The Glimmer Palace

by Beatrice Colin

  “Mr. Leyer? We can’t wait any longer,” she said.

  As her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw not one but four men inside the glass walls of Mr. Leyer’s office. She recognized two. One was the small figure of Mr. Leyer; the other was Ilya Yurasov. They all turned and stared at her.

  “Oh, hello,” she said. “I thought . . .”

  Ilya greeted her with a small incline of his head. In the letter he had written to her, the letter that the sad-eyed fat girl had lost, he had informed her that he had just been offered a new job. His prewar reputation had eventually caught up with him and he had been plucked from his lowly position as a negative cutter at Afifa and contracted by Deutsche Bioscop, a subsidiary of Ufa. In the letter, he had also explained that he had taken a new apartment, but he had given her his office telephone number and invited her out for lunch. As the weeks and then months had gone by and he had heard nothing from her, at first he had been bemused and then slightly angry and then relieved. He didn’t want to get himself entangled; he didn’t want any complications.

  But he could not get her face out of his head. He had often wandered across to the typing pool and in all the frenzied activity had managed to watch her unobserved. He noticed that her typewriter keys stuck and it was he who had arranged for a new machine to be delivered. It was also he who had once found her asleep at her desk on a Saturday and had carried her to a divan and taken off her shoes. He had even mentioned her to his boss, the typing-pool girl who looked not unlike the actress Anya Gregorin, and might be worth considering.

  Mr. Leyer, who was constantly being bombarded with casting suggestions by sisters, mothers, taxi drivers, had not bothered to follow up the lead. Ilya knew this and therefore was as surprised as Lilly was when she stepped into the producer’s office unannounced.

  “Oh. Anyway, it’s about Letters of Love,” she said. “Casting Letters of Love, actually.”

  Here, Lilly pulled Hanne out of the door frame, where she had been standing, and into the room. Mr. Leyer looked doubly surprised.

  “Has the script been sent out already?” said one of the other men.

  “No,” Lilly said. “I typed it. I work in the pool.”

  “Well,” said Ilya Yurasov, “you must have read a lot of scripts. So, do you like it?”

  It did momentarily cross her mind that she wasn’t supposed to admit that she read the work she typed. But Lilly did not pause before answering his question.

  “Apart from the unoriginal ending,” she said, “and the tendency to dwell on the melodramatic, it isn’t bad.”

  Ilya laughed. His whole face softened. She noticed for the first time the color of his eyes: green—green with flecks of blue. He was in Berlin, after all.The elation she felt within, however, had to be put to one side. She was here for Hanne.

  “My point entirely,” he said.

  The other men looked slightly dismayed. They were the writers. All four had met that day to discuss the script. Ilya had not been unforthcoming in his criticism.

  “So, what do you suggest?” he said.

  “Surely,” continued Lilly, “surely in scene thirty-four she needn’t actually pace up and down in front of her mailbox. A look would be enough.”

  “A look,” he repeated. “A look?”

  Without thinking twice, Lilly demonstrated. She knew how to use her face. The cabaret artist Wernher Siegfried, if nothing else, had been a good teacher.

  Ilya nodded. Mr. Leyer nodded. The other two men folded their arms.

  “So, what do you suggest for the ending?” Ilya asked.

  Lilly glanced from him to Mr. Leyer. The blackboard was covered in writing.

  “I really have no idea,” said Lilly. “But since it’s set in a city . . . maybe she throws herself from the top of a new apartment building.”

  Mr. Leyer looked at his Russian director.

  “The typing-pool girl?”

  Ilya nodded.

  “Not bad,” said Mr. Leyer. “Not bad at all. But I’ve never heard of any woman doing such a thing.”

  Outside, a couple of men were shifting scenery. As they passed, a painted flat of a forest momentarily blocked out the sunlight. At that moment Lilly glanced at Hanne with such a look that the two men could be in no doubt that she did indeed know of a woman who had done such a thing.

  “So?” said Lilly. “Will you at least consider . . . ?”

  “Indeed I will,” said Mr. Leyer. “I suggest we do a screen test. . . . We could even do it now. We’re casting this afternoon for that Lang film.”

  Lilly turned to her friend just as the sun filled the room again. But Hanne wasn’t smiling. Instead, she was staring blank-faced at Lilly, at the short blond hair that she herself had cut and dyed and the large gray eyes accentuated as she had suggested with just a smudge of black. And it seemed as if she suddenly saw her afresh.

  “Me?” Lilly replied. “Oh, not me. It’s Hanne you want.”

  But it was not.

  The Russian

  You are English citizens,” the director tells the crowd through a megaphone. “It is the sixteenth century and you have come to watch the king’s coronation.”

  They have hired four thousand extras, but they could have hired double or triple at half the cost. Nobody has a job anymore.Who can live on the government allowance? Everybody’s an actor in Berlin now.

  “Action!” the director shouts. “Take one.”

  They cheer until they’re hoarse, and then they cheer more, until they’ve reached the nineteenth take without a break. It’s the lighting, somebody says. It’s the acting. It’s Ebert, the president, on an official visit with his entourage. Ebert, the man they voted for but who has done nothing for them; Ebert, the one who cannot stop the strikes and shortages or the misery and the mayhem. From where they stand, it’s possible to watch as he sips a cup of tea and nibbles a sandwich from the catering stand the extras have not been allowed to visit. They start to swarm, wasps in a nest.

  “Down with Ebert!” somebody shouts. “Down with Ebert!”

  Lubitsch, the director, keeps on filming. He catches their faces, shouting, flushed and furious, until they are on the brink of revolution, on the brink of tearing down his flimsy sets and stringing up the president on the cardboard flats of Westminster Abbey. And then he cuts. The film company has to abandon its schedule and loses a quarter of a million.The finished film, however, wins an award.

  Lilly’s screen test at the Neubabelsberg studio was short and functional. She was told where to stand, her face lit by a bank of lights, and she was asked to look left, look right, look straight into the lens. The script was handed to her and she acted out a scene.

  “Have you done this before?” asked Mr. Leyer.

  “Not with all my clothes on,” she replied.

  Leyer roared with laughter. Lilly barely smiled. And then she returned to the typing pool and stayed late to make up the time that she had missed.

  On the way home, she went over and over what had happened that day. By the time she reached the boardinghouse, she had convinced herself that the whole thing was probably an elaborate joke. She would insist that they both go back to Mr. Leyer and try again. And yet, when she thought of the polite Russian and the way he had looked at her, she felt a jolt run straight from the top of her head to the ends of her toes. He hadn’t left Berlin, after all. But why hadn’t he been in touch?

  Hanne was standing at the sink wearing nothing but an underslip and her French shoes. She was rubbing cream into her face with short, circular strokes.

  “Did you get the part?” said Hanne.

  “I don’t know,” said Lilly. “Hanne, I’m so sorry about this afternoon.”

  “Why not? That’s what I always say.Why the hell not? If an opportunity comes along, then take it. I know I would.”

  Hanne spat on a tablet of kohl and then started to underline her lashes in black with a tiny brush. As she did so, her eyes reddened and her face set, but she kept going, never losing eye contact wit
h herself in the mirror.

  “Hanne?” Lilly laid a hand on her shoulder. Hanne turned and stared at it. Lilly removed it.

  “I’m working tonight,” she said, wiping two sooty streaks away and focusing on her cake of rouge.

  “I’ve failed every audition I’ve ever done,” Lilly said. “You know that.”

  Hanne smiled, but in the harsh light of the single bulb above the sink it looked more like a frown. And then she concentrated on trimming a small, blunt brush with a pair of nail scissors. It was already evening but the curtains were still open. Lilly drew them together, one at a time.

  “Remember that play you wrote at St. Francis Xavier’s?” said Hanne suddenly. “The golden boot. The beard. . . . Everyone laughed. You broke Sister August’s heart. You ruined everything for her. And then the place closed and everyone was separated. . . . Why did you do it?”

  Lilly felt the blood rush to her face. She stood, still wearing her coat and hat, and swayed slightly on her feet.Was it her fault that the orphanage had been sold? Was she the one to blame for the fact that Hanne had lost her brothers? It had never occurred to her before, but now Hanne’s words seemed to have a horrifying kind of logic. And a weight descended deep into her belly that would never entirely rise.

  “Is that what you think?” she said. “Is that what you’ve thought for all these years?”

  Hanne started to buff her cheek with a powder puff, but underneath it was already flushed.

  “I often think about my boys,” she said. “I thought if I was in a film, if I was up there, you know, on the screen, they’d come looking for me—if they were alive, that is. . . . I’m late. If they offer you a part, any part, take it.We need the money.”

  And with that, she pulled on her coat, let herself out, closed the door with a click, and cantered down the stairs, her high heels echoing up the stairwell before they ceased abruptly with the sharp slam of the front door.

  The next morning there was a note on Lilly’s desk requesting that she go straight to Mr. Leyer’s office. There were half a dozen people waiting in the corridor, but she was ushered straight in.The sun in his room was so bright that for a moment she was blinded again. A silhouette shook her warmly by the hand. As her eyes adjusted to the light, Mr. Leyer offered her the part of the servant girl and produced a contract from a drawer.

  “We’d like you to play Hedda,” he said. “It’s not a huge role, but it’s a start. Now, if you’ll just sign here . . .”

  He pulled a fountain pen from his top pocket and began to unscrew the top. Lilly hesitated.

  “Sit down and read it through, if you like.”

  When she didn’t take it, he put the pen down, sighed, and sat back in his chair. Behind him, outside, a rail of brightly colored costumes was being wheeled slowly by, sequins and crystals catching the sunshine.

  “You’re wondering, I suppose, at my motivation. And I must admit this is highly irregular. But it is not unheard of. The actress Molla Delusi was discovered working in a cake shop. The actor Gerhardt Dahl was once our postman.You see, the moving picture requires different qualities from what the stage requires. The rules of acting don’t apply. In the theater it is all about the body, dialogue, words; on film, it is all about the face. And although, as you may have heard, I am inclined to fall in love with my own sex, it is clear even to me that you, my dear, have the face.”

  Mr. Leyer had watched her screen test several times over. In the flesh she was an attractive young woman—that was undeniable—but on film, her skin looked as smooth and flawless as a pearl; her eyes were invitations fringed with long, dark lashes; the arch of her brow and the curve of her cheek were gradients so perfect it was hard to resist the urge to touch. She was stunning. And what was more, there was something about her presence on screen that suggested that she wasn’t acting. The script was trite and the characterization poor, but the girl made it all seem credible; you could see that, in her head, in her heart, in her whole body, she was there.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

  Mr. Leyer was momentarily stunned. He was used to strange reactions from actors. One young man got down on all fours and kissed his shoes. One woman offered herself to him in nothing more than a raincoat and a pair of stockings and was politely rebuffed. But this, a refusal, this was something he had not experienced before.

  “What?” he said. “Are you mad, my girl? Whyever not?”

  What could she say? How could she explain about the play, about Sister August, about the closing of St. Francis Xavier’s?

  She shook her head.

  “Well, if you’re sure . . .” said Mr. Leyer. “But you’re the one that everyone wants for this part, especially the director, Ilya Yurasov.”

  He started to screw the top back onto his fountain pen.The meeting was over. Just before Lilly turned to leave the room, she caught sight of her own reflection in the glass. She saw nothing extra, nothing special, nothing but her own ordinariness. But what would Hanne say? Hadn’t Hanne told her to take it? Furthermore, Ilya Yurasov wanted her. He wanted her. She could hardly believe it, but there it was. And the willfulness that the midwife had spotted on the day she was born came flooding back. She turned to Mr. Leyer.

  “Very well,” she said. “I’ll sign.”

  “That’s the right answer,” said Mr. Leyer. “Very good.”

  But even as she wrote out her name in full, her hand trembled and she was filled with trepidation.What would it cost her this time?

  Since the budget was small and she was an unknown, her fee was modest. It was, nevertheless, ten times what she was being paid as a typist.

  “You might be able to negotiate more for the next one,” Mr. Leyer told her. “Congratulations. We start filming on Monday.”

  The next one. At that point, Lilly didn’t really want to let herself believe there would be a next one. She was loath to give up her job in the typing pool and was given three weeks’ unpaid leave instead.

  etters of Love went into production in late 1920. Lilly’s love interest was also an unknown, a stage actor from Max Reinhardt’s troupe. But while he beat his chest and waved his arms as soon as the camera started to roll, Lilly barely moved at all. And while all his impulses and emotions were acted out in semaphore, hers revealed themselves only in the cast of her eyes or the slightest tilt of her head.

  “She is a natural,” Mr. Leyer said when he saw the rushes. “She could convey her heart through the movement of her little finger.”

  The film took four weeks to shoot. Lilly lost her job in the typing pool.

  As she had been filming from five in the morning until well after nine at night, she rarely saw Hanne. Occasionally they passed each other in the hallway when Hanne was coming in from a night out and Lilly was leaving to go to the studio, but they didn’t talk. Too much had been said, too much was still unsayable, and all that shared history that pulled them together now pushed them irrevocably apart.

  In the studio, however, it was decided that Lilly would become Lidi, and her history was rewritten. Her press officer, herself a would-be scenarist, claimed that Lidi was the daughter of a wealthy army officer who had died heroically in the first battle of the war. Her mother had, apparently, piled the rest of the family fortune into private acting tuition before succumbing to a fever of the heart and following the path of her late husband a tragic three months before her daughter was given her first screen role. The only truth, in fact, was her age, which needed no alteration. She was as old as the new century: twenty.

  “You’re single, aren’t you?” the press officer asked. “That’s good. All the girls say they are, you know.”

  There is only one photograph of the actress Lidi and the director Ily aYurasov from this period. It was taken in February 1921, in a park somewhere in Berlin. They are both wearing ice-skating boots and long dark coats with beaver collars. Lilly, or Lidi, as she was known then, is laughing, her head thrown back and her eyes half closed. The Russian looks slightly unc
omfortable and smiles as if he is unaccustomed to being photographed.

  Some speculated much later that their affair could have begun on that first day, after her screen test but before she returned to Berlin. As the floodlights cooled and the sun began to drop, as the flats of medieval castles and circus tents and cardboard forests began to lose their colors, maybe, they imagined, he reached toward her golden head and then pulled her face up to his. But you can tell by the skating photograph that this was unlikely. No, right from the very start, Lidi’s incredible presence on the screen was clearly not just purely physiological. Like millions of Germans at that moment in time, just after one war but less than two decades before the next, you can tell by her face that, despite everything, she is filled with longing, with feverish desire, with an overwhelming need for things or people she cannot have.

  lya had been meaning to tell Lilly. He had, in fact, been on the brink several times. But when she looked up at him with those eyes, those eyes that told him something he both dreaded and treasured, he found himself disarmed, humbled, mute.

  Ilya was engaged to a woman named Katya Nadezhda. Fifteen years his senior and widowed, with a daughter, Katya was beautiful, intelligent, and insecure. She had owned a flat on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg and an estate near Minsk inherited from her late husband, who had not believed in either fidelity or eating fruits and vegetables. Ilya had met her at a dinner party just after he had graduated from university with a first-class degree in classics. He had claimed he had no idea what to do with his life, and so she had hired him on the spot to teach her young daughter Latin. During the stiflingly hot summer of 1912, the textbooks remained resolutely closed while their affair blossomed. He was twenty-three and was filled with the heady sense of his own potential. She was thirty-eight and racked with the sense of her own decline. He proposed within a month but she politely turned him down for reasons that were obvious. She bought him a moving-picture camera instead and suggested he make something with it. Two years later he had made three films, two for the Khanzhonkov studio, and was about to make a fourth when he was drafted.