Kino (12 page)

The six-piece brass band was taking a break when we arrived at the Braukeller, a cavernous beer hall where the drunken shouts of a thousand proles were mixed with ripe sweat, cigarette smoke and spilled beer. I saw my Lilly right away, across rows of wooden benches. She clutched six steins to her chest and stood strangely tranquil among the raucous crowd, out of place, beautiful and aloof. She was tall and blonde, with short bangs, a sharply drawn chin, and the large, angular head of a movie star. She stood out like an apparition, and it was obvious that she had no idea where she was going with all that beer in her arms. I had seen Henny Porten, Asta Nielsen, Mary Pickford. Penelope Greifenau outshone all of them. I had found my Lilly.

Steffen agreed. “Without the glasses, she's perfect. I'll handle it.” He sniffed a heap of Zement from his tin.

I didn't take my eyes off her.

“No,” I said. This wasn't a word that passed between us in those days, but my relationship to Steffen had begun to change. His faults were becoming obvious to me. I no longer adored him blindly. “I'll do it,” I said.

From our bench, we watched the waitress weave through the crowded hall. She nearly spilled the beers two separate times before she unloaded them to a cheering group of Freikorps soldiers. She had already grabbed the next armful before I managed to get her attention. When she laid her eyes on me, my confidence vanished, and my first words to her, my future wife and the mother of my son, were delivered with a blush: “You ought to be in movies.” It wasn't a cliché yet.

As if she hadn't heard: “
Was
darf's denn sein
? Two beers?”

Close enough to see the moisture in the corners of her lips and the lights reflected in her eyes, I could barely think at all.

“They call me Kino.” I stood up and took an awkward bow. “And I want you as the lead in my film.”

Steffen shifted uneasily, itching to jump in and save me.

“I have a job,” Penelope said.

Without thinking, I put my hand on her arm. “You're above this. Will you come to Neubabelsberg tomorrow?”

She gave me a smile. Her glasses slid down her nose, but she didn't have a free hand to push them up. She sat down at the end of our bench. “My feet are killing me.”

A man in the black clothes and wide brimmed black hat of a journeyman shouted for her: “Fräulein!”

Penny ignored them. “Show me the script and I'll think about it.”

“The script?” Steffen said, no longer able to keep quiet. “No need to read it. Kino is a genius!”

“It's okay, Steffen.” I had the script with me–I always did–and offered it to her. She lifted an elbow and clutched it to her breast.

“
Bier her, Bier her, oder wir fall'n um
!” the journeymen sang, banging their empty steins on the table.

Penelope sat down and leafed through the script, ignoring the calls for more beer with a deep furrow on her lovely forehead. Finally, she slapped the pages down on the table.

“You wrote this?”

Proudly, I nodded.

“It's ludicrous,” she said. “You're asking me to play a sick woman who contributes nothing? To pine for a clown of a sailor? This is an insult to the cause of women.”

“A liberated woman!” I said. “You are perfect for the role! Lilly is the movie's true center, its conscience, the incorruptible heart of the story!” She continued to frown.

“Don't confuse the notes with the music,” Steffen said. “You have to trust Kino!”

“Women don't want to be put on a pedestal. You will never amount to anything if you don't respect your female characters as equals.”

“Come, Kino, these insults by a
Kneipentrulla
are beneath you.” Steffen made to leave.

But I regarded her carefully. What did she really want? I knew she was beautiful and a terrible waitress. I also knew this was no time to leave.

Steffen took me by the arm. “You can get Asta, or Pola Negri. Let's go.”

“Not so hasty,” she said. “I listed my objections to the role.” She took a deep breath and applied the double negative with precision: “I didn't say I didn't want to do it.” She did an absurd little curtsy. “Penelope Greifenau.”

Steffen clapped his hands. “Hallelujah,” he said. “You won't regret this. It'll be great fun.”

“Fun?” Penelope said with a frown. “I don't expect to find much fun in it.”

Did she know right away, in that soggy beer cellar, that she would be my ruin?

Among the degenerates assigned to
Tulpendiebe,
my new leading lady stood out like a cosmopolitan goddess–sophisticated, earnest, professional. On the first day, she knew the script and understood everyone's motivation, and her dedication to the film changed everything. The entire cast and crew had a crush on her, wanted to impress her. Even Harold Flint shaped up.

After we wrapped the first week with Penelope, she took me aside to tell me she didn't think I was in control of my actors. She told me my style was chaotic. We had filmed scenes in the tulip exchange and I had tried out new gags on the spot.

I told her that shooting was always messy, that I created order later, in the editing room.

“What about the drugs?” she said. She'd seen Flint and Krause smoke a hashish cigarette between setups, down by the loading docks. They had made crude jokes and giggled uncontrollably.

I told her that as long as the actors could still hit their marks, I didn't care what happened between takes. In fact, I wanted them to do whatever was best for their performance. I might have suggested she try a little hashish herself. I might have winked.

Oh my.

She looked at me with a contemptuous mixture of disgust and anger, a face I have seen many times since.

“You have no discipline,” she said, “and you're not dedicated to this movie.”

I thought I hadn't heard right.

“
Verzeihung
? This is
my
movie. I'm dead serious about it.”

“Then stop playing around.”

“My dear Fräulein Greifenau, ‘playing around' is how I work. Only at play are we open to our full potential! Art is pleasure! The orgasmic synthesis of ideas!” I was on a roll, and I quoted Steffen's motto, making it my own: “If it's not fun, why bother?”

“You're a hedonist!” she spat.

I laughed. “You say it as if it required parades and a flag and riots in the streets!”

At that moment, Steffen's car pulled up at the studio gate and honked for me. “You must excuse me,” I said. “I must attend a hedonist meeting, or, as we like to call them, ‘parties.' Would you like to join us?”

To my utter surprise, Penelope folded up her wagging finger and said yes.

On the ride to the Belvedere, she seemed pensive while Steffen told some story about a friend who had been beaten by the “brownshirts.” I didn't know anything about the Nazis at the time, but the story didn't surprise me. People were always getting beaten up in those days–by the communists, the Freikorps, and apparently, now, by “the brownshirts.” I didn't think about it twice.

I was thinking about Penelope Greifenau.

At Ray's party, Penelope relaxed, drank Steffen's lemon vodka, danced the Lindy, and sat on the pier with me to look at the moon. She told me that she was the daughter of Leo Greifenau, the celebrated physicist who lectured at Humboldt. The old certainties were crumbling in science just like they were in society. After the war, the universities had begun accepting women as students and Penelope enrolled, only to realize upon graduation that there was no future in the academy for women. Things weren't that liberated after all. Her father pulled some strings but the best he could offer her was a position as a secretary.

Penelope took it badly. She threw physics in her parents' faces, left home in a fury, and took the first job she could find. If she couldn't research and lecture, she wanted to embarrass them. The beer hall was humiliating, but she figured a movie was even worse, just the thing to get back at her elitist parents who had spent large sums of money to have their daughter educated at the best schools in Germany and abroad. She had attended the Sorbonne in Paris. To them, acting in a vulgar piece of primitive mass entertainment ranked somewhere below lugging beer steins. “The movies,” Leo Greifenau had said to her on more than one occasion, “just toss it all up there on the wall. They require nothing.”

Another man might have reacted differently to the insults. But it was a gorgeous night and Penelope was beautiful.

“You're in my movie to get back at your father?”

“Is that a problem?”

I didn't care. It was enough that she was in my film, that she drank with me, laughed, let me sit with her by the lake on a moonlit night. I was hopelessly smitten.

“I ran away too,” I said, “from wealth and a family business. My father didn't have any use for the cinema either. He trained me as an accountant, and nothing bores me more than numbers.” I told her how I'd given my inheritance away and left our Rheinland estate for the Oberlin's Scheunenviertel-
Hinterhaus
.

“We don't do what's expected of us,” I said. “You and I, we don't believe in rules.”

“Just the ones I make for myself. You don't seem to worry about consequences.”

I shrugged. “Good things happen if you let them.”

She gave me a skeptical look. “As a scientific proposition, that's rather weak.”

“It's not science, it's aesthetics. It's what I believe.”

Her smile said she was attracted to me against her better judgment. If you came close enough, you could watch her think–Penelope had a unique mind, brilliant and complicated, and it showed in her eyes. I could hear the party, laughter and music pouring out of the Belvedere, but I didn't want to join the crowd. I only wanted to spend time with this extraordinary creature.

When I tried to kiss her, she pulled away. Penelope considered a relationship between actress and director unprofessional, and that was that. She might have been the only actress in the history of movies, but she would not sleep with her director. That night at the Belvedere, Ray offered her one of the upstairs guest rooms, and she kept the door locked. I know because I tried.

From then on, I gave up Steffen's girls, Ute and the rest. I sent champagne to Penelope's dressing room, picked the best tulips for her every day after shooting. I
courted
her. I screened rushes for her alone so I could sit next to her in the dark while her face lit up the screen. I projected everything onto her. That is how movie stars work: they make you feel like you've always known them. Penelope became the conduit of all my dreams.

Eating the petals had been Harold Flint's idea. He began to improvise during the scene where the love-stricken sailor breaks into Lilly's bedroom. He might've been stoned. The script required him to climb in from the balcony while Lilly slept and to lay a tulip on her heaving breast. The flower–worth millions of guilders as a bulb–would heal the ailing beauty.

With the cameras rolling, Flint hopped around the set and engaged in all sorts of
Schabernack
. He crawled under the bed, opened every drawer, turned cartwheels. I let him go while Penelope, tired of pretending to sleep, made noises from under the covers. That's when he picked up the flower again, tore off a petal, held it to his lips for a trembling moment, and then chewed and swallowed, like a gourmand tasting a leaf of bitter chocolate. Penelope, who had grown impatient, raised herself, opened her eyes, and laughed.

It was the most innocent, unforced laugh you've ever heard, and even on silent film, the shot conveyed irresistible joy. “Keep on rolling,” I shouted, “keep going!” Flint plucked every petal from the tulip and stuffed it in his mouth while Penelope clapped and laughed and cheered him on. When he was done sucking up the last of the stem and dabbed his mouth with his shirt tail, he bowed deep, blew her a kiss, and disappeared the way he had come.

“Cut!”

We all knew the take was perfect: spontaneous and unplanned and true.