Before being Billy Wilder, the director of
The Apartment, Some Like It Hot, Twilight of the Gods
or
Sweet Irma,
there was a Samuel or Billie Wilder, student, journalist and film lover.
A guy who, with his greatest self-confidence and love of jazz and storytelling, carved out a path in Vienna between the wars and in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.
In those bustling cultural hotspots, full of artistic events and social events, a twentysomething who had spent his childhood in Krakow (he was born nearby, in Sucha, present-day Poland, in 1906 Austro-Hungarian empire, where his father ran several cafes and restaurants) and his adolescence in imperial Vienna, he lived his journalistic escapades, which can finally be read in
Billy Wilder, reporter
(Ediciones Laertes).
Luz Monteagudo's translation of the compilation brings together fifty articles selected and edited by Noah Isenberg in English last year.
Isenberg, in turn, has chosen them from two anthologies in German: one from 1996 with his Berlin works, and another from 2006 with his Viennese reports.
More information
the perfect comedy
The then Billie Wilder was never Austrian: after World War I, the Wilders were considered Polish citizens.
He did not feel much appreciation for that country that rejected him as a citizen, but in which he discovered his passion: telling stories.
Her father, on the other hand, had another destiny prepared for her, the law profession, a profession that seemed perfect for a Jewish boy in the twenties.
“I didn't want to, and I saved myself by becoming a journalist, a very underpaid reporter,” he told Cameron Crowe in the book
Conversations with Billy Wilder
.
Vienna and Berlin intermingled high society and middle class, culture for the elite, and urban and popular entertainment.
At Christmas 1924, aged 18 and a half, and having finished school, Wilder applied for a job at the tabloid magazine
Die Bühne.
He got it at the beginning of 1925 after sneaking into the newsroom.
The filmmaker was never a reliable source regarding his life, he tended to embellish the stories, and on this occasion he said that he had caught the theater critic having sex with a secretary.
The Paul Whiteman Orchestra in 1926. Wilder is second from the right, hands in pockets.
True or not, in August of that year Wilder already appears in a photo of the circle of friends of Max Reinhardt, film producer, and theater and film director, the promoter of expressionism, a magnet for talent.
Wilder combined
Die Bühne
with
Die Stunde,
another tabloid magazine from the same publishing group, and threw himself into writing.
He explained to his biographer Hellmuth Karasek: "I was daring, I was full of assertiveness, I had a talent for exaggeration."
Movie and music stars passed through Vienna, such as the actress Asta Nielsen or the band Tiller Girls (which decades later would inspire the female musical group in Some Like
It Hot)
or figures like the Prince of Wales.
Articles of those meetings have survived and are found in the new book.
Of the British heir he writes, after chatting about fashion: “This Englishman is a smart guy!
By the way, his good taste in clothing has convinced me.
From today I will start to dress in the English style!
Because it's cheap, and what's cheap today?
In the summer of 1926, the American jazz conductor Paul Whiteman visited the Austrian capital.
Wilder interviewed him for
Die Stunde,
and Whiteman invited him to listen to the band in Berlin.
Wilder did not hesitate, and with his broken English he went to Germany to work both as a journalist and as a press agent.
Berlin was, at the end of the 1920s, a completely Americanized city, brimming with cinema and creativity.
Through its streets, journalists crossed paths with, for example, the millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt IV.
For Wilder these are times of combining commissions in various publications, although he mainly writes for the
Berliner Zeitung
and the
Berliner Börsen-Courier.
He signs profiles —in the distance, he doesn't know them— of actors like Adolphe Menjou or filmmakers like Erich von Stroheim (director who would end up acting for Wilder in
Five Tombs in Cairo
and
Twilight of the Gods).
The journalist fable, record anecdotes and people around them so that the reader understands the sitter.
He interviews a witch, the world-famous clown Grock, the oldest Berliner and a poker player, or follows a minister down the street.
Billy Wilder, in an image from 'The Devil's Reporter' (1928).
The new book opens with the block that groups the reports.
There it is, along with an article about a heat wave, another about the alcoholic tastes of Berliners, another about a day of shooting in a movie studio, and a handful more.
Also the mythical
“Waiter, a dancer, please!”,
from which the legend was born that Wilder made a living for a time as a gigolo.
Published in January 1927, the report recounts the adventures of the then journalist as a social dancer for two months in afternoon and evening sessions.
That is to say, a dancer for hire, for whom they pay in the party room, with several rooms, at the Edén hotel, both women to accompany them to the dance floor and husbands who want their wives to have fun.
“Saturday is the worst day for a dancer.
All the rooms are full and there are no free seats.
On the dance floor, 50 couples gather, stepping on each other's feet, panting and arguing.
A single mass of meat, vibrating to the rhythm like jelly.
That day the dancer for hire loses a kilo in weight, but it is unlikely that he will gain a single
pfenning
”.
That yes, of sex, not a note.
Billy Wilder (center) and Peter Lorre (second from right) with other Central European Jewish refugees in Hollywood.
These are also the years in which Wilder begins to approach the cinema.
His film reviews may be the worst of this compilation, although here is also the article from which the script for
Sunday Men
(1930), one of the key films of the cinema of the end of the Weimar Republic, will be born.
Wilder had already collaborated as a writer in the shadow of other screenwriters and even signed the script and acted in
The Devil's Reporter
(1928), the antecedent of
The Great Carnival
or
Front Page.
However,
Sunday's Men
opens the doors of the industry for him, leading him to write dozens of scripts for three years, hired at the UFA production company, until when Adolph Hitler comes to power, Wilder travels to Paris, where he makes his directorial debut. with
dangerous curves.
weeks later,
In January 1934, he embarked for the United States, where his friend, the actor Peter Lorre, was waiting for him on the transatlantic
SS Aquitania.
He carries 20 dollars in his pocket and books in English to improve his knowledge of the language.
Across the ocean he awaits glory.
Fernando Trueba, who was a friend of Wilder, points out: “I don't remember anything special about that work in our talks.
I don't think he valued his journalistic work at all."
And he recommends a new book about the filmmaker, which reflects on the traces of the past in his filmography:
Joseph MacBridge's
Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge .
As his wife Audrey said, "Long before Billy Wilder was Billy Wilder, he was acting like Billy Wilder."
And this volume serves as proof of that.
Exclusive content for subscribers
read without limits
subscribe
I'm already a subscriber