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Fritz Lang began his Wanderjahre by visiting galleries and museums in Nuremberg , Munich, and Frankfurt, before journeying down the Rhine to Belgium and landing at his destination of Brussels. Arriving with twenty-five francs in his pocket, Lang began to sketch postcards , caricatures, watercolors, and easel art, selling them to tourists for coffee and bread. Years later he liked to relate how he lived by his wits in those preWorld War I salad days. He learned, for example, to sell a postcard for the price of a martini, then stretch that martini into two martinis by ordering the first in a cafe and drinking it very slowly, contemplatively, until the martini was two-thirds gone—when, with a sudden display of irritation, he would summon the waiter and complain that it wasn't properly made. Then he would receive a second martini free of charge. Martinis were already, as they would always remain, his favorite any-timeof -day drink. A martini tasted good, even for breakfast.A properly made martini , in Lang's opinion, was made with Tanqueray gin—exceptionally dry, perfectly chilled, with just a small olive. Lang set great store by martinis, and enjoyed expounding on the subject. One of the virtues of Gloria Grahame's character Debby, in the director's 1953 film The Big Heat, is that she can mix a first-class martini. Brussels proved both stimulating and educational, according to the director 's interviews and publicity. Vienna's Mein Film carried an article in 1926 wherein Lang claimed to have joined a Belgian circus during his residency there. That is how he picked up the "clown routines" he occasionally dredged up to amuse his friends, according to the magazine. The magazine also reported that circus folk taught Lang how to throw lassos and knives, and that for a time he earned money as a sharpshooter—a regular Buffalo Bill. "Then I fell in love with a woman. Her mother was from Indochina; her father was an officer in the French Army." What happened to this first sweetheart Lang never revealed. Romance is more plausible than the lasso-throwing and circus-clown bit on his resume, however. Lang fell in love easily, earnestly, and often. His head was stuffed with romantic notions, especially in this youthful period, even if invariably he C H A P T E R 2 1911 1918 28 F R I T Z LANG woke up the next morning to embark on a quest for a new and different bed partner. His infallible seduction technique, he told author Charlotte Chandler many years later, was to flaunt his own special brand of martini. He would invite the girl he was "in love with at the moment" up to his place and offer her an unheard-of "blue martini." "She would be mystified,intrigued, enchanted, and fall into my arms." The secret of the blue martini, which Lang swore he had never told anyone before? "Blue food coloring." Perhaps the exigencies of love drove him to Munich, where Lang claimed to have enrolled in the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule (which became the Academy of Art and Design, now part of the University of Munich). There, the film director said in later interviews, he attended the master class of Julius Diez, an illustrator and painter of the period, who was influenced by symbolist painter Franz von Stuck. Lang essayists, trying to trace his artistic forebears, have extracted some mileage out of the director's connection with Diez, who drew fairy-tale books, worked in ceramics and mosaics, designed noteworthy public murals and triptychs. Perhaps Lang did audit some of Professor Diez's classes—although, already back in Vienna, he showed a tendency to pad his education. And the files of the Kunstgewerbeschule for that era do not show that anyone by the name of Fritz Lang registered as a student or attended any classes. Supposedly to pay for these undocumented classes, Lang again cashed in on his artistic ability. "I even painted a fresco for a bordello," he often claimed. Newspapers and fashion magazines, Lang said in interviews, purchased his cartoons, as well as advertising, fashion, and travel sketches. Probably Lang did sell a few such items to periodicals. No doubt he had a degree of familiarity with the world of publishing; he returned to the milieu often in films, and gravitated to former newspaper reporters as scenarists. His rate of success, however, must have been less than phenomenal. Lang researchers in Europe have yet to...

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