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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 permissions@press.princeton.edu

Published by Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

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.

All Rights Reserved

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