by Lily Tuck
Liliane father’s real name is Rudolf—only he gives it the French spelling, Rodolphe, and goes by his nickname, Rudy. Rudolf was both a family name and a popular Christian name at the time of his birth, made still more popular by the tragic circumstances of the archduke’s death in 1889. Known as the Mayerling incident—named after the archduke’s hunting lodge in the Vienna woods where the apparent murder-suicide took place—the deaths of the Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and his seventeen-year-old mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera caused a huge international incident, fueled conspiracy theories, and, more important, contributed to the demise of the Hapsburg Empire by destabilizing the immediate line of succession. An only son, Archduke Rudolf had no heir and the succession was passed on to his cousin, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which triggered further divisions between the Austrian and Hungarian factions of the empire and led to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, at Sarajevo in June 1914—“the shot [actually two shots] that was heard round the world,” as the saying goes—and a cause for the start of the First World War.
Rudy was born in Bonn; later, he studied in Berlin. In 1933, he left Germany for Paris, claiming that, as a Jew—albeit an assimilated one—he was no longer allowed to play field hockey at his sports club. In Paris, he established a film production company and married Liliane’s mother. Together, they lived more or less—often less—happily in a large apartment in the Sixteenth Arrondissement on Rue Raynouard (named after a dull French Academician, who mistakenly wrote that the Romance languages were not derived from Latin) and had a child, Liliane.
On September 3, 1939, two days after the invasion of Poland, when both Britain and France declared war on Germany, everything changed in Rudy’s life. All German and Austrian men between the ages of eighteen and fifty living in France were rounded up and put into detention camps, their assets were frozen, their papers confiscated. Imprisoned at first in the Stade de Colombes, the site of the 1924 Olympics, Rudy described the conditions in the stadium in a memoir he wrote many years later about his wartime experience:
I brought along a sleeping bag, a rubber mattress, and a bit of food. A good thing I had taken these elementary precautions because the organization in Colombes was nonexistent—no one knew how to proceed. . . . Each new arrival received a number and was sent to find a place in the grandstand of the stadium—the Germans on the right, the Austrians on the left. To use the lavatories or to set foot on the lawn was strictly forbidden; at best, one could walk on the path around the lawn. The “toilets” were the most disgusting things I had ever seen: iron barrels placed perpendicular and at random, into which people relieved themselves. . . . Right away I decided to eat as little as possible so that my use of those barrels would be as infrequent as possible.
After fifteen days in the Stade de Colombes, Rudy and his fellow detainees were put on a bus and quickly driven through the streets of Paris to the Gare d’Austerlitz. On the way, Rudy wrote, “I took a last nostalgic look at the Champs-Elysées, which seemed to be singularly sad and lifeless.” From Paris, he was sent to a camp in Marolles, a village in the Loire Valley, seven kilometers from Blois, the town from where Joan of Arc launched her battle to free the city of Orléans. After spending his first night in Marolles inside a barn, Rudy continued:
I awoke feeling quite gloomy; I told myself that if they had forgotten about us at Colombes, here we were even farther away—the refugees were only a small problem for the French Government, or perhaps not even a problem—and to have brought us so far must mean that we would stay here a long time, maybe for the entire duration of the war. My gloomy thoughts were interrupted by a young man who came up to me and asked: Would you like two fried eggs with your breakfast? I thought he was pulling my leg and I answered him in kind: Sure, with pleasure! Ten minutes later, I got those eggs. Simon Herbst, a little Pole, who had nothing to do with the Germans, except that his papers, due to a bureaucratic mix-up, said “German national,” was an egg merchant in Paris as well as the most resourceful person I met during the entire war. Already, he knew everything there was to know about the village of Marolles and he was always in a good mood and ready to help. He made my life in camp much easier. Unfortunately, he did not stay as resourceful to the bitter end; Simon Herbst was one of the six million who never came back.
Elected by the 120 detainees, Rudy was made both head of the Marolles camp and spokesman to the French authorities. Luckily, the commander of the camp, an old lieutenant, was disposed to turn a blind eye if one of the prisoners broke the rules by strolling down the village street or by stopping at the only café to have a glass of wine. And, according to his memoir, Rudy must have done a fairly good job as head of the camp:
I never had to deal with any serious uprising, on the contrary—as a sign of affection, I was asked by one of the men to be a witness at his wedding. On Sundays, I was so tired out from all the discussions and petty quarrels, that I would go to church to have some peace and quiet for an hour. Every fifteen days or so, my business associate would come from Paris to see me and, once, he even arranged to have my wife come and visit me. None of the guards said anything when that night I did not sleep on the straw in the barn, but, in the morning, I was on time for the roll call.
After two months at Marolles, the day arrived when the much longed and waited for call finally came: Rudy was free to enlist in the Foreign Legion for the duration of the war in France and not, as had been originally stipulated by the recruitment officer, for the obligatory five years. (The alternative was being deported back to Germany.) Nonetheless, although relieved to leave the camp, Rudy was apprehensive:
My whole life growing up in Germany, I had always heard horrible stories about the Foreign Legion. . . . The Foreign Legion was portrayed as made up of murderers and thieves, and life in the Legion was like hell on earth, where certain death awaited one at the end. And this was the Legion I was going to join now—no longer quite so young (I was over thirty with a wife and child), no longer so tough (I was twenty kilos overweight since I had abandoned the sporting life several years ago), and here I was a film producer with a sedentary life and a taste for luxury!
From Fort St. Jean in Marseille, picturesquely located at the entrance of the old harbor, the place from which, traditionally, legionnaires embark for the unknown, Rudy was sent to Sidi Bel Abbès, in Algeria. Before leaving France, he took note of the large sign placed at the entrance of the fort that read: Legionnaire, tu es venu pour mourir et je t’envoie où on meurt—Legionnaire, you have come to die and I am sending you to where one dies.
Then, from Sidi Bel Abbès, Rudy was stationed in Maghnia, a Berber town located in northwestern Algeria, a few miles from the Spanish Moroccan border on the edge of the barren High Plateaus. There, for five months, Rudy led the life of a real legionnaire. He learned how to bear arms and march under the hot African sun to the tune of the popular Foreign Legion song:
Auprès de ma blonde,
Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon.
Auprès de ma blonde,
Qu’il fait bon dormir.
Next to my blonde girl,
How good it is, how good, how good.
Next to my blonde girl,
How good it is to sleep
During the five months he spent in Maghnia, Rudy lost weight, got into shape, and made friends: the pastry cook at Maxim’s, a hardened criminal released from prison on the condition that he serve in the Legion, a musician who called himself Alex Stone and later composed a haunting and hugely popular song called “C’est Fini,” “It Is Finished” (the title was misunderstood to be “Symphonie”), as he thought he was about to be shot by the Germans. At night, Rudy played gin rummy and drank the cheap but good local Algerian rosé wine, but best of all as he wrote:
I look back on this time with pride. I would not have missed it for anything in the world. The Legion gave me something for the rest of my life, not just a good consci
ence that I did my duty—the fact that I never saw any action was not my fault, I would have liked to, but few Frenchmen did during this lightning-quick war of 1940. I came out of the Legion with a self-assurance and feeling of stability that I did not have before. . . . It was at the Legion that I became a real man.
After the war, Liliane’s father became a naturalized French citizen and, soon after that, he left France to live in Rome, “the Eternal City,” about to be transformed by Cinecittà—Cinema City—into “Hollywood on the Tiber.” Already, by the early 1950s, a number of American production companies, profiting from cheap Italian labor, had begun shooting their films at Cinecittà—films that later included Ben-Hur, Helen of Troy, and Cleopatra. As, of course, so did the Italian directors—Rossellini, Antonioni, Fellini—in particular, Fellini, whose famous film La Dolce Vita epitomized the glamorous and often scandalous lives of the stars and would-be stars.
Meanwhile, however, compared to the privileged lives of those involved in the movie industry, the Italian working class was suffering mass unemployment and poverty. In 1952, according to statistics, almost one hundred thousand Romans were homeless or still living in shacks, caves, cellars, or in the borgate, the squalid shantytowns built on the outskirts of the capital. (Ironically, until 1947, Cinecittà served as a refugee camp and was the site where Rossellini’s Roma città aperta was filmed.) Several years later, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Accatone! would perfectly capture the harsh and violent lives of the Roman poor.
In Rome, Rudy drives an expensive sports car, a silver Lancia Spider. The Lancia has a right-hand wheel drive—a feature designed for racing that, as Liliane will discover, is dangerous, since the passenger sitting on the left has a clearer view of the road and of the oncoming traffic than the driver. Instead of a backseat, there is an uncomfortable narrow shelf that Liliane has to crouch on if ever her father takes along another passenger. At midday, the Via Veneto is crowded and there are no parking places. Miraculously, or so it seems to Liliane, a little man comes running out of a side street, waving his cap and yelling, “Pronti, pronti, dottore!”—Ready, ready, sir!—the same little man from whom Rudy buys the black market Chesterfields—and Liliane’s father hands him the keys to the Lancia.
Liliane’s father lunches at Bricktop. Named for its owner, a redheaded African American singer born Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith, Bricktop was originally located in Paris and was F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Cole Porter’s favorite nightclub. In fact, Cole Porter wrote “Miss Otis Regrets” based on a story Bricktop once told him about a lynching in the American South, adding, “Well, that man won’t lunch tomorrow.” In the early fifties, Bricktop moved to Rome, where it catered to the movie crowd: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra, and to Liliane’s father, who regularly goes there to play cards—Rudy plays gin rummy and almost always wins—and to eat American-style hamburgers.
Smiling, Bricktop asks Liliane, “Are you going to be a movie star and make your daddy proud?” The perfect hostess, she comes and sits at their table for a few minutes and chats with Liliane’s father. Her face is covered with freckles and Liliane cannot help but stare.
After lunch, Liliane’s father takes her to a museum—the Villa Borghese or the Doria Pamphili. He is genuinely interested in art and he would like Liliane to be interested as well. He points out paintings, frescoes, sculptures, and Liliane makes an effort to listen. The museums tire her, but she looks forward to visiting the souvenir shops. She wants to get postcards to send to her mother and her school friends and she asks her father to buy them for her.
Or they visit a famous church. Santa Maria in Aracoeli, the Church of the Altar of Heaven, appropriately named, is located on the summit of the Capitoline Hill. Every Christmas a wooden baby Jesus, carved from an olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemene and covered in jewels, is brought out to receive the children’s prayers. The baby Jesus does not interest Liliane and the only prayer she knows by heart—Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep—is not appropriate. What she likes best about the church are the 124 steps that lead up to it. Counting them under her breath, she likes to hop first on one foot then on the other all the way up and then all the way down again.
“Be careful,” her father calls out to her.
Rudy is not accustomed to looking after a little girl. He does not know what to do with her all day.
He does not know what to say to her.
What are you studying in school?
Do you have a best friend?
Likewise, Liliane does not know what to say to her father.
We are studying the Egyptians.
My best friend is Margo Maximov.
No doubt Rudy would like to ask Liliane different questions:
Is your mother happily married to her new husband?
Do you like your new stepfather?
But he doesn’t.
Liliane’s father takes her to the Fontana dei Quatro Fiumi on Piazza Navona. Created by Bernini, he explains, the fountains represent the four rivers that symbolize the four quarters of the world: the Danube for Europe, the Nile for Africa, the Ganges for Asia, and the River Plate for South America. What stays in Liliane’s head is the story he tells her of how Bernini positioned the cowering figure of a man—his arm held high in the air for protection, an anguished look on his face—on top of the River Plate fountain to show that the figure feared the Church of St. Agnes, built opposite, by Bernini’s rival, Borromini, would crumble and fall on top of him. As it turned out, the story is apocryphal since the fountain was built before Borromini built the church.
On Piazza Navona, her father buys her an ice cream cone, cioccolato e fragola—chocolate and strawberry—but, soon after eating it, Liliane vomits the ice cream in the street, the chocolate staining the front of her red coat.
At the Fontana di Trevi, Liliane’s father hands her a coin, telling her that in order to return to Rome, she has to throw it into the fountain. Liliane is not sure she wants to return to Rome but, obediently, she throws the coin—a halfhearted toss that barely lands it in the water. More vivid in her mind is how a woman dressed in rags, holding a little girl with matted hair by the hand, follows her in the street and reaches up to touch the sleeve of Liliane’s coat.
Signorina, the woman implores. Per amore di dio, aiutar me—for the love of God, help me.
Via! Liliane’s father shouts at the woman, motioning with his hands. Vattene!—Go! Then, grabbing Liliane by the arm, he pulls her away from the beggar woman and the child.
“Gypsies! Thieves!” her father shouts.
Although not musical, her father has a gift for languages. He speaks German, French, English, and Spanish fluently. He picks up Italian in a few weeks. He also speaks a little Russian. His best friend, Tolia, is Russian.
It is not clear what Tolia does—he and Liliane’s father make deals. Like Liliane’s father, Tolia is divorced. His former wife is a well-known French journalist whose lover is an equally well-known journalist. Photographs of them vacationing together on a yacht on the Riviera or partying at an elegant country house often appear in Paris Match. Tolia is short and nearly bald, his eyes protrude, yet, for reasons unknown to Liliane, women like him. Is it his soulful look, which marks his Russian predilection for despair? His wry humor, which masks this Russian predilection for despair? Or his questionable past—a five-year prison term in Loos, near Lille, for fraud?
Liliane also likes Tolia. If, on occasion, he joins them for a meal she feels relief. So does her father. Tolia knows the latest gossip in Rome—who is sleeping with whom or, the reverse, who is no longer sleeping with whom—and although Liliane does not understand everything Tolia says, she understands enough. Next, Liliane’s father teases Tolia about Véronique, a woman he was last seen with—Véronique will marry Gregory Peck. Tolia shrugs helplessly then, looking intently at Liliane
with his soulful, protuberant eyes, he tells her father in uninflected but accented English: “You’ll see, she is going to be a beauty,” and although Liliane does not believe him, she blushes with pleasure.
Most evenings, Rudy dines at a restaurant called Nino. There are two restaurants called Nino in Rome, owned by two brothers. One brother is named Nino and his restaurant, located on Via Borgognona, is fashionable and expensive; the other brother is named Mario and his restaurant, located off Piazza Barberini, is less expensive. The Nino Rudy goes to is the one owned by Mario and since Rudy gave Mario a small part, the part of a restaurant owner, in one of his films (Le Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna), Mario is eager to please Rudy and, by extension, Liliane, for whom—in spite of Rudy’s grudging approval—he makes a special pasta dish, rich with eggs and cheese. For Liliane’s father, eating at Nino’s comes closest to eating at home—or the idea of home. The atmosphere is cordial and lively. The diners shout to one another across the room, joking about the quality of the food, the slowness of the service. They know the waiters by name, long-suffering, sallow-looking men who, unperturbed, go about their business, ignoring the diners’ impatient complaints and demands, part of an act in which the diners and the waiters are complicit. The food at Nino’s is simple and good and, over the years, the waiters have remained the same.
