The Vengeance of Rome (66 page)

Major Nye had told me how Badehoff-Krasnya was famous for supplying English girls to special friends. ‘Distasteful as it is to an Englishman's mind, the fact remains that the most sought-after dancers,
demi-mondaines
and entertainers in Berlin are English. So many of our unfortunate little youngsters have fallen into the hands of the Hun traffickers. The procurers know the returns their percentages will bring in Berlin. It's a filthy trade and that man is at the rotten core of it.'

Major Nye had added that if Prince Freddy's talents had been turned in a constructive direction, he would have been one of the leaders of his day. Röhm had thought much the same. That combination of Asian and Teutonic was volatile and at the same time cold. His character contained a particular kind of hunger often only satisfied by opium or some other form of narcissistic hedonism. The Mongol had tenacity, analytical genius, personal magnetism but also a fatal taste for depravity. Outwardly a suave and gentle little man, delicate and old-fashioned in his courtesy, exquisitely neat in his person, he secreted beneath his modest exterior the most refined and excessive sadism. Kitty's mocking cynicism became a kind of fixed grimace when she talked about his vices, but her eyes betrayed her addiction.
La vie sensuelle
would soon devour her. It was not easy to remember that once I had watched her playing gaily in her short skirts and woollen stockings about the deck of HMS
Rio Cruz
as we steamed away from Odessa, exiles together. Now her face was already beginning to show signs of dissolution. I think she was twenty-four. But I cannot deny her attractions.

I soon discovered that the reason Kitty hated her mother was because, in her desperation for morphine, Frau Oberhauser had effectively sold her daughter to Prince Freddy. She could do nothing now, she said, because she was weak. But didn't I think it was wrong for a parent to expose a child to such dangerous company?

Of course, this was, perversely, to my own advantage. In hating her
mother, Kitty was inclined to love those her mother hated. No wonder Weimar was a happy hunting ground for Freud's army of Jewish pseudo-scientists preying upon the wealthy in Berlin and Vienna. Release your repressions! they cried. And a black monster with red jaws and glittering fangs, with grasping paws and a huge scarlet prick, was called into being. With him came the ghosts of those ruins yet to be. The ruins of Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Munich and Berlin. The ruins upon which such monsters thrive. Aggressive carrion willing to seduce when they can or rape if they have to. All innocence is defiled, all belief eroded, all virtue reviled.

The red-and-black monster roars and its saliva is poison dripping upon all that remains of our honour and our wealth. Once there was a power to defend us against the monster. A new Siegfried, we thought, who would drive the dragon of Bolshevism from our midst and establish a bright new order across Europe. Instead, Siegfried took the dragon into himself, or the dragon turned itself into Siegfried. Whatever the result, compromise was the cause. And Hitler's willingness to compromise, his failure to concentrate on the essential issues led him to his monumental, melodramatic self-destruction.

Prince Freddy was related to the Wittelbachs. This meant that certain fawning nationalist interests in the Bavarian capital were willingly blind and deaf to the rumours about him so long as his royal blood graced them with its acquaintance. As a result he was not living in obscurity. According to Kitty, his habit was to make sure that his private life appeared solidly conventional. I would eventually discover that the rooms to which casual visitors were admitted were full of panelling and leather and baize, with hunting trophies and various other masculine badges with which the average wealthy man advertises his vitality and prowess. He also displayed pictures of relatives whose names were associated with the height of breeding and respectability. The bedroom they might see would be sparse and equally redolent of masculine values. He would subscribe to local political parties, charities, business ventures. People would find him a gentleman through and through and roar in angry defence of him if any hint was offered concerning other practices. Indeed, should they find within themselves a desire to taste these forbidden pleasures, Prince Freddy would warn them of what became of people who developed such habits. If they persisted, they were his for ever. Kitty told me this and shrugged weakly. So it was with her.

In some ways the holiday in Nuremberg was my last ordinary innocent pleasure. When it was over, my descent into several kinds of hell began. I had no intimation of it, of course. After the break, as soon as we were back
in Munich, Kitty arranged for us to visit Prince Freddy's extraordinary flat where, she assured me, ‘snow' was always in plentiful supply. He could not seduce me, of course. I knew how to control my appetites.

In a note Prince Freddy told Kitty he would be delighted to see her guest. He already knew that the famous American film star, Max Peters, was in town, and he longed to meet me. He had seen many of my films and was immensely flattered that I should want to visit him.

His huge apartment was in a very well-to-do-suburb of the city, not far from where I had met Frau and Fräulein Röhm. The house itself was a rather fanciful one, owing a little to the extravagance of the Wittelbachs, so I was not surprised it had been built by one of that family. It was now owned by a Ruhr industrialist who used it occasionally as a holiday place but rented the upper part to Badehoff-Krasnya. The suburb's broad tree-lined roads were largely unmade at that time and carried little motor traffic but were well kept with sweepers and porters, even through the depths of the Depression.

Only the very wealthy weathered the crisis leading to the establishment of the new gold mark. Few feared a continuation of the poverty experienced in the early 1920s. Germany was a naturally prosperous country, growing more so every day. People feared civil war and were prepared to do almost anything to avoid it. The idea of Nationalist Bavaria marching against Socialist Prussia was anathema to modern Germans. That was why a party whose name included a compromise, which resolved the differences and united the people, was attractive to so many who knew little of the real Nazi policies and therefore did not properly support them when the time came. The fatal flaw was there from the beginning.

We were admitted into the Prince Badehoff-Krasnya's building by a uniformed porter who directed us to an electric lift which took us up a couple of floors. Here on the landing Prince Freddy awaited us. Slender, short and very dark, he reminded me of a Borgia dagger, but he was charming. One could easily see how he had ruined countless lives. His oiled hair was brushed straight back on his head, he had a pencil-thin moustache and rimless pincenez through which his silver-blue eyes gazed mildly and wonderingly. His lips were thin, tight against his teeth. His hands and feet were tiny but perfectly formed, while his bearing was that of an infinitely cultured, highly bred man of the world, chivalrous, gentle and courteous to a degree. He apologised for his inconvenient living quarters. This floor and the turret were completely cut off from the rest of the house so that privacy was assured.

He escorted us through the conventional apartment then pulled back a curtain disguising a door into a small lobby. From this a staircase rose.
He led us up to the top. Soundproofed double doors shut the staircase off from the landing and led into an entrance hall hung with astonishingly vivid futurist tapestries, more extreme than anything of Fiorello's! From the ceiling hung octagonal glass spikes of irregular length, stained dazzling red, green, blue, orange, rose du Barry. Inside the glass glowed electric light bulbs. Beneath them in clashing contrast sat a life-sized bronze of the Naples Hercules, pensive, solid in its colossal power.

As the doors closed behind us dead silence fell. Every door and shutter in that strange flat must have been equally soundproofed. Heavy curtains divided the apartment, hiding doors, windows and walls. The rooms and alcoves were dimly lit with more coloured lamps. It was unsettling to find something so exotic in the middle of Bavaria! Even in Berlin this would have seemed more like a film set than an individual's flat. I could hardly believe these were temporary quarters. The Prince's house in Berlin, said Kitty, was similarly decorated but was much larger and with special rooms.

The apartment's interior gave the appearance of tremendous space and loftiness. Each wall was panelled with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Between them, a foot in breadth, were wooden columns on which vaguely obscene mural frescos were painted in vibrant reds and yellows and blues. The ceiling was mirror glass; mirrors lined the shutters; the glare was toned down by pastel-coloured curtains, divans, cushions and silk hangings. A great, wide, canopied divan occupied half one wall; a cabinet gramophone, with piles of records, stood beside it. In a corner, inexplicably tangled up with electric wires, cables and green baize shades, was an enormous arc light. The floor was thickly carpeted so our feet were also soundless.

Prince Freddy was self-deprecating. ‘I have a taste for the exotic and the modern,' he admitted. ‘There is a little Eastern vulgarity in me, I fear. But without the vulgar, we die of good taste, do we not?'

Meanwhile, he made us welcome. He had a Japanese servant he called ‘Monsieur Frank'. If we required anything, Monsieur Frank was at our service. Kitty explained how she ‘owed' me some coca from Nuremberg. ‘You must tell me all about Nuremberg.' He crossed to a lacquered cabinet from which he produced a long yellow Venetian glass bottle. From the bottle he poured into a phial at least an ounce of the life-giving powder. ‘I hear it is a children's paradise.'

Refusing money, he assured me that my films had already entertained him so thoroughly he owed me at least that. ‘Take it,' he said. ‘There is more. There is always more.'

As Kitty and I were leaving, Prince Freddy recommended that we visit
the Flashlite Klub, which had opened a few days earlier across the river near Zeppelinstrasse. He had a small investment in the place and could recommend the English girl there. She was unusually talented. He smiled and rested his hand on my arm. I was bound to know her.

For a terrible moment I thought he referred to Esmé, who had so badly let me down in Egypt. Then the Prince produced a handbill to show me who he meant. I was astonished. The star chanteuse at the Flashlite Klub was Gloria Cornish! My old friend Mrs Cornelius! I was amused and delighted by the irony. A few days earlier I had yearned for feminine company and worried where I would find my next supply of ‘snow'. Now, it seemed, I had an excess of both!

Gloria Cornish was never more glamorous. With the customers' intimate torch-beams playing over her sensuously dressed figure, she stormed on to the little stage of the Flashlite Klub. Radiating
joie de vivre
, energy personified, she blew a kiss to the band, a kiss to the audience. The cellar was thick with cigar smoke and California poppy. It barely disguised the heavy smell of mould. Yet all was transformed, all shabbiness forgotten, when she emerged from behind the velvet curtain. She was sex. She was joy. A golden promise. The nightclub rented out electric torches and encouraged customers to direct the light wherever they pleased. White beams played on the artistes and on other customers who attracted them. Being mostly Bavarian burghers, they were frequently unsubtle in their play with the beams. Yet nothing could cheapen my goddess! Even Kitty, the eternal cynic, was entranced, though she pretended not to be.

These were the days before every chanteuse was expected to look like Lola-Lola in
Der blaue Engel
, a costume which became as formal as an Auguste's face. The real cabaret singers wore stylish gowns, like my Mrs Cornelius.

Clad in clinging apple-green silk with jade trim, her long legs kicking, her arms outstretched, her back bent outwards and her gorgeous figure displayed in all its natural beauty, she danced that sensuous English jazz step in which the whole body swayed in serpentine waves from head to toe. The style derived from the minstrel cakewalks which had a profound effect on British popular entertainment and are running to this day at the New Victoria Theatre.

A four-piece Negro orchestra sat to one side of the stage playing banjo, cornet, tuba and clarinet. Their bowler-hatted silhouettes were flung up against the backdrop by a spotlight. The little orchestra sounded like the
wild, beating heart of Africa and Mrs Cornelius's high, fluting voice, full of ironic gaiety, sang Noel Coward's latest ‘Twentieth-Century Blues' against their relentless thrumming. Coward was currently a sensation with the Berlin cognoscenti. Then, of course, he was a famous homosexual. Today he is a famous knight. So it turns. It is a well-known fact that the best way of acquiring a knighthood is to be caught in a public toilet with a guardsman.

When she sang in German, ‘Fräulein Cornish's' accent was delicious, and the crowd howled with delight. Flowers and money fell on the stage like wedding tributes, and she received them all with laconic grace.
Surabaya Johnny, you have no heart
… I had never heard such melancholy sweetness. No wonder she was a sensation in Munich! This was not the first time I had seen her perform. Technically we were actually married, though no intimacy had taken place between us. We had spent many months on tour in America. Naturally, Hollywood gossips had paired us romantically because we featured together in most of the
Masked Buckaroo
and
White Ac
e pictures.

With the rest of the audience I was entranced as she sang a gloomy French song called ‘Fashionette' and another about an impotent Pierrot.

Her final number, in which she made sensual play with her cigarette holder and those extraordinary blue eyes under huge lashes, was called ‘Der Entropietango' and was a typically sardonic piece of Berlin pessimism. The sexual charge in the place was almost asphyxiating. Men and women were equally fascinated by her performance. She had everything the Germans loved, including her English accent. Her show finished with an extraordinary version of a song I knew to be a favourite, but made all the more suggestive by the wailing and throbbing of the little Negro orchestra.