William R. Katovsky:
Klaus Kinski's FINAL INTERVIEW

A PERSONAL TRIBUTE

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Besides acting, his life-long obsession was sex - and this is where his autobiography takes a lusty turn to Henry Milleresque candor about women and what he liked doing to them. "I drag every woman I can grab into my bed," he wrote, "salesgirls, waitresses, maids, married women, mothers, American tourists, students, a Bedouin woman, all the girls in the coffee houses who smile at me as I pass by." Passage after passage describes these quick, sometimes faceless encounters. He loved to screw. Such bluntness about his many conquests made Random House lawyers nervous. The memoir was pulled from bookshelves right after it was published because they were worried about libel suits. "They wanted to prove who I fucked," he said. "How should I know who I fucked and where I fucked thirty years ago? If I said I did it and I wrote about it, that's enough. I told them to FUCK 0FF!" What angered him even more was that 150 pages had been excised from the original German Version and that the book had gone to press without his final approval of galley proofs. Understandably after that experience, he kept the American media at bay, maintaining a virtually invisible presence. He even turned down a request by Vanity Fair to run an excerpt from the autobiography. "Why should I let them publish what they want, when all they will do is fuck me over?"
If Klaus had such a vitriolic attitude toward the press, l felt obliged to spring the following question: "Why did you call me?" His voice immediately changed, shifting from spleen and bile, to a soft, fey, childlike tone muted with wonderment and sensitivity. "When I got your letter and magazine, l had just finished my second book on the making of my movie Paganini. I was ready. My instincts said it was the right thing to do. It seemed okay, since you are the publisher and editor, and not some reporter who will get screwed over by someone else." He paused, as if waiting for my personal consent, that I would become the protector and guarantor of his interests, whatever they might be. I became an enlistee in Klaus's small, private army.
And private it was. He often went for weeks without speaking to anyone, severing his contact with the outside world. "I don't read newspapers," he boasted. "Or listen to the radio or television. I used to have an antenna on my roof, but I took it down. I don't need to know what is going on in the world." For example, one of Klaus's few friends in Marin, county Supervisor Gary Giacomini, had the privilege of breaking the news to him that the United States was at war with lraq - several months after the fact. (Klaus told me that he found out about the Gulf War when he "saw all these trucks driving around with tiny American flags attached to their antennas. So I asked Gary why." Hearing this, I thought of a Japanese soldier emerging from hiding on a Pacific Island years after the end of WWII.)
A recluse by his own choosing, Kinski now had a gnawing need to reenter the world he scorned. He was embarking on a new crusade - to publicize Paganini; which he wrote, directed and starred in. A brilliant, tormented Italian composer, who is considered to be the greatest violinist who ever lived, Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840) was the first of the concert hall Superstars. He was the Mick Jagger of his day. "There was a feeling of Satanism about this tall, dark, emaciated Italian," wrote the music historian Harold Schonberg, "who could do undreamed-of things on his Guarnerius. Musicians swarmed to his concerts trying to figure out how he achieved his effects. The public also flocked, and many of the more superstitious listeners believed him in league with the Devil. Paganini did nothing to dispel the notion. A great showman, he played up the diabolical quality of his concerts and did everything but come on stage wrapped in a blue flame. He gave saturnalia rather than concerts. One of his tricks was to break a string in the middle of a composition and continue to the end on three strings. Or he would produce a pair of scissors, cut three of the strings, and perform mirades on the G string alone."

© 1992 by William R. Katovsky and Frisko Magazine

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