From a Kraków Hotel to the King of Hollywood: Billy Wilder’s Little-Known Polish Past

Some-Like-it-Hot-GettyImages-2214845552.jpg, default, Actor Jack Lemmon smiles with singer and actress Audrey Young and her husband, film director, producer and screenwriter Billy Wilder while leaning on

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Billy Wilder’s much-loved comedy Some Like it Hot stars Marilyn Monroe as Sugar Kowalczyk, a Polish-American singer who gets drawn into a series of madcap adventures set at a Miami hotel. And this location was no coincidence! Discover why Wilder knew all about the inner workings of hotels and, while we’re at it, all about his little-known Polish past.

The hotel in the iconic movie, The Seminole Ritz, may have been fictional, but it fitted the director like a glove. Ever since childhood, he had revelled in the mischievous realities of the hotel world. The business was in the blood. His father had owned a hotel at the foot of Kraków’s Royal Castle, and his grandmother had run one in nearby Nowy Targ.

Snacks from the hotel kitchen

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Marilyn Monroe and a bare-chested Tony Curtis chat on the beach by Hotel Del Coronado between filming the 1959, Billy Wilder comedy 'Some Like it Hot', photo: Screen Archives / Getty Images

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Many of his first memories were coloured by irate waiters and the temptations of the hotel kitchen. It was a world that he tapped into throughout his Hollywood career, from his first hit as a screenwriter, Ninotchka (1939), through many of his films as director: Five Graves to Cairo (1943), Love in the Afternoon (1957) Some Like it Hot (1959), Irma la Douce (1963) and Avanti (1972). The hotel was a kind of home from home, a vein of comic gold that kept on giving.

Billy Wilder was born on 22^nd June 1906 in Sucha (today’s Sucha Beskidzka, Poland) a small town in the Carpathian foothills, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Still, he might just have easily emerged at another stop down the line. His father, Max, ran a chain of restaurants on the railway that linked Vienna with Kraków and Lviv (then Lemberg, the capital of the crownland of Galicia). The Wilders were always on the move.

‘These were not ordinary snack bars,’ he told biographer Charlotte Chandler. Many of the stations resembled mini palaces, as if waiting to welcome an archduke. ‘At important stops, a guy would ring a bell and announce, “We’ll be here for one hour”. It was a hungry, captive audience. They would rush for the printed menu. They expected the service to be fast but good. My father, who had been a successful headwaiter, understood exactly how to please them.’ Soon, Wilder senior was able to set his sights on a grander prize – a hotel in the heart of Kraków.

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The Main Market Square in Kraków, c. 1910, photo: Tadeusz Rząca / Muzeum Fotografii w Krakowie MuFo

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In those days, Kraków may not have been the biggest town under the sun (it had a population of just over 100,000 when Billy was born). But it was growing fast. And what it lacked in size, it more than made up for in terms of ego. The Emperor Franz Joseph had given up ruling with an iron fist many years before. Galicia had been granted autonomy in the 1860s, and the Polish aristocracy rushed to turn Kraków – the former capital of Poland – into a kind of showcase of Polish history. Museums were opened, statues erected – even the Royal Castle was bought back from the Austrian military. As life remained repressive in the Russian and Prussian-ruled parts of the divided country, Kraków became a kind a pilgrimage spot and holiday destination for Poles from beyond Austrian borders.

Change was afoot for fellow citizens too. Equal rights had been granted to the Jewish community in 1867, and an aspiring middle class was emerging, with Jews making their mark in professions such as law, medicine and architecture. Billy’s father, who was from a small town on the eastern fringe of the province, had not been born Maximilian, but Hersch. Like his fellow Galician Helena Rubinstein, originally Chaja, he wanted to be modern – he also wanted a chance to fit in. Max set out to make his fortune in Kraków, where as a young lad, he secured a job as a low-level waiter.

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Illustration from the book ‘The Art of Service: A Handbook for Self-Study and for Supporting Practical and Theoretical Learning in Vocational Supplementary Schools for Catering and Hotel Management Students’ by Adolf Hess, published in 1909, photo: National Library of Poland (Polona)

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‘As my father was leaving [the restaurant], he heard the wife of the owner say to her husband, “He’s such a nice-looking boy, isn’t he? All the ladies will love him.” I’m sure my father was thinking, “It’s a good thing I don’t look Jewish.”’

By the time Max met Billy’s mother, Eugenia, he was already a headwaiter in the city. But this seemed somewhat lowly for Eugenia’s ambitious mother, who owned a hotel in Nowy Targ, and had family in New York. Galicia was the poorest crownland in the empire, and Max was from one of its poorest parts. But Max was ambitious too. And Eugenia was smitten. They were married in 1903. Two sons followed in quick succession, Wilhelm and Samuel. Except that Eugenia, who had spent time in the Big Apple, ended up calling them Willy and Billy. She had seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West extravaganza in the States, and Samuel’s nickname became Billy.

Hotel City

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'Planty Park at Dawn' by Stanisław Wyspiański, 1894, photo: National Museum in Kraków

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In April 1913, an article appeared in the Polish-language newspaper Nowa Reforma telling readers that a new venue had opened in Kraków at the foot of the royal castle – Hotel City. It boasted 102 ‘elegantly appointed’ rooms, each with its own telephone – the very peak of modernity.

‘Given the pace of development in the city in recent times, a new hotel is by no means superfluous, particularly as it has been established in a district that has been sorely lacking in this regard,’ the paper enthused, noting its ‘magnificent location’ by the Planty Gardens. The hotel had its own café and restaurant, both ‘spacious’ and ‘elegantly furnished’.

Billy was six at the time. He once said that he’d had wonderful adventures visiting his father’s railway restaurants (presumably he and his brother were bribed to behave with cream cakes). But the opportunities for fun presented by a four-story hotel – replete with hiding places and brand-spanking-new lifts – were infinite.

It seems only natural that the day-to-day rituals of the hotel would have made a deep impact on the future director. There has always been an element of theatre in hotels and restaurants, and back in the Belle Époque, this was especially so. Staff wore uniforms akin to the flunkies of imperial courts, and waiters greeted customers with a bow. Even the carrying of platters – level with the chin, like a javelin thrower – had a whiff of the circus about it. Mirrors heightened the sense of drama (while also helping customers to spy on each other). And of course, Billy’s father was the director of the whole show.

One of the trump cards of the Hotel City was that it had a terrace overlooking the gardens that had replaced the city’s medieval walls. When the sun was out, Max would bring in a miniature orchestra to play waltzes, while his customers tucked into coffee and cakes.

But behind the scenes, not all was as it seemed.

The hotel had a billiards room, and Billy soon became an ace player. ‘I grew up standing on chairs and playing billiards against the grown-ups,’ he told biographer Kevin Lally.

Regulars would size up newcomers’ skills, and if they thought money could be made, they would wheel out Billy, and bets would be placed. Unknowing customers were challenged to beat the boy. ‘There was always a sucker who did not know how to play billiards, whom I got to take for a few kronen.’ Initially, all the winnings went to the canny locals, who bribed Billy with sweets. But he soon moved on to money.

His next trick was swiping tips from the café’s tables, like a character from one of his own movies. But if he thought that being the owner’s son made him untouchable, he was wrong. Eventually the waiters cottoned on. ‘They beat the shit out of me,’ he recalled.

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A bird's-eye view of Kraków, 1900-1939, photo: National Digital Archive (NAC)

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When his father got word that something fishy was going on, Billy got an extra drubbing. Max, who had started off as a junior waiter himself, would have understood the pain of being deprived of tips. He lectured his son on honesty. ‘I learnt many things about human nature [at the hotel],’ Billy recalled, ‘none of them favourable.’

Meanwhile, storm clouds were gathering. One Sunday afternoon in late June, 1914, the band was gliding through a waltz on the café’s terrace, while customers enjoyed the sunshine. All of sudden, Max Wilder appeared, his chipper demeanour gone. ‘Ladies and gentleman, there will be no more music today,’ he announced. ‘Our Archduke Ferdinand has been killed in Sarajevo.’

Billy had turned eight the previous Sunday. A month later, the world was at war.

The end of an era

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A clip from the Nowa Reforma newspaper from August 1914 about Maksymilian Wilder being an upstanding citizen, Nowa Reforma (wydanie poranne). 1914, no. 374, photo: Jagiellońska Biblioteka Cyfrowa

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Kraków had been modernising fast in the preceding years. Now, everything was up in the air. At first, the front seemed far away, but in August, wounded soldiers began arriving in the city.

A newly unearthed article in the Polish paper Nowa Reforma, published on 30^th August 1914, gives a vivid snapshot of the Wilder family at the time:

‘While writing a few days ago about how the people of Kraków have been welcoming the wounded… we mentioned the owner of the Café City, who provided coffee to the wounded that day. Now we are informed that Mr Maksymilian Wilder, owner of the Hotel City and café, has been constantly sending fruit juice, soda water, coffee, milk, and cocoa to the wounded, free of charge. He hurries to serve the wounded with the help of his wife and the entire staff. This sense of civic duty deserves recognition and should be an example to others.’

Yet three days later, Lemberg had fallen. Kraków had some of the most extensive fortifications in the whole Habsburg Empire, but the situation was grim. The order for Kraków’s evacuation was given on 13^th September. Within a week, a third of the city’s inhabitants had gone. Many fled under their own steam, distrustful of the authorities’ hastily laid plans. With trains jammed full, leaving by horse-drawn cart became common – an experience that Billy recalled years later. The Russians took nearby Wieliczka in late November. Fighting was only a few kilometres away. But the Tsar’s forces were pushed back the following month.

Many of those who had left independently began to return. The Wilders were clearly back in town that winter, as on Saturday, 6^th February 1915, Nowa Reforma carried a short column under the headline ‘Tobogganing Victim’. An eight-year-old boy, who had been enjoying the snow in the way favoured by Krakovian children, past and present, had lost control of his sled and fallen off. He was whisked to the emergency room of a nearby hospital, as his legs had been ‘severely cut’. As the paper reveals, the unlucky lad was none other than Samuel (Billy) Wilder, who had clearly not lost any of his appetite for thrills and spills. A doctor managed to bandage him up.

In May that year, the Central Powers launched a massive counter-offensive. This time, the Russians were pushed back beyond Lemberg. Krakovians who were still in town were able to breathe a sigh of relief. However, running a hotel was no doddle, amid shortages of both basic foodstuffs and, not least, customers. On 25^th September 1915, we find a brief notice in Polish in Nowa Reforma, provided by Billy’s father.

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Hotel Royal in Kraków, 2010, photo: Zygmunt Put / CC BY-SA 4.0

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‘I would like to inform my friends and acquaintances that I am no longing running the Hotel City and its café. If any of my friends would like to contact me, I am staying at the Hotel Royal. MAX WILDER.’

It seems that he had decided to cut his losses. There are conflicting dates in studies, but as Andreas Hutter and Ed Sikov explained in their respective biographies, the family appears to have finally left Kraków in 1916. They moved to Vienna. But it was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. The city was already strained by shortages, and two years later, the Habsburgs found themselves on the losing side. Vienna descended further into poverty, and Kraków became part of the reborn Polish state.

The Hotel City managed to survive, albeit under different ownership, until 1945, when it was nationalised by the communists and absorbed into the neighbouring Hotel Royal. But echoes of Billy’s time there swirl through his work. Some Like it Hot, with its killer cake, cheeky bellboy, dodgy millionaires and dashing band, was voted the greatest comedy of the 20^th century by the American Film Institute. Yet the show didn’t stop with his own movies. Janusz Majewski’s Hotel Pacific (1975) and Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) are among the worthy successors to Wilder’s legacy. Billy would have been pleased to know that both directors were huge fans of his work.

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Billy Wilder’s bid to make Schindler’s List, and why it would have been a profoundly personal film for the director, is explored in the second of our articles marking 120 years since his birth.

_Sources:_{Nowa Reforma}_{(newspaper published in Kraków); Chandler, Charlotte,}_{Nobody’s Perfect: Billy Wilder: A Personal Biography}_{, 2002; Lally, Kevin,}_{Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder}_{, 1996; McBride, Joseph,}_{Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge}_{, 2021; Sikov, Ed,}_{On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder,}_{1998; Watson, Alexander, ‘Kształtowanie się narodu, upadek społeczności lokalnej: Kraków w czasie wojny, 1914–1918’, in}_{Studia i materiały do dziejów społecznych Polski 1914–1918}_,_{Metamorfozy Społeczne}_{, vol. 20, 2018; Zolotow, Maurice,}_{Billy Wilder in Hollywood}_{, 1977}

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