He was manager and co-owner of the restaurant The Brown Derby in Los Angeles, California, and was part of the failed project of his older brother Addison to create a new resort in Boca Raton, Florida.

Wilson ("Bill") Mizner was born in Benicia, California, one of eight children, including brothers William, Edgar, Murray, Addison, Henry, and Lansing and sister Mary.

Their father, Lansing Bond Mizner, was named Benjamin Harrison's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Central American states, and the family relocated to Guatemala for a year, the brothers allegedly spending their free time robbing churches, as they later claimed[citation needed] (both brothers recounted unverifiable details about their foreign experiences).

As he told it (there is no confirmation), he was known as the "Prince of Nome", established McQuestion, a saloon/casino, and was appointed deputy sheriff, where his "primary duty" was "to warn Eskimos that they'd have to smell better".

[2]: 25 After leaving Alaska, he claimed to have managed a banana plantation in Honduras for a few months, but returned to San Francisco to resume his career as a professional gambler.

The marriage did not last long, as the publicity generated "numerous" letters from California and Alaska warning the new Mrs. Mizner about her husband's past criminal activities;[2]: 26  their divorce was finalized in May 1907.

[2]: 26  Wilson then managed the Rand Hotel on West Forty-ninth Street in New York,[6] posting signs that read "Carry out your own dead"[7][8] and "No opium smoking in the elevators".

There, he obtained backing from Jack L. Warner and Gloria Swanson and bought into and managed the Brown Derby restaurants, and wrote screenplays for some of the early talk movies.

Biographer Alva Johnston wrote: [Wilson] Mizner had a vast firsthand criminal erudition, which he commercialized as a dramatist on Broadway and a screenwriter in Hollywood.

That Wilson Mizner was a ballad singer, medical lecturer, "general utility man in a segregated district", songwriter, and roulette-wheel fixer are all undocumented except in his own unreliable words.