The Glimmer Palace (41 page)

German films had begun to be shown in America. How could the American distributors refuse? The exchange rate reached 1.3 trillion marks to the dollar. They could have them for buttons. But the biggest market was still the home market. Despite everything, Germans still went to the cinema. Where else could they escape? Where else could they forget?

Most currency is pegged to the price of gold. Germany didn’t have any. And so it was decided by the imperial treasury minister to peg it to the price of rye. In November 1923, a new mark, the rye mark, was issued at 4.2 to a dollar. The Americans, with their Dawes Plan, backed the currency but charged a high price. Nevertheless, the economy was stabilized. In the days and months after, the silence in the air was like the silence immediately following the last note of a symphony. It was a silence filled with reverberation, with an audible sense of something immense ceasing to turn. The world had finally done what Lilly had wanted. It had stopped.

Hundreds of businesses, however, went bankrupt. Nightclubs, small bars, cafés boarded up their doors and reneged on their debts. And then it appeared, to the displaced middle classes, to the ones who had lost pensions and savings and investments and who had to live like beggars instead of the comfortably retired that they were before, that many Jewish businessmen seemed to have weathered the hyperinflation, or even benefited from it. They owned property, and property was the only thing that kept some notion of value. And they noticed them, as if for the first time, buying food in the shops that they themselves could not afford, or attending the opera or eating out in restaurants. And they did not forget. argraf, the jeweler, led Lidi, the film star, and the Prussian

count through two locked doors into his personal office. A few moments later his young female assistant came up from the vault carrying a tray covered in dark blue velvet. On this were laid diamond solitaire rings as large as wren’s eggs, sapphires set in platinum, and pearls strung together like children’s beads.

The count’s breathing became more rapid. His large fingers hesitated over the tray and then fell upon a modest pendant of rubies.

“This one,” he said. “Try this one, my dear.”

The actress glanced up at him and sighed. She looked over the jewels, then picked up a diamond necklace, sat down in front of a mirror, bowed her head, and let the female assistant place it around her throat. Then she pulled back the fur coat from her shoulders and looked at herself. Her hair was dark again but cut into a short, sharp bob. It made her eyes look bigger and her chin more determined.

“It’s thirty carats, madam,” said the jeweler.

“I’ll take it,” she said.

The count flushed. He coughed and he stuttered.

“Aren’t you at least going to try the pendant?”

He looked at her pleadingly, his pale blue eyes watering in the warmth of the jeweler’s inner office.

“Buy it if you like,” she said. “I can buy my own diamonds, you know.”

The jeweler smiled and bowed his head graciously. Everyone knew that he had bought in bulk before the inflation ended and paid virtually nothing. A diamond ring could be had for a side of ham or two pairs of boots. A sapphire that had been in the family for generations kept that same family from starving for approximately a fortnight.

And now the actress was buying jewels that used to belong to families such as the Hollensteins, the Hapsburgs, and the Brandts; necklaces and tiaras and strings and strings of precious gems. She had no intention of wearing any of them—ostentatious flamboyance was not her style; she bought them as investments.

Lilly wrote out a check as the count fumbled with his wallet. She supposed that this wasn’t the way he envisaged it; she suspected that she was humiliating him. And when he looked at her and smiled, she noticed a certain bitterness in the curl of his lips that she had not noticed before. Now that she had seen it, she would not be able to look at his face without seeing it, without feeling that same feeling in her gut. She suddenly knew that she would not accept his rubies, that she would return them in the box that same night and ask him most politely to stop calling her.

It’s my fault,
she would write on a card in old-fashioned calligraphy taught to her by Sister August,
not yours. You must be one of the most wonderful people I have ever met.

Her driver was waiting outside with the automobile engine running. She kissed the count on his flushed cheek and thanked him profusely. And then without looking back she climbed inside the automobile and was driven away.

On the way to her apartment, several people stopped in the street and pointed. Her hat was pulled down over her face and she had pulled the collar of her fur coat up tightly around her neck, but still they recognized her. She picked up her driver’s newspaper from the front seat, and there she was on page three with the count. “We lost our royalty,” Mr. Leyer was fond of saying. “And now we have you.”

Since she had broken with Ilya, she had been involved with a string of eligible men, and several women too. She had dated actors, actresses, writers, and numerous former aristocrats whose manners were impeccable but whose wallets were notoriously shallow. And after leaving them in varying states of mental anguish, she would always answer their pleas for a reason with the same words.

“Why? Because I’m not in love with you.”

“What is love?” Lidi was reported to have mused at a party for the Italian pianist Ferruccio Busoni in October 1924. “It is never rational; there is no middle ground. Our hearts are extremists. They give either all or nothing.” Although she always claimed that she had been misquoted, that she had never met a journalist at that party for Ferruccio Busoni and indeed wasn’t sure that she had even attended, the words she allegedly uttered remained in the public consciousness in their simplified form: “Love is all or nothing.”

As girls wearing panties embroidered with a single silk fig leaf served Manhattans and flirted with men in their evening suits, as Josephine Baker (yes, she was always there) danced naked and alone on the piano, and as jazz on the gramophone was played over and over until the needle was worn right down to a stub, Lidi took everything she was offered. Whiskey and Champagne, vodka and chloral hydrate, hashish and cocaine, she mixed and drank, smoked and snorted, all except one: Lidi wouldn’t touch morphine. And as her head began to drift and spin, her body to thrum and tingle with liquids and powders and adoration, she sometimes wondered if there had been a point when she had inadvertently chosen her glorious life on screen over her real destiny. And once, when she had smoked too much hashish, she kissed the face of a man she had met on a staircase and was convinced for a moment she was kissing the face of another until the man spoke and she opened her eyes and saw that there was not even the faintest resemblance.

In the minutes or hours before dawn, however, when the men had removed some of their clothes and the waitresses had relinquished their panties, when the drinks were all finished or spilled or the glasses had all been smashed for amusement, when someone would be found limp and lifeless and rushed to the hospital, Lidi, like a blind girl, put out her hands until they alighted on someone’s, anyone’s.

“Love me,” she would say.

But even as her lips touched the lips of another and she let their hands gather up her breast beneath her dress, as she slid her mouth across their skin and felt the unmistakable determination of their intent and the automatic surge of her response, she never gave herself completely; she couldn’t. Close proximity only made her feel more distant; intimacy filled her with emptiness. And they would know. And they would pull away. And only the most brutal, the most cruel, the most narcissistic, would continue to rip and press, to tear and thrust in a futile bid to reach her, to have her, to possess her.

Ilya had turned down a number of films. Instead he spent his days working on his script for
The Queen of Sorrow
and writing letters to friends in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Paris. Had they seen Katya? Did they know where he could get in contact with her? He received only one reply, from Katya’s cousin, who was living in Paris. She had heard nothing about Katya for years. “But Katya is a survivor,” the cousin wrote. “She’s alive, I’m sure of it.”

idi was half an hour late. She looked as if she hadn’t bothered to dress for the occasion and wore a creased tea dress and a pair of scuffed shoes. Her hair was unbrushed, her makeup barely applied, and she lit up a cheroot as soon as she arrived and filled the room with bitter blue smoke. And then she pulled out a scuffed copy of the script and yawned.

“Shall we get this over with as fast as possible?” she said.

Friedrich Bernstein smiled. He liked her already.

“Forget the script, just take a walk,” he said. “Take off your coat and walk up and down.”

Lidi looked at him with frank disbelief.

“You want me to walk? That’s it, just walk, like a cow?”

“Yes, that’s it. Like a cow, a prize cow.”

Lidi glared at Mr. Leyer, who was pretending to make a telephone call.

For a moment, she hesitated. And then she sighed, stood up, pulled off her coat, stubbed out the cheroot in the ashtray without having taken a single draw, and walked. No, she didn’t exactly walk, as the room was too small and the request was ridiculous; she swanned, she loped, she ambled back and forth three or four times before coming to a stop right in front of him. And there she raised an eyebrow.

“You see, I’m not wearing a wig and I don’t have a limp.”

Lidi had been invited to audition for a German director who had been lured back to Europe from Hollywood with an invitation he could not afford to turn down, or so he wrote in his self-published memoirs,
The Magnificent Machine
(Bernstein Press, 1951). At that point Germany was flooded with American movies, some of them even directed by Bernstein himself. California financiers were buying up film companies in Berlin and even building their own cinemas to show their films. And so, in a halfhearted attempt to stem the flow, the Parafumet agreement was signed: in exchange for a loan of four million dollars, it was agreed that one American movie would be screened for every German film made. The agreement also ensured that any “suitable” German films would be distributed in the United States.

It was clear, however, that this could be only a temporary measure. The German film industry was in crisis. It needed more capital; it needed new momentum; it needed an international hit. Although there were dozens of filmmakers bashing out ideas in offices all over Berlin, Friedrich Bernstein, with his American tan and sanguine approach, was an obvious choice.

Elisabeth Bergner had been lined up by Ufa to play the female lead but had read the script and turned it down. Asta Nielsen was busy and Pola Negri had gone to America and had fallen in love with Rudy Valentino.

Bernstein knew Lidi only through the pile of film stills. He was so unimpressed that he hadn’t bothered to thread the reels of the copy of
Letters of Love
he had been couriered the day before and watch the film in the screening room he had at his disposal.

“She’s quite pretty,” he said at the time, “but nothing more than you could see working behind the cosmetics counter of any department store. And what’s more, I have heard that she hasn’t worked for months.”

And yet he had been coaxed incessantly by Leyer, who was one of the executive producers, into seeing her. He eventually agreed to an audition, if only to prove his point.

“She had exactly what I wanted,” he told the now defunct cult cinema magazine
Movie Magic
in 1962. “There was something about her eyes that was arctic. No, that’s not what I mean at all. She was warm; she had this way of looking, a kind of animal, no, sexual intelligence. It’s hard to explain. It was as if she was both very young and very old, vulnerable and yet aloof. If I sound confused, contradictory, I am. I don’t know what she had, but as soon as I saw it, I wanted her. She was the face, if you can imagine it, of Berlin at that particular moment in history.”

anne had a tiny handbag in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She stood in Lilly’s apartment, but would not sit down. She looked as if she had been up all night, and her eyes were smudged with black.

“It’s been too long,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to . . . I mean I’ve wanted to . . .” Hanne continued until she ran out of words.

“Edvard came to see me,” said Lilly.

“Did he? Did he tell you?”

Lilly nodded.

“You know, I left him with the same as what I arrived with,” Hanne replied. “Nothing.”

She picked a strand of tobacco from her tongue.

“He used to give me books,” she went on. “Great, thick books. Idiot. I burned them last week when we ran out of wood.”

As the smoke rose from her cigarette in thin blue ribbons, Hanne laughed.

“He had no clue,” she said. “He had no idea how to be poor.”

She finally sat down on Lilly’s bed and unfastened her shoes. The leather soles were sodden and the heels worn down. She pulled two pieces of cardboard and a couple of ten-billion-mark notes from inside and laid them to dry on the radiator.

“You know, when I was married, there wasn’t a day—not a day— that I didn’t think of Kurt.”

She stamped out the butt of her cigarette and immediately lit another.

“He has gone into politics,” she went on. “The Nazi Party. They gave him a job, unlike the country he fought for. He is a storm trooper now.You should see his uniform. It is so smart.”

When Lilly didn’t respond, she went on.

“What kind of a government treats its people like this? Did you know that they have decided to resume payments of war reparations to France? When the country is starving again? When no one can afford to eat anymore and the city is full of rich Americans buying anything and anyone they want.”

“Hanne,” Lilly said softly.

“This country is run by Jews,” she said. “But not for long.We shall rid our country of them—of them all. The party leader is now Adolf Hitler.You should hear him speak, Lilly—he is so inspiring.”