Alongside three other girls from Shanghai, in the cargo hold of a ship, Bébé subsisted for two weeks on a stash of flour buns filled with preserved vegetables, and tangerine peel to stave off the seasickness. It was so hot and stuffy one of the girls fainted. They stripped her down to her underwear to cool her body, not realizing the floor had traces of ship diesel, leaving her with faint chemical burns on the backs of her calves when she woke. Upon docking, Bébé thought they’d reached Marseilles, but a tall African man appeared belowdecks and told them, in perfect Mandarin, that they were in Nairobi. Knocked out by his language skills, the girls dissolved into nervous giggles. They had to switch ships to avoid detection, he explained. The transit could take two hours, two days, or two weeks, depending. Depending on what? they asked. Your fortune, he said, as he brought them their first hot meal in a long time, a simple but delicious cornmeal paste with green peas. When he stretched over to refill their drinking water, he smiled kindly. The salty-sour edge of his perspiration reminded Bébé of five-spice powder, and she wanted to touch the kinks in his hair.
All Bébé saw of Nairobi was a crane moving a container.
They were given clearance to depart in a few hours.
Safe travels and smooth winds, the tall man said, as he chirruped like a starling and locked the hatch.
* * *
—
AS SOON AS they reached Marseilles, the girls were transferred from a container in a shipyard to the back of a van with tinted windows. Welcome to the Corsican-Chinese Friendship & Trade Association, a middle-aged Chinese woman said in Cantonese-inflected Mandarin. She had a bad perm and was flanked by two stocky white men who had collected their passports upon arrival. I am gravely sorry to inform you that the Nike factory has been shut down, the woman continued. Fortunately we have for you options. There was a management fee for the business contacts, transactional logistics, round-the-clock protection, communal housing, but not to worry, automatic installments would allow for ongoing repayment. Things don’t always go according to plan, it’s hard to be on one’s own in a foreign land. Ahyi understands—she referred to herself in the familiar form—Ahyi’s been through it all.
The girl with the chemical burns asked: What business contacts?
Don’t be stupid, another girl said, already crying. She’s talking about prostitution!
What an uncivilized word, Ahyi said. We much prefer to call our girls imported goods.
We could report you to the police, the girl with the chemical burns said. She was beginning to hyperventilate. You’re illegal immigrants now, Ahyi said serenely as she held a plastic bag over the wheezing girl’s nose and mouth. Breathe, she instructed. To the rest of them she said: I can assure you life with us will be more worthwhile than life in jail.
When the van came to a stop and the side door slid open, Bébé dove out of it, vaulting directly into the thickset arms of an older white man they would come to know only as the Corsican. He pulled Bébé toward him by her hair. Pity to scalp such a pretty face, Ahyi shrugged, but it’s no problem to put a wig on you. As she stepped around to the back of the van, she pushed her quilted floral jacket back to reveal a holstered handgun. Please, Ahyi said, for your own sake, don’t do something like that again. What do you take us for, amateurs?
* * *
—
THE CORSICAN-CHINESE Friendship & Trade Association was cordially established when Ahyi and the Corsican were wed almost a decade ago, having merged their hearts to consecrate their criminal potential. Ahyi’s homespun syndicate ran a job agency in Shanghai that was a front for human trafficking, specializing in a Shanghai-Nairobi-Marseilles route and a Nanjing–Belize–Los Angeles route. The Corsican’s crew ran a prostitution ring. Under the Corsican’s aegis an assortment of third-world women—Bulgarian, Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Kazakh—catered to businessmen passing through Marseilles.
Mostly the clientele was French and Corsican, occasionally Spanish and Italian. Nationality regardless, they were curiously the self-same species of man: middling, middle-aged, and married, potbellied or pinched in polyester suits they filled out too much or too little. The transactional logistics took place in little motels around the edge of the city center furnished with fusty beds that felt used even when they were freshly made, to and from which the girls were heavily escorted. Ahyi, who spoke a fluent if sharply nasal French with a strong Nanjing twang that made it sound more Cantonese than French, gave all of them new names.
Fresh beginnings, Ahyi said.
Bébé found hers a letdown in this regard.
In French the vowels rose and in Mandarin they descended, but “Bébé” was to all intents and purposes a phonetic facsimile of “蓓蓓.” For weeks she was repulsed that all things considered, there was room yet in her for so dainty a variety of disappointment. Even so, Ahyi hadn’t explained to her that Bébé wasn’t really a French girl’s name the way Estelle or Margaux was. One hot day months and months later in Paris, when Bébé learned in the course of the volunteer-run beginner French lessons at the immigrant activity center that her name was the French equivalent of baby, as in infant, as in a term of romantic endearment, as in 宝贝, she put her hand up to go to the bathroom. How do we ask politely to use the bathroom, the teacher cooed, if you please? Bébé kept her eyes on the daisy charms of the teacher’s spectacle chain as she recited, pronouncing the puis-je and the de bain too emphatically: May I please go to the bathroom?
In the bathroom Bébé thought she would throw up, but there was nothing inside. She ran the tap on high, washing her face with brisk, exaggerated motions. Smoothing back her damp hair in the mirror, she gargled her mouth.
Pas de baisers, Monsieur, j’ai dit pas de baisers!
4
A kiss is still a kiss, a man sang as he tickled piano keys on the TV screen in Marlene’s darkened apartment. A sigh is just a sigh. It was late on a Saturday night, or early on a Sunday morning, and Marlene had fallen asleep watching Casablanca when the boy called for the first time last weekend. The rhythmic ringing rattled Marlene awake. By the glow of the TV, she located the telephone and before scrambling to pick it up thought: Someone must have died.
Miss Dietrich’s residence, she said with an indeterminate accent to hide the tremble in her voice, who is calling? Over the line no greeting or name was offered. Instead a voice launched evenly into High German:
All is so far gone and long passed over.
Even the star from which I receive such light
has been dead for a million years.
I think I heard awful words exchanged
on a boat that went by. On the hour, a clock strikes
—but in which house?
Excuse me, Marlene said, dazed. Is that not Rilke?
The voice on the other end of the line laughed: So—it’s true.
What’s true?
You are an actress who knows your Rilke.
I’m sorry?
The voice ignored her to continue:
I should like to leave my heart behind
and step out under the vast sky.
I should like to pray. And one out of all the stars
must surely still remain.
I think, I know, which one it is—
In spite of herself Marlene interrupted the stranger, pulling her voice back to deliver the poem’s end from memory:
—At the end of her beam in the sky,
she alone stands like a white city.
A moment of silence followed, and she began to suspect that she was still asleep. This was a dream—not a bad one at that. A tad twee, but nonetheless something she could go along with.
She heard: Excellent, Marlene.
Where did you get this number?
You wouldn’t believe me, even if I told you.
Who is this?
Only a German schoo
lboy in Paris who heard that Rilke was Marlene Dietrich’s favorite poet and wanted to please her.
Write your own lines and get a life.
That’s easy for you to say, Marlene. You were born in 1901. I was born seventy years after you. Now everything has already happened. No new art of adequate meaning can come from my industrialized soul.
Your industrialized soul?
So quoting Rilke is not overreaching or derivative. It merely acknowledges my own limitations in my given time and place.
What drivel, Marlene said. What are they teaching in the schools these days?
Drivel is quite right, the voice on the phone said. Schools are conformist instruments of the state. Books are the great equalizer, and I am merely a boy who reads.
Marlene snorted.
Do your industrialized soul a favor, she said. Don’t call again.
She hung the phone up, her heart beating fast. Humphrey Bogart was smiling his invitingly weary smile at her from the TV, and it seemed as if he were the one Marlene had been speaking with. Ingrid Bergman looked up at Bogie: But what about us?
Bogie delivered his famous line with gentle panache: We’ll always have Paris.
Even though Marlene had slept through the movie, she found herself tearing up from muscle memory. She’d once cried at this precise line when watching Casablanca, why not cry once more? She would like—to step out of her heart and go walking beneath the enormous sky. She would like—to pray. Now she was really crying. She had never been able to shed a tear on command in a movie, and she was not a fan of the Stanislavski method, but she saw now its merits. The physicality of tearing up had led to the emotion, not the other way around. She wiped her eyes on the back of her hand, and picked up the phone to see if the stranger was still there.
He was not.
In which case, this was hardly a dream. Someone had called in the middle of the night, and Marlene had answered the phone. Hi, she whispered to the dial tone, I’m still here.
On the TV, Bogie lifted Bergman’s chin so her eyes met his.
Marlene held on to the cord of the phone, beginning to feel indignant that ten years shy of being a hundred, this fist-sized piece of pulp in her chest could still be conned into going faster by some schoolboy pranking with a bauble of German poetry, and tear ducts fulsomely activated just by watching Humphrey Bogart say his lines in a movie! Standards around here had fallen to rock bottom. This beating heart had been the dispassionate surveyor of the finest stock L.A./New York/Berlin/Paris/Cannes had to offer. Hemingway had once written Marlene: What do you really want to do for a life’s work? Break everyone’s heart for a dime? You could always break mine and I’ll give you a nickel.
Clearing her nose on her nightdress, she picked up her binoculars and focused on the TV. Marlene observed, in close-up, Bogie watching Ingrid Bergman board a waiting plane, as she found herself thinking that she would not mind if the boy called again. Who was he? And of all things, for him to have picked Rilke’s “Lament”! It was one of her old favorites. How pleased she was with herself, too, that without hesitation she had dredged the poem up perfectly, not a word out of place.
The plane was taking off.
Bogie was walking into the fog, watching Ingrid Bergman fly away from him, his gin joint, and Casablanca. If the boy was on the phone now, she could tell him that should have been her, for Marlene had been eyeing the leading role of Ilsa Lund that spring of 1942. Just past forty at the time, Marlene was on the lookout for a prestige project. Casablanca was a Warner Bros. production and Marlene was signed to Universal then, but she’d arm-twisted her agent into a possible loan. Ronald Reagan was one of Warner Bros.’s top contenders to play Rick Blaine. As for Ilsa Lund, Ann Sheridan’s and Hedy Lamarr’s names had been mentioned, but Marlene was looking to mount a challenge. It was of vital importance for a film actress to demonstrate that her market value as a leading lady remained undiminished even though she was no longer in her twenties or thirties. Marlene found it outrageous that her male counterparts in their forties and fifties had no problems being cast as romantic leads, but already the scripts she was beginning to receive were markedly different from before.
For ten years she’d played, exclusively and to great effect, femmes fatales.
Marlene made these stock characters entirely her own not by vamping them up or showing more skin. Her genius, which ran contrary to intuition, was simple. Because she played them bored, her characters became complex. Love is a divertissement they have long since tired of. Having seen it all, her characters go through life unmoved, with twinkling-eyed fatalism, but they’ll surprise the audience yet by dropping all worldly defenses for a moment of amour fou: after falling for the enemy and abetting his escape in Dishonored, X-27 declines a blindfold but reapplies her lipstick before turning to face down a firing squad.
That was one of her favorite roles.
Now she was being asked to play the older woman, the aging diva.
Was this the fate of every actress, or had her reputation tailed off ever since she and Josef von Sternberg broke up in 1935? It was still difficult for her to think about him. Jo was smart and generous, a true aesthete whose eccentricities made her laugh. What she liked best: behind the gristly veneer of his erudite skepticism, he had a soft-centered heart. But Jo was also jealous of everything, and she could not stomach the part of him that was convinced that he owned her because he’d spotted her in Berlin when she was a nobody and cast her in his movie. The Blue Angel was a hit, it was true, and things moved quickly after that. Paramount wanted to bring Marlene over to Hollywood immediately to be their answer to MGM’s Garbo. Receiving the offer, she had dithered before Jo came to Berlin to arrange everything for her.
I don’t know anyone in Hollywood, she said.
You know me, he said. That’s all you’ll need.
Contracted to make six films for Paramount together, they were a golden couple. Hollywood ate that candy right out of their hands even if, or especially because, they cut an unlikely figure together—Marlene was tall and radiant, Jo short and strange. On the afternoon they agreed to end it, Jo was wearing sporty white flannel trousers. Marlene recalled this sartorial inconsistency with clarity, because just then she had been flirting around with Fred Perry, who’d brought the fashion for tennis whites off the courts and into her parlor. Jo had scoffed that the only sort of men who would wear white pants to lunch were those who were all brawn and no brains, but here he was standing up in white flannels to congratulate her on their breakup as “at last an adult decision,” even advising her on which directors she should work with next. As he walked away, she saw that he was crying. Good luck, he said. They won’t light you like I light you. Listen to yourself, she made herself say. He left with the door wide open, and it took her a long time to rise to shut it.
The next time she heard from Jo, he was in Yokohoma.
I’m never going to make another film, he wrote her. My end is here.
Jo, she wrote back. I promise you you’re going to make more films. They just won’t have me in them.
* * *
—
AFTER HER ROMANTIC and creative partnership with Jo ended, Marlene found that shopping for roles was more daunting than she’d expected. Jo was an auteur who had written all his films around her; without him she would have to go about it just like everyone else—a working actress vying for prewritten parts. She had high hopes for Ilsa Lund in Casablanca, and was deeply offended when Warner Bros. announced that Ingrid Bergman would star, alongside Humphrey Bogart.
Really? Marlene said to her agent. That Swedish goody-two-shoes who doesn’t wear makeup?
Reading the script for Casablanca, Marlene had been shrewd enough to see from the outset that the movie would stand the test of time. What would remain was the love story. Not the anti-Nazi, anti-Vichy plot—it was, after all, a U.S. Department of War Films product. That wo
uld be forgotten in the blink of a future moviegoer’s eye, registering merely as a period backdrop against which idealism could triumph glamorously over cynicism. Such themes were current and urgent in Hollywood now that America had caught up with the political climate since Pearl Harbor.
They had certainly taken their time with that.
Indeed, not so many summers ago, taking her routine summer vacation in Cannes, Marlene had been incensed by Joe Kennedy preaching the benefits of isolationism to a brunch table. It had been Marlene’s summer of Joes. They were all staying at the same Riviera resort—Jo von Sternberg, Joe Kennedy, Joe Carstairs. Everyone was jealous of Joe Carstairs, whom Marlene called the Pirate for the salty tattoos on her toned forearms. The Pirate was a fine sailor and, as the heiress of Standard Oil, she often picked up everyone’s bill. Many a morning Marlene would sail out to sea with the Pirate on her yacht. They would drop anchor in the middle of the Côte d’Azur and scissor in the sun. When they returned to the resort tanned and sated, the brunch table would be in full swing. On this particular muggy afternoon, Joe Kennedy pontificated freely: We must proceed with caution. It would be dangerous for America to fall afoul of a country like Germany, and a man on a meteoric rise.
A man on a meteoric rise, the Pirate said. Is that all you have to say about Adolf Hitler?
Joe Kennedy sputtered on about the prudence of an appeasement policy, and not being hasty—let’s see what he does now that he is chancellor and president before we judge the man too soon—but he turned red in the face as Marlene chipped in: Isn’t anyone going to do anything about him before it’s too late, or do I have to finish him off with my altar of Venus?
The table roared with laughter.
The American ambassador was saved by the juvenile graces of his son, Jack, who had not yet turned twenty-one.
Delayed Rays of a Star Page 4