The Vengeance of Rome

Kitty stayed with me after the service. Slender and quick as a cat, narrow-shouldered, long-legged, with an almost triangular little face framed by her short, dark red hair, she had wide-set blue-green eyes, a broad, sensual mouth and a sleepy, mocking manner which was sexually provocative but which I pretended not to notice. She wore near-transparent pastel silk dresses, preferring green and rust, with flesh-coloured silk stockings and patent-leather high heels that shone as brightly as her lacquered head.

Kitty had been abandoned, she told me later as we toasted one another preparatory to retiring. Her mother was in England because she had a new ‘flame’, someone in the diplomatic corps.

‘She still hates you!’ Kitty whispered just before we parted. ‘I’d love to know exactly why.’

The next day she insisted we take a tour of the old city, which seemed even more of an insane fantasy than Ludwig’s famous palace. Everything was of the same red stone tending to a grotesque heaviness when not adulterated by ordinary shops and the market. The Nurembergers had a way of decorating their city to give it a liveable scale. During the Middle Ages their castle meant security and power, but now it was merely grim. The museums, with their many edged weapons and martial paintings, added to this peculiar mixture of attractive romanticism and brute threat.

When we returned to our party that afternoon Putzi was entertaining his guests. The man who came to be known as ‘Hitler’s clown’ was a great pianist and singer of comic songs, as he was pleased to demonstrate. He had always cheered the Führer up during those melancholy days of exile and struggle. At the drop of a hat the gentle ‘Smokestack’, as Kitty nicknamed him, would sit down at the hotel piano, a cigarette between his smiling lips, and pound out some rather Teutonic Gershwin. He took boyish pride in our pleasure.

Hanfstaengl had also been involved in the Fräulein Raubal business and was very concerned for his Chief. When we were alone later, he confided in me. He was planning a big event for Hitler’s birthday, still some months off. While in London, he had fallen in love with Gilbert and Sullivan all over again, and he was seeking volunteers with good operetta-quality voices, planning to surprise Hitler with a performance of The Mikado. His other idea was to put on some sort of minstrel show, but he did not think the Führer would be familiar enough with the conventions of the Cakewalk and the coon dance.

I agreed he should do something in the European tradition. America’s chief contribution to world culture was to cheapen the air with Negro jazz noise and chattering Jews in banal talkies.

Hanfstaengl became defensive. He was proud of his American blood. But in the end his huge head nodded in reluctant agreement, confiding that he had returned to Munich and the family print business because it was impossible to love both art and politics in America. Sales were at last beginning to improve, especially now he had an exclusive contract with the party. I had been to his shop with Röhm. It now sold mostly good-quality posters representing the Nazi hierarchy. Röhm had wanted me to see him larger than life-size, I think! Both Hoffmann, Hitler’s exclusive photographer, and Hanfstaengl were making fortunes from their leader’s rise to fame. Hitler trusted few Berliners and liked to have Bavarians and Austrians about him whenever possible.

Though the Führer got a royalty, Hanfstaengl was doing so well from his posters that he felt he owed Hitler something. He was having the costumes specially made in London and sent over. They were identical to those worn by the D’Oyly Carte Theatre Company. Like many Americans, Hanfstaengl was more appreciative of the Savoy Balladeers than the English, who tend to dismiss their greatest creative artists and keep them, as a matter of course, from any sort of real advancement.

Hanfstaengl tried to drag me into the scheme as a fellow American. I reminded him I had not been raised in the English tradition. He apologised. He was desperate for volunteers and most of his friends were dashing hither and yon trying to get the Nazis elected to majority power in the Reichstag. These were to be the crucial years, dependent as much upon luck as strategy, like all politics. Hitler never acknowledged his good luck and so aroused the ire of the gods who had first blessed him. The Greeks would have written a play about him! Indeed, Hanfstaengl confided in me that Hitler often saw Pericles as his model. He had read some potted popular history which he was always fond of quoting.