by Jürgen Fauth
Who were these men? Did Mina imagine seeing a curly wire in their ears, as if they were communicating with a mission control van waiting for them downstairs? Sam had called them secret agents. She glanced around the other rooftops, half-expecting to see snipers moving into position.
“Fuck,” Mina said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Whatever they wanted from her, it couldn't be good.
She swung her leg over the ledge. Just focus on the ladder, she told herself. Don't look down. This couldn't be worse than the time she went repelling in college. The ladder had held Dr. Hanno. She remembered something about a three-point rule–only move one limb at a time? She had no time for that. Rung by rung by rung, she descended, the metal cold against her fingers.
Don't look down, she reminded herself.
There was shouting above. They were closing in.
She had almost caught up with Dr. Hanno when she heard him give a strange sigh. She looked down and saw him let the suitcase slip. It teetered on his hip for a moment as if it were, perhaps, able to defy gravity and support itself, and then tumbled slowly downwards. It took a fearfully long time to hit the ground, and there wasn't much of a sound when it did. Just a dull thud. Mina could see her things–flippers, underwear, flowered sundresses–spill across the cobblestones below.
Suspended between the brightening Berlin sky and the approaching voices above and her honeymoon luggage and the sheepish face of Dr. Hanno below, Mina winced.
“You've got to be fucking kidding me.”
Chapter 9
Herr Dokter, you make a living out of the misery of others. The days here are deceptively mild like all California days, but at night, when the sedatives wear off, I hear the screams. I know I'm not alone in here. How many of us do you keep locked up? Don't you know there is no treatment for what ails us? If I was a car you'd stamp me Totalschaden and leave it at that. You're a junkyard attendant, warehousing wrecks. I showed people a better world. You're the warden of hell, and I am losing patience. I am trying to get to the point.
When I was led into Erich Pommer's office, my sweaty hands clutching the completed screenplay of Tulpendiebe, I had not slept, and I was pale, jittery. I had gone straight from Lang's apartment to the Belvedere, where Steffen's lover Ray kept an Adler typewriter in his study. I brewed coffee, snorted Zement, chewed cigars–whatever it took to turn the story I had spun at the party into a script.
Pommer shook my hand, took the pages from me, and barely looked at them. On his desk, I noticed the famous stack of silver coins he tossed to writers with good ideas. He motioned for me to sit. He wanted to know about my childhood in the Rheinland. He asked what kinds of movies I liked, and I told him Chaplin, Murnau, von Stroheim, Griffith, Dryer. He asked if my leg would be a problem on the set, and I told him that if Lang's dragon hadn't killed me, the director's chair certainly wouldn't. I wanted to tell him about my vision for Tulpendiebe but he cut me off with an axe chop of his hand that landed on a piece of paper he proceeded to push across the desk. It was a contract, already prepared. I flipped through the pages but didn't care what it said. It was a movie contract, and that was all I needed to know. I signed it “Kino.”
Later, I found out that Decla-Bioskop, Pommer's old company, had just been bought by Ufa and was being phased out as an independent entity. Tulpendiebe would be produced under their auspices. Pommer was worried about American predominance in the market and had signed off on some of the most expensive movies in Ufa's history. My historical romance–that's what he called it–would be made on the cheap as a way of diversifying the risk from the mega productions the studio's fate was riding on. Pommer was hedging his bets, and Tulpendiebe could be written off if it failed. I committed to a tight budget and was given little control. I was to shoot my movie in four weeks in a Bioskop studio. The ship, the market, the Duke's palace, the tulip fields, even the windmill–everything had to be created inside, on the cheap. We had to use the old Bioskop equipment, which worked with the outdated Doppelnockenverfahren. This meant my film couldn't be shown outside of Germany. But of course you wouldn't know the first thing about that, Herr Dokter.
The studio was a dump. Lang was in the Grosse Halle, making Metropolis, an even bigger production than Die Nibelungen, and Murnau was shooting Faust, another special-effects extravaganza, with Emil Jannings as Mephisto. Down the hall, Dr. Fanck was filming interiors for The Holy Mountain. I met Luis Trenker and Leni Riefenstahl, who shook her ass in my face. With Metropolis already ballooning out of control, nobody cared what we did.
To paint the backdrops, I hired Salvatore Luna, a Mexican painter known for his bold style, one of Steffen's friends. He's famous now, of course, for his extraordinary murals. Extras and costumes were difficult to come by because everybody was marching down the shafts of Lang's futuristic city. I had to fight for every clog and every pantaloon–the costume department was working overtime on Faust. The contract also gave me no control over the casting. I didn't meet any of the actors until the first day of shooting. They were fourth-rate talents: Harald Flint, the Czech acrobat who played the sailor, liked to chew tobacco and spit at the painted backdrops. The Duke was an old lecher. My crew consisted of drunks, dropouts, and halfwits. My cinematographer was an alcoholic with shaky hands.
On the first day of shooting, I gave a rousing speech about cathedrals of light and unfettered potential–but none of them understood. I wanted magic, they wanted paychecks. They wanted to know what cathedrals had to do with tulips. I've never been comfortable with authority, and I found it distasteful to tell people what to do. I didn't want to be like my father, and I'd never direct like Lang, counting out gestures. I wanted to give the actors room, but they saw my openness as weakness, as permission to do as they pleased. I was too young to know what was required of me, and we fell three scenes behind on the first day.
I also found that during my time on Die Nibelungen, I had acquired something of a reputation. Everybody kept asking me for drugs, so Steffen and his ever-changing entourage began hanging around the edges of the studio, doling out Zement. Salvatore was addicted to a South American fungus powder that he claimed helped him hallucinate. Soon, half of the cast and crew were hooked, and the cocaine going around was cut with the stuff.
The early rushes were terrible. My worst problem was Sandra König, the mugging fourth-rate diva hired to play Lilly. She was the daughter of a financier Pommer owed a favor, and she was a disaster. Tulpendiebe needed an ethereal beauty, afflicted with a mysterious wasting disease, but instead, I had a ruddy-faced broad who couldn't even faint with grace. If the chaos on set didn't do me in, Sandra König was certain to ruin my movie.
Steffen told me not to worry. I am not proud of what happened next, but whatever Steffen's morals, he was a loyal, uncompromising friend. Without warning, Sandra König failed to show up on the set. A letter was discovered in her home that said that she had received a message from God and was leaving on a pilgrimage for the Holy Land. Four weeks later, she telegraphed from Damascus–she had been found locked inside a shipping container filled with specialty foods destined for the Shah of Persia, drunk on Veuve-Cliquot. The last thing she remembered was having a nightcap with a handsome man.
Now I had a new problem on my hands: I had to replace the miserable Sandra König, and fast. Pommer threw a pathetic collection of headshots across his desk and told us to find someone by Monday or the production was finished.
If there was one thing Steffen was better at than anyone in the city, it was finding the right woman for a job, but by Sunday night, we were desperate. I needed someone who was haughty but also lovely, with an inherent wisdom and a vulnerable innocence. The only girl with a passable face was pregnant. Ute pushed her case relentlessly, but a Lilly with a prominent mole was impossible.
We tried the Romanisches, the Kranzler, Schwannecke, and the Jockey. We tried backstage at the Wintergarten, but the dancers either looked too cheap, too chipper, or too stupid to be Lilly. Steffen was exasperated with me. He
had seen dozens of women who seemed fine to him. “Just pick one,” he kept telling me. We kept roving through streets, bars, and nightclubs, we even tried the opera and the debutantes at the Schauspielhaus, fruitlessly. My movie was about to be cancelled, but I wouldn't relent. There couldn't be Tulpendiebe without the perfect Lilly.
The six-piece brass band was taking a break when we arrived at the Braukeller, a cavernous beer hall where the drunken shouts of a thousand proles were mixed with ripe sweat, cigarette smoke and spilled beer. I saw my Lilly right away, across rows of wooden benches. She clutched six steins to her chest and stood strangely tranquil among the raucous crowd, out of place, beautiful and aloof. She was tall and blonde, with short bangs, a sharply drawn chin, and the large, angular head of a movie star. She stood out like an apparition, and it was obvious that she had no idea where she was going with all that beer in her arms. I had seen Henny Porten, Asta Nielsen, Mary Pickford. Penelope Greifenau outshone all of them. I had found my Lilly.
Steffen agreed. “Without the glasses, she's perfect. I'll handle it.” He sniffed a heap of Zement from his tin.
I didn't take my eyes off her.
“No,” I said. This wasn't a word that passed between us in those days, but my relationship to Steffen had begun to change. His faults were becoming obvious to me. I no longer adored him blindly. “I'll do it,” I said.
From our bench, we watched the waitress weave through the crowded hall. She nearly spilled the beers two separate times before she unloaded them to a cheering group of Freikorps soldiers. She had already grabbed the next armful before I managed to get her attention. When she laid her eyes on me, my confidence vanished, and my first words to her, my future wife and the mother of my son, were delivered with a blush: “You ought to be in movies.” It wasn't a cliché yet.
As if she hadn't heard: “Was darf's denn sein? Two beers?”
Close enough to see the moisture in the corners of her lips and the lights reflected in her eyes, I could barely think at all.
“They call me Kino.” I stood up and took an awkward bow. “And I want you as the lead in my film.”
Steffen shifted uneasily, itching to jump in and save me.
“I have a job,” Penelope said.
Without thinking, I put my hand on her arm. “You're above this. Will you come to Neubabelsberg tomorrow?”
She gave me a smile. Her glasses slid down her nose, but she didn't have a free hand to push them up. She sat down at the end of our bench. “My feet are killing me.”
A man in the black clothes and wide brimmed black hat of a journeyman shouted for her: “Fräulein!”
Penny ignored them. “Show me the script and I'll think about it.”
“The script?” Steffen said, no longer able to keep quiet. “No need to read it. Kino is a genius!”
“It's okay, Steffen.” I had the script with me–I always did–and offered it to her. She lifted an elbow and clutched it to her breast.
“Bier her, Bier her, oder wir fall'n um!” the journeymen sang, banging their empty steins on the table.
Penelope sat down and leafed through the script, ignoring the calls for more beer with a deep furrow on her lovely forehead. Finally, she slapped the pages down on the table.
“You wrote this?”
Proudly, I nodded.
“It's ludicrous,” she said. “You're asking me to play a sick woman who contributes nothing? To pine for a clown of a sailor? This is an insult to the cause of women.”
“A liberated woman!” I said. “You are perfect for the role! Lilly is the movie's true center, its conscience, the incorruptible heart of the story!” She continued to frown.
“Don't confuse the notes with the music,” Steffen said. “You have to trust Kino!”
“Women don't want to be put on a pedestal. You will never amount to anything if you don't respect your female characters as equals.”
“Come, Kino, these insults by a Kneipentrulla are beneath you.” Steffen made to leave.
But I regarded her carefully. What did she really want? I knew she was beautiful and a terrible waitress. I also knew this was no time to leave.
Steffen took me by the arm. “You can get Asta, or Pola Negri. Let's go.”
“Not so hasty,” she said. “I listed my objections to the role.” She took a deep breath and applied the double negative with precision: “I didn't say I didn't want to do it.” She did an absurd little curtsy. “Penelope Greifenau.”
Steffen clapped his hands. “Hallelujah,” he said. “You won't regret this. It'll be great fun.”
“Fun?” Penelope said with a frown. “I don't expect to find much fun in it.”
Did she know right away, in that soggy beer cellar, that she would be my ruin?
Among the degenerates assigned to Tulpendiebe, my new leading lady stood out like a cosmopolitan goddess–sophisticated, earnest, professional. On the first day, she knew the script and understood everyone's motivation, and her dedication to the film changed everything. The entire cast and crew had a crush on her, wanted to impress her. Even Harold Flint shaped up.
After we wrapped the first week with Penelope, she took me aside to tell me she didn't think I was in control of my actors. She told me my style was chaotic. We had filmed scenes in the tulip exchange and I had tried out new gags on the spot.
I told her that shooting was always messy, that I created order later, in the editing room.
“What about the drugs?” she said. She'd seen Flint and Krause smoke a hashish cigarette between setups, down by the loading docks. They had made crude jokes and giggled uncontrollably.
I told her that as long as the actors could still hit their marks, I didn't care what happened between takes. In fact, I wanted them to do whatever was best for their performance. I might have suggested she try a little hashish herself. I might have winked.
Oh my.
She looked at me with a contemptuous mixture of disgust and anger, a face I have seen many times since.
“You have no discipline,” she said, “and you're not dedicated to this movie.”
I thought I hadn't heard right.
“Verzeihung? This is my movie. I'm dead serious about it.”
“Then stop playing around.”
“My dear Fräulein Greifenau, ‘playing around’ is how I work. Only at play are we open to our full potential! Art is pleasure! The orgasmic synthesis of ideas!” I was on a roll, and I quoted Steffen's motto, making it my own: “If it's not fun, why bother?”
“You're a hedonist!” she spat.
I laughed. “You say it as if it required parades and a flag and riots in the streets!”
At that moment, Steffen's car pulled up at the studio gate and honked for me. “You must excuse me,” I said. “I must attend a hedonist meeting, or, as we like to call them, ‘parties.’ Would you like to join us?”
To my utter surprise, Penelope folded up her wagging finger and said yes.
On the ride to the Belvedere, she seemed pensive while Steffen told some story about a friend who had been beaten by the “brownshirts.” I didn't know anything about the Nazis at the time, but the story didn't surprise me. People were always getting beaten up in those days–by the communists, the Freikorps, and apparently, now, by “the brownshirts.” I didn't think about it twice.
I was thinking about Penelope Greifenau.
At Ray's party, Penelope relaxed, drank Steffen's lemon vodka, danced the Lindy, and sat on the pier with me to look at the moon. She told me that she was the daughter of Leo Greifenau, the celebrated physicist who lectured at Humboldt. The old certainties were crumbling in science just like they were in society. After the war, the universities had begun accepting women as students and Penelope enrolled, only to realize upon graduation that there was no future in the academy for women. Things weren't that liberated after all. Her father pulled some strings but the best he could offer her was a position as a secretary.
Penelope took it badly. She threw physics in her pa
rents' faces, left home in a fury, and took the first job she could find. If she couldn't research and lecture, she wanted to embarrass them. The beer hall was humiliating, but she figured a movie was even worse, just the thing to get back at her elitist parents who had spent large sums of money to have their daughter educated at the best schools in Germany and abroad. She had attended the Sorbonne in Paris. To them, acting in a vulgar piece of primitive mass entertainment ranked somewhere below lugging beer steins. “The movies,” Leo Greifenau had said to her on more than one occasion, “just toss it all up there on the wall. They require nothing.”
Another man might have reacted differently to the insults. But it was a gorgeous night and Penelope was beautiful.
“You're in my movie to get back at your father?”
“Is that a problem?”
I didn't care. It was enough that she was in my film, that she drank with me, laughed, let me sit with her by the lake on a moonlit night. I was hopelessly smitten.
“I ran away too,” I said, “from wealth and a family business. My father didn't have any use for the cinema either. He trained me as an accountant, and nothing bores me more than numbers.” I told her how I'd given my inheritance away and left our Rheinland estate for the Oberlin's Scheunenviertel-Hinterhaus.
“We don't do what's expected of us,” I said. “You and I, we don't believe in rules.”
“Just the ones I make for myself. You don't seem to worry about consequences.”
I shrugged. “Good things happen if you let them.”
She gave me a skeptical look. “As a scientific proposition, that's rather weak.”
“It's not science, it's aesthetics. It's what I believe.”
Her smile said she was attracted to me against her better judgment. If you came close enough, you could watch her think–Penelope had a unique mind, brilliant and complicated, and it showed in her eyes. I could hear the party, laughter and music pouring out of the Belvedere, but I didn't want to join the crowd. I only wanted to spend time with this extraordinary creature.