Marlene (26 page)

“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.

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.

I trusted him entirely. He could make me a star.

IV

T
he offer arrived shortly before the shoot ended. I sat in my dressing room—actually, my dressing closet, for it was tiny—when von Sternberg arrived at the door.

“Paramount wants to sign you to a two-picture deal,” he sneered. “The rats have spies on my set. They cabled Hollywood to say you are sensational, a rival to Garbo.” He eyed me. “I suppose you’ll accept. It must be trumpets in your ears, the idea that you can depose her.”

“Since when has Garbo been my rival?” I asked, refusing to take his bait, even if I wanted to shout in joy. “But of course I’ll accept—if you will be my director.”

He grunted, pretending indifference when he felt anything but. “I can ask. I have to return to that miserable town in any event and have nothing new lined up. Why not?”

Paramount’s agent in Berlin drew up my contract. The UFA made a ruckus. I was under contract to them; to release me, they insisted Paramount must pay for an early termination clause. Von Sternberg didn’t stay for the negotiations. He was running late, over budget and out of time. He left for America before the final cut. Jannings was horrified. I was not.
His magic was spent, imprinted on canisters of celluloid. Our director had exhausted himself.

He was already bored with
The Blue Angel
.

As the editing team wrangled the reels into a release version for the censors, I packed my bag and vacated the set. That world, which had been my entire existence, where I’d given birth to the woman who would define me, stood empty now, the echoes of tyranny dissipated.

I had less than a month before the premiere and my date to set sail for Hollywood.

WHITE GOWN. WHITE MINK.
Platinum skin and hair. An emerald bracelet and matching necklace, like the one I’d admired years before, gifts from Uncle Willi to celebrate my success.

The emeralds were paste of course, but it didn’t matter. I took to the curtain call like a newly minted goddess, bestowed with a bouquet of roses as the audience went wild, their applause and jubilant cries bathing me in justification. Did anyone notice the spray of violets pinned at my cleavage like a taunting corsage? If they did, no one mentioned it. Nobody cared.

The Blue Angel
was a hit.

We had defied the censors—already kowtowing to moral rectitude imposed by the Nazi backlash against decadence—but the nervous UFA executives overlaid a Beethoven score on von Sternberg’s monstrous silent take of Rath’s demise, though nothing in the picture was remotely classical. He’d be enraged when he learned of it, but it was a minor setback in what otherwise promised to be a massive success.

My name was suddenly everywhere. Before I’d even left the Gloria-Palast theater on the Kurfürstendamm, boulevard of my earliest aspirations and defeats, the UFA was begging me to stay and re-sign my contract with them, at whatever price I requested.

“And miss meeting Garbo?” I said as the press blinded me with flashing bulbs and fans eager for autographs crammed the cordons separating them from my waiting car.

I was taken to Uncle Willi’s house, where a celebratory party had been arranged. Rudi wasn’t there. His new job had taken him to Munich for a picture. He sent a telegram to congratulate me, and Tamara came in his stead, lovely in a pink satin gown, with Heidede at her side, grumpy and sleepy, a huge bow affixed to her curls (Mutti’s doing) that I yanked off at once, the sight of it reminding me of my school years in Schöneberg.

“I’ll only be gone six months,” I told my daughter, cupping her chin. “I know you’ll miss me, but I’ll be back before you know it, my precious girl.”

“I won’t miss you,” she retorted. “Mutti says you’re going away to please a gnome with delusions of grandeur.” As I stood there, astonished to hear such words come out of her six-year-old mouth, she turned away to bury her face in Tamara’s skirt.

“She’s tired,” said Tamara. “I had a casting call today, so Josephine took her to housekeep and . . .” She sighed. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

I was distressed by Heidede spouting my mother’s venom, and suddenly doubt overshadowed my elation over the premiere and the offer from Hollywood. Was I doing the right thing, leaving my child and family behind for a country that wasn’t mine?

“Perhaps I should stay,” I said. “The UFA wants to retain me. I could work here.”

Tamara shook her head. “You must go. How can you not? Hollywood is where you belong. Von Sternberg is there; he’ll take care of you.”

I wasn’t so confident. He’d take care of my career, but my well-being? Suddenly, his departure before the picture’s release seemed to me an omen.

“It’s just last-minute nerves,” said Tamara. “You’ll be fine once you’re on the ship. And you mustn’t worry. I’m here. I’ll care for Heidede as if she were my own. You know how much Rudi and I love her.”

“Yes.” I smiled weakly. I did know, and while reassuring, it did not give me confidence. My child was growing up without me, just as Mutti had said she would. I leaned over to kiss Heidede, who refused to say good-bye. Once I saw them to the car I’d hired to take them home, exhaustion washed over me. I was in no mood to celebrate.

My trunks crammed with new outfits bought by the studio for my arrival were already loaded on my ship. At midnight, I was scheduled to take the last train to the dock at Bremerhaven for the five-day crossing. Thinking I’d slip upstairs to change and wipe off my makeup, I’d barely crossed the parlor when Jolie besieged me, giddy on champagne, her eyes glittering as she said, “I knew it. I told Willi from the moment I met you, she’ll astonish us all.”