“You wouldn’t sell my films. You would act with me!”
Menjou now twirls the other end of his mustache. He signs the contract and thinks to himself: insane.
“Surely you are French, surely from a fine noble family?”
Menjou is delighted that he has already signed the contract. “Noble? My father is French, my mother is German, from Leipzig. I’m an American. Born in 1892. I was a waiter in my father’s restaurant in Pittsburgh. Then I went to Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. In the war I served in France at the front. Then I was a motion picture agent. Until ten minutes ago I was still a salesman at C. C. Burr Enterprises. Now I’m the actor Adolphe Menjou. My brother will die laughing. And what, may I ask, will be my first role?”
“One of the Three Musketeers!”
One of the Three Musketeers catches Chaplin’s eye. He signs him on and directs the film A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (1923) with him and Purviance. Since then, Menjou’s brother isn’t dying of laughter anymore. Adolphe takes the ladder of success by storm, leaping up six rungs at a time. Lubitsch’s The Marriage Circle (1924) already shows him in top form, then he is a room waiter for the grand duchess, the gentleman of Paris. He is considered the world’s best-dressed man, along with the Prince of Wales, as the man with the two hundred suits and a thousand ties. His mustache, which had been the optical hallmark of the movie villain, sprouts offshoots on millions of upper lips, in America and Europe. He is one of the dozen people who can wear a tailcoat and a top hat, who can present a bouquet of flowers to a lady without occasioning a burst of laughter. Surely 100,000 per film was a bargain price for qualities like those.
When the contract ran out and Menjou wanted 150,000, Paramount didn’t sign, ignoring the fact that it was letting go its last, its only true gentleman, someone with both poise and a fine voice, someone who would bring his sound film, Fashions in Love (1929), adapted from Hermann Bahr’s play Concert, a great deal of success. Paramount does not give 150,000. Menjou is now in Paris. One cable after the other arrives. Their offer goes up to 125,000. Menjou doesn’t budge. He simply makes two sound films with W. R. Wilkerson in Europe on his own. He’s already working on two manuscripts with the author Ernst Bajda and will probably get the exquisite d’Abbadie d’Arrant as director. He doesn’t yet know where he will shoot it, in London, in Paris, or in Berlin.
“Frankly, Berlin would be my preference!” says W. R. Wilkerson. At this moment the long-distance office reports that Paris is on the line.
* * *
W. R. Wilkerson has put his feet up on the desk and is talking on the telephone with Adolphe Menjou, currently in Paris, Hotel Majestic. What I (a) can reveal, (b) have understood of Wilkerson’s garbled American English is this: that he had serious preliminary discussions with gentlemen from the German film industry on the Bremen; that he is going to Karlsbad today to see Laemmle to buy a story that Universal owns for Menjou; that he wants to begin production no later than October.
Then W. R. Wilkerson hands me the receiver. I don’t know why, but at this moment I take a deep bow before Menjou, who is more than a thousand miles away, adjust my wretched tie provocatively with my left hand.… Menjou speaks a very distinct and dignified German. Yes, he is looking forward to Berlin, quite a bit. Then he laughs when I state that Leipzig has accomplished something besides the trade fair after all. No, he’s traveling to Biarritz first to finish the scripts there. Work in Berlin? The odds are sixty to a hundred. It’s all very nice and polite. At the end W. R. Wilkerson hollers a cheerful goodbye into the mouthpiece.
A damned invention. One sits in an office in Berlin, holds a silly receiver in one’s hand, and sees the apartment in the Majestic quite clearly: Adolphe sitting in front of the machine in silk pajamas, woven in Siam, changing his clothes for the fourth time. The ends of his mustache are now being drizzled with holy oil by a Japanese servant. Miss Kathryn Carver, his wife, is standing next to him and hasn’t a clue what to do with the two hundred suits. Downstairs, on the set, six girls have been waiting for hours: they are bringing woolen ties they knitted for their Adolphe. But in the study, the elevator boy, who has the day off, is placing his autograph under a hundred photos: Adolphe Menjou, Adolphe Menjou, Adolphe Menjou.
Tempo, August 5, 1929
Klabund Died a Year Ago
THE WRITER AND THE DANCER FOR HIRE
That was a happy time, the winter of ’26: back then I was a dancer for hire in a big hotel in Berlin.
Waiter no. 4, with whom I enjoyed a close friendship, had actually warned me about the table next to the banjo. All he had to do was give me a sidelong scowl as he walked by, and I knew instantly: you’re not going to get a penny out of them. Oh, God, it didn’t look as though a tip was forthcoming, either. Next to a charming woman a thin young man was sitting, gazing sadly and shyly at the dance floor and then up at the lights, which now turned a soft red. Soft red meant tango, and the dancing really is much better and much sweeter with this lighting. Yes, but better and sweeter didn’t matter to me in the slightest back then. The weight, that was the question, whether one had to haul along 200 or just 180.
The Spaniards were just beginning to squeeze a sweet bit of music from their harmonicas. I wanted to duck out and give my legs a little breather, the wife of the distinguished financier having already trampled all over my sources of income during the foxtrot. But the dance instructor, a Russian who did not treat us well, caught me: the treadmill must not stand still for even a moment. So I went to this table, on the left next to the banjo, bowed in front of the sad young man, and began to sashay across the floor with his lady to a tango. While dancers for hire usually think about golden cigarette cases or new tie patterns while they dance, out of pure boredom, this lady was light on her feet and danced well. Every time we twirled past her young man, I watched him: he looked like Zinnemann.
Zinnemann had been the top student in our class, and we regularly copied our math homework from him. Terribly pale and thin, his hair cut short like a convict’s. Poor Zinnemann—we had thought he would one day invent a perpetual-motion machine—had a problem with his lungs. They’ve long since buried him. Next to the young man I saw a cap lying on the chair, along with a couple of books. You’d be far more likely to find a cap at a five o’clock tea than books like these.… surely no book was ever seen again in this dance club.
They came back often. I danced with the lady, and the young man watched us quite jealously. Once, when I was standing around in the hall, he came right up to me. I was already fearing that he wanted to offer me a tip: what the devil, I would have been loath to take it from him.
“Pardon me …” he addressed me timidly, “I wanted to ask you … so a dancer for hire … that must be very interesting … I’d think, very interesting …”
“Nope, it’s not.”
His eyes looked back at me feverishly from behind his glasses. “No, really … excuse me for asking … but how do you get to be one?”
Funny thing; dancers for hire are always asked how you get to be one. To the ladies I danced with or who were learning to dance the Charleston for seven marks fifty, I always spun all sorts of tales, from “I’ve seen better days” and “family feud, disinheritance, getting away from it all,” to “actually I wanted to become an aircraft designer,” and “not all hope is lost quite yet.” Still, I couldn’t feed a pack of lies to this pale fellow, who looked like my dead classmate Zinnemann: what can you do if you’re in bad shape? If your collar and cuffs can be reversed only twice? If you can’t spend the night on a bench in the Tiergarten during the winter? If the only line of credit you have is with a wine merchant who added three bottles of Malaga to your tab, then dumped this Malaga into the Landwehrkanal just to sell the empty bottles.—Rolls cost money. What can you do?
He found that terribly interesting. “How about writing that down, the way you told it to me. I’ll place it in a newspaper!” Yes, write … I had once done something along those lines, but I wanted to try it again.
“So come to me; I’ll help you!” He told me his address, near Ernst-Reuter-Platz.
“Whom should I ask for?”
“Ask for Klabund.”
* * *
On the following few days, the dance teacher was nowhere to be seen in Grunewald. The Russian dance instructor was spitting nails. I simply no longer showed up. At home I spent three nights writing about what my legs had experienced. Then I brought all of it to Klabund [aka Alfred Henschke]. He lived with his wife, Carola Neher, the lady with whom I had danced the tango.
My memoirs struck me as quite pathetic, but Klabund was pleased, and sat there for an hour doing revisions. It occurred to me to wonder what he might be doing to my text. Now and then Klabund told me about having done something similar as a piano player in a bar.
* * *
The B. Z. published my memoirs of a dancer for hire. But beforehand, Klabund wrote me a couple of lines of introduction. We got together in a café, where he gave me these lines to use as a preface for the essays. Very fine words about how one should write about life as it is, and this was the way to go about it.
As we sat there, on that gray winter’s morning, he looked even thinner, even paler. He held a handkerchief in front of his sunken mouth and coughed. “It’s nothing,” he said, and it really was nothing but a tiny red dot.
That is what he died of.
Tempo, August 12, 1929
* Dinner dance.
III
Film and Theater Reviews
As a means of engaging with the contemporary film and theater scene, and to earn a little rent money in the process, Wilder wrote dozens of reviews and short accounts of studio and industry developments. He attended movie premieres and theater openings, covered the latest hits and flops, and wrote about most of these productions within the restricted space of a capsule review. His reviews cover the final phase of the silent era and the advent of sound, using the new Tri-Ergon sound-on-film technology, which came comparatively late to Germany. He notes the talent of the great silent stars Chaplin and Norma Shearer, of the newcomers Marlene Dietrich and Henny Porten, and also of the beloved down-market duo Ole and Axel (or “Pat und Patachon,” as they were called in German). He offers a mixed review of Erich von Stroheim’s epic Greed (1924) but has plenty of good things to say about the film industry of the late 1920s in general. In “First Silhouette Sound Film,” Wilder writes admiringly of the pioneering animation work by Lotte Reiniger and its impact on Fräulein Fähnrich (Miss Midshipman, 1929), and his review of the American director Arthur Rosson’s The Winged Horseman (1929) affords him the chance to wax rhapsodic about the filmic portrayals of the American West—the source of his own nickname and the cultural mythology that captured the hearts of scores of European filmgoers—churned out on the backlots of Hollywood studios.
Wilder’s theater reviews feature a piece marking the fiftieth performance of Bertolt Brecht’s megahit Threepenny Opera, extolling the virtues of Kurt Weill’s music as well as the supreme acting of cabaret greats Rosa Valetti and Kurt Gerron, and a somewhat skeptical piece on John van Druten’s Young Woodley at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater. Although Wilder never showed much interest in Zionism elsewhere, in his review of Springtime in Palestine, an oddly compelling documentary of 1928 by Josef Gal-Ezer, he exhibits a degree of genuine curiosity, even sympathy. “We see European girls from bourgeois families who did office work or studied at universities back home now building streets,” he writes, “men previously unaccustomed to agrarian life now cultivating the soil.” He closed by noting that the applause in the theater was noticeably enthusiastic, something he himself would strive for, and nearly always achieve, in his own subsequent work as a writer-director.
Broken Barriers (1924)
A NEW SHEARER-MENJOU FILM
A film like a hundred other American ones; the interesting part is the subject matter, which is amazingly liberal; also of interest are four outstanding actors: Norma Shearer, James Kirkwood, Adolphe Menjou, Mae Bush.
The subject: Ward Trenton, who has been separated from his wife for years, is a misogynist, until Grace, a saleswoman, the youngest member of the impoverished Durland family, comes his way, in the following manner: Tommy Kemp, a friend of Irene and Gerti’s co-worker, organizes an orgy. Trenton is also there, and he makes sure Grace gets home before the explosion. Grace is in love with Ward Trenton. She (an American girl from a good family!) wants to break down the barriers imposed by morality and conventions and devote herself unconditionally to Trenton.
Meanwhile, Ward’s wife comes back, and the three—Grace, Ward, and Ward’s wife—happen to meet up at the home of Frau Reynolds; ugly scenes ensue: Frau Trenton will not hear of a divorce and insults Grace, who, in order to prevent a scandal, leaves the party. Now Grace knows she can never become Ward’s wife. And she wants to belong to Trenton more fervently than ever.
Ward struggles with himself, and goodness wins out. Grace now sees Ward less often. But one night, four old friends take part in a car trip: Grace, Mr. Durland, Irene, Ward Trenton, and—at the steering wheel—Tom Camp, dead drunk. The car drives through a forest at breakneck speed and flips over; the four of them have an accident. Tom Camp dies in Irene’s arms, Grace recovers quickly, Ward Trenton winds up in the hospital. There the physician sets up a little trap; he leads Trenton’s wife to believe that Ward will always remain a cripple. Then she demands a divorce from him and moves out. Now Grace can marry Trenton, who has a full recovery.
The cast: Grace Durland is played by Norma Shearer, a very personable young actress, beautiful, good figure, talented. Mae Bush, an outstanding actress who unfortunately receives too little attention, plays Irene. James Kirkwood does a solid job as Ward Trenton, playing him as serious and aristocratic, fully aware that his role entails embodying a Yankee imbued with the morality and conventions of America.
And then there is Adolphe Menjou (Tommy Kemp). His is only a supporting role, but it is brilliantly acted, full of inspiration and spicy details. Menjou, discovered by Chaplin and launched by Lubitsch, is today one of the most appealing and ingenious figures in American film.
Die Bühne, April 8, 1926
Ehekonflikte (Marital Conflicts, 1927)
AT THE PRIMUS PALACE
A wife is surprised by her husband while in her boudoir with another man. She pretends that she was attacked and that he is the burglar. But as the police are about to take him away, she reveals the hoax. She travels to Nice, the other man travels to Nice, the husband travels to Nice, and all three take up residence in the same hotel. And here the ludicrous game with the superficial conflicts continues, with the theft of a secret treaty added in for good measure, until the other man—who is the document thief—brings the married couple back together.
The writing, by Erich Herzog, and direction, by Alfons Berthier, are unbelievably clumsy. The second half was greeted with more and more laughter and whistles, and when the title card “These were awful hours” appeared toward the end, the audience chimed in with uproarious approval. Too bad that Lotte Lorring, Werner Pitschau, and Victor Colani were willing to stoop to this level for “baloney,” as the author sees it.
It was preceded by an equally weak American adventure film, Menschen der Nacht (Men of the Night, 1926).
B. Z. am Mittag, June 3, 1927
Eichberg Shoots a Film
When Richard Eichberg shoots a film, fun is sure to follow, and so the large studio set in Neubabelsberg is now reverberating with merry music. Der Fürst von Pappenheim (The Masked Mannequin, 1927), adapted from the well-known opera, is designed to set just the right mood. Egon Fürst, who manages fashion models, and his alter ego, “Fürst Egon,” are played by Curt Bois, and Mona Maris, an actress newly discovered by Eichberg, has the role of Princess Antoinette. The cast also features Dina Gralla and Werner Fütterer. The cinematography is by Heinrich Gärtner.
G. W. Pabst, the director of Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney, 1927), has spent hours standing outdo
ors in the searing sun, waiting for rain. And he succeeds in compelling the heavens to provide a downpour with lightning and thunder. The result is quite a soggy treat, and the scene is “true to life.” Now Pabst has gone to Paris with his lead actors and actresses, Brigitte Helm, Edith Jehanne, Uno Henning, and Fritz Rasp, and cameramen Fritz Arno Wagner and Walter Robert Lach, to film the outdoor scenes.
On a different part of the set, Dr. Fritz Wendhausen is working on the final shots for his film Der Kampf des Donald Westhofs (The Trial of Donald Westhof, 1927), adapted from the novel in the Berlin newspaper Illustrirte Zeitung. A scene in Spiess’s saloon, with a characteristic view onto the street, looks so natural that viewers think they are seeing the home turf of Elizza La Porta, Imre Ráday, Nicolai Malikoff, and Hermann Vallentin.
B. Z. am Mittag, June 7, 1927
Der Bettler vom Kölner Dom (The Beggar from Cologne Cathedral, 1927)
This rousing, fast-paced detective film provides good entertainment because it’s fun. Dr. Alfieri’s screenplay draws on a tried-and-true model, pitting a gang of thieves—who adopt many guises in their attempts to rob a young lady’s jewelry—against a famous detective, and he has a knack for tying together and tying up situations and imbuing the overall plot with a gentle, sometimes glitzy humor that nicely tones down the tension.
The shot sequences of the director, Rolf Randolf, move along rapidly and thus effectively. The acting is also very good. Harry Lamberz-Pausen, spiffed up as a “dashing fellow,” using his athletic strength to break into a strongbox, reels in hearty laughter. Henry Stuart plays the detective with genteel reserve, and Hanni Weisse, Fritz Kampers, Karl de Vogt, and Robert Scholz make for well-conceived characters as the band of thieves. The sets by G. A. Knauer and Willie Hameister’s camera work are quite lovely.
Billy Wilder on Assignment Page 15