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William R.
Katovsky
Klaus Kinski's final interview
A personal tribute
Frisko Magazine 00.12.1991
We all have one film we keep returning to.
It's usually a movie that involves a character
whose on-screen persona mirrors the struggle we sense
in ourselves. It's a conflict that won't go
away. As moviegoers, we seek an external validation,
to be wedded to a character's destiny that we can
also call our own. Perhaps that is why I have read
Moby Dick four times; during each reading I relive
Captain Ahab's obsessive quest for the elusive
white whale.
I have seen Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The
Wrath of God five times. I don't ever recall
viewing any other movie more than twice.
Aguirre is the bizarre saga of a deranged
conquistador's search for the lost city of gold
in the hidden reaches of the Amazon basin.
The German actor Klaus Kinski plays Aguirre,
whose tyrannical control over his party of explorers
is so complete that they have no recourse but to
follow him on his crazed quest, even as they are
being killed off by the unseen Indians. Here's
film critic Pauline Kael on Kinski's acting:
"...wearing a metal helmet that seemed to be
soldered to his skull, [he] had so little to do that
he kept acting up a grotesque storm. Aguirre's
glassy blue eyes didn't blink; they seemed to
have popped open and stayed that way. He was like an
angry, domineering Bette Davis; he held his mouth
like a dowager, pursing his lips and scowling, and he
took command of a group of soldiers by the demonic
force of his glare. Kinski's Aguirre was a crazed
conquistador who always walked at a tilt, and when he
stood still he was slanted backward or, occasionally,
sideways. He achieved the effect of the angled sets
in Caligari just with his own body, which told us how
off-balance his mind was." It is said of great
actors - and Kinski was considered one of
Europe's greatest - that there is one role that
awaits them. Though Charlton Heston was certainly not
a great actor, he was destined to play Moses in The
Ten Commandments. For the Polish-born Kinski, who
launched his career right after WW II, performing
Ibsen and Shakespeare monologues in cabarets, Aguirre
was the role of a lifetime. This twisted and
embattled Zarathustra was the cinematic embodiment of
someone who resided in an otherworldly dimension -
both timeless and placeless. As Kinski was fond of
saying, "I am like a wild animal born in
captivity, in a zoo. But where a beast would have
claws, I was born with talent."
When I first saw Aguirre in 1977, I left the
theatre haunted. Kinski's intense gaze, set off
by his high forehead and angular Aryan features, held
me in its grip. His penetrating blue eyes seemed to
offer a private passageway into a hellish inferno.
Why, this was the maddest and greatest actor of them
all, a demented Teutonic version of Dennis Hopper
with Robert De Niro thrown in for added existential
torque. Kinski was the lunatic lodestar before whom
all American actors paled in comparison.
Perhaps his Slavic brand of intensity was too
red-hot for American audiences to fully appreciate -
notwithstanding starring roles in movies like
Woyzeck, Nosferatu, and Fitzcarraldo, where he played
totaIly unhinged characters. In this country,
he's known for fathering Avedon serpentine pinup
Nastassja. In France, Germany, and Italy, he was
treated as silver screen royalty and he spent years
living in sumptuous comfort, with a fleet of
Ferraris, seven palazzos in Rome - the kind of caviar
lifestyle the fawning Robin Leach exploited for
tabloid TV viewers.
But in the last ten years, Kinski opted for a
Garbo-like existence, living alone with his German
shepherd Apollo on 40 acres untamed land outside
Lagunitas. He lives there, in an unheated cabin, to
be close his 16-year-old son, Nanhoi, who lives with
Kinski's third ex-wife in nearby Fort KnolIs.
Kinski deliberately shied away from the media, whom
in his 1988 autobiography All I Need Is Love, he
called, "... freaks... These vultures are trying
to feed off me. Mad masturbators, thieves,
plunderers. They want to write books about me.
Everything I say to them is misunderstood.
They're all nuts. I have the nauseating suspicion
that human society wants w accept me into its
fold."
So, like a bird of prey, I, too hovered close
to the legend of Kinski, hoping to secure an
Interview with him when I read in a Herb Caen column
that he had recently attended a book party for Norman
Mailer at Tosca's. The item mentioned that he
lived in Ross. I tried calling information; his
number was unlisted. No surprise there. I then wrote
to him in care of his movie agent, Paul Kohner Agency
in Los Angeles. I addressed the letter to a Mr.
Kinski. I briefly stated the purpose of my contacting
him. I wanted to meet him. I wanted to profile him. I
wanted to discuss his autobiography, which his
publisher Random House had yanked off the market. I
left the letter purposefully vague and open-ended,
because I was not sure how he would respond to
someone disturbing his privacy. I frankly did not
expect to hear from him. One week later, I did. He
called me at home. He had obtained my phone number
from the Frisko office. A voice, thick and foreign
and possibly German, asked for a Mr. Katovsky. He
said it was Klaus. I had difficulty placing a Klaus
in my life; I assumed it was a wrong number. He then
said loudly, "IT'S KLAUS KINSKI!"
Startled, I asked for his number and told him I'd
call him right back. I needed a moment to regroup and
plot my conversational strategy.
We talked non-stop for almost two hours.
However, it would be more exact to say that it was
Kinski who talked for most of the time. He was a
whitewater rush of dammed-up exhortations, jeremiads,
and rantings. He was relentless, pushing forward
insights and observations that needed to take bloom
in another person's mind. Assigned the role of
sympathetic listener, I was glad to have passed his
audition. Kinski's chief gripe was the sorry
condition of American publishing, which he claimed
was plagued by commercialism and censorship.
"It's shit, It's fucked," he
hollered repeatedly into the phone; in fact, almost
every other sentence was punctuated by a fiercely
spoken obscenity. Random House was the primary
villain for banning his book. A best-seller in Europe
for years, All I Need Is Love is a brutally honest
memoir written in the raw tradition of Genet. It
charts the turbulent circumstances of Kinski's
varied life, beginning with his poverty-stricken
childhood in Germany when he and his family of six
were forced to live in an unheated, toilet-less room
while they stole food to survive. His mother
eventually shunted him off to a children's
welfare home. When WW II broke out, he enlisted at
the age of 16, but was wounded in one of his first
battles and spent the remainder of the war in a
British POW camp. He gravitated to the stage and
theatre after the war, and quickly developed a
cabaret following as an accomplished Shakespearean
monologist. Before long, he was acting in movies -
180 of them over his 30-year film career. ("I
work only for money," he said, which explains
why he starred in so many low-budget scare-fi flicks
and Spaghetti Westerns. "If you always need
money like I do, then you can't be selective
about movies. They're all just one big heap of
nonsense."
Besides acting, his life-long obsession was
sex - and this is where his autobiography takes a
lusty turn to Henry Milleresque candor about women
and what he liked doing to them. "I drag every
woman I can grab into my bed," he wrote,
"salesgirls, waitresses, maids, married women,
mothers, American tourists, students, a Bedouin
woman, all the girls in the coffee houses who smile
at me as I pass by." Passage after passage
describes these quick, sometimes faceless encounters.
He loved to screw. Such bluntness about his many
conquests made Random House lawyers nervous. The
memoir was pulled from bookshelves right after it was
published because they were worried about libel
suits. "They wanted to prove who I fucked,"
he said. "How should I know who I fucked and
where I fucked thirty years ago? If I said I did it
and I wrote about it, that's enough. I told them
to FUCK 0FF!" What angered him even more was
that 150 pages had been excised from the original
German Version and that the book had gone to press
without his final approval of galley proofs.
Understandably after that experience, he kept the
American media at bay, maintaining a virtually
invisible presence. He even turned down a request by
Vanity Fair to run an excerpt from the autobiography.
"Why should I let them publish what they want,
when all they will do is fuck me over?"
If Klaus had such a vitriolic attitude toward
the press, l felt obliged to spring the following
question: "Why did you call me?" His voice
immediately changed, shifting from spleen and bile,
to a soft, fey, childlike tone muted with wonderment
and sensitivity. "When I got your letter and
magazine, l had just finished my second book on the
making of my movie Paganini. I was ready. My
instincts said it was the right thing to do. It
seemed okay, since you are the publisher and editor,
and not some reporter who will get screwed over by
someone else." He paused, as if waiting for my
personal consent, that I would become the protector
and guarantor of his interests, whatever they might
be. I became an enlistee in Klaus's small,
private army.
And private it was. He often went for weeks
without speaking to anyone, severing his contact with
the outside world. "I don't read
newspapers," he boasted. "Or listen to the
radio or television. I used to have an antenna on my
roof, but I took it down. I don't need to know
what is going on in the world." For example, one
of Klaus's few friends in Marin County,
Supervisor Gary Giacomini, had the privilege of
breaking the news to him that the United States was
at war with lraq - several months after the fact.
(Klaus told me that he found out about the Gulf War
when he "saw all these trucks driving around
with tiny American flags attached to their antennas.
So I asked Gary why." Hearing this, I thought of
a Japanese soldier emerging from hiding on a Pacific
Island years after the end of WW II.)
A recluse by his own choosing, Kinski now had
a gnawing need to reenter the world he scorned. Re
was embarking on a new crusade - to publicize
Paganini; which he wrote, directed and starred in. A
brilliant, tormented Italian composer, who is
considered to be the greatest violinist who ever
lived, Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840) was the first of
the concert hall Superstars. He was the Mick Jagger
of his day. "There was a feeling of Satanism
about this tall, dark, emaciated Italian," wrote
the music historian Harold Schonberg, "who could
do undreamed-of things on his Guarnerius. Musicians
swarmed to his concerts trying to figure out how he
achieved his effects. The public also flocked, and
many of the more superstitious listeners believed him
in league with the Devil. Paganini did nothing to
dispel the notion. A great showman, he played up the
diabolical quality of his concerts and did everything
but come on stage wrapped in a blue flame. He gave
saturnalia rather than concerts. One of his tricks
was to break a string in the middle of a composition
and continue to the end on three strings. Or he would
produce a pair of scissors, cut three of the strings,
and perform mirades on the G string
alone."
With monetary backing from an Italian
production company, Kinski, who played the composer,
filmed Paganini in 1988. A finished cut has been
shown in Europe, including a premiere at the Paris
Opera House, but the movie was blocked from being
commercially distributed in this country because of
some sort of legal snafu between Kinski and his
Italian money men, whom he characterized as the
"mafia." Kinski needed $600'000 to buy
the film distribution rights. He'd never allow
himself to be extorted. "I told them to fuck
off!"
Even when presented with the opportunity to
screen Paganini, Kinski was extremely selective in
his choice of venue. Though he once hosted a private
screening at Lucasfilm, he had recently turned down
the Mill Valley Film Festival because the theatre
lacked Dolby sound equipment. "Paganini can only
be appreciated in Dolby," he insisted. "It
can't be experienced any other
way."
Kinski viewed Frisko as the ideal vehicle to
call attention to Paganini, which he also thought was
his greatest acting triumph. Because I never
questioned his total indictment of celebrity
journalism and because I practically agreed with
everything he said, he decided to work with me. In
the business world, it's called a win-win
situation. Kinski would grant me an exclusive
interview, while I would be responsible for
assembling a multi-page cover story on the making of
Paganini. Our mutual project would go forward; our
destinies would intersect. My only fear:
throughout most of his acting career, Kinski
was notorious for being difficult to work with. His
repeated falling-outs with film director Werner
Herzog were legendary, including a near gun duel on
the set of Aguirre. In his memoir, Kinski wrote, -
"I absolutely despise this murderer Herzog. He
should be thrown to the crocodiles alive. An anaconda
should throttle him slowly. The sting of a deadly
spider should paralyze him. His brain should burst
from the bite of the most poisonous of all snakes.
Panthers shouldn't slit him open with their
claws, that would be too good for him! No. Big red
ants should piss in his eves, eat his balls,
penetrate his asshole, and eat his guts! The more I
wish the most horrible of deaths on him and treat him
like the scum of the earth that he is, the less I can
get rid of him."
I certainly didn't want Kinski to someday
turn against me. Nonetheless, we arranged to meet
over lunch the following week at Piazza D'Angelo
in Mill Valley. "I can't eat in an Italian
restaurant if it's not owned by Italians,"
he said. "You have nothing to worry about,"
I replied. "The two owners, Paolo and Domenico,
are from Calabria."
I was seated at the bar taking the first sips
of a Moretti beer when a disheveled-looking, white
mop-haired elderly man walked into the restaurant.
Dressed in a Eurostyle leather bomber jacket, a pair
of unfastened jeans opened at the waist, and a white
T-shirt, he seemed disoriented by something. He was
talking animatedly to Paolo, who was standing near
the entrance. It took a few moments for me to
register that this stranger was Kinski. Should I have
been expecting Aguirre himself in 16th-century full
body armor, with a sword at his side? This Kinski
looked like a cross between Andy Warhol and Rutger
Hauer. I slid off my bar stool to greet him. Re
exploded into a smile, relieved that I had found him
and happy to see me. At 65, his deeply lined face
bore the signs of a life lived hard, fast and on
self-agonizing terms -,a roadmap of private pain. Yet
his eyes, radiant and blue like a summer alpine sky,
shone with power and intensity. They were the eyes of
a fragile, haunted soul, of someone who felt too much
and saw too much.
Our first task was finding a table in the
near-empty" restaurant. Kinski led me from table
to table, with Paolo right behind us. No, this table
wasn't right because it was too close to other
diners. No, this table was in the sun. No, this table
was too near the aisle. So, we circled the room for
several minutes before he settled upon a small marble
table by the window in the front bar area that had
not yet been set up.
After we sat down and he ordered a Pellegrino,
I handed him a gift. It was a small kev chain called
the Final Word which electronically blurted out swear
words whenever it was pressed. There were several
foul-mouth choices, ranging from "fucking
asshole" to "eat shit." I told Klaus
that he never had to talk to anyone again if he
didn't like them. All he'd have to do is
press and point the keychain. Delighted by his
obscenity-uttering amulet, he began waving it through
the air like a goofy conductor, pointing this way and
that. I didn't know where to begin. How does one
engage in small talk, innocuous chit-chat with Klaus?
He engages you; you listen. He asked me where I used
to live. When I said Oakland, he began talking about
one of his favorite authors, Jack London. He narrated
the plot of one story, To Build a Fire, which he said
he always wanted to film. The tale is about a Yukon
adventurer who is caught out in the Klondike cold.
His only hope for survival in the sub-freezing
temperature is to build a fire, but his hands are
numb with frostbite. He does manage to ignite a fire
with matches and a scrap of beech bark, but only by
cupping the flame with his hands until his palms
begin to burn. While Klaus told this story, he, too,
cupped his hands. I half expected to see the yellow
tip of a flame flickering up through his
fingers.
When Paolo came by to take our order, he and
Klaus began speaking in Italian. In fact, Klaus went
through the entire menu, item by item, pointing to
each dish: capelIini, melazane alla parinigiana,
carpaccio, bruschetta, pesce del giorno, scaloppine.
He wanted to know in detail how each dish was
prepared. He understood Italian cuisine. He realIy
cared about what he was going to eat. "I
don't eat in restaurants anymore," he said.
"I'm used to having a bowl of soup in my
cabin. I don't go anywhere. If I visit San
Francisco, it's usually twice a year to buy
Italian coffee in North Beach."
I figured that once we'd broached the
subject of Paganini, I would have little opportunity
to converse (read: listen) about anything else. I
wanted to hear about his film career. But before I
had the chance to launch a salvo, Klaus started
talking frenetically about how stupid most people
are, how closed off to life they become, how
they've become ghetto-ized in their thinking and
behavior. He was making a point, a random outpouring
of associations that would lead somewhere definite.
The writer Marcelle Clements once likened
Kinski's conversational style to "a very
fine jazz improvisation, in which a musician explores
a theme from which he often detours, the detour then
becoming an adjunct to the theme itself, which is
always returned to. It is a highly personalized way
of addressing any subject, especially in combination
with his sometimes curious syntax and his bursts of
invective."
From the universal to the particular, he
ranged seamlessly. He started talking about how
stupid most directors are. "They want you to do
a hundred takes. One should be enough. They should
know what they want before they shoot a scene. But
they are all so stupid that they don't know if a
scene works or not. So they shoot it over and over
again. When I did Doctor Zhivago, I was paid to work
for four months. All I had was a small scene as a
soldier in the train. I did it once. The director
David Lean wanted to know if I wanted to do It over
again. I told him no. So I got paid four months for
working one day."
He went on to say that he turned down offers
to work with Fellini, Pasolini, Ken Russell, Steven
Spielberg, and many others. Either the money
wasn't great enough, or he had little respect for
their talent. "I make movies for money,"
and if they were trash films or Spaghetti Westerns,
then at least he knew he wasn't being exploited
by some pretentious auteur with "art" on
his mind. In a Playboy interview, he once noted,
"So I sell myself, for the highest price.
Exactly like a prostitute. There is no
difference."
I wanted to ask him about Werner Herzog. I
wanted to know why he continued working with a
director whom he despised and loathed so much that
when he came to California to visit him, Klaus met
him in Sausalito so "the asshole wouldn't
find out where he lived." But my question needed
to be couched in an elliptical, roundabout fashion,
or else I risked offending Klaus. So I mentioned that
I really liked the way FitzarraIdo had been filmed,
especially the sunrise scene of the steamboat being
lugged over the hill. "I filmed that
scene," he shouted. "It was my shot. Herzog
was always sleeping late. I had to wake him up
earlier and drag him out of his sleeping bag so he
could catch the dawn and mist on film. I told him
where to station his camera. I told him where to
point it. He was a lazy Idiot."
I sensed he was ready to discuss Paganini.
Which he was. Herzog and company were in the past.
Paganini was his future. He explained the complicated
legal maneuvering that had prevented the film's
distribution in the United States. In Europe,
however, the film was popularly received. He talked
about how audiences reacted favorably to his crowning
achievement, a film he shot in less than six months
on a six million dollar budget. He was the proudest
of his ability to authentically re-create the era in
which Paganini lived and performed. Concert halls
were illuminated solely by candlelight.
Eighteenth-century castles in Sicily were rented out.
"I would make a personal visit to these old
single women who still lived in these castles and
tell them that I had to use their castle for my film.
I would've slept with them if that's what it
took."
He cast his own son Nanhoi in the movie. I
asked him if Nastassja had a role. His face went
blank at the mention of her name. All color leeched
right out. Softly, as if to himself, and not to me
across the table, he said, "I wanted her to be
my wife in the movie, but her husband said no.
She's the mother of two children. She needed to
take care of them."
"She's a great actress," I
interjected.
"Yes, yes," he said distractedly, as
if looking for something or someone far off in the
distance. "She's one of a kind. She has a
beautiful aura, a glow. A woman like her is only born
every few centuries."
Klaus went back to discussing Paganini. We
explored the possibility of having a private
screening in San Francisco. Better yet, we would try
renting out the War Memorial Opera House or Davies
Symphony Hall. After all, he had managed to take over
the Paris Opera House for one evening and invite
1'000 guests. "Everyone was so confused by
the invitation; they thought they had to pay. I said,
,No, It's free.'"
"What about after San Francisco?" I
asked. "Why not in other cities?"
"Yes! Perfect!" he exclaimed.
"We will show Paganini in opera houses all over
the country. Fuck my Italian distributors. America
will finally get to see my film." He was joyous
at finding a way to circumvent his Italian nemeses.
His glee was contagious. I would support his newest
quest. Years seemed to miraculously slough off his
face as he continued talking. I was transfixed by the
force of energy that kept rolling toward me. He
reached out and clasped my right hand with his right
hand, and he held it there, in that warm mano a mano
Mediterranean way. It felt as if he were sending a
current in my direction, a Promethean
exchange.
He was so happy. There is simply no other way
to describe his emotional state. After lunch, we
walked out to his Jeep. His dog Apollo was tethered
in the back from both sides of the vehicle. "If
he's only held down on one side," Klaus
explained, "he would find a way to break
free." I petted Apollo's giant head; his
long ears were standing straight up.
"We must talk in two days about our
future plans," he said, as we swapped goodbyes.
"We have so much to do. We can't let this
opportunity slip away." As he drove off, I
looked down in my workbag where I kept my tape
recorder. I had purposely kept it switched off during
our three-hour lunch. How could I? Then again, how
could a tinny recording do justice to the sheer
magic, the alchemy of Klaus? My life - in ways I
couldn't even begin to predict - had been forever
changed and charged.
When I found out two weeks later that he had
died of a heart attack in his sleep, another one of
his Marin friends, the Lagunitas postmaster said to
me, "Klaus had that effect on people. He
doesn't get close to many people. But of those he
does, he sort of takes over you. He chooses you as a
friend; you don't choose him." During those
two weeks, his last two weeks alive, we talked on the
phone almost every morning. Sometimes our
conversations would last for an hour; other times
only ten minutes. He always wanted me to call him at
eight in the morning.
He had arranged for the Dolby Laboratory in
San Francisco to host a private screening of Paganini
for Frisko. The screening was scheduled for December
2. On the morning of his sudden death, November 22,
we discussed the screening and who to invite. He was
also bubbling with boyish pleasure since he had just
received a fax from Poland that said they wanted to
publish his Paganini book. "You must come over
to my cabin so we can go over my color slides of
Paganini," he insisted. We tentatively agreed to
meet that weekend. Very few people, I later learned,
were ever invited to his house.
The night I found out he died, I listened to
my Shlumo Mintz Deutsche Grammophone recording of
Paganini's "Caprices". The soulful,
troubling, achingly vivid sound of the violin's
eery wall unnerved me. I began to cry, for a man I
hardly knew.
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