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

can you have so many burned tires—. He looks at the clock. “Time to pay. Unfortunately I have to get to the office. A long-distance call with the Majestic Hotel, Paris, is coming. Would you like to make Menjou’s acquaintance by telephone? Fine by me. I’ll tell you everything as we go.”

As we go he does indeed tell me everything.

One summer’s day in 1919, a man in a light-gray suit crosses Hollywood Boulevard, a briefcase under his arm. On this day many men cross Hollywood Boulevard, many in light-gray suits and with briefcases under their arms, but none of them carry their briefcases the way our man does; no one walks in as focused a manner and yet as upright. That was striking, to us and to others. A car stops in front of the man.

“Pardon me. My name is Fairbanks. Douglas Fairbanks …” The man with the briefcase doffs his hat with magnificent elegance.

“Pleased to meet you. Adolphe Menjou.”

Fifteen minutes later they’re sitting across from each other at the studio.

“I’d like you to work for me!”

Menjou twirls the left end of his mustache. “I’m terribly sorry. I’m quite satisfied with my job as an agent for the C. C. Burr Enterprises film company. I earn 125 dollars a week, as well as percentages, plus a good Christmas bonus … for I am the best salesman in the place. And who can guarantee, Mr. Fairbanks, that I would distribute your films as well as I do our trash?”

“You wouldn’t sell my films. You would act with me!”

Menjou now twirls the other end of his mustache. He signs the contract and thinks to himself: insane.

“Surely you are French, surely from a fine noble family?”

Menjou is delighted that he has already signed the contract. “Noble? My father is French, my mother is German, from Leipzig. I’m an American. Born in 1892. I was a waiter in my father’s restaurant in Pittsburgh. Then I went to Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. In the war I served in France at the front. Then I was a motion picture agent. Until ten minutes ago I was still a salesman at C. C. Burr Enterprises. Now I’m the actor Adolphe Menjou. My brother will die laughing. And what, may I ask, will be my first role?”

“One of the Three Musketeers!”

One of the Three Musketeers catches Chaplin’s eye. He signs him on and directs the film A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (1923) with him and Purviance. Since then, Menjou’s brother isn’t dying of laughter anymore. Adolphe takes the ladder of success by storm, leaping up six rungs at a time. Lubitsch’s The Marriage Circle (1924) already shows him in top form, then he is a room waiter for the grand duchess, the gentleman of Paris. He is considered the world’s best-dressed man, along with the Prince of Wales, as the man with the two hundred suits and a thousand ties. His mustache, which had been the optical hallmark of the movie villain, sprouts offshoots on millions of upper lips, in America and Europe. He is one of the dozen people who can wear a tailcoat and a top hat, who can present a bouquet of flowers to a lady without occasioning a burst of laughter. Surely 100,000 per film was a bargain price for qualities like those.

When the contract ran out and Menjou wanted 150,000, Paramount didn’t sign, ignoring the fact that it was letting go its last, its only true gentleman, someone with both poise and a fine voice, someone who would bring his sound film, Fashions in Love (1929), adapted from Hermann Bahr’s play Concert, a great deal of success. Paramount does not give 150,000. Menjou is now in Paris. One cable after the other arrives. Their offer goes up to 125,000. Menjou doesn’t budge. He simply makes two sound films with W. R. Wilkerson in Europe on his own. He’s already working on two manuscripts with the author Ernst Bajda and will probably get the exquisite d’Abbadie d’Arrant as director. He doesn’t yet know where he will shoot it, in London, in Paris, or in Berlin.

“Frankly, Berlin would be my preference!” says W. R. Wilkerson. At this moment the long-distance office reports that Paris is on the line.

W. R. Wilkerson has put his feet up on the desk and is talking on the telephone with Adolphe Menjou, currently in Paris, Hotel Majestic. What I (a) can reveal, (b) have understood of Wilkerson’s garbled American English is this: that he had serious preliminary discussions with gentlemen from the German film industry on the Bremen; that he is going to Karlsbad today to see Laemmle to buy a story that Universal owns for Menjou; that he wants to begin production no later than October.

Then W. R. Wilkerson hands me the receiver. I don’t know why, but at this moment I take a deep bow before Menjou, who is more than a thousand miles away, adjust my wretched tie provocatively with my left hand.… Menjou speaks a very distinct and dignified German. Yes, he is looking forward to Berlin, quite a bit. Then he laughs when I state that Leipzig has accomplished something besides the trade fair after all. No, he’s traveling to Biarritz first to finish the scripts there. Work in Berlin? The odds are sixty to a hundred. It’s all very nice and polite. At the end W. R. Wilkerson hollers a cheerful goodbye into the mouthpiece.

A damned invention. One sits in an office in Berlin, holds a silly receiver in one’s hand, and sees the apartment in the Majestic quite clearly: Adolphe sitting in front of the machine in silk pajamas, woven in Siam, changing his clothes for the fourth time. The ends of his mustache are now being drizzled with holy oil by a Japanese servant. Miss Kathryn Carver, his wife, is standing next to him and hasn’t a clue what to do with the two hundred suits. Downstairs, on the set, six girls have been waiting for