Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1936)

The Tempestuous Life Slory of Luise Rainer [continued from page 25] then-floated up against the opposite wall. And she moved always with the sunbeam's eccentric grace. Her mother who sat stitching a pink batiste frock finished the entire hem and still, although she had taken the finest stitches, Luise, not having uttered a single word, was at her game. "Aren't you weary?" Emy Rainer asked as she folded up the frock she had been working on and laid it away in her sewing basket. Luise didn't answer. It wasn't that she was rude; simply that she was intent upon moving with that frisky sunbeam in its least quiver. Taking Luise by the hand her mother led her to her special chair, a chair about the size of that in which the smallest of the three fairy tale bears would sit. "I want you to rest until I come back," she said. "I'm going down to the kitchen to see about dinner, to see about the strudel." Luise's eyes, which even then were as ageless as eternity, grew wide and serious. And on her head her hair, black as a storm cloud, was baby soft and fine. A DOZEN things detained Emy Rainer. The goose the butcher had sent didn't please her. A friend called on the telephone. There was the salad dressing to be made, something she always prepared herself. She went hurriedly from one thing to another and then she remembered little Luise waiting upstairs. She flew up the stairs. Luise might have grown restless and wandered into the street. You never could tell what Luise might do. She was a strange child. "The Black One" her father called her because it was so evident even then that her important life was something she shared with no one, something she lived inside herself. However, Emy Rainer found Luise in the little chair where she had left her. The sunbeam no longer was there to tempt her to play. Long since it had disappeared and shadows were deep in the corner. "You poor Iiebchen," Emy Rainer said, gathering Luise into her arms. "Sitting here all this time! Didn't you get lonely? Aren't you very tired?" Luise shook her head. "It was nice," she said. And often it was like that. There were, through the years during which Luise Rainer grew up, many times when she was to sit alone and very still for many hours. Understandable enough if on that particular day her mother searched her eyes for a long time for some hint of the fantasies which had been absorbing her. For any mother knowing her child is more at home in the world of her imagination than she is with reality must long to make some small place for herself in that secret world. There were times when Heinz Rainer, a successful merchant who had returned to Europe to set up a business after becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States, insisted Luise was stupid. Her mother didn't believe this, however. And it's doubtful really that Heinz Rainer believed it himself. Luise was different, yes. And those who are different and don't lit into the pattern shaped by the majority must appear stupid at times. Always, you see, even when Luise Rainer was little more than a baby she had a special passionate quality. Whatever held her at all became intensely important to her. And always she was possessed to give back to people the images and feelings which people and things gave to her. It was, of course, this quality which made her an actress and brought her the fame she knew first on the stage and the screen in Europe and which she now knows here. And it also was this quality which for a while threatened to bring her life down about her head in a miserable shambles. An abnormal imagination and a passionate intensity often ruin those who possess these things before they can learn the great need they know to hold them in check with the reins of selfdiscipline. Emy Rainer had a cashmere shawl with the colors of many flowers caught in its gay Viennese pattern. Growing older Luise found that shawl one of the most beautiful things in the world. She used to sit for hours with it in her slender hands. And always when she turned it about so she might see the way the starry daisies lay beside the red of the roses and the iris flowers worked in purple floss a strange excitement would go shaking within her. "Colors so beautiful," she told me, talking of this part of her life, "I thought should be everywhere. I wanted to reproduce them over and over. The cream furniture my poor mother had bought for my room and of which she was so proud, saying always 'Now that you are growing up, Luise, it is suitable you should have such a room!' I came to hate very much. To me it was stupid as the color of milk." The colors in that shawl became an obsession with her. She saved every pfennig of her allowance and one by one she bought tubes of oil tempera of vermilion, ultramarine, chrome, magenta and emerald. She hoarded these colors as she collected them, one every week or so. When she had them all she was jubilant. "You mustn't come in," she called to her mother from her room. "Not even on a little crack must you open the door. I have a surprise!" She worked diligently. It didn't matter when her head ached from the turpentine and the paint and her back grew sore from all her bending. In the furniture in her room she would repeat the beauty that was stitched in her mother's shawl. It hung before her little fireplace to dictate her palette. Only it so happened that the colors which came oozing out of her tubes never were quite the same colors in the shawl and often, because she u;iunskilled in using them, they smeared. "TATHEX my room was done," she told me, * " "you had to squint your eyes to look in. As you do when you look towards the sun when it is strong. And if you should look for long your eyes they would burn and then all the colors — how they would dance together!" At last Emy Rainer was called in to see the surprise. She was surprised no doubt. She also w as horrified. For her daughter's room of which she had been so proud, finding it as chaste as it befitted a young girl's room to be, looked now like a madman's dream. She brought her hand down hard across Luise's cheek. And doubtless she wondered what strange and unsuspected traits in Heinz Rainer and herself had fused to become the heritage they had given this ardent, moody child of their's. Doubtless too. for a few uncertain moments, she envied the mother of the stolid, unimaginative child who lived next door. It was when Luise was fourteen that a nearby boy's school gave a gymnasium party. Luise heard the older girls talking about it at the girls' school she attended. It was the source of the most entrancing conversation in the coat room and during the recreation periods. Plainly it was something too wonderful to be missed. Luise knew none of the boys at this school. Her older brother was away, studying with his teacher and her other brother was six years younger than she and, of course, of no use at such a time. It was, she admitted to herself, unfortunate that she had not had any proper invitation to this party and that neither of her brothers could take her. But it never occurred to her to stay away. She counted the days and even the hours until that evening and that hour would arrive. She was aware of nothing else. Obsessed to attend a party as wonderful as the talk of the older girls promised this would be, she lived in a vacuum of waiting. "I did not speak about it to anyone at all," she says. "It seemed too wonderful to speak about. " But when the night came and the hands of the dining-room clock showed it was eight o'clock then I set out." ITER clothes didn't concern her then, either. **She wore a skirt and a sweater. She rode her bicycle. And it seemed very fitting to her that her bike should take her to such a wonderful thing as this boys' gymnasium party. Fortl e bike was wonderful, too. She could remember nothing ever giving her as much pleasure before. Amazing how you could perch up on its leather seat and simply by moving your feet in the pedals go everywhere, see everything. On that bike Luise had ridden through downtown streets the existance of which her parents were only vaguely aware, to witness the most amazing street tights between neighborhood gangs. In one instance she actually had seen one boy receive a broken nose. Her bike had taken her out beyond the town where it was still when I lie sun went down, spilling color all over the lower sky. It had taken her past gardens you never would have been able to see properly at all through the pickets of a fence. And it had crashed her into a vegetable cart and the most interesting conversation with the huckster that she ever had had with anyone. When the boy at the gymnasium door said she couldn't bring her bike in. that she must leave it outside, she was furious. For a minute she thought she would turn around and go home. But she couldn't quite bring herself to do that. "Stand aside!" she told that boy. Instinctively he obeyed the authority in her voice and in that same second she mounted her bike ami rode straight past him into the hall. | 1M 1 \s| ITKN TO PAG1 s I 82