On Sunset Boulevard Read online

  With the departure of these artists an entire way of life disappeared. “What happened to the novelists?” asks Robert Lantz. “Alfred Knopf’s whole publishing house was built on German novelists of the period. What happened? How could this have been? Where? What? It’s a most peculiar thing. In the world of music it is almost more astonishing, because in Berlin, on any one evening—like tonight, a normal Tuesday evening—there were more first-rank conductors performing on a routine evening in Berlin than now exist in the entire world. What happened? Where is everybody? When you really break a heart, people die. It wasn’t just a phase. If you break the spirit, it dies. And that’s what happened in Germany.”

  Despite the fact that Hermann Goering was appointed president of the Reichstag at the end of August, Wilder later reported with characteristic irony that regardless of the elections, the street fighting, the demonstrations, and the hideous rhetoric, he and his friends didn’t take the Nazis very seriously until the end of 1932: “But what happened then was one of the little caprices of mother history.” Wilder’s description of the Reichstag fire is equally classic: “The son of Hindenburg was involved in some kind of monetary scandal, and in order to blow out that fire, Hindenburg demoted the liberal chancellor, General Schleicher, and appointed Mr. Hitler out of nowhere. Mr. von Hindenburg was slightly gaga at the time. He was promised the constitution would stay the way it was and you could vote for different parties. But to grab all the power, Mr. Hitler got hold of a young Dutchman who was slightly out of his mind, locked him up in the Reichstag, and started the fire there. And Mr. Hitler said, ‘You see what the Communists have done? There will be no other parties—only the National Socialist party.’”

  At a party given for Ernst Lubitsch in December 1932, the journalist Bella Fromm asked the visiting director why he was no longer working in Germany. Lubitsch replied, “That’s finished. I’m going to the United States. Nothing good is going to happen here for a long time. The sun shines every day in Hollywood.”

  Unlike Lubitsch, Billie had no international career to support him. He was long gone from Berlin and eking out an impoverished existence in a fleabag Paris hotel when Was Frauen träumen enjoyed its gala premiere, specially timed to occur on April 20, 1933, the night of Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday. But by then, of course, the name of Billie Wilder had been deleted from all the prints.

  6. ESCAPE

  Paris is for lovers. Maybe that’s why I stayed only thirty-five minutes.

  —Linus Larrabee (Humphrey Bogart) in Sabrina

  Frantic, frightened, and prudent, the two refugees arrived in Paris. Hella is said to have brought along as much jewelry and as many furs as she could manage as well as a stock of gold coins. Billie, on the other hand, had a single suitcase. He kept the $1,000 tucked away in his hatband. Then again, maybe not. Walter Reisch recalled that he, not Hella, was Billie’s traveling companion: “Hitler took over Berlin in January of ’33. A few days later Wilder and I left for Paris.” Sports, not housing or employment, was their primary concern: “Our first stop when we got off the train was not at the producer’s office. Our first stop in Paris was at the Stade Roland Garros to see a French-English tennis match. That was the most important event when Hitler came to power.” Wilder told a Playboy interviewer in 1960 that he carried with him only “one suitcase and a bunch of rolled-up canvases,” checking them at the station and rushing off to catch Fred Perry and Bunny Austin in the Davis Cup. Billy revised the story later, declaring that he couldn’t have carried any rolled-up canvases because he hadn’t owned any. He told others over the years that they were posters, not paintings, and that his passport was Polish, not Austrian.

  The precise details don’t really matter. The salient point is that Billie Wilder demonstrated unusual prescience by leaving Berlin for a non-German-speaking country on drastically short notice, and he arrived in a strange city with $1,000 and a few friends. His nationality was a matter of opinion, which wasn’t at all surprising, since that had been the problem all along.

  As always, Wilder had read up on Paris and knew enough of the lay of the land to find a hotel room without too much difficulty. Armed with a list of what Zolotow colorfully describes as “rather louche hotels which weren’t too serious about making you register,” Billie found “a fleabag on the Boulevard Raspail,” the key feature of which was its view of a Montparnasse cemetery. He quit the place the same day and checked into the ever-so-slightly more respectable Ansonia, a tawdry residential hotel that had become temporary headquarters for some of the many recent German exiles who were showing up in Paris. The French called them apatrides, people without a country. A whole group of them moved into the Ansonia. Friedrich Holländer was there, as was Franz Wachsmann and his wife, Alice. Wachsmann had arranged and conducted Holländer’s score for The Blue Angel. The talented composer’s film career was just taking off when he was beaten up by Nazi thugs on a Berlin street—a good incentive for him to leave Germany with the rest of Ufa’s Jews.

  Peter Lorre took up residence at the Ansonia as well. “It was located on the rue de Saigon, one of these little streets between l’avenue Foch and l’avenue de la Grande-Armée,” Wilder recalled. “No one had much money, but life was cheap. On the street corner there was a restaurant, the Select, with a prix-fixe menu of seven francs. We would leave our napkins on the rack to pick them up in the evenings. Very petit bourgeois.”

  Billie moved into a room on the third floor of the dank hotel. “The rooms are small but dirty,” Holländer wrote in his memoirs—“dirty but cheap.” Depression and despair ran rampant in what Holländer describes as this “nest for the expelled, refuge of the expropriated, holding tank, transition camp, hotbed for all kinds of premature births—of ideas for the future to suicide plans.” If the Ansonians weren’t lying in their beds asking themselves what the hell they were going to do next, they were at the Select or the Brasserie Strasbourg across the street from the hotel; and if they weren’t there, they were “preparing their tea, eggs, or morphine injection on a small gas cooker in their rooms.”

  Holding no work permit, Wilder couldn’t write screenplays under his own name. To compound his difficulties, his spoken French may have been rather good (he’d evidently been practicing since his brush with flunking in high school), but because he thought in German, he still had to write in German and then translate everything into French. Billie nevertheless managed to maintain the air of a bon vivant, at least in public. He was, after all, in Paris, and he might as well have a good time. Holländer reports that he was struck by Wilder’s ability to pull off an elegant demeanor in the face of near-abject poverty. While the others were huddling over their cookers, Billie was heading out on the town, “as if thoroughly convinced that new money could only come if the old stuff was gone.” “What does he know?” Holländer asks. “He knows that he has a brilliant little head that he takes care of like the head of a brilliant pin whose worth lies in the future.”

  Lorre, his wife, Cilly, and the Wachsmanns lived upstairs on the fifth floor. Max Kolpe, Jan Lustig, and Paul Erich Marcus each lived on the first. Kolpe had the biggest room, so when the émigrés got together to scheme for the future or bemoan the past, they often met there. Bitching was an essential activity. They all resented the émigré upper crust, who shunned not only the Ansonia but the Ansonians and (in Holländer’s memorable phrase) their “suspect smell of paltriness.” The director Joe May and his wife, Mia, for instance, had rented a villa at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. According to Holländer, the Mays were on the pretentious side. In Germany, Joe May directed extravagant blockbusters under the banner of his own production company. It is only a slight exaggeration to call him the Weimar Steven Spielberg. Lang and Murnau made expensive art films, but May kept pulling in the crowds for over fifteen years with a string of big entertainments. Mia May, too, was no struggling refugee but a movie star in her own right. Though they were now refugees, the Mays didn’t share any of the financial anxieties that plagued the other refu
gees. Mia, according to rumor, managed to smuggle her jewelry out of Germany by embedding them on the shell of her pet turtle, Cleopatra, who, following contemporary fashion, was already sporting enough costume jewelery that the border guards didn’t notice the real ones. Fritz Lang, meanwhile, was ensconced at the luxurious Hotel George V.

  While the “emigrants deluxe” were wining and dining and keeping up appearances in Paris, the Ansonians weren’t as lucky. Some days they all just stayed in bed. It wasn’t just a kind of bohemian narcolepsy, but also a healthy form of hibernation, a protective coma in response to an unbearable trauma. Billie, of course, was too restless to sleep all day. His was a more public hibernation—he needed to be out to be calm. Despite the presence of Hella (whose existence in France is given further support by Holländer, though in his account she’s merely Billie’s nameless girlfriend), Billie was known to head over to the Avenue Wagram, where a red-haired whore nicknamed die Spinne (the Spider) entertained him—at a special discount rate for émigrés. She may have been cheap, but die Spinne didn’t shove Billie and her other clients out the door too soon. She didn’t mind just lounging around listening to them go on and on about their own woes and regrets and the beautiful city from which they ran. As Holländer put it, “One could lie beside her all night long and tell her about the Bayreutherstrasse and the Grunewaldsee.”

  Equally productive were the days the melancholy crew spent hatching movie ideas. Meeting in Kolpe’s room, the émigrés tried to figure out a way to make a movie and have someone else pay for it. One idea had to do with a crazed sex killer. Wilder, Lustig, Kolpe, Lorre, Holländer, and Wachsmann were sitting in Kolpe’s room one day struggling to figure out a plot for this opus. “I’ve just figured out the problem in your script,” Lorre suddenly shouted. “The character of our sex killer is lacking something essential—loving-kindness! Now if I were to play this role, this figure would have something universal, something popular—something that appeals to the common man with his childlike mind, namely …” Lorre didn’t get an enthusiastic reception, and he didn’t react well: “It doesn’t matter to you if I play him or not! Then naturally I don’t have to!” And he didn’t, because the film—like most of the other failed projects dreamed up at the Ansonia—was never made.

  Another project did progress all the way from inspiration to celluloid. Billie wrote it and, having no other choice, codirected it as well. Mauvaise Graine (Bad Seed) is a film about mobility, the way the world looks from a moving camera. The story concerns a young man’s undying urge to keep himself from getting stuck in one place. Henri Pasquier will do anything to keep moving, including grand larceny. In Wilder’s view as well as that of his protagonist, the worst thing in the world is to have your wheels taken away from you; the freedom-loving Henri steals other people’s cars so he can stay mobile. Wilder’s own restlessness propels his story, and his time at Ufa instilled in him a love of the moving camera. Mauvaise Graine’s plot may be about a rich young man’s descent into a life of crime, but its real subject is the pure, formal beauty of traveling shots—buildings, cars, trees, people, all sailing across the screen in an endless flow of motion. The first image in Billy Wilder’s career as a director is that of a spinning tire; the film ends with a moving shot of rolling waves, the camera hurtling forward, skimming the water toward an indefinite goal.

  Sparked by the young refugee’s own fidgety, unsettled life in the Ansonia, and driven by his hot ambition, Mauvaise Graine pieced itself together by circumstance. There’s a catch-as-catch-can quality to the work, just as there is with Menschen am Sonntag, but Wilder and his codirector, Alexandre Esway, turn this piecemeal filmmaking style to their advantage. Where strict narrative formulas and studio-quality visuals would have been (had there been more time, money, and equipment), spontaneity and a sense of unsteady life appear.

  Wilder pulled the script together with two other Ansonians, both friends from Berlin—Jan Lustig and Max Kolpe. (The three writers had some help from Claude-Andre Puget). Like Wilder, Lustig had been a newspaperman in Berlin and had written scripts for Ufa. Knowing that they wouldn’t be likely to have the money to build extensive sets, they devised a screenplay that, like Menschen am Sonntag, could be filmed mostly outdoors at public locations that would entail no cost, while the indoor sequences could be shot using cheaply constructed sets that required nothing exceptional in the way of decoration. The idea was to tell the story of an irresponsible youth, the bad-seed son of a wealthy Parisian doctor, who falls into a life of crime after his father sells his car out from under him. There would be a girl, of course, and some comic sidekicks; there would be some kind of chase; they’d go to the south of France and film some sequences there; they would try to find financing.

  According to Kolpe, “Everything looked perfect.” At first. These were eager, ambitious young men—professional schmoozers. They knew how to talk a good game, at least enough to convince other people that the project was professional enough to film. But the realities of picture making struck quickly in the form of a producer who was eager not only to sign onto the project but also to finance it, with a certain string attached: Monsieur Gaillart of the Panthéon Filament Company expressed interest in financing a film as long as his wife played the lead. Wilder and Esway got as far as giving the would-be starlet a screen test, but according to Kolpe she was terrible. The financier threatened to withdraw his support if she didn’t win the part. Disgusted, Wilder was willing to say auf wiedersehen to the financier, the wife, and the certainty of the production and start again from zero, but the other two producers were eager to make the film at any price and gave their go-ahead, sending the others into panicky despair. “One seldom saw a sadder bunch trotting along the banks of the Seine back to the hotel,” Kolpe later recalled.

  There was another problem as well: as ambitious as Wilder was, a deep insecurity about actually directing Mauvaise Graine kept nagging at him. He knew he could write, but the technical complexities of directing terrified him. Had he and his cowriters found someone else to direct it, Wilder would gladly have yielded the authority. But he and his Ansonia neighbors were accent-bearing refugees from Berlin. They were nobodies in the Paris film community, and Mauvaise Graine was scarcely a hot property. If Mauvaise Graine was to be made at all, it seemed, Billie would have to direct it.

  So the moment a potential codirector appeared on the scene, Wilder agreed. Alexandre Esway was as much of a nomad as Wilder, and he had what the French film historian Jean-Pierre Jeancolas generously called “an elusive personality.” Born in Budapest (probably), Esway had already spent some time in both London and Berlin before arriving in Paris in 1931 or 1932. By the time he met Wilder, he’d already directed Taxi for Two (Britain, 1924), Children of Chance (Britain, 1931), and Shadows (Britain, 1931), and codirected Le jugement de minuit (1932), and Une vie perdue (1933). Wilder brought Esway onto the project to provide stability and expertise, but there was another payoff, too, for it was Esway—perhaps on the basis of his having actually had some directing experience—who convinced a new producer, Edouard Corniglion-Molinier, to finance the film. Within a matter of days, the previous producer and his wife disappeared, Corniglion-Molinier agreed to pay for the film, and the ingenue role (albeit a criminal ingenue) went to Danielle Darrieux, who, at seventeen, knew precisely what she was doing in front of a camera, having already made seven films since the age of fourteen.

  “I directed it with another cineaste and I don’t remember how we found the money,” Billy told critic Michel Ciment in an interview in the early 1980s. M. Corniglion-Molinier was doubtless more memorable at the time. A World War I flying ace who had made a great deal of money and owned a film production facility in Nice, Corniglion-Molinier found the project appealing and marketable enough to finance, but he was shrewd enough to keep a tight rein on the budget. According to Wilder, not only did they have to improvise much of the filming, but “for lack of money we couldn’t use rear projections—the camera and the projectors were placed on a tr
uck and it was rather dangerous.” Mauvaise Graine is far better for it; rear projection would have looked considerably worse than the vertiginous sweep of a moving camera. When shooting moved to the south of France, the filmmakers didn’t even have enough money to afford hotel rooms. Still, Mauvaise Graine benefited from its own adversity, just as Menschen am Sonntag had. There’s an electric quality to the location shooting—a sense of experiment and play. In fact, as Wilder has been the first to note, Mauvaise Graine’s ellipses, jump cuts, and ingenuously shaky camerawork look ahead to Breathless.

  For the story of Mauvaise Graine, Wilder and his cowriters constructed a tale of youthful exuberance that leads, paradoxically, not only to catastrophe but to freedom. An opening title tells us that “Happy people don’t have stories. This isn’t entirely true—Henri Pasquier is very happy, but the one thing he needs is a new car horn.” Henri (Pierre Mingand) is rich, young, and supremely irresponsible. Wilder and Esway introduce him roaring through the streets of Paris at high speed, the camera mounted on the back of Henri’s car as it flies around curves, into and out of a traffic circle, and finally—in a rapidly edited sequence of shots—careening into a garage and nearly running down several bystanders. In short order, Henri picks up an attractive young woman and sets up a date with her for later that day, but when he arrives back at his father’s office to beg some money, he discovers that his father has sold the car and rendered him not only immobile but bourgeois. “It’s time for you to go out and get a job,” Dr. Pasquier (Paul Escoffier) demands, and Henri is suitably appalled: “And go work in some office earning a thousand francs a week?”