The Glimmer Palace (36 page)

“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 uncomfortable 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.

On the eve of his departure, Ilya promised Katya that he would return and marry her. They both knew their love was tempered with both gratitude and guilt. But it was still love. And so she accepted.

The war and then the revolution, however, kept them apart. He would have returned to Russia had her letters not urged him to go to the West, to wait for her there. She would leave St. Petersburg, she promised, when the time was right. And so he was waiting, working, saving up for the day that Katya and her daughter would join him. At first her letters came regularly, but then she told him that the situation in St. Petersburg had become much worse. She had decided to leave everything and head south, to the Crimea. From there she had heard it was still possible to buy passage on a boat and head West. And then, she promised, she would make her way to Berlin, to him, to her fiancé.The letters had then stopped.

And so Ilya had remained faithful to a woman he had not seen for five years. The camera, he told himself, was a membrane through which he could not pass. He could look, but the glass of the lens would always separate him from any woman. And that was the way, he told himself, it had to remain.

He worked nights to edit
Letters of Love
, and sometimes his assistant would find him asleep next to his splicer, Lidi’s face caught in a glance over her shoulder, perhaps, or her eyes unfocused and her mouth slightly open. And yet, if he were ever challenged, he would hotly deny his feelings were anything but professional. But the evidence to the contrary was clear for all to see: it was in her eyes; it was in his cut; it was in every single frame of every single scene she appeared in.

Lilly continued to live frugally on a fraction of the money she had made from the film. The rest she put into a savings account. She worked on what she could, typing up scripts for writers she had met at the film company, but she knew this kind of work would barely cover the rent once her savings had run out. And although Hanne always seemed to be working, she never seemed to have any money. She should never, Lilly told herself, have signed that contract. Also, she hadn’t seen Ilya since the last day of the shoot. He had taken her from the typing pool and dropped her again. She had been foolish, willful, vain. Sister August would have been ashamed of her. But despite all of this, she still felt the undeniable afterglow of blue inside.

And then, without a premiere and with the minimum budget for publicity,
Letters of Love
was released.

“Lidi’s gift is such,” said one review, “that she renders all others on the screen to cardboard. Her face is an instrument of a truly rare and unique substance.

“Even though this story of urban despair is a little slight,” the review went on to state, “the results are spellbinding and the tragic climax heartbreaking.”

Lilly had just come back from the studio, where she had dropped off a typed manuscript for a producer. She had picked up the newspapers on the way from the station. As she unlocked the door, she noticed that the air in the room was stale and smelled of perfume and something else, something that Lilly recognized but couldn’t immediately place. Hanne was sitting at the window painting her toenails.

“My film got a review,” she said.

“Any good?”

“Kind of,” Lilly said. “Do you want to read it?”

Hanne shook open the newspaper and then, after crumpling the pages until she found it, scrutinized the review.

“Did you sleep with him?”

“The journalist? I’ve never even met him,” Lilly replied.

Hanne handed the newspaper back. Lilly carefully folded it up again, smoothing it down.

“You won’t be living here for much longer at this rate,” Hanne said.

“What rate?”

But Hanne only snorted through her nose and looked out of the window.

“Listen,” Lilly said. “It doesn’t change anything. Let’s go out dancing, let’s go to the Café Josty and order Champagne, real Champagne, and then move on to the Friedrichstrasse. Let’s dance all night just like we used to. Come on, Hanne.”