And yet Goebbels, though he hadn’t quite put it this way, had suggested that the very act of making a start, even out of pain, would force him into the literary posture he sought and help him to regain his touch, which he prayed had not disappeared entirely.
Still, to entertain a nation of Jew-hating Nazis was unthinkable.
Goebbels called late at night.
“I hope I’m not interrupting your labors …”
“No, no, Herr Goebbels. I was preparing for bed.”
“I won’t offend by asking how you’re coming along. Did the pope call Leonardo with such a concern? But I wanted to assure you that there will be absolutely no editorial interference in your work. No politicizing. Not a sentence will be altered. In case I hadn’t made that clear. You have my word.”
“I appreciate that, Herr Goebbels.”
“I thought you might. Have a good night. And Heil Hitler.”
Wintermann rasped out, “Heil Hitler.”
A restless night was not out of the ordinary for Wintermann. But the one that followed was an ordeal. As he tried in vain to align comfortably his arthritic bones, there was a thought that nagged at him. Oddly enough, it had nothing to do with the gruesome consequences of refusing the Reichminister.
He forced himself, made an almost physical effort, to chip away at the edges and to confront the true state of his mind. And then, it was almost as if he’d wrestled a powerful adversary to the ground. His need to publish. That was it. His need to be heard. It had been several years since he’d had a word in print. The silence, the inability to share his ideas with even the most vile audience. This is what had defeated him. Some might say his silence was courageous. But with no outlet, no forum, no means to be heard, his life seemed pointless. He treasured his daughter. But was that a reason to exist? His long silence hastened him to the grave. Past triumphs were of no interest to him. His time on Earth seemed pointless. He yearned for a turn in the spotlight, even a final one. Only by seeing the name Max Wintermann in print, the work itself in print, would his life feel verified.
Goebbels had assured him that not a word of his would be altered. For some reason, and on this one point, he trusted the Reichminister.
The story, still unwritten, would stand alone. Untouched. The editorial matter? The cartoons that spit on the Jews? None of this was his responsibility. His story would be pure, isolated, contemptuous of its surroundings. Like an honorable man, standing upright among thieves. A stately and untouched tree in a scorched forest. No longer would he feel smothered by silence.
Sleep was out of the question. He approached the Olivetti with a familiar apprehension. He had felt it at the height of his powers. In many ways it was welcome.
The fear of making a start.
And this after a virtual lifetime of storytelling.
With trembling fingers, he tried a sentence. It was gibberish, but it was useful. The inadequacy pointed the way. He tried another, then several more. The sensation he felt was much like swimming after a long absence from the water. The stroke was there.
In short order, he surprised himself by working cleanly and effortlessly. The piece was finished in not much more than an hour. He put a hand to his chest, to make sure the exertion, mild as it had been, had not brought about a heart attack. He read his work. He was experienced enough to be his own editor. Quickly, he saw there was little need to change much of it. He felt confident that he had produced what others had called “a Wintermann.”
He delivered the manuscript at the appointed hour, then stood before Goebbels, cap in hand, his head bowed slightly, while the Reichminister reviewed his efforts.
To think I have to wait anxiously for the approval of a literary pygmy.
As he turned the pages, Goebbels for the most part did not change his expression. At one point he did snicker. Wintermann could not tell if this was an expression of amusement or contempt.
When he had finished reading the manuscript, Goebbels set it aside, pushed his chair back, and kicked his short, booted legs up on his desk. Then he rubbed his eyes.
“There is something I don’t understand.”
“Yes, Herr Goebbels.”
“I was under the impression that I had asked for ‘a Wintermann.’”
“As you did, Herr Goebbels.”
“I made myself clear on this point?”
“You did, indeed.”
“Then why, may I ask, do you give me this?”
He picked up the manuscript, then slammed it down on his desk. His eyes bulged. He had spittle on his lips, much like that of the cartoon Jews that he ridiculed.
“This is not ‘a Wintermann,’” he went on. “Why not call it what it is.”
He picked up the manuscript again and waved it in Wintermann’s face.
“Smell it. This is shit.”
“It’s but a draft, Herr Goebbels.”
“Never mind. I defy you to show me one touch of Wintermann in these pages. One speck. A crumb.”
“If the Reichminister would be so kind as to point out the inadequacies … they can be fixed—”
“They cannot be fixed.”
In a moment of relative calm, Goebbels said, “As satirists, we both know that what is born disfigured remains that way.
“All of it upsets me,” he continued, gathering heat. “It stinks in its conception, its execution … every phrase. To think I wanted once to sit at Max Wintermann’s feet. This is an insult to me, to the Beobachter, to the Third Reich itself. For the Führer to see it besmirch our pages …”
Shuddering at the possibility, he handed some cloth material to Wintermann.
“Here. Take this.”
Wintermann glanced at it.
“But these are armbands.”
“One for you and one for your daughter. A car will pick you up at seven tomorrow morning.”
“Where will it take us?”
“To the countryside, of course,” said Goebbels, with a thin smile. “The fresh air will do you both good. Take along only essentials.
“Guards!” he cried out.
Two uniformed Gestapo officers came running forth. Each took one of Wintermann’s arms and began to lead, then to drag, him off.
The soft-spoken Wintermann could not recall the last time he had raised his voice. But now, twisting his head toward Goebbels and with the roar of a dying lion, he cried out “VANTS.” It was one of the few Yiddish words he remembered. It meant “cockroach.”
“Vants,” Goebbels repeated to an adjutant, when the struggling Wintermann had been removed. “What does it mean?”
“Some Yid trash.”
“Still, it has a nice sound to it. A military bounce. For the time being why don’t you address me as such.”
“Of course, Herr Goebbels … Herr Vants.”
“I like it. Vants. Herr Vants. Vintage Wintermann, if you ask me.”
The Friendship
It might have been a perfect friendship if it hadn’t been for a single issue that hung between us like an overripe fruit that had never quite dropped from a tree. As so often happens, there was a woman at the center of it.
We had known each other for three decades. A slight, sandy-haired man, Jenkins was a Yeats scholar who collected rare manuscripts. He had inherited a great deal of money, and spent very little of it. Uncharacteristically, Jenkins had actually invested in the first film I directed. It was a documentary about a British scientist who spent a good part of his life trying to discredit Albert Einstein’s relativity theory—only to concede that the great physicist was correct in his calculations. Much to the surprise of the producers, the venture turned a small profit. This sunny outcome led to my friendship with Jenkins.
One night, at a cocktail party in Sag Harbor, we had both been introduced to a young actress named Claudia Mills. She was tall, raven-haired, chee
rful. She had the slender and leggy figure of a fashion model. Though I thought about calling her, I was lazy about doing so and never quite got around to it. There was a woman in my life who was important to me, so you could say that I was covered in that department. Still, Claudia was awfully attractive, and I thought that somehow, at some point, I would catch up with her. But Jenkins was quick off the mark. He pursued Claudia. They began what appeared to be a serious affair. It was difficult to imagine Jenkins, with his pinched ways, in bed with a woman, much less having sex with her. He was one of those people. Yet you never knew. I could picture Claudia parading around nude in front of Jenkins while he smoked his pipe and looked on with approval. But that was as far as my imagination would take me.
Several months after that first meeting, Claudia moved to Sausalito to be with her ailing parents. Jenkins remained behind in Manhattan but stayed in touch with her. Close as ever with money, he told me that he had begun to support Claudia, making payments on a houseboat she’d rented and caring, financially, for her five-year-old son, the product of a brief marriage to a Hungarian businessman who had since removed himself from her life.
Though Jenkins and Claudia were never together during this period, they spoke on the phone each night. He sent her regular shipments of books he felt she’d enjoy. He had platonic dates with other women, young women, “wards” Jenkins called them, but remained devoted to Claudia. The absentee arrangement seemed not to trouble him.
Jenkins and I had dinner now and then. He was a good listener, and pleasant to be with until he began, insufferably, to recite heroic poetry. He would, even more annoyingly, break out now and then with his own verses, which were, justifiably, unpublished. Still, I never had to worry about my appearance when I met him, nor did I feel the need to compete with him on any level. Easy enough to compare him to a comfortable pair of slippers.
He never ordered more than a main course for dinner, considering it wasteful and unnecessary to eat a salad or dessert. When the check arrived he would scrutinize it with great care before leaving a meager tip for his share of the meal. Yet somehow he managed to turn his tightfisted style—cheapness, really—into a charming affectation.
This was effective, but only for a time. On occasion, Jenkins asked me if I needed “financial support.” Since my filmmaking career was spotty, I was usually low on funds. But I didn’t care for the way he’d phrased the question. Had he asked me directly, “Do you need some money?” I might have taken him up on his offer. Financial support? Wasn’t that for the “most needy” families you read about in the Times at Christmas? As it was, I thanked him and told him—stretching the truth—that I was doing very nicely.
I asked now and then how Claudia was getting along.
“She’s having a difficult time,” he said. “Her parents aren’t getting any better. The boy, Rory, has had trouble adjusting at school. Her own health is frail. …”
In a rare show of emotion, Jenkins’s voice broke.
“If I ever lost Claudia, I’d have no reason to continue living.”
At one of our dinners, I mentioned that I would be in San Francisco for a month or so, scouting locations for a film venture.
“That’s good news,” said Jenkins. “I wonder if I might ask a favor. Claudia is stuck in with her parents and is very lonely. It would mean a great deal to me if you could find time to take her to dinner.
“I’ll pay for the meal, of course,” said my friend who, several years before, had told me he was worth $125 million. Carefully invested, it would have grown to twice the amount.
“I can’t get away myself,” he added, although he didn’t specify why.
I said I would be happy to help out. Soon after I arrived in San Francisco, I checked into the Clift Hotel and called Claudia, who seemed pleased to hear from me. Jenkins had told her I’d be in touch.
“It’s impossible to find the houseboat if you’re not familiar with the area,” she said. “Why don’t I pick you up at your hotel?”
We never made it out of the hotel room. When I reconstruct the episode, I remember Claudia arriving at the appointed time, wearing a flowered miniskirt, looking tanned and leggy, brimming over with Californian health and good fortune. A flash of blinding-white panties. I ordered drinks, we had a brief innocuous conversation dealing with life in the Bay Area—and then she flew at me in the style of love-starved women in pulp novels that were set in the tropics. Or so I recalled it. In actuality, I may have met her halfway. I’d had an earlier opportunity to be with Claudia—when Jenkins and I first met her—and I’d let it slip away. I felt that in a sense, we’d had a “date” that I hadn’t kept. There was no question that she was attractive, but there was also a need on my part to “balance the books.” The idea that she was Jenkins’s girl was never an issue. Hadn’t we all met on the same night? Jenkins had conveniently forgotten that. He had simply acted with greater speed than I had. That was his style in the financial markets as well.
My film work kept me in California for several months, which was not unpleasant. Claudia and I began an on-and-off affair. I was feeling morose about an unpleasant divorce, guilty about not seeing my two daughters half enough. Claudia was unendingly cheerful, almost desperately so. We got along decently in bed, though her preference was clearly for oral sex. She found the other “difficult.” This was a satisfactory arrangement—to a point.
On one occasion, I was lying back on the plump pillows of her cheerfully appointed bed when Jenkins called. He and Claudia chatted amiably for a bit, although I sensed the conversation was understandably a bit more constrained than if I hadn’t been there. You would think I might have experienced shame—or some illicit thrill—about the call, but I felt nothing in particular. I certainly didn’t want Jenkins—in fantasy terms—sharing a bed with us. And I kept reminding myself that the three of us had met at the same time. He was my friend and he was supporting Claudia, but they were never together. And he had made it easy for us to start an affair. Hadn’t he virtually thrown us together? He knew—or should have known—how I am around women. How any man would be around a willing and hungry Claudia. A shrink might have deduced that he had choreographed the affair. To carry it a bit further—if he couldn’t manage it in bed with her, why not send me in as a surrogate?
This was an affair, incidentally, that meant little to me. There was the constricted sex. And no matter how hard I fought against it, I felt deeply saddened by my divorce. The more solemn I became about it, the more Claudia pressured me.
“You can’t go on feeling this way,” she said.
“It’s something I have to go through. I can’t help it.”
“You have to stop,” she said, virtually stamping her foot, which of course, made me feel even more awful.
If she had given me some room to breathe, it might have worked out differently. As it was, I gradually eased out of the affair. My work was completed in San Francisco. Claudia seemed to have no means of support other than the money she received from Jenkins. To salve my conscience, as I drew away from her, I introduced Claudia to a gifted Czech filmmaker who was in need of a researcher. There was no questioning her intelligence and her cheerful outlook.
“She’s good company,” he said to me, many months later. Then he added morosely, “But all she gives is blowjobs.”
A mistake I made, one I couldn’t resist, was to use the mechanics of our story—that of me and Jenkins and Claudia—as the subplot of a film I was shooting. I did my best to disguise all three principals. I cast Jenkins’s character as the heavily accented German owner of a hunting lodge in Kenya. I made myself a Turk and Claudia a visiting anthropologist. Jenkins came to see a screening of the film and recognized himself immediately. (He always seemed ready to doze off. It was easy to underestimate his intelligence. His brilliance, really.) Still, he said nothing about the triangular affair, which was all there on the screen. A remark Jenkins made about me to a mutual frien
d got back to me: “Derek is a fine man and an excellent friend—except when it comes to women.”
Jenkins never once asked about my visit to California or even hinted that he knew of the affair. But it was always floating about on the edges of our friendship. When Claudia’s name came up, he would take on a quizzical, almost smirking, look, indicating that he knew more than he let on, although I may have been mistaken about that. On several occasions, after I’d drunk a few Gibsons at one of our dinners, I came close to admitting to the affair. I had a feeling that it wouldn’t have affected our friendship that dramatically. But I found the strength to hold back.
It’s possible Jenkins may have tried to punish me indirectly. On one occasion, he passed along a stock tip he had been given by his broker. I invested $20,000 in the Midwestern furniture company and lost most of it within a week. He later admitted that he hadn’t personally taken his broker’s advice, which of course was upsetting to me, though I didn’t admit to him how costly the setback had been. He generally ended each of our dinners by telling me, in painful and unnecessary detail, of meetings he’d had with a battery of financial handlers over how best to allocate his various assets.
After a decade of leading a single life, I’d gotten married to a pretty young psychologist. In an odd coincidence, Jenkins and I had both been introduced to Rachel at a gallery exhibition in the West Village. This time I moved more quickly than Jenkins did. I got to take her back to her flat that night in a taxi.
Jenkins called the following day.
“That wonderful girl we were talking to last night. I didn’t get her name.”
“It’s Rachel. And I’m going to marry her.”
Though we lived separately, Rachel and I saw each other each night for several months; then we decided to pool our resources and buy a cottage in the Catskills, an hour and twenty minutes’ drive from Manhattan. Though my directing career had faded, I was able to piece together a living as a set designer on small-budget films and as a location scout on others. Rachel took a job as a counselor at a local high school. On one occasion, I was stuck in Chicago at a time when Rachel needed to be hospitalized for some minor surgery. Jenkins agreed to travel up to the mountains and see to it that she got home safely after the procedure. Tight as he was with money, he could be generous with his time. He helped me out as well when I was traveling and unable to show up for an early-morning course I taught in filmmaking at the New School. Two other friends turned me down without apology. Jenkins said he’d be happy to fill in for me. From all reports, he was a hit with the students.
The Peace Process Page 6