by Ed Sikov
Wilder had good reason to respect Mayer and learn from him. Mayer was a creative perfectionist with a biting sense of irony. His scripts had a paranoid streak, a keen sense of impending disaster, but they were also sensitive and honest in their depiction of everyday cruelties. The German film historian Klaus Kreimeier describes it best: “Mayer was a politically thoughtful and socially conscious artist par excellence. He was an observer who understood how to think with his eyes. He could transpose what he saw and thought into ‘speaking’ film images, because the camera was not just a helpful optical device for him but an extension of his senses and his mind.” One can well imagine a twenty- or twenty-one-year-old Billie strolling up to Carl Mayer one day at the Kranzler, working hard to strike up a casual conversation with Germany’s most infamously depressive screenwriter, and revealing a sharp and appreciative command of what Mayer had written for the screen.
Géza von Cziffra, who had been working in films since 1923, also claimed to have helped launch Billie Wilder into the scriptwriting business. According to this sporadically reliable source, von Cziffra made it a point to introduce Billie to the head of the European Film Alliance, Friedrich Zelnik, in the hopes of generating some writing work for his young friend. But despite sharing a common background in Kraków, Wilder and Zelnik took an instant dislike to each other and it never got any better. According to von Cziffra, Billie’s theory was that “two Jews from Kraków understand each other only in Kraków. In foreign countries they are antipodes.” Von Cziffra continues: “When I told Zelnik what Wilder said, he asked me, astonished, ‘What does antipode mean?’ Then it was clear to me why the two of them didn’t understand each other.”
With his growing list of connections, not to forget his talent and spiny ambition, Billie found his way into the ghostwriting racket. Berliners had an unpleasant term for ghostwriters: they called them Neger—niggers. Many of the scripts Wilder wrote as a Neger were for Curt Braun, whom Wilder calls a “walking script factory,” and the writer-director Franz Schulz. When employed by Schulz, Billie would head over to Schulz’s apartment near Bayrischen Platz at 9:00 A.M., where he would remain, without food, for the rest of the day. Schulz, a notorious skinflint, would take himself out for a hearty lunch, leaving the starving Billie to work alone. On one occasion, Billie couldn’t stand it anymore and fixed himself a healthy liverwurst sandwich in Schulz’s kitchen, an offense for which Schulz made a point of bawling him out. (By the way, according to Wilder, it was really Franz Schulz who’d had the affair with Mrs. Remarque; Wilder knew this to be true because Schulz turned up for work one morning with a pair of black eyes.)
Of more far-reaching consequence was the fact that Wilder met Joe Pasternak, who managed the Berlin office of Universal along with Paul Kohner. Impressed with the personable and amusing young man, Pasternak hired Billie to be a tour guide for the Hollywood director Allan Dwan and his wife, a former Ziegfeld showgirl, who were traveling through Germany on their honeymoon. Dwan paid Wilder the equivalent of fifty dollars a week plus expenses to show him the best sights in Germany. Wilder, of course, knew nothing about Germany outside of Berlin. This was scarcely a problem for Billie, who simply bought a Baedeker guide and memorized as much as he could. Soon, however, Wilder realized that Dwan and his wife were much more interested in drinking than sight-seeing; Prohibition was still very much in force in the States. Dwan introduced Billie to the martini, they’d get tanked, and then they’d go touring. Hamburg, Cologne, Heidelberg … It was all very pleasant. In Heidelberg they found a fascinating castle, the history of which Billie, bored with Baedeker, proceeded to embellish with a wild tale of intrigue involving a crazed baron and—what story would be complete without her?—a slut. Dwan may have had a martini or two that day, but he wasn’t so sloshed that he missed overhearing a real guide recounting the real, if dull, facts of the castle. Billie was instantly fired.
Wilder has never been known as a heavy, problem drinker, and he was certainly no match for Dwan, who, when he gave Billie his discharge, is said to have announced his own personal rule of thumb: “Never trust a son of a bitch who doesn’t drink.” Pasternak later reported that Dwan had called him hysterically from Heidelberg and berated him, not just for hiring a liar as a guide, but also for hiring a liar-guide who put the moves on his pretty new wife.
Wilder could take getting fired by Allan Dwan in stride. By that point he was working more or less steadily as a journalist, and he was finding work as a script ghostwriter as well. The consequences of making an enemy of a powerful Hollywood director didn’t strike him as anything to worry about. After all, Billie was no longer a stranger in Berlin. He was twenty-two years old, and he had business contacts that were beginning to pay off. He was earning a little money, and if he didn’t have enough—and he never had enough because he always spent more than he had—one of his innumerable café buddies would always spot him. He may even have bought his first artwork around this time—a poster called La Goulue by Toulouse-Lautrec. “I just wanted to have something on the walls,” he said much later. He paid about eight dollars for it. “Of course it was way above my means,” he noted, “but it was huge and it covered a lot of wall space.” He also claimed to have bought himself a car—an old tan Chrysler with a rumble seat. It had taken some time, but Billie was making himself at home in the tough, frantic city he loved.
In late autumn of 1928, Max Wilder arrived in Berlin for a visit with his son. The details of this trip are unclear. Max was on his way to the United States for a visit with Willie; or Max was on his way back from a visit with Willie; or Max was on his way to emigrate to the States along with Genia (who, in this version, saw no need to accompany Max to say good-bye to Billie before leaving for America). What’s certain is that Max was not in good shape, physically or financially. Billie could see clearly enough how poor his father’s health was, but even when Max was suddenly stricken by severe and inexplicable stomach pains, Billie did not fully appreciate how gravely ill his father was. He died in Billie’s arms in the ambulance. They never even made it to the hospital.
The date was November 10, 1928. Billie certainly did not have enough money to send Max’s body back to Vienna, so he buried his father in a city and country in which his father had never lived. The Jewish cemetery in Weissensee records the vital facts of Max Wilder’s life: his name was Hersh Wilder, he was born on June 2, 1872, and he died on November 10, 1928. The cemetery lists Max’s occupation as merchant, and his address as Kyffhäuserstrasse—the street on which the hospital was located. Billie tried, as usual, to borrow some money—this time for a funeral—but he had no success. He didn’t even have enough money to call Willie in New York. It was one occasion when none of Billie Wilder’s many friends and acquaintances helped him. When kaddish was said over his father’s grave, Billie and the rabbi were the only people to utter it.
4. IN THE FOG OF THE METROPOLIS
Film is not a career for grown-ups.
—Willy II (Willi Forst) in Ein blonder Traum
Loneliness, depression, anxiety, despair—these emotions were as deeply ingrained as Billie Wilder’s sex drive, and, like sex, they often served as the setup for a punch line. Throughout his life, whenever this private, withholding man actually talked about being morose or suicidal, the chances were great that he was priming the pump for a joke. For example, he used to spring a much better story about his first screenplay sale than the dull one he told about Menschen am Sonntag. This one is a tale of chance, lust, and desperation. Several familiar themes reappear—not the least of which is his sad state of mind at the beginning of the tale. He is still living in the tenement on Viktoria-Luise-Platz. He’s depressed—a struggling young writer whose dreams of working in the German film industry are being stifled. Nobody wants to hire him; he’s got stacks of unsold scripts all over his room; he’s poor and miserable and the toilet keeps running. One awful night, Billie is awakened from the sound sleep of the despondent by the sound of a man pounding on the outer door of the apartment bu
ilding. It’s Heinz, the bruiser boyfriend of the landlady’s whorish daughter Lulu. Or maybe her name was Inge. Anyway, Heinz is robust. He owns or manages a lesbian nightclub called the Silhouette, and he has a bad temper. Inge/Lulu, in a panic, comes knocking on her friend Billie’s door and begs for assistance: “Help me! It’s Heinz trying to break in! He’s going to kill us!”
Billie, rousted from sleep, opens the door, and in walks Lulu’s customer, buck naked and holding his clothes under his arm. Lo and behold: it’s Galitzenstein, the president of Maxim Films! What luck! Lulu exits.
Making pleasant conversation, Galitzenstein asks Billie kindly to lend him a shoehorn. Billie tells him that not only will he give Galitzenstein a shoehorn, he’ll do him one better: he’ll give him a marvelous film script. Galitzenstein offers to set up an appointment with his temporary host, but Billie will have none of it, and, to the sound of a frenzied Heinz shrieking that he will cut the throat of any man who fools around with Lulu, Galitzenstein makes a prudent decision: he purchases Billie’s script right there on the spot for 500 marks, cash. A little later, Billie runs into Lulu outside the can, but Billie is only moderately appreciative: “Thank you for sending me Galitzenstein,” Billie says to the two-timing whore, “but he is a smalltime producer. Next time, please—Erich Pommer!”
In an astonishing coincidence, when fortune smiled on a youthful and depressed Billie Wilder, it once again took the form of an old, rutting goat. More likely, Wilder’s screenwriting career began over coffee and cigarettes at the Romanisches Café, though long before Siodmak showed up. Wilder worked, smoked, and relaxed there (in his life the three enterprises have been more or less synonymous) from his earliest days in Berlin. He took along his portable typewriter and banged away on script ideas and newspaper articles amid the din of a thousand clever coffee drinkers. By the beginning of 1929, he was anything but a stranger in Berlin.
Joe Pasternak and Paul Kohner soon forgave Billie his excesses with Mr. and Mrs. Allan Dwan, especially after Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Pictures in Hollywood, sent two gifts to his staff in Berlin: Laemmle’s nephew Ernest, who wanted to learn how to direct a motion picture, and an over-the-hill western star named Eddie Polo, who wanted to continue earning a living. Appalled, Pasternak and Kohner found themselves desperate. They needed something—or someone—to keep Uncle Carl happy, and they needed him quick, so they recruited their eager young friend Billie Wilder to write his first screenplay.
Years later, Kohner admitted that, yes, it had actually been his idea to hire Wilder to write the Eddie Polo script, having known Billie from (where else?) the cafés. Oddly enough, Pasternak, too, claimed full credit, telling Maurice Zolotow that Billie had “borrowed a thousand marks from me, and in order to get my money back I put him on the Eddie Polo picture. Wilder had lost all his money in a poker game with me and some others.” Pasternak added a final damning critique of his old friend: “He was a terrible poker player in those days.”
The story Billie concocted for Eddie Polo was close to his own soul. It was about a reporter who doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing but does it so fast that everything works out fine. The film is called Der Teufelsreporter (The Daredevil Reporter). Its working title had been Im Nebel der Grossstadt (In the Fog of the Metropolis)—but Der Teufelsreporter was more to the point, though Im Nebel der Grossstadt was retained as a subtitle. Polo begins Der Teufelsreporter, Billie’s only signed silent film, as a lowly typist at the Rapid Journal, though he might just as well have been a crossword puzzle editor in Vienna. Like anyone with any sense, he’s frantic to become a reporter. While the rest of the editorial staff is away, Eddie and a boy-apprentice named Max are left to manage the office. (Polo’s character’s name in the film is actually “Eddie Polo.”) When a group of American girls arrive in Berlin, Eddie, seizing his chance, decides to interview them himself. He’s late for the train, but he runs after the girls’ open-air bus and conducts his interviews from the running board. Paunchy Eddie, sliding toward sixty, is not the speediest runner in the world; lucky for him the girls are on the slowest bus in Berlin.
Alas, a complication: the girls’ hatchet-faced chaperone is really part of a gang of kidnappers. Beautiful Miss Bessie, the girls’ naive teacher, suspects trouble and slips Eddie a note asking him to watch out for them. Eddie doesn’t know what to make of this, and he jumps off the bus and lands almost immediately in the arms of the other kidnappers. Jonas, the chief gangster, decides to get rid of Eddie, so naturally he puts him in an insane asylum. (“He thinks he’s being pursued,” Jonas explains to the eager psychiatrists.) Eddie escapes from his padded cell and hurries back to the newspaper office with his story, which his grateful editor splashes all over the front page. Eddie is now a hero. Jonas, meanwhile, has spirited the girls away to an island in the Havel River. Their fathers in New York have received ransom notes informing them that they must pay up by the following day or else. (One measure of the film’s slapdash quality occurs when the gangsters yank the schoolgirls roughly off the bus. Two of the obviously inexperienced young actresses can be seen giggling in the background as they await their turn to be roughly manhandled.) An increasingly titanic Eddie finds the hideout by jumping out of windows, skipping across the roofs of moving cars, and hopping from the rumble seat of one onto the back bumper of another. The decidedly middle-aged Polo performs his stunts gamely, but he’s not quite able to achieve the right action-hero dexterity. It’s one thing when he commandeers a roadster. It’s quite another when he single-handedly fights off seven or eight armed thugs.
In any event, Max calls the cops and Eddie saves the girls. With his two weapons—a telephone in one hand and a revolver in the other—he holds the kidnappers at bay while phoning in his story. The kidnappers have insured that Miss Bessie and the girls won’t escape by stripping them down to their underwear, a fact revealed when Eddie pulls open the door and holds his hands over a cop’s eyes while taking a good long look himself. In a final stroke of fantastic luck he falls in love with Miss Bessie and proposes to her in the final fifteen seconds of the last reel. The whole thing takes all of sixty-five minutes to play out.
As Andreas Hutter points out, the hero of Der Teufelsreporter is more Billie Wilder than Eddie Polo. Perhaps for this reason, Wilder himself hates the film, hates his screenplay, hates the whole package: “It was bullshit, absolute bullshit,” Wilder snarled to interviewers Joseph McBride and Todd McCarthy in 1979. “The leading man was an old Hungarian-American cowboy actor by the name of Eddie Polo and he was already by that time seventy-five.” (He was fifty-four, but who’s counting?) Wilder’s scorn for his German scripts is curious; it points to his deeply held self-contempt. His judgments are harsh, and in terms of his own early films he wants to make sure he’s the first to level them. In the 1990s, when another interviewer asked him about his German screenplays, Wilder was equally, gripingly dismissive: “Do I have to talk about them? They were all lousy.”
Lousy or not, Der Teufelsreporter was a landmark: it was Billie Wilder’s first signed script, and it opened on June 19, 1929, at the Schauburgen Theater in Hamburg. But Billie was scarcely ready to quit his many day jobs on the strength of an Eddie Polo picture he probably didn’t like even at the time. Wilder was still a devil’s reporter himself, and he continued plugging away at celebrity interviews and anything else that came along. For the B.Z., Billie described some location shooting for Marlene Dietrich’s latest film, Das Schiff der verlorenen Menschen (The Ship of Lost Souls), directed by Maurice Tourneur. For Tempo, Billie commented on a popular soft drink. Someone he knows, Wilder wrote, “is drinking Coca-Cola, which tastes like burnt pneumatic tires. But it’s very refreshing. [Billie’s friend] is crazy about Coca-Cola—he’s just drinking his fourth glass. If somebody is wild about Coca-Cola, you can bet your last pair of pants that he’s an American. And if he’s pouring four glasses into himself, he’s surely a tired American.”
Billie commemorated Klabund’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of his death, i
n Tempo as well. Wilder’s friend and early mentor (the one who inspired him to write his gigolo articles) died of tuberculosis in 1928: “He was holding a handkerchief before his caved-in mouth and coughed. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, and it really was nothing. Just a tiny red spot. He died of it.”
One of Billie best stories, published in Der Querschnitt in April 1929, was a profile of a difficult Viennese-born film director who had earned an international reputation as a capricious, profligate, and eminently Teutonic mad artist. In 1929, the man who called himself Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von Stroheim—the son of an Austrian count and a German baroness, a decorated war hero who stormed into battle on horseback in the Bosnia-Herzegovina war and emerged with sixteen inches of lead in his body—was living in Los Angeles and honing his reputation as a monster. (No one knew it at the time, but von Stroheim’s self-generated biography was a rock-bottom fraud. He was Jewish, in fact, the son of a man who made straw hats, and never saw battle. He made up the “von” as well.) As far as German film audiences were concerned, the Berlin premiere of von Stroheim’s Greed in mid-May 1926 had helped von Stroheim’s villainous reputation immeasurably. Berliners greeted the picture with a violent display of hissing, whistling, and foot stomping at the city’s largest theater, the Ufa-Palast am Zoo. The situation deteriorated at the second night’s performance to the point that the screening had to be halted halfway through when outraged patrons demanded refunds and created a mob scene the likes of which Berlin moviegoers had never seen before. (Greed showed up later in repertory theaters, but it never found wider distribution in Germany.)