by William Boyd
Georg was a taciturn but placid bloke who seemed entirely happy with his life. His profession occupied most of his time. His pleasures were cigars (he smoked from rising in the morning and stubbed out his last butt when he switched off his bedside light), food—Frau Mittenklott’s gargantuan suppers—and his monthly masturb at the hand of Karl-Heinz. I worked with him for a while as his assistant when my funds began running low. I would parcel up dead butterflies and send them off to collectors, or take seething trays of maggots to fishing-tackle shops. One day we went out to the vast UFA studios at Tempelhof. A scene was being shot where the heroine (played by Nita Jungman, I think) was to be awakened by a butterfly landing on her nose. Georg carried a large jam jar busy with cabbage whites, while I lugged a hefty zinc-lined wooden box containing a block of ice wrapped in straw. One had to admire his technique. Georg encouraged his insects to act by chilling them, as it were, to the bone. The skill, the expertise, lay in knowing just how cold a butterfly or bluebottle had to be before it would do what was required. Not cold enough and it would just take off and fly away; too cold and it would simply die or fall numbed to the ground.
I watched Georg at work with real fascination. Nita Jungman slept; the cameras turned three feet from her face. Georg reached into his icebox where he had been chilling a butterfly. The freezing befuddled insect sat on his blunt fingertips, wings opening and closing very slowly. Georg took a sip from his cigar, pursed his loose lips together and blew a thin gentle jet of smoke onto the butterfly. The creature, irritated, could just manage a groggy two-foot flight. One hoped, naturally, it would head for the alluring peak of Nita Jungman’s pretty little retroussé nose. It was all a matter of nice calculations of correctly chilled, thus unenergetic, butterfly, and direction and velocity of cigar smoke goad. On this particular day Georg got it right three times with five butterflies. The entire studio broke into applause. Georg himself was proudest of a scene that you will probably remember in Heinrich Bern’s Deception. In it Georg persuaded a large housefly to visit every feature of the villain’s face (Rex Ermeram in his greatest role) by using the ice trick and by laying on with a pinpoint a tiny path of honey from demonic eyebrows to hooked nose, from leering lips to saber scar. Georg once told me, with passionate earnestness, that the single most important factor in any German man’s life was the freedom to smoke undisturbed in every corner of his house.
And so 1924 ended and I was still in Berlin, poorer and no further on with my career. In the New Year, Sonia wrote begging me to return for the birth of our second child and informing me of the shocking news that her father had secured me a position in his old pharmaceutical supplies company as trainee salesman. It was just at this time that I started work at the Hotel Windsor. I sent most of my first week’s pay home, said prospects were improving (I did not specify) and that the baby, if a boy, should be called Adam, and if a girl, Emmeline, after my mother.
I had not been entirely idle. Karl-Heinz and I had translated my script of Love’s Sacrifice and so far it had received only two rejections. Karl-Heinz said he would like to play the hero and I instantly agreed. Thus simply a professional association was added to our friendship, which was to survive the most hazardous traumas and ordeals.
Karl-Heinz too was knowing more success. He had acted in his first billed role as a shrewd detective investigating the disappearance of a lodger in a boarding house (I can recall nothing more of this film, which is remarkable only as Karl-Heinz’s debut). On screen he had an enticing, eye-catching impact. There was something latently unruly about him, a sense of good behavior only just being preserved with considerable effort. The Jahrbuch der Filmindustrie 1925 described him as “a most interesting find.” More offers of work came in. Karl-Heinz lent me money, some of which I sent on to Sonia.
Then, just before I finished my stint as Ulrich Pfau’s replacement, events began to move and my life to change. It was March and I was impatient for spring. I had been in Berlin for over four months and was feeling oppressed by its near-gray massiness. Karl-Heinz’s modest success made me conscious of my own frustrated stasis. I was in a bad mood, further irritated by a letter from Sonia that morning informing me that my second son had been born ten days previously and that his name was to be Hereford. Apparently there had been Herefords in the Shorrold family “for centuries.” (I quote. “You’ve heard of Hereford the Wake,” Vincent Shorrold proudly said to me later; “we go right back to him.”) As I paced up and down outside the Windsor I grew steadily more depressed. “John James Todd,” I said to myself, “accompanied by his two sons, Vincent and Hereford.” No, really, it was too appalling! Again I suspected the sly influence of Vincent Shorrold.
Just before my shift was up, at about four o’clock, a taxi pulled up in front of the hotel. I opened the door and Karl-Heinz got out. He was wearing a fawn overcoat with a fur collar. He put on sunglasses and warmed his hands on my blazing coat.
“Most amusing,” I said.
“We have a drink when you finish,” he said. “I’ve got a present for you. See you at the English Bar.”
The English Bar was on the Unter den Linden, in the passageway. It bore no resemblance at all to any hostelry in England, but Karl-Heinz thought it was a treat for me. When I arrived he was in the middle of a meal. He was still wearing his coat. I ordered a half liter of pilsner.
“Like the coat,” I said.
“You want some?” He pointed at his plate. “I pay?”
“What is it?”
“Smoked ham cooked in champagne. Delicious. With a radish sauce.”
“Tempting, but no thanks. What are we celebrating?”
“I got a job. Fantastic. Realismus Films. A. E. Groth directing. Diary of a Prostitute. I’m getting …”he considered it. “Five hundred dollars.”
“Are you the prostitute?”
“And I got one present for you.” He smiled and handed over a book wrapped in brown paper. “It’s by the same fellow as in Weilburg. You know—Rousseau.”
I read Julie, or The New Héloïse in two days with an effort directly proportional to my mounting dismay and disappointment. The turgid rhetoric, the lachrymose posturing, the relentless rhapsodies, were bitterly disillusioning after the never-to-be-forgotten exhilaration of The Confessions. For a landmark in the history of human artistic endeavor, and the signal for everthing we know as Romanticism to begin, it was extraordinarily hard going.
I find it hard now to explain why I did certain things then. I was only twenty-six years old, but the war had provided me with several lifetimes of experience. I was constantly on the verge of brilliant ideas, or at least I felt I was, and that feeling can sometimes be as important as the ideas themselves. So why, after that reaction to the book, did I decide to adapt it as a film? I had no honest explanation. It simply seemed the right thing to do. So I did it.
I wrote the script of Julie in seventeen days. I updated it to the present but kept the essential simplicity of the story. Saint-Preux—sensitive, melancholy, heart driven—is tutor to the beautiful young blond Julie, who lives in an idyllic château. They fall in love. Julie and Saint-Preux independently confide in Julie’s friend Claire (sprightly, dark) and she makes sure that the two soon know of their mutual passion. Overwhelmed by their feelings, Julie yields herself to Saint-Preux. They make love. Then Julie is stricken with remorse and guilt. She recoils from Saint-Preux and, distraught, marries an old codger called Baron Wolmar (her father’s initial choice.) Saint-Preux, suicidal, heads for the fleshpots of Paris. In despair, he decides against taking his life when he receives a letter from Julie saying that even though she is married, Saint-Preux will always be close to her heart.
Wolmar—prudent, sagacious, a philosopher of the human spirit—who knows of Julie’s past relationship with her former tutor, invites him (Saint-Preux is on the verge of nervous collapse) to come and live in their household. It is a profound and tormenting trial, but somehow Julie and Saint-Preux remain virtuous. The Baron Wolmar announces he is going on a lon
g journey and leaves the two behind. Julie and Saint-Preux suffer a terrible ordeal of temptation and frustration, but Julie does not succumb, she remains faithful. Then, tragically, she has a fatal accident. On her deathbed she informs Saint-Preux that she has always loved him. Cut to Saint-Preux’s stricken face. Julie dies. The end.
It was, I think, a good piece of work and the story was no more impossible than any other drama currently being made. Karl-Heinz loved it and it was he who suggested we take it to Realismus. I thought this was frankly a waste of time, but Karl-Heinz insisted there was some logic in his idea. He was currently filming Diary of a Prostitute; Realismus had a certain vested interest in his career and he had access to the head of the company, Duric Lodokian. I agreed to give it a try and he took the script of it with him.
Duric Lodokian was a hugely wealthy Armenian who had fled from his native country to Russia in 1896 shortly after the first Turkish massacres and pogroms against the Armenian people had begun. He had fled again in 1918 after the Russian Revolution and was among the first of the thousands of Russian émigrés who found sanctuary in Berlin. Lodokian had made his fortune in nuts. He described himself to me as a “nut importer.” He spoke Russian, German, French and passable English. He had sold many nuts to England, he said, but of only one type: Brazil nuts. Hundreds of tons of Brazil nuts. “What do they do with Brazil nuts?” he asked. I said I had no idea. I must say I find it hard to imagine a fortune founded on nuts, but this was Lodokian’s power base (“Every time I open a pistachio I am saying thank you,” he said to me once). The nut business sustained him through the few ups and many downs of his passion for films. Realismus Films Verlag AG was Duric Lodokian, and no film was made unless it conformed to the philosophy implicit in the name. His greatest success had been in 1920 with a movie about the horrors and dangers of venereal disease, called The Wages of Sin, and Unsparing Social Comment would, I think, have been a fair summary of the Lodokian and Realismus creed. True, it swam somewhat against the tide in the Berlin of the mid-twenties, but for every three flops there was a modest Realismus success that confirmed him in his principles, and he persevered. There was, in fact, a Realismus “school” notionally in opposition to the UFA films, the Expressionists, the Neue Sachlichkeit movement and all the other various artistic “isms” and groupings that flourished then. Two of Realismus’s regular directors were Werner Hitzig and Egon Gast. Lodokian had just persuaded the celebrated Swedish director A. E. Groth to join him and Diary of a Prostitute was the result.
Lodokian was a small, dapper brown man in his sixties. Brown as one of his nuts, I thought when I met him for the first time in the Realismus offices on the corner of the Französischestrasse and Friedrichstrasse. His face and hands were speckled with copious liver spots. He was smoking a Russian cigarette with a cardboard filter, the hand holding it trembling slightly. When he spoke it was through a kind of surf of wheezes and vascular gurglings, as if he were crippled with emphysema. There was a wheelchair and an oxygen cylinder behind his desk. He introduced me first to his son, Aram, who stood beside him. Aram was as small and neat as his father, my age, and running to fat. He had dark, slightly hooded eyes and a neat cleft in his chin. His plump cheeks gave a strange oblate look to his head. We shook hands and he smiled. It was a brilliant smile. Charm came off him like a perfume. He had the same immediate effect on me as Karl-Heinz had. Within seconds of meeting them both, you liked them and, more importantly, you wanted them to like you back. The only difference with Aram Lodokian was a slight side effect. A minute or so after yielding to the charm came a moment’s doubt as to the wisdom of so doing. Just a fleeting moment, then it passed. Although Karl-Heinz was in many ways utterly disreputable, this aftertaste never occurred.
I sat down.
“What do you know about my country?” Lodokian asked.
I decided on honesty. “Absolutely nothing.”
With enormous effort he got to his feet, shuffled laboriously to the window and beckoned me over. We looked down on the crowds in Friedrichstrasse.
“Do you think they know about the two million? Of course not.”
“Two million what?”
“The two million Armenians the Turks killed in 1915. The biggest genocide in the history of the world.”
I did not know what to say.
“Nobody wants to know the truth. That’s why I made these films.”
He clasped his mottled hands together and shook them at me in a curious gesture. He always did this to emphasize a point.
“Don’t turn your back on reality,” he said fiercely to me. “Don’t let people dream too much. Is dangerous.”
A line from some modern poem came into my head. “Human nature cannot stand too much reality,” I misquoted.
“It’s the only medicine,” he said. “The only medicine.”
I was wordless once more.
It took him two minutes to regain his seat, where he lit another cigarette.
“This is why I like your film,” he said, mystifyingly. “Very good philosophy, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Now this is Realismus. You talk to Aram, he will make the contracts.”
I felt an effervescence in my body—my blood turned to seltzer. I shook the old man’s hand and then Aram Lodokian showed me into another office. I think we talked vaguely of contracts. I remember Aram suggesting a fee of ten thousand dollars. He said they paid in dollars because of the last inflation. He smiled apologetically. I promised to acquire a lawyer that afternoon. He called for coffee and cake and offered me a Russian cigarette. His smiles and charm enfolded me like a shawl.
“Have you thought of a cast?” he asked, leaning over to light my cigarette. His English was perfect, accentless and somehow all the more foreign sounding because of that. He sat back and rubbed the knuckle of his forefinger up and down the cleft in his chin. It was a frequent gesture. I thought suddenly of it as a groove worn away by the constant motion.
“Well … Karl-Heinz Kornfeld for Saint-Preux.”
“Excellent! What about Monika Alt for Julie?”
“Possibly …”
“Or Lola Templin-Tavel?”
We nattered on, enjoying this the fantasy stage of a film project when absolutely anything and everything is possible. On my way out I asked if he could advance me five hundred dollars against my fee. Without the slightest hesitation he wrote out a check. I went straight to a post office and cabled Sonia: MONEY ON WAY STOP COME TO BERLIN SOONEST LOVE JOHN JAMES.
I still find it hard to explain why Duric Lodokian should have seen Julie as a fit subject for Realismus. I now think Aram had more influence than he acknowledged. He denied this at the time, stating that it was a combination of Rousseau’s name, the extreme length of the book and the comparative brevity of my script. His father had been very impressed that I could have constructed a story out of such intractable material.
“There are some fools,” Aram said, “who actually think that a story is unimportant. But a good story will satisfy anybody. Beautiful lightings, sets, costumes, fancy camerawork, intensity of style—this is for a coterie.” I half-agreed with him. But, anyway, whatever the reasons for the selection of Julie, I knew that I was now on my way. The path ahead was finally clear. And, also, I find it pointless to speculate on reasons too long. We can only do so much to influence events. The chain of cause and effect can be illusory and misleading. Why did that bullet shatter Somerville-Start’s teeth and not mine? What made Karl-Heinz send me the postcard? And so on. A little reflection and the so-called pattern of your life soon appears as little more than an aggregate of hazard and chance. We think we recognize good and bad luck when it affects us, but in reality there is nothing but luck. From that standpoint the Realismus contract did not seem fortuitous at all.
I acquired a lawyer, papers were drawn up and signed and half my fee was deposited in a newly opened bank account. I was suddenly wealthy again. I started looking for furnished accommodation for me and my family and moved into an office in the Realismus studios near
the huge gasworks in Grunewald.
I found a furnished apartment not far from 129B on Rudolfplatz a few blocks away. I was oddly reluctant to change districts; so too was Karl-Heinz. The night before I left (Sonia and the children were due to arrive in a week or so) we had a final celebratory dinner. I gave Frau Mittenklott extra money and she cooked a gargantuan meal that made even Georg gasp. We had green corn soup, carp marinated in vinegar with horseradish sauce, stewed mutton with paprika and a hot chocolate pudding. It was a pleasant occasion in that warm fuggy flat, surrounded by the buzz of insects, and we all drank far too much. I promised Georg that no film would ever employ so many insects as Julie would. It was a fine evening. And prophetic. For the first time I registered how much Karl-Heinz drank—topped off on this occasion by three tumblers of brandy at the end of the meal. And then we talked about casting Julie. I said that at the moment Monika Alt was the prime contender. Karl-Heinz screwed up his face.
“I can see she might be good,” he said, “but before you give her the job you should see one other person.”
“Who?”
“Doon Bogan.”
Doon Bogan, Doon Bogan. I can hardly write the name even to this day.