Billy Wilder on Assignment

better pursue their dreams of upward mobility. They lived in an apartment in the city’s First District, the hub of culture and commerce, just across the Danube from the Leopoldstadt, the neighborhood known for its unusually high concentration of recently arrived Jews from Galicia and other regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the monarchy collapsed, after the First World War, the Wilders were considered to be subjects of Poland and, despite repeated efforts, were unable to attain Austrian citizenship. Billie attended secondary school in the city’s Eighth District, in the so-called Josefstadt, but his focus was often elsewhere. Across the street from his school was a tawdry “hotel by the hour” called the Stadion; he liked to watch for hours on end as patrons went in and out, trying to imagine the kinds of human transactions taking place inside. He also spent long hours in the dark catching matinees at the Urania, the Rotenturm Kino, and other cherished Viennese movie houses. Any chance to take in a picture show, to watch a boxing match, or land a seat in a card game was a welcome chance for young Billie.

Although Wilder père had other plans for his son—a respectable, stable career in the law, an exalted path for good Jewish boys of interwar Vienna—Billie was drawn, almost habitually, to the seductive world of urban and popular culture and to the stories generated and told from within it. “I just fought with my father to become a lawyer,” he recounted for filmmaker Cameron Crowe in Conversations with Wilder: “That I didn’t want to do, and I saved myself, by having become a newspaperman, a reporter, very badly paid.” As he explains a bit further in the same interview, “I started out with crossword puzzles, and I signed them.” (Toward the end of his life, after having racked up six Academy Awards, Wilder told his German biographer that it wasn’t so much the awards he was most proud of, but rather that his name had appeared twice in the New York Times crossword puzzle: “once 17 across and once 21 down.”)

In the weeks leading up to Christmas 1924, at a mere eighteen years of age and fresh out of gymnasium (high school) with diploma in hand, Billie wrote to the editorial staff at Die Bühne, one of the two local tabloids that were part of the media empire belonging to a shifty Hungarian émigré named Imré Békessy, to ask how he might go about becoming a journalist, maybe even a foreign correspondent. Somewhat naïvely, he thought this could be his ticket to America. He received an answer, not the one he was hoping for, explaining that without complete command of English he wouldn’t stand a chance.

Never one to give up, Billie paid a visit to the office one day early in the new year and, exploiting his outsize gift of gab, managed to talk his way in. In subsequent interviews, he liked to tell of how he landed his first job at Die Bühne by walking in on the paper’s chief theater critic, a certain Herr Doktor Liebstöckl, having sex with his secretary one Saturday afternoon. “You’re lucky I was working overtime today,” he purportedly told Billie. (It’s hard not to think of the cast of characters that emerge from the pages of his later screenplays—the sex-starved men in his American directorial debut The Major and the Minor [1942] or in Love in the Afternoon [1957] or The Apartment [1960]—who bear a strong family resemblance to Herr Liebstöckl.) Soon he was schmoozing with journalists, poets, actors, the theater people who trained with Max Reinhardt, and the coffeehouse wits who gathered at Vienna’s Café Herrenhof. There he met writers Alfred Polgar and Joseph Roth, a young Hungarian stage actor named Laszlo Löwenstein (later known to the world as Peter Lorre), and the critic and aphorist Anton Kuh. “Billie is by profession a keeper of alibis,” observed Kuh with a good bit of sarcasm. “Wherever something is going on, he has an alibi. He was born into the world with an alibi, according to which Billie wasn’t even present when it occurred.”

FIGURE 1. Crossword puzzle by Billie Wilder, Die Bühne, 1925.

FIGURE 2. Group portrait of the Max Reinhardt Circle in the countryside, Die Bühne (August 6, 1925). From left to right: Bianca Békessy, Dr. Hans Liebstöckl, Dr. Eugen Lazar, Sybille Binder, Lina Wolwode, Billie Wilder, Louis Rainer, Annie Körner, Director Ludwig Körner, Mrs. Witzmann, Editor in Chief Emmerich (Imré) Békessy, Gitta Lazar, Theodor Danegger, Camilla Gerzhofer, Max Gülstorff, Architect Karl Witzmann.

FIGURE 3. Billie Wilder’s visiting card while a reporter for Die Stunde.

The Viennese journalistic scene at the time was anything but dull, and Billie bore witness, alibi or no alibi, to the contemporary debates, sex, and violence that occurred in his midst. He carried with him a visiting card with his name (“Billie S. Wilder”) emblazoned upon it, and underneath it the name of the other Békessy tabloid, Die Stunde, to which he contributed crossword puzzles, short features, movie reviews, and profiles. Around the time he was filing his freelance pieces at a rapid clip, a fiery feud was taking place between Békessy and Karl Kraus, the acid-tongued don of Viennese letters, editor and founder of Die Fackel (The Torch), who was determined to drive the Hungarian “scoundrel” out of the city and banish him once and for all from the world of journalism. To add to this volatile climate, just months after Billie began working for the tabloid, one of Die Stunde’s most famous writers, the Viennese novelist Hugo Bettauer, author of the best-selling novel Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews, 1922), was gunned down by a proto-Nazi thug.

“I was brash, bursting with assertiveness, had a talent for exaggeration,” Wilder told his German biographer Hellmuth Karasek, “and was convinced that in the shortest span of time I’d learn to ask shameless questions without restraint.” He was right, and soon gained precious access to everyone from international