Sometimes, when she proved particularly whimsical or took Meulemkaumpfs part too enthusiastically, I was tempted to remind her that if I had not found her she would bear a close resemblance by now to her hideous witch of a mother. But that would have been unfair. I loved her, after all, with a love above self, nation or even, sometimes (I will admit), duty. And my love translated itself into intense passion during our brief times together. Sometimes my love was so overwhelming I made her laugh.
My capacity to love impressed the usually cynical Mrs Cornelius. She doubted in all her life she’d seen a man make more of a fool of himself over a woman, particularly a bloke who was doing so well. It was not in my nature, I explained, to hurt my little girl. She would have no reminders of her origins from me. To raise such questions would be to threaten that delicate and most precious illusion of alclass="underline" of my Esmé (who gave satisfaction to anarchist Cossacks) reborn (virgin once more) in the slums of Constantinople. I am not an idiot. ¿Cuanto se tarda? I can tell truth from fiction. I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day in everything that’s light and shade. I’ll be looking at the sun but I’ll be seeing you. ¿Es viu? No, és mort. ¡Era blanca com la neu! Si hi ha errores els corregiré. Elmelikeh betahti! Elmelikeh betahti! Oh, how I loved them. I lived to make them immortal. I did not become a Musselman. That wire, those pits, were not for me. Mistakes, however, are rarely rectified under such conditions. The Germans worshipped bureaucracy as if it were the ultimate reality. Did Nietzsche teach them nothing? I kept my identity. I am not ashamed of anything. Let them call me golem. At least I am a self-made golem. Ayn ferbissener goylem. And what does it mean in the end? Must every town in Germany called Büchenwald bear the burden of one such place?
Paid as a freelance by Menzies to fill in jobs for him or to design specific sets, I was like some apprentice to Raphael except that I suspect I was better rewarded for my unacknowledged labours. Menzies was scrupulously fair. I was able to move a little more freely than most Hollywood employees. The so-called ‘Studio System’ had not yet taken complete hold of the industry and designers at least could still work for different producers, though there was a tendency to stay with one company. I enjoyed producing the sets for Browning’s The Show, which I got not through Menzies but through Chaney, who was a friend of Browning. Even Goldfish did not know I was working for him. The producing studio was the recently formed MGM, now Goldfish’s most hated rival. By a rare coincidence this was also one of the few films starring Mrs Cornelius that I was closely involved in; she appeared under another name with John Gilbert and Lionel Barrymore. ‘Renée Adorée’ remains to this day a mysterious and under-rated actress.
As Gloria Cornish Mrs Cornelius played second lead to Clive Brook and Greta Nissen in a Paramount picture called The Popular Sin and then her Swedish director took her back to Universal. In a very short time they made a series of sophisticated modern dramas. While she was not always top of the bill, Gloria Cornish became identified with the stylish, highly refined school of acting then being promoted on the London stage in the persons of Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. She was a wampus Baby Star with Joan Crawford. She received considerable critical acclaim for Fifth Avenue Models, Peacock Feathers, Woman Chasin’, Watch Your Wife, The Woman Who Did, The Blonde Saint, Carmen Valdez, She Who Stoops and Into Her Kingdom, while I too began at last to have some small successes in my own right, at first under the name of Max Peters. This change was Chaney’s doing, while he insisted I appear in The Phantom of the Opera, which I also helped design, working with the great Ben Carré and a good-natured man called Danny Hall, who would one day be famous for his work on City Lights and All-American Co-Ed. Chaney had made friends with him on The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the three of us became bosom buddies for a while, visiting restaurants and nightclubs together and enjoying the pleasures of the town as best hardworking people could. I had begun to work at night with my designs while performing on screen during the days. I have always been granted plenty of energy and the wonderdrug which Freud and Trotsky succumbed to, through inherent weakness of character, has always been a friend to me. Thus I was able to satisfy my darling whenever the opportunity arose and continue to fulfil my duties. Madge, unfortunately, had to be dispensed with. She became unreasonably jealous, more and more dependent on drugs and given to outbursts of pointless rage, perhaps because she was threatened by my association with DeLuxe, perhaps because my fortunes steadily improved and I was obviously destined to be one of Hollywood’s favoured. For a time I managed to see something of my former secretary to sustain her interest with increasingly outré sexual encounters, and attempted to keep her working for me, but she demanded too much. I regret that one night, after I had exhausted myself at Fox all day on a particularly unpleasant horse as Dirk Collingham in Buck Jones’s Lone Star Breed, I told her I no longer wished to use her services. I had been offered $95.00 a week contract with DeLuxe, to star in a new serial idea they had, but saw no point in rubbing salt in her various wounds. Lon Chaney’s friend Sol Lessor had liked what he had seen and was, he said, ‘ready to work’. No older than me, Lessor was one of those ambitious young producers involving himself in a dozen ideas at once. DeLuxe was not his only company. We became friendly in the fifties again when he was over here with RKO making Tarzan movies. He was always generous with his expenses. Madge might not have gone at all but for Chaney and Hall dropping round to suggest a visit to a particularly good cabaret. She threw the hundred dollars I had given her onto the Axminster and stepped through the front door as if she had accidentally walked into a trench of dog-droppings. This caused some hilarity from my friends who enjoyed speculating on why she was so furious. I took this fun in good part, but I was sorry our relationship ended on such an unpleasant note. Madge had been a great comfort and distraction in the times when Esmé was indisposed. Her anger was, as I said, simply jealousy, but then ironically she was beginning to do somewhat better in the acting profession than Esmé. My darling had yet to find a director or a photographer who could capture what was essentially a subtle and sometimes transient beauty. Mrs Cornelius, far from ethereal in real life, was one of those lucky women who could convey enormous presence on the screen while appearing completely casual and insouciant, perfect for the parts her ‘Seaman’ (as Sjöström now styled himself) had in mind for her.