“That’s what you think,” I retorted, but one of my neighbors turned out to be a lively brunette named Amelie Riefenstahl, or Leni, as she called herself. She was my age, twenty-two—a painter, poet, and interpretive dancer who’d traveled around Europe in an extravaganza produced by none other than my academy founder, Max Reinhardt. We became friends. An ambitious girl about town, when she invited me to go out with her and I showed up in my tuxedo, she promptly donned black trousers and a white dinner jacket, which suited her slim physique and dancer’s legs.
“I’m going to be a film star,” she told me as we dined at the Café Bauer and other expensive establishments where she managed to never pay for anything, always knowing someone there, usually a married man, who kept a tab for her. “Cabarets and music halls aren’t for me. I love painting but selling art is such a bore, and most artists I know are as poor as Russians. I want money and fame. Where better than in the movies?”
She was another Camilla—intent on her success, no matter the cost. But I found her company agreeable, for unlike Camilla’s, her avid pursuit of opportunity included me. While I found her poetry insipid and her paintings incomprehensible, and had no idea if she even knew how to act (she never mentioned any credentials aside from the extravaganza with Reinhardt), she generously referred me to casting calls where she didn’t fit the stated requirements.
We made a sensation together: me in my monocle and bow tie, and she in her suit, our hair slicked back and lips bloodred as we stormed about Berlin, raising eyebrows and other things among delighted film executives, who hastened to offer us drinks and invitations to dine and dance.
I was certain not a few of these invitations ended with Leni in their bed; like Camilla, she had no compunction about sealing the deal with her body. “It’s what they expect. Really, Marlene. Look around you. There are hundreds of girls, all competing for the same parts. Believe me, they won’t think twice about opening their legs for a contract.”
She was right. Most girls didn’t. And I certainly had my share of offers. Rudi often worked late at the studio or went out afterward to do his own schmoozing; he expressed no concern over my gallivanting with Leni. He said it would do me good to be seen and meet people who could advance my career, so I took him at his word. But I resisted the smarmy advances and creeping hands under the table, if not out of any moral obligation. Rudi and I were engaged but I didn’t know if he was faithful to me, though I assumed he was.
One night as I prepared to go out with Leni and he arrived home early from work, I asked him. From the startled expression on his face, I saw I had caught him by surprise.
“I haven’t slept with anyone else since we met,” he said, “if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Not once?” I applied lipstick in the mirror, already dressed for the evening. “I wouldn’t mind. It doesn’t concern me.” I was baiting him, trying to penetrate his unflappable reserve. Jolie’s words to me had sunk in; he was not homosexual, but he must desire other women. In a part of me, I hoped that he was unfaithful; a flaw in his perfect facade would be welcome.
“I haven’t.” He came up behind me, trailing his finger across my nape. “Have you? Perhaps with Leni or . . . some other man?” His voice quavered.
“Would it disturb you if I had?”
He averted his eyes. “It shouldn’t,” he said. “Considering the business we’re in.”
“I see,” I said. I had the feeling that my sleeping with women would disturb him less. He had enjoyed showing me off, watching women make overtures that he could intercept. Perhaps he deemed liaisons with my own gender as harmless or even erotic, but not a threat. But another man was different. With another man, he’d have to compete. He wasn’t so perfect, after all, to my relief. He had a human frailty.
I shook my head. “I haven’t.” I refrained from adding, “Yet.” The truth was, I hadn’t met anyone since him who appealed to me in that way. Leni had tried. She’d attempted to seduce me but I gently rebuffed her. She wasn’t really inclined, but merely did it to establish her modernity. To her, sex and power were the same thing. Taking her as a lover would spoil our friendship.
He met my eyes in the glass. “I suppose we’ll have to trust each other.”
I smiled. “Yes, trust is all that matters.”
He did not say more, but I understood he’d tolerate an occasional infidelity if he must, as long as it didn’t interfere with our relationship. It suited me, too. I was not looking for complications. And even if I’d had the inclination, I didn’t have the time, not with my demanding roster of plays at the academy and preparations for my wedding.
Liesel had to marry first of course, determined to beat me to the altar after she saw the size of my ring. Georg Wills made sure she also had the necessary trappings—a lavish gown and carriage ride along the Friedrichstrasse to the Winter Garden, where their reception was held in a pavilion, with the tiered cake and orchestra.
In contrast, our finances obliged Rudi and me to conduct a subdued affair. On May 17, 1923, in the town hall of Berlin-Friedenau, we wed in a civil ceremony, with Mutti and Liesel as my witnesses and the actor Rudolf Forster as Rudi’s best man. Uncle Willi gave me away; I wore a white dress with a crown of myrtle, traditional symbol of virginity. Rudi found it highly amusing and had me wear the crown to bed that night. Our exertions pulverized it; for days afterward, I was picking out crushed fragments of leaves from the sheets.
The following month, I left the Reinhardt academy after Rudi got me an audition for the producers Meinhardt and Bernauer, who operated a chain of successful theaters. Their repertoire wasn’t refined, consisting of popular fare, but offered more varied roles—and a salary to go along with them. As Mutti had foretold, Rudi wasn’t earning enough to fully support us, but I wanted to keep working anyway.
I appeared in six new plays and had a small part in a circus melodrama picture, The Leap Into Life, before I discovered I was pregnant.
X
My pregnancy was unplanned, but I’d also not made a fuss when Rudi stopped using prophylactics. He wanted a family; in my own way, so did I. Mutti was overjoyed at the news. She became a different person, as if my apparent willingness to settle into a life she approved of had made up for my former rebellious ways.
I had no trouble, save for the usual malaise and morning sickness, but I had to stop working as I entered my fifth month. Audiences didn’t want to see a woman with a belly playing comedies by Molière. And to my surprise, I was content to spend time at home, without a schedule and with a nearby bathroom, with Rudi supplying cheeses, strudel, and anything else my ravenous appetite might crave, while Mutti visited every day to attend to my comfort. Though we were not affectionate, she took such good care of me that our discomfort with each other lessened; she kept telling me a grandchild was something she had always longed for.
But the moment my birth pangs began on December 17, 1924, ten days before my twenty-third birthday, the idyll ended. It took me eight hours to deliver my baby and I suffered an internal rupture, followed by an infection, with the fever and accompanying weakness leaving me disoriented. The doctor advised Rudi and me that another pregnancy might kill me.
Perhaps this accounted for my initially tepid reaction to my newborn daughter, whom we baptized with my name, Maria, but affectionately dubbed Heidede. She was healthy, already sprouting tufts of silky auburn hair, but she felt like a stranger as I held her, a foreign intruder with her wails and burping. Only when she nursed (my milk miraculously did not sour) did I surrender to rhapsody, her toothless maw clamped to my engorged nipple.
Mutti imparted endless advice, from how to avoid diaper rash to the best way to ensure an early weaning. I heard it all through a stupefied fog; as time wore on, more than devotion bound me to my child. I also sought to escape the fact that in becoming a mother, I’d forsaken more than I intended. A newborn needed constant care, and my subsequent illness had taken its toll. I refused to look at myself in a mirror or ponder the inescapable
reality that while I’d been away, life had moved on without me, including my contract with Meinhardt and Bernauer.
Rudi broke the news. With the mark having soared to the unimaginable inflation rate of 2.5 million to one U.S. dollar, and with Germany facing the collapse of an already decimated economy, America had come to our rescue, implementing a plan to restore the mark to its prewar rate. In the wake of this surge in credit, Meinhardt and Bernauer had sold their theater chain to a Viennese producer. Given my absence, my contract had been voided under the new ownership.
“But there’s no need to worry,” Rudi assured me as I sat with Heidede at my teat, dismayed to hear I was unemployed, my figure in need of urgent attention if I ever hoped to work again. Girls who disappeared for less time than me disappeared forever, and I had put on almost ten extra kilos. “I’ve spoken with my boss at the UFA,” he went on. “He says once you recover and the baby can be entrusted to another’s care, he’ll offer you a test. This new economic plan has everyone racing new pictures into production. You’ll find plenty of work.”
I still worried. However, I committed to nursing Heidede for eight months. Following a much-needed summer holiday by the North Sea with the baby, Liesel, and her husband, Georg Wills, who was indeed, as Mutti had declared, as oily as a salesman, remarking that my legs needed toning if I planned to show them again in a chorus. His remark so enraged me that I gave my daughter to my mother in the mornings so I could plunge into an excruciating regimen with a Swedish trainer referred by Leni. I spent three hours at the gymnasium every day on my back, pedaling an imaginary bicycle to tone my thighs and rid my stomach of stubborn excess fat. I sweated like a Trojan and was as devoted to my cause, reaping the rewards when my UFA screen test yielded me the role of the coquette Micheline in a film adaptation of Manon Lescaut.
The part offered more screen time than anything I’d done before, though Mutti asked sourly how I planned to contend with work and a baby. Then Rudi was fired. He offered no logical reason for it, answering my urgent questions with a diffident “I think my boss wanted to hire his nephew in my place.” I thought I’d get fired, too, before shooting even started, but I was reassured that the part was still mine. Rudi suggested that while I went to work, he could stay home with Heidede. For all her dedication, Mutti was middle-aged and caring for an infant sapped her stamina. She also had her housekeeping, for like everyone else, she needed to pay the bills.
I was taken aback by Rudi’s suggestion, after all his declarations about propriety and respectability. Though everything in Berlin was upside down, with people doing whatever they must to survive, the arrangement was hardly orthodox. A husband caring for a baby was not the norm, regardless of how terrible one’s finances might be.
“Are you certain?” I said. “It’ll seem very unusual.”
“You have this picture,” he replied. “I don’t. Your mother is tired and Heidede needs one of us here. It might seem unusual, but it’s all we can do for now. After you finish shooting, you stay home and I’ll start looking for another job.”
If he was fine with it, I wasn’t going to complain. I was starting to feel smothered, much as I loved my daughter, bored with diapers and snatching naps whenever I could. I was exhausted; I needed to get back to work to save my own sanity. I had to have more in my life.
Mutti was not pleased. “Men don’t know the first thing about rearing a baby,” she said when I informed her. “Let him go out and earn a living. He’s the man, not you. Men are supposed to support their families. You’ll make him feel like a failure. I thought this nonsense of becoming an actress was over. You have a child. Do you want her to grow up without a mother?”
I sighed. We had come full circle. “We need money. We need it for our child. She can’t live on pride alone. We still need to eat and pay our rent.”
Mutti pursed her lips. Despite Rudi’s assurances that he’d be fine, she scaled back her own work to help him in the mornings. I would have to make up the difference in her pay.
My role of Micheline in a picture bankrolled by the UFA and directed by the renowned Arthur Robison, with Lya de Putti, Berlin’s reigning queen, in the lead, was certain to garner notice. I felt rusty, uncertain after more than a year away from acting. My first day at the Babelsberg Studio did not go well. I missed my mark several times and fumbled my lines, requiring retakes for which Robison lambasted me.
“You have one week to prepare,” he threatened. “One week off to learn your lines and get this part right. If you don’t return ready to work, don’t return at all.”
To distract me, Leni arranged a night out to the kinos, bringing along a new Chinese-American actress-acquaintance of hers, Anna May Wong, who’d recently arrived in Berlin and caused a sensation. Slithering to our seats in our gamine apparel, me in a tweed suit of Rudi’s that I’d altered and paired with a bowler hat, Leni in trousers with suspenders over a vest, and Anna May in a slinky kimonolike garment that revealed plenty of thigh, we had the other patrons eyeing us in lustful admiration or intolerant condemnation.
But everything around me faded as the film began. The Joyless Street, directed by G. W. Pabst, starred a new revelation—the Swedish actress Greta Garbo. In a doleful plot about murder and greed in postwar Vienna, Garbo played a devoted daughter whose decision to take in a lodger leads to romance with an American lieutenant. Critics either eulogized or panned the picture, but all were unanimous in praise of Garbo. On the stage, she couldn’t have gotten away with such enigmatic complexity, but the camera revered her, enhancing her poise, the translucence of her skin, and the flame in her pale eyes. Without doing much of anything, she conveyed a passion far more persuasive than mere dramatics; she had me, and everyone else, swooning in our seats.
I left the kinos in a daze, barely hearing Anna May as she told Leni, “She’s already left for Hollywood. Louis B. Mayer attended the premiere of this film with the sole purpose of getting her under contract. He’s announced that MGM will make her a worldwide sensation.”
Anna May turned to me. “Marlene, did you hear? One picture. Garbo has become famous with one role. And you look a little like her, doesn’t she, Leni? Those same hooded eyes and that beautiful white skin. Lighten your hair and you could be her sister.”
I didn’t think I looked anything like that sphinx who had just devastated me with her beauty. Neither did Leni, who said tersely, “I suppose there is a slight resemblance.”
Anna May’s eyes gleamed. “I’ve heard that our new star prefers violets, too.”
“Violets?” I’d never heard the term before. In delight, Anna May explained it to me. “French gourmands and certain women covet the petals as a delicacy. Do you understand?”
I went still, feeling Leni’s stare as Anna May used her fingernail to wipe a clot of lipstick from the corner of my mouth. “All the girls know it. Fräulein Garbo prefers to dive.”
With a smile, I hooked my arms between theirs and refrained from commenting on this lurid tidbit. But the next day, I invited Anna May to lunch, plying her with questions about Garbo’s technique as well as Anna May’s own experiences in Hollywood—she’d made twenty-three films there, playing secondary roles, before coming to Berlin to increase her visibility—until she took my hand and said, “Marlene, you can’t possibly be so blind. You walk around like you own the world yet fail to see what’s in front of you. Leni sees it, though. She’s so envious of you, she can barely stand it.”
“Envious? Of me?” I started to laugh. “Don’t be absurd. Leni knows everyone.”
Anna May tightened her fingers on mine. “She may know everyone but she’ll never amount to anything unless she gets it on her back. You can act and sing; you trained at the Reinhardt academy. She is obsessed with you. She wants to be you.”
I sobered at once, recalling my broken friendship with Camilla. We’d not spoken again since Rudi, though I had once run into her at a nightclub. She was having some success lately in pictures herself, and she turned her back to me, refusing to eve
n acknowledge my presence.
“Everyone thinks Garbo is a great actress,” Anna May said, “but she’s not. She simply knows that what she implies but doesn’t reveal gets our attention. That is her gift. You have it, too. You just need to perfect it.”
After lunch, I invited her to bed. My return to the world had woken me to everything I had missed; I found her sensual, attentive, and she returned my interest. She didn’t expect more; like me, she wasn’t looking for any permanency. “I’m not sure how long I’ll stay in Berlin,” she said. “But while I’m here, you’re always welcome, Marlene.”
Our afternoon of sex and advice changed me. On my way home, I submerged my guilt over being unfaithful to Rudi by pondering my career. Was I trying too much to prove myself? Perhaps I didn’t need to. Perhaps all I needed to do was cultivate a magnificent indifference like Garbo. If she had become a star, why shouldn’t I do the same?
I decided not to play Micheline as a flirt, but rather as a world-weary schemer. Rudi wasn’t convinced; he felt it was too understated, but during the shoot, I put my theory to the test. I raised my eyes slowly, at half-mast, as if just awakened from slumber, cultivating an insouciant yawn as a foil to Manon’s hysterics.
My director liked my performance. So did the critics who noticed, calling me “an arresting presence”—which brought offers to appear in a stage production of Duel on the Lido, portraying an amoral demimondaine, and as a Parisian playgirl on the make in Alexander Korda’s film satire A Modern Du Barry.
Leni bared her teeth. “Are you sure you’re not putting out, darling? Because you seem to be working far more than a girl who doesn’t put out should.”
Marlene: A Novel Page 16