Noah Isenberg - Billy Wilder on Assignment

A ROVING REPORTER, A TALE OF TWO CITIES, AND THE MAKING OF BILLY WILDER

Long before the award-winning Hollywood screenwriter and director Billy Wilder spelled his first name with a y, in faithful adherence to the ways of his adopted homeland, he was knownand widely publishedin Berlin and Vienna as Billie Wilder. At birth, on June 22, 1906, in a small Galician town called Sucha, less than twenty miles northwest of Krakw, he was given the name Samuel in memory of his maternal grandfather. His mother, Eugenia, however, preferred the name Billie. She had already taken to calling her first son, Wilhelm, two years Billies senior, Willie. As a young girl, Eugenia had crossed the Atlantic and lived in New York City for several years with a jeweler uncle in his Madison Avenue apartment. At some point during that formative stay, she caught a performance of Buffalo Bills Wild West touring show, and her affection for the exotic name stuck, even without the y, as did her intense, infectious love for all things American. Billie was her American boy, insists Ed Sikov in On Sunset Boulevard, his definitive biography of the internationally acclaimed writer-director.

Wilder spent the first years of his life in Krakw, where his father, the Galician-born Max (n Hersch Mendel), had started his career in the restaurant world as a waiter and then, after Billies birth, as the manager of a small chain of railway cafs along the Vienna-to-Lemberg line. When this gambit lost steam, Max opened a hotel and restaurant known as Hotel City in the heart of Krakw, not far from the Wawel Castle. A hyperactive child, known for flitting about with bursts of speed and energy, Billie was prone to troublemaking: he developed an early habit of swiping tips left on the tables at his fathers hotel restaurant and of snookering unsuspecting guests at the pool table. After all, he was the rightful bearer of a last name that conjures up, in both German and English, a devilish assortment of idiomatic expressions suggestive of a feral beast, a wild man, even a lunatic. Long before Billy Wilder was Billy Wilder, his second wife, Audrey, once remarked, he behaved like Billy Wilder.

The Wilder family soon moved to Vienna, where assimilated Jews of their ilk could better pursue their dreams of upward mobility. They lived in an apartment in the citys First District, the hub of culture and commerce, just across the Danube from the Leopoldstadt, the neighborhood known for its unusually high concentration of recently arrived Jews from Galicia and other regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the monarchy collapsed, after the First World War, the Wilders were considered to be subjects of Poland and, despite repeated efforts, were unable to attain Austrian citizenship. Billie attended secondary school in the citys Eighth District, in the so-called Josefstadt, but his focus was often elsewhere. Across the street from his school was a tawdry hotel by the hour called the Stadion; he liked to watch for hours on end as patrons went in and out, trying to imagine the kinds of human transactions taking place inside. He also spent long hours in the dark catching matinees at the Urania, the Rotenturm Kino, and other cherished Viennese movie houses. Any chance to take in a picture show, to watch a boxing match, or land a seat in a card game was a welcome chance for young Billie.

Although Wilder pre had other plans for his sona respectable, stable career in the law, an exalted path for good Jewish boys of interwar ViennaBillie was drawn, almost habitually, to the seductive world of urban and popular culture and to the stories generated and told from within it. I just fought with my father to become a lawyer, he recounted for filmmaker Cameron Crowe in Conversations with Wilder: That I didnt want to do, and I saved myself, by having become a newspaperman, a reporter, very badly paid. As he explains a bit further in the same interview, I started out with crossword puzzles, and I signed them. (Toward the end of his life, after having racked up six Academy Awards, Wilder told his German biographer that it wasnt so much the awards he was most proud of, but rather that his name had appeared twice in the New York Times crossword puzzle: once 17 across and once 21 down.)

In the weeks leading up to Christmas 1924, at a mere eighteen years of age and fresh out of gymnasium (high school) with diploma in hand, Billie wrote to the editorial staff at Die Bhne, one of the two local tabloids that were part of the media empire belonging to a shifty Hungarian migr named Imr Bkessy, to ask how he might go about becoming a journalist, maybe even a foreign correspondent. Somewhat navely, he thought this could be his ticket to America. He received an answer, not the one he was hoping for, explaining that without complete command of English he wouldnt stand a chance.

Never one to give up, Billie paid a visit to the office one day early in the new year and, exploiting his outsize gift of gab, managed to talk his way in. In subsequent interviews, he liked to tell of how he landed his first job at