Haaretz - Israel News - The real Stanley Kubrick
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The real Stanley Kubrick
By Dalia Karpel
Her uncle directed the Nazi propaganda film and she was a
member of the Hitler Youth. Christiane Harlan was the love of
Stanley Kubrick's life for more than 40 years.
Stanley Kubrick cut himself off from the outside world, giving
no interviews, declining to be photographed and not appearing
in public for 20 years. Even before his death, on March 7,
1999, he was called the Wizard of Oz, described as the
successor of the famous recluse Howard Hughes and was likened
to Dr. Mabuza, the all-seeing monster-type character in the
series of paranoid films made by Fritz Lang. Kubrick, the
genius who directed, among other films, "2001: A Space
Odyssey," "A Clockwork Orange," "The Shining" and "Eyes Wide
Shut," became a reclusive genius, a control freak, an
obsessive perfectionist and a misanthrope who hated women
especially.
"Where did people get the idea that he was a woman hater?" his
widow, Christiane Kubrick, guffaws. His third wife, she is the
mother of his three daughters and lived with him for more than
40 years. "The man was surrounded by women his whole life. He
had good relations with his mother and with his sister, he had
three daughters and he was a far better mother than I was. He
had no choice but to love the world of women. Stanley was fond
of women and was an avid supporter of women's liberation. When
we met, in Munich, he was the first man I had ever known who
used to call his mother regularly and hold pleasant
conversations with her."
Kubrick, who was Jewish, was born in the Bronx in 1928. From a
young age he was an expert chess player, and people close to
him say that in his films and his life he took far-reaching
risks in every move he made, as he did in chess. His black
eyes were focused and piercing, attested his friend, the
writer Michael Herr, who co-wrote the screenplay for "Full
Metal Jacket" (1987) and also wrote a book about the director
("Kubrick," Grove Press paperback).
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Heavily built, Kubrick felt ill at ease in physical contact
and his body language was stiff, Herr notes. It took Kubrick
four years before he placed his hand, awkwardly, on Herr's
shoulder, and then he backed off, lest he had overdone it. At
the same time, Herr emphasizes that he was a warm person but
did not express this in bodily contact, at least not with
people. Most of all he hated being photographed.
In the early 1970s, Kubrick decided that the media was beyond
the pale for him. Already in an interview to "Rolling Stone"
magazine, in 1972, he said that the test of a work of art lay
in the feeling one has for it and not in one's ability to
explain why it is good. In that period, he gave quite a few
interviews and turned out to have a razor-sharp humor. He told
The New York Times that year, "I have a wife, three children,
three dogs, seven cats. I'm not a Franz Kafka, sitting alone
and suffering." He remarked that no critic had ever succeeded
in illuminating even one aspect of his work.
"Right from the beginning he realized that he wasn't good at
interviews," his widow says. "He would listen to an interview
with him on the radio and grumble that he had done himself
damage and that he sounded idiotic. That was not true, but
that is how he felt. As someone who began his career as a
photographer for Look magazine and was present at interviews
with people whom he admired as being intelligent, Stanley
discovered that in interviews smart people sound stupid. If
there is one thing he hated, it was superficiality and small
talk. A person like him, who made films with such meticulous
attention to detail and wanted everything to be perfect and
correct, told himself one day that his films expressed him
best, that they are concentrated and contain the gist - so why
give interviews? He was frank with himself and understood that
he was bad at that."
So it's as simple as it sounds? There was no self-hatred or
anything like that involved?
"It did not stem from self-criticism. Stanley preferred to
devote his energy to his films. He was a good businessman and
wanted to focus on the budget, the production and marketing,
on everything that is entailed in directing a film, and
especially on working with the actors. That was the most
precious thing for him and the center of his life. He was a
happy person who loved to be in his home. He worked most of
the time and the term `going on vacation' would bring on an
outburst of anger from him. The quiet of life outside the
city, in a rural setting [in England], with the children and
the animals was the right thing for him. He was a person who
took an interest in everything, from the news to sports and
literature and history and what have you, and because of his
status he did not have to go anywhere: whoever wanted to work
with him came to the house. He thought that was wonderful, and
would say, `I'll sit in the garden and wait. They will come.'"
In 1987, Kubrick told the Chicago Tribune that everything that
had been written about him was grotesquely wrong and that he
was not a recluse but led a normal life. But the image that
clung to him was so convenient and so attractive that it
developed a life of its own. Christiane confirms that the
decision to stop giving interviews exacted a high price.
"Barricading himself from the media acted like a boomerang.
One day he understood that it was a bunker, because the media
hates him and is making up stories about him. He admitted that
he had made a mistake and that he had to correct it. `Maybe
I'll write an article,' he said. `Dear people, in practice I
am charming and amiable.' And we both burst out laughing."
But the laughter gradually faded, she said, "because the
situation became worse in the 1990s, when someone named Alan
Conway went around for a long time in all kinds of places
pretending to be Stanley Kubrick and trying to seduce children
by promising them a part in a film. The police tried to catch
him but failed, and the thing got bigger and bigger in the
press, and people said Stanley Kubrick was a pedophile.
Stanley thought something needed to be done, so he turned to
his friend Mike Herr, who had fought in Vietnam and had
written `Dispatches,' an important document about the war, and
was also involved in writing the screenplay for `Apocalypse
Now' [directed by Francis Ford Coppola]. Herr, a Jew who
became a Buddhist, knew Stanley well and wrote a moving book
about him. The Conway affair ended with his arrest and his
confinement in a psychiatric hospital. But later a documentary
film was shown in which Conway said how much he had enjoyed
being the great Mr. Kubrick, and that was awful. So, when
Warner Brothers suggested that I and my brother, Jan Harlan
[who was the executive producer of Kubrick's films in the last
30 years of the director's life] produce a documentary film
about Stanley, I thought it was time to stop being insular and
weeping and whining. After his death, the stories only
proliferated and worsened and became grotesque. We said that
if we remained silent and did not react, people would say it
was all true."
As a guest of last month's Haifa Film Festival, Christiane, a
German-born artist whose uncle, Veit Harlan, directed the
notorious Nazi propaganda film "Jud Suss" (produced 1938;
released 1940), brought not only a copy of the documentary
about her late husband, "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures,"
but also a wide-ranging homage to the director, which included
new prints of five of his films: "Paths of Glory" (1957),
"Spartacus" (1960), "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), "A
Clockwork Orange" (1971) and "Barry Lyndon" (1975). She and
Harlan are also behind an international exhibition about the
director's work, which is about to open in Melbourne and may
come to Israel. (Her paintings can be viewed at
www.christianekubrick.com.)
"Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures" was made by Jan Harlan
in 2001, and features figures such as Jack Nicholson, Martin
Scorsese, Woody Allen and the science-fiction writer Arthur C.
Clarke, co-author of the screenplay (with Kubrick) for "2001."
The film is a lengthy and somewhat didactic personal portrait,
which progresses chronologically via the 13 feature films
Kubrick directed between 1953 and 1999, through conversations
with members of the family, actors and directors, interspersed
with rare archival footage from Kubrick's childhood and
equally rare footage of Kubrick directing. The exhibition,
which contains about 1,000 objects from Kubrick's estate,
including costumes from his films and examples of his work as
a still photographer, is accompanied by a massive
catalogue-album, also overseen by Christiane Kubrick and Jan
Harlan, and published by Taschen, "The Stanley Kubrick
Archives" which sells for $200.
It was all personal
Kubrick conducted most of his ties with the world by phone. He
and Christiane lived on an estate in Hertfordshire, north of
London, surrounded by animals. His favorites were the cats,
which were concentrated in his wing. Herr writes that Kubrick
was capable of conducting hours-long phone conversations. He
notes that the writer Gustav Hasford, on whose book "The
Short-Timers" Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" was based, told
him that he once spoke with Kubrick on the phone for seven
hours. Hasford likened Kubrick to an earwig, a small insect,
that enters one ear but doesn't go out the other until it has
"eaten clean through your head." Christiane confirms this
predeliction: "There was no one whom he did not reach by
telephone. If someone told him it was the middle of the night,
he would say, `But you are awake, aren't you?'"
Kubrick's parents, Jack and Gertrude Kubrick, were
American-born, to parents who immigrated from Russia and
Romania. His father was a doctor and his mother, Christiane
says, was an autodidact and knew how to go about raising her
gifted child. "She said that he took no interest in himself as
a child. He was a gifted boy, brilliant and independent, and
she, in her wisdom, succeeded in implanting in him a strong
belief in himself."
School was not his thing, he decided to forgo a bar mitzvah
because it didn't interest him, and at the age of 15, as a
high-school student, he was not much in class. He was a
drummer in the school band and on Sundays attended an art
class. He started to take pictures with his father's Graflex
camera. His scholastic achievements continued to be mediocre
(he finished high school with a 70 percent average, and so did
not go on to college), but his photographs were published in
the school magazine and he preferred to spend his time in
movie theaters and wander about with the camera around his
neck. In June 1945 a photograph of a newspaper vendor mourning
President Roosevelt won him $25 and the image was published in
Look magazine. A year later he was working for the magazine
and publishing photo-stories about boxing and jazz
performances, about Frank Sinatra and about the young actor
Montgomery Clift. At the age of 19, he married his high-school
sweetheart, Toba Metz, and the two moved into a one-room place
in Greenwich Village.
Christiane: "He didn't want to be a boy and his mother said he
didn't do anything silly as a boy except for getting married
so young. He was focused and very ambitious and he was bored
to death in school and would copy the lessons from a friend.
Getting married at such a young age was an act of taking
responsibility by someone who had a burning desire to be an
adult. He was a photographer for Look and played chess for
money and read a tremendous amount. His father was a very nice
man, a bit conservative and a worrier, who sold his life
insurance so Stanley could make his first film, `Fear and
Desire,' in 1953."
Kubrick was then reading about 20 books a week and often
visited laboratories and film-editing rooms to see up-close
how films were made. He liked jazz and he never missed a
Yankees baseball game. He directed his second feature film,
"Killer's Kiss," at the age of 27, this time with funding from
his uncle, and his name appeared prominently in the list of
credits. According to Herr, Kubrick believed from the very
outset that he was the greatest director of all. He never said
so, but behaved as though he was. "They say he had no personal
life, but that's ridiculous," Herr writes. "It would be more
correct to say that he had no professional life, since
everything he did was personally done, every move and every
call he made, every impulse he expressed was utterly personal,
devoted to the making of his movies, which were all personal."
In 1955 Kubrick married Ruth Sobotka, a dancer and
choreographer. (His first marriage ended during the shooting
of "Fear and Desire.") According to Christiane, that marriage
did not succeed because Sobotka traveled a great deal and was
not faithful to him. But at the same time Kubrick had already
established his first production company, and his third film,
"The Killing" (1956) led to the making of his important
antiwar film "Paths of Glory" (1957), starring Kirk Douglas.
The film was shot in Germany, and during the preparations for
it, Kubrick, who was watching television in Munich, saw the
beautiful actress Susanne Christian, nee Christiane Susanne
Harlan. It was love at first sight for him, but she was
already married.
"He called my agent, who told me that an American director
wanted to see me. I thought I was going to meet a redneck. I
went to the studio and liked him at once. I was unhappily
married to a German actor and we had a daughter of two and a
half. Stanley and I soon started to live together in Munich.
We were married in Las Vegas in 1960," Christiane says.
After five years in Hollywood, he began to work in England,
making "Lolita" in 1962 and "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned
to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" the following year. "Our
daughters [Anya, born in 1959, and Vivian, born a year later]
grew up in England and we liked the fact that his studio was
in the village. The urban Stanley suddenly had a large garden
and a big kitchen and life was wrapped in great tranquillity."
Did the man who devoted his life to his films find time for
his family?
"When we met, I knew I was getting onto a merry-go-round. I
left everything and went to America with him with my daughter.
It was not a small risk. He read 20 newspapers a day looking
for stories, and with the same intensity he devoted himself to
his goldfish, to me and to the girls. He was involved in
everything. If the cat was sick he would drop everything and
talk to the vet and tell him `We will do so-and-so,' and argue
with him. He was certain that he was a good doctor and would
drive people crazy telling them to take pills of one kind or
another. He would explain to the women who worked on the set
what to do about a difficult menstrual period - `Don't eat
salt, eat this and this' - and would walk away, his cigarette
leaving a trail of smoke. He did the same thing with the girls
and it was hard for all the pampered women who wandered
through our house.
"He was always available for us and he was accessible and
attentive. He would speak on three telephone lines at once and
if someone came in and asked him something, he would drop
everything. He didn't lock himself in when he wrote, and when
he had to he would leave everything and then go back to
writing as though he hadn't been disturbed. Nothing made him
lose his concentration and he also had a phenomenal memory.
"I think that in many ways he was a better mother than I was,
because his eyes were always open. We were good friends and I
learned from him how to live everyday life and concentrate on
work. I copied that lifestyle. When people visited us in
Munich, they were astounded at the mess there. People came and
went and there were meals and even his mother was taken aback
by the mess, but we loved it. When he started to make money,
we had a house with large spaces and Stanley thought that this
was exactly the purpose of money, for space and time."
Wasn't he dominant and domineering about the girls?
"They are pretty dominant themselves. Katharina [Christiane's
daughter from her first marriage] is a painter, Anya is an
opera singer and Vivian is a composer. Stanley was very
involved in raising the girls and because he was in the house
a lot, that was nice. The girls fought him, especially Anya,
who would say things like `People think you are amazing but
they have no idea how boring you are.' He would sit and
grumble that he had no say in the house. What does not come
through in any of his films, and probably will not come
through when the widow tells about it, either - and I really
do not want to sound like the professional widow - but what
made Stanley extraordinary was his ability to love truly and
to identify with the girls and with what was happening with
them. He was angry and upset when they did not take his
advice, but they loved him because he was a tremendously
devoted and loving father. Yes, and domineering, too."
The murderers' state and me
She was born in 1932, to a family of theater and entertainment
people. From childhood she dreamed of being a painter but
studied and made a living from dance and acting. Her paternal
grandfather was a playwright and the director of a theater.
Her father, Fritz Harlan, was an opera singer; his brother,
Veit Harlan, a film director, entered history because he made
"Jud Suss." The film is a rare case in the history of cinema:
at the end of the war its maker was arrested and placed on
trial in Hamburg for crimes against humanity and preparing the
ground for genocide, with the film introduced as evidence. He
was acquitted twice in 1949, once on the grounds that the film
was essentially immaterial to the events that occurred, the
second time on the grounds that he was coerced by the Nazi
propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Harlan went on making
films in Germany until his death in 1964, at the age of 64.
Christiane: "That is the heavy burden I have borne since
childhood. I would be happy if I didn't come from a state of
murderers. Stanley took a great interest in my catastrophic
family background. We spoke about it a great deal. People
asked him, `How could you marry a German woman, especially one
with a background like that?' I thought a lot about the fact
that no one could have taken a greater interest in my family
background than Stanley, who understood that I came from the
other side, which was the opposite of his [background]. But he
also knew that my generation could plead innocence: I was very
young during the Holocaust, though at the same time old enough
to remember everything."
What did his parents say about his choice of a wife?
"I was very nervous ahead of the meeting with his parents, and
he was very nice and supportive, because he sensed that I was
suffering. I sat there as though my head was weighed down by a
ton. If only I were not from a state of murderers, I thought
to myself - but his parents were wonderful, especially his
mother."
Prof. Michal Friedman, from the Department of Film and
Television at Tel Aviv University, discusses "Jud Suss" in her
book about Jews in Nazi cinema, published in France in 1984.
The film, which was based (distortedly) on the 1925 novel of
the same name by the German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger
(1884-1958) - it was released in the United States under the
name "Power" - won a prize at the Venice Film festival of 1940
and continued to be shown in occupied Europe until the fall of
the Third Reich. It is thought to have been seen by 20 million
people.
The plot of the film, Friedman says in an interview, maintains
tension because of the protagonist's acts of dispossession and
rape. "The success of the film lies in the fact that the
central character was widely known from German literature and
plays, which developed it for different goals. In 1934, for
example, a film of the same name was made in England, based on
the Feuchtwanger bestseller. The film, like the book, extols
the activity of a court Jew in 18th-century Germany who,
because of schemes related to his origins, was executed in
1738. The Nazi version, however, portrayed a Jew who plunders
the local population and exploits its women to satisfy his
lust. The brutal rape of an Aryan girl in London leads to his
execution, as he violated the race laws."
The Nazi film's drawing power was in part due to its high
production values. Goebbels not only funded the film
generously but recruited the finest cinematic talent available
to him and chose the actors and the crew himself. Friedman:
"The director, Veit Harlan, took advantage of this fact in his
trial - his line of defense was based on the fact that he was
chosen to direct the film because of his reputation and was
therefore forced to submit to Goebbels' will. Actors and
directors, including Dr. Fritz Hippler, the director of `The
Eternal Jew' [the 1940 anti-Semitic film in which Jews are
likened to rats], testified that they were put under pressure
and threatened with being sent to fight at the front. It was
not only the argument of coercion that ultimately got Harlan
acquitted, as the judgment also noted, `It is difficult to
complain that the director did not soften the anti-Semitism in
the film, not least because the historical figure himself was
a criminal and exerted brutal authority over the nation he
controlled.'"
Did Kubrick see "Jud Suss"?
"He saw all my uncle's films," Christiane says, "and also met
him in the same year we met. My uncle, who was tried and
acquitted, was already sick. He liked Stanley and warned me
that if I were going to America, I should not expect people to
like me there. My uncle's story is complex. I liked him very
much and thought he was a fantastic person. He and my father
wanted to be circus people and used to do stunts, and when I
studied dancing they would hurl me in the air. But it
certainly depresses me to think about the nature of `Jud
Suss.'"
At the age of 10 she, like all her peers, was inducted into
the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth). "I liked going there because
it released me from housecleaning duties. I was a girl whose
whole world was the theater: I had a large puppet theater and
I wrote and directed plays and took money from children to see
them. And that's actually what I did in the Hitler Jugend. The
first time we were evacuated was when Germany attacked France.
In my conversations with Stanley, I often told him that the
ray of hope I had came from my being a bad and rebellious
girl. I was far from my parents and those people in the Hitler
Jugend, and even though I was educated to be a Nazi and was no
better than anyone, in my heart I did not believe it."
Is that a perception of hindsight or did you feel that way
then?
"I remember that I painted well and that when they taught us
[in art class] about the structure of the Aryan skull, I
thought it was ridiculous. The person who gave the talk didn't
even look Aryan. Germany is the most mixed state in the world
- there were 11 borders along the Rhine and the Danube, where
everyone came from - so what were they talking about? The
whole race thing was totally insane. Afterward, we were sent
to a labor camp that was protected from bombing and I did farm
work there. Female prisoners - Ukrainian, Polish and a few
French women - worked with us and I became friends with some
of them and that gave me a new ray of hope."
Her parents, who were part of the Wehrmacht entertainment
troupes, performed for the troops at the front. Her father was
later drafted and sent to a combat unit in the Black Forest
where, his daughter says, he guarded Russian prisoners. After
the war he was detained in an American prisoner-of-war camp.
She and her mother lived by Lake Constance, on the Swiss
border, in the hope of being able to cross into Switzerland.
"My father was arrested brutally - I will not go into details,
because it is a terrible story. He returned home three and a
half years later. My mother and I were at Constance; the
Moroccan-French army captured the area and I was very sick and
things were not easy. We got our `prize.' Stanley was
fascinated when I told him about those years, but also sad,
and sometimes we wondered who had a more horrific background -
him as a Jew or me as a German who lived through the Nazi
period."
How did your family react when you told them you were going to
marry a Jew?
"There was a bit of chaos. My family was a microcosm of the
events. My maternal grandmother, who was a pianist from
Hamburg, married a Jewish violinist from New York, so that
there was also a half-Jewish side in the family. The amazing
thing is that this was in a society that had the chance to be
respectable and was educated and not poor. The murders in
Germany were perpetrated by people who it is hard to believe
were capable of that. It is impossible to understand how it
was physically possible to murder so many people. They did it
meticulously, by manual means, and it was all documented in
the certainty that the hatred was justified and that Germany
was the savior of the world. I do not understand it."
She is from the generation that wanted to see and know
everything. When Kubrick was engaged in the preparations and
massive research for a film about the Holocaust, to be
entitled "The Aryan Papers," based on the novel "Wartime Lies"
by Lewis Begley, "I read all the material Stanley collected
with his usual care and became depressed, even though I knew
everything. He was also in a state of depression, because he
realized it was an impossible film.
"It's impossible to direct the Holocaust unless it's a
documentary. If you show the atrocities as they actually
happened, it would entail the total destruction of the actors.
Stanley said he could not instruct actors how to liquidate
others and could not explain the motives for the killing. `I
will die from this,' he said, `and the actors will die, too,
not to mention the audience.'" (After originally trying to get
Isaac Bashevis Singer to write an original screenplay for the
film, Kubrick abandoned the project because Steven Spielberg
was making "Schindler's List.")
Death and superstition
Interviews may not have interested Kubrick, but reviews did.
"When reviews of his films were published, he would tell me,
`You read it, I don't want to.' A while later he would ask
what the critics wrote and when I told him he became angry. In
the end he got angry at himself for getting angry at the
reviews and said he wasn't going to think about it at all. Of
course he was very childish, in all senses. He knew that. He
would tell me, `I'm an asshole.'"
His friends knew what he meant. Herr writes in his book about
the director that not only was Kubrick's attitude toward money
pathological and that he was terrible as a businessman, but
that even though he forsook Hollywood because of its brutal
management methods, he himself frequently resorted to similar
methods. According to Herr, Kubrick knew people thought it was
a great privilege to work with someone like him and took full
advantage of this. Herr himself refused to polish the
screenplay for "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999), because he understood
that Kubrick thought he would not have to pay him.
In their last phone conversation (one hour), Herr reports,
Kubrick talked about the prose style of Ernest Hemingway and
suggested that he come to watch "Eyes Wide Shut" and interview
him for "Vanity Fair" (the film was released after Kubrick's
death). Kubrick told Herr about a friend of his, the director
of a studio, who bought an apartment in New York and thus
became the first Jew to be approved by the other tenants.
Kubrick was astounded by the story.
Did he think about death?
"Stanley believed in superstitions and I would laugh at him.
He knew it was stupid, besides which he was a total
unbeliever. After all, all his thoughts in `Space Odyssey'
revolved around the question of what's out there. The girls
and I used to tease him by saying that his body language was
like that of Tevye the Milkman - he would clasp his hands and
sigh. He apparently grew up in a milieu where there were
religious Jews and from them learned to sigh with a big
`ochhh' while looking up toward God with accusation and
melancholy. We imitated him and laughed. I told him it was bad
luck to believe in superstitions."
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