CHAPTER 3 DAREDEVIL REPORTER

BERLIN, 1926

BILLIE WILDER (RIGHT, hands in pockets) WITH PAUL WHITEMAN AND HIS BAND

BILLIE WILDER SAT AT A small round table at the Romanisches Café, a cavernous hangout for musicians, artists, and intellectuals at the start of the two-mile-long Kurfürstendamm, the Fifth Avenue of Berlin. Occasionally, the smell of the nearby zoo elephants wafted over to the café’s canopied outdoor tables or in through its Romanesque doorway. A tall, wiry redhead, Billie had recently moved to Berlin and liked the café because he could read all the newspapers—attached to long wooden sticks—for free. Close to fainting from hunger, Wilder used the change in his pockets to buy the cheapest meal on the menu, a soft-boiled egg, which the café served in an elegant, rounded coupe glass, a tall saltshaker placed beside it by a bow-tied, white-aproned waiter. The service and surroundings at the Romanisches made you feel like a prince, even if you were broke. And no one ever asked you to leave, no matter how long you loitered there.

The Romanisches had a long, vaulted arcade supported by tall marble columns stretching to its lofty ceiling. Coatracks were filled to tumbling with fedoras and fancy furs, moth-eaten cloaks, and overcoats. Both rich and poor, young and old, Jew and Aryan congregated here, arguing, writing, and reading, their newspapers spread like bedsheets before them. The chess players silently battled it out in the gallery above, while below sat the fashionable ladies in cloche hats over rebelliously short haircuts smoking their cigarettes. Already established artists sat in cliques, just tables away from the undiscovered, like Billie. Through the café windows Billie could glimpse the gargantuan Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church—built by the same architect who had designed the Romanisches. The church—a monument to imperial prewar Germany—loomed over everything, its spire rising like a sharp canine tooth, piercing the blue sky above it.

To Billie, Berlin was a revelation, its streets and cafés filled with smart-talking wiseasses like himself. Jews were not second-class citizens as they had been in his home in Vienna. Billie, a freelance reporter, had come to Berlin to make a name for himself in 1926, though he wasn’t sure exactly how to go about that or what his name should be. The city he found was filled with pastry shops, gourmet food shops, and restaurants, but Billie had no money to even pay rent. He slept in the railway stations, eventually renting a place on the Viktoria-Luise-Platz, a pretty park with a fountain that he unfortunately could not see from his tiny back room. The park had been named long ago for the daughter of the now-deposed kaiser.

After losing the Great War, to make up for the carnage they’d inflicted, Germany was ordered to pay billions in reparations to their French and English enemies as part of the Treaty of Versailles. The German economy was now in a tailspin, though the worst was yet to come. Families who would never have considered taking in boarders were now taking in several, breaking up once grand homes into small compartments. Billie’s room was next to the hall bathroom, whose running toilet he would pretend was a beautiful waterfall in order to fall asleep each night. Unable to afford heat, he would, in more than one freelance story, describe his fingers turning blue. He cut his cigarettes in half to ration them and bought wine from one of the only store owners who would give him credit—just so he could dump out the contents and get the deposits on the bottles. He’d pay his debt to the wine merchant when he finally made a score. If he ever made a score.

Though the city’s glamour had not rubbed off on Billie yet, he was thrilled just to be here, amid the colors and movement, the bright lights and nonstop life. The spark in the city’s air even had its own name—Berliner luft.

Billie’s mother, Eugenia, was from Neumark, Prussia—which later became Poland, thanks to Eastern Europe’s shifting borders. Eugenia was smart and more sophisticated than most people they knew, encouraging her son to want more out of life. She had spent five years in New York City when she was an adolescent, living with an uncle who owned a jewelry store on Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side.

Eugenia—known as Gitla to her friends and family—begged her mother, the owner of a small hotel in Poland, to let her stay in New York permanently. But she was forced to return home, where she married and had her own children. Though Eugenia named her second son Samuel after her dead father, her nickname for him came from the American rodeo showman Buffalo Bill Cody, whom she saw during his Wild West tour of New York City in the 1890s.

Eugenia never lost her passion for New York and would tell Billie stories about how wonderful America had been in the Gilded Age, not just Buffalo Bill and his cast of cowboys and Indians, but the gaslit streets and stately mansions of Manhattan, the tamed wilderness that was Central Park, and the cat’s cradle majesty of the Brooklyn Bridge. The neighborhood she had lived in was full of German-speaking Prussians like them, the streets dotted with bright bakeries selling strudel, and dark saloons pouring steins of lager.

Billie inherited her fascination with America and also her sharp sense of humor. Eugenia was a tough audience, so Billie knew New York must have been truly extraordinary to have wowed her.

Billie’s father, Max, opened and operated railroad station cafés, moving the family from the small town of Sucha Beskidzka in Galicia to Kraków and eventually to Vienna. But in Austria, Max was denied citizenship because he was a Jew. A dreamer who wasn’t sure exactly what to dream about, Max had high hopes for Billie. He wanted him to become a lawyer. And Billie was smart, but was not the best student, preferring billiards, soccer, and movies—particularly those of Buster Keaton, Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks, the King of Hollywood—to going to class. Eventually his mother sent him to a school for problem boys. Though he passed the matura, the exit exam from high school, he opted out of college and became a newspaperman in Vienna instead. He had seen too many American movies with men in raincoats and press cards stuck in their hat bands. Billie dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent and moving to America. Never mind that he didn’t speak English.

At the Viennese newspaper Die Stunde, Billie made crossword puzzles—a wildly popular new craze—before moving on to entertainment writing. Each morning, Eugenia woke him, saying, “Get up and write some anecdotes.” And what anecdotes they were. Billie interviewed the composer Richard Strauss and a sixteen-member women’s dance company, a Swiss clown, a Mexican escape artist, an Austrian card magician, a Russian opera singer, and a working witch who placed spells on the enemies of bankers and businessmen. He wrote about plays, movies, and jazz music, one of his loves, whose lyrics provided his only knowledge of English. As a reporter, he was collecting a cast of characters—and an ear for dialogue.

But he soon found himself enmeshed in a breaking scandal. Editors and advertising executives at Die Stunde had been extorting money from businesses: if you didn’t pay a kickback, you got bad press. Billie was paid extra by his bosses for writing positive café reviews. They were his weakest pieces. “And the specialty coffee!” he wrote. “Praise be to the cook, praise to her heartwarming approach.… I have found my favorite café.”

After writing positively about the orchestra leader Paul Whiteman, whom he genuinely admired and who had recently commissioned and played on George Gershwin’s classical jazz masterpiece Rhapsody in Blue, Billie decided to follow Whiteman’s band to Berlin in 1926. But when he got there, he decided he wasn’t going back to Vienna. Die Stunde would soon fold, and Billie knew getting another newspaper job in light of the scandal would not be easy.

So here he was. In Berlin. His dream city. Or at least a close second.

To pay his landlady, a retired circus performer with a gray mustache, he took a job as a hired dancer, spinning rich old women on the floor of the Eden Hotel’s grand Pavillon restaurant, located right near the Romanisches. Women in gowns with thick legs and even thicker waists waited for Billie and his fellow gigolos to approach their large round tables covered in crisp white tablecloths. As the cigarette boy glided past, murmuring, “Zigarren, Zigarette,” a small orchestra played on a raised platform. Rich husbands sat and watched, drinking and smoking as Billie and his fellow dancers waltzed about with their wives.

“I wasn’t the best dancer,” Billie would say, “but I had the best dialogue.” He danced himself to exhaustion each night, sometimes falling asleep in his bed still wearing his secondhand tuxedo. One night, he dreamed a man had come to collect on back rent. Instead of garnishing his wages, he garnishes Billie’s knees. When he tries to chase the man, he falls over, naturally, since he has no knees.

While working as a dance gigolo, Billie took copious notes, parlaying the job into a series of newspaper articles titled “Waiter, a Dancer, Please!” His writing was sharp and mean: the woman with hair the color of egg yolks, the husbands studying the prices on the wine list through monocles. The series caused quite a stir and landed him better freelance work as a newspaperman in Berlin, which had dozens of papers, more than any other city. He eventually made enough money to buy a used Chrysler, which he drove from anecdote to anecdote.

Billie met other writers at the café who were working for the German film industry, which was second only to Hollywood. So in his spare time, between his newspaper and magazine stories, he began to ghostwrite short silent film screenplays. At the Romanisches, he wrote a piece about the silent film director Erich von Stroheim, met a young actress named Marlene Dietrich and a producer named Joe Pasternak, who ran the Berlin office for Carl Laemmle’s Universal Pictures in Hollywood. Pasternak hired Billie to write his own script in exchange for the thousand marks he owed him from losing at poker. The film, The Daredevil Reporter, drew on Billie’s own experience as a newspaperman and was his first screen credit. Though it was a box office flop.

His next picture, written on napkins and random slips of paper and shot on a shoestring budget, was called People on Sunday. The 1930 silent film follows five nonactors as they go about their life in Berlin on their day off—couples meeting near the golden clock outside the zoo train station, and then swimming, picnicking, and sunbathing at Wannsee Lake. The film was a sensation.

It was around this time that Billie’s father, Max, came to visit him in Berlin. But his trip would not last long. Max died of an abdominal rupture in Billie’s arms in the back of an ambulance. He was buried in Weissensee Jewish cemetery in Berlin, not far from where Jules’s father lay.