Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

Berlin would be pointless without five o’clock tea; with splendid women from abroad who divide their stay in Berlin between hotel rooms, halls, and ballrooms; with ladies who are there every day and no one knows where they’re from and where they’re going; with a thousand kinds.

This is no easy way to earn your daily bread, nor is it the kind that sentimental, softhearted types can stomach. But others can live from it. I did not earn badly this first week, but starting out is typically always difficult; let’s hope it goes on this way.

I won’t go hungry. My average daily earning is twenty marks, plus my wages. Later it will surely get better, only practice will get me there. Willy and the Spaniard earn twice as much, but they have experience, they are better psychologists, they know their way around.

The treadmill in the hotel keeps running, and with it the whole hullabaloo to which I now belong, full-fledged, like the others: the Spaniard, Willy, the paper sales representative, and Kurt.

In my notebook the reservations for dance lessons are increasing. Yesterday I was employed from ten to twelve—a family in Grunewald—and from two to four—two ladies who live in the hotel. The instructional hours alone make me forty marks. But the bad part is that I can no longer get a good night’s sleep.

These past ten days I earned roughly four hundred marks. Three-quarters of this sum got eaten up by the purchase of a portable gramophone, which I now need for the classes, as well as fifteen records. Whiteman, Hylton, the Revelers, Jack Smith. On top of that, the down payment at a top-notch tailor, on Kurfürstendamm, for a suit, dark blue, finely patterned, double-breasted, six buttons; wide trousers, the latest; three neckties; a pair of black shoes; four dress shirts.

Saturday is the worst day for the dancer. All the halls are full to the very last seat. On the dance floor fifty couples crowd together, stepping on one another’s feet, panting and sparring. One single mass of flesh, quivering in rhythm like aspic. It is a day when the dancer for hire loses a couple of pounds of weight but is unlikely to gain a single pfennig.

I position myself at the wall in the large hall and analyze all the tables. Facing away from me are two ladies, both with Eton crop hairdos and red ears.

I dance with the two Eton crops. With one of them, this dialogue ensues:

“I actually feel sorry for you, having to work so hard.”

“Oh, it’s a pleasure to be able to dance with my dear Madame.”

“Is it?”

“It is indeed.”

“And you think I dance well?”

“Superbly.”

“That I cut a fine figure?”

“A fabulous one.”

The eternal feminine—yet I’m nothing but a dancer for hire.

It is incredible how mean people can get.

A waiter informs me: table 87 wishes to have a dancer.

Fine, I go there. But not to table 87, because I misunderstand the number; I go to table 86. Sitting at this table are a burly young man and a bulbous-nosed lady with a tangerine-colored gown that comes down to her ankles.

I make my obligatory bow in front of the couple and recite my set phrase as I face the gentleman: May I be permitted to dance with the lady?

The man turns bright red in an instant, and his dueling scars stand out like white crisscrosses. His bellowing makes all the guests in the room jump up from their seats:

“I will permit nothing of the sort. How dare you indulge in this boorish behavior? How do you figure you can harass this lady? Youuu … nobody!”

I can’t think of absolutely anything to say in response. Dozens of curious people are now assembled around the table. I finally stammer: I beg your pardon—but I am the house dancer, and I was sent for!

“Is that so!” the man shouts back, foaming and trembling with fury. “What are you? We know these kinds of excuses.”

Herr Isin is already behind me, profusely begging forgiveness for my behavior. The customer is always right.

With a lovely black woman in sumptuous ermine, underneath it an evening gown that looks like a silver suit of armor, a pink rose at her hip.

She has summoned me to the table: nine courses, plus a bottle of Veuve Clicquot sec. Hither and yon we dance. She doesn’t say a word; she’s probably thinking: I’ve rented two legs because I want to dance right now, but their owner is an idiot.

Just once she asks, “Do you think the Black Bottom dance is coming into fashion?”

“No,” I answer. And once again there is silence for two hours. We just dance. Or we sit across from each other without speaking.

At two o’clock she says, “We’re going.” I am to bring her home, because she’s alone.

Fine by me, I think.

A taxi is already there. We get in, she says to the driver, “Kantstrasse …”

I’m nervous. I look through the side window at the neon signs outside, washed by the November rain. Kantstrasse. The taxi stops. I help the lady out of the car.

The taxi drives away.

She opens the front door. Suddenly, however, she wheels around, gazes into my eyes, and asks, looking dead serious: “Do you know who Kant was?”

Who Kant was? What a sweetheart. I don’t want to spoil the setup for which she paid seventy-two marks, not including the car expenses.

I answer: “Of course, my dear Madame, a Swiss national hero.”

She grimaces, then lifts her hand and caresses my cheek, the way you would with a poor little inane child. Then she goes into the house and locks the door behind her.

I turn up the collar of my overcoat and walk down the street.

B. Z. [Berliner Zeitung] am Mittag, January 19, 20, 22, and 24, 1927; reprinted in Die Bühne, June 2, 1927

Promenaden-Café

In Stockholm and in Singapore, people know just as well as they do in Cairo and Montevideo that in Vienna you need to have seen four things: the girls, St. Stephen’s