Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

nose, his ridiculously hulking shoes seem as heavy as lead balls, his back is crooked. This is how Grock comes into the dressing room—a sad old man.

Outside, a thousand hands are clapping, the sound of laughter can be heard all the way over here, Grock had twelve curtain calls, and flowers, so many flowers.

Grock, the man, plops down on the chair in the corner and breathes heavily. They wipe the sweat off his face. He can no longer keep his eyes open; that’s how much the footlights have blinded him. The photographer who has been waiting for an hour asks him to pose. Grock pulls his lips, which are painted black, into such a wide grimace that they almost touch his earlobes, and he grins into the lens. I think he dozes off during the photo sessions. But he doesn’t have the guts to say: Do it fast, that’s enough laughing, I have to get to bed!

Grock, the clown who has to make the world laugh, wants to get to bed, he doesn’t want to keep posing, he doesn’t want to smile, he wants to sleep!

Bienne is a small German city in Switzerland. Clock factories, clockmakers, clockface designers, clock hands manufacturers. And a café, Zum Paradies, owned by Herr Wettach, son, and daughter. Business at the café is as bad as bad can be, the people in Bienne are so hardworking. So what does Karl, the ten-year-old son, do about it? He performs in Papa’s café, juggles with cheesecake and beer bottles, plays the harmonica, tells the joke about the hippo and the sewing machine. The café is now full, every single evening, because his sister has also become an amateur performer, dancing on the rope stretched between the buffet and the cloakroom. Wettach has talented kids.

But the two develop an appetite for the circus ring, run away, find a spot for themselves with the circus, travel the world. Still, Karl Wettach is far from being Grock. First he lifts hefty weights, then he plays the clarinet, then he drops this career path and becomes a language teacher. Goes back to the circus. Successes, always successes. And the next thing you know, he is Grock, the clown dictator, the man who is booked solid for three years—his pay is guaranteed.

Eighteen years ago Grock was in Berlin. Came from Zirkus Schumann, went to the Wintergarten. Partner: Antonet. So what happened? Antonet and Grock bombed, because there is an enormous difference between the stage and the circus ring.—Antonet and Grock reworked the act, and one week later they—along with Reutter—were one of the two top attractions in Berlin.

His name is Grock, and here’s why: Brick, a very popular music clown, lost his partner, Brock, when Brock died. Then he looked for a new partner. Found Karl Wettach. They made a contract. But Brick and Brock had such a good name that Brick asked Wettach to call himself Brock. Wettach didn’t want to, since he never adorns himself with borrowed plumes. He called himself Grock. The name has stuck to this day.

What props does Grock work with?

He plays the piano, saxophone, miniature violin, and accordion.

He can dance a little, he can juggle a little, he can do a little gymnastics.

That is all.

There are performers who can present all these little odds and ends with so much humanity. There are no performers who do comedy as profoundly as Grock. He is a clown of the soul, a metaphysical clown, as it were.

There is no performer who can replicate that, there is none.

Except one: Chaplin.

Chaplin and Grock are two brilliant brothers. Somewhere, deep down within them, their individualities connect.

It is said of Mark Twain that while concocting his droll stories in bed, he always wept, and that Saphir thought of his best punch lines during his strolls at a cemetery in Vienna. Chaplin read Greek philosophy.

And Grock, the clown, has gray hair and suuuch a sad face.

The only one who could entertain Grock is Grock. Grock would laugh until he cried about Grock.

Berliner Börsen Courier, November 2, 1927

Ten Minutes with Chaliapin

Such a commotion.

A hundred bellboys. Elevator up, elevator down. All the top management. Everyone in the film industry. Fountain pens scratching away. Cameras eating up plate after plate. A camera takes aim, menacing as a cannon. The heavy hand of a portly cartoonist is trembling. Everyone is sweating.

My God, my God.

Just a bunch of people: a manager who looks like Feodor Chaliapin, and a Chaliapin who appears to be a heavyweight wrestler.

Only his head. A fine, good, noble head. Unmoving. Like the Volga (a short, wizened-looking lady, in spite of her youth, said as much in the hallway, while lovingly clutching a volume of Turgenev to her Persian fur and somehow treating her words as a pitch for the first topic).

But Feodor: a warm little wool jacket over the world’s most expensive bass voice; green tie, the red cockade of the Legion of Honor on his lapel; drinks sherry and speaks the broad French of someone who never makes it past the novice level; his hair is fair as flax; the cigar he is smoking seems to be the very best import, Chaliapin’s broad chest inhales its smoke deeply, too deeply; the singer’s fans are starting to stare.

From the crossfire that keeps coming at him, and which he withstands patiently, like a pro, we learn:

That Feodor Chaliapin was born in Kazan, in Tatarstan;

That his parents, simple peasants that they were, worked the land and had a warm pechka, a warm stove at which the young Feodor dreamed of Nevsky Prospect and the Iberian mother of God;

That Chaliapin joined a boys’ choir through divine providence, and in this post he got nothing less than one ruble per month;

That Feodor, who was smitten by the world of the stage at the tender age of twelve, traveled throughout the hinterlands of Russia at seventeen as a funny old man in a ludicrous operetta;

That in Tiflis, in the Caucasus, Chaliapin finally devoted himself wholeheartedly to his voice