January 22, 1966 - January 28, 1966

Pages 22-25

http://www.tvguide.com/

Out of Hogan's Heroes, the comedy hit dedicated to the unlikely proposition that POW camps are funny, have come some unlikely new stars - a gabby ex-disc jockey named Bob Crane who a few years ago might not have been expected to act his way out of a popcorn sack at his friendly neighborhood movie; and a balloon-jowled, hitherto obscure character actor named John Banner, whose spluttery Sergeant Schultz has made him suddenly famous. But in some ways the most unlikely star of all is a suave, bald-headed citizen of the world named Werner Klemperer.

Klemperer, as Klink, the heel-clicking German commandant of Hogan's Heroes, is the most resplendently pompous bit of monocle-bearing old Prussia to grace show business since Erich von Stroheim. If Klink is the season's most charming anachronism, Klemperer is not. Married to a beautiful American girl some 20 years his junior, the father of two small children, he has an outlook as contemporary as the Danish-modern furniture that fills his sleek Beverly Hills Home. Last fall, when CBS introduced the Heroes at a posh poolside press party in Palm Springs, some network wags decorated the commodes with Kink's portrait-in every suite except the Klemperers'. No one was more amused than Werner, even though he had to sneak next door to see one.

Not exactly what you might expect from the son of the world-famous conductor, Otto Klemperer, the towering, 6-foot-5inc genius of whom it has been said, "He enters the room as if he were carrying the podium," whose demands for musical perfection have become legendary throughout the world and whose reputation (he still conducts at the age of 80) persists as one of the two great Beethoven interpreters (the other: Toscanini) of modern times.

The Berlin of Werner's childhood was a far cry from Colonel Klink. It was the Berlin of the musical salon, of piano lessons with Karl Ulrich Schnabel (son of Arthur), of the Berlin State Opera which he and his younger sister, Lotte, knew only as "a place where my father functioned." The great and the near-great paraded through the Klemperer living room-Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, Schnabel, Stravinsky, even Cardinal Pacelli, later to become Pius XII, then frustrated composer himself. "The life of a child was difference then," Werner says. "We were brought in to say hello. Once I composed a little piece of music. My father was proud. He made me play it."

His mother was an opera singer. His father, originally a protégé of Gustav Mahler's, had renounced Judaism and become a Catholic. Werner was brought up a Catholic but later drifted away from the church. "IF I were dying, would I call a priest"? I don't know," he said recently. As a small child he was able to do something many of his elders found impossible-communicate with his father. Early every morning his father would take a bath, call his son in and they would talk. "He wanted to relate to me on a human level, something he never did when company was around."

In 1933, fleeing the Nazis, Otto went to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, sending for his family later. Werner and Lotte were met at the station by a chauffeured limousine, whisked off to a home in Bell-Air and instructed daily by a tutor who spoke no German. "It was like fairyland for a small boy." Not for Otto, however. The lotus eaters did not understand a man who cared nothing for symphony teas, only for music.

In 1939 Otto developed a brain tumor, an affliction which he eventually overcame by pure indestructibility of spirit. Proud of his father, Werner was also intimidated by him. How can you compete with a man who once fell asleep smoking, set himself afire, and still insisted on fulfilling a concert engagement despite half-healed skin-graft operations? Today Otto is still conducting the leading orchestras in Europe.

Werner's wife Susan, the daughter of a Seattle doctor, is about as unversed in the ways of European orchestra conductors as it is possible to get. She first met her father-in-law in London shortly after the marriage. She was ushered in, trembling, to high tea at the Claridge's, only to find Otto sitting at the end of the table glaring at her. Suddenly he swept aside the table settings, whipped out a musical notation sheet and without a word started writing.

"Finally, I discovered what he was doing," his daugher-in-law recalls. "He was composing a little song for me based on the vowels in my name."

"I love him very much," his son says. "But he believed in the good old-fashioned idea that a son should learn and learn and learn. Acting was not in the learning category and it took him a long time to accept the idea."

As a boy in Belin Otto's son had automatically fallen into the iron regimen of music-piano, trumpet and violin lessons (he is still fair pianist), harmony, composition, etc. But Werner was not an iron man. In 1940, shortly after Otto's illness ended his stormy six-year tenure with the Philharmonic, Werner chucked music in favor of the Pasadena Playhouse. "At least," he says, "acting was my own."

He was not ideally suited to be an actor, at least by superficial Hollywood standards. He was never a leading many in the Troy Donahue sense of the word. Even in his 20's he had what Howard Morris, who worked with Werner in Maurice Evans' Special Services unit in Hawaii during World War II, describes as "a bald personality".

"Werner looked bald, even with his hat on," Morris, who is now directing Hogan's Heroes, remembers. If he fit a category at all, it was "young character man," the kiss of death in a youth-obsessed society. He found himself playing a long line of Prussian generals and other similar types. Only once-in 1955, when he appeared with Tallulah Bankhead ("one of the great people because she relates as a human being") in a play called "Dear Charles"-did he do the kind of part for which he was really suited, the romantically charming, attractive older man, revered in Europe as the bon vivant but in America placed on a par with the bus boy.

If the type-casting bugs him, he enjoys life far too much to show it. He is not a brooder. He is an avid concertgoer, an exacting critic-of-the-critics ("In Europe, a music critic would have to be a musicologist to dare say some of the things they say here"), an insatiable conversationalist ("My wife's the doer, I'm the talker"), a brilliant poker player, a Dodger fan, a professional hobby-hater ("I despise workshops") and an enthusiastic, if hardly permissive, father. His children call him Poppa.

Still he is afflicted by periodic guilt feelings about music. Once he even went so far as to consider returning to "the conservatory" for five years, during which time he would hardly see his family at all-Otto Klemperer's son's idea of what it would take to even begin to aspire to any podium in the world.

"I can't cop out," Werner Klemperer says. "Sure I was afraid. But I know also that if I'd ever made up my mind, nothing could have stopped me. I still have that frightening feeling I might have made a great conductor."

Last May the junior Klemperers paid another call on the great one in Stockholm. This time they had to tell him about Hogan's Heroes. "Comedy, you say?" said the old man brightly. "Marvelous! Who's the author?"

There was an awkward pause. "How do you explain?" says Werner, recalling the incident. "Then he asked me to send him a script. I didn't dare."

And so the Klemperers are now citizens of Hollywood, Susan actively engaged in bringing up her children and teaching at a county school for delinquent girls on the side, her husband keeping tabs on that rogue called Colonel Hogan and loving every minute of it.

For a while he kept a violin case in his dressing room as a kind of whimsical reminder of days gone past. Friends who dropped around eyed it apprehensively, half expecting a concert. The Brahms Violin Concerto perhaps? No, merely Haig & Haig. Klemperer was using it to house a bottle of Scotch.

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Front Cover

Pages 22-23

Pages 24-25

Hogan's Heroes Listing

Last Modified : Fri 16 May 2008 8:11 AM