Showing posts with label Dorothy Thompson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dorothy Thompson. Show all posts

Thursday, October 1, 2020

Remembering the Life of Denis John Fodor (1927 - 2020)

When I learned of the recent death of Denis Fodor, I immediately recalled my conversation with him in June 2012 that evoked a past I had previously explored only through old newspaper articles, biographies, and history books. I had been researching the life of Denis’s father, M. W. Fodor, a Vienna-based correspondent who had covered middle Europe and the Balkans during the inter-war period for the Manchester Guardian, and Denis knew more about his father’s life than anyone else alive. Plus, he had memories of living as a child in Vienna during the early 1930s, and many adventures after that. I spent more than two pleasurable hours listening to Denis tell about his life and that of his father, seeing the past through the eyes of a witness.

The conversation with Fodor has been arranged and was also attended by Fabienne Gouverneur, who at the time was a doctoral student at Andrássy University in Budapest doing research for a dissertation that centered on M.W. Fodor and his correspondence over the years with important people, especially Sen. J. W. Fulbright. She had interviewed Denis Fodor once before and would have subsequent meetings with him, becoming well acquainted with him and his family. Information gathered from her talks with Fodor helped inform her dissertation and related book, both titled Personal, Confidential: Mike W. Fodor als Netwerker und Kulturmittler. Both include a comprehensive biography of M.W. Fodor. 

We met with Denis Fodor at his apartment on a quiet street in Munich and our conversation was accompanied by a modest lunch that he served. He answered our many questions with eloquence, intelligence, and some sharp edges. He remembered some things that occurred more than seven decades ago with great clarity, but some memories were elusive and, frustratingly, some things, such as the circumstances of the deaths of his grandparents, he did not know. He later replied to many other questions in e-mail exchanges. 

Denis was still residing in Munich when the end came in late July 2020. He was 93 years old. His death was not (as far as I can tell) reported by any newspaper or memorialized in any obituary.  In his honor, I will tell here some of his life's narrative and a few of the memories that he shared with Fabienne and me. 


M. W. Fodor

The story of Denis Fodor’s life must begin by introducing his father and describing the circumstances of Denis’s early life in Vienna.  M. W. Fodor, Denis’s father, was named Marcel Vilmos Fodor at birth and was later known by his friends as “Mike.” He was born to a wealthy family in Budapest in 1890, and he trod an improbable path to a distinguished career in journalism; from that perch, he observed, commented on, interpreted, and swam in the tide of events in Europe that changed the world after World War I.  After earning a degree in 1911 from the University of Budapest in chemical engineering, M. W. went to Great Britain in 1912 to work for the Frodingham Iron and Steel Company in Scunthorpe.  When World War I began, he was initially interned as an “enemy alien,” but was released in March 1917 to live on the estate of Lord Mowbray at Allerton to do “important war work.” As the war ended, he -- implausibly -- got a job as a Manchester Guardian correspondent reporting from Vienna.[1] Although he lacked experience as a journalist, M.W. Fodor spoke several languages of countries in middle Europe and the Balkans, and he had traveled extensively in the areas he was to cover for his newspaper. He soon developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the leaders and politics of the European countries on this beat and he made good friends of other Anglo-American correspondents stationed in Vienna during the inter-war years, most of whom hung out at the Café Louvre, where M.W. was often at the center of conversations about current events.     

Photograph from Ken Cuthbertson,
Inside: The Biography of 
John Gunther. 
  

In 1925, M.W. Fodor married Martha Roob, whom he had met in Vienna. She had been born in Slovakia.  Her mother was Slovakian, and her father, from Vienna, was a professional soldier in the Austrian army. She lived for many years with her parents in Hungary after her father was posted there. 

Denis entered the world on June 27, 1927. He was M.W. and Martha Fodor’s first and only child. Their  celebration of his birth was interrupted a couple of weeks later when M. W. had to cover Vienna’s “Days of Horror” (July 15-17), during which Vienna’s police killed 85 demonstrators who were protesting a court’s acquittal of three right-wing militia members who had murdered a child and an invalid war veteran in January. They had shot into a crowd of Social Democrats who were parading in Schattendorf, a village near the Hungarian border. The July eruption of violence, during which demonstrators set the Ministry of Justice building on fire, propelled Austria toward the end of its democracy.[2] 

A year later, a more pleasant event occurred in the lives of the Fodors:  J.W. Fulbright of Fayetteville, Arkansas, came to Vienna. The future senator’s study at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar had ended, and after a tour of Europe with his mother, he decided to hang out in Vienna. While there, he found the Café Louvre and M. W. Fodor, who became a mentor. Later, M. W. Fodor and Fulbright exchanged correspondence for more than two decades. 

As Denis was growing up, he met his father’s famous friends, sometimes with his parents at the Café Louvre and sometimes at their home on Börsegasse, near the Maria am Gestade Church. These friends included Dorothy Thompson, who arrived in Vienna as a young woman in 1921 with hopes of breaking into journalism; John Gunther who moved in 1930 to Vienna to cover events for the Chicago Daily News, and William Shirer, a journalist who stumbled into Vienna in 1929 as an insecure leftist reporter for the Chicago Tribune, a paper owned by reactionary capitalist. Thompson later became the second most famous woman in the U.S., eclipsed only Elinor Roosevelt, through the newspaper column she wrote from the later 1930s into the 1950s; Gunther’s fame came from his series of “Inside,” books, the first of which was Inside Europe, published in 1936; and Shirer – who was fired by his newspaper not long after he arrived in Vienna became a household name when he made regular radio reports from Berlin in the latter part of the 1930s and his books Berlin Diary and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich became best sellers. 

Picture was taken in about 1932. Published in M.W. Fodor. 1939. South of Hitler.

Another of Fodor’s friends was Robert Best, whom Denis also liked, a reporter for the United Press news service, who later became infamous when he stayed in Germany during World War II and made propaganda broadcasts back to the U.S.  After the war, Best was convicted of treason for his actions and died while still in prison.[3]  

Robert Best (left) with his
brother and sister as his treason trial ended.
AP press photograph

Surrounded by these and other talented journalists, Denis Fodor grew up in turbulent times. In February 1934, a few months before his seventh birthday, Vienna had a brief civil war instigated by Chancellor Englebert Dollfuss and the Christian Socialist Party, with its militia and the country’s army routing the supporters of the Social Democrats. The victors installed the one-party Fatherland Front (Vaterländische Front), an Austro-fascist government, as the country’s regime. A few months later, at the end of July, Dollfus was murdered by Austrian Nazis as they attempted to take over the government. In March 1938, when Denis was ten years old, Hitler sent the German Army to annex Austria.[4]

During his early school years, Denis was enrolled in the Schottenschule (now Schottengymnasium), a private Catholic school located a short walk from his home. At the time, he attended a Catholic Church with his mother, a Catholic. His father did not go to church but embraced Quaker beliefs. Nevertheless, both M. W. and Denis Fodor would have been classified under Nazi racial laws as Jewish because M. W. Fodor’s mother, Berta von Auspitz, came from a Jewish family. (M. W.’s father, Janos Fodor, was not Jewish.) 

As Vienna’s Nazis became more brazen in their behavior and anti-Semitism grew in Vienna, Denis’ parents sent him to England in 1936 to study at Abinger Hill School, a progressive and prestigious private school in Surrey. He was studying there on March 12, 1938, when German troops marched into Vienna. His parents fled Austria a week later after selling their apartment at a fraction of its value, leaving behind furniture, books, and papers. 

Soon after the Anschluss, the Fodor family made a trip to the United States and began the process of obtaining U.S. citizenship. With their citizenship clock ticking and permission granted to be absent from the U.S., the Fodors departed for England in June 1938 so that M. W. could resume reporting from Europe for the Chicago Daily News and the New Republic and Denis could prepare to return to his school. 

Two years later, following Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries, Denis and his mother hurriedly left England to travel to the United States, arriving aboard the M.V. Britannic on June 21, 1940. They were joined there by M.W. Fodor on the following day. He had been in Belgium in May when the Germans attacked, had made his way to Portugal via Paris, and had flown to New York City on a Pan Am “Atlantic Clipper” flight. 

The Fodor family spent the summer of 1940 at Dorothy Thompson’s expansive farm in Vermont. There, Denis spent time with his good friend Michael Lewis (1930-1975), Dorothy’s son, whom he had met earlier while living in Vienna. When summer ended, the Fodors settled in Chicago, where M. W. taught for a while at the Illinois Institute of Technology and later became a columnist for the Chicago Sun.  In 1943, M. W. was granted citizenship and Denis received “derivative citizenship.” 

Initial Citizenship Application, 1938

Denis attended Chicago’s Francis W. Parker High School, a private school with a progressive college-prep curriculum, graduating in May 1944.  One episode in his life during his high school years was documented in the Chicago Sun:  Living with his family at the Sherwin-on-the-Lake Apartments, 1205 Sherwin Ave., a few hundred feet from Lake Michigan, Denis had tried to rescue occupants of an airplane that had crashed into Lake Michigan within view of his apartment. According to the Chicago Sun, “Dennis Fodor, 15, … saw the plane crash, ran downstairs from his apartment…and began swimming out to the plane. His mother said, ‘Dennis tried at first to launch his sailboat, but he couldn’t; the water was too choppy. He then kicked off his shoes and began swimming but the rescue boat had already reached the pilot.’”[5] 

Between Fall 1944 and March 1949, Denis earned an undergraduate degree in English from Harvard College, taking time out to serve in the U.S. Army, with a stint as an army translator in Vienna. At Harvard, he played club football and basketball, and he had several stories published in the college’s literary magazines. He lived with two roommates in the apartment inhabited by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he studied at Harvard. After graduating, Denis moved to Germany – the front line of the Cold War -- where he took a job reporting for the United Press. His parents were living in Berlin at the time. His father edited the Berlin edition of Die Neue Zeitung, a daily newspaper published by the occupying U.S. forces.  

1947 Harvard Yearbook 

In about 1953, Denis Fodor began reporting for Time and Life magazines. He covered the 1956 uprising in Hungary and soon after that was sent to Beirut to write about events in the volatile Middle East. Not long after finishing that assignment, he switched from reporting to editing for Time and Life magazines. He spent the rest of his life working as an editor, first for Time/Life, then the Encyclopedia Britannica, and finally Reader’s Digest. He lived during much of the 1960s in New York; several years during the 1970s in Paris, where Reader’s Digest had its European office; and most of the rest of his life in Munich. In 1981, he co-wrote a book, The Neutrals, about the history of the European countries that remained neutral – or tried to – during World War II. Published by Time/Life, it was positively reviewed. 

Cover of The Neutrals by
Denis J. Fodor

When I had the chance to ask him questions in June 2012, most of my inquiries had to do with his memories of his early years in Vienna and of his father. Below are the summaries of some of the questions I asked and his responses to those questions, plus some of his other recollections that the illustrated the richness of his life. 

The Stammtisch for Anglo-American Journalists at the Café Louvre

As I read about the lives of Fodor, Thompson, Gunther, Shirer, and other English-speaking journalists stationed in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s, I was struck by the Café Louvre's role in their lives.[6] It was a regular meeting place for them as they did their work, and it provided a comfortable locale for socializing. At the Café Louvre, the journalists had a Stammtisch – a table or tables at the café reserved for them because they were regular customers. The café’s first-district location was perfect: it was a few steps from the Central Telegraph office from which the journalists could send their stories by telegraph. Also, it was across the street from Radio Austria, which could transmit urgent stories to their newspapers by wireless communications. 

Cafe Louvre in about 1940
From Der Spiegel

I was eager to hear what Denis remembered about Café Louvre, where he spent time as a kid. In the interview and some email exchanges, I learned the following from him: 

The café, located at the corner of Wipplinger and Renngasse, was in a neo-baroque or gothic building that “had eyebrows." The building had a dog-leg design. It was about five stories tall. 

In the middle of the L-shaped room of the cafe were marble top tables with cane chairs. On the sides were booths, upholstered in cloth. The waiters carried silver trays. The head waiter wore tails. The others wore smoking jackets with butterfly ties. Patrons called the head waiter by his last name. They called the other waiters by their first names. The usual order was one of several types of coffee -- melange, kleiner braune. You could also get a simple meal such as goulash or soup such as leberknödel. The dessert trays had cake and strudel of various kinds.” 

Robert Best at the Café Louvre 

One journalist used the Café Louvre as his office, even receiving telephone calls and his mail there. That man was Robert Best, who had, over time, made the café the central meeting point for most English-speaking foreign journalists in Vienna. He had done so by running a side business at the café that helped other journalists stay informed about breaking stories, covered for them when they were absent from the city, and provided other small services that made their jobs easier. The many journalists who worked with Best during his time in Vienna, most of whom considered him a friend, were shocked when he stayed in Europe after the start of World War II and made anti-Semitic propaganda broadcasts back to the U.S.[7] 

Best was a well-liked, but strange character. Elements of his life and personality were captured in two books written by journalists who knew him well. The first book, The Lost City, was written by John Gunther in the last half of the 1930s, but the publication of this roman a clef was delayed for nearly thirty years because of fears that some of its characters, who were clearly based on journalists and others living in Vienna in the early 1930s, would sue the publisher for libel. Foremost among those who might have claimed defamation was Robert Best, whose character in the novel was James N. Drew. According to the novel, Drew was “at once bashful, boyish, and portentous… a stout man in his middle thirties, with a heavy long face and an extraordinarily sweet – that was the only word for it – smile…. He was a mess, but, God damn it, he did have that sweetness.” In the novel, Drew – as apparently in real life --did some sleazy and even dishonest things.[8] 


Best was also the inspiration for the main character of William Shirer’s novel, The Traitor, which was set in Berlin. The character, Oliver Knight, according to the cover blurb, had “to choose…between returning to the land of his birth or staying in wartime Germany to satisfy his hunger for lust and power.” He made the wrong choice.[9] 

I asked Denis of his memory of Robert Best, and he gave a surprising answer. According to my notes, he observed that Robert Best was among his father’s best friends. Denis remembered Best as a "very nice man" and a "poor slob" who was deeply Southern, not too bright, and a bit uncouth. Illustrating the last point, Denis noted that Best spooned goulash sauce onto his Sachertorte. He also mentioned the Romanian "Princess" that Best supported (the “princess” was also an unsavory character in the novels written by Gunther and Shirer), saying that she was on drugs and he had to scramble to pay her costs. 

Denis recalled that Best often would loan his father money at the end of the month to help him make ends meet. He stated his opinion that his father would have testified in favor of Best as his trial for treason. He said that neither he nor his father blamed Best for what happened. According to Denis, Best was forced into his actions by specific circumstances, and we do not know what we would do if we were in those circumstances. 

The Fodors in John Gunther’s Novel, The Lost City

Among the sympathetic characters in Gunther’s The Lost City are three who were clearly based on the Fodors, whom Gunther obviously liked.  Laszlo Sandor was the name given to M. W. Fodor, Martha Fodor was Erji Sandor, and Denis was Albrecht, nicknamed “Putzi,” which was Denis’s nickname when he was a boy. Here are some short descriptions from the book: 


Like Balkan kings, [Laszlo] Sandor spoke no language perfectly, not even his own. His English had a Hungarian accent, his Hungarian a French accent, his French a German accent, his German an Italian accent, his Italian an English accent and so on around. His voice carried a friendly chuckle, and his eyes, beyond heavy owl-like spectacles, held a friendly gleam. He loved to elucidate, to share his wisdom; he would say, “Now, it is something inter-est-ing that will happen. Let me tell you about. He seldom conceded the necessity of using pronouns at the end of sentences. 

Erji was a Slovak and probably had gypsy blood. Her father, of the most respectable class, had been an officer….She asked nothing better of life than that she should run the household while he worked, sit quietly with him when he wrote his dispatches, and then go to a coffeehouse by his side in the evening. Laszlo asked for nothing more than what he had. She must always be close by [and] she could sing the old gypsy songs when they had a party.  

Albrecht, nicknamed Putzi, their six-year old son, came in with Fräulein. He paid little attention to his parents, but casually sat on the floor of the room where Sandor worked and pulled a pile of toys from a bottom shelf. Laszlo beamed and Erji dropped on her knees beside him, worshiping him with her eyes, adoring him. The child yanked at a tin locomotive. 

“For my name day I want a new locomotive. This locomotive has only one smokestack. I want a locomotive with two, three, six smokestacks! 

         “Locomotives do not come with six smokestacks.”

         “Oh, yes, they do. My locomotives do.” 

When I went to talk Denis Fodor in 2012, I took along a paperback edition of The Lost City to give to him in case he did not have a copy, had not read it recently, and might want to reread it.  A few days after the meeting, I received an e-mail from Denis in which he mentioned that he had re-read the book and concluded that “the characters in it are either more or less composites. My mother, for instance, is more composite than mother. I am Gunther’s Putzi and was called that, but don’t remember myself as acting Gunther-like.” 

Dorothy Thompson’s and Sinclair Lewis’s 1933 Christmas Celebration at Semmering

Denis was present as a child at a famous Christmas party hosted in 1932 by Dorothy Thompson and her husband Sinclair Lewis. The ten-day party was held at Semmering, a small Alpine ski resort town in Lower Austria about fifty miles from Vienna, and was attended by about forty of Dorothy’s friends, both journalists and others.[10] 

Accounts of this party can be found in the biographies of Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis and in a book titled Dorothy and Red by her friend Vincent Sheehan. Opinions about the party varied. M. W. Fodor is quoted in one of Thompson’s biographies as describing it as “a week of unadulterated pleasure enlivened by witty companions and his lovely Martha’s gypsy songs performed nightly to her own guitar accompaniment.”[10]  Other accounts, such as that given by Lilian Mowrer, had less generous assessments of the party.[11]  Amid ten days of fun, boredom, and drinking, two things happened to change the life of Dorothy Thompson: her deepening estrangement from her husband Sinclair Lewis and the feelings that she developed for one of her guests, Baroness Christa Hatvay (also known as Christa Winsloe), author of a book titled Mädchen in Uniform, which developed into a love affair.[12] 

Photos from this holiday party can be found in Sheean’s book and in Dorothy Thompson’s papers housed at Syracuse University. Included among them are those of the five young children at the party, including Denis. On December 24, 2012, the day before the eightieth anniversary of the party, I sent an email to Denis to ask him if he had any recollections of it. He replied that he had some, but they were vague: “The Fodors put up at our accustomed hostelry, the burgherly Hotel St. Johann. The others stayed at the Panhans, a modern (for the times) luxury hotel. One or others may even have stayed at the very conservative and luxurious Südbahn Grand Hotel. For skiers there was one slope that had a rope-lift, a novelty at the time, and another slope that had none. I used the slope that had none (neither my father nor mother skied). Meetings were over meals and cocktails. Buses, belonging to the postal service, had skis attached to their front wheels and chains at the rear, took care of the to-ing and fro-ing.” He later added, “I seem to remember a large Christmas tree, very silvery, and boxes etc…..people… and Red Lewis sitting there smiling benignly…It was in a house, not a hotel or hotel room. No Dorothy, no Michael.”

Children at Semmering, 1932
Denis Fodor is standing. Sitting by him is Michael Lewis.


Later I sent him two photos of the five young children at the event and asked him to point himself out in the photos. He confirmed that he is the only kid standing in the first picture, and the young boy near him was Michael Lewis. In the second picture, he is sitting, and Michael Lewis is standing. Denis commented, “I used to dress well back then.”

Children at Semmering, 1932
Denis Fodor is sitting. Michael Lewis is standing.


Fodor and Fulbright

Denis was only one year old when J. W. Fulbright showed up in Vienna, so he had no memories of him. However, he heard his father talk about Fulbright. I asked him what he recalled his father saying, and he replied that M. W. Fodor had liked Fulbright from the start. He was impressed and amused by him. Then he repeated a story about Fulbright that he heard from his father: 

In Vienna, it was custom before Christmas for different charities to collect donations from people for "Winterhilfe" -- literally winter help. One day, he and Fodor were together at a place selling dairy products and were chatting when a person soliciting contributions for the Nazi Winterhilfe campaign came into the room and walked up to Fulbright to ask for a donation. Fulbright looked at the guy then turned to Fodor for help figuring out who was soliciting the donation, asking, "What domination is this?"

Denis Fodor and Kim Philby

Denis lived in Beirut for more than a year in 1958 and 1959, and he recalled that his residence was an apartment had an angled view of the campus of the American University of Beirut and another angled view of Beirut`s main lighthouse. Among Denis’s acquaintances in Beirut was Kim Philby, who was a journalist working for the Economist. According to Denis, Philby used to hang out at the Hotel Normandie, just off the Corniche, and “after stealing the wife of Sam Pope Brewer, the Beirut bureau chief of the New York Times,” he took an apartment not far from there. Denis saw him daily and went to his house many times. In fact, according to Denis, Philby was good friends with all the Americans there. Philby stayed in Lebanon until January 1963, when he flew to Moscow as evidence was mounting that he had been an important spy for the Soviet Union. Before then, according to Denis, he and Philby’s other past and present colleagues did not know that he was a spy.[13]

Denis recalled that his father had known Philby when, as a young man, he “pitched up in Vienna in female company.” Philby connected with the Anglo-American press corps in Vienna because of his connections with a member of the British press corps there.[14] During his time in Vienna, according to Denis, “He seems to have been an overt far-leftist… and only turned surreptitious later.” Denis also noted that “ingenues of the Liberal flavor” who were visiting Vienna, as well as other visitors with suitable recommendations, often ended up “being hand-held by my father.” 

M.W. Fodor From His Son’s Perspective

When you read about someone’s life, it is important not only to find out about what they did but also get a sense of what they were like and what motivated them. We know that many of Fodor’s friends thought highly of him, but it is also valuable to see him through his son's eyes. Here are some of Denis’s observations about his father:

         My father was gregarious. Before and during World War I, he had the money to circulate among the haute monde. 

My father was never a writer as such. He was a Central European intellectual of a liberal orientation and had the kind of gregarious personality that could land him all kinds of interesting jobs. He was a wonderful moderate man and a pacifist. 

[My father] deserved to be rated an intellectual…He had a higher education not only in engineering but also in the humanities. 

The significance of John Hamilton [whom M.W. Fodor said was his mentor] to my father was as a teacher of the craft, not of the flow of history. My father was anything but a journalist by education (though my grandfather (part-) owned two newspapers, one in Budapest the other in Vienna). It was Hamilton, something of an intellectual, but mainly just a Manchester Guardian hand, who showed my father how to make his special kind of savvy of use to the editorial desks in Manchester. My father was grateful to him for this, but he also respected him for the acuity of his judgment of the situation as it developed in Berlin in the twenties.”  

As the only correspondent on the Guardian’s staff who was not Anglophone, the copy-desk editing that my father required was done in Manchester….My father filed daily by dictation over the telephone and did so from our apartment’s library, not from a separate office. His daily beat consisted of meeting a circle of local personalities – officeholders, diplomats, scientists, musicians, artists, and so on. 

   My father:

*never wore a wedding ring.    

*never raised his voice, even when he was angry; in fact, he was seldom angry.  

*was not docile but was quiet, even-tempered.

*had a strong sense of history.

*understood and wrote about leaders as people.

*was not a monarchist but thought the breakup of the empire was a mistake. 

*did not like Dollfuss very much. (Contrary to my impression based on his book, South of Hitler)

 

In one email, Denis told me, “I always enjoy opportunities to talk about my father, who remains to me dearly memorable.”  I am glad that I had the opportunity to meet Denis Fodor, not only to learn more about his father and but also to learn more about his remarkable life.   

--------------------------

Footnotes:

[1] Fran Baker. 2016. South of Hitler: Marcel W. Fodor and the Manchester Guardian, August 12, The John Rylands Library Special Collections Blog, accessed at https://rylandscollections.com/2016/08/12/south-of-hitler-marcel-w-fodor-and-the-manchester-guardian/

Fabienne Gouverneur. 2019. Personal, Confidential: Mike W. Fodor als Netzwerker und Kulturmittler. New Academic Press, Vienna.   The dissertation on which the book is based can be accessed at this web site: https://www.andrassyuni.eu/pubfile/de-213-dissertationfabiennegouverneur2016-doi.pdf

Dan Durning. 2011. Marcel W. Fodor, Foreign Correspondent  

https://www.scribd.com/document/65502558/Marcel-W-Fodor-Foreign-Correspondent 

[2] See July 15-17, 1927: Days of Horror in Vienna, Austria (blog entry). https://www.eclecticatbest.com/2012/01/july-15-17-1927-days-of-horror-in.html 

[3] Finding M. W. Fodor: Fulbright, Vienna, and Me (blog entry). https://www.eclecticatbest.com/2011/09/finding-m-w-fodor-fulbright-vienna-and.html 

[4] See Austria’s Fatherland Front, 1933-1938 (blog entry). https://www.eclecticatbest.com/2011/08/austrias-fatherland-front-1933-1938.html 

The Assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, July 25, 1934 (blog entry).  https://www.eclecticatbest.com/2011/08/assassination-of-engelbert-dollfuss.html 

[5] “Lake Crash Kills Flier in Snow Storm.” 1943. Chicago Sun, April 14, p. 1.

[6] A Great Night at the Café Louvre in Vienna (blog entry). https://www.eclecticatbest.com/2012/02/great-night-at-cafe-louvre-in-vienna.html 

[7] Edwards, John Carver. 1982. “Bob Best Considered: An Expatriate's Long Road to Treason.” North Dakota Quarterly, Winter, 50 (1): 73-90 and “Worst Best.” 1943. Time, February 15. [About journalist Robert Best]  

[8] John Gunther. 1964. The Lost City. Harper & Row. 

[9] William L. Shirer. 1950. The Traitor. Farrar, Straus, & Co. 

[10] Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis Celebrate Christman in Semmering (Austria), 1932 (blog entry). https://www.eclecticatbest.com/2012/12/dorothy-thompson-and-sinclair-lewis.html 

[11] Marion Sander. 1973. Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time. Houghton Mifflin Co. p. 179. 

[11] Vincent Sheean. 1963. Dorothy and Red. Houghton Mifflin Co., p. 213. 

[12] See Peter Kurth. 1990. American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson. Little, Brown and Company. 

[13] Robert Littell. 2012. Young Philby. Thomas Dunn Books. (Philby’s time in Vienna is included in the roman a clef.)

[14] The reporter was G.E.R. Geyde. His powerful account of the 1934 civil war is in chapter 9 of his book (p. 104), Betrayal in Central Europe in which he mentions, but not by name, a young Englishman who was helping some threatened social democrats escape capture. The young man was Philby, who had recently signed on with Moscow as a spy. G.E.R. Geyde. 1939. Betrayal in Central Europe, Harper & Brothers Publishers. Also, see Littell 2012, p. 53.

 

Friday, November 28, 2014

Hungarian Apache in a Budapest Wurtsel: Dorothy Thompson Talks to Ferenc Molnár about Liliom and Life

In late 1921, Dorothy Thompson, a fledgling reporter for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, visited Ferenc (Franz) Molnár, the famous Hungarian playwright, at his Budapest apartment. She went there with her good friend Josef Bard (whom she married in 1923 and from whom she was divorced in 1927), a Hungarian intellectual who knew Molnár. Because Molnár did not speak English and Thompson did not speak Hungarian, Bard translated the conversation.
Page 1 of Thompson's manuscript

Her story about the interview was published in the Ledger, illustrated by Viennese artist Alfred Gerstenbrand. Although I have not seen the published article, I have read a carbon copy of the typed manuscript, dated December 6, 1921, that she submitted to her newspaper.[1] Its title is “A LITTLE FLAT – A STRONG COGNAC – A GOOD BLACK COFFEE.” The subtitle is “Franz Molnar, Author of the New York Success, “Liliom”, Explains Why He Prefers to Remain in Budapest, and Talks About Life, Art, and His Desires.”

Reading the manuscript, I was both puzzled and intrigued by this early paragraph that described the play that had brought Molnár renown the previous year in New York City:

[Molnár] took a Budapest apache for his hero, and the Budapest Coney-Island for his scene, and from such stuff as these fashioned “Liliom,” a play which charmed and provoked New York last year as no play presented in many seasons has done, and which was the most brilliant success in the New York Theater Guild’s career of successes. “Liliom” is Budapest in the old days before the war; “Liliom” is the wurtsel at the height of its shrieking glory.

This paragraph made me curious not only about the play, Liliom, but also what a “wurtsel” and a “Budapest apache” were.  In addition, after reading Thompson’s description of her talk with Molnár, I wanted to know more about him and his life.

A Wurtsel?

First, what the heck is a “wurtsel”?  As far as I can tell, the word does not exist in formal German or Hungarian or English. I thought that perhaps Thompson meant to use the word “würstel,” which means frankfurter in Italian and sausage in Austria (e.g. bratwurst, currywurst, blutwurst) or the German word “wurzel,” which means root (the pronunciation of “z” and “ts” are similar).  However, she clearly did not mean “sausage” or “root” in the context of the word’s use. 
Re-reading her article, I noted that she began it by describing, lyrically, a walk through a rather desolate amusement park (the setting for much of Liliom) on her way to meet Molnár:

The Budapest amusement park has fallen upon evil days. Scenic railways, roller coasters, and ferris wheels, shrouded in canvass, look like the distorted ghosts of dead Hilarity. The cheerful roar of the wheels and the wheedling cries of the Barkers are almost stilled. Here and there a weary spieler drones out the merits of his attractions to a thin sprinkling of sausage-eating servant girls and loud-laughed factory hands. But the amusement park has followed the decline of the city….

Then she wrote, “...the Budapest wurtsel is silent and the voice of the spieler is no longer heard in the land….” In this context, it became clear that she used “wurtsel” as slang for “amusement park.” I can find no other uses of the word with this meaning through a google search or a search of the assorted English language newspapers in the newspapers.com data base. So either the use of this slang word was rare or was limited to Europe.  Perhaps she made it up.

Budapest Apache

The meaning of “Budapest apache” was easier to discover. Obviously the word “apache” did not refer to a member of the Native American Apache tribe. Instead the word was borrowed from the French who used it to refer to members of criminal street gangs in Paris beginning in the 1890s. Thompson was likely acquainted with the word because she lived in Paris for a few months in 1920 when some remnants of the gangs were still around. 
More about the French apaches can be found in a 2014 book, The Golden Moments in Paris: A Guide to the Paris of the 1920s, by John Baxter.  This engaging book contains a chapter titled “Wild in the Streets, Les Apaches.”  According to Baxter, “For the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th , gangs of young apaches (pronounced “arpash”) terrorized working-class Paris, particularly the districts of Montmartre and Belleville….Apaches combined in gangs with flamboyant names, each advertising its mastery of a particular of turf: the Tattooed of Ivry or the Beauty Marks of St. Ouen.”

He continued, “Their specialty was street robbery, for which they split into small groups. While two kept watch, one would throttle the victim from behind and another rifled his pockets.”

Describing the apaches, he wrote:

The uniform of the Parisian apaches featured [a] …tight jacket, trousers, and loose cloth cap … [with] a horizontally striped sailor’s jersey and a gold-fringed crimson sash, which could be wrapped around the hand in a knife fight or tied on the face as a mask. Tight shoes of yellow leather completed the outfit—not forgetting the important accessory, a short wooden-handled knife. …

Apache women, known as lamfe’, wore gaudy blouses brightly colored aprons over their dresses, and a black velvet ribbon around their throats. They took great trouble with their hair, but wore no hats. At a time when respectable women never went outdoors bareheaded, this omission flagrantly announced their renegade status.[2]

After these descriptions, Baxter wryly observed, “Apache gangs would have been more dangerous had they not wasted so much time and effort on their wardrobes and on fighting bloody turf wars.”

From Baxter’s chapter, a vivid picture of an “apache” emerges and clearly Thompson is labeling Liliom, the lead male character in Molnár’s play named after him as an Apache, a charming, womanizing, petty criminal. When the play begins Liliom is a barker in a Budapest wurtsel and, in most productions of the play, is dressed in attire resembling a Paris Apache.

Molnár’s Liliom

Liliom followed Molnár’s 1907 play, The Devil, which was a big hit in Budapest and by 1908 it was popular in New York city where four theater companies were simultaneously performing the play, two in English, one in German, and one in Yiddish.[3]  He wrote Liliom in three weeks, sitting in Budapest’s New York Café, where he was a regular. He was dismayed when in 1909 Liliom was a critical and commercial failure in Hungary.   

As explained by the New Yorker:

The playgoers came expecting to laugh. In the same theatre Molnar had diverted them with farces like The Lawyer, his first play and with sex comedies like The Devil, which had been a resounding international success, Liliom permitted them to laugh only occasionally and wryly. Moreover, the hero had the effrontery to die in the fifth scene and saunter up to Heaven. To kill off an actor might be all right in the Burgtheater in Vienna, where acute morality was a staple; in a place like the Gaiety [Theater], it was bad form.[4] 
 
Movie Poster for Fritz Lang
version of Liliom, 1934
http://www.cinemapassion.com/
affiche-film-7097.html
The play is a strange one and was a departure from his previous witty, ironic, and often cynical stories that were so popular. Its plot is summarized in Wikipedia as follows:

The play takes place partly in Budapest, Hungary, and partly in a waiting area just outside Heaven. The story concerns Liliom, a tough, cocky carousel barker who falls in love with Julie, a young woman who works as a maid. When both lose their jobs, Liliom begins mistreating Julie out of bitterness — even slapping her once — although he loves her. When she discovers she is pregnant, he is deliriously happy, but, unbeknownst to Julie, he agrees to participate with his friend Ficsúr, a criminal, in a hold-up to obtain money to provide for the child. Liliom is unwilling to leave Julie and return to his jealous former employer, the carousel owner Mrs. Muskat, and feels that the robbery is his only way left to obtain financial security. The hold-up is a disaster, but Ficsúr escapes, and Liliom kills himself to avoid capture. He is sent to a fiery place, presumably Purgatory. Sixteen years later, he is allowed to return to Earth for one day to do a good deed for his now teenage daughter, Louise, whom he has never met. If he succeeds, he will be allowed to enter Heaven. He fails in the attempt, and is presumably sent to Hell. The ending, though, focuses on Julie, who obviously remembers Liliom fondly.[5]


Liliom, the “Budapest apache,” is a smooth talking, seducing tough guy with little refinement. He is largely an unsavory person, though he has some good characteristics beneath his rough exterior. With his personality and background, it is not too much of a surprise when he decides to take part in a robbery.
Scene from a Budapest Production of Liliom
http://www.guidetomusicaltheatre.com/
biographies/molnar.htm

Despite its failure in 1909, Liliom was, in English translation, a major success on Broadway in 1921. In the following years, it became enormously popular and could frequently be seen in stage productions in the major capitals and small regional theaters of the world. It still can be viewed today. In February 2014, Liliom was produced by the Beautiful Soup Theater in Broadway in New York City (see http://www.beautifulsouptheatercollective.org/liliom-photos.html ) and when I was in Vienna in September, the city’s premier theater, the Burgtheater, was performing the play. In January 2015, the Hamburg Ballet will be staging a ballet version of Liliom that it premiered in 2013 (see  http://www.hamburgballett.de/e/_liliom.htm) .
The stage play was the basis for several movie versions of the story. Probably the most successful was produced by Fritz Lang in 1934 in France, starring Charles Boyer.

Although both Puccini and Gershwin wanted to use the play as the libretto for an operetta, Molnár refused both permission to do so.  Later, however, he allowed Rogers and Hammerstein to adapt his play as the basis for a new musical, Carousel.  This 1945 hit play was later made into a movie. Both the Liliom and Carousel are theater and movie classics.

The Devils, The Guardsman, The Swan, and Liliom were four of Molnár’s most successful plays; his forty or so other plays had different degrees of success. The New Yorker noted in 1946 that 18 of his plays had been performed on Broadway, and it compared him to playwrights George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, and Eugene O’Neill.[6]  A 1931 study by the New York Public Library showed that he “is the most popular of present-day European dramatists."[7]  To get a taste of Molnár’s wit and style, read his one-act play, A Matter of Husbands, here:


Thompson Talks to Molnár

When Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961] interviewed Molnár (1878 – 1952), she was 28 years old and he was 43. While she was still in the first year of her first full-time job as a journalist, he had been famous in Central Europe for a couple of decades as a reporter, newspaper essayist, war correspondent, author, and playwright. He was a highly visible celebrity in Budapest, famed for heading “Molnár’s Gang,” also known as the “New York Crowd,” a group of a dozen or more prominent composers, painters, and writers, who met nightly at the New York Café where Molnár exercised his coffee house wit. They usually departed for home only when the sun came up.[8]
 
Dorothy Thompson in 1920
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Thompson
According to Thompson’s article, Molnár lived in a “dilapidated old apartment building" on a rough street in Budapest.  As Thompson and Bard climbed the dark stairs and walked the corridors, they passed “unkempt inhabitants” of the building who had parcels of food under their arms. Also, they sniffed the scent of gulyas. As they neared the top floor, Dorothy grumbled to Josef: “if Molnar must live in this God-forsaken town, why in a tenement?”

(The answer was simple. Molnár had selected this out-of-the-way apartment for the purpose of having a place where he could bring a young actress he was pursuing without attracting attention:

In his overoptimistic youth, Molnár had fallen wildly in love with a well-known actress. Without being unduly encouraged, he confidently set about finding a rendezvous, so that, when the moment came, he would be prepared. He went to Buda (Budapest’s “old town”) and there, on a dark alley, he found that appeared to be the ideal place. It was a noisy, dingy two-room flat, but since it was on the dark alley, one could get in or out of it without being seen. Molnár engaged this flat at once. The rendezvous never materialized, but he lived in the flat for twenty-two years.[9]

Even if Thompson had known this, and perhaps she was told by her Budapest friend, she likely would not have reported it.)
In her article, Thompson introduced Molnár to readers in America as an apparently quaint and eccentric man. Dorothy described Molnár as short and compact, “as if his body had been pushed together.” He had a “fattish smooth face” and “evenly grayed hair and snub nose” that gave the face a “blond and babyish look, in spite of the black eyes under heavy brows.” As was his habit, he wore a monocle and was “impeccably dressed.”  In him was the hint of the dandy.

Having heard that Molnár very rarely left Budapest, Thompson asked him why and whether the city gave him all he wanted from life. His reply was eloquent:

Because I love Budapest... and I ask very little of life. What I like is a small flat ... a little tavern ... a good pen ... a nice stove ... a good black coffee, and a strong cognac... a good light lamp ... and the stillness of the night ... and I like to direct the rehearsals of my plays. The last I like best of all.

The conversation concluded with Molnár telling Thompson that he wanted always to stay in Budapest where he was born “to rehearse my plays in the theater which I have come to feel as my own; constantly to create new roles for the actor and actresses whom I understand and love – roles which will discover for them new powers and clothe them in new brilliancies.”  In the last sentence of her article, Thompson predicted that Molnár would never visit the United States.

Someone reading Thompson’s article likely would find Molnár to be an apparently lovable Central European, perhaps a little stuffy, an intellectual with some strange habits. Such a picture was seriously incomplete. Another Molnár was revealed to American readers in the next few years when he became an infamous celebrity whose personal life was tainted with scandal.

Molnar the Apache

Molnár, the eccentric genius, shared some of Liliom’s characteristics. He was a charming, egocentric, larger-than-life man, a bit of a hustler and faithless, but also apparently loveable. Just as he shared some of Lilion’s characteristics, he had a sin in common with him: No long after he married Margit Veszi, his first wife, in 1907, he hit her while she was pregnant.  

According to different observers, and many of his friends, Liliom was for Molnár “at once his confession, his defence and his justification” for what he did to his first wife.[10]. According to the New Yorker, Molnár’s friends said that Liliom is Molnár.[11]
Margit Vesci
http://www.geni.com/people/Margit-Moln
%C3%A1r/6000000016252966306

Certainly his courting of three women who became his wives and his three marriages were unusual. All three were distinguished women. He pursued the first, Veszi (1885-1961), for seven years. When her father did not give permission for her to marry Molnár in 1900, she moved to Paris and he soon followed. She was, by all accounts, an extraordinary young woman. Vanity Fair described her as “miraculously gifted …[with] subtle intelligence, erudition unique among women, great charm of manner, and a rare, fragile beauty.”[12] A 1925 newspaper article wrote about her gifts as journalist and poet, noting “She was the center of Budapest intelligentsia.”[13]  

After finally marrying her, they stayed together only a few weeks before he hit her and she sued for divorce. When their daughter was born, they remarried for a while, but again divorced.

His second wife, Sari Fedak (1879-1955), was “the most celebrated operetta diva in Budapest.”[14] They had known each other as children, then had been a couple for almost eight years when they married in October 1922, within a year after his interview with Thompson.
Sari Fedak
http://cultura.hu/kultura/a-kis-balvanydonto-fedak-sari/

The following year, he fell for a young actress, Lili Darvas (1902-1974), who was half his age. The author of a 1925 article published in an Ohio newspaper, wrote “she is a thousand times more beautiful than Sari Fedak; she is one of the most beautiful creatures imaginable.”[15]  In another article, she was called “an angel-faced actress, considered by many the most beautiful woman in Hungary.”[16] She was an actress in one of Molnár’s plays when “after a half hours tempestuous wooing [Molnár] convinced [her] to forget her promise to her sweetheart and marry [him] as soon as he divorced his wife."[17]   

A messy divorce followed as Molnár tried to stop his wife from getting a large divorce settlement; she wanted $30,000, he offered $15,000. After sensational charges in his lawsuit against her (he accused her of having had 42 lovers while they were together), she responded menacingly and loudly. Molnár avoided a nasty trial (more than 300 witness had been scheduled) by agreeing to pay $30,000.

The divorce was a sensation in Hungary and of great interest in the rest of Europe. It also was covered by many newspapers in the United States.
The marriage to Darvas lasted, though most of the time was spent living apart. After leaving Europe in the 1930s, she became a successful stage and scene actress in the United States. Perhaps he was lucky to rid himself of Fedak who became a strong Nazi supporter.  

During the 1920s, Molnár’s notoriety was spread in the United States in articles with headlines worthy of an Apache:  “Playwright’s Plots Outdone by Their Real Romances:…Franz Molnár Wins in Just Thirty Minutes a Substitute for the Love Mate He Was So Happy With – Until They Married,” "Victim of his Own Love Plot,” and “Merry Mr. Molnar’s Newest Rows With the Ladies: Mystery of the Backstage Slaps, the Insulted Beauty, and the Chubby Playwright’s Stormy Romances and Angry Wives.[18]
 
Portsmouth Daily Times, Oct. 3, 1925

The Rest of the Story

Molnár had his celebrity, but got caught up like everyone else in the sweep of history in the 30s. As a Jew, he had to leave Hungary in 1937 because of the fascist tide there. After spending time in Venice and Zurich, he realized that he needed to leave Europe and moved to New York City, arriving in January 1940, where he was given refuge. His wife, with whom he did not live, had moved to the U.S. before he did.   
Molnar with Ingrid Bergman who was starring in the 1940 Broadway rival of Liliom
New York Times, January 23, 2009, p. C1
Fortunately for Molnár, fame and royalties from Liliom and his many other successful plays made him rich. He could afford to live in the New York City Plaza Hotel the rest of his life, spending his summers in a “modest lodge” in Montauk Point. He ate most of his meals at a small delicatessen at Fifty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, and there he met often with members of the Hungarian émigré community, many of whom had been part of his “New York Crowd” in Budapest. A 1946 profile of Molnár noted that he rarely went more than a few blocks from his hotel.[19] 

In 1946, when the three-part New Yorker profile of him was published, Molnár’s first wife was in living in Hollywood where she was “a successful film writer.” His third wife, to whom he was still amiably married but with whom he did not live, was a theater actress who that year was playing the Queen in “Maurice Evan’s production of Hamlet." His second wife, the former Hungarian stage star with great legs, was a prisoner in Hungary for Nazi propaganda broadcasts she made from Vienna.[20]

Dorothy Thompson left Vienna in 1925 to head the Philadelphia Public Ledger’s bureau in Berlin; in 1927 she quit her job to marry famed writer Sinclair Lewis and in the late 1930s she became a famous nationally syndicated columnist read three times a week by millions of Americans. Although Molnár lived in New York City from 1940 to 1952 and Dorothy Thompson spent several months there every year during this time, there is no evidence in her archives that she again met Molnár or communicated with him.


Notes:

[1] The manuscript is in the Dorothy Thompson Papers. Special Collections Research Center. Syracuse University.

[2] John Baxter. 2014. The Golden Moments in Paris: A Guide to the Paris of the 1920s, Museyon Inc. (pp. 21-22)

[3] S.N. Behrman. 1946. Profiles. Ferenc Molnar. I - Ah, Budapesti. The New Yorker. May 25, p 28

[4] S.N. Behrman. 1946. Profiles. Ferenc Molnar. II -  The Red Wig. The New Yorker. June 1, 1946 p 32


[6] The New Yorker, May 25, 1946, p. 28. See note 3.   

[7] Looking into the reasons for Molnar’s American popularity. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Nov. 22, 1931, p. 57. (accessed on Newspapers.com)

[8] The New Yorker, May 25, 1946, p. 30-31. See note 3. Also seen The New Yorker, June 8, 1946, p. 34..

[9] S.N. Behrman. 1946. Profiles. Ferenc Molnar. III - Scene: A Room at the Plaza. The New Yorker, June 8, p. 36 

[10] Joseph Szebenyei. 1923. Franz Molnar: A Personal Study. Vanity Fair. January, Vol. 19, p.38

[11] The New Yorker, June 1, 1946, p. 32. See note 4.  

[12] Vanity Fair, 1923. See note 10.

[13] Victim of his own Love Plot. Zanesville Times Signal Sun, Nov 8, 1925. (Accessed on Newspapers.com)

[14] Zanesville Times Signal Sun. See note 13.  According to Vanity Fair (see note 10), she was “The most celebrated and popular operetta singer of the land”. A 1930 newspaper article described her as still Hungary’s “most popular music star” though “like the French Mistinguitt, she is over fifty.” See Merry Mr. Molnar’s Newest Rows with the Ladies. Hamilton Evening Journal, November 29, 1930.

[15] Zanesville Times Signal Sun. See note 13.

[16] Mix-up of the Married Molnars and Lovely “Angel Face”. Zanesville Times Signal Sun, August 23, 1925, p. 28. (Accessed on Newspapers.com)

[17] Playwrights Plots Outdone by their Real Romances. The Ogden Standard-Examiner, September 28, 1924. (Accessed on Newspapers.com)

[18] The Ogden Standard-Examiner (see Note 17), Zanesville Times Signal Sun (see note 13) and Hamilton [Ohio] Evening Journal (see note 14).

[19] The New Yorker, June 8, 1946, p. 32. See note 9.

[20] The New Yorker, June 8, 1946, p. 46. See note 9.