1933), which stars Peter Lorre, one of Wilder’s pals from the Romanisches Café, as a police detective on the trail of a female jewel thief.
When Hitler officially became chancellor in January 1933, Wilder realized his days in Berlin were numbered. The Nazis were tightening their grip on every aspect of German society, including the film industry. Wilder was very much aware that, as a Jew, he had no future in Germany.
Wilder opted to emigrate to France, since he was fairly fluent in French, which he had studied at school. Twenty-four hours after the Reichstag fire, Wilder took the midnight train to Paris. All the money he could scrape together was hidden in his hatband. He was wise to leave Germany when he did; a few days after his departure, the front office at Ufa carried out an official “purge” of the Jewish employees at the studio.
The twenty-six-year-old Wilder arrived in Paris on the morning of March 1, 1933. He holed up at the Ansonia, a shabby boardinghouse near the Arc de Triomphe, where several Jewish expatriates whom he had known at Ufa had taken lodgings: Lorre; composers Frederick Hollander and Franz Waxman; and screenwriters Max Kolpe, Hans Lustig, Walter Reisch, and Robert Liebmann. Wilder would work again with Hollander, Reisch, and Waxman in Hollywood. Right now he got together with Kolpe and Lustig and hashed out a screenplay for a low-budget caper film about a gang of delinquents who specialize in stealing cars. Waxman committed himself to scoring the picture once they got the project off and running. The screenplay was titled Mauvaise graine (Bad Seed), using a term for a youngster who is incorrigible and usually becomes a delinquent—thus the auto thieves in the script.
Wilder and his team had difficulty obtaining financial backing for the movie, since none had established themselves in the French film industry. One producer offered to fund the picture, provided that his girlfriend could play the female lead. Wilder sarcastically noted that the young lady could not act her way out of one of her cashmere sweaters and turned her down, thereby alienating the producer.
To save money, Wilder’s partners persuaded him to direct the movie. He in turn recruited a Hungarian immigrant, filmmaker Alexander Esway, to codirect the picture with him. Wilder had no experience in directing, but Esway had already codirected two French movies, including Le jugement de minuit (The judgment of the moment, 1932). It was Esway who in turn secured producer Edouard Corniglion-Molinier to finance the picture for one hundred thousand American dollars—a small budget by today’s standards, but a king’s ransom for an independent film in 1933.
Danielle Darrieux, who played Jeanette, remembered that the cast considered Wilder the principal director of the picture. He coached the actors during rehearsals, while Esway kibitzed from the sidelines. Wilder added, “Most of the interiors were shot in a converted garage, even the living room scenes.”17
Wilder shrewdly incorporated into the film several sequences that were shot silent, with only the addition of background music and sound effects. Waxman’s lively jazz score was filled with fox-trot tunes.
Wilder came up with some inventive directorial touches for his first effort as a filmmaker. Jeanette first appears holding up her compact mirror while checking her makeup. Then she lowers the mirror to reveal her lovely face. Jeanette, it develops, is the only female member of the mob of youthful auto thieves to which her brother Jean (Raymond Galle) also belongs. After Henri (Pierre Mingand) joins the gang, he soon falls for the beguiling Jeanette, and their relationship blossoms into love. Wilder slyly introduced a veiled homosexual subplot into the film. Baby-faced Jean has a crush on Henri, whom he invites to share his flat and sleep on his couch. Jean proudly proclaims more than once that Henri is his best friend, trots around after him like an adoring puppy, and is on hand when Henri undresses for bed. Yet none of the other characters seem to notice, perhaps because Henri is seriously preoccupied with Jeanette.
When Henri and Jeanette are spotted by the police riding in a stolen vehicle, the cops give chase. The speeding car careens off the road and crashes into a ditch. Henri and Jeanette manage to survive the accident and elude the police, but the harrowing experience motivates them to go straight. The film concludes with the young lovers’ embarking on a steamship bound for America and a new life.
Like Wilder’s earlier German film, the present French picture was shot documentary style in the streets and alleyways of the city and on country lanes. “We didn’t use a single studio soundstage. We shot mostly outdoors on real locations,” Wilder explained, just as François Truffaut and his comrades would later advocate.
Long unavailable for viewing, Mauvaise graine was released on DVD in the United States in a spiffed-up digital package in 2002. Wilder’s directorial debut cleverly weaves bouncy comedy with high-octane thrills. This movie is significant because it fills in a gap in Wilder’s filmography; it is a potboiler that mixes comedy with crime melodrama, as Wilder would later do again in Some Like It Hot (1959).
Mauvaise graine went into general release in France in the summer of 1934, greeted by mostly positive reviews. “I cannot say that it made me very happy” to have directed a feature film, Wilder said, since the pressure of directing his first film on the double and on the cheap made the production experience a real ordeal. “But now I knew I could do it.”18 He still preferred writing to directing, and by the time Mauvaise graine was in the cinemas, he was already in Hollywood pursuing his career as a film writer.
After finishing Mauvaise graine, Wilder sent an original script, “Pam-Pam,” to Joe May, a German who had known him at Ufa and was now a producer at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood. On the strength of Wilder’s screenplay, May arranged to bring him over to Hollywood at the studio’s expense for a brief writing stint at Columbia. Several of Wilder’s fellow refugees, including Lorre and Reisch, also decamped for Hollywood around this time.
Wilder left Europe for New York on the Aquitania on January 22, 1934. His brother Willie, who had preceded him to the United States by some years, met him at the dock. Willie had developed a successful line of women’s handbags in New York. Billy stayed a few days with Willie and his family in their home on Long Island, where he got his first impression of America. When he got up one snowy morning, he noticed a big, black Cadillac stopping in front of the house. A boy with a stack of newspapers got out and tossed one on the porch. The weather was bad, so the newsboy’s family, it seems, was driving him on his paper route. “What kind of a country is this?” Wilder exclaimed. “Newspapers delivered by Cadillac!”19 A few days later, Wilder arrived by train in Los Angeles.
A decade later, Willie followed Billy to Hollywood, where he produced and directed a variety of cheapies under the name of W. Lee Wilder to avoid being confused with his brother Billy. Willie’s only film of note was The Great Flamarion (1945), a low-budget film noir starring Erich von Stroheim, whose career was in decline, and directed by Anthony Mann, whose career was on the rise.
Soon after Billy’s arrival in Hollywood, he set to work at Columbia expanding his scenario for “Pam-Pam” into a full-length screenplay. Looking back, he said,
Basically you would have to divide the influx of German picture makers into the United States into two categories. First there were the ones that were hired by the American studios because they were outstanding geniuses like Murnau and Lubitsch, to mention just the very prominent ones. These were the people who came over in the ’20s who were sought after by studio executives because they had made enormously successful films in Europe. That was the first group.
Then in the middle ’30s came an avalanche of refugees who were looking for jobs on the basis of their experience in German pictures such as Zinnemann and myself. We didn’t come because we were invited like the first group; we came to save our lives, and from the first we desperately tried to learn English so that we could get work in Hollywood. So you see in my case I was a job seeker, not an accomplished motion picture maker. Moreover, Austria, my country, no longer existed for me. I really had to make good here. It wasn’t a question of my saying to myself, “Well, if things don’t work out here I can go back to Austria or to Germany.” For me it was a question of fighting it out here and surviving, or going back and winding up like most of my family in the ovens of Auschwitz.
Since my profession at the time was writing, it was especially important for me to learn English, and here I was knowing only German and French. It was a very tough period for me. I had sold an original story to Columbia while I was still in Paris and I made $150 a week for a short time because of that when I first arrived in Hollywood.
Though Wilder spoke no more than a smattering of rudimentary English, he admitted to knowing about a dozen words that the industry censor would not tolerate. He taught himself the language by regularly listening to baseball games on the radio and by going to American movies.
The studio boss of Columbia was Harry Cohn, an obstreperous, volatile, vulgar-tongued Hollywood mogul; he was once called a thug in a front-office suit. Sam Briskin, Cohn’s chief assistant, was an equally gruff, outspoken type.
During his first meeting with Wilder, Briskin was chagrined to observe Wilder’s poor command of English. When Briskin inquired about Wilder’s nationality, Wilder froze; his English temporarily deserted him and he muttered, “I . . . been . . . Austrian.” Briskin dispatched Wilder to the writers’ compound, where he was assigned to a six-by-eight cubicle. Wilder was severely handicapped by his elementary English. “I kept writing in German, and some of my pals who were a little ahead of me would translate my stuff into English.” Years later, he examined the translation of one of his scripts and suffered “a mild coronary” when he discovered that his translators were not always accurate in rendering his work into English.20
Wilder’s six-month contract with Columbia expired; so did the visitor’s permit with which he had entered America. He had to go to Mexico to obtain an immigration visa because the U.S. quota for immigrants from Europe had been filled. Wilder crossed the border into Mexico and rented a squalid hotel room in Mexicali, where he presented his case to the official at the U.S. Consulate. “I knew I needed a bunch of documents to present to the consul,” he said later, “but all I had was my birth certificate and my passport.” Wilder explained to the consul that he had left Berlin on very short notice; if he went back to Germany to obtain additional credentials, “they would ship me to Dachau on the next train.” Finally the consul asked him how he hoped to support himself in the United States. “I write screenplays,” Wilder answered. The consul paced up and down his narrow, dilapidated office, then returned to his desk and said, “Write some good ones!” With that, the consul, a movie buff, stamped Wilder’s passport, allowing him to stay permanently in the United States. Wilder concluded, “I have tried ever since not to disappoint that dear man in Mexicali.” For the record, Wilder became an American citizen in 1939, a date he remembered as one of the shining days of his life.
When he returned to Los Angeles from Mexicali, however, life was still bleak; he went hungry for weeks on end while he continued to study English. He endeavored to find employment as a scriptwriter on the basis of his previous work in Germany. “I had collaborated on German films that most people in Hollywood had never heard of. . . . I had to entice an agent to handle me because my list of credits from Germany was not impressive. There was no Nosferatu behind me as there was behind Murnau. I had none of the accomplishments of an Ernst Lubitsch.”
For a time Wilder got a cramped room at the tacky Château Marmont, an actors’ hotel on the Sunset Strip. During the Christmas season, however, the hotel was fully booked, and Wilder was reduced to living in the lounge adjoining the women’s restroom, since that was all he could afford. The ladies eyed him suspiciously as they passed through his “quarters” en route to the lavatory. Later on he bunked with Peter Lorre in a fleabag hotel for ten dollars a week. They survived “in dignified starvation” on one can of Campbell’s soup a day, warmed on a hot plate. “I had leather patches on the elbows of my jacket,” Wilder recalled, “not because it was fashionable, but because there were holes in them.”
Wilder’s poverty did not last, but he always retained his German accent. “You could lose your accent if you came over from Europe as a youngster,” he explained; “if you went to school here. But I was nearly twenty-eight when I arrived. It was too late for me to lose my foreign accent.”21 Elsewhere, he remarked, “If you think I have an accent, you should have heard Ernst Lubitsch,” for whom Wilder would work as a screenwriter. Wilder continued, “But he had a wonderful ear for the American idiom and slang; you either have an ear or you don’t, as Van Gogh said. I suppose I have it; many foreigners do.”22
Wilder also never lost his outsider’s view of American life. “We who had our roots in the European past, I think, brought with us a fresh attitude towards America, a new eye with which to examine this country on film, as opposed to the eye of native-born moviemakers who were accustomed to everything around them. Hence there was some novelty about our approach to the films that we made here from the start.”
As Wilder’s English improved, so did his fortunes. Joe May was offered a chance to direct films at Fox Studios, and he managed to wangle a short-term contract for Wilder there. Wilder collaborated on the script for May’s Music in the Air (1934), which was based on a dated operetta by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. The movie was produced by Erich Pommer, another immigrant for whom Wilder had worked at Ufa. Wilder received his first official screen credit on an American film, but the hummable Kern-Hammerstein score could not redeem the flimsy plot, and Music in the Air failed at the box office.
When Fox merged with Twentieth Century in 1935, Wilder was out of a job. He continued to live a hand-to-mouth existence in the film colony, not having much luck as a screenwriter. He collaborated on scripts for a string of forgettable pictures, sometimes uncredited; these included love stories, crime melodramas, and musicals.
Finally, in 1936, Wilder was placed under contract to Paramount by Manny Wolf, head of the story department. Wolf, a short, nattily dressed chap with Coke-bottle glasses, was a shrewd judge of talent. He saw that Wilder was a promising writer and hired him at a salary of $250 a week. The writers’ building on the Paramount lot, which housed 104 screenwriters, had been christened the Tower of Babel because it housed so many writers who were exiles, like Wilder himself.
One of the writers whom Paramount employed around this time was American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wilder was unimpressed by Fitzgerald’s screenwriting abilities: “It seemed to me as though he could never get beyond page 3 of a script. He made me think of a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect the fucking pipes, so the water would flow.” Fitzgerald was a great novelist, Wilder concluded, but he did not know how to construct a scene in a screenplay.23
During his first couple of years in Hollywood, Wilder shied away from dating women in the German refugee colony who, like himself, were employed in the film industry. Instead, he acquired American girlfriends who could help him master English. As a freelance screenwriter, he played the field and did not think seriously about marriage. Once he had a steady job on salary, however, he decided that he was in a position to marry.
Wilder had been introduced by another screenwriter to Judith Iribe, a sophisticated lady from a prominent California family. They had been dating for more than a year when he finally popped the question; they eloped to Yuma, Arizona, on December 22, 1936. The newlyweds moved into an apartment on South Camden Drive in Beverly Hills and eventually into a house on North Beverly Drive. Their daughter Victoria was born on December 21, 1939, one day before their third wedding anniversary.
Judith was courtly and reserved; Billy was brash and indelicate. Not surprisingly, they gradually grew apart, and Billy sought companionship elsewhere. Judith and Billy became increasingly estranged as the years went by and eventually divorced.
Wilder formed an important professional relationship in 1936, the year of his first marriage, that proved to be far more viable than his personal relationship with his wife. Wolf decided to team Wilder with another contract screenwriter, Charles Brackett. Fourteen years Wilder’s senior, Brackett was a graduate of Harvard University. He had become the first drama critic for the New Yorker while publishing short stories in slick magazines with big circulations like the Saturday Evening Post. He had been associated with a number of minor movies like The Last Outpost (1935), a flaccid Cary Grant starrer about British troops in the desert, codirected by Louis Gasnier and Charles Barton. Brackett was an accomplished wordsmith. So it was that, on the morning of July 17, 1936, Wolf called Wilder into his office and said, “Meet Charles Brackett; from now on you’re a team.” Brackett declared solemnly that a team was made up of those “whom God had joined together.”24
Once Brackett and Wilder joined forces, their screenwriting careers flourished. The two partners could not have been more dissimilar. Wilder was a feisty middle European Jew; Brackett was an East Coast patrician. “Brackett and I had nothing in common but writing,” said Wilder. It was precisely because he and Brackett were so different that their collaboration worked. “If two people think alike, it’s like two men pulling at one end of a rope,” Wilder commented. He was a firm believer that the best scripts emerged from the friction between the writers who collaborated on them. “If you are going to collaborate, you need an opponent to bounce things off of.”25 Moreover, Wilder welcomed a writing partner who could polish his uncertain English. He wrote, “I was lucky enough to be teamed with Charles Brackett,” an experienced writer for whom he already had great respect.26
The creative association of Wilder and Brackett was to last for more than a decade. They functioned perfectly as a writing team: Brackett, who had an impeccable command of English, fine-tuned the dialogue, while Wilder concentrated on plot construction, at which he had become proficient in his Berlin days.
The first film that Brackett and Wilder coscripted was a comedy titled Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), derived from a French farce that had been filmed in 1923 with Gloria Swanson. The remake would be directed by none other than Ernst Lubitsch, Wilder’s idol.