City of Nets by Otto Friedrich Page B

At least one hundred men had been squeezed into the living room. Groucho had hired them because (as he later explained) he had been hurt at our not taking him into our symphonietta. We took him in.”
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    The rise of Hitler brought America some of its best filmmakers, just as it brought some of its best composers, teachers, nuclear physicists, and everything else. America welcomed them, for the most part, with variations of apathy and dismay. Samuel Wilder, born in a Galician town not far from Krakow and nicknamed Billy because of his mother’s enthusiasm for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, got to Hollywood early in 1934 through a series of misunderstandings. In Paris, he had written a jazzy story entitled “Pam-Pam,” about a runaway girl who took refuge in an abandoned Broadway theater. He sent it to a friend from Berlin named Joe May, who had become a producer at Columbia. The studio offered Wilder a one-way ticket to Hollywood and a six-month contract at $150 per week, and only then discovered that its latest acquisition could hardly speak English.
    â€œPam-Pam” never got filmed, nor did the other scenarios that Wilder kept frantically churning out. By Christmas of 1935, he was living in a basement anteroom outside the women’s toilets in the Chateau Marmont. “This Christmas of 1935,” Wilder said later, “when I could not sleep, when women were coming in and peeing and looking at me funny, when I . . . knew that war was on the way for Europe, suddenly I wasn’t sure if I fitted in around here in Hollywood. I had the feeling I was not in the right country and I didn’t know if there was a right country for me. Right here was the low point of my life.”
    Wilder was still only twenty-nine, an ebullient youth with curly red hair and the courage of desperation. Erich Pommer, the former UFA producer in Berlin now under contract at RKO, bet Wilder fifty dollars at a party that he wouldn’t dare jump into the swimming pool with all his clothes on. Wilder promptly earned himself fifty dollars. Eventually, he found a job at Paramount, at $250 a week, as a foot soldier in the studio’s army of 100-odd contract writers. They were required by their contracts to turn in at least eleven pages of copy every Thursday. It was more or less assumed that nobody could write a movie script by himself. Paramount assigned the unruly young Wilder to the most implausible of partners, a wealthy New Yorker and Harvard Law School graduate named Charles Brackett, fourteen years his senior. Together, they were supposed to rewrite for Ernst Lubitsch a creaky Alfred Savoir play entitled La Huitième Femme du Barbe-Bleu.
    Bluebeard —Gary Cooper in pursuit of Claudette Colbert—was a solid success. Then came Midnight and the triumphant Ninotchka. And Hold Back the Dawn, in which Billy Wilder, having finally become an American citizen in 1939, wrote a sad little comedy about the refugees who were trapped in Tijuana, waiting for U.S. visas that never came. Wilder’s hero, who had arrived jaunty and confident, was finally reduced to lolling on his dirty hotel bed and addressing a bitter monologue to a cockroach. “Where you going?” he snarled at the cockroach, in the manner of an immigration official. “Let’s see your papers.”
    On the set one morning, Wilder was dismayed to hear that the scene had been cut. Charles Boyer, the star, a onetime classical actor who now lived mainly by his toupee, his corset, and his heroic image of himself, didn’t like it. Wilder went to Lucey’s restaurant, found Boyer having breakfast, and started to protest. “I could not speak such lines,” said Boyer. “One does not talk to cockroaches. You wish to make me look stupide? ” Wilder tried to explain the scene, but Boyer was not interested. “I don’t wish to have these discussions while I am at the table,” he said. “Go away,