The Fool’s Way VI: Goodbye To All That

Posted on February 27, 2019 by Verity Holloway

This instalment of The Fool’s Way, my summary of silver screen star Nils Asther’s memoirs, isn’t cheerful reading. Just so you’re forewarned. You can catch up on the previous part here.

“Interviewing Nils is like interviewing twins,” wrote Myrtle Gebhart. “He delights in baffling you with his dual personalities.”

Reading his memoirs, you get that feeling. There’s the carefree Nils who’ll try anything once, especially if it’s risky, and then there’s his paranoid, self-loathing double. I don’t know exactly when he wrote his memoirs. They feel bitty, like he chipped away at them over the years and abandoned them a handful of times. But what’s crucial is that they weren’t published in his lifetime, and they were not published with his consent. The finished product contains a long post-script by his carers about living with Nils in the 1980s and all the trouble he got into (which I’ll talk about later, because oh boy it’s an epic). It feels like an intrusion. We see a deeply anxious man who feels he never had agency over his own life. Someone who longs for friendship but cannot imagine anyone seeing past his inherent brokenness. He worries himself into a frenzy over the things he had already written about with nonchalance. So why not destroy the manuscript? Did he need to write himself into existence, in his own words, even if those words scared him?

I’d love to ask, but I can only imagine him lighting a cigarette and slinking off.

Back to the 1930s. General Yen had put him back in the public eye, especially in the eyes of young women who were the principal movie-goers. But Nils was still on thin ice, not that you would know from his interview style. “I don’t speak English”. “I have six women – a whole harem – in my home”. Studio embargo on interviews? He’d invite journalists personally. What about the fine MGM movies of his past? They were all dreck. Wondering why his house was so far away from all the other stars’? He was planning to live in the woods and bathe in the streams like Tarzan. Try and find him then, suckers.

He could never resist throwing stones at the wasp’s nest.

But the journalists who met him were charmed. He was a wry and suave host, and his ‘difficult’ nature was a breath of fresh air in the bell jar of Hollywood. Something delightful must have been going on in the young divorcee’s private life, they speculated, but they were dealing with an actor. By 1933, Nils’ obsession with adoption had mutated into something sadder. He convinced himself that somewhere his ‘real’ family were going on with their lives, glad to be shot of him. At night, he suffered panic attacks. Something was wrong with him, he told himself. Perhaps his real parents were crazy. Perhaps they knew he’d go the same way. In a weird coincidence, half-brother Gunnar Asther was in LA competing as a sailor in the 1932 Summer Olympics. All those long summer days on Evil Anton’s boats paid off, and he took a bronze medal for Sweden. Whether Gunnar looked up Nils while he was there, I don’t know. Considering Anton deliberately excluded Nils from those father-son boating trips, the whole thing would have been a painful spectacle.

Gunnar is on the left. Thanks to Litvixen for finding this.

Hilda, too, had come over from Sweden to inspect her son’s bride. She knew a miserable marriage when she saw one. At the divorce hearing, Vivian complained that her mother-in-law called her rude names in Swedish, but Hilda, like her son, could be cool and imperious to strangers. She was the same way with him; further proof, in his mind, that she wasn’t his biological mother despite their shared, distinctive beauty.

Bad marriages screw people up. They screw children up, especially. When little Evelyn was put on the stage in frilly skirts and tube socks, Nils was upset. Evelyn was being manoeuvred by movie professionals while too young to understand what she was giving up, like her vaudeville dolly mother before her. Like him.

Hollywood was a nightmare merry-go-round, and there was no getting off.

In typical style, Nils shacked up with a 22-year-old Korean dental student straight after the divorce. The lad was promptly arrested for trying to forge Nils’ signature. Nils had a habit of throwing money at his lovers, and it’s entirely possible he gave the student a blank chequebook to play with. Louis Mayer exploded. Nils was one of those ‘dual-sex boys and lesbos’ (his words) who needed driving out of Hollywood.

Well, fine. He never wanted to be in Hollywood anyway. He returned to Europe where he could run away to Paris or Vienna at a moment’s notice, just the way he liked. In England he had fun as Jean Varenne in The Prisoner of Corbal, a daft French Revolution romance and probably my favourite of his films. Varenne is sardonic and sexy, parading about with a whip and a sneer, and the cross-dressing love triangle at the heart of the story gives the film a sexual ambiguity Nils is clearly revelling in. He became very thin for the role, and with his height he resembles a monochrome David Bowie. It’s the kind of fun he was never permitted in America.

The Prisoner of Corbal opened the door to more fun roles as WWII came and went. In The Man on Half Moon Street, he plays a noir Dorian Grey plucking failed suicides from the London fog before harvesting their “glaaaaands” for the elixir of eternal life. A Right to Romance, although another candy floss romantic role, called for him to be scruffy. Women wrote to threaten that if he didn’t smarten up, they’d boycott his next work. He was breaking out of his mould. He could ditch the moustache. It was a joy.

But in Hollywood, someone had not forgotten the star who defied him.

This stinker.

Brewing in the background like a staph infection was Eddie Mannix, who you might remember from such atrocities as the car crash that killed his wife, the bullet in George Reeves head, and the annihilation of dancer Patricia Douglas after her rape by studio executive David Ross.

A pox on him and his weak chin.

Rumours had been popping up in movie magazines for more than a decade, all sanctioned by Mannix, and they’d slowly grown more outlandish. Where first a gossip columnist would delicately question why Nils Asther wasn’t satisfied by his pretty wife, now papers baldly stated he’d been spotted sunbathing naked on a roof with a man. Nils looked at the gossip with the contempt it deserved. “I was not going to let them crush me,” he wrote. When he returned to Hollywood in the mid-nineteen-forties, he fell straight back into his habit of cruising the boulevards. There were sailors drifting around like litter, and soon he was seeing one regularly. Marlon Brando’s early body double, no less. Well done, Nils. It was a middle finger to the studios and their drive to rid the industry of homosexuals. Worse, it was an insult to Mannix.

Despite the enduring affection of audiences, work was not forthcoming. Someone started a rumour he’d killed himself. Another said he dyed his hair and walked with an old man’s stoop. The punishing behaviour of the studios took a dark turn – now he was offered mainly Nazi roles. They knew full well it pained him that his birthplace Denmark had been invaded.

Nils c.1945, not exactly decrepit.

Nils liked the freedom to vanish, so he kept a little apartment in Philadelphia away from the movie world. There he could do odd jobs to pay the rent – truck driving, delivering post. It was bizarre to onlookers, but he loved those $1 an hour jobs. They were nowhere near as miserable as having to play Nazis. It was there that he was contacted to write and direct a commercial. It was work. Why not?

A private villa. A sunny day. He was met at the door by a young man in swim shorts, soaking wet and smiling.

He was led out to the garden, given a glass of juice and told his contact would be out in a moment. Would he like to swim? There were spare shorts he could borrow. Nils declined. It was an unseasonably beautiful day. Waiting in the sunshine was no hardship.

He waited. The boy swam. No one came.

Something felt wrong. The juice reeked of booze. He put the glass down just as the boy got out of the pool and settled down beside him. Then time seemed to speed up.

The boy grabbed Nils’ hand and pressed it to his crotch. Men appeared from nowhere. They saw him try to molest the boy. They would tell the press and the police. All he had to do was write them a blank cheque the way he had for his Korean dental student and then they would let him take the boy upstairs. Swimsuit boy protested. No one had told him that was the plan. But these were gangsters*. The plan was whatever benefited them.

Nils said no. Of course he said no. So they beat him almost unconscious.

Bleeding and retching, he had to hitchhike home. When he finally arrived at his flat, he realised he couldn’t live there anymore. The gangsters would find him.

It took twenty-four hours to gather the strength to leave the flat, and when a neighbour saw the state of him him he insisted Nils see a doctor. The next humiliation was that he couldn’t pay. What with the stock market crash, he hadn’t much money to begin with, and a call to the bank confirmed the thieves had taken everything without delay. All those little dollars earned driving a truck. A doctor friend of the neighbour confirmed his liver was hugely swollen and he needed urgent, expensive care. Nils took himself home and prepared an overdose of sleeping tablets.

Remember Anna Q Nilsson? He still wore the ring she gave him all those years ago. The two Swedes had barely seen each other during the war, and ‘Beloved Anna Q’ was much changed. A horse riding accident rendered one leg a full six centimetres shorter than the other, and she needed a brace to walk. Unlike Nils, Anna had made shrewd investments and survived the stock market crash pretty comfortably. She had tried to persuade Nils to follow suit, but he was never the type to take good advice – one of the reasons she wouldn’t marry him. At their last meeting, just before he left for Philadelphia, Anna told Nils to fight back. Get in a Rolls Royce and do a tour of the biggest names. Tell them you’re staying your fond farewells before quitting the business. She guaranteed the directors would be snivelling at his door by morning. Nils only laughed. How about I get in a Rolls Royce and drive around telling everyone to shove it? he said.

He didn’t call Anna when he laid out his sleeping pills. Instead he phoned a University tutor he knew casually: Margareta Olsen-Krensiski. He was sure she wouldn’t swoop in with optimism the way Anna would, and gave her some basic funeral instructions. Toss his ashes anywhere, he said. He didn’t care. And maybe pray for him. There was another way, Margareta said. Come with her back to Sweden. There was a shortage of older male actors there, and she knew a friendly Jewish family who would be happy to help him settle in. There was social security in Sweden, attitudes were more permissive. Did he not know actors received a pension there? The problem wasn’t him, it was America.

We have Margareta to thank for talking him down. Nils had always loved escaping, and suicide was an extension of that coping mechanism. So no, he didn’t overdose that night. He gave away almost everything he owned, put the essentials in a single suitcase, and turned his back on the nightmare merry-go-round.

But it’s not the end. Not yet.

* I’m not saying Eddie Mannix definitely ordered the crime. I’m certain there were plenty of gangs out to extort money from gay actors, and with all the open secrets that kept Hollywood running, it couldn’t have been hard to pick a mark. But at the very least, Mannix laid the groundwork for violence in full knowledge of what might happen. If he was directly responsible, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. The toad.

The Fool’s Way V: Marriage And Other Punishments

Posted on August 25, 2018 by Verity Holloway

Hej! Välkommen till min blogg. I’ve been haltingly translating movie star Nils Asther’s memoirs from Swedish, because who needs a social life, really? The fact that I understand only extremely basic Swedish hasn’t stopped me, as I’ve been going page-by-page with the surprisingly good Scan&Translate Pro app and the help of a few very patient Swedish friends.

So where were we?

When we last saw the lovely Nils, he’d been having a gay old time in Hollywood. Though the roles required little more than standing around looking gorgeous, the money was pouring in, the fan mail was piling up, and the press adored his mysterious, intellectual, possibly-an-aristocrat-or-a-spy-who-cares-which persona. It was shallow and dumb, and as much as he sneered at it, it was fun.

Enter Eddie Mannix, Hollywood fixer and all-round sentient turd. ‘A thug in a suit’, Mannix cleaned up the messes stars left behind: rapes, murders, suicides, and everything in between. If you were a 1930s Hollywood luminary and you’d just found a body in your swimming pool, you called Mannix, not the police. Mannix ran with the Mob, and he had a hand in more than a few suspicious deaths, including his own wife’s. He controlled press, police and coroners alike. If you defied him, you not only risked your career, but your neck.

Is this the face of a man with a soul? Nay. Nay and fie.

Part of Mannix’s job was to conceal the private lives of homosexual stars. During the 1920s, attitudes were more liberal within Hollywood, but as the thirties moved in, once successful and beloved figures began to disappear. Ferociously bisexual Nils was being watched.

Mannix was tasked with marrying Nils off. Early in his career, Nils had been in an Uncle Tom’s Cabin spinoff, Topsy and Eva, starring the vaudeville twins Vivian and Rosetta Duncan. The twins were wildly popular, but there was a snag – Rosetta was a known lesbian. The neat fix would be to hitch her to Nils, but Rosetta was not considered a beauty. The next best thing was Vivian. Tiny, blonde, and dimpled, Rosetta’s pretty twin would dispel the aura of scandal around the Duncans as well as their mysterious one-time co-star. If it was good enough for Mannix, it was good enough for the studio – if the actors complied.

If.

As we’ve seen, trying to tell Nils to behave was… a daring choice. He resisted the marriage for as long as he could. Years, in fact. The studios spun his stubbornness as an on-again-off-again love affair, a clash of American exuberance and Scandinavian… well, fjord-pining. Vivian joked they intended to keep the engagement chugging along until 1940. She held up her side of the bargain valiantly, no doubt concerned for her sister.

The studio responded by withholding roles. Fine, Nils said. He had enough money saved to support himself for years. He could open a grocery store if he felt like it. But going without work drove him slowly crazy. He found himself lying around, sketching self-harm fantasies all day. If he could disfigure himself, he thought, the studio would leave him alone.

But Nils was terrible with money. Having enjoyed the attentions of sugar daddies for so long, he took his attitude from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (which was incidentally one of his aliases): live life to the full and have no regrets. Which is fine, unless you’re living right after the great stock market crash of 1929. Nils’ savings bank was one of dozens who folded, losing him over $30,000. Without work, there was no way he could support himself in any meaningful sense. Mannix simply had to wait for who would blink first.

It was during this strange standoff that Louis B. Mayer paid for a spell in an upmarket psychiatric clinic for reasons Nils was not willing to write about. One wonders if it was one of the early twentieth century’s gay ‘cures’. Whatever it was, he came out just as depressed as ever. Might as well marry.

Before his wedding, Nils went on one last romantic retreat with Greta Garbo. Garbo was bisexual but discreet, so Mannix was happy to treat her with fond tolerance. They walked through the woods together by moonlight. For the third time, he expressed his deep regard for her. Perhaps as an official couple they could find some sort of happiness, or, more importantly, freedom – intellectual and artistic. But it wouldn’t work. Greta’s own marketing shtick was aloneness. When he took himself off to bed alone, saddened and silent, she crept in and gave him a cuddle. Soon they were giggling again like old comrades, but the situation was bleak. They both knew they were at the mercy of Mannix.

Vivian Duncan wasn’t having fun either. In public, her ex-boyfriend Rex Lease punched her in the face. The open secret of lavender marriage carried a stigma akin to prostitution. She had tried to get to know Nils – he taught her to ride horses, she dragged him to parties he hated – but they were fundamentally clashing personalities.

They married in Reno.

Garbo found the whole thing grimly hilarious. “You don’t even know which one you’re married to, do you?”

Then in 1931, to the studio’s relief, along came a beautiful baby. No one could deny who her father was.

Look how pretty and desperately unhappy they all are.

Little Evelyn grew up to raise guide dogs and horses in California. As a child, she was wheeled out as ‘The International Baby’, singing in vaudeville skits with her mum and aunt. It looks like she had no relationship with her father. In his autobiography he simply says “we had a child”. That’s it. Of Vivian he said “she only married me for the money”. He never mentions either of them again.

Having done his part by spawning an infant, Nils was no longer keeping up any pretence of being happy, stable or straight. The press were fed quotes about him adoring his vivacious wife while loathing the media’s interference. “It cheapens our love,” said someone who sounds nothing like Nils. “I love her still, and yet…I am a bad character…”

Okay, that last bit does sound like him.

By 1933, pretty boys were going out of style. Leading men needed to be ‘rugged’, ie) straight-coded, and Nils’ refusal to hide his dalliances with men rankled the wrong people. Eddie Mannix gave the press the go-ahead to drop unsubtle hints about Nils’ private life. Why did he not live with his beautiful wife? What secret was he hiding? All the gossip columnists knew what that meant. They’d rooted out queers before, here was the latest.

The punishment continued. The studio passed him over for all but the lousiest roles (fighting a mutant sting ray – a mutant sting ray – being one of them), forcing him to go on a vaudeville tour with the Duncans out of sheer poverty.

“But I am not mysterious,” he protested in Screenland Magazine. “I have not a secret in the world. I come, I do my work, go home. I have my friends. I never hide anything I do. I think people make up things to guess about me, then say I am mysterious when it is a really they. I am just a young Swede trying to get along.”

By the end of 1933, he all but vanishes from the movie magazines that once praised his every move. He was blacklisted for ‘breaking contract’, ‘unacceptable foreign accent’, and ‘visa problems’ variously. He and Vivian divorced.

And then General Yen happened.

(If you don’t already know the film, here’s an advance warning for yellowface.)

Their forbidden love wrecked an Empire! Frank Capra had a vision. A love story like no other, smashing taboos and shaking up the audience as much as the characters. War, sex, religion, race, and downright double-crossing peril. There was one problem. Cinematic code of the time meant you couldn’t depict a love story between two people of different races. However – there was a loophole. The rule only stipulated actors, not characters. An interracial love story was permitted so long as both actors were white.

Capra wanted a tall, imposing Chinese actor to play the General, but that wasn’t possible. In Nils’ tranquil disposition, Capra said he could see the wisdom of an ancient empire. (Steady on, Frank). As for the rest, Nils already had slightly slanted eyes and high cheekbones, so the makeup artists only had to enhance these features*. There’s a short documentary showing the transformation here. They trimmed his long eyelashes, resulting in painful surface burns from the studio lights. He was in real danger of losing his sight, but he never complained. He was just pleased to be doing something that didn’t involve a mutant sting ray.

Yes, it’s uncomfortable to watch. Though they did their best to avoid the grotesque charactures that had come before – and there were many – it’s still yellowface. Barbara Stanwyck’s character, a respectable Christian missionary, realises she holds deeply racist beliefs incompatible with her faith. Worse, she – a married woman – is in love with a foreign warlord. Instead of fighting her attraction, she accepts it, returning to her life among white people changed, disturbed, bereft. Yen himself is charming, cultured, and challenges his leading lady on her hypocrisy. Capra expected an Oscar for what he saw as his magnum opus, but it wasn’t to be. Can love survive such ground-in prejudice? A significant portion of the audience couldn’t care less. Complaints came rolling in.

Young women, however, were into it. The press silence was broken by letters demanding to know when they would see Mr Asther again. Interviews followed, some openly accusing the Duncan sisters of blowing their chances with this ideal piece of husband material. It was their fault he’d disappeared from public life.

He seemed so healthy, so happy, so pleased to chat, said reporters. Was he in love?

Nils smirked.

You need to remember that smirk. Because so did Eddie Mannix.

Read part six…

* Quick note: Nils actually claimed he came up with the makeup techniques for General Yen. Take it with as big a pinch of salt as you wish, but he wrote how he’d spend his days off in Chinatown, making sketches of his acquaintances there. Then, at home, he’d try to modify his eyelids in a more realistic manner than Hollywood’s usual ‘just tape them up, who cares’ method.

The Fool’s Way IV: The Spy Who Laughed At My Bald Spot

Posted on March 12, 2018 by Verity Holloway

Hello, and welcome to my continuing dive into the world of 1920s and ’30s Hollywood with Nils Asther’s memoirs. It’s all getting a bit out of hand, because I’m deliberately learning Swedish now.

When we last saw Nils, he was heading for Hollywood for either the time of his life or an unmitigated nightmare, depending on who you believe; Nils, or the people who sent him there.

Crafting a persona for a new star must have been terrific fun, because you could pluck any old rubbish out of the air and just go with it. Fresh off the boat, Hollywood took one look at Nils Asther and said “SPY!”

Nils was given a history of daring missions to Russia, flying over Finland under cover of darkness for tea with his best buddy, Lenin. He was an international skiing champion (that was how he was spotted by Mauritz Stiller, definitely not a creepy pickup in a bar) and his father, far from being just another sadistic businessman, was the scion of one of the oldest aristocratic houses of Sweden. The American press were keen to point out Nils struggled with English (he was fluent in four languages, but foreigners, am I right?) and new fans were warned they may have to look up Stockholm on a map. He had never been in love. Being in love was incompatible with Nordic self-control, so he only let his passions fly in front of the camera. This description, from a 1929 edition of Photoplay, is really something: “Nils Asther, as melancholy as a Swedish herring and about as animated as the Rock of Gibraltar, has no use for the average woman. He is not one to flit (imagine Nils flitting) from flower to flower.”

Hjalmar Bergman would have wet himself.

nils asther june 1932 big

Behind the scenes, things were less dramatic. His first meeting with an exec was an experience for everyone involved. Nils wasn’t as thin as he looked in his photographs. “Very probably. On the way here, I spent all your money on sweets.” His hair was too long. American men didn’t have long hair. Nils had already guessed that – he let his eyes travel openly over the American’s bald head. His expenses reciepts were unacceptable. Nils sprinkled them on the floor.

There were no singing children there to greet him, Nils noted wryly. Hollywood was boring. Studios were like contained towns, housing thousands of people, all equally unhappy. Outside, it was a cultural desert. Hardly any theatres, no concert halls, and definitely no opera houses, though there was a building in the shape of a giant teapot. Worse, everyone was unrelentingly cheerful. One culture shock for Nils was that when someone said “How are you?” he wasn’t expected to respond with something along the lines of “I’m unhappy and hungover and I hate this place, how do you stand it?”

It’s no surprise he earned a reputation as difficult. And when a waiter was French, he would speak to him in French. Highly suspicious.

When you have a star who calls a spade a spade and then hits you with it, you can’t allow him to speak for himself in the press. So you get ‘interviews’ like this:

This is the man who spiced up a dull evening with Garbo by putting a banana down his pants and waiting for her to notice, but okay, hello darkness my old friend.

The town was tedious, waiting around for a role was frustrating, and when a film did come along, it was a sentimental romance where Nils was expected to stand there looking pretty while the Duncan sisters capered around in blackface. He looked at ships back to Sweden. But then he was offered the role of Kit in Sorrel and Son. Anna Q. Nilsson, a fellow Swede once called the most beautiful woman in the world, would play his mother. The shipping timetable went in the bin. He’d never been able to resist an older woman.

Their open relationship was the longest and probably the healthiest Nils ever had. But when he suggested they marry, Anna was already wise to him. He wasn’t husband material. For one thing, in his own words, he would jump into bed with any man or woman who asked nicely. But she loved him all the same. The ring you see on his little finger in most photographs is an emerald from Anna, engraved ‘a sign you are my lover’. Throughout his tumultuous time in Hollywood, Anna would comfort Nils, rescue him, and even understand him. Not many did.

Sorrel and Son was a hit. Two films opposite Garbo followed: Wild Orchids and The Single Standard. You can watch them here – just search for Nils Asther. And they really are great fun. The chemistry between the leads is real, and The Single Standard explores some surprisingly feminist issues, like independence and integrity and falling in love with someone with a really silly name.

Oh dear God.

What.

Wait, no, this is fine.

Roles came pouring in. Most were the ‘pretty boys in uniform’ bits Nils found dull, but they were alongside hugely famous leading ladies (and Lon Cheney), and the fans lapped them up. Charlie Chaplin admired his comedy turns and wanted to collaborate. He was receiving literal crates of fan mail, which he endeavoured to respond to personally until it became impossible. Take that, Dad.

Nils was defiantly indiscreet about his love life. At one point, he was literally on call for liaisons. Kay Francis, frustrated with her ailing marriage, comforted herself by visiting Nils in his dressing room for kisses. Joan Crawford wanted a baby – guess who she turned to for help. This was all manageable for the studio, who wanted family-friendly, clean-cut leading men and would do anything to preserve that facade. They’d already crafted a persona for Nils that was mysterious, intellectual and impenetrably foreign. But when he was happy to joke with Garbo in front of entire film crews about roughing it up with sailor boyfriends, he garnered the wrong sort of attention.

Enter Eddie Mannix, Hollywood fixer, gangster, and all-round sentient turd.

I’m not looking forward to this.

Onwards to Part V…

The Fool’s Way Part III – Bloody Greta Garbo

Posted on November 7, 2017 by Verity Holloway

I’m still translating Nils Asther’s memoirs of silent stardom from Swedish. Catch up on parts I and II. And look – Nicole of Strange Fiction is providing illustrations!

Meanwhile, in the Roaring Twenties…

When he wasn’t yelling at him and making threats, Mauritz Stiller liked to tell Nils he was his favourite. He probably told Greta Garbo that too.

Stiller helped the teenage Greta Gustafsson come up with a new name and a new look. He had her lose weight and fix her teeth, chose shoes to make her feet look smaller (Stiller had a complex about the size of his own feet, so hey, why not everyone else’s?) and began to cultivate the special something that would make her a star. Rumour had it, her beat her. There was plenty of whispering about Greta Gustafsson. The girls at the Royal Dramatic Theatre called her untalented and ugly, but Stiller believed in Greta with his characteristic possessive fervour, and she adored him.

Greta Garbo and Mauritz Stiller

There was plenty of whispering about Nils, too. He was getting decent reviews for his stage work, plus plenty of film roles, but his fellow students were sure he was only tolerated because he was sleeping with the great Augusta Lindberg. Augusta’s exhibitionism wasn’t doing much to dispel the gossip. On one occasion, he was forced to climb out of a window mid-session to preserve her honour. She was perfectly happy with her quota of honour, but it was nice of him to make the effort.

When Nils met Greta, they were both students. Their first encounter would haunt him for the rest of his life. She wasn’t anything special to look at, not at first, but then…

“Suddenly she looked up and into my eyes. It felt like I was hit by a thunderbolt. I stared bewitched at her. But it seemed like she did not notice me. Her girlish face seemed to me wonderfully beautiful. My whole body was carried by a pleasant springing sensation, which I never before experienced, and the effects of which I could never completely free myself from. Something strange had happened inside me. The peculiar theatre student had lit a fire of love in me, bordering on bliss. It insisted that I must join with her forever.”

Within three days of setting eyes on her, Nils proposed for the first time.

This was typical Nils. Where Greta Garbo was supposed to fit alongside Augusta, Hjalmar, Stiller, Lutzy, the twins, and the estranged mother of his child, I don’t know. She wasn’t sure either. With grace, she told him she was married to her craft.

Linde Klinckowström

Anyway, there was Linde Klinckowström to consider. Linde was a Swedish countess who would become known for daring solo trips across Europe on horseback. She was intelligent and artistic, and Nils being Nils, he couldn’t help but flirt with her. They met when she was appearing as an extra in a film, dressed in men’s breeches. He said he had a way of falling in love with girls in trousers. Well then, she said, she said she ought to wear them more often. Somehow, “Ooh, I might have to propose”, came out of someone’s mouth, maybe even hers. At last, said his friends, a nice, relatively normal girl to keep him on the straight and narrow. Straight and narrow were new concepts to Nils, and he wasn’t sure what to do with them. Linde presented him to her parents, half-joking about a romance. She was nobility, after all, and though he looked the part, he had a commoner’s accent. But Linde’s brother was an artist, a good one, and he counselled Nils to leave the acting world and follow his dreams of painting. He and Linde were astute enough to see Nils’ self-destructive nature. Film would only encourage it, as would mad love affairs.

It was sound advice, so naturally he didn’t take it. Linde and her aura of calm would appear to him in dreams for years to come, begging him to slow down. Gently, she broke off their brief, strange relationship, leaving him free to pursue… more brief, strange relationships.

Oh My God, Stop Falling In Love

The Linde hangover was over. Now Greta Garbo was his one true love.

Where did this alluring creature hang out? Where could he loiter in the hope of bumping into her? There was her house, of course, but any idiot can lurk outside someone’s home address (and he did). You’ve got to think creatively. You have to go somewhere you’ll have something to talk about, things to do.

Her father’s grave, for instance.

And so he hung around in the snow amongst the headstones. Looking forlorn had always worked on Hjalmar, but it wasn’t going to cut it with Greta. What was this ‘just friends’ concept she was talking about? Nils thought he was losing his mind. Perhaps Mauritz Stiller had threatened her too?

A very young Greta Garbo

He and Greta actually had a lot in common. They had the same sense of humour and ability to see through bullshit. And Greta had a similarly horrible childhood to Nils, only far poorer:

“It was eternally grey—those long winter’s nights. My father would be sitting in a corner, scribbling figures on a newspaper. On the other side of the room my mother is repairing ragged old clothes, sighing. We children would be talking in very low voices, or just sitting silently. We were filled with anxiety, as if there were danger in the air.”

This was something they could bond over. Post-divorce, Anton Asther had settled down with his new wife and was producing more children. According to rumour, he hadn’t told his new family that his old one even existed. But Nils was becoming well-known in Sweden, and the Asther name was uncommon enough that surely someone would start asking questions. Nils decided to contact Anton one last time. For what, who knows? Maybe acceptance. But Anton refused to meet. Nils had brought the shame of ‘sawdust’ onto their name, he said. He was nothing but a simple clown.

But like Greta Garbo, the clown was going places. Friedrich Zelnick, one of the most important director-producers of the day, called Nils his ‘darling’. Bidding wars started up between directors determined to have him. Nils pretended not to care. He liked to see how far he could push it. “It’s all just so boring,” he shrugged, which only made the directors hurl more cash at him. Greta was in Turkey, making movies with Stiller. Nils was filming in Berlin, Vienna, and Sicily – doing what? He couldn’t remember.

“I have a peculiar talent for forgetting the names of all the bad films I’ve been in. Guess I’m just lazy.”

Lutzy, or Lucy Doraine

This may have been more down to his lifestyle than the quality of the films. Depressed by the chaos of his personal life, pining for Greta, he threw himself into further hedonism. Deciding that Lutzy Doraine was now the one and only woman for him, he went AWOL from the theatre to go on a mad dash across Europe to see her while she went travelling. The pursuit of his beloved consisted of a few months of daylight drinking in public spaces, romantic encounters with people who didn’t speak any of the languages he knew – none were as bewitching as Lutzy, of course, even the lady with the lovely ankles – and further day drinking. If he could just get all the way to Egypt, maybe he could become like a romantic knight, riding a camel to the pyramids. But Egypt turned out to be full of honking cars and strewn with rubbish. And it wasn’t really Lutzy he was after. He only ever seemed to want to run away.

In Nils’ own estimation, he was “totally deranged” at this point. Hjalmar Bergman, besotted as ever, lamented the behaviour of his “little idiot”. Keeping up with Nils was killing him. When Hjalmar wasn’t face-down in a mountain of cocaine, he was taking his feelings for his foster son to the brothels. Nils had begun to talk about America. It was the logical next step for his career, and Greta Garbo was already there, making a mark. Hjalmar couldn’t bear to lose the handsome youth he had idolised for so long.

After a night of heavy drinking, the writer broke down on Nils’ shoulder. Why had nature cursed him with such a repulsive face? Nils did his best to console the older man. Hjalmar had no need of something so trivial as good looks. He had been blessed by the Muses, and Nils admired and loved him for it. But he was missing the point. Bless him, he was quite good at missing the point. In four more years, Hjalmar would die alone in a Berlin hotel, wrecked by alcohol.

It’s really not that bad, Hjalmar.

Mephistopheles Doesn’t Care About Your Hangover

On the 17th of January 1927, Nils spent his 30th birthday alone. He composed himself this message:

“Congratulations on the birthday, you old rascal! Not that you deserve it, but may your future become light and fun, with great success. Well, why not world renown to satisfy your vanity? Beautiful girls, a thousand of them, and coins in large quantities, and good health so that you can enjoy these creature comforts. May all your dreams come true, even the idiotic ones. And when you’re drinking in a villa in Italy or Spain, where you can live in peace and with peace of mind, free from ambitions and desires, may you finally get your easel, canvases, brushes and paints. Cheers to you, old boy.”

Despite drowning his loneliness in champagne, it was a pretty good birthday. Paramount had noticed this Scandinavian heartthrob and were sending a representative over to Sweden to talk to him right away. But they were beaten to his door by rival company United Artists. Literally. They just barged in.

“I had not yet got out of bed and was waiting for morning coffee, when there came a knock on the door. Unannounced, it was a Mr. Berman from the U.S.A. Hat in hand, an extinct cigar hung from the corner of the mouth. ‘Hallo, Asther! You are going to Hollywood. You have a future there. You’re the type that the girls will run after.’ Uninvited, he had thrown himself down in an uncomfortable chair. He mistook my silence for awe, for he galloped in with a bunch of promises of life in Hollywood. He represented the prominent United Artists and told me what I already knew, that it was owned by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Norma Talmadge with Joseph Schenk as the Director. I would stay at the finest clubs and a Cadillac would be the only car for me, etc. Where the hell was the coffee…?”

Very politely, for someone hungover in his pyjamas, Nils explained he was flattered but had an appointment to keep with Paramount. To Hell with Paramount, said Berman. United Artists would beat any offer from those shmucks. Also, how do you feel about pretending to be twenty-five?

By the end of the month, Nils would be in America, having the time of his life.

“There is nothing that I more bitterly regret than leaving Sweden and giving myself to the violence of film,” he wrote, years later. “Above all, I let myself be caught by the untruthful Hollywood dream factory, where I experienced my life’s most terrible nightmares.”

It’s going to be so much fun, guys.

TBC.

Part IV awaits you…

The Fool’s Way Part II – God’s Orchid

Posted on October 14, 2017 by Verity Holloway

I’ve been translating Nils Asther’s memoir from Swedish because I apparently have nothing better to do. Catch part one here.

It’s fair to wonder what would have happened to Nils Asther had he not attracted the attention of Mauritz Stiller that evening. The teen had no money, no qualifications, no home to go to, and in his mind at least, no family.

Mauritz Stiller

Stiller was born in Helsinki in 1883, and fled to Sweden to avoid being drafted into Czar Nicholas II’s army. He was a pioneer of silent films, writing and directing more than thirty-five features in his lifetime. The night he laid eyes on Nils, Stiller was eating out with a fellow screenwriter, Sam Ask. Stiller ushered Nils and his companion over to Ask. “Doesn’t this one look like an actor?”

(Nils’ friend was ignored for the rest of the evening. Poor boy, he was lovely, but he had a face like the back of a tram.)

Soon they were joined by a hefty gentleman with thick curly hair. He looked out of place in the noisy eatery, standoffish and over-eager at the same time. This was Hjalmar Bergman, a respected author. Having established himself as highly literary and intellectual, the death of his father brought about huge debt, and Bergman was forced to write more crowd-pleasing works. This required research, such as drinking, snorting cocaine, and fraternising with gorgeous young men.

Tonight was Bergman’s lucky night.

“He looked at me as if I were an angel fallen from the skies,” Nils wrote. “It took a while before he sobered up. He asked me my name and what I did. I told him that I was kicked out of my adoptive parents’ house and from the Spyken school in Lund. Now I had decided to become an artist. Hjalmar Bergman reacted negatively. Not many artists could live on their jobs. Such fancies! Movie actors made big money. I was assured that all the artist dreams would be beaten out of my mind.”

Hjalmar Bergman

Debt be damned, Bergman was besotted. He rented an apartment for Nils, with a little kitchenette and a big bed with red curtains. Unaccustomed to older men being kind to him, Nils wondered if Bergman was his true father. When he asked him this, the writer became tearful. He only wished it were so! Trying to shrug off the emotion, he said if he were Nils’ father, he would pack him off back to school – even if he had to bribe the teachers to put up with him. From now, on Nils would be Bergman’s ‘foster son’, along with a young German lad who was coincidentally also a gorgeous actor who liked to do uppers on trains. Bergman had a type.

Nils at 22-years-old, by Einar Jolin, 1918.

Bergman isn’t widely known outside of Sweden, but in 1919 he published a drama based on his relationship with Nils: God’s Orchid. In it, an oafish father watches his beautiful son grow up and wonders how anything so perfect could have been created by him. The boy is compared to Christ, but he’s full of guile, always with his eye on the next opportunity to escape his low upbringing. They bicker and make up and bicker again, with the father’s obsessive love always verging on something more unhealthy.

In Bergman’s letters, he says of Nils, “It’s not his fault he’s a degenerate, nor mine”. But they encouraged each other. Nils doesn’t talk about cocaine in his memoirs, but Bergman joked that if he ever wanted anyone killed, he’d just send them out to party with his foster son.

After drinks, Bergman sometimes liked to arrange Nils where he could sit and stare at him, which isn’t at all skin-crawlingly weird. “You are Jesus to me,” he said on one such occasion. “I will love you as long as I live.” He dared to kiss his cheek. Another time, he gifted his ‘foster son’ with a copy of Death In Venice, which is a bit like handing someone a neon sign blinking “RUN AWAY”.

Aschenbach Off, Hjalmar

But Nils had nothing to run away to. His behaviour seems deliberately coquettish – at one point, he describes undressing in front of Bergman before inviting him to stay over. He always protested their relationship was never more than platonic. “He never tried to rape me,” he wrote, nevertheless describing all the awkward caressing as if that’s just what writers are like. It seems his need for a father figure meant he was willing to put up with almost anything.

Strange men started coming up to the apartment, seeking Nils’ company. That some of these men were publishing professionals makes me suspect Bergman deliberately fed rumours that he was getting more for his money than he really was. Everyone knew what was going on. Or thought they did. The artist Nils von Dardel teased Asther about it. “I know very well Bergman likes you, the pederast.”

Mauritz Stiller paid close attention. In 1916, he got Nils into the Royal Dramatic Theatre for tuition. “Try not to get expelled,” he said. Next came a film role, in Stiller’s The Wings. It’s a strangely post-modern piece, a film within a film, and you can see what remains of it here.

The Wings was a film about gay desire. At 19, Nils was too young for the lead, but Stiller couldn’t resist writing him a part to keep him close.

“He opened me to the art of loving and enjoying my own sex,” Nils wrote. Again, their relationship was one of power imbalance. Stiller was liable to fly into rages if his demands were not instantly obeyed. “The man had a demonic power over us actors. If he said that we must obtain and drink a teaspoon of piss every day […] I assure you that we would have done it.”

But threats and tantrums were nothing new to Nils. He was getting small film and stage roles, and as soon as he had enough money, he could quit and become the artist he longed to be. Acting was like worshipping a monstrous pagan god, he thought. Fame and decadence were fun, but he was astute enough to see they wouldn’t lead to happiness.

Speaking of unhappiness, Hjalmar Bergman’s wife was less than pleased with her husband’s obsession with this wayward boy. To comfort her, he suggested they have a baby. Isn’t that nice? But Nils had to be the father. Hjalmar only wanted a pretty baby.

Her reaction? “Get some class, deadbeat!” and a slap in the face. Not for Hjalmar. For Nils. Which seems slightly unfair.

Drug use and hectic living eventually killed Bergman. But jealousy put pay to his relationship with Nils, at least in Bergman’s eyes.

A Love ~~Triangle~~ ~~Pyramid~~ Dodecahedron

Lindberg,_Augusta_-_porträtt_-_Foto_Ferd_Flodin_Stockholm_1906-05-29_-_AF

Augusta Lindberg in 1906

Augusta Lindberg was Bergman’s mother-in-law. She was in her fifties when she first encountered Nils. As a veteran actor and mother of the director Per Lindberg, Bergman and Stiller thought she was a suitable mentor for their new discovery.

Sigh.

He was deposited in front of her with the script for Ibsen’s Ghosts. The play is a typically Norwegian nightmare about syphilis and incest, but Nils flipped through it and remarked Ibsen could have had the decency to throw some actual ghosts in. Like, yawn, am I right?

Augusta was tickled. Surprise-surprise, their weekly private acting classes didn’t involve much acting. Augusta had a taste for exhibitionism. A neighbour complained she had to pour herself a large brandy whenever Nils showed up at the door. At a party, Augusta decided to show Bergman he didn’t own Nils by dragging him into an adjacent room for loud, obnoxious understudying. Nevertheless, Augusta saw the wounded child in Nils and could always sense his anxiety. She mothered him, made sure he ate properly, and helped to keep him in school despite the cocaine and the all-night adventures with Bergman.

Nils saw all this in his unique and adorable fashion: “It has been claimed that there was a tug of war between him and his mother, Augusta Lindberg, and that she emerged victorious. It’s not true. He was merely amused to hear me talk about our games.”

Amused, devastated? One of those.

“Hello. I have an opening for a Tuesday afternoon girlfriend.” Solen Der Dræbte, 1918

Stiller also had opinions on Nils’ love life. As well as Augusta Lindberg, there were the actresses Linde Klinckowström and Lutzy Doraine, another fellow student, and a set of twins he could just about tell apart. Over dinner one night, Nils confided in Stiller that he was worried one of the twins might be pregnant. Stiller went ballistic.

“You fucking idiot. Is it not enough that you’re riding that hag Augusta?”

No one would ever buy into a movie star who was saddled with a wife and kids. Was that what he wanted? To be domesticated? If he went ahead with these relationships, Stiller would dump him completely. Worse still, Bergman was withdrawing his affection. It came as no surprise when Nils had a breakdown.

The Real Reason Visiting Hours Are Restricted

“I was an ambitious hunchback not worthy of anyone’s love. No one has ever loved me, and it’s certainly my hideous failure. Why was I such a vindictive and obnoxious person? Was it perhaps my hideous childhood filled with hymns, beating and screams that characterised me?”

Woe is me, Himmelskibet, 1918.

Nils retreated to a sanatorium at Saltsjöbaden where he was the youngest by about seventy years. Whether he was off the magic fairy dust at this time was unclear, but he still managed to make another of his trademark disastrous decisions by having a girlfriend over to visit. They conceived a child on the ward.

She miscarried, much to their mutual relief, and they celebrated… by getting pregnant again. They fell out and she went to Switzerland to give birth alone. If he was remotely interested in his child, he doesn’t let on.

If you’re thinking it’s about time his mother gets involved, you’d be right. He arranged to meet with Hilda Asther for the first time since running away. The poor woman looked broken. Anton had set up with another lady and was raising a new family. Nils urged Hilda to divorce him, and promised to support her for the rest of her days. To prove it, he handed her a wad of banknotes. Probably Hjalmar Bergman’s banknotes, but the sentiment was sound. He still couldn’t bring himself to ask her about his adoption. In his mind, she was his foster mother, and she loved him in a distant way that was the best he could hope for. With all his relationships, Nils seemed to have seen himself as someone merely passing through. He never imagined anyone could truly become attached to him.

But where could Hilda go? The Asther house in Malmö wasn’t hers. And Nils surely couldn’t put her up in his sugar daddy’s apartment.

Nils knew just the place.

[Cut to the freshly-divorced Hilda Asther setting up home with Augusta Lindberg.]

Okay…?

Read Part III here.

The Fool’s Way

Posted on October 7, 2017 by Verity Holloway

I translated Nils Asther’s autobiography from Swedish so you don’t have to.

Why, Verity? Why?

Because I love a gorgeous tragic dead boy, and people who’ve read it say it’s a car crash from start to finish.

How?

I can’t read Swedish. But I downloaded a translation app and know a couple of Swedes who helped me when Swedish idioms came out garbled and hilarious. The majority of the book was perfectly readable, even when I needed to make some leaps of logic to complete sentences.

And yes, it’s a scream from beginning to end.

Who?

Nils Asther is probably best known for his titular role in Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen. He had a long career, stretching from the First World War up to the 1960s, though his talent was mainly wasted on flimsy romantic roles. “I quit because I couldn’t stand making those ‘pretty boys’ films in uniform any more,” as he put it. His Swedish accent made him difficult to cast when the talkies came along, but his unusual beauty meant he stayed in demand for a long time, despite his open disdain for the film industry. Women were wild about him. Men, too. One male fan left the actor a fabulously expensive ring in his Will, a posthumous declaration of desire.

I mean, it’s little wonder.

Hollywood marketed Nils as a mysterious Scandinavian, an intellectual, an adventurer, and friend of Lenin for some reason. But in his memoirs, Narrens Väg (meaning ‘The Fool’s Way’), Nils looks back at the truth of his life (and I’m using ‘truth’ very loosely here) with bitterness, hilarity, and a ridiculously long list of lovers. How he found time for filming is beyond me.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun for other silent film fans if I summarised the fun bits in English.

Strap In, This Is Going To Get Bumpy

Once upon a time in Denmark, on a cold and dreary day in 1897, a boy was born to parents unknown. The child spent his first few months in a notorious orphanage until he was adopted by a beautiful, melancholy Swedish lady and her wicked husband who took him home to their big house in Malmö.

Or not. Once upon a time, a boy was born to Hilda and Anton, one-time lovers who had grown to despise each other. To conceal her shame, Hilda gave birth in Denmark and left her son in an orphanage temporarily to give her and Anton time to arrange a ‘colossal’ wedding that neither of them wanted.

They didn’t tell their son any of this. That would have taken the fun out of the next eighty years.

Despite his timid, bookish demeanour, little Nils Anton Alfide Asther was branded The Bad Child from the start. His elder half brother, Gunnar, was favoured in all things, and Nils and Hilda were largely left to their own devices, eating alone, vacationing alone, and trying to smile when Anton’s business partners came over, boasting about their money and their mistresses.

It seems everyone knew Nils’ shameful origins except him. The parish priest harboured a special dislike for the boy, making Sundays an ordeal he would later turn into gruesome art. (I’ll be sharing this painting later. It’s… something.)

Anton and Hilda’s marriage was poison. Neighbours whispered about the couple’s wedding night, when Hilda was seen trying to hurl herself out of a window. Relatives were concerned when she named her baby boy after her brother who brought shame on the family for sleeping with a maid. Hilda’s father beat the teen so badly – in front of the other children – he later killed himself.

So far, so horrifying.

Nils recounts his early memories like a series of battles. As a small boy, he walked in on his father violently assaulting his mother. She proceeded to use Nils as a human shield, which cemented in Anton’s paranoid brain that his wife and youngest son were in cahoots against him. Another night, Nils and Hilda barricaded themselves into a bedroom while Anton beat on the door with a gun.

It sounds like a melodrama from the silent films. And yes, Nils is probably embellishing. But decades before writing his memoirs, Nils gave interviews in Hollywood telling of how his main memories of Sweden were his mother crying alone in large rooms, and of being stunned when strangers treated them with kindness. The little details, like hardly daring to breathe when a certain floorboard creaked, ring true for survivors of abuse. After leaving Sweden, Nils never spoke to his father or half-brother again.

The domestic power-balance changed when Nils hit his teens. He shot past six foot, way above his father, and the physical difference made him realise he wouldn’t always be under Anton’s tyranny. Hollywood would later work hard to promote the shy, romantic teenage Nils over the self that emerged during this period, the one who was breaking windows and discovering boys.

Expulsion Number One – The Pekinese

We all had that one teacher we wanted to murder. For Nils, this was The Pekinese, a history teacher nicknamed for his unfortunate face and love of ‘biting’ boys with his cane. Nils liked the concept of history, but couldn’t absorb the names-and-dates nuts and bolts. It didn’t matter how hard Nils worked, The Pekinese just wouldn’t give him a break. His feelings for his teacher festered away along with the helplessness and frustration of his home life, evolving into a slightly manic hatred that would rear up again and again in later life.

One day in class, Nils was caught playing with a knife. That wasn’t a problem – all boys had knives – but he was using his to carve a willy into his desk. Inspecting the damage, The Pekinese discovered Nils’ cartoons – which, admittedly, were quite good – all depicting the teacher as an angry lapdog.

He was up against the board with his pants down in no time. The Pekinese got out his cane and delivered several sharp whacks. Refusing to show any pain, Nils waited until the final blow to peep over his shoulder: “Was that nice?”

The boys howled with laughter. Nils was mad with adrenaline. When this got back to Anton, he might actually die of rage. However, the headmaster showed a frustrating amount of leniency. You’re a smart boy, usually so well-behaved, you’re about to begin your leaving exams, etc, etc. He didn’t want to suspend him for something so silly as graffiti and cheek.

So Nils sawed two legs off The Pekinese’s chair and gave him concussion, just to make sure.

Expulsion Number Two – This Time, It’s Musical

When the yelling died down, Nils was sent away to the Spyken school in Lund. The school still exists and is probably lovely, but in the early 1900s, ‘The Spyk’ was where rich men sent their ill-behaved children when no one else would put up with them.

Things went well for a while. It was a relief to be away from home, even though he worried about Hilda being alone with Anton. But when a new PE teacher turned up – a short man with a chinstrap beard and dandy pretentions – that manic hatred boiled up again. The poor guy was doomed.

The gym was in the basement, and the boys had to file down a steep flight of stairs to get there. There was always plenty of larking about on the way, but one day Mr Chinstrap told them all to shut up and get in line. A strange compulsion seized Nils. It would be so much more fun to boot him down the stairs.

While the teacher lay clutching his broken ribs, Nils stood at the top of the stairs singing ‘Liten Karin’, a cheery Swedish folk song about a king who puts a maid into a barrel full of spikes and rolls her around until she dies.

Eesh.

Have A Screaming Match With Your Vicar In The Gym, Why Not

When you have a demon child on the premises, the only option is to call a priest.

Anton Asther stormed into the school, “roaring like a lion”. The headmaster called the family’s priest (the one who thought Nils was the physical manifestation of sin) and although the cleric’s presence stopped Anton from murdering his son, it was a life-changingly bad idea.

Most of Nils Asther’s memoir is about life-changingly bad ideas, honestly.

So they’re locked in a room together, just yelling at each other. Father Soandso attempted reason; words to the effect of “Why did you break your teacher’s bones again, you utter lunatic?” Nils stuck to his guns with a litany of “You lie, priest bastard!”, which is a great response to just about anything. This went back and forth until the priest gave up any pretence of Christian compassion or priestly discretion:

“How I wish my friend Anton had never let that woman persuade him into adopting you. We have reason to believe that you are the son of a whore and an adulterer in Copenhagen.”

Oh.

Now, if you’d just been told you were adopted, wouldn’t you go to your parents and maybe… ask them?

Or would you rather burst out of the room, grab your things and get the train to Stockholm without saying a word to anyone?

That’s the spirit!

There was a little bit of reasoning behind this move. Not much. But a bit. To summarise:

I am not related to awful Anton.
I am also not related to my beautiful, sad mother.
But she probably doesn’t love me either.
So I’m going to become an artist.
Anton will hate that.

This all turned out to be another life-changingly bad idea.

What do artists do all day? Well, they hang around in cafes looking interesting. In Stockholm, Nils found a floor to sleep on and an old school friend to hang out with. The pair became a regular fixture of murky city nightlife. One evening, going out to eat, the teenagers were approached by man with gigantic hands and even bigger feet. The boys must join him for dinner, he said, definitely not leering. Had Nils ever thought about acting? Did he like films?

Nils had never seen a film. He certainly didn’t know he was talking to Mauritz Stiller, the man who discovered Greta Garbo. According to Anton Asther, actors were degenerate idiots who disgraced their families and died penniless.

So yes. Yes, he was interested…

TBC. Read part II here.

Somewhere Without Horizons

Verity Holloway, writer

Tag Archives: The Fool’s Way