“I can manage.” I turned around and paused, glancing over my shoulder. “They stink, you know. Your pigeons. It smells like a barnyard up here.”
“Yes, well. They’re food.” He waved me off. “Go. I can see you’re desperate.”
I scowled. “If you’d only seen what von Sternberg wants me to wear—” I shuddered.
He returned to his birds while I marched downstairs to yank my trunk from the closet, filled to the brim with things I’d stolen from my theater and movie engagements over the years to replenish my personal wardrobe.
Heidede was delighted to join in my scavenging, squealing as I tossed out furs and shawls and flimsy dresses, capes and satin shoes and posh hats, even my opera glasses from Tragedy of Love. It was all marvelous, perfect for nights in Berlin, though I’d grown more attached to my masculine attire, preferring trousers with smart jackets to these items that required coordination and care, and were never warm enough for our unpredictable rain or gusty winds.
But once I had everything strewn over the bed and floor, my daughter rolling around in it like a scone in flour, Tamara chuckling at the mess, I sighed. “None of this works, either,” I said, looking up at my husband’s mistress. “It’s too stylish. Lola-Lola isn’t a fashion plate. She’s—”
“Yes, we know what she is,” said Tamara quickly, widening her eyes at Heidede, who sat up to watch us with a five-year-old’s avid interest.
“What is she, Mutti?” asked my daughter, and I melted to hear her use that word with me.
“A naughty girl,” I growled, “like you.” And I swooped upon her, grabbing her about her chubby waist and smacking her with kisses, tickling her ribs until she shrieked.
When Rudi appeared, his apron gone and looking as if he’d just gone out for a cognac, he gave me an amused smile. “Not what you were looking for?”
“In the least. I need tawdry. Used. Tatty. I need—” I suddenly knew. “I need you to take me tonight to the Nollendorfplatz.”
“You do?” He was startled. “Why?”
“Because I need your car. It’s for Lola-Lola. I must find her clothes. At Das Silhouette.”
THE “GIRLS” WERE THRILLED to see me again. I hadn’t been back in a while, not since my incident with Leni over the Nazis and winning my role in Two Bow Ties (our friendship had cooled considerably after that, Leni claiming I’d stolen the part by showing too much leg). With Anna May’s departure shortly thereafter to shoot a picture in London, it put an end to our Sisters About Town act. But transvestites marked time differently. They were loyal even during absence, provided that one was loyal in return. When I told them what I needed, they hauled me backstage to show off their wares.
“What about these lamé wrist cuffs?” one asked, pulling them out from a drawer. “You told me they made no sense without the matching gloves, but maybe for her?”
“Perfect.” I stuffed them into the large tapestry bag I’d brought. I had left Rudi at the bar, where he was clearly enjoying our old ambience. “And that kimono. Whose is it?”
“Mine, Liebchen. And I’m very fond of it,” said Yvette Sans-Souci, a regular performer at the club with the voice of a baritone and the smoothest legs I’d ever seen on a man. He must wax them every day, I thought, as I made pleading eyes at him.
He harrumphed. “Fine. But I want it back.” He retrieved the kimono from its peg. “I mean it. I know how you are. ‘Yvette, darling, can I borrow this? Can you lend me that?’ And I never see any of it again. You took those beige gloves from me, remember, that time you were here with your friends and yours had a nasty stain. Where are those gloves now, I wonder?”
“I promise.” I bent over a trunk crammed with the rattiest items imaginable, things no one but them could wear and make seductive. “Oh.” I extracted a pair of oversize ruffled knickers. “I remember these. When I first came here, centuries ago,” I said, winking at Yvette, “boys were running around in these under pink peignoirs. Very fetching.”
The girls gave each other snide looks. “The dildo queens,” said Yvette. “Sluts.”
“Lola-Lola would wear them.” I stuffed the knickers into my valise. “She’s a slut.”
“Naturally,” said Yvette. “All of von Sternberg’s ladies are sluts. He hates women.”
I paused. “He does?”
“Oh, yes. Haven’t you seen his pictures? He loathes them. Must be because he’s so short. Little cock and all that.”
“I’d fuck him,” piped up Yvette’s sidekick, a very thin and nervous redhead who was probably addicted to everything. “For a role in his picture, I’d do him and his entire cast.”
Yvette slid his heavily mascaraed eyes at me. “Have you?”
I wagged my finger. “Wouldn’t you like to know? Now, is there anything else here you think I can use? Not shoes. I have plenty of those, and your feet are too big.”
“Liebchen, you’ll strip us as naked as urchins,” drawled Yvette. “What more do you want? She’s a cabaret girl. She makes do with what she has. Though,” he said, contemplating me, “you might think of giving her a little of you, as well.”
“Like what?” I said eagerly, and Yvette’s red lips widened in a knowing smile. “I’m sure you’ll think of something. You always did know how to please the customer.”
THE NEXT DAY, Rudi took me to the studio in his car. After von Sternberg gave him a tour of the set, his congenial air masking his fury that I’d walked out on the fitting, he couldn’t resist raking his gaze over me and remarking, “I hear our costumes were not to your liking.”
“I thought they were lovely but hardly . . .” My confidence in my haul from Das Silhouette evaporated. He was watching me like a raptor, as if to convey that he had no idea who I thought I was, but he was considering gutting me for dinner.
Rudi said, “You realize, Herr von Sternberg, that Marlene has often selected her own costumes. She has an infallible instinct for character and has been working very hard to create your Lola-Lola. Perhaps if you can give her a moment to show you? I find that with Marlene, it’s easier to see than to listen.”
Von Sternberg frowned at my husband, who stood a foot taller and was impeccable in his gray flannel suit. I remembered what Yvette had said, He hates women, and wondered if he might hate some men, as well. Rudi was everything he was not, at least physically.
“Very well,” he conceded, though he couldn’t curb the bite in his tone.
Shouldering my bag, I went behind a stack of crates containing props for the set, divesting myself of my trousers and coat to pull on the ruffled knickers, a sleeveless tunic top, tattered stockings, and low-heeled white shoes that I’d dunked in wine and then scraped with sandpaper to make them appear weathered. At the last moment, I grabbed my silk top hat. A touch of me, Yvette had suggested. What better than something from my cabaret look?
When I emerged, sauntering as the girls did, pelvis thrust forward in bawdy invitation, I glanced at Rudi’s reassuring smile and then I waited.
Von Sternberg looked as if he’d turned to stone. Then he said, “I see.”
I set my hand on my hip. “She’s poor. She can’t buy new things, so I thought—”
“Yes.” An indecipherable expression came over him. He turned his back to me. “You are right,” he told Rudi. “She has an infallible instinct. It’s why I hired her. Will you join me for lunch, Herr Sieber? I think it’s time we became better acquainted.”
They left me standing there, in Lola-Lola’s clothes.
Von Sternberg might never admit defeat, but I had still won.
III
She is every man’s forbidden fantasy. Blue silk top hat, sleeveless black dress slashed open to reveal schoolgirl knickers, a sequin-edged gold kerchief corralling her throat and thigh-high stockings molded to her thighs, held by suspenders to a garter belt, though she is so ripe, so unfettered, her audience waits breathlessly for one of those suspenders to snap. With her hands at her hips, she strides across the crowded stage, unique among her bedraggled
companions—overpainted women in flouncy dresses, smoking cigarettes—before she gestures to one on a nearby barrel, who glares at her, indignant, but vacates her seat.
Lola-Lola assumes her perch, a stuffed seagull bobbing on a wire at her side. As she raises one leg and curls her arm about her knee, she leans back to croon in her smoke-and-dagger voice, “‘Falling in love again. Never wanted to. What’s a girl to do? I can’t help it . . .’”
And as she sings, she gazes to the balcony hung with life preservers, where Professor Rath sits, the unwitting guest of honor, pudgy hands clasped before him as if in prayer, flanked by the masthead of a bare-breasted siren as the siren on the gaudy stage below smiles with covert knowledge, as if she can feel his growing erection, beckoning with her eyes, promising—
“Sow!” bellowed von Sternberg. “Pull up your panties. I can see your gash.”
On his balcony, Jannings guffawed. “I can see it, too. From all the way up here.”
I hastily closed my thighs, almost tumbling off the barrel. With a beseeching look at von Sternberg as he emerged from behind the box camera, I said, “It’s the underwear. It stretches out. This is our hundredth take and—”
“A hundred and one now,” he interrupted. “Again. And try to remember this time that our censors won’t appreciate seeing your pubic hair, much as you like to show it.”
I avoided looking past the snickering crew to where Leni and her new director-friend Arnold Fanck stood. He had “discovered” her and turned her into an Alpine heroine in his grandiose landscape films. She had insisted on coming to see me on the set and now watched with sharp eyes, reveling in my humiliation. She’d wanted the part of course. She telephoned me as soon as she heard the news, though we’d not spoken in months. According to her, she and every other actress in Berlin had campaigned for it.
“Lucie Mannheim took ill,” she told me. “She had to go away for a cure. Von Sternberg promised her the role, so she introduced him to Höllaender. But he only hired the composer. Everyone is wondering what you did to earn it, if someone as famous as Lucie could not.”
“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t even know what he was testing me for.”
“Marlene, please. You must have done something. After all, he is a Jew.”
I hung up on her. But she finagled an invitation to the set anyway, wielding her director’s cachet; everyone who was anyone in Berlin came. They were agog. Already the UFA churned out advance publicity, their concern over the disastrous stock-market crash in America, known as Black Tuesday, hurling the studio executives into panic. Von Sternberg was on a tight schedule and a tighter budget, on loan with penalty fees in his contract, payable by the UFA for every day he went past the wrap date. When the UFA rats, as he’d dubbed them, arrived to tell him he must hasten things along, his roar was so loud that those of us waiting on the set could hear him.
“I’ll not be thwarted by such petty concerns. This film must be shot sequentially, in German and then in English. I must be left alone to fulfill my vision!”
The rats obliged. They had no choice. They’d invested $360,000—the highest budget for any picture made in Germany. Of that amount, my pay was 20,000 marks, a mere tenth of Jannings’s salary, but for me the money was the least of it. I knew von Sternberg had much more in mind for me, that his rage and copious insults only fueled his artistry.
I had discovered fury was his most defining characteristic. He had so much of it pent up inside him, the legacy of a troubled past that he had shared with me and Rudi over dinners at the flat, often joining us after the long days of shooting like a lost soul seeking shelter. Fury at his father, who’d beaten and neglected him; fury at the deprivations of his childhood in Austria, where a lack of proper nutrition had stunted his growth; fury at all the menial jobs and apprenticeships he’d taken in America in his youth, working under directors he deemed unfit to sweep cuttings off the floor. But most of all, fury with himself, for craving more than he had.
I understood. To me, he was a genius. I made it my mission to provide him with solace, to anticipate whatever he might need, from the goulash we could eat between takes for lunch to a fresh pencil to gouge the script, which he was endlessly revising; from cups of steaming coffee to keep him on his feet to his inevitable invitation to take me to bed.
I knew it was coming. Whenever he dined with us at the flat, where I happily cooked his favorite meal of pork chops and sauerkraut, I could feel his stare following me, so intent on my every move that even Rudi pulled me aside to whisper, “He’s in love with you, Marlene.”
“Nonsense.” I peered over Rudi’s shoulder to where von Sternberg sat on the sofa, chatting with Tamara while Heidede, fascinated by him, played with his discarded gloves and officer’s wand. “He’s lonely. He’s married but his wife went back to America and he’s alone, shooting an important picture and fighting constantly with the UFA. He’s under tremendous pressure. Besides, you know how infatuations develop during shoots and how they always end when the camera stops.”
“That may be part of it,” said Rudi. “But the other part, the darker part, goes much deeper. Be careful. He’s haunted by his obsessions. I like him very much. He’s unlike any filmmaker we’ve ever known. But I also think he must be quite mad.”
“Some might say the same of you with your pigeons,” I replied, smiling.
But that very night, when I accompanied von Sternberg to the Stadtbahn—he preferred the overhead railway for traveling to and from his hotel, saying it gave him the privilege of seeing ordinary people doing ordinary things—he suddenly gripped my hand.
“I must have you. I can’t wait any longer.”
I might have laughed at his clichéd declaration, so out of character from the dictator in the studio, but he held my fingers with such force, he was hurting me.
“Come now.” I pried my hand away. “We work together. It’s not wise to risk our professional relationship for—”
“When have you ever cared about that? I know everything,” he hissed. “I know you never give a shit about professional relationships if you like someone. Or is it me?” His face turned thunderous. “Am I not good enough for you? Too squat and foul for my fine Berlin lady who must rehearse her lines every night in the mirror so she can sound like a whore?”
His unwitting echo of the way Yvette had described him gave me pause. In autumn’s evening light, which always turned Berlin the cool hue of steel, I didn’t see the master I coddled on the set or suffered in silence as he shouted like a maniac. I saw a strange little man bedeviled by inadequacies—haunted, as Rudi had said, by his obsessions.
“One time,” I told him. “I won’t be your lover. Just once.”
“Once is all I desire,” he said.
He was a fierce lover, so conscious of his frail appearance with his pallid hirsute chest and bowed thighs that he attacked me like an acrobat. As he lavished his fascination upon me, I could feel the anguish in his poet’s hands, in the scratch of his mustache between my splayed thighs, and the stubby penis he thrust into me like vengeance.
“You are my muse,” he whispered afterward, “my Circe. You will not betray me. You will never disappoint. You are everything to me.”
He did not hate women, I realized. He worshipped at our altar like a penitent.
Josef von Sternberg might seek to mold me to his image, but I soon learned how much I could shape him with mine.
AS SHOOTING PROGRESSED, EmilJannings began to openly detest me. In only three months, from November 4, 1929, to January 30, 1930, the time it took to complete The Blue Angel, he became my avowed foe. Unlike me, he dreaded the microphone. In America, his career had faltered with the advent of sound. Insecure about his delivery, which tended to the ponderous, he trembled every time von Sternberg berated him for speaking his lines “like Hitler in the bathtub.” And although he had top billing as the puritanical professor brought to his knees by Lola-Lola, Jannings could see that he, too, was being brought to his knees—by me.
&nb
sp; Von Sternberg insisted on long takes in chronological order, frequently stopping to adjust the lights, test an angle, or fidget with my costume—anything to bring out the best in my performance. It didn’t help that whenever I took to the stage for my cabaret numbers, he demanded absolute silence, watching me as Rath watches Lola, fixated on what he might discover, though there’s nothing in her to find. She only appears mysterious because everything she is, she gives away. She exists for the moment. She is feral desire—fleet and cruel, a furtive yank in the back room and the hard exchange of cash. She doesn’t need to be understood. And after Rath in his despair tries to strangle her only to have her laugh in his face, he trudges back to his abandoned schoolroom to cower, while she straddles a chair in her top hat, alone on the stage, defiant in her autonomy as she sings that she must fall in love again because she can’t help it.
When we shot the scene where Rath assaults Lola, Jannings said under his breath, “I’m going to kill her,” and squeezed my throat so tightly, he cut off my air. He left bruises that required special makeup, as we had to repeat the scene in English. I forgave him, having seen the desperation in his eyes. It was the best performance he’d ever given; like his character, he, too, felt helpless against my triumph.
At home, however, I fell apart. “Von Sternberg is a monster,” I cried. “He’d see me dead to suit his vision. He torments Jannings on purpose, goading him to make our scenes come alive.”
“I did warn you,” said Rudi, as Tamara set compresses on my brow and plied me with tea and cake, for I’d lost more than five kilos, starving myself to fit von Sternberg’s ideal. “He has no respect for actors. He’s notorious for it. In America, he directed Paramount’s star William Powell, and after the picture wrapped, Powell demanded a clause in his contract that specifically stated he would never work with von Sternberg again.”
I thought this William Powell was a fool. For much as I detested being treated like chattel, hounded and yelled at, made to repeat take after take until I wanted to scream, I also felt what Jannings did—that elusive magic brewed by von Sternberg, a debauched mirage that would enrapture audiences, if not our wary censors.
Marlene: A Novel Page 20
