Mirror, Mirror. Paula Byrne

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Prologue

      Berlin, 1993

       Die Deutsche Kinemathek

      My mother was still alive when the wall came down, but she made no comment except this: ‘I have cried all my tears for Germany. They have dried and I have washed my face.’ She had the loveliest face since Helen of Troy, but her beauty was in flight, like Nike of Samothrace.

      When she died alone, in her Paris apartment, she left no will. Her millions had been spent. But she had kept every possession in cardboard boxes: hats, scarves, gowns, shoes, clocks. I sorted 45,000 pages of correspondence, 16,500 photographs, and over 3,300 textile objects, and I sent everything I had to the Deutsche Kinemathek.

She was finally being honoured. Berlin’s most famous and infamous child. I could never imagine her as a girl. She was a goddess; unknowable, unreachable. When I was a child I had a doll called Heidi. She was the most beautiful doll, with golden hair, and nobody could have loved her more than I. But every day, I prayed that I would never have a daughter. Dolls could not feel pain. Could not be hurt. I feared girl children. I would not know how to be a mother to such complex creatures.

      And now the last box has been sent. As I enter the museum, I find myself in a mirrored lobby, like a jewel box. A hundred images of myself are reflected back at me. I am old now. I see an elegant, white-haired lady in a smart suit. There are eyes everywhere, and with a sudden burst of grief and clarity, I know how she must have felt. Every aspect, every angle of her life scrutinised, photographed, filmed, analysed and judged. Nowhere to escape, and nowhere to hide. And now I understand what she meant when she told me ‘Kater, I was photographed to death.’

The Devil is a Woman

      It’s funny how I can remember every single person who’s ever been kind to me.

      When I look back now, I see so much, but I guess that’s the way it is for most people. I never knew my age in those days when we first went to Hollywood. That was because Mother constantly changed it, so I never had a chance to celebrate my birthday. To her friends and fans, I was a baby, to others, I was a young girl of nine, or maybe eight. All I knew was that I had the most beautiful mother in the world and that I was ugly.

      My face was covered with pimples. Mother blamed the cream pastries I ate. It was one of the things I most loved about America: the food. For breakfast, the maid would bring me a stack of pancakes with maple syrup and whipped butter. There were strips of salty bacon ‘on the side’. American waffles with cream and blueberries. Gloriosky!

      Mother glared at me, sipping water mixed with Epsom Salts. This was how she stayed pencil thin.

‘Sweetheart, hurry. The car is here. That Big Girl’s Blouse will be weeping into his coffee if I’m even five minutes late.’

      Her co-star was English. Peter somebody. On the whole, she disliked Englishmen, ‘thick, white ankles, fingers like uncooked sausages’. She was obsessed by the beauty of her own slender ankles. ‘Aristocrats have thin ankles, only peasants have thick ones.’ She looked at my fat ankles, accusingly, as she said this.

      I felt sorrow for my mother because she had given birth to such a plain child. I looked exactly like my father, but what was handsome in a man was plain in a female. In the mirrored dining table where we were eating a hurried breakfast I could see my reflection: high forehead, large flat nose, and deep-set eyes. My bushy eyebrows made me look perpetually cross. My hair was fine and a pale shade of ginger. I had blotchy brown freckles that I tried to scrub off with lemon juice. It never worked. But I had a lovely mouth, with a Cupid’s bow. It was the only feature that I had inherited from my mother. I decided then that it might be best to avoid mirrors.

As usual, it was an early-morning call. Mother was expected to be in Make-up at 5 a.m. Her car and driver were already outside the house. A hot Santa Ana wind had been blowing that week, and the Hollywood hills were sharp-edged СКАЧАТЬ