WHO KNEW ABOUT DUSE'S KANGAROO?

GRETA GARBO'S FEET AND MARLENE DIETRICH'S SNAKESKIN BOW TIE.

        

Yesterday, out of the blue, I had a call from Hans Peter Litscher.

           He was ringing, he explained, from Lake Constance in Switzerland, where he had been hired….

I settled back, knowing that, for the next half-hour, I'd be the less vocal half of a fascinating conversation.

           Hans Peter is prominent in avant garde theatre circles. Institutes and galleries from Stuttgart to Seoul pay him to stage the eccentric spectacles that have earned the label Litscheriade.

           For an opera company with too many sopranos on the payroll, he conceived a libretto in which a wandering dwarf stumbles on a community of seven Snow Whites. A German town in need of tourists paid him to transform a decaying hotel into an upmarket haunted house and chamber of horrors, which they publicised as the inn where Alfred Hitchcock spent his honeymoon and which inspired the shocks and scares of his films.

           In each case, Hans-Peter  was part of the show - a critic and musicologist explaining the background to the piece; a curator conducting visitors through a museum of memorabilia. In each role, he was utterly convincing.

           I don't remember exactly when we met. He seems always to have been there, head and shoulders above the crowd at a party, deep in conversation with the most beautiful woman in the room. Tall, bespectacled, greying, in a ground-sweeping overcoat and with a thick scarf wrapped around his throat, he might just have stepped in from some high and chilly place. Even in summer, one would not be surprised to see him brush a snowflake from his shoulder or shake the frost from his hair.

           I learned not to be startled by his unannounced appearances. On one occasion, showing a group of American female academics around Montparnasse, I'd briefly turned away from the window of the FNAC department store where they were examining a display about Marlene Dietrich when I heard a familiar voice.

          "I knew her, you know. A remarkable woman."

           In low, lulling, slightly mesmerising English - one of his five or six languages - he described how, hearing that the ageing star was living alone in Paris, he decided to make her gift. In the style of the American artist Joseph Cornell, he lacquered a cigar box black, glued inside a still from the film Morocco showing her dressed in male evening clothes, and added a celluloid collar and bow tie, pinned with a fake pearl. He made the tie from a real snake skin, coaxed out of a gardien in the reptile house at the Jardin des Plantes….

           "Ah, but I see I am late for my appointment," he said, consulting a square steel art deco watch that undoubtedly belonged in a museum. Waving to me over their heads, he said "So nice to see you again," and sailed off down Rue de Rennes, watched by his newest admirers.

           Did he make such a box? Did he even know Dietrich? That wasn't the point. He had created an alternative reality which we were free to accept or reject at will; our own private Litscheriade.

Once, when we knew him less well, and hadn't learned to accept his tales at face value, he held Marie-Dominique and I spellbound with the story of a retired civil servant whose life's ambition it was to invent a new evolution in figure skating; one that would bear his name as the Axel jump did that of skater Axel Paulsen, who first performed it in 1882. This man, Hans Peter explained, flooded the basement of his house to create a private skating rink and spent years experimenting...

           "Hold on,"  I interrupted. "Is this true?" 

           He considered the question with his usual seriousness. "Perhaps," he said eventually.   

           Periodically, he turns up at our door with a beribboned box from the season's trendiest patisserie, and a fund of stories about his latest project.

           "I don't suppose," he said during one such visit, "that you know where I can find a kangaroo suit?"

           Remembering that one appeared in the Australian film musical Starstruck, I loaned him the DVD. A few months later, he invited us to the premiere of In Search of Eleanora Duse's Red Headed Boxing Kangaroo, at the Swiss Cultural Center in Paris.

           As spectators assembled in what looked like a small regional museum, the curator - played by Hans-Peter - descended from upstairs, greeted us, and proceeded to explain, with reference to the exhibits in the glass cases, how 19th century Italian stage star Eleanora Duse rescued a boxing kangaroo from a circus and took it with her on her travels, smuggling it into the most fashionable hotels of Europe. For the second half of the show, we moved to a small theatre, where Hans-Peter,  now dressed in a kangaroo suit, spun further tales of Duse and Marcel Proust and Duse's lover Gabriele D'Annunzio.

           A few years ago, a press release for the latest Litscheriade arrived.  His subject this time was close to my area of expertise.  

       With Garbo in the Grignoni Canton.  

What could have moved a breathtakingly beautiful Hollywood icon to put an abrupt end to her movie career at the age of 37, and thenceforth spend her summers at the far end of the Prättigau valley in Graubünden? Hans Peter Litscher embarked upon a quest to reassemble the mosaic of her life there, stone by stone. In Klosters, he found X-rays of Garboʼs feet, the cane, shoes and clothes she wore, and innumberable objects Garbo used there at the end of her life.  Foremost among these treasures is the discovery of the estate of local shoe salesman and foot fetishist Chasper Caflisch (1947-1990). Mesmerized by Garbo's body language, Caflisch followed the diva's every step during her long visits here, stalked her, recorded her life in minutest detail, and assembled a veritable Garbo Mausoleum in his mobile home. This "Taj Mahal" on wheels serves as the core of Hans Peter Litscher's Garbo-Production....

           "So now it's Garbo," I said when we met again.

           "I thought you'd find that interesting." He bit into a macaron. "I'll let you know when we do it in France. You must come."

           "But there aren't really X-rays of Garbo's feet, are there?"

           "Of course." He looked offended. "Why not?"

           "And this Caflisch. He's another of your creations, isn't he? Like Duse's kangaroo?"

           "You don't believe in the kangaroo? How sad. But it's all true about Garbo. I have maps, doctor's reports...Caflisch made a film about her. And composed some music - A Serenade for Wind Instruments."

           "Both since lost, no doubt."

           "I see you will not let yourself be convinced." He sighed. "Well, this has been most pleasant. Do you mind if I take this last eclair?"

           A few days later, an anonymous email arrived,  with a link to a site on YouTube.  Greta Garbo At the Foot of the Magic Mountain.

           Resignedly, I clicked on it.

           On stage in a small theatre, three musicians blew on two-metre-long wooden alphorns, the native instrument of Switzerland. As they droned their monotonous  serenade, the screen behind them played clips of Garbo's movies, all of them featuring her feet: in ballet slippers for Grand Hotel, long leather boots for Queen Christina, clumpy brogues for Anna Christie.

           I should have known better than to challenge the master.