Marlene: A Novel by C. W. Gortner

Author:C. W. Gortner [C. W. Gortner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062406088
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

IV

The offer arrived shortly before the shoot ended. I sat in my dressing room—actually, my dressing closet, for it was tiny—when von Sternberg arrived at the door.

“Paramount wants to sign you to a two-picture deal,” he sneered. “The rats have spies on my set. They cabled Hollywood to say you are sensational, a rival to Garbo.” He eyed me. “I suppose you’ll accept. It must be trumpets in your ears, the idea that you can depose her.”

“Since when has Garbo been my rival?” I asked, refusing to take his bait, even if I wanted to shout in joy. “But of course I’ll accept—if you will be my director.”

He grunted, pretending indifference when he felt anything but. “I can ask. I have to return to that miserable town in any event and have nothing new lined up. Why not?”

Paramount’s agent in Berlin drew up my contract. The UFA made a ruckus. I was under contract to them; to release me, they insisted Paramount must pay for an early termination clause. Von Sternberg didn’t stay for the negotiations. He was running late, over budget and out of time. He left for America before the final cut. Jannings was horrified. I was not. His magic was spent, imprinted on canisters of celluloid. Our director had exhausted himself.

He was already bored with The Blue Angel.

As the editing team wrangled the reels into a release version for the censors, I packed my bag and vacated the set. That world, which had been my entire existence, where I’d given birth to the woman who would define me, stood empty now, the echoes of tyranny dissipated.

I had less than a month before the premiere and my date to set sail for Hollywood.

WHITE GOWN. WHITE MINK. Platinum skin and hair. An emerald bracelet and matching necklace, like the one I’d admired years before, gifts from Uncle Willi to celebrate my success.

The emeralds were paste of course, but it didn’t matter. I took to the curtain call like a newly minted goddess, bestowed with a bouquet of roses as the audience went wild, their applause and jubilant cries bathing me in justification. Did anyone notice the spray of violets pinned at my cleavage like a taunting corsage? If they did, no one mentioned it. Nobody cared.

The Blue Angel was a hit.

We had defied the censors—already kowtowing to moral rectitude imposed by the Nazi backlash against decadence—but the nervous UFA executives overlaid a Beethoven score on von Sternberg’s monstrous silent take of Rath’s demise, though nothing in the picture was remotely classical. He’d be enraged when he learned of it, but it was a minor setback in what otherwise promised to be a massive success.

My name was suddenly everywhere. Before I’d even left the Gloria-Palast theater on the Kurfürstendamm, boulevard of my earliest aspirations and defeats, the UFA was begging me to stay and re-sign my contract with them, at whatever price I requested.

“And miss meeting Garbo?” I said as the press blinded me with flashing bulbs and fans eager for autographs crammed the cordons separating them from my waiting car.

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