What does it mean, this tale we are about to read? How shall we understand it, ladies and gentlemen? Soon the music will begin, a movie will unfold. Where is the screen? Within? Without? It tells of matters both bitter and sweet. It tells of the world's conflicts and the soul's mysteries. Who knows where this tale came from? We can only read... and wonder.
Music sounds, the film begins.
You may applaud when it's over, ladies and gentlemen. An old castle, an old story.
Read now...
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This, with a few changes, was the prelude I wrote for the libretto of Bluebeard's Castle. Isn't it just perfectly awful? Perfectly cliche? I have never written a more exquisite bit of poetry or prose in my life, but the exquisiteness of this passage is agony: of a banality entirely worthy of Bela Balasz's place in world culture. Sadly it was saved by Bartok's magnificent score, the other Bela, the real Bela who never used more than seven words a day. He was the one with inspiration, I just lifted the deliberately functional words I wrote to describe the plot in the outline and put it into the libretto. It is truly amazing how opera can be so compelling while having no literary merit whatsoever.
Here is the most humiliating part: it was entirely deliberate. I wanted to write bad drama and I completely succeeded. The more insipid the script, the more flights permitted the composer of imaginative leaps that defy all rational consideration. One chord can provide a thousand implications where a mere sentence provides five.
And if music is liberated by bad writing, how much more liberated by it is film? We had thought there to be no art work more total than opera--a combination of all nine muses. But cinema is the tenth muse: all nine muses work together in opera, but cinema provides the portal through which we may encounter the muses themselves.
And what better subject is there to inspire ten muses to sing than the women themselves who inspire such flights? Opera is the realm of Violetta, Aida, Isolde, Mimi, Susanna, Pamina: operas through which heterosexual composers pour their longings--whether requited, unrequited, seduction or lament, it never matters. What matters is the longing, the pedestal, the sehnsucht, the desire to memorialize an ineffable longing forever in a sculpture of stone and ice. Until the emergence of this new composer, Britten, there has not been an unquestionably great homosexual operatist. The rest is all female heroines to whom the men fall in love, onstage and in the audience, even when the soprano needs to lose 50 kilograms. Yet homosexuals too identify with these heroines as though themselves.
Given the ability to see women in closeup, I thought movies would be entirely straight. Then I saw The Blue Angel, and the homosexuals were as in love with Marlene Dietrich as we were. I met Lena back in '24, noticing her on a movie set when no one else seemed to. She was magnetic even when she was an extra and knew just who she was. Within five minutes of introducing myself I said I would write her a script. The exchange was implied, but even then she was determined. She announced to me that one day she would be a star and we'd work together, 'I would hate to ruin the sexual tension between us.' We did not work together, the tension was as one-sided as what she shared with a hundred million men. \
And yet it was a mystery to me how one day I would become Professor Unrat.
We all know the woman who gave me horns by a different name, but her first name was Helene, and this Helene so bewitched that the Fuhrer himself went to war with her image in his mind.
There were the almond eyes of a mesmerist, narrowing at the slightest hint of a joke and lids melting at the slightest erotic attention. What's in the eyes is pure adventure: mischief upheld by utter control and self-assertion. What's behind the eyes is a Neuchatel clock: look closely and within a second of anything explained to her one sees the eyes dart and the head jolt. Behind the laughs and wit is a person whom the very eyes told you would do everything, go everywhere, and master it all with determination of iron and concrete. Whatever the world is for other women, the world was built for her willpower. The world is built for those who master all to which they take upon themselves and do so so agreeably that no one is aware of her mastery's extent until the work is done; and therefore, look closely. You know that one day the world will stand at her attention.
I have always been fascinated by the rare such woman, that woman who climbs from the pits of Tartarus to which the fairer sex is always hurled: women like Bluebeard's Judit with the determination to fight with Bluebeard's entire armory. Some are moral giants like that Scholl girl; others, like Marlene Dietrich, become the toast of the earth. Others? Others are like Leni.
Like any great work of art, Leni is a work of a thousand interpretations. There is the story of her evil, there is the story of her ambition, there is the story of her spite and seduction. None of these are true.
I do not know the truth behind Leni, I doubt even Leni truly knew the person in herself, but as I choose to tell this story: I tell you my Leni. My Leni was the nicest, most generous, gemutlicher woman in Germany. She was oh so generous with time, money, favors, sociability, and beneath it all, I had the sense there was only good will. I don't know what made this mistress of cinema deliberately lodge herself into history as its greatest villain. On the surface she was Lola Lola from The Blue Angel, but there was no killer from M beneath the surface; only a Brunnhilde who mystifyingly determined to ride herself into Siegfried's funeral pyre, and the why of it all was never discovered by me: the person best equipped to answer.
The name is Balazs Bela: international socialist, Hungarian exile, editor of fairy tales, Bluebeard's librettist, film theorist who puts readers to sleep; but film reviewer of renown who strikes fear in producer's hearts, and therefore bribed into being a film writer of mediocre distinction. These are all my hobbies: my profession, my calling, my place in history, is seduction. As an artist I'm no candidate for greatness, as a critic I am cliche, but as a seducer, I am the Magyar Byron without a pfennig of his dashing looks. No, my seduction is entirely through words, listening, wit, persistence and good taste in wine. I pity the era when women achieve their long delayed liberation and an ugly Jew must seduce women purely by virtue of his merit.
Great artists like Bartok and Kodaly, Pabst and Korda; life doesn't matter to them. All that is their lives, they put into art. To me, only life matters. Always give me more life, and more, and more. Art is there so crafty men like me may live better. Who is the greater artist: the art-maker who sacrifices everything so he may create, or the aesthete who hears their opera, looks at their art, eats their meal, walks through their garden with women so charming they are artworks unto themselves? Art is a gift to us, a blessing from the Gods. As the man who takes joy in the result, am I not the greater artist than the artist who suffers for it?
But I knew better than consider myself an active candidate for Leni. Most beautiful women are lonely, housebound creatures of intelligence who might as well be spinsters. Leni is a man deposited in the body of a wonderbeauty, and because she speaks their language, forty men of intellect were in love with her at any given time and so were their forty wives. Every city of Europe must have these great women imprisoned by the salon whom but for accident of birth would be great men. Rather, the great men in their midst achieve greatness by the muses they play. Vienna has Alma Schindler, Paris had Georges Sand, but Berlin is Europe's greatest city of all because it teems with these creative women: Marlene Dietrich, Lotte Lenya, Lou Salome and Leni Riefenstahl. But Leni alone escaped the confines of salon, sex and submission to become the maestra herself who sets the tempo, balances the harmonies and calibrates the dynamics.
I had no reason to believe she would choose me, and having no end of occupations I happily resigned myself to a gentleman's friendship of exemplary company: exhibiting patience and pleasantness as she took home men of twice my brawn and artists of twice my brain. But knowing that I must be magnanimous to gain entree to her good grace, I offered to write my mediocre dialogue for her directorial debut, free of charge. This hits on the great unmentioned secret of film: only the Jews are willing to pay real money so they may combat their reputations; everyone else is cheap.
Once I got onto her filmset, I happened on the idea of seducing her co-star, Martha Mair. Every night, a new club, every day, a new bottle of champagne. All of cultural Berlin saw us together within a week, yet I never took her home: never much more than a kiss between us. The next week, Leni barged into my office genially with a brilliant idea. Let's scrap Martha's part, write her out of the script and make her part into a man's. She set those almond eyes on me and what could I possibly do but accede?
When Martha found out she barged into my office ferociously first thing in the morning. She told me I sold her out to a more powerful woman who wasn't as beautiful as her: "it's because Leni's a goi! Isn't it?!"
I assured her Leni was no Aryan goddess and Jews like us have to stand up for each other in this business of vampires. What was shameful was that I believed it. She told me I was just another Jewish film executive using his power to get forbidden women and sell out his own landsleit. I told her this wasn't true and she was the only one for which I had eyes, and I would write her a movie that made her a star as big as Leni or Lena. Suddenly her eyes turned into the smoldering bonfire of Theda Bara's Salome. She pulled down my trousers and revived me in the office with the door half ajar. What could I do but promise that Leni and I would restore her part?
That day, the rest of us had to fly to the Italian Dolomites. I threw up on the fight. It was Leni who insisted on cleaning me up herself and ordered me a change of clothes from the costumes. And from 12:30 we spoke for 17 1/2 hours without a stop, until 5 the next morning before a 6 AM call. She offered me Scottish whiskey and Cuban cigars, which I accepted happily. She poured and lit for herself too, but I never did I see her put the drink or cigar to her mouth. I have only vague memories of what we discussed, but when we finally arrived at her cottage her face became obscured by darkness I felt as though for the first time I appreciated her crainioscopy in action: a mind moving with the speed of lighting, synthesizing all concepts of the world into order tightly enough for Kant: I don't remember her theories, but I remember things mentioned: Max Reinhardt and ballet, classical sculpture and Wagner, silent film and dance: especially dance. She enacted all the movements she wished to put in a musical film like Love Me Tonight or One Hour With You, only taking place in the days before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the songs set to the music of Tchaikovsky: and as moonlight bathed her silhouette, she acted a whole ballet from her mind with the grace of Pavlova and the voice of Lilli Lehmann. And then she demonstrated the end: the hero marched off to the Great War, and you saw our hero disappear among a cadre of a thousand marchers: and in the moonlight she stepped in time with the ending march of Sleeping Beauty.
That morning Martha was officially reinstated in a much smaller role. She never revived me again.
But 130 minutes later, at 7:10, Leni showed me a perfect sketch of a waterfall shot. A shot we needed by eight in the morning to get the proper sunlight with a 7.5 focal lens, R-stock filmstock with a red filter so that the palette comes out a darkest blue. No one else was there and we couldn't wait for the production team. I asked our driver where might be a good waterfall facing east and he drove us to the waterfall like the madman. When I saw the shot, I told her it couldn't be done, so did the driver. The mountains were much too steep and neither of us were willing to climb all that way to man equipment we thought ourselves sure to drop or fall. She threw her hands up, climbed one of the mountains alone with the camera and placed it herself. She lodged it in the dirt at an angle that could have destroyed the camera if it so much as dropped let alone fell. Then, production cost be damned, she kept the film rolling, descended the mountain, then climbed a second mountain so she could film herself next to the waterfall. With no one even to watch the camera, she got that shot in one take.
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Martha was right about one thing: movies are a business that only works by someone looking out for you. We call it a capitalist enterprise, but it's a business determined by an aristocracy for which every creator requires a Medici. My patron was Harry Sokal; as it turned out he was Leni's patron too. I only had chance to work with her because he recommended his lover to me as an actress, a soon to be bankable starlet, and a piece of arsch: but I knew what it was--offering a chance at his mistress as yet another bribe. But I had nothing like Harry Sokal's power, and by 1931 long knew better than think I had enough influence to win a starlet soon to fill a movie house. I contented myself with Sokal's wife, with his full knowledge of course, a woman whose ideas for films were better than Sokal's but left alone in a giant Charlottenburg villa.
This is the moment I should probably concede I'm married too. We have an open marriage and she understands that beneath these foppish cravats lurks a primitive animal whose Magyar heart she cannot satisfy any more than I hers. In those days of my forties I spent days I should have written plays smoking in the beds of their producers, served a late lunch fixed by their wives as I read their newspapers while smoking in their bathrobes: those wives were usually actresses themselves, withdrawn from the stage when they hit thirty like milk feared spoiled before its smelled. The stupidest of these actresses married other actors: actors who could bestride the floorboards as leading men into their sixties and in ten years would leave their wives of ever so slight wrinkles for a younger actress. The smartest actresses married producers: a specimen smart enough themselves to know that sex is disposable but reputation is not. The producers would come to parties with their wives, striking and ageless in form fitting gowns like velvet wrapped ivory, but so preoccupied are the producers with the newest models that they don't realize that beneath their ivory statues lurk wolverinas who have not been fed properly in years.
Leni would seem to be properly fed every day since she was twenty: men, women, men who thought they were women, women who thought themselves men; stars, directors, producers, stuntmen, cameramen, athletes, military men. Weimar Berlin was a place of sex without precedent or succession. Yet I believe there was one place she was not fed.
As a screenwriter, there is very little to do in post-production. I had yet to receive a new assignment, and tried to read Narcissus und Goldmund: the latest Hesse. I did not get more than five pages before I heard sobbing from a few offices over: I would not recognize the weeping had I not heard the same voice sing: it was Leni.
I seized my chance and went to attempt consolation.
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Leni: (between sobs) The film's no good.
Bela: It isn't?
Leni: It's furchtbar.
Bela: How can it be furchtbar?
Leni: You didn't see it!
Bela: I saw the rushes, what I saw was everything we hoped it would be.
Leni: Then I ruined it (starts crying again).
Bela: You didn't ruin anything.
Leni: How could this film turn out this way?
Bela: How did it turn out?
Leni: The studio hates it! The test audiences hate it! I watched the movie on my own, now I hate it!
Bela: They don't see what I see.
Leni: What do you see?
Bela: A beautiful woman who's also a genius.
Leni: GET OUT!
Bela: I'm sorry?
Leni: LEAVE MY SET!
And she threw the movie cannister at me.
Bela: What did I say?
No member of the fairer sex ever dared speak to me like this.
Leni: I am not one of your schlampes who falls for easy praise!
Bela: I think you misunderstood me.
Leni: All Berlin knows the great Bela Balazs! The mediocrity who writes Hungarian chicanery in German newspapers that derides the achievements of German artists and technicians who work seventeen hours a day to create the films you so deride then gets to sleep producers' wives so their films get good reviews!
Bela: Well you certainly misunderstand my job.
Leni: Critics are parasites! We have no need for you!
Bela: I'm not a critic. I'm a man of film: reviewer, theorist, screenwriter, and friend to talent. If I thought I had any talent myself I would direct.
Leni: What friend?
Bela: In the beginning of my career I was friend to the talent of composers: Bartok, Kodaly, they needed a man who would listen to their ideas, occasionally provide a piece of commentary, then promote their work to the intelligentsia and even the masses should the occasion arise. It's true, I'm Hungarian. Think for a moment how many poor gypsy musicians might have been great composers if they had the education or the money.
Leni: Why did you go to film then?
Bela: Beacuse film is democratic. Film is art for the age of the worker. A great artist of film needn't be an aristocrat or bourgeois, they just need to show up to work with a camera. A great artist of film may even be a Jew, or even, God beware it, a woman.
Leni: There are enough great Jewish directors.
Bela: We had no way of knowing that twenty years ago. How do you think the Wiene brothers became as great as they are? They had their talent but they needed opportunities, and they needed writers to champion them. Without writers like me, Robert Wiene would have been done after Dr. Caligari and we wouldn't have Raskalnikow or IMRI or Hands of Orloc.
Leni: So you came to film to promote talented Jews in the press?
Bela: I promote talented people, not Jews. I championed Metropolis when people hated it. I wrote about Pandora's Box and Faust when no one saw them. I was one of the first critics to tell people to see Nosferatu. I wrote about why Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss were actors as great as anyone acting in Brecht. I wrote about Lena Dietrich when she was a bit player and I certainly never slept with her!
Leni: Then why did you never write about me?
Bela: Because we had the same patron: Harry Sokal, and even a corrupt lusting like me has some ethics.
Leni: But you'll write for me?
Bela: I made a point of writing for you, even for free. I got to all these men when they were already artists, but I wanted to see the birth of a genius at its inception and watch as it mastered film in embryo.
Leni: This is quatsch!
Bela: This is genius! But it needs help!
Leni; Genius doesn't need help.
Bela: This is what I've tried to tell you. Nothing needs more help than genius! Genius is fragile, genius blows away at the slightest setback. But an artist becomes a genius because he disregards the setback and keeps working until the work of genius appears!
Leni: This is not a work of genius.
Bela: You don't know that yet! Why don't we recut the movie together.
Leni: But I...
Bela: Let's watch the movie...
Leni: It's terrible.
Bela: It's not terrible. Even if it's terrible, it's not terrible.
Leni: I can't bare to let you watch it.
Bela: You will let me watch it! After seeing your temper I'm convinced you're the strongest woman in Germany and you can survive letting someone see a movie that isn't up to the standards of a genius.
Leni: Do you promise not to tell people about the cut you saw here?
Bela: I swear.
Leni: You'd never go behind my back like that?
Bela: Your secret is safe here. You're safe here. I promise.
She embraced me and did not leave my arms.
Leni: A great artist would make a great film.
Bela: You HAVE made a great film. But a film is born three times, once in script, once in filming, once in editing.
Leni: This film is still born.
Bela: Such a thing does not exist.
Leni: I have no idea how to make it better.
Bela: Do you know why I offered to work for you free of charge?
Leni: You came to me because you wanted to sleep with me.
Bela: Yes, but I heard you were the most talented, intelligent young artist in Germany, and the reports were true.
Leni: I'd only be the most talented if Lang and Sternberg leave.
Bela: You're the most talented now! What would Sternberg be without Lena Dietrich? What would Lang be without Thea von Harbou?
Leni: They are geniuses!
Bela: They are geniuses because women inspire them to be geniuses! Without the muse there is nothing!
Leni: Then I'm just a muse.
Bela: No you're not. You're the rare muse who has stepped out from stone to become the poetess herself! You are your own muse and need no man.
Leni: (looks at me) I need men very badly.
Bela: You're right. People only call me Berlin's best scriptwriter because they're afraid how I might review them otherwise. But since people call me that, I can offer my services to anyone I want. I could go to Sternberg or Lang or Wiene or Pabst, get a lot of money and try to bed their stars: it would be a lot easier. But here was a beautiful woman kissed by genius. I chose you. Germany's chosen you.
And she kissed me.
For the first time in my life, I was faithful.
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We cut the movie. It was good. Not as good as the dailies, but I knew The Blue Light would be a hit. It was meant to showcase Leni the way The Blue Angel showcased Lena Dietrich. All we'd need is to introduce Leni to the public as a star that moved to the A-list, and she would be offered all the parts Lena was offered with no guarantee that Lena was the preferable star.
But then when it was time to show the movie to Harry, she'd recut the movie completely and it was the movie of a genius.
I'd helped her put together the fast-paced blockbuster required so she might have a chance to make a better movie next, but what we showed to Harry Sokal was a slow, meditative transfiguration. Slow enough to watch suns rise over the curves of hills, rivers rushing out of small-opened caves, the fog rise to the top of mountains, clouds brushing along the sun, moons peaking out from chimneys and trees, pottage on a wood fire boiling over, fresh milk poured out of a bowl, streams of perfect reflection with a single raindrop to glisten it, and Leni jumping around to watch it all as a feral girl of nature, in one shot even with her head peaking out amid a veritable herd of evergreen trees: as though she were Daughter Nature herself; a female Siegfried who'd never known fear. It was a transfiguration vivid enough to drive a rural Teuton mad with longing. And even amid all this Norse eros, she managed to do things in juxtaposition never done before: not only wooden images of Christ crucified with utter plainness, but the filming a church service--a real one! No one had ever done such a thing because no man had the charms to get away with it. All Leni had to do was blink an eye toward a holy father starved of intimacy, straight or gay, and within five second Leni received permission.
Leni cut the film to run at the speed of a touch across a leg. Sternberg filmed sex and sleaze, Lang filmed underworlds, Leni filmed the overworld, the salt of the earth, the volk: couples dancing happily enough to be at home in a Dresden doll, men in straw hats living in small wooden cottages with long beards; strapping muscular younglings in lederhosen, boys in medieval bycockets, wenchish maidens offering men grapes held in cornucopia. Everything in Lang and Sternberg seemed to dramatize ends. Everything in Leni seemed to dramatize beginning, awakening, possibility. In our cynical age, you never would believe such visions from the hand of anything less than a master, but in Leni's shots were all the the possibilities at the beginning of Beethoven's ninth and Tristan's prelude.
And then came the accusation: the denunciation before the world that Leni's character was 'the devil's witch' responsible for the death of the village's arrogant young men who kept climbing sheer mountains too dangerous for mortals to heights above the clouds. There was brief chase through town in fast motion, a stoning, just long enough to get the pulse raising, then the miraculous run through the forest where her body causes a flickering half-tint moving against every tree, and then back to the slowness. And yet Leni's pagan character, Junta, falls under deep trances from the light emitting from crystals: all through the movie you can't tell what the crystals are quite from: they seem as they may be trances of the moon, trances of flowers, trances even of the mountain. Then we find the source of the crystals at the mountaintop, and so do the townspeople, and Junta so prizes the crystals above all else that when she returns to her crystals at the end of the movie when they're all gone: all that remains is an opening between mountains of gynecological resemblance, and in despair, Junta careens off the mountain. Did she jump? Did she fall? We are not meant to know.
It so often seems like genius intuits its very state before it happens: Mozart wrote his Requiem amid his death, Thomas Mann predicted the rise of a great German mesmerist in Mario and the Magician, Oscar Wilde predicted the exposure of his double life in Pictures of Dorian Gray. Whether Leni meant it that way, the trance of The Blue Light was Leni's prediction, and it came absolutely true.
A screenwriter in 1932 didn't do very much. He might help the director come up with the story, but films in 1932 still barely spoke: the difference in music was far more than the difference in words. Bu as we filmed, Leni allowed me to insert a monologue in this story of love between two people of different races who could not understand each other. Vigo, the city poet and painter, speaks only German. Leni's character, Junta, able to speak only the Italian Leni, no stranger to the Dolomites, spoke fluently with an accent so heavy it had its own lederhosen. And in the middle of the movie, Vigo and Junta living together in the forest where none could harm them, Vigo declaimed to his mind as he paints while Junta poses as this feral girl reads:
"Junta, you little witch... you make me behave like a fool... If only we could speak with each other, it would be perfect. I have been here for many weeks now and... I'm afraid... I'm afraid... I'll not go back ever... back to the people..."
Junta then looked at a rose and fell into something like a trance.
And then we retired to the waterways of Spreewald, and we were happy.
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We came in the spring, we stayed until winter. There was no money in film for the sorts of films she wanted to make.
Leni didn't care much about politics, but she was a good socialist like us all. Just like Brecht made plays, she wanted to make films that exposed the injustices of the world so we could not look away. Her heart was set on a project filmed on location in Africa to expose the modern day slave trade. While the plot would be filmed in studio, it would be surrounded by a full half-hour's footage of the slaves themselves in all their appalling conditions. Every day I'd hear her on the phone explaining her vision to another producer: all of whom told her the same mantra--there isn't the money for it.
It was true. This was the Great Depression. There was barely money for a trip to Africa, let alone a movie on location, where lives of entire crews would be endangered in attempts to get the proper footage. But Leni was a woman of resolve implaccable. This was the movie she wanted to make, and she waited all too patiently. When there was no money in Germany, she tried producers in France, Italy, Great Britain, all of whom told her the same. She attempted undeterrably to find the numbers of adventurous Hollywood producers like Irving Thalberg and David O. Selznick: known for taking at least mild risks.
Yet you would never know: you never saw her upset. Every day, she simply hung up the phone after speaking with yet another producer, went back to her drawings, her mountains, her rivers, passed the days in perfect harmony with the surroundings, and then we went to bed.
She canoed. We canoed. I finished a screenplay, called The Visions of Hildegard. She photographed our property every day then moved onto photographing the property of neighbors. I read my books. She climbed the Krausnicks, and when she reached the mountain's peak, drew everything she saw. We played tennis. She taught me to dance. We played four-hand piano duets. We swam in the waterways together. She was happier than she'd ever been; or so she claimed. I was happier than I'd ever been, but I knew better than to say it out loud. We planned on returning to Berlin in the winter, ready to sell the movie to whomever held pursestrings at that moment with a pitch I helped plan for her as though it were a screenplay itself.
But we loved the country so much that we decided to stay through the winter, play in the snow and keep each other warm.
And we discussed what happens in the unlikely event a certain Uncle Wolfie takes power. We didn't want to think about it, but she forced me to. I had contacts in Russian film, I'd visited the Soviet Union just last year. I'd previously corresponded with Dziga Vertov at length for years, met Alexander Dovzhenko a number of times in the studio. Post filming he'd lock the door to his studio and next to the camera we'd discuss film and art over copious vodka. Vertov even arranged dinner with Czar of Cinema himself: Sergei Eisenstein.
Such an enlightened country was surely looking for a woman of genius, and would crow to the west about giving her the chance to make her masterpieces while the West was still caught in the chauvinism of old.
But even Leni tabled that discussion whenever she could.
Then Uncle Wolfie was appointed after an election in which we didn't even vote.
When she heard the news, Leni was utterly firm in her instant decision.
Leni: We're not going back to Berlin. We'll never go back if we have to.
Bela: You have contracts.
Leni: Everything changes now. Contracts mean nothing.
Bela: But what about your career?
Leni: SCHEISSGAL ON MY CAREER, NOTHING GOOD CAN COME FROM RETURNING! You will not return to Berlin! I'm staying with you until we go to Moscow and I will tie you to the bed if I have to!
Bela: But what about your artworks, your cameras, your
Leni: NOTHING GOOD WILL COME FROM BERLIN!
Three weeks later, she off-handedly brought up the idea of having a child after the move to Moscow.
The day before she brought it up, we had the most unlikely visit I'd ever had in my life. Fritz Lang: film's Kaiser himself, there in our cottage with his monocle and pursed lips: maker of Metropolis, the most expensive movie ever made and possibly the best. Nobody saw it, no friend saw it no matter how often I mentioned it. And just when everyone was ready to declare this Kaiser deposed, he'd made M: a movie that perfectly reflected of the Fatherland itself--poor, bruised, deacdent, awash in crime and murdering the future of its children. Of course, he wasn't there to visit me, he was there for Leni, and asked to speak to her alone.
My crest fell to the floor. I knew he was there to take Leni away from this paradise. I could never have known what he offered her: abscond with him to Hollywood. Goebbels had just offered him to run the German film industry, and he was taking the next train out of Germany for as long as the Nazis were in power, knowing that saying no to Hitler may forfeit his life and Thea's.
He wanted Leni to come with him: run away with him. I suppose Lang had erotic designs on Leni, but he always looked as though he'd never even heard of eros and his ultra-violent movies always looked similar. Sternberg had Lena Dietrich, and Lang had just divorced Thea, his wife, screenwriter and best advisor. He needed a German star to work with him in France or Hollywood to tap the European markets where German directors and stars were the brand of highest quality. 'You are Marlene's exact opposite" He told her. "Apollo to her Dionysus." Dancing where Lena sang. Naive where Lena was sophisticated. There would be plenty of young starlets to compete with, but a beautiful woman with a foreign accent who learns good English would go everywhere in that town. And if she wanted to direct, Hollywood may not allow it but Broadway would, the Metropolitan Opera would, and a Ballet Russe choreographer named Balanchine is trying to found a national ballet company for America and would require a second choreographer.
Leni left the meeting. Lang boarded a train for Switzerland. Leni threw up.
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Happiness is a woman's arms, happiness is the bracelet and frills touching your back and chest, happiness is a night at the theater with a hand in yours, happiness is sneaking about with secrets to keep, the thrill of the chase and the thrill of breaking expectations, the thrill of hiding and the thrill of inventing explanations when caught, happiness is the hotel room assignation and the walk across the street to and from whomever you meet. Happiness is a luxury in 1933.
I found a copy of the book: 'the book.' Not in 1933, but '32. Still three months into our new life: every fifth sentence underlined and notes in the margins everywhere. And as I struggled with the presence of Mein Kampf I put it out of mind for Leni. I am in love with a new woman every fourth day, but for all 1932, I was in love, and love is forgiveness. You forgive the object all flaws, all annoyances, all dangers. All that remains when you're in love is love, love that you strive for eternal prolongment even as to be in love is not to be in life. Was Leni capable of love? Was I? Am I?
This could not be Leni. She simply went about her days in the same blissful, storm and stress sheltered manner as ever before, and so did we as a couple. Friends joined us in the country over the weekends: Harry and his new lover, Emil Janning, Conrad Veidt and Gussy Holl (who'd recently left Janning for Veidt), and my own dear Budapest discovery: one Peter Lorre--who came to me as just a nine-year-old vorschule boy I hired to run a scene in a never finished play for cheap: he was so magnificent I told his parents to send him to drama shul in Vienna. Leni, ever the hostess and caterer, would put off her duties and banish our valet from the kitchen so that she could work all day on dishes German, Bavarian, Swabian, Rhenish, Hessian, Saxon, Viennese, Alpine, Styrian and Sudeten.
Even Brecht and Lotte came out, and of course Brecht asked if I begrudged him a night with Leni: how could I begrudge him? What was a night between geniuses when the exchange of creative fluids amid the physical could inspire them both? Lotte invited me to her: many times we'd madly kissed and groped in the old days of Berlin, but we never went to bed, and for the first time ever, I had eyes only for Leni, not Lenya. Weill was there too, Lenya and I laid upon the chez longe, holding each other silently as Kurt played the piano amid the noise of our meisters upstairs.
Leni said I love you every day, but what is 'I love you' to a woman of craft and genius? The greatest love, the greatest geschlechtsvehrker, is not to be compared next to greatness of creative compulsion, and the creative height of a genius must be the view from Olympus, making love to gods in manners that feel almost physical. What is the physical world next to this conceptual thing in itself that brings non-being into being?
And what are the heights of one dwarf-like Jewish man next to the heights of hundreds of thousands upon camera, all of whom represent strength?
I shan't deny, one day I was looking through her drawer so as to surprise her, my diminutive torso draped in her own clothing. To drape myself in the clothing of women is not a particular passion of mine, albeit to be in the presence of their smell... if you'll forgive such intimate vulgarities. And then I find a picture of Hitler in her drawer: his face that beams evil into the mind; the eyes that stare out absolute intensity into the world; to look into those eyes too long is to go insane.
Had Leni gone insane? Had I? I felt insane having seen it, as though staring at delusion. To imagine her glorious form seduced by the cadaverous grotesquerie of Nazism--her genius was already in the grips of some ecstatic madness every time she picked up a camera, surely she didn't need Hitler to be worthy of it.
And then I remembered, once a month, she would leave for a day and come back rather joyful. Having left one lady for another many times, I'd figured I knew where she was going and I didn't begrudge her: at least I didn't surmise I did. And yet the reasons why began to bubble. She continued driving to Berlin once a month and I did my best to put it out of mind and write; not about fiction but about films that had already been, where I knew my worries would not spill over.
I did not confront Leni about any of it: never: such was the spell she put me under. She simply did as she would had she seemed a democrat.
We continued our escape to Stalin's utopia which wasn't even a true escape: a simple trainride through the East, inspected at a German border all too happy to see me go, venturing through the republic of Poland and the Bialoweiser Forest, Warsaw, Belarus and Minsk, then into the Soviet land of dreams we go, then into beautiful Smolensk, and finally to Moscow, where Comrades assemble our glorious future. The invitation in my pocket was straight from Eisenstein himself. He never had reason to care about me, but he was clearly mad to meet Leni. Was it to make love to her or to work with her? I truly think it was neither: I think it was simply so he could talk to her, colleague to equal colleague.
But there we remained in Spreewald as though inert from invisible weight: no matter who visited, no matter how long we were there alone, Leni talked of revolution, she talked of workers, she talked of the tragedies subjected to women and all our homosexual friends, she talked freedom and equality, she talked of all those Jews of her life and how dearly she loved them. She spoke of America and the opportunities she'd have liked, but she said that the idea of America bored her. Life in Hollywood would be starring in a compromised picture after another compromised picture, with no guarantee of a woman ever directing and requirements to raise money should she take any creative endeavor elsewhere in this alleged land of opportunity. She spoke of the Soviet Union with at least a vague excitement. She wanted badly to meet Eisenstein. To learn from him, she thought, would be to truly learn cinema for the first time. They passed a few letters back and forth in which he proposed a few different movie ideas: 'was there a part for you?' I asked her: 'in some of them', she said. I asked if they spoke about her directing, and she said it was a strong possibility but first she'd have to prove use to the Soviet Union as an actress: once there was a movie that found great favor with Stalin and a now dear friend I'd never yet heard of named Zhdanov, she would in all likelihood be given unlimited budget for projects of her choice. As a bad Russian speaker, she asked me to teach her all the Russian I knew. Within a week her Russian was better than mine.
She talked of how Hitler horrified her, yet she also spoke of how her revulsion for him was a power over her she had never experienced. When he came to power, for the first time ever, I could see the terror come over her, a terror against which she looked powerless. Day after day I saw her shake, I saw her panic and overbreathe as I held her and told her she would be alright, I would be alright, all would be well and movie life soon would resume. Finally, we bought the tickets and packed the bags with as much of our life together as we could fit.
And when the day came for the train, I was there by 3 o'clock that afternoon. Leni had been in a panic for days, but she was utterly calm and said she had to make a few last phone calls. I protested that we had no time and she could send letters from the station. She said she'd meet me at the Ahnhalter Banhof for the 3:30 train, and I was to wait. I saw the picture of Uncle Wolfie in my mind but again I put it out.
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Three-thirty arrived, and in place of Leni was my wife, Anna. The train departed, and where once was Leni was only her pictures.
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Part 2
I arrived in Moscow to be personally greeted by Eisenstein with flowers. He was there for Leni and got a heartbroken Jew with a mustache. The portly genius stormed off with his crazy hair before I could even weep into his shoulder. It was left to Grigori Alexandrov to shepherd me around Moscow and give me a tour of Mosfilm and Sovkino. As his German was even worse than my Russian, there was not much to say. We looked at the cameras: he showed me the Debrie le Parvo silent camera on which so much of Potemkin was filmed and let me crank a film out of some beautiful technician taking the stock out of water and hanging it on a clothesline: she was dressed like one of Tolstoy's peasants, spoke only Russian but was all too happy to pose for my camera before I'd suggested any such thing. Clearly she showed interest in whomever held the camera, and in former times I'd find her enchanting even were she indifferent, but I found myself in a new country with utter lack of interest in the one pursuit that always sustained it. They showed me the American Bell & Howell camera on which Strike and October were made. This time they had me photograph her with double exposure.
...I began to see that some bureaucracy wanted me occupied with this one while Eisenstein spoke or whatever else to Leni. I have never, however, been fascinated by sex by bureaucracy.
Then she gave me the Mitchell Standard: the latest sound camera, and she indicated for me to film her as she sang: beautifully, I might add, what I later knew to be a Russian Saucer Song--one of those songs Russian women sang at Christmastide to determine a young lady's fate, not that anyone was supposed to be singing anything for Christmastide anymore.
Soon Alexandrov left me alone in the room with her, and she immediately began trying to fulfill her obvious instructions from Eisenstein, but there was nothing to be done. Instead I simply listened to her speak Russian at a speed I did not understand as she recounted to me what was, no doubt, a terribly turbulent lifestory given the theatrical agitation with which she told her tale. We stayed in the studio until three in the morning at which point I simply motioned for the door and told her to go home. There was only one presence for whose company I felt room.
I was asked later by Alexandrov if I had found her charming company and of course said I did. He apologized for Eisenstein: telling me in strict confidence that Eisenstein had just been released from a mental hospital after returning from Mexico, where he'd made a massive cinematic epic he would not be allowed to finish.
Alexandrov also said that Eisenstein had been talking to my old contacts, Vertov and Dovzhenko. All three all spoke to the Ministry of Cinema and made the same recommendation. That I should be appointed to the State Institute of Cinematography. My Russian was certainly not good enough to give a lecture, but I was told to lecture about film in German to a crowd of 200 students.
One week later I stood in front of 200 students and began speaking in German, no interpreter. Everyone stared at me blankly, like 200 images of the blank face on the screen: I could read any emotion I wanted into those faces.
At the end of the lecture, I received tumultuous applause, people were shouting, and aside from 'bravo' it was almost exclusively Russian phrases. A few of the women were crying. A few students hung around afterward and I asked what was going on, they said that it was the power of my lecturing. 'But I didn't speak to them in Russian.' 'Then your speech was all the more powerful. They felt it!' I remained entranced by the Soviet Union but not even I believed that.
As we kept talking, the students left one by one until I was face to face with a red-headed female student who told me quite directly 'they were instructed to do so by a visiting commissar, but it was also completely genuine.'
'How is that possible?'
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If you're wondering if I got over Leni well enough to go to bed with my students: the answer is, of course! Their indifference to me was enchanting, and I pursued them with the dogged faith in my cause of a Lenin. How can they resist a teacher who so obviously prefers them to his male students, listens to their ideas and problems, who jokes with and treats them as an equal, visits them in their domiciles as a surprise with caviar and vodka; an authority figure who gives them the approval no teacher ever had? Even at nearly fifty, the Magyar Byron could share his Hungarian heart just as well in the Soviet Union as among the Teutons!
And yet, something did not work. I don't know if it's because they seemed to me so immature, I don't know if it's because they seemed to me so substanceless compared to the wives of Germany who've already lived, I don't know if the presence of Leni haunted me, and I hesitate to admit this to you, beloved reader, but I was not the boudoir gypsy of my former days for a time. These girls do not inspire me as the women of old. They are beautiful, but their beauty is promise, not fulfillment.
And the lack of fulfillment carried over to my professional life. My lack of necessity in the film business inspired me to truly learn Russian, but none had time for me nor desire. Eisenstein, still recovering from his Mexican fiasco, taught at the film academy for a year and was utterly indifferent to my attempts to befriend him in a manner that was decidedly unenchanting. Vertov was much too busy to meet and had no need for a German language critic and theorist on his set. Dovzhenko would occasionally meet for dinner and vodka which of course became a full night that ends at 4, but he was far too busy lobbying the party for approval to make projects of his own. All I had were female students who were indifferent to me until the day we went to bed, and male students, to whom I was just as indifferent.
But then Fira Ilinishna came to visit our class: whom in private I rechristened Essie. The great Esfir Schub, the editor who recut and subtitled foreign films to make them ideologically compatible, and made documentaries fully equal to Seryozha Mikhailovich and Dziga Arkadyevich, but to me, another formidable woman of mischievous eyes and smiles that cure depression. Her presentation to the class about her editing work was extraordinary, but the class only wanted to know about her documentary trilogy about the fall of the Romanovs: about the details of how the aristocracy lived, about the details of how Russian government worked before the wars, about what secrets she discovered about the old regime. She answered them with impeccable diplomacy, but one could see in her eyes a glimmer of adorable fear.
I complimented her presentation to the very heights and asked if I could see her doing her work. She took me into the editing room, we shared a vodka bottle, within an hour she told me all the answers she withheld from the class, within two we were en flagrante on the floor next to her equipment, and I performed with a magnificence as extraordinary as her documentaries.
It was then that I learned there was a great surfeit of female film artists in the editing rooms of the Soviet Union, and I grew determined to visit every one of them among the editing equipment of Russia: and so I accomplished by 1936. I was informed that such circumstances were true in Berlin, in Hollywood, in the Ealing studios of London and the Cite du Cinema in Paris. Oh that I might be able to visit them all. A whole cabal of secret directors who remade the films of ostensible genii and rendered the ramblings of men into art! Secret rooms in every city in the world in which hundreds of Lenis practiced their craft.
And yet by '36, when it came time for the purges, these secrets turned out to be no secret, and these adorable invisible women disappeared as did everyone else.
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No matter how many editors there were, Essie and I were inseparable, and my deepest worry was that some informant would get it into their heads to separate us, and just like with Leni we discussed contingency plans of where we to move away from the arrests, but whereas Leni and I usually discussed alone amid the views of our balconies, we never discussed indoors and whispered our logistics in the parks of Moscow, where there always were hundreds of couples, whispering arm in arm, doubtless formulating exact same plans as we did.
Rumor came down upon us from on high that the entire film industry was about to be purged: we all prepared and packed our bags, slept in the hallways so children would not awake with nightmares, everyone said goodbye to their families every night and Essie kissed her daughter good night with tears in her eyes and every night Anna asked for what reason she cried. We told her it was happiness, and amid the Soviet Union, it was a kind of happiness.
Eisenstein's team wanted to get together to watch one last film in his study and we were invited: Essie was a little puzzled. She and Seryozha had a rift years ago after an uneasy, volatile friendship. They tried to have an affair, but Seryozha was neither attracted to her nor any other editor. It was said his lover was film, but everyone said his real love was his film crew.
Seryozha and Essie hadn't socialized with each other in the years since: they would make a gaudy show of friendship but they secretly detested one another. The reason? Essie was the inventor of montage: not Seryozha. When they were together, Essie showed Seryozha how to do it. But Seryozha was the first to get to use it on film in Strike and Potemkin, and he became known as the cinema genius, not Essie. Seryozha was a genius, with the same divine madness as Leni, a madness Essie did not possess amid all her good sense and stability. Would she have been capable of a narrative film as great as Potemkin? We shall never know.
But Essie was invited to this farewell party, and told over the phone to 'bring Bela.' It was truly the first time Seryozha showed any interest in me. Whether I was some Hungarian critic and teacher, or the lover of his nemesis, there was always a vague contempt: great interest shown in the men who stood next to me rather than I.
Yet here I was, and what do I see playing in the background of this farewell party? The Blue Light!
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"Bela Simonovich!"
Eisenstein came right up to me and gave me a vodka-fermented kiss on the mouth, as all Russian men were expected in those years. "You left a genius in Berlin and you acquired a genius in Moscow!"
He made his ostentatious bow to Essie, followed by an embrace that seemed to last forever.
"Come, let's drink and you'll tell me how she did it."
"Did what?"
"The film! How could she possibly get those mountain shots?!" He pulled out two chairs from around his desk and indicated us to sit down.
"Everybody out! Grisha! Start the movie again."
And shot by shot we went through the whole thing while everyone else drank rambunctiously in the hallway. A series of questions each more detailed than the last. I couldn't answer half of them and then he provided his own answers. Essie occasionally disagreed and Seryozha simply ignored her and kept talking to me. I could see Essie getting a little bit livid.
When it was over I told the story of how Leni recut the movie and how we first got together. Partially because Seryozha Mikhailovich would want to hear it, partially in hopes of putting some attention on Essie.
Seryozha replied "Of course genius is fragile! Genius needs support and without that support, we would have no cinema!" He stood up, poured us another shot and turned to Essie.
"To the genius of women!"
And he bowed.
I was stunned, yet Essie had that blank face I saw from Leni, where anyone could read any implication into that expression they liked from joy to rage.
"And now, Bela Simonovich, we watch her other film. Boys! Girls! Come back in!"
There were only boys.
