William R. Katovsky: Klaus Kinski's FINAL INTERVIEW A PERSONAL TRIBUTE Seite 2/6 But in the last ten years, Kinski opted for a Garbo-like existence, living alone with his German shepherd Apollo on 40 acres untamed land outside Lagunitas. He lives there, in an unheated cabin, to be close his 16-year-old son, Nanhoi, who lives with Kinski's third ex-wife in nearby Fort KnolIs. Kinski deliberately shied away from the media, whom in his 1988 autobiography All I Need Is Love, he called, "... freaks... These vultures are trying to feed off me. Mad masturbators, thieves, plunderers. They want to write books about me. Everything I say to them is misunderstood. They're all nuts. I have the nauseating suspicion that human society wants w accept me into its fold." So, like a bird of prey, I, too hovered close to the legend of Kinski, hoping to secure an Interview with him when I read in a Herb Caen column that he had recently attended a book party for Norman Mailer at Tosca's. The item mentioned that he lived in Ross. I tried calling information; his number was unlisted. No surprise there. I then wrote to him in care of his movie agent, Paul Kohner Agency in Los Angeles. I addressed the letter to a Mr. Kinski. I briefly stated the purpose of my contacting him. I wanted to meet him. I wanted to profile him. I wanted to discuss his autobiography, which his publisher Random House had yanked off the market. I left the letter purposefully vague and open-ended, because I was not sure how he would respond to someone disturbing his privacy. I frankly did not expect to hear from him. One week later, I did. He called me at home. He had obtained my phone number from the FRISKO office. A voice, thick and foreign and possibly German, asked for a Mr. Katovsky. He said it was Klaus. I had difficulty placing a Klaus in my life; I assumed it was a wrong number. He then said loudly, "IT'S KLAUS KINSKI!" Startled, I asked for his number and told him I'd call him right back. I needed a moment to regroup and plot my conversational strategy. We talked non-stop for almost two hours. However, it would be more exact to say that it was Kinski who talked for most of the time. He was a whitewater rush of dammed-up exhortations, jeremiads, and rantings. He was relentless, pushing forward insights and observations that needed to take bloom in another person's mind. Assigned the role of sympathetic listener, I was glad to have passed his audition. Kinski's chief gripe was the sorry condition of American publishing, which he claimed was plagued by commercialism and censorship. "It's shit, It's fucked," he hollered repeatedly into the phone; in fact, almost every other sentence was punctuated by a fiercely spoken obscenity. Random House was the primary villain for banning his book. A best-seller in Europe for years, All I Need Is Love is a brutally honest memoir written in the raw tradition of Genet. It charts the turbulent circumstances of Kinski's varied life, beginning with his poverty-stricken childhood in Germany when he and his family of six were forced to live in an unheated, toilet-less room while they stole food to survive. His mother eventually shunted him off to a children's welfare home. When WWII broke out, he enlisted at the age of 16, but was wounded in one of his first battles and spent the remainder of the war in a British POW camp. He gravitated to the stage and theatre after the war, and quickly developed a cabaret following as an accomplished Shakespearean monologist. Before long, he was acting in movies - 180 of them over his 30-year film career. ("I work only for money," he said, which explains why he starred in so many low-budget scare-fi flicks and Spaghetti Westerns. "If you always need money like I do, then you can't be selective about movies. They're all just one big heap of nonsense." © 1992 by William R. Katovsky and Frisko Magazine

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