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As a gregarious "coffeehouse guy," he mixes at all levels of the Hollywood social scale—in the Holmby Hills Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra), in the Kosher Rat Pack (Groucho Marx and friends), even in the exclusive A Group (top studio brass and long-established superstars, like Gary Cooper). For all his gregariousness, he can be cruel without reason, successfully plays the domestic tyrant. At dinner one evening, his wife Audrey announced brightly: "Darling, do you realize this is our anniversary?" Replied Wilder: "Please—not while I'm eating." Says Playwright George Axelrod: "Billy is essentially, not personally, mean. Most of his meanness goes into his work. He sees the worst in everybody, and he sees it funny."
Undivided Fame. For a professed cynic, Wilder was born at an unlikely time and place—the Johann Straussian Vienna of 1906. The son of a well-to-do restaurateur, Billy dodged law school at 19, signed on as a reporter for a Vienna daily. At 20, he was off to Berlin as a movie and drama reviewer. Not long afterward, he fell in love with a dancer and was fired for neglecting his work. Next thing he knew, Billy himself was dancing for his supper as a nightclub gigolo, and writing film scripts on the side. At 27, with 50 screenplays behind him and the German movie industry apparently at his feet, Billy, who is Jewish, fled to France to escape the Nazis.
In 1934, he landed in Hollywood with a little money, less English and no job. For several weeks he lived in an empty ladies' room at the Chateau Marmont ("Just me and six small toilets"), then shared the digs of a Berlin buddy named Peter Lorre. Rent: 50¢ a day.
After two punishingly lean years, Wilder at last got a screenwriting job at Paramount. And at the whim of an executive producer, he was teamed with Writer Charles Brackett, onetime drama critic for The New Yorker. Suave Charlie Brackett and rough Billy Wilder clicked right away. Wilder spewed Niagaras of notions, and in this prodigious stream of consciousness, Brackett fished for usable ideas. Together they wrote 14 films without a single flop, and some of their movies were among the biggest hits (Ninotchka, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard) of the era. But in 1950 Brackett and Wilder broke up. Says Wilder: "Sometimes a match and the striking surface both wear out, and that's what happened to us." Says Brackett: "Billy had outgrown his divided fame."