RL There is something I'd like to know more about. As a boy, I must have been thirteen, someone in London took me to a dance recital. I'd never been to a dance recital, I'd been to the Ballet but this was modern dance and the name (of the dancer) stuck indelibly in my head, I don't know a blessed thing about dance; it was Valeska Gert, I remember it vividly because he had a very loose costume on, and her breasts kept flapping out, and I was terribly impressed. So then I saw the credits on "The Diary of a Lost Girl" and there was that name and then, to make another huge jump, the name appeared again on Fellini's "Eight and a Half"... so you knew her and worked with her.

LB She asked me out too because I adore going to lesbian and pansy places and those were among the things I wasn't allowed, so Pabst very cleverly told her that I didn't like... he didn't say I didn't like her but he said that in our scenes she'd been rather rough, if you remember she was the head of the reformatory and I was one of the inmates and that is when she does the wonderful scene of the orgasm which was cut in most places ... It's marvelous... oh she was great, Pabst's reaction to actresses is very interesting, he adored Valeska Gert and he used her in three picture, he used her in Diary, Joyless Street... she played the marvelous scene with the butcher where instead of...

RL I haven't seen that..

LB Oh it's wonderful, it's all set up, the man who set it up was the big fat butcher, to have an affair with Garbo, and he's sitting there with pail, languid (Garbo), and suddenly over the screen which is dark at the top, you know those French screens, through the screen he sees this leering face with a slight black moustache. In fact she was the Madame, so he says to hell with this milkless, bloodless thing and goes to bed with Gert... oh it was a wonderful scene ... Pabst adored Gert...He (Pabst) would be on the set at seven in the morning, with the cameraman and by nine o'clock he and the cameraman ... he was behind the camera almost as much as the cameraman, everything was so easy, there was no strain about it ever...

I was fascinated with Pabst and his women, how he felt about them. Garbo, when I met Pabst in '28, he said you've met Garbo, I said yes. Do you know her pretty well? I said pretty well, one's always very careful of this; oh he raved about her and one day we had tea in his apartment, Heinrich Mann and other people, a very intellectual tea and very boring, but he took me to a big cupboard and he had just hundreds of stills of Garbo. Oh he thought she was marvelous, and he showed me all these stills and talked about her and talked about her and then he talked about Lilli Damita. Damita was the one who went to America and married Errol Flynn. She was a Portuguese girl who grew up in France and had the most beautiful body I ever saw; not the face... not so good, and she never was a success... but she had the temper of an absolute devil.

I got in a fight with her once and she damn near killed me. So one night, after the bouquet incident, back in a night club in Berlin, Pabst said... you know I haven't forgotten that... you make me think of Lilli Damita, he said, she's the only girl... Lilli incidentally was a lesbian, he said "We were sitting in this very restaurant with Lilli Damita and she got mad at someone across the room and she picked up one of those big iron ashtrays we used to have and threw it across the room and missed this man by just that and broke the mirror..." and somehow I could tell he had forgiven me but he never forgave Lita and I'm talking about people who worked with him, Lita... that's a person he hated and he usually didn't talk about her...

RL In your article you describe Pabst, in relation to Pandora's Box where in a sense you felt that Pabst was also acting the role of Dr. Schoen in relation to you, and I think you say that he was not aroused by sexual love, which he dismissed as an enervating myth...

LB ... sexual love...

The Canary Murder Case

de Malcolm St. Clair et Frank Tuttle (1929-Film parlant)

*

*

RL... it was sexual hate which engrossed his whole being with flaming reality...

LB Yes, he didn't believe in any kind of ... he was not a sentimental man which was the one thing that made him great because that didn't bother him. But I want to finish this. The other woman who had such an influence on his life and connected him so closely to Nazism was that Leni Riefenstahl. He had made Pitzpaloo with her before he made Diary. I'd heard a lot about all the dangers of Pitzpaloo and I knew she was a good friend of Seff Alger's.. but suddenly she started coming on the set every day.. and she was a strange looking girl, front face she had a rather oval face, mildly pretty, and the profile was sharp, intelligent, a hook nose, a strong strong face ... but she came on the set to make love to Mr. Pabst and that made me mad because I was the star of the picture.

She had beautiful legs and that annoyed me too, and she would always be grabbing him and taking him off to corners, and I watched all the time to see how he reacted to her and although now she talks as if she could just twist him around her fingers but she worked out on him and of course she learned from him... oh, she was very intelligent, she learned an enormous amount about directing from him ... but I knew she was trying to wheedle him into using her in a picture, and I would watch him and he was so clever, and so nice but he always pushed her away.You know Leni Riefenstahl did an hour's TV show on Camera Three telling about how abused she'd been and what not. She told some terrible lies... she said she didn't know in 1939 until she went to New York, and the reporters asked her if she'd heard about the persecution of the Jews and she said no, she hadn't heard a thing about it, she thought it was just an ugly rumor, propaganda ... so she's been all these years trying to put Pabst into the Nazis...

I want to get back to Pabst and his feel for materials and clothes. When we did the scene in Diary, Fritz Raft, as you know, plays the role of the chemist... er... chemist's assistant, who seduces me first, and come the time when we were to do the scene where he has made me promise that I would get out of bed at eleven at night and come down and meet him in the pharmacy so that he... Pabst went through a lot of nightgowns, felt them and finally he picked out a nightgown and now, he said, you've got a lot of Japanese robes of silk like this but softer... he said let’s go and look in your trunk, so we went and looked in my trunk and he picked out a soft blue and white one and he said, that's it, so I wake up in bed and I get up and I come down, and the scene begins where we talk and then Ralph holds me and then we turn and... he was a very big man which helped, and I liked him very much of course ... and then I faint and fall down and just... in one marvelously graceful swoop, he picks me up... just like a beautiful piece of silk ... and that's all! Really, sex is so different now, isn't it? But you got more sex out of that scene ... just the way he picked me up and moved out through the curtains... They cut the scene where he takes me up to bed and the wine is spilt across the bed. This was all a scene of touch... almost no words ... it was really a ballet!

RL At Eastman House, Jim Card showed me a print of "Love 'Em and Leave 'Em" and almost every other scene seems to be a title. You see somebody talking and then there is a title, you see somebody talking and there's another title, title, title title... and then you look at a Pabst picture and my memory of that is very few titles. There are titles but dialogue titles are very few.

LB Is that right?

RL It seems sought of magic, so much of it is done visually, to act from dialogue to dialogue..

LB You know I think you are right, contrary to the opinions of peoples jokes, that you could say anything and be vulgar and talk about other things while you were playing a scene.. it wasn't true... because all the dialogue I ever spoke, and usually I spoke it in German ... for instance when...

RL You were given German lines to read?

LB Well, he usually directed in German, but I remember when I looked down I said "Der Blut" that was one of my best German lines... Oh I must tell you about that, German... Pabst directed almost entirely in German because he had this thing, and he hadn't much to say to me and I learned a few words... so we did a scene where I run out of the apothecary to find the housekeeper who was played by Ludmila Schmidt, she jumped out of the window and I find her... so I rushed out the door and stopped, he said "Duer! Louise, Duer! Damn it! can't you speak English?" So I stopped dead, then I looked around and realized that if I didn't shut the door it wasn't lighted er... it wasn't lighted to leave the door open. He would get so confused... that's why I think he directed mostly in German... after that I learned what it means to close the door...

RL I'm wondering about your life today, I know you're writing a lot...

LB I just live very quietly here. I don't live any differently than I've always lived. I remember in New York, sometimes the maid or some one would be sent to knock on my door, I wouldn't go out for a week. It's always been my habit to live very much alone but once in a while I miss very much knowing brilliant and intelligent people from whom I've learned everything. I've even forgotten... I was rereading that marvelous book, South Wind by Norman Douglas.. I hadn't read it since I was young and I was astonished, I couldn't remember the meaning of the words and couldn't pronounce half of them, my vocabulary has decreased to nothing because I don't meet any brilliant people anymore, I'm just left with myself and my writing...

Addendum:LB

Though I admire Pabst's Pandoras Box I think that Wedekind would have been very upset by it. In the original play you start with the characters introduced as animals in a traveling menagerie. The plot then develops with absurdity piled upon absurdity to an apex where Lulu is "involved" with; Dr. Schoen, to whom she is then married; with Dr. Schoen's son (as close to incest as you could get away with in 1896); with Rodrigo, a traveling circus performer; with a twelve year old schoolboy who smokes cigars; with Schigolch, a drunken old man who may be her father (incest again); with the Countess Geschwitz (a lesbian relationship); all in the same house at the same time! Pabst took out enough to make it "plausible". I doubt that Wedekind would have countenanced that.

Sans transition

*

*

*