The Glimmer Palace (44 page)

By the time the nun picked up the phone, Lilly was incoherent with grief.

“Hello!”
the nun shouted into the chasm of the telephone line.
“Hello, hello!”

It was not the right Sister August. The wrong Sister August explained patiently that Lilly’s own Sister August, real name Lotte von Kismet, had left the order and then died years ago in the war, probably killed by a mortar attack on an army hospital. Her body lay in an unmarked grave somewhere in France, her long limbs bent to fit into a regulation-size coffin.

Edvard sent a bunch of white lilies. Hanne’s brothers could not be traced.The ladies who ran the adoption scheme now spent their days raising money for aged pit ponies. And so Lidi, the actress, was the only mourner at Hanne Schmidt’s small committal, apart from the Bulgarian who had once owned The Blue Cat, who came at the end and cried noisily into his sleeve.

Lilly sat alone in the cemetery as it grew dark. Few other mourners noticed her, a small figure dressed from head to toe in black. In the past few months she had felt not sad, not betrayed, but numb, so numb that she would often shake herself awake to find herself sitting like this, immobile, inert, with no idea how long she had been there.

ince he had bought Ufa, Hugenberg’s dinners were not optional for any actor or high-ranking crew member. They were compulsory. And this one was no exception. The studio couriered a rack of dresses and sent a car.

The room was alight with crystal and scented with huge vases of freshly cut gardenias. Actresses, singers, and dancers in dresses shimmering with jet drifted from the terrace to the cocktail bar and back again. Joseph Goebbels held court in a corner. He was easy to spot with his limp and his overlarge head. He came to every premiere, every wrap party, every fashionable gathering, or so it seemed, in Berlin. His friends were American socialites and titled Germans. He was married but that didn’t stop him from making advances at any passing starlet. His eyes, it was claimed, could strip you at twenty paces.

It was noted that the actress Lidi barely touched the food she was handed but drank several glasses of Champagne. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” somebody said. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.” Her glass was empty so she took another. But then it was empty again and she decided that she must have spilled it. The room was too bright, the music too loud. She stood swaying slightly as man after man spoke to her, responding to him with a simple nod, a “Really,” or an “I see.” A fresh glass was placed in her hand and she drank it in one mouthful. And then she looked up, and although the diplomat with whom she was engaged in conversation repeated the question three times, she did not reply.

Dressed in a black dinner jacket with his deformed hand in his pocket, Kurt mingled among the financiers, the bankers, and the politicians as if he had been circulating in this kind of company his whole life. He had seen her, she was sure of that, but as he passed by he looked straight through her. Her glass was empty again.The diplomat had given up and been replaced by an executive. She smiled, made her excuses, and headed to the bar.There she picked up a bottle of Champagne, but the dark green glass was wet and it slipped through her fingers and landed on the marble floor with a loud fizzy smash. Everybody turned and looked, everybody except him. They were waiting, it seemed in that moment, for something from her, a word, a joke, a smile. It didn’t come.

“Murderer!” she shouted after the former soldier as he made his way toward the French doors. “She loved you so much. . . .”

Even after years of elocution taught by Sister August, the second half of her sentence was swallowed in a sob. Kurt turned and looked back at her, and a single word slipped from his mouth, one word that he knew only she could hear.

“Jew,” he said.

How did he know? Had she told Hanne? She couldn’t remember. Lilly picked up a vase of flowers from the mantelpiece and hurled it, the roses, the water, the porcelain hitting the wall just to the left of him and showering the room with red petals and broken pottery. It was, some said later, so out of character that many had to do a double take. They laughed and wondered if it was some kind of press stunt. Then somebody took her by the elbow, covered her bare shoulders with a jacket, and tried to lead her to the door.

“No,” she said. “No.”

But it was not Mr. Leyer or Hugenberg or Kurt or even Joseph Goebbels.

“Ilya!” she cried. “Oh, Ilya.”

“Lilly, let me take you home,” he said.

But once they were outside, Lilly seemed to sober up. And the awkwardness between them returned.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” he said.

Lilly nodded.

“Are you all right?”

He tried to look at her, to catch her eye. But she would not.

“Just put me in a cab,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Lilly,” he said. “We have to talk.”

Lilly looked up the street. A taxi was approaching.

“Let it pass,” he said. “Get the next one. Please?”

“I’ll call you,” she said. “And thank you.”

Ilya told himself later that he should have stopped her. He should have taken her hand and led her back to the place they had once been. He had loved her; he loved her still. Katya was a ghost, a figment from the past. Lilly was the one who was real, who was alive, who was there. But he let her go.

The taxi slowed as it approached the center of the city. In the middle of the street were a group of adolescent Nazis, boys as young as fourteen dressed in brown uniforms shouting, “Death to Judah!” As they marched past, Lidi saw that they had a girl with them, a girl whose head was shaved and who had a placard round her neck that read: I GAVE MYSELF TO A JEW.

Lilly had turned down a contract from MGM five times but agreed to sign it the day after Hugenberg’s party. In truth, she hadn’t even read the first offers; she had merely noticed the studio’s stamp on the envelope and thrown them away. The deal she accepted was for three thousand dollars a week with a fully staffed house in the Hollywood Hills. It was four times higher than the original offer and would cost Bill Frame his job.

The morning she left Berlin, the sun was shining. It promised to be the most glorious day in 1927. Wet shirts hung in courtyards would be dry before lunchtime, cats lay sprawled in the shade, windows that had been closed for months were finally yanked open to let the damp air of countless nights of restless sleep escape.

The grass in the Tiergarten was awash with black serge as bank clerks and businessmen stretched out their lunch break. Groups of students sunbathed on the beaches of the lakes in the nude. Long brown bodies lay side by side—the short, the hairy, the pale, the pink. Everybody who had a job could afford a beer in the Swedish Pavilion or a jaunt in a mildewed rowing boat. Even the city’s landladies, the widows, the ones who’d lost their sons in the Great War and their daughters in the flu epidemic, came out onto their balconies, where their faces, painted garishly by gaslight, puckered in the sunshine.

The smell of moisture and decay, a smell that caught in the mouth, mixed with the scent of gardenia and honeysuckle, rosemary and lavender. If policemen and storm troopers, traffic wardens and train drivers unbuttoned their shirts and rolled up their sleeves, who could blame them? It was a day for forgetting sadness and forgoing judgment. Nothing mattered but the caress of your lover’s hand or the midday sun on the back of your neck, nothing mattered but the effervescence of the beer in your mouth or the water as you swam, nothing mattered but the sense that you were at the moment in full illumination, in focus.

She had called him the day before she had arranged to leave. Ilya had agreed to come to the station to see her off. He had bought a couple of magazines and a bunch of mimosa wrapped in newspaper. At first he hardly recognized her: she wore a simple cotton day dress and a frayed coat. She looked uncomfortably like the girl he had found in the typing pool.

“You’ll be a smash,” Ilya Yurasov told Lidi as they stood shivering in the filthy shade of the platform. “A smash.”

“Have you ever thought of leaving?” she asked.

“No,” said Ilya. “At least, not yet.”

Wait for me in Berlin
, she had written. Katya’s words were seared into his subconscious. He would wait. But when she finally arrived, he would meet her and explain what had happened. And then he would break it off.

The train was ready. The passengers were invited to board. Lilly stared at the green lights on the track but didn’t move. If he had asked me to change my mind, I would have, Lilly admitted to herself later. At that moment, if he had expressed one single sentiment that suggested he still wanted me, I would have had my trunk removed from the train and ripped up my ticket. But why should he?

She didn’t say much. And so he talked about the weather. And the bicycle race he’d been to the night before. And then he pointedly watched a large French gentleman argue with a porter about a tip. She climbed aboard her private compartment on the train to Le Havre and he slammed the door shut behind her with more gusto than he had intended.

“Lilly,” he said suddenly through the window. “Forgive me.”

Lilly stared at him. She thought for a second she had misheard him. How could he be this cruel? How could he bring up the past like this?

“What did you say?”

He didn’t repeat himself. She must have been mistaken. The train whistle blew. How like a film, she thought in passing. He looked at the clock.This is the end.The end of it all.

“Write to me,” he said. “Good-bye, Lilly.”

“Good-bye, Ilya,” she replied.

They had not kissed, or hugged or even shaken each other’s hand. If you had seen them at this moment, you would have thought them distantly related or maybe employed by the same firm. There was a physical formality between them that was immediately visible.

She sat down in her compartment and stared out of the other window so he wouldn’t see her eyes cloud over with tears. Ilya took it as indifference and his smile began to fade before the train even began to move. And then he watched as the locomotive blew a cloud of steam and began to slowly roll forward. It headed out of the station, with ever-increasing speed, toward the suburbs and then onward all the way to the flat fields of France.

I mean nothing to her, he told himself as he turned and walked away, still holding the crumpled bunch of mimosa. Everything we once had is lost. And so he did not see the figure that leaned out of the window at the very back of the train, the figure that had run the length of three carriages to try to catch one final glimpse.

Lidi, the actress, traveled incognito to the United States of America. There is no Lidi or Lilly Nelly Aphrodite on the passenger list of the SS
Sufren
, which left Le Havre on the fifteenth of October, 1927, and arrived in New York nine days later. There are two L. Smiths, however. One, we may assume, was Lidi. Onboard she avoided the endless cocktail parties and black-tie dinners. She ate in her cabin and spent the days sitting out on deck with a book. A few people tried to befriend her—an elderly couple from Vermont even offered to adopt her—but she politely and firmly turned them down.

She had not expected to be received like Pola Negri, who was Polish, with flowers and orchestras and the explosion of press bulbs when she arrived at Pier 27 in Manhattan. She was German, and Bill Frame had warned her that the bad taste of the war had not quite faded. And yet when she stepped off the gangplank with the address of a hotel that he had given her and a purse full of newly minted dollars in her hand, she was met by a dozen journalists, seven studio executives, and a translator.

“How do you like America, Lidi?” they shouted at her.

The translator hastily explained their question.

“I haven’t seen it yet,” she replied.

And when they heard what she had said, they laughed as if she were hilarious.

“Well, America loves
you
!” they yelled.

Before she could respond, however, she was rushed into a limousine and driven uptown to the Hotel St. Regis on Fifth Avenue.

“All the European movie stars stay here,” said an executive who claimed he originally came from Frankfurt. “Is it true you only have one trunk?”

“I don’t intend to stay here forever,” she said. The studio executive, who would leave his wife for a Brazilian dancer, lose everything he owned in the crash of 1929, and eventually end up in Sing Sing, laughed.

“That’s what I said,” he said. “But once you’ve seen California, you won’t ever want to go back.”

Although she was barely known in the United States, two of her films, including
Kinetic
, had been released in the major cities and had clocked up respectable box-office returns. As the American economy boomed, people began to seek out new experiences, to wonder about the world outside their borders, to dream of foreign travel, and there was an appetite for the exotic, for the foreign, for the European.

“What do I remember of my first arrival in America?” she said later. “I remember the smell of roasting peanuts and flower stalls. I remember the light, which seemed a different color from what I was used to: cleaner, brighter, harsher. I remember the heat, which made the air almost too hot to breathe. And I remember the music. It seemed to be coming from everywhere, from people playing in the streets, from gramophones you could hear through open windows, from the band playing on the roof terrace of my hotel. You felt as if you were in a movie even when you walked to the corner shop to buy a coffee.”

Lidi’s arrival in America made the gossip page of the
New York Post
. The photograph was a little blurred and her left hand was raised and covered half of her face. Only one eye was visible but was in the process of a blink, and her mouth, which was open, seemed on the point of forming a word beginning with the letter O. The headline read “German Screen Vamp Takes a Bite of the Big Apple.” From then on, it was decided by the studios to keep her out of sight until her first American feature was about to be released. She boarded a train for California the next day and, several days later, disembarked in Pasadena to avoid the waiting journalists. And then, or so it seemed to her American fans—of whom there were at least several thousand—she disappeared.