The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

  She acted in three plays in four weeks, then left for ten days’ filming in Rome and Florence. She returned to Berlin on 4May and took up again the punishing routine of making films by day, then leaving the studio at Babelsberg to drive to the theatre for her evening performance. ‘Of course it is very tiring to be filmed,’ she told her aunt, who had never strayed from the stage, ‘but one’s got to get along.’ In her case, this meant making as much money as possible. She now knew for certain that her mother, her daughter, Ada, and her niece, Marina Ried, were to arrive on 10 May. ‘I’ve got to buy them clothes and find a place to live.’ Olga wanted ‘to earn a lot of money this summer’, to take Ada and Marina ‘to the south of France or Italy for six weeks’.

  Before leaving Russia for the last time, Olga’s mother, Lulu Knipper, took the seven-year-old Ada round to Misha’s apartment to say goodbye. Misha, then at the height of his success in Moscow, never imagined that he too would soon follow the path of exile.

  Aunt Olya went back with Lev to Germany that summer, visiting both Freiburg and Berlin. On their return to Russia, they went down to Yalta to see Aunt Masha, who was still guarding her brother’s house as a shrine to his memory. After Moscow, the tall cypresses and the meridional warmth of the Crimea exerted an irresistible appeal. Aunt Olya, almost like a child, had a ritual on first catching sight of the sea. She would stand up in the railway carriage and bow to it, ‘with a slightly guilty smile’.

  They first visited Masha at the Chekhov house in Yalta. The local young ladies, hearing of their arrival, came over, ostensibly to pay their respects to Chekhov’s widow, but also, it would appear, to make the acquaintance of her good-looking nephew. Lev was evidently an effective seducer, but one suspects that he gave little away emotionally.

  After the visit to Yalta, the two holidaymakers from Moscow spent most of the time at Gurzuf, where Aunt Olya had the small seaside house left to her by Anton Chekhov. This simple house of whitewashed walls, terracotta tiles and pale green shutters was situated at the base of a promontory formed by dramatic rocks overlooking a small bay. The house had a handful of cypresses to provide a little shade from the blinding sunlight.

  Soon after their return to Moscow, Aunt Olya received a letter from Masha in Yalta. ‘I am now working for the Soviet state,’ she wrote with a mixture of amusement and pride. ‘I am now officially director of the Chekhov house-museum. Give my greetings to Lyova and tell him that he has put splinters into the hearts of local ladies. They are unable to forget him.’ But the real reason for the letter came at the end: 1924 marked the twentieth anniversary of Chekhov’s death and there was to be a celebration in the Kremlin to mark it. ‘Tell me,’ she wrote, ‘how Lunacharsky sees Anton Pavlovich in the light of the present situation.’

  Aunt Olya reported back a fortnight later. ‘The commemoration of Anton Pavlovich did not go very well in my view,’ she wrote. It had taken place in the Kremlin in the Hall of Columns. The audience consisted of two sharply opposite worlds, the lovers of the theatre and of Chekhov on the one hand, and hard-line Bolsheviks on the other. Aunt Olya had not enjoyed reading her memories of life with Chekhov to such a divided crowd. ‘What was liked by one made the other sceptical ... My memories could only be understood by an audience used to literary life. Lunacharsky spoke for a long time, but I did not listen and I told him so. He seemed to be talking about a “Chekhovist movement” which had not been understood correctly.’

  In Berlin, Olga eagerly awaited the arrival of all her surviving family, save Lev. Her sister Ada was going to follow later. Olga had rented a new apartment with fifteen rooms at Klopstock Strasse 20in the Tiergarten district of Berlin. There had been no problem with exit visas. Lulu Knipper arrived safely with the two little girls. They had taken the same sea route as Aunt Olya, down the Baltic from Leningrad to Stettin, but they were spared from dreadful weather.

  The Klopstock Strasse apartment soon looked partially lived in, with icons and family photographs brought out of Russia by Lulu. But the walls seemed strangely bare in the principal living rooms, as if they were about to move on again. The revolution, the civil war and the death of her husband, Konstantin, had changed Lulu, now known to the whole family as Baba. From the musical young mother, she had become an imposing grey-haired, stout woman. She was also a very heavy smoker, with a gruff voice and manner, although her heart was warm.

  Baba ran the household and dealt with the staff, while Olga earned the money in her punishing regime of work. As well as the cook, Baba oversaw the parlour maid, Olga’s lady’s maid, the chauffeur and an English governess for the two girls. The household—and the chaos—increased later with the arrival of Lux, a large white dog resembling a half-grown polar bear. The Knipper family, which Anton Chekhov had considered so very German in Moscow, seemed to become increasingly Russian during their exile in Berlin.

  The Knipper matriarchy was, of course, surrounded by other Russian émigrés in the western part of Berlin. But Olga’s social life revolved around her work, especially the theatre. She would go occasionally to grand receptions, where she could meet interesting and useful people. At the Ullstein Villa in the Grünewald, she met the foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann. In typical style, she claims not only to have become great friends with him, but that he arranged for her German citizenship.

  She travelled frequently, sometimes making movies abroad, but always at a hectic pace. ‘Dear Aunt Olya!’ she wrote in April 1926. ‘As you see, I am in Paris. I’ve come here to rest for ten days in between two films.’ One of them was René Clair’s The Italian Straw Hat. ‘The most important thing is to get a breath of a different pace of life for the new film ... Next winter I’ll be playing with Reinhardt.’

  That year she also had a role in a very German film, Die Mühle von Sanssouci (The Mill of Sans Souci). It was the first of several films glorifying Frederick the Great. The story in this case was impeccably democratic—Frederick wanted to pull down a mill overlooking his new palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam, but was thwarted by his own law courts. Yet almost anything about the Prussian king and legendary strategist held an almost sacred appeal to nationalists embittered by the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler, a fanatic of the cinema, would almost certainly have seen it, having already greatly admired Olga Chekhova in a movie earlier that year, Brennende Grenze or Burning Frontiers. Olga Chekhova, on the other hand, would probably have been barely aware of the future Führer’s existence at this stage.

  In July Olga wrote from Italy to her aunt, who was then staying with Masha in Yalta. ‘I am stuck here again with filming. Yesterday we visited new archaeological works at Pompeii. My God, how interesting! Yesterday there was a little eruption of Vesuvius—the sight was grandiose. Did you get my [money] transfer? I will write again at the end of the month. Kisses and greetings to everyone.’

  Having never been taken seriously by her aunt, especially after her disastrous marriage to Misha, it was hardly surprising that Olga could not resist alluding to her success. ‘I will be here [in Berlin] until 15—20 October,’ she wrote the following year, ‘then off to London, and back here only at Christmas. Karenina is a big and beautiful role ... In this film world every other word is “money”, and every day away from here costs money. Sometimes it is so hard to live like this, like a gypsy. I have to travel because of my work, but what can one do? ... They keep inviting me to America, but I am not going, I cannot work among people who have no heart and soul.’ What she did not mention in the letter was that the movie she was making in Paris and London at that time was Moulin Rouge, which became a great succès de scandale.

  Olga Chekhova was still trying to broaden her range of parts away from the typecasting of baroness and society beauty. In the French version of Moulin Rouge, she performed an erotic dance with a python wrapped round her, and the chorus line included many bare breasts. Even though Moulin Rouge proved a huge success all over Europe and in the United States, and at last made her an international star, it was one of the films which she failed to men
tion in her letters to Aunt Olya, in case it shocked her.

  Olga was now thirty years old and playing the grande dame in real life, even if she tried to avoid it in front of the cameras. She commissioned a very expensive stained-glass panel with the Knipper coat of arms and her writing paper was embossed with a specially designed monogram, consisting of her initials in German, OT for Olga Tschechowa. She used it in her letters to her aunt, written always in pre-revolutionary style. She even insisted on referring to her aunt’s address in its old form of Prechistensky bulvar, rather than its new name, Gogolevsky bulvar. Above all, she enjoyed inviting her aunt to stay in Berlin, insisting that she would pay for everything.

  In September 1929, she wrote to her aunt from a film set in Bavaria. ‘I am studying singing and learning to breathe properly, and studying English too. I am surprised at myself.’ She was learning English because Hollywood, fascinated by European actresses such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, felt compelled, as always, to try to replicate a winning formula.

  The comedy Die Drei von der Tankstelle (Three from the Filling Station), her first ‘talkie’ in 1930, had also achieved international success. Later that year, Olga Chekhova sailed for New York from Cuxhaven on the transatlantic liner Europa. She was under contract to Universal to make a romantic comedy, Love on Command. In Hollywood, she went to parties with Greta Garbo, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin asked her to teach him how to chew sunflower seeds in the true Russian style, spitting out the husks.

  Olga Chekhova was deeply impressed by the technical advances which she encountered in American film-making. It was the first time that she had seen a camera able to move around, following the actors and the action. No longer did the actor have to play as if on a tiny stage. Yet her brief time in Hollywood was not a great success. In Love on Command, another talkie, Olga Chekhova’s Russo-German accent proved rather too strong for American tastes. This was a major disadvantage, since Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich had already cornered the sophisticated Nordic market. The studio bosses also made it clear to her that she was overweight and demanded that she lose up to twenty pounds. Perhaps not surprisingly, Olga Chekhova strongly echoed her aunt’s dislike of the United States when she returned home.

  In Moscow, Lev had started to make a mark, but he had not yet achieved anything like the fame of his sister. The first public performance of his music took place in 1925 in the Revolution Theatre. The piece bore the slightly pretentious title ‘Fairy Tales of a Plaster Idol’.

  ‘It was shameful and scary,’ Lev wrote many years later, ‘because my music was disgusting. It must be the usual thing for any young composer when his music is played for the first time.’ During a rehearsal, a famous critic had come in wearing an expensive coat open down the front and wearing a fur hat.

  “‘What are you playing there?” he asked.

  “‘It’s my own composition.”

  ‘“Ah, it sounds very interesting.”

  ‘The next day this critic published a laudatory review of my music, which he did not really listen to. Others praised me too. Others warned me of “dangerous tendencies”. I should give up a lot of clever inventions. I had to look for a simple and understandable musical language.’

  Lev did not waste time consolidating a reputation, he wanted to move on. The following year he began work on an opera based on Voltaire’s Candide. ‘My dream was to perform it in the Leningrad Opera Theatre,’ he wrote. Initially, the reaction to his work in Leningrad was clearly encouraging. ‘They are making such a fuss about me here,’ he wrote to Aunt Olya. ‘I won’t say it’s unpleasant, but I don’t swell up. I modestly oppose exaggerations and say that one shouldn’t get carried away if the first act has been a success. This does not automatically mean that all the following acts would be as good.’

  Perhaps they were not as good, or perhaps his overall scheme failed. He aimed to combine symphony music, opera, dancing and speaking. ‘Even Radlov, who was a very daring producer,’ Lev had to admit in later years, ‘got scared by the complication of the whole performance and never staged it.’

  That summer Lev spent as usual in the Crimea in Aunt Olya’s house at Gurzuf. ‘My life is still much the same: I see no one, go out only to play tennis. I am extremely well.’ The competitive Lev was soon the tennis champion of the Crimea.

  Then, like the rest of the family, he gravitated towards the complex of the Moscow Art Theatre. Nemirovich-Danchenko employed him as a consultant to its Music Theatre for opera in 1929, which suited Lev perfectly as he was determined to write a piece by which he would always be remembered. Nemirovich-Danchenko advised him on the first version of his adaptation of a play about a notorious incident during the civil war—the killing by the British of twenty-six commissars from Baku. In its final form as North Wind, the opera proved a considerable success.

  A more sinister explanation has also been advanced for Lev’s work with the Moscow Art Theatre. As an institution it was increasingly seen as ‘politically unreliable’ and Lev may well have been expected by his OGPU masters to report on his colleagues. There are even rumours that Aunt Olya was suspected of denouncing rivals and that she had promised young lovers in the cast that she would save them from arrest. Such stories are probably more indicative of the back-stabbing within the theatre than anything else. There is no evidence that either Lev or Aunt Olya denounced anybody, nor that any members of the company were arrested at this time. Lev may even have used his influence with the ’security organs‘, as he did later, to help friends.

  Lev’s controller at this time was Major of State Security, later Commissar of State Security, Viktor Ilin. Ilin worked in the secret political department and was in charge of running informers among the intelligentsia, ‘and, more importantly, with persons among the intelligentsia and political figures who had relatives abroad’. During the 1920S, Lev’s primary task for the OGPU had been to provide intelligence on émigré intellectuals, but he was also expected to report on Russians of German origin within the Soviet Union. Under Stalin, a new mood of xenophobia was developing along with the hunt for Trotskyists.

  Misha Chekhov’s greatest achievement on the Moscow stage was almost certainly his Hamlet of 1924 with the Second Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. As well as the title Honoured Actor of the USSR, he was elected to the Moscow Soviet. But over the next three years he fell foul of the Soviet cultural authorities, including Lunacharsky. According to Misha’s loyal cousin Sergei, ‘his enemies spread a rumour that Misha’s philosophy was counter-revolutionary’. His views, especially on dramatic art, were indeed counter-revolutionary, because Misha believed in artistic truth rather than Communist political correctness.

  Opportunists began to create trouble for him at the theatre and he made a bad situation even worse for himself. During the winter of 1927—8, he did not create a single new role and in the following spring he and his wife, Xenia, went abroad. One rather tall tale claims that Misha had played chess with the notorious OGPU chief Yagoda and won, thus gaining an exit visa. Whether or not he had made up his mind before they left, it was soon clear that they would not return to the Soviet Union. Almost as soon as he had departed, rumours began to circulate that he was working in Vienna with Max Reinhardt. This later proved to be true. It could not have been a wiser decision. Misha would never have been able to stand the regime of Socialist Realism which began six years later. And he might well have suffered the same fate of torture and execution as Meyerhold.

  When Misha and Xenia reached Berlin in 1928, his former wife, Olga, came to their rescue. She found them a small apartment near to her own so that eleven-year-old Ada could visit her father easily. But perhaps the most piquant part for her of this gentle reversal of fortunes was to direct Misha in her own film called Der Narr seiner Liebe (The Fool of Love). Shortly after Misha played the village idiot in the movie Troika, in which Olga starred.

  Misha moved to Paris in 1931, where he played several of his most famous roles: Hamlet, Malvolio in
As You Like It and Strindberg’s Erik XIV in the Theatre de Montmartre. Then, under the encouragement of a new Swiss admirer, Georgette Boner, he set up a company called the Theatre de l‘Avenue. They created a play, Le Château s’eveille (The Castle Awakes), based on the fairy tale of Prince Ivan.

  Olga’s sister, Ada, who had never enjoyed anything like her sister’s success, joined her former brother-in-law’s cast as ‘ist Witch’. Ada had clearly not accustomed herself to life outside Russia as easily as Olga. ‘I both accept the West and push it away with all my force,’ she wrote to Aunt Olya. ‘I am avoiding people here, they are all strangers... I’ve enrolled as an actress here, and can you imagine, it’s all going very successfully from the first play ... Misha is content, he says I’m a good actress.’

  In her letter, Ada recounted that everybody at home in Berlin was fine, but they were hard up. ‘Olga only played in one film, in June.’ This comparatively lean period would not last long, and soon Olga was working again as hard as ever. Her most successful movie at this time, Liebelei, directed by Max Ophüls, was a tragic romance based on Arthur Schnitzler’s famous play about codes of honour in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. The storyline was typical of those inter-war years. A good-looking officer falls in love with a violinist’s daughter, but a past love affair with a baroness comes back to haunt him.

  Yet even during the six-month period of little work, Olga had shown hardly any inclination to become seriously involved with a man. Perhaps seeing Misha again had reminded her of the disadvantages of men trying to run her life.

  Her brother, Lev, on the other hand, had married quite suddenly the previous year. His choice of partner was surprising for a supposedly penitent White Guardist. His wife, Lyubov Sergeevna Zalesskaya, was the daughter of a famous architect of noble family. She was daring, intelligent and avant-garde, and looked the part with short hair and tennis shoes. At a time of developing Stalinist conformity, it was almost shocking.