by Ed Sikov
It was no simple matter to clean up the mess, though, especially since their apartment was still crammed to the brim. For instance, all of Billy’s and Audrey’s clothes had to be inventoried by the insurance company before they were sent out to be cleaned to remove the smell of smoke. Forced by circumstance to chronicle his ridiculous array of material possessions, the compulsive clotheshorse was shocked at what his closets and dresser drawers contained. As Armand Deutsch reported later, “Billy was stunned to learn that he owned sixty cashmere sweaters.”
Billy Wilder in his old age became even more of a surly cherub than he had been in his youth. Gracious one minute and bitter and rude the next, he spent his time shopping, shmoozing, going into the office, receiving admiring visitors, and accepting major international awards given by groups who kept wanting to applaud him. In 1990 it was the Kennedy Center Honors. When he found messages in his office to call a number with a Washington area code, he called Audrey and told her to start packing: “I’m being appointed to the Supreme Court.” In 1991 it was the Preston Sturges Award from the Writers Guild. In his acceptance speech, Billy confessed to being testy because he had to miss the televised Florida State-Michigan game to attend the ceremony.
Another award was more trying for him. In 1991, Billy Wilder was given the Golden Order, First Class, for Meritorious Services Rendered to the Republic of Austria. The award was bestowed upon him at the Austrian consul’s house in Los Angeles. One of Billy’s favorite Austrians, the chef Wolfgang Puck, was in attendance; the Wilders were regulars at Spago, Puck’s restaurant overlooking the Sunset Strip. Given the prominence of the award and his harsh ambivalence about those who would have been his fellow countrymen had they not denied his father citizenship, Billy chose the occasion to be unforgiving of Kurt Waldheim. Wilder made it a point to tell the Austrian press just how offensive he found their unrepentant president. Still, he told the magazine Profil, he was grateful for the award: “I’m sure I’ll get a better table at the Hotel Sacher.”
Germany was far less tormenting to him than Austria. In 1992, he planned two trips—first to the Frankfurt Book Fair in September to celebrate the publication of Billy Wilder: Eine Nabaufnahme (A Close-Up), Hellmuth Karasek’s biography, and then again in December to receive another Lifetime Achievement award—this time at the Felix awards held at Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam. He relished all the attention at the Book Fair, though he later said privately that he didn’t much like Karasek’s book. “Why go to the trouble of writing a book if you’re going to write a stupid one?” he asked a friend. Once again, having revealed some of himself to an admiring biographer, Billy detested the final result. (And curiously, Wilder’s family receives even less attention from Karasek than from Zolotow; his wife has little to say, his daughter nothing at all.)
He was still raging about politics, culture, Congress, baseball teams…. When he would launch into one of his regular diatribes about America, Audrey would try valiantly to cut him off. “Billy,” she’d begin. “Yes, yes, I know,” he’d answer, “if I don’t like it here I should go back where I came from.”
Ill health prevented his attendance at Babelsberg, though he announced his intention to travel to Berlin for the Film Festival two months later, where he was to receive yet another award—an honorary Golden Bear. “Personally, I’d prefer a Volkswagen,” he said. A bizarre sight greeted him upon his arrival: a troop of American-style cheerleaders waving pompons. He was quite perplexed by it all, and as the guest of honor, he saw little need to hide his displeasure. More to his liking was the commemorative plaque that had been installed on the face of his old apartment building at Viktoria-Luise-Platz n. It was a belated effort to make up for a past slight; on a 1987 visit to the building, Billy mistook another plaque (for composer Ferruccio Busoni) for his own.
A film idea had been tugging at him, and even though he knew he was too frail to withstand the rigors of directing it, he was compelled to try—at least to pitch the notion. He continued to feel “fury, tears, reproaches” over his mother’s death at Auschwitz. “Why didn’t I take my parents with me?” he kept asking himself well into his old age. “I left the day after the Reichstag fire and I left my mother in Vienna. What is done is done and cannot be undone.” So when Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s List came out in 1982, Billy’s immediate response was to try to buy the rights and direct it.
The story spoke to him: a self-serving, amoral bastard finds redemption by saving helpless Jews from the gas chambers. He got as far as talking to Universal about the idea, only to find that the studio had already bought the rights for Steven Spielberg. According to Billy, Spielberg actually considered letting Wilder direct it, with Spielberg producing it on his behalf; another plan, said Billy, was to let Wilder produce the film so Spielberg could direct it himself. Spielberg himself has acknowledged that Wilder’s intense drive was what convinced him to make the film after years of procrastination. “He made me look very deeply inside myself when he was so passionate to do this,” Spielberg said. “In a way he tested my resolve.” Wilder wrote Spielberg a long letter of appreciation after seeing Schindler’s List. “They couldn’t have gotten a better man,” Wilder said. “The movie is absolutely perfection.”
Wilder had a great deal more to say about the film, and he chose his audience with the precision of a sharphooter: he bypassed American readers entirely and published his essay, written in German, in the Süddeutscbe Zeitung Magazin. He told his former countrymen (particularly those in conservative southern Germany, where the magazine was headquartered):
Yesterday I saw Schindler’s List for the third time, and next week I will go again with my wife. Actually, she doesn’t like war movies, but this movie, my God, is no movie. It is an event—a document of the truth. I was so moved afterwards that for an hour I couldn’t utter a single word. It was the same with the others in the theater—everywhere you looked you saw handkerchiefs. Even after the first ten minutes I had forgotten it was a movie. I didn’t care about camera angles and all that technical stuff—I was only enthralled with the total realism. It starts like a newsreel from the period—very difficult to stage, to make real. And believe me, these scenes are so authentic it makes you shiver. I lost a big part of my family at Auschwitz—my mother, my stepfather, my grandmother—and the whole agony came up again. I sat there and saw on the screen how the Jews were driven together into the trains on which they were deported to the gas chambers, and I looked at the line of people, thinking—my mother has to be somewhere in that crowd. But I couldn’t find her.
Wilder laid an early bet on the Academy Awards: “I am convinced that he’ll finally get the Oscar this year. I always voted for him, but this time nobody will be able to avoid it. The Piano is also a wonderful movie, too, though I did fall asleep a little bit in the middle. Don’t pass that on.” (Spielberg took Billy to Spago some time along the way, and the younger, more famous man was immediately surrounded by autograph hounds, only one of whom approached Billy. “Could you autograph three times?” Wilder’s fan asked. “Sure,” Billy answered, “but why?” The hound’s answer was simple: “Because for three Wilders I can get one Spielberg.”)
“The most important function of this movie is this,” Wilder concluded: “It manifests for all time that these unbelievable cruelties really happened. We need not forget that. With each year dust lays itself on this history; it is pushed away, forgotten. The young people, growing up today without the awareness of it, are already doubting that such a horror really could happen in the cultivated country of Goethe. ‘The Auschwitz myth.’ Nonsense, more and more people are saying—concentration camps, gas chambers, all that exists only in a Jewish fantasy. I venture to ask in each case: if the concentration camps and the gas chambers were all imaginary, then please tell me—where is my mother? Where can I find her?”
Wilder returned to Vienna in May 1994. It was his first visit since the disastrous 1958 trip when, feeling snubbed by the Viennese press, he let fly with his growling remarks
about how his old colleagues used to call him “the bootlicker,” and how the kids always called him the Polak. Billy had returned to Germany several times since then, but Austria remained a kind of forbidden zone; it was too painful. But Vienna had gradually but essentially yielded; Wilder finally became more or less Viennese in the eyes of the Viennese.
As his international stature grew, the city began tentatively to embrace him. But it took a lot of cajoling for him to return the hug. In 1981, for instance, on the occasion of Billy’s seventy-fifth birthday, there was an article in the Austrian press touting “the Viennese Billy Wilder.” One of Wilder’s Austrian émigré friends, Dr. Robert H. Austerlitz, read the piece and reacted with outrage: Wilder was being called “Viennese” by the very people who had dismissed and denied him. So Austerlitz wrote from Los Angeles to the newspaper Die Presse in Vienna: “Vienna was, as is well known, only one of his stations during his life; it is where he came with his parents from Kraków. He himself has never called himself nor has he viewed himself as Viennese, nor has he even been proud of being Viennese. I am certain of this.” Austerlitz quoted Billy himself: “All of a sudden, they’re calling me Viennese, even though in 1938, together with the other Jews, they wanted to send me to hell.”
In 1992, Chancellor Franz Vranitzky of Austria issued a personal invitation to Wilder to return to Austria. He repeated the invitation in 1993. And again in 1994. Billy was finally talked into it that year, thanks to the intervention of the Austrian film director Wolfgang Glück. Chancellor Vranitzky met him personally at the airport and whisked him to Fleischmarkt 7, where Vienna’s cultural minister, Ursula Pasterk, unveiled a new plaque commemorating Wilder’s old home. (The city managed to mount the plaque a matter of hours before Wilder’s arrival.) This ceremony and the state dinner at which Wilder was the guest of honor were all covered closely by Austrian television. Special screenings of Double Indemnity were arranged at one of the movie houses. Vranitzky offered a discreet but poignant toast at the state dinner—he said he hoped Wilder would see “a new Austria.” Billy, visibly moved, responded graciously. He offered to cast Vranitzky in the role of the dashing diplomat in his next picture.
In October 1993, Billy won the National Medal of Arts at ceremonies held at the White House; in November, he won the first Lifetime Achievement Award in Screenwriting given by PEN Center USA West. He received a more unusual honor in 1996, when, on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, School Street in the heart of Sucha Beskidzka was renamed Ulica Billy Wildera. As Wilder noted in a letter to town officials, it was “one of the highest points in my life.” “They wouldn’t just grab anybody and name a street after him,” he said.
In the early 1990s, Billy learned about the proposed musical adaptation of Sunset Boulevard being written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer of various operatic extravaganzas. Lloyd Webber seems to have been more appealing a musical translator of his work than Stephen Sondheim had been, though only mildly so. “I’m not saying he writes great music,” Billy declared; “He’ll have one good song.” As for Lloyd Webber’s theatrical style, Billy was precise: he “provides a kind of whole special atmosphere, a kind of magic for enveloping you. That’s originality. People pay for that, because it is different from the neighbor’s house.” Billy claims to have heard of the project first from some Paramount lackey, who called him up to say that the studio wanted to take a picture of him standing with Lloyd Webber at the famous Bronson Avenue Gate. “Tell me,” Billy snapped, “who is this good for? This is good for Paramount, right? Because I’m not going to see a single penny from this show, because the picture was made before 1960 and Paramount owns it. So why should I go and be photographed with Mr. Lloyd Webber? Have Mr. Webber come to my office and photograph me here. Preferably with the Twentieth Century-Fox sign in back of me.”
To librettist Christopher Hampton, Billy was less nasty. He simply said that he held no claim to the property: “Call it injustice or a cruel boo-boo of the capitalist system, the sole possessor of the property is Paramount Pictures.” Hampton’s play, Tales of Hollywood, about German refugees in the movie colony, hadn’t impressed him much, but as Billy put it, “He seems an okay guy.” Sunset Boulevard proceeded without Wilder’s official input, though the Wilders dined with Lloyd Webber and his wife, Madeleine, while Webber was in town working on the Los Angeles opening. Shirley MacLaine had once been considered for the role of Norma Desmond—a nice resonance, but it wasn’t to be. The role was ultimately taken by Patti LuPone in London and Glenn Close in Los Angeles and New York.
In November 1993, Billy and Audrey flew to London for the West End premiere, where they were joined in the reunion by Nancy Olson. Billy later said he and Audrey each had tears in their eyes; “It was like seeing old friends.” “The best thing they did was leave the script alone,” Billy observed after the show. “I thought the director did a good job, considering.” He had no love for the immense, gaudy set: “It looks more a palace built by some Arab sheik for his ladies.” About Patti LuPone, Wilder had nothing but praise: “She’s a star from the moment she walks on the stage.” As for Kevin Anderson as Joe Gillis, Billy said, “I just wish he’d change his hair style.”
The Wilders later traveled to New York for the Broadway opening of Sunset Boulevard, and Billy actually appeared onstage for the curtain call, though it took quite a bit of talking before he agreed to do so. Glenn Close greeted his entrance with a curtsey low to the ground. But it was at the earlier Los Angeles opening that Billy was in his finest form. Peter Bart recalls the scene. Tout Beverly Hills appeared at the opening night party, including Nancy Reagan and her socialite friends, and as Bart puts it, “Everyone was being very civil and polite until one woman asked, ‘Billy, why does the show open with this, this monkey?’” “Don’t you understand?” Billy replied; “The Glenn Close character was fucking the monkey before Joe Gillis came along.” Bart reports that “Nancy Reagan looked like she was about to pass out.”
In case anyone thought he’d gone reassuringly soft in his old age, Billy made it a periodic point to disabuse them of the notion. When Tony Curtis’s son Nicholas died of a heroin overdose in the summer of 1994, Curtis was devastated. He climbed into bed and stayed there for a week or so, until he decided to venture out into the world of greater Beverly Hills once more. Curtis chose Spago for his first night out; there he ran into Billy at his usual table. “I knelt down by him for a moment,” Curtis remembers, “and he said, ‘How are you, Tony?’ I said, ‘Billy, my son died. My son Nicholas died. He died of an overdose of heroin.’” Wilder’s response was terse: “He learned it from you.”
In 1995, Billy told Sight and Sound the story of his recent conversation with a studio executive who told him that they were interested in remaking Love in the Afternoon. The studio was prepared to offer him $2,500 immediately and $25,000 if they actually made the film. “You must be crazy!” Billy said he told him. The executive said he’d think about it, to which Billy replied, “While you are thinking, remember that Mr. Eszterhas just got $3 million for Natural Instincts, I mean Basic Instinct. Three million dollars, do you hear?” Then he hung up on him. Billy said they called back soon thereafter and offered $100,000, and he told them that whatever he got, half would go to Barbara Diamond. The sale appears not to have gone through.
Sydney Pollack got a taste of Wilder’s grumpiness when he invited Billy to an advance screening of his 1995 remake of Sabrina. According to Pollack, Wilder was not happy about the film being made at all. If they had to remake it, he told Pollack, they should make the Larrabee family’s company bankrupt, and Sabrina’s competition for the younger Larrabee should be the daughter of a Japanese prospective buyer. Pollack ignored Billy’s advice and made a more faithful update. When the new Sabrina was finally complete—with Harrison Ford in Bogart’s role, Julia Ormond in Hepburn’s, and Greg Kinnear in Holden’s—Pollack invited Wilder to watch the film at a Paramount Studios screening room. The two men were the only audience in the small theater. The lights w
ent down, the 1990s Sabrina began, and in the middle of the opening scene—with Ormond assuming Hepburn’s perch in the tree—Billy barked, “Why is it so dark? Who was the cinematographer?” Pollack told him. “An Italian!” Billy snapped. “He should know better!”
It went downhill from there, though Billy made a few pleasant remarks at the end. Then they went out to lunch. Pollack noticed that the room suddenly hushed when they walked in, everyone holding Billy in awe. When they sat down at their table, Billy promptly turned to Pollack and said, “How many Oscars you got?” “Two,” Pollack replied. “I’ve got six,” said Billy.
Wilder also took the opportunity to offer a capsule review of another one of Pollack’s films: “That African movie you made—classy but boring.”
Billy continued working. He had moved out of the Artists and Writers Building into a second-story office a few blocks away, a cozy space over some Beverly Hills boutiques. In a 1993 interview with Buzz magazine, he talked about his daily routine. He was still speaking in the present tense, though it had been a dozen years since Buddy Buddy: “When I’m shooting a picture I have a large suite at the studio. But once the picture is finished, I come back here to my little office on Brighton Way. It’s not like the old days when we were all under contract and lived on the lot. But at least this way I don’t have to worry about running into a studio executive.”
His secretary came in once a week on Fridays to type and make phone calls. “I usually have several scripts in the works at once, so I’m always rewriting something,” he said. “When I don’t feel like writing, I sit by the window and wait for the muses to fly in and kiss my brow. If they don’t, I go shopping.”