Читать книгу Westward - Leo Schelbert - Страница 10

Linda Geiser is at home in two worlds – in the East Village in New York as well as in Liebefeld near Bern. When she was 16 years old, she was incurably infected with the “acting virus.” To be on stage – that’s what she wanted. “At that time, being an actress was a rather ill reputed profession, almost like prostitution. A concerned neighbor advised my mother to keep me at all cost from going to the theater; that would be something indecent, and actresses were loose girls.” That was in 1951. Yet theater, the movies, and television are Linda’s great passion to this day.

Linda is on a home visit for a few weeks with her partner John. I am meeting the 73-year old expert in the art of living in her Swiss quarters, in the house of her sister Annemarie Bachofner. As always Linda’s calendar is full to the brim: a meeting at the studio of Swiss TV, doctors’ visits, and lots of invitations to see her Swiss friends. “People are wonderful; I ‘collect’ them, integrate them into my circle of friends. I am a gregarious person and know almost too many people. Because of time limitations I unfortunately cannot see all my friends every time when I am here, and this I regret very much.”

On the streets of Bern people turn their heads when they see the attractive senior woman with her partner who is 20 years younger; they recognize Linda Geiser as the legendary mother of the TV series Die sechs Kummerbuben (The Six Boys of the Kummer Family), or as Johanna from the TV soap opera Lüthi and Blanc. “John is amused – I believe he is even a bit proud of me. Of course, in New York this doesn’t happen.”

Linda stops short. “I should start at the very beginning of my life, or even before that. One thing is for sure: Folks in our family were not theater people. My father came from a very strict religious family of Anabaptists. He grew up in the Mennonite town of La Chaux d’Abel in the Bernese Jura. He was the only one of the thirteen children of this farm family who was allowed to attend a school of higher learning. He told us that little by little he had to pay back the loan the Anabaptist community had given him to attend the Teachers’ College Muri-Stalden. As a very young teacher in training he met my mother at that college where she was a student in secondary school (6^th to 9^th grade). Yet they did not really click until later. Mother also became a teacher. Eventually they married and together taught the primary and secondary grades in a tiny schoolhouse in Vorderfultigen.”

Linda was born in 1935 in Wabern, four years after her sister Annemarie and eight years before her brother Hans-Beat. (1937)

Linda was born in 1935 in Wabern as their second daughter, four years after her sister Annemarie and eight years before her brother Hans-Beat. And it was quite a sensation a few years later that Mr. Geiser, a primary teacher in the canton Bern, was able to move with his family into a small one-family house in Spiegel near Bern – in the midst of World War II. “Even more sensational was the fact that I had several uncles in America. As a child I would check on the map where Dover, Ohio, was, the place where my uncles Ernst, Werner, Charles, and Willy lived. In school I bluffed about having relatives in America. I remember how the others tapped their foreheads – ‘she is nuts!’ These brothers of my father had not emigrated for religious, but economic reasons; the small farm in the Jura was too small for the large family.”

Religion had no relevance in the teacher’s house, but “it was very relevant with Grossätti and Grossmuetti, grandpa and grandma, in the Jura. Grandfather was rather liberal and did not wear an Anabaptist’s hat. Yet I rarely ever saw my grandmother without her blue apron dress. Though she wore it with buttons, not with pins as Anabaptist women still do today in Pennsylvania. And of course we grandchildren had to accompany them to chapel on Sundays. I remember how bored we were and how we secretly chuckled when the text was too bombastic for us. After chapel there regularly was braided bread and tea for everyone at the grandparents’ farmhouse. The Anabaptists came with their horse drawn buggies from all directions – everything was simple and modest. My current relatives in Ohio, the children of my late uncles, now have a much more modern lifestyle, they are ‘apostates’ as it were.”

Linda Geiser’s childhood was marked less by religion than World War Two. “Even today I can hear Hitler and Göring yelling in the news broadcast of Radio Beromünster; this filled us with fear. In Switzerland we didn’t suffer from hunger, but we needed stamps to buy food. And even after the war had ended, we children wore each others’ clothes.”

Linda’s first day at school. (1942)

Linda’s enthusiasm for school was limited. “After the primary grades where I had been a good student, my parents decided that I should go to the Progymnasium, the first years of the college preparatory school, yet I was miserable there. I was no longer interested in the study material, which I found entirely unnecessary. I preferred to dream, to read books, to paint, and I wanted to have a career in theater. What I did take with me from those years is a stock of wonderful people whom I got to know there. I have an entire ‘clan of girls,’ as I call them, with whom I still have a close connection.

“When I had to repeat one class, Mani Matter and Jürg Wyttenbach were my classmates. Mani Matter later became the originator of the Bernese Troubadours, and Jürg Wyttenbach a famous musician and composer.

“Fortunately my parents allowed me to participate in evening courses at the acting school even while I was still in school. Margarethe Schell-von Noé directed this department of the Conservatory. As luck would have it, they were preparing a student production in which I was allowed to participate. It was an open-air performance, and I was given the part of a young sentimental girl who was enamored of her teacher and in her lover’s grief wanted to jump into the river, the Aare. What a beginning!” Now Linda wanted to join the professional theater.

“Mrs. Schell admonished me that I still would have to learn a whole lot. What for? I already had a first engagement at the newly established studio theater at the Effingerstrasse. Nothing could hold me back now. I resolved to observe in every detail what the experienced actors did and to imitate everything. This worked.” Linda Geiser adds: “However, this does not mean that I did not have to learn a lot more about this profession in the course of the years.” Thus it was a settled matter. Linda’s father signed her first contract for the Atelier Theater under director Adolph Spalinger. “I was only sixteen, and my parents were relieved that I had a firm engagement. They knew: She won’t run away from there!

“During WW II immigrants shaped the theater in Switzerland to a significant extent. Many stage artists from Germany and Austria lived and worked in our country. Those who were not able to escape to America gathered in Switzerland. They shaped not only the famous Schauspielhaus in Zurich, we also met these extraordinary artists in the theaters in Bern, St Gallen, Lucerne, Basel, Solothurn, and elsewhere.

“They brought with them the great old tradition of theater and revived and inspired theater life in Switzerland. By now almost all of them have died. They are not totally forgotten, yet as the saying goes, ‘posterity presents no wreaths to actors,’ and most of them were not immortalized in films – to say nothing of television. Thus today we have only one last witness to this era in the great Maria Becker in Zurich who still makes appearances on stage.”

For 250 Swiss francs a month Linda Geiser played the roles of naïve young girls – as her specialty was called then – in the ensemble of the Atelier Theater. In addition there were salon ladies, character actors, the young heroes – all designations that are no longer used today. “From one day to the next I had to take on great parts for which I had not even been hired. Such a piece of luck! Two actresses were absent; they were talented, but one turned out to be an alcoholic, the other one a hysteric. Thus I was able to play the parts of Eliza in Pygmalion by G. B. Shaw, of Jessica in Dirty Hands by J. P. Sartre, and several other parts for which I was essentially still much too young.

“These wonderful tasks were the best acting school. It was much simpler for me to play such parts as Wendla Bergman in Frühlings-Erwachen (Spring Awakening) by F. Wedekind or Emily in T. Wilder’s Our Town. In this last production Mani Matter played the part of the newspaper boy that I had helped him get when Adolph Spalinger asked me whether I knew a talented classmate who would like to work with our group.

“For three seasons at the theater in Bern I was lucky enough to live with my family, but no one kept tabs on me. I loved the adventurous life in the theater world.”

Linda’s parents were generous. “The restaurants were often already closed after our performances and thus half of our ensemble walked or drove to Spiegel, filled the Geiser house, and raided the refrigerator – though they brought along wine and other beverages. And as the money for stage sets and props was scarce, our furniture was sometimes kidnapped. Chairs, tables, carpets, dresser drawers, plates – and clothes of my mother – caused sensations in various productions. My sister Annemarie also helped out and we played twins in the Christmas production for children. In time our entire family was bitten by the theater bug, and in 1957 my father even launched an amateur theater, the Spiegelbühne, which still exists today.”

In 1954 television in Switzerland was still in its infancy. Linda Geiser was full of enthusiasm for this new medium that had already been well established in America. “With our entire ensemble we drove from Bern to the Bellerive Studio in Zurich. We were given a contract for Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband in which I played the part of Mabel. At that time Swiss television could not yet afford its own productions.

“On the way to Zurich all our costumes were stolen from our truck. Thus in great haste and agitation we had to organize costumes for the ensemble. The play was broadcast live – the viewers saw each mistake, heard each slip of the tongue! Later I also experienced such TV theater productions in Hamburg and Berlin. They were always connected with great agitation. Oh God! Actors who had trouble learning the text never wanted to do television. This did not bother me; fortunately I have a photographic memory. I look at the texts and then remember them. In general I have little stage fright. Actually it is good to be nervous before a performance because it helps to build up energy and vibes.”

At age 19 Linda needed a different environment. “I was advised to get out of the provincial atmosphere of Bern. And after I had auditioned for the Kammerspiele in Hamburg for a French comedy The Stork’s Nest, I was able to sign my first contract myself.”

Linda Geiser and Dinah Hinz at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. (Fall 1954)

For two years she was at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg where she had many parts and was happy until, one day, the boss kicked her out. That hurt. “They said that I had been rude and disrespectful toward a director. I felt that I was treated unfairly, got the short end of the stick, packed my bags, and my family welcomed me home with open arms.”

In spite of the disappointment, Linda remained true to the theater. Subsequently she played in two productions in Berlin and soon thereafter was engaged by the Komödie in Basel. Offers for television and radio plays were also not lacking. “Then came a dreadful German movie Der Königswalzer (The King’s Waltz) in which I played Princess Elisabeth of Wittelsbach. Long before Romy Schneider I portrayed the future empress of Austria in this super trashy film that was the first German film in cinemascope. Shooting it was pure torture. The cameraman first had to fly to Hollywood to learn the new technique and returned with an extra thick lens that, fastened to the front of the camera, made the wide screen effect possible. But this also meant that the lights had to be three to four times as strong; we had tropical heat in the studio. Actors and technicians outdid each other perspiring. The result was a film with a cheerful atmosphere.” In addition to the films the young Swiss woman found nightlife in Munich very interesting. “I met many colleagues who are friends until today – if they are still alive.”

In her private life at that time Linda was happy – and yet not really happy, as she recognizes in retrospect. “I imagined that getting engaged and then married would follow. I was very fond of Jürg Federspiel, an author, who was just becoming famous, wrote his first books, and worked as a journalist and theater critic for several newspapers. He was horribly jealous and felt that on stage I had kissed a colleague for too long.

“This led to a huge fight. I didn’t understand him and I no longer understood myself. Not just because of this incident. I believe I was in love with being in love rather than in love with Jürg.

“And then I suddenly realized that I did not want to get into a marriage that came with three bottles of red wine per day. So I broke up; my parents were very happy. They had also seen that I was not able to deal with his difficult temperament. Our friends accused me of having broken his heart forever. But thank God, that wasn’t true! In the course of his life he went on to meet several wonderful women and he has a wonderful son. I am friends not only with his family, but his ex-wives and ex-girlfriends, too. They remain a part of my life even after Jürg unfortunately died a few years ago.”

Love led Linda down unusual paths. “At the ticket counter of the Schlosspark Theater in Berlin a young man who was right ahead of me was, in my estimation, an American. He didn’t understand what the woman at the counter was trying to explain to him. I intervened and helped him get a seat right next to me for the sold-out performance of Genets The Balcony. He felt obliged to strike up a conversation; his name was Peter Mayer, and I found out that he was a student at Berlin’s Free University intending to write a dissertation about Klee and Kafka. I told him that I knew Klee’s son Felix who was a producer at Radio Bern.

“Peter spoke a funny broken German. His parents were originally from Essen and had emigrated via London, where Peter was born, to New York. After the performance we already were almost friends. He asked me to drive his car from the city’s edge to downtown; he would take me on his motorbike to the car. Thus at midnight on the backseat of his Lambretta I clung to a man who had been an utter stranger to me just a few hours before and then followed him in is blue Volkswagen in the direction of Berlin-Center. Crazy…!”

Linda visits her Anabaptist relatives in Dover, Ohio. (1961)

This was the beginning of a great love story and a life-long friendship. “We enjoyed the life in Berlin before the Wall. And I sent Peter for his studies on Paul Klee to [Felix] Klee and said he could stay with my parents. They felt the young American was very nice. Peter returned to New York and I followed him in 1961 after I had played Lisi from Ziberlihoger after the novel Annebäbi Jowäger by Jeremias Gotthelf.

“Upon arriving I told him right away that I hadn’t come to marry him, but rather because I found that we were the ‘couple of the century’ in the sense that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were a couple. I did not need a swimming pool nor was I truly keen on having children. Already as a young girl I had the strange idea that I would die if I had to give birth to a child. This is a fixed idea that is still with me today.”

For the first few months the couple lived in an apartment in the East Village. “At that time New York was a city without money, a bit run down just like Berlin. Not bombed out, but also rather shabby. We lived between Avenues C and D in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side.

“The area was fairly Jewish then and also Ukrainian. Our neighbors had numbers from concentration camps on their arms; across the street a rabbi had his schul; and on the first floor of our house they baked bagels. I attended the acting school in the West Village to learn to act in English. I was the ‘key student’ in the class of Herbert Berghoff; this meant I was keeping the log and this allowed me to attend the school tuition-free. Later I also had lessons with his wife, the famous Uta Hagen.

“The young women in class envied me for my boyfriend. Peter was handsome, and it was unusual that I cohabited with him. In the early 1960s America was very prudish. It was almost a tragedy if a woman at twenty did not yet know whom she would marry. She would be seen as lost, an old maid. Many girls were advised to go to college, mainly to find a husband as ‘security for life’! Women earned much less than men in all professions. The pill would start to change everything.

“Feminism and emancipation were at first just small trickles, but exploded in the 1970s and 1980s.” Linda Geiser was given a part in a film with Rod Steiger. “My first work in film in America! I found out that famous actors behaved simply and naturally. In Germany, for example, you could always feel a difference between those who were already successful and those who were not there yet. Not so in New York. I played with a large touring ensemble that included stars such as Sir John Gielgud and Vivien Leigh, and we all sat down at the same table for meals, unthinkable in Europe.”

During a ten-month tour with an ensemble of 50 people Linda became acquainted with the country and with the world of American theater. She had parts in plays by Tennesse Williams, Shakespeare and Gelderhode in Washington. In Akron, Ohio she was in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. “The older generation of my god-fearing relatives in Ohio was dismayed at the rough language of the play.”

Linda and the six “Kummer boys” at the Rudi Carell TV show. (1988)

In New York Linda Geiser did not break through in theater since the parts she played on Broadway were too small. But still: she breathed “Broadway air”! As a European type the parts of emigrants, refugees, and victims of concentration camps fit her best; in them she was several times quite successful on television. Again and again Linda returned to work in Switzerland. In 1967 Franz Schnyder wanted her for the part of the mother of the Sechs Kummerbuben (The Six boys of the Kummer Family), a series that was being filmed for television.

To play Sophie Kummer she remained in the Emmental for six months. A shortened version of the story was also made into a movie; this was to be Franz Schnyder’s last film. Linda Geiser had already played in his first Gotthelf-film, Ueli der Knecht (Ulric the Farm Servant) in 1954 and in the two Annebäbi Jowäger films in 1961. In both she played rather loose farm girls. In 1957 she had portrayed the very opposite as Anna in Der 10. Mai (The 10^th of May); this was Franz Schnyder’s very successful anti-war film shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 1958.

In New York Linda Geiser alternately fought and reconciled with her friend Peter. “Our relationship was constantly off and on. He thought I should have a super career but still wash his socks at home. He left me, then I left him, and then we were together again. It was exciting.

“We were at the first original Woodstock festival that was called Hoot-an-Nanny and was an impromptu get-together. Anyone who knew how to play the guitar could perform. The organizers had posted notes announcing the gathering all over the town. About a thousand people turned up with coke, beer, food, and drugs. The festival lasted late into the night. The mess left behind scared the village elders to such an extent that they applied the emergency brake the following year. The new group of organizers, which had a much better financial footing, had to buy a 3 miles long meadow located 28 miles from the village for the festival which was to be totally rained out, but still became world-famous and a legend.”

In 1963 Linda decided to move in with a girlfriend; they rented a small apartment in a red brick house on 5^th Street. Both left their boyfriends. The apartment cost 35 dollars per month. The reliable Swiss woman soon earned the sympathy of the house owner, Mr. Trachtman. “From time to time I painted the walls, I organized the plumber when a pipe burst somewhere, and made sure that everything looked nice.

“My landlord thought I was great, ‘you are intelligent,’ he said. Fine! And after 16 years he said one day: ‘Why don’t you buy the house? You can have it cheap!’ No one from his family wanted to take it over. Thus, in 1979, I bought the red house in the East Village, the old immigrant house built in 1898, for $40,000. At the time this was about 160,000 Swiss francs. I had discussed it with my parents who helped.” Linda is enthusiastic about her neighbourhood. “Then the East Village was not as elegant as it is today. It was more of an alternative district with many hippies, but very informal and friendly. And New York was not yet the city of global business. The [World Trade Center] towers were just being planned. South of 14^th street there were still cobblestone streets. It was only later that prosperity arrived here too – that entire big bubble which now has burst.”

Little by little Linda remodeled the apartments, the old-fashioned “railroad flats” in which one room leads into the next. “In the meantime the apartments have arrived in the 21^st century, except my own. The Swiss TV series Lüthi and Blanc unfortunately stopped one year too early. I had invested the money I earned from this role in the renovations. Now I have to save again, and thus the four-footed tub still sits in the last room.”

5^th Street between First and Second Avenue is often used as a backdrop for films. Very close to the red house is New York’s most famous police station, Precinct 9, which has been filmed very often. “Our façade is often in the camera’s view, or camera people climb up the fire ladder in order to shoot from up above. Then I get 200 dollars.”

Linda Geiser laughs playfully. “And it was not just a house that was passed on to me; without this special find I would not have met my current life partner. I was 43 and he was 20. John managed the bar on the first floor in my house. He taught me to play pool with the police officers stationed next door. He showed me pool tricks – and one night he didn’t go home. He stayed. My friends, women and men, warned me: This relationship will not go anywhere!”

You bet! “John is still here and has been with me for thirty years now. In the meantime he is fifty. A few times I kicked him out and called his mother that she ought to take him back. His mother is two years younger than I am. But he came back. He is from Brooklyn, a world that is totally different from mine and in the evening he smokes his marijuana joint. This is not for me. I tried mescaline once – which was strange. Marijuana does not agree with me and in 1968 I stopped smoking altogether, also regular cigarettes. Many of my friends at that time experimented with LSD and had anxiety attacks. And then it was I who stayed with them through all their panic taking care of them for hours and even days. Smoking, drugs, and alcohol are part of the theater world, but not for me. I can’t even drink much. My father says this is to do with our genes – as Anabaptists neither smoked nor drank.”

In the 1980s Linda Geiser also established herself as artist-craftswoman in New York. She was among the first people who exhibited erotica. “I made frames for mirrors with scenes from the Kamasutra. I could even exhibit them in the Kornfeld Gallery in Bern together with mirrors that I had decorated with angels. My mother was ashamed for me. After the first half hour all the erotic mirrors were sold, but only two of the angel mirrors!” She also wrote a play about Clara Schumann for the Music Festival in Interlaken (Switzerland) and another one about Heinrich Heine’s last mistress. Her “travel tours for women” – Seeing New York with Linda Geiser – also became popular in Switzerland.

“For years I explored Manhattan on foot and on the subway with groups of Swiss women – men were not actually excluded! For these visitors Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition was as sensational as a blues’ mass on Sunday in Harlem, signing the book of condolences for the death of Frank Sinatra in the most famous funeral home, or a performance in the theater during which we were all sprayed with water. Unfortunately the last two tours, which were solidly booked, were canceled after 9/11… though at that time the Swiss would have experienced the people of New York as never before and probably never again. But who knows, I may start the tours again.”

Since 1982 several cultural institutions of Switzerland have been renting apartments in Linda’s “Red House” where fellowship recipients from various art sections can spend some months. So far 113 artists, both women and men, have been able to profit from the cultural energy of New York. “These encounters with artists are very enriching for me and make me happy. The quiet house helps their talents to unfold and grow in the midst of the hectic, creatively exciting atmosphere of New York. I am hoping that in the coming years many more young artists will spend time here.

“I have found my path. It is only natural that occasionally I am in a bad mood or feel depressed. But on the whole I am a person who is able to come to terms with everything. Freedom is, however, important to me, and I don’t like it when people are dependent on me. Yet I am very willing to give of my time. People are important to me, but I want to be able to tell John: today I won’t cook. His socks he has to wash himself anyway. I like living with him – I can’t explain how we are doing it, but we function well together.

“We live modestly, and as I get older, I am eating less and more simply. I write, talk to myself, reinvent the world anew and then take it apart again. Thoughts dance around in my head; at times they are bats, at times precious stones.” Then Linda says almost to herself: “Actually, I should be disconsolate that I have not become famous. As an actress, wouldn’t this have been the goal? Strangely, in the course of my life, fame has ever more lost its attraction for me.

“As a young girl I wanted to become a world renowned star – I pinned the ad for Lux soap with Judy Garland and Greta Garbo on the wall above my bed: I wanted to be like them, look like them, wear my hair as they did, and appear in ads. Thank God, I lost this kind of ambition. Other values gained importance like having friends, remaining healthy.

“I don’t have a good health insurance and can’t afford to be sick.” Thoughtfully she says, “many of my colleagues have died, but luckily some are still here. I always enjoy to see them again – Stephanie Glaser, Hans-Heinz Moser, Peter Arens, and others.” Does Linda still have unfulfilled wishes? “Several. Let’s wait and live. I think that being on stage will be open to me for many years yet – playing character parts, older women with bats in their heads, or very old women with precious stones in their heads. My fondest wish is to play a sharp country woman, a Swiss Miss Marple who unwittingly becomes a detective and turns all of Switzerland, or at least half of it, topsy-turvy.”