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

who seek his services, the jealous husbands who glare at him, and the grueling hours of labor on the dance floor. “I wasn’t the best dancer,” he later said of this period, “but I had the best dialogue.”

Early on in the same piece, he includes a review of his performance attributed to the hotel management that in many ways serves as an apt summation of his whole career: “Herr Wilder knew how to adapt to the fussiest audiences in every way in his capacity as a dancer. He achieved success in his position and always adhered to the interests of the establishment.” He put the skills he acquired on the dance floor to continued use on the page and on the screen, always pleasing his audience and ensuring his path to success. “I say to myself: I’m a fool,” he writes in a moment of intense self-awareness. “Sleepless nights, misgivings, doubts? The revolving door has thrust me into despair, that’s for sure. Outside it is winter, friends from the Romanisches Café, all with colds, are debating sympathy and poverty, and, just like me, yesterday, have no idea where to spend the night. I, however, am a dancer. The big wide world will wrap its arms around me.”

An ideal match for Billie arrived when, in 1928, the Ullstein publishing house, publisher of the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, introduced a new afternoon Boulevard-Zeitung, an illustrated paper aimed at a young readership and bearing a title that would speak directly to them and to Wilder: Tempo. “It was a tabloid,” remarked historian Peter Gay in his early study of the “German-Jewish Spirit” of the city, “racy in tone, visual in appeal, designed to please the Berliner who ran as he read.” The Berliners, however, quickly adopted another name for it: they called it jüdische Hast, or “Jewish haste.” Billie, an inveterate pacer and man on the move, was a good fit for Tempo and vice versa (it was in its pages that he introduced Berliners to the short-lived independent production company Filmstudio 1929 and the young cineastes, including Wilder himself, behind its creation).

In 1928, after serving as an uncredited ghostwriter on a number of screenplays, Billie earned a solo writing credit for a picture that had more than a slight autobiographical bearing on its author. It was called Der Teufelsreporter (Hell of a Reporter), though it also bore the subtitle Im Nebel der Großstadt (In the Fog of the Metropolis), and was directed by Ernst Laemmle, nephew of Universal boss Carl Laemmle. Set in contemporary Berlin, it tells the story of the titular character, a frenetic newspaperman played by American actor Eddie Polo, a former circus star, who works at a city tabloid—called Rapid, in explicit homage—and whose chief attributes are immediately traceable to Wilder himself. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, young Billie even has a brief appearance in the film, dressed just like the other reporters in his midst. “He performs this cameo,” write German film scholars Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen, “as if to prove who the true Teufelsreporter is.” In addition to asserting a deeper connection to the city and to American-style tabloid journalism, Der Teufelsreporter lays a foundation for other hard-boiled newspapermen in Wilder’s Hollywood repertoire, from Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) in Ace in the Hole (1951) to Walter Burns (Walter Matthau) in The Front Page (1974).

Further affinities between Wilder’s Weimar-era writings and his later film work abound. For example, in “Berlin Rendezvous,” an article he published in the Berliner Börsen Courier in early 1927, he writes about the favored meeting spots within the city, including the oversized clock, called the Normaluhr, at the Berlin Zoo railway station. Two years later, when writing his script for Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930), he located the pivotal rendezvous between two of his amateur protagonists, Wolfgang von Waltershausen and Christl Ehlers, at precisely the same spot. For the same script, he crafted the character of Wolfgang, a traveling wine salesman and playboy, as a seeming wish-fulfillment fantasy of his own exploits as a dancer for hire. Likewise, in his early account of the Tiller Girls arriving by train in Vienna, there’s more than a mere germ of Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators, the all-girl band in Some Like It Hot (1959); there’s even a Miss Harley (“the shepherdess of these little sheep”), anticipating the character of Sweet Sue herself. In a short comic piece on casting, Billie pays tribute to director Ernst Lubitsch, a future mentor in Hollywood (many years later, Wilder’s office in Beverly Hills featured a mounted plaque designed by Saul Bass with the words “How Would Lubitsch Do It?” emblazoned on it). Finally, in his 1929 profile of Erich von Stroheim, in Der Querschnitt, among the many things young Billie highlights is Gloria Swanson’s performance in Stroheim’s late silent, Queen Kelly (1929). It was the first flicker of the inspired idea to cast Swanson and Stroheim as a pair of crusty, vaguely twisted emissaries from the lost world of silent cinema in Sunset Boulevard (1950).

FIGURE 6. Lobby card for the film Der Teufelsreporter (Hell of a Reporter, 1928).

FIGURE 7. Billie Wilder appears in a cameo, second from left, in Der Teufelsreporter.

FIGURE 8. Berlin as it appears in Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1929).

By the time Wilder boarded a British ocean liner, the S.S. Aquitania, bound for America in January 1934, he’d managed to acquire a few more screen credits and a little more experience in show business, but very little of the English language (he purportedly packed secondhand copies of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel in his suitcase). He had gone from a salaried screenwriter at UFA in Berlin to an unemployed refugee in Paris to an American transplant with twenty dollars and a hundred English words in his possession. “He paced his way across the Atlantic,” remarks Sikov. And soon he’d pace his way onto the lot of MGM, Paramount,