Paris: A Love Story (10 page)

“I sat with a German family and experienced with them the emotional catharsis repeated all over this country. The Knies family of Bonn decided to watch
Holocaust
as a family, all eight members gathered in front of their television sets for seven grueling hours. Willem Knies, once a pilot in Hitler’s Luftwaffe, could only say he was seeing nothing he did not already know, but knowing the facts is one thing, experiencing the emotions is another. ‘It’s terrible,’ he said, ‘and it’s true.’

“Shortly after the broadcast of
Holocaust,
” I reported, “West German police started cracking down on bands of neo-Nazis. They’ve confiscated pictures of Adolf Hitler, swastikas, and even more chilling, an arsenal of machine guns and revolvers and explosives found in a small town near Hanover, where a group of eighteen youths had formed a neo-Nazi training camp.

“But a far greater danger until now had been an unwillingness on the part of most Germans to even admit to the Nazi
past . . . In a way this is a period of testing: a nation still on probation in the eyes of much of the world has been on trial in recent weeks—maybe years. Foreign observers, this reporter included, have been astonished at the overwhelming reaction to the broadcast of
Holocaust
. As one German friend put it, ‘I don’t feel personal guilt for all those things I had nothing to do with. What I do feel now is shame.’ . . . This is Kati Marton, ABC News, Bonn.”

•   •   •

Again, it was in Paris that Peter and I reunited. The unlikely figure of the brooding religious leader who was about to shake the world to its core brought us together in the French capital. The Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, exiled spiritual leader of Iranian Shiites, slipped into France in late 1978. Following his thirteen-year exile in Iraq, he arrived in the sleepy Parisian suburb of Neauphle-le-Château. Twenty-five miles east of Paris, this leafy hamlet was a strange spot from which to organize a revolution. But that is precisely what the Iranian religious leader planned: the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I was thrilled to be assigned to cover Khomeini’s French exile. Each morning that winter of 1979, my crew and I drove to the ayatollah’s compound. His followers had pitched a huge blue and white prayer tent, which they called a mosque. Khomeini stayed in his modest bungalow, inaccessible to the growing number of us reporters. Our goal was to catch him twice a day as he shuffled from the bungalow to the tent with our cameras and microphones. “Allahu Akhbar!” his supporters
shouted when Khomeini appeared.
God is great.
They surged toward the turbaned old man, eager to touch the hem of his black robe. I was chilled by his gaze. His eyes were pitch-black, and beneath his bushy brows they glowered at everyone—his adoring followers included. There seemed no life in his eyes at all. He seemed as repelled by his supporters as by the rest of us. He literally recoiled from being touched by human hands.

One day, I was doing my rapid-fire stand-up report, in time to have the ayatollah in the shot behind me as he crossed the lawn to his tent. Suddenly, I noticed that my cameraman, Tony Hirashiki, had stopped shooting. He seemed frozen in place. “C’mon, c’mon!” I barked, “we haven’t got much time.” Tony shook his head. I turned around and there, standing behind me, dark and menacing, was the ayatollah himself. Eyes stormier than ever, he gestured with his hands that I should cover my head. I think I was more annoyed than frightened. In those days, Ayatollah Khomeini seemed just an angry old man. The world had not yet encountered his ruthless power. I borrowed a headscarf from a colleague and finished my stand-upper without Khomeini in the shot.

I was not the only one who underestimated Khomeini and what he stood for. The idea that religion would be the most dangerous political force of the late twentieth century seemed inconceivable then. Washington was caught as flat-footed as the rest of us when the ayatollah unleashed his vengeful theocracy a few months later.

Though a sign on the wall of his bungalow informed us that “the ayatollah has no spokesman,” we knew better. Sadegh
Ghotbzadeh was a dapper Georgetown University School of Foreign Service graduate who befriended all of us in the press corps and acted as Khomeini’s emissary. He was charming, flirtatious, and absolutely devoted to his master. The ayatollah referred to Sadegh as “almost my son.” Peter and I met Sadegh at his favorite Parisian brasserie, La Closerie des Lilas, dear to both Hemingway and to my father. He and Peter wore almost identical blue blazers. Peter teased Sadegh that he would have made a great foreign correspondent. But Ghotbzadeh had grander dreams.

From a redbrick garage attached to Khomeini’s modest house, Ghotbzadeh and other aides, assisted by student volunteers, made cassette tapes of the ayatollah’s speeches. Transmitted by telephone to Iranian mosques, Khomeini’s noontime sermons in Neauphle-le-Château were heard by millions of Iranians. Sadegh and his cohorts were laying the groundwork for Khomeini’s return to his homeland.

On January 16, 1979, I scored a small scoop. It was the day Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the once all-powerful Shah of Shahs, who had ruled Iran with an iron fist, fled his country, to begin exile in Egypt. I cornered the shah’s son-in-law and ambassador to Washington, Ardeshir Zahedi, as he hurried to catch a connecting flight at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport. The debonair envoy seemed shaken but agreed to be interviewed. It wasn’t so much what Zahedi said. That was boilerplate—
the struggle for the soul of Iran will continue.
But he was our only voice from the fallen shah’s entourage. It was the day’s biggest story.

•   •   •

Peter and I continued our stormy relationship. One Friday night, a massive snowstorm shut down the Bonn–Cologne airport and left me stranded, unable to meet Peter in Paris. In desperation, I persuaded two fellow passengers to share a rental car with me and drive to Paris. I called Peter from an airport phone and told him I was en route—snowstorm be damned! The drive took almost seven hours in terrible conditions. The others, two German businessmen, did the driving. It was midnight when we finally pulled in to Paris. Let’s get a bite and a drink, one of them suggested, and celebrate our arrival. They suggested onion soup at the famed Au Pied de Cochon, in Les Halles. I could hardly decline their invitation. They had driven me to Paris.

When I arrived at the Lancaster an hour later, Peter was furious. It did no good for me to explain how dangerous the drive had been, how amazing that I had made it at all. That I had to show my gratitude for the lift by having a bite with the drivers. He was unrelenting in his anger. Knowing he was waiting for me, I should have come straight to the hotel, he said. For the rest of that snowy Paris weekend he barely spoke to me. I flew back to Bonn on Monday bleary-eyed and exhausted.

Things will be better when we live together, I told myself. All these separations are not good for us. We adored each other. Time would calm our fevered passions. “My dearest Katika,” he wrote me from Paris, while I was on home leave in New York, “you will not wake up for an hour and the time is crawling by—Time is a centipede today. I am trying to be calm, mindful of your urging, but it isn’t easy . . . As I look across the street
from the Bureau’s fifth floor here and admire the Haussmann balconies I am thinking how much I learn from you and what a great joy it is. I have a hard time thinking back to those days when I was not particularly fond of Paris. Even without you here, there is so much of
us
in it. (Even if I have to hear for the umpteenth time, ‘That’s the corner where I lived and there are the paving stones I tore up for the Revolution.’) What’s difficult about you being in New York is the pressure of the corporation on us as a couple. I have come with a great rush to value privacy more than ever before. That is so true because for the first time privacy—with you—is so profound, so fulfilling. God, can you give up the photographers for that sort of adulation?” In the margin of that letter, Peter had drawn a candle and written beside it: “This is a candle! You are my light.”

On February 1, 1979, the ayatollah and his entourage astonished the world. Among the first to learn of Khomeini’s sudden return trip to Iran was Peter. “Darling,” he wrote me, “have returned from lunch to find that Khomeini is leaving tonight . . . and I’m going with him! Pray for me—It sounds bad and I have to convince myself that what is bad is my imagination in situations like this. I love you, will love you always, through thick and thin and thick—there has been no thin for us. I miss you with a pain in my heart—I want you. I want and need us.”

Khomeini boarded a Tehran-bound Air France 747 in Paris, accompanied by Peter and 140 other journalists. The plane did not have permission to land in Iran. It was a very dangerous mission, but Peter would never turn down such an
assignment. En route, he scored an exclusive interview with the ayatollah. “How do you feel about being back in Iran?” Peter asked him. “I feel nothing,” the imam answered. I was not surprised. Based on my own observations, I judged Khomeini to be emotionally dead.

Tumultuous crowds welcomed the cleric’s return. Ghotbzadeh and his other faithful servants had done a masterly job preparing the way. In March, 98 percent of the population voted in favor of replacing the shah’s regime with an Islamic republic. Khomeini himself became Supreme Leader in November. Three years later our friend, the forty-six-year-old, handsome Sadegh, Khomeini’s “almost son,” was led before a firing squad and executed. In the harsh theocracy of the mullahs, there was no room for westernized secular figures such as Sadegh Ghotbzadeh. The Islamic revolution was consuming its own. I think of him each time I am at the Closerie des Lilas. “Look at his face,” Sadegh once said to me, indicating Khomeini. “He can only be a good man.”

Peter and I continued our roller-coaster ride of passionate reunions and agonizing separations through the next year. In the spring, the network again tried to lure Peter back to New York. I wrote to Peter from London, “I am sitting just where you and I sat at Brown’s Hotel—having tea. This is the first moment I’ve had since our dramatic night of phone calls. Roone’s summons is not what stands out in my mind. Your question, ‘Will you come?’ does. It was so important for me to hear that. And to hear my reaction—which came without the slightest hesitation from the deepest part of me. It almost doesn’t matter
what happens now. I want you to be happy—and right now I think New York has an almost symbolic importance for you.
^*
So I hope you and Mr. Wizard [Roone Arledge] can come to terms. You and I have, I think. I feel good and strong and calm about us. I do not feel I have to give up a part of myself for you. That wouldn’t make either of us happy. I feel I am growing, stretching beside you. I somehow feel a much fuller person with you than I ever have without you. Which does not preclude a strong professional side. I think we can work that out together.” Reading this now, I sound as if I am trying mightily to persuade myself of this less than obvious fact.

•   •   •

Later that year, Peter flew from our London home to Tehran to cover the militants’ seizure of American diplomats and others as hostages. President Jimmy Carter had bowed to intense pressure from friends of the shah—notably Henry Kissinger—and admitted the exiled monarch to the United States. The ayatollah’s followers retaliated by seizing the American Embassy in Tehran and taking fifty-three hostages.
America Held Hostage
was more than the name of a new nightly ABC News broadcast anchored by Ted Koppel. It expressed the shock and humiliation of a nation, and eventually drove a president from the White House. Almost the minute Jimmy Carter’s limousine rolled out of the White House, Tehran released the American
hostages—yet another jab at the country that Khomeini’s supporters had dubbed the Great Satan.

Microphone in hand, I stood on the frozen tarmac of Frankfurt Airport when the freed hostages landed, and interviewed them for NPR radio. They looked much thinner but as wan as the defeated American president.

I had given up my post as ABC News bureau chief in Germany. Carrying on a long-distance love affair with Peter while reporting for ABC News proved too stressful. I moved to London during the summer of 1979, already pregnant with Elizabeth. Peter continued to resist the network’s attempts to lure him back to New York and became
World News Tonight
’s overseas anchor. We married in early September and moved into a charming but derelict rowhouse in Notting Hill. I threw myself into its renovation and into my new domestic role with the same zeal with which I once attacked unmasking corruption in Philadelphia and spy stories in Germany. It was clear to me that I could not combine life as Peter’s wife, the mother of his child, with the life of a full-time foreign correspondent.

With Peter by my side for eleven hours of natural childbirth, Elizabeth Ilona Marton Jennings arrived on September 29, 1979. It was the happiest day of my life. Peter returned to Tehran a few weeks later and stayed away for six weeks. By the time he returned, Lizzie was sleeping through the night and our house renovation was complete. When Christopher Charles Jennings was born two and a half years later, we moved to a bigger house, with a bigger garden, in Hampstead. This pile needed even more extensive renovation than our Notting Hill rowhouse.

•   •   •

Maternal and marital bliss did not snuff out my other dreams and ambitions, however. While still nursing Lizzie, I wrote a lengthy essay about the Polish pope, John Paul II. It was a long shot, but I sent it off to the
Atlantic.
I still have the telegram I received from the magazine’s editor. “Vatican piece excellent. Letter follows.” Titled “The Paradoxical Pope,” my story made the magazine’s May 1980 cover. It was an unaccustomed thrill to see that cover on newsstands, with my byline under the pope’s portrait. Television, an ephemeral medium, did not give me that same sense of satisfaction.

The next article I wrote for the
Atlantic
was also made a cover. It was a profile of a then obscure Swedish diplomat who had saved thousands of Jews in Budapest during the last months of World War II, only to be taken prisoner by the Red Army. His name was Raoul Wallenberg, and that story changed my life. It became my first book.