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

hours: they are bringing woolen ties they knitted for their Adolphe. But in the study, the elevator boy, who has the day off, is placing his autograph under a hundred photos: Adolphe Menjou, Adolphe Menjou, Adolphe Menjou.

Tempo, August 5, 1929

Klabund Died a Year Ago

THE WRITER AND THE DANCER FOR HIRE

That was a happy time, the winter of ’26: back then I was a dancer for hire in a big hotel in Berlin.

Waiter no. 4, with whom I enjoyed a close friendship, had actually warned me about the table next to the banjo. All he had to do was give me a sidelong scowl as he walked by, and I knew instantly: you’re not going to get a penny out of them. Oh, God, it didn’t look as though a tip was forthcoming, either. Next to a charming woman a thin young man was sitting, gazing sadly and shyly at the dance floor and then up at the lights, which now turned a soft red. Soft red meant tango, and the dancing really is much better and much sweeter with this lighting. Yes, but better and sweeter didn’t matter to me in the slightest back then. The weight, that was the question, whether one had to haul along 200 or just 180.

The Spaniards were just beginning to squeeze a sweet bit of music from their harmonicas. I wanted to duck out and give my legs a little breather, the wife of the distinguished financier having already trampled all over my sources of income during the foxtrot. But the dance instructor, a Russian who did not treat us well, caught me: the treadmill must not stand still for even a moment. So I went to this table, on the left next to the banjo, bowed in front of the sad young man, and began to sashay across the floor with his lady to a tango. While dancers for hire usually think about golden cigarette cases or new tie patterns while they dance, out of pure boredom, this lady was light on her feet and danced well. Every time we twirled past her young man, I watched him: he looked like Zinnemann.

Zinnemann had been the top student in our class, and we regularly copied our math homework from him. Terribly pale and thin, his hair cut short like a convict’s. Poor Zinnemann—we had thought he would one day invent a perpetual-motion machine—had a problem with his lungs. They’ve long since buried him. Next to the young man I saw a cap lying on the chair, along with a couple of books. You’d be far more likely to find a cap at a five o’clock tea than books like these.… surely no book was ever seen again in this dance club.

They came back often. I danced with the lady, and the young man watched us quite jealously. Once, when I was standing around in the hall, he came right up to me. I was already fearing that he wanted to offer me a tip: what the devil, I would have been loath to take it from him.

“Pardon me …” he addressed me timidly, “I wanted to ask you … so a dancer for hire … that must be very interesting … I’d think, very interesting …”

“Nope, it’s not.”

His eyes looked back at me feverishly from behind his glasses. “No, really … excuse me for asking … but how do you get to be one?”

Funny thing; dancers for hire are always asked how you get to be one. To the ladies I danced with or who were learning to dance the Charleston for seven marks fifty, I always spun all sorts of tales, from “I’ve seen better days” and “family feud, disinheritance, getting away from it all,” to “actually I wanted to become an aircraft designer,” and “not all hope is lost quite yet.” Still, I couldn’t feed a pack of lies to this pale fellow, who looked like my dead classmate Zinnemann: what can you do if you’re in bad shape? If your collar and cuffs can be reversed only twice? If you can’t spend the night on a bench in the Tiergarten during the winter? If the only line of credit you have is with a wine merchant who added three bottles of Malaga to your tab, then dumped this Malaga into the Landwehrkanal just to sell the empty bottles.—Rolls cost money. What can you do?

He found that terribly interesting. “How about writing that down, the way you told it to me. I’ll place it in a newspaper!” Yes, write … I had once done something along those lines, but I wanted to try it again.

“So come to me; I’ll help you!” He told me his address, near Ernst-Reuter-Platz.

“Whom should I ask for?”

“Ask for Klabund.”

On the following few days, the dance teacher was nowhere to be seen in Grunewald. The Russian dance instructor was spitting nails. I simply no longer showed up. At home I spent three nights writing about what my legs had experienced. Then I brought all of it to Klabund [aka Alfred Henschke]. He lived with his wife, Carola Neher, the lady with whom I had danced the tango.

My memoirs struck me as quite pathetic, but Klabund was pleased, and sat there for an hour doing revisions. It occurred to me to wonder what he might be doing to my text. Now and then Klabund told me about having done something similar as a piano player in a bar.

The B. Z. published my memoirs of a dancer for hire. But beforehand, Klabund wrote me a couple of lines of introduction. We got together in a café, where he gave me these lines to use as a preface for the essays. Very fine words about how one should write about life as it is, and this was the way to go about it.

As we sat there, on that gray winter’s morning, he looked even thinner, even paler. He held a handkerchief in front of his sunken mouth