When I was twenty-two I started as a newspaper reporter at the New York Herald and the New York Times. “Wonderful thing to be a journalist,” Vanderbilt says. When Wilder interviews Cornelius Vanderbilt, “American multimillionaire,” he seems to delight in quoting him in defense of Wilder’s own profession. I’ll go ask her to dance.īut Herr Isin taps my shoulder. Over there in the corner, the lady in the Persian lamb coat and the crocodile leather shoes. Herr Isin’s red eyes gaze at me as though straining to say: Go! Aside from the banjo player, who is looking down, bored and mouth agape, at the couples as they jump, grind, chuff, and hop. The jazz band on the upper level is slouching over their instruments and bobbing to the rhythm.
Young men with garish neckties and brightly colored spats. The most successful story in this collection, “Waiter, a Dancer, Please!,” about being a hoofer for hire at a big hotel, is waspish and (if you allow for the choppy sentences) jazz-era excitable, New Yorker–ish, with a self-deprecating turn and a fairly urbane sense of the perfectly ridiculous: The American style seemed to come naturally to Wilder. Noah Isenberg writes in the introduction to Billy Wilder on Assignment, a collection of his journalism, that while working for those papers he began nodding to the “Americanophilia that was already blossoming inside him.” That sense of human interest, of ease and personality-what was later recognized as part of the Wilder approach-began to show itself in 1929, in the first film on which he gained a solo writing credit: Der Teufelsreporter ( Hell of a Reporter), about a former circus star who becomes an intrepid journalist. He had, as journalists on the make sometimes do, a tidy talent for exaggeration, and he later claimed to have interviewed, over the course of a single day, Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst’s colleague Alfred Adler, the writer Arthur Schnitzler, and the composer Richard Strauss. He made it to Berlin, where he wrote for Berliner Zeitung and Berliner Börsen-Courier, for Tempo and the literary journal Der Querschnitt. In those years, he was caricatured as “the racing reporter,” his bowler hat being swept from him with the effort to get ahead. Wilder understood the (often grievous) relationship between newspaper sales and entertainment. In 1925 in Vienna, when he was eighteen years old, he wrote the crossword puzzle (signed “Billie Wilder”) for Die Bühne, a slightly saucy culture magazine with a thing for girls’ legs. However happy he was with his six Academy Awards, he once said, the thing that made him really proud was appearing twice in the New York Times crossword, “once 17 across and once 21 down.” It’s the specificity that makes it funny, but also-and here’s the Wilder touch-it carries a truth from his own experience. Wilder’s liking for facts was fundamental. The best of them are filled with the kinds of details that provide pure oxygen to nascent drama, raising it to a level of life more interesting than the original material might have promised. Billy Wilder, who also started in journalism, might have taken from the filthy trade the bracing social cynicism that makes his movies tick. It was a fellow artist-journalist, George Orwell, who took the trouble to point out that the “unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing is the unnecessary detail.” It’s not so much the germane fact as the casual one that gives his novels their delightful atmosphere. Billy Wilder, Walter Matthau, and Jack Lemmon on the set of The Front Page, 1974
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