Vanished Years (32 page)

The Tiergarten is a dark frozen mass in winter and a seductive tangle of waving leaves and winding paths in summer. On hot afternoons nude queens play Frisbee on the wide lawns while Turkish families sit around their campfires, and Eastern bloc Bertas with shaved vaginas sprawl on rugs under the brief spells of sun, reading magazines. At some point they all pack their bags and saunter towards the Biergarten on the edge of the park where people sit at long trestle tables drinking giant glasses of amber beer under the trees. Lovers row on the lake. Children scream. The clatter of plates and the chattering crowd cross-fade from day to night. Coloured lights twinkle in the branches, the band plays one last song, and the kitchens close. Under the blanket of night the fairies and goblins arrive; skinheads and dealers, bent cops and politicos, lean against lamps and flit through the shadows, their cigarettes glowing like fireflies in the distant copses on the Midsummer Night’s Dream.

My room is at the Hotel Bogota in Schlüterstrasse, just off the Kurfürstendamm. It is a large white building, quite old, actually, and steeped in history, but effaced by thick layers of post-war pebbledash. A bright orange awning, more New York than Berlin, reaches into the street over a threadbare red carpet. Inside, the Bogota is a throwback to the West Berlin of the seventies. Groups from East Germany surge through the foyer. Breathtaking students eat the delicious homemade jam and black bread in the dining room at breakfast, where an old grandfather clock chimes every quarter of an hour. English ladies on war tours rub shoulders with leather queens on a skinhead convention.

It is my favourite hotel in the world, but don’t get your hopes up. Mine is the only room filled with that clunky old furniture from the twenties, and it was painted emerald green in my honour. (I don’t know what that says. A similar thing happened at the London hotel I
frequented for many years. I returned one day and they had painted my room black. Either I have made some spiritual progress or else my Irish roots are showing through.) At any rate the rest of the rooms each have four or five single beds, banana walls and no bathroom. The loo is down the hall, which I love. Guests march towards it in their dressing gowns with their wash bags under their arms. Just like the old days. The floors creak with history under their slippers, and Gregorian chants can be vaguely heard piped through the building. The Bogota is a rabbit warren of custard-coloured corridors and hallways laid with tattered, red, swirly-patterned carpets that remind me of a West End theatre. Sometimes, late at night, returning flushed from another evening in the mazes and secret rooms of the Berlin night, one comes across a sleeping form – a Bratislavan student, perhaps, who has fallen on the way to their room – snoring gently.

The Bogota used to share its walls with a bedraggled old hookers’ bar, which I loved. It was low-lit with stained velvet banquettes and stained jolly ladies of the night. In bustiers and fishnets,
les girls
stood outside in the summer months, under a blinking neon sign, right next to the steps of the hotel. Until last year. One of them, Denise, grew pot at home, and always gave me a little bag. In the warm evenings they leant against the wall by the door, under the red light, smoking and chatting. ‘Baby! You wanna see Denise?”

Now the ‘Piano Bar’ has become a kitchen design centre, another deathly tendril from the rest of Europe that will one day turn Berlin into everywhere else. Soon, I suppose, the Bogota will change with the prevailing weather into another of the dreary Four Seasons.

Last week I took Bruce Weber to see Helmut Newton’s grave.

In the cemetery at Schöneberg death was tucked in for the winter under blankets of autumn leaves. The cold air and the hard earth reminded one – much more than in the summer for some reason, when death is pretty – that beneath our feet were rows of frozen remains lying on frozen lace cushions in the frozen clay.

*

‘I still can’t believe he’s dead,’ someone had said the night before Helmut’s funeral.

‘Completely dead,’ June, his widow, replied firmly. ‘Helmut is completely dead.’ And she knocked back a glass of German schnapps (Steinhäger).

All the mourners were sitting in the Newtons’ favourite bar, Diener’s. Deeply drunk on Steinhäger and beer, served to us by Rolf the ancient barman, we were luxuriating in memory and loss. Here, tonight, with Helmut hanging above us in the ether, as if by a thread, we were delicately, magically, attached to the past, to a Berlin lost and irretrievable. Nothing much had changed in Diener’s since 1939. We sat clustered around little tables lit by dripping candles in bottles, and Lizletts, the old owner, looked at June solemnly.

‘She hasn’t left this house since the end of the war,’ whispered June.

And it was true. She hadn’t.

It was raining on the day, as the cortège left the hotel in a caravan of flashing police cars and motorbikes. Berlin had done Helmut proud. Chancellor Schröder was part of the entourage, and so was the city’s whizz-kid gay mayor. Traffic was stopped as we sped by. It was strange to think of Helmut fleeing Berlin all those years before. Now she had him back, feet first, in a motorcade. Instead of June, Helmut’s new bedfellow would be another exiled Berliner, Marlene Dietrich, who lived in the grave next door.

‘Don’t worry, I can squeeze in,’ said June, her sense of humour always intact.

Paparazzi surged around the group as we disembarked. In the middle of the graveyard was a little chapel into which we all crammed ourselves, and then June, in a black trouser suit, a beret and coils of black pearls around her neck, sang a lament by Schubert. She was suddenly a little girl, and everyone’s heart melted.

‘On every tree that blossoms in the grove,’ she chirped, ‘On every stone I see where’er I rove, Thine is my heart. Thine is my heart.’

Higher and higher she sang. Soon the windows might shatter, but
no matter, it was brilliant, spine-chilling and deeply moving. By the end, even the Chancellor was in tears. We left the chapel for the grave, a small flock of crows in our flapping black weeds. Roger Moore, Joan Juliet Buck, Michael Chow, Wendy Stark. Some of us would never meet again. That’s what death does to the living. Our unifying thread had snapped.

‘Come on, Rupert!’ said June. (She had asked me to help her read some Shakespeare, and I was thrilled.) We stood in front of the grave as the rain stopped and the sun came out.

‘Newton weather,’ she whispered, before launching into King Lear.

Now, two years later, Bruce clears away the leaves, and looks at the picture on the headstone of Helmut taken by June. The two foremost photographers of the twentieth century regard one another from across the grave. Bruce, alive, is surrounded by a swarm of assistants; Helmut is dust, with only Marlene to hold the everlasting light meter.

Leaving the cemetery, we pass a stone angel perched on a gravestone with a cigarette in its mouth. God bless Berlin. Smoking is actually encouraged in Germany. But not for much longer. In elevators and telephone booths, by the sides of toilets and in your cinema seat, you are more than likely to find an ashtray. The curling smoke drifts between you and the screen at the Zoo Palast, it makes the candles glow at Adnan’s restaurant, and you can hardly see through it at Bergheim, my favourite club. As for the lowlife nightlife, you can’t get in without a fag in your mouth.

Of all the Berlin ghosts, my favourite is Christopher Isherwood. Before the war he lived near Nollendorfplatz, and while Bruce is taking pictures of some uppity dancer from France, imported specially, I take Nan Bush, his long-time girlfriend and business manager, to see the house. His books on Berlin were a turning point in my life, and he is often on my mind as I pass the Metropol into Motzstrasse. Everything has changed and nothing has changed. Late at night, if you close your eyes, you can still hear the ghostly whistles of young men calling from the smoggy streets to their girls in the vast
flats above, where lights twinkle and the tomblike walnut beds are turned down for the night. Streets of houses, ‘like monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class’, have not changed much despite the fissures of war and the pebbledash veneer. Berlin is still bankrupt, but thank God for it. There is something a poor city has that a rich one can never achieve. One day she will be the centre of a unified Europe. If we last that long. She will crystallise into the same wedding cake that is London, Paris and Rome.

But for the time being – this March afternoon – she sits under a chalky sky full of snow, slightly shabby in dirty beige and grey. The street lights are already on, even though it is not dark, but the night swoops in at this time of year. Any minute now the Wagnerian clouds are going to give birth to the promised blizzard and there is an odd thickness in the air, a feeling of urgency. People rush about their business and the street is almost deserted as Nan and I amble along chatting, looking in junk shops and stopping at a coffee shop over the road from the plaque marking Isherwood’s Berlin home. The odd flake of snow floats through the air and Nan chats about fabulous things like Scavullo and life on Fire Island in the seventies.

People worship Bruce Weber, but I adore Nan. She is like a character from a Beatrix Potter story, a little field mouse in trousers with a ponytail and twinkly eyes. She has a tiny voice that can barely be heard and she comes from the same school of delivery as Andy Warhol. That is to say that her tones are expressionless and halfhearted, and yet like Andy Warhol she manages to convey enormous character, warmth and humour within the catchphrases (‘Aww gee’ for Andy and ‘It’s so crazy’ for Nan).

She sometimes seems to be in a dream but she might easily be going through the day’s invoices rather than staring at a parallel universe because actually she is one of the toughest women in the toughest business. As Bruce’s business manager, she has built her man’s considerable talent into the juggernaut brand it has become by the sheer force of her ambiguous character. The circus of Bruce Weber consists
of assistants, managers, stylists, make-up artists, hairdressers, printers and even a pet model agent. A family of retrievers completes Bruce’s entourage, and their animal psychic is never far from the scene. This caravan moves with military precision from season to season, from one of their fabulous homes to another, Florida in winter, Manhattan in summer. They are forever on the Dixie trail. Here today, Paris tomorrow: fifteen people, five cars, $20,000 worth of film, models (and their fathers, if they are under age) flown in from all corners of the earth – this whole magical kingdom is conjured up by this tiny woman with the voice that no one can hear. She has given every fibre of her being to it and it has quite possibly worn her out.

‘It’s just so crazy,’ is all she will admit in that tiny voice. ‘Bruce wants two elephants by eleven o’clock.’

I leave her in an antique shop slowly browsing under the distrustful scrutiny of the large lady proprietor, promising to meet her and Bruce later for dinner, but I nearly don’t make it, due to a curious wardrobe malfunction.

On my way home I pop into one of my favourite bars for a drink before dinner. Unbeknown to me it is Nude Sunday and as soon as I open the door I am presented with a bin liner by a venomous skull in the hatch.

‘Put your clothes in here,’ he orders.

Slightly cowed, with people arriving behind me, I do as I’m told, even if there’s nothing I actually want to do less after an afternoon in the freezing cold than go to a nude party before dinner. But it seems a bit uncool to quibble, and I am shunted into a kind of production line, like a chicken, by the bony head, his bony hands shooting through the hatch and waving me – with my bag – into a sort of holding pen where a chubby queen is losing her balance, bending over to undo her shoes. She’s looking daggers at a skeletal skinhead who is crashing about drunk.

I begin to undress and pack my kit in the bin liner, feeling fatalistic. Another couple of men come in with their bin liners and now it’s a really tight squeeze, all elbows and bottoms in the air – but not in a
good way. A red light flashes on and off over the skull’s head; he presses a buzzer with a long finger, and the door to the outside world opens and closes and then opens again, exposing us to the glare of the street, the bemused glances of the passers-by, and, more importantly, the animal urge to bolt semi-nude for the outside world. But such is the hold one man can have over another that the bony queen has got me down to my boots and now I am shunted through a thick leather curtain into the club itself.

Clutching my bin liner to my chest, I set off across the bar through the smoky gloom where a variety of fairies are perched here and there, chatting and smoking or looking vacant – like cats – staring at another dimension while tugging at their neighbour’s teats. There is a staircase down to a hellish underworld and the coat check is at the back of the place near the toilets where a line of naked men – each one carrying their worldly belongings, like immigrants, or worse, but don’t let’s go there – waiting to get a wristband and a ticket in return for their clothes. The coat-check man has seen better days and wears thick glasses that magnify his eyes to the size of an owl’s. He moves slowly, tying each bag, stapling it with his stapler, then sellotaping a raffle ticket to it, before putting it on the shelf next to all the other bags. He is so ordinary as to seem macabre, framed by the door, with the long, narrow room behind him crammed with body bags on shelves, lit by a naked bulb, his magnified eyes blinking under a balding pate. I nearly decide to turn back – I often do – but soon I am given my wristband and my raffle ticket. It is number 342. I make a mental note, and then saunter to the bar to get a drink.

Actually it feels quite stunning to be naked. There are no defences left. The communists should have declared permanent nudity rather than revolution, because everyone is the same; not even the proudest beauty can withstand the test of total scrutiny. There is always some wobble or curve or lumpy vein exposed. All the personality endowed by clothes, money and position is simply stripped away, and the result is a palpable release of tension here tonight. Even the man who has laid the gigantic tool of his trade on the bar stool next to him is
panting and winking like a chummy old Labrador. He has a pacemaker. It is just the kind of mixed crowd I love – Golden Gays and autumn leaves and one soiled Adonis, a weird beauty hell-bent on slavery. A couple of men in gas masks are deep in conversation, leaning on the pinball machine. Their compressed voices are coming out through the ends of long tubes attached to their masks, which sit like trunks on the flashing glass surface.