Hooray For Me!

A Column by Captain Spaulding

(Late 2000 early 2001)

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

Note : This came from a website that I can no longer find.