Marcelle Clements:
KLAUS KINSKI & THE THING
Is this man of strange and explosive power really the world's greatest actor?"


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His autobiography, not yet published in this country, was a best seller in Germany and France. It was variously described as "ordurous" and "pornographic," deemed "the work of a magician," "atrociously lucid" and was compared to Rimbaud, Celine and Henry Miller.
The account of his childhood in Berlin between the wars vividly re-creates a life of hunger, cold and filth, of six people sleeping on a maggot-filled mattress in an unheated room, of incestuous sexuality, of stealing to eat. The sensuality of the adolescent and adult Kinski is not for the queasy. Explosive, compulsive, combining brutality and tenderness, his erotic sensibility is articulated in defiant detail. "Don't you dare to judge me!" its author seems to be saying.
He recounts his desertion from the German army and his subsequent incarceration in a British prisoner-of-war camp, where homosexual favors were traded for cigarettes and where he first went on stage, aptly enough, as a prisoner performing for prisoners. Then he spent years sleeping in the parks and on the pavements of the capitals of Europe; in winter, he shared the hobos' street stoves, hands and feet protected by rags, sleeping on subway grates for their intermittent wafts of warmth. But during the day, the young actor worked on his diction and began to perform in Shakespeare, Ibsen, Cocteau and his own adaptations of Dostoievsky. Spectators went to the cabarets of Berlin where Kinski, barefoot, recited Villon's poetry and collected money afterward in his hat. From there, it seemed like a natural trajectory to the one-man "recitals," which lasted as long as four hours and for which Kinski filled the biggest sports arenas of Europe. By then, movie offers were proliferating. Kinski turned down some 40 of them, because he felt the roles did not have enough scope. Then there was an about-face. Headed for a distinguished image as a celebrated artiste, he began to accept any offer that was made, solely on the basis of salary. "I realized it didn't matter," he says. "I could not do what I wanted, anyway, in this fucking ghetto, and I wanted money, because I had never had any. And I learned that people do almost everything for it."
Then came years of sumptuous profligacy: palazzi in Rome, caviar diets and huge domestic staffs, Ferraris and Rolls-Royces given away when Kinski decided he no longer liked their colors or the way a door closed. In Italy, he was a top box-office draw and began doing "guest appearances," working on a film for a few days, one day, a few hours-which enabled producers to feature his name on the marquees and brought him the cash he needed to support his extravagances.
But by then, his pattern of deserting what he had been able to conquer was established: Adored in Italy, where he had lived for a decade, he left everything behind and moved to France. He stayed there for only a few years, long enough to become a star of the French cinema (though with Aguirre he had already conquered the French public).
Then, he moved - incongruously, it seemed to me, but perhaps not - to California. And that is where, with some difficulty, I made contact with him.

© 1985 by Marcelle Clements and Playboy Enterprises Inc.

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