Review: Billy Wilder on Assignment

Who doesn’t love Billy Wilder, the great Hollywood screenwriter/director of such classics as Some Like it Hot, The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard? But, until now, we have known much less about the young newspaperman of 1920s Vienna and Berlin, hospitable cities at the time for talented, assimilated Jews such as himself.

Wilder elbowed his way into this exhilarating life at the age of 18 with nothing but his outsize self-confidence and a “gift of the gab”. But he was soon penning pieces for Viennese tabloids owned by “shifty Hungarian émigré” Imre Békessy.

In this first English-language compilation of Wilder’s early journalism (he still spelt his name “Billie” then), by Professor Noah Isenberg of the University of Texas, we can see the mischievous humour and love of snappy dialogue characteristic of his later movies.

As well as writing the urbane, observational essays known as feuilletons — so popular in Mittel Europa during the inter-war years — Wilder was quick to sniff out a story and to grab a telling interview with a visiting celebrity. As he put it many years later: “I was brash, bursting with assertiveness, had a talent for exaggeration and was convinced that in the shortest span of time I’d learn to ask shameless questions without restraint.” And so, in his broken English, he quizzed, among many others, the American band-leader Paul Whiteman (who paid for Wilder to accompany him to Berlin); the “wonderful” Tiller Girls dance troupe (claiming they would give you a “harmless, friendly, obligation-free little kiss if you beg for one”); affable newspaper mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, who invited him to New York: “While speaking, he displays a sturdy but flawed set of teeth. Why doesn’t he go to the dentist”,the interviewer wonders.”

Perhaps his most celebrated article is the four-part account, for the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag in 1927, of his stint working as a dancer for hire in swanky hotel ballrooms. He schmoozes his way around the floor, dancing with women of every type — “Table 91. An older lady in a bottle-green dress, with a long neck and hair the colour of egg yolks; and a little lady, whose reddish snub nose is trying too hard to look uppity. I stand in front of them… sweat on my brow… helpless and wobbly. Then I methodically thrust my torso forward… “May I ask for this dance?”

A man-about-town raconteur, his fedora at a jaunty angle on his head, he was in his element amid the literati who gathered at the fashionable cafés, especially the Romanisches Café on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. And he had important mentors there to help him along, among them the famed writer Egon Erwin Kisch, who not only oversaw Wilder’s work but found him an apartment.

Wilder’s first film as named writer was the 1929 German silent thriller The Daredevil Reporter, inspired of course by his own exploits. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he fled to Paris, but was soon on a ship bound for America and a new life in Tinsel Town. But a deep fondness for his reporting days stayed with him. You’ve only to watch his 1974 black comedy The Front Page to realise that.

 

Author and journalist Monica Porter has just completed her first children’s book.