The Glimmer Palace (48 page)

“I’ll sign if you sign for me,” she said softly.

Goebbels looked at Lidi, the actress who was a favorite of the Führer’s, the actress who was going to consolidate everything he had worked for, with slight unease. Had he conceded too much? Could he trust her? Was she hiding something? And he decided with absolute certainty that she had to be brought down a peg or two. Although at that moment he had no idea how he would do it.

He dropped her hand, picked up the contract, and signed.

“I expect dinner,” he said as he wrote. “À deux, of course.”

Suddenly the door opened and a woman strode in, unpinning her hat.

“Ah, Magda?” he said. “What do you think of her? Isn’t she delightful? In the flesh she looks decidedly . . . sultry.”

Magda Goebbels shook Lilly’s hand but didn’t smile. She looked at her husband and the actress with a wariness prompted by her recent discovery that her husband was having another affair.This time it was with a young woman from an Alpine hotel whom he had “persuaded” onto the big screen. Mercifully, in some respects, she proved to be a hopeless actress.

“Pleased to meet you at last,” she said. “We have a shortage of good people.”

“Really?” replied Lilly.

“Yes, it was something of a coup to get you, I suppose,” said Magda Goebbels as she opened the door to a maid bearing more tea. “But you will do rather well out of it, I hear. As well as two hundred thousand marks, half paid in foreign currency, you have asked for a return ticket to America for you and for your husband.”

“The ministry will arrange all that,” said Goebbels. “Just call them with your dates and times.”

“I only just heard you were married,” said Magda Goebbels. “Any-one we know?”

“I have the perfect script for you,” Goebbels cut in as he stirred the pot of tea. “It’s been in preproduction for a while. As far as I know, it was actually written for you by someone you once worked with.”

“I’ve worked with quite a lot of people,” Lilly replied. “I wouldn’t necessarily remember a name.”

“Of course,” he said. “Anyway, we have had to rewrite some of it, but the basic conceit is good. It’s called
The Queen of Sorrow
. More tea?”

Goebbels lifted the teapot, his wife offered milk, but they both noticed simultaneously that the actress’s face had blanched. She shook her head.

“Well, then, maybe you’d like a cake?” asked Joseph Goebbels with a slightly strained smile.

va Mauritz, Communist agitator and sister of Stefan, had been released from the Moringen women’s camp near Hanover sometime in spring. For two years she had been incarcerated in a converted psychiatric hospital where she slept ten to a cell with other Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Gypsies on straw-filled sacks. As a Communist, Eva had received the brunt of the “correction”: she had been beaten daily by the camp commander until she admitted everything and more and cursed the ground that Karl Marx had ever walked upon. If she was physically scarred by the experience, she didn’t let it show. But to those who had known her before—to the women she’d loved and left in Berlin’s clubs, such as the Magic Flute Dance Palace and the Dorian Gray—to hear her echo Göring’s words and encourage them to “take hold of the frying pan, dust pan, and broom and marry a man,” it was patently obvious what damage she had sustained.

Her only visitor, her only confidant while she was in prison, had been her brother. In 1927, as her only living relative, Stefan had been informed of her whereabouts and had come looking for her. Something had changed in him and he seemed to have pulled himself together again. He had found a job as an insurance clerk and a comfortable room in a boardinghouse. Over the years they had come to a tacit agreement not to mention the war or the years that followed. And yet, one day just after her release, he admitted that he knew that Lilly, his wife, was still alive.

“I watched her, you know. For years I watched her. But why?” he implored her. “Why did she ask you to lie for her?”

Eva could not admit her culpability. In fact, she didn’t admit anything.

“And now she has emigrated to America and I will never see her again.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Eva said, and reached up and cupped his broken face. “I promise. We can get a place and live together like we used to.”

But Stefan pushed her hand away.

“I hate this city,” he said. “I hate this government. I hate this country.”

And he left without another word.

n 1934, one in three people in Berlin was unemployed.The Great Depression had already crossed the Atlantic well before Lilly made the trip. The new government had to take drastic measures: wages were cut, trade unions taken over, and the unemployed put up in tent camps on the outskirts of Berlin. But as the French politician Léon Blum pointed out at the time, while socialism represents a morality and communism a technology, fascism represents an aesthetic. All over Germany, cinema façades had been updated or lit up with newly installed spotlights. They had become government buildings in what would become known as a campaign of illusion.

Goebbels had high hopes for
The Queen of Sorrow
. The filming schedule had fallen behind and the budget had already gone to pot, but they were almost finished.They had left the climactic scene—the scene in which Mary, Queen of Scots, has her head chopped off at the order of her treacherous cousin, the queen of England—until last.

Anyone who saw the filming of scene 125 would never forget it. The setup had taken a week to perfect. Flats had been painted to look like a medieval English castle. Three spotlights had been positioned, at three, six, and nine o’clock, to throw the longest shadows. A mob of extras had been chosen for their strange physiognomies or physical deformities.The scaffold had been polished with butter.

They rehearsed the scene several times. Lidi, dressed in black velvet, her face as white as alabaster, her hands tied behind her back, whispered the words, “Into your hands, O Lord, into your hands.” And then off came her black velvet gown, to reveal a chemise of brilliant crimson, and she placed her head on the block.

They filmed the scene in a single take.The sight of a young woman with her newly bleached fair hair pulled back and her gray eyes wide open as the ax came down was heartbreaking. Some of the extras even cried.

Goebbels was extremely irritated when he was informed that the actress Lidi had married the Russian director Ilya Yurasov in secret the day after she arrived.Yurasov had not been seen entering the Esplanade Hotel, as he had feared; it was only when the churchwarden in Schöneberg was arrested for sheltering a Jewish mistress and bartered the information in exchange for her that the marriage was uncovered.

Goebbels had met the director once years before at a party and found him charming. When Yurasov had applied to go to Paris, however, he had personally turned down his exit visa. The explanation given was a lack of correct paperwork, but the real reason was that Yurasov was a highly skilled filmmaker, a talented director, a writer of note: he was a valuable asset despite his defiant stance. And now he had inadvertently assigned him a visa and the German film industry would lose him.

But his irritation was more than merely professional. Three times since returning to Berlin, the actress had accepted Goebbels’s invitation to dinner and then canceled at the last minute. Goebbels was a man not used to being rebuffed by women, not since his political ambitions had been realized, and as she had given him no indication to the contrary, he believed that an affair was just a matter of logistics. And now he saw plainly that the Russian director and the woman he had gone to some lengths to bring back to Germany had duped him. But what could he do? He had personally signed a contract with the actress. He didn’t want her to go back to America and spread the word among other German actors on the point of returning that he couldn’t be trusted. No, he couldn’t get out of it without major embarrassment or scandal. A month before the date scheduled for the premiere of
The Queen of Sorrow
, however, Goebbels received an interesting phone call from the Berlin chief of police.

Lidi’s contract stipulated that she had to attend the film’s premiere. As the film was being edited, however, she grew increasingly restless. She was not alone. It wasn’t just the endless military parades up and down the Unter den Linden or the public beatings, it was the sense that the city wore its new bravado with an underside of shame. Since homosexuality had been criminalized, many of the bars and cabaret clubs she used to know had closed down or had changed hands, while countless new decrees banned Jews from working, owning shops, even hiking in groups.

Mr. Leyer was taking care of Ilya. He had found him a job in the film-processing plant again, working the night shift as a negative cutter. It was a mundane and laborious task, cutting miles of film together in the order that he was instructed, slicing and pasting reels and reels of numbered frames. He would be safe there, Mr. Leyer told Lidi, until the time came.

The premiere of
The Queen of Sorrow
was held in February 1935. Lidi wore a gold lamé dress and a pair of diamonds in her ears that had been given to her by the minister of propaganda. He had seen the rough edit and had informed the Führer that it was a “singular triumph.”

The night was cool and clear and the sky was overcrowded with stars. The cinema’s façade had been draped with white cloth and was bathed in cool blue electric light. When Lidi arrived in a long black Mercedes-Benz, two dozen white doves were released from a series of birdcages. She paused momentarily on the stairs and smiled out at the crowds. Many photographs were taken by the party photographer. None is known to have survived.

One by one, more cars rolled up and dispensed their passengers. As well as party officials, the specially invited audience was made up of actors, journalists, and businessmen. At the welcoming reception inside were trays of French Champagne and English muffins. Dozens of jokes were made about the choice of refreshments. None of them was particularly funny, but they were symptomatic of an almost tangible anxiety that was in the air that night.There was a definite sense, it was said later, of foreboding.

As Lidi took her seat between the minister of propaganda and his wife, there was news of a delay. The film was so new, the rumor spread, that a final print had only just been completed. At first the film star made polite conversation about the weather, but then she lapsed into a tense silence. She closed her eyes and willed herself back into Ilya’s arms, she tried to remember his softness, his laugh, the upward slant of his eyes. But the reality of her situation could not be ignored for long. There was not enough time: their plan had allowed for a fifteen-minute delay, but not for this. If she didn’t leave soon, she would miss the train. Not long now, she told herself, not long now. But as the minutes ached by, she began to tremble with unease, with apprehension, with pure hot fear.

“Nervous?” asked Goebbels.

Lilly nodded. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t trust her voice not to give her away.

It was then announced that it was a person they were waiting for, not a print: a rather special person who was late because of business of an official capacity. Goebbels took advantage of the lull in the proceedings to mount the podium and thank his leading lady. He praised her beauty, her purity, and her decision to support her country when it mattered. If there was something triumphant in his tone, Lilly didn’t register it.

At the Ufa-Palast, at nine, an hour after schedule, the lights lowered and a single spotlight picked out the entrance of the small man with the black mustache. He marched to his seat, turned, saluted once to the assembled crowd, and then sat down. Hitler was a little put out to discover, when the houselights rose again before the feature, that Lidi was gone. He had been looking forward to meeting her. But the screening was already late and Goebbels pointed out that women were apt to make frequent visits to the lavatory in these sorts of circumstances. And so, when the orchestra launched into the overture, he sat back, relaxed, and waited for the red curtains to part.

Mr. Leyer met Lilly at the back door of the Ufa-Palast with her suitcase. A car was idling at the curb.

“It’s a close call,” he said, “but you’ll make it as long as the traffic’s light.”

“Where’s Ilya?” Lilly asked. “I thought he’d be here.”

“Don’t worry. He took a taxi from Afifa. The ministry made out a ticket for him in your name and left it at the ticket office. I’ve just checked and he’s already picked it up.”

“He was working tonight?” Lilly said. “How can he at a time like this?”

“He’s been on night shift,” Mr. Leyer explained. “We don’t want to arouse their suspicions. Now hurry or you’ll miss the blasted train and he’ll go without you.”

“Thank you so much,” Lilly said as she squeezed his hand. “For everything.”

Mr. Leyer’s eyes glistened. He knew he was a sentimental fool.

“Good luck,” he called out as the car drew away. “And give my love to that husband of yours.”

It was only then that he looked down and found the pair of diamond earrings that Lilly had pressed into his palm the moment before she had climbed into the car.When an SS man found them several months later in Mr. Leyer’s desk, he pocketed them and gave them as a gift to a girl from Hamburg.They were found in the rubble of a building near the Rathausmarkt in late 1943.

Of course, everyone stared at the film star as, still dressed in lamé, she hurried through the station toward platform 12, but nobody approached her for an autograph—not there, not then. They could see by her face that she would not have paid them any attention, that she was cutting it fine, that nothing or no one could detain her.There was a commotion at the ticket office—another random act of violence, another senseless beating—but she barely registered it.

The guard helped Lilly aboard the very last carriage and then blew the whistle. As the train began to move, she stood for a moment at the back of the train, watching the platform, the station, the city recede, her golden dress catching the reflection of a million streetlights.And then she turned and began the long walk to the front of the train, to carriage A, to compartment 14, where her husband was waiting for her.