I Once Met… Billy Wilder Anthony Lipmann
‘Let’s not talk over the phone,’ Wilder had said. ‘You come over to California and we can spend some time together – and I can show you around.’
He said I should stay at the Chateau Marmont Hotel and that he would collect me at 9am on the appointed day. He also said, ‘Please call me Billy.’
I was 30. Wilder had invited me over when he heard through the Berlin grapevine that I was writing a biography of the artist he credited with welcoming him into Hollywood in the Thirties, Ernst Dryden (1887-1938).
So there I was, in October 1987, waiting outside the hotel on a halcyon sunny morning. Billy arrived in an ordinary blue Japanese sedan and told me to jump in. He was a terrible driver, apparently aiming at the oncoming traffic on Sunset Boulevard.
Upon mentioning Sunset Boulevard, he said William Holden was a wonderful man to work with. He recalled the ghostly mansions on Wilshire (not Sunset) that had inspired the film.
He said he wanted to make it in black and white to echo the glory days of early film. By the late Forties, Buster Keaton, the other silent greats, and directors such as Erich von Stroheim were forgotten shadows in this town, he added.
We passed the Hollywood Golf Club. Wilder told me about the B-movie star Victor Mature whose greatest aspiration was not so much to make it in films but to join the golf club. Each time he applied, he was told, ‘We’re sorry, but we don’t take Jews or actors.’ Mature replied, ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever been called an actor.’
We got to Rodeo Drive and went up to Billy’s little office. There was a row of Oscars in a glass bookcase. As a metal merchant, I noticed that the brass of the newer Oscars was less oxidised than the older ones.
When we broke for lunch, Billy asked me if I liked Italian food and showed me a book of Italian recipes for which he had written the foreword. ‘You take the work where you can get it,’ he said.
He asked me to his apartment to see an object that had belonged to Dryden – the walls were covered in pictures by famous artists. He pointed to a Picasso against the wall and said, ‘You know you are rich, I suppose, when you have nowhere to hang the Picassos.’ We passed through the bedroom where his wife was having a nap. ‘Don’t mind Audrey,’ he said breezily, as we walked round the edge of the bed with Audrey Young lying on her back. And there in the bathroom was the kitsch, ebony statue of a black boy, holding up a brass plate. ‘I just took it,’ he said, ‘because it was the only thing I could afford as a memory of Dryden.’ When I finished, I sent him the script (he always called it the script), asking him if he would write the foreword. He was in hospital by that time with osteoarthritis and in pain, but he had read the whole book. ‘I am not a writer,’ I had said. To which he replied, ‘You are a writer, because you write’. A few weeks later, an envelope arrived with a handwritten note and a beautifully double-spaced foreword.