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 Hooray For Me!
A Column by Captain Spaulding
THE
KLEMPERER'S NEW CLOSE
I have come to
sing the praises of the newly-departed dead. Hail
and farewell, Werner Klemperer!
Why, you may
ask, make such a fuss over the curtain ringing
down on a character actor from a middling sixties
sitcom? It's all in the details. Klemperer was
not your normal piece of moderately-famous obit
fodder. Read between the lines of the man's
career bio, and there's actually a few lessons to
be learned about the actor's lot in life. Not
that Werner Klemperer is, or was, a figure of
pity, mind you. Unless you're one of the Diff'rent
Strokes kids, it's hard to garner any
sympathy when you're a beloved (or semi-beloved)
former television actor. But sometimes life has a
way of fulfilling your dreams while putting a
bittersweet twist on what it is that you asked
for.
Klemperer was
born in 1920 in Cologne, Germany as the son of
one of the biggest celebrities of that time and
place. His father was the legendary conductor
Otto Klemperer, one of the most illustrious
classical music figures of the twentieth century.
His mother was an opera singer. Theirs was an
interesting relationship for that era; she was
Lutheran and he was Jewish, but he converted to
Catholicism shortly before the Nazi takeover of
Germany in 1933. Of course, Klemperer's
conversion mattered not one whit to the
stormtroopers, so he fled to the United States
that year. Once he had secured a position with
the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he sent for his
wife and kids. The Klemperers became naturalized
American citizens.
 Young Werner naturally
gravitated to classical music, and he was trained
from an early age on piano, trumpet, and violin.
But his love was for the theater. He studied at
the Pasadena Playhouse in the early forties
before enlisting in the Army. He spent the
balance of World War Two serving in a Special
Services unit led by famed Anglo-American actor
Maurice Evans (best known to the general public
as Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes). Evans' unit toured
bases in the South Pacific, doing Hamlet
for GIs, sailors, marines, and airmen as sort of
the military's highbrow change-of-pace from Bob
Hope and his USO showgirls. It's easy to picture
the young Klemperer doing a bang-up Polonius
onstage in some godforsaken Solomon Islands fuel
depot; he had the imperious bearing and the
Teutonic accent, and he was already going bald in
his early twenties.
After the war he
found himself typecast. Moving from one stage
production to another, he invariably found
himself stuck in the role of the older
continental gentleman, due to his baldness and
his accent.  Seeking to diversify his
appeal, he learned to suppress the accent. He
began to get work as a character actor in films;
he did nine of them between 1956 and 1958,
including Hitchcock's The Wrong Man. He
was never a star, but at least he was playing a
broad range of characters. But the film work
dried up for him; he didn't appear onscreen at
all in '59 and '60.
Around that time
the world's most notorious surviving Nazi,
Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann, was captured
by the Israeli Mossad in Argentina and brought
back to Tel Aviv to stand trial for crimes
against humanity. Hollywood wanted to put out a
quickie film "grabbed from the
headlines", as the expression goes, about
the Eichmann capture. Klemperer bore a
resemblance to Eichmann, and he could do the
accent, so he ended up with the title role in
1961's Operation Eichmann. He then
followed it up by appearing as the venal Nazi
judge Emil Hahn in Judgment at Nuremberg
that same year. It was a fateful move for his
career. Now he was again typecast as a German --
but this time as an evil Nazi or Communist
functionary. His subsequent movie and television
roles would be in that vein.
Oddly enough,
however, the role for which he is best-known is a
comic riff on his latter-day stock character.
That role, of course, was Colonel Wilhelm Klink
-- the self-proclaimed "Iron Eagle",
the vain bemonocled idiot who ran Stalag 13 and
was a dupe for Allied espionage and sabotage
operations in the hit TV series  Hogan's Heroes.
Despite the puzzling use of a WW2 German POW camp
as the setting of a comedy, the show was a hit.
It ran from 1965 to 1971, and it won Klemperer
four Emmy nominations and two Emmy Awards. Hogan's
Heroes continues to enjoy widespread
popularity around the world today in reruns, even
in the unlikely locale of Germany. And it forever
fixed Klemperer in the public eye as Klink; he
even reprised the role in a Simpsons
episode five years ago, playing Klink as Homer
Simpson's guardian angel in a hilarious take on It's
a Wonderful Life (Klink: "This is what
the world would have been like if you had never
been born." Homer: "Hee hee! Hey,
Colonel ... did you know that Kinch had a radio
in the coffeepot?" Klink: Ho-merrr!").
But for a lot of
people there was always a strange uneasiness
about Hogan's Heroes. Of course, there had
been comedic elements in the two most famous
films set in German POW camps, Stalag 17
and The Great Escape. But, unlike the TV
show, those movies also portrayed the wartime
death and the suffering of confinement that went
on in those camps. And in the minds of many
people, the difference between a POW camp and a
concentration camp wasn't so easily recognized.
The show was a light-hearted look at good-guy
saboteurs blowing up stuff in which the Germans
were more bumbling than evil, but the backdrop
was still a source of some controversy.
And it also put
the Hollywood tradition of ethnic typecasting in
a strange new light. In Hollywood, you
traditionally took whatever work you could get;
playing up your ancestry as a stereotype was the
price that you paid for appearing on the silver
screen or the boob tube. Asian-Americans
invariably wound up playing inscrutable Chinese
mandarins or homicidally-crazed Japanese
soldiers; Italian-Americans often wound up
portraying mafiosi; and blacks were usually
confined to roles as servants, sharecroppers, or
urban criminals. But the unsettling thing about
the recurring German characters in  Hogan's Heroes was
that they were played by Jewish actors. Besides
Klemperer, there was John Banner (Sgt. Schultz)
and Leon Askin (Gen. Burckhalter). Both of them
were Austrian Jews who were forced to flee the
Third Reich, and both of them lost most of their
families in the Holocaust. Even the lone American
to play a recurring role as a German officer,
Howard Caine (SS Major Hochstetter), was Jewish
(he was born Howard Cohen). The coincidence even
extended to the actors playing non-German
characters; Robert Clary, who played French
prisoner Louis LeBeau on the show, was an actual
Holocaust survivor. To this day Clary bears a
numbered tattoo on his arm given to him at the
Buchenwald death camp.
(Perhaps the
weirdest, most sinister fact surrounding this
light-hearted TV show is that the notorious Nazi
sex flick, Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS, was
filmed on the Hogan set several years
after the show was canceled.)
Although his
onscreen acting career was more or less frozen in
amber, Klemperer was able to achieve no small
amount of personal satisfaction as an actor,
post-Hogan. He did a few operatic roles,
appeared on Broadway in both Cabaret and Uncle
Vanya, and most notably carved out a name for
himself as a lecturer/narrator on the classical
music circuit. The latter was an especially
fruitful endeavor for Klemperer, allowing him to
merge his loves of the stage and the symphony. It
was essentially the work that he was still doing
before he contracted the cancer that killed him
this month.
But Klink was
the centerpiece of Klemperer's career as an actor
and public figure, and in interviews he continued
to maintain a certain defensiveness about the
character and the show. He maintained that he
only accepted the role on the condition that the
show's producers would ensure that Klink would
never succeed in his schemes. He steadfastly
maintained that there was nothing untoward about
using a German POW camp as a setting for comedy,
and that his Klink role was as valid as that
taken on by any actor. When asked once if the
show could succeed even in the PC-straitjacketed
era of the nineties, he said, "Of course! It
is a satire. You cannot take Hogan's Heroes,
look at it, and take it seriously. I mean, that's
ridiculous!"
He's right about
that, on the face of it. But sensitivities
abounded enough for the questions to persist, and
for Klemperer's response to them to take on a
somewhat peevish tone. His Jewish heritage, and
that of his fellow Hogan Germans, only
made the situation stranger. But it's possible in
the end to simply chalk it all up to the vagaries
of the actor's life. Actors have only a limited
amount of control over their professional lives;
they are at the mercy of whatever offers they
get. As high-minded as they sometimes get about
the sociological or historical importance of
their roles, in the end the work's the thing for
an actor.
 But perhaps that's the
strangest thing of them all. Klemperer is the
classic example of an actor trapped by who he was
offstage. As an immigrant, he was forever being
cast by his accent. When he discarded it, he
basically gave himself the freedom to sink into
obscurity and insecurity. Only when he reassumed
his alien identity was he able to carve out a
niche for himself in the public consciousness. To
be an actor is to adopt a life where one can take
on the guise of one different person after
another. But if one is continually compelled to
take on the guise of a caricature of one's
discarded ethnic identity, does the satisfaction
for a job well done still remain? I suppose that
we should look at the Emmys and at the many
laughs Klink has provided for millions over the
years, and hope that for Werner Klemperer the
answer was "yes".
CAPTAIN
SPAULDING
CAPTAIN SPAULDING
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