That is how Lena succeeded in ferrying her radio operator as far as the Swiss frontier, with whisky sprinkled over a Flugleutnant's uniform, a seamstress at the opera house in Stuttgart had brought her a shawl one evening where there was no performance, to her hotel, for you, tonight also it’s going to turn very cold, very quickly.
Instead of keeping out of sight, Lena makes a few arrangements and speeds off in her car to pick up her radio operator before he can set foot in the street where they’re waiting for him, she was lucky, a good tip about the cold, and for a while in London an Australian transmissions instructor repeated to students training to be spies, this is a very interesting business to be in, take me for example, it gave me an opportunity to be the lover of a great singer, for one night only, in a car, somewhere in Europe, a very fine motor, a Maybach Zeppelin.
Lena had given herself a real fright, anyone else would have fled Germany after pulling a stunt like that, would have taken a harmless little trip for example to Lucerne, in fact she did go to Lucerne, a visit to a very old girlfriend, but she went back to Germany immediately afterwards, not the sort who gave up easily, and whatever she might say she loved the atmosphere, the uniforms against which her dress could positively shine, she loved the parties, the last time I met her in Berlin was at the Opera, a gala for the Wehrmacht, in 1938, at the time of the Munich talks.
She was radiant surrounded by all those uniforms, I pointed this out to her, she got angry, she said, ‘Goffard, you’re just a footling Frenchman’, she bawled me out in front of everyone, said I was small-minded, I thought she was going to slap my face, I beat a retreat, I felt quite ill for the rest of the evening, I was aware that she had just shattered our friendship, it was my fault, I watched out for an opportunity to have another word with her, she saw me coming, she withered me with a look, the people around us, Nazi dignitaries and generals in full dress uniform, the swine were waiting for her to slap my face, she spat a few words in my direction, she spoke through gritted teeth, white-hot fury, I hardly heard what she said, I walked out of the Opera, got into my car, left Berlin, I was weeping, I took the Munich road, Lena had just said to me ‘Max, you see the company I keep these days, go back to your poker-playing friends, tell them not to sign, they are to be told not to sign, you see the company I keep?’
I ran the errand, told the English and the French, but in Munich sign they did, they weren’t interested in knowing what German generals were telling them not to do.
In the cockpit of the plane, Max’s voice has grown louder, more articulate, anxious to hide nothing from de Vèze:
‘I spent nearly twenty years, de Vèze, twenty years adding it all up, sifting through it, then it all became perfectly clear one evening in Paris in the early fifties, in the Officers’ Club, the room for Senior Men and special guests, a dinner for Allied Generals, with Marlene Dietrich and other luminaries, press barons who were being honoured for their efforts on behalf of the cause of freedom, when Lena came in there was a ripple of interest which took in Marlene too, they’d both sung that afternoon in support of the charitable work of the Allied armies, Lena was magnificent, very handsome at fifty, figure like a model but with talents and ideas, the most important man there that evening was Gruenther, the NATO boss, he was first to get to his feet, he went over to her.
‘He gave a military salute, saluted a woman, a civilian, the farm-boy from Nebraska, a yokel, instead of bringing his heels together smartly and lowering his head to kiss her hand he gave a soldier’s salute, very snappy, parade-ground stuff, the other men all stood up, she was their guest, clicking of heels, bows, hand-kissing, only Gruenther blundered, he saluted military fashion, everyone thought it was a bloomer, and then he compounded his mistake, proud to be standing next to her, not the way a man is when he has swept a beautiful woman off her feet, proud as if he’d been standing next to Patton.
‘At that moment I more or less got it, in London I’d seen French officers salute sober family men in grey suits who wore a small ribbon in their buttonhole, a shot-silk ribbon, green, black edging, you know, the sort of men who derail trains using only a mackintosh, she wasn’t wearing a ribbon, the other officers did not salute, she responded by offering Gruenther her hand, smiled like a lady of fashion, it was perfect.
‘Other things came back to me, in the end I knew all of it, just had to get the right angle, in 1947 she sang with Stirnweiss, Elisabeth Stirnweiss, no one protested, picture it, Madame Stirnweiss, once a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, not one of the top names, nothing terrible against her, Austrian, with a big heart, but even so, she’d sung for the Führer, she’d dined with him, Stirnweiss wasn’t a Nazi but she had an NSDAP card, during the post-war years it was enough to limit her to giving private lessons to middle-class Viennese citizens for ten years, long enough for her to lose her voice.
‘And dear scatterbrained Lena agrees to sing with her, yes, in ’47 the request came directly from Stirnweiss, or indirectly, and Lena did not respond indirectly, she came to Stirnweiss, tears in Stirnweiss’s eyes, their paths had crossed in Berlin and Vienna, in the thirties, two friends, Stirnweiss had given her an entrée to the best salons, the best society, and Lena loved that, once she’d turned up with Lindbergh, she saw the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson, but Lena never went as far as those people, she loved a party but she got angry every time the Nazis tried to exploit her presence, and the Nazis back-pedalled because she knew a few personal telephone numbers and because she wasn’t afraid to give people a roasting.
‘So in ’47 she reopened doors closed to Stirnweiss, from friendship, with no second thoughts, out of artistic preference, but there was also something else, she must have discussed it with Washington before leaving, people from the East should not be allowed to deliver Persil-white certificates of cleanliness to wayward talents, with or without NSDAP cards, like Furtwängler or Stirnweiss, or Karajan, people like that should not be allowed to scoot off to Dresden or East Berlin, the Soviets had just reopened the Staatsoper, with Orpheus, Eugene Onegin, Rigoletto, to which add a magnificent Arts Centre on Unter den Linden, the cold war was just beginning, shifting alliances, one side salvaged von Braun, the other von Whoever, Lena whisked Stirnweiss off to Salzburg, for the festival, and no one turned a hair.
‘My old friend Linus Mosberger told me that a newspaper columnist in New York had decided to get the knives out for Lena and her taste for ex-Nazis, he was called in, he shut up, she was very protected, she handled the whole Stirnweiss business with panache.
‘No one knows why but there was not one West German who could say no to Lena, no one ever said anything, but the great and the good were at each other’s throats to get her round their dinner tables or into their drawing rooms, to hear her talking about Toscanini or the Waltenberg Seminar or the Congress of Versailles from which so much evil had flowed, they trusted her implicitly, told her everything, and as the evening drew to a close people would start saying how they’d secretly opposed Hitler, Lena would listen, one day she’d remarked “many Germans opposed Hitler, such a shame they never got together”.
‘She always had a slightly mad streak, in 1956 I was in West Berlin, everywhere things were getting tense, the Poles, the Hungarians especially, summer of ’56. One of Berlin’s main shopping streets, I bump into a man, he drops his parcels, I apologise, I give him a hand, he raises his hat, old-style polite gesture, I respond in kind, we spend as long as is required by Berlin courtesy, we go our separate ways, I never saw him again, I’d just had time to hear a few words “she’s in Budapest, hasn’t got a diplomatic passport, it’s going to turn extremely cold”.