The Artful Emigre

‘My first impressions of Los Angeles?” filmmaker Billy Wilder mused, peering over the top of his dark-rimmed glasses. “Well, I’ll tell you. I came by train in 1934 and arrived downtown. Not at Union Station. They opened that later, after train travel stopped. I got off at a shack between 2nd and 3rd streets. And I’ll tell you, I was open-mouthed. I looked around and said, ‘Where are they? Where’s Clark Gable? Where’s Claudette Colbert?’ I thought they would be walking around on the streets.”

Like many other Europeans in the arts who immigrated to America in the 1930s, Wilder found that the streets were neither paved with gold nor populated with glamorous celebrities. Even artists who were far better known than the fledgling film writer-director--and spoke more English than his few words--faced stiff obstacles to carrying on their careers.

“We were accepted,” he said. But it wasn’t easy to construct a new life in a foreign country while World War II ravaged their native lands. Yet a stream of talented and accomplished artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers did exactly that, and they left an indelible imprint.

Wilder, who has lived in Los Angeles for nearly six decades and celebrated his 90th birthday last year, is one of the most successful. A legend in the film industry who has received 21 Academy Award nominations and won six Oscars, he is revered for an unusual range of writing and directing skills and distinguished by a devilishly wicked wit.

An engaging raconteur with an insider’s view of the war’s effect on the arts, he agreed to talk about his experiences during the period covered by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition “Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists From Hitler.” But he had misgivings.

“Don’t make me out to be a hero,” he said. “I don’t want to be a spokesman for everyone.” He has met many of the artists represented in the show, but he was on the periphery of their scene, he said.

Counting many artists among his friends, Wilder has been a voracious and savvy collector of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art. He sold a major part of his collection in 1989--at the peak of the art market--for a whopping $32.6 million in a Christie’s New York auction. But he considers himself something of an outsider in the art world.

Still, he is intrigued with the LACMA exhibition. “It’s a good idea,” he said. But as he thumbed through the catalog, he couldn’t resist a Wilder-esque dig: “The book would be better if it had pictures of naked girls.”

Well, what can be expected of the man who gave us Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in hilarious drag in “Some Like It Hot,” Marilyn Monroe with her white pleated skirt blowing up to her shoulders in “The Seven Year Itch” and Gloria Swanson as a wretchedly aging Hollywood star in “Sunset Boulevard”?

A mixture of horrific memories, bittersweet tales of success and humorous asides, that’s what.

The story begins June 22, 1906, in the small town of Sucha, then located in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of Poland. Born Samuel Wilder, he was nicknamed Billy. HHis mother, Eugenia Baldinger, had lived in New York during her youth and was infatuated with America. His father, Max Wilder, was a businessman with interests in cafes, restaurants and hotels.

The family moved to Vienna in 1914. Billy enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1924 but dropped out after a few months. “My father wanted me to be a lawyer, but I became a newspaper reporter,” he said.

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Wilder moved to Berlin in 1926, first working as a journalist and later ghostwriting and collaborating on film scripts. He had found an outlet for his talent, but the political climate was ominous. Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany on Jan. 30, 1933. Less than a month later, Feb. 27, the Nazis burned the Reichstag and blamed the fire on the Communists as an excuse to end political freedom.

The following day Wilder sold his possessions and took a night train to Paris. Having no visa, he had to dodge officious concierges who kept close tabs on foreigners, but he eventually found work as co-director of the film “The Bad Seed.” The real opportunities in the film industry lay elsewhere, however, and so did Wilder’s dreams.

“By then I was a motion picture man. I wanted to go to Hollywood,” he said. He made a few contacts and set sail for America early in 1934. During his first few months in Los Angeles he roomed with friends, later moving into the Chateau Marmont, where he paid $70 a month for lodging.

Wilder had arrived in Hollywood with script ideas but very little English. “It was an enormous problem,” he said. “I still have an accent. If you come to America younger than 10, you lose your accent; if you come at 11 or 12, it stays with you. I could never find le mot juste, the right word.”

The solution was a collaborator, Charles Brackett, with whom he wrote several scripts. Wilder became a U.S. citizen in 1939 and directed his first American film, “The Major and the Minor,” in 1942. As the war dragged on, he earned increasing critical acclaim for films such as “Double Indemnity,” a thriller about a woman who schemes to kill her husband to collect his insurance.

“Elmer Davis, who was head of the Office of War Information, read about me in Life magazine and asked me to serve in the Psychological Warfare Division in Germany after the war,” Wilder said, referring to a U.S. government agency that disseminated information promoting the Allied cause in enemy territory during the war through radio broadcasts, pamphlets and newspapers, and later became involved in Germany’s reconstruction. He finally agreed--but only to salve his disappointment over the public reception to “The Lost Weekend,” his 1945 film about an alcoholic.

“A thousand people went to the preview. When it was over, only 50 were there; 950 had walked out,” he said. “I was crushed, so I sent a telegram to Davis saying, ‘I will go now.’ ” Working under William Paley, president of CBS, Wilder was stationed in Bad Homburg, where he wrote a 400-page manual to help reconstruct the German film industry, screening out undesirable Nazis.

“One day a letter came from the director of the Passion Play in Oberammergau,” Wilder said. “He was requesting permission to perform the play, with Anton Lang as Jesus. I translated the letter and was asked my opinion. Anton Lang was a Nazi, so I said, ‘Permission granted, but the nails have to be real.’ ”

During his tour of duty, Wilder was a civilian with the rank of colonel. “When I wanted to get my discharge papers, they had to come from Bill Paley,” he said. “The trouble was, we played gin rummy and he owed me $1,000. I finally gave away a few games and got his debt down to $700, and he let me go.”

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Back in California, Wilder got a magnificent reception in the form of professional vindication. “ ‘The Lost Weekend’ won Academy Awards for best picture, best director, best script, best everything,” he said.

During the war and its aftermath, Wilder had fleeting acquaintances with such emigre artists as Salvador Dali, whom he encountered at the St. Regis Bar in New York, and Oskar Kokoschka, at Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan. In Los Angeles, Wilder met Man Ray, an American who had moved to Paris but fled during the war and resided in Hollywood from 1940-50.

“He lived in an apartment on Vine Street, and he needed money desperately,” Wilder said. Man Ray invited him to visit, hoping to sell some of his work. “I was making $400 a week at Paramount then, so I went and looked around,” he said. “What I liked best was a very beautiful, very small work by Yves Tanguy. But it was inscribed as a gift to Man Ray. I felt awkward about asking if it was for sale, but he said, ‘Of course, for $500.’ I ultimately sold it to Galerie Beyeler in Basel--for more than $500.”

Many artistic refugees went home after the war, but Wilder remained in Los Angeles, making films into the 1980s. America is his home, he said, and he embraces its eclectic way of life--from “Monday Night Football” to sake and sashimi at Matsuhisa on La Cienega Boulevard.

Did he ever consider moving back to Europe?

“Never,” he said. “I didn’t feel wanted. And there was too much to forgive for what they did to my family. My father died in 1928. My mother remarried. She, her second husband and my grandmother all died at Auschwitz.”