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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504008600 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 03/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 474 |
| File size: | 770 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
William Wyler
The Authorized Biography
By Axel Madsen
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1973 William Wyler and Axel MadsenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0860-0
CHAPTER 1
When Melanie and Leopold Wyler's second son was born July 1, 1902, Mulhouse was called Mülhausen. It had no Common Market aspirations then. It was simply a provincial town on the western marches of the good Kaiser Wilhelm's empire.
Berlin was far away.
Stuttgart, Zurich, Baden, Frankfurt, Ulm, and Freiburg were much closer and the whole family had to know right away. As soon as Melanie could sit up in bed, she wrote about Willy to the Wylers in Endingen and to her own family, the Auerbachs. When Leopold wasn't minding the store down on Wildemannstrasse, he was running to the post office. Writing to the family was always Melanie's passion and all through childhood, Willy would remember vacations with Mama sending off postcards. Hundreds of them, it seemed, to relatives all over southern Germany and parts of Switzerland.
After Robert, Melanie had wanted a girl. On grand occasions, she had fun dressing Willy like one. They looked pretty together in photographs—Robert, two years older, in his new sailor's uniform and Willy with a little bow in his brown locks, a chiffon collar, and little lacquered shoes, all from Papa's show window. "Sit still," she admonished, while the photographer ducked under his black cover. It was always something to make Willy stay quiet.
Although she wasn't a native, Melanie liked Mülhausen. She never had trouble making friends and she could practice her French. They had always called her Franzosenkopf at home because she adored things French. There were older families in town, even older Jewish families, who spoke French. Leopold met them, the Engel-Dollfus brothers, the Brisachs, at the synagogue. Fleetingly. He didn't go that often. As newcomers to Elsass—or Alsace as the French called the province—the Wylers had little nostalgia for the French past fading with the old century. Leopold was Swiss, from the Argau canton—Endingen was the old ghetto of Baden. Melanie was from Stuttgart. Her famous novelist uncle, Bertold Auerbach, was from Nordstetten. The Lämmles on her mother's side were from Laupheim and were all over also. Cousin Carl had gone to America, but he might possibly return one day, as her father Ferdinand had done.
Mülhausen was not that little. The 1900 census had disclosed a population of nearly ninety thousand. Textile printing was the main industry and after 1871, cautious men of commerce had managed to transplant the city's business into the German economy without major disruption. The new prosperity, circumspect and hard-earned, also helped them forget the French past. Prussians spoke a little funny but they knew how to get things done. Besides, a lot of new ideas were in the air. The twentieth century looked more than promising even if the city elders thought caution was the only civic virtue.
The city fathers had always governed prudently, as men do who live between powerful neighbors. Nothing had foreordained the confluence of the Dollar and Ill rivers as a hub of human activity, the spot was neither geographically inviting nor strategically important, which may explain why the town didn't appear until long after Gauls, Romans, Franks, Teutons, Visigoths, and Attila's hordes had trampled the marshy left bank of the upper Rhine. Mülhausen first appeared in 803 and was next mentioned in the twelfth century when the territory was divided between the bishop of Strasbourg and the Hohenstauffen family. Between crusades, Frederick Barbarossa founded a village for artisans and merchants next to the bishop's hamlet and, in 1224, the new town received its imperial privileges and the right to fortify itself.
Charles the Foolhardy of Burgundy tried to bullwhip the good burghers into a league against King Louis of France, but the city of Mülhausen signed a treaty with neighboring Basel and, in 1515, joined the thirteen cantons in their confederacy as an "associate locality." For the next two and a half centuries, Mülhausen chose to tie its destiny to that of the Swiss.
In 1523, the burghers of Mülhausen voted in favor of the Reformed Church and the city stayed neutral in the religious wars, escaping the pain and destruction that ravaged both shores of the Rhine.
When the Treaty of Westphalia put an end to the Thirty Years War, the city's political independence was respected and Mülhausen did not become a French province along with the rest of Alsace.
In the middle of Voltaire's century of Enlightenment, the first shop for "indiennage"—textile prints in the East Indian manner—appeared. By 1769, the city had fifteen factories. A stock exchange sprang up along with an opera house, and Johann Heinrich Lambert wrote his treatises on mathematics and cosmology. Lambert was the city's only illustrious son. Mülhausen was also the birthplace of a famous—some said infamous—French army officer—Alfred Dreyfus.
Economics, not ideology, were behind the city's decision to join the French Revolution. As Napoleon was about to seize power and embark on empire building and endless wars, Mülhausen voted to abandon its independence and to join the French Republic. After Napoleon's downfall, the decision did make sense. Bigger markets and bigger horizons spurred the Mulhousiens, made them build Alsace's first railway, Europe's first "workers' city," and from textile printing branch into lithography and photography. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 was an exercise in brinkmanship that went too far, proved disastrous for France, and achieved unification for Germany. The gains came all too easily, proved to be an embarrassment for Germany, gave aristocratic statesmen the first taste of national hatreds, and lighted the long fuse that exploded in 1914. Otto von Bismarck did not usually sympathize with popular emotions and not even his principle of sorting people out into their linguistic "tribes" seemed to justify laying claims to German-speaking Alsace. Not in the beginning at least. At the end, Bismarck was trapped by his own impetuosity, became the prisoner of German public opinion, and of a military high command that wanted to crown its victory with tangible gains. When a humiliated France capitulated and sued for peace in 1871, Alsace-Lorraine became part of the Reich.
Recent history was taught a little differently in the schools Willy went to—and was thrown out of. Behind Professor Dr. Schmeltzle's pince-nez and the Gothic lettering on the textbooks was the might of Germanismus. By becoming Elsass-Lothringen, Alsace-Lorraine had found its natural destiny and obvious place in the modern world. And why not? as so many said. The reign of Wilhelm II was cautious, liberal, and—as Leopold said—there was not a streak of anti-Semitism in the emperor. Melanie would sometimes laugh and tell them it was a well-known fact that if you spat in the face of a German Jew, he would say it was raining. But wasn't her own brother an officer? Since when had you heard of Jews making careers in the army? The French might have their Dreyfus affair; here at home, thank God, all that was the past. This wasn't Kiev or Warsaw. This was Imperial Germany. Nineteen hundred and ten! Besides, what mattered was that business was good.
Leopold Wyler couldn't complain. When it got a little too hectic around the house, when Melanie insisted the boys take both French and violin lessons on Thursdays or she organized theatrical soirées with the Cahen children, the Jacob boys, and who knows who else, he could trot down to the store and go over the figures again. They had a nice home—even a maid now; the Badenweiler succursale, as Melanie called the branch store, was coming along. She and the boys spent the summers over there—tending the little branch wasn't much work—when they didn't go on real holidays, last year clear across France to Deauville—well, Trouville—on the Channel coast. Of course sea resorts were the dernier cri. For a boy from Endingen who had started as a traveling salesman, he could be worse off.
If Leopold was what he was—a thrifty salesman who, with his wife's modest dowry, had set himself up in the haberdashery business and made things prosper—Melanie was her own center of dynamics. Frau Wyler, they said, was the kind of person people fell in love with after five minutes. Complete strangers came away smiling. She was full of imagination and ideas, energy and endless curiosity. Of course, she was an Auerbach, as she would say.
Melanie loved her boys and the only black cloud in her life was that little Gaston, the third son, seemed definitely retarded. They had tried everything, but there was nothing doctors could do. Or so they said. Luckily, there were Robert and Willy, even if Willy was a garnement.
Was it necessary to dare and doubledare every boy from Riedesheim to Brunstadt? If somebody dared Willy to drink the ink out of the school-bench inkwell, he would do it. "I bet you don't dare ..." was all anybody had to say.
The earliest memory Edmond Cahen had of the younger of the Wyler brothers was seeing Willy eating a goldfish on a dare. "I bet you're too scared to swim the Ill," and Willy was already wading in. Paul Jacob, who like Cahen was to become a lawyer, remembered Willy crossing the ice on the Tivoligarten pond on the way to school one winter's morning and not making it. Cahen was never to forget Willy's going swimming in the Ill. When Melanie learned where her ten-year-old had gone, she became more than upset. Several boys had drowned in the river that summer. When he didn't return by nightfall, her anger turned into fright. Other boys were questioned, Papa was called from his card game. By ten o'clock, the neighborhood was marshaled. She was beside herself, asking the same question to the same boys again and again, imploring and praying when suddenly Willy came slinking around the corner. In a second, her tears turned to radiance and in another second to the fury of a mother who has been at her wits' end for no reason. To Leopold she suddenly cried out, "Schlag ihn tot! "—"Beat him to death!"
Elsasserdeutsch wasn't the purest of German, but it was unmistakable. Few could believe what they were hearing in November, 1944, when a U.S. Air Force major climbed out of his jeep in the middle of Rue du Sauvage and began to speak Alsatian. The American just grinned and said his name was Willy.
Luckily, Robert was a bit more sensible. He didn't get himself thrown out of every Realschule and Gymnasium he was sent to. He was interested in math and Melanie wanted to send him to college in Lausanne. And Willy? He'd just have to learn haberdashery and take over the business one day. In the meantime, Professor Schmeltzle had to give him private lessons in mathematics.
When Robert had the measles, Willy was sent to Stuttgart to stay with his grandparents. Grandpa Ferdinand Auerbach told marvelous stories. As a young man, he had gone to America and once there, he had never stopped traveling. A civil war had broken out and he had become a wandering salesman as the Americans called it, going from town to town with a cartful of wares. Willy sat fascinated and listened when he wasn't asking about skyscrapers forty stories high. Grandpa had been to Baltimore and even way west to Chicago. He had liked it and had come back to Stuttgart to marry Grandma. But she had doublecrossed him, he laughed. Once they had gotten married, she had refused to go to America with him. Stuttgart was all right; he had prospered in real estate and America was just a gleam in his eyes now. Except on the 4th of July. On that day, he flew an American flag in memory of his youth and opportunities across the sea.
Others had gone to America. The Lämmle brothers, Joseph and little Carl. Joseph lived in New York. Carl had first settled out in Indian country—in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Grandpa said. Then he had moved again, to Chicago, where he was now in this new "moving pictures" business.
Melanie loved the new fad. There were three movie theaters in Mülhausen. One of them had a black doorman—the only Negro Willy and his friends had ever seen. Children made detours on the way home from school, just to pass by the Kino and watch the black man in his uniform.
In the afternoons, Melanie sometimes treated the boys. She loved Asta Nielsen in pictures like Der Abgrund. No wonder they called the Danish actress "la Duse du Nord." For Willy, she sat through the Otto Ripert serials—action, chases, a man standing on a railway track with a train bearing down on him. Or the Fantomas, two-reelers with the masked detective chasing villains over the rooftops of Paris and always disappearing just before the end so you would come back next week. Once there was a Tonfilm, but the sound turned out to be nothing more than a scratchy record.
Melanie also took the boys to serious things: concerts, theater, and, when good companies visited, the opera. Willy was fascinated. He even promised he would study the violin. Imagine, to stand in the pit and conduct the orchestra—a hundred musicians maybe! And up behind the feu de la rampe, the stage, the singers. And the sets! Deep mysterious forests for Siegfried to swear eternal love or for Boris Godunov to rally his men. Or the exotic garden where the American officer abandoned Madame Butterfly. Melanie cried each time.
On winter evenings, she organized theatrical events in the parlor. Paul Jacob and the other boys came over and everybody had to help. Melanie let them hang new sheets to serve as curtains and had everybody singe bottlecorks to make black mustaches. Then they had to write plays, or at least sketches, and learn lines. She had to arbitrate disputes over who should play Ivanhoe. Outdoor recreations included primitive skiing in the Tannenwald.
In the summer, they were in Badenweiler, on the Black Forest side of the Rhine. It was beautiful in August and September. The shop was tiny and next door was the best konditorei in all of Schwartzwald. They had strawberry tarts so good nobody could eat dinner. And there was baker Greter's daughter, the same age as Willy. Everybody teased him about her. As if a ten-year-old were interested in dumb girls.
Leopold came every Saturday night from Mülhausen and sat reading his newspapers on the veranda. Sometimes Herr Greter came around after dinner and they argued about war, admitting that it was unthinkable in this century. Leopold thought wars were like motorcar accidents. Every accident was caused, in the last resort, by the invention of the internal combustion engine and by people's desire to get fast from one place to another. The "cure" for road accidents was to forbid automobiles.
They could never agree on whether wars had profound causes or grew out of specific events. But Herr Greter insisted Germany was right to make herself strong since she was squeezed on all sides. Leopold wasn't so sure, but then again, as Herr Greter insinuated once or twice, he was Swiss.
When he was alone, Leopold Wyler wondered. It was all Wilhelm the Second's Reich, but the feelings were different on this side of the Rhine. In Schwartzwald, they clamored for a strong Germany and in Elsass, twenty kilometers away, people thought it was wise not to vindicate, not to condemn. To Leopold, what was important was to understand. The purpose of politics was prosperity and peaceful intercourse among nations. Germany and France and everybody else had been in peace for over forty years now. Statesmen knew that. History, he was sure, was without heroes and perhaps even without villains.
Sometimes Melanie had to laugh. How Swiss could anyone be? That made him less sure. Dr. Jacob and some of the others were so cynically clever. They said Mülhausen lived in "splendid isolation" and that even if the bourgeoisie controlled the city's economy, all real power was concentrated in Berlin.
Even after the murder of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, he believed. Like everybody else. That had been in June and it was now July. They had just celebrated Willy's twelfth birthday. He sat on the veranda and watched his blue cigar smoke disappear into the night. In September, Robert would be fourteen. The boy was already in Lausanne and Switzerland was certainly not interested in war. Besides, who had ever heard of fourteen-year-olds going to war. He had nothing to fear himself. After all, he was Swiss.
To Willy, the war rumors were terribly exciting. When mobilization notices were plastered on street corners and people gathered, Willy and another kid bored into the crowd. Most people were worried. When others tried to sound a reassuring note—after all, war might still be avoided—Willy's face fell.
Together with the Catholic family from the third floor and the Protestant family from the ground floor, the Wylers spent August 6 and 7 in the cellar listening to the shells fly overhead. The women prayed together and everybody cringed at each terrifying detonation. The men took turns running up to empty slop buckets and were able to retrieve a loaf of pumpernickel bread Melanie suddenly remembered was on the back shelf. They all shook their heads with disbelief. On July 28, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia over the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. On August 1, the Russian mobilization in support of Serbia provoked Germany to declare war on Russia and two days later on France, Russia's ally. On August 4, Berlin's refusal to respect the neutrality of Belgium provoked Great Britian to declare war on Germany.
Willy and one of the other boys climbed on top of the crates stacked by the window to peer up into the street. All they could see were feet, soldiers going back and forth. And they could all hear shooting, sometimes distant and sometimes frighteningly near.
When Melanie saw the boys looking out the window, she quickly made them get down. They were soon back up on the crates. They didn't want to miss any of the excitement. A dead soldier had fallen in front of the grating, grotesquely blocking the view. The boys got a broomstick, shoved it through the grating and rolled the dead man over so that they could see again.
On August 8, the bombardment stopped and again they heard marching soldiers. Willy was back up on the crates, while the adults consulted each other and the men decided to venture upstairs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from William Wyler by Axel Madsen. Copyright © 1973 William Wyler and Axel Madsen. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PART ONE The Early Years,PART TWO The Stride,
PART THREE The High 1930s,
PART FOUR War and Aftermath,
PART FIVE Eclectic Patterns,
PART SIX The Later Films,
Notes,
Awards,
Filmography,
Bibliography,
Index,