* * *
—
AFTER THE UFA production studio fell under the auspices of the new Ministry of Propaganda, the Doctor had made a speech at the Tobis Film Palace. This was a war they had to fight in many theaters, including that of culture, Herr Doktor Minister Goebbels intoned. The continued service of creative professionals in the motion picture industry to produce Ministry-approved German films was as indispensable as that of soldiers going into battle. Some of the crew found it absurd that films now had to be approved and censored by a governmental body before they were green-lit for production or distributed for public consumption, but what was there to do besides making a couple of quibbles and going on with your work, if you wanted to keep your job in this unstable economy?
Senior crew who had worked for more than ten years in the industry could apply with an upcoming project, signed by a director, to be exempt from conscription. Most of the other crew stayed on gladly, scrambling, simpering to get the remaining state-sanctioned directors in Berlin to sign them on to their projects, but Schmitz was one of the few with other ideas.
One weekend they were having a drink at their usual tavern when a dispute began to escalate. Hans Haas was not sure he followed.
There were so many parties, fronts, coalitions, and putsches it was hard to keep track of them all, the SPD, the KPD, the NSDAP, the DNVP. The production coordinator was trying to drown everyone out in a loud voice about “us workers against the goddamn old boys’ club.” The film loader, the most educated of them, talked about job creation through rearmament and living space going hand in hand with “breaking the chains of shame of Versailles and putting an end to the system that abandoned us to slavery.” The boom operator, barely audible, suggested “the necessity of compromise.” Democracy is for the weak, the production coordinator said to shut the boom operator up, and the film loader agreed, it had to be all or nothing. Someone made a joke about how the only thing that brought the left and the right together was when they united to bash the middle, hö-hö. War is war, and schnapps is schnapps!
Hans Haas was a little tipsy. Though he was not really grasping their boozed-out arguments, he was still enjoying their rowdy camaraderie, when all of a sudden Schmitz banged his fist on the table.
Friends, he said. Talk is cheap.
Schmitz took a piece of paper out of his pocket and passed it around. It was an enlistment slip with his name on it. The boom operator was very drunk as he held the paper up to the light.
Who’re you fighting for, Schmitz?
Everyone knew that Schmitz was not active with any of the parties, left, right, or center.
Parties change hands, Schmitz said, country is forever.
The boom operator laughed and lunged for Schmitz’s crotch.
His pecker is too big for his underpants! Schmitz is himself the man!
Runts, Schmitz said. Piss off or shut up.
The night ended in typical fashion: lindy hop; broken glass; a trouncing. They were all kicked out of the bar when the production coordinator crowed like a rooster, Egyptian-walked all the way to a chubby waitress, reached out, and started to massage her sizable breasts in his hands as he called out: Hello, breakfast! He received from the feisty girl a kick in the nuts, and the well-lubricated group disbanded outside the bar, knocking heads and shaking hands, as Hans Haas walked with Schmitz until the junction of Alexanderplatz.
I’ll follow you, Hans Haas said as they parted.
I’m going home, Haas.
I mean—I’ll join up, too.
Get stuffed, Haas.
I’ll go where you go.
What’s it to you?
I’m your apprentice.
You’re a pain in the ass!
* * *
—
HANS HAAS TENDERED his resignation alongside Schmitz.
Kid, Schmitz had said to him any number of times. It’s war, not an adventure.
But it was simpler than that for Hans Haas, who never had someone to look up to. His father was a ne’er-do-well who went out to play skat and came home just to slap his mother around. The one time Hans Haas tried to put his body between them, he was punched up so badly he’d lost most of his milk teeth ahead of their time. He never tried it again. The day he left home, he’d asked his mother tremulously: You’ll be fine, won’t you? Yes, she said, I will be. Her voice was so firm he could almost look past her wet eyes. Apprenticing with Schmitz, Hans Haas found someone to learn from, and believe in. Though he looked imposing, Schmitz would have been the last person to throw his weight around. He could have had his assistants move all the equipment on set for him, but he would chip in and they would do it together. Out loud he might make a joke or two about you, but in a pinch he would stick his neck out for you, no questions asked. That was why Hans Haas wanted to go wherever he went, but of course he said nothing of this sort to Schmitz. Schmitz hated sentimental nonsense and would cross his eyes at him when they were lighting a schmaltzy scene for a production. Everything good he knew about life had come from Schmitz, and under his charge he’d built up a quiet confidence. There was a long way more to go before Hans Haas could be as good a gaffer, but that could wait.
Before they received their marching orders and after they collected their prorated paychecks, Schmitz took Hans Haas to the brothel he frequented on Ku’damm. Look, Hasi, Schmitz said. The longer you put it off, the harder it’ll be to live down when you’re older—You’ll thank me when you’ve got yourself a wife, she won’t think you’re a nancy—besides, what if you died a virgin on duty? Not going to have that pinned on me!
Schmitz offered up his go-to girl to Hans Haas.
It’s your first time, Schmitz said. Say hi to Gunda for me.
Gunda was much older. Hans Haas swallowed nervously as he entered the room. She had thin lips, and bewitching stretch marks on her belly and under her thighs that he wanted to touch but did not dare to, as she moved expertly to lick the shaft of his penis. She laughed when he tried to hide his erection from her. Didn’t Schmitz tell you I don’t bite, she said, or your money back? She wore her hair piled in a precarious chignon, and Hans Haas put a hand on her head, not to push her, but to see if the chignon would unravel. The moment her hair came free to frame her face was lovelier than the moment he tried to push himself clumsily into her. For the love of Thor, she said, it’s not like a spear you throw into the dark. She guided him with her hand. Hallo, he said to Schmitz in his head. So this is where you go to when you’re lonely? When it was over and Gunda put her hair back up, Hans Haas was amazed that it was just the same disheveled chignon as before. He tried to pay her. She waved him off, informing him that Schmitz had already prepaid in kind: silk stockings, hashish, chocolate liqueurs.
The man looks like a mountain bear, Gunda said, but I grant you, he’s got taste. First time he’s brought someone here, she added. Who’re you anyway, his kid cousin? Hans Haas told her they worked together at UFA. Schmitz is the best gaffer in Berlin, Hans Haas said proudly, and I assist him. Gaffer, Gunda said, so that’s what he is. The burns on his hands!
Hans Haas tried to tip her, but Gunda told him she didn’t accept cash. She’d not used paper money ever since the death of her sister—Edda had jumped into the Spree because a loan of four hundred marks she took out in 1921 had turned into forty-five trillion marks in 1923. A fish stinks from the head, but they were rid of the Kaiser and his cronies now. Things were looking up, the NSDAP was doing an admirable job of stabilizing the economy, all in good time, but it was best to live hand to mouth. What did freigeist riffraff like her need paper money for anyway? To stoke the fire?
VI
Leni’s collarbones shone. The hair and makeup unit was working their magic. She brushed loose bronzing powder off her blouse with the back of her hand, moving her neck and shoulders to see how best to position them when she mounted and dismounted the horse in her scene. Perha
ps there was too much around her décolletage, but she was pleased with the result in the mirror.
Leni watched as the extras stood in line.
The makeup artist shaded their faces with dark eye shadow and blush so they would look ruddy and dirty, darker complexioned: the extras were playing Moorish peasants. Other directors or actors might prefer to hide away in their own trailer till everything had been set up, but she liked nothing more than making her rounds and looking out for details, however tiny, that she could improve by pointing them out. Everything was of consequence on camera.
At the front of the line was a little girl.
More kohl around the corners of her eyes, Leni said. The girl fidgeted as the makeup artist worked. Unable to hold her eyes open to accommodate the movements of the pencil around their edges, the girl started to cry. There, there, Leni turned to the girl, have a toffee! She clicked her fingers at the assistant, who produced a paper bag of sweets from her waist pouch. Made from real butter and caramel, these sweets were hard to come by, even on the black market. From the look on the girl’s face, it must have been some time since she last had a treat. She’d stopped crying. Leni sat the girl on her knee, stroking her hair. The girl sucked on the toffee with loud, smacking sounds. Madam Riefenstahl, the girl said, unsticking her teeth and looking up hopefully at Leni, may I please have another? Leni patted the girl’s soft head. Of course you may, she said, pressing a big piece into her hand. And please, call me Tante Leni.
Tante Leni, the girl said solemnly, when I grow up, I want to be an actress, just like you.
What is your name, my dear?
Zazilia, the girl said, but you can call me Zee.
How adorable children were! Someday, Leni thought, she was bound to make a fantastic mother. She was impatient with everyone else, but with children she could be endlessly accommodating. That would show her own mother, who’d commented that Leni would be best off not procreating, she was so self-centered she would not even be able to keep a houseplant alive for more than a month. Schau, Mama! She stroked the girl’s soft, tangly hair and told the hair stylist to comb through the curls till they shone. Leni shared her mirror with the girl: Aren’t you pretty? The girl smiled up at her. When she was ready, she made a fist around the extra toffee and ran off to the holding area, where an older woman was watching with a worried look on her face. Leni gave a little nod in their direction to show that it was all very well, but just then she noticed one teenaged extra with a striking face.
Leni pictured her in a scene.
The extras had to blend into the background so that the leads could pop in the foreground. Give that girl there a scarf to wear, she told her assistant. Her face is too strong. It was done right away. Leni watched as the girl tucked her hair into it. Pretty faces had a head start, and Leni was a practical woman. She had a clear-eyed view of where she stood in every department. Her own face was not the one that would be noticed in a crowd, but from very early on she had understood her audience to be men, and learned to spin a portable world around her that they would look in on and fail to understand. As creatures of ego they saw in their failure to understand only the allure of a woman. And that point of indistinction was where she cut it on the bias, took them by the hand, and hinted that she needed them. In planting her need she seeded their want, in such a way that it would seem to them innate by the time that want surfaced. As far back as she could remember, it had always worked for her this way. There was first a Chilean expatriate who bought her a tennis racket. Leni did not know how to play tennis, but why should that stop her from showing up on the courts of the see-and-be-seen Berlin tennis and ice-skating club in white socks, folded down twice to expose her ankles?
Let me teach you, the Chilean said when he saw her.
I was hoping you might say that, she said.
One summer a Romanian Jewish producer with an aristocratic underbite chatted her up on a beach, where she was improvising dance in a monokini, throwing jetés inspired by the lusty tide, reaching upward toward the sky as she turned her face exultantly to the wind. He was enamored enough to wave away her amateurism as avant-gardism, to rent out entire concert halls to showcase her “free association” dances. When she broke her knee, she wept and asked him inconsolably: Tell me, wasn’t I Germany’s answer to Anna Pavlova? He kissed her shins. I will pay for the best physician in Berlin, he said. You must dance again.
Waiting to board a train to consult with an esteemed physician on the subway platform at Nollendorfplatz, Leni saw a movie poster: MOUNTAIN OF DESTINY. On it was a silhouetted man climbing a magnificent mountain, arm and leg lifted midstride as if in a choreographed dance sequence. Her train arrived. She let it pass. In a trance she hobbled to Mozart Hall, a few blocks down, where the poster indicated the movie was showing: snow, pathos, beauty! When the film ended, she knew with clarity what her new destiny was. She could no longer be a dancer? She was going to be a world-famous actress. The stage would forget you. A film reel could not.
* * *
—
IT TOOK LENI some time, but eventually she buttered up the right socialite from the tennis club’s circle and secured a meeting with the director Arnold Fanck at the Rumpelmayer pastry shop on Kurfürstendamm. How old are you, he asked. Twenty-three, she said. And have you played in bit parts? No, she said. She was saving herself up for a leading role. Ah, he said. She asked if he shot his movies on location, they were so stunning. He said yes, and mentioned that because of the extreme weather conditions, his actors rarely did their own stunts. They all had body doubles, professional mountaineers. If you cast me, she said, I would be very happy to do my own stunts. Surprised, he said he had not known she was familiar with mountaineering. How many expeditions had she made, and where to?
None yet, she said. But I know I can do it if I make my mind up to.
At the end of their chat, he said he would consider her for his next movie, but he did not have a new script yet. He was experiencing some writer’s block, he admitted. Trust me, she said, inspiration will flow if it’s meant to be. After he left, Leni went from the café directly to the nearest hospital, with neither appointment nor overnight bag, and coaxed an orthopedic surgeon into operating on her in the morning. Knee surgery was not the sort of thing anyone did on a whim, and Fanck had promised her nothing, but if things went as Leni hoped they would, she had to be one step ahead. Her knee had healed superficially, but it would not withstand the pressures of mountain climbing.
Your case isn’t an emergency, the surgeon said.
It’s more urgent than that, she said, I am about to be in a movie.
As she went under the ether at dawn, she saw clouds, precipices, mountains. When she woke at dusk, she had the invoice sent directly to her Romanian Jewish admirer, and she cabled the director-geologist to let him know what she’d done. Fanck arrived in her ward the next morning, and it was even better than what she’d imagined: from under his coat he handed her a bundle of paper wrapped in newspaper. I have to admit, he said, I was going to ignore your cable. But then, I couldn’t stop thinking of you—a young woman who asks you out for coffee, and twenty-four hours later, she’s gone for knee surgery so that, in case you are to cast her, she is ready to do her own stunts in your next Bergfilm. She smiled at him, licking unrouged lips. Since you kept me up all night, he said, I wrote you this.
She unwrapped the newspaper to find a manuscript entitled:
THE HOLY MOUNTAIN
It would be the first of numerous collaborations between them.
True to her word, Leni successfully performed all of her own stunts, getting better at it with every new movie they made. S.O.S. Iceberg, slated for a fall release in 1933, would take them to the Arctic, and she’d even choreographed the action sequences. Leni was looking forward to the adventure and took it upon herself to train up strength and stamina for the role. Every alternate weekday she brought weighted shin guards to the
Sportpalast and ran at least four times around the track. This particular afternoon, entering the arena, she was annoyed to see that it was entirely filled and she would not be able to use the facility. It appeared to be a rally for the upcoming federal elections. She had never been to one and was surprised they were so well attended. Since she was already here, she strapped on her weights all the same and did knee bends as she listened to a man with a small moustache and side-parted hair who spoke into a bullhorn: Whenever I stand up for the German peasant, it is for the sake of the Volk. The podium was far away but he had a clear, spirited voice that pricked Leni’s ears to attention. I have neither ancestral estate nor manor, he went on. My interests are yours. I believe I would be the only statesman in the world who does not have a bank account. I hold no stock, I have no shares in any companies. I do not draw any dividends. We are not fighting Jewish or Christian capitalism, we are fighting every capitalism: if you allow me, I would like to make you completely free.
Leni’s calves began to tremble in their weighted shin guards.
She could not see his face in detail from the back of the stadium, but his last words had curved round the arena to touch the tips of her bare shoulders. She had to squat briefly to regain her balance. When she stood up, the crowd erupted into a penultimate wave of Heils that carried her forward. Who is he, she asked the stranger next to her in the midst of the rabble. The one who will finally show the world what we are made of, the stranger said as he raised his hands.
Delayed Rays of a Star Page 14