On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Beginning with his next film, Es war einmal ein Walzer (One Upon a Time, a Waltz), Billie found himself writing a string of musicals, a genre for which he had no love. Directed by Viktor Janson, it was the first of two operettas Wilder wrote for AlthofAmboss Film A.G. (Aafa). An heir and an heiress, perennial favorites, are the film’s central characters, but in keeping with the Zeitgeist, they’re both bankrupt. Rudi Möbius, heir to an on-the-skids Berlin banking family, is all set to marry the heiress Lucie Weidling across the border in Austria. She’s also poor. But everything goes wrong in Vienna and they fall in love with two other people, both of whom are as cash-starved as they are. The four principals travel to Berlin, with Lucie’s mother, a notary, and an assessor named Pfennig in hot pursuit. It all works out when they decide to open a Viennese-style café in the otherwise unused and empty family bank.

  According to Wilder, it was a sorry time for screenwriters. With alarming regularity, they had to force-feed seven or eight songs into the stories they were trying to develop. The composers had their own ideas, as did the lyricists, not to mention the directors. Often, Wilder observed, the songs “only interfered with the development of the story and unnecessarily held it up.” For Es war einmal ein Walzer, at least, the great Franz Lehár wrote the score, and the leading lady was the sprightly young Hungarian soprano Marta Eggerth. Miss Eggerth recalls Billie as a very pleasant young man—not a troublemaker at all, but charming and cooperative, friendly and helpful on both of the films he wrote for her. (She also appears in Das Blaue vom himmel.) He used to show up on the set every day, she remembers, and he was especially helpful in terms of helping her with her dialogue. Since German wasn’t her first language—and since she was playing someone from Vienna—she found certain words next to impossible to say convincingly. “Whenever I had difficulties with this or that German word,” Eggerth reports, “Billie wrote other words for me which were easier to pronounce.”

  An Ufa musical-comedy about a former circus acrobat named Jou-Jou was next—Ein blonder Traum (A Blonde Dream). Wilder wrote the script with his friend Walter Reisch, working mostly in Reisch’s apartment near the Olivaer Platz. Directed by Paul Martin, the film stars Willy Fritsch, Willi Forst, and Lilian Harvey. Forst had been Wilder’s friend from his Vienna days, and now that Wilder was earning good money in Berlin, he and Forst would meet regularly over a good meal at the Austrian restaurant Mutzbauer. Forst, Wilder, Géza von Cziffra, the actors Hubert von Meyerinck and Hans Heinrich von Twardowsky, and a pilot named Ernst Udet—all enjoyed a regular lunch table in the Mutzbauer, where they could feast on decent schnitzel and tafelspitz and obscure Viennese idioms to their hearts’ content.

  Fritz Lang frequented the Mutzbauer as well, as did Wilder’s old Hungarian friend, the café cutup Laczy Löwenstein. In fact, it was over a Mutzbauer table that Lang convinced Löwenstein, now called Peter Lorre, to star in his new thriller, M. In an odd twist to the Imré Békessy scandal, Lorre, who had been traveling back and forth between Berlin and Vienna throughout the mid- to late-1920s, had become friendly with Karl Kraus, the “lecture ape” who scourged Békessy. In the years since Billie left Die Stunde, the bilious Kraus had not been satisfied with his archenemy Békessy’s mere exile and had written a scathing play based on the old scandal—Die Unüberwindlichen (The Unconquerable). Kraus himself offered the leading role to Lorre, whom he had met at the Café Central. Lorre played it: the piggish Barkassy, a corrupt newspaper publisher who plays footsie with Vienna’s bankers.

  Lorre, thanks to M, was becoming an international star. Billie, meanwhile, was stuck writing operettas and jamming the best story ideas he could think of into a string of songs written by other people over whom he had no control. Ein blonder Traum is such a film. It isn’t a bad film—in fact, it’s quite lively and a lot of fun—but it can be said literally to have given Wilder the Willies. Not only did Willy Fritsch and Willi Forst star, but they also appeared as Willy I and Willy II, window cleaners from the firm “Blitz-Blank.” Ein blonder Traum is a Depression comedy. The Willies live in two abandoned railroad cars in the outskirts of Berlin. They can afford nothing better.

  The two men kid each other and brawl like overgrown boys; Ein blonder Traum is the first of Wilder’s many buddy movies. Willy I says to Willy II in one of the opening scenes, “I dreamt you were with my Erna.” “Funny you dreamt that,” Willy II replies. “What did you want with Erna?” says Willy I; “I was looking for you,” Willy II replies. The scene ends with the two pals wrestling on the ground, rolling over and over on each other and enjoying themselves immensely. All remains fine until the day the Willies go to clean the windows of the American embassy, where they meet Jou-Jou (Lilian Harvey), who immediately comes between them. Indeed, they meet this beautiful blonde dream in a most dreamlike way: one of the Willies drops his sausage in the window and Jou-Jou’s little dog eats it.

  Ein blonder Traum was a top-drawer production. Forst, Fritsch, and Harvey were all immensely popular Ufa stars. Not only was Harvey (in Zolotow’s phrase) “the Ginger Rogers of Germany,” but to top it all off, she was Erich Pommer’s favorite actress. She was also his girlfriend. Because of the three actors’ popularity as well as Harvey’s relationship with Pommer, the pressure on the two screenwriters must have been very great. The first draft Wilder and Reisch submitted did not meet Pommer’s expectations on any level—particularly in terms of its unresolved romance, or, rather, the nature of the romance’s resolution. Wilder and Reisch wanted Jou-Jou to be unable to make up her mind between the two Willies, thereby leaving the resolution up to the men, who deal with the dilemma by abandoning the woman and resuming their lives as bachelors. As Zolotow describes it, the Willies were originally scheduled to exit the film together, riding away on bicycles in the rain. Pommer didn’t like this idea very much, but Harvey herself was irate. The magnetic, appealing star had no inclination to let herself be ditched by two men, let alone one, so Pommer ordered a rewrite, at which point Billie is said to have solved the problem by dreaming up the dog and using it as Willy II’s consolation prize.

  That, at least, is what Wilder told Zolotow. In point of fact, however, in the film itself the dog has nothing to do with it. Ein blonder Traum ends with a film producer, Mr. Merryman, showing up (since he’s an American, his production office is in the embassy!) and offering to hire Jou-Jou, but only as a back-row chorus girl. Willy II then intervenes on behalf of his best friend, altruistically yielding Jou-Jou to Willy I. Jou-Jou herself would gladly have moved to Hollywood if Willy II didn’t proceed to give Merryman a host of reasons why he shouldn’t hire her. The window washer’s concluding advice to the Hollywood producer is magnificent: “Film ist kein Beruf für erwachsene Leute,” he tells Merryman—“Film is not a career for grown-ups.” Because of Willy II’s uncommon shrewdness and knowledge of the Hollywood system, Merryman instantly offers him a job as his assistant. His chief task: to talk would-be starlets out of their Hollywood dreams. The dog stays in Berlin. It’s the Austrian Willy, Willi Forst, who ends up heading to Hollywood—alone.

  Ein blonder Traum has been all but forgotten; even in Germany it’s not well known. The influential sociopolitical critic Siegfried Kracauer dismisses this good-natured satirical comedy for being not only pap but politically offensive pap at that; Jou-Jou, Kracauer writes, is nothing more than “a living projectile in a tent show.” What’s worse, according to Kracauer, is that the film only works by “pretending that the underprivileged themselves were fully satisfied with their lot.” But Kracauer misses entirely the cruel ironies of the film. Ein blonder Traum is a satire, not a naive romance. For example, a derelict of the philosophizing type—his nickname is “Vogelscheuche” (“Scarecrow,” played by Paul Hörbiger)—lives with the Willies on the outskirts of town, and he sings a sad song concerning the advisability of death: once you’re dead, he sings directly to the camera, a black crow firmly planted on his knee, you won’t have to pay rent anymore because you’ll have your own hole in the ground. The two Willies’
friendship is given a sour spin when Willy II sees that Willy I’s window-washing ladder is badly splintered and in danger of collapsing under him—and because of the sexual tension introduced by Jou-Jou he doesn’t tell him. Of all the operettas Billie Wilder wrote in Germany, Ein blonder Traum is by far the edgiest and most politically conscious—a brittle, cynical comment on what Berlin audiences knew to be their own grim social reality in 1932.

  Despite his success, Billie was not yet finished writing scripts for films in which his name was nowhere to be seen in the credits. Paul Martin directed Wilder’s script for Der Sieger (The Victor) in 1932, but Robert Liebmann and Leonhard Frank got all the credit. It was, in Klaus Kreimeier’s words, an “ode to a con artist”: a lowly postal worker loses his savings at the races “but wins the heart of a billionaire’s daughter.” Wilder then traveled to Vienna with one of his closest friends, the writer Max Kolpe, to put together a script for an Austro-German company, Lothar Stark G.m.b.H. The project, the first of two musical comedies for Lothar Stark, was called Scampolo, ein Kind der Strasse (Scampolo, a Child of the Streets). Based very loosely on a play by Dario Niccodemi, Scampolo was both written and filmed in Vienna, though Wilder and Kolpe had already returned to Berlin by the time filming began. Wilder had met Kolpe at the Romanisches Café in 1930, and they hit it off quickly. Like Reisch, Max Kolpe was able to work with the ever-fidgeting Billie without being driven to distraction. Then again, like Reisch, Kolpe was Billie’s close friend before he had to write a script with him.

  Scampolo (Dolly Haas) is a poor young orphan living on the streets of Vienna. She’s boyish, with a short haircut and a striped sailor’s shirt, and she looks to be about sixteen years old. What little money she earns comes from running errands, one of which is to pick up some cash from a dead-beat named Maximilian. (Curiously, Niccodemi’s play does not contain a character by that name.) The fellow has no money, but he does have good manners, he presents himself elegantly, and he’s also very kindhearted, so despite the difference in their ages—or perhaps because of it—Scampolo immediately concludes that he is the man of her dreams. In addition to his other debts, Maximilian owes his boardinghouse several weeks’ worth of back rent. There’s a board next to the door on which the landlord has written the names of all the deadbeats. Herr Wilder and Herr Kolpe are each listed as owing two weeks’ worth, along with someone named Wachsherr (a play on the film’s composer, Franz Wachsmann). In an effort to earn a living, Maximilian sets himself up as a language teacher. “The most important word in French is l’amour; in English it’s the money; in Spanish it’s el torero,” Maximilian teaches. A better joke is this: Scampolo appears to have learned a few handy phrases from her new friend, a talent she reveals when she tries to communicate with an old man on the street: “Parlez-vous français? Do you speak English? Hispano-Suiza?”

  Niccodemi’s original Italian realism yields in Wilder and Kolpe’s adaptation to a strange kind of naturalistic farce. For instance, the street urchin hears about a great stock market tip through her unlikely association with the head of a bank, a wealthy sugar-daddy type named Phillips. Of the three older men in Scampolo’s life, only Phillips really comes on to her romantically; hence he bears the brunt of the filmmakers’ distrust. Wilder’s early canine theme reappears along with the accompanying sausage leitmotif when Max yells at Phillips for buying Scampolo a set of beautiful and very feminine clothes. Max compares Scampolo to a little pet: a poor man has a dog, he explains, and then one day a rich man shows up and gives his sausage to the dog and spoils it, with all the attendant complications.

  Scampolo premiered in Vienna in late October (under the title Um einen Groschen Liebe—For a Penny Love); it opened four days later in Berlin. German critics gave Scampolo a hard time, but audiences liked it, if box office figures are any indication. By that point, the second Wilder-Kolpe collaboration was in front of the cameras at Aafa-Film’s studios—Das Blaue vom Himmel (The Blue of the Sky). Directed by Viktor Janson, it was yet another in the seemingly endless string of operettas, this one only eighty-two minutes long. Anni Müller (Marta Eggerth) finds a job in the token booth of an U-bahn station. Hans Meyer (Hermann Thimig), an airmail pilot, uses this subway station, too, and on Anni’s first day of work he shows up at the token booth and promptly stiffs her for the price of a token.

  Das Blaue vom Himmel is without a doubt the least plausible of Billie Wilder’s screenplays, a fact that becomes idiotically clear when a thunderstorm forces Hans to crash-land near a tree in the woods—the very tree under which Anni has taken shelter after leading an impromptu marching band out of the subway and into the forest. (Don’t ask. The event is entirely unmotivated, except, of course, by the need to do a musical number.) Lo and behold, Anni and Hans fall in love. But there’s trouble already. Anni works underground during the daytime, while Hans works in the skies at night. Thus they have only ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening to see each other—hence the song “Einen Tag möchte ich bei Dir sein” (“One Day I’d Like to Be with You”). Meanwhile, Anni’s love interests multiply when the head of a cigarette factory—where the marvelously named Tabu-Cigarettes are made—meets and falls in love with her. Her allure is scarcely surprising, especially since Eggerth’s Anni is clad in a series of exceptionally tight, gauzy outfits that do not appear to have the beneficial support of slips and bras.

  Das Blaue vom Himmel reaches its ridiculous conclusion when Anni, unbeknownst to Hans, convinces the cigarette magnate to hire Hans to do skywriting for Tabu. First he writes “Tabu,” and then, when the executive tells him how he got the job, he jumps into his plane, takes off, writes Ich liebe Dich Anni! in the heavens, lands the plane in the middle of a Berlin street, picks up an overjoyed Anni, and together they fly, all to the cheering of the crowd. Whenever Wilder insisted that his German films were all lousy, Das Blaue vom Himmel must have been near the top of his mind. “Yes,” Marta Eggerth admits, “the story of Das Blaue vom Himmel was maybe not the greatest, but in those days they built the story around my voice, so to speak, and for this purpose it was charming and—more importantly—the public loved it. What else can one ask of a movie? It sold tickets.” She goes on to make a charming observation: “If Billy Wilder said that he did not like to write operettas, I can only say what a pity, because, frankly, in his American films I can spot the music even in his dialogue.”

  One amusing footnote to Das Blaue vom Himmel is that Billie’s script ran afoul of the Berlin censors, who initially prohibited the film from being shown to adolescents on the grounds of the adverse effect it might have had on their moral development. The implication was one that Billie would favor in later years: the censors were particularly upset by the sequence in which Anni pays a visit to the Tabu head’s office and, in the eyes of the censors, acts like a prostitute. After an appeal by Aafa-Film, the censors approved the film with only one deletion—Anni’s provocative line, “Sure, you’re interested for one night, huh? And by tomorrow morning you would have forgotten me, and that’s right.”

  With all of these steady writing assignments Billie was now making a very good living. He gave up his old Chrysler for a blue, two-seater Graham Paige convertible. (It might go without saying, but it’s worth saying anyway: Billie Wilder liked to drive very fast.) He moved out of his little furnished room in Kisch’s building on Güntzelstrasse and found himself a new apartment in a stylish, Bauhaus building—the Sächsichen Palais on Sächsischestrasse. He could afford to furnish his new digs in style as well, so he began buying modern pieces, some of which were designed by Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. He’d picked up these tastes in part from his coscreenwriter Max Kolpe, whose brother was a Bauhaus architect. Billie began to collect art, too—mostly prints and posters. He spent money on good food and at tony restaurants. And for the first time in his life, his income enabled him to exercise fully his most extravagant sartorial impulses. Billie became a clotheshorse, a passion he maintained for the rest of his life. In addition to sporting expen
sive silk shirts and ties and custom-tailored suits, Billy took up an odd new affectation: he began carrying a walking stick. It proved to be an excellent prop. Not only did it lend him an eccentric, Stroheim-like effect, but it was something he could wave and jab in the air, wildly and unpredictably, whenever his incessant pacing wasn’t enough.

  Now separated from Gisela Liner’s home cooking and haimish evenings playing living-room soccer with Kisch, Billie consoled himself by going to the finest spots in Berlin. Wilder generally demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for food, but now the food was the best in town. He began wearing hats, both indoors and out, to cover his bright red curly hair. He took vacations at the posh Hiddensee island spa or at Heringsdorf. On one occasion, he went to Hiddensee with Franz Wachsmann, Scampolo’s composer, together with Wachsmann’s married mistress. When the woman’s husband suddenly showed up unannounced, she and Billie exchanged rooms to maintain the charade. Morally loose and temperamentally on edge, Berlin had taken Billie in completely. As Peter Gay puts it, “Berlin was the city where mobile men came to rest.” Billie Wilder was at home there.

  He was twenty-six years old.

  The writing assignments kept coming. German box office receipts remained high despite the rising stench of German political life. As Klaus Kreimeier dryly describes it, “German workers, provided they were not in the direst poverty and totally demoralized or had not been pulled into the maelstrom of politics as pickets or strikebreakers or foot soldiers of the SA or ‘Iron Front,’ poured into movie theaters in droves.” It was in this context that Billie and Max Kolpe produced their third script together: Madame wünscht keine Kinder (Madame Doesn’t Want Children). Kolpe (who later changed his last name to Colpet and worked with Marlene Dietrich as her composer) noted in his memoirs that he and Billie went on vacation together every year to a resort island off the coast of Rügen (on the Baltic Sea). Typically for Wilder, they worked while relaxing. Kolpe described one of these holidays: “We were only a few kilometers out of Berlin when Billie turned to me and asked, ‘Have I recovered yet?’ He proved how quick-witted he could be when a policeman stopped us in a village because he had been speeding. It’s true—we were really tearing along in his convertible. But Billie not only admitted that the cop was right but also declared, with the world’s most self-evident expression, ‘I’m sorry, but this is a new American model. It only drives fast.’ The policeman nodded, aghast, and put his ticket pad back in the pocket of his uniform. We slowly drove away.”