The highlight of my movie critic career was my hour with Billy Wilder. It stemmed from an interview with Fernando Trueba, a young Spanish filmmaker whose BELLE EPOQUE earned an Academy Award for best foreign film the same year that Tom Hanks won for PHILADELPHIA. When I interviewed Trueba in San Francisco just a few days before the awards ceremonies he mentioned that Billy Wilder was his favorite director. You may recall that at the ceremony Tom Hanks invoked the son of the deity numerous times in a brief acceptance speech. When Trueba accepted his award he said, “I would like to thank the Academy. I would also thank God (long pause) but I do not believe in him. I believe in Billy Wilder. Thank you, Billy Wilder.”
I tracked down Billy through a publicist pal on the day after and asked how he felt when Trueba honored him. “As you know Swifty (Irving Paul Lazar-the diminutive super agent) died so there was no party at Spago’s. I was mixing a martini at the time and now when I stroll in Beverly Hills people genuflect.”
We ultimately met one year later when Billy was eighty-eight. Knowing he had lived in Paris when he fled Berlin I greeted him in French and he ushered me into his office in the Writers Building on Brighton in Beverly Hills where we enjoyed a fifty minute chat before he sped off to have fresh calves brains at Kate Mantalini around the corner – the only place in town that served them.
Before leaving I told him that my sources had informed me that he was known to keep headshots and that he would sign them. He retrieved a glossy black and white photo in which he resembled Jabba the Hut and, as the journalist he had been in Berlin before the war, he signed it: “To Terrance Gelenter. Thank you, I hope.” It passes on to my son when I check out.
Billy Wilder lived in Paris in the early thirties while on the lam from the Nazis. IRMA LA DOUCE, his 1963 film adapted from a successful Broadway play, presented a version of Paris neighborhood life as it must have been, a little like journalist Elliot Paul’s THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS. The corner bar/café, les ouvriers, les poules and les flics. In typical Wilderian fashion it was softened for contemporary American morals but replete with hidden meanings.
When asked if a director should be able to write, he replied:” No, but he should be able to read.”
My Favorite Wilders
