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Transcript

A Polite Word for Liar · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
0:27
Speaker 2: I always flatter myself. I think I'm going to be
0:29
Speaker 2: able to play it that fast, and I actually can.
0:31
Speaker 2: So take it from your introduction again after the three
0:34
Speaker 2: chords a little slower.
0:42
Speaker 3: If you ever want to treat yourself to something wonderful,
0:45
Speaker 3: type in the name Adler and the word harmonica on YouTube.
0:49
Speaker 3: This is from an Australian program called four Corners from
0:52
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty one. There are a hundred videos like this.
0:56
Speaker 2: Do people take it seriously with this instrument? Well, nasty question.
1:00
Speaker 1: I do.
1:01
Speaker 4: Oh, I take myself so seriously.
1:02
Speaker 2: I do take it.
1:04
Speaker 1: You haven't.
1:04
Speaker 5: Well.
1:05
Speaker 2: If Vowan Williams writes for the mouth Ogan, he's not
1:08
Speaker 2: doing this for a joke.
1:18
Speaker 3: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
1:22
Speaker 3: my podcast about things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This is the
1:27
Speaker 3: first of two episodes about memory, about the myths we
1:30
Speaker 3: hold about it, and the games are Memories Playing. This
1:36
Speaker 3: one is about an argument between two old friends over
1:39
Speaker 3: what supposedly happened or did not happen during a raid
1:43
Speaker 3: on a house supposedly full of Nazis in July nineteen
1:47
Speaker 3: forty five, or maybe April of nineteen forty six.
1:51
Speaker 1: I have no idea.
1:56
Speaker 5: This is an interview with Larry Adlard by Dorothy Horowitz
2:02
Speaker 5: on February the fifth, nineteen eighty six. And Harry Adler
2:10
Speaker 5: is the virtuo so hand organ player? Is that correct title?
2:20
Speaker 5: Did you say hand organ mouth Oregon?
2:23
Speaker 2: Because the hand organs which you've grown from mongy.
2:26
Speaker 3: By the time Larry Adler sat down to tell his
2:28
Speaker 3: life story to a historian with the American Jewish Committee,
2:31
Speaker 3: his reputation was well known.
2:33
Speaker 2: Perfectly all right with me? No no, no, no, no no.
2:35
Speaker 5: No mouth Oregon player or harmonica player.
2:40
Speaker 2: I use the word mouth organ, but the people who
2:43
Speaker 2: manufacture it could harmony.
2:46
Speaker 5: And I might add a raccont tour par excellence. And
2:51
Speaker 5: we hope you're going to indulge in a lot of
2:54
Speaker 5: that because we're going to want to know all about you.
2:56
Speaker 2: Of course, you know that raconteur is a very polite
2:59
Speaker 2: word for liar.
3:01
Speaker 3: Raconteur is a very polite word for liar. That could
3:05
Speaker 3: easily be on Larry Adler's tombstone. Larry Adler was the
3:14
Speaker 3: greatest harmonica player in the world. Your grandparents would know
3:17
Speaker 3: exactly who he was. I have to admit I'd never
3:20
Speaker 3: heard of him until I was rooting around one day
3:23
Speaker 3: in the oral history archives at the New York Public Library.
3:26
Speaker 3: I ran across his interview, listened to it for a
3:29
Speaker 3: few moments, and was about to give up when Adler
3:32
Speaker 3: began to tell the story of his affair with Ingrid Bergmann,
3:35
Speaker 3: back when she was considered the most beautiful actress in
3:38
Speaker 3: the world. They met while Adler was on tour at
3:43
Speaker 3: the end of the Second World War entertaining the troops
3:46
Speaker 3: in Europe. Late one night, He's in a bar in Augsburg, Germany,
3:50
Speaker 3: playing the piano.
3:51
Speaker 2: And she came into the room where I was playing,
3:55
Speaker 2: like when I was playing, asked me what it was.
3:57
Speaker 2: I said it was something I made up, and she said,
4:00
Speaker 2: have you written it down? I said no, I can't
4:02
Speaker 2: write music. And he said, you're very smugging't you. You're
4:05
Speaker 2: not only ignorant, you're proud of your ignorance. How I'm
4:09
Speaker 2: at Ingrid Bergmann.
4:11
Speaker 3: Adler tells his interviewer that he'd just recently read a
4:14
Speaker 3: biography of Bergmann in which Bergmann's husband claimed that he
4:17
Speaker 3: Larry Adler had come to him and confessed their affair.
4:21
Speaker 2: I know I wouldn't have done such a thing, because
4:24
Speaker 2: I wouldn't have done that to England. I wouldn't have
4:27
Speaker 2: named what would happening to her husband. However, it is
4:31
Speaker 2: in the book, and I can't deny that he said
4:33
Speaker 2: that to the author of the book. But as I say,
4:36
Speaker 2: I can't see me doing it. It is against my
4:39
Speaker 2: nature and my principles.
4:41
Speaker 3: Just to be clear, Larry Adler was having an affair
4:44
Speaker 3: with one of the most famous actresses in the world,
4:47
Speaker 3: and the actress's husband says Adler confessed it to him.
4:51
Speaker 3: You would think that would be a memorable event. But
4:54
Speaker 3: Adler's response is maybe, I guess it could have happened
4:58
Speaker 3: by the way in.
5:00
Speaker 2: War in peace and I'm paraphrasing, of course, because you
5:04
Speaker 2: can't remember tolstoy word for would. There's a sequence where
5:07
Speaker 2: a young man who's been at a I think the
5:09
Speaker 2: Battle of Borodino is in Moscow in a drawing room,
5:13
Speaker 2: telling these very attractive young ladies about his war experiences.
5:16
Speaker 2: But he was behind the lines. He didn't see action.
5:20
Speaker 2: He only heard about action from other soldiers. But he
5:23
Speaker 2: saw that he was losing his audience because he couldn't
5:26
Speaker 2: give them any tales of battle action. So he began
5:29
Speaker 2: to use the story that other soldiers had told him,
5:32
Speaker 2: but making it personal, as if he had experienced that action.
5:36
Speaker 2: And then Tolstoy has a line very much like this,
5:40
Speaker 2: and he realized as he spoke that the truth was
5:43
Speaker 2: slipping away from him, and soon he would no longer
5:46
Speaker 2: know what the truth was now. I think that applies
5:49
Speaker 2: very much to anybody telling any story about anything.
5:54
Speaker 3: The officer in Tolstoy's War and Peace tells a story
5:57
Speaker 3: that isn't true, and from then on forgets that it
6:01
Speaker 3: isn't true. Larry Adler doesn't call the officer a liar
6:05
Speaker 3: or say he shouldn't make things up. Adler says, that's
6:09
Speaker 3: the way memories work. They're up for grabs. In fact,
6:12
Speaker 3: throughout the Oral History, Adler keeps summoning memories and simultaneously
6:17
Speaker 3: discounting them until he has completely convinced you that that's
6:21
Speaker 3: the way we all ought to act. The interview culminates
6:29
Speaker 3: in the story of the raid on the Munich boarding
6:31
Speaker 3: house full of Nazis with his old friend, the dashingly
6:34
Speaker 3: handsome spy named Hans Werner aka John Whites. But we're
6:41
Speaker 3: getting ahead of ourselves. Larry Adler was born in Baltimore
6:48
Speaker 3: in nineteen fourteen to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. His dad
6:53
Speaker 3: was a plumber. At the age of two, he wandered
6:55
Speaker 3: away from home and was later found at a local bar,
6:58
Speaker 3: standing on top of a pool table and singing I've
7:01
Speaker 3: got the profiteering blues to wild applause.
7:04
Speaker 6: He was a prodigy.
7:07
Speaker 3: At fourteen, he took his harmone on the train to
7:09
Speaker 3: New York City and talked his way into performing on Broadway.
7:13
Speaker 2: I passed the Paramount Theater and Rudey Valet's name was
7:16
Speaker 2: on the marquee.
7:17
Speaker 3: Rudy Valley was basically the jay Z of the nineteen twenties.
7:21
Speaker 2: So I got off the streetcar, sneak past the stage
7:24
Speaker 2: door man found Rudy Valley and started to play for him,
7:28
Speaker 2: and he interrupted, I mean, look, I'm just a master
7:30
Speaker 2: of ceremonies, your kid, I'm not an agent.
7:33
Speaker 3: Valley put him on that very night. It was obvious
7:36
Speaker 3: even then that Adler was something special. He had perfect pitch,
7:41
Speaker 3: an astounding musical memory. He could make the harmonica sing
7:44
Speaker 3: in a way that no one else has ever done.
7:47
Speaker 3: If you watch any of those old videos of Adler,
7:49
Speaker 3: on YouTube. He's mesmerizing, slender, long, thin fingers, huge forehead,
7:55
Speaker 3: oversized eyes. There's a wonderful story about him in The
7:58
Speaker 3: New Yorker in nineteen forty two, which describes him as
8:01
Speaker 3: resembling a very young and slightly sinister kitten. Once, when
8:08
Speaker 3: he's living in Beverly Hills, Adler gets a call from
8:10
Speaker 3: Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin says, please come over and make a
8:14
Speaker 3: fourth for tennis, because Bill Tilden can't make it. Bill
8:17
Speaker 3: Tilden argued with the greatest tennis player of all time
8:20
Speaker 3: after Roger Federer. Adler goes over. There's a woman there
8:24
Speaker 3: with badly combed hair and black sneakers and a man
8:27
Speaker 3: with a weird mustache. They hit for a while and
8:29
Speaker 3: he realizes, Oh, the woman is Greta Garbo, and the
8:33
Speaker 3: man with the weird mustache Salvado'dlly Tilden, Garbo, Dolly Chaplain.
8:42
Speaker 3: This kind of thing happens to Adler all the time.
8:45
Speaker 3: He wanted to subtitle his autobiography name drops keep falling
8:49
Speaker 3: on My Head. He was friends with the legendary composer
8:52
Speaker 3: Frank Lesser, but he hated Lesser's wife, whom he called
8:55
Speaker 3: wait for it the evil of two lessers. I mean,
9:00
Speaker 3: how much do you love this guy?
9:02
Speaker 7: Prince Philip wrote me a wonderful letter when my father
9:05
Speaker 7: died from Buckingham Palace and said, you know how close
9:08
Speaker 7: they were.
9:09
Speaker 3: That's Peter Adler, Larry's son. Prince Philip, of course is
9:13
Speaker 3: the Queen's husband.
9:14
Speaker 7: Well, they were both members of an infamous club called
9:17
Speaker 7: the Thursday Club, and I think there were only thirteen members,
9:21
Speaker 7: and they would meet every other Thursday at Wheeler's Restaurant
9:26
Speaker 7: and all get very drunk and tell tales and whatever
9:30
Speaker 7: they did. And we were living in Grosvenor's Square at
9:32
Speaker 7: the time, and in the middle of the afternoon, my
9:35
Speaker 7: father arrives without warning, totally drunk with Prince Philip. They'd
9:40
Speaker 7: come straight from a Thursday Club lunch. And the fact
9:43
Speaker 7: that my father had never given my mother any warning
9:45
Speaker 7: he was arriving with the Duke of Edinburgh. I don't
9:47
Speaker 7: think you forgave him.
9:53
Speaker 3: But the greatest Larry Adler story comes earlier. Adler is
9:57
Speaker 3: in Germany entertaining the American troops. He's touring with Jack Benny,
10:01
Speaker 3: one of the most famous entertainers of the day, and
10:04
Speaker 3: Ingrid Bergmann, who has just met at the Piano Bar
10:06
Speaker 3: in Augsburg and is possibly already sleeping.
10:09
Speaker 2: With And the story is Jack Benny Ingrid Bergman and
10:16
Speaker 2: I were in Munich July nineteen forty five and we
10:20
Speaker 2: met this young man, John Whites, who is the commander
10:22
Speaker 2: of an OSS unit.
10:27
Speaker 3: John Whites the second old friend in this story. From
10:31
Speaker 3: the nineteen sixties to the nineteen eighties, John Whites was
10:34
Speaker 3: a successful high end men's fashion designer. He made the
10:38
Speaker 3: kind of clothes he would put it in an overnight
10:39
Speaker 3: bag before jumping on the concord to make a lunch
10:42
Speaker 3: date at the Savoy in London. In shirts. White's favored
10:46
Speaker 3: what was known as the European cut, which, as a
10:49
Speaker 3: fashion critic once wrote, disqualified anyone without a perfectly flat stomach.
10:55
Speaker 3: Whites was six foot two, insanely handsome, raced sports cars
10:59
Speaker 3: at Lahmann and Sebron, wrote best selling thrillers and scholarly biographies.
11:04
Speaker 3: Educated in exclusive English boarding schools, aristocratic bearing, married to
11:09
Speaker 3: a stunning actress, Susan Kohner. He was basically James Bond.
11:16
Speaker 4: What was the world that your father was?
11:21
Speaker 3: Father and mother inhabited in sort of sixties and seventies
11:24
Speaker 3: New York.
11:25
Speaker 6: I was a pretty, you know, kind of beautiful people set.
11:31
Speaker 3: That's John White's son Chris. He and his brother Paul
11:34
Speaker 3: are both filmmakers in Los Angeles.
11:36
Speaker 6: There's actually there's a book called The Beautiful People in which.
11:38
Speaker 8: My parents are featured, along with the rest of their bunch.
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Speaker 3: You've probably seen some of the Whites brothers films about
11:45
Speaker 3: a boy, The Exquisite in Good Company, American Pie if
11:49
Speaker 3: you're wondering their father was a big fan of American Pie.
11:53
Speaker 6: But our dad really loved it.
11:56
Speaker 9: Yeah, he defends you know.
12:00
Speaker 2: So.
12:01
Speaker 6: I remember him.
12:01
Speaker 10: Saying that he was in a coffee shop and some
12:06
Speaker 10: old guy said to him, well, sarcastic, I bet you
12:08
Speaker 10: really proud of your kids for making this horrible film,
12:12
Speaker 10: And he's I don't know where he came up with this,
12:14
Speaker 10: but he said, haven't you ever masturbated in your life?
12:20
Speaker 3: John Whites was German born in Berlin in nineteen twenty
12:23
Speaker 3: three as Hans Werner Whitz. He was also Jewish and
12:27
Speaker 3: of that class of wealthy assimilated German Jews, for whom
12:30
Speaker 3: those two identities were not a contradiction. His father, Robert
12:35
Speaker 3: had fought for Germany in the First World War and
12:37
Speaker 3: won an Iron Cross.
12:39
Speaker 6: Vacations in the north of Germany and kind of a
12:43
Speaker 6: beautiful life.
12:45
Speaker 3: Then Hitler took power. Whites's family fled in nineteen thirty eight,
12:50
Speaker 3: then onto Shanghai where he waited for his American visa
12:53
Speaker 3: and played rugby on the side, and finally to America.
12:56
Speaker 3: In nineteen forty one, John Whites joins the US Army
13:00
Speaker 3: and gets recruited by the legendary wartime spymaster while Bill
13:04
Speaker 3: Donovan into the USS, the forerunner of today's CIA. Then
13:08
Speaker 3: he sent too occupied Europe as an undercover spy. Because
13:12
Speaker 3: of course he doesn't have to pretend to be German,
13:14
Speaker 3: He's actually German. He's dropped into France, makes contact with
13:19
Speaker 3: the resistance. He's part of the group that liberated one
13:21
Speaker 3: of the most infamous concentration camps, Daco.
13:25
Speaker 8: He told me about when he was in Dachause seeing
13:30
Speaker 8: a gas chamber and there was a little window whereby
13:34
Speaker 8: the operator could tell whether the people inside were dead
13:38
Speaker 8: or not, and next to it was a.
13:41
Speaker 6: Picture of his little child. He described it as being
13:45
Speaker 6: the way that a taxi driver would have a picture
13:49
Speaker 6: of his family and children like taped to the dashboard,
13:54
Speaker 6: but that really stuck with them.
13:57
Speaker 3: After the war, Daca was turned into a holding pen
14:00
Speaker 3: for prisoners of war. Whites was sent into the camp
14:04
Speaker 3: to spy on the captured German soldiers to impersonate a
14:07
Speaker 3: German pow. Some German soldiers after the war ended would
14:11
Speaker 3: burn off their SS tattoos with the end of a cigarette.
14:15
Speaker 3: Whites got a tattoo and then burned himself as well
14:18
Speaker 3: to make the impersonation real.
14:21
Speaker 6: Now you'd say he had PTSD actually, but nobody talked
14:25
Speaker 6: about it in that way. So he was, you know,
14:30
Speaker 6: a drinker, not a sloppy one, but someone who sort
14:33
Speaker 6: of regularly until he suddenly cut it off like cold
14:36
Speaker 6: turkey at some point in our childhood. He didn't sleep well,
14:40
Speaker 6: He woke up very early in the morning. He had
14:45
Speaker 6: incredibly regular habits born of the Army, of kind of
14:49
Speaker 6: keeping things in order. He was if he was crossed
14:54
Speaker 6: by a stranger, if someone was rude to him or impolite,
14:59
Speaker 6: he would be very scary and dangerous. He definitely seemed
15:04
Speaker 6: from the war someone who had no physical fear of
15:08
Speaker 6: other people, and that was really scary as a child to.
15:13
Speaker 3: Watch White told his sons that he didn't know whether
15:17
Speaker 3: he could ever be a good father. The war had
15:20
Speaker 3: changed him too much.
15:21
Speaker 9: Chris and I used to talk about our childhood as
15:24
Speaker 9: growing up in a behind the iron curtain. I think
15:27
Speaker 9: you had to have sort of surreptitious modes of self expression,
15:33
Speaker 9: and humor was a big aspect of that.
15:36
Speaker 11: The fact that we ended up working together is partly
15:38
Speaker 11: because we sort of developed this shared sense of humor,
15:41
Speaker 11: and it was kind of like a samizdat method of
15:44
Speaker 11: maintaining our autonomy with a very sort of domineering dad
15:51
Speaker 11: who was always ready for things to lapse into complete Yeah.
15:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, a dad who was always ready for things to
16:02
Speaker 3: lapse into catastrophe. Back to Munich, the war has just ended.
16:10
Speaker 3: Whites is now running an undercover operation against a German
16:13
Speaker 3: guerrilla group called Werewolf. It's made up of ex Nazi
16:17
Speaker 3: soldiers who are causing trouble across liberated Europe. A Werewolf
16:21
Speaker 3: cell had holed up in a Munich rooming house not
16:24
Speaker 3: far from the Deutsche Theater. John Whites has infiltrated the
16:28
Speaker 3: group under the name Hans Werner. Then work comes in
16:31
Speaker 3: from the Allied Brass round up the Werewolf members, And
16:35
Speaker 3: just as the order is issued, Whites runs into Larry Adler,
16:40
Speaker 3: Ingrid Bergmann, and Jack Penny.
16:43
Speaker 2: And he said that they had found the house where
16:47
Speaker 2: they knew there were eight German soldiers. Now the war
16:51
Speaker 2: was over. Therefore these soldiers had neither surrendered nor been captured.
16:55
Speaker 2: John and his OSS unit were going to raid them,
16:58
Speaker 2: and would Jack, Ingrid and I like to come along?
17:01
Speaker 6: Well?
17:01
Speaker 2: Jack and Ingrid refused that were terrified of the idea.
17:04
Speaker 2: I loved it.
17:06
Speaker 3: Now let's just pause here while I point not the obvious.
17:10
Speaker 3: A twenty something John White's the dashingly handsome undercover spy
17:15
Speaker 3: runs into, respectively America's most famous actress, America's most famous comedian,
17:21
Speaker 3: and the world's greatest harmonica player, presumably at a nightclub,
17:25
Speaker 3: and he invites all three of them to join him
17:27
Speaker 3: in raiding a house full of Nazi gorillas, and one
17:30
Speaker 3: of them, the skinny harmonica player from Baltimore, says, yes,
17:35
Speaker 3: the Whites Brothers disciples of Hollywood, do not find this
17:39
Speaker 3: as odd as I did?
17:40
Speaker 4: Does it strike you one of the many weird things
17:42
Speaker 4: with that story is the notion that you are an
17:45
Speaker 4: OSS officer in Munich you're going to do this bus
17:48
Speaker 4: and you bring along a famous harmonica player.
17:54
Speaker 11: What's strange about that.
17:57
Speaker 9: I guess it's a testament of the power of celebrity.
18:00
Speaker 11: It was kind of like a ride along, you.
18:01
Speaker 8: Know, like Kevin Hart and ICEQ.
18:08
Speaker 3: So Larry Adler for his mission, I'm guessing he's lying
18:11
Speaker 3: in the arms of the world's most beautiful actress. He
18:14
Speaker 3: gets up, puts on a helmet and goes off to
18:17
Speaker 3: capture some Nazis.
18:19
Speaker 2: So I met these oss men at four thirty in
18:21
Speaker 2: the morning. We got into a jeep, went to this
18:23
Speaker 2: house and according to John, the oss men burst into
18:28
Speaker 2: the house. Two of the Germans fired back at them
18:30
Speaker 2: and were killed. The other six were captured Kifrais.
18:34
Speaker 3: According to John, John Whitez remembers a gunfight, but Adler
18:39
Speaker 3: remembers something completely different.
18:42
Speaker 2: My story is when we got into the house, there
18:44
Speaker 2: were two old ladies. There was no firing, no one
18:47
Speaker 2: was hurt in any way. And so there are these
18:51
Speaker 2: two diametrically opposed stories my two people who were there.
18:57
Speaker 3: In John Whitez's memory, a house full of Nazis a
19:01
Speaker 3: nasty battle, death drama. In Larryadler's memory of the same night. Nothing,
19:07
Speaker 3: no nazis, no gunfight, no one dies. They burst in
19:10
Speaker 3: and all they find is a room full of harmless
19:13
Speaker 3: old women, presumably knitting. But wait, there's another version, same characters,
19:22
Speaker 3: same setup, only it's supposed to take place almost a
19:25
Speaker 3: year later, in April of nineteen forty six.
19:28
Speaker 2: I told this story to a group of publishers in
19:32
Speaker 2: London when I made a speech, and one of the
19:34
Speaker 2: publishers told me, after, what, mister Bradler, did you know
19:38
Speaker 2: that the raid you're talking about is mentioned in another book?
19:42
Speaker 2: And John Whites is mentioned, but not by name. He's
19:44
Speaker 2: called Werner because that was his name as an agent
19:47
Speaker 2: to infiltrate the German lions. John under the name of
19:50
Speaker 2: Werner is leading the raid. You are with him, and
19:53
Speaker 2: now there are eighteen Nazi soldiers. The house is surrounded
19:57
Speaker 2: by armored carriers and floodlights. And I still remember two
20:01
Speaker 2: old ladies. So the question is who is right?
20:08
Speaker 1: Exactly who's right?
20:10
Speaker 3: For the rest of their days, Adler and Whites will
20:13
Speaker 3: argue about it.
20:14
Speaker 9: I remember Larry bringing up the story to Needle Dad
20:20
Speaker 9: and my dad.
20:22
Speaker 6: The funny thing is my father could be very very
20:26
Speaker 6: forbidding and peremptory with people who sort of crossed him.
20:28
Speaker 8: For some reason.
20:29
Speaker 6: He had a soft spot for Larry.
20:33
Speaker 3: Everyone had a sou spot for Larry.
20:38
Speaker 9: What I heard at lunch was you were rounding up
20:41
Speaker 9: these Nazis, and all I saw was old women. Oh Larry,
20:50
Speaker 9: you some shut up and have another champagne.
21:02
Speaker 3: There's a very specific idea about memory embedded in the
21:06
Speaker 3: story Larry Adler tells from War and Peace, the story
21:10
Speaker 3: about the soldier entertaining a group of young ladies in
21:12
Speaker 3: Moscow and the Battle of Borodino. The officer wants to
21:17
Speaker 3: impress the people around him, so he moves himself to
21:20
Speaker 3: the front lines, and once he makes that improvement on
21:23
Speaker 3: the truth in the service of his own ego, what
21:26
Speaker 3: actually happens slips away. He becomes the victim of his
21:29
Speaker 3: own self deception. That's the theory Adler believed in he
21:36
Speaker 3: tells another story about the time he was in Newfoundland
21:39
Speaker 3: during the war entertaining troops. He needs to get back
21:42
Speaker 3: to Gander Airport because he has a nightclub appearance scheduled
21:45
Speaker 3: in New York. He finds an airman who is a
21:48
Speaker 3: cargo plane which is going to be towing a glider,
21:50
Speaker 3: and he says to Adler, you can ride in the glider.
21:53
Speaker 2: I was in the glider, the captain was in the
21:56
Speaker 2: front plane. And how exciting it was for me being
21:58
Speaker 2: in the glidder being towed, And how the most exciting
22:00
Speaker 2: part came when we were over Gander Airport and he
22:04
Speaker 2: cut the glider loose by a release mechanism and we
22:06
Speaker 2: floated down in this heavenly feeling I had of his
22:09
Speaker 2: escape that I never wanted the land.
22:12
Speaker 3: Adler tells that story for years.
22:15
Speaker 2: Well, my daughter found a diary. It covered my trip
22:19
Speaker 2: to Newfoundland. I wasn't in the glider. I was in
22:22
Speaker 2: the front plane. Now you see how that took over.
22:26
Speaker 2: It's a better story being in the glider. It makes
22:29
Speaker 2: it if you say to somebody, I was in the
22:31
Speaker 2: first front plane, but we were towing a glider, that's
22:33
Speaker 2: no story. I was in the glider and that was
22:36
Speaker 2: very exciting. That's more of a story. So that after
22:39
Speaker 2: a while, the wish to be in the glider took
22:42
Speaker 2: over and became fat and put me in the glider.
22:45
Speaker 2: And the truth is that I've never been in a
22:47
Speaker 2: glider in my life. That's what I mean by self deception.
22:54
Speaker 3: Adler knew he had a big ego, and he simply
22:56
Speaker 3: assumed that his ego was out in the world, rewriting
22:59
Speaker 3: history on his behalf, which seems to make sense. Adler
23:04
Speaker 3: is the compulsive storyteller, right the name dropper. In his
23:08
Speaker 3: New Yorker profile, there's this line. The most casual request
23:11
Speaker 3: for information from a newspaper reporter or interviewer will often
23:15
Speaker 3: bring in reply a twelve or fifteen typewritten single space
23:20
Speaker 3: narrative composed and typed by Larry in person and containing
23:24
Speaker 3: dialogue and anecdotes. I think that whenever we run across
23:29
Speaker 3: someone telling a false story, we assume that this is
23:32
Speaker 3: what's happening, that the lie is driven by ego. In
23:37
Speaker 3: the next episode, I'm going to talk about an instant
23:40
Speaker 3: that you'll almost certainly remember. A modern version of Adler's
23:43
Speaker 3: glider story. Somebody famous was caught saying, in effect that
23:48
Speaker 3: they were in the glider when they were actually in
23:50
Speaker 3: the plane pulling the glider, and the overwhelming assumption was
23:54
Speaker 3: that the storyteller changed the details of what happened because
23:58
Speaker 3: he wanted to look better, braver, bolder. But here's my question,
24:04
Speaker 3: why do we always have to frame memory, disagreements and
24:07
Speaker 3: errors in terms of character. Why do we always need
24:11
Speaker 3: a culprit, because I'm not sure Adler can be explained
24:14
Speaker 3: the way as an egotist. There were all kinds of
24:17
Speaker 3: ways in which he was anything.
24:18
Speaker 5: But at what point, I know, life became somewhat complicated here.
24:26
Speaker 3: Adler was part of a group that went to Washington
24:29
Speaker 3: in the middle of the McCarthy era to protest the
24:31
Speaker 3: anti communist hysteria sweeping through Hollywood. Then he got accused
24:35
Speaker 3: of being a communist. He went bankrupt fighting McCarthyism at
24:40
Speaker 3: the height of his career, he was blacklisted, lost everything.
24:44
Speaker 2: Then Roy Cohn, who was McCarthy's advisor, offered me a deal.
24:51
Speaker 2: He had arranged that I would give testimony secretly before
24:55
Speaker 2: the McCarthy Internal Security Committee, and he said, what we're
24:59
Speaker 2: going to do is, I've prepared a list of names
25:01
Speaker 2: for you. All of these people have been named by others.
25:04
Speaker 2: They've already been named, We know their names. Who just
25:07
Speaker 2: read their names off, and you're not hurting anybody.
25:11
Speaker 3: In the middle of a national hysteria, one that would
25:14
Speaker 3: end up ruining countless lives, Adler is offered a get
25:17
Speaker 3: out of jail free card. He won't take it.
25:21
Speaker 2: Nice of mister con What the hell's the sense of
25:22
Speaker 2: me reading a list of names that you already know.
25:26
Speaker 2: So he looked out of the window and he spread
25:28
Speaker 2: his hands and he says, go fight City Hall. We're
25:30
Speaker 2: all trying to get you back to work later and
25:32
Speaker 2: you're not helping us. So that was that. I wouldn't
25:36
Speaker 2: have given the name of an enemy. I just am
25:38
Speaker 2: against the principle of the informer. I always have been.
25:42
Speaker 2: I still am.
25:44
Speaker 3: Adler ended up moving his whole family to London. He
25:47
Speaker 3: gave up their house in Beverly Hills, the beach house
25:49
Speaker 3: in Malibu. The tennis matches with the Stars started over.
25:54
Speaker 3: Chris White says his father liked Adler not just because
25:58
Speaker 3: of his musical genius or his hilarious stories, but because
26:01
Speaker 3: he had and I'm quoting a major set of balls.
26:06
Speaker 3: Here's Peter Adler again.
26:08
Speaker 7: He would really chake huge risks on principle. He was
26:11
Speaker 7: a very, very principled man, and I remember him doing it,
26:15
Speaker 7: which terrified me. He did a public reading of the
26:18
Speaker 7: Satanic Verses with various other artists at the time that
26:22
Speaker 7: Salman Rushdie had de fatois put on him, you know,
26:26
Speaker 7: simply to protest against this kind of nonsense. And he
26:31
Speaker 7: would do a lot of things like that, and he
26:34
Speaker 7: wasn't doing it for publicity. He's doing it because he
26:36
Speaker 7: really cared about it.
26:41
Speaker 3: So maybe when the young John Whites asks Larry Adler
26:44
Speaker 3: if he wants to do a ride along on that
26:46
Speaker 3: rate of Munich, it's not a lark. Maybe he's serious,
26:51
Speaker 3: and maybe Adler volunteered because it was important. Remember he's
26:55
Speaker 3: a Jew in Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi Party.
27:00
Speaker 3: If it's all a lark, then the grandmother version is funny.
27:04
Speaker 3: It's the kind of punchline you can imagine landing well
27:06
Speaker 3: at a Hollywood dinner party. Larry Adler, the compulsive storyteller,
27:11
Speaker 3: wins over another crowd. But if he's serious about the raid,
27:15
Speaker 3: then the grandmothers aren't funny. They're not a punchline. They're
27:20
Speaker 3: a sad and awkward ending.
27:22
Speaker 2: My story is duller. One would not never even tell
27:25
Speaker 2: such a story, And I would tell it only because
27:29
Speaker 2: that is my memory of it.
27:32
Speaker 3: He's right, But then consider his companion, John Whites, would
27:38
Speaker 3: go on to write many books, among them Friends in
27:41
Speaker 3: High Places, a thriller with a really complicated core.
27:45
Speaker 9: The main character was somebody who was in the auto
27:48
Speaker 9: industry and was joining the Nazi Party in order to
27:51
Speaker 9: get ahead in his career.
27:52
Speaker 12: I think he.
27:54
Speaker 9: Felt about himself that he hadn't in Jewish. Maybe there,
27:57
Speaker 9: but for the grace of God would go his moral center.
28:04
Speaker 3: When John Whites turned to writing serious historical biographies, his
28:08
Speaker 3: subjects were Germans, from the same class he had come from,
28:11
Speaker 3: wealthy cosmopolitan intellectuals who ended up serving Hitler. You don't
28:18
Speaker 3: have to be a psychoanalyst to make sense of these stories.
28:21
Speaker 3: There are Whites's attempt to sort through the conflict between
28:25
Speaker 3: his love of his native Germany and his devastation about
28:28
Speaker 3: what his Germany had done.
28:32
Speaker 12: It's long ago, now, I know, But well, I was
28:35
Speaker 12: young and I could wear all sorts of clothes and
28:38
Speaker 12: make them look real.
28:39
Speaker 3: In nineteen ninety seven, Whites went on the Charlie Rose Show.
28:44
Speaker 3: He and Rose talked happily about White's new biography until
28:48
Speaker 3: Rose started to ask Whites about White's own experience during
28:52
Speaker 3: the war.
28:52
Speaker 12: Did you go into Germany? I was in Germany when
28:56
Speaker 12: after I want to pull this out of you. John
28:59
Speaker 12: the journalist.
29:00
Speaker 3: Yes, Whites doesn't want to talk about it.
29:03
Speaker 12: I started in France during the general time of the invasion.
29:09
Speaker 12: Plans plans, yes, the parachute into No, no, oh never.
29:14
Speaker 1: How did you get in it?
29:15
Speaker 12: You have many ways of being delivered, but not by
29:18
Speaker 12: parachute because they can see you coming.
29:19
Speaker 1: So how'd you get in?
29:21
Speaker 12: You can go in by both.
29:22
Speaker 1: Did you get by a small plane? How did you
29:24
Speaker 1: get in?
29:25
Speaker 12: Well, by by my small airplane.
29:28
Speaker 1: Small airplane, small landed.
29:30
Speaker 12: There were many beaches, small plane landed on the fly,
29:35
Speaker 12: you know the dead.
29:37
Speaker 3: This goes on and on.
29:39
Speaker 1: How many trips did you make in and out of France? Ten?
29:48
Speaker 12: No, no, no, lesser more, oh much, less less.
29:52
Speaker 1: Than one, less than four being the journalist all right.
29:56
Speaker 3: Finally Rose just gets exasperated.
29:59
Speaker 1: Tell me why you're so at this late stage? What
30:03
Speaker 1: is the what is the code that keeps you from
30:06
Speaker 1: being more forthcoming?
30:08
Speaker 6: Well?
30:08
Speaker 12: General Donovan issued a MEMORIZLEL. Donovan, Yes, our boss, head
30:13
Speaker 12: of a lesson, which.
30:14
Speaker 1: Said, for as.
30:15
Speaker 12: Long as there are people alive. I spoke to one
30:19
Speaker 12: a day before yesterday on the phone, an eighty nine
30:23
Speaker 12: year old ex colonel of panzas of Armored Forces Knight
30:28
Speaker 12: crosswearer who was a resistance officer. As long as there are
30:32
Speaker 12: people alive, you'd be amazed that how many Germans, stupid
30:37
Speaker 12: ones would still be angry at somebody who brought some
30:43
Speaker 12: form of resistance.
30:46
Speaker 3: This is nineteen ninety seven, the war has been over
30:50
Speaker 3: for more than half a century, and Whites refuses to
30:53
Speaker 3: give anything more than the barest details of his experience
30:56
Speaker 3: because of a memo written by his former boss, who,
31:00
Speaker 3: by the way, has been dead for decades. Whites and
31:04
Speaker 3: Adler are principled men. It's just that their principles take
31:08
Speaker 3: different on matters of emotional significance. One man shrouds his
31:15
Speaker 3: memories in a blanket of chatter and whimsy. The other
31:18
Speaker 3: falls silent and retreats. When we encounter conflicts and memory,
31:23
Speaker 3: we want to label one party as a liar. We
31:25
Speaker 3: want to make a judgment. This strategy is authentic. This
31:29
Speaker 3: strategy is dubious. Adler is the egotistical one, Whites is
31:33
Speaker 3: the evasive one. But why why can't we just accept
31:37
Speaker 3: that all of us deal with the uncertainty of our
31:39
Speaker 3: experiences in different ways. Memory does not reveal character. That's
31:46
Speaker 3: our mistake. In the early nineteen nineties, John Whites talked
31:53
Speaker 3: to a historian named Perry Biddiscombe, who was working on
31:56
Speaker 3: a book about the werewolf movement. Biddiscomb found White's name
32:00
Speaker 3: in the phone book and called him out of the blue.
32:03
Speaker 3: This time, Whites told yet another version of the raid.
32:07
Speaker 3: In this version, there was no shooting, no resistance, no
32:11
Speaker 3: one died. The members of Werewolf were all punks, too
32:15
Speaker 3: young to have fought in the war, full of false bravado.
32:19
Speaker 3: Whites and his team of Allied soldiers surrounded the housing
32:22
Speaker 3: complex where the Werewolf lived and arrested them. Then, and
32:26
Speaker 3: I'm quoting now from Bidiscombe's notes, the scene was invaded
32:30
Speaker 3: by forlorn mothers and grandmothers, each insisting that her lad
32:35
Speaker 3: was really a good boy and could not possibly be
32:38
Speaker 3: mixed up in this werewolf nastiness. Do you see what
32:45
Speaker 3: Whites did? He took his version and combined it with
32:49
Speaker 3: Larry Adler's version. There were arrests, and they were grandmothers.
32:54
Speaker 3: I've no idea whether it was conscious or not, but
32:56
Speaker 3: at the end of his life, Whites decided that friendship
32:59
Speaker 3: was more important than memory. He decided not to be
33:03
Speaker 3: a memory fundamentalist Larry Adler, for his heart, gave his
33:10
Speaker 3: last concert in May of two thousand and one at
33:13
Speaker 3: the Royal Albert Hall. It was Prince Philip's eightieth birthday
33:22
Speaker 3: celebration and the Duke wanted his old friend to play
33:25
Speaker 3: for him. Adler was near the end. His son Peter
33:33
Speaker 3: knew he wasn't well.
33:35
Speaker 7: Now he was in hospital, and he, much to my horror,
33:40
Speaker 7: had himself checked out and he was wheeled onto the
33:43
Speaker 7: stage at the Royal Albert Hole by a nurse in
33:46
Speaker 7: a wheelchair.
33:48
Speaker 3: If the past is hazy and uncertain, then all you
33:52
Speaker 3: have is a present. That's what propelled Larry Adler to
33:56
Speaker 3: seek his fortune on Broadway as a kid, to give
33:58
Speaker 3: the harmonica. It's due to risk it all fighting McCarthy
34:02
Speaker 3: to leave Ingrid Bergman in the early morning hours to
34:04
Speaker 3: go round up some Nazis. Even at the very end
34:07
Speaker 3: of his life. He wasn't going to stay in the hospital,
34:10
Speaker 3: was he. He privileged experiences over memories, And.
34:20
Speaker 7: He played the harmonica from the wheelchair and blew every
34:24
Speaker 7: other ushist off the stage, and he was wheeled off
34:27
Speaker 7: to a standing ovation and he was looking straight into Cameron.
34:30
Speaker 7: I'm sure at me going, you do not tell me
34:33
Speaker 7: what to do and died a few days later.
34:37
Speaker 3: I checked he actually died two and a half months later. Somewhere.
34:43
Speaker 3: Larry Adler is laughing. Revisionist History is a Panoply production.
34:57
Speaker 3: The senior producer is Mia Lobel, with Jacob Smith and
35:01
Speaker 3: Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flann Williams is
35:06
Speaker 3: our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by
35:10
Speaker 3: Luis Kerra. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg.
35:15
Speaker 3: I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
35:24
Speaker 2: I tell a story about getting to these to Israel.
35:29
Speaker 2: Just after the Sixth Day War. Special service officer met
35:33
Speaker 2: me at the airport. I even remember his name, Major Zaffreer,
35:37
Speaker 2: and he told me that an Israeli soldier had written
35:40
Speaker 2: the song char milshaff So I learned it was damn
35:44
Speaker 2: good tune. I played at first at Larish in the
35:47
Speaker 2: Sinai and there were about two hundred tangs, about two
35:51
Speaker 2: thousand sols. General Rabin, who was then Chief of Staff,
35:53
Speaker 2: he was there. I played and the audience went mad.
35:57
Speaker 2: The opplause went on and on. I played it again.
36:00
Speaker 2: It made me play it six times, and I then said,
36:03
Speaker 2: my friends, I haven't got the vocabulary to describe the
36:06
Speaker 2: emotional experience of this moment. I'll never forge get it.
36:09
Speaker 2: But there are other artists who have come down to
36:11
Speaker 2: the Sinai. They're waiting to entertain you. I don't hold
36:14
Speaker 2: up the show. Please don't ask me to play Charmel
36:17
Speaker 2: Shak again. And it Israeli soldier calls out, You'll play
36:20
Speaker 2: it till you get it right now. Isn't that a
36:24
Speaker 2: great story? But of course it's not true. It's an
36:26
Speaker 2: opera story. This the tenor singing Pollianchi. Now all the
36:30
Speaker 2: details that I told you, Major Solfrier, the Charmel shaf
36:34
Speaker 2: playing it at l reach, that's all true. But believe me,
36:36
Speaker 2: I only played it once. However, twisting that opera story
36:40
Speaker 2: around makes it a much better story. I agree,