“Possibly …”
“Or Lola Templin-Tavel?”
We nattered on, enjoying this the fantasy stage of a film project when absolutely anything and everything is possible. On my way out I asked if he could advance me five hundred dollars against my fee. Without the slightest hesitation he wrote out a check. I went straight to a post office and cabled Sonia: MONEY ON WAY STOP COME TO BERLIN SOONEST LOVE JOHN JAMES.
I still find it hard to explain why Duric Lodokian should have seen Julie as a fit subject for Realismus. I now think Aram had more influence than he acknowledged. He denied this at the time, stating that it was a combination of Rousseau’s name, the extreme length of the book and the comparative brevity of my script. His father had been very impressed that I could have constructed a story out of such intractable material.
“There are some fools,” Aram said, “who actually think that a story is unimportant. But a good story will satisfy anybody. Beautiful lightings, sets, costumes, fancy camerawork, intensity of style — this is for a coterie.” I half-agreed with him. But, anyway, whatever the reasons for the selection of Julie, I knew that I was now on my way. The path ahead was finally clear. And, also, I find it pointless to speculate on reasons too long. We can only do so much to influence events. The chain of cause and effect can be illusory and misleading. Why did that bullet shatter Somerville-Start’s teeth and not mine? What made Karl-Heinz send me the postcard? And so on. A little reflection and the so-called pattern of your life soon appears as little more than an aggregate of hazard and chance. We think we recognize good and bad luck when it affects us, but in reality there is nothing but luck. From that standpoint the Realismus contract did not seem fortuitous at all.
I acquired a lawyer, papers were drawn up and signed and half my fee was deposited in a newly opened bank account. I was suddenly wealthy again. I started looking for furnished accommodation for me and my family and moved into an office in the Realismus studios near the huge gasworks in Grunewald.
I found a furnished apartment not far from 129B on Rudolfplatz a few blocks away. I was oddly reluctant to change districts; so too was Karl-Heinz. The night before I left (Sonia and the children were due to arrive in a week or so) we had a final celebratory dinner. I gave Frau Mittenklott extra money and she cooked a gargantuan meal that made even Georg gasp. We had green corn soup, carp marinated in vinegar with horseradish sauce, stewed mutton with paprika and a hot chocolate pudding. It was a pleasant occasion in that warm fuggy flat, surrounded by the buzz of insects, and we all drank far too much. I promised Georg that no film would ever employ so many insects as Julie would. It was a fine evening. And prophetic. For the first time I registered how much Karl-Heinz drank — topped off on this occasion by three tumblers of brandy at the end of the meal. And then we talked about casting Julie. I said that at the moment Monika Alt was the prime contender. Karl-Heinz screwed up his face.
“I can see she might be good,” he said, “but before you give her the job you should see one other person.”
“Who?”
“Doon Bogan.”
Doon Bogan, Doon Bogan. I can hardly write the name even to this day.
VILLA LUXE, June 18, 1972
The old bus from town deposits us at the nunnery on the outskirts of the village. There was no mail for me today — something of a wasted journey, I walk through the village towards the track that leads to my villa. As I pass the church the German girl, Ulrike, steps out from the shadow of one of its crude buttresses.
“Mr. Todd?”
“What!.. Hello. Sorry, you gave me a shock.”
“Can I offer you a drink?”
“Well, I’m in a bit of a—”
“Please, there’s something I want to ask you.”
We go to Ernesto’s bar. Amazingly, he is actually there — I can hear him shouting angrily at his mother in the kitchen. We sit on the terrace and Feliz brings us two beers. It is that pleasant time of the evening. The heat has gone from the sun; pink bathers plod by from the public beach; soon the early bats will be swooping between the pine trees. I raise my cool glass to Ulrike. Without her spectacles and with the even tan she has now acquired, she really is quite pretty.
“Mr. Todd, did you ever make movies?”
For an instant I thought about denying it. “How do you know? Yes, I did.”
“I knew it!” She smiled broadly.
She explained: her boyfriend was a lecturer at the university in Munich. He was very involved with film studies.
“When you told me your name I thought I had heard it before. I wrote to him about you. Yesterday I got his letter.” She looked closely at me. “He said you were very famous.”
“Well, I was, I suppose. Forty years ago.”
She went on to tell me about her boyfriend’s work for some film festival in Berlin. A retrospective: “Silent Films of the German Cinema.” She unfolded a piece of paper.
“He has some questions he would like me to ask you. May I?”
“Fire away.”
“Good. Question one. Do you know the whereabouts of a film star called Doon Bogan?”
9 Passions
I knew whom Karl-Heinz was talking about. Doon Bogan was an American, a film star with a huge following in Germany due to the improbable success of an improbable film called Mephistophela, made by Alexander Mavrocordato in 1922, a version of Faust in which, yes, Mephistopheles was a woman. Doon wore black throughout the film. Her face was chalk-white with shadowed eyes and pale lips, and always framed by a tight black cowl. She was the perfect embodiment of fate, sex and death, and the film itself, in a somewhat ham-fisted Expressionist style, was dark and garish and untidily powerful. Doon Bogan became famous, married her director, Alexander Mavrocordato, divorced him a year later and stayed on in Berlin, where she made other successful films with the likes of Pabst, Murnau and Kluge. I asked Aram what he thought of Karl-Heinz’s idea. He was intrigued and suggested that we meet her and sound her out. He warned only that the budget for Julie would rise considerably if she consented to play the part.
We sent her the script and a meeting was arranged for lunch in the Adlon or Metropol Hotel. Perhaps it was the Bristol.… I am not too clear on the details of that day. I remember feeling the sensation of softness of the pile on the maroon carpet in the hotel bar through the thin soles of my new expensive shoes. Inside, the bar was sumptuously gloomy. Outside it was a dull noon, swagged pewter clouds over the city threatening rain, a fretful gusty wind tugging at the overcoats and skirts of passengers leaving the Friedrichstrasse Station opposite (it must have been the Metropol Hotel, after all). I was early, having visited a travel agent on some matter arising over Sonia’s and the children’s tickets and encountered a mindless bureaucratic problem. The ensuing fruitless argument with the clerk had irritated me and I went straight into the hotel bar for a drink. I ordered a large gin and water and calmed down somewhat.
A blond woman in a jade-green dress sitting in a leather armchair across the room was scrutinizing me. Her hair was pale blond — ivory-colored — bobbed, with a fiercely edged fringe cut short across the middle of her forehead. Wide, thin but well-shaped red lips. A narrow small nose with a perceptible hook. Where had I seen her before …? She stood up. She was tall, tall as me, even wearing flat ballet-dancer-style pumps on long, slightly splayed feet. She walked over towards me with an odd elegance, big strides, like a champion girl swimmer, say; muscled but lean, with a phocine grace.