The Glimmer Palace

by Beatrice Colin

  “You’ll be a smash,” Ilya Yurasov told Lidi as they stood shivering in the filthy shade of the platform. “A smash.”

  “Have you ever thought of leaving?” she asked.

  “No,” said Ilya. “At least, not yet.”

  Wait for me in Berlin, she had written. Katya’s words were seared into his subconscious. He would wait. But when she finally arrived, he would meet her and explain what had happened. And then he would break it off.

  The train was ready. The passengers were invited to board. Lilly stared at the green lights on the track but didn’t move. If he had asked me to change my mind, I would have, Lilly admitted to herself later. At that moment, if he had expressed one single sentiment that suggested he still wanted me, I would have had my trunk removed from the train and ripped up my ticket. But why should he?

  She didn’t say much. And so he talked about the weather. And the bicycle race he’d been to the night before. And then he pointedly watched a large French gentleman argue with a porter about a tip. She climbed aboard her private compartment on the train to Le Havre and he slammed the door shut behind her with more gusto than he had intended.

  “Lilly,” he said suddenly through the window. “Forgive me.”

  Lilly stared at him. She thought for a second she had misheard him. How could he be this cruel? How could he bring up the past like this?

  “What did you say?”

  He didn’t repeat himself. She must have been mistaken. The train whistle blew. How like a film, she thought in passing. He looked at the clock.This is the end.The end of it all.

  “Write to me,” he said. “Good-bye, Lilly.”

  “Good-bye, Ilya,” she replied.

  They had not kissed, or hugged or even shaken each other’s hand. If you had seen them at this moment, you would have thought them distantly related or maybe employed by the same firm. There was a physical formality between them that was immediately visible.

  She sat down in her compartment and stared out of the other window so he wouldn’t see her eyes cloud over with tears. Ilya took it as indifference and his smile began to fade before the train even began to move. And then he watched as the locomotive blew a cloud of steam and began to slowly roll forward. It headed out of the station, with ever-increasing speed, toward the suburbs and then onward all the way to the flat fields of France.

  I mean nothing to her, he told himself as he turned and walked away, still holding the crumpled bunch of mimosa. Everything we once had is lost. And so he did not see the figure that leaned out of the window at the very back of the train, the figure that had run the length of three carriages to try to catch one final glimpse.

  Lidi, the actress, traveled incognito to the United States of America. There is no Lidi or Lilly Nelly Aphrodite on the passenger list of the SS Sufren, which left Le Havre on the fifteenth of October, 1927, and arrived in New York nine days later. There are two L. Smiths, however. One, we may assume, was Lidi. Onboard she avoided the endless cocktail parties and black-tie dinners. She ate in her cabin and spent the days sitting out on deck with a book. A few people tried to befriend her—an elderly couple from Vermont even offered to adopt her—but she politely and firmly turned them down.

  She had not expected to be received like Pola Negri, who was Polish, with flowers and orchestras and the explosion of press bulbs when she arrived at Pier 27 in Manhattan. She was German, and Bill Frame had warned her that the bad taste of the war had not quite faded. And yet when she stepped off the gangplank with the address of a hotel that he had given her and a purse full of newly minted dollars in her hand, she was met by a dozen journalists, seven studio executives, and a translator.

  “How do you like America, Lidi?” they shouted at her.

  The translator hastily explained their question.

  “I haven’t seen it yet,” she replied.

  And when they heard what she had said, they laughed as if she were hilarious.

  “Well, America loves you!” they yelled.

  Before she could respond, however, she was rushed into a limousine and driven uptown to the Hotel St. Regis on Fifth Avenue.

  “All the European movie stars stay here,” said an executive who claimed he originally came from Frankfurt. “Is it true you only have one trunk?”

  “I don’t intend to stay here forever,” she said. The studio executive, who would leave his wife for a Brazilian dancer, lose everything he owned in the crash of 1929, and eventually end up in Sing Sing, laughed.

  “That’s what I said,” he said. “But once you’ve seen California, you won’t ever want to go back.”

  Although she was barely known in the United States, two of her films, including Kinetic, had been released in the major cities and had clocked up respectable box-office returns. As the American economy boomed, people began to seek out new experiences, to wonder about the world outside their borders, to dream of foreign travel, and there was an appetite for the exotic, for the foreign, for the European.

  “What do I remember of my first arrival in America?” she said later. “I remember the smell of roasting peanuts and flower stalls. I remember the light, which seemed a different color from what I was used to: cleaner, brighter, harsher. I remember the heat, which made the air almost too hot to breathe. And I remember the music. It seemed to be coming from everywhere, from people playing in the streets, from gramophones you could hear through open windows, from the band playing on the roof terrace of my hotel. You felt as if you were in a movie even when you walked to the corner shop to buy a coffee.”

  Lidi’s arrival in America made the gossip page of the New York Post. The photograph was a little blurred and her left hand was raised and covered half of her face. Only one eye was visible but was in the process of a blink, and her mouth, which was open, seemed on the point of forming a word beginning with the letter O. The headline read “German Screen Vamp Takes a Bite of the Big Apple.” From then on, it was decided by the studios to keep her out of sight until her first American feature was about to be released. She boarded a train for California the next day and, several days later, disembarked in Pasadena to avoid the waiting journalists. And then, or so it seemed to her American fans—of whom there were at least several thousand—she disappeared.

  America

  Ludwig’s curls are dark and his eyes are the color of a bottle of bromide.He wears a white cotton coat and spotless white gloves. All the girls at the Afifa processing facility are in love with him. His room smells of seduction, hot celluloid, and damp silk.

  Lang’s new film Metropolis has just arrived in a box from the censors. Since Hugenberg decreed that Ufa could “edit or alter the completed film as we see fit,” some directors had walked out of Tempelhof Studios and never returned. Karl Grune, like others, wept when he saw what they’d done to his pacifist love story.

  But the girls and boys in white coats at Afifa are busier than ever before. Films are delivered by the vanload for cutting and slicing, for changes in subtitles and order of sequence and lopping of endings. And now Metropolis is to be trimmed from 4,189 to 3,241 meters, from two and a half hours to a mere ninety minutes.

  Ludwig takes the first reel and threads it through his splicer. He holds his breath, he cuts. A tail, a curl, a spiral of film falls to the floor, scene after scene, gone forever. Afterward he will make love to the girl who works in the mailroom, in an attempt to soothe his conscience. And when it doesn’t work, he will bring out the scissors. Cut it, he will insist, cut it all off. And then she will take a loose brown curl and snip.

  The house that Lidi lived in from 1927 until 1929 came with a maid, a cook, and a gardener. MGM gave her a bank account with a balance of ten thousand dollars for her personal use. A tutor, a young woman who worked mainly as a voice coach, was hired to teach her English. The first day she woke up on Roxbury Drive, she lay and listened to the sound of the cicadas. Occasionally a motorcar would pass, its engine puttering and the driver calling out whenever it passed another automobile, “Niceday, t
akecare.” But despite this and the noise of the insects, she had never known such silence before.

  From the terrace you could see the sea, and behind rose up the hills, hills cut into by Coldwater and Benedict canyons. In twenty short years, however, this barren stretch of coast had been watered and planted and then sold off as building plots for residential housing. Although the bricks and mortar gave the impression that the landscape had been tamed, this was only partly true. Out of the cracks in the patio came lizards and huge brown pine sawyer beetles. The green lawns had to be watered and weeded daily to combat the scorching sun.Wildflowers, yellow California buttercups, and bright pink Indian paintbrushes would grow back practically overnight, while the imported European blooms, begonias, and pale white lilies had to be coaxed into flower gently, with plenty of water and partial shade.

  The autograph hunters and tourists who hung around the gate at Pickfair, the house built by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, or who cried on the cold gray stone of Rudolph Valentino’s grave, occasionally tried to catch a glimpse. But Miss Lidi, as she was called by her Mexican maid, never lay in the sun.They didn’t loiter long; some of them had seen Kinetic and claimed she was cold and unfeeling. “She’s German,” they said, as if that explained everything.

  America was the leading producer of film in the world. With five big studios and the so-called factory system, the industry could afford to sign up the most promising actors, directors, and technicians and keep them on long-term contracts. Paramount had Pola Negri, their European vamp. Now MGM had Lidi.

  The party had been going on all day and most of the guests were pink-faced and salt-skinned, their gaze bleary with too much wine and the incessant wind. The red sun hung low and the wind whipped along the coast, snapping the striped awnings on the porch and blowing grains of sand into eyes and mouths and creases in clothes. The wide lip of beach was almost deserted. Only sandpipers stalked the wet strip where the sea advanced and then receded.

  Over an open grill someone was cooking fish. A gramophone had been set up on a checkered blanket and a girl was hunched over a box of records, blowing sand from the grooves and carefully choosing a selection with exclamations to everybody and nobody in particular, that this one is hot, this one was done better by Fred, this one is inspirational, ohmylordy. Later she would dance on the spot on her own and then fall asleep on a lap.

  Lidi’s fine white silk chiffon frock, cut to float and flutter in the calmer climes of palm courts or dining rooms, clung to her arms and lashed around her knees. The straw bonnet on her head was pulled down tight and then it was gone, rolling across the beach before being whisked up by a gust and blown away to God knows where. Lidi took a drink from a tray, pulled off her shoes, and made straight for the water. And as she stood on the edge of the ocean, her toes sinking, just a little, into the soft surface of the sand, as a swell rolled over her feet in a rush until she was ankle deep in cool clear water, she looked, another guest said later, like an apparition, so pale that she was practically transparent, a shimmering, flickering projection from another, darker world.

  Wafts of music reached her from the party behind. But she did not hear the famous actor approach. She did not smell the sweeter notes of his cologne above the barbecue smoke and the salt air. She did not catch, even from the corner of her eye, the presence that had been labeled remarkable by the Hollywood Reporter more than once.

  “You came,” he said in German, and placed his hand on the back of her waist.

  Lidi jumped, then turned. The actor was in his mid-forties, with butcher’s hands and an overlarge head. His eyes radiated creases all the way to his ears, which made him look as if he were smiling even when he wasn’t.

  “Thank you for inviting me,” she replied. “You speak good German.”

  “My mother was from Saxony,” he said. “But I grew up in upstate New York.”

  He moistened his lips with his tongue. Then he reached and tucked a strand of her windblown hair behind her ear. She looked away. It was an act so intimate that she found she could not return his gaze in case he thought that she condoned it.

  “Can I get you anything?” he asked.

  She had met the actor only once before, at a casting. She had not been given the job.

  “A good part?” she replied.

  The famous actor laughed and then he took her arm and guided her back up the beach.

  “You’re very witty as well as being very beautiful,” he said. “Come and meet everyone.”

  Lidi shook two dozen hands and immediately forgot two dozen names. She drank four Manhattans and smoked a French cigarette. And although she made polite conversation, she was aware the other guests kept their distance. Only the famous actor remained at her side, filling her glass and trying to persuade her to dance. And when she yawned, he offered her his very own bed and she should have, she chastised herself later, known better.

  “Sleep with me,” the famous actor said in English as soon as the door was closed.

  “I’m sorry?” she said, unsure if she had understood him correctly.

  He repeated it in German.This time there could be no doubt. He moved closer and started to unbutton her dress.

  Her shoes still lay on the beach and would be carried away by the mid-morning tide. The sun had dropped but would soon come up again on another perfect day. She walked up the driveway barefoot and found her car with the driver asleep inside. Her hand still smarted from the blow she had dealt the actor.

  “You’ll never work in this town again!” he had shouted in English, and she had almost laughed. She understood that without translation. Was that the best he could come up with?

  After that, she rarely attended large Hollywood parties. She allegedly told the actor Emil Jannings, who had also moved to California, that she found Americans shallow and vacuous, their laws infantile and their food inedible, but this could have been a blatant attempt to cover his own tracks, as he was infamously rude about his filmmaking hosts. But even if this was true, it was soon immaterial. A bare two months after she arrived, she received a bad write-up in one of the most sycophantic gossip magazines, suggesting that she was stuck up. Go home, one of them suggested. And leave America to the Americans. Under her picture there was one word: Nazi?

  Lilly was devastated. She lay awake all night and first thing the next morning called Bill Frame out of an important breakfast meeting.

  “What should I do? I can’t believe they would print such a thing. Can you ask MGM to issue a statement?”

  “MGM won’t do that,” Bill Frame said. “But listen, it doesn’t matter. They don’t even know what the word means.”

  The next day she was sent a script; it featured a manipulative, evil, sexually driven woman. “This is the perfect vehicle for you,” wrote the studio boss.

  She turned it down.

  From then on, scripts were couriered to her daily, but they all proposed she play the same kind of one-dimensional role: the adulterer, the seducer, the criminal.

  Time passed, indigenous yellow poppies grew all over her lawn, and she instructed her gardener to leave them alone. The first sound film, The Jazz Singer, was released. And although nobody believed they would, films with sound effects, with songs, with dialogue took off. A new code was also in the process of being drawn up for American production by Will H. Hays that would effectively ban all eroticism and nudity from the screen and instead promote marriage, fidelity, and moral standards.

  Lilly kept a packed suitcase at her front door and was on the brink of returning to Berlin every day. She dreamt about the city, about her apartment, about Hanne, about Sister August, and when she woke she would ache with sorrow. She had lost them and now she was lost. Scripts lay unread in piles, phone calls were never returned, and requests by mail went unanswered. It took three years for MGM to let her fall off the payroll. It was an understandable oversight. Dozens of actresses never made the transition from silent to talkie. Lillian Gish was dropped by MGM after the box-office failure of T
he Wind; Paramount used Clara Bow’s thick Brooklyn accent as an excuse to cancel her contract; and although Mary Pickford had a hit with Coquette, she and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, made a series of flops and would eventually both retire from the movies. The old silent stars were replaced by a whole raft of new ones such as James Cagney and Joan Crawford.

  Lilly had invested her money, as Bill Frame recommended. She sold her diamonds and bought stocks and shares. In 1929,Wall Street crashed. America as a whole lost thirty billion dollars. Lilly’s wealth vanished overnight.

  Some said that after she left the house on Roxbury Drive she worked as an extra; they claimed that the back of her head or the turn of her ankle appeared in dozens of films, including Tabu, Grand Hotel, and Trouble in Paradise. Others, that she was supported by a wealthy Italian who kept her and funded her in return for a disdainful glance or the occasional kiss on the knuckle of her glove-encased hand. Someone else was sure she worked as a florist in a tiny kiosk on Sunset Boulevard and he bought roses from her every day except Sunday, when it was closed. She didn’t deny anything. It was all true.

  In fact, it was the letters that saved her. Just when she thought that she might walk into the Pacific with rocks in her pockets, the letters started to arrive, first one a month and then one a week. She kept them for decades, filed in order to plot out the slow trajectory of her heart.

  It is so good to hear from you, wrote Ilya in a letter dated early 1930. I think about you often and your new life in California. I can’t believe that America has you and is not using your talents; that the directors and producers of Hollywood are not fighting between themselves for the honor of working with you. Their loss is more than they will ever realize.You ask me about the industry here and I have to admit that it is rather slow at the moment.