Billy Wilder on Assignment
Billy Wilder on Assignment
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR BERLIN AND INTERWAR VIENNA
Edited by Noah Isenberg
Translated by Shelley Frisch
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2021 by Noah Isenberg
English translation of Billy Wilder articles copyright © 2021 by Princeton University Press
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [email protected]
Published by Princeton University Press
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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following previously published material:
Figures 8, 9, 12, and 13, from Deutsche Kinemathek.
Figure 14, from Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.
Figures 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, and 11, from Filmarchiv Austria.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wilder, Billy, 1906–2002, author. | Isenberg, Noah William, editor. | Frisch, Shelley Laura, translator.
Title: Billy Wilder on assignment : dispatches from Weimar Berlin and interwar Vienna / edited by Noah Isenberg ; translated by Shelley Frisch.
Other titles: Articles. Selections. English.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2021] | Includes index. | In English, translated from the original German.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021170 (print) | LCCN 2020021171 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691194943 (hardback) | ISBN 9780691214559 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Journalism—Germany—Berlin—History—20th century. | Journalism—Austria—Vienna—History—20th century. | Theater—Reviews. | Motion pictures—Reviews. | Berlin (Germany)—Social life and customs. | Vienna (Austria)—Social life and customs. | Berlin (Germany)—History—1918–1945. | Vienna (Austria)—History—1918-
Classification: LCC PN4725 .W54 2021 (print) | LCC PN4725 (ebook) | DDC 073–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021170
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021171
Version 1.0
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Jacket art: (1) Portrait: Filmarchiv Austria; (2) background image: Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, ca. 1930, INTERFOTO / Alamy
Contents
Editor’s Introduction: A Roving Reporter, a Tale of Two Cities, and the Making of Billy Wilder 1
I. Extra! Extra! Reportage, Opinion Pieces, and Features from Real Life 19
“Waiter, A Dancer, Please!” 23
Promenaden-Café 42
That’s Some Cold Weather—in Venice! 43
This Is Where Christopher Columbus Came into the Old World 47
The Art of Little Ruses 50
Naphthalene 52
Anything but Objectivity! 54
When It’s Eighty-four Degrees 56
Day of Destiny 58
Wanted: Perfect Optimist 60
Renovation: An Ode to the Coffeehouse 63
Why Don’t Matches Smell That Way Anymore? 65
The Rose of Jericho 68
Little Economics Lesson 69
Film Terror: On the Threat of Being Photographed 72
Berlin Rendezvous 74
Night Ride over Berlin 76
The Business of Thirst: What People Are Drinking Nowadays 78
Here We Are at Film Studio 1929 80
How We Shot Our Studio Film 83
Getting Books to Readers 87
How I Pumped Zaharoff for Money 90
II. Portraits of Extraordinary and Ordinary People 95
Asta Nielsen’s Theatrical Mission 97
My “Prince of Wales” 100
Lubitsch Discovers: A Casting by America’s Great Director 103
The Tiller Girls Are Here! 105
The Tiller Girls’ Boarding School at the Prater 107
Girardi’s Son Plays Jazz at the Mary Bar 110
Paul Whiteman, His Mustache, the Cobenzl, and the Taverns 111
Whiteman Triumphs in Berlin 115
I Interview Mr. Vanderbilt 118
The Prince of Wales Goes on Holiday 121
Chaplin II and the Others at the Scala 124
The Lookalike Man: Tale of a Chameleon Named Erwin 126
A Minister on Foot 129
Interview with a Witch: Women’s Newest Profession 131
Grock, the Man Who Makes the World Laugh 134
Ten Minutes with Chaliapin 137
Claude Anet in Berlin 139
At the Home of the Oldest Woman in Berlin 140
Felix Holländer 141
The Elder Statesman of Berlin Theater Critics 143
The B. Z. Lady and the German Crown Prince 145
Stroheim, the Man We Love to Hate 148
A Poker Artist: The Magic of Fritz Herrmann 152
“Hello, Mr. Menjou?” 157
Klabund Died a Year Ago 161
III. Film and Theater Reviews 165
Broken Barriers (1924) 167
Marital Conflicts (1927) 168
Eichberg Shoots a Film 169
The Beggar from Cologne Cathedral (1927) 170
Ole and Axel at the North Sea Shore (1927) 171
Radio Magic (1927) 172
Frost in the Studio: A Bath at Twenty Degrees Fahrenheit 173
Ole and Axel at Beba Palace 173
His Wife’s Lover (1928) 174
From the Studios 175
Greed (1924) 176
A Blonde for a Night (1928) 176
The Valley of the Giants (1927) 177
The Last Night (1928) 177
In the Name of the Law (1922) 178
Sounds Are Recorded: The Studio Shots 179
The Threepenny Opera, for the Fiftieth Time 181
Springtime in Palestine (1928) 181
First Silhouette Sound Film 182
What a Woman Dreams in Spring (1929) 183
“Youth Stage”? 184
Stroll through the Studios—They’re Shooting Silent Films 185
The Missing Will (1929) 188
The Winged Horseman (1929) 188
Men without Work (1929) 189
The Merry Musicians (1930) 190
Susie Cleans Up (1930) 190
Translator’s Note 193
Index 197
Billy Wilder on Assignment
Editor’s Introduction
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 known—and widely published—in 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 Kraków, 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 Billie’s 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 Bill’s 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 Kraków, where his father, the Galician-born Max (né Hersch Mendel), had started his career in the restaurant world as a waiter and then, after Billie’s birth, as the manager of a small chain of railway cafés 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 Kraków, 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 father’s 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
