Marlene (20 page)

She gave me an odd look. “Are you quite sure? These days, one never knows.”

Her words took me aback. I suddenly had the disturbing thought that she’d discovered something about my uncle. I had wondered about him before, and he, too, seemed rather taken with Rudi. Jolie was also not herself; she looked tired, though impeccably turned out in her turban and jewelry, but with a strange wariness in her gaze. She’d been flirtatious with Rudi, fluttering about him, refilling his cup and plate before he’d finished what he had. I wanted to ask her what was wrong, but Willi strode back into the room with Rudi at that moment, both stinking of cigar, his hand on Rudi’s shoulder as he declared, “You’re very lucky, Lena. I think he’s going to be a fine husband.”

As we returned to Mutti’s flat, I glanced at Rudi. “Did you like them?”

He squeezed my hand. “Delightful. I had no idea your family was so distinguished. The store and the house: You come from very good blood. Your uncle Willi made me promise I’d take excellent care of you.”

Before I could probe further, he went on, “Even more reason for us to be respectable. I see now why your mother is so difficult to impress. Old families are like that.”

And he set out to do just that, on Sundays bringing Mutti fresh-cut roses that I had no idea how he could afford after the price of my ring, and tins of Lyons tea biscuits, the kind she loved, never mind that only the expensive emporiums sold them and he still didn’t have a job.

“Do you intend to squander on her every mark you’ve saved?” I grumbled. “She won’t approve. I could marry the kaiser himself and she’d find some fault in it. Even Liesel’s Herr Wills isn’t up to her standards. He runs a playhouse, she says. What kind of honest man makes a living hiring mimes and actors?”

“I’m not running a playhouse,” replied Rudi. “Give me time.”

He had a way about him, an even-tempered approach that could set my nerves on edge even as his attentiveness wormed its way into Mutti’s exacting heart, until one evening as I prepared to go with him to my per
formance at the academy, I heard her laughing—actually laughing—in the parlor and emerged to find her with a rare smile on her face.

“Your Rudi is most amusing,” she said. “He tells me he’s accepted a job at the UFA but they made him do a screen test first, though he’s not an actor. He had to jump around a fence for hours. Can you imagine it? A grown man leaping about like a sheepherder.”

I turned to him. “They did?” I said suspiciously, for it sounded to me as if he had cited my very experience at the Tempelhof Studio.

“It was a joke,” he said after we bid Mutti good night, promising to have me back after curtain call. “She isn’t so terrible. She has a certain wit, when she cares to.”

“And the job? Was that a joke, too?”

He smiled. “I have a second interview tomorrow. Don’t worry.”

I didn’t appreciate the way he now expected me to accept whatever he said at face value, but I had to concede that he’d gone above and beyond his duty to please my mother. And he was right about the job: The UFA hired him as a production assistant, a lower position than the one he’d held with Joe May, but much better paid. I pounced on his first paycheck, demanding he rent us a room somewhere. He found an apartment on the top floor of a building at 54 Kaiserallee, not far from Mutti. I had hoped to move farther away, only he again cajoled me into doing the right thing. “If we must live together before the wedding, Josephine must be able to visit us whenever she likes. We want her blessing. Once she gives it, she cannot find fault later.”

“That’s what you think,” I retorted, but one of my neighbors turned out to be a lively brunette named Amelie Riefenstahl, or Leni, as she called herself. She was my age, twenty-two—a painter, poet, and interpretive dancer who’d traveled around Europe in an extravaganza produced by none other than my academy founder, Max Reinhardt. We became friends. An ambitious girl about town, when she invited me to go out with her and I showed up in my tuxedo, she promptly donned black trousers and a white dinner jacket, which suited her slim physique and dancer’s legs.

“I’m going to be a film star,” she told me as we dined at the Café Bauer and other expensive establishments where she managed to never pay for
anything, always knowing someone there, usually a married man, who kept a tab for her. “Cabarets and music halls aren’t for me. I love painting but selling art is such a bore, and most artists I know are as poor as Russians. I want money and fame. Where better than in the movies?”

She was another Camilla—intent on her success, no matter the cost. But I found her company agreeable, for unlike Camilla’s, her avid pursuit of opportunity included me. While I found her poetry insipid and her paintings incomprehensible, and had no idea if she even knew how to act (she never mentioned any credentials aside from the extravaganza with Reinhardt), she generously referred me to casting calls where she didn’t fit the stated requirements.

We made a sensation together: me in my monocle and bow tie, and she in her suit, our hair slicked back and lips bloodred as we stormed about Berlin, raising eyebrows and other things among delighted film executives, who hastened to offer us drinks and invitations to dine and dance.

I was certain not a few of these invitations ended with Leni in their bed; like Camilla, she had no compunction about sealing the deal with her body. “It’s what they expect. Really, Marlene. Look around you. There are hundreds of girls, all competing for the same parts. Believe me,
they
won’t think twice about opening their legs for a contract.”

She was right. Most girls didn’t. And I certainly had my share of offers. Rudi often worked late at the studio or went out afterward to do his own schmoozing; he expressed no concern over my gallivanting with Leni. He said it would do me good to be seen and meet people who could advance my career, so I took him at his word. But I resisted the smarmy advances and creeping hands under the table, if not out of any moral obligation. Rudi and I were engaged but I didn’t know if he was faithful to me, though I assumed he was.

One night as I prepared to go out with Leni and he arrived home early from work, I asked him. From the startled expression on his face, I saw I had caught him by surprise.

“I haven’t slept with anyone else since we met,” he said, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Not once?” I applied lipstick in the mirror, already dressed for the evening. “I wouldn’t mind. It doesn’t concern me.” I was baiting him, trying to penetrate his unflappable reserve. Jolie’s words to me had sunk in; he was not homosexual, but he must desire other women. In a part of me, I hoped that he was unfaithful; a flaw in his perfect facade would be welcome.

“I haven’t.” He came up behind me, trailing his finger across my nape. “Have you? Perhaps with Leni or . . . some other man?” His voice quavered.

“Would it disturb you if I had?”

He averted his eyes. “It shouldn’t,” he said. “Considering the business we’re in.”

“I see,” I said. I had the feeling that my sleeping with women would disturb him less. He had enjoyed showing me off, watching women make overtures that he could intercept. Perhaps he deemed liaisons with my own gender as harmless or even erotic, but not a threat. But another man was different. With another man, he’d have to compete. He wasn’t so perfect, after all, to my relief. He had a human frailty.

I shook my head. “I haven’t.” I refrained from adding, “Yet.” The truth was, I hadn’t met anyone since him who appealed to me in that way. Leni had tried. She’d attempted to seduce me but I gently rebuffed her. She wasn’t really inclined, but merely did it to establish her modernity. To her, sex and power were the same thing. Taking her as a lover would spoil our friendship.

He met my eyes in the glass. “I suppose we’ll have to trust each other.”

I smiled. “Yes, trust is all that matters.”

He did not say more, but I understood he’d tolerate an occasional infidelity if he must, as long as it didn’t interfere with our relationship. It suited me, too. I was not looking for complications. And even if I’d had the inclination, I didn’t have the time, not with my demanding roster of plays at the academy and preparations for my wedding.

Liesel had to marry first of course, determined to beat me to the altar after she saw the size of my ring. Georg Wills made sure she also had the necessary trappings—a lavish gown and carriage ride along the Friedrich
strasse to the Winter Garden, where their reception was held in a pavilion, with the tiered cake and orchestra.

In contrast, our finances obliged Rudi and me to conduct a subdued affair. On May 17, 1923, in the town hall of Berlin-Friedenau, we wed in a civil ceremony, with Mutti and Liesel as my witnesses and the actor Rudolf Forster as Rudi’s best man. Uncle Willi gave me away; I wore a white dress with a crown of myrtle, traditional symbol of virginity. Rudi found it highly amusing and had me wear the crown to bed that night. Our exertions pulverized it; for days afterward, I was picking out crushed fragments of leaves from the sheets.

The following month, I left the Reinhardt academy after Rudi got me an audition for the producers Meinhardt and Bernauer, who operated a chain of successful theaters. Their repertoire wasn’t refined, consisting of popular fare, but offered more varied roles—and a salary to go along with them. As Mutti had foretold, Rudi wasn’t earning enough to fully support us, but I wanted to keep working anyway.

I appeared in six new plays and had a small part in a circus melodrama picture,
The Leap Into Life,
before I discovered I was pregnant.

X

M
y pregnancy was unplanned, but I’d also not made a fuss when Rudi stopped using prophylactics. He wanted a family; in my own way, so did I. Mutti was overjoyed at the news. She became a different person, as if my apparent willingness to settle into a life she approved of had made up for my former rebellious ways.

I had no trouble, save for the usual malaise and morning sickness, but I had to stop working as I entered my fifth month. Audiences didn’t want to see a woman with a belly playing comedies by Molière. And to my surprise, I was content to spend time at home, without a schedule and with a nearby bathroom, with Rudi supplying cheeses, strudel, and anything else my ravenous appetite might crave, while Mutti visited every day to attend to my comfort. Though we were not affectionate, she took such good care of me that our discomfort with each other lessened; she kept telling me a grandchild was something she had always longed for.

But the moment my birth pangs began on December 17, 1924, ten days before my twenty-third birthday, the idyll ended. It took me eight hours to deliver my baby and I suffered an internal rupture, followed by an infection, with the fever and accompanying weakness leaving me disoriented. The doctor advised Rudi and me that another pregnancy might kill me.

Perhaps this accounted for my initially tepid reaction to my newborn daughter, whom we baptized with my name, Maria, but affectionately dubbed Heidede. She was healthy, already sprouting tufts of silky auburn hair, but she felt like a stranger as I held her, a foreign intruder with her wails and burping. Only when she nursed (my milk miraculously did not sour) did I surrender to rhapsody, her toothless maw clamped to my engorged nipple.

Mutti imparted endless advice, from how to avoid diaper rash to the best way to ensure an early weaning. I heard it all through a stupefied fog; as time wore on, more than devotion bound me to my child. I also sought to escape the fact that in becoming a mother, I’d forsaken more than I intended. A newborn needed constant care, and my subsequent illness had taken its toll. I refused to look at myself in a mirror or ponder the inescapable reality that while I’d been away, life had moved on without me, including my contract with Meinhardt and Bernauer.

Rudi broke the news. With the mark having soared to the unimaginable inflation rate of 2.5 million to one U.S. dollar, and with Germany facing the collapse of an already decimated economy, America had come to our rescue, implementing a plan to restore the mark to its prewar rate. In the wake of this surge in credit, Meinhardt and Bernauer had sold their theater chain to a Viennese producer. Given my absence, my contract had been voided under the new ownership.

“But there’s no need to worry,” Rudi assured me as I sat with Heidede at my teat, dismayed to hear I was unemployed, my figure in need of urgent attention if I ever hoped to work again. Girls who disappeared for less time than me disappeared forever, and I had put on almost ten extra kilos. “I’ve spoken with my boss at the UFA,” he went on. “He says once you recover and the baby can be entrusted to another’s care, he’ll offer you a test. This new economic plan has everyone racing new pictures into production. You’ll find plenty of work.”

I still worried. However, I committed to nursing Heidede for eight months. Following a much-needed summer holiday by the North Sea with the baby, Liesel, and her husband, Georg Wills, who was indeed, as Mutti
had declared, as oily as a salesman, remarking that my legs needed toning if I planned to show them again in a chorus. His remark so enraged me that I gave my daughter to my mother in the mornings so I could plunge into an excruciating regimen with a Swedish trainer referred by Leni. I spent three hours at the gymnasium every day on my back, pedaling an imaginary bicycle to tone my thighs and rid my stomach of stubborn excess fat. I sweated like a Trojan and was as devoted to my cause, reaping the rewards when my UFA screen test yielded me the role of the coquette Micheline in a film adaptation of
Manon Lescaut
.

The part offered more screen time than anything I’d done before, though Mutti asked sourly how I planned to contend with work and a baby. Then Rudi was fired. He offered no logical reason for it, answering my urgent questions with a diffident “I think my boss wanted to hire his nephew in my place.” I thought I’d get fired, too, before shooting even started, but I was reassured that the part was still mine. Rudi suggested that while I went to work, he could stay home with Heidede. For all her dedication, Mutti was middle-aged and caring for an infant sapped her stamina. She also had her housekeeping, for like everyone else, she needed to pay the bills.