The Failed Socio-Situationist Sculptor in Düsseldorf
8
Before the hot plate, Marlene prepared her meals by balancing an aluminum tray over her beaded bedside lamp. Heating up a tin of baked beans took up to an hour, and even then the canned mush remained tepid. Once Marlene made her mind up about anything, she was prepared to be prodigiously resourceful, and had survived ably without leaving the apartment by activating her fan base.
Don’t send love, she wrote them. Send me something I can eat.
So the French sent pastries, the Germans liverwurst, the Swedish pickled herring, and on one occasion, from Japan by air, the sweetest vacuum-sealed cod roe, all to 12 avenue Montaigne. Marlene developed a taste for eating old-fashioned sausages straight out of the packet. Sauerkraut was a good one, too. It never went bad, could be left out a whole fortnight uncovered on a Tiffany dessert plate. Tiffany’s was the dullest jewelry shop in the world, but their bone china? Lovely. Of course, there were offers from wealthy, worried fans who wanted to cater her three gourmet meals daily, but Marlene had turned them down. This worn-out body was the last thing left under her control, and plying it with processed food made her feel sharp. Convinced that all these years of living badly might one day come in handy if she needed to guilt anyone into anything, Marlene was of two minds when the Chinese maid purchased the hot plate, with money saved from all the times she had been told to keep the change. Marlene could hardly believe how daft the maid was. You have to look out for yourself before you look out for others, she scolded, or do you really want to be a servant for the rest of your life? But the maid was already unearthing some groceries she’d bought to test out the new contraption.
They started small.
No-frills foodstuffs and properly heated canned food, but as Marlene recovered her taste for a good, hot meal, the maid began to pick out fresh produce each week. Asparagus, potatoes, beets, eggs, pumpkin, collards, whitefish, chicken breasts. Marlene’s mouth watered, but she was too proud for eagerness, and so made sure to go through the motions of misgiving. Soon enough, she saw that there was little need for pretenses with the maid. This struck Marlene as a great novelty, and by degrees, she began to drop the poses, big and small, that she was so used to defaulting to. All her life there had been the pressure of not being Marlene enough, but she marveled one day, as it came to her, abrupt and belated: Choupette, you have no idea who I am, do you?
The maid looked up from her cleaning with serious eyes. Madame?
Marlene cackled with delight.
* * *
—
TODAY MARLENE HAD sent the maid out with a long list of ingredients made out in a spidery hand: beef shanks, marrow bone, onions, carrots, celery, rutabaga—she was sure she had forgotten one or two things, but she would never get started if she was counting on herself to remember everything first.
She wanted to make pot-au-feu for Bogie.
Her pot-au-feu had once been as legendary as her legs, and through the years, Marlene knew full well she’d begun to play the love fool whenever she caught herself reeling off the ingredients in her head, floating down the well-lit aisles of gourmet supermarkets in a printed scarf and dark glasses, haggling at the butchery, as a matter of principle, over the price per pound of beef shank and bone marrow.
In retrospective appraisal, she divided her affairs not by gender or duration, but those for whom she’d cooked pot-au-feu and those she had not. The last beau to receive the special stew treatment was probably Yul Brynner. Although she was almost twenty years his senior—and had been much annoyed when the press termed their romance “not autumn-spring but winter-autumn”—he, like all her other sweets, went to the ground before her: lung cancer, four years ago. Now the coldest season had come to pass—Marlene would not have guessed that she had one more pot-au-feu left in her, and for an anonymous caller no less.
It had been only a month, and already she could not imagine her days without Bogie’s weekly intervention, every Sunday around noon. Marlene had no idea what the voice over the phone looked like, but for once, that suited her better. Her life, once overpopulated with options, no longer offered opportunities for the exercise of her discretion, and it was her turn now to be the floozy at the whim and fancy of another. But even that had not led her to mistaking Bogie’s phone calls, and her indulgence thereof, for what might be called love: it had always been clear to Marlene that what was more pleasurable than being in love, was acting like it.
The summer Marlene was sixteen she understood this for the first time. The one she acted for was a countess, a friend of her mother’s, wedded to a humorless aristocrat four inches shorter than she, who wore two-toned wingtips with three-inch heels. The countess had agreed to take her to see Tannhäuser, which was being performed up in Weimar. For a fortnight beforehand our intoxicated mädchen halved her meal portions, sending herself to bed with no dessert, so as to fit into a velvet dress so tight it pinched her sides. In the train cabin, the countess kept her gloves on but removed her court shoes, sliding on pink slippers finished with ostrich puffs along the toe line. How tiny her dear feet were! Whenever she moved them the feather puffs shivered. On her hands, the fine sable gloves were so snug they looked wet across her knuckles. Every time they went into a tunnel, Marlene bent to kiss her hand in the dark. The older woman chided her each time they approached another underground passage: Marlenchen, are you really going to kiss that dirty glove?
The next summer, Countess Gerdorf came to visit again, and Marlene was cut down to size by her own contempt for the same woman, a year on. Was this really the one whose used-up silken cigarette tips she’d hoarded on the sly? The one to whom she’d written: Don’t you know, if you were not married to the Count and I were not under age, I would do anything to get you?
That was when she knew that it was the act she courted, hardly the person, and that for her there was no contrition or contradiction in this. To be able to wear feelings lightly while experiencing them deeply was a rare sort of freedom. As for possible harm caused to others—there must be something in it for them, too, if they did not stay away. When she came of age, she added domesticity to her repertoire and savored, for a limited run, the role of virtuous hausfrau to the hilt. She liked people who liked to eat. Men who did not have an appetite were seldom good in bed, and one of the purest delights in life, when living with a woman, was finding her sitting loose-haired in your kitchen in the middle of the night, mopping up leftover stew with a huge hunk of bread. Whenever Marlene began cooking, the domestic treatment hoodwinked many an innocent paramour into thinking it was going to last a while now, just as Erich Maria Remarque had when his tears fell into her pot-au-feu on a balmy evening around 1940. All sorts of things were happening in Berlin, Remarque said, and he was soaking up the sun in L.A., developing an idea for a new novel. This was life?
How thin he had grown in loosey-goosey California!
Although the gauntness lent his face an attractive, ascetic touch, Marlene took it upon herself to fatten Remarque up immediately. He was one of those Germans who could not or would not forget for a moment that he was here and not there, in circumstances such as these. Early on in 1933, Goebbels had banned and burned Remarque’s books, and in 1938, the NSDAP had revoked his German citizenship. His youngest sister would soon be tried in the Volksgerichtshof, and found guilty of “undermining morale,” just for having been heard stating that she considered the war lost. Your brother is, unfortunately, beyond our reach, the court judgment would say. You, however, will not escape us. The invoice for 495.80 reichsmarks, billed to Remarque, for his sister’s prosecution, imprisonment, and execution by beheading would not reach him until the war had ended.
In the safe harbor of L.A., Marlene talked the Paramount boys into hiring Remarque for a script, something to take his mind off things. All Quiet on the Western Front had been a hit—Remarque was in a far better position to negotiate his transatlantic cross
over than the other German literati beginning to pile up in L.A. like so much flotsam that summer. She knew that Adorno, having settled in the Pacific Palisades, was trying to arrange for the safe passage of friends like Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin back in Europe.
Some made it over. Others did not.
Marlene donated a quarter of her pay to the European Film Fund, set up by her agent, Paul Kohner, who managed everyone from Greta Garbo to Maurice Chevalier—almost all of whom tithed 10 percent of their weekly salary. Tirelessly Kohner made out daily affidavits and fake work permits for performers, writers, and artists trying to leave Germany. For those who reached L.A., hotel bungalows on long-term leases to Paramount and MGM that had been used for executive meetings and scriptwriting pow-wows were fast being converted into halfway houses for those with papers stamped ENEMY ALIEN in America.
* * *
—
IT HAD TAKEN Marlene some time to get that far with Remarque, and even to urge him over to America. The first she saw of him, his monocle was glinting across the ballroom of the Hôtel des Bains in Venice, in 1939. They danced together that night but retired to their own rooms, a blemish on her personal record.
Marlene woke the next morning ready to set things straight.
She made up her face very lightly and put on a pair of lounge pajamas. She rolled the sleeves up, then down, then up again. Unable to decide, she walked out into the parlor with one sleeve up and the other down. Up or down? she asked her husband, Rudi, and his mistress, Tamara, with whom she often traveled: three interconnecting rooms, two bathrooms. Marlene gave Rudi as long a leash as he gave her. They had no quarrel, and were happy together. Rudi and Tamara, used to her extracurricular activities, voted for Marlene to wear her sleeves down. She unrolled her sleeves. As she was leaving the room, she noticed her dog-eared copy of Rilke’s Complete Poems, a gift from Aunt Jolie, just like the diamond-paste bracelet. The book had been Marlene’s travel companion since she was eighteen, and she knew most of the poems from memory. Where the pages had come loose, she had stitched them back together by hand. With this prop under her arm, she sauntered out of the hotel in sandals. Crossing the boardwalk she saw Remarque sitting in a spot of sun, gazing out at the choppy Adriatic Sea. She passed before him, making sure the worn spine bearing Rilke’s name was visible.
Of course, Remarque said shortly, without greeting her. All movie stars read poetry.
Marlene smiled, pressing the volume into his hands.
Choose a poem, she said. Tell me only the title. He condescended to browse and asked for “The Panther.” Marlene declaimed the first two stanzas. He removed his sunglasses, the better to look her in the eye, as she recited the last stanza:
Only at times the curtain of the pupils
lifts without a sound—Then enters an image
through the gliding stillness of arrested muscles
straight to the heart where it ceases to be.
Remarque flipped the pages again and stopped at random. “Leda,” he said, and she recited it by heart to perfection. “The Gazelle,” he said, and she gave it back, too. Did you memorize all that Rilke just to impress me? he said, amused. Surely a movie actress has better use for her time? I like your novels, she said, but you shouldn’t overstate your case. After midmorning sex in his room, they slipped into monogrammed hotel bathrobes, and she threw open the balcony windows.
Her Rilke lay quite forgotten on the deck chair.
There was hardly a boat out at sea, and as they looked out Marlene told Remarque to move to L.A. before it was too late. She would help him out if he needed anything there. She told him that Rudolf Hess had been to New York to see her over Christmas in 1936, and had extended a personal invitation back to Berlin, direct from Hitler and Goebbels. I can assure you, Hess had said, that you will be moving around in the highest circles. What Marlene said to him: Merry Christmas, I am late for a party. Please don’t come again.
Remarque said: You could have been killed. Marlene said yes, she knew. Hess had publicly commented that anyone who could change his last name from the German spelling Remark to the French spelling could not possibly be a real man, Remarque told Marlene. Hess was also the one who took down Hitler’s dictation of Mein Kampf on toilet paper in prison, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch.
Can you imagine, he said, all of that, on toilet paper?
Absolutely, Marlene said, I’d clean my ass on it.
* * *
—
WHEN MARLENE TOLD Bogie over the phone that she had herself wooed Remarque with Rilke’s verses all those years ago, Bogie wanted to know what happened later. He plumped up, Marlene said, and I got bored. He dedicated one of his books to me, before shacking up with Paulette Goddard.
Lucky for me, Bogie said. You can’t get bored of what you don’t know.
Bogie had a voice and manner out of his age and time. Crisp and pristine, it was a voice made to read women classics and hold court in High German. He had none of the Berlin drawl she herself slid into. His syntax was formal, his accent refined. This decorum engendered a sense of courtship. They partook in classics that circumambulated cultural time, that would not age the way mortals did, that made her clean forget she was ninety and he eighteen. It could just as well have been the other way around.
She asked him the same thing each week he called, before they said their good-byes.
Bogie, are you sure you won’t tell me your name?
Milady, he teased. Why ruin a good thing with empty convention?
That’s hardly fair, she said, given that you know mine.
Come on, Marlene, he said, laughing, as he slowly rolled her name off his lips, let’s be above board here. Your name has not belonged to you for years. Everyone can put your face to it, without knowing anything about you—it’s nothing but a symbol!
9
When he first refused to tell her his name, Marlene dropped her voice to whisper: Is there a von in it? At this he had to laugh. He did not know anyone in his life who could be classed as of noble birth, not by a long shot. Ah, she said conspiratorially, I knew you were titled, you are so well spoken. I shan’t ask more now. Surely she could not be serious, she was just an actress through and through, game for any bait that came along.
Born in North Rhine-Westphalia in a welfare ward, he did not cry as a baby, even after he was spanked a second time. Other than his silence, he was healthy in all regards, and the doctor proffered generic congratulations to his parents, who were peering at their rumpled miracle: It’s a boy!
He looks white, his mother was thinking, but did not say.
He looks brown, his father was thinking, but did not say.
They named him Ibrahim Max Müller.
His father, an avid football fan, considered this joining of two national sporting heroes—Max Morlock and Gerd Müller—a stroke of genius on his part. Didn’t it have a nice ring to it! Ibrahim was his mother’s addendum, against what his father considered better judgment: Don’t you want our child to have a future? Even if he’s fair enough to pass, the name will be a burden.
* * *
—
HIS MOTHER WAS a Turkish Kurdish guest worker from Urfa. His father had cuckolded her Turkish husband. They worked at an open-field lignite mine. The Turks were miners. The German was a line supervisor. When the Turkish husband was rotated temporarily to a neighboring mine, the German supervisor took his chances. To his surprise, the Turkish woman did not resist. Her body was as lovely as he’d guessed, under the rough-hewn, navy-blue work suit rendering all workers lumpen. When her husband returned to the mine, the woman told him the line supervisor had seen her hair and body. The Turkish man head-butted the German line supervisor. His work permit was canceled, and he was sent back where he came from. The Turkish woman and the German line supervisor were not formally married. Divorce would have been impossible from a sharia court. Sim
ply, she was far enough away from Ankara and Urfa to ignore the letters from both sides of the family—those from hers more virulent than her deported husband’s. One of her uncles wrote: If I lay my eyes on you, I’ll kill you and castrate the foreign scumbag who brought a whore like you astray.
Ibrahim grew up speaking German to his father and Turkish to his mother. Although his mother could speak some German, she spoke to Ibrahim exclusively in Turkish. His father knew no Turkish whatsoever, and sometimes his mother would tell Ibrahim things in Turkish she did not want his father to hear.
Max, his father would ask, what is your mother saying?
His mother called him Ibrahim and his father called him Max. Even before he could understand it was happening, he grew tired of being tugged to and fro between them. It ended when he was about eight and his father told him to tell his mother that he had fallen in love with a Swedish woman. Ibrahim told his mother: Papa has fallen in love with a dog. His mother reached out to hug him close to her, but he did not let her. His father stopped coming home, but he continued to send them money all the way from Travemünde, where he had moved in with the Swedish woman, who ran an economical chalet on a nudist beach.
Look, his mother said to Ibrahim. Your father still loves us.
They sent him letters, his mother writing in the Turkish alphabet.
Papa can’t read them, Ibrahim said.
Delayed Rays of a Star Page 23