Ghosting Read online

  “How quickly can we do it?” Tiger asked me.

  “I'm not sure.”

  Since he wanted to publish the following year to coincide with Riefenstahl's ninetieth birthday, there wasn't a great deal of time. But it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up, and in any case I was getting used to tight deadlines. So “we” did it.

  In the autumn of 1991 we travelled to Leni Riefenstahl's home in Pöcking, just south of Munich. It was a beautiful house on the shores of the Starnberger Lake, known locally as The House That Nuba Built—a reference to the royalties Leni Riefenstahl had received for her photographs of the Nuba in the Sudan. Horst Kettner, her long-time partner, invited us inside and served us coffee and cake. Horst had started as her cameraman in 1968 and remained at her side ever since. There was a whiff of excitement as we waited for Leni to join us. Upstairs we heard a door opening and a few moments later she made a dramatic entrance down the open staircase leading into the sitting-room, her high heels clicking on every step. The first impression was of a nimble, mobile woman who couldn't possibly be nearly ninety. She had yellow hair and painted fingernails and was wearing leopard skin leggings and a slinky sweater. She moved like a ballet dancer and welcomed us with a broad smile and both hands outstretched. Her manner was distinctly coquettish.

  Before we got down to work she spoke in English about her reasons for writing her memoirs. She started off diffidently—“I am not gifted for writing”—saying she knew the book wouldn't change things, and that because of her association with Hitler she would remain an untouchable. “Nothing I say now will help.” She was quite hesitant in English, and before long she had slipped into German and embarked on an animated denial of the crimes of which she had stood accused for half a century. “What's she saying? What's she saying?” Tiger couldn't bear to be left out. For quite a time she continued to dodge bullets that hadn't even been fired—she was interested in artistic excellence, not the glorification of the Reich, she had never promoted racism, she had never joined the Nazi party, she had no knowledge of the camps. “I made films, that's all. Films that won prizes.” She must have rehearsed these things so many times, yet she spoke with a terrific passion that seemed fresh and new, moving effortlessly between triumph and disaster, vainglory and self-pity. Horst began to look concerned. “It's time to stop now,” he said.

  I had imagined that she might be difficult to work with, but she wasn't at all. Despite her age she was still able to concentrate for hours at a time with only short breaks in between. I had already marked the suggested cuts in the text, and though each one had to be discussed at length she was generally in agreement. As we sat at the table, Horst hovered over her all the time. Was she all right? Did she want anything? Shouldn't she rest a bit now? He was completely devoted to her. He was only half her age, but this didn't seem to matter—they looked completely natural together.

  At the end of our stay Leni took us downstairs to the basement to see her archive. It was a large, well-lit area, like a library stack-room, with rows of huge white cupboards behind sliding doors containing her cameras, editing equipment, slide collections and film reels. She was in her true element here. As she led us round the room her face was rapt, her eyes bright, her voice hushed. We were shown slides of Nuba tribesmen, slides of exotic fish from the Indian Ocean, slides of Japanese yakuza with tattoos all over their bodies. “Look,” she said, “even their penis is tattooed. They have suffered for their art.” Then she grinned. “Like I.” Tiger loved this—“Yes, the same like you!” he laughed.

  As we examined different parts of the archive, Tiger kept saying “Amazing! Amazing!” And indeed it was. Every part of her life had been recorded and labelled and catalogued, and it was all stored in box upon box, shelf upon shelf. The boxes were even colour coded: yellow for press cuttings, green for de-nazification documents, red for American correspondence, grey for German, white for personal letters and black for all the court cases—more than fifty of them. “Amazing!” said Tiger, quite transported by the degree of organisation. He told her he had met his soul mate.

  In September 1992, a few weeks after her ninetieth birthday, Leni and Horst came to London to mark the publication of her memoirs in English. I picked them up at Heathrow and took them to their suite in the Mayfair Hotel. She had agreed to do a number of interviews—against Horst's advice. He was cynical about journalists and very protective of her. “They're all against her,” he said. “They will destroy her.”

  She got a mixed reception, and the questions were tough and often offensive. But she answered them sensitively and with dignity, especially on the subject of the responsibility of the artist. She insisted she was ignorant of atrocities and pleaded guilty only to irredeemable naïvety By the end of the week she was exhausted, and during an interview at the BBC, on being asked yet again about the nature of her friendship with Hitler, and if they had been lovers, she broke down and wept. When we left the studio Horst was waiting outside, clearly furious about the grilling. He took her gently in his arms and held her till she recovered.

  The launch party was held at the Museum of the Moving Image on the South Bank, an appropriate venue for someone who had changed the face of film-making. Earlier at the hotel she had laid out clothes on the bed and wanted me to help choose an outfit for the evening. “Wie sehe ich aus?—How do I look?” she asked when I went to pick her up later. She was wearing a silk dress in black and gold, a fur-trimmed jacket and sensational stilettos. “Stunning!” I said. “The most elegant ninety-year-old I've ever seen.” We had been laughing and I had meant it lightly, but she turned serious and told me that her longevity was a sort of curse: though she lived to be a hundred she would never be free of the burden of the past.*

  “I'm too vain to wear my glasses,” she said, so she held onto my arm as we went up the steps to the entrance of the Museum of the Moving Image. “Count out the steps for me—I want to hold my head high.” As she entered the crowded room under piercing lights, there was a hushed silence. Adulation was in the air. For one evening at least she was among friends, people who simply admired her artistic excellence and had come to pay tribute. Tiger, resplendent in a blue silk suit with gold lining, made a theatrical salaam before her and kissed her jewelled hand.

  All round the walls there were giant screens playing Olympia, her film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics: breathtaking black and white shots of runners, pole-vaulters, and long exquisite sequences of divers flying through the air against a darkening sky, one image after another in slow motion like a tone poem. Artistic genius, or fascist celebration of the body beautiful? Whatever the truth—and we can never be absolutely certain—it is unlikely that she fully appreciated the significance of those moments in history in which she played such a prominent part. Perhaps she knew not what she was doing, only how to do it.

  * Leni Riefenstahl died in her sleep on 10 September 2003, aged 101.

  Summer 1991. At Bordeaux airport we are greeted by the gardien. He has bad news. The goat has been killed.

  “J'ai une mauvaise nouvelle. Éclair a tué la chèvre!”

  Tiger reacts with horror, clutching his ears as if by doing so he could cancel what he had just heard.

  “Ce n'est pas possible! Ce n'est pas possible!” he roars, and he goes into a sort of head banging routine, though in the immediate area outside the arrivals hall at Bordeaux airport there is very little in the way of suitable material to bang against, only the sultry French air. Tiger has a talent for making a bad situation terrible. The noises he makes are not quite human. In between the pas possibles he emits high-pitched mad-dog-barking-for-the-moon howls. He is hugging himself, his limbs taut, his head tilted oddly, his body revolving slowly on an axis of grief. He is wearing denim jeans and a loud shirt in colours not found in nature. I stand by feeling helpless and anthropological. Who would have thought the death of a goat could cause such anguish? It occurs to me that perhaps Tiger holds goats sacred the way Hindus do cows. At the very least it must have been a beloved pet t
o merit this scale of reaction. In which case, why on earth has this Éclair person killed the goat? And who is Éclair for that matter? Clearly a bit of a bastard. He must have known how upset Tiger would be to have his precious pet killed for goat meat.

  “Who is Éclair?” I ask after what seems like a decent length of time. Tiger is making repetitive movements like a caged animal. His distress makes him deaf to my question. I try the gardien.

  “Qui est cet homme? Qui est cet Éclair?”

  It turns out Éclair isn't a man at all, but a dog—one of three Dobermann guard dogs in fact, and Tiger's favourite. According to the gardien, Éclair is well-trained and normally of benign disposition, not overly aggressive. But recently he has embarked on a bit of a killing spree, first the laying hens, then the guinea-fowl, now the goat who was discovered in a pool of blood, his throat déchirée. For the avoidance of doubt the gardien makes a swift slitting gesture across his own throat. Éclair has even attacked one of the other guard dogs and—this aspect of things is evidently a particular affront to the gardien—it was Éclair's own brother, his own flesh and blood. Sa propre chair!

  This was an inauspicious start to our first working trip to France together. Tiger's property in France had been portrayed as an idyll, a haven from life's stresses and strains. Now it appeared that the haven was overrun by mad killer dogs. There was no guarantee that this killing spree was at an end. Hens, guinea-fowl, his own brother, now a goat—he was obviously getting a taste for it. What—or perhaps who—would be next? The seeds of alarm were sown.

  In the mid-eighties Tiger had responded to an advert in Private Eye offering the magazine's editorial retreat in the Dordogne for sale at a modest price. Apparently Lord Gnome needed to raise funds to settle a claim for damages. The property was described as “unspoilt,” which turned out to mean derelict and neglected, but Tiger bought it anyway, sight unseen. He set about restoring it at huge expense, and over the next five years or so, as more land was acquired, the modest retreat turned into two separate houses, a studio, a swimming pool, a manmade lake stocked with exotic fish, a vineyard and mixed woodlands, not to mention a whole landscaped hillside with caves tucked in underneath.

  The journey time from Bordeaux airport to the heart of the Dordogne is a little over three hours by car, mostly on country roads with only a short stretch of motorway on the outskirts of Bordeaux. We made this same trip together several times over the years. Although Tiger himself couldn't drive, he took charge of every aspect of the journey. Mussolini made the trains run on time, and Tiger applied the same sort of efficiency initiative to our travel in France. Even before our plane touched down, everything had been planned with military precision. The gardien was to park the car, a Mercedes, in the short-term car park and select the bay nearest to the arrivals exit. He was then to stand in a prominent place at the arrivals gate and meet us with a trolley. Once the trolley was loaded, he was immediately to wheel it with all speed to the car while we marched smartly behind. The gardien was then to open the car doors, first the front passenger door for Tiger, next the back nearside door for me, before putting the luggage in the boot. As soon as he had stowed the trolley in the trolley bay, he was to drive to the exit, insert the parking ticket in the meter to raise the barrier, and we would be off. This routine was perhaps a little precise for most people's taste, but it was straightforward enough, or so one might imagine. The execution, however, was always fraught. Tiger made it so.

  As soon as the automatic doors of the arrivals hall opened, he would immediately launch into a stream of invective against the gardien.

  “Where is he? Where is he? Where the fuck is he? I don't believe it! Son-of-a-bitch! He's supposed to be here. I told him to wait at the front!”

  Yet this tirade was gratuitous, for the gardien was always there, standing faithfully with the trolley, right at the front as directed. He was never once not there. Indeed he had probably been there for hours, just in case the plane arrived early. But Tiger didn't ever reappraise the situation or withdraw from this kind of attack, even when it was clear that it was without basis. At such times the world was evidently against him, and he had to deal with it in the best way he could. This involved anticipating disaster—and in these circumstances every conceivable hitch, however small, counted as disaster—and guarding against it. Thus:

  “Vous avez le trolley?”

  “Oui, monsieur.”

  “Il ne marche pas, le trolley?”

  “Mais si, monsieur. Il marche bien.”

  “Oú est la voiture? La voiture est loin?”

  “Non, monsieur. La voiture est tout près d'ici.”

  “Vous avez le billet?”

  “Oui, monsieur. Bien sûr.”

  “Il y a beaucoup de circulation?”

  “Non, monsieur, pas beaucoup.”

  “Il va pleuvoir?”

  “Non, monsieur, il fait beau.”

  This sort of exchange, endlessly configured and reconfigured, took place each time we arrived in France. Tiger always belligerent, fearing the worst, looking for trouble; the gardien unfailingly placatory, reassuring, a man of peace. It could have been a martial art. At such times, Tiger seemed vulnerable and I felt sorry for him. I wished he could have been less anxious. In between his fretful questions there were volleys of “Allez! Allez!” and “Vite! Vite!” which he discharged into the air with a slap on his thigh. As soon as we were seated in the car and the gardien was off parking the trolley, Tiger would exclaim in cadences reserved by others for calamity: “What's he doing now? Oh, my God! Where has he gone? He's mad! I don't believe it!”

  Was this genuine anxiety? Or was it a personality disorder? It seemed genuine, it sounded genuine, but its provenance was puzzling. The gardien, it was plain to see, was parking the trolley just a few metres away; moreover, he was parking the trolley as swiftly as any man had ever parked a trolley. It was never clear to me why we were in such a hurry, why this part of the proceedings had to be so stressful. Wasn't this meant to be a restful break from the mad scramble of London?

  The need for haste characterised all journeys with Tiger. Only when he reached his destination did he begin to relax, and even then it was a curiously tense relaxation. Air travel was particularly challenging since all manner of things can go wrong. Bad weather, bomb scares, snow on the runway—the list is endless. Airports provide a serious test for a man who likes everything to go smoothly and speedily. Tiger knew that there was little he could do to prevent acts of God or acts of terrorism. He therefore did everything possible to expedite those matters that fell within his own control. His basic plan of action was to try to steal a march on his fellow passengers. The clear objective was to be first in the check-in queue, first through security control, first in the departure lounge. There he would pick the spot nearest to the boarding gate and stand at the ready like a sprinter in the blocks waiting for the starter's gun.

  He always took charge of my passport as well as his own. At first I made a token protest—I was a grown woman, couldn't I be trusted with my own passport? But this sort of objection always made matters worse and I soon learned to fall in with what was required. Falling in with what was required became a governing principle in many different areas of our relationship. Sometimes, when I was feeling particularly trampled upon, I told myself I was adhering to one of Gandhi's main precepts: active resistance by means of non-resistance. It is always possible to retain some amour-propre if you put yourself in the same frame as Mahatma Gandhi. Resisting by not resisting, according to Gandhi, is an alchemical analogy. Far from being passive, it calls for active love and self-control. It's a challenging concept and I have sometimes wondered if it might be applied more widely. Believing by not believing? Seeing by not seeing? Feeling by not feeling? Fucking by not fucking? Could these too be alchemical analogies?

  It sometimes happened that Tiger chose the wrong boarding gate, or perhaps it was changed at the last moment. On these occasions there would be a mad dash across the departure lounge
, with loud artillery instructions rending the air. “Quick! Quick! This way, beloved! Keep up! Follow me!” People would stop and stare, speculating about the nature of the emergency. Tiger did not subscribe to British etiquette governing queuing, and he made promiscuous use of elbows and shoulders to get ahead. Once through the gate there were valuable opportunities for overtaking during the headlong rush down the tunnel. Alas, there would be the inevitable jam at the entrance to the aeroplane and in the gangway as passengers found their seats and stowed their hand luggage. At these times Tiger hated his fellow man. He wore the black scowl of the misanthrope.

  As soon as we disembarked there were even more things to worry about, the worst being the absence of a mobile phone signal. On Tiger's scale of personal adversity this counted as a catastrophe, and whenever it happened he was ready to kill the evil-doer back in London whose fault he decided it was. “How could he be so stupid? I told him! He's a fucking idiot!” And right in the middle of the concourse, with people looking on, he would have a temper tantrum, stamping his feet, cursing, brandishing the mobile phone, shaking it, trying to whip it back into life. When he got excited he spat a lot, and a fine spray of globules glinted in the light. Like the old Soviet politburo, he could look threatening and ludicrous at the same time.

  The best and easily the most relaxing part of the whole trip was the journey from the airport to the heart of the Dordogne. Nothing was required of me at this stage. I didn't need to keep up, I wasn't accused of anything, I didn't have to act out my bit part in the disaster movie. I could simply sit quietly in the back of the car for the next three hours while Tiger issued brisk instructions to the gardien on overtaking, driving speed, braking and the negotiation of corners. And soon we would be passing some of the best vineyards in the world. When I saw the gates bearing the names Château d'Yquem, Château Margaux, my heart would lift.

  I came to love the Dordogne. The landscape I know best is the Scottish glens, the corries and rock-basin lochs carved out by glaciers thousands of years ago. I feel at home in the haunting bleakness of Glencoe, the rolling hills of the Southern Uplands, the rugged headlands of the east coast and the pink granite rocks rising out of a green Hebridean sea. There is a wild beauty about much of Scotland and, in the Western Isles in particular, a purity of light and colour, which, once glimpsed, will stay with you till you die. The Dordogne is different but, like Scotland, it is a land of contrasts.