Paris: A Love Story (8 page)

Bonn in those days was not much changed from John le Carré’s description of a decade earlier in his classic Cold War thriller,
A Small Town in Germany.
“Bonn was a Balkan city, stained and secret, drawn over with tramwire. Bonn was a dark house where someone had died, a house draped in Catholic black and guarded by policemen. Their leather coats glistened in the lamplight, the black flags hung over them like birds. Now a car, now a pedestrian hurried past, and the silence followed like a wake . . . A tram sounded but far away.”

I arrived in the once-sleepy German capital to find it in a virtual state of siege. (With Berlin deep in the Soviet zone, Bonn
was chosen partly for its proximity to the home of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the first president of the Federal Republic.) Two and a half decades after the end of World War II, Bonn bristled with submachine-gun-toting, green-uniformed security forces, stopping cars and asking to see “Papieren, bitte.” An old movie, rewound again. German authorities had reason for alarm. Their homegrown terrorists were skilled political murderers and were bent on provoking the state into overreaction.

Still, it was exciting to move into my new apartment in the pretty, provincial German city on the Rhine, and to take charge of the ABC Bureau, in the golden age of foreign corresponding. In Pressehaus II, an easy walk to the Bundestag, the parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany, my office was wedged between the
New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times
bureaus. I was taking my place among the Big Boys, for indeed, the press corps was virtually all male.

Peter arrived during my first weekend, and missed very few after that. Zipping down the Bonn–Cologne autobahn to the airport early Saturday morning in my green Volkswagen Beetle to pick him up became part of my routine—and the high point of my week. He always brought a gift. A piece of Wedgwood from London, or more exotic items if he’d been traveling that week. One Saturday he arrived with a richly embroidered Palestinian dress, which I wore all weekend.

We lived quietly and domestically. We shopped together in Bonn’s picturesque outdoor market and cooked in my tiny, sunny kitchen. We walked and biked along the Rhine, and
planned our future. Bonn was a fine place for two people in love, uninterested in nightlife or the company of anyone but each other. In some ways Peter was more eager for a settled life than I—the freshly minted foreign correspondent. There was never any doubt that we would spend our lives together. It was just a question of when. Before fame, before stratospheric success, and even before children, we lived our best days in that small town in Germany.

Peter trained me to keep one ear cocked to the clicketyclack of the wires bringing news from other ABC bureaus and the world, to be prepared for the call from the assignment desk. He tutored me in the ways of the network news hierarchy: the anchor’s droit de seigneur always trumped the local correspondent, a mere serf, when a Lord or Lady of the Realm was visiting.

Soon I learned this lesson the hard way. Barbara Walters arrived on July 15, 1978, to cover a story I had been working on for weeks: President Jimmy Carter’s first state visit to the Federal Republic of Germany on the occasion of the economic summit. I returned to my office after lunch one afternoon to find the Grande Dame of television news occupying my desk, perusing my scripts. “Nice work,” she said, barely looking up. “We can use these on
GMA
[
Good Morning America
].” I understood that the
we
was royal.

I retreated from my office, in tears. Peter followed me. “She used to do it to me, too,” he said, an arm around my slumped shoulders. “Forget it. When she leaves town, you get your story
back.” What he didn’t say was that he had the same rights and privileges as “Bigfoot” local correspondents himself.

When the Bigfeet departed, I moved to covering stories from the twilight atmosphere of the divided city of Berlin. I reported on the unmasking of former West German chancellor Willy Brandt’s personal aide, Günter Guillaume, as an officer in the East German secret police. Le Carré could not have improved on this scenario.

Standing in front of the hideous concrete barrier that sliced the real German capital in two, I spoke into the ABC News camera: “The Berlin Wall is the most cruel symbol of a divided Germany. The biggest new spy threat is considered to be from the thousands of women, who work at all levels of the government in the West German capital of Bonn. Given the loneliness of that one-business town, women are often vulnerable to the advances of professional spy recruiters.” The camera then followed me into a Berlin prison, where I interviewed a “secretary spy,” Renate Lutze, who had been seduced and recruited by Brandt’s aide.

From my perch at the Hotel Kempinski, on the glittering Kurfürstendamm, I dictated my scripts to New York, as my parents had from our Budapest apartment. Meanwhile, Peter kept my parents apprised of my progress from London. His weekly phone calls were a cherished ritual for my mother and father.

•   •   •

But as my love affair with Peter deepened, spy swaps, airline hijackings, and political kidnappings no longer made my pulse
race quite as fast. Would I be back from Amman, Mogadishu, Rome, or Brussels by the weekend? The need to be with Peter was now edging out my zeal to “make air” on
World News Tonight.
But not quite. The dilemma was how to balance the two. For Peter it was no dilemma at all. He was the star and he could do as he pleased. The dreaded New York assignment desk could only
suggest
stories to him. But they really didn’t need to. He was the consummate pro who could smell a story from several time zones away and rarely missed one.

“The Desk” was the bane of my life. They called at all hours. (“What time is it there?” was the most irritating question asked by assignment editors calling at 3
A.M.
and pretending not to know.) How fast can you get to Moscow or Athens, was all they needed to say to me. The rest was up to me. A part of me was still thrilled to pack and go, but now there was another part of me.

I did reckless things just to be with him. Once, while filming at a Palestinian refugee camp outside Amman, I hired a Jordanian taxi, and, for a king’s ransom, had him drive me to Jerusalem, where Peter was on assignment. I will never forget the look on his face when I surprised him at the American Colony Hotel. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Amman?” Peter gasped. “Well, yeah, but it’s such a short drive—less than an hour—and here you were, and there I was, and we can have dinner together, and I’ll be back in Amman before anyone finds out.” The
distance
was not the problem—people commute farther in New York. But this was the Middle East, where distance is measured not in miles but in geopolitics. Amman and Jerusalem
might as well have been on different continents. “How do you think you’ll get back to Jordan from Israel?” the seasoned Mideast veteran asked his greenhorn girlfriend. It turned out there was no return trip from Jerusalem to Amman, by taxi or camel. I had to fly to Paris and from there to Amman, at great personal expense, and in a total panic that my dinner in Jerusalem would register on the radar of the ever-suspicious assignment desk.

Paris was where we lived the most romantic and melodramatic part of our love story. This was not the Paris of my Left Bank student days. Our Paris was the opulent Right Bank, the Champs-Élysées and the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, with the Tuileries replacing the Luxembourg Gardens as our park. No more creaky parquet or Madame Koumarianos’s booby-trapped kitchen door. The ABC Bureau on tree-lined avenue d’Eylau was presided over by the former Kennedy White House spokesman Pierre Salinger. Our offices reeked of Pierre’s cigar. Peter chain-smoked Player’s cigarettes, sometimes lighting one and then leaving it in the ashtray to burn while he left the room. There was always a hot lunch prepared by the bureau’s chef waiting for visiting firemen. Peter and I preferred Chez Francis, on nearby place d’Alma. ABC once photographed us lunching there for an ad campaign. Peter, the dashing, trench-coated foreign correspondent sucking on a pipe, me in my chic Parisian suit.

There was an almost unbearable intensity to our romance, as one of us was always just arriving, or just leaving. After Peter finished his live “stand-upper” on the Champs-Élysées, we would walk over to Fouquet’s. Sitting in the sidewalk café
of the world’s showiest boulevard with Peter and Pierre, sipping Kirs, I felt like I was in one of those black-and-white films I used to watch in my student afternoons in the Latin Quarter. I could hardly believe that this handsome, famous man was in love with me. I marveled at the grace with which he moved through crowds, perfectly aware of the impression he was making. The way his immaculately tailored jacket molded to his strong chest, with his long legs under the table entwined with mine—who cared if I arrived exhausted the next day in Berlin or Vienna?

We always stayed at the Lancaster Hotel on the rue de Berri. The concierge, in cutaways the Duke of Windsor would admire, became the coconspirator of our love affair. He called me “Mademoiselle Incognito,” as we were still not quite open about our relationship. Peter was separated but not yet divorced. His former lovers were legion. One of them ran the Paris bureau and was implacably sullen toward me. When a group of South Moluccan independence fighters seized a railway car with Dutch passengers, Renate instructed me to make my way to this remote corner of the Netherlands
tout de suite.
“A camera crew will meet you there,” she said, with few other guidelines. “Just rent a car and here’s a map.” It was my first time driving long-distance in Europe and it took me days. But she got me out of Paris and away from Peter.

En route back to Paris, I wrote Peter, “I yearn for that headstrong, untiringly ambitious refugee girl who wanted it all. The American Dream. She—that lost forever child—had her moments of emotional need—but she never lost sight of what was
most important: Her Ambition. Then you came along and it was really like being at square one in the construction of my vision of happiness. It all centers around you now: my need to make you happy, my hunger for permanence with you. All the rest seems trivial now. Stuff I can work out somehow.” Rereading this, it’s heartbreakingly clear I was trying to persuade myself of something I did not absolutely believe—even then. I was torn between my passion for Peter and my drive to become a great foreign correspondent. That ambition struck Peter as unseemly,
unfeminine.
When he used the word
ambition
as it applied to me he gave it a biting sound, like
avarice.
Indeed there weren’t many role models for what I wanted: a big career and a family. I felt there was something wrong with me for wanting both as much as I did. There was no one I could talk to about this, least of all Peter.

“I am drawn to you,” I wrote later that spring. “Like Pooh to his pot of honey. Only when you retreat to that defensive cold place—when you imagine something that I swear to you does not exist—only then do
I
want to retreat. Please don’t let me!”

Soon my parents arrived in Paris to visit my sister and me, and meet the man Papa had advised me to learn from. We dined on oysters at Peter’s favorite restaurant, Prunier, and everybody was delighted by everybody else. As I surveyed that elegant dinner table—my parents, my brother, sister, and French brother-in-law, and Peter, entertaining them with his exploits, as though they were already his family—I beamed with pride. I shot my father a look that said, “See, Papa, I listened to you.”

•   •   •

En route to Athens, on Olympic Airlines stationery I wrote Peter, “Thank you for one of my life’s most fulfilled weekends. You were wonderful with my family. They took to you instantly . . . I only hope I win your family over just as fast.”

From the earliest days the strains of a love affair between two emotionally needy and ambitious people were apparent. Nor did
New York
appreciate its star anchor, being groomed by ABC News president Roone Arledge for big things, crisscrossing Europe and the Middle East chasing its bright new recruit. There was little they could do to Peter. But their power over me was almost infinite.

•   •   •

Before long, my boss,
World News Tonight
producer Av Westin, summoned me home for “a little talk.” We met for lunch at the Café des Artistes, the elegant Upper West Side restaurant preferred by ABC executives. Terrified, I faced the smooth Westin and his sidekick, Stan Opotowsky. The head of news operations, Stan was a pudgy, bald, perpetually disheveled figure for whom the term
ink-stained wretch
must have been coined. In the years I knew him I don’t think he ever changed his gray shirt, which, I assume, had once been white. He did not like Peter and now he did not like me.

“We had high hopes for you,” Av began, with a deep sigh. My blood ran cold. Facing these two men who held my future in their hands, I felt very alone. In that gleaming restaurant, my cherished dreams were evaporating. “You’re blowing it,
Kati,” Av concluded. Stan said nothing, just sat there, his face a grim reprimand.

“What are you talking about, Av?” I asked, for I wasn’t going down without a fight. “Have I missed a single story? Have I not done a good job on every single assignment?” “It’s not that,” Av said, shaking his head. “It’s the
perception
people have . . .” “Perception of what?” I asked, my composure about to slip. “Well,” he answered with a deep sigh, “that you are not serious about your job. Because of Peter.”

So that was it. No dereliction of duty, just the
perception
of something. I had become water cooler fodder.

“Av,” I pleaded. “I love my job. I worked very hard to get here. Let me go back and do my job. I won’t let you down. And Peter and I are not a
thing.
We are serious. We love each other.” Av kind of snorted and gave me a look that said, “Oh, you poor kid. Are you ever in for it.” Stan said nothing.

The lunch was over and I received a stay of execution. Now, so many years later, I flip through my news scripts from those two years as foreign correspondent and I marvel at the range of subjects I covered. Brezhnev in Germany, Jimmy Carter in Germany, the crisis of the neutron bomb, Palestinian refugee camps, terrorist kidnappings, spies in Berlin, civil war in Rhodesia—soon to be Zimbabwe—NATO war games, the Vienna Boys Choir, Fashion Week in Milan, and scores of others. I was a proficient reporter. But my bosses worried about my “perception” problem. Their star reporter and I were conducting a passionate love affair and that was not part of their plan.