On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Deinler also remembers Billy taking him on tours of the city. The charred remnants of the Reichstag building, the Tiergarten, the bombed-out pile of bricks that had been the Romanisches Café as late as the final weeks of the war…. They went anywhere they could drive. They talked about what Germany had been, and what it had become. And they talked about the Germans. Deinler knew that Wilder was searching for his family, but it remained Wilder’s private horror. “He may have been bitter,” says Deinler, “but he never showed it.”

  Wilder and some army buddies were careening down the Kurfürstendamm. (Where else would Billy have been careening, if not the heart of Berlin’s entertainment district? Never mind that it was now a strip of rutted pavement running through mountainous piles of wreckage.) They were going so fast that they nearly ran over a pedestrian, who made the mistake of yelling “asshole” in German. The jeep stopped short, and Wilder jumped out and sternly informed the man—in German—that he should not simply assume that people in American uniforms wouldn’t understand words like asshole. Wilder also noted, correctly, that the man would never have dared say anything like that to a Nazi. Billy then ordered the man to remain there while he summoned the authorities, a task he had no intention of performing. Hours later, Wilder and his friends passed by the spot and saw the terrified German still standing there, obediently awaiting his punishment.

  One day, Wilder met with two Soviet colonels, one of whom looked—in Wilder’s picturesque recollection—like a cross between Leon Trotsky and the cross-eyed silent comic Ben Turpin. Upon learning that Wilder was a Hollywood director, Trotsky/Turpin spun on his heels and left the room. Billy panicked, recalling in an absurd jolt of paranoia his own script for Ninotchka. He feared that he’d offended the Soviets. But Colonel Turpin returned a few minutes later with a big grin. “Mrs. Miniver!” he cried, pumping Billy’s arm. “Mr. Wyler!” the other colonel beamed, whereupon he kissed Billy on the cheek. “We have seen all of your films, especially Mrs. Miniver! Your films are wonderful.” Billy graciously accepted the praise.

  In a more serious vein, Wilder was asked to report on the condition of Berlin’s film facilities. He was able to visit Ufa’s Tempelhof studios, which were in the American sector, and he reported that the soundstages were still in good condition. Wilder also visited Johannisthal, where the Tobis Studios had been located, in the Soviet sector—three soundstages there were totally unusable—and the Althoff Studios in Babelsberg, also in the Soviet sector. Two of those soundstages remained in working condition, while a third needed repair. Finally, at Ufa’s Babelsberg studios, Billy found the situation complicated by the fact that the demarcation line between the Soviet and American sectors ran straight through the middle of the lot. The soundstages were in the American sector, while the workshops were squarely under Soviet control. Remarking on this senseless bifurcation, Wilder must have written one of the most literate military memoranda in the war: “The gentlemen who thought out this demarcation line certainly qualify for a new vaudeville act: sawing a live studio in half. However, I think I better reconsider the word ‘live’ because the heart and the lungs have been removed.” The Russians, Billy went on to observe, had taken apart all the usable equipment and shipped it east.

  By the time he left Bad Homburg Billy had given up on the atrocity documentary. But he arrived in Berlin with a fresh idea—he wanted to write and direct a fictional romance about postwar Germany. This movie would be produced not by the army but by Paramount Pictures, which could actually get the job done. As described in the letter of introduction Davidson Taylor wrote on Billy’s behalf (to Lieutenant Colonel Ray Fried of Information Control in Berlin), Mr. Wilder’s presence in Berlin had two objectives: to check out the condition of the city’s once-extensive film studios, and more important, to gather background information for the feature film he wanted to make. Billy would need the army’s permission, of course, since he proposed to film at least part of the movie in bombed-out Berlin, the visible symbol of the cataclysmic twentieth-century. No building remained unscarred. The city was divided into four sectors, each ruled by a conquering army’s military police. The people, living in squalor, were all but hopeless. They were still digging rotten corpses out of the rubble and trying to salvage bricks. For Billy Wilder, Berlin was the perfect location for a new romantic comedy.

  By the end of August, Billy had completed his preliminary research and laid the preproduction groundwork by lobbying the crucial military personnel for permission. Davidson Taylor was already promoting Billy’s idea as “the film which we want him to make with Paramount” and urging his superiors that he “be dispatched to New York on military orders immediately to commence work on this film.” Upon approval of Wilder’s screenplay, Taylor concluded, PsyWar would wire the War Department agreeing to sponsor the film and would even make arrangements to take care of a Paramount filmmaking crew of eight to twelve people, including Billy, for the three to five weeks necessary to do exterior shooting in Germany.

  While army personnel (Taylor, Paley, McClure, Douglas Schneider) debated the merits of supporting Wilder’s Hollywood inspiration, Billy himself prepared to return to California. By the end of August there was little left for him to do but plan his next movie and keep the army brass from killing it. Some concern was beginning to be voiced in military quarters about the ethics of favoring one particular Hollywood studio over the others—Billy was nothing if not direct in proposing that Paramount produce and distribute the film—but Wilder’s talent for sweet-talking proved to be as effective as ever (though the movie would end up taking far longer than he planned). Paley took Billy’s lead on that score by insisting to McClure that there were precedents for this sort of favoritism (though Paley didn’t bother to spell out precisely what these precedents were) and that film companies regularly received assistance from the military.

  As for Billy himself, he contributed his own articulate rationale for the army’s aid and support in the production of what would become A Foreign Affair. It took the form of a report on the vital propaganda value of mass entertainment. The Germans were receptive to the recent propaganda documentaries they had been shown, Wilder wrote to Davidson Taylor. But as he quickly went on to point out, this positive response would not last forever. “In Berlin it has worn off already,” Wilder observed. The Allies, he predicted, would find it increasingly difficult to keep shoving the Germans’ noses in their own misdeeds, as sickening as those misdeeds had been. “Will the Germans come in week after week to play the guilty pupil?” Wilder asked. Sure, they might show up at the theaters, but they’d probably end up sleeping through the dull propaganda so they would be “bright and ready for Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl.”

  Wilder had nothing against Cover Girl, he went on to say, but that kind of movie served no reeducational goals. “Now if there was an entertainment film with Rita Hayworth or Ingrid Bergman or Gary Cooper, in Technicolor if you wish, and with a love story—only with a very special love story, cleverly devised to help us sell a few ideological items—such a film would provide us with a superior piece of propaganda: they would stand in long lines to buy and once they bought it, it would stick. Unfortunately, no such film exists yet. It must be made. I want to make it.”

  Billy reminded the army of Mrs. Miniver’s political importance in 1940—a time when Americans still perceived the war in Europe to be remote from their own emotional lives. According to Wilder, Roosevelt himself had been so impressed with the film as a political tool that he had pushed MGM to release it as soon as possible. And Roosevelt was right: Wyler’s melodrama served as more effective propaganda than fifty newsreels. Billy also presented his case for Paramount. He’d already talked it over with Barney Balaban and Russell Holman, Billy acknowledged, and they were all for it. In fact, Wilder insisted, “they would consider it unfair if I went out and made the film for another commercial company,” especially “since I am on a long-term contract to them and only ‘on a temporary loan to the U.S. Government.’” In fact, he reported
, Paramount had already offered him “top stars, the best staff, and a budget of 1½ million to do the film.” Each of the pieces was in place. All the army had to do was give Billy its approval.

  The film would be a simple story, Wilder went on—the tale of an American GI and a German woman whose husband, an officer in the Luftwaffe, had been killed over Tunisia. In fact, Billy said, he’d already met such a woman: “She was working in a bucket brigade cleaning up the rubble on the Kurfürstendamm. I had thrown away a cigarette and she had picked up the butt. We started a conversation. Here it is: ‘I am so glad you Americans have finally come because …’ ‘Because what?’ ‘Because now you will help us repair the gas.’ ‘Sure we will.’ ‘That’s all we are waiting for, my mother and I…’ ‘I suppose it will be nice to get a warm meal again.’ ‘It is not to cook …’ There was a long pause. I kind of felt what she meant, and I wished she would not say it. She did. ‘We will turn it on, but we won’t light it. Don’t you see? It is just to breathe it in, deep …’ I held out a brand new Lucky Strike to her. She did not take it. She just picked up the bucket and went back to the rubble.”

  Wilder plunged on. This would be the whole point of the picture—to give such a woman a reason to live. By the time A Foreign Affair was actually made, of course, the suicidally depressed German widow who stoically refuses the gift of a cigarette had become a supremely self-reliant ex-Nazi whore played by Marlene Dietrich—the kind of woman who would have accepted Billy’s Lucky, lit it, taken a drag, and tossed the rest of it on the pavement next to Billy’s shoes, all without a moment’s hesitation.

  “As for the GI,” Billy wrote, “I shall not make him a flag-waving hero or a theorizing apostle of democracy. As a matter of fact, in the beginning of the picture I want him not to be too sure of what the hell this war was all about. I want to touch on fraternization, on homesickness, on the black market.” Indeed, the scenes in A Foreign Affair in which Wilder introduces his GI involve him bartering a cake—specifically, a cake that has been brought to him from back home in the States—for a vile, stained, and obviously well-used mattress, which he presents as a gift to his whore (Marlene). Billy didn’t spell out these choice details at the time, of course. His memo is a model of patriotism and discretion.

  Wilder chronicled his research in Berlin: “I found the town mad, depraved, starving, fascinating as a background for a movie.” One can only imagine the most lurid of Wilder’s findings, since he limited himself to the most reportable: “I have lived with some of [the 82nd Airborne Division’s] GIs and put down their lingo. I have talked to Russian WACs and British M.P.s. I have fraternized with Germans, from bombed-out university professors to three cigarette-chippies at the Femina. I have almost sold my wristwatch at the black market under the Reichstag. I have secured the copyrights to the famous song ‘Berlin kommt wieder.’ I think I am quite ready now to sit down with my collaborator and start writing the script.” He signed off his memo with a touch of well-deserved bravado: “I am conceited enough to say that you will find this ‘entertainment’ film the best propaganda yet.”

  Billy’s confidence in his own talent was due at least in part to some surprising news from the States. Against all expectations, The Lost Weekend was getting good word of mouth from the small, select screenings that Paramount was nervously arranging. Given the right handling, together with its vastly improved musical score, the film might not be a colossal bomb after all. Eager to get back to America, both to shepherd The Lost Weekend (the wolves in the front office were still on the prowl) and to begin writing his new propaganda romance, Wilder needed only to get a release signature from his gin rummy buddy, Bill Paley. The problem was, Colonel Paley owed him about $2,000 and didn’t want Billy to leave without evening the score. So (according to Billy) Billy systematically began to lose—“and with an opponent like Paley it wasn’t easy.” Finally, with his debt reduced to $700, Paley agreed to sign Billy’s papers, and Wilder found himself on a plane bound for the States. He didn’t return home empty-handed. The compulsive art collector managed to pick up a George Grosz painting during his summer in Germany, and for a very good price—a carton of cigarettes.

  15. CHEERS

  During the war he couldn’t go fast enough for you. Get on that beachhead, get through those tank traps, and step on it, step on it. Faster—a hundred miles an hour, twenty-four hours a day, through burning towns and down smashed autobahnen. Then one day the war is over. And you expect him to jam on those breaks and stop like that? Well, everybody can’t stop like that. Sometimes you skid quite a piece. Sometimes you go into a spin and smash into a wall or a tree and bash your fenders.

  —Johnny (John Lund) in A Foreign Affair

  On October 2, 1945, two weeks after Billy returned from Europe, Judith Wilder filed for divorce. She cited “extreme cruelty,” the current catchall explanation to describe to the court why a husband and a wife didn’t love each other anymore. Her petition was hardly a surprise. Everyone at Bad Homburg knew that Billy and his wife were splitting up—he and Paley sat around discussing it, along with everyone else—but Judith waited until he was back in the States before actually filing the papers. The couple officially separated on September 26. Their community property included the house on North Beverly, a Studebaker, and a Buick convertible. Judith got the Studebaker; Billy got the Buick. Eventually, he’d get the house, too, but in the meantime he moved in with Ernst Lubitsch.

  Under the terms of their separation, Billy paid Judith $20,000 off the bat plus an additional $15,000 in weekly payments of $96, plus $2,000 for alimony, and an additional $13,000 per year at $250 per week until Judith remarried. Judith took custody of Victoria, then almost six. On March 6, 1947, after a year-and-a-half legal separation, the divorce was finalized, and Judith celebrated by announcing her engagement: as L.A. newspapers reported it at the time, her groom was another writer, albeit a less famous one. She became Judith Badner, moved to Brooklyn Heights with her new husband, and took Vicki with her.

  In the late 1940s and 1950s, when Billy had custody of Victoria for a month in the summer, he would pick her up at Judith’s place in Brooklyn and spend a few days in New York taking her to see the top shows and dining with her in the finest restaurants, after which the clumsily endearing father and his adoring daughter would take the train together to Los Angeles. These trips on the Twentieth Century and the Super Chief were the only times they spent alone with each other, free from the entertaining distraction of Billy’s many Hollywood acquaintances and, of course, his incessant work. Showering little Victoria with gifts throughout her childhood was Wilder’s way of expressing affection. He even overcame his morbid fear of horses enough to take her horseback riding (though of course he never mounted a nag himself, but simply waited on the sidelines for Victoria to ride to her own heart’s content). Victoria kept her childhood nickname after she grew up: her friends and family called her “Billi.” The name once graced the vanity plates of her Mercedes. Billy’s daughter remembered his cars with particular fondness: “I loved driving very fast with Daddy up the coast highway. I remember the Cadillacs when I was little, playing with the power windows.” (Billy, having moved through Cadillac, Rolls, and Jaguar phases, eventually settled on Mercedeses as well.) She married twice—first a high school teacher named Fiorenzo Gordine, then the racecar driver Tony Settember. Eventually Victoria made Billy a grandfather by giving birth to a daughter, Julie (by Gordine). Julie in turn made Wilder a great-grandfather when she delivered her own little girl.

  “My daddy is a hard person to get to know,” Victoria Wilder Settember told Zolotow. “I worship him, but I cannot seem to get close to him. He is kind and generous, but he can’t say ‘I love you.’ He never has to me, not once. It embarrasses him.” A doting distant father, Billy was more enthusiastic about introducing his daughter to the things he loved—food and friends and the roar of Hollywood society. He once marched the eight-year-old Victoria into Romanoff’s and ordered her a drink—Dubonnet with a twist. (Years later
, in the 1970s, father and daughter took granddaughter Julie to The Bistro and sat her on a stack of telephone books because the deluxe restaurant possessed no child seats and she was too small to sit in a chair.) At sixteen, Victoria got her own sports car. At twenty-one, she got a two-and-a-half-month tour of Europe. Her parting words to Zolotow were, “I hope your book will explain my father to me. I never could understand him.”

  Billy and his family had been in the news even while Billy himself was still in Germany. Willie Wilder had grown tired of making women’s purses, so he moved to Hollywood with his wife and son and began making movies. In August, with his brother still serving with the army, Willie announced that he was going to be directing The Glass Alibi, a dark thriller, for Republic Pictures. Willy told it to Louella: the film, Parsons announced, was about “a newspaperman who marries a $6,000,000 heiress believing that she is so ill she will die. But she fools him by recovering—so he kills her!” The Glass Alibi would be a low-rent Double Indemnity, an acidic film noir that had neither the need nor the money for any patina of respectability. It set the tone for the rest of Willie Wilder’s film career.

  Spurred by Billy’s sensational success, Willie’s own ambition to be a showman had been mounting for several years. Wm. Wilder Co., Inc., Original Handbags, was a successful Manhattan business, but it wasn’t enough. Neither was Willie’s house in Great Neck—especially not in comparison to what Billy had in Beverly Hills. Willie had made a few trips to Hollywood in 1943 and 1944—trips in which he’d talked to Paul Kohner about representing him as a producer-director. Kohner agreed. One idea was to do a Hollywood adaptation of Emil und die Detektive. Willie talked to Billy about the question of rights to the property, but nothing ever happened. Instead, Willie landed at Republic Pictures, the best and most successful of Hollywood’s smaller, cheaper studios. His first task was to produce The Great Flamarion for director Anthony Mann. The Glass Alibi would be Willie’s second film; this time he’d direct as well as produce. Under the professional name W. Lee Wilder, Willie kept working in the film industry for the next twenty-three years. Although his career remained decidedly on the low end of the industry, this worked to his benefit. As one admiring critic explained, Willie’s artistic virtue lay in the fact that he was “one of the more extreme of the noir directors.” On the other hand, Billy himself jokingly called his brother “a dull son of a bitch” and had nothing else to say about him in public.