“What, you can strip but you can’t smile?” the director said. “Is this how girls from Berlin are now?”
The producer knew a dentist who could fix her front tooth, but it would cost a lot. Hanne got a part anyway. She would play a police inspector’s daughter who revealed one too many “secret” files to the hapless hero of the piece.
“Now you,” said the director.
Lilly sat down on the sofa. She was wearing her old winter coat and a new blue silk chiffon dress, cut to the knee with a row of tiny pearl buttons down the back. An investment dress, Hanne had called it.
The bright lights had made the room at the back of the villa hot and damp. The windows were steamed up and the air was stale. But despite the trickles of perspiration that ran down between her shoulder blades, Lilly trembled.The director aimed his mechanical gaze at her and licked his lips. He checked the stock, positioned himself above the eyepiece, and once again started to crank.
“Rolling,” said the director. “Okay . . . let’s go.”
Lilly’s hands reached up and she began to unbutton her coat. Her hair fell into her eyes, yellow hair, shocking to her still, and she suddenly wished it was long again, long enough to cover her face. Her fingers wound around the last of the horn buttons and she pushed it through the buttonhole. Her coat fell from her shoulders. Carefully she pulled down her underpants and stepped out of them. And then, without looking up, she reached behind her back and began to unbutton her dress. The room was completely silent apart from the ticker of the camera motor.
“Beautiful,” said the director.
Lilly stared straight into the camera lens. She could see herself upside down in its beveled surface, her blond hair and her face drawn in with lipstick and kohl. Was she beautiful? For a second or two she didn’t move. As the lights blazed and the camera rolled, as time ticked through the sprockets and frame by frame her image was recorded, she took a breath and was filled with blue sparks, the same blue sparks she had felt all those years ago on the makeshift stage at the orphanage. As then, time seemed to slow down and every single second stretch; she was outside herself, she was free of herself, she belonged to the moment. Although the lights meant that she couldn’t see them, she could feel the gaze of the director, the producer, the camera. And Lilly was suddenly aware of her own ascendancy; she was a temporary deity, momentarily immortal, a fixed point. But following swiftly came a rush of horror: at what had happened after her play, at what she was expected to do now, at how she had just felt. And her eyes began to swim.
“More?” she asked.
“Of course,” replied the director. “Of course more. And make it swift.”
Lilly swallowed and lowered her face. And then she dropped her arms and in a sigh of blue silk chiffon, the dress began to slip.
“I’ve got it,” said the director. “I’ve got it all.”
But he had spoken too soon. Just as the dress crumpled on the floor, just as her pale body, the swell of her breasts, the jut of her hips, and the dark triangle between her legs were unveiled, exposed, revealed, with a flicker and a small surge the illumination, all those hundreds and hundreds of volts and amps and watts, all those brand-new bulbs from Siemens, cut out, leaving the temporary studio in warm black darkness.
At first nobody moved. Only the camera kept turning. They all stood and listened as if the dark were masking something audible. Then the director shook his head at the producer.The producer tried the light switch, on, off, on, off, with increasing force, as if he could rectify the situation with willpower alone.
When it was clear that he could do nothing, Lilly reached down quickly, pulled her dress back on, and reclaimed her underwear. Without the lights, the room in the villa in the west of the city seemed nothing more or less than what it was, a back room in a shabby house in the suburbs. When a dog began to bark in the next garden, the fragile construct that it was a film studio at all was shattered. The girls in the hall swore under their breath, pulled on their hats, and began to leave. They guessed correctly that the power plant workers had gone on strike again. The whole city would be out for hours.
“What about my friend?” Hanne asked the director as he tried to pack up his equipment in the pitch-blackness. “Aren’t you going to give her a part too?”
“Leave your name and a contact number,” said the director. “I’ll take a look at what we’ve got on film and then I’ll be in touch.”
Only three or four frames of the actress who would soon be known as Lidi, however, survived. The director burned out the first half of the roll of film when he accidentally opened the camera later that evening after three glasses of beer. In the film that was salvaged—the few seconds or so during which the director waited to see if the power cut was purely a temporary glitch—the image of Lidi is so underexposed that the almost nude girl in the almost dark could have been anyone. It was just as well, for the rest of his archive would eventually turn up in an auction room and be bought, duplicated, and sold under the counter all over Germany as Girls on the Casting Couch.
“I failed the audition,” she said years later of that first screen test. “Thankfully,” she added.When asked to explain, she politely changed the subject.
The fighting went on; the center of Berlin had been placed in a state of siege. On her way to buy bread, Lilly found the next street had been sealed off. Barbed wire and barricades had been erected overnight by both the Spartacists and the government troops, and for the next month they moved back and forth, a street or two at a time, a square, a park, a monument lost and gained over and over.
Hanne’s first day of shooting was in another “studio” in East Berlin. The trams were erratic, so she had tried to walk; the streets were covered in masonry and the random stain of congealed blood, but they were still passable. But even Hanne soon decided that it was too dangerous. Bullets ricocheted across the Alexanderplatz and mortar shells bombarded the police headquarters. And the opposing forces didn’t just focus on each other: passing through their checkpoints, pedestrians could be targeted at random for carrying the wrong papers, for offering the wrong answer, for giving the wrong kind of look. And so Hanne called the director from a café on the corner and he reluctantly agreed to send a car.
Hanne’s filming schedule was usually nocturnal. The new tooth was taking longer to pay off than she had anticipated. But she never talked about what happened in the “studio” or where the finished films were actually screened. And Lilly could not help but notice the slow dulling of Hanne’s spirit when it was clear that her new career was not what she had supposed at all but simply a repeat of her last.
And so, at Hanne’s insistence, they both auditioned for revues, for cabarets, for theaters. The counts and princes of Prussia and Bavaria had come back from Mesopotamia, from France, and from Georgia and taken rooms in luxury hotels or reopened their villas. Nobody could ignore the barricades, the bloodshed, and the gunfire, but life went on. People drank, they ate, they drank, they danced, they wanted to be entertained. Together with hundreds of other young women, all dressed in knee-skimming skirts and with short, bobbed hair, Lilly and Hanne waited in dusty back stages or hung around in the stalls until, called one by one to sing, dance, or strip, they would take the stage and do their best.
Lilly, who could not sing or dance or even strip with any real sense of conviction, was never called back for a second audition. Hanne was recalled once to the Chantant Singing Hall in Oranienburger Strasse but was not chosen for the final lineup.
Although Hanne knew she was spending far more than she was making, she had become more extravagant than ever. She bought a wind-up phonograph and a stack of recordings. She had her dresses altered to make them shorter, sexier, more revealing. French fashion was now filling the department stores again, and Hanne bought them each a pair of buckled shoes with small heels from Paris.
“Take them,” she had said when Lilly protested. “I can’t go out dancing alone, and you can’t tango in a pair of boots.”
“I can’t tango in a pair of shoes, either,” she replied.
“Just put them on, for God’s sake.”
Hanne was tired of taking the lead, of presenting Lilly with solutions that she never took advantage of. And the worst thing was that she still thought she had a choice. Lilly put them on.
“There,” said Hanne. “They’re a perfect fit. And I’ll teach you to dance.You must be the only girl left in Berlin who can’t.”
In winter 1919, the new republic had banned fishing in lakes with hand grenades and social dancing, or Tanztaumel. Five dance halls had been raided and closed down. But the fact that it was illegal only made it more attractive. Since the war had ended, dancing had become more than just a craze in Berlin: it was a mania, an obsession, an addiction. In secret halls and private clubs, in parks and even in the streets, workers and boys, soldiers and war widows and businessmen and whores danced the tango, the fox-trot, the cakewalk all night to the syncopated tunes of Scott Joplin or James Reese Europe.
The boarders in the room below eventually gave up banging the ceiling with a broom. For three hours, as Hanne played “Broadway Rose” or “Tiger Rag” over and over, they counted steps and spun around, they raised their knees and threw back their heads, they clasped their arms around each other and narrowed their eyes with concentration.
“I think you’ve got it,” Hanne said eventually.
Hanne, who had learned it all from another actress while waiting for their scene, was a competent teacher.With each new dance, Lilly grew in confidence. Dancing, she realized that night, was an anesthetic. It made her feel high, energized, sexual even. Like Hanne, she swung her arms and rocked her hips. She tossed her head and clicked her heels; dancing was all about movement, about how glorious the body is, about being alive and young and vital, about holding on to time by dancing every single beat out of it. And once you started, she now saw, it was almost impossible to stop.
Just off the Friedrichstrasse, above a former restaurant, the Bad Boys’ Ball was packed. When they arrived, a black jazz band from New Orleans was already playing in the corner. The slide of the trumpet and the giddy beat of the drum were infectious, rhythmic, undeniably erotic. Couples moved together, rubbing faces and bodies. One woman, frustrated by the restriction of her skirt, leaned down and ripped it up to her thigh. Not to be outdone, another girl ripped hers up to her waist, revealing her garters, her stockings, and her lack of underwear.
Although the music, the so-called devil’s music, had come from the slave songs and rhythms of the marching bands of the Deep South of America, in Berlin in 1919, jazz had taken on a whole new meaning. It was everything the kaiser’s empire had condemned. It was the sound of liberation: from starvation, from grief, from virginity, from conformity.
“What did I do after the war?” Lidi responded to an interviewer years later. She laughed as her face lit up with memory. “I danced,” she said. “For a whole year, almost all I did was dance.”
At three a.m. at the Bad Boys’ Ball, the hall was raided. Four hundred arrests would be made, including the band. Everyone would eventually be released without charge. By October, the republic would reverse the law, making dancing legal again, and drop all state censorship. The ban on fishing with grenades in lakes, however, remained.
Hanne and Lilly joined the crush as the crowds swelled toward the back door of the Bad Boys’ Ball. They all poured out into the clear spring night, their feet aching and their ears still ringing.
“Look,” said Hanne. “It’s the polite Russian from the boardinghouse.”
The Russian was with a big group of friends, both male and female, both Russian and German.
“Hey, Ilya,” one young woman called. “Everyone’s coming back to my place.You want to come?”
“I’m so sorry, I’m working early,” he told her with a bow. “I most humbly apologize.”
Ilya, so that was his name. Lilly took in his smart black suit and polished black shoes. The cuffs were beginning to fray and the style was prewar, but he had a way of wearing his clothes that made them look expensive. He was in his late twenties, she guessed, a man, not a boy. He caught her looking at him and she glanced quickly away.
“Come on,” said Hanne. “Let’s go somewhere else. It’s only three.”
But the polite Russian had left his friends and was coming toward them through the crowd.
“A very pleasant evening,” he said to them both. And then his head tilted to the side. “I like it, your hair,” he said to Lilly. “Extremely becoming.”
“Thank you.” Lilly smiled. “It’s all Hanne’s work.”
He nodded and looked at Hanne. Her hair was bleached, too, but instead of softening her features, it hardened them. She lit a cigarette.
“I would like to invite you,” he said with a bow, “to the Movie Palast on Nollendorfplatz. I play the piano there every night. Ask for me and you will be given free tickets at the door.”
He was looking straight at Lilly, a smile playing across his face. When he caught her eye, he bowed. She blushed but suddenly felt gauche and unsophisticated, flat-footed in her new French shoes.
“Thanks for the offer,” said Hanne. “Maybe we’ll take you up on it.”
Hanne linked her arm through Lilly’s and suggested they both head over to a private club, a very exclusive club that admitted only women.
Before they walked away toward Friedrichstrasse, before they hailed a cab and headed over to the H-Lounge on Bülowstrasse, Lilly turned.The polite Russian was standing in a pool of streetlight, watching them go. On his face was an expression that Lilly could not read.
“Dosvedanya, dosvedanya,” Hanne said as the cab swerved through the empty streets. “Those Russians are everywhere.”
Like Ilya Yurasov, many of the Russians who had arrived in Berlin after the revolution had impeccable manners, learned as paying guests at the Carlton in Nice or the Ritz in Paris. Many were now doormen or waiters or bellboys. The others, well, they would be lucky to find a job at all. On any given night you could find dozens of czarist Russian officers in the cramped, dirty bunks of the homeless shelters, practicing their French as they sat it out until the Bolsheviks crumbled and dreaming of the day the czar, the Little Father, would come back to power and they could go home.
Before the war, Ilya Yurasov had worked as a director at the Khanzhonkov film studio in Moscow. On the Eastern Front he had been captured by the Germans and held prisoner in Lodz. In 1918 the armistice was announced and he was released. But instead of heading east like the rest of his regiment, he hitched a ride and ended up in Berlin.
From their first meeting when he barged into their room by mistake, Ilya Yurasov had seen something in Lilly’s face that he recognized. It was a symmetry of feature, a tilt of the eye, a gradient of lip, all of which reminded him of another woman. Though the girl in the boardinghouse really looked nothing like Anya Gregorin, the Russian actress, her face had the same quality, the same striking gaze. But that night as he stood on the street and she turned and looked back at him, the upward trombone slide of Ilya’s heart was quite, quite new.
That year cinemas were seldom less than packed. Some cinemas employed orchestras, but most recruited piano players to accompany the films. And when the lights went down and the piano started to play, as the red velvet curtains slowly parted and reopened on the cobbled streets of England or the mythic forests of Bavaria, the bathhouses of ancient Rome or the deserts of distant India, the audience laughed and gasped and wept as if enchanted by the play of light and shade and music.
The first film they saw was The Golem. At first Lilly watched the polite Russian as he played the piano in his shirtsleeves, his face illuminated by the throw of light from the big screen. But as the film progressed and the action unfolded against a series of nightmarish sets, as the music rose and fell in one crescendo after another, Lilly, like the rest of the audience, was drawn in. Would the golem catch the girl it had fallen in love with, or would it destroy the world instead?<
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They sat in their seats for long after the end titles had started to roll and the crowds had left. At the piano, Ilya rolled down his sleeves and pulled on his jacket.
“What did you think?” Ilya asked.
“It was quite terrifying,” Lilly answered. “I loved it.”
He laughed.
“Well, come again,” he said. “Anytime.”
Ilya Yurasov continued to give them cinema tickets. They were not, as they assumed, free: he paid for them by dipping into money put aside from his day job in the Afifa film-processing plant. And at the end of each film, when they thanked him, he bowed deeply and thanked them for being so kind as to come. But he did not ask either girl to come for a glass of wine or take a walk, as they both expected he might. The cinema tickets, he told himself, were purely a gesture of courtesy to two attractive young women. He could allow himself to go no further. He was a man of principle.
Hanne and Lilly saw all the latest films, often two or three times. Costume dramas like Madame DuBarry and The Eyes of the Mummy, starring Pola Negri, and when the censorship laws were abolished, pictures like Lost Daughters, Hyenas of Lust, and A Man’s Girlhood.
“That’s where I want to be,” Hanne breathed at the end of each film. “Up there.”
The money that Hanne had made during the war ran out, but by this time the film producer’s business was doing well: the market for cheap soft pornography was booming. Hanne was in increasing demand and was so busy having costume fittings, read-throughs, and screen tests that she gave up looking for more respectable employment on the stage.
Lilly found a part-time job as a cocktail waitress in the Kakadu Bar on Joachimstaler Strasse. It was a huge warren of a place with a dance palace, cabaret, vegetarian restaurant, and bar. Over every table in the dining room hung a parrot in a cage. To summon the mâitre d’ or the waitresses or even just for the hell of it, the customers would tap their knives on their water glasses and, in an old man’s voice, the parrots would squawk, “The bill, the bill.”
The Glimmer Palace Page 24