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The Sunday Poem  is published weekly, and strives to include the poet reading their work.

Joan E. Bauer reads her poem at its conclusion.

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Wikimedia Commons

Billy Wilder; c. 1942

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You Know by the Laughter

Billy Wilder loved voice-over & the velocity
it gives a script. He loved to jump ahead trusting

the audience to stay with him. What’s more,
the satirist in him liked to comment.

So we have failed screenwriter & cadaver
Joe Gillis [voice over] telling his story

in Sunset Boulevard’s opening lines.

*

Billy was born Samuel in Galicia. His mother
who’d lived briefly in New York, nicknamed him

for Buffalo Bill. The family settled in Vienna.
His father managed cafes along the railroad lines.

His parents read the newspaper. Billy read Zola
& Dumas. His first job, as a pool shark.

Billy grew up a restless red-haired macher,
transfixed by movies & American jazz.

*

By18, a fast-talking reporter. Crime stories.
Theater reviews. Then he moved to Berlin,

thrilled to share that moody international city
with Hemingway, Dietrich & Cocteau.

His dream: to write movies. First script for Lubitsch.
By 22, a walking script factory, living in style.

When Hitler became chancellor, time to move on.
Paris in 1934, then America, improving

his English by reading A Farewell to Arms.
In Hollywood, a screenwriter for Harry Cohn.

First film, penned for Gloria Swanson, a flop.
Then he found his first writing partner,

the erudite & even-tempered Charlie Brackett.
Together, they made film history.

*

His first big hit, the incomparable Ninotchka
pairs Garbo with Melvyn Douglas. It skewers

dour Soviet apparatchiks. Love blooms
& Garbo laughs. He goes on to write & direct

the greatest films of their genre: Double Indemnity,
Lost Weekend,  Some Like It Hot & more.

‘He has a brain full of razor blades.’ Maybe so.
After World War II, he’d gone to Europe to find

his family. They’d perished, including his mother
in a slave labor camp near Krakow.

*

Nattily dressed, sporting a fedora. Eyebrows
raised, responding with a little shrug & smile.

‘It’s fun to make pictures because you live five,
ten, fifteen, maybe twenty different lives.’

Did he hope for life- after-death? ‘So many shits,
I wouldn’t want to meet them again.’

*

Billy Wilder never forgot being young & broke
in Hollywood, or earlier in Vienna, working

as a dancer-for-hire, but not a gigolo.
In his films, almost no one is ever clean.

Wilder never lost his mischievous edge
or his guttural Austrian accent.

Brisk, professional, always punctual.
His own life wasn’t crazy, reckless or foolish.

On being a director:
‘It’s not a profession for a dignified human being.’

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Listen to Joan E. Bauer read her poem

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Photo by Ruth Ella Hendricks

Joan E. Bauer  is the author of three full-length poetry collections,  Fig Season  (Turning Point, 2023),  The Camera Artist  (Turning Point, 2021),  and  The Almost Sound of Drowning  (Main Street Rag, 2008).  Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream and Chiron Review. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor and now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-curates the Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.

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Watch a clip from the 1959 Billy Wilder film  Some Like it Hot,  with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemmon  [Movieclips]

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Click for:

Information about the  Jerry Jazz Musician  book,  Kinds of Cool: An Interactive Collection of Jazz Poetry

The Sunday Poem

More poetry on Jerry Jazz Musician

“Bluesette,” Salvatore Difalco’s winning story in the 67th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest

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