By 1982, Wilder had spent nearly half a century in Los Angeles. He had fled Germany in 1933 for Paris. Already a screenwriter in Berlin, he saw Hitler named chancellor and got nervous. A month later, he cleaned out his bank account and bought a one-way ticket to Paris. From Paris, he sold a story to a German director he knew at Columbia. It got Wilder a work visa and a ticket to Hollywood that saved his life.
From his family, only his older brother, Wilhelm, got out. The lesser-known Wilder, Wilhelm produced low-budget horror schlock like Manfish and The Man Without a Body under the grandiose screen credit, “W. Lee Wilder.” As for the rest of the family, the far more accomplished Wilder known simply as “Billy” spent decades wracked with “fury, tears, reproaches,” as he told Michiko Kakutani, over his failure to get them out of Vienna before the 1938 Anschluss. “I left the day after the Reichstag fire, and I left my parents in Vienna,” he said. “What is done is done, and cannot be undone.” His mother, stepfather, and grandmother all stayed behind. “The optimists died in Auschwitz,” he would say later. “The pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.”
In early 1982, at 77, Wilhelm died. That June, Israeli journalist Benny Landau stopped by the office to interview Wilder. Landau surprised Wilder by asking him about Israel and the ongoing invasion of Lebanon. It was not a Six-Day War, but a conflict that dragged on for months without any victory for Israel to claim. When you’re Billy Wilder, you expect questions about Marilyn Monroe, not Menachem Begin—but Wilder offered a chastened view of the war anyway. “I don’t feel good about [the siege on] Beirut,” Wilder told Landau, “but my heart is with the soldiers.”
Wilder had been an ardent Zionist since the 1920s, but as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict entered a new decade, he looked on with dismay at yet another front opening up. “I would have liked someone to explain to me,” he asked Landau, “how the problem will be solved if we take the cancer from Beirut and transfer it to Damascus or Riyadh.… When you talk to the average American, or to your non-Jewish wife, you feel disappointment, you sense their apprehension that the state, which always looked brilliant and sophisticated, is sinking into some kind of fanatical aggression, a cycle of an eye for an eye.” Nor did Wilder feel that Israel’s long record of success with targeted assassinations would reverse the cycle. “I don’t believe that the elimination of [Yasser] Arafat will solve the problem. In [the Palestinians’] ranks fight kids who were taught, since they were two years old, that they should destroy the State of Israel. This war [in Lebanon] is turning into a fanatic, religious war.”
