The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (46 page)

The option of working for the UN faded as it became clear that it would take years to become a US citizen. Although Michel was a legal immigrant, there seemed no shortcut, despite the fact that California Congressman Clyde Doyle and Senator Helen Gehagen Douglas introduced private bills before Congress to obtain citizenship based on his war record.

In the meantime, he concentrated increasingly on education, particularly languages. ‘In a way I saw education as a continuation of the war. Democratic countries had fought not just to defeat the Nazis but to preserve free societies. I felt one of the factors that contributed to the rise of the Nazi Party was an educational system in Germany, which I had experienced as a student, that concentrated on creating a small elite to govern a vast ignorant mass. I remember professors proclaiming that graduation from high school needed to be difficult: “We want an elite - we don’t want an educated proletariat!”’ Michel believed the opposite to be true, and that a free society needed an effective educational system for all to produce informed and concerned individuals. He had been impressed by a statement made by Thomas Jefferson: ‘If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be.’

As he thought more about the necessity of an educated citizenry and the importance of learning, his thinking was given added direction by a remark made by the professor at the Sorbonne when Michel had been a student in France: ‘Nobody knows anything about the learning process of the human mind.’ ‘I wanted to explore and probe that learning process. I needed to find out how humans learn so I could discover how to teach. And I felt that the most alien thing for somebody to learn was a foreign language. Not the most difficult, but the most alien - simply because you know nothing when you begin. And I took as my cornerstone the idea imparted from my maths teacher, that there was nothing so complicated that it could not be made simple. So I chose to teach foreign languages because it would allow me to probe the learning process from zero to high levels of achievement.’

The Polyglot Institute on 400 North Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills (occupied today by Chanel) opened in September 1947. The building was a small, one-storey Californian bungalow converted into an office. A large painted sign of a parrot was placed outside. Directly across the street was Sugie’s Tropics, a fashionable meeting place at the time where people enjoyed exotic and powerful cocktails such as Missionary’s Downfall. The Polyglot Institute did not prosper at first, but lurched from one financial crisis to another. Michel was joined at the institute almost immediately by Dorris Halsey, who helped translate documents, type letters, boil eggs for sandwiches, and bath Barry. In reality, she managed and ran the school. More importantly, Dorris was a fellow alien. ‘We understood each other very well. I had been stateless, like Michel, and worked with the Résistance and French intelligence and been imprisoned by the Germans. You walk around with those experiences for the rest of your life. Half of my friends who had been active in the war had been killed. So Michel was not closed down with me because I knew of what he spoke. He didn’t have to explain, or dot the i’s or cross the t’s. We communicated in half-words. He was an alien and so was I.’

Dorris was actually a Hungarian Catholic from Budapest who had moved to Paris with her family at the age of eight. She was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in the south-west of France when the Germans moved into the unoccupied zone. ‘They came to the school to find out if anyone spoke German, and like an idiot I put my hand up.’ She was ordered to work as an interpreter at the local German command post after school. As Frenchman betrayed Frenchman, Dorris’s main activity was mistranslating, losing or delaying as many of the numerous letters of denunciation as she was able. She also reported to the Résistance. The locals, however, treated her as a collaborator and refused to fill her ration allotment of eggs and butter. ‘I was told by the Résistance that being thought of as a collabo was a good cover - but it was not easy to bear.’

The Germans eventually discovered her activities and she was sent to prison in Toulouse. ‘Luckily, it was then 1944 and they were retreating all over the place so I was not sent to a camp.’ St Michel’s prison in Toulouse dates from 1275 and Dorris was placed in a small cell with thirty-nine other women for a total of ninety-six days. ‘There was a mixture of political prisoners and prostitutes and God-knows-what, all sleeping on straw mattresses. I became the cell’s champion flea and louse killer and would tell the others fairy tales from Hungary and Germany to send them to sleep at night and avoid my turn to empty the slop bucket.’

After the Liberation, Dorris returned to her village to find a photograph draped with ribbon in a local shop window identifying her as a collaborator. She moved to Paris and began to work for the Deuxième Bureau - the French intelligence service. Her mission was to deliver thousands of francs in cash to hotel porters and concierges employed as paid informers.

American troops on the Champs Elysées threw cigarettes at French girls to see if they would stoop to pick them up. Dorris ground them under her heel and was accused by the GIs of being less friendly than the German girls. But one American officer was more gracious when he asked for directions in appalling French. ‘What on earth are you trying to say to me, captain?’ Dorris replied in English. They went for a drink together and the American turned out to be a major in the Quartermaster Corps. ‘He had access to instant coffee, cigarettes and nylons, and I was seventeen.’ The couple married and Dorris moved with her husband to California, where she later met Michel. ‘He was very easy to work with. He became my friend, my confidant and eventually godfather to my second marriage. Many of the friends I still have today I met through Michel. And later my second husband and I were witnesses at the ceremony for Michel’s citizenship.’

One of Dorris’s early tasks at the Polyglot Institute was to translate divorce papers for the actor George Marshall, whose wife was the well-known French actress Michelle Morgan. (He later married Ginger Rogers.) ‘I also taught the occasional mad Hungarian if he came through the door. I became a sort of mascot and was known as Miss Polyglot.’

Another of Dorris’s many roles in the office was to play romantic traffic cop in Michel’s love life. ‘Michel was the greatest Casanova I have ever known. Women found him a romantic
Casablanca
figure, and he had mystery and allure for people whose only hardship in the war was a shortage of gasoline coupons. There was this guilt among those who had not been in the war but remained safe and cosy in America.’ The womanising had a driven quality. ‘I watched all the goings-on with great amusement. Someone would be coming in as someone was going out, and I was in the front office going crazy. Everyone believed they were the one and only one, and I thought there might be a disaster sometime.’

Michel developed a reputation in Hollywood as a ladies’ man. ‘I love women and they know it and feel it. My relationships were very good friendships and I was open and honest and didn’t make promises or cause unrealistic expectations. I always said very early on that marriage was out of the question. It’s true there were a lot of ladies, and I did not tell one about the other, but everybody knew where they stood.’ Dorris accused Michel of abusing his charm. He defended himself by comparing his weakness to Dorris’s partiality for cake. ‘You are offered a beautiful cake - chocolate, lemon, sponge or whatever - could you resist? Wouldn’t you be tempted to take a slice?’ From then on, when women called, Dorris would hold up a drawing of a slice of cake.

Michel disliked Dorris’s first husband intensely and felt she was wasting herself on him. ‘After I learned English I realised we didn’t have much in common,’ Dorris said, ‘especially when he told me that the only thing he read was the labels on beer cans.’ Michel introduced her to Reece Halsey, head of the literary department at the William Morris Agency.
[196]
The two hit it off, divorced their respective spouses and married. ‘They had a long and good marriage. Reece Halsey quit William Morris to start his own agency and Dorris left the school to work with him.’ Michel lost a colleague but gained a lifelong friend and met the extraordinary collection of writers the new agency represented, including Henry Miller and Aldous Huxley. ‘I have fond memories of Henry Miller. We played a lot of ping-pong together.’
[197]
He met many writers at Miller’s home, and quarrelled with Lawrence Durrell, irritated by his indifference and easy-going attitude towards the collaboration of Vichy.

Michel was very much on the scene, and he received endless social invitations to a wide variety of Hollywood parties and enjoyed the company of the successful and the famous. ‘He learned the necessity of being a chameleon,’ Dorris said. ‘He could be bright and intelligent and cultured or play the simpleton. He could change.’

But even in Hollywood, the war was never very far away.

In the period directly after the war, when Michel worked for US Army Counter Intelligence in Germany, he had been largely ignorant of American politics and public opinion back in the States. He rarely read American newspapers or magazines, with the exception of the
Stars & Stripes
, although he knew that the Malmédy Massacre had outraged Americans and had resulted in a commitment to hold war crimes trials. The subsequent court case should have been a straightforward prosecution of SS criminals, but suddenly the tables were turned and the US Army would stand accused.

All seventy-three SS defendants had been found guilty in the trial. However, by the standards of American peacetime courts the army’s legal procedures were open to criticism. The defendants had been tried
en masse
with only numbered white cards draped around their necks to identify them. The verdicts were hastily delivered when each of the accused received an average of only two minutes’ deliberation before sentence. Punishment seemed arbitrary and illogical. Gustav Knittel, for instance, who confessed to giving the order to shoot eight unarmed American prisoners, received a life sentence while his commander, Joachim Peiper, who personally issued no such order, was given a death sentence. In Germany the verdicts were seen as victors’ justice.

The lawyer assigned to defend Peiper, and several others of the accused, was Colonel Willis Everett, a Georgia attorney who was demobilised from the army directly after the trial. He returned to America feeling that justice had not been done and began to orchestrate a public attack on the army in an attempt to have the sentences overturned.

Two weeks before the trial began, Everett had objected that some of the defendants’ statements had been made under duress. In addition, the prosecution admitted that in some instances interrogators had used elaborate ‘mock’ trials to obtain confessions. Black hoods were placed over prisoners’ heads, and they were then led into a room where inquisitors sat behind a table with burning candles and a crucifix. The prisoners believed they were at an actual trial, and were told their lives were ruined and that they would never be released.

The first of thirteen investigations made by the army into the treatment of Malmédy prisoners was launched. Thirty of the SS men Everett had named as having made serious charges against the army were interviewed. Only four claimed mistreatment, ranging from blows to the head or body to being pushed down stairs. However, a review of the verdicts criticised both the conduct of the trial and questioned the admissibility of some of the sworn statements, given the nature by which they had been obtained. Temporary stays of execution were granted and the convicted men were allowed the opportunity to appeal.

Ex-SS officers used the official criticism of the army to elaborate upon the accounts of American brutality to feed a rumour mill. Wild stories went around of prisoners being starved, having their testicles crushed, their teeth knocked out, and being subjected to freezing temperatures and intense heat. Human flesh and hair was said to have been found on the walls of the men’s cells together with a black hood with dry blood upon it. The rumours circulated among the American military in Germany and then spread to the States.

Everett’s original intention of denigrating the procedures of the Dachau trial now expanded into a campaign to rehabilitate the convicted SS murderers as honourable soldiers. As one army review after another rejected the claims of his former clients, he petitioned the Supreme Court, continuing to cite the discredited rumours as evidence. When the petition was rejected, the lawyer met with the secretary of the army who had publicly expressed concern over the conduct of the case. Everett repeated the rumours and unsubstantiated allegations as fact. He claimed all the defendants had been tortured in their cells by Jewish refugees intent on revenge. (Correspondence written by the lawyer at this time displayed open anti-Semitism. He resented bitterly the trial judges’ legal adviser, who was Jewish, and complained that three members of the investigating War Crimes Group were Jewish refugees.)

Appalled by what he took to be fact, the secretary of the army ordered a halt to all executions. The proclamation provided new ammunition for the pro-German lobby in America, and unrepentant Nazis in Germany, to attack the conduct of the entire war crimes trials. New accusations were made that confessions had been obtained from defendants by threatening to hand them over to the Russians. The secretary of the army appointed a three-man commission of American judges to investigate the way war crimes had been prosecuted, with particular emphasis on the Malmédy trial.

The judges flew to Frankfurt to spend sixweeks studying the case and prepared a classified report. It found no evidence of systematic intimidation and declared the trials to have been ‘essentially fair’, although some of the methods used in obtaining sworn statements were again categorised as ‘questionable’. The report went on to say that the evidence proved the guilt of the defendants, but suggested commuting the death sentences to atone for any injustice that might have been committed.