[This is the final installment of my “Berlin Memoir,” my account of the quarter-decade I spent as an intelligence officer in West Berlin in the early ’70s. (Parts 1 through 7 were published on 16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January 2017, 9 and 19 February 2017, and 6 and 29 March 2017.) In this segment, I’ll mostly be covering the theater activities in which I participated, including an amateur theater troupe I helped launch, and some experiences that grew out of those. As always, I recommend that new readers of “Berlin Memoir” go back and catch up with the earlier parts because the background informs much of what I recount here, plus a lot of the terms, abbreviations, and events I use and allude to have been explained and defined in the preceding sections.]
I said earlier (see Part 6, posted on 11 March) that some of the amateur actors in Berlin
Brigade decided to form a theater group so we could do stuff together on a more
continuous basis—workshops, little classes, camaraderie with the British group,
and such. (The wife of one of our founders, an Air Force sergeant, was a
Brit herself and she knew some of those folks. Their group was called
BATS: the British Amateur Theatrical Society.) We formed our group
sometime in September or early October 1972 and the Air Force guy got us
sponsored by the Skyrider Service Club, Tempelhof’s NCO club, of which he was a
member. We called ourselves TAT: the Tempelhof American Theatre.
(Some had wanted to model our name after the Brits’ group, but amateur
has a more derogatory connotation in American than it does in British.)
We even designed a logo in which the two T’s in TAT were stylized Greek
masks, one of comedy and one of tragedy. We put ads and announcements on
AFRTS—I was the publicity director—and got stories planted in Stars and
Stripes.
That last had an odd consequence for me: I ended up the
“model” for a posed photo to illustrate an article—me standing by a lighting
instrument on a floor stand. (It wasn’t even really a stage
instrument.) When the article came out
in July ’73—and I still have a copy somewhere—it appeared in the S&S
all over the world, including Asmara, Ethiopia. One of my W&L
roommates, who had enlisted in the Air Force after we graduated, was stationed
there and he saw the photo and article and called me! (Remember, all
USAREUR and USAFE facilities are interconnected by the same telephone system.)
TAT’s first show (December 1972) was a children’s play, The
Wonderful Tang by Beaumont Bruestle, which was a fairy tale set in
China. It had a character, The Chorus, who's like a children’s version of Our
Town’s Stage Manager, and I did that role in yellow-face. (Today, no
one would dare do that—but what did we know?) I channeled Mickey Rooney
from Breakfast at Tiffany’s (yes, I know—his character was Japanese; again: what
did we know?) As un-PC as it would be today, it was a big hit then.
We were invited to do a cut-down version of the play—maybe it was the whole
thing; it wasn’t very long—on a children’s show on AFTV.
Well, I’d never done anything like that before, so this was
an experience. First off, AFTV was still black and white in the ’70s, so
all our fancy make-up had to be redesigned for the gray-scale.
(Yellow-face didn’t read on b&w TV, so I didn’t need that, but everything
else had to be rethought.) No one knew anything about this, so we just
experimented in front of the cameras during rehearsal until we got something
acceptable. Then, in one scene, one of us—maybe it was me, I don’t
remember anymore—was supposed to appear out of nowhere. On stage, we just
did it conventionally—the actor just jumped out from behind curtains to the
accompaniment of a lot of Oooh’s and Aaah’s from the other
characters—but I suggested, Why not try to do it with some trick
photography? Again, no one knew how to do this—the AFRTS staff were just
airmen and –women with some basic TV training, not pros—so we winged it. It came out
a little jumpy, but it worked—at least for “local” TV. (We did this all
on tape, of course—not live. I think they aired it a couple of
times. The AFTV show, a local children’s program, also included some
interviews—children’s style—if I recall, about who we were and what TAT did and
what the play was about and so on.)
Then we mounted A Hatful of Rain by Michael V.
Gazzo. I was the dope dealer, Mother—played on stage and in the movie by
Henry Silva, one of the all-time great screen villains—and I was one nasty
sum’bitch. One day, out near the commissary or something, some Air Force
NCO stopped me, and in really angry tones, explained that I was a real bastard
and he’d like to take care of me some night in a dark alley—or something like
that. Talk about suspending disbelief!
I had to point out I was a commissioned officer—I wore civvies,
remember—and he needed to back off. (Aaahh, stardom. Has its
burdens, don’t it?)
Well, Hatful was a big success, too. (Remember,
we had a very culturally deprived audience. Many GI’s didn’t get out
much!) So the NCO club invited us to do the play for a dinner
theater. Our usual performance space was a large room at Tempelhof with a
moveable, blue-carpeted platform that had a red curtain backdrop—intended
for lectures, small concerts, and meetings—for our stage (unless we built
something more elaborate; one of our actors discovered a talent for scene
design and set building after I gave him some pointers—from my vast experience
in that field!). But the NCO club got an actual auditorium with a
proscenium stage for their dinner-theater event, and we moved in there for one
night. Now, what no one really considered was that Hatful is not
really dinner-theater fare—it’s pretty grotty and stomach-churning melodrama,
what with all the shooting up, drug withdrawal, and thuggery. Not
terribly conducive to digesting food. Nevertheless, we were a hit.
Hatful was also entered in 1973’s Third Annual USAFE
Play Contest and we actually won for Best Play. That prize included a
December command performance at Ramstein AB, the USAFE HQ in Germany. So
we had to dismantle our set—the first really elaborate one we’d done, with
walls and everything, not really designed for touring—and get it and us to Ramstein. We got the set booked on an Air Force
cargo flight, and we would take the Duty Train to Frankfurt where someone from
Ramstein would meet us and drive us to the AB, about 85 miles away. But guess what. At
the very last minute, the set was bumped for a helicopter tail section.
Well, we scrambled and made dozens of phone calls and somehow managed to get
the set onto the train with us and arranged for a truck to meet us in Frankfurt
to haul it to Ramstein.
Of course, it was raining, and the set got to the theater
banged up and scarred from the train ride and the open deuce-and-a-half.
We were able to fix most things by ingenuity and luck—it was now maybe 7 or 8
p.m. the day before the contest festival (which included presentation of the
awards for Best Actor and Best Actress, and so on—a big megillah)—but
parts of the walls had been marred so that the paint had come off. (The
flats weren’t muslin-covered frames, but solid constructions of something like
homosote.) We didn’t have any of the paint, and no one could locate any
at that hour—even if we could match the wall color. Then someone—me, I
think—noted that the walls were pea-green. Why not run to the commissary
or deli—something was actually still open—and get some pea soup? By God,
that’s what we did, and it worked! We touched up the damaged set with
Campbell’s condensed pea soup! (As Ken Barnes, the TD at W&L’s
Troubs, said: Necessity is a mother.)
So, we finished repairing and mounting the set, and I guess
we must have done a quick run-through or something for the cues—but we had no
time for a full rehearsal. So we went on the next day in an unfamiliar
theater, not exactly cold, but luke warm. Everything was going well
enough—Dave Hickey, our Johnny Pope, had caught a little cold or stomach flu
or something and he was a bit weak so when I pushed him in one scene, he kind
of went flying a little, but no harm and no one but us noticed. However,
in one scene I smoke a cigarette which I drop on the floor and stamp out with
my shoe. Except that this theater had a raked stage with some kind
of woven-rope floor covering. Not having rehearsed here, it never
occurred to me, and certainly not in the heat of the scene, that when I dropped
the butt on the floor, it was going to roll down toward the proscenium.
And that’s what it did—heading straight for the front row of seats. And
I’m trying to “casually” reach my foot farther and farther down the stage to
stop it and put it out. I know that lit butt is going to start the
rope floor cover ablaze and the performance and the theater will go up in
flames and smoke, sending Brig. Gen. Robert Thompson, the USAFE Chief of Staff
who hosted the ceremony, fleeing out into the late-December night (and I’d have
a new senior officer with my name on his shit list!). In the end, I just
had to let the butt roll, and nothing happened—except I had a small heart
attack up there that night.
(I posted a version of the Hatful anecdote on ROT as
“Short Takes: Theater War Stories” on 6 December 2010, and on 20 November 2014,
the AF NCO who designed the set, David Rogers, stumbled on it. He wrote me and filled in some information
which I either hadn’t known or had forgotten.
So, here’s more of the story:
(When Dave met the train on which the set came back to
Berlin. he said he knew something was wrong when they opened the boxcar
door. He could smell it! The set had stayed in Ramstein about three
days after we left and Dave figured they’d left it outside the theater. When he arrived to pick it up at the train
station in Berlin, there was stuff growing out of it. My suggestion to paint it with green pea soup
did the trick for the performance, but it also was organic enough to sprout
mold and mildew over the entire set.
Dave told the folks at the station just to throw the whole set out.
(Dave told me that the reason the actor playing Johnny was
so sick—and so was most of the cast and crew—was that Ramstein’s troops
recently had gotten their flu shots. The
bugs, Dave said, were everywhere. During
the command performance, Mike, the young man who played Mother’s henchman, Apples,
got terribly ill, and the director, Bruce Limpus, tapped Dave to play the part.
So he spent a while in the afternoon going through Apple’s lines with me and
the cast. As it turned out, Mike was the
real trouper and he went on in his role.
Meanwhile, Dave was up in the light booth, almost falling asleep,
running lights for the show.
(Back stage, the green room was a mess, Dave recalled. Many of the cast members were so sick with
the flu that, between stage entrances, they’d go back to the green room and lie
down on coats and clothes and anything that would afford a comfortable sick
bed. It looked like a wartime hospital
back there, Dave said.
(Then there was the Technical Director for the theater who
insisted we put green foliage on the set above the “street entrance” (where
Apples and I entered) because it was stark and unappealing. It was supposed to be stark and unappealing,
Dave observed. It was a seedy part of
New York City! The set dressing made the set look like a garden apartment that
was below ground. Dave recalled that
the TD outranked him, because he didn’t fight her on this.)
By the way—one of the judges for the USAFE contest was
Dennis Cole, that renowned actor of refinement and distinction. Well,
Cole arrived in Berlin without enough warm clothing, so they had to take him
off to the ’X to shop. I don’t know what else he bought—he sported a
black leather jacket, but I think that came with him—but he did purchase a pair
of Corcoran paratroop boots. Man, he thought those were cool! He
wore them everywhere the whole time he was in Berlin. What a honcho!
TAT was mostly fun—we had meetings and did scenes and
improvs, the Brits came over and did some light pieces, we went to their shop
and schmoozed, we mounted a bill of one-acts (I did the father in Chekhov’s Marriage
Proposal; the other shows on the
bill were Edward Albee’s The American Dream and The Feast by Dan
Wright) and Peter Ustinov’s Halfway Up the Tree (I
assistant-directed). But one thing was not fun. One of our actresses
was the daughter of an Army colonel, a medical officer at the hospital.
Her name was Nancy and she was married at the time we started TAT. It was
already her second marriage—she was the same age as I or a little younger—and
she had a 7- or 8-year-old daughter from her first; within a month or so, her
second marriage broke up.
The word at the time was that her husband, whom I met once
or twice, just up and left, but after I got to know Nancy, I had to
wonder. She and I became friendly and then started to move toward
romance. I got to know her father some; Nancy and her daughter were
living with him in the senior-officer housing, and he seemed to approve.
I admit, her track record bothered me a little and the fact that she came with
instant family worried me, too—I wasn’t at all sure I was ready at around 27 to
become a father to an 8-year-old all of a sudden. Then, little by little,
Nancy started to get possessive and slightly obsessive. She’d call me at
all times of the day and often wouldn’t get off the phone. She’d call and
ask if we could go somewhere right then—and I started to see that she was
always leaving her daughter at home, even blowing off things like
parent-teacher meetings and such. I decided to back off any relationship—she
was scaring me, frankly—but she kept calling and “running into me” as if she
had been waiting for me. (The term stalking didn’t really exist yet, but
looking back, that’s what it was.)
One time Nancy disappeared from home—her father called to
see if she was with me—and was later found walking along the railroad tracks in
Berlin. That’s when I learned that Nancy was a paranoid schizophrenic and
had been hospitalized at least once before and had been on medication which
she’d apparently stopped taking. (This is when my original judgment of
her husband began to alter.) Her behavior was all manifestations of her
illness, I learned—especially the tendency to latch onto someone about whom the
paranoid schizophrenic forms a fantasy relationship based on the flimsiest
evidence. (Believe it or not, this happened to me once again, when I was
at the American Academy a few years later.) Later the day she
disappeared, Nancy called me from the hospital. (I was home on comp time
for some extended duty.) She’d walked off the psych ward and was calling
from the ER; she wanted me to come and get her. I told her I couldn’t do
that, trying to be as calm and supportive as I could (acting again), and tried
to hang up the phone so I could call her father. But Nancy wouldn’t hang
up and the peculiarity of the German phone system was that if the calling party
keeps the line open, you can’t break the connection. I finally ran down
the hall to a neighbor—thank goodness it was the temporary quarters of a
married officer and his wife was home—and used that phone to
get through to Nancy's father at his clinic in the hospital. He thanked
me for informing him—he was always strangely calm during all this—and sent
someone to retrieve Nancy from the ER.
I don’t remember how long Nancy stayed in the hospital, but
she was eventually remedicated and released. She was supposed to be an
outpatient, of course, but basically she went back to her previous life,
including TAT. I tried not to be cruel, but I did everything I could to
separate from her—I stayed away from TAT stuff a lot—and Nancy started to latch
onto another member of the group. (I never understood why the guy, an EM
and a little younger than Nancy, would get involved with her after all that had
happened—none of this had been secret—but I figured it was none of my
business.) Then one evening, I came home from work and Nancy was waiting
for me outside my BOQ with a bag of groceries. It turned out that the bag
was all stuff she’d liberated from home; she said she wanted to come up to my
apartment so we could “taste things.” I told her to go home and that I
wasn’t going to let her in. I was both scared and angry, and I didn’t
want to get involved in this. There was no lock on the outside door of
the building, so Nancy followed me up to my apartment on the second floor, but
I wouldn’t let her in. I figured she’d go home soon, but she stayed
outside my apartment, sitting on the corridor floor and talking to me through
the closed door. I stopped telling her to go and didn’t respond, hoping
that she’d give up and go home. I suppose it was stupid, but I’d never
encountered anything like this and I had no idea what to do. I don’t know
why I didn’t just call her father, and I’m ashamed now that I
didn’t. I finally called him and he sent someone to bring her home or
back to the hospital.
I can’t say I handled any of this well; I was all of 27 or
so and had never met a crazy person before, so what did I know? I know I
was scared, though, and I was angry at Nancy’s parents because they never even
hinted that there had been anything wrong until it all exploded more or less in
my face. Not only didn’t her father ever tell me anything about his
daughter’s illness, he was a doctor and didn’t give me any instructions on how
to handle situations once her condition was revealed. This time, of course, Nancy stayed
hospitalized for some time, but she stayed in Berlin and when she was released,
she returned to TAT. I thought that was a bad idea, since it seemed
to me that this was the environment that either triggered her schizophrenia or
exacerbated it. Why she would be encouraged to go back into it was a
mystery to me. Nancy and I remained apart after this, though, so I
don’t know what happened later. She
eventually went back to the States, I think, and, of course, I never had much
to do with her father anymore so I was out of the loop. Less than a year
later, I left Berlin and the army. It’s not one of my pleasanter life
experiences—and, as I hinted, it repeated itself on a much smaller scale a few
years later. (Some guys are babe magnets? I was a kook magnet.)
When I was visiting D.C. in April 2004, I went to “my”
museum—the International Spy Museum (see “Spook Museum,” 25 March 2010). Now, that was really a walk
down memory lane. I had expected
something of a joke—all James Bond and Maxwell Smart or something—or a
superficial whitewash, full of gimmicks and mock-ups. It’s not.
It’s actually a serious museum—entertainment more than edification, to be sure,
but not a joke and not all that superficial. I mean, it’s cleaned up a
bit for general consumption—the biggest group of visitors, at least when I was
there, is teen and pre-teen boys—but it’s only romanticized a little, and it
covers pretty much the whole business. It was skewed toward the Cold War
era when I visited, perhaps understandably; this was before the global terror
campaign had really taken hold. The
museum also doesn’t show much of the philosophically nastier, morally compromising
aspects of the field—as I’ve noted, we used to remind each other that what
spies do is fundamentally illegal—but it’s pretty accurate in what it does
show. There were James Bond and the Avengers about—a replica of one of
the Bond cars was on display—but for the most part, these were just what we
used to call “eyewash”—dressing to keep things lively. On the other hand,
there was a mock-up of a car showing how several people could be hidden in
it—just like the exfiltrators used to do.
The real exhibits are actual artifacts of spycraft (including an Enigma machine). The museum is
something of a rabbit warren inside and when we left one exhibit area and
followed a corridor to another, we emerged into a space with a large sign on
the opposite wall that read: “BERLIN – City of Spies”! It was a little
stage set—a café table, walls with maps of Berlin, photos of street scenes with
Soviet soldiers, and things of that sort—all from the ‘60s. That’s only a
few years before my time there, and little had changed in appearance between
then and my day. Talk about déjà vu!!
The advertising slogan for Berlin tourism used to be “Berlin
ist eine Reise wert”—Berlin is worth a trip. Has it been?
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