If Wilder had signed autographs, actors would have been the first in line: They idolized him. Before his March 27 death of pneumonia at 95, Wilder had created many of Hollywood's greatest moments, from Gloria Swanson getting ready for her closeup in Sunset Boulevard to Marilyn Monroe's dress blowing up around her waist in The Seven Year Itch. Nominated for 21 Oscars and a winner of six, he was, by that and any other measure, the greatest writer-director of them all. "He was a scientist of American culture," says Shirley MacLaine, who starred in two of his films. "He knew us better than we knew ourselves."
Born in 1906 in what is now Poland, Samuel Wilder (his America-loving mother, Eugenia, nicknamed him Billie) was only 5 or 6 years old when he began pool-hustling hapless adults staying at the Krakow hotel owned by his father, Max. He and older brother Wilhelm spent their later childhoods in Vienna, where Billie was a teenage journalist. (Stopping by to get a quote one day from Herr Doktor Prof. Sigmund Freud, Wilder had the door slammed in his face.)
A lean 5'10" redhead, Wilder spent the late '20s in Berlin, writing for newspapers and hanging out with screenwriters. His father became ill while visiting him there in 1928 and died as Billie rode with him in an ambulance. Max "never saw me successful, and I regret that," Wilder said years later. "[He] would have been proud of me." As Hitler ascended in 1933, the Jewish Wilder fled to Paris. Columbia Pictures producer Joe May, whom he had met in Berlin, offered him a job Stateside, so Billie (who would soon masculinize the spelling of his nickname) sailed for America with a contract to write his first screenplay—in English, a language he spoke hardly at all but began studying on the trip.
In L.A. a fellow writer introduced Wilder to a painter five years his junior named Judith Cop-picus, whom he wed in 1936. The pair had twins three years later—Victoria, 62, now a grandmother, and Vincent, who died three months later.
At work Wilder stuck his thumb in the eye of the industry's taste guardians and left it there for 40 years. In 1942's The Major and the Minor he made sly jokes about pedophilia as 31-year-old Ginger Rogers, disguised as a 12-year-old, attracted a flustered Ray Milland. Two years later Wilder collaborated with Raymond Chandler to make the noirest film of all, Double Indemnity. In 1945 Wilder's The Lost Weekend, the first movie to treat alcoholism as a problem instead of a joke, won Best Picture, Director and Screenplay honors.
If those films were dark, Wilder's personal life was even more tormented: The first reports of Nazi death camps began emerging in 1943, and Wilder would later conclude that his mother and stepfather had perished at Auschwitz. After the war he served as arts commissioner for a rebuilding Germany (in America his activism was limited to briefly joining a group that protested the McCarthy hearings about Communism in Hollywood). When one ex-Nazi asked for Wilder's approval to play Jesus Christ in a staging of the Passion Play, Wilder said yes, but only if "in the Crucifixion scene you use real nails." Back home, he didn't go back to Judith and, while filming The Lost Weekend, met Audrey Young, who had a small part in the film. Divorcing Judith, he married Audrey in 1948.
The '50s saw some of Wilder's best work, starting with 1950's corrosive Sunset Boulevard. Young screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) sells himself to the lunatic diva Norma Desmond (Swanson) and winds up narrating his story from the grave, a trick later borrowed by American Beauty. But Wilder mellowed as the years went on. Returning to comedy, he put Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in dresses for 1959's Some Like It Hot, the first of Lemmon's seven Wilder pictures. Wilder "saw beauty and a sense of living in everything around him," recalls Curtis, who regaled Wilder between takes with tales of his bachelor exploits. "He really liked the ladies." He even liked Marilyn Monroe, despite the 50 or more takes she required to say a line as simple as "It's me, sugar." Said Wilder: "If she showed up, she delivered."
With the 1960 Lemmon-MacLaine comedy The Apartment, Wilder took another Oscar triple crown. It would mark the penthouse of his career, as later years saw a string of disappointments leading to his last picture, 1981's Lemmon-Matthau film Buddy Buddy. In later years director Cameron Crowe—who interviewed his idol for the book Conversations with Wilder—and Tom Cruise begged Wilder to make his acting debut in Jerry Maguire. Wilder declined and, sizing up a casually outfitted Cruise with a gimlet eye, added, "In my day movie stars used to dress, even if they were going to the store." Says Crowe now: "To any fan of film or any student of how a great life is lived, all roads lead to Billy Wilder."
Of his closest friend—his wife, Audrey, who survives him—he once told Crowe: "She is good, she is intelligent, I cannot lie to her...80 percent perfect." Audrey pointed out that he never signed his notes to her. "He always used a pseudonym, a character like Colonel Johnson," she said. Replied Wilder: "I didn't want to leave a trace!" About his films, he remarked, "I was not a guy who was writing deep-dish revelations. If people see a picture of mine and then sit down and talk about it for 15 minutes, that is a very fine reward, I think. That's good enough for me." And for us.
With reporting by Alexis Chiu, Lyndon Stambler and Frank Swertlow in Los Angeles
- Contributors:
- Alexis Chiu,
- Lyndon Stambler,
- Frank Swertlow.
CELINE’S INFERTILITY STRUGGLE: MY PRIVATE HEARTBREAK
Daily injections, painful tests and four failed IVF attempts: The singer, 41, reveal her dreams for a second baby. ‘I’ll try until it works’
