Marlene turned to Jo, her hand stroking his: Is that not right, Jo-Jo?
But Jo was still on the tail end of his own commentary. They were speaking over each other, and only Anna May was listening. Style never asks, Jo said, style never apologizes. The coffee arrived, and the waiter set down a cup for each of them. Style never hesitates, Jo gesticulated. Style necessitates. He knocked over the sugar bowl but went right on: One day I meet a Russian at a screening of The Last Command, and I ask the Russian whether Russians behave as they do in my film. No, the Russian answers me, they do not, but they should!
十
Jo loved Asia. This proclamation was perhaps not half as facile as it might appear to be. He was proud that he’d put his body through some motions firsthand, having bathed in the Ganges River within sight of burning corpses in Varanasi, tipped a Burmese temple’s rosewood alms collection box in U.S. dollars after he touched the androgynous toes of the biggest Buddha statue and a fair bit of his or her limestone toenail chipped off, clapped his hands in a twelve-stoned Shinto garden in Kyoto that had been landscaped with the eye in mind such that at any one point you could only ever see eleven stones no matter your vantage point, had an indestructible hexagonal lump of his earwax extracted with a flaming candle and moxa needles as he prostrated himself on a bamboo mattress in Shanghai.
On all his journeys farther east, Jo would track down the equivalent of theater or live performance in that part of the world. In this way he had been privy to kuda lumping in Jakarta, where men in sarongs danced with rattan horses and chewed grass in a trance, or jo-ha-kyu five-act plays in Nagoya, a concept of modulation and movement applied to composition and pacing, translating imperfectly into beginning-break-rapid.
He had every admiration for what he termed the Oriental aesthetic, where craft was taken no less seriously but art had no qualms about commingling with life. Transcendence was muddied, not pristine. Jo learned this in a packed wooden playhouse in Manchuria as humid as a sauna, observing gender-indeterminate performers with painted faces and voluminous sleeves singing onstage in castrati voices, as the audience shouted for tea refills and threw pumpkin seeds over their shoulders. No one minded that the viewers were as loud as the performers themselves, and little Chinese children had clambered over his thighs and calves to make their way onto the stage, where they danced or laughed, mimicking the actors or chirruping among themselves.
When they got bored, they slid back down his lap to their parents.
The performers were completely indifferent to the children rolling at their feet, sidestepping or crawling over them as necessary. Toward the back of the small stage, there was a single hooded figure, all in black. The figure had his arms raised, though he did not move. His face was obscured, pure shadow. Jo thought he must have been a personification of death. Fascinating to include a literal figure of darkness static onstage without lines, but surely he would intervene in the action at some point?
After half an hour Jo was given to understand that the hooded man was a tea server.
From time to time, the performers would break character as they pleased, turning their backs to the audience, reaching for a small tray hidden behind the sleeves of the hooded man, to sip lukewarm tea from tiny porcelain cups. The tea server’s black garb indicated that he was meant to be invisible to the audience. After the performers returned the cup to the tray, they readjusted their beards or lily sleeves or headgear, carrying on right where they left off in their twangy falsettos. Enamored of the deliberate histrionics and natural restraint, Jo did not think the poker-faced Chinaman emoted less. He thought their emotions were more fluid, but that they did not simply allow their feelings to seep into and out of every pore without due consideration.
Anna May was the first Asian American performer he had worked with, and from everything he had seen her in, she was a natural. From Across to Singapore to Flame of Love, he found her to be an underutilized actress of the highest order. After a bout of acrobatic lovemaking, when Marlene had demanded to know whom else—other than herself—he thought to be a fine performer, he’d tried to sidestep the ambush by naming men (Emil Jannings, Charles Laughton, and you can’t deny that Bela Lugosi is deliberate but effective), but she forced it out of him all the same. All right, he conceded, all right. Hedy Lamarr, Anna May Wong—
Anna May Wong?
It’s too bad the studios are sticks in the mud about color, he said. Wouldn’t it be bold to see Anna May Wong play Catherine the Great?
I would like to play Catherine the Great, Marlene said coldly.
You already are Catherine the Great, Jo said, where would the fun in that be?
In any case, Marlene said, the studios would never sign off on a movie like that. A Chinese lead wouldn’t be able to make them any money.
To hell with the studios and money, Jo said, I am concerned with cinema!
* * *
—
AMERICAN CRITICS FOUND him so new and yet so old. The Europeans were intrigued but confused: Is he one of us, or one of them? Jo knew he was able to give off this old-newness and us-themness because Jonas Stern was born by the Danube in Vienna, Austria; Jo Sternberg had grown up in and dropped out of Jamaica High School in Queens, New York; and Josef von Sternberg was now making movies with one leg in Babelsberg, Berlin, and the other in Hollywood, L.A. For him, “us” and “them,” “here” and “there,” “new” and “old” were neither “either” nor “or.” He was able to accessorize himself convincingly with all of these contradictions at once, further augmented by and realized in his choice of self-presentation: the artful dandy lost in time. The equestrian jodhpurs and ill-fitting jackets, his thinned-out moustache and imperial affectation had all been carefully selected and puckishly performed.
If you do not entertain yourself now, who will when?
And so with gusto and glee Jo exploited different aspects of himself, improvised in loving accordance with his environs. In Berlin he thought like a New Yorker, talked like a New Yorker, moved like a New Yorker. In L.A. he thought like a German Jew, talked like a German Jew, moved like a German Jew. Was it pompous and pretentious to say he was as influenced by Japanese kabuki as he was by German expressionism as he was by Hollywood Prohibition gangster flicks? He was pompous and pretentious, then. Would Western critics see the kabuki in the Viennese-German-Jewish-American? Not in a hundred years. Would his contemporaries, in the complacency of their unseeing insularity, deride the curiosity of his cosmopolitan cupidity? In a heartbeat. Perhaps this, too, was what he liked best about Marlene: her lust for bothness. The German press gave Marlene a hard time for becoming American without realizing, Jo thought, that as with everything else she did in her life, she played it both ways: she looked as good in a skirt as she did in trousers, she was married but she philandered without concealment or deception, she was not a simple opportunist in her career but she was game to try everything once. By their very nature decisions tended toward narrowing life’s possibilities, but Marlene had a knack for making decisions that opened rather than closed, shrugging labels off like they were fleas.
On his part Jo never resisted any label.
He had foresight enough to see that the more labels were attached to him in theory, the more leeway he had in practice. But he supposed that was easy for someone like him to say about himself. He could collect labels freely and flick them away as easily as the ends of cigarillos when he was done using them, but on someone like Anna May, labels once availed of could not be so simply obliterated.
Even so, he thought that with the rise of talkies, what would have placed a limitation on the roles Anna May could play was her voice. And frankly it had nothing to do with being Chinese, but everything to do with being Californian. Her voice was alto, colored with a regal sadness, but the diction was quite flat. You did not notice it much when she was a side character with a throwaway line or two, but it would have been noticeable had she needed to c
arry an entire film. Jo had preempted the sound problem for Marlene, who had a thick Berlinische tongue that wrapped itself helplessly around English. The moment she docked in New York he’d gifted her a bottle-green Rolls-Royce and hired for her the following personnel at significant personal expense: an accent coach, a dietician, a personal trainer, a hairdresser. Marlene accepted them all, no questions asked, other than the personal trainer: I’d rather starve than exercise. Powered by Prussian willpower she shaved off the pounds in no time. Her dark roots never showed under their bottle-blonde cover, and her mid-Atlantic accent—littered with a few last German idiosyncrasies he scolded her aloud for, but in secret found utterly endearing—was soon crisp.
* * *
—
WHEN MARLENE MADE her first public appearances in New York and then L.A., glowing on Jo’s arm and a full head taller than him in her heels, he said to entertainment reporters: I am Marlene—Marlene is me.
Editorial responses ranged from the unimaginatively obsequious (“premium artistic collaboration of our here and now, this Trilby and Svengali”) to the concerned (“smitten as he seems, one senses a latent, insalubrious misogyny on the part of this director”), but there was one reporter who had picked up on the Flaubertian aspect of his comment (“it was almost a hundred years ago when Gustave Flaubert was asked how it was that he could write from a woman’s innermost self so spellbindingly without the experience of being a woman, and the author had answered: I am Madame Bovary—Madame Bovary is me. When Mr. von Sternberg effected the same response at the Astor Place hotel yesterday evening following the arrival of his muse to New York City, before they move on to Hollywood and go straight into production, for Paramount has hastened to sign the starlet even before the ship sailed, we see that he is even more of a master illusionist than we know him to be: where does the foppish gent end in Marlene Dietrich, and the astute seductress begin in Mr. von Sternberg?”).
The only regret he had in regard to his wife (that this was his only regret either spoke poorly of his character, or showed he had never loved the woman) was that she had left him thinking he and Marlene were a half-baked cliché: ingenue meets director, ingenue sleeps with director. Humor me, Jo, close this loop with me, will you? His wife drew a circle in the air between them with her finger, where it lingered. Director makes ingenue a star, ingenue leaves director.
It’s not what you think, he said hotly. You wouldn’t understand.
I wouldn’t understand, she said in a defeated way, quiet tears wetting her cheeks, and then she screamed so loudly and angrily he jumped: I wouldn’t understand? Rubbing his temples vigorously, he wished she could settle down and shush, her crying was giving him a grand headache. Marlene could be dramatic and unreasonable, but she was never one for tears. He liked that about her. He put his hands up, gesticulating for language. Marlene and I, he began. Marlene and I, we are: a glove puppet tattooed onto the back of a hand; a recursive matryoshka nesting doll set that never ends; a trompe l’oeil twice reversed in a magic mirror; a hermaphrodite sea star cartwheeling across the ocean floor—
He thought his wife had broken down into ever more hysterical sobbing, but then he saw that he was much mistaken: she was laughing. Her hoarse contempt shocked him into silence. He did not dare go on. A hermaphrodite sea star, Jo? she whispered when she caught her breath. I’ll sign the papers.
He hoped his ex would read the Flaubertian editorial (he was of poor character and he had never loved the woman). How lucky he was to have found Marlene. It had come so close to not happening, too. He had considered many other German actresses for the role of Lola Lola in The Blue Angel—Trude Hesterberg, Lucie Mannheim, Leni Riefenstahl, Käthe Haack—when a friend took him and his producer to see a comic play in a cheap theater to round off their evening with something lowbrow.
Marlene was in the play.
She was awful, an amateur. Her acting was sheer melodrama, but nobody could look away from her. The ass is not bad, someone said, but doesn’t she need a face, too? Another warned: Be on your guard, she is one of those new-age ambisexuals. The next day, unbeknownst to his friends, Jo sent Marlene a memo to come audition. Promptly she came, but not the way the other hopefuls arrived, looking as if they would fizz out if you spoke one word with them. Jo spotted Marlene in the waiting room, reading a book. When he passed by her, he said: What are you reading, poetry? Close enough, she said with a shrug, barely looking up. He squinted to scrutinize the spine. It was Schopenhauer. He blushed and said he would see her later. For the audition and screen test, they wanted her to sing the same song in German and English, “You’re the Cream in My Coffee.” She said in a bored tone: Can’t I just smoke a cigarette?
Later he saw just how clever and funny she was.
There is nothing a director finds less interesting than an actress who is dying to be cast in his film, and there is nothing more intriguing for a man who needs to be in control than the self-possessed comportment of a woman who has casual sex with both men and women by night after closing a rowdy cabaret act as the last girl in a chorus line—and her nose in a book by day. Under his baton, which she yielded to like a clever marionette, she was the brightest star on both sides of the Atlantic, courted and coveted by scions and studios, but she had not forgotten who had turned her into one. Wrapping up a Paramount press conference announcing Shanghai Express, the minder selected a reporter to pose his final queries. Mr. von Sternberg, is Miss Dietrich the most talented actress you have ever met?
But you must be sorely mistaken, Jo said. Talent is far from the most essential quality in an actress.
What is the essential quality, Mr. von Sternberg?
Radiance, he said.
Without looking at her, he could feel Marlene smile next to him.
Last question—to Miss Dietrich—is Mr. von Sternberg really as sadistic as they say?
Jo watched his leading lady uncross her legs and lean forward, as she raised one rakish eyebrow: Ought a sculptor be labeled a sadist for chipping his stone or pounding his clay?
十一
At the penultimate wardrobe fitting for Shanghai Express, Anna May observed that some of her dresses were more embellished. Compared with Shanghai Lily’s fur and feathers, Hui Fei’s wardrobe had been quite dull and modest. Now the fabrics were richer, the cuts sharper. Nice work, she told the costumer as a stray sequin was stitched into place.
Miss Dietrich said you were to be allowed more glamour, the costumer said.
Anna May was surprised that she had it in her to feel offended by this, but she slipped on the upgraded brocade robe anyway and proceeded to set. Was this, indeed, what Shanghai looked like? Though largely constructed from papier-mâché, it was made by production designers to be bustling and attractive, with so much street life even Anna May forgot she was on a production back lot. There was a train and a quarter mile of functional track borrowed from the Santa Fe Railway. A cow and her calf were lowing by the side. They were to feature prominently in a scene where the Shanghai Express chugged by, only to be stopped short by an animal suckling her young on the tracks. Anna May heard that Jo had arranged for the cow to birth and nurse her calf right next to the station at La Grande, so that mother and child would be undisturbed by the cacophony and thoroughly prepared for their cameo. A rooster crossed her path, wattles quivering as it edged forward. A Chinese child extra was chasing it, but when he saw Anna May, he stopped short and hid behind one of the pillars, the better to gawk at her. Don’t lean on it, a production manager hollered after the boy, it’s plaster of paris!
Anna May saw Jo perched on a ladder propped against the train.
An assistant with a dark-gray paintbrush moved in accordance with what Jo pointed to. But, Mr. von Sternberg, someone said, the train is black. Of course it is, Jo replied calmly. I am painting the shadows of clouds on the back of the locomotive, can’t you see?
He was called away toward an effluvium of b
lond at the other end of the studio, where they were moving key lights around Marlene. As per Jo’s direction, the cinematographer and gaffer had set up a screen and lighting test. Marlene’s cheekbones were resplendent. She wore a dress that began at the neck in a swirl of dark feathers and ended in black Chantilly lace at her feet. Marlene and Jo had spent an entire day going through thousands of feathers to find the perfect iridescence that would show on black-and-white film, finally going with the black-green tail feathers of Mexican fighting cocks. Anyone with eyes could see that everything on set was arranged to flatter Marlene: lighting, blocking, costume textures, production backdrops. It had been exactly ten years since Anna May had first scored a credited role in a Hollywood movie, 1922’s Toll of the Sea, and a decade later, she had yet to enjoy such privileges, secured by studio stars and auteur muses. Everyone consistently praised Anna May’s performances, and at twenty-seven now she considered herself to be in her prime, but she was still waiting for Hollywood to cast her in a lead role.
I’m telling you this sooner so you won’t regret later, her father said early on, you know you can’t be doing this all your life. At first she thought he meant it rhetorically, but he went on to ask: Liu Tsong, have you ever seen a Hollywood movie where the lead character is Chinese, and played by a Chinese?
She was shocked that her father, whom she considered outmoded, slow-witted in the measures of the world, was the one who clued her in to this. White men could play all the yellow emperors and brown sheikhs in the world, but she would never play a European countess, or even an American housewife! How had it honestly not occurred to her that a good number of roles automatically excluded her? She’d thought she was doing well enough. Before even turning twenty, she was booked for role after role in Hollywood—a Spanish honky-tonk girl in Thundering Dawn, a Mongol slave in The Thief of Bagdad, an Inuit in The Alaskan, and the Native American princess Tiger Lily in Peter Pan. It was true none of them were lead roles, but she’d assumed she’d not been invited to try out for those because she wasn’t yet ready, not because she was Chinese.
Delayed Rays of a Star Page 17