See How They Run (9 page)
The newsman recited a short preface to the special film ABC News was about to present, citing the extraordinary circumstances behind the film’s showing, apologizing for the film’s content beforehand.
The eleven-minute clip was then shown without interruption.
The first five minutes of the film consisted of old black-and-white news and Nazi propaganda footage.
The 1940s-style film presented the usual straight-arming, jackbooted marching scenes through Munich and Berlin. Then Hitler Youth and little
Deutsches Jungvolk
in Frankfurt, singsonging
Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
It panned across crowds of German people screaming approval like Stuka dive-bombers. It flashed a sign on a Munich streetlamp:
ACHTUNG JUDEN!
Then the Führer appeared, the famous manic stare making him look more like Charlie Chaplin than Adolf Hitler.
The Führer was shown driving a new black VW convertible through a crowd of 200,000 cheering Nazis.
He was pictured after just having made monkeys of Daladier and Chamberlain.
Most chilling of all, a brand-new, original piece of marching music had been composed and scored for the film.
After the black-and-white segment, a tall, blond man, a recognizable film actor named Owen Landers, appeared on screen.
This portion of the film was in slickly shot 35mm color. No expense seemed to have been spared in its filming.
The pleasant-looking actor wore a charcoal business suit, starchy white shirt, striped red necktie. He looked very much like the president of some large, very successful company. On his right arm, the actor wore a red-and-white Nazi brassard.
Very calm and reasonable, with the intensity and polish of a regular news commentator, the actor explained how misguided Jews now living throughout America were a major cause of the country’s social, economic, and, especially, moral problems. The Jews were America’s pornographers. Its slumlords. Its dissidents. The Jews were the moneyhoarders on one hand, the moneylenders on the other. The contentious Jews were the chief reason America had made enemies all over Europe and in the Middle East, of course. Because of their vast wealth, the Jews had unequal representation in Washington.
The camera slowly crept in on the impressive-looking actor. “The time has come for all of us to look closely at the Jewish element in America. To carefully consider some fundamental questions about our country.
“This does not mean any kind of violence directed against Jews. It simply means examination. Careful examination of the priorities of this country—and the reasons behind our priorities.
“Those of you who agree, those of you who believe we should reexamine important issues at this time, I ask you to do one thing only. A simple, harmless gesture,” the actor said.
A gesture.
Almost too small a gesture it seemed.
Curious.
“Tomorrow at noon … simply honk your automobile horns. Tomorrow at exactly noon.”
All along Fifth Avenue, every other car, or third car, or fourth or fifth car was honking its horn.
Cars down near Forty-second Street and the library honked. Cars and trucks opposite Korvette’s, Brentano’s. Right in the heart of America’s most sophisticated city, they honked. Right in the middle of the city with the largest Jewish population in the world.
Up near Saks and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, cars honked, and a fistfight had begun in the street. Past Central Park and the Plaza, on way up into Harlem—the shrill symphony of horns seemed even louder, more horrifying, and unbelievable.
At about three minutes after twelve noon, the din began to lessen.
A false silence came. Then a few late beeps. Angry personal statements.
Then an eerie calm fell over New York, over Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, over any little highway where there were cars, and horns, and Nazis.
On Fifth Avenue, a pretty, short-haired businesswoman wandered out of a soup shop called La Potagerie. The dazed woman sat down on the curb next to New York patrolman Michael Rosenberg.
A stranger. Another Jew.
The two young people held each other for a long, tender moment. They just held on and looked into the dark, passing automobiles.
Automobile horns.
Bleating against the thin skin of her eardrums. The hammer, anvil, stirrup, vibrating. Making Alix Rothschild feel nauseated and afraid.
That evening the actress wandered south on Fifth Avenue from the Sherry Netherland, where she had her New York apartment. Down toward a violet shroud of smog and night that lay over the area of Manhattan known as Gramercy Park.
11:15
P.M
.
Dark suits and long gowns were arriving home at the Plaza from
A Chorus Line
and
Deathtrap
. From expensive suppers at Sardi’s, Caravelle, Gallagher’s. A few late-night lights blinked off in the GM Building. Hispanic cleaning ladies; investment house and advertising-agency workaholics. Doubleday’s was just closing on the block between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh. A shopping-bag lady slept peacefully in the alcove of Elizabeth Arden.
Automobile horns.
Simply honk your horn
, the Reich had commanded.
The new Nazis. Countless thousands of them in New York; in Southern California; in Maine, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Texas.
A cab honked in front of the St. Regis, and Alix nearly flew out of her skin! “God damn you stupid! …”
Her long legs felt tired and rubbery all of a sudden. Her mind was bogged in a swamp of the blackest, foulest images. Her stomach was twisted into a tight, impossibly hard knot.
Alix heard distant New York police sirens; she could almost hear the Gestapo cars wailing through the streets of Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich. The overhead streetlamps might have been the searchlights on the dark towers surrounding Dachau
Konzentrationslager
.
The Nazis were marching again.
The Nazis had never actually stopped marching.
Alix Rothschild was struck by a severe blood-sugar rush on her walk down Fifth Avenue. A slight ringing in her ears grew into a shrill, head-splitting whistle. She gasped out loud for air, more oxygen.
Finally, she had to stop walking altogether.
The tall, slender, dark-haired woman leaned against the hood of a parked car. Her movements were like those of a drunk about to be sick. Out of the corner of her eye, Saks’s front canopy sign appeared to be
spinning
across the avenue.
A familiar series of pictures went flashing through her mind. Out of control as they flew at her optic nerve. An old favorite nightmare album.
A bloodred dawn shone across acres and acres of gray, muddy fields. The rising sun seemed to sit like a squashed red egg on top of a line of ghostly ash trees.
Dark wooden walls interceded. Blackwashed turrets. High barbed-wire fences.
A very early-morning parade in a bleak, smoking prison yard.
A young woman seen from the waist up. Naked, emaciated—Nina Rothman.
Alix’s mother.
A German soldier, an SS captain, telling nineteen-year-old Nina Rothman to kneel down on the muddy, smoking ground. A smell a hundred times worse than the worst decaying smell of fish and uncleaned animals hung thick in the air. A heavy odor of human sweat, excrement, dysentery, spotted typhoid over everything. Nina seeming not to notice. Thinking in her fear-crazed mind that this is such a waste—such an incredible, stupid, horrible twist of fate.
The erect SS captain sauntering away from the young Jewish woman. Down a long line of young women and teenage girls. The prettiest ones this morning—a few of the elite German Jews, the wealthy ones. Sixty-seven of them. Most past guessing what the Nazis wanted this time.
This SS captain turned out to be their friend. A Nazi of unusual compassion. Almost no taunting and cruel delays. His right arm flashed quickly behind the sixty-seven backs.
The squad of prison guards fired.
The kneeling women toppled over into a three-foot-deep gully dug just in front of them. Young mothers and teenagers obliterated in seconds. Nearly buried as well.
Some ragged camp children ran toward the long, gaping trench, and peered into tt. Alix Rothman saw! The large, bloody hole in Nina Rothman’s back.
Her mother’s murder.
Alix screamed out on Fifth Avenue. She couldn’t remember her vision: just the feeling of terror.
She screamed words she wouldn’t remember a minute afterward.
The horns. The death-camp visions
.
A few late-night strollers stopped to look at her. But no one came to help.
The New York City policemen finally came on the run.
Two heavy, Bronx- or Brooklyn-accented voices. Gruff. Very male and scary.
“What’s going on here?”
“What’s the matter with you?”
Alix was suddenly alert and embarrassed. She was trembling uncontrollably. She understood what had happened. What was about to happen now.
“I’m all right now,” she managed. Her mouth was incredibly parched, sticky dry. “I’m all right. Thank you.”
Then, one of the policemen suddenly recognized who she was. “Hey!” he said to his partner. “Do you know who this is?” His voice became high-pitched as he spoke to Alix. “Are you all right? … Miss Rothschild? Are you on any drugs, Miss Rothschild?”
Alix shook her head. She tried to stand away from the parked car. …
If they take me to Bellevue
, she began to panic.
“Today was very bad. The horns … I’m sorry that I screamed out. I was just very afraid.”
She didn’t know how much she was going to have to explain. Thank God, they seemed to understand.
The two policemen brought Alix back to Fifty-ninth Street in their cruiser. They were gentle and they tried to be understanding. One of them was Kevin Stapleton, a St. John’s graduate. The other was Howie Cohen, a young fallen-away Jew from Brooklyn. They had both seen
Sara, Sara
, and they told Alix that she was a tremendous actress.
An artist
.
In the car with them, Alix slowly regained her self-control. … She was thinking that she couldn’t allow herself to get this out of control again. She promised herself she wouldn’t let it happen ever again. No matter what.
The officers accompanied Alix inside the gold-and-Italian-marble lobby of the Sherry Netherland. They escorted her up to the lacquered birdcage elevator bank. Doormen, bellmen, deskmen, wealthy European and Texan hotel guests stared curiously. Impossible not to. Their strange images reflected off the nearby windows of Le Petit Café.
Patrolman Cohen made her promise to see a doctor.
Alix promised.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and then went upstairs to the safety of her room.
“The new ROTHSCHILD look. Now you can have it, too!” proclaimed the front cover of
Vogue
.
“The ROTHSCHILD Only Her Masseur Knows,” squealed a subhead on
Cosmo
.
ROTHSCHILD AND REDFORD bellowed a hundred-foot-long movie poster over Broadway and Forty-fifth Street, just north of Times Square.
That year, Alix Rothschild was the living legend in America. At least Alix was as close as she wanted to being a legend.
It had begun when she was twenty-one years old, 1964, with Alix quietly establishing herself as one of the world’s more successful commercial models. In the next few years, Alix had done everything from the latest shampoo to Russian Crown fur. Both men and women seemed to like her sensual face, her figure, the way she moved, especially her smile.
Then Alix had segued into film acting. One of the more successful model-to-actress transitions, it turned out.
Alix had been nominated for Critic’s Circle awards for her first two films. She’d won an Oscar for her fifth film. Alix already had her own bronze star on Hollywood Boulevard.
Film number 6 had been a hugely successful television movie tracing Jewish Arab roots in Palestine. Number 7 had grossed in excess of ninety million dollars. So far, there had been no eighth film—just an endless stream of gossip broadcast from Chasen’s and the Polo Lounge.
Alix and David Strauss had three important connecting points in their pasts.
First—Alix and David were either third or fourth cousins, both of them always forgot which. From the time they were six or seven years old, they had been thrown together at a variety of bar mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals. David, in fact, had been one of the first children Alix had been able to successfully relate to after she’d come to America.
Second—Alix and David had been teenage lovers at Scarsdale High School. They’d suffered through the traditional ring and letter-sweater transferrals, the loss of virginity at fifteen inside the Pound Ridge Reservation, the awful nicknames for each other—Franny and Zooey, from the J.D. Salinger novella.
Third—they had been lovers in college. David at Princeton. Alix, a two-hour car ride away at Vassar.
Then Alix had mysteriously left Vassar in the middle of her senior year. She’d gone to the Ford Agency in New York, and then to Wilhelmina during the “Model Wars.” And finally to William Morris as she launched off into film.
Alix admitted to interviewers again and again that she was neurotically driven, obsessively motivated to be one of the best actresses in the world. Most of all, Alix revealed in the interviews, she had to feel that
her life had purpose
. … Otherwise, she might as well have died with the others back in Germany.
David, meanwhile, had decided that he wanted to be a doctor. He was also certain that he was over Alix Rothschild, or Alix Rothman, as he’d known her back in Westchester.
Every so often one of them sent off a letter or telegram—To FRANNY … TO ZOOEY (usually when one or the other of them was in trouble, or when one needed a sympathetic shoulder), but that was the extent of it.
THE END, in movie terms.