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Through William Burroughs I’d met the writer and painter Brion Gysin – inventor of the cut-up and Burroughs’s sometime collaborator. Brion was a really kind soul. When I was living on the street in London, I would occasionally go and see him. He was one of those rare people who genuinely did care about you; he was different, especially in those dark troubled times in London, Brion stood out like a beacon when everyone else seemed so self-centred and horrible – there was little sympathy for someone in my state in those days.
One day Brion took me round to where the occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger, whom I’d met through Robert Fraser, was staying. Kenneth was notorious for his film Scorpio Rising, a montage of Hell’s Angels, Hitler, fellatio, sodomy, Jesus, and assorted satanic imagery. Anger has made some two dozen movies, almost all dealing with satanic subject matter; aside from Scorpio Rising, the best known are Invocation of My Demon Brother, and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. I should have run as fast as I could from a self-styled conjurer of dark powers – however silly his dilettantish Satanism seemed to me – but I was very susceptible to the influence of others just then and easily led. As my father would have reminded me, in the words of Virgil, facilis descensus Averno – easy is the descent to Hell.
But love and light to Kenneth – only thing to do with Kenneth – love and light I send. Really. Can’t do anything else. I’ve gone through so much recently. All the anger, bitterness, upsetness, paranoia, grief has gone away. Hopefully, for good.
At the time I met him, Kenneth was living in Robert Fraser’s flat – Robert was in India. Kenneth saw that I was very vulnerable, obviously anorexic, on drugs, nowhere to live, and wanted to help me by putting me in his film. He didn’t understand my reasons for being on the wall, but saw that I could definitely be used, and that, in a nutshell, was how I came to be in Lucifer Rising. Kenneth really believed that he was setting me on my feet again as an actress. He thought I was on his side, which in a sense I was – as an artist. But basically he didn’t have a clue what I was up to – or how fragile I was. On junk, at the end of my tether and in no shape to do anything – let alone play a graveyard-haunting Mesopotamian night demon with a penchant for destroying children. Actually, since the advent of ‘cosmic feminism’, Lilith has become something of a heroine of women’s rights. In the Talmud she was the first wife of Adam, but refused to accept her subservient role. Adam rejected her, after which God created Eve as a more obedient mate. Because she refused to accept the inferior relationship in the primal marriage, she has been interpreted as a strong-minded woman reacting to male oppression. In Hebrew folklore she is said to have slept with Lucifer, giving birth to hundreds of lilin, female demons who would become the succubi of medieval and Jewish legend.
Whew! Kenneth got me at a very weak moment – I was completely dependent on the kindness of strangers, and, in fact, met a lot of very kind strangers. My friends the meths drinkers, for example, and the people in the Chinese laundry and my drug dealer – well! – and all sorts of funny, generous people I ran into. Even the police looked after me.
Strangely, Kenneth thought he could take me, a heroin addict, off the street, transport me to Egypt, and get me to play Lilith. It was great to go to Egypt – don’t get me wrong – but to have to crawl around an Arab graveyard dressed as a nun covered in Max Factor blood with skulls all around me was insane! It’s amazing they didn’t stone me to death, actually. The scene was shot very early in the morning when nobody was around, thank God. Of course today I’d probably be on some list of infidel dogs for desecrating a Muslim graveyard in a movie. Anyway, lightning didn’t strike – but, of course, it did eventually.
Naturally it was a huge mistake. Karmically a seriously wrong turn for me and something that took me a long time to overcome. I never should have done it, and had I been in my right mind I wouldn’t have considered it for a minute. That was one of the problems of being as high as I was at that moment, that somebody like Kenneth Anger – who is definitely on the dark side – could come along and get me to do mad, satanic things. What did I think I was doing? Well, I thought it was art, I suppose. I never got paid, which I always think is a sure sign it’s art. It was art, wasn’t it? It was the Devil’s art, and it’s very hard to get paid by the Devil, as you may know. There’s a few other people we could put in that category – mainly from the music business.
But before I get any further into the less charming aspects of Kenneth’s character I want to bang on a bit about the good things he did, because so far I’ve only given you his ruthless side.
One memorable evening Kenneth took me to see Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine at the National Theatre. Kenneth was naturally a huge fan of Marlowe, that Elizabethan ‘student of the School of Night’ whose death – a blow to the head by his own knife – is often seen as being foretold in his bloody and demon-haunted plays. ‘Black is the beauty of the brightest day,’ he has the ruthless tyrant Tamburlaine boast. Tamburlaine – parts I and II – is awe-inspiring and grotesque in an epic sort of way that only Elizabethans and Jacobeans could manage. I am grateful to Kenneth for that, even though it was three or four hours of disembowellings and upside-down crucifixions and tits being cut off and children being slashed. ‘Blood is the god of war’s rich livery.’ Endless horrors, but still fantastic. Kenneth was drooling throughout, and so was I, Christopher Marlowe being one of my heroes, too. Marlowe had his profligate vision, his wayward, possessed intent and conception of himself as the doomed, ‘brain-sick’ artist (‘What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?’). I’m always impressed when I see monstrous happenings turn into art before my eyes. When you see Tamburlaine, orany Christopher Marlowe play, you are confronted with actual genius, with a metamorphosis of horror into art. The great Elizabethan ‘blank-verse beast’ whirls words like a conjurer juggling sapphires, swords, stars, and the axle-tree of heaven as if they were so many balls:
I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains, And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about; And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.
Heavens! You truly believe some word-mad god tunes this music to our souls.
On the other hand, I’m afraid I’ve never really felt that Lucifer Rising was art. To be kind, let’s say the jury is still out on it. The thing is, for me it’s just sort of undigested cult stuff. There’s no question that it fits exquisitely well into this ghastly world we live in, but there’s a difference. I didn’t have a very high opinion of him to begin with and after I’d seen the alchemical films of Harry Smith I realised where Kenneth must’ve got many of his images from. The idea of drawing flying saucers coming into the screen – that was Harry’s idea. You could say Kenneth nicked it or you could say he was influenced by Harry, depending on how generous we want to be. Or we could say they influenced each other – which may well be the case. Harry started out as a fan of Kenneth’s work.
Harry, in any case, was at the other end of the spectrum. He was cool and relaxed – he didn’t have to promote himself. Kenneth tries too hard. Harry wouldn’t have minded whatever I said about him. He could take a joke, but Ken can’t – which is something I learned when I wrote my last book.
I suppose I was a bit unfair to Kenneth in my autobiography. The way I described my experiences was honest – the whole fiasco was so disturbing I still flinch when I think about it – but at the same time, I understand why Kenneth was so upset.
Obviously he was expecting a delightful, charming portrait of himself instead of what he got. I suppose I was pretty harsh, even a wee bit nasty, and now I’m trying to see it from his point of view – which isn’t all that easy. But, whatever I said about him, I certainly didn’t expect the vituperative response I got. Sometime after the book came out, Kenneth sent me a letter containing a curse written in fake blood. I opened it up and basically flipped out. I was so troubled by it I immediately took it down to my friends, Julian and Victoria Lloyd, to figure out what to do. On one level the letter was silly and hysterically funny, too. There was the part where he says, ‘You Jew! You Jew, like Kirk Douglas, like DANNY KAYE!’ What kind of curse is that? A Hollywood witch’s curse, I imagine, right out of Vampira’s grimoire. It was all about Jews and Danny Kaye – because Danny Kaye was Jewish, not a fact you would be likely to focus on, but Kenneth, of course, would (being virulently anti-Semitic). I’ve got a lovely Jewish granny, thank God, from whom I got my blonde hair and the big lips. Kenneth knew about all that. This put a rabid bee in his bonnet.
He’s been going on about my being part Jewish for years. He’s given lectures about it, about ‘my flaw’. I’ve heard from other people about this terrible flaw in my character: the fact that I am Jewish! That was funny and silly; I just laughed at that. But then the really vile stuff started to spew out: ‘DIE OF LUNG CANCER!’ and all that generic malice right out of the Common Book of Beastly Spells. For someone who considers himself a magus scrying out his victim’s secrets, he somehow missed a few critical things that might have hit home to me rather more effectively. Like sleeping pills! You’ll die from an overdose of sleeping pills! Or painkillers. He missed all that. Kenneth was quite capable of picking out the one thing that would truly sting you. The curse he sent to poor Robert Fraser had nothing in it except a razor blade and a piece of type saying: ‘Something to cure your stutter.’ I joke about it, but at the time I was absolutely panicked, holding the vile curse in my hands – not a fun thing to have in one’s possession. I went down to Jules and Vic’s – they were still living on the corner by Leixlip Castle then and showed it to them. Victoria was appalled but Julian was giddily impressed. ‘It’s a masterpiece!’ he declared. ‘You’ve got to send it to the V&A!’ I don’t know exactly what the Victoria & Albert Museum would’ve made of it, but visually it was an astonishing item. Very graphic and ghastly at the same time, and as maliciously conceived as only a true Satanist and twisted individual could conjure up. It was this huge piece of paper with threats inscribed in blood – Max Factor blood, I’m sure, completely fake – but as an artefact it looked incredible. It was a big, malign, poisonous curse – maybe a bit too wordy, maybe he raged on a bit too much. I mean, does the Devil rant you to death?
‘What the hell!’ I screamed at Julian. ‘I know it’s sort of wonderful in a ghastly cult artefact sort of way. It would be fine if it went to someone else, but it came to me, and, um, I can’t exactly look at it as an aesthetic object just now.’
In the end, Victoria told me to take it to the crossroads where there was a Lady Chapel and burn it with salt, rosemary and rue. Where would I find rue in this day and age? In Vic’s garden. Victoria is not a witch and does not grow this stuff for magical purposes. It’s just a herb, a lovely, old-fashioned herb. It’s in the wonderful mad scene in Hamlet: ‘rue for remembrance’. Or was it rosemary?
OPHELIA: There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.
LAERTES: A document in madness!
But, why burn Kenneth’s hideous screed with rosemary when it was something I clearly didn’t want to remember? I did it in order to remember my true self. And mark that this nonsense from Kenneth had got nothing to do with me. To fight back. For him to remember who he’s dealing with and for me to know who I am.
Kenneth must have been terribly roiled by what I said about him in my book, but I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just said what I really thought, like I do, but one has to have compassion. I realise now, in hindsight, that Kenneth was half using me, and half trying to help me, and in a funny way, I accept that and I can say ‘thank you’, but at the same time, it caused me a hell of a lot of trouble. I should have just said ‘no’. I don’t mean I was ready to reform completely, but I should have said no. ‘No thank you, darling, perhaps we’ll practise one of your satanic rituals some other time!’ If you let somebody do things to you, such as using you as an actress in a demonic ritual, you will pay a price. Let’s face it, it’s dabbling in darkness and it’s no joke. It’s down to a question of darkness and light, and I’m not even talking about it in religious terms because I’m not a religious person. I have my own spiritual track, but I’m certainly not religious. In fact, I’m against religion, and that helped me, of course, to avoid being drawn into Kenneth’s sway, because black magic is a religion. I, of course, did not tell Kenneth what I’d done – burning his letter at a wayside shrine – because in some Harry Potterish way he could have made a counter curse to that, too. It’s quite complicated, this whole business. And you have to be very careful. What I didn’t want to do – which in fact you can do – was to send the curse back to Kenneth so that it would land on him. Within the occult scheme of things if you send out that much hatred against someone and the recipient has enough power to hurl it back at you psychically, it can rebound – like the piece of paper with the spell on it that Dana Andrews slips back into the magician’s pocket at the end of Curse of the Demon. I’m not an expert, needless to say, but it’s a wearying and aggravating business.
I do think my counter-attack worked. I somehow knew intuitively what to do. In that way I’m quite like my mother – I’ve got that side to me, I just choose not to go to the dark side. White magic is another story entirely – that I am quite capable of using – and this is what you must do if you’re ever unfortunate enough to get a poison-pen letter from Kenneth.
Perhaps by playing a demoness I had summoned up long-dormant demons, some ghoulish skull-fondling jinni out of the desert wastes – but what is quite certain is that demons will fasten on you when you are at your weakest point and by toying with them, even in a film, you give them power. As Christopher Marlowe says at the conclusion of Doctor Faustus, his hero’s fate for meddling in dark matters should make wise men pause before dabbling in ‘unlawful things’
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits To practice more than heavenly power permits.
And I didn’t entirely rely on my magical practices. In a very English way I wrote him a stiff letter in which I said, ‘Now, look, Kenneth, I’ve supported you, I’ve always said how great you are, and you know what a big fan of your films I am …’ blah-di-blah-blah – I mentioned everything I’d ever done or said about him – ‘so do not go into a queenie fit about the book. Please let’s have no more of this nonsense!’
He wrote back – a much calmer Kenneth. But then at the end of his letter he added: ‘Unfortunately, I can’t take the curse back.’
eva
My mother had been another person entirely before the war. I always had a hard time imagining what she was like as a cool, urbane, young Weimar girl. It certainly didn’t carry over into her life with us. The war must have changed her drastically. She was only twenty-four when the Anschluss happened and overnight a precious part of her life was simply ripped away.
As my mother got older, she talked more and more about her parents. It was always a very idealistic portrait, with no unpleasant scenes whatever. Her childhood had been perfect.
Even though I never saw much of this Weimar side to Eva, I must have imbibed it somehow in my mother’s milk – it’s the only explanation I have for how I was able to do the Kurt Weill material so believably. Doing these songs takes an aptitude for seeing the grotesque as an aspect of love. Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht songs are the counterpoint to the unsettling paintings of Otto Dix and George Grosz. The style was called the Neue Sachlichkeit, New Realism, but actually it’s a celebration of the edge between beauty and the bizarre. That’s really what the Brecht/Weill canon is all about. You’ve got to be able to go there. That wonderfully masochistic chorus in ‘Surabaya Johnny’, for example. The sheer erotic perversity of it.
Surabaya Johnny. Will the hurt ever mend?
Surabaya Johnny. Oh, I burn at your touch.
You got no heart, Johnny, but oh, I love you,
I love you, I love you so much.
They’re all like that. You can hear it in Pirate Jenny’s song, her all-consuming quest for vengeance in The Threepenny Opera – something my mother understood all too well: the ship, the ominous black ship, sailing into the harbour.
As a person Eva was much warmer than my father and I’m more like her in that respect. But of course that emotional side of her had a downside. She could erupt in an irrational fury. My father’s detachment was oddly soothing compared to my mother’s rages. He didn’t get so emotionally involved, and his remoteness, which I often lamented, was reassuring amidst the family turmoil.
My mother was extreme in her passions: her likes, her dislikes, her resentments. She was an almost savage person. Sophisticated and refined on a certain level, but utterly dominated by hatred and love and regret and bitterness. She first became embittered about my father, later on it was me. But long before either of us had failed her, she was a tinderbox. Drinking made it worse. Unlike my father, my mother wasn’t intellectual. And as she got older and her past began to weigh on her, she became very religious. She suffered from melancholia – that was her word for it. Something like depression, but a much more romantic concept: a gloomy state of mind saturated in Middle-European Weltschmerz, the sense that one’s own sorrow is intrinsically linked to the sadness of the world.
I remember going to church with my mother when I was young and watching her getting incredibly emotional – praying loudly with tears streaming down her face, racked with sobs actually. I was terribly embarrassed. Of course she had just been through the war, but children don’t really understand that. When it finally dawned on me that her involvement with the church brought her peace, I felt glad for her – and then very magnanimously forgave her for embarrassing me.
At the end of her life, God and Christ, Heaven and Hell, all those emblematic ideas became terrifyingly real to her. I suppose she was concerned about going to Hell. She had shot a man, after all. When the Russians entered Vienna at the end of the war, they were hellbent on rape, destruction, and pillage. They opened all the wine cellars in Vienna. Wine running down the streets; all the Russian soldiers had to do was open their mouths and the wine ran in. They got blind drunk, and then raped every woman in sight. A Russian soldier from the steppes burst into the room where my mother and grandmother were hiding. He raped my mother and was about to rape my grandmother, at which point Eva picked up a gun and shot him. It was justifiable homicide, of course – but murder in the eyes of the church.
As a result of the rape my mother had to have an abortion. After the Russians came to Vienna, there were long lines of women queuing up to have abortions. I’ve heard that when a woman has had an abortion, she always wants to have a child. Certainly, this explains why Eva wanted to marry my father and have me.
After my parents divorced, my mother and I moved into 41 Milman Road in Reading. I was about seven at the time and, looking back, I can see that Eva was relatively happy when in Reading. She was teaching and I was going to school and things were okay, but I don’t think she realised it until long after it was over. I’ve found that the ability to realise you’re happy while it’s happening is actually quite elusive.
Eva got a job teaching maladjusted children, as they were then called: children from broken homes who’d gone through hellish lives. And of course she was very good at it. Filled with empathy, she taught them dance, current affairs and art. Eva taught a type of free dance, very much like Isadora Duncan. The children danced in bare feet, made symbolic gestures, and acted out expressive scenes. Sometimes I would go to her classes, which was quite a strange experience. These kids were very disturbed; they had gone through truly terrible experiences and some had done horrible things. I remember one boy had killed some kittens, and he was obviously going to grow up to be a psychopath. That was my unforgiving, childlike take on it. If I saw them being rude to my mother, I would freak out and yell at them, which did no good whatsoever. Eva, in a very matter-of-fact way, would just give them a smack – not hard, but just a quick clip, like a mother lion.
Eva also taught dance at my school for a while and I found myself put into one of her productions. At fourteen, I was playing the lead in The Snow Queen and, right in the middle of the performance, I got my first period. There was blood on my white costume, and even worse I had absolutely no idea what it was. My mother took no notice.
‘The show must go on,’ she said. ‘Just ignore it.’
When he was a young man my mother’s father fell in love and married an eighteen-year-old Jewish girl from Hungary. Coming from his aristocratic family this was a highly unusual thing to do – and of course his family opposed the marriage, but her family even more violently. One time Eva’s grandmother asked her to go to the synagogue with her, and Eva refused. She had been brought up a Catholic and Catholics aren’t supposed to attend other people’s churches. Many years later Eva still regretted it, which was probably why she became so ecumenical when she got older.
When the Nazis came to power in Vienna they insisted Jews wear the Star of David on their arms. My grandfather was outraged that his wife should be subjected to this indignity and said to my mother: ‘Come on, Eva, we’re going to visit the head of the Gestapo, and we’ll see about this!’ He put on his Tyrolean hat and his cloak – he was very tall and imposing – and as he strode along the street in a fury, my mother, quite frightened by the whole business, was trying to keep up with him. Eventually they got to the Gestapo headquarters and my grandfather announced himself.
‘Baron Sacher-Masoch,’ he said. ‘I demand to see the officer in charge!’ They were shown in to the office of the head of the Gestapo in Vienna, who turned out to be an ensign in my grandfather’s regiment in the First World War.
‘What’s this nonsense about my wife having to wear a Star of David?’ my grandfather asked him. ‘I want you to cancel that order immediately.’ And this officer – my mother always used to call him by some daft German name like Bumpfelkaeger – who clearly hero-worshipped my grandfather, answered immediately: ‘Oh, mein Kolonel, mein Kolonel, itis fine, it is fine, sir. I’ll give you the papers right now. Of course, Frau Baroness Sacher-Masoch doesn’t have to wear the Star of David.’
And with that he gave my grandfather the documents exempting her. My grandfather snatched up the papers and swept out of the room. As he got to the doorway, he stopped and turned back and fixed Herr Bumpfelkaeger in his sights, head of Gestapo in Austria, a very powerful man, and said: ‘If I had known in the First World War what you were going to become, I would have shot you in the trenches!’ Despite the fact that my grandmother had converted to Christianity, she still attended synagogue on high holy days. Conversion was not uncommon among Jews in Austria at that time. For instance, Karl Kraus, the famous aphorist, gadfly, and playwright, was an assimilated Jew. That’s why the Second World War and the Nazi racial laws came as such a shock. Many people felt that first and foremost they were Germans or Austrians or Hungarians. My grandmother thought of herself as a Hungarian patriot. She’d grown up in Hungary and had strong feelings about Hungarian independence even though she was married to an Austrian army officer.