Billy Wilder was a man famed for his charm and sparkle – both in person and in the confections he dished up for his audience. When comedian Dick Cavett started going to Hollywood parties in the 1960s, he asked an insider if there were any rules he should follow. ‘Yes,’ his source replied, without batting an eye-lid, ‘try and sit next to Billy Wilder!’
The director was an endless source of anecdotes, told with self-effacement and dry humour. He was capable of giving the darkest subjects a wry twist. Still, when telling a story, he often spun it slightly differently each time, and with conflicting dates, leaving biographers to scratch their heads. One such researcher was Joseph McBride, author of Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge.
‘I have often felt like Dr Watson in “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes”, trying to probe the firmly barricaded personality of a legendary man who gratified the press’s need for a colourful and amusing character but remained a somewhat enigmatic figure due to his emotional aloofness.’
When his father died in 1928, Billy, then 22, was already working in Berlin as a journalist, while also trying to get his foot in the door of the film world. Berlin was the hotspot of the European film industry at the time. Several trailblazers had already been cherrypicked by Hollywood, like Ernst Lubitsch, who would later become a mentor to Wilder, and a collaborator on his first Hollywood hit as a screenwriter – Ninotchka (1939). But the biggest array of talent – about 1500 film professionals – fled after the Nazi Germans took power in 1933. Billy went first to Paris, and then to America in 1934.
‘The optimists died in the gas chambers,’ he said many years later. ‘The pessimists ended up with pools in Beverly Hills.’
Close-up on a cataclysm