She picked up the phone.
Before she could close herself up again, she dialed Marlene’s number. If she did not get to see Marlene tonight, part of her would go quiet. That silence might be permanent and tremendous. Inside of it, she would never be able to unlearn anything. When the phone was answered, Anna May closed her eyes as she said: Do you want to come over?
Yes, Marlene said, I would like that very much.
* * *
—
REMOVING HER STOCKINGS drying on the radiator Anna May knocked down a vase of lilies. She drew the curtains open, then shut them again. A warm flurry settled between her chest and stomach, and though she was nervous, she was very glad that she’d called. She made the bed, tipping the pillows and her pulse points with a few drops of her favorite Penhaligon’s. It was the closest scent she’d found, over the years, to that of Marlene’s handkerchief when first they met. She had only a popular jazz piano record, so she put that on. She stepped back to survey the room. Worrying everything would come off too studied, she hastened to disarray a cushion and the coverlet as the doorbell rang, jangling several times in quick succession. Just a sec, Anna May called out. She wished she’d given herself something to drink before answering the door. When she opened it, Marlene was leaning her head against the doorframe. Hi, Marlene said casually. She was wearing a bouclé jacket and her face was flushed. Anna May watched as Marlene tottered over to the armchair by the window and took out a cigarette. You don’t mind if I smoke, she mumbled after lighting it, or perhaps you do? Before Anna May said anything, Marlene snuffed out the cigarette on the cuff of her jacket, burning a hole through the curled yarn.
It’s only the latest Chanel, she giggled.
She was obviously drunk.
Are you okay? Anna May said.
I’m selfish, Marlene said solemnly, reaching over to take Anna May’s hand, pressing it fast to her forehead like she was miming a fever. I love providing, but only because it binds others to me. I’m never interested in playing a character, she went on as she brought Anna May’s fingers to her lips and bit on one of them lightly, I’m merely interested in a character being me.
With her other hand, Anna May swept Marlene’s curls back from her moist forehead.
That’s what he said, Marlene said, sitting up straighter.
Anna May did not follow.
Jo is a big fan of your naturalism, Marlene said, more loudly now. He says you are a generous performer, so you must be a generous person. It follows. You let other people play off you, whereas I only ever play off myself. He told me to learn one or two things from you, can you imagine?
Her fingers, still interlaced with Marlene’s, went cold.
That’s why you sent me lilies? Anna May said.
She wanted to remove her hand, but Marlene was gripping too tightly.
The lilies, Marlene exclaimed, yes, of course! Let me tell you about the lilies. She looked around to acknowledge the flowers. Jo-Jo sent them to me, Marlene slurred. So predictable—men—am I right? He’s said his piece and wants me to call so we can patch things up now. What does he think I am, a pushover? So I helped him forward on all the lilies to you, since he admires you so much. Let’s see, she nodded curtly at the vases like she was counting out the important people she recognized at a premiere, that’s a lot. How do you like them? Must have cost him a pretty penny.
A jaunty Gershwin hit went on playing in the background. More than anything, Anna May wanted to turn the music off. How could she have thought that Marlene was playing for keeps? She should never have called. Silence was remote, but at least it was safe. There was nothing to take back outside of it. She wanted to be alone. I think you should go, Anna May managed to say. With a lot of control, her voice came out just right, neither too loud nor too soft. She did not want to see Marlene now, and in fact she did not want to see her again, but the woman had curled up in the armchair and closed her eyes.
Why are you still here? Anna May said. We have a long day tomorrow.
Marlene ignored her, but her left hand kept time with the music against the side of the armchair. Anna May walked over to the player on the table and took its arm off the record. Right away, Marlene’s eyes flicked open, affronted, as if this were her room and Anna May had just walked in and silenced her music. Well then, Anna, Marlene said, sitting up, should we practice our scene, and you can show me how to do my lines? If you keep up the good work, Jo might even cast you as Catherine the Great. He doesn’t care that it’ll bomb the box office, isn’t he a real artist? Suddenly, before Anna May could say anything, Marlene began to sob. I’m a horrible person, Marlene said, pulling Anna May toward her, I know I am. She burrowed her face into Anna May’s caftan. Jo said if it weren’t for him, I would never have made it in Berlin, much less America. She wrapped her arms around Anna May’s midriff and looked up at her hopefully. Don’t make me go, Marlene said, please Anna, I’m sorry. Tears were still running down her face. She tugged on Anna May to make her sit on the couch beside her.
Anna May sat.
Thank you, Marlene said. Thank you, she whispered again, as she took Anna May’s hand, brushing it across her own forearm, back and forth. Laundry hands, Marlene said. Remember? She smiled weakly at Anna May. Anna May felt herself soften as she continued the movement on her own accord, running her palm over Marlene’s smooth skin to comfort her. They were quiet and close this way till Marlene closed her fingers around Anna May’s wrist. Your pearls, Marlene murmured, when first we met. They were freshwater, weren’t they, filly?
十三
Shanghai Express was America’s highest-grossing movie in 1932. Paramount Pictures was justifiably elated—they’d trounced archrival MGM’s all-star Grand Hotel at the box office. Dietrich/von Sternberg had prevailed over Garbo. Vanity Fair reviewed the sensational smasher as follows:
Floridly vulgar, Mr. von Sternberg trades his open style for fancy play, chiefly upon the legs in silk, and buttocks in lace, of Marlene Dietrich, of whom he has made, once again, a veritable slut. The Sternberg problem is not one of ability, but taste. His umbilical perseverance is fixed on the navel of Venus, as meanwhile the inimitable Anna May Wong outclasses Dietrich, Brook and Oland in every scene she appears.
Jo, who read reviews for laughs, was used to the capricious pronouncements of the press. One moment it was “a brilliant impresario ahead of his time,” the next it was “Who taught him drama? Hitler?” Not so Marlene. An argument ensued about who was doing whom in, who would be nothing without whom, who was leaving whom right this instant. Every time they fought personally, which regrettably was often enough, one of them would threaten to leave Paramount professionally, though they both knew they were hog-tied together by a watertight six-picture contract.
Shanghai Express was the midline. Three down, three to go.
If they brawled in the middle of a shoot, Jo would ready himself to receive the studio bigwigs who would hightail over to his place uninvited, one of whom even went right down on bended knee, begging him to make up with Marlene (“Anything it takes, my man. Bill us the flowers, the champers, knock yourself out”) and not get the company in serious trouble by turning their prize horse into a hayburner.
When in a fit of anger Jo said to Marlene that she wasn’t that great an actress, just an oversized personality on legs, she swore she would never speak with him again.
In fact I didn’t mean it in a bad way, he tried as she walked out the door. Surface is the only thing that’s real to me, he called out after her sincerely; what’s more, I know all your faults and love them like they’re my own! She was too busy revving up the bottle-green Rolls-Royce to listen, so he tried: Who bought you the fast car? At that she looked him in the eye. But only to shut down the engine, throw the keys into the bushes, and stalk off the property in stilettos.
Woman, he screeched at the gate, I’ll give you three hours to come back to me,
or you can pack your bags and get out of my house!
As always, when she returned, barefoot and blistered, he washed between her toes and kissed them.
* * *
—
A COMMON CUSTOM in Hollywood then was for the director to applaud after a scene, in particular if it was difficult. Oftentimes “difficult” merely meant “emotional,” and was played big to compensate. Some directors even clapped after every scene. Jo found this idiotic; it would be like applauding himself. He believed that whatever performers appeared to have done onscreen was possible only because of the psychophysiological state the director had coerced, lulled, or tricked them into. The higher up you went in the movies, unlike theater, there was rarely a good or bad actor at the bottom of it, only a good or bad director. Jo had seen many a fine acting talent squandered by a director with no vision, and on the other hand, there was, every so often, the ordinary man or woman transformed by the way a director presented him or her in a film.
Circumnavigating the same old social circles through later years, it was not uncommon for individuals from Marlene’s bevy of ex-lovers to come up to Jo and rue the disservice he’d done them by endowing her with traits not her own on the screen. I did not give to her anything she did not already have, he would defend Marlene by saying each time, I only dramatized them. You saw what you wanted to see, don’t let’s be bitter.
Still, there would be a shred of solidarity between Jo and such men, having been through all of that: It was good while it lasted. Did she make you believe? Because she was a narcissist and so was he, it could have been love, just as likely as it could have been vanity. As long as they trusted each other, any distinction between those two emotional states carried no practical significance.
For a substantial period Marlene had refused to be loaned out to and used by any Hollywood director other than Jo, and he was touched by her loyalty. After they’d broken up irrefutably, when he was ready to subject himself to the pleasure and torture of watching the woman he’d talent-spotted, trained up, brought over, and shared a bed with in someone else’s movie, he saw that in standing by him she might simply have had her own best interests at heart. Next to his talent for making her beautiful, he might have been completely incidental.
He missed her face.
He’d written entire scenes, designed whole sequences just to watch her light up a cigarette, put on a hat. Pity the contractual agreement was complete; they could no longer use it to extort from one another as they pleased. Were seven opulent films worth a lifetime’s heartache? The line he wrote with his own hand and coached Marlene to deliver in their last movie together: If you really loved me, you’d have killed yourself. All the reviewers had latched onto the observation that both male protagonists in The Devil Is a Woman physically resembled Jo so closely. He couldn’t have cared less.
* * *
—
BEFORE GOING OFF on a long voyage to Japan to purge himself of Marlene and wean her off him, Jo told her in good faith that her next best chance was with Rouben Mamoulian or Ernst Lubitsch. Already he sensed that she was the one who would be remembered, and he dismissed in time as a diminutive oddball in ill-fitted suits who was lucky enough to have had a big bite of a beautiful woman once. Almost turning back at the harbor, he forced himself to board the ship. With Marlene everything was bright, but there was no future.
On the ship he exaggerated for himself a bachelor’s debauchery, subsisting on oysters and liqueurs that he regurgitated to starboard in tears. Arriving in Tokyo he whored himself silly before hauling himself onto a Kyoto-bound train to seek out a nameless kabuki actress he’d been hoping to meet. She was the descendant of a Meiji-era courtier, and had achieved a hallowed reputation as a performer of great versatility, although she had never been allowed to perform professionally.
Kabuki was an old boys’ club. Her troupe upheld the onnagata tradition of male actors trained specifically and stringently for female roles. The Noh stage was highly symbolic, so there was absolutely no need for a woman to play a female role. That would only lead to a backsliding in tradition. Further, her nature as a woman was too soft. She would not be able to produce the differentiation between gentle movements and the forceful actions that were essential to the shape and dynamism of Noh. She was allowed, however, to join in the troupe’s training as a fashionable hobby, an accomplished amusement, but only because of her father’s reputation in Noh circles. Learning from distinguished onnagata she might even improve on her feminine character along the way!
After decades of cultivating her craft on the sidelines, just two or three more gifted than her, a handful her equal, and the vast majority mediocre, the woman was committed to a Zen Buddhist asylum when she lost her mind at a shūmei naming ceremony, where year after year she had gone unhonored as the men around her were promoted, their names and designations recorded for posterity in the troupe’s annals.
It took Jo a week to get to the Zen Buddhist asylum.
Far out in greater Kansai prefecture, it was a gated compound with a rock garden and a slim moat. When Jo inquired as to the architecture of the asylum, what he understood from the monk was that the moat (finger tracing oval perimeter) was to keep the external pandemonium (flurry of hands, circling wide) of the world at bay (hands making a barrier) so it couldn’t disturb the personal entropy (whizzing of finger to the temple) of the patients’ rich (fists clutched to chest, blooming outward) interior lives.
For a comparatively sane person encountering its thoughtful architecture, the Japanese asylum was quaint and restful. Some years later, when commissioning Richard Neutra to erect a mansion in San Fernando, Jo asked for just the one bedroom, high windows retrofitted for privacy (“You are a modernist in exile, you will find an aesthetic yet practical solution”), ample space for entertaining but no locks on any bathrooms (“On the few occasions I am in the mood for guests I do not want lachrymose thespians slitting their wrists in my sinks”), and a sinuous moat all around the mansion (“to keep the generic madness of the world from infecting the particularities of my personal idiosyncrasies”).
When Jo reached her garret, the kabuki actress was in a frenzy of performance. One moment her wrists were listless, the next her fingers could have strangled a cow. Although her hands were empty by her sides, her eyes gave the impression of looking out from behind a paper fan. The safety bars across the window striated her face in discontinuous shadow. In great agitation she cut a mie pose, holding on for three beats and crossing her eyes before letting her body fall back into a drunkard’s leaden swagger. But she was only falsifying her weakness, and floated straight back up right away, with a clear and light countenance to show the hidden aspect of her character.
Jo had only heard of haragei.
In haragei, the same actor takes on different characters on the Noh stage without changing costumes or speaking styles. The change had to be indicated to the audience from within. “Belly acting” was technically demanding. It could take more than ten years for a novice to learn, and twenty more for a virtuoso to master, but once he was adept, the triumphant pride of devouring the tidal energy of the audience recognizing and riding on the actor’s emotion was unsurpassable.
The kabuki actress came up right to him.
A nose away from Jo, her eyes locked onto him without seeing.
Jo wept noiselessly into his elbow.
He did not know what she was performing, but he could feel the internal landscapes of her characters burning. She was on fire, beyond the ambit of a prop, the feudal prejudices of the troupe, the highest honor of having an audience member call out your stage name, followed by your father’s stage name, when you had accomplished an inspired mie. Despite being barred from performance, for years she had trained relentlessly for the dream of hearing their patronymic heralded. Now, disintegrating in solitary confinement behind bars, she had forgotten everything there was to regret: her lines, her sex, her
name.
Nothing separated her from her craft now.
The Collection Camp for Nonsedentary Persons of Roma and Sinti Descent in Bucolic Salzburg
IX
Cut, cut, cut! Leni said, putting a hand to her temple to steady herself, I told you this would never work. A German shepherd will not look like a wolf, just as the transvestites on Bülowstraße do not look like women! Return this dog to wherever you got it from. If there’s turpentine to spare, remove the gray paint we daubed over its fur. Now if you cannot locate for me a tame wolf, I told you, I will find one by myself, but do not try to convince me otherwise with knockoffs! I must cut close to the bone. I require authenticity. And how about the eighty sheep for Pedro’s flock? Have we secured them? I want Merino sheep. Not the ones with horns, and not the ones with black faces. Merino.
Even Leni could not recall the original deadline for Tiefland. She’d bulldozed past it again and again, and kept everyone on full payroll as the project dragged on. It was the fair thing to do, and as much as possible, she liked to think of herself as a fair person. She respected the crew’s time and commitment. Since reports had to be sent to the Doctor and the Ministry of Propaganda for every extension, it was getting harder and harder to justify each time. In that respect, her bladder colic was a blessing in disguise. Anyone who could chastise a sick woman about adhering more efficiently to the planned schedule was surely going to look bad.
As for logistical complications, she let them play out in full. That often took good time.
Leni had written the film to be set in the fictional town of Roccabruna. She had envisioned shooting in the Catalan lowlands. Location-wise, the Doctor advised that Spain was dicey, but Italy was a safe bet. They were on good terms with the Duce. After scouting, she settled on Krün, a village wedged in a mountain plateau on the Bavarian side of the Alps for the primary shoot, and the Italian Dolomites for some establishing shots.
Delayed Rays of a Star Page 19